materialistic tendency has been made in England by men of great repute. That this approach should have been made is a significant fact. Men of high character and of noble aims have held what would have been called materialism a very short time ago, and other men of intellect and character have borne to hear the avowal. This is a great fact, and indicates a great change. Does it portend that men are giving up their hard-won inheritance of thought, and are going to begin the world afresh, as though Christ had never risen? Is the scientific mind of Christendom, or what was Christendom, reduced to the state of Rome in the days of her worst decadence, when "Esse aliquos Manes et subterranea regna Nay, our state would be ten thousand times worse; for, on this hypothesis, the doctrine of the soul's immortality is not only uncertain, but flung back into a region to which the human mind is so hermetically sealed that no light from heaven could ever reach it, unless some unknown god altered fundamentally the whole constitution of the intellect. Thinner than the thin shades which wandered on the shores of the Styx, the souls of our dead ancestors not only escape the longing arms which try to enfold them, but become, what is far worse than impalpable, inconceivable. The soul has sunk below a ghost; it is an abstraction, the ghost of a thought. Poor Faust! he may poison himself in peace, for no "Christ is risen" will disturb him. Not with an Io Pæan of triumphant scorn, but with a tearful Requiescat in Pace, and with averted face, science rolls a stone on the grave of a religion which is worse than dead, since it cannot by any possibility be an object of knowledge. I do not expect any such lamentable result; nay, I firmly believe that it can never be. I hold that the world, even the scientific world, can never return to the state in which it was before Christ came. My reasons lie in the fundamental difference which Zeller, perhaps the most competent living man, finds between Greek and modern, even non-Christian, philosophy. Though, according to him, modern thought is even more sceptical than Greek, and has called in question what the Greek never dreamed of denying the truth of the outer world yet there is this great difference, that the modern sceptic in philosophy always writes like a man whose conscience is not quite at rest. Read the Tusculan disputations: hear how quietly and coolly the Atheist and the Materialist defend their dogmas. It never enters into the head of any of the disputants that he is saying anything that he has not a perfect right to say-nay, anything out of the way. They are simply Roman gentlemen talking over open questions into which the very notion of right and wrong can never enter. A wrong thought would appear to them as much a contradiction in terms as a square or a yellow one. All is calm as the murmur of the Liris, or the whispering of the wind in the plane-trees on the banks of the Iiyssus. There is nothing of the struggle and the agony and the fierce white heat of modern thought. The disputants are in a state of noble savagery, or of primæval innocence. "They are naked, and they are not ashamed." This, I firmly believe, can never be again. Science, even physical science, has been baptized, and can never wipe out the character from its brow. My reason is precisely that of Zeller; he says that Christianity has introduced into thought a new idea, that of orthodoxy, which not even its opponents can forget.* I look therefore on the screams of the orthodox, and still more on the passionate eloquence and indignant protests of their foes, as signs of life. No one is quite at his ease; the orthodox screams because he feels that science has slipped away from him, and ought to be recalled; the heterodox is indignant because there is just a possibility of his being wrong, and wrong he does not wish to be. The scientific Bismarck from his heart sincerely regrets that he must lay waste with fire and sword a city which contains a magnificent cathedral where generations have adored and prayed. If he must annex what is Christian ground, he is on the defensive, and is anxious to prove that it is really his own, and must be restored to its lawful king. Whatever may be the case with the Prussian statesman, I accept what has been called the ferocity of men of science as a mark that they possess a conscience, and I have hopes at some time or other of peace. The object of this paper is to tend to peace, though in a very humble way, yet by no unworthy compromise. I fully acknowledge that science, like Cæsar, has its own rights, and that these rights. must be rendered to it. It has its own field and its own methods, and no one ought to interfere with it on its own ground. Yet I cannot negotiate on the basis that each, theology on the one hand, and science on the other, should say its own say on every possible question without minding the other. In nine hundred and ninety-nine questions out of a thousand, science may say whatever it may choose with perfect freedom; but there are questions which belong to both, and on these it must expect that God will claim his own, and summon Cæsar to give way. I do not think the Church unreasonable. When once the Copernican theory was proved, it practically withdrew its opposition, and frankly allowed its children to say that the earth goes round the sun, nay to alter an old interpretation of Scripture to suit scientific views. Geologists are welcome to hold that creation took place in any amount of millions of years. I would even allow to Darwinians that there is a truth in natural selection; but when they go on to claim for it that it is the key to the universe, and apply it to the soul of man, then it seems to me that the Church has * Einleitung, 46. a right to warn science off, and to say that this question belongs to her. At the same time it is perfectly open to the Christian, even though he be an Ultramontane Catholic, like the present writer, to argue not condescendingly, but on equal terms, with his opponents. I am anxious to say this, because both friend and foe may object to the equality—the one on the ground of its being a sacrifice of principle, the other as hypocrisy. The very principle of the Church is that such an opinion as the immortality of the soul, besides being a revealed dogma, is also to be proved by natural reason, apart from revelation. If so, why not prove it by science alone, without taking revelation into account? Furthermore, though I believe most firmly in the truth of my conclusion-though I am quite sure that it can be proved -yet it by no means follows that my own arguments are irrefragable. Truth is not logic, nor is logic truth. As far as mere formal logic is concerned, there may be very strong reasons adduced for falsehood, and very bad arguments alleged for truth. A Christian then has only got to make the not very difficult abstraction between the truth and his own defence of it, in order with perfect sincerity, and yet without giving up one atom of undoubted truth, to be able to meet its opponents on equal terms. This is a principle of very wide application. Yes, my most orthodox friend, you possess the truth; but it by no means follows that you have an infused knowledge of all science, or an unerring logic which will act like a specific. You have got to reconvert the world; and this will not be effected either by contempt or by screaming. Neither the vulgar violence of shallowness, nor the smartness of plausibility, will convert any one. I too have a zeal for my brethren, and when I see men of earnest aims and great intellects opposing the truth, I could find it in my heart to weep. But we shall never reconquer what we have lost unless we understand and are understood—two most indispensable conditions. We must understand our adversaries, and this will never be if we despise them, and treat their conclusions as contemptible. What you have got to do is to set to work and master their system. What can be more absurd than Berkeleyism? Solvitur ambulando. Yet it is the work of a genius, and it rests on arguments, though by no means irrefragable, yet hard to refute. Excellent jokes may be made on the notion that man is evolved by a process of natural development out of some purely animal species. My whole soul revolts from the conclusion. Nevertheless, the premisses consist of a vast network of scientific and undoubted facts, formidable from their number, and though not strong enough to warrant, yet tending towards the conclusion. You have a perfect right to reject the system, but you * * See some excellent articles in The Month. have no right to call it nonsense till you have taken the trouble to master it. I have known professors who, with a triumphant Q. E. D., have before a class of admiring pupils proved that Kant's system is absurd. What they really had proved was their utter ignorance of the subject. We must begin by understanding our opponents. If we are to make any impression on the nineteenth century, we must boldly look difficulties full in the face, and frankly acknowledge them. We must cheerfully accept all facts, however they at first sight tell against us. We must pierce down to the very core of things. Furthermore, we must make ourselves understood, and for this purpose we must use modern terms. If I may venture to speak of myself, after having done my best to believe in modern philosophy, I have returned to the Aristotle which, thank heaven, I learned many years ago at Oxford, when Newman was king. I believe that, on the whole, truth is to be found in the system of the old heathen, into the form of whose terms the Church has, to a great extent, cast her theology, though its most strenuous supporters "have no intention to deny that the old philosophy may be perfected by some of the labours of the new."* Nevertheless, holding its truth as I do, I am perfectly convinced that you may as well address the House of Commons in Chaldee as attempt to reach the intellect of the world with scholastic philosophy. If you would aim at Christianizing English science, you must speak, not bad Latin, but plain English. Materia prima, whether true or false, will never convert the world. You may define your terms if you will, but your definitions will fall cold upon the hearts of men whose minds have been cast in another mould, and to whose whole mode of thought the very ideas are grotesquely strange. For fighting purposes the schoolmen are as wooden ships to ironclads. You will never get within range, and your arguments will never penetrate the iron-bound hide of your adversary. Our very first condition of obtaining a hearing is being intelligible. My object, then, in this paper is a very humble one. I wish to try to put into modern language that theory of the human soul which I take leave to call the Christian one, because it is the view of the enormous majority of Christendom, and the official pronouncement of the only Christian body which knows its own mind-or apparently has a mind on the subject. Virtually as far back as the time of the Apollinarian controversy, explicitly in the fourteenth century, again in the age of Leo X., and very lately in our own day, in the course of its long combat with German Professordom, by the mouth of Pius IX., the Church of which Rome is the centre has put out a definite view about the soul. This * Kleutgen, "Die Philosophie der Vorzeit," 4, 1, 295. theory is expressed in scholastic language as follows:-"We affirm that man is one complete being, made up of body and soul in the sense that the intellectual soul is by itself the true and immediate form of body."" Let me try to put this into modern language. Although Englishmen who go to church recite the Creed of the Apostles, yet I suspect that the notion of the resurrection of the body has a very loose hold upon their intellect. The popular view of the immortality of the soul seems to be an odd mixture of Plato and Descartes. Matter and spirit, two substances at the opposite poles of being, have been brought into a temporary union by the fiat of the Creator. The body with its functions is one thing, the mind with its functions is another. When the mind is freed from the body, it is thus not wonderful that it should still exist with all its functions unimpaired. It" shuffles off its mortal coil," and is all the better for the change. The liberated soul springs towards heaven naturally, as a bird flies from its cage, and only exercises its powers with greater vigour now that it is freed from the fetters of the flesh. It is impossible that a system so untrue to facts could stand for a moment before anything so real as a philosophy based on experience. Not a function of life, whether involving pain or pleasure, not a phenomenon of death, not an exercise of the senses, not an idea of the mind, but proclaims that body and soul are not two wholes accidentally joined, and separable without hurt to either, but one organism, in which the parts are for the whole and the whole for the parts. Fortunately perhaps few men take the trouble to think; but when a great audacious thinker like Descartes does analyze his thoughts, then the defects of such a false dualism as this become patent at once. When a mind clear as his begins to stammer, you see at once that something is wrong. A man who can look on "the sensations of pain and hunger, as nothing else but confused kinds of thinking, arising out of the union and, as it were, mixing up of body and soul," betrays at once the opposition between his theory and facts. When that which is really one organism is thus unnaturally bisected, what belongs to both parts together is sure to be violently assigned to one; nor can the unmeaning words "union" and "mixing" heal the mischief. How there is a union possible between two things, which, according to the view of Descartes, have not only nothing in common, but are absolute contradictions, is the very question to be solved. The soul does not think pain in a body with which it is somehow connected; it feels pain with the body. The views of Descartes, then, and the popular views of immortality which are unconsciously based upon it, must disappear together before any system which strongly expresses the great fact that man is one whole being, and which has * Brief to the Bishop of Breslau, April, 1860. |