Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17.djvu/258

250 limits of our science, personal; that it is not a power exerted upon Nature, or from without, and in contravention of her ordinary processes; that, so far as our knowledge goes, on the contrary, whatever may be our faith, it is a power invariably exerted through Nature, or from within, and therefore in habitual consistency with her ordinary effects. In other words, they insist, that, so far as the Divine power is cognizable to us, it falls exclusively within and never without the routine of Nature; and as universality is the characteristic of that routine, they do not hesitate, on behalf of science, to affirm that the Divine action is never addressed to specific or differential results, but always to universal or identical ones. In short, they logically refuse to the Divine power as exhibited in Nature all personal or moral quality, as inferring on the part of Deity any possible unequal or inequitable relations to the creatures He has made; and assign to all such reputed partial exhibitions of it a purely educative, and therefore universal, bearing upon the mind of the race.

Such, in brief, is the question agitated between the old and new faiths; whether God acts outwardly upon Nature, or inwardly through Nature,—that is to say, whether His action is specific as addressed to private ends, or strictly universal as addressed only to public ends. If the former hypothesis be true, then sense rightfully controls reason, and everything is exactly what it appears. If the latter hypothesis be true, then sense rightfully serves reason, and nothing is as it appears to be, namely, absolute and independent of everything else, but simply phenomenal and relative to everything else. It is evident to a glance that a controversy so eminently scientific could never have gone to the unwholesome lengths which it has reached in our day, unless there were something in it more than meets the eye: unless, for example, the interests of morality, which is the only recognized bond of our existing societies, were at stake. For if one and the same law binds all Nature, then plant and animal and man have one and the same destiny, so far as their nature goes. If, for example, the plant as one form of natural existence, and the animal as another form, are what they severally are, by no means absolutely, or in themselves, but only by relation to all other plants and animals, then man, who is only a higher, that is, a moral, or evil absolutely or in himself, but only relatively to all other men. And if we allow morality only this relative force,—if the good man is not good absolutely or in himself, nor the evil man evil absolutely or in himself,—why, then our existing civilization, which is built upon such absoluteness, has a fictitious basis, and must fall to the ground.

Hinc ilia lachrymæ. This is why a question apparently of pure science turns out practically so full of inward heartburning and mutual reviling. Neither theology nor science is competent to the philosophic recognition of man's associated destiny, and hence have neither of them the secret of those perturbations which ever and anon gloom our political atmosphere and shut out to the eye of sensuous thought the entire future of the race. Philosophy alone possesses this secret, because it alone perceives that all our political, civil, and even domestic broils grow out of this identical warfare between men's religions and scientific convictions,—have no other source than that persistent insubmission which the interests of force, as represented by priesthoods and governments, are under to the interests of freedom, represented by society. Philosophy mediates between the religious and secular thought of mankind, by making the sphere of God's universal action identical with that of man's organic necessities, and the sphere of His specific action identical with that of man's moral freedom: so harmonizing the two in one subject. Philosophy alone, in short, is competent to the future of human destiny, because it alone adjusts the relation of morals to physics, alone adjusts the specific interests avouched by religion with the universal interests avouched by science. And its competence is owing to this fact exclusively, that it alone apprehends or appreciates the distinctively social destiny of man, a destiny in which the interests of the most intense and exquisite freedom or individuality are bound up with the interests of the most imperious necessity or community,—or, what is the same thing, which presents every man no longer in subjective or moral, but only in objective or æsthetic, contrast with his kind, that so the general harmony may be inflamed by the widest partial diversity. Thus philosophy bids society recognise itself at once as God's perfect work on earth,—bids it rise to instant self-consciousness as the real Divine substance which Church and State have only feebly typified, and put on all Divine strength and peace as its rightful breastplate and ornament. For if all these