BOOKS.
RELIGION AS A CREDIBLE DOCTRINE.*
This is an exceedingly clever and very fresh book on a subject of transcendent interest. We cannot help wondering how it will be received. The author of The New Republic has always been somewhat of the enfant terrible at the feast of the philosophers, and like most enfants terribles, has seemed to enjoy the role rather too obviously. " Is life worth living ? " he 'asked some years ago. But the world took it as a jest, and stayed not for the answer. So now he raises an immense issue, and traverses an enormous field. The part he professes to play betweenthe high contending parties of faith and science is, it is true, a humble one, not even that of an intellectual Bismarck, that of the honest broker, but only that of the professional accountant. Neither side, he says in effect, knows the value of its assets or the extent of its liabilities. I will go coldly and impartially through both and bring out a debtor and creditor account at the end, by which they and the world will know whether they can carry on business, and with what prospect of profit. The idea is ingenious, and adequately carried out, the book being well arranged and, in point of style, excellently written. In these respects, indeed, it is— and we mean it as a compliment—more like a French than Relipwn as a Credible Doctrine a Study of the Fundamental Difficulty. By W. H. Mallock. London : Chapman and Hall. [124.] an English book. It touches intricate and deep topics with lightness and lucidity ; it presents both arguments dia results with effect and point, and in a way to arrest and be understood by the man of the world. But it has the flippancy and audacity of the enfant terrible. Mr. Mallock himself is aware that he is likely to irritate both aides. He can scarcely fail to do so. Like Disraeli in his famous speech, Aftcr a good many gibes at " nebulous professors," he finally declares himself on the side of the angels. But the friends of the angels will be inclined to cry, Non tali auzilio ; and the professors, even if they admit that he states their case fairly, can hardly be expected to be pleased with either the method or the result.
A professional accountant does not, as a rule, when making his audit, indulge in a running fire of jeers at the impropriety or insane folly of the investments, even if he has to condemn them. But this is what Mr. Mallock does. He professes respect for both parties, but treats both with cavalier indiffer- ence, and in particular seems to go out of his way, not only to " make game " of them, but to choose for his illustrations examples and metaphors which appear deliberately and grace- lessly irreverent. Thus he compares God Almighty to a man firing a thousand shots every day into the sea, and twice in a lifetime hitting the same bathing-machine. He vanquishes the idealist, not only " with a grin," but with a parable of ten men and one mutton-chop. A mutton-chop is a concept ab- stracted from the ten percepts of ten different philosophers who are cognisant of it. One eats the concept. What becomes of the percepts of the other nine, or indeed of his own ? He insinuates that the spectacle of the starry heavens which so mach impressed Kant may be looked at in a very different way, and "suggest nothing so much as a wearisome Court ceremonial surrounding a King who is unable to understand or break away from it." The rest of the passage is even more startling, and there are many paragraphs like these, and some more shocking still.
Yet the fact is that though Mr. Mallock may express him- self flippantly, and even gracelessly, he has a genuine interest in these profound topics, born of a natural gift for dealing with them, and his enfant terrible manner is for the serious purpose of the book neither here nor there. He states, then, all three sides of the case, calling as his witnesses,—for religion, two Roman Catholics, Father Maher and Father Driscoll; for the ideal philosophy, Dr. W. G. Ward and Professor James Ward; and for natural science and materialist philosophy, Haeckel, Huxley, and Herbert Spencer. He gets with admirable rapidity to the main points and ultimate theories,—the exist- ence of God, the immortality of the soul, the freedom of the will, and the dualistic as against the monistic explanation of the universe. The upshot of the whole matter is that on all sides, and looking at the world from all these aspects, we find that we soon reach the end of our tether, and that our finite powers are baffled by the infinite. We cannot with their utmost stretch conceive or think either of the world of sense or of the world of religion, either of the material or the moral cosmos, without quickly coming to a logical impasse. And further, to start at all, we must begin with an act of faith, not of reason or logic. To believe that the will is free, to believe that the external world exists, and that there are other beings like ourselves in the world,—these, the first postu- lates of religion, philosophy, and physical science, are each and all acts of instinct, acts of faith. Hume saw this, as Mr. Mallock shows, as clearly as any religions thinker. " Nature has not left, he says, this act—i.e., a belief in the ex- ternal world—to man's choice," and Reid, Huxley, and Herbert Spencer have in different ways followed Hume.
Both sides, indeed, nowadays accept the contradictory of their own position, and that is the difference between the present-day battle of religion against science and the aspect of the same struggle fifty years ago. What they do not recognise in thought is what they recognise practically, the actual way out. It is this that Mr. Mallock demonstrates clearly, and indeed, in concluding, with fine eloquence. The religious thinker accepts from the man of science the inexorable, inevitable law of the material world. The scientific thinker, on the other hand, finds himself under the necessity of rein- venting the moral law, and its sanction in the God whom he has abolished. We have to think that we are free, that the ex- ternal world exists, or motive dies, and with it comes not only moral but intellectual suicide. Fortunately only few men can deny this, or hold their breath, so to speak; long enough to kill themselves. What is more, it is increasingly clear that the individuals and the races without faith of some sort are the least fit to survive in the world as it is consti- tuted, and are destined to be superseded by more virile com- petitors. Races without the instinct of self-preservation would naturally die out, and so will races without the instinct of faith, which alone makes self-preservation seem desirable. This point, the same that has been put with so much force as an applied philosophy by Mr. Kidd, is put in the abstract with similar force by Mr. Mallock. It sounds an amazing practical paradox that Evolution should in this way both theoreti- cally and actually devour her own children ; but as both Mr. Kidd and Mr. Mallock point out, nothing is more notable and pitiful than the struggles of Professor Huxley and Mr. Herbert Spencer to evade the logical issue of their arguments, to invent a moral law in opposition to the cosmic law, or an " Unknow- able" to take the place of the God whom they have conducted over the frontier. To succeed, to survive in the world as science shows it to be, we need both motive and intelligence, both science and faith ; but the greater of these is faith. That seems to be Mr. Mallock's final position.
The ideal philosophers will not be content with his brief risume of their view. Nor is his statement of either the scientific or the religious side exhaustive. Such arguments as those of Sir Oliver Lodge in favour of the immortality of the soul he hardly alludes to. And, of course, the book is not intended to deal with questions belonging to any particular faith, such, for example, as Christianity, and the historic side of such faiths is naturally absent. It is a brief popular, or semi-popular, discussion of the fundamental question whether religion at all is to be regarded or credited. Much of the argument is not new—Mr. Mallock does not profess that it is —but it is newly and freshly put.
Mr. Mallock quotes Tennyson repeatedly in this volume, generally with respect, though on occasion he cannot resist the temptation to have a little fling at him too. He might have quoted him even more. Tennyson had thought over, nay, all his life was always thinking over, these great ultimate questions. He, like Mr. Mallock, felt the grievous difficulties, and expressed them in language as strong, if not as aggressive, as Mr. Mallock. " The lavish profusion in the natural world appals me," he wrote, "from the growths of the tropical forest, to the capacity of man to multiply, the torrent of babies." And again : " God is love. Yes ; but where do we get that from ? If we look at Nature alone, full of perfection and imperfection, she tells us that God is disease, murder, and rapine." And in his poems he sums up the whole in such well-known and splendid passages as those from "De Profundis " and from the " Ancient Sage" :-- " The pain. Of this divisible-indivisible world," in which the "main-miracle" is- " Thatthou art thou, With power on thine own act and oa the world."
And again,— "Thou canst not prove that thon ar6 bedy. alone, Nor canst thou prove that thouart spirit alone, Nor canst thou prove that then arebothin one: Thou canst not prove thou sirtiaunortal, no;
Nor yet that thou art mortal—a40% my BQP, • -
Thou canst not prove that I,.who speak _with. thee,..., Am not thyself in converse with thyself, For nothing worthy proving can be proven Nor yet disproven : wherefore thou be wise, Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt, And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith !"
Is not Mr. Mallock's teaching much the same, though far otherwise expressed, and though differing as the detailed argument of the philosopher differs from the intuition of the poet P We could wish Mr. Mallock had shown a little more of the reverence and reticence which this high theme demands; but let those who dislike the book as a whole refute its arguments.
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