Fragments of science Part 48

A merchant sits complacently in his easy chair, not knowing whether smoking, sleeping, newspaper reading, or the digestion of food occupies the largest portion of his personality. A servant enters the room with a telegram bearing the words, 'Antwerp, &c... Jonas and Co. have failed.' 'Tell James to harness the horses!' The servant flies. Upstairs the merchant, wide awake; makes a dozen paces through the room, descends to the counting-house, dictates letters, and forwards despatches. He jumps into his carriage, the horses snort, and their driver is immediately at the Bank, on the Bourse, and among his commercial friends. Before an hour has elapsed he is again at home, where he throws himself once more into his easy chair with a deep-drawn sigh, 'Thank G.o.d I am protected against the worst, and now for further reflection.'

This complex ma.s.s of action, emotional, intellectual, and mechanical, is evoked by the impact upon the retina of the infinitesimal waves of light coming from a few pencil marks on a bit of paper. We have, as Lange says, terror, hope, sensation, calculation, possible ruin, and victory compressed into a moment. What caused the merchant to spring out of his chair? The contraction of his muscles. What made his muscles contract? An impulse of the nerves, which lifted the proper latch, and liberated the muscular power. Whence this impulse? From the centre of the nervous system. But how did it originate there?

This is the critical question, to which some will reply that it had its origin in the human soul.

The aim and effort of science is to explain the unknown in terms of the known. Explanation, therefore, is conditioned by knowledge. You have probably heard the story of the German peasant, who, in early railway days, was taken to see the performance of a locomotive. He had never known carriages to be moved except by animal power. Every explanation outside of this conception lay beyond his experience, and could not be invoked. After long reflection therefore, and seeing no possible escape from the conclusion, he exclaimed confidently to his companion, 'Es muessen doch Pferde darin sein '--There must be horses inside. Amusing as this locomotive theory may seem, it ill.u.s.trates a deep-lying truth.

With reference to our present question, some may be disposed to press upon me such considerations as these: Your motor nerves are so many speaking-tubes, through which messages are sent from the man to the world; and your sensor nerves are so many conduits through which the whispers of the world are sent back to the man. But you have not told us where is the man. Who or what is it that sends and receives those messages through the bodily organism? Do not the phenomena point to the existence of a self within the self, which acts through the body as through a skilfully constructed instrument? You picture the muscles as hearkening to the commands sent through the motor nerves, and you picture the sensor nerves as the vehicles of incoming intelligence; are you not bound to supplement this mechanism by the a.s.sumption of an ent.i.ty which uses it? In other words, are you not forced by Tour own exposition into the hypothesis of a free human soul?

This is fair reasoning now, and at a certain stage of the world's knowledge, it might well have been deemed conclusive. Adequate reflection, however, shows that instead of introducing light into our minds, this hypothesis considered scientifically increases our darkness. You do not in this case explain the unknown in terms of the known, which, as stated above, is the method of science, but you explain the unknown in terms of the more unknown. Try to mentally visualise this soul as an ent.i.ty distinct from the body, and the difficulty immediately appears. From the side of science all that we are warranted in stating is that the terror, hope, sensation, and calculation of Lange's merchant, are psychical phenomena produced by, or a.s.sociated with, the molecular processes set up by waves of light in a previously prepared brain.

When facts present themselves let us dare to face them, but let the man of science equally dare to confess ignorance where it prevails.

What then is the causal connection, if any, between the objective and subjective--between molecular motions and states of consciousness? My answer is: I do not see the connection, nor have I as yet met anybody who does.

It is no explanation to say that the objective and subjective effects are two sides of one and the same phenomenon. Why should the phenomenon have two sides? This is the very core of the difficulty.

There are plenty of molecular motions which do not exhibit this two-sidedness. Does water think or feel when it runs into frost-ferns upon a window-pane? If not, why should the molecular motion of the brain be yoked to this mysterious companion--consciousness? We can form a coherent picture of the physical processes--the stirring of the brain, the thrilling of the nerves, the discharging of the muscles, and all the subsequent mechanical motions of the organism. But we can present to our minds no picture of the process whereby consciousness emerges, either as a necessary link or as an accidental by-product of this series of actions. Yet it certainly does emerge--the p.r.i.c.k of a pin suffices to prove that molecular motion can produce consciousness.

The reverse process of the production of motion by consciousness is equally unpresentable to the mind. We are here, in fact, upon the boundary line of the intellect, where the ordinary canons of science fail to extricate us from our difficulties. If we are true to these canons, we must deny to subjective phenomena all influence on physical processes. Observation proves that they interact, but in pa.s.sing from one to the other, we meet a blank which mechanical deduction is unable to fill. Frankly stated, we have here to deal with facts almost as difficult to seize mentally as the idea of a soul. And if you are content to make your 'soul' a poetic rendering of a phenomenon which refuses the yoke of ordinary physical laws, I, for one, would not object to this exercise of ideality. Amid all our speculative uncertainty, however, there is one practical point as clear as the day; namely, that the brightness and the usefulness of life, as well as its darkness and disaster, depend to a great extent upon our own use or abuse of this miraculous organ.

Accustomed as I am to harsh language, I am quite prepared to hear my 'poetic rendering' branded as a 'falsehood' and a 'fib.' The vituperation is unmerited, for poetry or ideality, and untruth are a.s.suredly very different things. The one may vivify, while the other, kills. When St. John extends the notion of a soul to 'souls washed in the blood of Christ' does he 'fib'? Indeed, if the appeal to ideality is censurable, Christ himself ought not to have escaped censure. Nor did he escape it. 'How can this man give us his flesh to eat?' expressed the sceptical flouting of unpoetic natures. Such are still amongst us. Cardinal Manning would doubtless tell any Protestant who rejects the doctrine of transubstantiation that he 'fibs' away the plain words of his Saviour when he reduces 'the Body of the Lord' in the sacrament to a mere figure of speech.

Though misuse may render it grotesque or insincere, the idealisation of ancient conceptions, when done consciously and above board, has, in my opinion, an important future. We are not radically different from our historic ancestors, and any feeling which affected them profoundly, requires only appropriate clothing to affect us. The world will not lightly relinquish its heritage of poetic feeling, and metaphysic will be welcomed when it abandons its pretensions to scientific discovery and consents to be ranked as a kind of poetry. 'A good symbol,' says Emerson, 'is a missionary to persuade thousands.

The Vedas, the Edda, the Koran, are each remembered by its happiest figure. There is no more welcome gift to men than a new symbol. They a.s.similate themselves to it, deal with it in all ways, and it will last a hundred years. Then comes a new genius and brings another.'

Our ideas of G.o.d and the soul are obviously subject to this symbolic mutation. They are not now what they were a century ago. They will not be a century hence what they are now. Such ideas const.i.tute a kind of central energy in the human mind, capable, like the energy of the physical universe, of a.s.suming various shapes and undergoing various transformations. They baffle and elude the theological mechanic who would carve them to dogmatic forms. They offer themselves freely to the poet who understands his vocation, and whose function is, or ought to be, to find 'local habitation' for thoughts woven into our subjective life, but which refuse to be mechanically defined.

We now stand face to face with the final problem. It is this: Are the brain, and the moral and intellectual processes known to be a.s.sociated with the brain--and, as far as our experience goes, indissolubly a.s.sociated--subject to the laws which we find paramount in physical nature? Is the will of man, in other words, free, or are it and nature equally 'bound fast in fate'? From this latter conclusion, after he had established it to the entire satisfaction of his understanding, the great German thinker Fichte recoiled. You will find the record of this struggle between head and heart in his book, ent.i.tled 'Die Bestimmung des Menschen'--The Vocation of Man.

[Footnote: Translated by Dr. William Smith of Edinburgh; Truebner, 1873.] Fichte was determined at all hazards to maintain his freedom, but the price he paid for it indicates the difficulty of the task. To escape from the iron necessity seen everywhere reigning in physical nature, he turned defiantly round upon nature and law, and affirmed both of them to be the products of his own mind. He was not going to be the slave of a thing which he had himself created. There is a good deal to be said in favour of this view, but few of us probably would be able to bring into play the solvent transcendentalism whereby Fichte melted his chains.

Why do some regard this notion of necessity with terror, while others do not fear it at all? Has not Carlyle somewhere said that a belief in destiny is the bias of all earnest minds? 'It is not Nature,' says Fichte, 'it is Freedom itself, by which the greatest and most terrible disorders incident to our race are produced. Man is the cruellest enemy of man.' But the question of moral responsibility here emerges, and it is the possible loosening of this responsibility that so many of us dread. The notion of necessity certainly failed to frighten Bishop Butler. He thought it untrue even absurd--but he did not fear its practical consequences. He showed, on the contrary, in the 'a.n.a.logy,' that as far as human conduct is concerned, the two theories of free-will and necessity would come to the same in the end.

What is meant by free-will? Does it imply the power of producing events without antecedents?--of starting, as it were, upon a creative tour of occurrences without any impulse from within or from without?

Let us consider the point. If there be absolutely or relatively no reason why a tree should fall, it will not fall; and if there be absolutely or relatively no reason why a man should act, he will not act. It is true that the united voice of this a.s.sembly could not persuade me that I have not, at this moment, the power to lift my arm if I wished to do so. Within this range the conscious freedom of my will cannot be questioned. But what about the origin of the 'wish'?

Are we, or are we not, complete masters of the circ.u.mstances which create our wishes, motives, and tendencies to action? Adequate reflection will, I think, prove that we are not. What, for example, have I had to do with the generation and development of that which some will consider my total being, and others a most potent factor of my total being--the living, speaking organism which now addresses you?

As stated at the beginning of this discourse, my physical and intellectual textures were woven for me, not by me. Processes in the conduct or regulation of which I had no share have made me what I am.

Here, surely, if anywhere, we are as clay in the hands of the potter.

It is the greatest of delusions to suppose that we come into this world as sheets of white paper on which the age can write anything it likes, making us good or bad, n.o.ble or mean, as the age pleases. The age can stunt, promote, or pervert pre-existent capacities, but it cannot create them. The worthy Robert Owen, who saw in external circ.u.mstances the great moulders of human character, was obliged to supplement his doctrine by making the man himself one of the circ.u.mstances. It is as fatal as it is cowardly to blink facts because they are not to our taste. How many disorders, ghostly and bodily, are transmitted to us by inheritance? In our courts of law, whenever it is a question whether a crime has been committed under the influence of insanity, the best guidance the judge and jury can have is derived from the parental antecedents of the accused. If among these insanity be exhibited in any marked degree, the presumption in the prisoner's favour is enormously enhanced, because the experience of life has taught both judge and jury that insanity is frequently transmitted from parent to child.

I met, some years ago, in a railway carriage the governor of one of our largest prisons. He was evidently an observant and reflective man, possessed of wide experience gathered in various parts of the world, and a thorough student of the duties of his vocation. He told me that the prisoners in his charge might be divided into three distinct cla.s.ses. The first cla.s.s consisted of persons who ought never to have been in prison. External accident, and not internal taint, had brought them within the grasp of the law, and what had happened to them might happen to most of us. They were essentially men of sound moral stamina, though wearing the prison garb. Then came the largest cla.s.s, formed of individuals possessing no strong bias, moral or immoral, plastic to the touch of circ.u.mstances, which could mould them into either good or evil members of society. Thirdly came a cla.s.s--happily not a large one--whom no kindness could conciliate and no discipline tame. They were sent into this world labelled 'incorrigible', wickedness being stamped, as it were, upon their organisations. It was an unpleasant truth, but as a truth it ought to be faced. For such criminals the prison over which he ruled was certainly not the proper place. If confined at all, their prison should be on a desert island where the deadly _contagium_ of their example could not taint the moral air. But the sea itself he was disposed to regard as a cheap and appropriate subst.i.tute for the island. It seemed to him evident that the State would benefit if prisoners of the first cla.s.s were liberated; prisoners of the second cla.s.s educated; and prisoners of the third cla.s.s put compendiously under water.

It is not, however, from the observation of individuals that the argument against 'free-will,' as commonly understood, derives its princ.i.p.al force. It is, as already hinted, indefinitely strengthened when extended to the race. Most of you have been forced to listen to the outcries and denunciations which rang discordant through the land for some years after the publication of Mr. Darwin's 'Origin of Species.' Well, the world--even the clerical world--for the most part settled down in the belief that Mr. Darwin's book simply reflects the truth of nature: that we who are now 'foremost in the files of time'

have come to the front through almost endless stages of promotion from lower to higher forms of life.

If to any one of us were given the privilege of looking back through the aeons across which life has crept towards its present outcome, his vision, according to Darwin, would ultimately reach a point when the progenitors of this a.s.sembly could not be called human. From that humble society, through the interaction of its members and the storing up of their best qualities, a better one emerged; from this again a better still; until at length, by the integration of infinitesimals through ages of amelioration, we came to be what we are to-day. We of this generation had no conscious share in the production of this grand and beneficent result. Any and every generation which preceded us had just as little share. The favoured organisms whose garnered excellence const.i.tutes our present store owed their advantages, first, to what we in our ignorance are obliged to call accidental variation;'

and, secondly, to a law of heredity in the pa.s.sing of which our suffrages were not collected. With characteristic felicity and precision Mr. Matthew Arnold lifts this question into the free air of poetry, but not out of the atmosphere of truth, when he ascribes the process of amelioration to 'a power not ourselves which makes for righteousness.' If, then, our organisms, with all their tendencies and capacities, are given to us without our being consulted; and if, while capable of acting within certain limits in accordance with our wishes, we are not masters of the circ.u.mstances in which motives and wishes originate; if, finally, our motives and wishes determine our actions--in what sense can these actions be said to be the result of free-will?

Here, again, we are confronted with the question of moral responsibility, which, as it has been much talked of lately, it is desirable to meet. With the view of removing the fear of our falling back into the condition of 'the ape and tiger,' so sedulously excited by certain writers, I propose to grapple with this question in its rudest form, and in the most uncompromising way. 'If,' says the robber, the ravisher, or the murderer, 'I act because I must act, what right have you to hold me responsible for my deeds?' The reply is, 'The right of society to protect itself against aggressive and injurious forces, whether they be bond or free, forces of nature or forces of man.' 'Then,' retorts the criminal, 'you punish me for what I cannot help.' 'Let it be granted,' says society, 'but had you known that the treadmill or the gallows was certainly in store for you, you might have "helped." Let us reason the matter fully and frankly out. We may entertain no malice or hatred against you; it is enough that with a view to our own safety and purification we are determined that you and such as you shall not enjoy liberty of evil action in our midst. You, who have behaved as a wild beast, we claim the right to cage or kill as we should a wild beast. The public safety is a matter of more importance than the very limited chance of your moral renovation, while the knowledge that you have been hanged by the neck may furnish to others about to do as you have done the precise motive which will hold them back. If your act be such as to invoke a minor penalty, then not only others, but yourself, may profit by the punishment which we inflict. On the homely principle that "a burnt child dreads the fire," it will make you think twice before venturing on a repet.i.tion of your crime. Observe, finally, the consistency of our conduct. You offend, you say, because you cannot help offending, to the public detriment. We punish, is our reply, because we cannot help punis.h.i.+ng, for the public good. Practically, then, as Bishop Butler predicted, we act as the world acted when it supposed the evil deeds of its criminals to be the products of free-will.' [Footnote: An eminent Church dignitary describes all this, not unkindly, as 'truculent logic.' I think it worthy of his Grace's graver consideration.]

'What,' I have heard it argued, 'is the use of preaching about duty, if a man's predetermined position in the moral world renders him incapable of profiting by advice?' Who knows that he is incapable?

The preacher's last word is a factor in the man's conduct, and it may be a most important factor, unlocking moral energies which might otherwise remain imprisoned and unused. If the preacher thoroughly feel that words of enlightenment, courage, and admonition enter into the list of forces employed by Nature herself for man's amelioration, since she gifted man with speech, he will suffer no paralysis to fall upon his tongue. Dung the fig-tree hopefully, and not until its barrenness has been demonstrated beyond a doubt let the sentence go forth, 'Cut it down, why c.u.mbereth it the ground?'

I remember when a youth in the town of Halifax, some two-and-thirty years ago, attending a lecture given by a young man to a small but select audience. The aspect of the lecturer was earnest and practical, and his voice soon rivetted attention. He spoke of duty, defining it as a debt owed, and there was a kindling vigour in his words which must have strengthened the sense of duty in the minds of those who heard him. No speculations regarding the freedom of the will could alter the fact that the words of that young man did me good. His name was George Dawson. He also spoke, if you will allow me to allude to it, of a social subject much discussed at the time--the Chartist subject of 'levelling.' Suppose, he says, two men to be equal at night, and that one rises at six, while the other sleeps till nine next morning, what becomes of your levelling? And in so speaking be made himself the mouthpiece of Nature, which, as we have seen, secures advance, not by the reduction of all to a common level, but by the encouragement and conservation of what is best.

It may be urged that, in dealing as above with my hypothetical criminal, I am a.s.suming a state of things brought about by the influence of religions which include the dogmas of theology and the belief in freewill--a state, namely, in which a moral majority control and keep in awe an immoral minority. The heart of man is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. Withdraw, then, our theologic sanctions, including the belief in free-will, and the condition of the race will be typified by the samples of individual wickedness which have been above adduced. We shall all, that is, become robbers, and ravishers, and murderers. From much that has been written of late it would seem that this astounding inference finds house-room in many minds. Possibly, the people who hold such views might be able to ill.u.s.trate them by individual instances.

The fear of h.e.l.l's a hangman's whip, To keep the wretch in order.

Remove the fear, and the wretch, following his natural instinct, may become disorderly; but I refuse to accept him as a sample of humanity.

'Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die' is by no means the ethical consequence of a rejection of dogma. To many of you the name of George Jacob Holyoake is doubtless familiar, and you are probably aware that at no man in England has the term 'atheist' been more frequently pelted. There are, moreover, really few who have more completely liberated themselves from theologic notions. Among working-cla.s.s politicians Mr. Holyoake is a leader. Does he exhort his followers to 'Eat and drink, for to-morrow we die'? Not so. In the August number of the 'Nineteenth Century' you will find these words from his pen: 'The gospel of dirt is bad enough, but the gospel of mere material comfort is much worse.' He contemptuously calls the Comtist champions.h.i.+p of the working man, 'the champions.h.i.+p of the trencher.' He would place 'the leanest liberty which brought with it the dignity and power of self-help' higher than 'any prospect of a full plate without it.' Such is the moral doctrine taught by this 'atheistic' leader; and no Christian, I apprehend, need be ashamed of it.

Most heartily do I recognise and admire the spiritual radiance, if I may use the term, shed by religion on the minds and lives of many personally known to me. At the same time I cannot but observe how signally, as regards the production of anything beautiful, religion fails in other cases. Its professor and defender is sometimes at bottom a brawler and a clown. These differences depend upon primary distinctions of character which religion does not remove. It may comfort some to know that there are amongst us many whom the gladiators of the pulpit would call 'atheists' and 'materialists,'

whose lives, nevertheless, as tested by any accessible standard of morality, would contrast more than favourably with the lives of those who seek to stamp them with this offensive brand. When I say 'offensive,' I refer simply to the intention of those who use such terms, and not because atheism or materialism, when compared with many of the notions ventilated in the columns of religious newspapers, has any particular offensiveness for me. If I wished to find men who are scrupulous in their adherence to engagements, whose words are their bond, and to whom moral s.h.i.+ftiness of any kind is subjectively unknown; if I wanted a loving father, a faithful husband, an honourable neighbour, and a just citizen--I should seek him, and find him among the band of 'atheists' to which I refer. I have known some of the most p.r.o.nounced among them not only in life but in death seen them approaching with open eyes the inexorable goal, with no dread of a 'hangman's whip,' with no hope of a heavenly crown, and still as mindful of their duties, and as faithful in the discharge of them, as if their eternal future depended upon their latest deeds.

In letters addressed to myself, and in utterances addressed to the public, Faraday is often referred to as a sample of the a.s.sociation of religious faith with moral elevation. I was locally intimate with him for fourteen or fifteen years of my life, and had thus occasion to observe how nearly his character approached what might, without extravagance, be called perfection. He was strong but gentle, impetuous but self-restrained; a sweet and lofty courtesy marked his dealings with men and women; and though he sprang from the body of the people, a nature so fine might well have been distilled from the flower of antecedent chivalry. Not only in its broader sense was the Christian religion necessary to Faraday's spiritual peace, but in what many would call the narrow sense held by those described by Faraday himself as 'a very small and despised sect of Christians, known, if known at all, as Sandemanians,' it const.i.tuted the light and comfort of his days.

Were our experience confined to such cases, it would furnish an irresistible argument in favour of the a.s.sociation of dogmatic religion with moral purity and grace. But, as already intimated, our experience is not thus confined. In further ill.u.s.tration of this point, we may compare with Faraday a philosopher of equal magnitude, whose character, including gentleness and strength, candour and simplicity, intellectual power and moral elevation, singularly resembles that of the great Sandemanian, but who has neither shared the theologic views nor the religious emotions which formed so dominant a factor in Faraday's life. I allude to Mr. Charles Darwin, the Abraham of scientific men--a searcher as obedient to the command of truth as was the patriarch to the command of G.o.d. I cannot therefore, as so many desire, look upon Faraday's religious belief as the exclusive source of qualities shared so conspicuously by one uninfluenced by that belief. To a deeper virtue belonging to human nature in its purer forms I am disposed to refer the excellence of both.

Superst.i.tion may be defined as constructive religion which has grown incongruous with intelligence. We may admit, with Fichte, 'that superst.i.tion has unquestionably constrained its subjects to abandon many pernicious practices and to adopt many useful ones;' the real loss accompanying its decay at the present day has been thus clearly stated by the same philosopher: 'In so far as these lamentations do not proceed from the priests themselves--whose grief at the loss of their dominion over the human mind we can well understand--but from the politicians, the whole matter resolves itself into this, that government has thereby become more difficult and expensive. The judge was spared the exercise of his own sagacity and penetration when, by threats of relentless d.a.m.nation, he could compel the accused to make confession. The evil spirit formerly performed without reward services for which in later times judges and policemen have to be paid.'

No man ever felt the need of a high and enn.o.bling religion more thoroughly than this powerful and fervid teacher, who, by the way, did not escape the brand of 'atheist.' But Fichte a.s.serted emphatically the power and sufficiency of morality in its own sphere. 'Let us consider,' he says, 'the highest which man can possess in the absence of religion--I mean pure morality. The moral man obeys the law of duty in his breast absolutely, because it is a law unto him; and he does whatever reveals itself to him as his duty simply because it is duty. Let not the impudent a.s.sertion be repeated that such an obedience, without regard for consequences, and without desire for consequences, is in itself impossible and opposed to human nature.'

So much for Fichte. Faraday was equally distinct. 'I have no intention,' he says, 'of subst.i.tuting anything for religion, but I wish to take that part of human nature which is independent of it.

Morality, philosophy, commerce, the various inst.i.tutions and habits of society, are independent of religion and may exist without it.' These were the words of his youth, but they expressed his latest convictions. I would add, that the muse of Tennyson never reached a higher strain than when it embodied the sentiment of duty in AEnone:

And, because right is right, to follow right Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence.

Not in the way a.s.sumed by our dogmatic teachers has the morality of human nature been built up. The power which has moulded us thus far has worked with stern tools upon a very rigid stuff. What it has done cannot be so readily undone; and it has endowed us with moral const.i.tutions which take pleasure in the n.o.ble, the beautiful, and the true, just as surely as it has endowed us with sentient organisms, which find aloes bitter and sugar sweet. That power did not work with delusions, nor will it stay its hand when such are removed. Facts, rather than dogmas, have been its ministers--hunger and thirst, heat and cold, pleasure and pain, fervour, sympathy, aspiration, shame, pride, love, hate, terror, awe--such were the forces whose interaction and adjustment throughout an immeasurable past wove the triplex web of man's physical, intellectual, and moral nature, and such are the forces that will be effectual to the end.

You may retort that even on my own showing 'the power which makes for righteousness' has dealt in delusions; for it cannot be denied that the beliefs of religion, including the dogmas of theology and the freedom of the will, have had some effect in moulding the moral world.

Granted; but I do not think that this goes to the root of the matter.

Are you quite sure that those beliefs and dogmas are primary, and not derived?--that they are not the products, instead of being the creators, of man's moral nature? I think it is in one of the Latter-Day Pamphlets that Carlyle corrects a reasoner, who deduced the n.o.bility of man from a belief in heaven, by telling him that he puts the cart before the horse, the real truth being that the belief in heaven is derived from the n.o.bility of man. The bird's instinct to weave its nest is referred to by Emerson as typical of the force which built cathedrals, temples, and pyramids:

Knowest thou what wove yon woodbird's nest Of leaves and feathers from her breast, Or how the fish outbuilt its sh.e.l.l, Painting with morn each annual cell?

Such and so grew these holy piles While love and terror laid the tiles; Earth proudly wears the Parthenon As the best gem upon her zone; And Morning opes with haste her lids To gaze upon the Pyramids; O'er England's abbeys bends the sky As on its friends with kindred eye; For out of Thought's interior sphere These wonders rose to upper air, And nature gladly gave them place, Adopted them into her race, And granted them an equal date With Andes and with Ararat.

Surely, many utterances which have been accepted as descriptions ought to be interpreted as aspirations, or, as having their roots in aspiration instead of in objective knowledge. Does the song of the herald angels, 'Glory to G.o.d in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men,' express the exaltation and the yearning of a human soul? or does it describe an optical and acoustical fact--a visible host and an audible song? If the former, the exaltation and the yearning are man's imperishable possession--a ferment long confined to individuals, but which may by-and-by become the leaven of the race. If the latter, then belief in the entire transaction is wrecked by non-fulfilment. Look to the East at the present moment as a comment on the promise of peace' on earth and goodwill toward men.

That promise is a dream ruined by the experience of eighteen centuries, and in that ruin is involved the claim of the 'heavenly host' to prophetic vision. But though the mechanical theory proves untenable, the immortal song and the feelings it expresses are still ours, to be incorporated, let us hope, in purer and less shadowy forms in the poetry, philosophy, and practice of the future.

Thus, following the lead of physical science, we are brought without solution of continuity into the presence of problems which, as usually cla.s.sified, lie entirely outside the domain of physics. To these problems thoughtful and penetrative minds are now applying those methods of research which in physical science have proved their truth by their fruits. There is on all hands a growing repugnance to invoke the supernatural in accounting for the phenomena of human life; and the thoughtful minds just referred to, finding no trace of evidence in favour of any other origin, are driven to seek in the interaction of social forces the genesis and development of man's moral nature. If they succeed in their search--and I think they are sure to succeed--social duty will be raised to a higher level of significance and the deepening sense of social duty will, it is to be hoped, lessen, if not obliterate, the strifes and heartburnings which now beset and disfigure our social life. Towards this great end it behoves us one and all to work; and devoutly wis.h.i.+ng its consummation, I have the honour, ladies and gentlemen, to bid you a friendly farewell.

XV. PROFESSOR VIRCHOW AND EVOLUTION.