Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/831

Rh when I say "I believe in moral obligation," I use the word believe just as I do when I say "I believe in the attestations of memory." "God is not necessary only to my conception of morality. His existence is necessary to the existence of obligation." 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. The Unknowable suddenly stabs me to the heart." I believe in the uniformity of Nature only in the sense in which I believe in every other high probability—for instance, only in the sense in which I believe that the sun will rise tomorrow. I believe in God in the sense in which I believe in pain and pleasure, in space and time, in right and wrong, in myself, in that which curbs me, governs me, besets me behind and before, and lays its hand upon me. The uniformity of Nature, though a very useful working hypothesis, is, as Professor Huxley admits, unproved and unprovable as a final truth of reason. But "if I do not know God, then I know nothing whatsoever," for if "the pillared pavement is rottenness," then surely also is "earth's base built on stubble."

There was a certain perceptible reluctance to follow Father Dalgairns, which lasted some couple of minutes. Then we heard a deep-toned, musical voice, which dwelt with slow emphasis on the most important words of each sentence, and which gave a singular force to the irony with which the speaker's expressions of belief were freely mingled. It was Mr. Ruskin. "The question," he said, "Can experience prove the uniformity of Nature? is, in my mind, so assuredly answerable with the negative which the writer appeared to desire, that precisely on that ground the performance of any so-called miracles whatever would be really unimpressive to me. If a second Joshua to-morrow commanded the sun to stand still, and it obeyed him, and he therefore claimed deference as a miracle-worker, I am afraid I should answer: 'What! a miracle that the sun stands still?—not at all. I was always expecting it would. The only wonder to me was its going on.' But even assuming the demonstrable uniformity of the laws or customs of Nature which are known to us, it remains to me a difficult question what measure of interference with such law or custom we might logically hold miraculous, and what, on the contrary, we should treat only as proof of the existence of some other law hitherto undiscovered. For instance, there is a case authenticated by the signatures of several leading physicians in Paris, in which a peasant-girl, under certain conditions of morbid excitement, was able to move objects at some distance from her without touching them. 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