Sir Bertram Coghill Alan Windle

“ No one nowadays would commit himself to such a statement, and men in general would be chary of urging that we should not believe anything which we cannot understand. I have myself heard a distinguished man of science of his day—he is dead this quarter of a century—make that statement in public, wholly ignoring the fact that any branch of science which we may pursue will supply us with a hundred problems we can neither understand nor explain, yet the factors of which we are bound to admit. ”

“ If one seriously considers the matter it is—so it seems to me—utterly impossible to subscribe to the accidental theory of which the immanent god—the blind god of Bergson—is a mere variant. One must agree with the late Lord Kelvin that "science positively affirms creative power ... which (she) compels us to accept as an article of belief." But what are we to say with regard to the series of repeated accidents which the polyphyletic hypothesis would seem to demand? Is it really possible that any man could bring himself to place credence in such a marvellous series of occurrences? ”

“ He is restricted by science: he is not completely free but is bound by knowledge—the knowledge which he or others have acquired.
To say he is limited by it is not to say that he is imprisoned by it or in bondage to it. "One does not lose one's intellectual liberty when one learns mathematics," says the late Monsignor Benson in one of his letters, "though one certainly loses the liberty of doing sums wrong or doing them by laborious methods!"
Before setting out upon any research, the careful man of science sets himself to study "the literature of the subject" as he calls it. ”

“ And he tells us that "the survival of the most fit is the very real and the very stern rule of life in the Amazonian forests. From birth to death it rules the Indians' life and philosophy. To help to preserve the unfit would often be to prejudice the chances of the fit. There are no arm-chair sentimentalists to oppose this very practical consideration. The Indian judges it by his standard of common sense: why live a life that has ceased to be worth living when there is no bugbear of a hell to make one cling to the most miserable of existences rather than risk greater misery?" ”

“ Any person thus educated will, for the remainder of his life, be able at least to understand what is meant by science and the scientific method of approaching a problem. He will not, like an educational troglodyte at a recent Conference, refuse to describe anything as science which is not capable of mathematical treatment, nor allude compendiously to physiological study as "the cutting up of frogs." In a word, he will be an educated man, which can no more be said of one ignorant of science than it can be of one whose mind has never experienced the softening influence of letters. ”

“ What is Vitalism? It is the theory that there is some other element—call it entelechy with Driesch, or call it what you like—in living things than those elements known to chemistry and physics. If it is not there, cadit quaestio; if it is there it is not "supernatural." It might with reason be called "super-mechanical," or "super-chemical," or "super-physical"; but if it is in Nature, as it is held to be, it is not "supernatural" in any true sense of that word—no dictionary confines the term "Nature" to the operations of chemistry and physics. ”

“ I can only regret this," he continues, "because I believe that it is due chiefly to a defective knowledge of Christian philosophy and theology."
That he is entirely right as to the existence of this feeling there can be no doubt; no one can read at all widely in scientific literature without becoming aware of it. Contrary to all the tenets of science there is even a bias against any such idea as that of a Creator, though science is supposed to confront all problems without bias of any kind. ”

“ Let us, however, take heart: "Mysticism will not die out; for those strange fancies knowledge is no cure; but their forms may change, and mysticism as a force for the suppression of joy is happily losing its hold on the modern world" (ib., ib.) . Let us eat and drink—and, it may be added, sin—for to-morrow we die. Such is the new gospel of science, an old enough gospel, tried and found wanting years before its latest prophet arose to proclaim it to the world. ”

“ No Catholic, scientific man or otherwise, who really honours his Faith would desire wilfully to advance theories apparently hostile to its teaching. Further, even if he were convinced of the truth of facts which might appear—it could only be "appear"—to conflict with that teaching, he would, in expounding them, either show how they could be harmonised with his religion, or, if he were wise, would treat his facts from a severely scientific point of view and leave other considerations to the theologians trained in directions almost invariably unexplored by scientific men. ”

“ We are anxious that science and scientific teaching should be assisted in every possible way. But let us be quite clear that while science has much to teach us and we much to learn from her, there are things as to which she has no message to the world. The Minor Prophets of science are never tired of advising theologians to keep their hands off science. The Major Prophets are too busy to occupy themselves with such polemics. But the theologian is abundantly in his right in saying to the scientific writer "Hands off morals!" for with morality science has nothing to do. ”

“ However, it is much more with those who only "stand and wait" than with those who were actually in the trenches that we are concerned; what about the lamentable army of wives and mothers, widows and orphans, people bereft of those they loved or rising every morning in dread of the news which the day might bring forth; what about these and their attitude towards the things unseen? That many such have turned to some genuine form of religion is happily beyond dispute, but it is also unquestionably true that thousands have turned aside to the attractions of spiritualism. ”

“ In a thousand ways my freedom, or what I call my freedom, is interfered with: it is the price which I pay for being one item of a social organism and for being in turn protected against others, who, in virtue of that protection, are in their turn deprived of what they might call their liberty. ”

“ The thing which strikes one most forcibly about the physics of these paper philosophers is the extraordinary contempt which, if they are consistent, they must or ought to feel for men of science. If Newton, Lagrange, Gauss, and Thompson, to say nothing of smaller men, have muddled away their brains in concocting a scheme of dynamics wherein the very definitions are all wrong; if they have arrived at a law of conservation of energy without knowing what the word energy means, or how to define it ”

“ To say "we know" when really we only surmise is a misuse of language, just as it is also a misuse to ask the question "Does nature make a departure from its previously ordered procedure and substitute chance for law?" since the ordinary reader is all too apt to forget that "Nature" is a mere abstraction, and that to speak of Nature doing such or such a thing helps us in no way along the road towards an explanation of things. ”

“ If we carefully consider the matter we shall be unable to come to any other conclusion than that every writer, even of the wildest form of fiction, is in some way and to some extent hampered and limited by knowledge, by facts, by things as they are or as they appear to be. ”

“ The scientific writer has to remember that whilst he may explain many things, his work is a torso unless and until he has either accepted the Creator as the first Cause, which he is too often disinclined to do, or has supplied an equally satisfactory explanation, which he is permanently unable to do. On the other hand, at least some defenders of Theism in the past might well have borne in mind that, whilst we are assured of the fact of Creation, we know absolutely nothing of its mechanism save that it came about by the command of God. ”

“ It is true that the seeds must be almost innumerable, but the germ, though small, is capable of accommodating an almost innumerable number of independent factors, if the prevalent views as to the constitution of matter are to be believed. And, as it is quite inconceivable that we can ever have microscopes which could detect such minute objects as the ultimate bricks of which the atom—no, not even the atoms themselves which compose the germ—consists, it is impossible that we should be able to say that the seed-theory is untrue. ”

“ Nature's inexorable discipline of death to those who do not rise to her standard—survival and parentage for those alone who do—has been from the earliest times more and more definitely resisted by the will of man. If we may for the purpose of analysis, as it were, extract man from the rest of Nature, of which he is truly a product and a part, then we may say that man is Nature's rebel. ”

“ It was my lot to have to dine one night with an old friend of my father's, a person of some distinction, who having, I believe, been a viveur in his youth, had in later years embraced the most ferocious type of Evangelicanism. When the ladies had retired I was left alone with this formidable person, whom I eyed much as a rabbit eyes a snake into whose cage he has been introduced. ”

“ Here we have to do with arrangement, consummately skilful arrangement, an arrangement which practically never fails, for, leaving aside the case of monstrosity, a consideration of which would detain us too long, not merely are the various cells all placed in their proper positions, as we have seen, but their aggregation, the individual, is so formed as to belong to the proper compartment of that large museum, the world—the same compartment as that occupied by his progenitors. Neither the particulate nor the chemical theories help us here. ”

“ Now I cannot but believe that such writers are thinking of the bugbear of artificial sins invented by the professors of a gloomy creed of religion. It is not to be supposed that any serious writer—and those to whom I allude are eminently such—would speak or write with pleasure and satisfaction of escaping from the bugbear of sins against morality or against one's neighbour ”

“ Everybody admitted that the chemists must have the final word on this subject: are you now claiming that religion or theology, or whatever you choose to call it, is also entitled to a say in a matter of that kind?" This supposititious conversation illustrates the confusion which exists in many minds as to the point at issue. One science is entitled to contradict another, just as one scientific man is entitled to contradict another on a question of fact. ”

“ Fortunately, or unfortunately, we have the opportunity of studying the experiment in actual operation in a race which, of course in entire ignorance of the fact, is actually putting into practice the teachings of Natural Selection, though it must be admitted that the practice has not been successful, nor does it look like being successful, in raising that race above the very lowest rung of the ladder of civilisation. ”

“ My own theory about the peasant, as I know him, and about people of lowly culture in general so far as I have learnt to know about them, is that the ethics of amity belong to their natural and normal mood, whereas the ethics of enmity, being but 'as the shadow of a passing fear,' are relatively accidental. Thus to the thesis that human charity is a by-product, I retort squarely with the counter-thesis that human hatred is a by-product. The brute that lurks in our common human nature will break bounds sometimes ”

“ Yet, just as at the time that Darwin's views were first made public, many thought that they were subversive of Christianity, so, even now, some whose acquaintance with the problem and its history is of a superficial character, are inclined when they see the word creation, even with the qualifying adjective "special" prefixed to it, used in contradistinction to evolution, to imagine that the theory of creation, and of course of a Creator, must fall to the ground if evolution should be proved to be the true explanation of living things and their diversities. ”

“ It is, indeed, as Father Wasmann says, a thousand pities that the reasonableness, the logic, the dignity of the Catholic religion should remain for ever hidden from the eyes and minds of many who so often are as they are, because they were brought up as they were. In all these things we find the key to another problem. In another essay in this volume I have called attention to the glad intelligence, as it seems to a certain school of writers, that we are freed from the "bugbear of sin," as one of them puts it; able to enjoy ourselves without any thoughts of that kind. ”

“ It is a good rule to endeavour to understand your opponent's position before you try to confute him; an excellent rule seldom complied with by anti-Catholic controversialists. Now the Church starts with the proposition that man has an immortal soul destined to eternal happiness or eternal misery, and she proceeds to claim that she has been divinely constituted to help man to enjoy a future of happiness. ”

“ We need not hesitate, it appears, to do so and to admit that it is a new species which has been produced within historic times and under conditions with which we are fully acquainted. It may, however, be argued, and quite fairly argued, that such a process of evolution, though definitely proved, is a very different thing from such an evolution as would permit of a common ancestry for animals so far apart, for example, as a whale and a rabbit, or perhaps even nearer in relationship, as between a lion and a seal. ”

“ As Catholics we can rest assured that the true explanation, whenever it emerges, cannot be opposed to the considered teaching of the Church. What the Church does—and surely it must be clear that from her standpoint she could not do less—is to instruct Catholic men of science not to proclaim as proved facts such modern theories—and there are many of them—as still remain wholly unproved, when these theories are such as might seem to conflict with the teaching of the Church. ”

“ Of course we all grumble, but then everybody, except its own members, always does more or less grumble at anything done by any government: that is the ordinary state of affairs. But at any rate we submit ourselves, more or less gracefully, to this restraint because we persuade ourselves or are persuaded that it is for the good of the State and thus for the good of ourselves, both as private individuals and as members of the State. ”

“ Chesterton somewhere notes that "a time may easily come when we shall see the great outburst of science in the Nineteenth Century as something quite as splendid, brief, unique, and ultimately abandoned as the outburst of art at the Renaissance." ”