True philosophy, it appears to me, leads us to an entirely opposite conclusion, viz. that having, for a great and sufficient object, interfered with certain rights or laws, you should all the more anxiously and speedily, for the general good, restore their just supremacy the moment that object is attained.

In conclusion I desire to take leave of all subjects such as these. Broken health constrains me to do so; and if we could hope to obtain from this controversy any practical beneficial result I shall be quite willing that every point at issue should be left to the arbitration of Mr. W. Shaw, M.P., the head of that Home Rule party to which Mr. Power professes to belong. With Mr. Shaw I have but a very slight personal acquaintance, but I have every reason to believe him to be a man of integrity, intelligence, and of very good intentions; and I have now only to ask his forgiveness for here introducing his name without having obtained his permission to do so.

PETER FITZGERALD, Knight of Kerry.

GOD AND NATURE.

An elderly clergyman, dying some years ago in the East of London, bequeathed his silver spoons and the like to his nephews and nieces. But the spoons could nowhere be found. Ultimately they were discovered in a closet beneath a pile of sermons; the good clergyman having, for the sake of safety, chosen for his little stock of plate the place in which, as he imagined, it was most likely to be permitted to remain undisturbed.

I fear that I committed a mistake not long since by doing something analogous to that which was done by him whose providence I have just now chronicled, though with a different intention. I printed, in the form of an Appendix to a volume of Oxford and Cambridge Sermons, a Note on Matter, for some portion of which, at least, I should like to crave more consideration than perhaps it has already received. The following paragraph contains the thought which I wish just now to put before the reader and to develope in this essay :

'I have referred to Cudworth's discussion of theories of matter with regard to the possible atheistic tendencies of some of them; and the time has not gone by, perhaps it never will, when the fear of atheism, as growing out of physical theories, will have ceased to exist. I am by no means prepared to say that there is no ground for such fear; but I think that some portion at least of the danger of science being found to have atheistic tendencies would be got rid of, if a clearer view could be obtained of the manner in which it is possible to establish a connection between physical theories and atheistic conclusions. It seems to me that we want a new word to express the fact that all physical science, properly so called, is compelled by its very nature to take no account of the being of God: as soon as it does this, it trenches upon theology, and ceases to be physical science. If I might coin a word, I should say that science was atheous, and therefore could not be atheistic; that is to say, its investigations and reasonings are by agreement conversant simply with observed facts. and conclusions drawn from them, and in this sense it is atheous, or without recognition of God. And because it is so, it does not in any way trench upon theism or theology, and cannot be atheistic, or in the condition of denying the being of God. Take the case of

physical astronomy. To the mathematician the mechanics of the heavens are in no way different from the mechanics of a clock. It is true that the clock must have had a maker; but the mathematician, who investigates any problem connected with its mechanism, has nothing to do with him as such. The spring, the wheels, the escapement, and the rest of the works are all in their proper places somehow, and it matters nothing to the mathematician how they came there. As a mathematician the investigator of clock-motion takes no account of the existence of clockmakers; but he does not deny their existence; he has no hostile feeling towards them; he may be on the very best terms with many of them; it may be at the request of one of them who has invented some new movement that he has undertaken his investigations. Precisely in the same way the man who investigates the mechanics of the heavens finds a complicated system of motion, a number of bodies mutually attracting each other and moving according to certain assumed laws. In working out the results of his assumed laws, the mathematician has no reason to consider how the bodies came to be as they are; that they are as they are is not only enough for him, but it would be utterly beyond his province to inquire how they came so to be. Therefore, so far as his investigations are concerned, there is no God; or, to use the word above suggested, his investigations are atheous. But they are not atheistic; and he may carry on his work, not merely without fearing the Psalmist's condemnation of the fool, but with the full persuasion that the results of his labours will tend to the honour and glory of God.'1

The thought contained in this paragraph, and which may be said to be compressed in the word atheous, appears to me to be interesting intellectually, and valuable morally. It is not desirable that the reproach of atheism should be thrown about rashly. That there is such a thing as atheism, and that the atheistic condition of mind may be not only a very miserable, but also a very immoral one, I would not venture to deny; but that charges of atheism are not unfrequently rashly made, and the attitude taken up by scientific investigators is sometimes regarded as atheistic when it is not fairly to be described by that terrible epithet, is also true. Physical science is not more essentially atheistic than arithmetical or geometrical: all three are atheous, not one is atheistic.

Yet God and nature are very close the one to the other: the natura naturans and the natura naturata must necessarily be contiguous. We need a 'scientific frontier' between them, a line which shall on no condition be transgressed by those who occupy the territory on one side or the other.

The necessity of keeping this frontier line sacred is perhaps not sufficiently recognised, and there is a great tendency to transgress it; Oxford and Cambridge Sermons, p. 280. (George Bell & Sons.)

but it is not a mere arbitrary line to be laid down by treaty, as the boundaries of adjacent States are settled, but is like one of the great waterscheds of nature, which no human arrangement can alter: it is like the great divide' in the Rocky Mountains, one side of which means for every drop of rain that falls a passage to the Pacific, and the other side means a passage to the Atlantic. On a smaller scale there are similar edges on Snowdon and Helvellyn; you may stand upon them and throw two pebbles with the right hand and with the left, which will be miles apart before they come to rest.

For in truth the difference between the two territories, separated by our supposed scientific boundary, is greater than that which is expressed by the terms natura naturans and natura naturata.2 The conception of a natura naturans might be merely that of a first cause, a logical beginning of nature, without any of those moral attributes which men with almost one consent associate with the name and conception of God. If the transgression of the legitimate boundaries of the field of physical science merely introduced the inquirer to metaphysical speculations, no harm would ensue, though possibly not much advantage. The condition and quality of mind which make a man a successful investigator of nature, either by the way of observation or by that of mathematical analysis, are seldom associated with those mental powers which enable a man to get beneath the surface of phenomena and speculate with any success as to the ground and underlying conditions of things. I do not say that a mind may not possess both kinds of power, but the combination is rare. Still, a man at the worst can only fail, and a brilliant observer or analyst may prove himself to be a poor philosopher, and that is the worst result that can come. But this is not in reality the result of crossing the scientific frontier; if on the one side is God and on the other nature, this means that on the one side you have a moral and religious region, and on the other a purely physical region; and the passage from one to the other is quite certain to be fraught with danger, not to say mischief.

Let me illustrate my meaning by reference to a passage in Ernst Haeckel's History of Creation.

Creation (he writes), as the coming into existence of matter, does not concern us here at all. This process, if indeed it ever took place, is completely beyond

2 I have used this phraseology as expressing the difference between the cause and the phenomena of the material universe. Bacon writes in the first aphorism of the second Book of the Novum Organum: Datæ naturæ Formam, sive differentiam veram, sive naturam naturantem. . . invenire, opus et intentio est humanæ Scientiæ.' But upon this Mr. Ellis remarks in a note: This is the only passage in which I have met with the phrase natura naturans used as it is here. With the later schoolmen, as with Spinoza, it denotes God considered as the causa immanens of the universe, and therefore, according to the latter, not hypostatically distinct from it.' As employed by me, the phrase is not intended (I need hardly say) to have any pantheistic tendency.

human comprehension, and can therefore never become the subject of scientific inquiry. Natural science teaches that matter is eternal and imperishable, for experience has never shown us that even the smallest particle of matter has come into existence or passed away. . . . Hence a naturalist can no more imagine the coming into existence of matter than he can imagine its disappearance, and he therefore looks upon the existing quantity of matter in the universe as a given fact. If any person feels the necessity of conceiving the coming into existence of this matter as the work of a supernatural creative power, of the creative force of something outside of matter, we have nothing to say against it. But we must remark that thereby not even the smallest advantage is gained for the scientific knowledge of nature. Such a conception of immaterial force, which at the first creates matter, is an article of faith which has nothing whatever to do with human science. Where faith commences science ends. Both these arts of the human mind must be strictly kept apart from each other. Faith has its origin in the poetic imagination; knowledge, on the other hand, originates in the reasoning intelligence of man. Science has to pluck the blessed fruits from the tree of knowledge, unconcerned whether these conquests trench upon the poetical imaginings of faith or not.3

With much which is contained in the preceding quotation I entirely agree. Where faith commences, science ends; this is perfectly true; but I miss any recognition of the truth that the supernatural power which most persons' feel the necessity of conceiving' is something much beyond a creative force outside of matter.' It is difficult, I think, for most of us to keep our minds clear of the conception of such force outside of matter, though I quite agree with the author that nothing is gained for the scientific knowledge of nature by adopting the conception. But what I think the mind feels chiefly the necessity of conceiving is the existence of a Being who is the ground of all the moral phenomena of the world; and, if a writer on natural history goes beyond his subject at all, he should recognise the fact that the passing of the boundary carries the mind into a region of moral philosophy and religion, and not merely into a speculation concerning the possible origination of matter.

That this criticism is not unfair and not unimportant may be, I think, concluded from the results to which Ernst Haeckel is himself led, and to which he wishes to lead his readers. He tells us that he has no fault to find with the hypothesis, if we feel it to be necessary, of an origin of matter; but he tells us subsequently that there is no purpose in nature, and no such thing as beneficence on the part of a Creator.

Every one (he writes) who makes a really close study of the organisation and mode of life of the various animals and plants, and becomes familiar with the reciprocity or interaction of the phenomena of life, and the so-called 'economy of nature,' must necessarily come to the conclusion that this 'purposiveness' no more exists than the much-talked-of 'beneficence' of the Creator. These optimistic views have, unfortunately, as little real foundation as the favourite phrase, 'moral order of the universe,' which is illustrated in an ironical way by the history of all nations. The dominion of 'moral' popes, and their pious Inquisition, in the mediæval times, is not less significant of this than the present prevailing militarism, with its 'moral' apparatus of needle-guns and other refined instruments of murder.* Vol. i. p. 19.

Vol. i. p. 8 (English translation).