Natural

to inter

preting in

telligence.

even in the case of those beings we call " inferior animals," who are so great a mystery to us, but infinitely less in the case of the Universal Designer. Yet so far as man is able to look into reality, he sees in natural adaptations what he may with moral confidence act upon, as signs of what he can think of only as consciously calculating mind; but this without having a right to assert that he can adequately realise what, for want of more expressive language, he calls eternal or infinite "Mind.”

I have spoken of adaptations in nature as fit to be law itself implies distinguished from law or regularity in the sequences adaptation of nature. Yet looked at more deeply, it may appear that not only do faith in physical law, and faith in divine construction or adaptation, rise somehow out of the practical constitution of man, relieving him of the sceptical paralysis that would be otherwise induced by the appalling sense of mysterious infinity; -the two faiths even appear to coincide at last. For all natural uniformity-law in nature-may be regarded as adaptation of the temporal process to the moral and intellectual constitution of man. If we could suppose ourselves living consciously in a physical chaos, instead of living in what faith recognises as a physical cosmos; and if in this supposed conscious life we could be endowed with our present moral and religious constitution-with moral reason in its highest human development, we should still,

it would seem, be obliged to suppose that the chaos around us must somehow, and at some time, have its final outcome in a reasonable world; but besides this greatly increased strain upon our moral faith, we should lose the educational and other practical advantages of living now in a world so adapted to us that we gradually learn how to regulate our conduct, in reasonable expectation of changes which the sustained order in nature enables us to anticipate as probable.

purpose of

its physical

tions, in

to man.

The divine constitution of physical order, with its The final natural evolution of organic adaptations, may seem a Matter and roundabout method for accomplishing what infinite adaptaPower might be supposed to accomplish in man extra- relation naturally or by sudden miracle. What is the purpose of an organism so curiously constructed as the eye, one may ask, if men could have existed, able to experience mentally the conscious state called "seeing things," without eyes; or what the need for the complex structure of our bodily organisms, if we could have the mental life we pass through between birth and death without bodies, or as unembodied conscious spirits? If those elaborate bodily constructions do not originate the conscious life with which they are found connected, what are they adapted for? and must their organic adaptations not be looked at as superfluous in what is essentially a spiritual world? This raises a question about Matter, and about miraculous as distinguished from natural revelation of God, the consideration of which enters at a later stage in our course of argument.

Summary.

The lesson of the present lecture is, that design is a conception in harmony with, and even involved in, natural evolution, and that whether Nature is contemplated as a whole, or in its particular organisms and events. Designed order in the whole involves design in each part, as much as universal gravitation is illustrated even in the fall of an apple to the earth. The universality of adaptation—the application of the idea of providence to all natural changes

seems as possible as the universality of the ideas of gravitation or of evolution within the sphere of their applications. Nothing is too great or too little for natural law, and therefore for providential purpose. Universal Providence is in this sense necessarily special. teleological.

The very idea of natural law is

93

LECTURE IV.

DIVINE NECESSITY: ONTOLOGICAL.

ence of

has collect

which sug

critical

cover

in theistic

I HAVE been trying to show that those are proceeding The Sciunreasonably, and therefore unphilosophically, who Religions treat theistic faith, or the disposition to put finally an ed facts ethical and religious interpretation upon the universe, gest that as in every form only a subjective sentiment, char- analysis acteristic of some men, or some races of men, or of will discertain stages in the history of mankind-a sentiment reason which may take the form of what is called religious faith. thought, but which after all is only transitory fancy that is likely to become an anachronism, if it is not already this among the educated. The great historic fact of the permanence, in many forms, of the disposition to put a morally obligatory or supernatural background to human life, and especially to extraordinary events that happen in the world, with the immense influence the religious instinct has in the history and development of mankind, suggests that

Theists

may be in

uncon

scious of the fundamental rationality of their

theistic

faith.

theistic faith in the Power at work around us must be reconcilable with reason, if it is not even reason itself, in its deepest and truest human manifestation. The modern Science of Religions has accumulated abundant evidence that Religion is this potent factor in history; although the human disposition to interpret experience in the light of supernatural power darkens and degrades the interpreter, when a faith that is essentially ethical presents itself as non-moral, or immoral superstitions. But even in superstitions, one can trace the ineradicable dissatisfaction with what is merely finite, and some sense of dutiful conformity to eternal and ennobling ideals. And in all this theism appears in

germ.

The individual subjects of moral and religious exdistinctly perience of course may not themselves see what their own disposition to read the world religiously means when regarded philosophically; they may fail to see in our morally religious faith the most rational conception that man can finally form of the changing universe. Those even in whom the religious instinct is strong and pure are not on that account intellectually awake to its essential reconcilableness with reason, or with the physically scientific interpretation of the world, which so many now treat as if it exclusively were the final reason that is the proper criterion of all reasonableness and unreasonableness.

The rationale of theistic

My last three lectures were meant to show that in yielding to the religious tendency, which, in its de