George F. Barker

“ They watch what they conceive to be the progress of materialism, in such fear and powerless anger as a savage feels, when, during an eclipse, the great shadow creeps over the face of the sun. The advancing tide of matter threatens to drown their souls; the tightening grasp of law impedes their freedom; they are alarmed lest man’s moral nature be debased by the increase of his wisdom.
If the “New Philosophy” be worthy of the reprobation with which it is visited, I confess their fears seem to me to be well founded. ”

“ Pure unsifted solar light is white; and if all the wave constituents of such light be reduced in the same proportion, the light, though diminished in intensity, will still be white. The whiteness of Alpine snow with the sun shining upon it is barely tolerable to the eye. The same snow under an overcast firmament is still white. Such a firmament enfeebles the light by reflection, and when we lift ourselves above a cloud-field—to an Alpine summit, for instance, or to the top of Snowdon—and see, in the proper direction, the sun shining on the clouds, they appear dazzlingly white. ”

“ No theory upsets them. Let the most destructive hypothesis be stated only in the language current among gentlemen, and they look it in the face. They forego alike the thunders of heaven and the terrors of the other place, smiting the theory, if they do not like it, with honest secular strength. In fact, the greatest cowards of the present day are not to be found among the clergy, but within the pale of science itself. ”

“ Many who hold it would probably assent to the position that at the present moment all our philosophy, all our poetry, all our science, and all our art—Plato, Shakespeare, Newton, and Raphael—are potential in the fires of the sun.
We long to learn something of our origin. If the evolution hypothesis be correct, even this unsatisfied yearning must have come to us across the ages which separate the unconscious primeval mist from the consciousness of to-day. I do not think that any holder of the evolution hypothesis would say that I overstate it or overstrain it in any way. ”

“ The Good Father could have made me like the lilies, who, though they toil not, neither spin, are yet clothed in glory; and why should I, a nobler being, be subject to the dust and the sweat of labor?” This thought should enlighten every artisan of the thousands that people the factories and guide their whirling machinery in our modern cities. Every revolution of a wheel is moving the car of progress, and the timed stroke of the crank and the rhythmic throw of the shuttle are but the music the spheres have sung since time began. ”

“ There is no discovery so limited as not to illuminate something beyond itself. The force of intellectual penetration into this penumbral region which surrounds actual knowledge is not dependent upon method, but is proportional to the genius of the investigator. There is, however, no genius so gifted as not to need control and verification. The profoundest minds know best that nature’s ways are not at all times their ways, and that the brightest flashes in the world of thought are incomplete until they have been proved to have their counterparts in the world of fact. ”

“ Submission of will, loving trust, confiding faith—these belong to the child: how strange they appear to the executing, commanding, reasoning man! Are they so strange to the woman? We all know the answer. Woman is nearer to the point of departure of that development which outlives time and peoples heaven; and if man would find it, he must retrace his steps, regain something he lost in youth, and join to the powers and energies of his character the submission, love and faith which the new birth alone can give. ”

“ I would hope that this wonderful unity and mutual interaction of force in the dead forms of inorganic nature, appears to you identical in the living forms of animal and vegetable life, which make of our earth an Eden. That even that mysterious, and in many aspects awful, power of thought, by which man influences the present and future ages, is a part of this great ocean of energy. ”

“ There are tories even in science who regard imagination as a faculty to be feared and avoided rather than employed. They had observed its action in weak vessels and were unduly impressed by its disasters. But they might with equal justice point to exploded boilers as an argument against the use of steam. Bounded and conditioned by coöperant reason, imagination becomes the mightiest instrument of the physical discoverer. Newton’s passage from a falling apple to a falling moon was a leap of the imagination. ”

“ It is not considered that, if we know nothing about the composition of any body whatever as it is, then we do know nothing, and that it is strangely idle to offer absolute ignorance as a support for the most dogmatic knowledge. If such statements are, as is really expected for them, to be accepted, yet not accepted, they are the stultification of all logic. Is the chemistry of living to be seen to be the same as the chemistry of dead protoplasm, because we know nothing about the composition of any body whatever as it is? ”

“ But we can also say more than that—we can say that any fruitful application even of infinite time to the general problem of difference in the world is inconceivable. To explain all from an absolute beginning requires us to commence with nothing; but to this nothing time itself is an addition. Time is an entity, a something, a difference added to the original identity: whence or how came time? Time cannot account for its own self; how is it that there is such a thing as time? Then no conceivable brooding even of infinite time could hatch the infinitude of space. ”

“ Small in mass, the vastness in point of number of the particles of our sky may be inferred from the continuity of its light. It is not in broken patches nor at scattered points that the heavenly azure is revealed. To the observer on the summit of Mont Blanc the blue is as uniform and coherent as if it formed the surface of the most close-grained solid. A marble dome would not exhibit a stricter continuity. And Mr. Glaisher will inform you that if our hypothetical shell were lifted to twice the hight of Mont Blanc above the earth’s surface, we should still have the azure overhead. ”

“ The only thing out of place in the discussion is dogmatism on either side. Fear not the evolution hypothesis. Steady yourselves in its presence upon that faith in the ultimate triumph of truth which was expressed by old Gamaliel when he said: “If it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it; if it be of man, it will come to naught.” Under the fierce light of scientific inquiry this hypothesis is sure to be dissipated if it possess not a core of truth. ”

“ In the smallest, lowest protoplasm-cell, then, we have this rational unity of a complement of individuals that only are for the whole and exist in the whole. This is an idea, therefore; this is design: the organized concert of many to a single common purpose. The rudest savage that should, as in Paley’s illustration, find a watch, and should observe the various contrivances all controlled by the single end in view, would be obliged to acknowledge—though in his own way—that what he had before him was no mere physical, no mere molecular product. ”

“ Far be it from me, however, to wish to fix you immovably in this or in any other theoretic conception. With all our belief of it, it will be well to keep the theory plastic and capable of change. You may, moreover, urge that although the phenomena occur as if the medium existed, the absolute demonstration of its existence is still wanting. Far be it from me to deny to this reasoning such validity as it may fairly claim. Let us endeavor by means of analogy to form a fair estimate of its force.
You believe that in society you are surrounded by reasonable beings like yourself. ”

“ The force which the plant stores up is undeniably physical; must not the force which the animal sets free by its conversion, be intimately correlated to it?
But approaching our question still more closely, let us, in illustration of the vital forces of the animal economy, choose three forms of its manifestation in which to seek for the evidences of correlation; these shall be heat, evolved within the body; muscular energy or motion; and lastly, nervous energy, or that form of force which, on the one hand, stimulates a muscle to contract, and on the other, appears in forms called mental. ”

“ Reverting to an old acquaintance of ours, it would seem, on purely scientific grounds, as if a Veracity were at the heart of things; as if, after ages of latent working, it had finally unfolded itself in the life of man; as if it were still destined to unfold itself, growing in girth, throwing out stronger branches and thicker leaves, and tending more and more by its overshadowing presence to starve the weeds of error from the intellectual soil. ”

“ But the growth to maturity saw the development of all the qualities inherited from the irresponsible denizen of the forest. Man inherits from his predecessors in the creation the buddings of reason: he inherits passions, propensities and appetites. His corruption is that of his animal progenitors, and his sin is the low and bestial instinct of the brute creation. Thus only is the origin of sin made clear—a problem which the pride of man would have explained in any other way had it been possible. ”

“ I suppose that, to many, the idea that there is such a thing as a physical basis, or matter, of life may be novel—so widely spread is the conception of life as a something which works through matter, but is independent of it; and even those who are aware that matter and life are inseparably connected, may not be prepared for the conclusion plainly suggested by the phrase “the physical basis or matter of life,” that there is some one kind of matter which is common to all living beings, and that their endless diversities are bound together by a physical, as well as an ideal, unity. ”