On the power, wisdom and goodness of God as manifested in the adaptation of external nature to the moral and intellectual constitution of man

Front matter

THE BEJ33GEWATEE, TREATISES ,

ON THE

POWER, WISDOM, AND GOODNESS OF GOD, AS MANIFESTED IN THE CREATION.

Dedication

With this powerful aid I commenced the high investigation to which your Lordship has called me. To imagine that I have completed it, would be to forget at once the fulness of the Creation, and the finitude of the Creature. "Whatever the department of Nature may be which we explore, in quest of evidence for the perfections of its Author, there is no inquirer, though even of the most transcendent powers, who shall ever attain the satisfaction of having traversed the whole length and breadth of the land. He will have but entered and proceeded a certain way, within the margin of a territory, whose riches are inexhaustible.

That your Lordship may long continue, by your zeal and talents and lofty erudition, to sustain the honours, and to promote the vital good, of our Religious Establishments in this Empire, is the fervent desire and prayer of

My Lord, Your Lordship's most obliged and obedient Servant,

Preface

we should have left out a very rich and Important track of argument, had we forborne all observation on the evidence for the Divine perfections, in the structure and processes of the mind itself, and confined ourselves to the evidence afforded by the relations which the mind bore to the external world. In the adaptation of external nature to man's physical constitution, there are many beautiful and decisive indications of a God. But prior to these, there is a multitude of distinct indications, both in the human anatomy, and the human physiology, viewed by themselves, and as separate objects of contemplation. And accordingly, in this joint undertaking, there have been specific labourers assigned to each of these departments. But we have not had the advantage of any previous expounder for the anatomy of the mind, or the physiology of the mind; and we felt that to have left unnoticed all the vivid and various inscriptions of a Divinity, which might be collected there, would have been to withhold from view some of the best attestations in the whole range and economy of nature, for the wisdom and benevolence of its great Architect.

But to construct a natural theology on any subject, It is not necessary to make of that subject a full scientific exposition. The one is as distinct from the other, as the study of final is from the study of efficient causes — the former often lying patent to observation, while the latter may be still involved in deepest obscurity. It were a manifest injury to our cause, it were to bedim the native lustre of its evidences, did we enter with it among the recondite places of the

PREFACE.

xxxix mental philosophy, and there enwrap it in the ambiguity of questions yet unresolved, in the mist of controversies yet unsettled. Often, though not always, the argument for a God in some phenomenon of nature depends upon its reality, and not upon its analysis, or the physical mode of its origination — on the undoubted truth that so it is, and not on the undetermined, perhaps indeterminable question of how it is. We should not have shrunk from the obscurer investigation, had it been at all necessary. But that is no reason why time must be consumed on matters which are at once obscure and irrelevant. It is all the more fortunate that we are not too long detained from an entry on our proper task, among the depths or the difficulties of any preliminary disquisition which comes before it — and that the main strength of the argument which our mental constitution, taken by itself, furnishes to the cause of theism, lies not in those subtilties which are apprehended only by few, but in certain broad and palpable generalities which are recognised by all men.

But there is another explanation which we deem it necessary to make, in order fully to reconcile the actual topics of our essay, with the designation which has been prefixed to it.

If by external nature be meant all that is external to mind, then the proper subject of our argument is the adaptation of the material to the mental world. But if by external nature be meant all that is external to one individual mind, then would the subject be very greatly extended ; for beside the reciprocal influence between that individual mind, and all sensible and material things, xl

PREFACE.

we should consider the reciprocal influence between it and all other minds. By this contraction of the idea from the mental world to but one individual member of it — and this proportional extension in the idea of external nature from the material creation to the whole of that living, as well as inanimate creation, by which any single man is surrounded — we are introduced not merely to the action and reaction which obtain between mind and matter ; but, which is far more prolific of evidence for a Deity, to the action and reaction which obtain between mind and mind. We thus find access to a much larger territory, which should otherwise be left unexplored— and have the opportunity of tracing the marks of a divine intelligence in the mechanism of human society, and in the framework of the social and economical systems to which men are conducted, when they adhere to that light, and follow the impulses of those affections, which God has bestowed on them.

But in the progress of our argument, we come at length to be engaged with the adaptations of external nature, even in the most strict and limited sense of the term. In the origin and rights of property, as well as in the various economic interests of society, we behold the purest exemplification of that adjustment which obtains between the material system of things and man's moral nature — and when we proceed to treat of his intellectual constitution, it will be found that the harmonies between the material and the mental worlds are still more numerous, and more palpably indicative of that wisdom which originated both, and conformed them with exquisite and profound skill to each other.

Contents

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PAST I.

ON THE ADAPTATION OP EXTERNAL NATURE TO THE MORAL CONSTITUTION OP MAN.