Reflections and Comments 1865 1895 by Edwin Lawrence Godkin

E >> Edwin Lawrence Godkin >> Reflections and Comments 1865 1895

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We pass over, as of no consequence for our present purpose, the
various exceptions which he then takes to Huxley's arrangement of
his lectures, to the tone of his exceptions, and to his mode of
referring to the biblical hypothesis, and come to what he has to say
of Huxley's evidence, which he truly calls "circumstantial
evidence." The first thing he does is to define circumstantial
evidence; but here, at the very outset, we have been surprised to
find a logician who conceives himself capable of overhauling the
argumentation of the masters of science, going to a lawyer to get
"a statement of the principles which regulate the value of
circumstantial evidence." This is a matter which lay logicians
usually have at their fingers' ends, and we have never known one yet
who would not be puzzled by a suggestion that he should do as Dr.
Taylor did--go to a "distinguished legal friend" for information as
to the conditions of this kind of proof. For, as we have more than
once pointed out, lawyers, as such, have no special skill or
training in the use of circumstantial evidence as scientific men
know it--that is, as evidence which derives all its force from
the laws of the human mind. The circumstantial evidence with
which lawyers, _qua_ lawyers, are familiar under our system of
jurisprudence is an artificial thing created by legislation or
custom, with the object of preventing the minds of the jury--
presumably a body of untrained and unlearned men--from being
confused or led astray. Moreover, they are only familiar with its
use in one very narrow field--human conduct under one set of social
conditions. For example, a lawyer might be a very good judge of
circumstantial evidence in America, and a very poor one in India or
China; might have a keen eye for the probable or improbable in a New
England village, and none at all in a Prussian barrack.

A familiar illustration of the restrictions on his experience of it
is to be found in the rule which compels the calling of "experts"
when there is a question as to any point of science or art. "The
words science or art," says Mr. Fitzjames Stephen, "include all
subjects on which a _course of special study or experience is
necessary to the formation of an opinion_," and the opinion of such
an expert is a "relevant fact." So that Dr. Taylor's "distinguished
legal friend," if a good lawyer, would not, in spite of his
proficiency in circumstantial evidence, undertake to dispute with
Professor Huxley about the relation of the anchitherium, hipparion,
and horse; and if Dr. Taylor offered himself for examination on such
a point he would be laughed out of court. In none of our courts is
the presentation allowed of _all_ the circumstances which strengthen
or weaken a probability.

A lawyer, therefore, though he might not be as ill fitted for a
scientific discussion as a minister, is, _as such_, hardly more of
an authority on the force and limits of that portion of scientific
proof which is drawn from simple observation. Dr. Taylor's
consulting one as a final authority as to the very nature of the
argument on which he was himself about to sit in judgment is at the
outset a suspicious incident. The definition of circumstantial
evidence which he got from his legal friend was this:

"The process of proof by circumstantial evidence consists in
reasoning from such facts as are known or proved, and thence
establishing such as are conjectured to exist. The process is
fatally vicious, first, if any material circumstance from which
we seek to deduce the conclusion depends itself on conjecture;
and, second, if the known facts are not such as to exclude to a
reasonable degree of certainty every other hypothesis."

"Now, tried by these two tests," says Dr. Taylor, "the professor's
argument was a failure." Taking this definition as it stands,
however, we think it will not be difficult to show that Dr. Taylor
is not competent to apply the tests, or to say whether the
professor's argument is a failure or not.

It is hardly necessary to say that all the evidence in our
possession or attainable, with regard to the history of the earth
and of animal and vegetable life on its surface, is circumstantial
evidence. The sciences of geology, palaeontology, and, to a certain
extent, biology are sciences of observation, and but few of their
conclusions can be reached or tested by experimentation. They are
the result of a collection of facts, observed in various places, at
various times, and by various persons, and variously related to
other facts; and the collection of these facts, and the arrangement
of them, and the formation of a judgment as to their value both
positive and relative, form the greater portion of the work of a
scientific man in these fields. Professor Huxley's argument, which
Dr. Taylor disposes of so summarily, consists of a series of
inferences from facts so collected and arranged. They are the things
"known or proved," on which, as his legal friend truly says, the
reasoning in the process of proof by circumstantial evidence must
rest.

Now, Dr. Taylor, by his own confession, is no authority in either
geology, biology, or palaeontology. He has neither collected,
observed, nor experimented in these fields. He does not know how
many facts have been discovered in them, or what bearing they have
on other facts in other fields. Therefore, he is entirely unable to
say whether Huxley is arguing from things "known or proved" or not.
Moreover, he does not, for similar reasons, know whether Huxley's
process has been "fatally vitiated" by the dependence of any
"material circumstance" on conjecture, or by the insufficiency of
the "known facts" to exclude every other hypothesis; for, first, he
does not know what is in geological, biological, or palaeontological
induction a "material circumstance"--nor does any man know except by
prolonged study and observation--and, second, he does not know
whether "the known or proved facts" are sufficient to exclude every
other hypothesis, because he neither knows what facts are known nor
what is the probative force of such as are known. We can, however,
make Dr. Taylor's position still clearer by a homely illustration. A
wild Indian will, owing to prolonged observation and great acuteness
of the senses, tell by a simple inspection of grass or leaf-covered
ground, on which a scholar will perceive nothing unusual whatever,
that a man has recently passed over it. He will tell whether he was
walking or running, whether he carried a burden, whether he was
young or old, and how long ago and what hour of the day he went by.
He reaches all his conclusions by circumstantial evidence of
precisely the same character as that used by the geologist, though
he knows nothing about the formal logic or the process of induction.
Now, what Dr. Taylor would have us believe is that he can come out
of his study and pass judgment on the Indian's reasoning without
being able to see one of the "known facts" on which the reasoning
rests, or appreciate in any degree which of them is material to the
conclusion and which is not, or even to conjecture whether, taken
together, they exclude the hypothesis that it was not a man but a
cow or a dog which passed over the ground, and not to-day but
yesterday that the marks were made.

Dr. Taylor further on makes a display of this inability to
appreciate the logical value of scientific facts by asking: "Where
is the evidence, scientific or other, that there was evolution? We
see these fossils (those of the horse). Huxley _says_ they are as
they are because the higher evolved itself out of the lower; we
_say_ they are as they are because God created them in series." To
recur to the former illustration, it is as if the Indian should show
Dr. Taylor the marks on which he relied in his induction, and the
doctor should calmly reply: "I see the marks; you _say_ they were
made by a man's foot in walking; I, who have never given any
attention to the subject, and have never been in the woods before,
_say_ they were made by the rain." The fact is that if there were
any weight whatever in this kind of talk--if no equality of
knowledge were necessary between two disputants--it would enable an
ignorant field-hand to sweep away in one sentence the whole science
of geology and palaeontology, and even astronomy, and to dispose of
every conclusion on any subject drawn from a skilled and experienced
balancing of probabilities, or nice mathematical calculation, by
simply saying that he was not satisfied with the proofs.

Dr. Taylor's reasons for believing that the appearance of fossil
horses with a diminishing number of toes is caused by the creation
at separate periods of a four-, a three-, a two-, and a one-toed
horse are, he says, "personal, philosophical, historical," and he
opposes them with the utmost apparent sincerity to Huxley's
assertion that "there can be no scientific evidence" of such
creation. The "personal reason" for believing in successive
creations of sets of horses with a varying number of toes can,
of course, only be the reason so often urged in ball-room
disputation--that "I _feel_ it must be so;" the "philosophic reason"
can only be the one with which those who have frequented the society
of metaphysicians are very familiar, namely, a deduction from some
eminent speculator's opinion about the nature of the Supreme Being,
the conclusion being apparently that if the Creator wished to
diminish the number of a horse's toes, it would not do for him to
let one drop into disuse and so gradually disappear, but he would
have to make a new horse, on a new design. What Dr. Taylor means by
the "historical reason" we can only conjecture from his saying that
it is of the same order as his historical reason for believing "that
the Bible is the Word of God." The historical reason for this, we
presume, is that there are various literary and traditional proofs
that the Old Testament was held to be the Word of God by the Jewish
nation at a very early period, and was by them transmitted as such
to the modern Christian world, and that many of the prophecies
contained in it have received partial or a complete fulfilment. But
how by a process of this kind, partly literary and partly
conjectural, and attended by great difficulties at every step, he
would reach a fact of _prehistoric times_ of so much gravity as
creation in series, we think it would puzzle Dr. Taylor to explain.
Indeed, the mere production in a controversy of this nature of these
vague fancies, half pious, half poetical, conjured up in most cases
as a help to mental peace, by a leading minister in the character of
a logician, is a very remarkable proof of the extent of those
defects in clerical education to which we recently called attention.

TYNDALL AND THE THEOLOGIANS

The recent address delivered by Professor Tyndall before the British
Association at Belfast, in which he "confessed" that he "prolonged
the vision backward across the boundary of experimental evidence,
and discerned in matter the promise and potency of every quality and
form of life," produced one by no means very surprising result. Dr.
Watts, a professor of theology in the Presbyterian College in that
city, was led by it to offer to read before the Biological Section
of the Association a paper containing a plan of his own for the
establishment of "peace and co-operation between science and
religion." The paper was, as might have been expected, declined. The
author then read it before a large body of religious people, who
apparently liked it, and they passed him a vote of thanks. The whole
religious world, indeed, is greatly excited against both Tyndall and
Huxley for their performances on this occasion, and papers by no
means in sympathy with the religious world--the _Pall Mall Gazette_,
for instance--are very severe on them for having "recourse to a
style of oratory and disquisition more appropriate to the chapel
than the lecture-room," or, in other words, for using the meetings
of the Association for a sort of propagandism not much superior in
method to that of theological missionaries, and thus challenging the
theologians to a conflict which may make it necessary, in the
interest of fair play, to add a theological section to the
Association. Of course, when Professor Tyndall passed "beyond the
boundary of experimental evidence," and began to see with his
"mind's eye" instead of with the microscope and telescope, he got
into a region in which the theologian is not only more at home than
he, but which theology claims as its exclusive domain, and in which
ministers look on physicists as intruders.

But then, Dr. Watts's "plea for peace and co-operation between
science and religion" is one of many signs that theologians are, in
spite of all that has as yet been said, hardly alive to the exact
nature of the attitude they occupy toward science. They evidently
look upon scientific men as they look on a hostile school of
theologians--as the Princeton men look on the Yale men, for
instance, or the New looked on the Old School Presbyterians, or the
Calvinists on the Arminians--that is, as persons having a common
standard of orthodoxy, but differing somewhat in their method of
applying it, and who may, therefore, be induced from considerations
of expediency to suppress all outward marks of divergence and work
together harmoniously for the common end. All schools of theology
seek the glory of God and salvation of souls, and, this being the
case, differences on points of doctrine do seem trifling and capable
of being put aside.

It is this way of regarding the matter which has led Dr. Watts to
propose an alliance between religion and science, and which produces
the arguments one sometimes sees in defence of Christianity against
Positivism, drawn from a consideration of the services which
Christianity has rendered to the race, and of the gloomy and
desolate condition in which its disappearance would leave the world.
Tyndall and Huxley do not, however, occupy the position of religious
prophets or fathers. They preside over no church or other
organization. They have no power or authority to draft any creed or
articles which will bind anybody else, or which would have any
claims on anybody's reverence or adhesion. No person, in short, is
authorized to bring science into an alliance with religion or with
anything else. Such "peace and co-operation" as Dr. Watts proposed
would be peace and co-operation between him and Professor Tyndall,
or between the theologians and the British Association, but "peace
and co-operation between science and religion" is a term which
carries absurdity on its face. Science is simply a body of facts
which lead people familiar with them to infer the existence of
certain laws. How can it, therefore, be either at peace or war with
anybody, or co-operate with anybody? What Professor Tyndall might
promise would be either not to discover any more facts, or to
discover only certain classes of facts, or to draw no inferences
from facts which would be unfavorable to Dr. Watts's theory of the
universe; but the only result of this would be that Tyndall would
lose his place as a scientific man, and others would go on
discovering the facts and drawing the inferences.

In like manner, the supposition that Christianity can be defended
against Positivism on grounds of expediency implies a singular
conception of the mental operations of those persons who are
affected by Positivist theories, and indeed, we might add, of the
thinking world generally. No man believes in a religion simply
because he thinks it useful, and therefore no man's real adhesion to
the Christian creed can be secured by showing him how human
happiness would suffer by its extinction. This argument, if it had
any weight at all, would only induce persons either to pretend to be
Christians when they were not, or to refrain from assailing
Christianity, or to avoid all inquiries which might possibly lead to
sceptical conclusions. It is therefore, perhaps, a good argument to
address to believers, because it may induce them to suppress doubts
and avoid lines of thought or social relations likely to beget
doubt; but it is an utterly futile argument to address to those who
have already lost their faith. Men believe because they are
convinced; it is not in their power to believe from motives of
prudence or from public spirit.

However, the complaints of the theologians excited by Professor
Tyndall's last utterances are not wholly unreasonable. Science has
done nothing hitherto to give it any authority in the region of the
unseen. "Beyond the boundary of experimental evidence" one man's
vision is about as good as another's. It is interesting to know that
Professor Tyndall there "discerns in matter the potency and promise
of every quality and form of life," but only because he is a
distinguished man, who gives much thought to this class of subjects
and occupies a very prominent place in the public eye. As a basis
for belief of any kind, his vision is of no more value than that of
the Archbishop of Canterbury, who would probably in that region
discern the promise and potency of every form of life in a supreme
and creative intelligence. Scientific men are continually pushing
back the limits of our knowledge of the material universe. They have
during the last eighty years made an enormous addition to the sum of
that knowledge, but they have not, since Democritus, taken away one
hair's-breadth from the Mystery which lies behind. In fact, their
labors have in many ways deepened this Mystery. We can appeal
confidently to any candid man to say, for instance, whether Darwin's
theory of the origin of life and the evolution of species does not
make this globe and its inhabitants a problem vastly darker and more
inscrutable than the Mosaic account of the creation. Take, again,
the light thrown on the constitution of the sun by the spectroscope;
it is a marvellous addition to our knowledge of our environment, but
then, does it not make our ignorance as to the origin of the sun
seem deeper? No scientific man pretends that any success in
discovery will ever lead the human mind beyond the resolution of the
number of laws which now seem to govern phenomena into a smaller
number; but if we reached the limit of the possible in that
direction to-morrow, we should be as far from the secret of the
universe as ever. When we have all got to the blank wall which
everybody admits lies at the boundary of experimental evidence, the
philosopher will know no more about what lies beyond than the
peasant, though the peasant will probably do then what he does
now--people it with the creatures of his imagination. If a
philosopher in our day likes to anticipate that period, and hazards
the conjecture that matter lies beyond, he is welcome to his guess,
but it ought to be understood that it is only a guess.

The danger to society from the men of science does not, we imagine,
lie in the direction in which the theologians look for it. We do not
think they need feel particularly troubled by Professor Tyndall's
speculations as to the origin of things, for these speculations are
very old, and have, after all, only a remote connection with human
affairs. But there are signs both in his and Professor Huxley's
methods of popularizing science, and in those of a good many of
their followers, that we may fear the growth of something in the
nature of a scientific priesthood, who, tempted by the great
facilities for addressing the public which our age affords, and to
which nearly every other profession has fallen a victim, will no
longer confine themselves to their laboratories and museums and
scientific journals, but serve as "ministers of nature" before great
crowds of persons, for the most part of small knowledge and limited
capacity, on whom their hints, suggestions, and denunciations will
have a dangerously stimulating effect, particularly as the contempt
of scientific men for what is called "literature"--that is, the
recorded experience of the human race and the recorded expression of
human feelings--grows every year stronger, and exerts more and more
influence on the masses. The number of dabblers in science--of
persons with a slight smattering of chemistry, geology, botany, and
so on--too, promises to be largely increased for some time to come
by the arrangements of one sort or another made by colleges and
schools for scientific education; and though there is reason to
expect from this education a considerable improvement in knowledge
of the art of reasoning, there is also reason to fear a considerable
increase of dogmatic temper, of eagerness for experimentation in all
fields, and of scorn for the experience of persons who have never
worked in the laboratory or done any deep-sea dredging. Now,
whatever views we may hold as to the value of science in general and
in the long run to the human race, and in particular its value for
purposes of legislation and social economy, which we are far from
denying, there is some risk that lectures like Professor Huxley's at
Belfast, dressed up for promiscuous crowds, and produced with the
polite scorn of infallibility, in which the destruction of moral
responsibility is broadly hinted at as one of the probable results
of researches in biology, will do great mischief. For what does it
matter, or rather ought it to matter, for social purposes, in what
part of a man's system his conscience lies, or whether pressure on a
particular portion of the brain may convert him into a thief, when
we know, as of experience, that the establishment of good courts and
police turns a robbers' den into a hive of peaceful industry, and
when we see the wonders which discipline works in an ignorant crowd?

THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE

A considerable body of the graduates of the Irish Catholic
University, including members of the legal and medical professions,
presented a long and solemn memorial to Cardinal Cullen and the
other Catholic bishops at the late commencement of that institution,
which throws a good deal of light not only on the vexed question of
Catholic education in Ireland, but on the relations of the Catholic
Church to education everywhere. The memorial examined in detail the
management of the university, which it pronounces so bad as to
endanger the existence of the college. But what it most complains of
is the all but total absence of instruction in science. The
memorialists say that the neglect of science by the university has
afforded a very plausible argument to the enemies of the university,
who never tire of repeating that the Catholic Church is the enemy of
science, and that she will carry out her usual policy in Ireland
with respect to it; that "no one can deny that the Irish Catholics
are miserably deficient in scientific education, and that this
deficiency is extremely galling to them; and, in a commercial sense,
involves a loss to them, while, in an intellectual sense, it
involves a positive degradation." They speak regretfully of the
secession of Professor Sullivan, to take the presidency of the
Queen's College, Cork, and declare that "no Irish-Catholic man of
science can be found to take his place." They then go on to make
several astounding charges. The lecture-list of the university does
not include for the faculty of arts a single professor of the
physical or natural sciences, or the name of a solitary teacher in
descriptive geometry, geology, zoology, comparative anatomy,
mineralogy, mining, astronomy, philology, ethnology, mechanics,
electricity, or optics. Of the prizes and exhibitions, the number
offered in classics equals that of those offered in all other
studies put together, while in other universities the classical
prizes do not exceed one-fourth of the whole. They wind up their
melancholy recital by declaring that they are determined that the
scientific inferiority of Irish Catholics shall not last any longer;
and that if they cannot obtain a scientific education in their own
universities, they will seek it at Trinity or the Queen's Colleges,
or study it for themselves in the works of Haeckel, Darwin, Huxley,
Tyndall, and Lyell. They make one other singular complaint, viz.,
that no provision is made for supplying the lay students with
instruction in theology.

It ought to be said in defence of the cardinal and the bishops,
though the memorialists probably could not venture to say it, that
the church hardly pretends that the university is an efficient or
complete instrument of education. It has been in existence, it is
true, twenty years, but the main object of its promoters during this
period has apparently been to harass or frighten the government by
means of it into granting them an endowment, or giving them control
of the Queen's Colleges. Had they succeeded in this, they would
doubtless before now have made a show of readiness to afford
something in the nature of scientific instruction, because, as the
memorialists remark, there is no denying "that the physical and
natural sciences have become the chief studies of the age." But the
memorialists must be either very simple-minded or very ignorant
Catholics, if they suppose that any endowment or any pressure from
public opinion would ever induce the Catholic hierarchy to undertake
to turn out students who would make a respectable figure among the
scientific graduates of other universities, or even hold their own
among the common run of amateur readers of Huxley and Darwin and
Tyndall. There is no excuse for any misunderstanding as regards the
policy of the church on this point. She has never given the
slightest encouragement or sanction to the idea which so many
Protestant divines have of late years embraced, that theology is a
progressive science, capable of continued development in the light
of newly discovered facts, and of gradual adaptation to the changing
phases of our knowledge of the physical universe. She has hundreds
of times given out as absolute truth a certain theory of the origin
of man and of the globe he lives on, and she cannot either abandon
it or encourage any study or habit of mind which would naturally or
probably lead to doubt of the correctness of this theory, or of the
church's authority in enunciating it. In fact, the Pope, who is now
an infallible judge in all matters of faith and discipline, has,
within the last five years, in the famous "Syllabus" of modern
follies, pronounced damnable and erroneous nearly all the methods
and opinions by which Irish or any other Catholics could escape the
deficiency in scientific knowledge which they say they find so
injurious and so degrading. It is safe to say, therefore, that a
Catholic cannot receive an education which would fit him to acquire
distinction among scientific men in our day, without either
incurring everlasting damnation or running the risk of it. Beside a
danger of this kind, of course, as any priest will tell him,
commercial loss and social inferiority are small matters.

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