DR. WARD ON THE DIVINE PRE-MOVEMENT.

WE have always recognised in Dr. Ward—the author of " The Ideal of a Christian Church," which more than a generation ago made such a stir at Oxford, and till very recently the editor of the Dublin Ilevime —one of the ablest and clearest of the philosophical thinkers of the-day. Little as we agree with his uot.merely Roman Catholic, but peculiarly Ultrarnoutane theology, we believe that he has done more ser- vice to the cause of true philosophy in England than any thinker of the day, unless we except Dr. Martineau, who, indeed, has it in his power to do far more than he has actually done, in the sense at least of having given to the public, for English psychology and metaphysics. But greatly us we esteem Dr. Ward's writing, we question whether he has ever published anything weightier and more effective than a pamphlet which has just appeared,—republished from the Dublin Review of fourteeu years ago, on " Science, Prayer, Free-will, and

Miracles."* It would be impossible for us, of course, in a newspaper article, to deal with the whole of this remarkable paper ; and, indeed, we only contemplate touching what Dr.

Ward says of the scientific view of the uniformity of Nature in relation to that Providential view of the Universe with which it is supposed to be more or less inconsistent. No one

can deny that Dr. Ward states the facie view of the unreasonableness of prayer with sufficient clearness and energy, in the following hypothetical argument against it :— " Your country is visited with famine or pestilence, and you sup- plicate your God for relief. Your only .child lies sick of a dangerous fever; and as a matter of course you are frequent in prayer. You aro diligent, indeed, in giving her all the external help you can ; but your chief trust is avowedly in God. You entreat, him that he will arrest the malady and spare her precious life. What can be more irrational than this ? Would you pray, then, for a long day in Decem- ber ? Would you pray that in Juno the sun shall set at six o'clock ? Yet surely the laws of fever are no less absolutely fixed than those of sunset ; and were the case otherwise, no science of medicine could by possibility have been called into existence. The only difference between the two cases is, that the laws of sunset have been thoroughly mastered ; whereas our knowledge as to the laws of fever, though very considerable, is as yet bat partial and incomplete. The abstract power of prediction,'—as Mr. Stuart Mill calls %— this is the one assumption, in every nook and corner of science. All scientific men take for granted—when they cease to do so they will cease to be scientific men—that a person of superhuman and ade- quate intelligence, who should know accurately and fully all the various combinations and properties of matter which now exist, could predict infallibly the whole series of future phenomena. He could predict the future course of weather or of disease, with the same assurance with which men now predict the date of a coming eclipse. Pray God all day long—add fasting to your prayer, if you like, and let all your fellow-Christians add their prayer and fasting to yours—in order that the said eclipse shall conic a week earlier : do you suppose you will be heard ? Yet the precise date of an eclipse is not more peremptorily fixed by the laws of nature, than is the pre- cise issue of your daughter's fever. You do not venture to doubt speculatively this fundamental doctrine of science ; in our various scientific conversations, my friend, you have always admitted it. But, like a true Englishman, you take refuge in an illogical com- promise. You assume one doctrine when you study science ; and another, its direct contradictory, when your child falls ill. And yet I am paying you too high a compliment : for you do not profess that this latter doctrine is true ; you do not prof, 6S that your prayer to God is reasonable, or can possibly be efficacious : your only defence that your reason is mastered and overborne by the combined effect of your religious and your parental emotion. As though you could please God—if, indeed, there be a Personal God at all—by acting in a manner which your reason condemns."

Well, the answer to this difficulty is given in a passage of some humour—and our readers may be surprised to hear that there is a good deal of humour in Dr. Ward,—in which he propounds for us the view which philosophical mice imprisoned in a piano, or some more complicated iustrument of the same kind, might be likely to take of " the laws of Nature," as represented by the sounds and vibrations of these instruments :-

" We begin, then, with imagining two mice, endowed, however with quasi-human or semi-human intelligence, enclosed within a grand pianoforte, but prevented in some way or other from interfering with the free play of its machinery. From time to time they are de- lighted with the strains of choice music. One of the two considers these to result from some agency external to the instrument ; but the other, having a more philosophical mind, rises to the conception of fixed laws and phenomenal uniformity. ' Science as yet,' he says, is but in its infancy ; but I have already made ono or two important discoveries. Every sound which reaches us is preceded by a certain vibration of these strings. The same string invariably produces the same sound ; and that louder or more gentle, according as the vibra- tion may be more or less intense. Sounds of a more composite char- acter result when two or more of the strings vibrate together ; and here, again, the sound produced, as far as 1 am able to discover, is precisely a compound of those sounds, which would have resulted from the various component strings vibrating separately. Then there is a further sequence which I have observed : for each vibration is preceded by a stroke by a corresponding hammer ; and the string vibrates more intensely, in proportion as the hammer's stroke is more forcible. Thus far I have already prosecuted my researches. And

• Burns and Oates.

so much at least is evident even now ; viz., that the sounds proceed not from any external and arbitrary agency—from the intervention, e.g., of any higher will —but from the uniform operation of fixed laws. These laws may be explored by intelligent mice ; and to their exploration I shall devote my life.' Even from this inadequate illus- tration, you see the general conclusion which we wish to enforce. A sound has been produced through a certain intermediate chain of fixed laws ; but this fact does not tend ever so distantly to establish the conclusion, that there is no human pre-movement acting continu- ously at one end of that chain. Imagination, however, has no limits. We may very easily suppose, therefore, that some instrument is dis- covered, producing music immeasurably more heavenly and trans- porting than that of the pianoforte ; but for that very reason immea- surably more vast in size and more complex in machinery. We will call this imaginary instrument a 'polychordon,' as we are not aware that there is any existing claimant of that name. In this poly- chordon, the intermediate links—between the player's pre-movement on the one hand, and the resulting sound on the other—are no longer two, but two hundred. We further suppose—imagination (as before -said) being boundless—that some human being or other is uninter- mitteutly playing on this polychordon ; but playing on it just what airs may strike his fancy at the moment. Well : successive genera. tions of philosophical mice have actually traced one hundred and fifty of the two hundred phenomenal sequences, through whose fixed and invariable laws the sound is produced. The colony of mice, shut np within, are in the highest spirits at the success which has crowned the scientific labour of their leading thinkers ; and the most eminent of these addresses an assembly. • We have long known that the laws of our musical universe are_ immutably fixed ; but we have now dis- covered a far lager number of those laws, than our ancestors could have imagined capable of discovery. Let us redouble our efforts. I fully expect that our grandchildren will be able to predict as accu- rately, for an indefinitely preceding period, the succession of melo- dies with which we are to be delighted, as we now predict the hours of sunrise and sunset. One thing, at all events, is now absolutely incontrovertible. As to the notion of there being some agency external to the polychordon, — intervening with arbitrary and capricious will to produce the sounds we experience,—this is a long- exploded superstition ; a more dream and dotage of the past. The progress of science has put it on one side, and never again can it return to disturb our philosophical progress.' "

The reader may infer very easily what that reply really amounts to. It comes to this,—that a very considerable power of tracing out the order of phenomena, and even of predicting the future order of phenomena, from the past, may be acquired by crea- tures who are liable, nevertheless, to be entirely misled by the knowledge they so acquire, as to the most important of all the causes at work in producing these phenomena. Just as the mice were certainly wrong in supposing that, because 150 steps in the phenomenal order had been discovered, the remaining fifty would lead to no new kind of cause—no true initiative—so scientific men may be just as wrong in supposing that because they have discovered so many of the uniform links in the order

of Nature, there is no divine hand beyond, which moves the whole network of physical agencies as it will, so as to produce this

or that result. The player outside the order of Nature counts none the less in determining that order, even though men who confine their minds to groping about within it, convince themselves that the chain of second causes is literally endless. Some one will at once ask whether, then, Dr. Ward means that it would be as rational (if there were any excuse for it) to pray for the lengthening of the day at Christmas or the hastening of an eclipse, as to pray for the recovery of a sick child ? Does the band outside the great instrument really select all its melodies absolutely arbitrarily, or are there some which so underlie all others, that to expect their arrest, is to expect that the musical instrument itself shall cease to be ? It is clear that Dr. Ward would answer the two first questions in the negative, and the last in the affirmative. He regards what he calls the cosmical laws as constituting a permanent framework for our Universe, and though, of course, no less subject to the will of God than the others, yet as so framed that changes or modifications in them can neither be necessary nor desirable for the purpose of man's education in religions trust. What happens by cosmical law cannot be inconsistent with any such special guidance of human lots, as is needful to teach men to lean on God. Within the fixed framework of these laws, there is plenty of compass for such a play of special providence on the one side, and of trust on the other, as the religious life requires. Hence, though it is, of course, to be assumed that the Divine pre-movement does determine the courses of the stars, there is no reason why the laws deter- mining them should be pliant, since their pliancy is not needful to teach man the necessity of trust iu God, and therefore there can be no sense or piety in praying that they should be altered. The whole compass of human fate depends ou combinations of a much more variable and composite kind :—

" By cosmical phenomena, we mean such as the hours of sunrise and sunset ; of moonrise and moonset ; the respective apparent position of the heavenly bodies, &c. By earthly phenomena we mean such as the weather ; the violence and direction of the wind ; the progress of disease; and others of a similar kind. The discovery of Copernicanism placed these two phenomenal classes in far more striking contrast. It appears that cosmical phenomena are produced by an incredibly vast machinery, in which this earth plays a very subordinate part ; whereas earthly phenomena are due in great mea- sure to agencies, which act exclusively within •the region of our planet. From the very first, therefore, there was a real presumption that these latter agencies were subject to a premovement, quite dif- ferent in kind from any which influenced the former ; and this pre- sumption would be very greatly increased by the discoveries of Galileo and his successors. Now it is most remarkable, and bears thinking of again and again, that the only power of indefinite pre- diction which science has procured concerns cosmioal phenomena, and not earthly."

Nay, more, Dr. Ward might have added, had he been writing now, that even the latest investigations into cosmical laws suggest the intervention of causes existing on a very grand scale, and analogous, in some respects, to human volition, which do not seem to be immanent in these laws as they are at present known. All the great physicists re- gard the gradual diffusion and equalisation of heat through- out the universe as the running-down of a mechanical pro- cess, of which they cannot present to themselves the winding- up. The sun will in a certain number of millions of years burn itself out, and all its concentrated heat will be scattered throughout solar or stellar space. But when you ask how that heat—which will then, in its diffused and equalised state, be no longer a cause of motion, but a condition of rest —can be again concentrated, so as to become once more the source of new life and motion, no answer is given, and we are told that to create such a store of energy there must be the intervention of some new cause, of which at present we cannot even guess the nature. That is merely another way of saying that however uniform cosmical phenomena may be throughout long periods of time, there is yet in existence some cause, of which we know nothing, which, if it did not initiate an absolute beginning, yet could do what is quite as inconceivable—so change the pheno- mena as to reverse the order of things as we see it,—could play, as it were, the cosmical tune backwards, and concentrate that which is now always in course of diffusion, or diffuse that which had previously been in course of concentration. Take even the cosmical laws as they are, and you find in them the necessity for some external control, which can reverse their order and revolutionise their tendency.

But. of course, if this " divine pre-movement" of which Dr. Ward speaks exists, it must be much more observed in the sphere of mind than in that of matter. Men certainly, in the exercise of their volition, cause almost as many obvious changes in the physical order of the universe as they do in the moral order ; but then, all their modifications of the physical order of the universe begin in their own purposes and intentions, and may, therefore, be said to be of moral origin. And, of course, we should expect that those divine pre- movements of the physical order of the universe which alter the character of the melody or the harmony, would also begin very often at least, in the minds of men. And so, no doubt, the Bible represents it. It makes the call of a man —the divine pre-movement of his will—the commencement in the history of religion. It makes the call of a nation by its greatest prophet, the starting-point of the most important of all national histories, at least if we think that the most important which is intended to give a moral and spiritual example to the whole. It makes the call of one man after another the starting-point of one new era after another in that history, and it makes the pre-movement of an absolutely perfect human nature by God the central point of human destiny. In all these cases, a number of secondary and human causes, which spend their force as secondary causes in the usual manner, are, as it is asserted, set in motion by the "divine pre-movement," which Dr. Ward assumes as the explanation of all providential interferences with the lot of man. Even in secular history, the same im- portance attaches to the first entrance of a new and unaccount- able moral force on the scene,—a force which we at least should

find it more difficult to ascribe to any human cause, than to a definite impulse by the hand of Providence itself. Take such an impulse as that given by Socrates to Greek thought,—

which he himself expressly ascribed to the teaching of a super- human power; take such an impulse as that given to the Arabian intellect by the career of Mahommed ; take such an impulse as that given to the spiritual affections and the rebellion against

ecclesiastical conventions by the conversion of Luther,—and in all these, and a thousand other cases, we should see the direct modi- fication of the order of human events, by a divine pre-movement of the mind of man. Not more certain is it that to account for the motion of the planets, you need to assume an original force of " projection " as well as a source of centripetal attraction, than it is that to account for the destiny of man, on the national, no less than the individual scale, you need to assume a con- stant " pre movement," from some source of which no man who rejects revealed religion can assign the origin. Dr. Ward has done the world of thought a real service, by the hypothesis of his "philosophical mice ;" for he has cleared up by it a branch of his subject on which thought is very apt to become hazy, and even to lose its way.