CHAPTER V.

FAITHS OF SCIENCE-AIMS AND OBJECTS.

THUS it is seen that science rests on the same grounds and employs the same methods which its champions have censured religion for using.

But perhaps it will be said that, although science and religion have no really different grounds or methods, yet the different objects to which they are applied in each justify men in refusing to the propositions of theology the same credit that they give to those of physical inquiry. There is certainly an apparent difference of this kind, seeming to many very real and broad, which ought not to be omitted from any thorough discussion of this subject. An opponent of religion would put it something like this:

Religion, perhaps, may employ the same instrumentalities as science, but the trouble is, she aims to master with them truths which they are not competent to grasp. Science deals with material masses, their relations of heat, color, weight, and their

changes of form, bulk, place, quality, etc.—all of them things visible and tangible.

The endeavor of religion, however, is to establish the existence, nature, and relations of immaterial beings, called spirits; a Supreme Spirit behind and above all Nature, and minor spirits within each human body-things which no sense can ever dis

cern.

Science attends to phenomena, their coexistences and successions. It busies itself about those things only of which there is or can be experience. Religion aspires to go behind the empirical to the metempirical. It talks of ideal conceptions and supersensual objects.

Science, again, limits itself to the aspects of things in their relations to us, under the limitations of earthly life, and as they may be clearly comprehended by us. Religion, on the contrary, dreams of the Absolute, the Infinite, the Eternal, and loses itself in the mazes of the contradictory and the inconceivable. Behold in this difference of aims and objects the ample justification of the modern suspicions of religion. Immaterial Spirit, First Cause, Eternal, Infinite, Absolute-how can such things ever be known? What finger ever touched them, what optic or auditory nerve ever gave report of them, what telescope was ever or can ever be made so space-penetrating, what microscope so delicate in its scrutiny as to discern objects of this nature? "They are," says Büchner, "arbitrary assumptions

without any real basis." "Human thought and human knowledge," he maintains, are "incapable of discovering or knowing any thing supersensual." "The materialist," says Virchow, "can never be satisfied with it: he knows only bodies and their qualities; what is beyond he terms transcendental, and he considers transcendentalism as an aberration of the human mind."

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Indeed, to the physical inquirer, supersensual and immaterial things are not even conceivable. "A force not united to matter, but floating freely above it," Moleschott characterizes as an ideal notion." The idea of immaterial spirit, Carl Vogt declares to be "a pure hypothesis," and assigns it a place among "speculative fables." "The remark of a somewhat crazy, but all the more ingenious, father of the Church," says the author of the " Old Faith and the New" (p. 152), "has become the principle of modern science- Naught is immaterial but what is naught.""

Similarly says Büchner: "Those who talk of a creative power which is said to have produced the world out of nothing are ignorant of the first and most simple principle founded upon experience and the contemplation of Nature. How could a power have existed not manifested in material substance, but governing it arbitrarily according to individual views? Neither could separately existing forces be transferred to chaotic matter, and produce the world 1" Force and Matter," p. xli., Introduction.

in this manner; for we have seen that a separate existence of either is an impossibility." "

1

Certainly, say the scientific objectors, it is not for man to comprehend God, for the finite to think to find out the Infinite. All conceptions involving Infinity, Self-Existence, Eternity, Absolute Being (Herbert Spencer labors at length to show, in the second and fourth chapters of his "First Principles," and in other parts of his writings repeats the statement again and again), are but "pseudo-ideas," "symbolic conceptions of the illegitimate order." Every religious system "involves itself in the unthinkable." Every theologian who attempts to tell the nature of God or the soul falls into contradiction and absurdity. All the real knowledge that we can attain to is, that "the power which the universe manifests is utterly inscrutable," a conclusion to which Profs. Huxley and Tyndall give repeated and emphatic amens. "As little in our day, as in the days of Job," says Prof. Tyndall, " can man by searching find this power out." Quoting the reply of Napoleon, when, to the savants who tried to account for the universe without any Divine agency, raising his finger to the heavens, he said, "It is all very well, gentlemen, but who made all these?" Prof. Tyndall says: "As far as I can see, there is no quality in the human intellect which is fit to be applied

3

1 "Force and Matter," chapter i.

2 Address before the British Association, Belfast, 1874.

to the solution of the problem. It entirely transcends us. The phenomena of matter and force lie within our intellectual range, and as far as they reach we will, at all events, push our inquiries, but behind and above and around the real mystery lies unsolved, and as far as we are concerned is incapable of solution."

Now, the defender of religion would not deny that there are mysteries insoluble both to religion and science. He would not deny that we must, from the nature of the case, remain ever in ignorance of much, probably of most, that relates to the origin and history of the universe, the character, nature, laws, and relations of God and the soul. But he claims that, though we cannot know all, though we cannot know any thing, perhaps, with absolute certainty, yet we can know something with strong probability-probability equal to that with which men are satisfied in the realm of science. Human intellect cannot, of course, fathom to the bottom the depths of spirit. It cannot comprehend all the mysteries of the Divine. But it can drop the plummet of thought deep enough to know whether that which it is dealing with is matter, such as we know, or something else. It can trace out a section of the Infinite hyperbola sufficient to show whether the curve runs by chance or by law, whether its course is toward the irrational or the rational, toward the evil or the good, toward matter or toward spirit. And narrow as the circle of warrantable belief may be