IS GOD ICNOWABLE P * Mn. RERACH would have made
this very thoughtful and original book still more effective than it is, if he had not ranged over so wide a surface, and especially if he had not required in his. readers so much knowledge of the thinkers with whom he is at issue. The chapter on "Dean Mansel and Mr. Herbert Spencer," for instance, will hardly be intelligible to any who.
* Is God Knowable? By the Rey. J. 'versa, ILA., Aberdeen. London Hodder and Stoughton. have not read a good deal of Dean Maned and Mr. Herbert Spencer for themselves, whereas it would have been perfectly possible for Mr. Iverach so far to have condensed and explained the difficulties raised by Dean Mansel and Mr. Herbert Spencer as to the impossibility of any intelligent apprehension of the Absolute and Infinite Being by a finite creature, as to make his own reply a great deal more effective than it will be at pre- sent, to those who have not made a study of the philosophy of Agnosticism. It may be said that the book is hardly addressed to those who have not made some study of the Agnostic philosophy. But the truth is that a great many educated men who have not made much study of the Agnostic philosophy, have been greatly daunted by its superficial plausi- bility. Moreover, a great deal of this book is in the strictest sense intelligible to all educated men, and there is so little in it of technical philosophy, that it might very well have been cleared of all dependence on the reading of technical philosophy by a lucid exposition (such as no one has it more in his power than Mr. Iverach to give) of those few impressive and dismay- ing demonstrations that it is idle in such a being as man to seek to apprehend such a being as God, with which he intended to deal. The only fault we find with this book, which is full of moral and spiritual strength, is that it does not sufficiently con- fine the argument to specific points, and that where it does do so, it assumes too much knowledge on the part of its readers of tha character of the reasoning with which the author is grappling. Mr. Iverach would, we think, have materially strengthened the volume before us, if he had devoted his first chapter, on "The Statement of the Question," to the statement of the difficulties he intended to meet, and had there put those difficulties in as effective and as formidable a shape as possible. It always adds interest to the force of a reply, for the reader to see at once that he is in the hands of a thinker who has faced the whole extent of the difficulty, and not shrunk from representing it in its utmost vividness to his own mind. And again, we must say that we think Mr. Iverach's book would have profited greatly by some survey of Frederick Denison Maurice's controversy with Mr. Mansel on the subject of Mr. Iverach's fourth chapter. The lectures on "What is Revelation ?" and the Sequel published after Mr. Mangers reply, were amongst the ablest of Mr. Maurice's writings, and condensed, indeed, into a short compass the study of a lifetime. As it is, this fourth chapter, on "Dean Mansel and Mr. Spencer," and the chapter on "The Search after God" (which, again, we believe that Mr. Iverach would have greatly improved by a study of Mr. Maurice's Religions of the World and their Relation to Christianity), do not seem to us up to the very high intellectual mark of other equally important chapters in this interesting book.
The truth is, perhaps, that Mr. Iverach is a little too im- patient to dash into his answer, before he has clearly defined the nature of the difficulties for which an answer is needed. Thus, in the very first chapter, which he terms "Statement of the Question," we find no very clear statement of the question, but do 'find at least as much of the statement of the answer as we do of the statement of the question. Before we have heard clearly where and who his antagonists are, Mr. Iverach begins deploying his legions and offering battle. This is the sign of a fiery and eager thinker, but it is hardly the sign of a methodical and commanding reasoner. And, in fact, the book, rich as it is in suggestion and vigorous in attack, is not masterly in arrangement, and in not a few of its chapters attempts a survey far more comprehensive than it is possible to do justice to in the space.
However, we are too thankful for what Mr. Iverach gives r.s, to insist further on what he does not give us. And we will go at once to the strong points of this book. The strongest point seems to us to be this,—Mr. Iverach insists justly enough that the Agnostics have all taken to rendering an impersonal account of the origin of the universe, on the strength of their familiarity with sciences which do not pretend to render the least account of the origin of persons at ell. And he declares that such a proceeding is most unjustifiable. If they could in any way suggest how persons might arise out of agencies which are impersonal, agnostics might plead their scientific knowledge of those agencies to some purpose. Ent the truth is that, so far as our knowledge of the impersonal agencies them- selves go, that knowledge, as Mr. Iverach shows, is all due to persons, and so, absolutely due to them, that we can hardly be said to understand the impersonal agencies themselves, of
which scientific men write, till we have studied them in the writings of the persons who first illuminated the subject by their genius :—
" Look for a moment at science itself. I wish to learn what science- has to teach me. I come with the understanding that science is the- universe as apprehended and understood by man. It may be that i
nature s greater than science, and there is in nature something grander, greater, and more subtile than man has yet known, but at present I seek to know what science has to teach me. I begin with- the mathematical sciences, and proceed from the simplest element onwards to the most profound and far-reaching analysis. Nothing seems present here except definitions, axioms, and their results. I pass on to physics and chemistry, and here too I find myself in a. region of impersonal forces, where all is calm and objective. I put myself under the guidance of the masters of natural science, and still there is speech only of necessity and chance, of natural selection, which, on inquiry, means only the pressure of force from behind, not the onward beckoning of personal intelligence, working to a great and adequate end. Suppose I yield myself with all loyalty and obedience to their teaching, and try to explain the origin and growth of things by the forces postulated by Darwinism ; suppose I accept the account which science gives of the universe, on reflection I find myself pressed by another question,—how am I to account for science ? If the larger effect which we call nature can be accounted for by the action of im- personal forces, may science, the lesser effect, be accounted for in the same way ? As a candid seeker after truth I go to find an answer. I follow the stream of history downwards ; as far as possible I find that the existence of the elements of geometry implies Euclid, that. the elementary problems of mechanics imply Archimedes, that other mechanical knowledge implies Galileo, that the laws of atmospheric pressure imply Pascal, that the laws which regulate the movements of the heavenly bodies imply Kepler, that the law of gravitation im- plies Newton, and to finish, that quaternions imply Sir William R. Hamilton. With regard to Natural Science, I only remark that Darwinism implies Mr. Darwin. In all the other sciences I find every advance linked with the name of a man ; and in seeking to know the present state of any science I have recourse to Thomson and Tait, to Clerk Maxwell, to Huxley, or to others, and everywhere it is found true that science has a personal origin. It is nothing to the purpose- here to say that science so far is only a true account of what goes ot, in nature. I am not asking here whether science is true or not, but how did it arise, and how do we account for it, and I find the solution lying close at hand, plain, gross, and palpable ; science has, I repeat, a personal origin. Not only so, but all the uses which man has made of nature, from the construction of the first rude weapon of flint up. to railways, telegraphs, and other appliances, in their origin and de- velopment, have come from persons. Both in the arts of war and in the arts of peace, science and art have to make room for the dis- coverers of the differential calculus, and for the inventors of the bow and the spear, and for the inventors of the printing- press and the steam-engine. Nor does science find any difficulty in making this acknowledgment. Men of science some- times write biography, and recent accounts of Mr. Darwin, written by the most strenuous advocates of natural selection and of the method which seeks to eliminate every personal element from science, dilate on the greatness of the man, on the revolution he has wrought in our ways of thinking, and on the vast personal force which dwelt in him, apparent to all readers of his works, and manifest in a much more marked manner to those who bad other ways of knowing him. The conclusion to be drawn from these accounts of Mr. Darwin is that it takes a person to produce impersonal results. But in what way the eulogists of Mr. Darwin, by the methods of science, justify their account of him, does not appear. Certainly, the method which recognises only impersonal elements has been laid aside or changed by them when they pass from the writing of science and begin to speak of Mr. Darwin As a matter of fact, it is not by the mere abstract result which may be reached when personality has been left out of account that the great men of the past have raised the common level of human life ; these abstract results may be tabulated in manuals and formulated in unimpressive, dry-as.dust, lifeless tables. It is altogether different when we go to the great masters themselves, and find ourselves in contact with them. Then the borders of feeling are widened, and thought becomes vivid, and reason moves more swiftly because we are in contact with men of a mightier mould. But the fact that I am able to recognise their great- ness proves our kinship, and I know that their works are the out- growth of a personality like my own. Their relation to me and mine to them is a personal relation. This holds true even in the case of men who lived long ago, and it is much more true in the case of men living at this hour."
If, then, Mr. Iverach argues, our knowledge of science itself is all- due to the genius of great men, who have identified every step- in science with their intelligence, does it not seem most rash and illogical to assume that the origin of the agencies them- selves, to which we are thus personally introduced, must be impersonal, especially since the one point on which science has, as yet, thrown no light at all, is the marvellous appearance of persons in a world, which, if you deny a personal Creator, would be without any germs of personality.
Our author also deals with great force with the assertion that. it is " anthropomorphic " to ascribe personality to the creative. Power of the Universe, and points out that anthropomorphic it undoubtedly is, but that it is simply impossible to escape anthro- pomorphism by the very simple and ol2ildish device of omitting all the highest part of man in our view of the origin of things, and carefully ascribing to it all the lowest part of man. No.
systems, says Mr. Iverach, in a very powerful chapter of this book, are so anthropomorphic as the systems which make most parade of avoiding anthropomorphism. It is hardly possible to put this better than Mr. Iverach puts it, in the following fine passage :—
"If we take a system like that of Spinoza, of which so much has been written in recent years, and of which men speak as if Spinoza had got beyond the accidents and limitations of human view, and saw the truth in universality and parity, what is the real essence of the system of Spinoza P It is to be found not in hie definitions, mor in the axioms, nor yet in what he is pleased to call demonstrations, bat in a simple fact, which he quietly slips in as if it were of no cense- tmence,—in the simple fact that man is both a res cogitans and a res eztensa. The universal substance, with infinite attributes, of which, however, only two can be known, to wit strength [sic. thought] and extension, is, when we come to look at it, simply man reduced to an -extended and thinking thing, and enlarged indefinitely. Surely we may borrow here the language of Mr. Matthew Arnold, and say, that here is a magnified, non-natural man, non-natural because it is the onlargement to monstrosity of two aspects of ourselves, and these not the highest. Yet we are told that Spinoza has transcended anthropomorphism and approached near to objective truth. If this be to transcend anthropomorphism, truly it is easy to be overcome. As Spinoza has put man under a microscope and has seen those aspects of him which he regarded enlarged to the utmost limits of existence, so certain followers of his, who have also drunk deeply of the scien- tific spirit of modern time, have looked at man from a distance so great as to see him reduced to the size of an atom. Bat both the universe of Spinoza and the atom of Professor Clifford are formed in -the image of man. Mind-stuff is simply man minimised and brought down to atomic dimensions. A moving molecule of inorganic matter does not possess mind or consciousness, but it possesses a small piece of mind-stuff. When molecules are so combined together as to form the film on the tender side of a jelly-fish, the elements of mind-stuff which go along with them are so combined as to form the faint beginnings of sentience. . . . When matter takes the complex form of a living human brain, the corresponding mind-stuff takes the form of a human consciousness, having intelligence and matter.' (Clifford on Mind, No. IX., p. 65.) In this essay on the natures of things in themselves, Prof. Clifford, with that remarkable clearness of statement characteristic of all he wrote, has set forth the con. oeption which was dimly hovering before the mind of Spencer and of Bain, which has now come to be known as the double-aspect theory. Mind corresponds to matter as the concave of a circle to the convex. 'They are inseparable, and appear in the molecule, as in larger and snore complex measure they appear in man. It is not our purpose here to criticise this view. A trenchant criticism of it from another point of view than ours will be found in the work of Mr. Malcolm 'Guthrie, entitled On Mr. Spencer's Unification of Knowledge. What we seek here to point out is how anthropomorphic all this is. So in truth are all systems of philosophy, for they deal with the relation of mind to matter, and of matter to mind. They always start with these factors of our own personal life, and they always -come back to theta with what experience they have gained by the way. They are anthropomorphic, whether, with Spinoza, they postu- late a universal substance which has the known attributes of exten- sion and thought ; with Kant, a manifold of sense, with a priori forms which make knowledge and experience possible ; with Hegel, a universal self-consciousness, which constitutes the objects of its knowledge, and makes them possible to be known as objects ; or with Spencer, an inscrutable power which must ever remain unknown, and yet, strange to say, can be named by man. All these great con- structive systems, strive as they may, never get beyond anthropo- morphism; and the more they strive to get beyond it, the more anthropomorphic they become. Even Darwinism, or evolution, which is thought by some, Strauss, for example, to have won an objective view, is, when we consider it, more anthropomorphic than any other system. It is simply an extension of Malthusianism to the animal world ; and the fierce struggle for existence which he sees going on throughout all life is only an enlarged form of the competition with which we are all familiar. Darwinism is Malthnsianism writ large."
Of course, the book is not as effective on its positive as it is 'mita negative side. It is always much easier to show the weak- ness of other thinkers, than to replace that weakness by our -own strength. Mr. Iverach argues—and, to our minds, argues most truly—that though all systems which only represent the unassisted efforts of human thought to get at the heart of the universe have failed in disclosing the origin of the universe, -there is ample evidence, to those whose minds and hearts -go in search of it, that a Power infinitely higher than our own has sought us out, has filled us with the con- viction of his guidance, has impressed upon us his power to inspire and raise us, and to unite himself more and more closely with us, and has himself fulfilled the hope which he deliberately raised. Mr. Iverach is often forcible in this part of his book, but not so forcible as in the earlier part of it. The passage, in the chapter on "The Christian Solution," in which Mr. Iverach dwells on the desire of modern philo- sophy to find unity in the universe, and to dwell on "the persistence of energy" as the pledge of that unity, and where he shows that St. Paul anticipated that desire long before science had elaborated it, and expressed in words of marvellous force his belief in a persistent bond of creation, is a very fine
passage, and one that will do more to impress religions men of science than any other in this book. But whether it will impress men of science whose minds are turned in the opposite direction, we are very doubtful.
Nevertheless, in spite of its deficiencies, we value this little book, as indicating the appearance of a strong man in the field of philosophy and theology,— a man who, with more method and deliberation, will undoubtedly obtain a careful hearing, even from bitterly prejudiced antagonists, if, at least, they are as able as they are prejudiced.
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