Charles Force Deems

“ If any man shall charge me with being an infidel as touching geometry, and try to turn me out of the church of science, I shall become hotly indignant, because I know that Euclid did not believe more in geometry than I do, and I believe as much in the teachings of geometry as I do in the teachings of theology, regarding them both, as Aristotle did, as mere human sciences, ranking theology with psychology, geology, and botany. ”

“ In the wildest dreams of fanaticism—and there are fanatics in the laboratory, as there are in the sanctuary of God and in the temple of Mammon—it has never been believed that there shall come a man who shall know all things that are, all things that have been, all things that shall be, and all things that can be, in their properties, their attributes, and their relations. Until such a man shall arise, science must always be concerned with the cognition of that which is the real truth as to probabilities, or with probable cognitions of that which is not only real truth, but absolute truth. ”

“ All science is purely a classification of probabilities.
We do not know that the same result will follow the same act in its several repetitions, but believe that it will; and we believe it so firmly that if a professor had performed a successful experiment before a class in chemistry, he would not hesitate to repeat the experiment after a lapse of a quarter of a century. Scientific men are not infidels. Of no men may it be more truly said that they "walk by faith." They do not creep, they march. Their tread is on made ground, on probabilities ”

“ The more truly religious a man is, the more humble he is; the more he sees the deep things of God, the more he sees the shallow things of himself. He claims nothing positively. He certainly does not make that most arrogant of all claims, the claim to the prerogative of infinite intelligence. There can exist only one Being in the universe who is positively and absolutely orthodox, and that is God. In religion, as in science, we walk by faith; that is, we believe in the probabilities sufficiently to act upon them. ”

“ Copernicus, who revolutionized astronomy, was one of the purest Christians who ever lived—a simple, laborious minister of religion, walking beneficently among the poor by day, and living among the stars by night; and yet one writer of our day has dared to say, in what he takes to be the interest of science, that Copernicus was "aware that his doctrines were totally opposed to revealed truth." ”

“ We can all afford to agree upon the definition rendered by the only man who has been found in twenty-two centuries to add anything important to the imperial science of logic. Sir William Hamilton defines science as "a complement of cognitions, having in point of form the character of logical perfection, and in point of matter the character of real truth." Under the focal heat of a definition like this, much that claims to be science will be consumed. It is the fashion to intimate, if not to assert, that it is much more easy to become scientific than to become religious ”

“ A scientific man ridicules the idea of any religious man claiming to be "orthodox." It must be admitted to be ridiculous, just as ridiculous as would be the claim of a scientific man to absolute certainty and unchangeableness for science. ”

“ But "the society," or "the academy," has stood in opposition to science quite as often as it has to religion. Sometimes the sin of one has been laid upon the other, and sometimes the property of one has been scheduled as the assets of the other. It is time to protest, in the interests of the truth of God, and in the name of the God of truth, that religion no longer be saddled with all the faults of the churchmen, all the follies of the scientists, and all the crimes of the politicians. ”

“ Ideals produce substantial, or invisible substantials, upon motion, produce visible substantials; or that which is necessary to matter—namely, form—owes its existence to that which is neither substantial nor ideal—to nothing, in fact. The entire and sublime science of geometry, at one time the only instrument of culture among the Greeks, and so esteemed by Plato that he is said to have written over his door, "Let no one enter here who does not know geometry," in all its conceptions, propositions, and demonstrations, rests upon the conception of that which has no parts, no magnitude. ”

“ Geologists, psychologists, and theologists, must all ultimately promote the cause of religion, because they must confirm one another's truths, and explode one another's errors; and a religious man is a man whose soul longs for the truth, who loves truth because he loves God, who knows if the soul be sanctified it must be sanctified by the truth, even as the mind must be enlarged and strengthened by the truth. He knows and feels that it would be as irreligious in him to reject any truth found in Nature, as it would be for another to reject any truth found in the Bible. ”

“ The very facts, then, which make us proud of modern science should make scientific men very humble. It will be noticed that the most arrogant cultivators of science are those who are most ready to assail such religious men as are rigid, and hold that nothing can be added to or taken away from theology; and such scientific men make this assault on the assumption that physical sciences are fixed, certain, and exact. How ridiculous they make themselves, a review of the history of any science for the last fifty years would show. ”

“ Science has the finite for its domain, religion the infinite; science deals with the things seen, and religion with the things not seen. When Dr. Hutton, of Edinburgh, announced, in the last century, "In the economy of the world I can find no traces of a beginning, no prospect of an end," it is said that scientific men were startled and religious men were shocked. Why should they be? The creation of the universe and its end are not questions of science, and can be known only as revealed to faith. ”

“ All this dust about "the conflict" has been flung up by men of insufficient faith, who doubted the basis of their faith; or by men of insufficient science, who have mistaken theology or the Church for religion; or by unreasonable and wicked men, who have sought to pervert the teachings of science so as to silence the voice of conscience in themselves, or put God out of their thoughts, so that a sense of his eternal recognition of the eternal difference between right and wrong ”

“ The visible cosmos is God's love-letter to man, and religion seems to probe every corner of the sheet on which such love is written, to examine every phrase, and study every connection. A few upstarts of the present day, not the real men and masters of science, ignore the fact that almost every man who has made any great original contribution to science, since the revival of letters, was a very religious man; but their weak wickedness must not be charged to science any more than the wicked weakness of ecclesiastics to religion. ”

“ And this brings us back to what was stated in the beginning, as one of the causes of this cry of "conflict." It is the confounding of theology with religion. Theology is not religion any more than psychology is human life, or zoölogy is animal life, or botany is vegetable life. Theology is objective; religion is subjective. Theology is the scientific classification of what is known of God; religion is a loving obedience to God's commandments. Every religious man must have some theology, but it does not follow that every theologian must have some religion. ”

“ God makes religion, and men make churches. There are irreligious men in every church, and there are very religious men in no church. Any visible, organized church is a mere human institution. It is useful for the purpose of propagating religion so long as it confines itself to that function and abstains from all other things. The moment it transcends that limit, it is an injurious institution. In either case it is merely human, and we wrong both religion and the Church when we claim for the latter that it is not a human institution. ”

“ No man should be charged with being an atheist who does not, in distinct terms, announce himself to be such; and in that case the world will believe him to be too pitiful a person to be worth assailing with hard words. But as you may drive a man away from you by representing him as your enemy, so a scientific man may be driven from the Christian faith, if convinced that the Christian faith stands in the way of free investigation and free discussion; or, he may hold on to the faith because he has brains enough to see that one may be most highly scientific and most humbly devout at the same time ”

“ An attempt to determine the limits of religion is no disparagement thereof, because all the most religious men who are accustomed to think are engaged in striving to settle those limits, in order that they may have advantage of the whole territory of religion on the one hand, and on the other may not take that as belonging to religion which belongs to something else.
Now, if Sir William Hamilton's definition is to be taken, we shall perceive that he represents science in its quality, in its quantity, and in its form. Cognition of something is necessary for science. ”

“ If one should say that there is in the universe a circular triangle, we should deny it, not because the concept of a triangle is irreconcilable with the concept of a circle, as consistent in the same figure, which is quite true, but because they are contradictory. ”

“ No man can abandon a real truth without degradation to his intellectual and moral nature; but Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, in their studies from time to time, employed and discarded theory after theory, until they reached that which was capable of demonstration. It was only that which took its place as science. In the case of Kepler, it is known what great labor he spent in attempting to represent the orbit of Mars by combinations of uniform circular motion. His working hypothesis was the old doctrine of epicyclic curves. But his great labor was not fruitless, as has been carelessly asserted. ”

“ This impatient and weak criticism on the part of religious men is injurious to scientific progress, as well as to the progress of religion. For the latter, it makes the reputation of unfairness; for the former, it does one of two bad things: it obstructs free discussion among students of science, or pushes them into a foolish defiance of religion. Men must co-work with those of their own sphere of intellectual labors. They must publish guesses, conjectures, hypotheses, theories. Whatever comes into any mind must be examined by many minds. ”

“ Now if, while scientific men are employing working hypotheses merely as such, men representing religion fly at them as if they were holding those hypotheses as science, or if men representing science do set forth these hypotheses as if they were real knowledge of truth, and proceed to defend them as such, then much harm is done in all directions.
In the first instance, the religious man shows an impatience which is irreligious. "He that believeth doth not make haste." It is unfair to criticise any man while he is doing. ”

“ The fact is that any man, who is careful of his reputation, has some trepidation in issuing a volume on science, lest the day his publishers announce his book the morning papers announce, also, a discovery which knocks the bottom out of all his arguments. This shows the great intellectual activity of the age—a matter to rejoice in, but it should also promote humility, and repress egotism in all well-ordered minds. There is, probably, no one thing known in its properties and accidents, in its relations to all abstract truths and concrete existence. ”

“ When we go back to consider the immense labor performed by Kepler in his investigations which led to his brilliant discoveries, we feel that if his nerves had given way under his labors, and domestic troubles, and financial cares, or his industry had been just a little less tenacious, he would have failed in the prodigious calculations which led him to his brilliant discoveries, and gave science such a great propulsion. ”

“ Even where there has been gathered a sufficient amount of knowledge to be wrought by the logical understanding into the form of a science, so that such a mind as Hamilton's would admit it as a science—i. e., a sufficient complement of cognitions of truths put in logical form—another age of labor, in other departments, would so shrink this science that, in order to hold its rank, it would have to work in the matter of more knowledge, and, to preserve its symmetry, be compelled to readjust its architectural outlines. ”

“ But we do know some theologians who have little religion, and some that seem to have none. There may be a conflict between theology and some other sciences, and religious men may deplore that conflict, or may not, according to their measure of faith. There are those whose faith is so large and strong that they do not deplore such a conflict, because they know that if, for instance, a conflict should come between geology and theology, and geology should be beaten, it will be so much the better for religion ”

“ In other words, what is science to one age may not be science to its successor, because that successor may perceive that, although its matter had the character of real truth, and its form the character of logical perfection, as far as it went, nevertheless, there were not enough cognitions ”

“ What is irreconcilable to you may be reconcilable to another mind, because "irreconcilable" indicates the relation of the concept to the individual intellect; but what is contradictory to the feeblest is contradictory to the mightiest mind, because "contradictory" represents the relation of the concepts to one another.
In the definition of a person there is nothing to exclude infinity, and in the definition of infinite there is nothing to exclude personality. There is no more exclusion between "person" and "infinite" than between "line" and "infinite;" ”

“ In other words, we have never been able to collect more material of knowledge than the plan of any temple of science could work in, and really did not demand for the completion of the structure, and that very few temples of science have been finished, even in the outline, while all the plain of thought is covered by ruins of buildings begun by thinkers, but unfinished for want of more knowledge. ”