Through science to faith

Front matter

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Copyright ]^°:

COPyRIGHT DEPOSIT.

II New York

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

THE LIBBARY Qf

GOt'GRESS.

Two Oop«s8 Receive*

0«»VRK»HT ENTRY

CLASS ^XXa N«.

c«PY a

Copyright, 1902 By Charles Scribner's Sons

Published^ February, 1902

UNIVERSITY PRESS • JOHN WILSON AND SON • CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.

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Preface

This volume contains a course of lectures whicli were given before the Lowell Institute in Boston during the winter months of 1900-1901. It was their object to answer the inquiry whether, through the science of the century which was then passing away, the coming age might enter into richer possession of the spiritual faiths which have been man's heritage through all the centuries.

Modern science is a new appeal to nature. Our inherited religious faiths cannot maintain their power, and they ought not to survive, if they fail to accept fully nature's answer to the latest appeal of our science, and if they do not search diligently for the true interpretation of new disclosures of life. The teachers of divinity to the coming age will need, as an essential element of the instruction in schools of theology, a working knowledge of modern methods of scientific inquiry. For the assurance of faith cannot be maintained from a fortified critical position outside the province of the evolutionary science ; it may be won by positive participation in the work of the scientific world. Some acquaintance especially with biological studies and results should be made a required part of any thorough education for the modern ministry of the vi PREFACE

word of life. In this promising direction of inquiry the younger ministry may find from the following chapters some suggestive aid for their further studies.

This book is not intended for teachers only, but more generally for readers who would inform themselves concerning the scope and tendencies of the evolutionary science since Darwin's time, especially in its relation to our most cherished human faiths and hopes. We have had enough, indeed, of too hastily conclusive and often unverified popular articles concerning the religious teachings of modern science ; there is need of painstaking and appreciative sifting of the results of modern investigations of nature in order that we may understand their real bearing upon the highest problems of human concern. To many persons who are too busy to search for themselves among the strictly scientific sources of knowledge, but who also are too thoughtful not to be interested in such inquiries, this volume may come as an endeavor to meet this need.

As the lectures, which are here revised for publication, were originally prepared for a general audience, technical expressions and too detailed scientific discussions have been avoided; but for the aid of students who may wish to pursue these inquiries further, and with critical minuteness at various points, numerous references to scientific authorities and contributions have been added in the foot-notes. Many of the articles cited contain full summaries of the literature of the subjects to which they refer.

To scientific investigators, likewise, — the author ventures to hope — it may not seem a useless or un-

PREFACE yii

welcome endeavor, if a guest in their laboratories and an admirer of their patient and ingenious researches, would take the accepted results of their inquiries, and seek to understand and interpret them in their larger relations to the outlying realm of human thought and life. He trusts that this book — the fruitage in his religious thinking of seeds gathered from their fields — may be received in scientific circles as a grateful recognition, from the theological side, of the value of faithful scientific work not only to the material welfare of the world, but also for the higher moral and spiritual life of men.

I would mention my personal indebtedness for aid in the laboratory, and for valuable suggestions, to Professor S. I. Smith, and to Dr. W. R. Coe of the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University; and readers of this volume will be indebted also with me to Dr. Coe for his very excellent drawings of the diagrams which illustrate the contents of that most wonderful thing in the world, the living cell, and the fascinating mystery of its process of self-division and multiplication.

NEWMAN SMYTH.

New Haven, Conn., Jan. 1, 1902.

Chapter I

Nearly two centuries ago a young man, who had begun to study divinity, wrote to a theologian, " I design the search after truth as the business of my life." Some decades later in the same century another young man who had recently published his thesis as a doctor of medicine wrote to an older man who had become a chief scientific authority of his time, these words concerning the common object of their pursuit: " This is your view, also, glorious man. We are investigating for truth only ; we seek that which is true. Why then should I contend with you ? "

The first youth who at school proposed to make truth the business of his life, afterwards became known as Bishop Butler, the author of that famous Analogy which far down into our own time has been used as a text-book in our colleges, and which has proved a noble discipline to many minds in search for truth. The other student, Caspar Friedrich Wolff, who had questioned in his thesis the prevalent biology of his day, succeeded in finding truth which has entered into the science of the present age. The common desire to follow after truth only, which was manifested by the theologian and the biologist, is the spirit in which all inquiries into nature and divinity should be made. Their agreement in the pure love of truth near the beginning of the modern era of investigation may be regarded as a happy omen of some future harmony of all science and religion. It is in this spirit that w^e are to seek again and again to interpret nature. Distrust of nature's fact were unbelief in nature's God. We must follow the course of nature, if we would know how the living One has gone before us in the way.

During the century just ended two epochs in the relation of science and faith, broadly speaking, may be distino-uished ; and a third and better era is dawnins: at another century's beginning. The first period was one of religious alarm and scientific conflict. The appearance of Darwin's books on the Origin of Species and the Descent of Man, was accepted as a challenge to the then prevalent religious view of the creation, and a period of warfare ensued. That was one era, and it was followed by another, which may be described as the time of truce between scientific writers and theologians. There has been of late years a period of compromise between science and religion. Naturalists have learned to avoid needless collision with man's religious faiths, and theologians have become careful so to state their beliefs as to avoid conflict with scientific theories. This has been largely a negative and critical era. But the tliird epoch is coming — it is already come ; it follows naturally after the eras of conflict and of compromise. It is the age of reconstruction. It is to be a positive era, a productive age, requiring for its task no longer the agitator or the obstructionist, the iconoclastic scientist or the controversial divine ; but it calls for deeper investigations and for larger interpretations both from its science and its faith.

The older natural theology, in which but a generation ago Christian faiths might still find safe and comfortable shelter, has become uninhabitable ; the new is yet to be built. The materials for it are already abundant and rich. Fresh inquiries are inviting; larger vistas are opening; nature is becoming more spiritually fascinating even to the scientific lover of her truth. Particularly during the last half of the past century has science made a vast contribution to our knowledge of living nature. Biology has opened up a marvellous field for exploration which before had been almost an unknown land.

Our science, it is true, must still strike midway into the path of life on the earth. We cannot go back to some distant and lowly point and say, There was the beginning of all. Nor can we say on any visible height of being. This is the end of all. Our knowledge in its utmost extension is of intermediate things. But it is true knowledge so far as it goes. Midway, and for some distance, we have followed with scientific care the course of life far enough to know something of its direction from the distant past and of its possible tendencies beyond our present experience. In this knowledge of life and its history, the larger part of which has been gained during the closing decades of the century, a new point of view has been won. From it all our natural and Christian faiths are to be resurveyed. They are to be observed anew from higher ground and in larger horizons. We have learned from a century's science that we are no longer to think of the world and its Maker under Paley's familiar similitude of a watch and its designer; for we now know that things have not been put together in nature as an artisan would assemble the several parts of a machine ; we have now to consider all things around us, and the constellations in the skies, as One of old taught tlie disciples to consider the lilies, how they grow. For the new science of nature is a study of the method of its growth. It is characterized in general by the word evolution. But that word is far too elastic to serve as a scientifically definitive term. An assortment of diverse views may be bound up by it as by a rubber band. It may cover alike much science and considerable ignorance. It may be employed generally to designate the modern scientific conception of nature ; and it may be used precisely to designate a special and now outgrown view of the creation which obtained over a hundred years ago, — the view that all creatures preexisted in miniature in the Qgg^ or were preformed in the germ. No close thinker can define his position now by a word which has been so overworked. We may all call ourselves evolutionists, and speak popularly of the evolution of everything under the sun ; the real question would remain, what kind of evolutionists are we ?

The new point of view might be characterized still generally as the biological conception. Biology is the science, almost the new science of living matter. It includes comprehensively all investigations of the processes, forces, conditions, and laws, which may be known in the organic world. In its larger scope, and in relation to the outlying problems of life, it passes into a philosophy of the living world. Herbert Spencer's Principles of Biology^ for instance, constitute a part of his system of philosophy. If we find that our modern biology has discovered any ruling ideas in the organic realm, and if it has followed them far enough through the history of life to be sure of them, we should take such principles of life up into our philosophy, and use them in our effort to become masters of the world in our thought of it. Spiritual mastery of the world, we may be sure, cannot be won except by discovery and use of the actual principles which run through nature.

In this discussion of questions which lead up to the higher interpretation of life we shall start from the naturalist's point of view. It shall be our purpose to seek, especially among recent biological materials, for signs and evidences of the constitutive principles of nature ; and through these, so far as they may be revealed, to find some surer and clearer interpretation of our life. Our method will be a simple, but positive method. We shall not seek to adapt science to religion, or to impose faith upon science. We shall seek to learn first from the biologists the significant facts which they have observed. Secondly, we shall accept and make the most of their theories or explanations of the observed facts, so far as they may be made to go. Then, thirdly, we shall inquire for ourselves, what may be their higher and larger significance for our rational and religious conception of the world. We shall thus hope in a positive method, and not merely by a critical marking time, to make a fresh start at least in the way towards a more scientifically spiritual understanding of the creation — of its underlying unity, of its informing principles, of its real continuities through all its spheres, and of its possible completions beyond our present knowledge.

At the outset we would emphasize the vital religious importance of the new inquiries into nature which may now be conducted in this method. If at times such scientific excursions may seem to lead into regions remote from our practical interest in life, they will be found to return ere long with some fresh contribution to our personal creeds for the conduct of life. For our present endeavor will be much more than a temporizing effort, such as the theologians have so often made, to arrange some common terms in which science and faith may dwell amicably together, like boarders in the same house. We shall seek rather to learn and to own their natural relationship. We would bring to mutual recognition principles in which they have a common heritage. If there are such ^principles, and we may know them, — constitutive and vital principles which run up and down through all nature and life, from the least and lowliest to the heights of being and of destiny — strong, infrustable principles, upon which as on invisible but continuous laws all the spheres are threaded ; — then surely these principles are the great powers of nature and of life for us to lay hold of with a firm religious trust. We can build our highest religious faiths safely, if we may build them on the sure foundations of nature.

On the very threshold, however, of such inquiry, we are met by two difficulties which seem at first sight to bar oar way in this direction. One of these obstacles lies in the admitted fact that biology is itself an immature science, — almost the youngest of the whole family of the modern sciences. It is hardly twenty-five years since it became a well equipped working science, and it is not yet half-endowed in our Universities. The name compounded for one of its chief branches of investigation, Cytology, or the science of the living cell, is almost an unknown term even to the educated public. Moreover, in the current numbers of the biological magazines, not only do different theories come into frequent collisions, but also the investigators do not always report that they have seen precisely the same things through their microscopes. Many important facts in the behavior of living cells are not well known as yet, and indeed living nature sometimes seems to have an almost feminine power of becoming most fascinatingly elusive just when a man is most eager for some decisive manifestation of her meaning. Many biological views which attract attention must still be regarded as tentative. No one theory of heredity can claim as yet general acceptance. The domain of life is too large and wonderful, and the processes of nature are too subtly involved in the whole spiritual mystery of being to be easily comprehended within some single and simple formula, which some over-confident investigator may propose as the solution of the whole matter.

Nowhere more than in the biological field is there need of that virtue which Dr. Chalmers so happily characterized as the modesty of true science. The present attitude of our ablest investigators in this field of research is one characterized by much reserve and hesitancy of judgment. And when all possible inferences seem to have been drawn from the known facts, the only way of progress is to return to new investigations. These are being made in our biological laboratories by many and most skilful observers. Not long since a fresh student in one of these laboratories brought to his work a blank note-book, the alternate pages of which were neatly labelled "observations," and "philosophical deductions from observations." His professor told him that the division was right, but that he thought he would need far less space for his philosophical deductions. Biology at the present time is mainly engaged in making observations. But observations must in time be arranged under some idea, fertilized, as it were, by some stimulating thought, if they are to be made fruitful ; and the philosopher with his ideas and interpretations naturally follows the investigator. It is his task to institute what might be called the higher criticism of science. Interpretative biology may be called the higher biology. The two should not be confounded, — the work of the single-eyed observer, and the task of the rational interpreter ; but each serves the other, and the work of both is necessary to a complete scientific and rational conception of nature and life.

The present confessed uncertainty of much biological science may teach us caution, and keep us from venturing our faiths too largely out upon any prevalent theory of life ; but, nevertheless, the effort to think biologically, that is, to think under biological forms of conception and in relation to biological principles, is now a possible mode of thought, and it is justified by the knowledge which has been alreadj^ won. For notwithstanding all uncertainties many important facts of biology are well ascertained, and certain processes of living matter have been followed with definite observations, so that vital principles to some extent may be deduced from our present biological knowledge. By means also of the different theories, with which investigators are seeking to light up the field of life, we may follow more intelligently and confidently the rational ways along which nature from her lowly origins has been led with ever increasing spiritual ascendency up to the heights of man's being, and his life of free thought and love. In short evolution as a general conception of the world and of the methods of life, within the past fifty years of scientific observation, has advanced fully far enough to require now and to justify the construction of a new natural theology ; and that in its turn will lead to some reconstruction of Christian theology.

We offer therefore no further justification for our task than this, that it is now possible to attempt it, and that its achievement is greatly to be desired.

The other difficulty which has been raised, is independent of the extent, greater or less, of our scientific knowledge; it is an objection which would be always fatal to this endeavor, if at any time it were true. It is said that there is an impassable gulf fixed between the natural and the spiritual spheres, and that we cannot reason from the one to the other. Fanciful analogies, or illuminative imaginations, it is admitted, may be drawn from the natural for the help of man's spiritual thought ; but it is asked, can any true analogy, or real continuity of principles, be followed from tlie lower spheres straight through the ascending orders of nature up to the very higliest and into the spiritual world? Curiously enough this question has been raised, and this obstacle is put in our way, both in the name of science and of religion. Coming from opposite directions and proceeding to different conclusions, some scientific students and some spiritual philosophers meet for the moment at this common point, and unite in warning off any attempt to reason either up or down from the natural to the spiritual. Leave to us, say the former, our science, and we will leave to you, as beyond our ken, your faith. Attempt to connect the two, and you will only succeed in confusing science, and introducing doubt into the domain of faith. And some of the latter, the philosophers and theologians, likewise, will go on their separate way, quite content to affirm that man stands wholly apart in the creation, and that his supreme individuality is not to be understood as nature's grand climax. Thus in this particular these two find themselves for the moment in agreement, — the naturalist who holds his science wholly apart from his faith, and the theologian who holds his faith regardless of any science. Both fail to discern the underlying unity of the creation.

The question thus brought before us is this : Is the created universe one order, and has it come to pass in one process of development ? Or does it consist of separate realms, such as the inorganic and the organic, matter and mind, the natural and the spiritual, which are not bound together in any process of development ? Are we to regard the creation as a process still going on, like an unfinished drama, or are the worlds and all things therein to be looked upon as a collection of ready-made products of all kinds and sizes, like a vast department store ? If we take the answer from science and say. Nature is not a patchwork, its parts and colors artificially matched and fitted into some semblance of design; nature is a continuous weaving of subtle but unbroken threads ; if, in a word, we say evolution ; then the further question immediately arises, In what does its unity consist? What Haeckel in the title of his last book calls the Riddle of the Universe^ is not the simple riddle of one soulless substance which he thinks it is in his drear denial of all divinity ; the problem, the ultimate mechanical and spiritual problem of the universe, is a double problem, partly scientific, and partly philosophic, partly a question of fact, and partly a question of interpretation : Is the world one, and. How is it one ?

In this introductory chapter we take as the point of departure for the subsequent inquiry the scientific belief that nature is one. Evidences of this fundamental postulate will appear as we shall proceed. The answer to the question, How is it one ? is the interpretation of the world which in the course of our inquiries we are to seek from the nature-process itself. As our immediate object is to make clear the starting-point, we may sketch here, more with an etcher's lines than with a detailed description, the new view of nature as one process of development.

From the scientific side the presumption has become immense that there have been no real breaks in the evolution of the heavens and the earth. Apparent gaps there may be, which no knowledge of ours can fill up ; but there is no fissure anywhere that runs clear through to the foundation of the world. Because we cannot see the bottom of a chasm, however we may peer into its depths, it does not follow that it is a bottomless abyss. We may not repeat in any scientific account of things the story so often told in local traditions of the lake which has no bottom. That simply means that no man as yet may have brought a long enough line to find it. Nature, our science now knows enough to affirm, undergirds the worlds with her strong continuities. This first article of scientific faith in the unity of things relates specifically to their genetic oneness, — their unity, that is, of descent. The creation is genetically one — one in its birth and growth.

We may appreciate the conclusive force of this belief in the unity of the world around us, if we review the discoveries of the relationships between things which have been made during the course of the past century's science.

One of the first of these disclosures of the unity of the world is known as the law of the conservation of energy. It is not poetry only which bids us regard all things as " blossomings of one tree " ; it is sober scientific physics which teaches us to find a constant sum of energy through all its ceaseless transformations. There is one energy commutable into the different forms of energy of the physical world, and the same always in its quantity (within any closed system). In other words, nature tickets no form of energy as not transferable, and good for this passage only ; and in nature's continuous working no energy seems wasted or lost. This discovery of the unity of energy is the most fruitful conception which has been introduced into physical science. The first comprehensive statement of the law of conservation of energy was published by Mohr in 1 837 ; but our knowledge of it is due not to the brilliant discovery of any one thinker, but rather to the accumulated science of all this modern time.

Another signal discovery of unity has been made in the organic kingdom. In the year 1838 a botanist, Schleiden, showed that all plants are built up of certain simple structural units which he called cells, and he discovered that the origin of the plant life is from a single cell ; the succeeding year a physiologist, Schwann, found that the same observations were true of animals ; animal tissues likewise are built up of cells, and every animal life proceeds from an egg-cell. This was a most interesting discovery of the fundamental unity of all living nature. The original bricks, so to speak, used in building the vegetable and animal kingdoms, are similar, and the method of laying them is much the same. It is now demonstrated that there is no radical difference, no fundamental distinction in kind, between the vegetable and the animal kingdoms.

If you examine under a microscope a drop of water from a pool which is slightly colored with a diffused green, you will fmd within it as the cause of its greenish tinge numbers of a small organism, called Euglena, which move rapidly about, often changing their form as they move ; which have spots of chlorophyll — the coloring matter of leaves — within their minute bodies, and which also may be seen under a high power of the microscope to have a mouth. They feed both as plants and animals feed, partly by means of their chlorophyll, and partly through their mouths, partly from inorganic matter, and partly from other living matter, feeding as plants by daytime in the sunshine, and as cannibals in the night. So this Euglena has been claimed by different naturalists as belonging both to the animal and the vegetable kingdom. It is hard to say whether the botanists or the zoologists may best claim it. Indeed our most skilled naturalists differ in their classification of several lowly organisms which present " a puzzling combination of animal and vegetable characters." " The important point," says Professor Parker, " for the student to recognize is that these boundaries are artificial, and that there are no scientific frontiers in nature." ^ The conclusion which our eminent American botanist, Professor Asa Gray, reached years ago, has been confirmed by subsequent researches : " The fact is, that a new article has recently been added to the scientific creed, — the essential oneness of the two kingdoms of organic nature." ^

1 Elementary Biology, p. 182.

2 Natural Science and Religion, p. 12.

More recent researches have brought out even more curious similarities between plant and animal life than those resemblances in their methods of nutrition and in some points of their conduct which led to the establishment of this new article of the scientific creed. Moreover, botanists are now saying that " the movements by which the parts of fixed plants assume and maintain through life their position, are due to the co-operation of organs of sensation and organs of motion." We are assured that there is " a sense of gravitation " in plants ; that the apex of a plant which turns towards the earth (geotropic), is " a percipient organ " ; that " a brain function " may be ascribed to the sensitive apex of the root ; and one observer claims to have traced " a continuous fibrillar structure " in the substance of the cells (cytoplasm), by means of which stimuli may be transmitted in the motions of plants.-^

Man also is included in the unity of this structural plan. The Hebrew psalmist said of old in his childlike wonder : " Thine eyes did see mine unperfect substance, and in thy book were all my members written, which day by day were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them." With no less wonder, the reverent eyes of science, through the partial lifting of the veil from the holy mystery of life's origins, may now see how that unperfect substance has been organized, and these members fashioned, even as lowliest plant has grown, and humblest creature has been formed from the proto-

1 See Nature, August 15, 1901, p. 372 : Journal Roi/nl ]\fic. Soc, Aug. 1901, p. 437. Also Dr. Francis Darwin's remarks at the meeting of the Britisli Association, 1901. B. NCmec, Die Reizleitum/ tend die rcizlcitenden Strukturen bei den PJlanzen.

plasmic germ, and by the multiplying cell : we too are physiologically one, structurally and vitally one, with all living nature. When Saint P'rancis in his spiritual ecstasy went through the forests and the fields of sunny Italy calling the animals his brothers, and the birds his little sisters, he was far nearer than he knew to the sober truth of the great biological generalization of modern science that all living nature is of one descent and constitutes one relationship.