LORD BROUGHAM'S DISSERTATIONS ON SUBJECTS or SCIENCE CONNECTED 'WITH NATURAL

THEOLOGY.

WHEN we look round upon nature or art, it is a puzzling pan of Lord Ilium/awes main topic, the Origin of Evil, to think how much perishes to enable some favoured thing to reach mi. !twice. The earth, which supports man, has only been breught to its sustaining point by the death and decomposition of inctin- ceiyable millions of creatures, which have perished leaving no traces behind : running over the history of mankind, so far as it is known to us, we perceive various nntions each in their turn struggling to advance civilization, and having attained their allotted point, va. nishing away ; the few rents whose deeds thrill the landmarks of the social world being indebted for their distinction to the pre- paring labours of those who went befbre. So it is with letters. The predecessors of HOMER enabled him to attain his excellence and seal the destruction of his tutors ; the earlier drama of Eng. land was obscured by the mighty genius it formed ; the toils of astronomers for thousands of years were, for COPERNICUS to show that they had been labouring in vain ; and the votaries of every science scent to have wandered in the mazes of hypothesis and speculation to show some more lucky mortal the right path, or to tell mankind they have been pursuing it phantom. And sub, in a rigorous sense, is the character of the volume before us, so fir as it pretends to a philosophical character. It settles little that wig before unsettled, nor does it throw any new light on what was be. fore obscure ; but it may teach others to avoid, as useless specula- tions, subjects which the accomplished and powerfhl mind Of BROUGHAM has failed in unravelling, as egregiously as any of his predecessors ; while he has sometimes been guilty of inconsistencies which would have been avoided by the calmer and more philoso- phical minds amongst them, even by those of the lower grade. The Dissertations discuss a variety of curious or knotty matters of science, which are connected with natural theology—chiefiy to infer proofs of design in creation, but partly in order to solve some very puzzling questions. Besides several short disqui- sitions on subordinate or incidental points—as the ubiquity of God, and the physical probability of the Resurrection— Lord Buottonim handles thur great topics. 1. The nature of Instinct, and how far animals are endowed with reason. 2. The Origin of Evil. 3. An analytical view of CUVIER'S Researches on Fossil O. teulogy, with an application of its deductions to natural theology. 4. A popular abridgment of NEWTON'S Principia, so far as such a subject can be popularized ; in order to enable those who have but a slender knowledge of mathematics to understand the labours of our great countryman, the wonders he unfolded, and the proofs oft which they rest. The characteristics of such labours must vary, of course, with their varying natures ; but the following may be taken as the leading merits or defects of the whole. The author everywhere exhibits great clearness of' statement and great power of' engaging the reader—often, perhaps, as much as is possible in such subjects. Ile mostly displays great keenness and comprehension of view, considerable powers of' argument, with much skill in selecting his facts or topics and placing them in the most favourable light. And besides the result of the reflections of' an extraordinary mind, the volumes contain the cream of the writer's extensive and endow reading in various philosophies—of facts, as natural history or physics—of demonstration, as mathematics—of metaphysics, as the speculations of LOCKE and others upon instinct. On the other side, the keenness and skill of the writer are obviously those of an advocate, rather than of a judge. He has a case to make out,

and, like a pleader speaking for a client, he presses things into the

service of his cause, which, if they impose upon the vulgar who have more zeal than logic, do not stand the test of calm examine. lion. But perhaps the great fault is, that the objects the anther

aimed at are not achieved. The matters of Instinct and Evil are

left where they were; and though Lord BROUGHAM may have brought up additional evidence in favour of Natural Theology, he has adduced no additional proof: so that the work is rather to be considered a series of ingenious and readable arguments, and it col- lection of remarkable filets, than a new contribution to religion and science. It will convert no sceptics ; it will satisfy no schoolmen ; it will teach nobody any thing absolutely new. The two analyses of NEWTON and Cevi nit do not of course fall under these remarks they are genius-like abridgments of recondite works—a coining of philosophical bullion. The disquisition on Instinct is in the form of a dialogue between Lords Atruour and BROUGHAM. The idea is avowedly

taken from those treatises which the great Roman orator eomposea, when bad men and bad times had driven him from power and place, after, as he says, an infinite labour of forensic business and the

occupations of ambition : and if the writer suggests comparisons with CICERO in the weaker points of that eminent man, it is but justice to say that this dialogue, for literary merit, reminds one of the

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treatise De °More. The introduction—a visit of Lord ALTHORP to his noble friend after the election of the Mautouttxx Pasha- maut—is apt, pleasant, and natural. The thcilities for digression and allusion which dialogue affords, are skilfully used thr theetious or graver purposes ; great calmness is preserved throughout, aud the force of argument fairly proportioned, if indeed Lord ALTUORP is not made to have the best of it ; the passing allusions are playful, devoid of asperity, and have a personal interest and character to boot ; whilst the advantages of dialogue to stop or turn aside are pressed into service. For example, Lord ALTILORP thus interrupts one of the dryest arguments.

A. I think the instinct of hunger has begun to operate upon my structure, whether stimulated by the operation of the gastric juice upon the coats of the stomach, or how otherwise, 1. do not stop to inquire. Nor do I apprehend that our good hostess's instinctive love of oaks and method would approve of our keeping dinner waiting. B. Your own excellent mother was the pattern of that regularity, as of so manv other admirable qualities ; and the intercourse of society was in this, as hi far more important lairticulars, greatly retiwined by her example. There- fore let us adjourn our further discussion, of which not much remains, till to- marrow, at least not much that is difficult.

The point of the dialogue comes to this—that instinct, in B.'s view, is most probably, as Nmrrox thought, a direct operation of the Deity—""rwas the Divinity that stired" A.'s stomach; and that animals have a species of reason. The dialogue consists of four books ; and the mode of treating each subject is similar—in one dialogue the facts are discussed, and in another the theory. In- stead, however, of following the disputants through their " wander- ing mazes," we will take a few independent extracts. here is one of the characteristic passages. Lord Ammon. has displayed a wish to advance more rapidly, when B. exclaims— B. Patience, good man, patience What is this to what you have gone through: Pitney yourself once more in the house of Commons, on the Trea- sury knell, listening to —

Cod tbrbid B. Or suppose yourself in Downing Street, with Drummond announcing a saccesFion of seven deputations or of seventeen suitors,

A. The bare possibility of it drives me wild. Why, to convert you to the must absurd doctrine I could fitney—to make you swallow all the Zoonomia whole, and believe that men derive their love of waving lines and admiration of finely-moulded forms from the habit of the infant in handling. his mother's 1300111, or even to drive you into a belief that the world was made by chance— would be an easy task compared to the persuading any one suitor at any one U!. the offices that you had any difficulty in giving him all he asks, or convin- cing any one of those seven deputatious that awc exists in the world another body hut itself.

B. Or to convince any one man who ever asked any one job to be done for him, that he had any one motive in his mind but the public good, to which he was sacrificing his private interest. I remember 3. mtee drolly ()it:ening, when I said no unto could tell how base men are till he came into ollice—" On the v ,n iv, I never betime lout such an opinion of human virtue; for now I find that no man ever drops the least hint or any motive but disinter..stedness and self-denial; and all idea of gain, or advantage, is the only thing that none seem cwt. to dream of." But now compose yourself to patience and discussion ; take an extra pinch of snuff, walk about for five minutes, a distance of five yard.> and hack, whit your hands in your hreeches-poekeis ; and then return to rite question with the same calmness with which you would have listened to com abusing you by the hour in Parliament, or with whieli you looked an hour ago, in the Castle farm, at the beast you had bred, and which by your complacent aspect I saw you had sold pretty well.

A LOT OF FACTS.

When a sow farrows, the pigs are expellid with so!ne three, and to a little iiistance, by the action of the uterus and abdominal muscles. Each pig in- stantly runs up to one of the teats, which he ever after regards its his (»en peculiar property; and when more pigs than teats arc 101 need, the latter ones um to the tail of sonic of the others, and suck till they die of inanition. [Carious, et' true.]

Mr. Davy, in his account of Ceylon, mentions a remarkable instinct of the alligator. Ile saw an egg in the sand just ready to crack, and broke it with

stick. The animal came out, and made at once thr the river. He hell Li,: stick before it ; and immediately the mane put itrelf in a posture of de- fesce, as an adult al!i,ator would have done in like circumstances.

lit Dialogue ill there is some doubt expressed as to the water-moth loading

ca. 0, if too light iii the water, with a kind of ballast. The larvat of the Piny/gamy/ are stated by Mr. Lycll to do this habitually, and to use fresh- water shells ibr their ballast. This gives rise to ninny masses of calcareous Totter in the tertiary formations. As many as one hundred small shells are tuttad surrounding one tube. (Princiides it (Jeobvy, vol. ii. P. 232.) In Dialogue IV. some remarks are made upon Hereditary Instincts. Mr. Bouillon has related a similar instance of such instinct in the hunting-dogs of Mexico. Were they to attack the deer in front, whose it eight exceeds their own sixfold, they would he destroyed, and have their backs broke, as Inipi.et.s to other dogs ignorant of the manteuvre ; which consists in at from 1.chind, or laterally, and seizing the very moment when the deer, in run.: zing, rests upon two kip. The dog then takes hold of him by the belly, tout limas him over. The dog of pure breed inherits this stratagem, and never attacks otherwise. Should the deer come upon him unawares, (from not seeing Iran.) he steps nodule and makes his attack at the piroper time in the animal's flank; other dogs, however superior in sagacity and strength, make the attack ILL rrow, anu . have their necks broken by the (leer. So, too, some of our English nutters tarried out greyhounds to hunt the hares in 31exico. The air on that vivvated platform, 91410 feet above the level of the sea, is so rare that the mer- cury .,,ands at 19 inches generally, and the dogs were soon exhausted with malt: lung Iii such all atmosphere; but their whelps are iLot at all incommoded Iv:. it, and IMiit as easily as the dogs of the country.

The last fact is rather a proof of the effects of acclimation, than any thing to be called hereditary : the dogs would succeed to a short breath.

As a proof of the laxness with which the author occasionally handles if not injures his "great argument," we may take the following passage.

REASON OF ANIMALS.

Some of these acts show more sagacity, according to Mr. Locke's observa- tion, than is possessed by many men. The existence of a comparing and con- triving power is therefore plain enough. And on the whole, I conceive that a rational tuind cannot be denied to the animals, however iu1;:rior iu degree their faculties may be to our own. B. That inferiority is manifestly the cause why they have made so little progress, or rather have hardly made any at all. Some littleis proved hy such facts as Mr. Knight has collected; but they are only exceptions to the rule which has doomed them to a stationary existence. lids indifference, however, is merely the result of the inferior degree of their mental powers, as well as the- different construction of their bodily powers. The want of fingers endowed. with a nice sense of touch is au obstruction to the progress of all, or almost all the lower animals. The elephant's trunk is, no doubt, a partial exception ; and accordingly, his sagacity is greater than that of almost any other beast. The monkev would have a better chance of learning the nature of external objects, if his thumb were not on the,same side of his hand with his fingers, whereby he cannot handle and measure ohjects as we do, whose chief knowledge of size :mil }bran is derived from the gold...meter of the finger and thumb, the move21,10 angle which their motion and position give us. Insects work with infinite nicety by means of their antenme; when these are removed, they cease to work at nil, as Huber clearly proved. Clearly, this different external con- formatiou, together with their iliferior degree of reason, is sufficient to account for brutes having been stationary, and for their being subdued to use, as the Deity intended they should when he appointed this difference. To argue from the complex effect of all the 1Mmltics, bodily and (neural, iu giving different progess or power to our race and to theirs, and to infer from this difference that there is an essentitd and specl,ic diversity in our structure, nay, that they have not one single faculty the same with ours in kind, is highly unphiloso- phical. It is indeed contrary to one of the fundamental rules of philoso- phizing, that which forbids ns needlessly to multiply CallSCS.

ThiS is not even an admission, for an admission implies the ac- knowledgment of something existent. The assertion, on which the boldest materialist would have ventured with caution, is a gra- tuitous supposition. Lord Buouunam cannot affirm, he can only conjecture, that if the monkey's thumb were differently placed it would "have made a man of him." The infidel could not assert more than that mind depends upon organization.

The " Dissertation on the Origin of Evil " gives a brief and rapid view of the leading opinions which have been entertained upon the subject ; and after endeavouring to expose their fallacies, Lord Baotonast makes some -remarks on it himself. Unable, however, to resolve the riddle he lots propounded,—why an all- powed'ul and benevolent Being should create evil?—he strives to escape from it ; arguing, that if we knew all, it would most probably be tbund that the amount of evil is comparatively little, and that it is productive of good. Who doubts this, though un- able to observe more of the scheme of creation than is open to un- assisted reason? Death is an evil to the individual dying—at least he generally thinks so ; but to all others beyond his connexion it is a good. It' it were not fly death, what would become of the living—elbowed by each other, by animals, and by plants ? Or, indeed, with universal life, how could any thing live at all, since we live upon each other ? Pain is now'' universally admitted to be an evil; but physiologists show it to be a necessary evil, and that there is probably as little of it as is consistent with our existence : the great sensitiveness of external organs, for example, being requisite to warn us of impending danger; otherwise we might lose our limbs or our sight without knowing it ; and the pain of internal organs, when di:cased, being necessary to acquaint us with their morbid state. Nay, it has been doubted by some, whether a well-constituted body would not resist disease, unless pre- dispose] to it by some antedecent circumstances. But what of all this ? Vill it lessen the pain—the cell—of' the martyr to dis- ease, to tell him that he has brought it upon himself," or inherited it front foolish or vicious pareots ; or that the hopeless torture he endures was necessary, ()them ise he would have died suddenly, when the lesion had reached some vital part ? To this, as to the evil of death, tire objection quoted by Lord llama-mast in the Out- set applies—" Why should a Being of perfect power and perfect benevolence have created creatures to suffer misery ?" and which query ZonoAsrmt endeavoured to solve by the rival principles of Good and Evil ; the Epicureans by assuming matter and its laws to be eternal ; and theologians by the Fall. Christianity accounts for the introduction of evil into this world, but revelation leaves its origin unaccounted for.

Neither arc Lord Baoronsaf's views one whit sounder applied to moral instead of physical evil, or to evil flowing front acts of Man. The vices of competition, so to speak—as avarice and ambition— are merely exaggerations of that active desire for self-advanccment without which mankind would be degraded to a level with beasts, if' not below it. The miseries induced by lust, are the irregula- rities of a passion accessary to the continuation of the species, and to the production of the domestic charities and relations. It is probable, perhaps certain, that vice cannot, unless b■,- accident, exist alone ; that it must have aiders and ibettors ; and that it always carries its proportionate punishment with it. But what of that ? the ecil that vice inflicts or suffers is still evil.

Is pain

Less pain to them

The immediate gee of individual vices, it is not always easy to trace ; for we cannot see theavhole results. The use of national evil is more obvious, to far as man can perceive. The barbarian invasions of the Empire destroyed a society in the last stage of corruption, and gave rise to the improved social systems of modern Europe ; the aborigines of America, when annihilated, were re- placed by it superior people ; when time allows a complete view to be taken of the French Revolution and the wars of NArowes, it may show advantages resulting from them of proportionate great- ness. But what then ? Were not the Romans, spoiled and slaughtered by the hordes of Asia and Northern Europe—or the Indians, tortured by the Spaniards—or the miseries inflicted in our own day by the French Revolution and its wars—productive of as much evil, perhaps, as humanity could endure? Say the Romans • The Stoics denied pain lobs an lt% were vicious and cowardly, the Indians weak, and the mdderns fools and rogues: the question put by Lord BROUGHAM at the out- set, as his starting-point, still returns—why were they created to be so ? Vice and folly, we may admit, produce their consequences ; but why should a "Being all powerful and all benevolent allow vice and folly to have been ?"

The fact is, that any arguinent founded on the uses of moral evil resolves itself into this, that somebody benefits at another's expense ; while discussions on the origin of evil have no other use than to show their uselessness. The philsophic mind perceives enough under the existing system of things, to infer that there is no gratuihms evil, if it be not all necessary ; that the evil bears no proportion to the good; and that, like pain in the body, it is a symptom of ill, which most probably it will eventually cure or destroy : all which may teach us to " bear and be thankful." He who would go further than this, and attempt to solve the origin of evil, must first of all undertake a harder task, and ascertain why the universe was created as it is.

"Why is not man a god, and earth a heaven ?"

is the latent problem in the minds of men who speculate upon the origin of evil.

Here we must break off, leaving untouched the subordinate sec- tions; the precis of CUVIER and of NEWTON; as well as a very amusing and characteristic paper on the Structure of the Cells of Bees,—the object of which is to show, that the instinct of bees and the mathematics of Lord Barn:GRAM perfectly coincide. We should however say, that throughout the book we assume the mathematical -questions to.be correctly worked.