James McCosh

“ So, in these days, development, having furnished a key to open so many of the secrets of Nature, has led some to imagine that it can solve all the mysteries of the universe. Some of us may be inclined to admit, and to use for scientific purposes, the doctrine of development, and yet be prepared to deny that it can explain everything. The fact is, it overlooks a great many more things than it notices. There are signs of a reaction among scientific men against its extreme positions; and it is the work of the age now present to show how much development can do, and how much it cannot do. ”

“ Is the youth who has run in debt less likely to rob his master when he is assured that both he and his master are mere throbs in the vibrations which constitute life? Agnosticism never can become the creed of the great body of any people; but should it be taught by the science and philosophy of the day, I fear its influence on the youths who might be led, not to amuse themselves with it, but by faith to receive it, would be that they would find some of the hindrances to vice removed, and perhaps some of the incentives to evil encouraged. ”

“ We may not be sure, for example, as to a new form of plant or animal, whether it is a creation or simply a development according to law; and I am not sure that religion gains by our taking one side or another. We cannot, we have seen, determine for certain what were the powers of Nature that were working from the very beginning. But it is clear and sure that powers have appeared in Nature from time to time which did not operate at first nor for long ages; nay, if geology speaks truly, nor for millions of years. ”

“ So far he is a materialist, and the undoubted tendency of his philosophy is materialistic—he makes matter the basis even of mental action. He is not like Hume a skeptic, for he does not affirm that there are no things: all that he says is, that if they exist we can not know them; or, rather, that things known to us are merely impressions in the shape of sensations—of sensations remembered and correlated. He is not an atheist, not he; he only says that we have no proof of the existence of God. He is simply an honest agnostic—not believing in mind, or in matter, or in God. ”

“ It seems to be required by that deep law of causation which not only prompts us to seek for a cause for everything, but an adequate cause, to be found only in an intelligent mind. Our greatest American thinker, Jonathan Edwards (whom I can claim as my predecessor) , maintains that, as an image in a mirror is kept up by a constant succession of rays of light, so Nature is sustained by a constant forth-putting of the divine power. In this view Nature is a perpetual creation. God is to be seen not only in creation at first, but in the continuance of all things. ”

“ Once more, I have ever stood up for a doctrine of Development. There is a development of one form of matter from another, of one force from another. There is, as every one allows, a development of the plant and animal from the parent. I see nothing irreligious in holding that the bird may have been evolved by numerous transitions from the reptile, and the living horse the old horse of the Eocene formation. An accumulation of powers, new conditions and surroundings may, it is acknowledged, produce a variety which may become hereditary. ”

“ I am inclined to argue that there is evidence of design in homologies which may have been produced by descent, as when we see the pectoral limb of the horse, the whale, and the bird—whether fore-leg, paddle, or wing—formed on one type, though turned to very different uses. All that Owen and Agassiz have said about the anticipations and the prophecies in Nature may be acknowledged as true, even by those who hold that they have been produced by development, I do believe that these old horse-like forms were preparations for the horse now living. ”

“ I hold the doctrine of the Conservation of Force—that is, that the sum of energy, real and potential, in the universe is always one and the same, and cannot be increased or diminished by human or mundane action. ”

“ He who assails Christianity has to attack a phalanx. The pure morality fits in to the character of God, revealed as a spirit, revealed as light, revealed as love. The miracles, being almost all of them meant to remove evil, most of them to heal diseases, adapt themselves to the manifest disorder in the world, to our consciousness of sin, and the doctrine which reveals an atonement. The supernatural system is higher than the natural, but it is in accordance with it. ”

“ Have we thereby set aside any doctrine of philosophy or religion? The Christian, even the Christian theologian, may say wisely: "Let naturalists dispute as they may about the derivation of plants and of the lower animals; their hypotheses, arguments, and conclusions, do not interfere with our belief that God is to be seen everywhere in his works and rules over all." It appears to me that the whole doctrine of vegetable and animal species needs to be reviewed and readjusted—and religion need not fear the result. ”

“ Carpenter evidently looks upon the operations of the mind as composed of sensations and ideations. His view of both these is very insufficient. In all sense-perception, there is more than mere sensation considered as a feeling; there is knowledge of something extended. Then along with every perception there is consciousness of self as perceiving. According to the school of James Mill, sensation is a mere feeling, and ideation is a reproduced sensation. Memories, imaginations, conceptions, are all ideations; nay, judgments and reasonings are only combined ideations. ”

“ It is astonishing that the mystery which is farthest removed from our knowledge—I mean the transmission of original sin—should be that without which we can have no true knowledge of ourselves. It is in this abyss that the clew to our condition takes its turnings and windings, insomuch that man is more incomprehensible without this mystery than this mystery is incomprehensible to man. ”

“ Neither reason nor experience sanctions the doctrine that matter can produce mind; that molecules or masses of matter can think or feel, or discover the distinction between good and evil. At this point Huxley seems to separate from such men as Tyndall and Du Bois-Reymond, who tell us that to bridge the wide gulf that divides mind from matter is altogether beyond human capacity or conception. ”

“ Let us suppose that they can also, in rare cases of combination, produce species: religion is not thereby undermined, either in its evidences or in its essential doctrines.
The question now arises and presses itself upon us: Can we by these acknowleged agencies explain the whole of the present state of the universe, with all its fitnesses, its harmonies, its beauty, its utility, its beneficence? The development theory, in the narrow and exclusive form which it commonly takes, overlooks vastly more than it notices. ”

“ Some scientists in our day are insisting that every thing, even in history, morals, and religion, is to be settled by experiment and calculation, and would place all truth under the microscope—subject it to the blowpipe, and express it in statistics—and they do not see that the highest truth escapes in the process. The defenders of religion maintain that in religion a sincere mind will discover the truth with or without scientific knowledge. ”

“ Carpenter will soon find that they have very insecure footing, and must either go forward and identify will, as they do intelligence, with material agency, or retreat so far back as to hold that there are many other operations, such as the discernment of higher truth and higher goodness, which cannot be derived from atoms. If there be such an agent as will—and I agree with Dr. Carpenter in thinking that consciousness testifies in its behalf—then we must provide a compartment for it, and we may place there reason and our ideas of the good, the infinite, and the perfect. ”

“ Even John's gospel is brought within a hundred years of our Lord's death, almost certainly in the first century, is shown to be as little inconsistent with the synoptics as Plato's Socrates is with Xenophon's Socrates, and breathes an air so superior to that of the Apostolic Fathers, that we see the one to be heaven-descended, the other to be the product of imperfect human nature at a time when the minds of Christians were saturated with divine truth. It is clear that the "expectancy" of accounting for the life of Christ by human causes has not yet been realized. ”

“ Professor Huxley has nothing original to advance on the subject of moral good. Neither of them holds the selfish theory of morals. Both hold that man has a native instinct which leads him to sympathize with his neighbor, and to be pleased at seeing him happy. So far both are right; but, on the very same ground on which it is shown that there is a disposition in our nature to promote the pleasure of others, it can be shown that there is a principle in our nature which leads us to approve of what is good and condemn what is evil. ”

“ We meet this skepticism on the part of Hume and agnosticism on the part of Huxley by maintaining that what we perceive originally are things, and what we perceive by the faculty that discovers relations are relations of things. When we classify plants by their resemblances, we classify the plants and not impressions. When we decide that a thing which begins to be must have a cause, we have a reality: first, in the thing that begins to be; which implies, secondly, a reality in the cause which we regard as producing it. ”

“ Huxley admits this. I discover adaptation and contrivance, not only in the products but in the very process of development. Viewed in this light, development may, in the hands of a new Paley, furnish further and very striking cases of design. For, in order to the success of the process, there is often need of coördinated structure, that is, of a structure in which a number of parts are adapted to each other. ”

“ Truths thus self-evident to our minds become necessary; we can not be made to judge or decide that they are not true. Necessity is commonly put forward by metaphysicians such as Leibnitz and Kant as the test of such truths. I regard it as the secondary, the primary being self-evidence.
Hume and Huxley have discussed the question of Necessity especially as applied to causation. Hume accounts for it by custom and association of ideas: we are accustomed to see cause and effect together, and when we see the one we are constrained, whether we will or not, to think of and expect the other. ”

“ The great body of mankind believe that they themselves, and the objects they have to deal with, are more than impressions, and that they are realities in a real world; that there is matter that is solid, that there is mind that thinks and feels, that we all possess a soul, and that our neighbors also have souls. ”

“ Huxley, in the opening of his last lecture, has expressed his admiration—an admiration with which I thoroughly sympathize—of the structure of the horse: "The horse is in many ways a most remarkable animal, inasmuch as it presents us with an example of one of the most perfect pieces of machinery in the animal kingdom. In fact, among mammalia it cannot be said that there is any locomotive so perfectly adapted to its purpose, doing so much work with so small a quantity of fuel, as this animal, the horse." ”

“ Some of the highest statesmen and lawyers in Great Britain imagined that they could get more good from the direct and homely appeals of Moody than from those select dilettant meetings in London of savants and littérateurs who have abandoned Christianity, and are seeking to catch some higher religion which evanishes as they would lay hold of it.
Everybody acknowledges that all witnesses are not to be trusted; yet in the common affairs of life, in trials, in history, we do find testimony which we implicitly believe. ”

“ Carpenter has unfolded, as Hume had done a century ago, the tendencies which predispose man to believe in preternatural occurrences. But are there no "prepossessions" and "expectations" which incline some scientific men in the present day to account for all things by natural agency, and prejudice them against calling in any thing preternatural? The business of science is to look into the causes of obvious or recondite phenomena, and, proceeding in the right method, they have discovered the natural causes of events which many regarded as supernatural. ”

“ We feel that we have an animal part cleaving to the dust, and allying his to the brutes. But we feel also that we have a divine nature, a power of distinguishing between good and evil, a longing for something higher, a seeking after God. ”

“ At this point he has been abandoned by the disciples of Bain, Huxley, and Tyndall, by M. Ribot, and the writers in the Revue Scientifique, the organ of the school in France who wonder that he should stop where he has. For, if material agency can generate so much, can account for imagination and genius generally, can explain our higher intellectual efforts of judgment and reasoning, can fashion conscience and gender the obligation of duty and the sense of guilt, and our reverence for the unseen and the sublime, why may it not also produce will, an operation evidently so swayed by causes? ”

“ He is no longer killing hypotheses which died a natural death long ago. He is arranging his materials for the defense of the theory of Evolution. He has as yet only brought forward the cases which he acknowledges are not demonstrative of the truth of evolution, but are such as must exist if evolution be true, and which, therefore, are upon the whole strongly in favor of the doctrine of development. He makes a number of admissions. He allows that there are species which have continued unchanged, not only throughout all historical years, but all geological ages. ”

“ The moral argument so powerfully urged by Kant in favor of a judgment-day and a life to come to satisfy the full demand of the law, is entirely undermined in a philosophy which does not admit of an authoritative and imperative morality, and does not call in a God to make the moral law work out its effects. This skepticism is to be met by showing-that mind and matter are made known to us by different organs, the one by the self-consciousness, and the other by the senses ”