William Jackson

“ Such shouldst thou still become, thyself all permeable to a holier power! thyself at once hidden and glorified by its own transparency, as the accidental and dividuous in this quiet and harmonious object is subjected to the life and light of nature; to that life and light of nature, I say, which shines in every plant and flower, even as the transmitted power, love and wisdom of God over all fills, and shines through, nature! ”

“ Thou and I, O reader, have harboured strange fancies;—let them go;—we are but parts of the Whole; and the Whole is a mechanical Unity. Now that we find ourselves disabused and illuminated, our great difficulty may perhaps be to fall down, Strauss-like, and worship this Universum. Can such worship, or such an object of worship, bless and satisfy our high aspiring race? Eyes that have watched for Righteousness, hearts that have yearned after it, let the answer come from you! In this answer lives or dies the twofold belief of the Natural Theologian, the twofold hope resulting to Mankind. ”

“ But there belong exclusively to Man, instinctive beliefs, impulses, and ideas, which possess a glory of their own;—raise him, first above the brutes,—next above himself as he now exists,—and make him know that he may aspire to become the denizen of a brighter world than this. Among them, is the feeling that Nature herself is (like the tree or cloud illumined by the sun) , everywhere penetrated by a beauty and a power streaming through her;—compared with the reality of which she is but a filmy veil,—or it may be an illusive image. ”

“ Moral Truth thus opens to Man's eye a clear vista into the Timeless
and the Absolute, to an immortal life beyond the grave, and to God the Sovereign both of Nature and of Man. It tells us the secret of true Causation, and with it of all that is most worth living for, the intrinsically greatest and Best of Humanity. And it binds every human being, as by golden links, to that ever present Divine throne, the shrine and oracle set up within his own breast. We ought always to remember that upon those grand truths which if practically certain cannot be ultimately false, Kant staked his all. ”

“ How melancholy is it to feel that intellectual congratulation which attends the serene triumph of a life of studious toil chilled by the consciousness that the labour, the research, the Asiatic splendour of illustration, have been devoted, in part at least, to obtain a wicked end—not in the headlong wantonness of youth, or the wild sportiveness of animal spirits, but urged by the deliberate, hearted purpose of crushing the light of human hope—all that is worth living for, and all that is worth dying for—and substituting for them nothing but a rayless scepticism. ”

“ Such is Theism, penetrating the head and heart of Man; appealing to his intellect, his conscience, and his affections. Such is Theism; sending upwards, out of Man's spirit, aspirations which "dumb driven cattle" cannot breathe—often the sole sweet incense from Earth to Heaven. It is possible that, to some readers, the passages extracted will sound like the accents of a foreign tongue. Of such it may properly be asked, whether any man has a right so to call in question another sane man's honest consciousness, as to deny its reality, worth, and excellence? ”

“ There are many truths which we discern afar off, like features of a smiling land of promise; and, knowing that they must become one day the heritage of mankind, we tend towards them without haste, yet without forgetfulness, and in this temper of mind wait contentedly. But, there are some truths for which we cannot afford to wait. They concern our destinies too closely; they are too near our hearts; too influential on our lives and happiness.
The old question asked in the youth of human philosophy, is the one we all begin by asking in our first confidence and eagerness of pursuit. ”

“ Its beauty is infinite. The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both. Is not the charm of one of Plato's or Aristotle's definitions, strictly like that of the Antigone of Sophocles? It is, in both cases, that a spiritual life has been imparted to nature; that the solid seeming block of matter has been pervaded and dissolved by a thought; that this feeble human being has penetrated the vast masses of nature with an informing soul, and recognized itself in their harmony, that is, seized their law. ”

“ There is, probably, no example of production more definite than the work of a real statesman. A gifted human mind determines to pursue the thing that is just and right and good; sees where the means to be utilized may be found and enforced; touches the right spring of activity and power, and leads his fellow-men into a path of precedent or constitution for which ages may consecrate his memory.—But, let us suppose that he or any other true producer falls short of realizing his idea. Then, the act of Will would be in its essence as noble a reality as the deed itself. ”

“ We know what sorts of intelligence are required to apprehend, and to do no more than apprehend, the rationale of many among these natural movements, forces, and processes. Some of them can be explained only by a very great mathematician, other some by an equally great chemist, biologist, or psychologist. And in some, Man of the 19th century is as much a tyro and disciple,—as ignorant and as tentative—as his forefathers were two thousand years ago. What a complexity of Minds, or what a majestic supremacy of one Mind becomes thus discernible by the eye of Reason! ”

“ To look on the life of a father or a near friend, after death, is like looking on a moonlighted landscape; its harsher features are lost in lengthening shadow; all that we thought rugged and stern, appears subdued and blended with a thousand fondly-remembered softnesses. A mild and silvery radiance flows over the whole familiar scene;—we gaze and sigh,—and sigh and gaze again. To think of its becoming veiled from our eyes, seems like losing a portion of our own existence. ”

“ Would he not have urged with the force of truth, that to animalize a Man is to destroy his Manhood, to weaken his judgment and impair his Moral sense? Would he not have argued from Rousseau the depraved boy, to Rousseau the shop-man and footman, and pointed out that in such cases Truth, Honesty, and Gratitude become mere names and shadows?—No one could have replied that Hume was wrong in fact and experience, but some might have said that all which lowers the supremacy of the Moral sense lowers the Manhood of Man. ”

“ There are two features in which all these productive men resemble each other. One, the creative influence of a purely human will, which not only sees what is not as though it is,—but also determines that it shall be. The other, a way of looking at, or rather, through Nature, as something more than an assemblage of facts or phenomena;—of penetrating to the mind of Nature,—her ideal laws legible by the intellectual eye of Man;—and finally, of putting each required law into motion,—that is to say, converting an idea into a force, by the movement of the producer's Will. ”

“ No wonder if men soon concluded that a moving force,—material and soulless,—would equally fulfil the same exalted functions. And, surely, one thing is an account of the Universe as reasonable and as sufficient as the other.
If we place a non-theistic theory in relation to our human inner nature, there ensues the same monstrous incongruity. The plenitude of loveliness, which overflows creation, as it were with multitudinous waves of light, we are asked to think of as the work of blind non-being. ”

“ How triumphant does Idealism now appear! How little trustworthy that boasted sense of which mankind have constantly said, "seeing is believing," although an apostle and philosophers innumerable have put the two in opposition!
Perhaps, however, instead of leading to a "triumph of Idealism," the paradoxes and incongruities—in a word, the vast accumulation of the Unknowable—belonging to eyesight considered as a Sensation, must be allowed to land us on the shore of a far-stretching Scepticism illimitable to the mind's eye. ”

“ Nothing could be more useless than to repeat illustrative examples of Design already thrice told by an endless variety of treatises. Of so wide a subject everything may be quoted as an illustration, from a pebble to a world, if only the principle illustrated—the pivot on which the argument turns—be understood and admitted. In modern times, this turning-point is precisely the centre of the dispute. Untrained minds misapprehend the meaning of the word Design, and are further still from apprehending the real force of argument from analogy. ”

“ And, never has there existed any human being more truly impressible by Nature's loveliness, or more skilled in conveying the impression to the minds of others, than a genuine British Naturalist. For the holiday-maker to walk with such a lover of Nature through field and forest, over moor and mountain, by rivulet, lake or sea, is to gain a new sense of wonder and admiration;—new perceptions of excellence, symmetry, and unity; while freshened emotions of religious awe and trust keep springing upwards from them all. It is with outward nature, as it is with individual natures ”

“ It seems singular that this rise of thought has of late years seldom been explicitly put forward as the natural continuation and necessary extension of the argument from Design. "He that planted the ear, shall He not hear? He that formed the eye, shall He not see?... He that teacheth man knowledge, shall not He know?" In other words, if we may argue from the structure of the eye and ear to an Intelligence which comprehends our sense-perceptions, their conditions, and their activities, may we not always argue from the reason of man to an Intelligence comprehending our highest human endowments? ”

“ For in reality we see, not only with our bodily sense and our contemplative reason, but also with the strength and insight of affection. And thus many a weary Man perpetually finds the aspect of the visible universe indescribably soothing amidst his own confusions and disappointments. He may feel, at times, that his human heart can penetrate beyond what eye and head have taught him; and, while thoughtfully observing the footprints of creative mind, he can feel within his bosom a sense of superhuman tenderness, like the warm breath of his living Creator. ”

“ In any point of space, in any section of Time, let there be a living Man; and there is an Infinitude above him and beneath him, and an Eternity encompasses him on this hand and on that; and tones of Sphere-music, and tidings from loftier worlds, will flit round him, if he can but listen, and visit him with holy influences, even in the thickest press of trivialities, or the din of busiest life. ”

“ The strong man subjects Nature, but the Supernatural is above both it, and him. He cannot even possess the thought of the Supreme. Whether he will or no, it possesses him. To his reason, Nature cannot subsist, as the true and independent ground of anything;—her laws are the servants of his volition;—and her chain of antecedent and consequent hangs between a First and a Last, without giving any sufficient account of either. If the Universe began in a shining Nebula, the question remains unsolved,—what first brought the thin cloud into being? ”

“ Who shall persuade him to deny the reasonableness of a Providence following creation? Who can reprove the man when he feels and asserts his own moral power, for a belief in Miracles? Above all, who will demonstrate that prayer is inefficacious, if we can rise (as Baden Powell says we can rise) "by analogy with the exercise of intellect, and the volition, or power of moral causation, of which we are conscious within ourselves, to the Supreme Mind and Moral Cause of the universe?" ”

“ Proof of the existence and presence of any being is quite different from the immediate perception, the consciousness of it. What then will be the joy of heart, which his presence, and the light of his countenance, who is the life of the universe, will inspire good men with, when they shall have a sensation, that he is the sustainer of their being, that they exist in him; when they shall feel his influence to cheer and enliven and support their frame, in a manner of which we have now no conception? ”

“ Refined Materialism proceeds to ask in the next place, what more do we know of Matter than its rigid undeviating reign of Law?—The great Globe itself obeys the same Laws as the falling stone: they pervade and direct the mechanism of the starry heavens. Life does not exempt either vegetable or animal from the same rule of law. We have just seen that Mankind is not so made to differ, as to permit a plea of exemption from the same empire. Ascend from Protoplasm to the highest human intelligence,—one heritage devolves through brute to man. ”