| <The Relation of Metaphysics to Literature and Science>
| <John Stuart Blackie>
| <August 1873>
| <pb n="191">
| Metaphysics is with most persons in this country, perhaps to a 
| certain extent in all countries, a word of ill omen.  When they 
| hear it uttered, they are apt to feel uncomfortable, as if at the 
| suspicion of an approaching headache.  They rub their eyes and 
| look apprehensive, doubtful whether the intrusive apparition be a 
| cloud or a ghost ~~ in either case an object of just avoidance; for 
| in a world of clouds we are apt to lose our bearings, and in a 
| world of ghosts we lose our wits.  Philosophy is a term of less 
| unpleasant associations; still it is not popular.  A philosopher, 
| John Bull is apt to conceive, is a person who can do anything but 
| hit a nail on the head; and Sandy, though not without a certain 
| pride in his Humes and his Hamiltons, feels on the whole 
| inclined to refer in matters of speculation rather to a jury of <p> 
| "common sense;" </p> and besides cannot understand what 
| synthesis or antithesis of abstract ideas can contribute to the 
| replenishing of his empty pockets.  The Englishman is pre-eminently
| a practical man; and in the composition of the Scot a 
| certain hard and square utilitarianism, suspicious of sentiment 
| and condemnatory of all operations not directly conducing to a 
| visible and immediate result, is a strong element.  Nevertheless, 
| both John Bull and Sandy, in their sweeping condemnation of 
| metaphysical speculation, are wrong.  Metaphysics, as the 
| science of ultimate principles, is merely the highest form of 
| thought, and a man can no more reject it altogether than he can 
| reject thinking.  No doubt there is a considerable class of persons 
| to whom thinking is rather a bother, and they content themselves 
| easily with as little of it as possible; whereas metaphysics always 
| means as much of it as possible.  But even these persons, unless 
| in the lowest scale of mere nomad or gypsy life, cannot get on 
| without some substratum of consistent thinking; and this they 
| generally find ready-made to their hands in the current theology 
| of the country to which they belong.  The existence of religion, 
| indeed, except in its very lowest forms, where it expresses only 
| dependence, proves that man is a metaphysical animal; for the 
| highest thought to which the metaphysician can ascend is God, 
| and theology and metaphysics are only two different names for 
| the same goal arrived at by different roads.  We are all, therefore, 
| in so far as we are complete men, by necessity metaphysicians; 
| some ultimate principles of thought and action we must either 
| work out for ourselves, or assume as worked out by others.  The 
| only apology that can be offered for the proverbial English 
| antipathy to metaphysics is, that Metaphysicians are not always 
| wise, and sometimes are even absurd, according to Cicero's 
| well-known saying, <q> </q>; and seem to have employed themselves 
| in twisting a golden or gilded cord with which to strangle 
| themselves.  All this may be freely admitted; also that some 
| persons, who in this unspeculative country have been allowed to 
| pass as philosophers, have stamped with their signature 
| speculations more suitable
| <pb n="192">
| for pigs ~~ if indeed pigs could speculate ~~ than for men; and 
| some of them have even gone so far as, not without a certain 
| amount of reverberant applause, to plant Epicurus publicly on the 
| throne of Plato.  Better no philosophy at all, of course, than such 
| open prostitution of all that is noblest and highest in human 
| nature, such perverse inversion of the natural poles of things.  
| But it is not fair to make metaphysics, any more than poetry or 
| political economy, the scapegoat for the sins of its professors:  
| and it must remain an unshaken truth in the history of human 
| society, that a nation which disowns metaphysics has already 
| condemned itself as either utterly unthinking or contented with a 
| style of thinking sufficient only for the most immediate uses and 
| the most ephemeral purposes.
| One thing I candidly admit ~~ that there is no necessity for all 
| men being metaphysical; nay, more, I say, happiest often are they 
| who have nothing to do with abstract thinking, and happiest it 
| may be, the ages in which no profoundly metaphysical question 
| was ever stirred.  How this?  Plainly because in the constitution 
| of certain minds, and in certain stages of society, the great and 
| fundamental truths of metaphysics exist in a sort of concrete, 
| unconscious state; believed in and acted on, but not proved, 
| because not questioned.  Homer, I feel sure, was no 
| metaphysician; neither Homer nor the age of which he was a 
| spokesman; but that he was full and complete, a rich, luxuriant, 
| and thoroughly well-furnished, and altogether healthy-minded 
| man will scarcely be denied by any; and if so, his concrete nature 
| could not have been destitute of those original instincts and 
| fundamental convictions which the metaphysics of the schools 
| can systematise, but does not pretend to create.  Nor is it difficult 
| to see wherein his concrete metaphysics lay.  He had the most 
| profound and deep-rooted conviction of the omniscience and 
| omnipotence of the gods, and the providential government of the 
| world ~~ a belief which in a summary form, and with a popular 
| phraseology, in fact enunciates the highest metaphysical 
| doctrines to which the comprehensive encyclopaedism of a 
| Leibnitz or the constructive subtlety of a Hegel has yet attained.  
| And what we say here of Homer and the Homerides applies with 
| equal truth to Walter Scott, the least metaphysical of modern 
| poets, and to the atmosphere which he breathes.  It is the 
| happiness of poets specially, and of all poetical and artistic 
| natures, as Wordsworth has it, <q> </q>.  But there can be no 
| enjoyment of any good which is not present; and so we may 
| certainly say it is the privilege of poetical natures to be and to 
| feel what philosophers prove ought to be and to be felt; and more 
| than this, that great poet ~~ a Homer, a Shakespeare, a Burns, or 
| a Scott (for no doubt there are sickly and senseless rhymers of 
| whom the same cannot be said) ~~ is a much safer and more 
| reliable thermometer and barometer of a salubrious human 
| atmosphere than a great metaphysician.  For a great poet, by the 
| breadth and depth of his sympathy, is inclusive of all things 
| beautiful and sublime, exclusive of none; whereas a 
| metaphysician ~~ besides the danger of trying to leap out of his 
| skin, which is always near ~~ is apt, as Professor Ferrier well 
| remarks, to leave some element out of the account which does 
| not exactly fit into his system, and so he stands forth to the world 
| like a bright sun with a big segment cut out of one side, or a fair 
| woman squinting with one eye, which is but ill compensated for 
| by the transcendent brilliance of the other.
| <pb n="193">
| In an age so deeply stirred as the present with all sorts of 
| questions, that probe the very roots of all existing habits of 
| thought and time-hallowed institutions, it could not be but that 
| poetry and literature generally should be more or less infected 
| with that sort of conscious and formal metaphysics from which 
| we consider it rather the privilege of Homer and Walter Scott to 
| have been free.  All this flirtation and tentative matchmaking 
| between metaphysics and literature must be looked upon as a 
| necessary growth of the age; and, if in some cases leading to 
| strange discords and discomforts, not therefore by any means to 
| be condemned wholesale.  Literature, which, as distinguished 
| from science, is the cunningly harmonised voice of humanity in 
| reference to all things universally known, can exclude nothing 
| from its sphere; and the union of contraries and apparent 
| incompatibilities is just the grand function and the great glory of 
| the highest minds.  In Plato the ancient world saw a great 
| philosopher draped in the vestments of a great poet, such as the 
| ancient world saw but that once; and in Goethe the modern world 
| admires a wonderful creature, in whom the impassioned 
| imagination and the subtle sensibility of the poet shake hands 
| with the profound speculation of the philosopher and the nice 
| observation of the man of science, after a fashion to which even 
| the rich intellectual records of classical Athens present no 
| parallel.  All this is true; but great combinations are only possible 
| to the greatest  minds; and upon the whole I think it were better, 
| if only to avoid too much of a strong seasoning, which to many 
| palates tastes very much like a drug, that this most recent alliance 
| between metaphysics and minstrelsy should not go farther for the 
| present.  It ought to be borne in mind that poetry, like religion, 
| misses the principal mark of its aim if it is not popular; and there 
| can be no question that a transcendental desire, whether to fly 
| into the uppermost heaven or to gauge the deepest hell, has rather 
| a tendency to make a man obscure for the generality of 
| earth-treading mortals.  A good poem, it seems to me, rather, 
| should be like a good wife ~~ 
| <q> </q>
| At least let us have some poetry of this kind, like Chaucer and 
| Burns and Scott.  Let poets, made as they are, like other mortals, 
| of flesh and blood, not indulge too freely in the high-strung 
| luxury of spinning transcendental cobwebs even out of 
| sunbeams.
| So much for literature.  As for science, as it is by its essential 
| nature possessed of a systematised consciousness of its own 
| ideas, it must either remain destitute of ultimate principles or 
| borrow them from metaphysics.  The very definition of science is 
| to know.  The exercise of the cognitive faculty in a certain 
| definite sphere is the proper domain of science; speculation does 
| not come within its jurisdiction; and the moment it attempts to 
| fix the boundary between the knowable and the unknowable it 
| becomes metaphysics.  Accordingly, we find in fact that 
| scientific men are divided into two distinct classes:  those who, 
| confining themselves to their own proper sphere of knowing, are 
| content to analyse and generalise the observed facts, and to 
| tabulate the results; and those who mingle those results with 
| certain theories and speculations which are either metaphysics or 
| a temporary substitute for them.  Take meteorology, for instance, 
| the science of the weather and atmospheric changes.  Such a 
| science, though prosecuted on the largest scale, and crowned 
| with the most important practical results,
| <pb n="194">
| would not contain a single element of what could be called 
| philosophy.  No record of facts or concatenated series of regular 
| sequences is a philosophy:  it is only a step towards a philosophy.  
| In the same way we have botanists who only count stamens and 
| pistils; anatomists who discriminate and distinguish bones, 
| <reg orig="&c.:"> etcetera: </reg> grammarians who enumerate the 
| regular and irregular forms of words in special languages, 
| without attempting to explain the cause either of the rule or the 
| exception.  Yet that there is a philosophy of plants, of bones, and 
| of words is not to be doubted; and such a philosophy, wherever it 
| appears is either a branch of metaphysics or a contribution 
| towards a branch.  The insufficiency of mere science to satisfy 
| the demands of thoughtful minds is strikingly proved by the 
| tendency of scientific men to elevate their special platform into 
| the sphere of universal rules and ultimate principles.  So 
| craniology, or science of the skulls (Schedellehre) was baptised 
| phrenology:  and instantly, as a mental doctrine, assumed the 
| dictatorial functions that belong to metaphysics.  In the same 
| way, when a distinguished living zoologist gave being to the 
| new-coined word protoplasm, a certain class of minds were eager 
| to pick it up as the germ of some possible philosophy of life:  but 
| whether there be any such substance as protoplasm, whose 
| importance deserved a new name, or not, it is plain that such a 
| fact is only another link in the great chain of observed physical 
| sequences, from which to metaphysics there is the whole 
| tremendous gap that exists between the steam-engine and the 
| mind of James Watt.  It is plain, therefore, that all sciences, 
| whether physical or moral, in the common British sense of the 
| word, stop short of metaphysics.  They contain within themselves 
| no key to their own mysteries:  they are a palace of which the 
| owner is absent; a throne, or the footstool of a throne, of which 
| no sovereign is seated; ambassadors from a power which has not 
| revealed itself, and knows not how to find acknowledgment.
| Of the sciences most in favour with the British public at the 
| present moment, the most prominent are the physical and the 
| material; and among the prominent, the most fashionable, 
| perhaps, are geology, chemistry, and the political economy.  The 
| popularity of these sciences depends partly on their novelty, 
| partly on the striking nature of some of their phenomena, partly 
| on the gigantic strides of discovery by which they have recently 
| advanced, partly also, no doubt, on the manifest utility of some 
| of their results to manufacturers, traders, agriculturists, and all 
| those who are occupied in carrying on the most necessary and 
| urgent business of daily life.  All honour to such occupations, 
| and to the sciences whose conclusions subserve their uses:  but 
| let it be remembered that they are not the highest; and according 
| to the significant theological allegory in the laws of Menu, those 
| who practise them are sprang from the arms and thighs, not from 
| the head, of the creative Brahm.  As little can the new physical 
| sciences of the social organism, with all their array of grand and 
| significant cosmical facts, be allowed to invert the natural order 
| of the Rectual dignities, by assuming a superiority, either in 
| interest or importance to metaphysical speculation.  Divine 
| philosophy, as Milton termed it, must always retain the imperial 
| knowledge:  and the sciences, especially the physical, in their 
| most advanced state, can only maintain the position of kings 
| subject to the king of kings, and of provincial governors to a 
| great central authority.  The brilliant scales of some antediluvian 
| fish, the droppings of a pre-Adamite pigeon, and
| <pb n="195">
| the foot-prints of ante-Noachidian cassowaries in the ribbed 
| sand, however curious to stare at, and to talk about, or to dream 
| about, can never possess a permanent human interest equal to 
| that possessed by the great science of man, with his whence, and 
| whither, and what, and how, and all that is included in the 
| complex organism of human society, and in the strange history of 
| human progress and retrogression.  If we regard the world and its 
| evolutions as a great Divine drama, the domain of the physical 
| sciences constitutes only the stage, with the scenery and 
| decorations of the piece; the play and the performers belong to an 
| entirely different category, which, if we will not confuse things 
| naturally opposed, we must call metaphysical, or rather 
| anti-physical.  Nothing, certainly, can be more manifestly 
| inconclusive than the attempts that have recently been made by 
| some speculators to enlarge the domain of mental science by 
| examining with microscopic minuteness into the structure and 
| ponderosity of the brain.  We know clearly that we cannot think 
| without our brain, and cannot live without our stomach.  One of 
| the most universal of all truths is that no spiritual force (and all 
| force is fundamentally spiritual) can make itself known to us, or 
| appreciated in any way by us, except through what we call a 
| material organisation.   No theologian, I presume, asserts that the 
| action of the Spirit of God upon the soul of man (in which I 
| believe most potently) is independent of the brain of man and of 
| the veins of man.  But though intellectual force always acts 
| through a chain of what we call material organism, it by no 
| means follows that the unifying energy which we call mind can 
| receive the slightest illustration of its essential cause from such a 
| complex manifoldedness as we understand under the term matter.  
| And the greater the likeness, and the closer the identity, of the 
| simian and the human brain, which people have been parading 
| lately, the wonder is the greater (if physics could explain 
| metaphysics) that man should so seldom, if indeed ever, sink into 
| the mere monkey, or that the monkey should never have risen, or 
| shown any signs of rising, into the man.  From physical science, 
| therefore, we are to expect no light thrown into the penetralia of  
| humanity.  There is a veil here, like the veil of Isis, radiant with 
| all shapes of gods and mightiest celestial powers, beyond which 
| the strongest glace of the keenest physiologist, with a microscope 
| of the highest power, never pierced.  <q> </q>:  and yet God is 
| there behind all that curiously woven vital tissue, just as certainly 
| as James Watt lies behind the steam engine, or Michael Angelo 
| behind St. Peter's dome, or Ictinus behind the fluted marble of 
| the Parthenon.  God is the great constructive artist of the 
| universe; and the only difference betwixt His work and ours is 
| that His work is always essentially vital, and His reason is 
| always immanent as the necessary supporter of that vitality.  Our 
| work is lifeless and imitative:  and we stand outside of our poor 
| performance like a child beside a castle of cards.
| But these remarks have brought me directly, I perceive, into the 
| relation of metaphysics to theology, and here I must allude, with 
| sorrow, to what appears to me the atheism, or, if that be an ugly 
| word, the practical godlessness of certain epiphanies of our 
| modern science, and what some of us trumpet also as a sort of 
| philosophy.  Aristotle long ago said that, if there be a science of 
| ultimate causes anywhere it is theology:  and if, this be true, a 
| godness science is a science without philosophy, and a 
| philosophy
| <pb n="196">
| without God is like an eye-socket without an eye, or a body 
| without a heart.  The history of speculative theism is extremely 
| curious, and would make a very instructive and interesting book.  
| Among thinking men the existence of such a monstrous use of 
| intellect ~~ for surely it is a monstrous thing that intellect, 
| asserting itself stoutly in the little world of man, should deny 
| itself in the great world of which man is a part ~~ is to be 
| explained mainly on the principle of reaction; and the negation is 
| to be understood as applying only to some particular positive 
| which it contravenes.  The well-known sentence in the opening 
| paragraph of the book of Protagoras, that <q> </q>, may 
| charitably be considered to have its meaning exhausted when 
| applied to the popular notions about Jove, Here, Aphrodite, and 
| the other personages of the then Olympian dynasty.  Our modern 
| scientific men, who ignore God, or at least from some reason or 
| other seem studiously to avoid allusion to the great cosmical 
| Reason in their books, have less excuse certainly than the old 
| Abderitan; but perhaps at bottom their theism is not much farther 
| to seek.  My charity, at least, leads me to believe that the want of 
| a philosophical piety, which makes their works look so blank, is 
| to be traced, first, to a one-sided training, which has left one of 
| the noblest sides of their nature uncultivated, partly to a revolt 
| from a certain anthropomorphic phraseology familiar to glib 
| orthodox tongues when discoursing on the nature and attributes 
| of the Supreme Being.  Not a few British theologians and 
| religious persons seem to talk of the great cosmic Architect as if 
| He were sitting somewhere outside of and far away from His 
| great work the world, which, having made, after Dr. Paley's 
| similitude of a watch, He allows to move itself by virtue of a 
| spring with which He has nothing further to do.  But the supreme 
| <f> </f> is nothing like a human artisan in this gross sense; the 
| world is not a manufacture, but a growth; and growth is the 
| continuous product of the indwelling formative Reason of the 
| world, which all true thinkers, from Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and 
| Plato downwards to Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Hegel, have 
| understood by the highest word ~~ God.  If this be not a 
| sufficient explanation of the deplorable absence, I shall not say 
| of all devout glow and fragrance in some of our scientific works, 
| but of anything like a natural reverent recognition of the <f> 
| </f>, the imperial mind, which was the keystone of the Platonic 
| philosophy, I am heartily sorry.  In this case I can only attribute it 
| to that notable weakness of the human intellect, sometimes seen 
| at the passage of Reform Bills and other epidemic commotions in 
| the social system, which seems to render the entertainment of 
| more than one idea for a certain season in the public brain a 
| cerebral impossibility.  One sees, with sorrow, as a human 
| phenomenon, that monstrous fancies in science, like monstrous 
| fashions in costume, have their day; and when the contagious fit 
| is in the atmosphere, it is often as vain to argue with it as to 
| preach moderation to a drunken man or fairness to a political 
| organ.  Nothing the less, however, does drunkenness signify 
| beastliness and atheism nonsense; and it remains as true now as it 
| was in the days of David and of John Milton that
| <q> </q>
| <paragraph>
| In looking back upon the history of this divorce of science from 
| piety, which is so sad a trait of these latter times (how different
| <pb n="197">
| from the days of Kepler and Copernicus!), we are constrained to 
| confess that the great leader of the movement was a Scot ~~ 
| David Hume ~~ and one who helped the movement considerably 
| in a subordinate sphere was also a Scot ~~ I mean James Mill.  
| These men were metaphysicians, not men of science.  But this 
| was necessary; for science, as such, is too sensible of its own 
| ancillary position to attempt to create a philosophy; and the 
| philosophical theories which it occasionally vents it gladly 
| covers with the broad shield of some professional Ajax of 
| metaphysics.  Such an Ajax was David Hume, a man whose 
| varied learning, ingenious speculation, graceful expression, and 
| practical sagacity it were not easy to overpraise, but to whose 
| achievements in the way of the highest speculation no earnest 
| truth-seeker has felt himself under any particular obligation.  The 
| most that he seems to have done as a metaphysician, so far as I 
| can see (and I have read him often and carefully), is to pick out 
| very keenly the holes in other man's coats only that he might put 
| on a much more widely rifted habiliment of his own.  If some 
| men before his time fancied that they had caught the true cause 
| of a thing, when they had only put their finger on one link of a 
| long series of unvaried sequences, Hume destroyed the notion of 
| cause altogether, and taught men to palm off a scholastic phrase 
| for a significant explanation.  If some theological dogmatists 
| spoke as if they had been prime ministers at the creation, and 
| were as familiar with the most curious jointing and the most 
| distant scope of the Divine procedure as with the answers in their 
| own catechisms, Hume taught sceptically inclined intellects to 
| deny the kinship of the human intellect and the Divine altogether, 
| to build up an impassable barrier between the universal Heavenly 
| Father and the universal human family, and to create man, not, as 
| Moses did, in the image of God, but in the image of some strange 
| complex of impressions and ideas, which it was extremely 
| difficult to distinguish from the hallucinations of a Bedlamite.  A 
| notable Scotsman, perhaps the greatest Scotsman of his age 
| except Burns, in metaphysics Hume stands out merely as a poor 
| self-puzzler, strangling all possibility of consistent thinking with 
| sceptical doubts which admit only of a sceptical solution, and 
| living without God in a world of speculation, where not to 
| acknowledge God as the only possible keystone of intellectual 
| sanity, is to revert with deliberate purpose to chaos and old void.  
| And yet there is nothing in all the unreasoned babble about laws, 
| and forces, and sequences, developments, evolutions, natural 
| selections and what not, apart from God, that cannot be traced 
| back to this poor bewildered, self-puzzling, and self-strangling 
| negative spokesman of the poor flat eighteenth century, when 
| half the world was asleep and the other half playing cards.  As 
| for James Mill, he worked up the association theory of Hartley, 
| deprived of its pure Evangelical aroma, into a dish of soar 
| pottage and gritty sand, which a brilliant Scotch barrister and a 
| tasteful Episcopal clergyman, afterwards feeding on, elaborated 
| into that sophistical theory of beauty according to every man's 
| fancy, which explained away the essence of the thing by 
| ingeniously talking about its accidents.  Thus religious Scotland 
| has had the singular destiny of promulgating a philosophy 
| without God, and an aesthetics without reason, the ghosts of 
| which, haunting our grey metropolis even now, neither the 
| cataphract erudition of Hamilton, nor the keen-bladed subtlety of 
| Ferrier, nor the Herculean swing
| <pb n="198">
| of Stirlings' Hegolian club have prevailed completely to exercise.
| Let us now state a little more distinctly what we have hitherto 
| rather assumed than proved ~~ why all philosophy that does not 
| both begin and end with God must be unworthy of the name, and 
| why all true theology is only another name for metaphysics.  The 
| deficiency of some of our most prominent modern scientific 
| speculators, considered in the light of metaphysics, plainly lies in 
| this, that they content themselves with certain fashionable 
| technical names, such as law, force, sequence, development, 
| evolution, natural selection, which at bottom express only 
| methods of operation, but are given forth with an air as if they 
| contained some idea of an ultimate cause, or, at all events, 
| rendered hopeless the idea of finding anything in nature that 
| looked more like a cause; that is, as if they contained a true 
| metaphysics, or the best possible attempt at a metaphysics.  But 
| not one of these fashionable phrases contains any element which 
| can be accepted as an explanation of a reasoned universe.  To 
| talk of development and evolution teaches nothing, except the 
| bare and very patent fact of gradual progress, unless you teach 
| also whence the evolution proceeds; from God, says the Hebrew; 
| from <f> </f> or Reason, says the Greek; and what say you, the 
| wise men of mighty Britain in the third quarter of this nineteenth 
| century?  If you say that all this magnificently organised 
| Something comes from a mighty inorganic Nothing, then you say 
| something even less than I learned from the old Bosotian 
| theologer, who taught that Night was the mother of Light; and I 
| am entitled to hold your wisdom very cheap.  If, to avoid this 
| impotency, you are willing to go farther, and say that the ultimate 
| cause of all things is not nothing, but what practically to us is as 
| good as nothing, only a vast unknown and unknowable, then, I 
| ask, what thing is there within the range of your curious analysis 
| of which you can say that you have penetrated into its essence by 
| direct cognition?  Do you know me, do you know yourself, do 
| you know anybody or anything except by outward 
| manifestation?  And why should you imagine that you should be 
| able to lay your finger directly on the Supreme Reason, when 
| you cannot directly handle any finite reason?  This unreasonable 
| ignorance which you profess in order to justify your practical 
| atheism is, no doubt, just that old sophism of Hume, that the 
| world is a product so utterly diverse from any work of human art, 
| that nothing, however truly predicated, of the latter can with any 
| safety be transferred to the former.  But there is a chink in this 
| logic through which any man may put his finger.  A thing may be 
| essentially different from another in one respect, and essentially 
| like it in another.  The shaping force of a Phidias or a Canova, 
| moulding the rude marble into beautiful stone figures, is in one 
| respect removed from the shaping force of the Supreme Reason 
| moulding inorganic matter into bodies of wonderful living 
| creatures, by all the difference that separates death from life; but 
| it is closely akin to it, in fact identical with this Divine force, in 
| so far as both are thoughts, both effluences of one and the same 
| universal cosmic Reason.  In virtue of this thought-projecting 
| reason, whose essential function it is, by a plastic unifying 
| energy, to realise its inherent ideals, man is much more closely 
| allied to the God above him than to the monkey below; and the 
| first chapter of Genesis, when it says that <q> </q>, pronounces 
| a profound metaphysical truth, compared to which the wisdom of 
| our modern
| <pb n="199">
| induction-mongers and minute analytic fingerers sounds to a 
| sane ear like the babblement of children, the gibbering of ghosts, 
| or the maundering of Bedlamites.  The real fact seems to be that 
| John Bull, inflated and made giddy by the wonderful material 
| and mechanical discoveries, in reference to the forces of the 
| external world, which he has recently made through the 
| persistent application of the Baconian method of research, has 
| got himself possessed with the fixed idea that there is no such 
| thing as internal truth at all, and that all knowledge must be 
| picked up by the fingers, submitted to the microscope, and 
| weighed in the balance.  A material philosophy of this kind, if 
| persevered in, can end only in the intellectual degradation of the 
| people that is deluded by it; for it is no more possible to construct 
| a philosophy of this essentially reasoned world, by mere 
| sensuous induction, than it is possible to build up the 
| propositions of Euclid without the metaphysical postulate that 
| two and two make four.  And in fact we must acknowledge that 
| there is just as good reason for denying that two and two make 
| four, as for doubting the existence of the Primal Self-existent 
| Reason which we call God; and, accordingly, one of the most 
| reputable of the school of sophistical externalism, which is now 
| filling the air with big, swelling words of vanity, has put it on 
| record that, in his sober judgment, in some possible world two 
| and two may make five!
| But if a philosophy without God dissolves at the touch of Reason 
| into a mere formula of unmeaning phrases, a theology without 
| Reason is a mere Brocken phantom in the clouds, which people 
| may take for a giant, but which is only a shadow.  And a 
| theology which, being reasonable in the main, yet controverts 
| reason in some of its salient points, is a deformed angel to which 
| a person of good taste will naturally prefer as a well-formed man.  
| Such a deformed angel is any Christian Church that obstinately 
| persists in buckling itself round with the bristling mail of a 
| traditional orthodoxy, which once a day fought bloody battles 
| that have now lost all their significance, and carry (like some 
| other wars) no pleasant fragrance in their memory.  Theology, 
| like other things, must change its dress with the times, if it were 
| only to avoid singularity.  But theologians ought to learn not only 
| to change their dress with the times, which is comparatively an 
| easy affair; they must learn also to say 'Peccavi,' and to cut off 
| even a right hand, and to pluck out a right eye, if it gives just 
| cause of offence to a reasoned philosophy and an exact science.  
| But it needs no large knowledge of history to know that 
| Churchmen have almost always found it as difficult to do this as 
| conquerors to restore their conquests and diplomatists to unsay 
| their lies.  Every Church rests to a great extent on authority; and 
| to support this authority it is naturally led to favour the idea of a 
| virtual infallibility, sometimes professed, generally implied; and 
| besides there is a kindly feeling which tempts many a good man, 
| in reference to a creed essentially rotten, to say with the old 
| Roman poet, <q> </q>.  But a time comes when the dainty-fingered
| toleration, and amiable piety without truth, will no 
| longer do:  the worn-out formula is driven into a corner and 
| drags through a mouldy existence, divorced hopelessly from the 
| intellectual leadership of the time, and surrendered to the simple 
| faith of adult children with Jack the Giant-killer, Puss in Boots, 
| and Sindbad the Sailor.  For a true metaphysics can hold no 
| terms with a theology which cannot distinguish between the 
| ephemeral form and the eternal substance of
| <pb n="200">
| its doctrine; and the hard facts of science, which are testified by 
| the sharp experience of every day, will have no difficulty in 
| maintaining their ground against the windy buffets of a decrepit 
| infallibility sent about drowsy ears once a week, on a Sunday.  
| Worse than that:  the more obstinately an unreasoning theology 
| is preached, the more widely will a reasoning infidelity present 
| itself.  A theology without philosophy has always been the 
| unblissful mother of a science without God.
| Before concluding, completeness would demand that I should 
| show the intimate relation that exists between a sound 
| metaphysics and a large treatment of law, politics, social science, 
| and political economy.  But scantness of time and your exhausted 
| patience forbid any expatiation at present into these very 
| important and interesting fields.  Suffice it to say in a single 
| word, that without philosophy law is sure to degenerate into a 
| complicated network of the most arbitrary subtleties and the most 
| artificial formulas, politics into a mere cunning invention of 
| shifts to serve momentary occasions; social science will occupy 
| itself principally with draining and washing for the body, and 
| with examination boards and crams of utilitarian knowledges, 
| after the Chinese model, for the mind; and political economy will 
| teach the inhabitants of a country intoxicated with a flush of 
| material prosperity to place their highest good in the 
| accumulation of heaps of gold gathered without reason, 
| distributed without love, and wasted on every sort of unmeaning 
| gaud and unmanly luxury.  For metaphysics is the supreme 
| seeing science, and the eye of all the rest.  It alone, as the science 
| of primary causes and of ultimate ends, knows the relation of 
| each special kind of cosmical work to the whole of which it is a 
| part, and thus is alone capable of dignifying each part by the 
| consciousness of its participation in the harmony of the whole.  It 
| occupies the same place in regard to all subordinate spheres of 
| energy that God does to the universe; it is the centre and the soul:  
| it is the alone permeating, animating, and controlling principle, 
| exercising by necessary right a perpetual presidency, which binds 
| all to each and each to all by a thread of Divine reason, which 
| may be tangled sometimes, and sometimes lost, but never can be 
| broken.
|