The Bible the word of God

I. What Do We Know?

—GEIBEL.

Cast into this mysterious world without our knowledge or our choice; a prey of the forces of nature; the sport of circumstances and of our fellow-men; doomed to die, and yet uncertain as to when, where, and how the sentence of death is to be executed, — we are, after all, unspeakably miserable and "through fear of death subject to bondage."

And yet we find within us an inexterminable longing, not only for joy and peace, life and power, but also for knowledge. Even the soul of the child, beholding the world surrounding it, is filled with awe and wonder, and, seized with a desire for knowledge, asks incessantly. What is this? What is that? For it feels unconsciously that it grows through knowledge ; it appropriates to itself things foreign to it, assimilates its surroundings, makes them subservient to itself, and rules over them. Satan well knew this mighty primal impulse of the human soul, and enticed it by the promise, "Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil."

What do we know? Much. What an immeasurable wealth of knowledge millions of men have accumulated during six thousand years, of which only a very small part has ever, for a time at least, been perpetuated in writing! For even if we knew all books and all manuscripts of all times, we should yet not know the history of hundreds of peoples and tribes, with their language, their customs, their laws, their views of the world and of nature, their civilization and their art. For even in the days of Cortez and Pizarro neither the Peruvians nor the more advanced Mexicans had any knowledge of an alphabet; the former contenting themselves with quipu language, the latter with hieroglyphics. And when we bear in mind to what an astonishing degree even wild tribes of fishermen and huntsmen are cognizant of nature ; when we bear in mind the millions of observations made by Indians and Samoyedes, by Bushmen and Tartars, concerning plant life and animal life, on which they are dependent for their livelihood, we are amazed at the mass of man's knowledge.

Observing more closely, we are at once aware, of course, that there is a difference between knowledge and wisdom; between the mere knowledge of facts and phenomena, and the cognizance of their connection, their causes, their import, and their value. Even here opinions as to the much or little of man's knowledge differ.

Thus Socrates ironically summed up his knowledge in the sentence, "I know that I know nothing," and the wise Solomon, well versed in natural science, said: *'I gave my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all things that are done under heaven: this sore travail hath God given to the sons of man to be exercised therewith." "I said, I will be wise ; but it [wisdom] was far from me. That which is, is far off, and exceeding deep, who can find it out?" (Eccles. i, 13; vii, 23, 24.) And Goethe sighs: "Ich sehe, dass wir nichts wissen koennen; das will mir schier das Herz verbrennen."

But those were ancient people in ancient days, almost simple in their modesty, who were ever ready to confess, ^1 do not know." Such words are no longer proper among us modern people, in an age that drops knowledge and wisdom. "Thirty years ago the nature of disease was not known." "There is nothing that science can not search out." Such boasts are heard daily. Or, as a French savant recently exclaimed, "II n'y a plus de mystere!" (There is no longer any mystery!) Such boasts of the daily press, and the hymns of praise to human knowledge and ability, please the masses, and to them are lucid truths, deniedonly by reactionaries and pessimists for the purpose of keeping the masses ignorant. But those having true knowledge do not speak thus. They repeat the words of one of the chief among them : "There is little that we know ; there is very much that we do not

know."

Whence have we our knowledge? How do we acquire it?

When we enter this world, we unconsciously establish ourselves as a unit, an ego, that exists, has a right to exist, and exists as that which it is. For me the world is founded on this faith, this principle of identity: a=a, j^j^ ego=ego {Ich bin, der ich bin). Here faith and

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sight are one. But this is merely a matter of consciousness, an mtuition. That I am, is undemonstrable. The world's phdosophers have never yet fathomed, and all our learnmg has not yet told us the real meaning of the little words "I" and "to be." Even the well-known fundamental tenet of the Cartesian philosophy, "I think, therefore I am, is equal in its content to "I am, for I am " "I am and I am he, who I am," is the axiom, the firm assumption and conviction essential to all thinking. It were madness to doubt it, and an impossibility to prove it to him who no longer believes it, and is mentally deranged _ Man proceeds from himself as an entity, and as subject lays hold upon the world as object. Without this fundamental believing there is no possibility of man's knowmg. Yea, life, the joy of life, consists in beinstrong enough as subject to control the non-ego as object imitating God, the highest and absolute ego, for whom the universe is mere object; suffering, on the other hand, consists in feeling one's self treated as object by this world, the non-ego.

If we ask on what man's further cognition and knowledge are based, the simple answer is: On the senses and on faith in what they tell us. Even the ancients knew there is nothing in the mind of man that does not enter through the senses. What could a man without senses know of himself and the universe? When a child enters this world. It opens its eyes, hears with its ears, grasps with Its hands, and believes what its senses tell it of the world of light, sound, and matter. It believes that the tree is green, that the sky is blue, that the stone is hard that the quadrilateral has four corners, that the trianHe has three, and that 1+1=2. Man believes these things for he can never comprehend, and his eye can not tell him, why and how it sees; his ear can not tell him how it hears, nor his hand how it feels. Upon this faith in what he sees, hears, and feels, man gradually constructs his view of the world. Knowledge begins and ends with seeing. "They shall see God." And it argues nothing to the contrary that we strive to perfect our knowledge of the world by means of all sorts of ingenious apparatus ; for we can use such apparatus only by means of the senses. What would a telephone profit the deaf, or a spectroscope the blind ?

But do I know that things really are as I perceive them ? Is not the world of my perceptions an illusionary juggle of my senses that has little or nothing in common with the real world? That our senses are limited, need not be proven. That they tell us something, but not the whole, of heat, electricity, gravitation, and other forces, every learned person well knows. But limitation is not negation. The dimmest light is still light, and the fact that our love and hope are weak does not argue that there is no love and hope. To assume that the world as it appears, and consequently our language and all our thinking relative thereto (as when we speak of ardent love, clear knowledge, great or small power), is an entirely erroneous picture of the world as it really is, is to assume that the Creator has intentionally deceived and continually deceives His creatures, that He is not a God of truth, but of falsehood, or that there is no God, and that the world is merely a disconnected work of chance, in which logical conclusions are impossible. Neither assumption is entertained by the Christian. It is written : "The invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are lo THE BIBLE THE WORD OP GOD.

clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead ; so that they are without excuse." How could this be possible, how could they seek Him in His creation, that "they haply might feel after Him and find Him," if it were only semblance and deception? To the Christian the visible Cosmos is a reflection and an effect of the invisible Cosmos, although he knows that knowledge through sense-perception has been alarmingly darkened by the fall of man. No scholar or investigator has ever been able to show that we do not perceive at least a phase of things, or that "the thing-in-itself" has nothing in common with its phenomena, — an unphilosophic assumption, utterly contradictory to reason, the more since this "thing-initself" is the cause of all visible things.

Thus the sum total of our knowledge is based on faith in our senses. I can never have any knowledge of fire, except I burn myself, nor of getting wet, save through contact with water; and if it is not in reality true that fire burns and water wets, all our knowing and thinking is at an end.

Concerning what does sense-perception give information? Evidently only concerning that which is perceivable by means of the senses. My eyes tell me the tree is green. Why it is green and not blue, neither my senses nor all my apparatus tell me. And they are utterly silent as to the main question, viz., what end this particular color may serve for the tree, and of what consequence this individual fact is for the universe. Our senses, themselves phenomena of unknown psychic forces, can inform us only concerning the phenomena of the universe, but they can not enter the realm of principles and causes ;

KNOWLBDGB AND FAITH. n

i. e., they can not enlighten us in regard to the real essence, the how and why of things, nor in regard to ourselves. And they are limited even in the realm of the visible.

The study of nature has revealed much that is beautiful and magnificent. With their two eyes, the microscope and the telescope, investigators are diligently and untiringly pressing deeper and deeper into things small and great. The order of diatomacese, those crystal shells of microscopic creatures, unnumbered billions of which inhabit the waters and seas of the earth, reveal thousands of neat, elegant, and fascinating forms. With his giant telescope the astronomer reverently beholds white, blue, purple, and green suns revolving about one another, apparently slowly, but in reality with terrible rapidity, and together hastening through the depths of space. And from out the depths of the ocean, from out the mysterious, eternally cold, lightless, silent abysmal region we take uncanny creatures, gleaming in their own colored light, some black, with hideous teeth and stupidly staring eyes, like demons from hell. But even here man finds himself surrounded by adamant walls, forbidding his entering farther. Our eyes, themselves composed of atoms, will never behold the world of atoms, nor will our instruments ever lay hold on it. Matter can not see nor seize itself. Concerning astronomy, Kant exclaimed, "The most important feature of it is, that it discloses to us the abyss of our ignorance." How true this is in our day ! What do we know about the five hundred millions, yea, thousand millions of suns they hope to be able to place by photographing the heavens, and which no human eye will ever see, not even through the most powerful

THE BIBLE THE WORD OF GOD.

telescope? What possibilities of being and development of existence, of life, of matter, and of mind! The part of the universe that we survey is small, exceedingly small a spot invisible from yonder worlds, its ratio to the whole' inconceivably less than the ratio of an atom to the earth Despite all knowledge and ability, mankind, separated from the source of light and knowledge, is like a shipwrecked crew carried about on a raft of their own construction, and without a compass, by a shoreless, unfathomable ocean. And if a storm arise we are lost. ^ With the facts and phenomena of the universe the creator, therefore, acts like a wise father, who does not give his son a completed structure, leaving nothing more to be done, but gives him single stones, with which in a style suited to his individuality, he may himself construct a building. Thus from the ever-accumulating facts perceived either by his own senses or the senses of others man consciously or unconsciously deduces a conception of tlie universe that constitutes his knowledge, his science This conception he will invariably connect with his idea of the causes and the moral law of the universe; i e with his conception of good and evil. He can not do otherwise, his explanation of mere facts and bare phenomena must have an intellectual background.

Man's explanation of facts and phenomena will always accommodate itself to his innermost life, to the .great affirmations or negations, the light or the darkness, the love or the hatred of his soul. Those who like A. Comte and his followers, the French positivists' and the English agnostics, pretended to be content with a knowledge of mere facts, and who would have denied to men the right of taking the moral value of phenomena into account, have ever, like Comte himself, become bankrupts in a very short time. "It is useless," says Kant, "to ieign unconcern in view of investigations whose subject matter must concern human nature. And the would-be indifferentists, if they think at all, inevitably relapse into the very metaphysical assertions of which they had feigned contempt." (Foreword to Critique of Pure Reason.)

Modern science, of course, frequently demands that I look away from my individuality, and measure heat and cold by the thermometer, and not by my feelings; that my system receive a certain per cent of albumen and phosphate daily, whether the food eaten strengthens me and I relish it, or not. Just so in the realm of the spiritual. Since God can not be proved experimentally, this "hypothesis," as Laplace called the idea of God, must be stricken from science. Others say neither religion nor morality should have a place in science, since good and evil can be distinguished neither chemically nor physically. We operate exclusively with and on the basis of facts and numbers; with and on the basis of that alone which is absolutely certain. All else is a matter of individual concern, and has no scientific value. That seems evident to many. But, in the first place, neither facts nor figures, i. e., our conception, our valuation, our verdict relative thereto — are absolutely correct; for it must be clear to every one, e. g., that we can not measure or weigh a piece of metal absolutely. Even in this respect, then, our knowledge is only relatively, not absolutely, true. In the second place, a science dealing exclusively with facts and figures, if such a science were at all possible, would have no intellectual value, and scientific research that did not appeal to the intellect, and excluded all faith, would be like the mechanical clatter of a mill Facts and figures in themselves are no more science than a dictionary is language.

The intellectual background, the explanation of facts, the ideas underlying them— and the greatest investigators have considered these of more importance than the observance of facts— and their combination to an orderly structure, these alone constitute science. Natural science and cosmophysics have no mtellectual value without metaphysics (which lives on faith) as a background; and, fortunately, man is so highly organized that knowledge without faith can not satisfy him. The investigator is constantly inquiring. Why d^d it come to be thus? The question itself presupposes causality. He is ever inquiring for what purpose plants polyps, infusoria, have such or such organs, and takes for granted a teleological arrangement of the universe, and a wise primal cause. He is constantly striving to ascertain a higher cause for material phenomena, and what relation the individual phenomenon sustains to the whole thus entering the realm of individual faith, which faith IS associated with the fundamental formula of his soul and his ego. Even the most godless scientist weaves a great deal of faith into his view of the world. Thus Haeckel, in order to explain heredity, sets up the dogma of the unconscious memory of the molecule, and expects us, merely on his authority, to 'Relieve" a thing so inconceivable. And upon examination there is found in many scientific works a residuum of stronger faith than "is found in Israel." Thus many believe that the world originated spontaneously, that something suddenly arose out of nothing; how, for what purpose, and why, no man knows! And those believing these things, praise the exact and positive sciences over against reHgious myths and dogmas.

Here, also, mankind is ever wavering and swinging like a pendulum between two extreme poles. After the natural philosophy of Schelling and Oncken, which, it is true, was ofttimes rather bold, superficial minds thought they could dispense with the spirit in natural research, and exclaimed : "No more metaphysics ! Nothing but exact natural science!" A little reflection will show upon what an uncertain basis this exact natural research rests. In his important work "Das Weltgesetz des kleinsten Kraftaufwandes," Dr. G. Portig says : "A deeper study shows that natural science is full of hypotheses. The truly important leaders asknowledge it; only those ranking second and third deceive themselves and others by hastily passing off as scientifically true what is merely conjecture." Concerning these hypotheses Professor Dr. Drehef writes : "All hypotheses of exact natural science are rooted in presuppositions which to our thought seem inadmissible." (Die Grundlage der exakten Naturwissenschaft in Lichte der Kritik.) This is true of the atom, of gravitation (since a body is said to operate, where it does not exist, which^ as is well known, Newton also found inexplicable), of the light-wave theory, etc. Arthur Wilke {Centralzeitung fuer Optik imd Mechanik) asserts that we can never expect an answer to the question. What is electricity? That electricity, like other conceptions of forces, is merely an auxiliary conception by which many natural processes are united; and that it is an error to suppose that out in nature there is a distinct something that answers to our

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conception of electricity; that, on the whole, the question, ''What exists?" can not be answered, no matter to what it may pertain.

But even a so-called "exact" science becomes insipid and unsatisfactory to man. All knowledge is to man what the rigging is to a ship. Masts, yards, and sails are intended to help her along, and without them she is lifeless; but what do they all profit her, if the wind fail her? Even Socrates complains in "Phaedo," that the scientists of his day constructed systems out of many facts, but could not say why just such a condition of things is good for the individual, and to what extent the good of the individual is also the good of the whole. That knowledge alone has value which can be turned into good, or, as we Christians say, which serves as the rounds of a ladder in order to mount to God. Of what great importance is the struggle for or against Darwinism? The origin of species in itself, as well as the whole world of phenomena, needs be of no importance to me at all, if I am not shown what eternal values the soul gains or loses by its truth or fallacy. This even his heart feels, whose mind has not clearly grasped it. As in art and literature bare naturalism rapidly made way for idealism (even though ofttimes morbid), so natural research is turning back to natural philosophy. Hear on this point, R. France, Professor Otto Lyon, G. Portig, Brunetiere, Pasteur, or keen-eyed Ed. v. Hartmann. The latter writes (Foreword to Schelling's System of Philosophy) : "The age of exact natural science is nearing its end." "The study of the theory of knowledge, of psychology, and ethics, pursued during the past generation, has convulsively closed its eyes against metaphysics.

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and has therefore led to a dead point." "A natural philosophy or scientific metaphysic must be regained that shall bridge over the existing chasm between natural science on the one hand, and modern mental culture on the other."

But only the Word of God and faith in the Word of God are able to construct such a bridge that shall endure eternally; and this fact is overlooked by modern scholars.

We all, mankind as a whole, the educated and the uneducated, art and science, idealists and realists, believe — believe in things we have never seen. Mathematics believes in axioms, chemistry believes in atoms and molecules, physics in cosmic ether and contradictory attributes in bodies, astronomy in the incomprehensible infinity of space, all natural science in invisible natural forces and natural laws. We know, the latter exclaims, that these laws and forces are eternal. Nay, we only believe it. We can not even prove that bodies have eternally attracted one another, and that they will eternally do so. But since we can not imagine what the condition of things would be if they did not attract one another, we lay down for our own comfort the article of faith, the dogma of their eternal mutual attraction. And this is true of many other things. Thus the structure of our knowledge, apparently firmly joined, rests, like the palaces of Venice and Amsterdam, on subterranean waters of "faith."

Even where we think we have examined a thing to the very bottom, we are deceived. This is true of Darwinism. It is indeed disappearing, as it came; for the evidence of geology, of the fauna of the deep seas, of the study pf the plancton, is too strong against it, and the number of scientists deserting it is increasing daily. Other theories are taking its place. In the convention of German scientists in Hamburg, 1901, Dr. H. de Bries and men like Koelliker emphasized "the stability of species," as well as "their saltatorial development," and, approximating to Bible and geology, advocated "mutations," sudden, "explosion-like modifications of species," veritable "shatterings of species." But even supposing Darwinism, with all its consequences, to be true, what would be gained ? Would we know what life is, or how it originated on the earth? Would we know what consciousness is, and how it comes about, or what matter and spirit are ? Would we at last have found the bridge between the body and the soul, or know how, why, and to what end the universe exists, and whence good and evil are? No. In his ingenious work, "Der Wert der Wissenschaft," Raoul France properly expresses surprise at the fact that such great importance is attached to so secondary a question as the origin of species; and we add, many scholars imagine that, by a highly problematic answer to this question, they have solved the mysteries of creation. But we commonly confound the observation and description of cosmic phenomena with the explanation of the same.

If to explain means to find and show the essence proper of things, their real how and why, we must admit that science has never yet explained anything. After all, then, we know practically nothing. For we know only that which is external and superficial, but not that which is within and enduring ; we know phenomena, but not the underlying principle ; the relative, but not the absolute; the temporal but not the eternal. We can write innumerable books on man's behavior, on what he has done during past centuries, and what he is doing to-day. But what man really is, what / am^ I can not find out ; I do not know what my soul and my body are, and how one reacts on the other. I have senses, but I do not know how they operate, how they give me knowledge of things; in short, I am hidden from myself, which is shown by the simple fact that I can not look into myself, do not know what organs I have in me ; and if the machinery does not perform its normal functions, physicians advise and consult and can not find out where there is a screw loose. And if I turn to the world, my ignorance is just as great. We do not know, and shall never know here below, what matter is; consequently, we can not fathom the material world. We do not know, and shall never know here below, what spirit is; consequently, we can not comprehend the spiritual world. Therefore in six thousand years we have made no progress toward answering the questions : How and why have I come to be? For what ptirpose do I exist? Why am I placed under obligation ? Whither am I hastening ? Those who call themselves the learned and enlightened answer, No man knows. Thus A. v. Humboldt, the man whose "Cosmos" was so enthusiastically welcomed as a lucid presentation and survey of the entire field of human knowledge, wrote shortly before his death : 'Xife is the greatest folly. After striving and investigating for eighty years, one must at last admit that he has gained and found out nothing. Would that we at least knew to what end we are in this world." Behind us, nothing; in front of us, eternal night; round about us dense fog! And yet we desire to know. ''Ich sehe, dass zvir nichfs wissen koennen, das zvill mir schier das Herz verhrennen,"

Science and reason! The two ideas that in our daycontrol the notions of civiHzed mankind, as once the idea of eternity controlled the Egyptians, the idea of beauty of body and soul controlled the Greeks, the idea of power and of the state controlled the Romans; but with this difference between us and the ancients, that their ideas to them were symbols of eternal things, gifts of the gods coming from on high. To them beauty was divine. The blessed gods granted strength and power and prosperity. We no longer believe in gods, and in science we reverence our knowledge, in reason our wisdom. Examined closely, our worship of science and reason is a naive adoration of our own ability, a worship of our own ego. Here, too, man leans on a broken reed. We have seen how and why his knowledge is incomplete and impotent. But his reason! True, God has granted reason to the soul, a capacity to view this world intelligently, to utilize it properly, to arrange his affairs in it practically. It is well known that reason has kept millions from leading an irrational, and thousands from leading an over-rational, life. In every-day life it is eminently useful; in the higher and intellectual life it profits little or nothing, for it is not the spirit. Indeed, these two, as may be seen in the gifted artist, seldom dwell together peaceably, and are inclined to despise each other. Reason is not only individual, but also national. Just as it points out different things to the sanguine person and to the phlegmatic, so it tells the Chinese mandarin one thing, the English lord another. It is also a product of its time. The doctors of Salamanca rationally proved to Columbus that, even if the earth were round, he might descend on the one side, but could not possibly ascend again on the other; and fifty years ago many of the present "attainments of science" were rejected with disdain by rational persons as wild fancies and irrational imaginings of lunatics. For reason always operates with, and its conclusions depend upon, the knowledge of its day. It produces nothing, but only utilizes what it receives. It can — simple as it may sound — predicate nothing of what it does not know. If there were no tree in all the earth, the reasoning power of all mankind combined could not tell whether there are trees at all in the universe, nor how a tree is and must be. If God had created the earth's atmosphere somewhat less transparent, human reason, be it ever so acute, would know nothing of sun, moon, and stars ; would not anticipate that millions of cosmic bodies revolve about us. Therefore the assertion that it is irrational to believe in a superterrestrial world of angels and spirits, belongs to the most irrational, therefore to the most stupid thinkable, that a man can make.

What we call reason is therefore something composite, a product, on the one hand, of a ps3^chic faculty; on the other hand, of prevailing ideas and circumstances, of the degree of knowledge attained to, and even of individuality and temperament. Therefore it is a variable quantity, differing in each individual. For whence comes contention in art and science, in public and private life; whence the struggle in national and international politics and statecraft, tariff, and commercial treaties, elective franchise and taxes, and many other things in the Reichstag, at the beer table, and in the press, if it does not arise from difference of "the reasons" {"Vernuenfte"), of which, according to the latest calculations, there are sixteen hundred millions on earth? Which of these shall I trust? "My own, of course," is the modest answer of every rational man; and it is correct, inasmuch as every man, simply because he is not like his neighbor, must house with his own reason and taste. But if there be a clash between his reason and mine, or, as we see it daily, between the ruler's and his subject's, between the employer's and the employee's, between the husband's and the wife's, between the father's and the son's — and all claim to be rational beings — then the delicate question always arises : Who is to decide whose reason is the more rational ? Where is the arbiter of all these reasons ( Vernuenfte) ? The question is not answered, and for the time being each one contents himself with the fundamental thought, and strives, more or less energetically or pleasingly, to impress it on his fellow-men : I am rational, and those are also rational who are of my opinion; he who can not see that, is irrational, a blockhead.