Page:The optimism of Butler's 'Analogy'.djvu/9

Rh situation which appears to me to be in sympathetic touch with the peculiar qualities of Butler's mind, that I am emboldened to believe that, by the ordinary and natural movement of thought, and not through any individual plea raised on his behalf, the moment is arrived in which he may, once again, be drawn into the central currents of our intellectual life.

But, if this, is to happen, it can only be done through a bold and drastic abandonment of much that stands in the way of his recognition as a modern constructive force.

First, as we all know, the particular Controversy, in which he was mainly engaged, is wholly dead and done with. The Deist, with whom he was concerned, was the special product of a certain temporary stage of scientific development. He was the normal intellectual deposit of the great mechanical Sciences. Under the infinite elasticity of mathematical categories, Physics and Astronomy had given to man's apprehension of the Universe an amazing expansion. For the first time, he had grasped something of its appalling scale. Yet, even in his minute insignificance, he had the faculty to recognize the reign of intelligent Law; and in this intelligibility of Law, in this rational Order and Design, governing every part with mechanical accuracy, directing the whole according to a preconceived scheme, he saw the evidence of a God who answered to his own rationality. The Religion of the living heart, of romance, of pathos, of tragedy, might have to vanish, in face of this absorbing and abstract mechanism. Christianity ceased to have a meaning; because man's emotional life in the flesh, here on earth, had ceased to have any value. Such a life with its passions and its desires, its laughter and its tears, would not fall into mathematical categories. And it fled away into ashamed nothingness before the hosts that peopled the enormous heavens. But the God of Design and Purpose, who responded to the demands of pure reason, remained on His throne. Religion survived in the form of Deism.

So it might succeed in doing, in that brief moment when