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RELIGION
AS AFFECTED BY
MODERN MATERIALISM:
AN
ADDRESS
DELIVERED IN
MANCHESTER NEW COLLEGE, LONDON,
At
the
Opening of
its
89th Session,
On TUESDAY, Oct. 6th, 1874.
by
JAMES MARTINEAU, LE.D.
PRINCIPAL.
WILLIAMS AND NORGATE,
14, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, LONDON;
And 20, SOUTH FREDERICK STREET, EDINBURGH.
1874.
�PREFACE.
The following Address, published by desire of my College, was
much curtailed in oral delivery.
As somewhat more patience may
be hoped for in a reader than in a hearer, it now appears in full.
The position assumed in it, of resistance to some speculative tenden
cies of modern physical research, is far from congenial to me : for it
seems to place me in the wrong camp. But the exclusive pretension,
long set up by Theology, to dominate the whole field of knowledge,
seems now to have simply passed over to the material Sciences ;—
with the effect of inverting, rather than removing, a mischievous
intellectual confusion, and shifting the darkness from outward Nature
to Morals and Religion.
I cannot admit that these are conquered
provinces : and to re-affirm their independence, and protest against
their absorption in a universal material empire, appears to me a
pressing need alike for true philosophy and for the future of human
character and society.
London, Oct. 12, 18
7
*4.
�RELIGION AS AFFECTED BY MODERN
MATERIALISM.
The College which places me here to-day professes to
select and qualify suitable men for the Nonconformist
Ministry; that is, the headship of societies voluntarily
formed for the promotion of the Christian life. In carrying
out its work, two rules have been invariably observed:
(1) the Special Studies which deal with our sources of
religious faith—whether in the scrutiny of nature or in
the interpretation of sacred books—have been left open to
the play of all new lights of thought and knowledge, and
have promptly reflected every well-grounded intellectual
change; and (2) the General Studies which give the balanced
aptitudes of a cultivated mind have been made as extensive
and thorough as the years at disposal would allow. In
both these rules there is apparent an eager thirst for a
right apprehension of things,—a contempt for the dangers
of possible discovery, a persuasion that in the mind most
large and luminous the springs of religion have the freshest
and the fullest flow; together with the idea that the
Preacher, instead of being the organ of a given theology,
should himself, by the natural influence of mental supe
riority, pass to the front and take the lead in a regulated
growth of opinion.
A2
�There have never been wanting prophets of ill who dis
trusted this method as rash. So much open air does not
suit the closet divine; such liability to change disappoints
the fixed idea of the partisan; and the “ practical man”
does not want his preacher’s head made heavy with too
much learning, or his faith attenuated in the vacuum of
metaphysics. At the present moment these partial dis
trusts are superseded by a deeper and more comprehensive
misgiving, affecting not the method simply, but the aim
and function of our Institution. Side by side with the
literary pursuits of the scholar, the study of external nature
has always had a place of honour in our traditions and our
estimates of a manly education; and there is scarcely a
special science which has not some brilliant names that
range not far from the lines of our history; and from the
favourite shelf of all our libraries, the Principia of Newton,
the Essays of Franklin, the Papers of Priestley and Dalton,
the “Principles” of Lyell, the Biological Treatises of South
wood Smith and Carpenter, and the records of Botanical
research by Sir James Smith and the Hookers, look down
upon us with something of a personal interest. The suc
cessive enlargements given by these skilled interpreters to
our earlier picture of the world,—the widening Space, the
deepening vistas of Time, the new groups of chemical ele
ments and the precision of their combinations, the detected
marvels of physiological structure, and the rapid filling-in
of missing links in the chain of organic life,—have been
eagerly welcomed as adding a glory to the realities around,
and, by the erection of fresh shrines and cloisters, turning
the simple temple in which we once stood into a clustered
magnificence. Thus it was, so long as discoveries came
upon us one by one; nor did any Biblical chronology or
Apocalypse interfere with their proper evidence for an hour.
�5
But now—must we not confess it ?—certain shadows of
anxiety seem to steal forth and mingle with the advancing
light of natural knowledge, and temper it to a less genial
warmth. It comes on, no longer in the simple form of
pulse after pulse of positive and limited discovery, but with
the ambitious sweep of a universal theory, in which facts
given by observation, laws gathered by induction, and con
ceptions furnished by the mind itself, are all wrought up
together as if of homogeneous validity. A report is thus
framed of the Genesis of things, made up indeed of many
true chapters of science, but systematized by the terms and
assumptions of a questionable if not an untenable philo
sophy. To the inexpert reader this report seems to be all
of one piece; and he is disturbed to find an account appa
rently complete of the “ Whence and the Whither” of all
things without recourse to aught that is Divine; to see the
refinements of organism and exactitudes of adaptation dis
enchanted of their wonder; to watch the beauty of the
flower fade into a necessity; to learn that Man was never
intended for his place upon this scene, and has no commis
sion to fulfil, but is simply flung hither by the competitive
passions of the most gifted brutes; and to be assured that
the elite beings that tenant the earth tread each upon an
infinite series of failures, and survive as trophies of im
measurable misery and death. Thus an apprehension has
become widely spread, that Natural History and Science
are destined to give the coup de grdce to all theology, and
discharge the religious phenomena from human life, that
churches and their symbols must disappear like the witches’
chamber .and the astrologists’ tower; and that, as every
thing above our nature is dark and void, those who affect
to lift it lead it nowhither, and must take themselves away
as “ blind leaders of the blind.” Whether this apprehension
�6
is well founded or not is a very grave question for society
in many relations; and is emphatically urgent for those
who educate men as spiritual guides to others, and who
can invest them with no directing power except the native
force of a mind at one with the truth of things and a heart
of quickened sympathies. Hitherto, they have been trained
under the assumptions that the Universe which includes
us and folds us round is the Life-dwelling of an Eternal
Mind; that the World of our abode is the scene of a Moral
Government incipient but not yet complete; and that the
upper zones of Human Affection, above the clouds of self
and passion, take us into the sphere of a Divine Communion. Into this over-arching scene it is that growing thought
and enthusiasm have expanded to catch their light and
fire. And if “ the new faith” is to carry in it the contra
dictories of these positions,—if it leaves us to make what
we can of a simply molecular universe, and a pessimist
world, and an unappeasable battle of life,—it will require
another sort of Apostolate, and would make such a differ
ence in the studies which it is reasonable to pursue, that
it might be wisest for us to disband, and let the new Future
preach its own gospel, and devise, if it can, the means of
making the tidings “glad.” Better at once to own our
occupation gone than to linger on sentimental sufferance,
and accept the indulgent assurance that, though there is
no longer any truth in religion, there is some nice feeling
in it; and that while, for all we have to teach, we might
shut up to-morrow, we may harmlessly keep open still, as
a nursery of “Emotion.”* I trust that, when “emotion”
proves empty, we shall stamp it out, and get rid of it.
Though, however, no partnership between the physicist
* See Professor Tyndall’s Address before the British Association ;
with Additions, p. 61.
�7
and the theologian can be formed on these terms of assign
ing the intellect to the one and the feelings to the other,
may it not be that, in the flurry of exultation and of panic,
they misconstrue their real position ? and that their rela
tions, when calmly surveyed, may not be in such a state
of tension as each is ready to believe ? Looking on their
respective contentions from the external position of logical
observation, and without presuming to call in question the
received inductions of the naturalist, I believe that both
parties mistake the bearing of those inductions upon reli
gion; and that, although this bearing is in some aspects
serious, it is neither of the quality nor of the magnitude
frequently ascribed to it. I venture to affirm that the
essence of religion, summed up in the three assumptions
already enumerated, is independent of any possible results
of the natural sciences, and stands fast through the various
readings of the genesis of things.
The unpractised mind of simple times goes out, it is
true, upon everything en masse, and indeterminately feels
and thinks about itself and the field of its existence, the
inner and the outer, the transient and the permanent, the
visible and the invisible: its knowledge and its worship,
the pictures of its fancy and the intuitions of its faith,
are as yet a single tissue, of which every broken thread
rends and deforms the whole. Hence the oldest sacred
traditions run into stories of world-building; and the ear
liest attempts at a systematic interpretation of nature, in
which physical ideas were clothed in mythical garb, are
regarded by Aristotle as “ theological.” It must be ad-r
mitted that our own age has not yet emerged from this
confusion. And in so far as Church belief is still com
mitted to a given kosmogony and natural history of Man,
it lies open to scientific refutation, and has already re
�8
ceived from it many a wound under which it visibly pines
away. It is needless to say that the new “ book of Genesis,”
which resorts to Lucretius for its “ first beginnings,” to
protoplasm for its fifth day, to “ natural selection ” for its
Adam and Eve, and to evolution for all the rest, con
tradicts the old book at every point; and inasmuch as
it dissipates the dream of Paradise, and removes the tra
gedy of the Fall, cancels at once the need and the scheme
of Redemption, and so leaves the historical churches of
Europe crumbling away from their very foundations. If
any one would know how utterly unproducible in modern
daylight is the theology of the symbolical books, how
absolutely alien from the real springs of our life, let him
follow for a few hours the newest m ivement of ecclesiasti
cal reform, and listen to the reported conferences at Bonn
on the remedies for a divided Christendom. Scarcely
could the personal re-appearance of Athanasius or Cyril on
the floor of the council-hall be more startling, or the cries
of anathema from the voices of the ancient dead have a
more wondrous sound, than the reproduction as hopes of
the future, by men of Munich, of Chester, of Pittsburg,
and of the Eastern Church, of formulas without meaning
for the present, the eager discussion of subtle varieties of
falsehood, and the anxious masking of their differences by
opaque phrases under which everybody manages to look.
Such signs of strange intellectual anachronism excuse the
aversion with which many a thoughtful man, with a heart
still full of reverence, turns away from all religious asso
ciation, and lives without a church. It has been the in
fatuation of ecclesiastics to miss the inner divine spirit
that breathes through the sources of their faith, and to
seize, as the materials of their system, the perishable con
ceptions and unverified predictions of more fervent but
�9
darker times; so that, in the structure they have raised,
all that is most questionable in the legacy of the past,—
obsolete Physics, mythical History, Messianic Mythology,
Apocalyptic prognostications,—have been built into the
very walls, if not made the corner-stone, and now by
their inevitable decay threaten the whole with ruin.
Why indeed should I charge this infatuation on councils
and divines alone ? It is not professional but human; it
is a delusion which affects us all. We are for ever shaping
our representations of invisible tilings, in comparison with
other men’s notions, into forms of definite opinion, and
throwing them to the front, as if they were the photo
graphic equivalent of our real faith. Yet somehow the
essence of our religion never finds its way into these frames
of theory; as we put them together it slips away, and, if
we turn to pursue it, still retreats behind; ever ready to
work with the will, to unbind and sweeten the affections,
and bathe the life with reverence ; but refusing to be seen,
or to pass from a divine hue of thinking into a human
pattern of thought. The effects of this infatuation in the
founders of our civilization are disastrous on both sides,
—not only to the Churches whose system is undermined,
but to the spirit of the Science which undermines it.
It turns out that, with the sun and moon and stars, and
in and on the earth both before and after the appear
ance of our race, quite other things have happened than
those which the consecrated kosmogony recites : especially
Man, instead of falling from a higher state, has risen from
a lower, and inherits, instead of a uniform corruption, a
law of perpetual improvement; so that the real process has
the effect, not only of an enormous magnifier, but of an
inverting mirror, on the theological picture. Yet, notwith
standing the deplorable appearance to which that picture
�10
is thus reduced, it is exhibited afresh every week to mil
lions still taught to regard it as Divine. This is the mis
chief on the Theologic side. On the other hand, Science,
in executing this merited punishment, has borrowed from
its opponents one of their worst errors, in identifying the
anomalous or lawless with the divine, and assuming that
whatever falls within the province of nature drops thereby
out of relation to God. As the old story of Creation called
in the Supreme Power only by way of supernatural parox
ysm, to gain some fresh start beyond the resources of the
natural order, so the new inquirers, on getting rid of these
crises, fancy that the Agent who had been invoked for
them is gone, and proclaim at once that Matter without
Thought is competent to all. In thus confounding the idea
of the Divine Mind with that of miracle-worker, they do
but go over to the theological camp, and snatch thence its
oldest and bluntest weapon, which in modern conflict can
only burden the hand that wields it. How runs the his
tory of their alleged negative discovery ? The Naturalist
was told in his youth that at certain intervals—at the
joints, for instance, between successive species of organ
isms—acts of sudden creation summoned fresh groups of
creatures out of nothing. These epochs he attacks with
riper knowledge; he finds a series of intermediary forms,
and fragmentary lines of suggestion for others; and when
the affinities are fairly complete, and the chasm in the
order of production is filled up, he turns upon us and says,
‘ See, there is no break in the chain of origination, how
ever far back you trace it; we no more want a Divine
Agent there, and then than here and now.' Be it so; but
it is precisely here and now that He is needed, to be
the fountain of orderly power, and to render the tissue of
Laws intelligible by his presence; his witness is found not
�11
only in the gaps, but in the continuity of being,—not in
the suspense, but in the everlasting flow of change; for,
the universe as known, being throughout a system of
Thought-relations, can subsist only in an eternal Mind
that thinks it.
The whole history of the Genesis of things Eeligion
must unconditionally surrender to the Sciences. Not in
deed that it is without share in the great question of
Causality; but its concern with it is totally different from
theirs; for it asks only about the ‘ Whence, ’ of all pheno
mena, while they concentrate their scrutiny upon the ‘How:
by which I mean that their end is accomplished as soon
as it has been found in what groups phenomena regularly
cluster, and on what threads of succession they are strung,
and into what classification their resemblances throw them.
These are matters of fact, directly or circuitously ascertain
able by perception, and remaining the same, be their origin
ating power what it may. On that ulterior question the
Sciences have nothing to say. And, on the other hand,
when Eeligion here takes up her word and insists that
the phenomena thus reduced to system are the product of
Mind, she in no way prejudges the modus operandi, but
is ready to accept whatever affinities of aspect, whatever
adjustments of order, the skill of observers may reveal.
On these investigations she has nothing to say. If indeed
you could ever show that the method of the universe is
one along which no Mind could move—that it is absolutely
incoherent and unideal—you would destroy the possibility
of Eeligion as a doctrine of Causality: only, however, by
simultaneously discovering the impossibility of Science,—
which wholly consists in organizing the phenomena of the
world into an intellectual scheme reflecting the struc
ture of its archetype. That those who labour to render
�12
the universe intelligible should call in question its relation
to intelligence, is one of those curious inconsistencies to
which the ablest specialists are often the most liable when
meditating in foreign fields. If it takes mind to construe
the world, how can it require the negation of mind to con
stitute it?
It is not in the history of Superstition alone that the
human mind may be found struggling in the grasp of some
mere Nightmare of its own creation : a philosophical hypo
thesis may sit upon the breast with a weight not less
oppressive and not more real; till a friendly touch or a
dawning light breaks the spell, and reveals the quiet morn
ing and the bed of rest. Is there, for instance, no logical
illusion in the Materialist doctrine which in our time is
proclaimed with so much pomp and resisted with so much
passion ? ‘ Matter is all I want,’ says the Physicist: ‘ give
me its atoms alone, and I will explain the universe.’
‘ Good; take as many of them as you please: see, they
have all that is requisite to Body, being homogeneous
extended solids.’ ‘That is not enough,’ he replies; ‘it
might do for Democritus and the mathematicians, but I
must have considerably more: the atoms must be not only
in motion and of various shapes, but also of as many kinds
as there may be chemical elements; for how could I ever
get water, if I had only hydrogen molecules to work with ?’
‘ So be it,’ we shall say; ‘ only this is a considerable en
largement of your specified datum,—in fact, a conversion
of it into several; yet, even at the cost of its monism, your
scheme seems hardly to gain its end; for by what manipu
lation of your resources will you, for example, educe con
sciousness? No organism can ever show you more than
matter moved; and, as Dubois-Reymond observes, there is
an impassable chasm “ between definite movements of defi
�13
nite cerebral atoms and the primary facts which I can
neither define nor deny,—I fed pain or pleasure, I taste
a sweetness, smell a rose-scent, hear an organ tone, see red,
together with the no less immediate assurance they give,
therefore I exist“ it remains,” he adds, “ entirely and
for ever inconceivable that it should signify a jot to a
number of carbon and hydrogen and nitrogen and oxygen
and other atoms how they lie and move“ in no way can
one see how from their concurrence consciousness can
arise/’* What say you to this problem?’ ‘It does not
daunt me at all,’ he declares: ‘ of course you understand
that my atoms have all along been affected by gravitation
and polarity; and now I have only to insist, with Lechner,f
on a difference among molecules; there are the inorganic,
which can change only their place, like the particles in an
undulation; and there are the organic, which can change
them order, as in a globule that turns itself inside out.
With an adequate number of these, our problem will be
manageable.’ ‘ Likely enough,’ we may say, ‘ seeing how
careful you are to provide for all emergencies; and if any
hitch should occur at the next step, where you will have to
pass from mere sentiency to Thought and Will, you can
■again look in upon your atoms, and fling among them a
handful of Leibnitz’s monads, to serve as souls in little, and
be ready, in a latent form, with that Vorstellungsfahigkeit
which our picturesque interpreters of nature so much prize.
* “ Ueber die Grenzen des Naturerkennens,” p. 29. Compare p. 20.
“ I will now prove, as I believe in a very cogent way, not only that,
in the present state of our knowledge, Consciousness cannot be ex
plained by its material conditions,—which perhaps every one allows,—
but that from the very nature of things it never will admit of expla
nation by these conditions.”
+ Einige Ideen zur Schopfungs-und Entwickelungsgeschichte der
Organismen, §§ i. ii.
*
�14
But surely you must observe how this “ Matter” of yours
alters its style with every change of service: starting as a
beggar, with scarce a rag of “property” to cover its bones,
it turns up as a Prince, when large undertakings are wanted,
loaded with investments, and within an inch of a plenipo
tentiary. In short, you give it precisely what you require
to take from it; and when your definition has made it
“ pregnant with all the future,” there is no wonder if from
it all the future might be born?
“We must radically change our notions of Matter,” says
Professor Tyndall; and then, he ventures to believe, it will
answer all demands, carrying “the promise and potency
of all terrestrial life.”* If the measure of the required
“ change in our notions” had been specified, the proposition
would have had a real meaning, and been susceptible of a
test. Without this precision, it only tells us, “ Charge the
word potentially with your quaesita, and I will promise to
elicit them explicitly.” It is easy travelling through the
stages of such an hypothesis; you deposit at your bank a
round sum ere you start; and drawing on it piecemeal at
every pause, complete your grand tour without a debt. ■
Words, however, ere they can hold such richness of prero
gative, will be found to have emerged from their physical
meaning, and to be truly #eo</>6pa ovo/zara,—terms that bear
God in them, and thus dissolve the very theory which they
represent. Such extremely clever Matter,—matter that is
up to everything, even to writing Hamlet, and finding out
its own evolution, and substituting a molecular plebiscite
for a divine monarchy of the world, may fairly be regarded
* Address before the British Association; with Additions, pp. 54,55.
Compare the statement, by Dubois-Reymond, of the opposite opinion,
quoted supra, p. 13, note.
�15
as a little too modest in its disclaimer of the attributes of
Mind.
Nor is the fallacy escaped by splitting our datum into
two, and instead of crowding all requisites into Matter,
leaving it on its old slender footing, and assuming along
with it Force as a distinct entity. The two postulates will
perform their promise, just like the one, on condition that
you secrete within them in the germ all that you are to
develop from them as their fruit; and in this case the word
“ Force'’ is the magical seed-vessel which is to surprise us
with the affluence of its contents. The surprise is due to
one or two nimble-witted substitutions, of which a conjuror
■might be proud, whereby unequals are shown to be equals,
and out of an acorn you hatch a chicken. First, the noun
Force is sent into the plural (which of course is only itself
in another form), and so we get provided with several of
them. Next, as there is now a class, the members must be
distinguishable; and, as they are all of them activities,
they will be known one from another by the sort of work
they do : one will be a mechanician,—another a chemist,—
a third will be a swift runner along the tracks of life,—
a fourth will find out all the rest,—will do our reasoning
about them, and get up all our examinations for us. The
last of these, every one must own—at least every one who
has graduated—is much more dignified than the others ;
and all through we rise, at every step, from ruder to more
refined accomplishment. With things thus settled, we
seem to have found Plato’s ideal State, in which every
order minds its own business, and no element presumes to
cross the line and become something else. Not so, how
ever; for, after thus differencing the forces and keeping
them under separate covers, the next step is to unify them,
and show them all as the homogeneous contents of a single
�16
receptacle. The forces, we are assured, are interchange
able, and relieve each other; when one has carried its mes
sage, it hands the torch to another, and the light is never
quenched or the race arrested, but runs an eternal round.
But why then, you will say, divide them first, only to unite
them afterwards ? Follow our logical wonder-worker one
move further, and you will see. He has now, we may say,
his four vessels standing on the table; the contents of the
whole are to be whisked into one ; having them all, he has
more ways than one of working out their equivalence; and
it remains at his option, which he shall lift to let the mouse
run out. For some reason, best known to himself, he
never thinks of choosing the last; indeed it is pretty much
to avoid this, and obtain other receptacles empty of thought,
that he broke down the original unity. If he be a circum
spect physiologist, he will probably prefer the third, and
exhibit the universal principle as in some sense living; if
he be a daring physicist, he will lay hold of the first,
and pronounce mechanical dynamics good enough for the
kosmos.
Am I asked to indicate the precise seat of fallacy in the
hypothesis which I have ventured to criticise ? The alleged
division of forces, considered as something over and above
the phenomena ascribed to them, is absolutely without
ground; each of them, as apart from any other, has a
purely ideal existence, without the slightest claim to objec
tive reality. Science, dividing its labours, has to break
down phenomena into sets according to their resemblances
and the affinities of their conditions; it disposes them thus
into natural provinces, the laws of which, when ascertained,
give us the rules by which the phenomena assort them
selves or successively arise,— lut nothing more. But what
ever field we survey, we carry into it the belief, inherent
�17
in the constitution of the intellect itself, of a Causal Power
as the source of every change: we believe it for each, we
believe it for all: it repeats itself identically with every
instance; and when a multitude of instances are tied up
together in virtue of their similarity and made into a class,
this constantly recurring reference, this identity of relation
to a power behind, is marked by giving that power a sin
gular name ; as the phenomena of weight are labelled with
the title Gravitation, expressing unity in their causal rela
tion. Were we closeted with this group of facts alone, this
unity would live in our minds without a rival, and we
should have no numerical distinction in our account of
force. But, meanwhile, other observers have been going
through a like experience in some separate field; have
gleaned and bound into a sheaf its scattered mass of homo
geneous growths, and denoted them by another name—say,
Electricity—carrying in it the same haunting reference to
a source for them all. Now why is this a new name ? Is
it that we have found a new power ? Have we carried our
observation behind the phenomena, so as, in either instance,
to find any power at all ? Are the two cases differenced
by anything else than the dissimilarity of their phenomena ?
Run over these distinctions, and, when you have exhausted
them, is there anything left by which you can compare
and set apart from each other the respective producing
forces ? All these questions must be answered in the nega
tive ; the differentiations lie only in the effects ; the causal
power is not observed, but thought; and that thought is the
same, not only from instance to instance, but from field to
field; and by this sameness it cancels plurality from Force,
and reduces the story of their transmigration into a scien
tific mythology. The distinctive names therefore mark only
differences in the sets of phenomena; they are simply in
B
�18
struments of classification for noticeable changes in nature,
and carry no partitions into the mysterious depths behind
the scenes. The dynamic catalogue being thus left empty
and cut down to a single term, do we talk nonsense when
we attach qualifying epithets to the word Force, and speak
of ‘electric force,’ of ‘nerve force’ of ‘ polar force,’ &c. ? Not
so; provided we mean by those phrases, simply, Force,
quantum sufficit, now for one set of phenomena, now for
another, without implication of other difference than that
of the seat and conditions and aspect of the manifestations.
But the moment we step across this restriction, we are in
the land of myths.
Power then is one and undivided. As external causal
ity, it is not an object of knowledge but an element given
in the relations of knowledge, a condition of our thinking
of phenomena at all. Were this all, our necessary belief
in it would be unattended by any representation of it;
it would remain an intellectual notion (Begriff), and we
could no more bring it before the mind under any definite
type than we can the meaning of such words as “sub
stance ” and " possibility.” In one field, however, and no
more, it falls into coincidence with our experience; for
we ourselves put forth power in the exercise of Will and
are personally conscious of Causality; and this sample
of immediate knowledge because seZ/-knowledge supplies
us with the means of representing to ourselves what else
we should have to think without a type. Here accord
ingly we reach, I venture to affirm, what we really mean,
and what alone saves us from the mere empty form of
meaning, whenever we assent to the axiom of causality.
It is very true that the exercise of Will, having more or
less of complication, itself admits of analysis ; intention
may play a larger or smaller part, may leave less or more
�19
for the share of automatic or impulsive activity; and by
letting the former withdraw into the background of our
conception, we may come to think of causation apart from
purpose,—which, I suppose, is the idea of Force. But this
is a bare fiction of abstraction, shamming an integral real
ity;—an old soldier pensioned off from actual duty, but
allowed to wear his uniform and look like what he was.
Since we have to assume causality for all things, and the
only causality we know is that of living Mind, that type
has no legitimate competitor. Even if it had, its sole
adequacy would leave it in possession of the field. For
among the products to be accounted for is the whole class
and hierarchy of minds ; and unless there is to be more in
the effect than in the cause, nothing less than Mind is
competent to realize a scheme of being whose ranks ascend
so high. As for the plea,—which has unhappily passed
into a commonplace,—that, even if it be so, that transcen
dent object is beyond all cognizance,—I will only say that
this doctrine of Nescience stands in exactly the same rela
tion to causal power, whether you construe it as Material
Force or as Divine Agency. Neither can be observed; one
or the other must be assumed. If you admit to the category
of knowledge only what we learn by observation, particular
or generalized, then is Force unknown; if you extend the
word to what is imported by the intellect itself into our
cognitive acts, to make them such, then is God known.
This comment on current hypotheses refers to them only
so far as they overstep the limits of Science, and aspire to
the seat of judgment on ulterior questions of Philosophy.
So long as they simply descend upon this or that realm of
nature, and try their strength there in simplifying its laws
or rendering them deducible,—or, passing from province to
province, labour to formulate equations available for several
b 2
�20
or for all,—they must be respectfully left to pursue their
work; and whenever their authors present their demon
strated “ system of the world/’ all reasonable men will learn
it from them, whatever it may be, as scholars from a master.
In the investigation of the genetic order of things, Theology
is an intruder, and must stand aside. Religion first reaches
its true ground, when, leaving the problem of what has
happened, it takes its stand on what for ever is. I do not
say that it absolutely matters not to us how antecedent
ages have been filled, and have brought up the march with
which we fall into step to-day; for we are beings of large
perspective, concentrating in us many lines of distance and
images between the eye and the horizon. But still, if the
light were all turned off from the Past, and on facing it we
looked only into the Night, the reality for us is not there,
but here, where it is Day. However the present may have
come about, I find myself in it: in whatever way my facul
ties may have been determined, faculties they are, and they
give me insight into my duty and outlook on my position:
however the world, of Nature and of Society, may have
grown to what it is, its scene contains me, its relations
twine around me, its physiognomy appeals to me with a
meaning from behind itself. If these data do not suffice
to show me my kinship with what is above, below, around
me, and find my moral and spiritual place, I shall not be
greatly helped by discovering how many ages my constitu
tion has been upon the stocks, and its antecedents been
upon the way. The beings that touch me with their look
and draw me out of myself, the duties that press upon my
heart and hand, are on the spot, speaking to me while the
clock ticks; and to love them aright, to serve them faith
fully, and construct with them a true harmony of life, is
the same task, whether I bear within me the inheritance of
�21
a million years, or, with all my surroundings, issued this
morning from the dark.
Remaining then at home, and consulting the nature
which we have and which we see, we find that, far from
being self-inclosed, or related only to its visible depen
dences, it turns a face, on more than one side, right towards
the Infinite, and, often to the disregard of nearer things,
moves hither or thither as if shrinking from a shadow ad
vancing thence, or drawn by a light that wins it forward.
We are constantly,—even the most practical of us,—seeing
what is invisible and hearing what is inaudible, and per
mitting them to send us on our way. Not left, like the
mere animal, to be the passive resultant of forces without
and instincts within, but invested with an alternative
power, we are conscious partners in the architecture of our
own character, and know ourselves to be the bearers of a
trust; and this fiduciary life takes us at once across the
boundary which separates nature from what transcends it.
Seducing appetites and turbulent passions and ignoble ease
never gain our undivided ear; while we bend to them,
there are pleading voices which distract us, and which,
if they do not save us, follow us with an expostulating
shame. Nor, if ever we wake up and kindle at the appeal
of misery and the cry of wrong, or with the spontaneous
fire of disinterested affection or devotion to the true and
good, can we construe them into anything less than a Divine
claim upon us : we know their right over us at a glance; we
feel on us their look of Authority in reply : if, to our care
less fancy, we were ever our own, we can be so no more.
Once stirred by the higher springs of character, and pos
sessed by the yearning for the perfect mind, we are aware
that to live out of these is our supreme obligation, and that
for us nothing short of this is holy. To have seen the vision
�22
of the best and possible and not bo pursue it, is to mar the
true idea of our nature, and to fall from its heaven as a
rebel and an outcast. This inner life of Conscience and
ideal aspiration supplies the elements and sphere of Reli
gion ; and the discovery of Duty is as distinctly relative to
an Objective Righteousness as the perception of Form to
an external Space: it is a bondage, with superficial reluc
tance but with deeper consent, to an invisible Highest;
and both moral Fear and moral Love stand before the face
of an Authority which is the eternal Reality of the holy,
just, and true. On the first view, you might expect that
the stronger the enthusiasm for goodness, and the surer the
recoil from in, so much the fitter would the mind be to
stand alone in its self-adequacy; yet it is precisely at such
elevation that it most trusts in a Supreme Perfection to
which it only faintly responds, and leans for support on
that everlasting stay. The life of aspiration, attempting to
nurse itself, soon pines and dies; it must breathe a diviner
air and take its thirst to unwasting springs; and wherever
it settles into a quiet tension of the will and an upturned
look of the affections, it is sustained by habitual access to
the Fountain of sanctity, and by the consciousness of an
Infinite sympathy. Are not both the need and the exist
ence of this objective sustaining power acknowledged by
Mr. Matthew Arnold himself, when he insists on that
strange entity, “ That, not ourselves, which makes for right
eousness” ? By an abstraction, however, such a function
cannot be discharged; nothing ever “ makes for righteous
ness” but One who is righteous. To support and raise the
less, there must be a Greater; and that which does not
think and will and love, whatever the drift of its blind
power, may indeed be larger, but is not greater, than the
sinning soul that longs for purity.
�23
Now so long as the devotee of Goodness is possessed by
a faith, not only in his own aspirations, but in an Infinite
Mind which fosters and secures them as counterparts of
the highest reality, it is of little moment ethically what
theory he adopts of their mode of origin within him.
Whether he takes them as intuitive data of his Under
standing, or, with Hartley, as a transfiguration of sensible
interests into a disinterested glory, or, with Darwin and
Spencer, as the latest refinement of animal instinct and
discipline after percolating through uncounted generations,
•—that which he has reached,—be it first or last,—is at all
events the truth of things, the primordial and everlasting
certainty, in comparison with which all prior stages of
training, if such there were, give but dim gropings and
transient illusions. In Hartley himself, accordingly, a
doctrine essentially materialistic and carrying in it the
whole principle of Evolution, so far as it could be epitomized
in the individual’s life, easily blended with moral fervour
and even a mystic piety; and, in Priestley, with a noble
heroism of veracity and an unswerving confidence in the
perfect government of the universe. But what if the pro
cess of atomic development be taken as the Substitute for
God, not as His method ? if you withdraw from the begin
ning all Idea of what is to come out at the end,—all Model
or Archetype to control and direct the procedure, and re
strain the possible from running off indefinitely into the
false and wrong ? Do you suppose that the ethical results
can be still the same ? The inevitable difference, I think,
few considerate persons will deny; and without attempt to
measure its amount, its chief feature may be readily defined.
It was often said by both James and John Stuart Mill,
that you do not alter, much less destroy, a feeling or senti
ment by giving its history: from whatever unexpected
�24
sources its constituents may be gathered, when once their
confluence is complete the current they form runs on the
same, whether you know them or not. How true this may
he is exemplified by the younger Mill himself; who, while
resolving the moral sentiments into simple pleasure and
pain, and moral obligation into a balance of happiness, yet
nobly protested that he would rather plunge into eternal
anguish than falsely bend before an unrighteous power. If
so it be, then one in whom benevolence, honour, purity, had
reached their greatest refinement and most decisive clear
ness would suffer no change of moral consciousness, on
becoming convinced that it is a “poetic thrill” of his
“ ganglia”* induced by the long breaking-in through which
his progenitors have passed, in conformity with the system
of organic modification that has deprived him of his fur and
his tail. In spite of the apparent incongruity, let us grant
that his higher affections will speak to him exactly as
before, and make their claims felt by the same tones of
sacred authority, so that they continue to subdue him in
reverence or lift him as with inspiration. The surrender to
them of heart and will under these conditions, the vow to
abide by them and live in them, may still deserve acknow
ledgment as Religion; but, inasmuch as they have shrunk
into mere unaccredited subjective susceptibilities, they have
lost all support from Omniscient approval, and all presum
able accordance with the reality of things. For what are
these moral intensities of his nature, seen under his new
lights ? Whence is their message ? With what right do
they deliver it to him in that imperative voice ? and, if it
be slighted, prostrate him with unspeakable compunction ?
Are they an influx of Righteousness and Love from the
* Professor Tyndall’s Address, p. 49.
�25
life of the universe ? Do they report the insight of beings
more august and. pure ? No ; they are capitalized “ expe
riences of utility” and social coercion, the record of ancestral
fears and satisfactions stored in his brain, and re-appearing
with divine pretensions, only because their animal origin
is forgotten; or, under another aspect, they are the newest
advantage won by gregarious creatures in “ the struggle for
existence.” From such an origin it is impossible to extract
credentials for any elevated claim: so that although low
beginnings may lead, in the natural order, to what is better
than themselves,—as a Julia may be the mother of an
Agrippina,—yet in such case the superiority lies in new
endowment, which is not contained in the inheritance. For
such new endowment as we gain in the ascent from interest
to conscience the theory of transmission cannot provide;
if the coarse and turbid springs of barbarous life, filtered
through innumerable organisms, flow limpid and sparkling
at last, the element is still the same, though the sediment
is left behind; and as it would need a diviner power to
turn the water into wine, so Prudence run however fine,
social Conformity however swift and spontaneous, can never
convert themselves into Obligation. Hence arises, I think,
an inevitable contradiction between the scientific hypo
thesis and the personal characteristics of a high-souled
disciple of the modern negative doctrine. For his supreme
affections no adequate Object and no corresponding Source
is offered in the universe: if they look back for their cradle,
they see through the forest the cabin of the savage or the
lair of the brute; if they look forth for their justifying
Reality and end, they fling vain arms aloft and embrace a
vacancy. They cannot defend, yet cannot relinquish, their
own enthusiasm: they bear him forward upon heroic lines
that sweep wide of his own theory; and, transcending their
�26
own reputed origin and environment, they float upon vapours
and are empty, self-poised hy their own heat. One or two
instances will illustrate the way in which what is best in
our humanity is left, in the current doctrine, unsupported
by the real constitution of the world.
Compassion—the instinctive response to the spectacle of
misery—has a twofold expressiveness: it is in us a pro
testing vote against the sufferings we see; and a sign of
faith that they are not ultimate but remediable. Its singu
larity is, to be not one of these alone, but both. Were it
a simple repugnance, it would drive us from its object;
but it is an aversion which attracts: it snatches us with a
bound to the very thing we hate, and not with hostile
rush, but with softened tread and gentle words and up
lifting hand. And what is the secret of this transfigura
tion of horror into love ? It could never be but for the
implicit assurance that for these wounds there is healing
possible, if the nursing care does not. delay. Should we
not say then, if we trusted its own word about itself, that
this principle, so deep and intense in our unfolded nature,
is an evident provision for a world of hopeful sorrow ? It
is distinctly relative to pain, and would be out of place in
a scene laid out for happiness alone; yet treats it as tran
sient, and on passing into the cloud already sees the open
ing through. It enters the infirmary of human ills with
the tender and cheerful trust of the young sister of mercy,
who binds herself to the perpetual presence of human
maladies, that she may be for ever giving them their dis
charge. Compassion institutes a strange order of servitude:
it sets the strong to obey the weak, the man and woman
to wait upon the child, and youth and beauty to kneel and
bend before decrepitude and deformity. How then do the
drift and faith of this instinct agree with the method of
�27
the outer world as now interpreted ? Do they copy it
exactly, and find encouragement from the great example ?
On the contrary, Nature, it is customary to say, is pitiless,
and, while ever moving on, makes no step but by crushing
a thousand-fold more sentient life than she ultimately sets
up, and sets up none that does not devour what is already
there. The battle of existence rages through all time and
in every field; and its rule is to give no quarter,—to de
spatch the maimed, to overtake the halt, to trip up the
blind, and drive the fugitive host over the precipice into
the sea. Nature is fond of the mighty, and kicks the
feeble; and, while for ever multiplying wretchedness, has
no patience with it when it looks up and moans. And so
all-pervading is this rule, that evil, we- are told, cannot
really be put down, but only masked and diverted; if you
suppress it here, it will break out there ; the fire of anguish
still rolls below and has alternate vents; when you stop up
/Etna,, it will blot out Sodom and Gomorrha, and bury the
cities of the plain. Who can deny that such teachings as
these set the outer universe and our inner nature at its
best at hopeless variance with one another ? Do they not
depress the moral power to which we owe the most human
izing features of our civilization ? We have not to go far
for a practical answer. Within a few weeks the question
has been raised whether the recent flow of commiseration
towards the famine-stricken districts of India does not
offend against the Law of Nature for reducing a superfluous
population ; and whether there were not advantages in the
old method of taking no notice of these things, and letting
Death pass freely over his threshing-floor and bury the
human chaff quietly out of the way. Moral enthusiasm
makes many a mischievous mistake in its haste and blind
ness, and greatly needs the guidance of wiser thought; but
�28
this tone of moral scepticism, which disparages the very
springs of generous labour, and treats them as follies laughed
at by the cynicism of Nature, is a thousand-fold more deso
lating. For it carries poison to the very roots of good. It
is as the bursting out of salt-springs in a valley of fruits;
it soaks through the prolific soil of all the virtues, and
turns the promise of Eden into a Dead Sea shore.
Beyond the range of the merely compassionate impulse,
Self-forgetfulness in love for others has a foremost place in
our ideal of character, and our deep homage as representing
the true end of our humanity. We exact it from ourselves,
and the poor answer we make to the demand costs us
many a sigh; and till we can break the bonds that hold
us to our own centre, and lose our self-care in constant
sacrifice, a shadow of silent reproach lies upon our heart.
Who is so faultless, or so obtuse, as to be ignorant what
shame there is, not only in snatched advantages and ease
retained to others’ loss, but in ungentle words, in wronging
judgment within our private thoughts alone; nay, in simple
blindness to what is passing in another’s mind ? Who
does not upbraid himself for his slowness in those sym
pathies which are as a multiplying mirror to the joys of
life, reflecting them in endless play? And the grace so
imperfect in ourselves wins our instant veneration when
realized in others. The historical admirations of men are
often, indeed, drawn to a very different type of character:
for Genius and Will have their magnificence as well as
Goodness its beauty: but before the eye of a purified re
verence, neither the giants of force nor the recluses of
saintly austerity stand on so high a pedestal as the devoted
benefactors of mankind. The heroes of honour are great;
but the heroes of service are greater; nor does any appeal
speak more home to us than a true story of life risked,
�29
of ambitions dropped, of repose surrendered, of temper
moulded, of all things serenely endured,—perhaps un
noticed and in exile,—at some call of sweet or high affec
tion. Is then this religion of Self-sacrifice the counterpart
of the behaviour of the objective world ? Is the same
principle to be found dominating on that great scale ? Far
from it. There, we are informed, the only rule is selfassertion: the all-determining Law is relentless competition
for superior advantage; the condition of obeying which is,
that you are to forego nothing, and never to miss an oppor
tunity of pushing a rival over, and seizing the prey before
he is on his feet again. We look without, and see the
irresistible fact of selfish scramble: we look within, and
find the irresistible faith of unselfish abnegation. So here,
again, Morals are unnatural, and Nature is unmoral; and
if, beyond Nature, there is nothing supreme in both rela
tions to determine the subordination and resolve the con
tradiction, he who would be loyal to the higher call must
be so without ground of trust; if he will not betray his
secret ideal, he must follow it unverified, as a mystic en
chantment of his own mind.
Once more; the Sense of Duty enforces the suggestions of
these and other affections by an authority which we recog
nise as at once within us and over us, and making them
more than impulses, more than ideals, and establishing them
in binding relations with our Will. The rudest self-know
ledge must own that the consciousness of Moral Obligation
is an experience sui generis, separated by deep distinctions
from outward necessity on the one hand and inward desire
upon the other; and the only psychology which can bridge
over these distinctions is that which escapes with its
analysis into prehistoric ages, and finds it easy to grow
vision out of touch, and read back all differentiation into
�30
sameness. No one would carry off the problem into that
darkness who could deal with it in the present daylight:
so, we may take it as confessed, that to us the suasion of
Eight speaks with a voice which no charming of pleasure
and no chorus of opinion can ever learn to mimic. To
disregard them is a simple matter of courage; we defy them,
and are free : but if from it we turn away, we hear pursuing
feet behind; and should we stop our ears, we feel upon us
the grasp of an awful hand. Moral good would, in our
apprehension, cease to be what it is, were it constituted by
any natural good, or related to it otherwise than as its
superior. It is not a personal end—one among the many
satisfactions assigned to the separate activities of our con
stitution : else, it would be at our disposal, and we might
forego it. Others are our partners in it: for it sets up
JRiglits as counterparts to Duties, and widens by its reci
procity into a common element of Humanity. Is that then
its native home ? Have men created it, as an expression
of their general wish,—a concentrated code of civic police ?
We cannot rest in this : for no aggregate of wills, no public
meeting of mankind, though it got together all generations
and all contemporary tribes, could by vote make perfidy a
virtue and turn pity into a crime. Moral Eight is thus no
local essence; but by its centrifugal force, relatively to our
abode, slips off the earth and assumes an absolute univer
sality as the law of all free agency. That it should present
itself to us in this transcendent aspect is intelligible enough,
if it be identified with the Universal Mind, and thence
imparted to dependent natures permitted to be like Him :
for, in that case, the related feelings and convictions are
true; in the order of reality, Eighteousness is prior to the
pains and pleasures of our particular faculties and the
natural exigencies of our collective life; and our allegiance
�31
is due to an eternal Perfection which penetrates .the moral
structure of all worlds. How then does this intuitive faith
of our responsible will, this worship of an eternally Holy,
stand with the kosmical conceptions now tyrannizing over
the imaginations of men ? It encounters the shock of con
temptuous contradiction. Ethically, we are assured, the
known world culminates in us. Before us, there was
nothing morally good: over us, there is nothing morally
better: Man himself is here the supreme being in the
universe. In the just, the beneficent, the true, there is no
pre-existence : they are not the roots of reality, but the last
blossoms of the human phenomena. And even there, the
fair show which gives them their repute of an ethereal
beauty is but the play of an ideal light upon coarse mate
rials j—rude pleasures and ruder constraints are all that
remain when the increments of fancy have fallen away.
The real world provides interests alone; which, when ade
quately masked, call themselves virtues and pass for some
thing new: and, duped by this illusion, we dream of a realm
of authoritative Duty, in which the earth is but a province
of a supramundane moral empire. And so, we must
conclude, the Conscience which lives on this sublime but
empty vision has transcended the tuition of Nature, and,
in growing wiser than its teacher, has lost its foothold on
Reality, only to lean on a phantom of Divine support.
On the hypothesis of a Mindless universe, such is the
fatal breach between the highest inward life of man and
his picture of the outer world. All that is subjectively
noblest turns out to be the objectively hollo west; and the
ideal, whether in life and character, or in the beauty of the
earth and heaven, which he had taken to be the secret
meaning of the Real, is repudiated by it, and floats through
space as a homeless outcast. Even in this its desolation a
�32
devoted disciple will say, ‘I will follow thee whithersoever
thou goest;’ but how heavy the cross which he will have
to bear ! Religion, under such conditions, is a defiance of
inexorable material laws in favour of a better which they
have created but cannot sustain,—a reaction of man against
Nature, which he has transcended,—a withdrawal of the
Self which a resistless force pushes to the front,—a preser
vation of the weak whom Necessity crushes, a sympathy
with sufferings which life relentlessly sets up,—a recogni
tion of authoritative Duty which cannot be. Or will you
perhaps insist that, in this contrariety between thought and
fact, Religion must take the other side, discharge the Oeta
ovetpara as illusory, and in her homage hold fast to the
solid world ? This might perhaps in some sense be, if you
only gave us a world which it was possible to respect.
But, by a curious though intelligible affinity, the modern
doctrine allies itself with an unflinching pessimism; it plays
the cynic to the universe,—penetrates behind its grand and
gracious airs, and detects its manifold blunders and impos
tures : what skill it has it cannot help; and the only faults
and horrors that are not in it are those which are too bad to
live. Human life, which is the summit that has been won,
is pronounced but a poor affair at best; and the scene
which spreads below and around is but as a battle-field at
night-fall, with a few victors taking their faint shout away,
and leaving the plain crowded with wounds and vocal with
agony. Existence itself, insists Hartmann, is an evil, in
proportion as its range is larger and you know it more, and
that of cultivated men is worst of all; and the constitu
*
tion of the world (so stupidly does it work) would be an
unpardonable crime, did it issue from a power that knew
* Philosophic cles Unbewussten, c. xii. p. 598.
�33
what it was about.
*
How can these malcontents find any
Religion in obeying such a power ? Can they approach it
with contumely at one moment, and with devotion at the
next ? If they think so ill of Nature, there can be no
reverence in their service of her laws : on the contrary, they
abandon what they revere to bend before what they revile.
To this humiliation the more magnanimous spirits will
never stoop; they will find some excuse for still clinging to
the ideal forms they cannot verify; will go apart with them
with a high-toned love which stops short of faith but is
full of faithfulness; will linger near the springs of poetry
and art, and there forget awhile the disenchanted Actual;
and will wonder perhaps whether this half-consecrated
ground may not suffice, when the temples are gone, to give
an asylum to the worshippers. Such loyalty of heart towards
the harmonies that ought to prevail, with disaffection towards
the discords that do prevail, may indeed lift the character
of a man to an elevation half-divine; and in his presence,
Nature, were she not blind, might start to see that she
had produced a god. But, for all that, she is not going
to succumb to him; she can call up her lower brood to
suppress him, or monsters to chain him to her rock. He
contends with the lower forces, believing them to be the
stronger, and fights his losing battle against hordes of infe
riors ever swarming to overwhelm what is too good for
the world. Such religion as remains to him is a religion
of despair,—a pathetic defiance of an eternal baser power,
And if there be anything tragic in earth or heaven, it is
the proud desolation of a mind which has to regard itself
as Highest, to know itself the seat of some love and justice
and devotion to the good, and to look upon the system of
* Ap. Strauss ; der alte and der neue Glaube, p. 223.
0
�34
the Universe as cruel, ugly, stupid and mean. The most
touching episodes of history are perhaps those which dis
close the life of genius and virtue under some capricious
and ignoble tyranny,—asserting itself in the ostracism of
an Aristides, the hemlock-cup of Socrates, the blood-bath
of Thrasea; and no other than this is the life of every man
who, walking only by his purest inner lights, finds that
they illumine no nature but his own, and are baffled and
quenched by the outer darkness.
It cannot be denied that there does exist this contrariety
between the modern materialistic philosophy and religious
faith. It cannot be believed that this contrariety is charge
able on any mutual contradiction among the human facul
ties themselves. Were we really placed between two in
formants that said ‘ Yes ’ at the right ear and ‘ No' at the
left, we should simply be without cognitive endowment at
all, and all the pulsations of thought would cancel each
other and die. Can we end the strife by separating the
provinces of the two opposites, and saying that the func
tion of the one is to know, of the other to create ? Cer
*
tainly, “ creative ” power is something grand, and Theology
should perhaps feel honoured to be invested with it. But,
alas ! a known materialism and a created God presents
a combination which thought repudiates and reverence
abhors; and the suggestion of which must be met with the
counter affirmations, that the atomic hypothesis is a thing
not known but created, while God is not created but known.
The only possible basis for a treaty of alliance between the
tendencies now in conflict is not in lodging the one in the
Reason and the other in the Imagination, in order to keep
them from quarrelling, but in recognizing a Duality in the
* Professor Tyndall’s Address, p. 64.
�35
functions of Reason itself, according as it deals with phe
nomena or their ground, with law or with causality, with
material consecution or with moral alternatives, with the
definite relations of space and time and motion, or with
the indefinite intensities of beauty and values of affection
which bear us to the infinitely Good. When once this
adjustment of functions has been considerately made, the
disturbed equilibrium of minds will be reinstated, the panic
a.nd the arrogance of our time will disappear, and the pro
gress of the intellect will no longer shake the soul from her
everlasting rest.
C. Green & Son, Printers, 178, Strand.
��
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Victorian Blogging
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Religion as affected by modern materialism: an address delivered in Manchester New College, London, at the opening of the 89th session on Tuesday, Oct. 6th, 1874
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Martineau, James
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Place of publication: London
Collation: 35 p. ; 22 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Printed by C. Green & Son, Strand. Includes bibliographical references.
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Williams and Norgate
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1874
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G5357
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Religion as affected by modern materialism: an address delivered in Manchester New College, London, at the opening of the 89th session on Tuesday, Oct. 6th, 1874), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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Materialism
Religion
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Conway Tracts
Materialism
Religion and science
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IS THERE ANY^ AXIOM OE CATTSALTTY” ?
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A
rPHE cultivation of the Natural Sciences has advantageously
contractedsthe .meaning of the word “ Cause,” which formerly
was identified (as its derivative “Because” still is) with every answer
to the question “ Why?” and was said to lurk in the conditional
clause of every hypothetical proposition. But now, we withdraw
the word both from the logical ground of a belief (causa cognoscendl),
and from the interdependence of mathematical magnitudes (causa
essendif We do not, with Aristotle, call the premisses of a syllogism
the causes of the conclusion (An. Post. I. ii. 22), and, with Spinoza,
the essence or definition of Substance, the Cartse of its existence. And
though we say “ If two circles touch each other internally, their
centres and point of contact will be in the same straight line,” we
do not speak of the internal contact as the cause of straightness in
the uniting line. The order'of consecutive thought is expressed by
the word “ Beason.” The relations with which mathematical truth
is concerned have no origin or consecution inter se; but exist in
reciprocal interdependence, which may be traversed in various orders.
Were there only an unchanging universe, there would be, in the
modern sense, no Cause and Effect. Between “ Things,” as such,
this relation cannot exist; it requires Phenomena. It is only with
w
�IS THERE ANY “AXIOM OF CAUSALITY”?
637
the causa nascencli that we have now to do. We speak, no doubt, of
objects,—a glacier, a coal-bed, an asteroid,—being caused by this
or that; but only as having assumed their present form in time.
Change alone, however, does not suffice to give entrance to
causality. A body existing in a state of uniform rectilinear motion
would be always under change, bM the ^change would not be an
effect; nor for the body’s movement through one segment of its
course should we assign as cause its movement through the pre
vious segment. Successive stages of continuous and unvaried change
do not constitute the relation : the two terms must be ih^edwgeneous.
There are thus two marks of an effect: .it must <be; a phenomenon, and
not homogeneous with the Cause. Whatever carries these marks
obliges us to look beyond itelf; for what ? for its origin in some
thing different. This difference might be satisfied hither by simply
another phenomenon, or by what is other than phenomenon.
I. Suppose the Cause to be ^another phenomenon; in what does the
relation between the two consist ?
1. Is it in Time-*succession ? Is habitual antecedence tantamount
to Causality ? This hypothesis is already excluded by the rule of
heterogeneity already given, for habitual antecedence, belonging
equally to successions of the like and of the unlike, makes no provi
sion for satisfying this rule. After using up the resources of habitual
succession, we should therefore still .have to set up a .supplementary
law of Thought, that every change must be referred to something
other than its own prior stage.
2. Is it in Sequence + Heterogeneity; so that where two different,
phenomena are invariably successive in the same order,.the prior is
cause of the posterior? Not so, unless the blossoms of the almond
are the cause of its leaves; and low water the cause <of high; and
the off fore leg of a horse moves his hind near one; and the fall of
the leaf is the cause of winter; and (to recur to an old example not
yet tortured to death) night the -cause of day. Successions of this
kind, constant yet independent of each other, we can conceive multi
plied to any extent. Suppose them to be universal, so as to occupy
the whole field of observation,. There would still be laws of invari
able order; definite rules of co-existence and succession, securing
the means of prediction; but no causality. Premonitory signs are
still something short of causes.
3. Is the shortcoming remedied by stipulating that the sequence
shall be “ unconditional” ? By decorating his “invariable antece
dent ” with this new mark, Mr. Mill completes its promotion to the
rank of Cause. First, let us see whether we have got here a new
mark at all. When does an antecedent become invested with this
“ unconditionality ” of relation ? When upon its presence, whatever
�638
THE CONTEMPORARY REVIEW.
else may be or not be, the second phenomenon regularly happens.
Whether it has this character or not can be learned only by letting
all other conditions absent themselves by turns, and so reveal their
indifference to the result; and finding the residuary element to be
the sole constant. What we discover thus, however, is nothing but
our old acquaintance “ invariableness,” cleared by comparison with
its inconstant companions.
Or, in order to make “ uncondition
ality” mean more than “ invariableness,” shall we insist that the
antecedent is to be the sole condition “ requisite,” on the occurrence
of which the second phenomenon is “sure to happen, ” and “ will follow
in any case ” ? How, then, am. I to know such an antecedent when
I see it ? What test do you give me of this exclusive requisiteness,
—this sureness to happen ? If it be anything else than the old
invariableness, it cannot be got out of your time-succession; but
assumes a cognition of necessity other than that of habitual sequence,
a certainty of the future other than lies in the juxtaposition of prior
and posterior. In short, it is not from foreseeing its sequel in the
future that we recognise anything as Cause; but from knowing it
as Cause that we are sure of its sequel. Either, therefore, the mark
“ unconditional?” is simply “ invariable ” over again; or else the
rule given to us is, “ Take an antecedent: see that it is invariable :
mind that nothing else is requisite: and you have the Cause ”—a pre
scription more prudent than instructive.
It is a vain attempt, then, as Sir John Herschel remarks, “to
reason away the connection of cause and effect, and fritter it down
into the unsatisfactory^lation of habitual sequence.” (Treatise on
Ast., ch. vii.)
Yet between phenomenon and phenomenon, as occurring in time,
no other relation is observable. Three things only can we notice
about them; their resemblance or difference; their order in space;
their order in time; and scrutinise them as we may under this last
aspect, we can never (as Hume and Brown have adequately shown)
make out anything more about them than which comes first and
which next. Higher magnifying powers, new refinements of dis
covery, may detect unsuspected intermediaries; and bisect and
re-bisect the intervals, till a pair of seeming proximates is pulverized
into a long series ; as the light of Sirius, once regarded as a simple
transaction between the star and the eye, cannot now be scientifically
described without ;ffiiany xa |phapter on undulations, and refraction,
and physiological optics, and the mental interpretation of the visual
field. But the process only introduces more terms into the conse
cution, and reveals nothing other than consecution. Perceptive
experience and observation, then, can never, it is plain, carry us
beyond premonitory signs, laws of co-existence and succession; and
�■IS
ANY “AXIOM OF CAUSALITY"? 639
Kf, as we have maintained, these fall short of Causality, Comte is so
far right in expunging the quest of causes from the duties of
■Inductive Science, and confining it to the work of generalization,
measurement, and deductive prediction. In this he seems to me to
I be more correct than Brown and the Mills, who continue to use
the language of Causation, after it has been atrophied by reducing
it to live on “habitual sequence.”
And if premonitory signs are all that Science can find, so are they
all that Science wants. It culminates in prevision and its counter
part, retrospection ; and in order to read truly the past and future of
the world, it is needful and it is sufficient to Know the groups of
concomitant and the order of successive phenomena. Were they
all loose from each other as sand-grains, or as soldiers filing out of
a barrack-gate, still, so long as they were regularly disposed and
regimented, we should know what’ to look for behind, before, and
around, and this would satisfy our scientific curiosity. But that
there is something else which it does not satisfy is1 plain, from our
not being content with the language of succession and premonition,
but trespassing into terms of causEion. We compel the antecedents
to profess more than antecedence. "We look on the perceptible con
ditions as standing for an imperceptible Causality, hiding within
them or behind them. That they only represent it to our mind, and
are not identical with it, is evident from the way in which the word
“ Cause ” may be shifted about amongst them, settling now on this
condition, now on that, and again upon the aggregate of them all;
never absent, but always movable. For instance, the clock strikes
twelve: required the Cause. The answer may be,—the hands have
reached that point; or, there is a bell for the hammer to hit; or,
there is a hammer to hit the bell; or, the beats of the pendulum
keep the time; or, the iron weight gives motion to the works; or,
the earth’s attraction operates on pendulum and weight. The prin
ciple on which we select among the conditions that which we
designate as Cause has been variously stated. It has been often said
that we pitch upon the most active element, and single it out in
disregard of the passive conditions ; but it would be a good account
of a robbery to say that the safe was not locked. Mr. Mill thinks
that we elect as cause “the proximate antecedent evMf’ rather than
any antecedent state. And it is, he says, in ordrl^ to indulge this
tendency, and escape the necessity of admitting permanent things,
like the earth, into the list of caus'es, that we have set up the
“ logical fictions ’ of “ Force ” and “ Attraction," and stowed them
away into the earth, to execute for us any jerks and pulls that we
may require; for so I understand the statement, that we represent
to ourselves the “ attraction ” of the earth “ as exhausted by each
effort, and therefore constituting at each successive instant a fresh
vol. xiv.
uu
�640
THE CONTEMPORARY REVIEW.
fact, simultaneous with, or only immediately preceding, the effect/’
(Log., B. III., ch. v., s. 3.) This bold attempt to reclaim the pro-l
vince of dynamical language for the successional theory of causation
seems to me to belong to the class of “ heroic remedies,” getting
over a difficulty by adopting it, and formulating it as an advantage.
Surely the earth’s “ attraction ” is held to be no less “ permanent ”
than the earth itself; and the spasmodic conception of it, as put
forth per saltuni wherever it has some new thing to do, is a pecu
liarity of Mr. Mill’s imagination. To the idea of “Force ” we resort,
not to break down but tojfgpin persistency, and fill the measure of
power fully up to the durability of matter ; so that, instead of being
an escape into the phenomenal theory of Causality, it is precisely our
method of deliverance, from it.
To avoid the difficulty of singling out a cause from among the
conditions, it is now usual^o take them all in the aggregate, and to
deny causality to anything short of the whole. This conception, in
which Mr. Mill rests, is due to Hobbes, who says :—“ When we seek
after the Cause of any propounded effect, we must in the first place
get into ouF mind an exact notion or idea of that which we call
Cause, viz., that a cause is the sum or aggregate of all such acci
dents, both in the agent and the patient, as concur to the producing
of the effect propounded; all which existing together, it cannot be
understood but that the effect existed with them ; or that it can
possibly exist, if any one of them be absent.” (Elem. Phil., P. I.,
ch. vi., s. 10.) However well this definition may work for the pur
poses of natural science, it does not satisfy the psychological condi
tion of saying what
mean by “ Obtuse,” and why we habitually
distinguish between atr/a and aXvaeria, and refuse to put the members
of the “ aggregate ” upon a level. Is it not thus ? In asking for a
Cause, we ask always an a&ma^^Muestion——why Z7w‘s phenomenon
rather than that—why some, phenomenon rather than none : and
whatever it be that upsets th® equilibrium of conditions and turns
the scale of this alternative is selected by us as the Cause. As the
two members are not explicitly stated, the positive phenomenon
inquired about may, in different hearers, undergo comparison with a
different suppressed term ; and hence they will not all alight upon
the same condition as the cause. Why does the clock strike twelve
(rather than eleven)!’ because the hands have just reached that point:
(rather than not strike) ? because of the hammer and bell: (rather
than not go at all) ? because of the pendulum and weight. I believe
that this principle gives an adequate account of the apparently
random selection of a cause from among a host of indispensable con
ditions.
No phenomena, however, whether thus divided or left in the group,
can pass beyond the rank of premonitory signs, or give us more than
�gZA fTHERE ANY “AXIOM OF CAUSALITY”? 641
the nidus of Causality, inasmuch as they disclose nothing but their
order; and by causality we mean more than order.
II. The required heterogeneity, then, of Effect and Cause must be
sought on the remaining side of the alternative; the Cause, not being
another phenomenon, must be other than phenomenon, i.e., “ Noumenon,” or entity given by the very make of the intellect itself. The
axiom, ‘‘Every phenomenon has a cause,” instead of meaning,
“Every phenomenon invariably succeeds anothei' phenomenon,”
really means, “ Every phenomenon springs from something other
than phenomenon.” That this, is a true account of the law of thought
appears :—
1. From its a priori character. This character it plainly has.
For how can the causal law be inductively gathered by experience,
when it is the incunabula of experience itself, the condition of the very
scene in which we gain it ? The external world springs up for us
simply in answer to our intellectual demand for a Cause of our sensa
tions ; which, apart from that demand, could never present them
selves to us as effects, with counterparts elsewhere in space. Why,
but for this primary law, should we want any exit from our own im
mediate states ? Why not take them as they come, stop with them
where they are, and let them weave their tissue upon the inner walls ?
Moreover, as Helmholz has observed, there’rf’is a clear indication of
the logical character of the causal law in this—that no experience
is of the least avail to refute it. We often have occasion to discharge
our long-established explanations of phenomena; but however often
baffled, we can never raise the question whether perhaps they are
without cause. In this persistency of search, however, there are, I
think, two distinct beliefs involved—one, in the 'uniformity of
nature; the other, in the derivative origin of phenomena. These, I
think, are not on the same footing. Of the former, Mr. Mill’s
inductive explanation seems to be sufficient; and it might perhaps
be unlearned in such a world as he supposes, where all uniformity
should be broken up. But the second belief would, I conceive,
survive such experience; nor is there any tendency in the apparent
lawlessness of phenomena to make us think that' they issue from no
power. Of these two beliefs—often confounded together—if is the
second alone which I designate as the principle of Causality, and claim
as an axiom a priori. It has nothing to do with the consecution of
phenomena. Amid order or disorder, we equally regard them as
the outcome of power. The other belief-^-not in causation, but in
premonitions—can only be copied from the successions which it
attests, and it would be absurd to suppose that if their uniformity
were broken up, the mind would be driven by intuitive necessity to
rely upon it when it was gone.
If the principle of Causality is an d priori intellectual law, the
�642
THE CONTEMPORARY REVIEW.
“ Cause ” which, it obliges us to think will naturally be, not pheno
menon, but noumenon.
2. From the indispensableness of Dynamical language for the
proper expression of causal relations, and the confessed impossibility
of translating the literature of science into terms of mere co-existence
and succession among phenomena. The very writers who most
rigorously limit us to laws of uniformity—Comte and Mill—are
obliged, no less than others, t® speak the dialect of “Forceand in
a single page I find the litter recognising “the action of forces,
“ the propagation of influences,” “ instantaneous ” and “ continuous
forces,” “ centres of force ” (Log., B. III., ch. v., s. 1); while the
former, falling in with the phraseology of physical astronomy, tells
how the equilibrium of the solarsystem is the “necessary conse
quence of gravitation 5” atod, in his anthropological exposition, assures
us that, in force and intensity, each lower principle has the advan
tage over the higher. What is this idea of “ Force ” still clinging
to those who insist^ that “ alOii we know is phenomena”? Hume,
admitting that we hav-e it, treated it as a figment of customary
association,.-—-a subjective nexus of ideas turned into an illusory
objective bond. The mere recent representatives of his doctrine
deny that such phrases are more than a shorthand compend for
invariable succession, or carry any other meaning to the mind.
This construction Of the phrases is assisted by the fact that Force is
inconceivable without gradations, while Succession is inconceivable
with them : and the difference between the more and the less, the
difficult and the easy, the intense and the remiss, which intelligibly
enters into dynamical facts, brings only nonsense to the relation of
Prior and Posterior. Another device for recalling “ Force ” into the
Time-field is to define it as “ Tendency to Motion.” Motion I know
as a phenomenon j but what sort of phenomenon is the “ Tendency ” ?
If it is outwardly there at all, is it anything else than just the
dynamical element which it tries to expel ? The only way of con
struing it in harmony with the theory is to treat it as not outwardly
there, but as intimating our belief that, under certain supposed
conditions, there would.be motion. This subjective interpretation
puts into the language a meaning which will work; only it is not
our meaning; for We intend to assert something, not about our
hypothetical beliefs, but about the bodies outside us. And it is
incumbent on one who accepts the construction to explain the
objective character of the language, and why it is that, without
mistake of phrase, we mean one thing, and ought to mean another ?
On the whole, the language of Agency, with its measures of intensity,
could never have sprung from an experience limited to successions.
Laws of order are not yet causes ; and if we know anything of causes,
we know more than Laws.
�IS THERE ANY 11AXIOM OF CAUSALITY"? 643
The axiom, then, stands, that “Every phenomenon springs from
something other than phenomenon
and this TVoz/menon is Power.
III. It remains to find the form in which it is given to us.
1. The cognition of an external world is the most conspicuous
primary application of the Causal law. In virtue of this law the
understanding sets up in space before it the Cause of what is felt in
the organs of Sense, and effects the transition from Sensation to
Perception. In sensation itself there is nothing objective; and that
we ever escape beyond our skin is due to the intellectual intuitions
of Space, Time, and Causality. Physiologically, not less than psycho
logically, it seems, the distinction is marked between mere sense and
perception. Flourens attests that the removal of a tubercle will
destroy visual sensation; the retina becomes insensible, the iris
immovable. The removal of a cerebral lobe leaves undisturbed the
visual sensation, the sensibility of the retina, the contractibility of
the iris; but it destroys perception. (De la Vie et de V Intelligence,
2me Edit., p. 49.) Objectivity, then, is given to us by the Causal
law, and is not itself a phenomenon, but the construction which the
Understanding puts upon phenomena.
2. ’ Mere objectivity, however, or external existence, would still
not appear in the form of Power, were it not introduced to us as the
antithetic term (the non-Ego) to our own personality (the Ego).
Two functions, fundamentally contrary, co-exist in our nature ;—a
sensitive receptivity, in virtue of which we are the theatre of
feelings;—and a spontaneous activity, in virtue of which we expend
energy and effect movements. These are contraries, as taking
opposite lines of direction; to the centre and from the centre; the
initiative abroad, and the initiative at home; sensation arriving
without notice, and sensation earned by executive act signalled from
within. In the crossing lines of these functions do we first find
ourselves, and, as distinguished from ourselves, the objective world.
Had we only the passive receptivity, we should not have sensations,
but be sensations; we should feel,'without knowing that we feel.
But with the exercise of living force or will, the self-consciousness
arises; balanced, in the encounter with limitation and impediment,
by the recognition of something other than self. This pair of
existences becomes known to us merely in relation and antithesis :
in whatever capacity we apprehend the one, in the same must we
oppose to it the other. Now, in putting forth our Will (using the
word for the whole activity which may become voluntary), we
certainly know the Self as Force; we get behind the phenomena
which we produce, and are let into the secret of their origin in a way
which we should miss if we only looked upon them. In other words,
we know ourselves as Cause of them. In this same capacity, then
i.e., dynamically, is the other than Self, known as our own opposite
�644
THE CONTEMPORARY REVIEW.
and the universe falls into Causal polarity, in which the outer sphere
is hut the complement of our own Power. Concurrent with this
dynamical antithesis is the geometrical or local antithesis by which
the Ego is known as here, and the non-Ego as there, and whatever is
foreign to ourselves is planted out as external to ourselves. In virtue
of the inseparable union of these two antitheses, as factors of Percep
tion, Objectivity and Causality necessarily blend in our outer world;
and we cannot separate Matter from Force, or Force from Matter.
The use frequently made of the “ Muscular Sense ” to explain our
introduction to the outer world is unsatisfactory, because the muscular
feelings occur during the delivery of the act, and happen to us just
like the passive feelings of any other sensed whilst the Causal nisus
issues the act, and may perform it, though, through sensory paralysis,
the muscles do not feel at all. ?
Mr. Mill denies our self-knowledge of Causality, on the ground
that, prior to experience, we have no foresight of what we can do.
The question is not whether we can foresee, but whether we can try ;
and whether the putting forth of force, with or without success, is an
experience sui generis. Frustration, from want of foresight, is indeed
an important part of the lesson by which we learn the meaning of
Can and Cannot.
It is, then, under the form of Will that we are introduced to
Causality; and the axiom resolves itself into the proposition, “ Every
phenomenon springs from a Will.” The universe, it is admitted,
appears to men in simple times, to young eyes still, to poets in all
times, as Living Objective Will. But it is supposed that, with the
aids of Science, we learn something better. And certainly we do
learn to discharge the host of invisible powers once distributed
through the world, and, as Law flings its arms more wide, to fuse
the multiform life of nature into One. But no fresh way of access
to the cognition of Power is opened to us. We have to reach it
through the same representative typer and to this hour it has no
meaning to us except what we take from Will. The scientific idea
of Force is nothing but Will cut down, by dropping from it some
characters which are irrelevant for the purposes of classification and
prediction. The idea of Will is not arrived at by the addition of
Force + Purpose ; but that of Force is arrived at by the subtraction
of Will — Purpose. Such artificial abstractions supply a notation
highly serviceable for the prosecution of phenomenal knowledge,
but they can gain no authority against the original intuition on
which they work, and to which they owe their own validity. The
necessity may be disguised, but can never be escaped, of interpreting
the universe by man.
James Martineau.
�
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Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
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2018
Publisher
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
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Original Format
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Pamphlet
Dublin Core
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Title
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Is there any "axiom of causality"?
Creator
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Martineau, James
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [s.l.]
Collation: [636]-644 p. ; 26 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. From Contemporary Review 14, October 1870.
Publisher
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[s.n.]
Date
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[1870]
Identifier
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G5407
Subject
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Causal Analysis
Rights
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<p class="western"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /><br />This work (Is there any "axiom of causality"?), identified by <a href="www.conwayhall.org.uk">Humanist Library and Archives</a>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</p>
Format
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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English
Causation
Conway Tracts