W. H. Dallinger

“ But with what mystery and majesty, with what proportions and powers, with what mass and movement is space full! and of what sequences and phenomena has time been the unconscious recorder! It is into these that the mind of man intently peers; it is across the bourneless area of uncharted space that he would carry his mental vision; it is into all the vicissitudes that have arisen, since the succession of cosmic phenomena marked off a section of duration, that the mind of man is ever struggling to thread its way; and if possible, to find the meaning and origin of it all. ”

“ Every phenomenon is motion; motion can only begin in force. Within the range of human experience and thought, as it has been long without answer contended, there is no force known but will: could any other cause than the volition of a mind, have primarily directed force to affect matter so as to produce, for ever, the infinite harmonies and self-adjusting interactions of this vast Universe? ”

“ But since a cause is no more a phenomenon, than a thought is a material manifestation, that which fills the whole circumference claimed by science does not fill all the area legitimately held by reason. A prevision of the order, and the methods of the changes of the universe, is the ideal of science. But mind in its entirety refuses to be locked within such limits. It looks deeper than sequences, and farther back than phenomena; it demands, by the very laws of its existence, their cause. A continuity of transformed causes undoubtedly explains a wide, and ever-widening area of sequences. ”

“ Teleology does not now depend for its existence on Paleyean ‘instances;’ but all the universe, its whole progress in time and space, is one majestic evidence of teleology. The will and purpose running through it are as incapable of being shut out of our consciousness and reasoning faculties, as its phenomena and their modes are of being rendered wholly imperceptible by our senses.
A ‘mind’ that is not a mind, in any sense as we know it, is, to us, nothing. Will, to be will, to us, must be such as we know of; though it be infinite. Intelligence that is infinite cannot cease to be intelligence. ”

“ We may be enabled no longer to say of any structure that it is a ‘final cause;’ our insight is not deep enough for that; but an equally powerful weapon in defence of theism takes its place: I designate it ‘CONCURRENT ADAPTATION;’ that is, fitness, for ever, throughout all time and all space; and fitness absolutely constant amidst all changes. Adaptation is universally concurrent with existence; and whether we have to account for it by sudden and unexplained action, or by the slow operation of laws, is a matter of no essential moment: it is there. ”

“ Is it not enough that it was the supreme, as it was, so far as our present knowledge will carry us, the final outcome of creation?
When the Creative Power and wisdom had built man’s physical nature of the dust of the ground, whether suddenly or slowly, by this method or by that, He breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and he became a living soul. It was the possession of what we call the soul that gave to the manhood its being. ”

“ The ‘law of evolution’ and that of ‘variation and the survival of the fittest’ may, if you will, be held to account for all that narrower knowledge had attributed to direct design. But evolution, like gravitation, is only a method; and the self-adjustments demonstrated in the ‘origin of species’ only make it, to reason, the clearer, that variation and survival is a method that took its origin in mind. It is true that the egg of a moth, and the eye of a dogfish, and the forearm of a tiger must be what they are to accomplish the end of their being. ”

“ Then, in all the area of the universe as we know it, that is, within the range of our experience and experiment, infinite vicissitude leaves what we know as an elementary body, with its first qualities intact, neither more nor less. But we must transcend experience, disregard the evidence before us, and believe that if we give the primal atoms with their inalienable motion time enough, they will emerge at last, not only as life, but as intellect!
Can it avail to repudiate materialism, and yet to philosophically conjure mind out of matter? ”

“ A Divine origin of the universe is usually rejected, because the Divinity eludes the methods of science. But we cannot supplant the Deity by enthroning force. Science can tell us what force does, but it can no more find what force is, than what an infinite mind is. Force is an irresistible mental inference from matter in motion, but its ultimate nature is defiantly beyond the reach of science.
It appears, then, that to obtain even the ‘elements’ of our modern chemistry, the philosophy of mechanical evolution must, at the beginning, call in uncovenanted aid. ”

“ There may be, there is, no direct design in the path of the Amazon or the Danube; but surely there is magnificence in the design that caused the great, the cosmic methods of nature so to co-operate as to cause those rivers inevitably to carve their perfect paths? The dynamics of nature are self-acting up to the very limit of our power of research; but after that, and beyond it, what? Why is the direction of nature’s dynamical methods always and everywhere, through all time and space, beneficent and beautiful? ”

“ That one vast harmony, one perfect method, should fall out by chance, through the operation of uncounted millenniums of ages, is almost inexpressibly improbable; but that a system of harmonies, practically infinite in number and measureless in extent, should all be locked together in one vast uniting harmony, making all creation a chorus, to which all its parts from the centre to the margin contribute their flowing and concerted strains, without a discord to the unity of thought ”

“ Manifestly, then, physical science and its methods cannot illuminate and explain all the dilating area of space, and flow of time, with which our consciousness and reason are concerned. Shapes and motion, form and number, are not data that can carry us to the origin of the universe. You must import an unacknowledged factor. Force stands ready: if you endow it, in imagination equipped in the uniform of science, with the very qualities of mind, no doubt you may cross the boundary of experimental science, and see in matter affected by motion the possibility of all that is. ”

“ I would repeat, that in such a mental effort, it is vain to seek logical aid from the employment of the word ‘force.’ We have seen that the only scientific idea of force we can ever have, is motion. Motion is the result of ever-varying relations, borne to each other by matter, space, and time. At a given instant a body is here; in a measurable interval after, it is not here, but yonder. ‘Motion’ carries with it no occult constructive power. ”

“ All that mechanical evolution has to work with, is atoms and motions. Pile the atoms into complexities too large for clear thought, cluster molecule round molecule, and let them beat in multitudinous harmonies defiant of conception, yet all you have is matter in motion. It is not life with its sentiency; it is not life with its self-chosen movement; it is not life with its power to construct its own substance out of matter that is dead, and to multiply its kind ad libitum. ”

“ Thus the ultimate demand of thought, of reason, and of consciousness, is that when we are unravelling the modes of phenomena, pushing our inquiries into the conditions of all existences, generalizing vast areas of knowledge, expressing in formula of geometry and numbers the splendid rhythm and order of all things in heaven and earth, we are simply finding, and expressing, the thoughts of an Infinite Intelligence; discovering the modes by which His immutable perfections were caused to take form in matter and mind.
It is science alone that can discover and express the mode of action ”

“ There is a sense indeed in which creation by evolution or development is taking place for ever around us. Development is evolution beginning at a fixed point; evolution is only development ab initio.
Every spore that unfolds itself into a fern, every seed that gives origin to another tenant of the forest, every egg that peoples earth or air or sea with another life, is an instance of development. It is only abbreviated evolution; evolution which gives a written record of its laws in every stage, down to the primitive ovum. There the record of the organism in itself ceases. ”

“ Beyond the common fact of existence, there is not a quality of the one that is not infinitely unlike all the qualities of the other.
What this disparity is we all know: enough, that matter is inert, absolutely without perceiving power, and unable in itself to move or to produce motion. But mind is conscious, knows that it exists; and, however mysteriously, originates motion. Matter has mass; mind is absolutely without it. Matter cannot be thought of save as an occupant of space. Mind has no extension. ”

“ It is true that the philosopher, by the common consent of mind, occupies the throne of intellect; but it is not, for all that, to the esoteric philosopher, not to the deep mental seer, who girdles all space, all duration, all phenomena with his thought, that nature reveals her latest, her subtlest, her profoundest secrets. ”

“ Yes; the mind goes out to this conclusion, not defiant of science, but gratefully paying toll to it for an infinitely enlightening and ennobling passage through the marvels of phenomena, and the splendour of Nature’s methods, right to the very margin, beyond which science herself declares she cannot go; and although the physicist may declare he does not need it, and the mathematician that he can dispense with it, although all their immediate problems can be worked without it, yet the mind goes forth on the wings of its rational powers, its moral consciousness, its judgment ”

“ If we can obtain so complete a knowledge of matter and motion, by a scientific study of them, as will enable us, with that knowledge alone, to explain their origin and account for the sequences they involve, then there is no more mystery. There are no ‘ultimates’ to explain. Our knowledge covers all that is, in space and time. The ‘Absolute’ itself is a meaningless superfluity, and the mysterious ‘power’ that is philosophically invoked can have no true place, for all is explicable without it.
A beginning is inevitable to a philosophy of material evolution. ”

“ Now let us ask, can we as rational beings account for all the properties of living things in terms of matter and motion? Will vibrating atoms, with millenniums of ages to work in, but no power to direct them, explain the wonder? Was the transmutation of not-living matter into living brought about merely by what we can reduce to solid geometry and transcendental numbers? atoms, which we can approximately measure, dancing to the rhythm of complex motion? ”

“ Our knowledge of the observed processes of nature erects no mental barrier to the occurrence of something never before observed. Miracles are not, it is now broadly admitted, dependent on science, but on evidence for their possibility and truth. Nay, more, it is conceivable that, what to us might be profoundly miraculous, might be the outcome of sheer and unmodified natural law.
If we could annul the interval of time between the great minds of the long past and bring them into direct and intelligent contact with the most marked victories of modern research and genius, what would be the effect? ”

“ Can it strip theology of one ray of the splendour of Deity, to find, from the evidence of nature, that He thought, and willed into action, the balanced forces and immutable laws, which were so related to each other, and to the foreseen requirements of onward and upward movement, that their progress is music, and their products are harmonies?—perfect adjustments—and, amidst ever-changing circumstances, ever-changing adaptations and self-adjusted design? ”

“ Now modern biological science, guided by the splendid genius and ceaseless research of Darwin, and the whole field of biologists, for the past quarter of a century, has been able for all practical purposes to discover and demonstrate a great ‘law’ or method, according to which all the varieties of living ‘species,’ animal and vegetable, have arisen; connecting the remotest ages of the life of the globe with the present flora and fauna in one unbroken continuity, by one unchanging method. The organic history of any individual becomes an analogue of the organic history of the world. ”

“ Can that be a higher view of an illimitable Creative Mind, which conceived of Him as a Power who caused the earth to be formed, and the heavens to be filled, in six literal days, rather than to think of Him to whom there can be no yesterday and no to-morrow, but an unchanging now, as determining laws and forces, which, in the slow progression of uncounted ages, should express His creative will and accomplish His Divine idea? ”

“ Science can find no more; it asks no more; and materialism says, there is no more. There is no design in it; it is, because to be at all, it must be that. There is no design in the form of the river-bed which the mighty waters have engraved for themselves in their irresistible movement down the mountain slope and along the windings of the valley to the sea. ”

“ Science is without function in presence of a primal cause. It is powerless, by virtue of its knowledge or its methods, to affirm or to deny an infinite and eternal self-existence. And yet such is not only possible to thought, but has congruity with all the faculties of reason. The principle of causality involves merely that every finite existence must have had a cause for its being ”

“ Then, if by long trains of sequential effects and secondary causes we are led up, not by demonstration, but by irresistible moral conviction, to a Primordial Power, a source of all, what is such creative cause? Is it inevitably God? Is the universe, as we know it, infinite? ”

“ Then what can that ‘matter’ be with which the physicist must ultimately and in the beginning deal? When matter is divested of all its qualities, divested in thought of all the ‘modes of motion’ by which it manifests itself to us, what is it? Is it mass, wholly incapable of affecting our senses? Matter sine perceptione? That cannot be a thing, it is an abstraction, and he must be something more than a bold man, who would logically infer an actual factor, corresponding to the abstract conception. ”

“ But if the mode of creation be a question of evidence, who are the witnesses? They are those who are students and masters of the facts of Nature. Willing or not willing, in the end, we must accept the facts of Science. What, from the very nature and constitution of our mind, we are bound to accept as truth, it would be a travesty of all morality to ignore, much more to reject. ”