mitted the same course."* The same has been commonly exemplified in the history of science. Says Lange: "With the exception of Democritus, scarcely a single one of the great scientific inventors and discoverers of Greece and Rome belongs to any school of Materialists; but we find a long series of men most worthy of honor, who belonged to schools of the most opposite tendency possible, idealistic, formalistic, or even enthusiastic. Mathematics is especially to be noticed. Plato, the father of an enthusiasm sometimes beautiful and of deep meaning, sometimes misleading and fanatical, is still the spiritual father of a series of investigators who brought mathematics to the highest point which it attained in ancient times." After adducing various historical exemplifications of his position, Lange adds: "The small part which materialism has had in stimulating scientific investigation is not accidental, nor can it be ascribed to the contemplative quietism of Epicurus; but the fact is that, in those who achieved anything for the progress of (physical) science, the ideal element was a power in the closest connection with their discoveries and inventions." To the same purport are the words of Humboldt: "In Plato's high appreciation of mathematical development of thought and in Aristotle's morphological views embracing all organisms, lay the germs of all later advances of physical science."‡

This undying desire to find the spiritual in nature is exemplified in Shelley. He was an atheist. He vauntingly wrote his name on the rocks of the Alps, "Percy Bysshe Shelley, Atheist." Yet in his letters he says that he loves to think of a fine intellectual spirit pervading the universe. It is the pathetic cry of a refined and cultivated mind imprisoned in the negations of atheism, yet unable to repress its own rational intuitions and yearning to commune in nature with a fine intellectual spirit like its own. It is the delicate spirit Ariel, imprisoned by a malignant witch in a cleft pine, and writhing to escape and soar in its native empyrean.

VII. The claim that the empirical science of nature is the only and exclusive science, contradicts the constitution of the human mind, the essential nature of human thought, and its entire history. This is an inference from the foregoing discussion. I have already alluded to this claim. From the position which we have now attained, we also see that empirical science, far from being justified in this claim, cannot exist as science by itself exclusive of science in the higher grades; but that the three grades, distinguishable but inseparable, are all essential to the completion of scientific thought on any object of investigation.

* Address before British Association, Belfast, 1874: Sub initio.

+ Geschichte des Materialismus. Vol. I., pp. 92, 93. Book I., Section I., Chap. iv. Cosmos, Otté's Transl. Vol. II., p. 176.

Prof. Lotze says: "The world is certainly not so constituted that the individual fundamental truths which we find dominating in it hang together according to the poor pattern of a logical superordination, co-ordination, and subordination. They form rather a texture so woven that they are all at the same time present in every bit and fold of it. You can, according to the need you feel, make every one of these threads the chief subject of your consideration; but you cannot do this at all, or at least you cannot do it in a useful way, without taking account at every instant of the other threads with which it is indissolubly united."*

But after all

their classes

The incompleteness and lack of significance of the empirical science of nature when isolated from science in a higher grade may be illustrated by the study of a book. We would study Homer's Iliad. The first step must be to learn the letters and the order of their grouping in words. We accordingly proceed to examine them with scientific accuracy; we arrange them in classes according to resemblances, and observe various uniform sequences of them in words. This is the empirical science of the phenomena presented in the book: this study we know only the phenomena of the book in and uniform sequences; that is, the letters and the words. We do not understand the book till we discover the thought which these letters and words express, and comprehend the whole in its unity and design as an epic poem. This part of our study is analogous to philosophy. But when we read the Iliad we know that it expresses the thought of an intelligent being who was its author. This corresponds to theology. The study of the letters and their arrangement in words is the first department of knowledge respecting the book, indispensable to any knowledge of it. But it would be preposterous to say that this is the complete and only knowledge of the poem. So in the study of nature, the observation, classification and co-ordination of phenomena, which we call empirical science, is only the learning of the letters, classifying them as in a case of type by resemblance, and co-ordinating them in words. But this no more gives a real knowledge of nature than the knowledge of the letters and of spelling gives a complete knowledge of Homer's Iliad. So difficult is the task of learning to read that we do not wonder that the attention of children is wholly occupied with the letters and words, and that they at first read mechanically without taking the sense. And so vast is the book of nature and so laborious the process of learning to read it, it is not wonderful that its students should stick for a time in the letter and read mechanically without

* Philosophy of the last forty years, by Prof. Lotze: Contemporary Review, Jan. 1880.

taking the sense. But maturer knowledge and further intellectual growth will take them beyond this childishness, and make them, not merely observers, but also interpreters of nature.

I will give another illustration. Science teaches that all thinking, volition and emotion involve molecular action of the brain. Suppose some instrument invented by which you can look through the skull and observe this molecular action. You find some Shakespeare composing Macbeth, some Newton writing the Principia, some Paul glowing with self-sacrificing love; and in each case you make an exact chart of the course or orbit of every moving molecule. You have an exact delineation of the action of the brain; but it bears not the remotest resemblance to the thoughts and feelings expressed by it, to the imaginative creation of Macbeth, the mathematical demonstrations of the Principia, the self-sacrificing love of Paul. You have observed the phenomena, you have totally missed their significance. Suppose, now, an infinitesimal inhabitant of the brain, to whom the brain is the whole known universe and to whom the motions of its molecules are relatively as great as to us the motions of the planets. Suppose this infinitesimal being provides himself with telescope and microscope and observes all these motions of the molecules, classifies them by resemblance, and coordinates them in their uniform sequences. Now he claims that he has created a science of the universe-this brain which he lives in being to him the universe-and yet he entirely misses the thought, the volition, the emotions expressed in these movements, and has no knowledge of the intelligent being whose thought, volition and emotion the action of the brain expresses. How plain it is that this infinitesimal being deludes himself with the mere show of knowledge while he misses its deepest reality. And yet it is no more a mere show without reality than is the science of the natural universe which confines itself to the resemblances and sequences of phenomena, with no apprehension of the thought which the phenomena express, or of the supreme intelligence in which they originate, or the rational system in which they exist.

Ludwig Noiré, speaking of Büchner's materialism, compares it to a child's description of music, who describes it as the action of the player putting his hand on the keys, moving them up and down, and crossing his arms, but leaves out the music.*

VIII. Another inference from the foregoing discussion is that science in the three grades must be in harmony with itself. These three grades of scientific thought are but the different processes of intelligence, each necessary to the other, all necessary to complete intelligence. When they are rightly apprehended conflict is impossible.

• Die Welt als Entwickelung des Geistes: ss., 18, 19.

We have, therefore, rational ground of certainty that the progress of empirical and noetic science can never conflict with theology nor invalidate it. And it is equally certain that the true scientific spirit is never hostile to the truly religious spirit which rules all right theological inquiry. Scientists continually insist on the "searching, open, humble mind;" and Jesus said: "Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." The obscuration of religious belief does not result from science, but from the incompleteness or perversion of science. We have reasonable ground of assurance that any such obscuration attendant on the scientific study of nature must be temporary, and the ultimate and abiding issue of scientific investigation and progress must be in the future, as it has always been in the past, to confirm man's belief in God, and to purify, illuminate and enlarge the knowledge of Him. Frau von MarenholzBülow relates the following: "Froebel said, 'Let the empirics work in their quarries; they will bring treasures to light which are also necessary. It appears to me,' said I, 'that the investigators of nature, who work in the dark mines of the material world by the light of their own lanterns and imagine that there is nothing brighter, no sunlight, must sometime or other break through the surface above, when they can no longer deny the brighter light of the sun.'"*

Mr. Lewes, in the opening of the "Problems of Life and Mind," says: "Some considerable thinkers. argue that religion has played its part in the evolution of humanity—a noble part, yet only that of a provisional organ, which in the course of development must be displaced by a final organ. Other thinkers, and I follow these, consider that religion will continue to regulate the evolution; but that to do this in the coming ages, it must occupy a position similar to the one it occupied in the past, and express the highest thought of the time, as that thought widens with the ever-growing experience." I accept this demand on theology as reasonable, though I differ from Mr. Lewes as to what complete compliance with the demand implies. However far empirical and rationalistic science may advance, true theology must still be competent to maintain its position as the Science of sciences and the Philosophy of philosophies. It must be competent to take all the results of the highest thought and integrate, interpret and vindicate them in a rational system. However far science may advance, it can never transcend Theism, which recognizes perfect Reason as the ultimate ground of the universe, and its truths, laws, ideals and ends as the archetypes which the universe is progressively expressing. Man cannot overleap reason any more than he can over

* Reminiscences of Froebel, p. 267.

leap the zenith of the firmament; for reason is man's intellectual firmament, the everlasting sunlight which lies about him; and yet he carries it with him, and is always beneath its zenith wherever he goes. Science by no advancement can set aside the supremacy and universality of reason; for it would set aside the godlike power of man which makes science possible, and annul its own essence and calling as science; for science consists essentially in finding the product and expression of reason in all that is. Theism therefore gives the grand reality by which theology is competent to integrate, interpret and account for all things under any possible progress of science. The progress of reason can never transcend reason. The progress of science may purify, elucidate and enlarge theoretical knowledge, but it can never annul the Theism of which true theology in its remotest ramifications of doctrine is the exposition.

I accept, therefore, the words of President Eliot of Harvard University, though perhaps giving a meaning different from his own to his expressions: "Science has thus exalted the idea of God, the greatest service which can be rendered to humanity. Each age must worship its own thought of God, and each age may be judged by the worthiness of that thought. In displaying the uniform continuous action of unrepenting nature in its march from good to better, science has inevitably directed the attention of men to the most glorious attributes of that divine intelligence which acts through nature with the patience of eternity and the fixity of all-foreseeing wisdom. A hundred lifetimes ago a Hebrew Seer gave utterance to one of the grandest thoughts that ever mind of man conceived. . . . This thought, tender and consoling toward human weakness and insignificance as a mother's embrace, but sublime also as the starry heights and majestic as the onward sweep of the ages, science utters as the sum of all its teaching, the sublime result of all its searching and its meditations, and applies alike to the whole universe and to its last atom: The eternal God is thy refuge and underneath are the everlasting arms.'

61. The alleged Conflict of Natural Science and

Theology.

I. Conflict between natural science and theology can arise only from error or incompleteness of knowledge on the one side or the other. A true and complete science of nature can never be in conflict with true and complete theology. Students of natural science do no violence to science in remaining theists or Christians, as multitudes of them have done. Religious unbelief does not spring from science but from ig

⚫Report of Speech at the opening of the Am. Museum of Natural History.