Iv.] IS DARWINISM FATAL TO RELIGION? 127

directed towards the Unknown. The Unknown is an ocean? What is conscience? The compass

of the Unknown." Yes, the office of conscience is prophetic. It is truly "the compass of the Unknown," ever pointing man to the Divine Personality: "tu homo, tantum nomen, si te scias!"

And what, if we weigh the matter well, is the very central idea of Christianity but this, of the root of moral obligation in the Divine nature and in man's filial relation to it? As I have elsewhere observed,* the doctrine of the affinity of the better side of human nature with the Divine, was the fount from which the moral and religious teaching of Christ flowed. This was the first great note of his teaching. The second, no less clear and unmistakable, in His proclamation of Himself as a teacher come from God, in a very special and unique sense: as the Deliverer of men from the tyranny of that lower self whereby they were held back from the supreme Good: "the Way, the Truth, and the Life" in the memorable words reported by the author of the Fourth Gospel. It is the doctrine of Kant that "without a God and without a world invisible to us now but hoped for, the glorious ideas of ethics may indeed be objects of approbation and admiration, but cannot be the springs of action." Religion, and especially the Christian religion, has for its very office to proclaim

*Chapters in European History, vol. i. p. 53.

Deity and Immortality as the crown of that moral law, whose existence and dictates and absolute character reason itself discloses. How then do these transcendental conceptions accord with the verities of physical science, summed up in the evolutionary formula?

That is the question.

The answer to it seems

I

to me this: That while Mr. Darwin has succeeded, to some extent, in tracing and exhibiting the evolution of conditions, he has revealed to us nothing whatever concerning the evolution of essence. accept gratefully all that he can teach me about the facts of natural history. But he cannot teach me that which he did not himself know, that of which he disclaimed all knowledge. A physicist, not a philosopher, he worked in the sphere of sense perception. In metaphysics, in mental science, as is evident upon the face of his writings, he was quite unversed. He tells us explicitly that his system "is not concerned with the origin of spiritual or vital forces." That moral sense, of which I have been writing, may have been evolved as Mr. Darwin supposes. The facts seem to me to point clearly to such a conclusion. I do not doubt that as the germ of ethics exists in the low varieties of our race, still extant, who seem less human, in feeling, than our dogs and horses, so it existed in tertiary and quaternary men, aptly characterised by the poet as "mutum et turpe pecus;" dormant, like sunlight in coal, but still really there. I can as

little doubt that the physical organism, material nature, human society, have been conditions and instruments of its evolution. But you do not explain a thing by merely tracing it back to rudimentary forms, or by exhibiting the course of its development. If there is any one fact of which I am sure it is this: that in the moral sense there is something transcending organic life and sensation. Relativity is the last word of Darwinism, as of all physical science. The Categorical Imperative is not relative. It has a value quite independent of my interests, of all interests. It is absolute. Physical science cannot tell me what it means. But it can tell me much of the meaning of physical science. "Everything in the phenomenal world," says Leibnitz, "takes place at the same time mechanically and metaphysically; but the source of the mechanical is the metaphysical." The facts given by physics are but the printed syllables. It is the office of metaphysics to construe them. Those "beautiful contrivances" which Mr. Darwin so well describes in his book on the Fertilisation of Orchids, surely indicate objective purpose, design. The doctrine of final causes alone offers a rational interpretation of them. I do not speak of final causes as Dr. Pangloss expounds them. I speak of what Professor Huxley happily calls "that wider teleology which is not touched by the doctrine of evolution, but is actually based upon its fundamental propo

K

Where can this passage berfonid?

Ригв

130

رادو

THE REVOLUTION AND SCIENCE.

[CH.

sition." Again, what I read in the same fasci-
nating volume of the "marvellous adjustments
between the plants and their environment, speaks
to me plainly of a cause inherent in them which
is one of the attributes of life itself. Nor, when
I rise from its perusal, is there room left in me
for doubt of the intelligence of these wonderful
plant-organisms, of their consciousness, however
dim, of their surroundings, of their possession in
their measure, of the self-same endowment which
in man we call mind. Mr. Darwin's facts point as
clearly to a psychic basis of life as to Directive
Intelligence. And so they lend themselves to the
deepest spiritual teaching, and receive from it their
only legitimate explanation. They lead us on to
think, with Wordsworth, of "life and soul to every
mode of being inseparably linked;" to conceive of
matter, not as the base thing of the sensualistic
philosophy, but as substance in its dynamic condi-
tion, pregnant with the potency of personality;
to regard its laws as modes of the divine agency,
its properties as effects of the divine indwelling.
And surely thus the whole universe is trans-
figured before us, and we catch, as "in high
dream and solemn vision," some glimpse of its real
meaning. The supreme law which rules through-
out it is a law of tendency upward, of striving
after perfection. This is the true law of evolution.
Not only in man, but in the non-human animal, in
the plant, and everywhere throughout the vast

surely! barchal New

was not so co

шомов

дору!

risk the

je kisanctipeer dispoon, of

ہو

matter and

a very good grason his mind in these respects
for a very
of a high deson mating quality. As evidenced by

& If this is a s

occasio

-ple of catholic pecce then them is little asio for being purprised that morley disper-gedit.

Iv.]

THE SUPREME LAW.

131

family of organic life, down to the furthest limits of
consciousness, of existence-the two words denote
one thing, "cogito, ergo sum"-this great law rules
supreme. What a flood of light is hereby thrown upon
that deep saying that "the whole creation groaneth
and travaileth in pain together," waiting for the
deliverance! "In pain; " pain everywhere; pain
throughout the boundless battle-field, the illimitable
sepulchre of creation: but everywhere the necessary
instrument of advance, not fruitless, even as He,
in whom the eternally ideal became the historically
real, was made perfect through suffering; in this,
as in all else, "the first-born of every creature."/
The highest and noblest of our race, in all ages and
of all creeds, bear witness that to them pain was
no real evil, but a supremely beneficent discipline.
With one voice they proclaim that there is only
one evil in the world: deflection from its divinely
appointed law. And herewith accords the testi-
mony of the moral sense, even in the lowest and
least noble for it speaks no word of "happiness,
our being's end and aim;" it witnesses only of
justice. Happiness! If that be the end and aim,
the martyrs, the saints, the heroes, in every gene-
ration who 66
suffered countless things, who
battled for the true, the just "-were indeed fools
and blind; and the voice of conscience is a lie. But
to tell me that, is as much a contradiction of a fact
as would be the denial of my sense perception. As
much, or rather, far more. For the fact thus gain-

K 2
and

y many of them themselves from

were st

author has not get worked to pueberity.

virulent melo-dran