*

ART. V.-THE SCIENTIFIC ELEMENTS OF RELIGION. SAYS Herbert Spencer, "A religious creed is definable as an a priori theory of the universe." Science is not limited in its investigations to the visible, as so many erroneously deem it to be, even of its votaries. It does not stand in antagonism to religion, especially to its first or fundamental principles, but is so blended with those primary principles as to be incomplete and foundationless without them. Science not only postulates as a theoretic principle invisible forces or potencies, but affirms, as an absolute necessity, the existence of such invisible entities. There could be no science of astronomy without postulating the invisible force of gravity, which is in no way an object of sense, and whose nature no scientist assumes to understand. This science is based upon that invisible force whose laws and modes of action it makes the special subject of its investigation. The recognition of this invisible force, called gravity, and the investigation of the laws of its action are not only necessary to lay the foundations of the science of astronomy, but also need ful to conduct its discoveries.

No power of the microscope has been able to discover the atom which chemical science postulates as the ultimate and primary form of matter. Faraday defines the atom as a point of force. Without the assumption of the existence of these atoms, or points of force, the science of chemistry could formu late no laws of chemical combination, and all the mysteries of chemical affinity would be insoluble. Here, also, is a force, invisible in itself, whose effects extend through all the multifarious changes of matter, and to whose workings the scientist is compelled, in the very phrase with which he names its operations, to ascribe selective intelligence by terming it "elective affinity."

Science has sometimes sought to evade the religious element necessarily involved in the recognition of an intelligent First Cause by affirming that the existence of forces is not only inherent in matter, but originates in matter. But, as a necessity of philosophic thought, science has been obliged to abandon the old materialism, and, while affirming that force is the substratum

*First Principles, p. 143.

of matter, to admit the fact that force must have its origin in mind.

The old philosophy of Hume, that cause is mere antecedence, -at least this is all we know about it-science has been obliged to discard, and to recognize efficiency as a necessary element in cause; to admit that no cause can properly be deemed such which does not possess as an inherent quality the element of efficiency; that is, the power adequate to produce the effect and actually issuing in those effects.

Thus it is that philosophy and science have joined hands in removing the old theory of second causes, whose existence in science finds its precise correlation to the doctrine of polytheism in religion. Various systems of philosophy have long since exhibited the fallacies of Hume's theory of cause as mere antecedence, showing that there is a broad distinction between mere antecedency and the conditions and elements requisite for fulfilling the idea and relations of cause. The analysis of the necessary elements of cause led also to the discovery of the absurdity of the doctrine of second causes. This fact cannot be exhibited more clearly than in the language of Professor Bowen, Harvard College:

Second causes are no causes at all, and exist only in thought. A cause, in the proper sense of the word, that is, as an efficient cause, as original and direct in its action, must be a first cause; that through which its action is transmitted is not a cause, but a portion of the effect, since it does not act, but is only acted upon. At most, it is only an instrumental cause.*

Professor Tyndall never rendered a greater service as a physicist to the cause of physical science than when he shattered the theory of second causes, and also displayed the fallacy of Hume's theory of cause as antecedence, in the explanation he rendered of the relations of the physical phenomena of light, heat, electricity, and magnetism, as well as chemical affinity to each other, showing how light produces heat and heat in turn produces light; that heat also produces electricity and in similar manner electricity produces heat; also that electricity produces magnetism and magnetism in turn evolves electricity; that electricity develops chemical affinity and chemical affinity evolves electricity. Which, then, he pointedly asks, can be *Princeton Review, May, 1879.

35-FIFTH SERIES, VOL. V.

cause and which effect? for each in turn is antecedent to and productive of the other. The whole enigma is resolved, as Professor Tyndall shows, when science reveals to us the fact that light, heat, electricity, magnetism, and chemical affinity are only different modes of motion. All these changes are based upon the scientific doctrine of the convertibility of motion, which is the true explanation of all the phenomena that relate to the doctrine of the correlation of forces. The true, efficient cause for all these varied phenomena can be found only in the source of the motion producing these varied manifestations, or effects. But when we seek for the source of motion we are brought face to face with the Omnipotent One. And it is in the recognition of such an omnipotent Power, Creator and Upholder of the universe, "the eternal Energy from which all things proceed," that religion has its origin and existence, so that the fundamental element in religion constitutes also the primary principle and fact in science and philosophy.

Here it is that science, philosophy, and religion find themselves on common ground, in postulating the existence of a First Cause. The question now at issue between them is, first, What is the nature of this Cause? secondly, What are the relations which this creative and efficient Cause, called First Cause, sustains to the material universe? First, as to its nature:

Science, or at least a certain school of scientists who insist on limiting the researches and sphere of science to that which relates strictly to the phenomena of the material world, refuses to enter the domain of philosophy and extend its inquiries beyond force and its manifestations in visible phenomena to the source and origin of force. This is the agnosticism of science, when it insists on not crossing in its explorations the boundaries that separate it from philosophy and religion, affirming that the true and proper limits of science forbid its entering upon the search after the origin or source of force.

But it is impossible to confine the human mind to these limitations. Pressed by the impulses and demands of its own nature, mind must seek to know of origin and source. The axiomatic principles incorporated into its very nature, without which mind could not be mind, guide it in its search. There is no phenomenon of nature of which the mind feels so certain as that every effect must have a cause. It may not know what

the cause is, but of its assured existence it knows, as a necessary and universal truth. Knowing that a cause must exist, it discerns the fact that knowledge is incomplete until it has searched out the cause and become acquainted with its nature and modes of operation. The love of knowledge, in which both science and philosophy have their birth, is the noble impulse that urges it onward in its quest, and thus the mind itself becomes its own impulse and guide into the region of philosophy and religion. And these conjointly supply (to the knowledge of that fundamental element and primary principle) the basis on which science itself rests.

Mind reveals the fact that there must be a cause for all the phenomena of the material universe. Religion reveals, as science cannot, the nature of this cause. Philosophy reveals the fact that it must be an efficient cause. Religion reveals its unity, not merely as the efficient cause of certain material phenomena in nature, but as the one source of all the forces in nature, the Omnipotent One.

But, further, science itself reveals this power as necessarily omnipresent in nature. This is a revelation both of science and philosophy, as well as of religion. A power can act only where it is present. Newton affirmed this fact in regard to the force of gravity. At the same time that he conceded our ignorance of the nature of gravity he says:

not.

It is inconceivable that a power or force should act where it is . . That one body may act upon another, at a distance, through a vacuum, without the mediation of any thing else by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it. Gravity must be caused by an agent acting constantly according to certain laws.

Wherever power is, there must be the omnipotent one source of all power. Thus it is that science affirms the omnipresence of the Omnipotent One. As Herbert Spencer states it: "Of this we may be certain, that we are ever in the presence of that eternal Energy from which all things proceed."

Of the nature of this force of gravity in its mysterious relations to the movements of the planets, Professor Charles

A. Young, an eminent astronomer of our own age, most appositely says:

What it is and how it acts, I do not know. I cannot tell. It stands with me along with the fact that when I will my arm to rise it rises. It is inscrutable. All the explanations that have been given of it seem to me merely to darken counsel with words and with no understanding. They do not remove the difficulty at all. If I were to say what I really believe, it would be that the motion of the spheres of the material universe stand in some such relations to Him in whom all things exist, the ever-present and omnipotent God, as the motions of my body to my will.

Mental philosophy reveals the fact that the only conceivable source of force is will, so that both by science and philosophy we are brought to the recognition of mind or will as a necessary element in this omnipotent and omnipresent Power of the universe. It follows that if mind and will are thus necessary elements in the nature of this omnipotent and omnipresent Power, having their existence in primitive Being, First Cause, ground and origin of all other beings, there can be no other power competent to constrain or to limit and direct its energies. Hence it must be a self-determining power, as religion asserts concerning the divine will in its relations to the varied objects in the created universe, “For thy pleasure they are and were created." Such are the revelations which religion makes, in harmony with philosophy, of the nature of this creative, omnipotent, omnipresent, self-determining Power, at once Creator and Ruler of the universe.

The question arises, Whence, then, the antagonism between philosophy and religion? We answer, Simply because, on the one hand, philosophy has not been always true to itself in its expositions of the correct philosophic theory of cause and its necessary nature; nor, on the other hand, has religion been always true to itself in its teachings of the being and nature of God. Instead of holding firmly and consistently to the doctrine of the omnipotence and omnipresence of Deity, it has taught the anthropomorphic view of a God separate from nature. This erroneous doctrine of the relations of God to nature, which many of the old divines maintained, was derived, not from the Greek philosophy, as has been sometimes affirmed, at least not from the spiritual school of Greek phi