RELIGIOUS RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT.

Freethought Review, Volume I, Issue 7, 1 April 1884, Page 14

RELIGIOUS RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT.

[By Herbert Spencer.]

(Concluded from our last.) Two factors must unite in producing them. There is the development of those higher sentiments which no longer tolerate the ascription of inferior sentiments to a divinity ; and there is the intellectual development which causes dissatisfaction with the crude interpretations previously accepted. Of course in pointing out the effects of these factors, I must name some which are familiar ; but it is needful to glance at these along with others. The cruelty of a Fijian god who, represented as devouring the souls of the dead, may be supposed to inflict torture during the process, is small compared with the cruelty of a god who condemns men to tortures which are eternal; and the ascription of this cruelty, though habitual in ecclesiastical formulas, occasionally nccuring in sermons, and still sometimes pictorially illustrated, is becoming so intolerable to the better-natured, that while some theologians distinctly deny it, others quietly drop it out of their teachings. Clearly, this change cannot cease until the beliefs in hell and damnation disappear. Disappearance of them will be aided by an increasing repugnance to injustice. The visiting on Adam’s decendants through hundreds of generations, dreadful penalties for a small transgression which they did not commit: the damning of all men who do not avail themselves of an alleged mode of obtaining forgiveness, which most men have never heard of ; and the effecting a reconciliation by sacrifice of one who was perfectly innocent ; are modes of action which, ascribed to a human ruler, would call forth expressions of abhorrence ; and the ascription of them to the Ultimate Cause of things, even now felt to be full of difficulties, must become impossible. So, too, must die out the belief that a Power present in innumerable worlds throughout infinite space, and who during millions of years of the Earth’s earlier existence needed no honoring by its inhabitants, should be seized with a craving for praise ; and having created mankind, should be angry with them if they do not perpetually tell him how great he is. Men will by and by refuse to imply a trait of character which is the reverse of worshipful. Similarly with the logical incongruities more and more conspicuous to growing intelligence. Passing over the familiar difficulties that sundry of the implied divine traits are in contradiction with the divine attributes otherwise ascribedthat a god who repents of what he has done must be lacking either in power or in foresight ; that his anger presupposes an occurrence which has been contrary to intention, and so indicates defect of means ; we come to the deeper difficulty that such emotions, in common with all emotions, can exist only in a consciousness which is limited. Every emotion has its antecedent ideas, and antecedent ideas are habitually supposed to occur in God ; he is represented as seeing and hearing this or the other, and as being emotionally affected thereby. That is to say, the conception of a divinity possessing these traits of character, necessarily continues anthropomorphic ; not only in the sense that the emotions ascribed are like those of human beings, but also in the sense that they form parts of a consciousness which, like the human consciousness, is formed of successive states. And such a conception of the divine consciousness is irreconcilable both with the unchangeableness otherwise alleged, and with the omniscience otherwise alleged. For a consciousness constituted of ideas and feelings caused by objects and occurrences, cannot be simultaneously occupied with all objects and occurrences throughout the universe. To believe in a divine consciousness, men must refrain from thinking what is meant by consciousness stop short with verbal propositions ; and propositions which they are debarred from rendering into thoughts will more and more fail to satisfy them. Of course like difficulties present themselves when the will of God is spoken of. So long as we.refrain from giving a definite meaning to the word will, we may say that it is possessed by the Cause of All Things, as readily as we may say that love of approbation is possessed by a circle ; but when from the words we pass to the thoughts they stand for, we find that we can no more unite in consciousness the terms of the one proposition than we can those of the other. Whoever conceives any other will than his own, must do so in terms of his own will, which is the sole will directly known to himall other wills being only inferred. But will as each is conscious of it, presupposes a motive —a prompting desire of some kind : absolute indifference excludes the conception of will. Moreover will, as implying a prompting desire, connotes some end contemplated as one to be achieved, and ceases with the achievement of it : some other will, referring to some other end, taking its place. That is to say, will, like emotion, necessarily supposes a scries of states of consciousness. The conception of a divine will, derived from that of the human will, involves like it, localization in space and time : the willing of each end, excluding from consciousness for an interval the willing of other ends, and therefore being inconsistent with that omnipresent activity which simultaneously works out an infinity of ends. It is the same with the ascription of intelligence. Hot to dwell on the seriality and limitation implied as before, we may note that intelligence, as alone conceivable by ns, presupposes existences independent of it and objective to it. It is carried on in terms of changes primarily wrought out by alien activities—the impressions generated by things beyond consciousness, and the ideas derived from such impressions. To speak of an intelligence which exists in the absence of all such alien activities, is to use a meaningless word. If to the corollary that the First Cause, considered as intelligent, must be continually affected by independent objective activities, it is replied that these have become such by act of creation, and were previously included in the First ' Cause ; then the reply is that in such case the First Cause could, before this creation, have had nothing to generate in it such changes as those constituting what we call intelligence, and must therefore have been unintelligent at the time when intelligence was most called for. Hence it is clear that the intelligence ascribed, answers in no respect to that which we know by the name. It is intelligence out of which all the characters constituting it have vanished.

These and other difficulties, some of which are often discussed hut never disposed of, must force men hereafter to drop the higher anthropomorphic characters given to the First Cause, as they have long since dropped the lower. The conception which has been enlarging from the beginning must go on enlarging, until, by disappearance of its limits, it becomes a consciousness which transcends the forms of distinct thought, though it for ever remains a consciousness.

" But how can such a final consciousness of the Unknowable, thus tacitly alleged to be true, be reached by successive modifications of a conception which was utterly untrue ? The ghost-theory of the savage is baseless. The material double of a dead man in which he believes, never had any existence. And if by gradual de-materialisation of this double was produced the conception of the supernatural agent in general—if the conception of a deity, formed by the dropping of some human attributes and transfiguration of others, resulted from continuance of this process ; is not the developed and purified conception reached by pushing the process to its limit, a fiction also ? Surely if the primitive belief was absolutely false, all derived beliefs must be absolutely false." This objection looks fatal; and it would be fatal were its premiss valid. Unexpected as it will be to most readers, the answer here to be made is that at the outset a germ of truth was contained in the primitive conceptionthe truth, namely, that the power which manifests itself in consciousness is but a differently-conditioned form of the power which manifests itself beyond consciousness. Every voluntary act yields to the primitive man, proof of a source of energy within him. Not that he thinks about his internal experiences ; but in these experiences this notion lies latent. "When producing motion in his limbs, and through them motion in other things, he is aware of the accompanying feeling of effort. And this sense of effort which is the antecedent of changes directly poduced by him, becomes the conceived antecedent of changes not produced by himfurnishes him with a term of thought by which to represent the genesis of these objective changes. At first this idea of muscular force as anteceding unusual events around him, carries with it the whole assemblage of associated ideas. He thinks of the implied effort as an effort exercised by a being wholly like himself. In course of time these doubles of the dead, supposed to be workers of all but the most familiar changes, are modified in conception. Besides becoming less grossly material, some of them are developed into larger personalities presiding over classes of phenomena which being comparatively regular in their order, foster the idea of beings who, while far more powerful than men, are less variable in their modes of action. So that the idea of force as exercised by such beings, comes to be less associated with the idea of a human ghost. Further advances, by which minor supernatural agents become merged into one general agent, and by Avhich the personality of this general agent is rendered vague while becoming widely extended, tend still further to dissociate the notion of objective force from the force known as such in consciousness ; and the dissociation reaches its extreme in the thoughts of the man of science, who interprets in terms of force not only the visible changes of sensible bodies, but all physical changes whatever, even up to the undulations of the ethereal medium. Nevertheless, this force (be it force under that statical form by which matter resists, or under that dynamical form distinguished as energy) is to the last thought of in terms of that internal energy which he is conscious of as muscular effort. He is compelled to symbolise objective force in terms of subjective force from lack of any other symbol. See now the implications. That internal energy which in the experiences of the primitive man was always the immediate antecedent of changes wrought by himthat energy which, when interpreting external changes, he thought of along with those attributes of a human personality connected with it in himself ; is the same energy which, freed from anthropomorphic accompaniments is now figured as the cause of all external phenomena. The last stage reached is recognition of the truth that force as it exists beyond consciousness cannot be like what we know as force within consciousness ; and that yet, as either is capable of generating the other, they muse be different modes of the same. Consequently, the final outcome of that speculation commenced by the primitive man, is that the Power manifested throughout the Universe, distinguished as material, is the same power which in ourselves wells up under the form of consciousness.

It is untrue, then, that the foregoing argument proposes to evolve a true belief from a belief which was wholly false. Contrariwise, the ultimate form of the religious consciousnes is the final development of a consciousness which at the outset contained a germ of truth obscured by multitudinous errors. Those who think that science is dissipating religious beliefs and sentiments seem unaware that whatever of mystery is taken from the old interpretation is added to the new. Or rather, we may say that transference from the one to the other is accompanied by increase ; since, for an explanation which has a seeming feasibility, it substiutes an explanation which, carrying us back only a certain distance, there leaves us in the presence of the avowedly inexplicable. Under one of its aspects scientific progress is a gradual transfiguration of Nature. Where ordinary perfection saw perfect simplicity, it reveals great complexity ; where there seemed absolute inertness, it discloses intense activity ; and in what appears mere vacancy it finds a marvellous play of forces. Each generation of physicists discovers in so-called '' brute manner" powers which but a few years before the most instructed physicists would have thought incredible; as instance the ability of a mere iron plate to take up the complicated aerial vibrations produced by articulate speech, which, all translated into multitudinous and varied electric pulses, are re-translated a thousand miles off by another iron plate, and again heard as articulate speech. ' When the explorer of Nature sees that quiescent as they appear, surrounding solid bodies are thus sensitive to forces which are infinitesimal in their amounts —when the spectroscope proves to him that molecules on the Earth pulsate in harmony with molecules in the stars —when there is forced on him the inference

that every point in spaco thrills with an infinity of vibrations passing through it in all directions ; the conception to which he tends is much loss than that of a Universe of dead matter than that of a Universe everywhere alive : alive if not in the restricted sense, yet still in a general sense. m This transfiguration which the inquiries of physicists continually increase, is aided by that other transfiguration resulting from metaphysical inquiries. Subjective analysis compels us to admit that our scientific interpretations of the phenomena which objects present, are expressed in terms of our own variously-combined sensations and ideas— expressed, that is, in elements belonging to consciousness, which are but symbols of the something beyond consciousness. Though analysis afterwards reinstates our primitive beliefs, to the extent of showing that behind every group of phenomenal manifestations there is always a nexus, which if the reality that remains fixed amid appearances which are variable ; yet we are shown that this nexus of reality is for ever inaccessible to consciousness. And when, once more, we remember that the activities constituting consciousness, being rigorously bounded cannot bring in among themselves the activities beyond the bounds, which therefore seem unconscious, though production of either by the other seems to imply that they are of the same essential nature ; this necessity we are under to think of the external energy in terms of the internal energy, gives rather a spiritualistic than a materialistic aspect to the Universe : further thought, however obliging us to recognise the truth that a conception in phenomenal manifestations of this ultimate energy can inno wise show us whatitis. While the beliefs to which analytic science thus leads are such as do not destroy the object-matter of religion, but simply transfigure it, science under its concrete forms enlarges the sphere for religious sentiment. From the very beginning the progress of knowledge has been accompanied by an increasing capacity for wonder. AmoiF savages, the lowest are the least surprised when shown remarkable products of civilised art : astonishing the traveller by their indifference, And so little of the marvellous do they perceive in the grandest phenomena of Nature, that any inquiries concerning them they regard as childish trifling. This contrast in mental attitude between the lowest human beings and the higher human beings around us, is paralleled by the contrasts among the grades of these higher human beings themselves. It is not the rustic, nor the artizan, nor the trader, who sees something more than a mere matter of course in the hatching of a chick ; but it is the biologist who, pushing to the uttermost his analysis of vital phenomena' reaches his greatest perplexity when a speck of protoplasm under the microscope shows him life in its simplest form, and makes him feel that however he formulates its processes the actual play of forces remains unimaginable. Neither in the ordinary tourist nor in the deer-stalker climbing the mountains above him, does a highland glen rouse ideas beyond those of sport or of the picturesque "but it may, and often does, in the geologist. He, observing that the glacier-rounded rock he sits on has lost by weathering but half an inch of its surface since a time far more remote than the ber'inniii°-s of human civilisation, and then trying to conceive the slowdenudation which has cut out the whole valley, has thoughts of time and of power to which they are strangers—thoughts which already utterly inadequate to their objects, he feels to be still more futile on noting the contorted beds of gneiss around, which tell him of a time, immeasureably more remote, when far beneath the Earth's surface they were in a half-melted state, and again tell him of a time, immensely exceeding this in remoteness, when their components were sand and mud on the shores of an ancient sea. Nor is it in the primitive peoples who supposed that the heavens rested on the mountain tops, any more than in themodern inheritors of their cosmogony who repeat that " the heavens declare the glory of God," that we find the largest conceptions of the Universe or the greatest amount of wonder excited by contemplation of it. Rather it is in the astronomer, who sees in the Sun a mass so vast that even into one of his spots our Earth might be plunged without touching its edges ; and who by every finer telescope is shown an increased multitude of such suns, many of them far larger. Hereafter as heretofore, higher faculty and deeper insight will raise rather than lower this sentiment. At present the most powerful and most instructed intellect has neither the knowledge nor the capacity required for symbolizing in thought the totality of things. Occupied with one or other division of Nature, the man of science usually does not know enough of the other divisions even to rudely conceive the extent and complexity of their phenomena • and supposing him to have adequate knowledge of each, yet he is' unable to think of them as a whole, Wider and more complex intellect may hereafter help him to form a vague consciousnes of them in their totality. We may say that just as an undeveloped musical faculty, able only to appreciate a simple melody, cannot grasp the variously-entangled passages and harmonies of a symphony, which in the minds of composer and conductor, are unified into involved musical effects awakening far greater feeling than is possible to the musically uncultured ; so, by future more evolved intelligences, the course of things now apprehensible only in parts may be apprehensible all together, with an accompanying feeling as much beyond that of the present cultured man, as his feeling is beyond that of the savage. And this feeling is not likely to be decreased but increased by that analysis of knowledge which, while forcing him to Agnosticism yet continually prompts him to imagine some solution of the Great Enigma which he knows cannot be solved. Especially must this be so when he remembers that the very notions, beginning and end cause and purpose, are relative notions belonging to human thought' whichare probably inapplicable to the Ultimate Reality transcending human thought; and when, though suspecting that explanation is a word without meaning when applied to this Ultimate Reality, he yet feels compelled to think there must be an explanation. But amid the mysteries which become the more mysterious the the more they are thought about, there will remain the one absolute certainty, that he is ever in presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy, from which all things proceed.—Herbert Spencer.