Aphorisms and Reflections from the Works of T. H. Huxley Part 8

CLIV

Descartes, as we have seen, ill.u.s.trates what he means by an innate idea, by the a.n.a.logy of hereditary diseases or hereditary mental peculiarities, such as generosity. On the other hand, hereditary mental tendencies may justly be termed instincts; and still more appropriately might those special proclivities, which const.i.tute what we call genus, come into the same category.

CLV

The child who is impelled to draw as soon as it can hold a pencil; the Mozart who breaks out into music as early; the boy Bidder who worked out the most complicated sums without learning arithmetic; the boy Pascal who evolved Euclid out of his own consciousness: all these may be said to have been impelled by instinct, as much as are the beaver and the bee. And the man of genius is distinct in kind from the man of cleverness, by reason of the working within him of strong innate tendencies--which cultivation may improve, but which it can no more create than horticulture can make thistles bear figs. The a.n.a.logy between a musical instrument and the mind holds good here also. Art and industry may get much music, of a sort, out of a penny whistle; but, when all is done, it has no chance against an organ. The innate musical potentialities of the two are infinitely different.

CLVI

It is notorious that, to the unthinking ma.s.s of mankind, nine-tenths of the facts of fife do not suggest the relation of cause and effect; and they practically deny the existence of any such relation by attributing them to chance. Few gamblers but would stare if they were told that the falling of a die on a particular face is as much the effect of a definite cause as the fact of its falling; it is a proverb that "the wind bloweth where it listeth"; and even thoughtful men usually receive with surprise the suggestion, that the form of the crest of every wave that breaks, wind-driven, on the sea-sh.o.r.e, and the direction of every particle of foam that flies before the gale, are the exact effects of definite causes; and, as such, must be capable of being determined, deductively, from the laws of motion and the properties of air and water. So again, there are large numbers of highly intelligent persons who rather pride themselves on their fixed belief that our volitions have no cause; or that the will causes itself, which is either the same thing, or a contradiction in terms.

CLVII

To say that an idea is necessary is simply to affirm that we cannot conceive the contrary; and the fact that we cannot conceive the contrary of any belief may be a presumption, but is certainly no proof, of its truth.

CLVIII

It is remarkable that Hume does not refer to the sentimental arguments for the immortality of the soul which are so much in vogue at the present day; and which are based upon our desire for a longer conscious existence than that which nature appears to have allotted to us. Perhaps he did not think them worth notice. For indeed it is not a little strange, that our strong desire that a certain occurrence should happen should be put forward as evidence that it will happen. If my intense desire to see the friend, from whom I have parted, does not bring him from the other side of the world, or take me thither; if the mother's agonised prayer that her child should live has not prevented him from dying; experience certainly affords no presumption that the strong desire to be alive after death, which we call the aspiration after immortality, is any more likely to be gratified. As Hume truly says, "All doctrines are to be suspected which are favoured by our pa.s.sions"; and the doctrine, that we are immortal because we should extremely like to be so, contains the quintessence of suspiciousness.

CLIX

If every man possessed everything he wanted, and no one had the power to interfere with such possession; or if no man desired that which could damage his fellow-man, justice would have no part to play in the universe.

CLX

To fail in justice, or in benevolence, is to be displeased with one's self. But happiness is impossible without inward self-approval; and, hence, every man who has any regard to his own happiness and welfare, will find his best reward in the practice of every moral duty.

CLXI

Virtue is undoubtedly beneficent; but the man is to be envied to whom her ways seem in anywise playful. And though she may not talk much about suffering and self-denial, her silence on that topic may be accounted for on the principle _ca va sans dire_.

CLXII

If mankind cannot be engaged in practices "full of austerity and rigour?" by the love of righteousness and the fear of evil, without seeking for other compensation than that which flows from the gratification of such love and the consciousness of escape from debas.e.m.e.nt, they are in a bad case. For they will a.s.suredly find that virtue presents no very close likeness to the sportive leader of the Joyous hours in Hume's rosy picture; but that she is an awful G.o.ddess, whose ministers are the Furies, and whose highest reward is peace.

CLXIII

Under its theological aspect, morality is obedience to the will of G.o.d; and the ground for such obedience is two-fold: either we ought to obey G.o.d because He will punish us if we disobey Him, which is an argument based on the utility of obedience; or our obedience ought to flow from our love towards G.o.d, which is an argument based on pure feeling and for which no reason can be given. For, if any man should say that he takes no pleasure in the contemplation of the ideal of perfect holiness, or, in other words, that he does not love G.o.d, the attempt to argue him into acquiring that pleasure would be as hopeless as the endeavour to persuade Peter Bell of the "witchery of the soft blue sky."

CLXIV

In whichever way we look at the matter, morality is based on feeling, not on reason; though reason alone is competent to trace out the effects of our actions and thereby dictate conduct. Justice is founded on the love of one's neighbour; and goodness is a kind of beauty. The moral law, like the laws of physical nature, rests in the long run upon instinctive intuitions, and is neither more nor less "innate" and "necessary" than they are. Some people cannot by any means be got to understand the first book of Euclid; but the truths of mathematics are no less necessary and binding on the great ma.s.s of mankind. Some there are who cannot feel the difference between the "Sonata Appa.s.sionata" and "Cherry Ripe"; or between a grave-stone-cutter's cherub and the Apollo Belvidere; but the canons of art are none the less acknowledged. While some there may be, who, devoid of sympathy, are incapable of a sense of duty; but neither does their existence affect the foundations of morality. Such pathological deviations from true manhood are merely the halt, the lame, and the blind of the world of consciousness; and the anatomist of the mind leaves them aside, as the anatomist of the body would ignore abnormal specimens.

And as there are Pascals and Mozarts, Newtons and Raffaelles, in whom the innate faculty for science or art seems to need but a touch to spring into full vigour, and through whom the human race obtains new possibilities of knowledge and new conceptions of beauty: so there have been men of moral genius, to whom we owe ideals of duty and visions of moral perfection, which ordinary mankind could never have attained: though, happily for them, they can feel the beauty of a vision, which lay beyond the reach of their dull imaginations, and count life well spent in shaping some faint image of it in the actual world.

CLXV

The horror of "Materialism" which weighs upon the minds of so many excellent people appears to depend, in part, upon the purely accidental connexion of some forms of materialistic philosophy with ethical and religious tenets by which they are repelled; and, partly, on the survival of a very ancient superst.i.tion concerning the nature of matter.

This superst.i.tion, for the tenacious vitality of which the idealistic philosophers who are, more or less, disciples of Plato and the theologians who have been influenced by them, are responsible, a.s.sumes that matter is something, not merely inert and perishable, but essentially base and evil-natured, if not actively antagonistic to, at least a negative deadweight upon, the good.

CLXVI

Judging by contemporary literature, there are numbers of highly cultivated and indeed superior persons to whom the material world is altogether contemptible; who can see nothing in a handful of garden soil, or a rusty nail, but types of the pa.s.sive and the corruptible.

To modern science, these a.s.sumptions are as much out of date as the equally venerable errors, that the sun goes round the earth every four-and-twenty hours, or that water is an elementary body. The handful of soil is a factory thronged with swarms of busy workers; the rusty nail is an aggregation of millions of particles, moving with inconceivable velocity in a dance of infinite complexity yet perfect measure; harmonic with like performances throughout the solar system.

If there is good ground for any conclusion, there is such for the belief that the substance of these particles has existed and will exist, that the energy which stirs them has persisted and will persist, without a.s.signable limit, either in the past or the future. Surely, as Heracleitus said of his kitchen with its pots and pans, "Here also are the G.o.ds." Little as we have, even yet, learned of the material universe, that little makes for the belief that it is a system of unbroken order and perfect symmetry, of which the form incessantly changes, while the substance and the energy are imperishable.

CLXVII

Of all the dangerous mental habits, that which schoolboys call "c.o.c.ksureness" is probably the most perilous; and the inestimable value of metaphysical discipline is that it furnishes an effectual counterpoise to this evil proclivity. Whoso has mastered the elements of philosophy knows that the attribute of unquestionable certainty appertains only to the existence of a state of consciousness so long as it exists; all other beliefs are mere probabilities of a higher or lower order. Sound metaphysic is an amulet which renders its possessor proof alike against the poison of superst.i.tion and the counter-poison of shallow negation; by showing that the affirmations of the former and the denials of the latter alike deal with matters about which, for lack of evidence, nothing can be either affirmed or denied.

CLXVIII

If the question is asked, What then do we know about matter and motion?

there is but one reply possible. All that we know about motion is that it is a name for certain changes in the relations of our visual, tactile, and muscular sensations; and all that we know about matter is that it is the hypothetical substance of physical phenomena, the a.s.sumption of the existence of which is as pure a piece of metaphysical speculation as is that of the existence of the substance of mind.

Our sensations, our pleasures, our pains, and the relations of these, make up the sum total of the elements of positive, unquestionable knowledge. We call a large section of these sensations and then-relations matter and motion; the rest we term mind and thinking; and experience shows that there is a certain constant order of succession between some of the former and some of the latter.

This is all that just metaphysical criticism leaves of the idols set up by the spurious metaphysics of vulgar common sense. It is consistent either with pure Materialism, or with pure Idealism, but it is neither.

For the Idealist, not content with declaring the truth that our knowledge is limited to facts of consciousness, affirms the wholly unprovable proposition that nothing exists beyond these and the substance of mind. And, on the other hand, the Materialist, holding by the truth that, for anything that appears to the contrary, material phenomena are the causes of mental phenomena, a.s.serts his unprovable dogma, that material phenomena and the substance of matter are the sole primary existences. Strike out the propositions about which neither controversialist does or can know anything, and there is nothing left for them to quarrel about. Make a desert of the Unknowable, and the divine Astraea of philosophic peace will commence her blessed reign.

CLXIX

"Magna est Veritas et praevalebit!" Truth is great, certainly, but, considering her greatness, it is curious what a long time she is apt to take about prevailing.

CLXX

To my observation, human nature has not sensibly changed through the last thirty years. I doubt not that there are truths as plainly obvious and as generally denied, as those contained in "Man's Place in Nature,"

now awaiting enunciation. If there is a young man of the present generation, who has taken as much trouble as I did to a.s.sure himself that they are truths, let him come out with them, without troubling his head about the barking of the dogs of St. Ernulphus, "Veritas praevalebit"--some day; and, even if she does not prevail in his time, he himself will be all the better and the wiser for having tried to help her. And let him recollect that such great reward is full payment for all his labour and pains.

CLXXI