Richard Holt Hutton

“ What can be better evidence that there is at least no a priori belief in the uniformity of Nature than the delight in fairy tales, which, certainly in childhood, are accepted with quite as much private belief that some great enchanter's wand will be triumphantly found at last, as are the dullest and most matter-of-fact of histories? ”

“ Martineau, believes profoundly that the true worship of a righteous will is the highest end of all human life? Can anything be more superabundantly evident, more conspicuously and, so to say, oppressively clear, than that ninety-nine men out of every hundred live as if God were at most nothing more than a remote probability, which it is hardly worth while to take into account in the ordinary routine of life? ”

“ Stephen is quite wrong in supposing that the matter can be settled as one of evidence alone. You must first overcome that violent prejudice in your minds which prevents you from vouchsafing even a glance at the evidence we should have to offer you. But I will, if the society permits me, leave that part of the subject, and return to the principal question before us—the impossibility of proving the uniformity of Nature from experience alone. ”

“ We ought to engage what I have ventured in this society to call the "emotion of conviction," the caprices of which are so extravagant and so dangerous, much more seriously on the side of the uniformity of Nature than we have ever hitherto done. We should all try to distinguish more carefully than we do between possibility, probability, and certainty. ”

“ Ruskin's remark that he had always been expecting the sun to stand still was to me peculiarly interesting, because, as I have formerly told the society, whatever may be the grounds for assuming the uniformity of Nature, I hold that there is nothing which the natural mind of man, unless subjected to a very serious discipline for the express purpose of producing that belief, is less likely to assume. A year or two ago I ventured to express in this room the opinion that credulity is the natural condition of almost every man. ”

“ For the scientific man justly fears that, if he investigates them thoroughly, he shall wound many amiable men's hearts, and that if he does not wound amiable men's hearts he shall compromise his own character as a man of science.
As Professor Huxley's rich and resonant voice died away, Father Dalgairns, after looking modestly round to see whether any one else desired to speak, began in tones of great sweetness: Professor Huxley has implied that to the scientific student the words "I believe" have a stricter and more binding force than they have to us theologians. ”

“ Men of science were too busy in their fruitful vocation to hunt up the true explanation of cases of arrested miracle, complicated as they generally were with all sorts of violent prepossessions and confusing emotions. He, for his part, did not pretend that the physical uniformity of Nature could be absolutely proved. He was content to know that his "working hypothesis" had been proved to be invaluable by the test of innumerable discoveries, which could never have been made had not that working hypothesis been assumed. ”

“ But we do know that in millions and billions of cases expectations founded on the same sort of evidence as the expectation that the sun will rise to-morrow, and that the dropped bar will fall to the earth, have been verified, and that the imaginative illusion which half-educated people still so often indulge, that exceptions will occur for the occurrence of which there is no rational evidence, is a most mischievous one, which we ought to try to eradicate. ”

“ Indeed, you will find in almost every young person of any promise the profoundest tendency to revolt against the law of uniform succession as too dull to he credible, and to exult in the occasional evidence which the history of their time affords that "truth after all is stranger than fiction." ”

“ Is not the early love of tales of marvel, and the later love of tales of wild adventure and hair-breadth escapes, and again, the deep pleasure which we all feel in that "poetic justice" which is so rare in actual experience, a sufficient proof that men retain, even to the last, a keen prepossession against the doctrine that laws of uniform antecedency and consequence can be traced throughout the most interesting phases of human life? ”

“ What is a matter of the highest moment is whether or not they feel or do not feel their religious faith in every action of their life. If God is really ruling you, is it not better to feel his eye upon you, even though you show your sense of that vigilance unreasonably and foolishly, than to live on very much as you would do, if, as Isaiah said, God were on a journey or had gone to sleep? ”

“ Martineau's position, that because the best testimony which we have in modern times to the interference of Divine power in the chain of physical causation is more or less mixed up with what he would regard as superstition and hysterical emotion, therefore it is perfectly justifiable to leave such matters uninvestigated, and to pass by on the other side. Surely the whole character of modern civilization would be altered if we could prove satisfactorily for ordinary minds that the Divine will is a true cause, which manifests itself habitually to those who humbly receive the Divine revelations. ”

“ Taking the evidence for what it may be worth, the discovery of such a faculty would only, I suppose, justify us in concluding that some new vital energy was developing itself under the conditions of modern life, and not that any interference with the laws of Nature had taken place. Yet the generally obstinate refusal of men of science to receive any verbal witness of such facts is a proof that they believe them contrary to a code of law which is more or less complete in their experience, and altogether complete in their conception ”

“ He asked whether those who believe most fervently in the uniformity of Nature ever show the slightest anxiety to examine asserted exceptions. He imagined, he said, that what impresses physicists is the fruitfulness of inductive science, with the reasonable inference that inductive science could not be the fruitful field of discovery it is, unless it rested on a legitimate basis, which basis could be no other than a principle of uniformity. ”

“ Ward will correct me if I am wrong, but I interpret this as meaning that if what men ingraft on lower creatures is spoken of by the angelic doctor as doing them a certain violence, altering, I suppose, their mere involuntary qualities by infecting them with a certain human purposiveness not their own, how much more is it evidently open to the Divine purpose to ingraft on this uniformity of Nature a supernatural bent of its own, to open it, as it were, to the power of miracle, to infuse it with the significance of revelation! ”

“ But of this I am very sure, that at present we are much apter to accept superficial and inadequate evidence of the breach of laws of uniformity than we ought to be; that education does not do half enough to beat out of our minds that credulous expectation that there is some disposition in the governing principles of the universe, either to favor us or to persecute us, as the case may be, which springs, not from experience, but from groundless prejudice and prepossession ”

“ We can not exhaust the number of interfering causes which may break that uniformity. I at least can not doubt that, so far as mind influences matter, there may be a vast multitude of real disturbing causes introduced by mind to break through those laws of uniformity in material things, of which at present we know only the elements. ”

“ But it is one thing to see the evidence of spiritual influence in every page of human history and quite another to attach importance to such preternatural occurrences as the Archbishop has recently referred to, which are usually so mixed up with superstitions of all kinds, and so great a variety of hysterical emotions, that I for one should despair of any good result from investigating minutely these curious conquests effected by pretentious physical marvels over the gaping intellectual credulity of moral coldness and disbelief. ”

“ If an experienced observer could compress into a formula the law of all the simultaneous conditions, he would be able to foresee the contents of any future moment—not, however, to modify them, for his prescience depends on their being in themselves determinate, and on his calculations bracing all the elements of the problem, including the states of his own mind. ”

“ The law determines the instrument it is to use, and the instrument it is to use determines the world. Why, then, should the law be regular and not variable? Why, because it is the instrument of a being who is not variable. The schoolmen tell us that Nature has an appetite, a desire to accomplish its ends. They say of Nature "appetit," "desiderat." ”

“ He was one of the very best and most active members of our society, as long as his health lasted—most friendly to everybody, though full of amazement at the depth to which skepticism had undermined the creed of many among us. ”

“ Now, how do we Catholics, who have a philosophy the value of which we imagine that you believers in Spencer and Mill and Bain greatly underrate, account for the uniformity of Nature without trenching in any way on the supernatural basis of that Nature? ”

“ Ward answered that the belief in genuine exceptions to the law of uniform phenomenal antecedents and consequents does not in the least degree invalidate this assumption of the general uniformity of Nature, if these exceptions are announced, as in the case of miracles they always must be, as demonstrating the interposition of some spiritual power which is not phenomenal, between the antecedent and its natural consequent -which interposition it is that alone interrupts the order of phenomenal antecedence and consequence. ”

“ Stephen will sift the evidence, or even regard it as worth his serious attention. He has hardly assigned sufficient force to that strong predisposition to incredulity which is so widely spread at this moment in the Protestant world, a predisposition which I can not entirely reconcile with Mr. Bagehot's very striking remarks on the universal credulousness of the natural man. Perhaps, however, there may be such credulousness where there is no prejudice, and yet incredulity still more marked where there is. ”

“ I know God by "a combination of intuition and experience, which is Kant's condition of knowledge. If there be a God, our imagination would present him to us as inflicting pain on the violator of his law, and lo! the imagination turns out to be an experienced fact. ”

“ But then I should not apply that remark to any case of internal consciousness of supernatural influence, because, from the very circumstances of the case, the evidence of the existence of such influence can not be open to any mind except that which is the subject of it, and in my view it is quite unreasonable to deny that there are indirect but yet conclusive proofs in history that such supernatural influences have transformed, and do still habitually transform, the characters of the very greatest of our race. ”

“ No men could be more different among themselves than Dr. Ward and Father Dalgairns and Archbishop Manning, all of them converts to the Roman Church. But, nevertheless, all had upon them that curious stamp of definite spiritual authority which I have never noticed on any faces but those of Roman Catholics, and of Roman Catholics who have passed through a pretty long period of subjection to the authority they acknowledge. In the Metaphysical Society itself there was every type of spiritual and moral expression. ”

“ All that remains behind is an indistinct outline which can never be filled up. Under certain conditions rare occurrences are quite as probable as common ones. The main condition of the probability of such an event is that the rare occurrence should, from its nature and from the circumstances under which it occurs, be capable of being observed, and that the evidence of it should be recorded in the manner which I have already described. ”

“ The reason why their existence is disbelieved or doubted is not that they are seen, if at all, so seldom, but because in each particular instance they are seen, if at all, in such an unsatisfactory way that it is doubtful whether they ever were seen. ”

“ The man of science, however, "who commits himself to even one statement which turns out to be devoid of good foundation, loses somewhat of his reputation among his fellows, and if he is guilty of the same error often he loses not only his intellectual but his moral standing among them; for it is justly felt that errors of this kind have their root rather in the moral than in the intellectual nature." That, I suppose, is the reason why men of science are so chary of investigating the trustworthiness of the soi-disant miracles to which Dr. ”

“ Aquinas says in his "Summa"—and the Archbishop, of course, pronounced his Latin in the Continental manner—"Tota irrationalis natura comparatur ad Deum sicut instrumentum ad agens principale"—the whole of inanimate and irrational Nature bears to the Divine being the relation of an instrument to the principal agent. That is to say, the Divine intellect conceives the law which the Divine will sanctions and enforces by a great methodical instrument. ”

“ I hold that children believe in the suggestions of their imaginations quite as confidently as they believe in the asseverations of their memories; and if grown-up men do not, it is only that their credulity has been battered out of them by the hard discipline of constant disappointment. ”