BOOKS.
DR. MARTINEAU'S " STUDY OF RELIGION."•
[CONCLUDING NOTICE.]
THE latter part of Dr. Martinean's second volume is occupied first with the controversy on human free-will, and then with the indications that death is not the close of man's career. On each of these subjects he speaks with the mastery of a singularly powerful as well as a singularly subtle mind, though there are one or two omissions, as it seems to us, in the treatment of the earlier subject, of portions of the subject, the discussion of which would have further strengthened his already very strong position. The immense importance of this determinist con- troversy, so far as it bears on the existence of God, seems to us this,—that while determinism is not inconsistent with either the belief in God or the negation of God, human free-will can hardly be believed at all without belief in a per- sonal Creator. That any mere development of material or unconscious life, should lead to the existence of a being who can liberate himself in any degree from the control of the forces which had brought him into being, is so utterly incredible that we cannot conceive a sincere believer in human free-will who could doubt for a moment that that will must have owed its origin to a personal God, and not to a mere evolution of physical force. That the mere outcome of a long procession of natural forces should be able to break its own chains and select freely between two alternatives, is as incredible as that a projectile should suddenly be able to arrest its own downward flight, and soar once more into the air. Dr. Martineau does not put it in this way, yet it seems to us most important, for though, of course, the determinist view is not inconsistent with theism, and has usually been held as con- fidently by theists as by agnostics, the free-will view, if estab- lished as Dr. Martineau seems to us to have established it, is absolutely final against the notion that human freedom could be the birth and product of material necessity. For the rest, the discussion of this great subject, into the intricacies of which it would be impossible in such a review as this to follow Dr. Martineau, is conducted with the utmost lucidity and force ; but it appears to us that Dr. Martineau has not given the answer he might, to the assertions of those psychologists who deny that we have any means of knowing how far human volitions may take their origin from some source beneath the field of consciousness the antecedents of which we have no more means of discerning than the somnambulist has of discerning the origin of his own procedure as a sleep-walker. We should have said that the late Dr. W. G. Ward's admirable essays on this controversyt fill up a gap here to which it would have been well to draw attention. Nevertheless, that singularly acute and able psychologist's treat- ment of the subject is not once referred to by Dr. Martineau. Dr. W. G. Ward maintained that if we know anything of ourselves, we know in critical moments to what the total drift of our nature,—barring some great effort of " anti-impulsive " volition, —would carry us, as well at least as the ferryman knows whither the current of a powerful stream,—barring the strong effort of his arms in rowing,—would carry the ferry-boat. And further, Dr. Ward held that we know, whenever we do pull against the stream, and land ourselves where but for our own strong efforts we could not have landed, that our efforts were not caused, were not brought into being, by the reasons or motives which supplied us with our intellectual or moral ground of action, but were caused simply by ourselves. This is the only side of the discussion on which Dr. Martineau might, as we think, have still further fortified his position if he had drawn upon the stores of one of the greatest of his contemporaries. We will only add that no more striking contribution could have been made to the literature of this question than Dr. Martinean's very remarkable quotation of Diderot's defence of free-will in the Encyclopedie, together with the same writer's attack upon it in his letter to Baron Grimm in 1756. Dr. Martineau does not seem able to determine which of the two passages was latest written ; but we should suppose that it must have been the determinist letter to Baron Grimm. Nothing could be more impressive than to find the same writer urging in one year that determinism abolishes vice and virtue,
• A Study of Religion : its Sources and Contents. By James Martineau, D.D., LL.D., late Principal of Manchester New College, Lcndon. 2 vols. Oxford : Clarendon Press.
t Essays on the Philosophy of Theism. By William George Ward, D.D. With an Introduction by-Wilfrid Ward. 2 vole. London; Regan Paul, Trench, and Co. and throws contempt on the sentiment of duty and on the language of praise and blame, and in another, probably later year, but yet not one far removed from the first, that this very fact that determinism blots out all meaning from the words "duty," " praise," and " blame," is precisely the beauty of the determinist philosophy, and the very feature of it which recommends it to true philosophic thinkers. The passages quoted from Diderot between pages 318 and 320 of Dr. Martineau's second volume seem to us to give the essence of the determinist controversy in a nutshell, as well as to show the clearness of Diderot's• intellect, both when he rejected and when he held determinism.
Dr. Martineau's treatment of the subject of death is marked by that grave and cautious sobriety which marks the difference between the popular and the scientific thinker. He avails him- self of the admissions of the men of science to establish that,. as they are utterly unable to explain how physiological change gives rise to conscious thought, and do not even pretend to. assert that it does give rise to it,—so they must not pretend to argue that when life, in its physiological sense, ceases, the thought which they have never been able to connect with it, ceases also :—
" Comparing the deflection of a magnetic needle by an electrical current with the sequence of consciousness on a state of the brain, he [Professor Tyndall] says : the oases differ in this, that the passage from the current to the needle, if not demonstrable, is thinkable, and that we entertain no doubt as to the final mechanical solution of the problem. But the passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable. Granted that a definite thought, and a definite molecular action in the brain, occur simultaneously : we do not possess the intellectual' organ, nor apparently any rudiment of the organ, which would enable us to pass, by a process of reasoning, from the one to the other. They appear together, but we do not know why. Were our minds and senses so expanded, strengthened, and illuminated, as to enable us to see and feel the very molecules of the brain ; were we capable of following all their motions, all their groupings, all their electrical discharges, if such there be ; and were we intimately acquainted with the corresponding states of thought and feeling, we should be as far as ever from the solution of the problem "How are these physical processes connected with the facts of consciousness ?" The chasm between the two classes would still remain intellectually impassable.' Under these conditions, I presume it will be physiologically correct to say that, in the supposed molecular motions, their groupings, their electrical discharges, we have the function of the brain : they are the actions it is fitted to perform, precisely as the chemical resolution of food is the business of the stomach, and the burning of carbon that of the lungs, and the contraction of fibre that of the muscles, and the conducting of stimulus that of the nerves. The organ then finds its function in a class of phenomena separated by a chasm intellectually impassable' from consciousness and will : with what sense then or consistency are we to charge it with these also as a part of its busi- ness ? They are confessedly but co-existences turning up in a different and unapproachable world, not only unlinked as yet with their physical concomitants, but, we are assured, intrinsically and for ever incapable of being brought into intelligible relation with them. If the organic and the mental phenomena lie thus apart, how can
any legitimate infer. rice carry us from the one to the other If we could not say, Given the first, the second must follow,' how can we say, Take away the first, and the second cannot be '? If no one can discern their connection to be necessary, who can affirm their dis- connection to be impossible ? If the structure, when seen through and through to its minutest changes, brings us no nearer to conscious- ness, the cessation of these changes takes us no further from it. It is a mistake therefore to imagine that the mere organic history covers the whole field of this problem, and by its termination demon- strates consciousness to be extinct : we are not entitled to say more than that the signs and evidences of consciousness have vanished ; but beyond or behind the physics of the brain' there is another world, of invisible phenomena, whose relations to the former are unknown, and on the possibilities of which we are not qualified to pronounce." (Vol. IL, pp. 331.3.)
And in a subsequent page, Dr. Martineau says :—" If the union of the physics of the brain' with the trains of thought be so. profound a mystery, their separation can hardly be regarded as out of possibility : if the one is barely credible, the other ought not to be incredible." Going a little farther, he appeals to a very striking analogy between physical and mental beginning, as suggesting that what once commences, far from being bound to come to an end, may, in the absence of any counteracting agency, endure to all time :—" Within the limits of organic life, whose history consists of a cycle of chemical changes, it is true that birth is the invariable precursor of a series leading to death ; but beyond this range it cannot be shown that either mechanical or mental genesis must run its course and come to an end. What indeed does Newton's first law declare, but that a particle once set in motion in empty space will continue to move in a straight line with uniform velocity for ever, unless some external force supervenes ? And if we can think of the law of gravitation " [? first law of motion] " as having been given to the material of the universe, surely we are not on that account
compelled by any logical necessity to anticipate its cessation : nothing can less carry the marks of a temporary character, or be more easily conceived to be eternal. Nor can I see that it is otherwise with the case of intellectual and moral natures. If, at a certain stage in the development of the cosmos, the Supreme Mind set up at a given centre a personal subject of thought and will like his own, with adequate assignment of causality, what is to prevent this from being a freehold in perpetuity, and to reduce it to a terminable loan ? Why may not the communicated Divine nature endure as long as the uncommunicated Source on which it lives ?" (Vol. II., pp. 354-55.) And again, in replying to the strange assertion of the Pantheists that every finite personality is a sort of encroachment on the Infinite, and cannot, therefore, be supposed to endure eternally, Dr. Martineau says :—" If it be metaphysically impossible for a finite subject to co-exist in antithesis to the infinite, it is not an impossibility that begins with death ; it must have place now as much as then, and then no more than now. Yet here we are, holding the very relation supposed to contradict itself ; conscious of ourselves, conscious of God : and if the wonder has not been too great to arise, what harder condi- tions forbid it to abide ? Once at least have we been disengaged from the infinite, and emerged from non-existence. In comparison with this, is it not a small thing to emerge from Death ? For there is now, at all events, the ready-made Ego, the established unit of formed character and practised powers, instead of blank nothingness, a mere zero of potentiality : there is no need to provide both field and agent : let the field be reopened, and the agent is there." (Vol. II., 362-63.) So much as regards the supposed a priori impossibility of "emerging from death." When Dr. Martineau goes on to argue that the stamp of a being who is to survive death is written upon human history, literature, and, above all, on our moral experi- ence, he writes with a restrained power that must impress even the most sceptical reader. The argument founded on the moral experience of man is too long to quote and too closely connected to break, and we must content ourselves, therefore, with this fine passage on the disproportion between the intellectual faculties of man and the very short career which is reserved for them here :-
" The ideal faculty, as a perpetual vision of higher possibilities, is perfectly intelligible, if the realisation lies before it ; though it visits the heart with a noble discontent,' the light upon the future balances the shadow on the present. Bat it is utterly unintelligible, if, like Plato's interior eye-light when the lids are closed, it spends itself in weaving dreams ; so that every creative genius must live, either in a fool's paradise, or, if disenchanted of its illusions, in sadness unre- lieved. If it is said that the possibilities unfulfilled for the individual who conceives them may prove true forecasts for the race, we must still ask whether a race, however progressive, can be credited with success, every generation of which is haunted by the consciousness of failure. Minds cannot be used up as mere material for foreign or collective purposes ; each carries its own end, and only in approaching this falls into consonance with others, and reduces the distance to the goal of all. Who can believe that the Everlasting Mind fulfils its end by disappointing every other ? and that each age is to spend itself in lamenting its inheritance from another and its own short- coming ? Is the eternal design. of Perfection to be gained by the frustrated aspirations of countless ephemeral generations ? Or, to the role that one soweth and another reapetb,' is there not the com- pensating sequel, he that soweth and he that reapeth shall rejoice together'? I will only add, ere I turn away from the consideration of the intellectual powers, that, in spite of their dependence on organic media of action, there is clear evidence of their being adequate to indefinitely more than the present term of life allows them to accomplish. The student of Nature, or the servant of Art, is indeed obliged to put a limit to his aims and be content with small achievements : but what is it that arrests his attempts ? Simply the consciousness expressed in the maxim, Ars longs, vita brevis' not that he could go no further and do no more ; but only that he has a short loan of time and tools, and must reckon his piece-work by his hours. The very fact that he sees what he must relinquish, and resigns it with regret, shows that he could conquer it, if he had the chance ; and it is precisely at the end of life, that, from the vantage- ground of a lofty elevation and a large survey, he most intently turns to the horizon and best discerns the outline of the promised land on which hie eyes are about to close. I do not know that there is any- thing in nature (unless indeed it be the reputed blotting-out of suns in the stellar heavens) which can be compared in wastefulness with the extinction of great minds : their gathered resources, their matured skill, their luminous insight, their unfailing tact, are not like instincts that can be handed down ; they are absolutely personal and inalienable ; grand conditions of future power, unavailable for the race, and perfect for an ulterior growth of the individual. If that growth is not to be, the most brilliant genius bursts and vanishes as a firework in the night. A mind of balanced and finished faculties is a production at once of infinite delicacy and of most enduring constitution ; lodged in a fast perishing organism, it is like a perfect set of astronomical instruments, misplaced in an observatory shaken by earthquakes or caving in with decay. The lenses are true, the mirrors without a speck, the movements smooth, the micrometer exact ; what shall the Master do but save the precious system, refined with so mach care, and build for it a new house that shall be founded on a rock ?" (Vol. II., pp. 376.78.)
We cannot part from this book, of the learning and grasp and massive intellectual power of which we have thus endeavoured to give our readers the means of judging, without expressing our profound conviction that it will be one of the books to which thinkers will refer long after this and many future generations have passed away ; that it will rank with the great works of Berkeley, Butler, and Cardinal Newman, amongst the most enduring efforts of English philosophical thought, and together with the author's previous work on ethics, even found an ethical and religious school not less original and probably m ore enduring, because laid upon deeper foundations, than that which Kant founded in Germany by his Criticism of the Practical Reason.
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