J. C. Hardwick

“ Significance of Pascal.—It is not as a systematic thinker that Pascal is of importance to the historian of thought. He typifies that more or less inarticulate and unreasoned revolt which the arrogance and optimism of a new science or a new philosophy arouse against themselves. He voices the eternal protest that it is not by bread alone that men live. As is [Pg 41] generally the case with such protests, the pessimism of Pascal was no doubt exaggerated; but exaggeration is necessary if minds are to be impressed; and those who feel strongly see only one side of a question. ”

“ Thus naturalism, blind to the mutilation of our nature of which it is guilty, is psychologically unsound. And yet, our nature is not so easily mutilated after all. Naturalistic dogmatism has it in its power to create an atmosphere which is unhealthy for religion, but that growth has its roots too deep for it to be easily destroyed. Springing as it does from the depths of our nature, it will prove as permanent as humanity itself. ”

“ Let Leibniz speak for himself:—
"Each portion of matter is not only infinitely divisible, but is also actually subdivided without end.... Whence it appears that in the smallest particle of matter there is a world of creatures, living beings, animals, entelechies, souls. Each portion of matter may be conceived as like a garden full of plants, or like a pond full of fishes.... Thus there is nothing fallow, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe...." ”

“ Religion and science regard reality from different angles, but it is the same reality that is the object of their vision, and the goal of their search.
Religion looks at existence as a whole, and attempts to determine its meaning and value for mankind. Religion, we may say, stands at the centre of existence, and regards reality from a central position. ”

“ The facts may belong to the past history of mankind, to the social statistics of our great cities, to the atmosphere of the most distant stars, to the digestive organs of a worm, or to the life of a scarcely visible bacillus. It is not facts themselves which make science, but the method by which they are dealt with. The material of science is co-extensive with the whole physical universe, not only that universe as it now exists, but with its past history and the past history of all life therein. ”

“ In fact, we may say that Pascal was the first, in an age of exaggerated reverence for logic (the damnosa hereditas of the Scholastic theologians) to understand that the best arguments for religion are the facts of human experience, and the conditions of human life.
"In vain, O men, do ye seek within yourselves the cure for your troubles! All your knowledge can only teach you that it is not within yourselves that ye find the true or good!" Here we have the language of religious experience. ”

“ Common-sense Philosophy.—The strength of this mechanical view lies in the fact that it stands on the shoulders of a natural science which itself has its feet firmly planted on the irrefragible rock of sense-experience. The mechanical view thus rests, in the last resort, upon the belief (which is held everywhere with confidence by plain men) that sense-experience is a sound foundation for knowledge. ”

“ Kant had, in fact, by this theory, instituted a revolution. His new dogma was: The mind is the mould into which all our knowledge must be cast; and the constitution of our mind predetermines the shape that our knowledge takes. ”

“ Bergson's philosophy is, in fact, a reaction against intellectualism or rationalism; by which is meant the theory that pure reason is competent by its nature to give a complete and exhaustive account of reality.
But according to Bergson, intellect, which is a faculty developed to enable men to subdue and turn to advantage their material environment, and which is, as it were, "fascinated by the contemplation of inert matter," will not reveal the true meaning and nature of existence; it gives us "a translation of life in terms of inertia," and can do no more. ”

“ The sun displaces the earth as the central point of the universe: around it revolve the planets—including the earth; and, at an immeasurable distance, is the immovable heaven of the fixed stars. Copernicus left it an open question whether or no the universe was infinite. It remained for his successor, the greatest of the Renaissance thinkers, Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) to declare it to be limitless, and to contain an infinity of worlds like our own. ”

“ Neither Hobbes, nor Holbach, nor Büchner, with the best will in the world, can exorcise from the human heart that instinct which seeks for itself personal relations with the universe—which sees a mind behind phenomena. This is one of those instincts of which it is true that the more you repress them the more insurgent they become—they will have their way in the end. ”

“ There are times when all existing culture—even of a high level—is closely associated with the current religion, endorses its ideals, sanctions its hopes, puts the stamp of finality upon its faith. Such an age cannot perhaps hope to be permanent; for life means movement, and movement upsets equilibrium, and human knowledge tends to increase faster than the human mind can adapt itself to it or digest it. ”

“ The Mechanical View Assailed.—Such are the lines upon which the new criticism of the mechanical view (the most radical criticism it has had to meet since Kant) proceeds. That view, and the idea of predetermined human action which it involves, is an inevitable product of an intellect naturally incapable of understanding freedom and spontaneity. These, as they destroy its scheme of thought, it casts out as an illusion. "Incorrigibly presumptuous," it insists on interpreting freedom by means of those notions which suit inert matter alone, and therefore always perceives it as necessity. ”

“ We have indeed travelled a long way from the austere abstractions of Mr. Herbert Spencer. The new evolutionism is very different from the old. It substitutes for "mechanism" another conception—that of "dynamism," according to which the process of evolution is something undetermined and impredictable—"creative," in fact. The world of organic life is embodied "creative activity," and what this "creative activity" is, we ourselves experience every time we act freely. ”

“ Science not Invalid but Incomplete.—This line of criticism of scientific method—i.e. that it deals with abstractions and analogies rather than with things, for the sake of economy and convenience of thought—does not deprive science of validity, but only invalidates that superficial dogmatism which had crept into so many investigations. A critical estimate of scientific methods makes it evident how much and how little we have the right to expect from them. They will enable us to give a simple description of phenomena as they are seen when reduced to their simplest terms of matter and motion ”

“ Naturalism Checked.—Thus Bradley and Balfour between them, merely by adopting a critical attitude, created an embarrassing situation for naturalism. Between them these writers administered a serious check to that naively uncritical dogmatism which, backed by the prestige of natural science, had sought to impose itself on the world as a new orthodoxy less liberal, in some ways, than the old.
Nor did they stop short at negative criticism, but substituted (according to the idealistic tradition) a spiritual view of reality for the mechanistic materialism that had become so popular. ”

“ Comte's doctrine was that, all spheres of Nature now being brought under the sway of positive science, the time had arrived for men, when constructing their conceptions of life and the world, to reject all but such ideas as positive science can accept. The age of theology and speculation was past; the new age of positive science, where both imagination and argumentation should be subordinate to observation, was at hand. ”

“ The critical philosophy, before attempting (as Spinoza had done) to tackle the problem of existence, first attacked the problem of knowledge. Before asking What is the truth? it put the preliminary question, [Pg 54] What are the means at man's disposal for reaching the truth? It prefaced all philosophical enquiry by an examination into the nature and scope of human thought. Such was the preparatory investigation which was to place metaphysics upon a secure and scientific foundation. For the new philosophy, the gateway to all sound knowledge is the reflection of the human mind upon itself. ”

“ The saying has become famous, and the words that follow are hardly less so; they remove the overpowering and crushing incubus of man's illimitable material environment, which, since Copernicus, had weighed upon thinkers like a nightmare:
"Were the universe to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which slays him, because he knows that he dies, and the advantage that the universe has over him: of this the universe knows nothing. Thus all man's dignity lies in his thought." ”

“ That Pascal was no mere narrow anti-rational [Pg 39] obscurantist is evident, not only from his own extraordinary insight, but from his continual reiteration of his idea that the essential dignity of man lies in his thought:
"All bodies, the firmament, the stars, the earth and its kingdoms, are not worth the smallest mind, for a mind knows them, and itself, and bodies know nothing."
Here lies the true greatness of man. In respect of material bulk he is nothing, but his thought cannot be measured. "Man is only a reed, the feeblest reed in nature, but he is a thinking reed." ”

“ Against this aspect of contemporary philosophy, the work of James and Bergson has been a revolt. "Indeterminism," i.e. a belief in the reality of freedom and spontaneity, is an essential part of their system. Their indeterminism is indeed the necessary and logical accompaniment of their anti-intellectualism. For determinism is "a fabrication of the intellect," a device which makes reality more manageable, more amenable to logic, more easily systematised. Freedom, like life and motion, eludes the categories of the intellect. ”

“ Nor has religion always enjoyed that full measure of freedom which is indispensable to its vigorous life. The curious and sad fact is that the human mind seems to delight in creating prisons for itself. The scientific spirit created a mechanico-materialistic scheme which has ended by becoming the enemy of scientific research, and which (besides this) asks, as a sacrifice, the mutilation of our spiritual instincts. ”

“ Which is really a criticism of what is known as the a priori method, whereby the inquirer starts with certain predefined theories to which all phenomena must conform, and which all experience must verify. If facts will not suit the particular theory, so much the worse for the facts: one could always disregard them, and apply a blind eye to Galileo's telescope. Such is always the procedure of the dogmatic mind, which is already so certain of the truth of its notions that no evidence can persuade it to the contrary. ”

“ Having tasted of the fruits of knowledge, the human race is cast forth from its Paradise. This view is unduly pessimistic. There is no valid reason for excluding the possibility that our knowledge of reality and those ideal hopes which constitute our religion may actually coincide. Religion and science, approaching the problem of existence from contrary directions, may independently arrive at an identical solution. ”

“ But, in the seventeenth century, it was the philosophers and learned men that were in need of a spiritual interpretation of the universe; common men had theirs already, in the traditional pietism which philosophers are often too ready to despise. To Spinoza—and this is one of the many indications of the genuine profundity of his thought—the simple believers seemed already to be in possession of too much of the truth for it to be desirable or profitable for them to indulge in speculation. ”

“ Names do not carry us very far; but the mere fact that biologists have gone to the trouble of providing a name, is important. It constitutes an admission on their part that there is something mysterious about the organism; for it has been a principle of modern science since the days of Galileo never to appeal to mysterious causes if known ones can be found. The deus ex machina method seems to them fundamentally unsound, and so it is. If every difficulty were considered solved merely by the word "mystery," knowledge would never advance. Labelled ignorance is still ignorance. ”

“ Moreover, towards the end of the century, a number of new facts in physics, biology, and psychology came to light and tended to discredit the mechanical view as a final explanation of reality. The indestructibility of matter, even the conservation of energy and of mass (corner stones of the mechanico-materialist view) began openly to be questioned, not by metaphysicians, but by men of science themselves. The foes of materialism were those of its own household. ”

“ For this conservation of motion, Leibniz substitutes the conservation of force as being logically the more fundamental concept. True reality, according to him, is not motion itself, but the force which is its cause. Force and existence became for [Pg 35] him identical terms; to work and to exist were the same. That force is the true reality, Leibniz expressed in the language of his time by saying, "Force is substance, and all substance is force"—a proposition which would not be repudiated by modern science—and upon this statement his philosophy is built. ”

“ Our intellect is, as James had taught, a faculty developed by the evolutionary process in our species to enable it to deal with its material environment. And Bergson was the first to point out that as a consequence of its having been developed for this particular purpose (i.e., dealing with a material environment) , intellect is "never quite at its ease, never entirely at home, except when it is working upon inert matter." If it has to deal with "living" matter, it "treats it as inert, without troubling about the life that animated it." ”

“ When every fact, every present or past phenomenon of that universe, every phase of present or past life therein, has been classified, and co-ordinated with the rest, then the mission of science will be completed. ”

“ Mechanism is the medium through which the mind understands phenomena. It belongs not to the things in themselves, but to our way of understanding them. And attached to this radical criticism of mechanical notions, was an idealistic philosophy of the most genuinely religious and spiritual character. Kantian idealism is one of those contributions to human thought behind which we shall not again regress. ”

“ The conditions of affairs during the classic ages of religion, however impossible at the moment, must remain our ideal. Head and heart must some day speak again with one voice, our hopes and beliefs must be consistent with our knowledge. Science must sanction that attitude towards existence which our highest instincts dictate. ”

“ It is evident that "science" can hardly fail to affect "religion." Systematised knowledge necessarily affects an individual's (or a society's) attitude to life—either by broadening and elevating that attitude, or by debasing it. Our knowledge, or what we believe to be such, tends to create certain preconceptions which make our minds hostile to certain beliefs or ideas. A man reared from his cradle on mechanical science will tend to regard miracles with suspicion ”