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The Natural Theology Of The Future
by
In the rest, gentlemen, let us think, and let us observe. For if we are ignorant, not merely of the results of experimental science, but of the methods thereof, then we and the men of science shall have no common ground whereon to stretch out kindly hands to each other.
But let us have patience and faith; and not suppose in haste, that when those hands are stretched out it will be needful for us to leave our standing-ground, or to cast ourselves down from the pinnacle of the temple to earn popularity; above all, from earnest students who are too high-minded to care for popularity themselves.
True, if we have an intelligent belief in those Creeds and those Scriptures which are committed to our keeping, then our philosophy cannot be that which is just now in vogue. But all we have to do, I believe, is to wait. Nominalism, and that “Sensationalism” which has sprung from nominalism, are running fast to seed; Comtism seems to me its supreme effort: after which the whirligig of Time may bring round its revenges; and Realism, and we who own the Realist creeds, may have our turn. Only wait. When a grave, able, and authoritative philosopher explains a mother’s love of her newborn babe, as Professor Bain has done, in a really eloquent passage of his book on the “Emotions and the Will” (Second Edition, pp. 78, 79), then the end of that philosophy is very near; and an older, simpler, more human, and, as I hold, more philosophic explanation of that natural phenomenon, and of all others, may get a hearing.
Only wait; and fret not yourselves, else shall you be moved to do evil. Remember the saying of the wise man: “Go not after the world. She turns on her axis; and if thou stand still long enough she will turn round to thee.”
Footnotes:
{313} Novalis, I think, says that one’s own thought gains quite infinitely in value as soon as one finds it shared by even one other human being. The saying has proved true, at least, to me. The morning after this paper was read, I received a book, “The Genesis of Species, by St. George Mivart, F.R.S.” The name of the author demanded all attention and respect; and as I read on, I found him, to my exceeding pleasure, advocating views which I had long held, with a learning and ability to which I have no pretensions. The book will, doubtless, excite much useful criticism and discussion in the scientific world. I hope that it may do the same in the clerical world; and I earnestly beg those clergymen who heard me with so much patience and courtesy at Sion College, to ponder well Mr. Mivart’s last chapter, on “Theology and Evolution.”
{320} Quoted from Schleiden’s “The Plant, a Biography.”–Lecture XI. in fine.
{326} I am well aware what a serious question is opened up in these words. The fact that the great majority of workers among the social insects are barren females or nuns, devoting themselves to the care of other individuals’ offspring, by an act of self-sacrifice, and that by means of that self-sacrifice these communities grow large and prosperous, ought to be well weighed just now; both by those who hold that morality has been evolved from perceptions of what was useful or pleasurable, and by those who hold as I do that morality is one, immutable and eternal. Those who take the former view (confounding, as Mr. Mivart well points out in his Genesis of Species, “material” and “formal” morality) have no difficulty in tracing the germs of the highest human morality in animals; for self-interest is, in their eyes, the ultimate ground of morality, and the average animal is utterly selfish. But certain animals perform acts, as in the case of working bees and ants, and (as I hold) in the case of mothers working for and protecting their offspring, which at least seem formally moral; because they seem founded on self-sacrifice. I am well aware, I say again, of the very serious admissions which we clergymen should have to make if we confessed that these acts really are that which they seem to be. But I do not see why we should not be as just to an ant as to a human being; I am ready, with Socrates, to follow the Logos whithersoever it leads; and I hope that Mr. Mivart will reconsider the two latter paragraphs of p. 196, and let his “thoughts play freely” round this curious subject. Perhaps, in so doing, he may lay his hand on an even sharper weapon than those which he has already used against the sensationalist theory of morals.