Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/768

748 field of scientific inquiry by relegating it to the supernatural, and assuming it to be settled by an infallible preternatural inspiration, which is above the sphere of science that deals only with the natural. Orthodoxy plants itself upon the divine, infallible record, which by its nature and source is claimed to be above the reach of science. But Dr. Martineau is heterodox and cannot take this ground. His position is, that the Bible is sacred, but not infallible—sacred like the sacred books of other religions. He says: "I am asked how, after giving up the Old Testament cosmogony, I can any longer speak of 'sacred books,' without informing my readers where to find them . . . . Can a literature, then, have nothing sacred unless it be infallible? Has the religion of the present no roots in the soil of the past, so that nothing is gained for our spiritual culture by exploring its history and reproducing its poetry, and ascending to the tributary waters of its life? The real modern discovery, far from saying there is no sacred literature, because none oracular, assures us that there are several; and, notwithstanding a deepened, because purified attachment to our own 'origenes' in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, persuades us to look with an open reverence into all writings that have embodied and sustained the greater pieties of the world."

By this position the absorption of theology into science is complete. For if Christianity has no other or different claims for the validity of what it offers than half a dozen other religions have—and impliedly a hundred other religions—what remains but to accept the phenomena of religions as a part of the phenomena of Nature open to scientific exploration? And, if thrown upon Nature, we encounter unity and evolution, and must study the genesis of religious beliefs, the development of superstitions, and the derivation of theological systems, as we study the unfolding of life, or the origin and progress of human institutions. The underlying principle of evolution is continuity, the lowest being connected with the highest by unbroken lines of unity and causation. But though committed, as we think, to this view by the position he has taken. Dr. Martineau affirms a break in the upward movement, so abrupt and total that science cannot cross it. He says, "Nature, in respect of its higher affections, compassion, self-forgetfulness, moral obligation, is constructed in harmony with a world divinely ruled," and this is the sphere of intuition and theology where science does not belong. But does the divine rule necessarily rule out science? and are not intuitions in this higher realm as open to be inquired of scientifically as instincts in the lowest sphere? The writer's declarations that it is the office of theology to explore the "whence" of things, and that it pertains to the "upper zone" of human nature, do not quite clear up the confusion of its boundary relations to science.

Dr. Martineau labors to point out, in his present essay, the difficulties that the "materialist" must encounter in explaining things by the atomic hypothesis; and in his next article he promises to show the deficiencies of the dynamic hypothesis for the same purpose. It is unnecessary to say that, as a writer, Dr. Martineau is an accomplished master of rhetorical effect.

is an interesting question how the different races of mankind rank as liars. Is the capacity to falsify a constant quantity in all the varieties of men, or does it vary like other qualities; and, if variable, is it subject to development, and how do the various tribes of men stand upon the scale?

A United States Senator has given us his decisive dictum upon the subject, and there ought to be wisdom in a