The works of Orestes A. Brownson, collected and arranged by Henry F. Brownson

THE WORKS OF

ORESTES A. BROWNSON

COLLECTED AND ARRANGED

BY

HENRY F. BROWNSON.

VOLUME IX.

CONTAINING THE SPIRIT-RAPPER AND CRITICISMS OF SOME RECENT
THEORIES IN THE SCIENCES.

DETROIT:

THORNDIKE NOURSE, PUBLISHER.

1884.

tot

CONTENTS.

.

PAGE.
THE SPIRIT-RAPPER— PREFACE, . .

CHAPTER I. THE FIRST LESSON

" II. GUESSES,

III. FURTHER EXPERIMENTS, . / .14

IV. AN EXPLOSION •

V. SOME PROGRESS 28

VI. TABLE-TURNING, 37

VII. A LESSON IN PHILANTHROPY, ... 43

VIII. A LESSON IN WORLD-REFORM, 55

IX. THE CONSPIRACY, 67

X. MR. COTTON is PUZZLED,

XI. WORTH CONSIDERING, 92

XII. A MISSIONARY TOUR,

XIII. THE TOUR CONTINUED,

XIV. ROME AND THE REVOLUTION, ... 118
XV. THE ULTERIOR PROJECT, . . . .129

XVI. A REBUFF,

" XVII. A GLEAM OF HOPE, 144

" XVIII. RELIGIOUS MONOMANIA 151

XIX. MESMERISM INSUFFICIENT, . . . 161

XX. SHEER DEVILTRY,

XXI. SPIRIT-MANIFESTATIONS, . . . .177

" XXII. SUPERSTITION,

" XXIII. DIFFICULTIES,

" XXIV. LEFT IN THE LURCH,

" XXV. CONCLUSIONS, . . . • . • 211

" XXVI. CONVERSION, 225

PRETENSIONS OF PHRENOLOGY, . •. • • • • 2^<>

SCIENCE AND THE SCIENCES, . . . • • t

FAITH AND THE SCIENCES, 268

1 V CONTENTS.

PROFESSOR DRAPER'S BOOKS, 292

PRIMEVAL MAN, , . . . .318

SPIRITISM AND SPIRITISTS, 332

OWEN ON SPIRITISM, 352

TUB PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE, 365

SPIRITUALISM AND MATERIALISM, 379

HEREDITARY GENIUS, ...... 401

ORIGIN OP CIVILIZATION, 418

HERBERT SPENCER'S BIOLOGY, 435

THE COSMIC PHILOSOPHY, .... 439

THE PRIMEVAL MAN NOT A SAVAGE, .... 457

DARWIN'S DESCENT OF MAN, ..... 485

TRUE AND FALSE SCIENCE, 497

TYNDALL'S ADDRESS, 52g

THE CONFLICT OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION, . . 547

ANSWER TO DIFFICULTIES, 566

THE SPIRIT-RAPPER; AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY.

PREFACE.

IF the critics undertake to determine, by any recognized
rules of art, to what class of literary productions the fol
lowing unpretending work belongs, I think they will be
sorely puzzled. I am sure I am puzzled myself to say what
it is." It is not a novel ; it is not a romance; it is not a bi
ography of a real individual ; it is not a dissertation, an
essay, or a regular treatise ; and yet it perhaps has some ele
ments of them all, thrown together in just such a way as
best suited my convenience, or my purpose.

I wanted to write a book, easy to write and not precisely
hard to read, on the new superstition, or old superstition
under a new name, exciting just now no little attention at
home and abroad ; and I chose such a literary form as I —
not, properly speaking, a literary man — could best manage,
which would afford me the most facilities for bringing dis
tinctly before the reader the various points to which I
wished to direct his attention. If the critics think that I
have chosen badly, they are at liberty to bestow upon the
author as much of the castigation which, in his capacity of
Reviewer, he has for many years been in the habit of be
stowing upon others, as they think proper. I have thought
it but fair to give those whom I may have offended by my
own criticisms in another place, an opportunity to pay their
debts and wipe off old scores.

The book, though affecting some degree of levity, is se
rious in its aims, and truthful in its statements. There is
no fiction in it, save its machinery. What is given as fact,
is fact, or at least so regarded by the author. The facts
narrated, or strictly analogous facts, I have either seen my
self, or given on what I regard as ample evidence. The
theory presented as their explanation, and the reasoning by
which it is sustained, speak for themselves, and are left to
the judgment of the reader.

The connection of spirit-rapping, or the spirit-manifesta
tions, with modern philanthropy, visionary reforms, social
ism, and revolutionism, is not an imagination of my own.

VOL. IX— 1

THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

It is historical, and asserted by the Spiritists, or Spiritualists
themselves, as any one may satisfy himself who can have
the patience to look through their Library. I have endeav
ored to be scrupulously exact in all my statements and rep
resentations in this respect. The shafts which the author
shoots at random may perhaps hit some well-meaning per
sons who get crochets in their heads, or astride of hobbies ;
but they are not poisoned with malice, and will titillate the
skin, rather than penetrate the flesh.

I have not aimed at originality, or at displaying my eru
dition in the Black Art. I have certainly read some on the
subject, and at one period of my life made myself acquaint
ed with more "deviltry" than ever did or ever will do me
any good. I have however drawn very little from "forbid
den " sources. In writing, I have used freely a recent French
work, from which I have taken the larger portion of my
facts, and many of my arguments, although I had previously
studied the subject for myself, had learned the same facts,
with one or two exceptions, from other sources, and had
adopted the same solution. The work I refer to is entitled,
Pneumatologie : Des Esprits et de leurs Manifestations

rtuidiques. By the Marquis Eudes de M . Paris,

1853. There are some views, not unimportant, in this
work, which I am not prepared to accept ; but, upon the
whole, it is the only really sensible and scientific work I
have seen on the subject, and I freely confess that I have
done little more than transfer its substance to my pages.

The volume when it was begun was intended to be pub
lished anonymously, but my publishers have preferred to
issue it with the name of the author. I think they have
judged unwisely, but as they ought to know their own trade
better than I, and as there is nothing in it that I am partic
ularly ashamed of or unwilling to avow, I cheerfully com
ply with their request, and send it out with my name, to
make or mar its fortunes. If it tend in any degree to throw
light on the dark facts of history, to check superstition, to
rebuke unreasoning scepticism, and to recall the age to faith
in the Gospel of our Lord, the purpose, the serious purpose,
for which it was written will be answered, and I shall be
content, whatever reception it may otherwise meet from the
public.

BOSTON, August 11, 1854

THE FIRST LI>

CHAPTER I. THE FIRST LESSON.

MY days are numbered ; I am drawing near to the close of
my earthly pilgrimage, and I must soon take my final depar
ture, — whither, I dread to think. But before I go I would
leave a brief record of some incidents in my worse than un
profitable life. A few who have known me, and will hav»-
the charity to breathe a prayer at my grave, may IHJ irlad to
possess it ; and others of my countrymen, who know not
what to think of the marvellous phenomena daily and hour
ly exhibited in their midst, or are vainly striving to explain
them on natural principles, may find it neither uninteresting
nor uninstructive.

Of my exterior life I have not much to record, for though
few have played a more active or important part in the
great events of the past few years, my name has rarely been
connected with them before the public. I was born in a
small town in western New York. My parents were honest
agriculturists from Connecticut, and descended from an
cestors who, with Hooker, founded the colony of Hartford.
They were among the early settlers of what used to be called
the " Holland Purchase," and, till emigrating to the new
world west of the Genesee, were rigid Puritans. Like most
emigrants from the land of " steady habits," they were in
telligent, moral, industrious, and economical, and, as a matter
of course, soon prospered in this world's goods, and became
able to give their only son the best education the State could
furnish, and to leave" him a competent estate. 1 made

mv

preparatory studies at Batavia,and entered, at seventeen, the
freshman class of Union College, Schenectady. ^ I remained
at college four years, a diligent, if not a brilliant student,
and graduated at the close with the highest standing, and
the general love and esteem of my classmates.

My early predilection was for the mathematical and phys
ical sciences. The moral and intellectual sciences were not
much to my taste. I took no great interest in them. They
struck me as vague, uncertain, and unprofitable. I preferred
what M. Comte has since called Positive Philosophy. I soon
mastered mathematics, mechanics, and physics, as far as they
\vciv taught in our college, but I found my greatest delight
in chemistry, which, by its subtle analyses, seemed to prom
ise me an approach to the vital principle and to the essences
of things.

On leaving college I studied — not very profoundly — med-

THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

icine, and took my degree, less with a view to professional1
practice, in which I never engaged, than with a view to gen
eral science. After taking my degree as doctor of medi
cine, I resumed and extended my college studies, entered
largely into the study of natural history, physical geography,
zoology, geology, mineralogy, and indeed all the 'ologiesy
then so fashionable that one must have a smattering of them
if he would woo successfully his sweetheart. I paid some
attention to Gall and Spurzheim's new science of phrenol
ogy, when Spurzheim visited this country, where he died,
and was much interested in it till I had the misfortune ta
listen to a course of lectures in its exposition and defence,
by George Combe, the great Scottish phrenologist. That
course upset me, and I have since abandoned phrenology,
save so far as I find it taught by Plato in his Timaeus, and-
only laughed at its pretensions and its adherents.

I was arrested, for a moment, by Boston transcendental
ism, but I could not make much of it. Its chiefs told me
that I was not spiritual enough to appreciate it, and that I
was too much under the despotism of the understanding to-
be able to rise to those empyrean regions where the soul as
serts her freedom, and sports with infinite delight in all the
luxury of the unintelligible. I thought they talked meta
physics, what neither their hearers nor themselves could un
derstand ; and finding myself very little enlightened by
their intelligible unintelligibility, their dark utterances, and
their Orphic sayings, 1 gave them up, and returned to my
laboratory.

About 1836, I made the acquaintance of Dr. P , or,

as he claimed to be, the Marquis de P , a native of one

of the French West India Islands, but brought up and edu
cated at Paris, where he had been a Saint-Simonian, and a
chief of the savants of the new religion. The decision of
the French courts in 1833, that Saint-Simonism was not a
religion, and therefore that its chiefs were not priests, and
entitled to a salary from the state, dispersed the new sect,
and he soon after came to the United States, and commenced,
though with a very imperfect knowledge of our language,
and very little facility in speaking it, a course of lectures in
several of our eastern cities, on Mesmerism, or, as he pre
ferred to call it, animal magnetism. His appearance was by
no means prepossessing, and his manners, thougn unpretend
ing, were very far from indicating tfiat exquisite grace and
polish which are supposed, for what reason I know not, to

THE FIRST LESSON.

foe peculiar to the Frenchman ; but he was a serious, earnest-
minded man, who in several branches of science had made
solid studies. I knew him well, and esteemed him much.
At that time I had paid not much attention to mesmer
ism. I had heard of Mesmer indeed, of his extraordinary
pretensions, and the wonderful phenomena which lie pro
fessed to produce by his rod and tub ; but I had supposed
that the matter had been put at rest for all sensible persons
by the famous , report of the French Academy in 178±,
signed, among others, by Bailly the astronomer, and our own
Franklin. I supposed that every scientific man acquiesced
in the conclusion of that report, that the extraordinary phe
nomena exhibited by magnetism were to be ascribed to the
imagination, and that from the date of that report magnet
ism nad ceased to occupy the attention of the scientific. I
was therefore surprised, nay, scandalized, to find a man of
real science, and, as I wished to believe, of real worth, pro
fessing faith in what I had been led to regard as an explod
ed humbug, and which, at the very best, could have no
practical utility beyond illustrating the deceptive power of
the imagination, and the sad consequences which might re
sult to those weak-minded people who become dupes to their
•own disordered fancy.

Dr> p assured me that I was mistaken both as to the

bearing and as to the effect of the famous report of the
French Academy. That report, he said, concedes the real
ity of the mesmeric phenomena, and only declares that the
assertion of Mesmer, that they are produced by means of a
subtle fluid analogous to electricity or magnetism, was not
proven or demonstrated by the experiments the commission
witnessed ; which gives no uneasiness to any animal magnet-
ist in our day, because now no one pretends to explain those
phenomena by means of such a fluid. It is true, he said, the
commission, in their published report, assert ^that the phe
nomena are to be explained by the imagination ; but m ^a
private report, addressed to the king, they say, that " it is
impossible not to recognize m them a great power which
agitates and subjects the patients, and of which the naagnet-
izer appears to be the depositary." This, contended Dr.

P , is by no means compatible with the theory which

ascribes them to the imagination, for that theory supposes
the cause that produces them to be in the magnetized, since
it is to their imagination, not to that of the magnetizer,
.that they are to be ascribed ; but in this secret report, the

3 THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

power winch produces them is assumed to be in the mag-
netizer, " of which," it says, " he who magnetizes seems to-
be the depositary." For these, as well as other reasons, lie
said, the report of the Academy was not regarded by mag-
netists as any authority against animal magnetism as under
stood and practised at the present time.

Moreover, he assured me, that the report of the Academy
had not settled the question, or seriously checked the culti
vation or the progress of animal magnetism. It had at no
moment ceased to be studied and practised, chiefly for its
therapeutic effects, and, as he proved to me, was at the time
firmly held and practised by large numbers of the most up
right, benevolent, learned, and scientific members of the
medical profession in France, Germany, and Great Britain.
It had continued to make progress, and was now very gen
erally held and respected on the continent of Europe. * If I
would not be behind my age, if I would not remain ignorant
of a very curious and interesting class of phenomena, I must,
he insisted, investigate and make myself acquainted with
animal magnetism. I should do it as a lover of science ; I
should do it more especially as a lover of my race, as a friend
of humanity ; for I might rest assured that animal magnet
ism is the most facile and powerful means ever yet discov
ered of solacing, and to a great extent curing, a thousand
ills that flesh is heir to.

My curiosity, I confess, was excited, and I resolved to in
vestigate the subject. Dr. P had picked up, some
where in Rhode Island, a somnambulist, an honest, simple-
minded young woman, of no great strength of intellect,
and very little education or knowledge. She was sickly,
and suffering from some nervous affection. He had found
her very susceptible to the mesmeric influence, and he made
her the subject of numerous experiments. He had brought
her, in the winter of 1836-7, to Boston, and there exhib
ited her to his class. Spending that winter in the same city,
I consented one afternoon to be present at his experiments.
There were some twenty or thirty gentlemen present on the
occasion, mostly lawyers, physicians, ministers, and literary
and scientific gentlemen of distinction, all disbelievers in
mesmerism, and on the alert to detect the least sign of
deception or complicity.

The doctor introduced his patient, who took her seat in
an arm-chair placed in the centre of the room, and, without
any visible sign from Dr. P , was in a few minutes ap-

THE IIK^T I.]-:»oN. 7

parently fast asleep. Her breathing \va> regular, lier pulse
natural, and her sleep sound and tranquil. Was it sleep?
It was, as far as we could ascertain, and sleep accompanied
by complete insensibility. We resorted to every imagin
able contrivance to awaken her. One tickled her nose with
a feather, another shook her with all his might, another dis
charged a pistol close to her ear, another stuck pins and
needles into her flesh, — all without the least effect. There
was no quivering or shrinking, no muscular contraction,
and to the rudest proofs she was as insensible as a corpse.
Wr all exhausted our inventive powers in vain, and stood
astounded, unwilling to trust our own senses, and yet un
able to detect the least conceivable deception or collusion.
We none of us knew what to think or say. We were taken
all aback.

Various written questions, after we had given over trying

to awaken her, were handed to Dr. P , which he put to

her mentally, without a word or sign that we could any of
us discern, and to which she instantly answered. One
question was, the time of the day ; she answered, and an
swered correctly, much more so than most gentlemen's
watches present. To the question put she answered, and
so far as any of us knew, or could ascertain, with perfect
accuracy. The doctor at length told her he thought she
had slept long enough, and would do well to wake up. In
stantly she was wide awake, and apparently unconscious of
all that had passed. She remained awake for some time,
when Dr. P- - said to her, " I will you to go to sleep
again for just fifteen minutes, and then to wake up." In
stantly she dropped asleep. One or two of the company
took the doctor into a different part of the room, got him
into an angry discussion, and made him forget the order he
had given. I stood by the somnambulist holding my watch
in my hand, and to my astonishment, precisely at the expi
ration of fifteen minutes, she awoke, various other experi
ments were tried, various severe tests were put ; — some of
them with complete success, others, indeed, proved total
failures ; and after a session of about three hours the party
broke up and went to their several homes, some two or three
converted, the greater part satisfied that there was and
could be no collusion or deception, and yet wholly sceptical
as to the alleged magnetic power.

8 THE SI'IRIT-RAPPER.
CHAPTER II. GUESSES.

IT is no easy matter to give full credit to the reality of
the mesmeric phenomena, or to admit the alleged facts, and
when forced to do so by a mass of testimony which it is im
possible to resist, nothing is more natural than that we should
suggest various hypotheses to account for them. Of all
these hypotheses no one, to those who have been eye-wit
nesses to the mesmeric phenomena, is less satisfactory than
that which attributes them to a species of juggling or
sleight-of-hand, or to collusion between the magnetized and
magnetizer. Whatever may be the jugglery or connivance
in particular cases, or whatever be the real solution of the
problem, we must, as a general rule, admit the good faith of
the paities. The man who could produce by address or
skill, by art, the wonderful phenomena produced by the
mesmerizer, who could so successfully elude the scrutiny of
the most acute and intelligent witnesses, and so effectually
deceive the senses of all classes, would have no motive to
practise mesmerism, for he could produce more excitement,
and gain more notoriety, and more money as a professed
juggler. It is very easy for those who have never seen the
mesmeric phenomena, to set them down as a mere cheat,
which they, if present, could very easily have detected, but
it is very possible that they who have witnessed them are as
able to detect an imposition as would be these critics them
selves, and are far better judges than they are, not having
seen them, unless we are to suppose that the blind can in
some cases see better than those who have eyes. Among
the innumerable witnesses of these phenomena there may
be as careful and as intelligent observers as those who emit
their oracles with solemn gravity on matters of which they
confessedly know nothing. Academicians and members of
royal and scientific societies are no doubt very respectable
personages, but they are not always the best observers in
the world. I would trust " Jack " to distinguish between
a seal or horse-mackerel and the sea-serpent, much quicker
than I would Professor Owen or Professor Agassiz.
Learned academicians and members of scientific societies,
whether of Paris or London, Berlin or Philadelphia, are
the easiest people in the world to impose upon. A clever
lad could pass off upon them a sucker for a pike, and a
crawfish for a lobster. But they need not judge all the
world by themselves. Human testimony is not yet become

GUESSES.

wholly worthless. There is a cloud both of competent and
of credible witnesses in almost every country, to the real
ity of the mesmeric phenomena, and to the good^faith, the
simplicity, and trustworthiness of both mesmerizers and
mesmerized. Whatever be the agent that actually pro
duces these extraordinary phenomena, we must seek it else
where than in mere jugglery, sleight-of-hand, trickery, or
fraud.

I do not give the results of my first experiments as any
thing very wonderful. They would excite little attention
now. Mesmerism is much more advanced than it was in
the hands of my French friend. It is true, there were
rumors even then of far more marvellous phenomena,
strange stories of clairvoyance or second-sight were whis
pered, and strange revelations of an invisible world5> not
recognized by received science, were hinted; but my friend
would not heed them. He was a rationalist, and^ would not
hear of any thing not explicable on natural principles. But
what I witnessed convinced me of the reality of the mag
netic sleep, and of the subjection of the somnambulist to
the will of the mesmerizer, or that one person can, under
certain circumstances, exercise an absolute control over the
organs of another, and render the somnambulist, during
the magnetic sleep, absolutely insensible to all save the mes
merizer. Here was certainly a marvellous power ; what
was it ? Was it, as Bailly and Franklin's Keport of 1784
asserted, the imagination ? Singular effect of imagination
that would put a person asleep at another's will, render her
•completely insensible — dead to all the world but ^ the mes
merizer ; make her go to sleep and wake up at the time spec
ified, answer questions only mentally put, and with a
promptness and an accuracy wholly impossible in her nor
mal state ! A very inexplicable imagination that, and itself
not less puzzling than the mesmeric phenomena themselves.
" No, it is not imagination," insisted Dr. P- — , " any
more than it is a magnetic fluid, as asserted by Mesmer. It
is the will of the magnetizer operating immediately on the
will of the somnambulist, and through that on her organs.
Or rather, it is the spiritual being in me operating immedi
ately on the spiritual being in her, and therefore these phe
nomena afford an excellent refutation of materialism, and
reveal a great and glorious law of human nature, recog
nized, though misconceived, in all ages and nations ; a
mighty law, but hitherto denied to human nature, and sup-

10 TJIE SPIKIT-KAPrER.

posed to be something lying out of our sphere, superhu
man, and even supernatural. Modern science began by de
nying the mysterious facts recorded in history, but it is be
ginning to accept them, and to show that they are all
explicable on the principles of human nature."

" What strikes me as most remarkable in the mesmeric
phenomena," said Mr. Winslow, a rather grave minister of
the extreme left of the Unitarian denomination, who had
joined Dr. P- — and myself on our way to my lodgingsy
" what strikes me as most remarkable in the mesmeric phe
nomena is, not the kind of power they reveal, but the de
gree. Every man who has been accustomed to public
speaking, if he has observed, is conscious of a kindred
power."

" To put his audience asleep," interposed Jack Wheatley,
a young lawyer, who was usually one of my companions
while in the city, "but not always to make them submissive
to his will."

"It is a mysterious power," continued Mr. Winslow,
" which the orator seems to have over his audience, a power
of which he is conscious, but which is wholly unintelligible
to himself."

"But very intelligible to his hearers," interposed Jack.

"You are impertinent, sir," replied the minister, with
offended dignity. "Sometimes when I have attempted to
preach, I have found myself, though perfectly familiar with
my subject, hardly able to say a word. My ideas dance
around and before my mind like summer insects, but at
such a distance, and with such rapidity, that I strive in vain
to seize them. If I do succeed in saying something, my
words penetrate not my hearers ; they as it were rebound,,
and affect only myself."

" Indeed ! " interjected the incorrigible Jack.

"Other times," continued Mr. Winslow, not heeding
Jack's exclamation, " my ideas seem to come of themselves,
to flow without effort, and to clothe themselves, without
any thought or intervention of mine, in the most fitting
words. I find myself elevated above myself; I am in inti
mate relation with the minds of my hearers. It seems that
an electric current passes from them to me and from me to
them, making us as it were one man. I speak with their
combined force added to my own, and each of them hears
and takes in my words with the united understanding of
all."

(.fKSSES. 11

"There may be something in that," said Jack. "You
know, Doctor, turning to me, "that I have no more religion
than a horse, and am seldom serious for five consecutive
minutes in my life. Well, being in the country the other
evening, on a visit to a crochety old aunt, whose very cat
would not dare to purr or to wash her face on Sunday, and
finding it exceedingly dull, I took it into my head to seek
a little amusement or diversion by attending a Methodist
l»i-a ver-meeting, or conference, held in a school-house close
by. I seldom go to meeting, but once-in-awhile I like to-
attend a Methodist evening gathering. I sometimes find
plenty of fun. The performances this evening had begun
before my arrival, for, as usual, I was rather late. On en
tering I found the house crowded almost to suffocation.
Ten or a dozen men, women, boys, and girls, were down on
their knees, all screaming at once from the very top of their
lungs, and the rest of the brethren and sisters were groan
ing, shouting, clapping their hands, in glorious confusion.
I worked my way along to a vacant spot which I spied just
before a blazing fire. Turning my back to the fire, and
holding aside the skirts of my coat so that they should not
get scorched, I stood and looked for some minutes on the
scene before me. At first I was struck with its comical
character, and was much amused ; soon, however, I grew
serious, became sad, and then indignant, that beings in hu
man shape, and endowed, I presumed, with the faculty of
reason, should make such fools of themselves.^ I inwardly
resolved that for once I would ' speak in meeting,' and that
as soon as there should be a pause or a lull, so that I could
stand some chance of making myself heard, I would give
them a piece of Jack Wheatley's mind. In a word, I re
solved to give them a downright scolding, and to tell them
plainly what fools they were to suppose that they could
please God by acting like so many bedlamites or howling
dervishes.

"Well, after some fifteen or twenty minutes, there came
a slacking up, and I opened my mouth. I remembered
what my old rhetoric master had taught me, though how
I came to is a puzzle, and resolved to begin in a modest and
conciliatory manner. It would not do to shock them in the
outset. I must first gain their ears and their good-will. So
I began with a grave face and a solemn tone, an<l made
some commonplace remarks on religion, awl the duty to
love and worship God, meaning (after my preliminary re-

^t> THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

marks, iutcuded to gain the jury) to bring in, with crush
ing effect, my rebukes. But the brethren did not wait.
Mistaking me for a pious exhorter, they cried out almost at
my first words, "Amen!" "Glory! ""Bless the Lord!"
"Go on, brother!" Will you believe it? Instantly I
caught the enthusiasm, became possessed by the genius loci,
entered in spite of myself into the spirit of the meeting,
and gave a most magnificent methodistical exhortation. The
brethren and sisters were edified, were enraptured, and
when the time came for the meeting to break up, the leader
requested me to close the performance with prayer, which I
did with great fervor and unction. The spell lasted till I
got out of the house into the open air."

" So Saul was among the prophets," remarked Mr. Wins-
low, as Jack concluded. " I am not surprised, for some
thing similar occurred to myself when I first began to
preach. There is, I believe, something infectious in these
Methodist gatherings, and a wise man often finds himself
.acting in them as a fool acteth."

"Few wise men, I should think, ever go near them," I
remarked.

" I know not how that may be," replied Mr. Winslow,
"but there are few men that are always wise, or who never
find themselves doing a foolish action. Even the greatest
and wisest of our race sometimes unbend, and prove that
there are points in which they are united to ordinary hu
manity. There is in this secret and invisible influence, to
which I refer, of one man over another what has long ar
rested my attention. Often have I known both speaker and
hearers electrified by a few commonplace words, carried
away, it would seem, by a force not their own ; now melted
into tears ; now inflamed with a pure and unearthly love ;
now maddened with rage ; now fired with a lofty enthu
siasm, swelling with heroic emotions, and panting to do
heroic deeds. In these moments man is more than man
a higher than man possesses him, and he becomes thau-
maturgic, works miracles, removes mountains, stops the
course of rivers, heals the sick, casts out devils, moves,
speaks, and acts a god. I call it the demonic element of
human nature, and I think, if these mesmeric phenomena
turn out to be real, they will be found to have their expla
nation in this mysterious and even fearful element, which
the older theologians called faith, and superstition looks
upon as supernatural."

"That there is some analogy between animal magnetism
and the class of facts to which you refer, or which you have

in your mind," observed Dr. P , " I do not deny. But,

after all, what is the power which produces them ? To re
solve one class of facts into another, equally if not more
mysterious, is not to explain them."

"But what more, my dear Doctor," I asked, "do you
yourself do? There are here two distinct questions: Is
there really such a class of extraordinary phenomena as you
mesmerizers assert ? and if so, what is the agent or efficient
cause in producing them ? As to the first, I am so far sat
isfied as to concede that the remarkable phenomena asserted
may be real ; but I have not seen enough to warrant any
sound induction as to their cause or general law. I must
continue my observation of facts much longer, and extend
it much further, before I proceed to any induction in the
case. You say they are produced by the will of one acting
immediately on the will of another, and through that on
the organs of the person magnetized, by virtue, as you al
lege, of a law of human nature. Yet you do not tell us
what this law is, or what is the nature of that which my
reverend friend calls the demonic power of man."

" In no case does it belong to man to answer similar ques
tions," replied Dr. P . "We in no case know the

essences of things. All that men are able to do is to observe
phenomena, and from them to infer or affirm that there is
and must be an agent or power which produces them. Can
you tell me what is gravitation ? All you can tell me is,
that bodies fall or tend to the centre of the earth, and what
are the laws and conditions of that tendency. What is elec
tricity ? You cannot tell me. You can only tell me that there is
a certain class of phenomena, which you can trace to a certain
invisible and imponderable agent, and to that invisible and un
known agent, that ( occult power,' as an earlier philosophy
would have called it, you give the name of electricity. All you
can know of it is, its existence, the laws by which it oper
ates, the means by which you can avail yourself of it, get
power over it, avert it from your house or barn when it
breaks forth in the thunder-gust, or use it to drive your
machinery, to convey your messages, or to solace your pain.
Science calls it a fluid, but what it is in itself science knows
not, for it has seen it only in its operations or effects. So-
with this power, or law 01 human nature, to which I ascribe
the magnetic phenomena. All I pretend to tell is, that the

14 THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

law is a reality, and all I pretend to demonstrate is, that we
may avail ourselves of it, and use it for the most useful and
noble purposes. This is enough. All we need to know is
its existence, or the purposes to which it may be applied,
and how we can apply it or render it serviceable. Let
man know that he has it, and then let him learn how to use
it."

" But after all, I am a little frightened at the supposition
of this power," remarked Mr. Winslow. There is some
thing fearful in this complete subjection of one, soul and
body, to the will of another. The somnambulist is, during
the mesmeric trance, the slave of the mesmerizer, as much
so as was the genie to the possessor of the wonderful lamp,
and he may do with him or her what he pleases. Is there
not danger here ? May he not use his power in a base way,
to gratify his passions, his lusts, his hatred, or his revenge,
and with complete impunity, since the somnambulist retains
no consciousness or recollection on returning to the normal
state, of what passed during the magnetic slumber ? Let
animal magnetism become generally known and practised,
and who could know when or where he was safe ? Any
one of us might at any moment fall a victim, or be made
the blind instrument of the basest and most malignant pas
sions of others."

"Those are idle fears," replied Dr. P ; "none but

virtuous men can exercise the power, or if others can, they
can exercise it only for honest and benevolent purposes."

" That, if true, would be reassuring," I observed ; " but
for myself, I revolt at the bare idea of being so completely
in the power of another, however honest or well-disposed
he may be. I choose to be rny own, and not another's."

CHAPTER III. — FURTHER EXPERIMENTS.

DR. P- — continued his lectures, private instructions,
and experiments for some months, and very soon they beo-an
to produce their natural effect. JN~o people are more dis
posed to run after every novelty, or are naturally more fond
of the marvellous than the Anglo-Americans. They live in
a constant state of excitement, and are always craving some
new stimulant. They have been transplanted from the old
homestead, are without ancestors, traditions, old associations,
or fixed habits transmitted from generation to generation
through a long series of ages. They have descended, in

FURTHER EXIM.KIMKN T<. 1 •">

givat part, from the 'jets that separated in the seventeenth
century from the Anglican Church, whicji had in the six
teenth century itself separated from the Church of Rome,
and to a great extent broken with antiquity. They are a
new people, — in many respects a child-people, with the
simplicity, freshness, impressibility, unsteadiness, curiosity,
caprice, and waywardness of children. They must huv»'
their pi ay tilings, and they no sooner obtain a new toy than
they tire of it, throw it away, and seek another. Yet are
they richly endowed, and they possess in the highest degree
many of the nobler virtues of our nature. They are a
poetical and imaginative, as well as a reasoning and practi
cal people. They have a robust and not unkindly nature,
— are susceptible of deep emotions, and capable of heroic
deeds. They treat few subjects with absolute indifference,
and seldom fail to give any one who lias, or professes to
have, something to say, a tolerably fair and patient hearing.
Whoever is able to touch their fancy, stir their feelings,
excite their curiosity, or their marvellousness, is pretty sure
of having them run after him — for a time.

Animal magnetism soon became the fashion, in the prin
cipal towns and villages of the Eastern and Middle States.
Old men and women, young men and maidens, boys and
girls, of all classes and sizes, were engaged in studying the
mesmeric phenomena, and mesmerizing or being mesmer
ized, — some declaring themselves believers, some expressing
modestly their doubts, the majority, while half believing,
loudly declaring themselves inveterate sceptics. Jack Wheat-
ley very soon became a famous mesmerizer — for sport. He
laughed at the whole concern, and yet he was the most suc
cessful of the mesmerizers, and his subjects always behaved
with great propriety, seldom, if ever, failing him, or dis
appointing the wondering spectators. Mr. Winslow, after
hesitating a while, began to try experiments himself, and
found that he had a wonderful magnetic power, especially
over the young misses and spinsters of his congregation.
He found by actual experiment, often repeated, and fully
attested, that he could mesmerize without being in the same
room with his subject, without any previous communica
tion of his intent, and even persons with whom he had no
acquaintance, and had never spoken. More than once he
had thrown a young lady in the adjoining room into the
magnetic slumber. Of this there could be no doubt. He
knew well his own intention, and hundreds of witnesses

10 THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

were ready to depose to the fact of the slumber. At first he
tried this experiment only upon those who had been previ
ously mesmerized, but he afterwards tried it with brilliant
success on others.

But the marvel did not stop here. Mr. Winslow soon
found that he could magnetize material objects, which in
turn would magnetize persons. He wished to mesmerize a
young lad^y, without communicating to her his wish. He
mesmerized a glass of water, which was handed her by a
person ignorant of what he had done, and of his intention.
She drank of it, and in a very few minutes sank into a pro
found magnetic slumber, and exhibited the phenomena
usually exhibited in artificial somnambulism. When I first
heard of this experiment I laughed at it, for it seemed to
me a wholly inadmissible fact. I could conceive it possible
for mind to act on mind ; for the will of the magnetizer to
affect the will of the magnetized ; but it was repugnant to
all received science to suppose that mind or spirit can, with
out some natural medium, operate on material objects. But
from what I subsequently saw and did myself, and what I
was assured of by others, both competent and credible, I
became convinced that I must admit it, or reject all human
testimony.

Mr. Winslow, once become a mesmerizer, very soon left
Dr. P— - far behind. In pushing forward his investiga
tions, he found that he could not only throw persons, not
indeed every one, but one in twenty-five or thirty, into the
mesmeric sleep, render them insensible, dead as 'it were to
all the world except himself, but that he could develop in
them, or superinduce upon them, a marvellous physical
strength. I saw him place a weak and sickly boy in a chair
on the platform of his lecture room, and so nerve his arm
that not two of the strongest men could move it. He would,
by his mental operation, so nail the chair to the floor that
no force applied to it could raise it. He would throw the
boy by the same operation upon the floor, render his whole-
body, neck, legs, arms, fingers, and toes, rigid, and stiff as a
crowbar ; then suddenly relax all his limbs, and render him
as flexible as a reed — now fill him with rage, make him rave
furiously, rush through the audience as one possessed, over
throwing every thing and every one in his way — now recall
him, soothe his rage, make him cry and weep as if afflicted
with the deepest and most inconsolable grief, and now drv
at once his tears, and break forth into the wildest and mad
dest joy.

FURTHER KXI'KRIMKNTS. IT

These were singular phenomena. Whence this apparently
superhuman strength ? That certainly was no effect of com
plicity, for the hoy exhibited a physical strength far sur
passing that of both mesmerizer and mesmerized in their
normal state. It could not be the effect of imagination.
" For how," said Mr. Winslow, " can you explain by
imagination the effect produced on material objects? You
see "that I can magnetize a glass of water or a bunch of
flowers. Do you pretend that these are endowed with
imagination ; are not only sensitive, but also intellectual, and
even volitive? Have the most common material objects
sense, intellect, and will ? Imagination, highly excited,
may indeed develop and concentrate the strength which one
has, but how impart a strength which one has not ? "

" I have been studying these wonderful phenomena."
said Mr. Increase Mather Cotton, a rigid puritan minister
of high standing, and who had accompanied me to see Mr.
Window's experiments, "and I think I see in them the
works of the devil."

" Why, sir," replied Mr. Winslow, " I do these things
myself. My patients move and act, are paralyzed, laugh,
cry, weep, rage, foam, run, fly, fight, or make love, at ray
will. Do you think I am the devil ? "

" Be not too confident," replied Mr. Cotton. " You may
yet find that, if not the devil yourself, that it is a devil, and
a very base and wicked devil, that moves you, and uses you
as the instrument of his malice."

"I have no belief," answered Mr. Winslow, "in devils or
demons, as separate and intelligent beings."

"I know very well, sir, that you are a Sadducee, and be
lieve in neither angel nor spirit, although you would fain
pass for a Christian minister," replied, with a severe tone,
the stanch puritan, whose great ancestor had taken so con
spicuous a part in Salem witchcraft.

" You do me wrong, Mr. Cotton," replied Mr. Winslow.
"I am a Christian, and no Sadducee. I believe in the
Christian religion as firmly as you do. I do not deny angel
or spirit. By angel I understand what the word itself im
ports, a messenger, and by spirit, a power, force, or energy.
But I do not suppose that I am to understand by either an
order of beings distinct and separate from man. I concede
the spiritual power or energy, but it is the power or energy
of the human being ; I grant the demonic character of these
phenomena, but the force that produces them is the demonic

VOL. IX-2.

18 THE SPTRIT-RAPPER.

force of human nature itself. There are no personal angels,
and no personal devils or demons."

" And no personal God, you will say next, I presume,"
replied Mr. Cotton with a sneer.

" God is personal in me, in the human personality,"
proudly answered Mr. Winslow. " Personality is a circum
scription, a limitation ; and God, since he is infinite, in
capable of circumscription, cannot be personal in himself.
He can be personal only in creatures, and consequently,
only in such creatures as have personality, that is, men."

" Your notion of personality is of apiece with your whole
miscalled theology," replied Mr. Cotton. " Personality is
the last complement of rational nature. If the nature is
rational, that is, capable of intelligent and voluntary activity,
and complete, it is a person, and if infinite, an infinite per
son. Your argument is a mere sophism, founded on a false
definition of personality. A little philosophy or common
sense would be of great service to such Christian ministers
as you are."

u Let us not," I interposed, " get involved in a theological
discussion. We are to investigate this subject as men of
science, not as theologians. We have here a' scientific sub
ject, and science leaves theologians to their speculations,
without presuming to intervene in their interminable, use
less, and wearisome disputes. If your theology is true, it
can never be in conflict with science."

" If your science be true, or really be science," retorted
Mr. Cotton, " it can never be in conflict with theology. I
do not attempt to deduce my science from my theology,
but I make my theology the mistress of my science. What
ever is inconsistent with it, I know beforehand cannot be
genuine science, or true philosophy."

" That may or may not be so," I replied ; "but I am no
theologian. I am an humble cultivator of science, and I
consider myself free to push my scientific investigations
into all subjects independently, without restraint, without
leave asked or obtained either from you or my friend Mr.
Winslow. All history has its superstitious and marvellous
side. Science has heretofore denied the reality of that side
of history, and regarded the marvellous facts with which
ancient and mediaeval history is filled, as never having really
taken place, or as the result of fraud, trickery, or imposture,
exaggerated by the credulity, the ignorance, the wonder,
and the disordered imaginations of the multitude. These

FUUTIIKli KXTKItlMKNTS. . 19

mesmeric phenomena may throw a new light on that class
of facts ; they may even relieve history from the charges
which have been brought against it, and rehabilitate the
ages that we have condemned, so far at least as the facts
themselves are concerned, though not necessarily as to the
theories by which they were in past times generally ex
plained. I am myself at present bewildered. I am not
willing to admit the facts, but I am unable to deny them,
if they must be accepted, I incline to the view of my
friend Mr. Winslow, and am disposed to assume that there
is in human nature a law not hitherto well understood, a
mysterious power, what he here calls the demonic power of
human nature, the limits and extent of which science lias
not as yet explored."

" There is something mysterious in man," remarked Mr.
Sandborn, a Universalist minister present. "I remember,
some years ago, that one summer I was very much out of
health. I suffered much from a bowel complaint, which
brought me very low. But my mind was exceedingly
active, and I seemed to myself to have not only more than
my ordinary intellectual power, but also at my command a
mass of information on a great variety of subjects which I
was sure I had never acquired in the course of my ordinary
studies. I seemed familiar with several physical sciences
which I had never studied, and with facts, real facts too,
which I had never learned. While I was in this state I was
visited at my residence in the village of Ithaca, New York,
by a young friend, a brother minister, residing some eigh
teen or twenty miles distant. He saw my state, and urged
me to go out and spend a few weeks with him at his boarding-
house. The pure breezes, he said, from the hills would do
me good, revive my languishing body, and restore me to
health. I accepted my young friend's invitation, and the
next morning we took the stage, and after some three hour's
drive were set down at his lodgings. We were hardly
seated in his library, when a servant brought him a letter
which had been taken from the post-office during his ab
sence. I saw a slight blush on his face as he took the
letter, and instantly comprehended that it was from his
' ladye love,' although I was entirely ignorant that he was
I laying his attentions to any one, or that he had any matri
monial intentions. Asking my permission, he broke the
seal, and read his letter in my presence. When he had
done, I said to him,

20 THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

" i You have there a letter from your sweetheart, the young
lady to whom you are engaged to be married.'

" < How do you know that ? ' he asked in reply.

"*O that is evident,' I replied. 'I see it in your face.
Let me see the letter, and I will tell you her character.'

" ' I would rather not,' he answered.

" * I do not wish to read it,' said I, i I only wish to look
at the handwriting.'

" ' But can you tell a person's character by seeing his
handwriting ? '

" ' Certainly, nothing is easier,' I replied, although I had
never tried, or even heard of such a thing before.

" He then handed me the letter. I fixed my eye on the
writing for a moment without reading a word of the letter,
and I saw, or seemed to see, standing before me, at some
six or eight feet distant, a very good-looking young lady, a
little below the medium size, with an agreeable expression
of face, apparently about eighteen years of age, as plainly
as I see any one of you now in this room. I proceeded quietly
and at my ease to describe her to my friend. I told her
age, described her size, her height, her complexion, the
color and texture of her hair, the colors and quality of her
dress, indeed her whole external appearance, even to a
hardly perceptible mole on her right cheek. My friend,
you may well suppose, listened to me with surprise, aston
ishment, and wonder, and several times interrupted me
with the question i Are you really the devil ? ' He agreed
that my description was accurate, and far more so than he
could himself have given.

" I then proceeded, to my friend's equal astonishment, to
describe her moral and intellectual qualities, her disposition,
her education, her tastes, her habits, &c., all of which he de
clared were correctly described, as far as he himself knew.
I had never previously seen or heard of the young lady,
who lived in another State, and was actually at the moment
some hundred and fifty miles distant. But this was not all.
My friend married the young lady in the course of two
or three months, and two years afterwards I called at his
house, and was introduced to a lady whom I instantly
recognized as the one whose image I had previously seen
before me.* There is something in all this, and analogous
facts related and well attested by others, that I cannot ex
plain."

* A literal fact, in the experience of the author.

AN EXPLOSION.

21

We all agreed that the case was remarkable, and appar
ently inexplicable, on any known principles of received sci
ence.

CHAPTER IV. AN EXPLOSION.

DR. p having accomplished his object in visiting this

country, and being invited home by his family, took his
leave of us in the summer of 1840, and returned to the
"West Indies. I have not seen him since. But he left be
hind a large number of disciples, and we had no lack of
mesmerizers, and mesmerizers to whom he was a mere
child. Some of these made mesmerism a trade, and gave
public lectures and experiments as a means of gaining noto
riety and filling their pockets. Others made their experi
ments in private circles, and from curiosity, or in the in
terests of science, and not unfrequently by way of amuse
ment. Mr. Winslow devoted much time to a series of ex
periments intended to prove the reality of what he called
the demonic element of human nature. He wished to be
able to accept and explain the miracles recorded in sacred
and profane history on natural principles, without the recog
nition of the supernatural. Jack Wheatley continued his
•experiments, apparently more in jest than in earnest, and
was remarkably successful. He had no theory on the sub
ject, said nothing of the use to which mesmerism might be
applied, and never speculated on the cause of the mesmeric
phenomena. He contented himself with producing them,
.and leaving others to use or explain them as they saw
proper.

A year had passed without my seeing Jack. In the win
ter of 1840-41, while on a visit to Boston, I met him one
day accidentally in the street, and was startled at his altered
appearance. His look was wild and oppressed, his face was
pale and sallow, his youth and bloom were gone, and his
body was wasted to a skeleton. He made as if he would
avoid me, and with reluctance and a certain timidity replied
to my greeting.

" Why, Jack, what is the matter ? "

" Don't you see ? I see her night and day," he replied
with a shudder, as if he beheld some strange and horrible
vision from which he would avert his looks, but could not.

" See what '( " said I. " 1 see nothing."

He trembled all over, and seemed unable to speak. See-

22 THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

ing that he had either lost his wits, or was fast losing themr
I took his arm in mine, and with gentle violence led him
to my lodgings, at no great distance, conducted him to my
room, and induced him to repose himself on the sofa. 1
closed the door, and seated myself by his side. I took his
hand, and caressed his forehead and temples as if he had
been a child. He seemed soothed. " Tell me, Jack," said
I, in a voice almost as gentle and affectionate as that of a
mother, " tell me what has happened."
" I am lost, I am damned."

" Say not that. As long as life lasts no one is lost, and
nothing is irreparable."

" Life no longer lasts. I do not live. I killed her."
' ]STo, no. But of whom do you speak ? "
" You did not know. I never told you. You seemed to*
be a cast-iron man, as Miss Martineau says of Mr. Calhoun,
and disposed to put every sentence in your crucible, and
subject it to your retorts and blowpipes."

" But Mr. Calhoun has a heart, as I have had ample oc
casion to prove."

"I was always light and trifling, careless, ^ay, and iovous,
yet I truly and deeply loved."

" And none the less deeply and truly because gay and
joyous."

" But you know nothing of love ? "
" JSTo man is always wise."
" But you will laugh at me."

"My dear Jack, tliere are few hearts without some little
romance, in some hidden or unhidden corner. There are not
many persons unwilling to listen to a story of true and o-en-
uine love."

" I was young and foolish, but I loved one, and one whom
I thought every way worthy, a thousand times worthy, of
my love. I felt myself infinitely her inferior, and unworthy
even ^to kiss the ground on which she had trodden."
" That is easily comprehended."
' Now you are laughing at me."

" No, I am not. But you may leave something to mv
imagination, if not to my experience. I do not doubt that
she whom you loved had all imaginable charms, all con
ceivable graces, and all possible and impossible perfection s.'r
" But my Isabel was the most beautiful, sweet, amiable,
and glorious creature that ever gladdened the earth with her
presence."

AN EXPLOSION. A6

"Unquestionably. He who doubts that his mistress is an
angel, is divine, is a goddess, has his liver whole, and I
will warrant him sound in wind and limb. The lover never
finds his mistress mortal till after the wedding."

"You are incorrigible. You promised not to laugh at
me. Indeed, indeed, Doctor, I do not deserve to be laughed
at."

" I own it, my dear Jack, and nothing is farther from my
heart than to laugh at you. But do tell me what has hap
pened. I am really grieved to see you so afflicted."

" Well, I loved Isabel, and had the happiness of believing
that she returned my love. I gained her consent, and that
of her parents and my own, and we were only waiting till I
was fairly established in my profession to be married. Not
withstanding Shakspeare's dictum, the course of our true
love did run smooth. There never was a lover's quarrel
between us, and there were no obstacles interposed by
friends, enemies, or fortune. My acquaintance accidentally

formed with you brought me into company with Dr. P ,

and interested me in animal magnetism. ^ In mere sport,
as a pastime, I began trying my mesmeric powers on one
and another of my young friends". Capital fun we found it.
Xone of us dreamed of there being any harm in it, or that
we might not sport with it as we pleased without any un
pleasant consequences. I know not how it was, but
proved to be a powerful magnetizer, although I was said not
to have the right sort of temperament for a mesmerizer.
My experiments rarely failed, and were almost always un
usually brilliant.

" One evening at a friend's house, where some ten or a
dozen of my companions and acquaintances were assembled,
I mesmerized a boy about twelve years old. I found him
completely under my control, and perfectly docile to all
my intentions. His behavior was admirable. I asked him
mentally a large number of questions which it was certain
that in his normal state he could not answer, and which he
answered explicitly, with surprising accuracy. He had
never been taught music, and in his normal state could not
distinguish even one tune from another. I willed him to seat
himself at the piano, and play for us a favorite waltz of
Mozart. He obeyed, and performed it with accuracy, with
spirit, a delicacy of touch, and brilliancy of effect, which
none of us had ever heard equalled, or even approached. I
then mentally ordered him to sing us, to his own accompani-

2± THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

ment, one or two songs from Fra Diavolo, which were then
in fashion. He obeyed. We were all surprised, and began
talking among ourselves of the apparent miracle, when, to
our still greater astonishment, he commenced playing of his
own accord a strange piece, which none of us knew or had
ever heard, and which, for its wild and unearthly character,
for its brilliancy, depth, and pathos, surpassed all that we
had ever conceived of music. We were all entranced.
TIere was some agency not the boy's, not mine, not that of
.any one present. Such strains had never had mortal com
poser.

"I knew not what to think, and so contrived not to think
at all, but enjoyed the music, and looked no farther. Carpe
diem, you know, was my philosophy. I saw I had a bril
liant subject, and I resolved to make the most of him. I
had heard of the marvellous powers of clairvoyance and
second sight exhibited by some somnambulists. I blind
folded the boy, and gave him a letter. He read it with
ease. I placed another at the back of his neck, he read that
also ; I placed another, folded up, on the back of his head.
He told me who was the writer, described his appearance,
his complexion, size, and character, with more accuracy
than I could have done, although the writer was well
known to me, and must have been a total stranger to the
boy. I took the boy with me on a journey, that is, mentally.
We stopped at Providence, went on to Stonington, took the
steamer for New York, landed and went up Broadway, down
the Bowery, and through several other streets. He named
the hotels, churches, and other public buildings we passed,
and read the signs over the shop doors. We went up the
Hudson, to Albany, from there to Utica, Eochester, Niagara
Falls, and then returned, and on our way back stopped at
jour house in Genesee county, with which you know I am
familiar. We went into the library, and the laboratory, in
each of which he named and accurately described the prin
cipal objects. Having come back, we took an excursion
into the other world, of which he told us strange things,
which none of us believed, for we were all Unitarians, Uni-
versalists, or unbelievers, and his revelations seemed to
favor what is called Orthodoxy.

" My betrothed was present at all these experiments.
She was greatly excited. Time and again she wished that
I would mesmerize her. She wished this much more after
she had heard the boj- describe what he saw in the other

AX EXPLOSION". 25

world. I know not why, but I shrunk from complying
with her wish. I saw no harm in others being mesmerized,
and I had, without any scruple, mesmerized young ladies by
the dozen ; but some how or other I could not bear to have
my Isabel mesmerized, or even to mesmerize her myself. I
instinctively felt that there would be something indelicate
in it, something hardly modest, and that it would be a sort
of desecration. She was modest, retiring, even timid, but
her curiosity was excited, and she would brook no denial."

" A true daughter of Eve. Women are timid creatures,
but will brave Satan himself to gratify their curiosity, or
their passions."

" That now is malicious."

" Never mind ; go on."

" I was at length obliged to consent, but only to mag
netize her at her father's house, and at first only in presence
•of her mother or her sister. She yielded very readily to
the mesmeric influence, and became a remarkable clairvoy
ant. She had, when in the magnetic slumber, not only a
clear view of remote terrestrial tilings, of which she had no
previous knowledge, and which were equally unknown to
me, but also of heaven and hell, and revealed to me strange
things of angels and spirits, of the state of departed souls,
good and bad, and of their intercourse with the living. We
both became deeply interested, and took every opportunity
to make our investigations. We were left much alone, and
she remained in the mesmeric state from one to two hours
almost every day or evening. If I was unable to visit her,
she would, though I knew it not, invite some female friend
to mesmerize her, for gradually she seemed to wish to live
only in the mesmeric state, and appeared restless and un
easy when out of it. Her physical system began to suffer.
She complained, when awake, of a universal lassitude. The
bloom faded from her cheek, her eye assumed a wild, lus
treless glare, and her motions were heavy and languid. She
was listless, absent, forgetful, taking little or no interest in
anybody or any thing. I beheld her, as you may well be
lieve, with great anxiety and alarm.

" One evening, about two months ago, I visited her. I
found her alone, and in a few minutes threw her into the
mesmeric sleep, for it was only in that state that her mind
retained its strength and brilliancy. She was attacked with
-convulsions and spasms as I had never seen her before. I
hastened to awake her. It was too lute ! I had killed her;

26 THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

and that countenance which had been so dear to me, which
had so often beamed on me with the sweet smile of love,
now bore only the expression of fear, horror, rage, and an
guish. It was the face of a demon. It froze my blood to
behold it.

" I had my own grief to bear, I had to endure the tortures
of my own remorse and utter despair, and to face the grief,-
silent, but deep, of her father, and the rage of her mother,,
who cursed me, cursed me as only a mother in the violence
of her wrath and grief can curse. How I lived through
that dreadful night I know not. The relations agreed to
conceal the circumstances of Isabel's death. I followed
her to the tomb, and returned to my own home, blasted,,
withered, worse than dead.

" All this was bad enough, but worse followed. The day
after the funeral, while sitting alone in my office, I saw, at
a few feet from me, partly behind me, a grayish appearance,
without any sharply defined outline. I looked at it for a
moment, and it assumed then the well-known form of her
I the day before followed to the grave, and, horror of hor
rors, with that fearful expression of face with which she
had died. It came nearer to me, I receded ; it followed, I
rushed into the street ; it pursued, I turned aside my face,,
it turned as I turned, so as to be always within my view.
From that day to this has it haunted me ; I have scarcely a
moment's respite. Day or night, light or dark, with my
eyes opened or closed, always does it stand before me, and
glare on me with that terrible look. I cannot sleep ; I can
not eat ; I have no rest. The only few moments of quiet
I have had are those since I have been with you in this
room. I do not see it now. O, it was a sad day for me
when I chose animal magnetism for a plaything ! "

I was much affected by Jack's sufferings. I was not sur
prised at the fatal effects of mesmerism on the young lady ;
for death, I had been assured, is no unfrequent result of
what the physicians who practise it call its injudicious use.
The form which haunted him gave me no uneasiness, as it
was, in my opinion, clearly a case of hallucination, a species
of monomania, well known to the physicians of our lunatic
hospitals, and our writers on mania or insanity. The shock
my young friend had received had probably produced some
slight lesion of the brain, and the imagination gave shape
to the deceptive appearance, as in dreams we see often re
produced, following us, preceding us, or dancing around usr

AN EXPLOSION. 27

the shapes and images which had deeply impressed us when
awake. But I was fond of poor Jack, and my great anxiety
was to console him, and to prevent what might be only a
temporary hallucination from becoming a confirmed insan
ity. Finding him better when with me, I persuaded him,
with the consent of his family, who understood very little
of his case, and feared for his reason, to accompany me to
my home in Western New York, and to place himself under
my care.

He remained very much depressed for several months,
but gradually his appetite returned ; he was able to get some
sleep, and his health began to improve. The vision did not
entirely leave him, especially when alone, or not with me,
but its visits became less and less frequent, and less and less
appalling. The expression of the face gradually became less
horrible, and more human, but still indicated great suffering
and profound grief. In the course of a year, however, he
seemed to have recovered, and returned to Boston. But in
proportion as he seemed to be regaining his health and
peace of mind, as far as peace of mind he could hope to
have, a very singular change began to come over me.

I had spent my time, since leaving college, in literary
ease and scientific pursuits. I had had few strong or violent
passions to trouble me, and few things had wounded me
very deeply. I had had, it is true, my little romances, but
not being of a sentimental turn, and having a strong con
stitution and most excellent health, they had hardly rippled
the surface of the ordinarily smooth current of my life. I
had pursued science as a pastime. I took an easy, pleasant
interest in it, but had no passion for it. I had no enthu
siasm, and found in the pursuit only a gentle excitement, as
in reading one of James's novels, which, by the by, are
the best of all novels, for you can take them up or lay them
down when you please. Spare me, I always say, those much-
be praised works of fiction which deal with strong and vio
lent passions, which produce in the reader a painfully in
tense interest, and which, when you once begin reading
them, you cannot lay down till you have read to the end.
I avoid reading such a novel, as I avoid a night's debauch.

But now a change came over me. I became restless, and
had an intense longing to explore the secrets of things, and
to look within the veil with which nature kindly slirouds
her laboratory. I longed to make myself acquainted with
the primal elements of being, and to be able to command

28 THE SPIRIT-RAPPEE.

them ; I burned to enlarge not only my knowledge, but my
forces. I would be able to raise the tempest on the deep,
to fly through the air, to wield the lightning, to leave and
^nter my body at will, to succor my friends or overwhelm
my enemies at a distance. I would read the stars, compre
hend their influences, and command their courses. I en
vied the old Chaldean sages, the mighty magicians of the
East, and the wizards and weird sisters of the North. Why
should it not be literally true that mind is omnipotent over
matter ? Is not man called the lord of this lower creation ?
Why then should he fear, or not be able to exercise his lord
ship ? Had we not seen the wonders of science ? Had not
man learned to make the lightnings his steeds, and flames
of fire his ministers ? What are the mighty forces of nature ?
May not mail seize them, use them, and wield their might
at his pleasure ?

Such thoughts were new to me, still more new were those
intense longings. The horizon of human power seemed to
enlarge around me, and I seemed to rise in the majesty and
might of my nature. I was becoming, as it were, a new
man. The ethereal fire within had hitherto slumbered. It
was now kindled, arid its flames aspired to their native heav
en. I would no longer be the puny thing I had been.
Henceforth I would be a man ; a man in the full and lofty
sense of the word. Now suddenly my soul seemed to grow,
and to become too large for my body, against which it beat
as the prisoner beats his head againsc the walls of his pris
on-house. I knew not then the source or nature of these
feelings, and I cherished them as precious intimations of my
affinity with the Origin and Source of all things. At times
I was elated ; my eye glowed with an unwonted fire, and
sparkled with an unearthly brilliancy ; my step was elastic,
and my whole frame seemed to have received new youth
and buoyancy, and to be in some measure withdrawn from
the ordinary laws of gravitation. It seemed as if all the
great forces of nature flowed into me, and became subject to
my will. Nothing was impossible to me.

CHAPTER V. — SOME PROGRESS.

HITHERTO I had neither been magnetized myself nor
magnetized others. I had read the principal works which
had been written in French and English on the subject, and
had witnessed and carefully analyzed the experiments made

SOME PROGKI •>- . Ztf

by my friends; but now I madly resolved to make experi
ments for myself.

A portion of the winter of 1841-2 I spent in Philadel
phia, and as my acquaintance was principally with the Hicks-
ite Quakers, Unitarians, Swedenborgians, Universalists,
and open unbelievers in all religion, 1 was, as a matter of
course, thrown into the very circles where animal magnet
ism, as well as all conceivable novelties and absurdities, were
the order of the day. My friends and associates were near
ly all philanthropists and world-reformers. There were
among them seers and seeresses, enthusiasts and fanatics, so
cialists and communists, abolitionists and anti-hangmen, rad
icals and women's-rights men of both sexes ; all professing
the deepest and most disinterested love for mankind, and
claiming to be moved by the single desire to do good to the
race. All agreed that hitherto every thing had gone wrong ;
all agreed in denouncing all forms of religion and govern
ment that had hitherto obtained amongst men ; all agreed
in declaiming against the clergy of all denominations, in
manifesting their indignation against all political and civil
rule, and whatever tended in the least to restrain the pas
sions of individuals or the multitude, in asserting the won
derful progress of the human race during the last hundred
years, and in predicting that a new era was about to dawn
for the world ; but beyond this I could find scarcely a point
on which any two of them were not at loggerheads.

I cannot say that the differences I found among these ex
cellent people when it concerned their philanthropic pro
jects or their various schemes of world-reform, edified me
'much, but I was charmed with their disinterestedness, with
their zeal, and their superiority to the restraints of popular
prejudice, and what they stigmatized as conventionalism. I
was above all delighted to observe the new importance as
sumed in behalf of woman ; and it was a real pleasure to hear
a charming young lady, whose face a painter might have
chosen for his model, in a sweet musical voice, and a gentle
and loving look, which made you all unconsciously take her
hand in yours, defend our great grandmother Eve, and
maintain that her act, which an ungrateful world had held
to have been the source of all the vice, the crime, the sin
and misery of mankind, was an act of lofty heroism, of no
ble daring, of pure disinterested love for man. Adam, but
for her, would have tamely submitted to the tyrannical or
der he had received, and the race would never have known

-30 THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

how to distinguish between good and evil. How, with the
sweet young lady — I see and hear her now — sitting on a
stool near me, laying her hand in the fervor of her argu
ment on mine, and looking up with all the witchery of her
eyes into my face, how could I fail to be convinced that
man is cold, calculating, selfish, and cowardly, and that the
world cannot be reformed without the destruction of the
male (it might be called the mat) organization of society,
the elevation of woman to her proper sphere, and the in
fusion into the government and management of public and
private affairs, of some portion of the love, the daring, the en
thusiasm, and disinterestedness of woman's heart ? There
was nothing to be said in reply.

But alas ! unhappy Saint-Simonians ; you believed also
that the evils endured by the race were owing, in great
measure, to the fact that society had hitherto been organized
and governed by men as distinguished from women, and
therefore without the female element. You would in your
reorganization of the world, avoid this sad mistake. You
could not agree on the definitive organization of mankind till
you had obtained the voice of woman. But how obtain
that from woman, the slave of the old male organization 1
Kpere supreme vou had found, but a woman to sit by his
side as mere supreme, and to exercise with him equal author
ity, you found not, and could proceed no further. You
selected twelve apostles, and sent them forth in search of a
mere supreme. They searched France, England, Germany,
Italy, all Europe, even to the harem of the Grand Turk,
but they found her not, and returned and reported their ill-
success. Then fear and consternation seized you ; then fell
despair took possession of your souls ; then you saw all your
hopes blasted, and you separated and dissolved in thin air.
Perhaps, if you had sent your apostles to the United States,
to^ Philadelphia or Boston, you might have succeeded, and
Pere Enfantin not have vanished from Paris, the capital of
the world, to waste himself as an engineer in the service of
Mehemet Ali.

It was a real pleasure to find these men of advanced
views, and these women of burning hearts and strong minds
who had outgrown the narrow prejudices of their sex all
substituting the love of mankind for the love of God. They
all agreed that philanthropy was the highest virtue, and the
only virtue. Charity was an obsolete virtue, no longer in
use, and not suited to our advanced stage of human prow-

SOME PROGRESS. 31

ress. That taught us to love man in God, but we have
learned to love God in man ; that is, man himself, without
any reference to God. This was charming, and emancipat
ed us from our thraldom to priests, and all old-fashioned
religion. What was better still, I found that even this no
ble philanthropy received a very liberal interpretation, and
did not interfere at all with those pleasant passions and vices,
called anger, spite, envy, &c. It was only a love of man
in the abstract, the love of mankind in general, which per
mitted the most sublime hatred or indifference to all men
in particular. Wonderful nineteenth century ! I exclaimed ;
wonderful seers and seeresses, and most delightful moralists
.are these modern world-reformers !

In this pleasant and delightful circle mesmerism attracted
its full share of attention. I met it in almost every circle
where I happened to be present. It seemed to take the
place of cards, music, and dancing. One evening I was at
a friend's house, where were collected some twenty-five or
thirty gentlemen and ladies, or perhaps I should say, ladies
.and gentlemen, mainly on my account, for I was, in a small
way, something of a lion, and our people are great in lion
izing whenever they have an opportunity, as Dickens, Kos-
suth, Padre Gavazzi, and others hardly less worthy can abun
dantly testify. Indeed, our people are democrats only from
envy and spite. In their souls they are the most aristocrat
ic people in the world, and would be so avowedly, only they
have no legitimate aristocracy. Democracy has its origin
in the feeling, — since I am as good as you, and since I can
not be an aristocrat, you shall be a democrat with me.

In this private party there were two or three somnambu
lists, and twice that number of mesmerizers. My friend,
Mr. Winslow, from Boston, was present, and also Mr. Cot
ton, who was in the city on some business pertaining to hold
ing a world's convention in London for evangelizing France,
Italy, and other benighted countries of Europe. Mr. Wins-
low was in high spirits. He was sure that he was making
out his proofs that there is a demonic element in human
nature, never once reflecting, that if demonic it is not hu
man.

"I am," said he, "on the point of rehabilitating his
tory. Miracles, divinations, sorceries, magic, the black arts,
which suprise us in all history, sacred and profane, and which
are either denied outright, or ascribed to supernatural agen
cies, I think I shall be able to accept, as facts, as ivul nhe-

32 THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

nomena, and explain on natural principles. I think I have in*
mesmerism an explanation of them all."

" So you imagine that with mesmerism you may take your
place with the magicians of Egypt, and enter into a success
ful contest with Moses," said Mr. Cotton. " You forget that
those magicians were discomfited, and at the third trial were
obliged to give up and acknowledge themselves beaten.
4 The finger of God is here.' r

" Moses was a superior mesmerizer, and he mesmerized
for a good, and they fora bad purpose, which makes all the
difference in the world," replied Mr. Winslow.

" But these magicians, then, could exercise the mesmeric
power up to a certain point, and for evil ; I thought it was
a doctrine of mesmerizers, that none but virtuous and honest
men could mesmerize, and these only for a good and honest
purpose," said Mr. Cotton.

" I am not," said I, " particularly interested in explaining
what the Germans call the night-side of nature, or the mar
vellous deeds recorded in sacred and profane history, I would
be able to do those deeds, reproduce those wonderful phenom
ena, and exert myself a power over the primordial elements
or primitive forces of nature, be they spirits, be they what
they will. I am tired of being pent up within this narrow
cage, and of being the slave of every external influence. I
would master nature ; ride upon the whirlwind and direct
the storm. There may, for aught I know, be an element of
truth in the marvellous machinery of the Arabian Nights
Entertainments, and something more than the extravagances
of an oriental imagination in those tales of magic, of good and
evil genii. What, if the tale of Aladdin's Lamp were true ?
Who dare say that the river and ocean gods, the naiads, the
dryads, hamadryads, Pan and his reed, Apollo and his lyre,
Mercury and his wand, the supernal and infernal god's of
classic poetry, were all mere creatures of the poetic imao-i-
nation ? Perhaps even the diablerie of modern German ro
mance^ of Hoffman, Baron de Fouque, and others, has more
of reality than most readers suspect."

" All the gods of the gentiles were devils," replied Mr.
Cotton, " and to a considerable extent I concede the reality
you intimate. There are good angels and bad, and both have
intercourse with mankind. The air swarms with evil spirits,
with devils, fallen angels, endowed with a more than human
intelligence, and a more than human power. These are un
der a chief called Lucifer, Beelzebub, Satan, who seeks to

SOME PROGRESS. 33

seduce men from their allegiance to God, to make them re
ceive him for their master, to put him in the place of God,
and to pay him divine honors. It was this fallen angel, the
prince of this world as St. Paul calls him, and the prince
of the powers of the air, who everywhere and unceasingly
besieges the Christian, and against whom we have to be con
stantly on the guard, that the ancient gentiles literall}7 wor
shipped as God, and it is these evil spirits, these powers of
the air, that swarm around us, and infest all nature, that an
cient classic poetry celebrates, and that your modern philos
ophers would persuade us were mere poetic fancies."

" The powers or forces themselves, I concede," said Mr.
Winslow, " but I do not recognize their personality, nor their
superhuman character."

" Perhaps," said I, " Mr. Winslow is a little too hasty in
supposing them to be the innate power or force of human
nature. This power exerted by the mesmerizer may well
be natural and yet not be human. It may be one of the
mighty forces of universal nature, which the mesmerizer has
the secret of using or bringing to bear in the accomplish
ment of his own purposes. In mesmerism, perhaps, we may
find the key to the mysteries of nature, and the secret of
rendering practically available all the great and mighty
powers at work in nature's laboratory, so that a man may
learn to strengthen himself with all the force of the entire
universe."

" The power you speak of," said Mr. Wilson, an ex-Uni
tarian parson, and who passed for a traiiscendentalist, " I be
lieve to be very real. We sometimes ascribe it to the will,
and it is true that under certain relations the will has great
energy, and is well-nigh invincible. Yet it is not, I appre
hend, so much the energy of the will itself as of faith, which
brings the will into harmony with the primordial laws of the
universe, and strengthens it by all the forces of nature. c If
ye had faith as a grain of mustard seed,' said Jesus, ' ye could
say to this mountain, be removed and planted in yonder sea,
and it should obey you.' I am far from being able to pre
scribe the limits of full, undoubting, and unwavering faith.
Faith is thaumaturgic, always a miracle-worker, and if we
could only undertake with a calm and full confidence of suc
cess, I have little doubt but the meanest of us might work
greater miracles than any recorded in history. ' If ye be
lieve, ye shall do greater works than these-'

VOL. IX-3.

THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

<< There is more in this power of faith than received
philosophy has fathomed. By it one's eyes are opened, and
one seems to penetrate the profoundest mysteries of the uni
verse, even to the essence of the Godhead. "We may mark
it in all our undertakings. Whatever we attempt, nothing
doubting, we are almost sure to accomplish. Let me, as a
public speaker, desire to produce a certain effect, and let me
have^full confidence that I shall succeed, and I am sure not
to fail. Let me utter a sentiment, with my whole soul ab
sorbed in it, confident that it is going right to the hearts of
my hearers, and it goes there. Whenever I am conscious in
what I ana saying, of this calm, undoubting faith, I am sure
of my audience. I no sooner open my lips than I have them
under my control, and I can do with them as I please. When
[ have felt this faith in what I was about to utter, I have
felt, before uttering it, its effect upon the assembly, and my
whole frame has been sensible of something like an electric
shock, and it seemed that my audience and I were connected
by a magnetic chain. In conversing with a friend, in whom
I have full faith, and to whom I can speak with full confi
dence, I have felt the same. Our souls seem to be melted
into one, to move with one and the same will, and each to be
exalted and strengthened by the combined power of both.
Then rise we into the upper regions of truth, far above the
unaided flight of either. Heaven opens to us, and we be
hold the hidden things of God. Something the same is felt
also when one goes forth in love with nature, and yields to
her gentle and hallowing influences. We inhale power with
her fragrant odors, become conscious of purer, loftier and
holier thoughts and feelings, and form stronger and nobler
resolutions."

" All that," said Mr. Cotton, " is common enough, but it
is easily explained by sympathy and imagination."

But," Mr. Wilson replied, " what, then, is the power of
sympathy or imagination ? That is a question I cannot an
swer. I yield to the power, enjoy it, and question it not.
Be^m to question it, and it is gone. I know well that philos
ophers call the power I speak of under one aspect, love
under another sympathy, under another, imagination, under

1 another, faith, but what it is in itself they cannot tell
me. .Be it what it will, it is demonic, supernatural, an ele
ment in human nature, of which men in all ages have had
glimpses but of which none of us have as yet had any thin*
Ine history of our race everywhere bristles with

SOME PROGRESS. 60

prodigies. These prodigies were once regarded as miracles,
and supposed to be wrought by the linger of God ; now an
unbelieving age treats them as impostures, cheats, fabrica
tions, proving only people's love of the marvellous, their nat
ural proneness to superstition, and the ease with which they
can be gulled by the crafty and the designing. I believe
them, for the most part, real. I believe that there are times
when man has a power over the elements, and can make the
spirits obey him. Who knows but the time may come, per
haps is now near, when the law by which this power oper
ates will be discovered, and this power, which has hitherto
been irregular and transient in its manifestations, will be
come common and regular, and therefore bear the marks of
a fixed and permanent law of nature?

" But, call it what you will, it is not identical with the
human will, nor in my opinion is it, strictly speaking, a prop
erty of human nature. It is an overshadowing, an all-per
vading power, identical, most likely, with that Power which
•creates, and manifests itself in the universe. We can avail
ourselves of it, not because it is ours, but by placing ourselves
in harmony with it, within its focal range, and suffering its
rays to be all concentred in us."

" That is substantially my own view," remarked Mr. Win-
slow, " and I regard mesmerism as revealing the regular and
permanent means by which we can avail ourselves of that
creative and miracle-working power. I do not pretend that
man is thaumaturgic in himself, as distinguished from the
Being from whom his life emanates, but by virtue of his
union with the Fountain of All Force."

" I think," said Mr. Sowerby, an ex-Methodist elder, " that
by magnetism, we shall be able to explain the operations of
the Holy Ghost, and the mysteries of regeneration."

" More likely," interrupted Mr. Cotton, " the operations
of Satan, and the Mystery of Iniquity."

" Yes, but in a sense thou dost not mean," interposed Obe-
diah Mott, a Hicksite Quaker. " Thou knowest how dif
ficult it is for thee to explain the Popish miracles, many of
which thou knowest come exceedingly well attested. Mes
merism will show thee, that they were wrought by mesmeric
influences."

" But I have no wisli to explain Popish miracles on a prin
ciple that would take from Christian miracles all their value.
I hate popery, but I love the Gospel more."

The conversation was continued for some time, in the small

36 THE SPIRIT-KAPPEK.

circle around me. In another part of the room they had got
a somnambulist, and were making various experiments.
When the larger part of the company had dispersed, I re
quested Mr. "Winslow to try if he could not mesmerize me.
He did not think he should succeed. He thought I had not
the sort of temperament to be magnetized ; that I had too-
strong a will, too robust a constitution, and quite too vigor
ous health. It would at any rate require far more mesmeric
power than he had to subdue me. However, he would try,
and do what he could.

I seated myself in an arm-chair, with my feet to the south,
and Mr. "Winslow began with his passes. The first ten
minutes he produced not the slightest effect, for I resisted
him by the whole force of my will. At length I closed my
eyes, and resigned myself to his influence. 'l now became
aware of his passes, though they were made without actually
touching me. It seemed as if slight electric sparks were
emitted from the tips of his fingers, producing a slight, but
agreeable, and as it were a cooling sensation. I felt slight
spasmodic affections at the pit of my stomach, which grad
ually became violent. My arms made involuntary motions,,
and my legs and feet felt light and flew up as he' extended
his passes over them. I had not the least inclination to
sleep, but found that he was actually exerting an influence
over my body greater than at all pleased me. I tried, and
found that I could arrest his influence if I willed, and that
he had power over me only so long as I offered no voluntary
opposition. I alternately yielded and resisted, and found that
he had no power to overcome my own will. He operated
for about an hour, with no other effects than those I have
mentioned, and gave up the task of putting me to sleep as
hopeless. The most remarkable thing about it, that I rec
ollect, though it did not much strike me at the time, was,
that although my eyes were closed, I saw or seemed to see
distinctly, slight luminous appearances at the ends of his fin
gers as he made his passes. These luminous appearances
were in rapid motion, and seemed of a bluish tinge edged
with yellowish white.

There was nothing in the experiment that could establish
the reality of the mesmeric influence to bystanders, but there
was enough to satisfy me that it was neither jugglery nor
imagination. I could easily see from the experiment, that
upon persons differently constituted from myself, less accus
tomed to self-control, and to the quiet analysis of their own

TABLE-TURNING.

37

feelings, much greater and more striking effect must have
been produced.

I never submitted myself to an experiment of the sort
again. I found that in my own case it was quite unneces
sary, and that I could do all that the mesmerized could with
out being thrown into the somnambulic state. I commenced
from that time to practise mesmerism myself. I entered up
on a course of experiments which carried me much further
than the masters I was acquainted with. I found, that while
no machinery for magnetizing was absolutely indispensable,
yet passes with the hand were serviceable, and that the tub
and rod of Mesmer, which had been discarded, were of great
assistance. Metallic balls, properly prepared, and magnet
ized, and placed in the hand of the person to be affected, as
practised by the electro-biologists, very much facilitated the
process. I* was thus brought back to Mesmer, and induced
to reject the doctrine of the ultra-spiritualists, who would
Lave 'it that the effects are produced by the simple will act
ing on the will of the person to be mesmerized. There was
certainly a fluid in the case, whether electric, magnetic, or as
the Baron Keichenbach would say, odic, and whether it is
to be regarded as efficient cause or only as an instrument, as
maintained by a recent French author, who seems to have
studied the whole subject with rare patience, and yet rarer
good sense.

CHAPTER VI. TABLE-TURNING.

THE point to which I at first directed my attention was to
ascertain the power, which, by means of mesmerism, I might
acquire over the elemental forces of nature. I found that
with or without actual contact I could at will paralyze the
whole body of another, subject it in great measure to my own
will, and force it to obey my bidding. I could render it pre-
ternaturally weak and preternaturally strong. I found also
that I could produce all these effects at a distance, by means
of magnetized inanimate objects. For instance, I would
magnetize a bunch of flowers, and a person knowing nothing
of what I had done, who should take them up and smell of
them, would exhibit all the usual phenomena of the mes
merized. Here it was evident that the mesmeric power,
whatever it might be, could act directly on matter, and lodge
itself in a material object. It was clear then that the mes
meric phenomena had a real objective cause, and therefore

38 THE SPIRIT-EAPPER.

could not be the effects either of imagination or hallucination.
Here was a most striking and important fact, and one which
entire!}7" refuted the ultra spiritualism of the majority of mes-
merizers.

My experiments in clairvoyance and second sight were
equally surprising in their results. The theory of those who
conceded the facts was, that in some inexplicable way, the
somnambulist uses the brain of him with whom he or she is-
en rapport, and therefore is restricted in the clairvoyant
power to the images already in that brain. I mesmerize, say
a young woman. In her mesmeric state she becomes clair
voyant. She can see with my organs of vision whatever I
myself can see, or have seen, but nothing else. She can tell
my most secret thoughts and intentions, or those of any one
with whom she is en rapport, but nothing more. She can
answer correctly any question the answer to which is known
to the interrogator, 'but not questions the answer to which is-
unknown to him. But repeated and well-attested experi
ments prove to the contrary. Nothing is more common
than for her to answer correctly questions equally unknown
to herself and to those with whom she is placed in communi
cation, and in cases where it is certain the answer could not
be known by any human means to either. The magnetic
power was, then, clearly a medium of knowledge distinct
from the brain or mind of the magnetizer, or individual with
whom the magnetized is en rapport.

What tends to confirm this is the surprising fact that persons
mesmerized by a mesmerized glass of water, or bunch of flow
ers, manifest equally a superhuman knowledge. I passed one
day by a boarding-school, and threw over the wall, unseen my
self, a bunch of flowers which I had mesmerized. One of the
young ladies saw it, picked it up, smelled it, and placed it
in her bosom. Almost instantly she became strangely af
fected, seemed bewitched, acted as one possessed. But what
it is important to note is, that she saw and described, as wa&
clearly proved, things with perfect accuracy, which none of
the inmates of the school, and neither she nor I, had any hu
man means of knowing. She had learned no language but
English, and yet could understand and answer readily in any
language in which she was questioned, could and did foretell
events, with all the particulars of time and place when they
would happen. Moreover, the poor girl herself complained
of feeling herself under a foreign power, and one which made
her say and do things to which she felt, even at the momentr

TABLE-TURNING.

the greatest repugnance. It was clear, then, that the mesmeric
power was not a mere blind force, but acted from intelli
gence and will, and an intelligence and will foreign to mine,
for how could I lodge my intelligence and will in a bunch
of flowers, and render them there more powerful than in my
self ? Clearly the force was not exclusively material, unless
mutter can be endowed with intelligence and will.

I was somewhat puzzled, it is true, but I was resolved to
continue my experiments, and wrest from nature, if possi
ble her last* secret. I soon found that it was not necessary
to operate with others ; that I had the clairvoyant power
myself. With a slight effort I could throw myself into the
mesmeric state. As soon as I found myself in this state I
seemed no longer master of myself. I suffered in entering
into it, and on coming out of it, convulsions more or less
violent. "While in it, I felt oppressed at the pit of my stom
ach, and my organs of speech seemed to be used by anoth
er. When I spoke, it was clear to me that I heard a voice
at the pit of my stomach, speaking the words, and I was
perfectly conscious of struggling not to say things which,
nevertheless, were uttered by my organs. If in this state I
sat down to write, my arm and pen seemed seized upon by
a foreign power, and moved and guided without any agency
of mine. What I wrote I knew not, and had never had in
my mind till it came off the end of my pen, and^I read it
as written down. Evidently the power was distinct from
me, and operated by a will not my own.

But I was not at all pleased to find myself subject even
momentarily to a foreign power. I did not choose to let an
other use my organs, and to suffer my own will to lie in
abeyance. The question arose, whether the same power
could not be made to operate without using my organs. If
I could mesmerize a material object, and by that mesmerize
persons, why might I not mesmerize by it other material ob
jects, and make them serve as organs to this power? I tried
the experiment. I mesmerized a bunch of flowers and laid
them on a table in my room, with the will that they should
communicate to the table their mesmeric virtue. Immedi
ately the table began to move, and to dance around the room,
to raise itself from the floor, to balance itself on two legs,
then on one leg, to come to me or remove from me as I
willed. I was delighted. I found the force could be com
municated to the table. I wished to ascertain whether this
power was intelligent or not. I required the table, if it

40 THE SPIRIT-RAPPEE.

sign, 10 tea me, wnetner it understood me by virtue of the
mesmeric force. It gave the sign. Then I requested it to
tell me, in the same way, whether this mesmeric force is one
of the forces of nature, like electricity or magnetism, or

and found it, as it were, nailed to the floor. I could not
move it. I am a strong man, of far more than ordinary
physical strength, and was then in its full possession. The
table was a light card-table, but with all my strength, repeat
edly put forth, I could not so much as raise one end of it.
This was extraordinary. I sat down on the sofa at a little
distance. Immediately I began to hear slight raps, appar
ently under the table. Very soon they became louder, and
seemed to be sometimes on the table, and sometimes under
it ; sometimes they seemed to come from a corner of the
room, and sometimes from under the floor. I knew not
what to make of them, but I felt no alarm, and remained
calm and undisturbed, in the full possession of all my facul
ties. In some six or eight minutes they ceased, and then I
saw the bunch of flowers which still lay on the table, taken
up without visible agency, and carried and placed in a por
celain vase on the mantle-shelf. I was sure I was surround
ed by invisible and mysterious agencies, but I began to ap
prehend that I was in the condition of the magician's ap
prentice, sung by Goethe, who had overheard the word by
which the master evoked the spirits, but had forgotten or
had not learned that by which he dismissed them. I how
ever retained my equanimity, and felt that I had gained at
least something.

The next day I tried my experiments anew. This time
I merely mesmerized the table. It soon began to move,
raising itself about six inches from the floor, and whirlin^
round like a dancing dervish. It seemed animated by a c£
pricious or rather a mocking spirit, and it was some time
before I could make it behave with a little sobriety. But
I had spent the greater part of the night in consulting an
old work on magic, which some years before I picked
up on one of the quais of Paris. It was written chiefly in
characters and hieroglyphics, which at first I could not* de
cipher; but at length I stumbled upon what I found to be

TABLE-TURNING.

.a key to their meaning, and which was scarcely any mean
ing at all. However, I obtained one or two significant
hints, and I went armed with a new power. I held a long
dialogue with the table, which, however, I shall not record.
I ascertained the origin of the raps, how to produce them,
and how to read them. But this was but a trifle. I would
have the power visible to my eyes, submissive to my orders,
and speak to me in plain and intelligible language, properly
so called. I obtained a promise that this should come in
due time, but that for the present I must suffer the force to
remain invisible, and be content with a language of mere
arbitrary signs.

I was informed that I was on the eve of gratifying my
most secret and ardent wish, and that I should have, in full
measure, the knowledge and power I craved. But I was
not yet prepared, inasmuch as I craved them for an irrelig
ious end. I was moved by no noble motive. I was moved
by curiosity, and the love of power, for my own sake, not
from love and sympathy with mankind. I was not in har
mony with the great principles of nature, and did not seek
the real end of the universe. I needed purification, a sub
limation of my affections, and an elevation of my aims. I
had devoted myself to the physical sciences, which was all
very well, but I had neglected moral science, which was not
well. I had only partially imbibed the spirit of the age,
and took no part in the great movements of the day ; felt
no interest in the great questions of social amelioration and
progress. I had no sympathy with the poorest and most
numerous class, and made no efforts to emancipate the slave,
or to elevate woman to her proper sphere in social and po
litical life. I did not properly love my race, and had no
due appreciation of humanity. I had great talents, great
abilities, and might, if I would, make myself the Messiah
-of the nineteenth century.

But what had I done ? What good cause could boast of
having had me for its friend and advocate ? Had I aided
the Moral-Reform Association ? Had I raised my voice in
behalf of the Abolitionists ? Had Owen or Fourier found
me a coadjutor in time of need? Had I risked my popu
larity in defending new and unpopular sects, those prophets
of the future ? Or had I given my sympathy to those no
ble spirits everywhere moving society, and risking their
lives to overthrow the tyranny of church and state, to con
quer liberty, and to raise up the down-trodden millions of

42 THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

mankind ? No, no ; I had done nothing of all this. I might
have been kind or useful to this and that individual, and sym
pathized with suffering when immediately under my eyes,
and removable or mitigable by my individual effort ; but I
had not sympathized with humanity, and labored to relieve
the poor and destitute, to enlighten the ignorant and super
stitious of remote and neglected regions. The age is phil
anthropic, and love is the great miracle-worker of our times.
In love you place yourself in harmony with the source of
all things, make yourself one with God, and possessor of
his omnipotence. Learn to love, associate yourself heart
and soul with the movement party of the times, and you
will soon render yourself capable of receiving an answer to-
your questions and your wishes.

It must not be supposed that all this was told me at once,,
or in plain, direct terms. It was told me only a little at a
time, and in a very indirect and cumbersome mode of com
munication. It required several weeks daily communing
with my mesmerized table, and in spelling out the raps with
which 1 was favored. But though it reproved me, I was
still delighted. The power was good, and this accorded with
my previous conviction. I regarded the power which, by
mesmerism, was brought into play, as one of the primordial
laws or elemental forces of nature, and as nature was good,
as it worked always to a good end, of course I could "hope
to avail myself of it only in proportion as I myself became
good and devoted to the end to which nature herself works.
God will work with and for us, only as we work with and
for him ; that is, for the end for which he himself works.
As to the intelligence apparently possessed by this force,,
that was in harmony with what of philosophy I had. Is not
God infinite, universal intelligence ? and is he not the orig
inal and similitude of the universe? "What, then, is the
universe itself but an emanation of infinite and universal
intelligence. All creatures participate their creator, for they
are nothing without him, and therefore all that exists must
participate intelligence, or be a participated intelligence, and,
of course, the higher the order of existence, the greater and
more comprehensive its intelligence. All nature bears evi
dence that its laws are the laws of reason, and that its prim
itive forces are intelligent forces. How, then, should tliis-
force not be intelligent, and if intelligent, far more intelli
gent than I ?

I resolved to prepare for placing myself in immediate re-

A LESSON IN PHILANTHROPY. 4r£

lation with infinite power and intelligence. I thought I
caught a glimpse of a deeper significance in the words, uye
shall be as gods," than had been generally suspected, and I
began to think in real earnest that my sweet lady-friend in
Philadelphia, who had so eloquently and lovingly defended
Eve in eating the forbidden fruit, was quite right, and that
her disobedience was really a brave and heroic act. Man
could really become as a god, but the priests had invented
the prohibition to prevent him. The god of the priests,
then, could not be the true God, and Satan, instead of being
regarded as the enemy, should be, as the author of Festus
seems to teach, loved and honored as the friend of man. A
new light seemed to break in at once upon my mind. The
world had hitherto worshipped a false god ; it had called
evil good, and good evil ; it had enshrined in its temples the
enemy of man, and chained to the Caucasian rock that god
Prometheus, who was the true and noble friend and benefac
tor of the race.

CHAPTER VH. A LESSON IN PHILANTHROPY.

FOLL of my new resolution, I immediately set myself at
work to carry it into effect. The safest and most expedi
tious way of doing it, I thought, would be to place myself
at once in communication with some prominent and well-
instructed philanthropist. Accordingly, I started forthwith
for Philadelphia, to consult the beautiful and fascinating
young lady, who, in my previous visit, had so warmly and
energetically defended the eating of the forbidden fruit at
the suggestion of that first of philanthropists, as a brave, he
roic, and disinterested act. She, of all my acquaintances
and friends, was unquestionably the one best fitted to com
plete my initiation into the mysteries of philanthropy, and
to inspire and direct me in my efforts at world-reform.

This lady, whom, out of respect to the great Montanus,
who claimed to be the Paraclete or Comforter, and professed
to have the power of working miracles very much of the
character of those wrought by our modern mesmerize rs and
spiritualists, I must be permitted to call Priscilla, had some
years before touched my fancy, and if the truth must be
confessed, had made more than an ordinary impression on
my heart. She had often visited me in my waking dreams,
as a lovely, though flitting vision. She was at my last visit
at least twenty-five years old, but as fresh and as blooming

44: THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

.as at seventeen, when first I had the pleasure of meeting
her. She was a sweet lady, with a lovely and graceful fig
ure, exquisitely moulded, regular and expressive features,
and as learned, as brilliant, as fascinating, and as enthusiastic
as the celebrated Hypatia of Alexandria, who stirred up the
zeal of the good monks of Nitria, gave so much trouble to
Saint Cyril, and' spread such a halo around expiring pagan
ism. She had been sent by the Abolition Society as a dele
gate to the great Anti-Slavery World's Convention at Lon
don, and being denied a seat in that illustrious body, because
a woman, she had turned her attention to the question of
woman's rights, and, after travelling a few months on the
continent, had returned home well instructed in Godwin's
Political Justice, and a devout believer in Mary Wolstone-
croft. She was liberal in her views, and very far from be
ing a " one-idea " woman. Her mind was large and com
prehensive, and her heart was capacious and loving enough
to embrace and warm all classes of reformers, white, red,
black, religious, moral, political, social, and domestic.

The morning after my arrival in the City of Brotherly
Love, I called on Priscilla at her residence in Arch Street,
as I supposed with her mother. I found her surrounded by
some ten or a dozen reformers, variously dressed ; some in
petticoats, some in trousers ; some with and some without
beards ; the majority appearing to be of what grammarians
call the epicene gender. She greeted me kindly, and re
quested me to be seated ; she would be disengaged in a few
moments. I took a seat, and amused myself as well as I
could in studying the interesting group before me, and con
sidering the sort of materials that go to the making up of a
world-reformer, and the charming associates I was likely to
have in my new career. Having listened to their several re
ports, heard their suggestions, and given them her directions,
Priscilla soon dismissed them with a sweet smile, and a
graceful salute with her hand, that would have done credit
to the grace and dignity of an empress. She then seated
herself near me, and welcomed me most cordially and affec
tionately to Philadelphia. My visit was an unexpected
pleasure, but all the more welcome. " But," she exclaimed,
looking me more closely in the face, and struck with my
changed and careworn expression, " what in the world, my
friend, has happened to you ? "

I was about to reply, when I observed that we were not
alone. An exceedingly meek and submissive-looking man, if

A LESSON IN PHILANTHROPY. 45

man he could be called, had just entered the room, and seemed
to be hesitating whether to advance or retreat. I looked in
quiringly at Priscilla.

" O, it is only my husband," she replied. Then turning,
with her sweet face to him, with an indefinable charm in
her soft musical tones, said, " You may leave us, dear James.
This gentleman and I would be alone."

He quietly retreated through the door he had entered,
gently closed it, and went away without speaking a word, or
betraying the least sign of discontent.

" But, my dear madam," said I, " this takes me by surprise.
I was not aware that you had a husband."

" Possibly not ; yet I have been married these five years."

" What ! you were married when I was in the city last
year and had the pleasure of meeting you, and having that
most pleasant and instructive conversation with you?"

"Most assuredly."

"This alters my plan. I had made up my mind, — "

"Not to marry me yourself?"

"Pardon me, my dear madam, but I own that I had
dreamed of something of the sort."

" You might have done worse. I could have made you
a good wife, but you would never have made me a good
husband."

" Why not ? I am not precisely a man to be slightly re
jected."'

" That may be ; and had you proposed in season, I might
not have rejected you. I am glad, however, that you did
not, for I might have loved you, and you alone, and then I
should never have become a philanthropist, and devoted all
my sympathies and energies to the emancipation of my sex,
and to the development and progress of my race. You
would have engrossed all my thoughts and affections, and
have been my tyrant."

" But if I had loved you in return, and laid my own heart
at your feet ? "

" That would have made the matter worse. In loving
me you would only have loved yourself, and sought only
your own pleasure. Men usually love only to sacrifice her
they love to themselves ; while woman, when she loves, is
ready to sacrifice herself to her beloved. Man's love is sel
fish ; woman's is disinterested."

" Women are disinterested creatures, and never exact any
return for their love ! "

46 THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

" They are more disinterested than you believe. There
is nothing that a true woman will not do for him she loves.
She will abandon herself without reserve to his wishes, go
through fire and water, nay, hell itself, for him, and take
delight in damning her own soul, to please him."

"That is because her love is an instinct, a blind passion,
a sort of madness or frenzy, not a sober, rational affection."

" Perhaps so ; but it is rather because her- love is love.
Unhappily, woman feels, she does not reason, or if she rea
sons, it is only in the interest of her feeling. Reason is
cold, calculating ; love is warm and self-sacrificing. It is
heedless of consequences."

" And therefore is the better for having reason or pru
dence for a companion."

" It is clear that you have never loved."

" Perhaps not ; but at any rate I think I could have loved
you very much in your own fashion."

" That is not improbable, at least, as far as it is in your
calculating nature ; ffor I have been thought to have my at
tractions, and it would not be difficult to make any man my
slave — unless I loved him. Yet you would always have
loved me as a master, and have always held me in subjec
tion. There are natures born to command. You would
never have loved me as my dear James loves me, and never
have been the meek, submissive, quiet, dear good man that
he is. His love is not tyrannical, and it imposes no burden
on me. He interferes with none of my plans, restrains none
of my movements, and is satisfied with feeling that he is my
husband and belongs to me, without once" presuming to
think of me as his wife and as belonging to him."

" That is charming, and must, no doubt, entirely satisfy
your heart."

" That is my own affair. But I will tell you that it does
not, and that it does."

" But that is a riddle ; pray rede it."

" It does not satisfy the deep want of the heart to love,
for no woman can love, with all her heart, a man she can
make her slave, or who does not maintain himself as her
master. But as I would not become any one's slave, as I
would not that any man should engross all my affections,
and compel me to live all my life in love's delirium, it sat
isfies, and more than satisfies me. It leaves me free to be a
philanthropist, and does not compel me to give up to one
what was meant for mankind. If my husband engrossed

A LESSON IN PHILANTHROPY. 4:7

all my affections I should be happy and contented at home,
and should never seek relief in going abroad."

" And should it not be so ? "

" Consult the parsons and old-fashioned moralists, and
they will tell you that it should. But I am a philanthropist.
My James loves me sincerely, warmly, disinterestedly, con
sults my wishes, does whatever I require of him, has full
confidence in -me, is proud of me, and never doubts that
whatever I do is perfect. That is enough."

" But do you return his love with a disinterestedness and
:generosity equal to his own ? "

" Why should I ? It is enough for him that I permit him
to love me, and to call himself my husband. For myself, I
remain free to be a philanthropist. I cannot give my heart
to any individual. I reserve its deepest and holiest affec
tions for mankind."

" But mankind, without individuals, is an abstraction, a
nullity; and to love the race, without loving individuals, is
worse than loving a statue or a shadow."

" Ah ! my dear friend, I see that you have not studied the
profound philosophy of Plato, and are still a nominalist, and
therefore an egoist. You are still a psychologist, stuck fast
in the slough of individualism."

" It may be so, my dear Priscilla, but I am willing and
even anxious to be liberated and set right. I have resolved,
let come what will, to be a philanthropist, and to become a
word-reformer ; and it is to solicit your instructions and as
sistance to this end that I have visited your city, and sought
"my interview with you this morning."

She shook her head and looked doubtingly.

" Do not doubt it," I said, " I am serious, never more
serious in my life. I am on the verge of important discov
eries, and perhaps well-nigh within reach of a more than
human power. But it is necessary that I at first become a
philanthropist, unite myself with the movement party of
the age, and take a decided and an active part in the great
philanthropic reforms now so widely agitated, and live hence
forth for mankind, and not for myself alone."

"Is this true?"

"Most assuredly ; as true as that I am here present."

Slowly conviction seemed to fasten on her mind as she
6aw my serious and earnest manner, and indeed my agitation,
as I rose from my chair and stood before her. A brilliant,
joy suddenly sparkled from her large, liquid, deep blue eye,

48 THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

and radiated over her whole face. Springing from her seatr
and seizing me by both my hands, " This is too much," she
exclaimed. " This I had wished, had prayed for, but had
not dared hope." Her eyes filled with sweet tears, and, as
if overcome with her emotions, she sunk into my arms, and
rested her head upon my shoulder. I pressed her to my
breast. But she instantly recovered herself, and we both
resumed our seats. After a few moments' silence, Priscilla,
with an animated and contented look, exclaimed : —

" Now, my dear, dearest friend, I have hope. The good
work will now go bravely on. Pure, noble, and strong-
minded women to co-operate with me, I have found, but a
man, a full-grown man, with a clear head, and a well-bal
anced mind, heretofore found I not. The men who have
been ready to embark with me, are dwarfs, pigmies, simple
tons, needy adventurers, cheats, knaves, or crack-brained
enthusiasts, with but one idea in their heads, and that only
half an idea. Drill them as I may, I can make nothing: of
them."

" But," said I, maliciously, " is not your dear James a
philanthropist and reformer?"

" My dear James is my husband," she said, with dignity and
spirit. " But you are slow to comprehend these things. The
great and glorious work of regenerating man and society,
cannot be carried on either by man alone or by woman alone.
The two must be united and co-operate, or there can be no
spiritual, as there can be no natural, offspring. But in re
generation, in the palingenesia, it is not at all necessary that
they be husband and wife after the flesh. Married and
made one in spirit they must be, but not married and made
one flesh. Man and woman are each other's half, and they
must be brought together to make a complete, active, and
productive whole. But the relation of husband and wife is
a purely domestic relation, and looks solely to a domestic
end. If each finds the complementary half in the other,
both are satisfied, contented, and neither has any wish or
motive to look beyond the circle of the purely domestic
affections."

" That is, they who find their bliss at home have no need
and no temptation to go a-roaming."
''Precisely."

" Then it is unhappiness, discontent, uneasiness, want, at
home, that makes men and women turn philanthropists, and
take to world-reform ? "

A LESSON IN PHILANTHROPY. 49

"Yes; and herein you learn the deep philosophy of
life, and the signiiicance of that religion of sorrow, 01 which
Carlyle speaks so touchingly, and which the world has pro
fessed for two thousand years, but which it has never under
stood. Hear my favorite poet : —

' The Fiend that man harries is love of the Best;
Yawns the pit of the Dragon lit by rays from the Blest;
The Lethe of nature can't trance him again,
Whose soul sees the Perfect, which his eyes seek in vain.

' Profounder, profounder man's spirit must dive;
To his aye-rolling orbit no goal will arrive ;
The heavens that now draw him, with sweetness untold,
Once found, — for new heavens he spurneth the old.

1 Pride ruined the angels, their shame them restores;
And the joy that is sweetest lurks in stings of remorse.
Have I a lover who is noble and free? —
I would he were nobler than to love me.

' Eterue alternation, now follows, now flies,
And under pain, pleasure, under pleasure, pain lies.
Love works at the centre, heart-heaving alway,
Forth speed the strong pulses to the borders of day.'

" The ' love of the Best ' is our innate and deathless desire
of happiness, our being's end and aim. Happiness is ever
the coy maiden, that still woos us onward, and flies ever as
pursued,

' Man never is, but always to be blest.

In this deep ever-recurring want of the soul for happiness,
the source of all our pain and sorrow, is the spring and mo
tive of all our activity, and in activity is all our life and joy.
Hence, ' under pain pleasure, under pleasure pain lies.' All
our life and joy have their root in pain and sorrow, in this
eternal craving of the soul to be what we are not, and to
have what we have not. The pain and sorrow spur us on,
and lead us to acquire and possess. But no possession satis
fies us. The most coveted is no sooner obtained than it is
loathed and cast away.

The heavens that now draw him, with sweetness untold,
Once found, — for new heavens he spurneth the old.'

" Love dies in the wooing. The acquiring is more than
the possessing. All possessing leaves the heart empty, — an

VOL. IX-4.

50 THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

aching void within, which nothing fills or can fill. This
aching void will not let us rest, will not leave us in repose,
which is only another name for inaction, death, but compels
us to exert ourselves, to struggle with all our strength and
energy to make new acquisitions. In this struggle, in these
efforts, humanity is developed, and the progress of the race
carried on."

" Carried on, my dear Priscilla, towards what ? Sings not
your poet,

' Profounder, profounder man's spirit must dive,
To his aye-rolling orbit no goal will arrive? ' "

" That is the glorious secret, my dear friend. The end
of man is not the possession, but the pursuit, of happiness,
or rather eternal progress and growth. By the fact that the
pain, the want, the aching void, remains eternally, there is
and must be eternal activity, therefore eternal development
and progress of humanity."

" But as that development and progress leave us as far as
ever from happiness, or fixed and durable good, I see not in
what consists their value."

" Their value is obvious. Good is relative to the end of
a being, and consists in going to the end for which it exists.
Progress being our end, of course our good must consist in
making progress. This progress is the progress of the race,
and is effected by the activity of individuals, and to it all
the activity of individuals, whether what is called vicious or
virtuous, alike contributes."

" If all our activity, our vices, and crimes, as well as our
virtues, contribute to this progress, or to the realization of
our destiny, I do not see any great call for us to be world-
reformers. Moreover, our destiny seems to be any thing
but a cheering one. Your poet-philosophy is apparently
very sad. If we are destined to chase forever a happiness
that fiies us, a good that recedes as we advance, all exertion
seems to me as idle, as useless as that of the child striving
to grasp the rainbow."

" So it may seem to you, for you are, as yet, not a philan
thropist. You are still affected by your egoism, and un
able to appreciate any activity that does not bring some
thing solid and durable to the individual. Here is the rock
on which all old-fashioned morality splits. Individuals are
nothing in themselves ; they are real, substantial, only in
humanity. The race is every thing. Individuals die, the

A LESSON IN PHILANTHROPY.

51

race survives. Men and women have no substantiality of
their own. They are merely the bubbles that rise on the
surface of the broad ocean of humanity, hurst, disappear,
and become as if they had not been. Foolish bubbles, ye
forget your own nothingness, and would arrogate to your
selves all the rights and prerogatives, glory and happiness
of humanity. The race is not for individuals ; individuals
are for the race. They are simply the sensations, sentiments,
and cognitions of the race, in which it manifests its own in
herent virtually, and through which it is developed and
carried forward in its endless career through the ages,—
through which it grows and realizes its own eternal and
glorious destiny. The progress you are to seek is not the
progress of individuals, for individuals have, properly
speaking, no progress ; but the progress of the race, which
is and can be effected only by the activity of individual men
and women."

" Still, I do not comprehend the work there is for world-
reformers."

" Why, you are stupid, Doctor. All activity, whether
called vicious or criminal, is good, for it aids progress. But
nothing is vicious, criminal, or sinful, except that which re
presses the free activity of individuals, and thus hinders the
development and growth of the race. It was, therefore, not
a friend, but an enemy, that imposed upon our first parents
the prohibition to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil. It was a friend, not an enemy, that in
spired Eve with the thought and the courage to disregard that
prohibition, to reach forth her hand and pluck the fruit, and
having eaten thereof, to give it also unto her husband. The
fable was invented by priests and governors as a means of
imposing their system of restraints, of establishing their
restrictive policy, to which they have adhered, as old-fogie
politicians adhere to protection. They have always had a
horror of free trade, as incompatible with their monopoly,
and have made it their study to repress our native activity,
to keep us cabined, cribbed, and confined, within the nar
row enclosure of their hidebound systems, of their immoral,
contracted, galling, and senseless 'conventionalism. They
will not allow nature, humanity, fair play. They brand, as
from the enemy of souls, all free activity. The heart must
move according to their rulr>, and love or hate as they bid ;
the mind must run only in the grooves which they have
hollowed out, and never dare search beneath their solemn

52 THE SPIKIT-KAPPER.

shams, or send sharp and piercing glances into the artificial
world they have built up around "us. We must repress our
purest and noblest instincts, and crucify our sweetest and
holiest affections. Everywhere restraint, repression, tyranny.
The church tyrannizes over the state ; the state tyrannizes
over man and society ; man and society tyrannize over wom
an, making her a puppet, a toy, or a drudge. Here, my
dear, dear friend, behold your work, and that of your fel
low-reformers. Go forth and break down this vast system
of tyranny. Emancipate the state from the church, man
and society from the state, and woman from man and so
ciety."

" But some government, some restraint is necessary to keep
our appetites, passions, and lusts within bounds, and to main
tain peace and order in the community."

" Alas ! my friend, how hard it is for you to cease to be
an ^egoist, and to learn to be a philanthropist. Know, that
philanthropy seeks no individual, no exclusive good, and does
not consist in loving and seeking the welfare of our fellow
men and women. It is the love of man, not men, and seeks
the welfare of the race, not of individuals. The welfare of
the race consists in progress, which is effected only by free
activity^ All free activity is good, virtuous, right.' Virtue
is in action, not in non-action, which is death, the wages of
sin. The only good is free activity, and every conceivable
good is included in that one word, LIBERTY."

" But liberty, if not sustained and regulated by authority,
may degenerate into license."

" Still, monpauvre ami, in bondage to the law, and igno
rant of the glorious liberty of the children of God. Away
with your legal cant ! By the deeds of the law no flesh ever
was or ever will be justified. Long had the world groaned
in this ignoble bondage, but know you not that it was to set
them free that the Liberator came ? O, liberty ! sweet, sa
cred liberty ! how I love thee ! My heart and soul pant for
thee as the thirsty hind pants for brooks of water. My flesh
cries out for thee. Thou art my God, and to thee I conse
crate my life, my love, and on thy altar I offer myself a liv
ing holocaust."

"Is there really no difference between liberty and li
cense?"

" Be not the dupe of words. You seek to be a philan
thropist. Philanthropy, I tell you again and again, is the
love of man, mankind, humanity. Who that loves human-

A LESSON IN PHILANTHROPY.

53

ity would repress any thing human ? If man is the supreme
object of your love, how can you distrust any human ten
dency, or fear any human activity ? "

"Suppose, my dear Priscilla, who speak to me as one in
spired, I should forget myself so far as not to remember
James, and proceed to make love to his wife ? "

" She would say you have a very short memory, and no
very great sagacity. She would most likely know how to
oppose her activity to yours."

u And thus surrender her doctrine ; for in such case her
activity would overcome mine, or mine would overcome and
restrain hers."

" Not necessarily. There would be a struggle of oppos
ing forces, a free activity on both sides, and whatever the
result, a development and progress of humanity. But all this
is folly. There can be no love passages between us. We
understand each other on such matters. United, married,
if you will, in spirit, we are, or if not, must be, but we have
no leisure or inclination for dalliance, which would be for
eign to our mission. Our thoughts, I trust, yours at well as
mine, rise higher, and move in a serener atmosphere. But
be not disheartened. Our relation is, and must be, purely
spiritual."

" I did but ask the question, my dear Priscilla, in order to
see if you were prepared to carry out your doctrine to its
legitimate conclusion."

" That was foolish. No true woman ever stops half way
in her principles, or shrinks from carrying them out, by a
cold and cowardly calculation of consequences. She leaves
that to masculine virtue. When once women adopt a prin
ciple, they are prepared to follow it to its last results, with
out counting the sacrifice. You men cannot do this. You
are always hesitating, deliberating, craving the end, but afraid
to grasp it, compromising with your reason and your con
science. Recollect Macbeth, and Lady Macbeth, as painted
by Shakspeare, who knew man's heart and woman's too.
Here is the reason why you always stop half way in your re
forms, or never do more than patch a piece of new cloth on
to an old garment, which only makes the rent worse. Hence
your need of woman's straightforward logic, her disinterest
edness, her singleness of heart, her constancy of purpose,
and her invincible courage."

" But perhaps, my dear lady, women are not seldom rash,
and what you commend in them is the effect of narrowness

THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

of view, and not of that clear and enlarged comprehensive
ness, that ' many-sidedness,' to use a Germanism, which is
desirable in a true and trustworthy reformer. Perhaps she
lacks prudence, and may not use sufficient caution in adopt
ing her principles, and thus may adopt false principles, and
find ruin where she imagines she is to find only safety."

" It is safer to trust her instincts than man's "reason. Yet
I deny not the danger to which you allude, and therefore it
is that it is never safe to trust her to act alone. Hence the
necessity, in all our movements for reform, of the strict
union of man and woman. She needs him as a drag on her
too great rapidity of motion, and to temper her zeal with his
prudence, and he needs her to inspire him with courage,
energy, and love. Either is only a half without the other,
and both must be united, as I have already told you, to form
a complete and productive whole."

"I think I now understand what is meant by philanthro
py. I have the idea, but as a pure idea it amounts to noth
ing. We must realize it, or reduce it to practice. Our
great work is to remodel the world according to this idea.
But how is this to be done ? "

" That is undoubtedly the most difficult question, although
our difficulties will not end even there. When we have as
certained what we are to do, and how it is to be done, we
have still the difficult task to do it. But courage, mon
ami. Once started, reforms are carried forward by their
own momentum, and, like popular rumor, grow as they go
onward. For myself, I am not exclusive, and have no spe
cial plan of my own. I listen to all sorts of plans, and coun
tenance all sorts of reforms. None of them commend them
selves in all respects to my understanding any more than to
my taste. But all seem to me to be inspired by the same
spirit, and in different ways to work to one and the same end.
There is a diversity of gifts. All see not truth under the
same aspect ; none, perhaps, see it under all aspects at once,
and each sees it under some special aspect. We must toler
ate them all ; for to attempt to bring them all into order,
and to compel them all to think alike, and to work after one
and the same manner, or in one and the same method, is ab
surd, and if successful, would only establish in another, and
perhaps in an aggravated form, the very system of tyranny
and repression we are laboring to demolish. You know
something already of our -reformers, and the most prominent
are now in the city, holding conventions. We have repre-

A LESSON IN WORLD-REFORM. 55

M-ntativesfrom all the Northern and Middle States, and sev
eral English and Continental philanthropists. Some of them,
I cannot sav how many, will meet at my house this evening,
and you must meet with them. You will find their conver
sation interesting and instructive, and perhaps you will be
come acquainted with some who will give you valuable hints,
although, to confess the truth, I have no very high opinion
of any of them, taken individually. Be sure and not fail me ;
come early, at seven o'clock."

So saying, she rose, gave me her hand, au revoir, and I
departed to my lodgings, charmed with the sweetness and
fascinated by the manner of Priscilla, rather than enlighten
ed by her philosophy or convinced by her reasons.

CHAPTER VIII. A LESSON IN WORLD -REFORM.

WHEN I returned in the evening, I found Priscilla in high
spirits, more radiant and fascinating than ever. Her com
pany were slowly assembling in her luxuriously, and even
elegantly, furnished rooms. Among the earlier arrivals were
my friend, Mr. Winslow, and strange enough, my Puritan
acquaintance, Mr. Cotton, who had recently become a resi
dent of Philadelphia, and pastor of a Presbyterian church in
that city. Others were announced, some whom I knew, but
more whom I knew not. The majority were from the mid
dle and upper classes, although all classes of society had their
male or female representatives. The principle on which
they came together was universal philanthropy, and whoever
was a philanthropist, and had an idea, or the smallest fraction
of an idea, had the entree, unless he had African blood in
his veins. All were of course abolitionists, or friends of the
blacks, and therefore excluded studiously the negroes from
their social gatherings. Generally speaking, all professed
universal democracy, and hence were very exclusive in their
feelings, and aristocratic in their tone and bearing ; that is,
so far as aristocracy consists in a consciousness, not of one's
own worth, but of the worthlessness of his brother. The
company was too large to have only one centre, and gradual
ly separated into groups according to their special tastes and
tendencies. In the centre of each group was some male or
female reformer, distinguished from the rest by superior
knowledge, volubility, or impudence, and regarded as the
oracle of his or her own set, for however loud people's pro
fession .of democratic equality, nature will show itself, and

56 THE SI'IRIT-RAPl'ER.

every set of them will have its chief, honored as my Lord
or my Lady.

Mr. Winslow had been dismissed from his parish, and hav
ing no other means of getting his living, he had followed the
example of Mr. Sowerby, and devoted himself to lecturing
and experimenting on mesmerism. He was urging upon
Priscilla the importance of forming mesmeric circles in all
the cities, towns, and villages, of the Union. The first thing
to be done was to organize a philanthropic Ladies' Aid So
ciety, for the purpose of supporting a mesmeric travelling
agent or missionary, whose business should be to form these
circles or associations, instruct some member of each in the
art of mesmerizing, and serve as their common centre and
bond of union. If no one more worthy were found he would
himself consent to accept, for a moderate salary, such agen
cy, or to be such missionary. These circles formed, and af
filiated visibly and invisibly to each other, would become a
powerful body, and exert a moral influence which both the
church and the state, politicians and clergymen, would be
obliged to respect. In this way he was sure all the element
ary forces of nature herself could be brought to bear on the
great and glorious work of world-reform.

Mr. Edgerton, a New England t ran seen dentalist, a thin,
spare man, with a large nose, and a cast of Yankee shrewd
ness in his not unhandsome face, was not favorable to this
plan. " I dislike," he said, " associations. They absorb the
individual, and establish social despotism. All set plans of
world-reform are bad. Every one must have a theory, a
plan, a Morrison's pill. No one trusts to nature. None"are
satisfied with wild flowers or native forests. All seek an ar
tificial garden. They will not hear the robin sing unless it
is shut up in a cage. The rich undress of nature is an of
fence, and she must be decked out in the latest fashion of
Paris or London, and copy the grimaces of a French danc
ing-master, or lisp like an Andalusian beauty, before they
will open their hearts to her magic power. Say to all this,
Get behind me, Satan. Dare assert yourselves ; plant your
selves on your imperishable instincts ; sing your own song of
joy, your own wail of grief ; speak your own word ; tell
what your own soul seeth, and leave the effect to take care
of itself. Eschew the crowd, eschew self -consciousness, form
no plan, propose no end, seek no moral, but speak out from
your own heart ; build as builds the bee her cell, sing as
sings the bird, the grasshopper, or the cricket."

A LESSON IN

>-UKK«»KM. 57

"So," said Mr. Mcrton, a young man, with a fine cl;is-i<-
liead and face, who seemed to have been drawn hither by
mere curiosity, " so you tliink the nearer men approach to
birds and insects the better it will be for the world."

" I never dispute," replied Mr. Edgerton. " I utter the
word given me to utter, and leave it as the ostrich leaveth
her eggs. Men should be seers, not philosophers ; prophets,
not reasoners. I never offer proof of what I say. I could
not prove it, if asked. If it is true, genuine^ the fit word,
opportunely spoken, it will prove itself. If it approves not
itself to you, it is not for you. You are not prepared to re
ceive it. It is not true for you. Be it so. It is true for me,
and for those like me. Fash not yourself about it, but leave
us to enjoy it in peace."

" But'are we to understand," replied Mr. Merton, " that
truth varies as vary individual minds ?"
* " Sir, you will excuse me. I am no logician, and eschew
dialectics. Truth is one, it is the whole, the all, the univer
sal being. It is a reality in, under, and over all, manifesting
itself under an infinite variety of aspects. Every one be
holds it under some one of its aspects, no one beholds it un
der all. Each mind in that it is real, is itself, is a manifes
tation of it, but no one is it in its integrity and universality,
any more than the bubble on its surface is the whole ocean.
Under each particular bubble lies, however, the whole ocean,
and if it will speak not from its diversity, its bubbleosity, in
which sense it is only an apparition, an appearance, a show,
an unreality, but from what is real in it, from its real sub
stantial self, it may truly call itself the whole ocean. So,
under each individual mind lies all truth, all reality, all be
ing ; and hence, in so far as they are real, all minds are one
and the same. Men are weak, are puny, differ from one an
other because they seek to live in their diversity, and to find
their truth, their reality, in their individuality. Let them
eschew their individuality, which is to their reality, their
.real self, only what the bubbleosity of the bubble is to the
ocean, and fall back on their identity, on the universal truth
which underlies them. If they will be men, real men, not
make-believes, strong men, thinking men, let them be them
selves, sink back into their underlying reality, on the one
man, and suffer the universal over-soul to fiow into them,
and speak through them without let or impediment."

"We must," said another transcendentalist, sometimes
-called the American Orpheus, "return to the simplicity of

58 THE SPIKIT-KAPPER.

childhood. ' Except ye be converted and become as a little
child, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven.'
The man who thinks, Rousseau has well said, is already a
depraved animal. All learning is a forgetting ; science and
wisdom are gathered from babes and sucklings. We are not
prepared as yet to talk of world-reform. We must ~be before
we can do ; be men before we can do men's work. All being
is in doing ; rather all doing is in being. Ideas are the es
sences, the realities of things. Seek ideas. They will take
to themselves hands, build them a temple, and instaurate
their worship. Seek not ideas from books ; they are lies.
Seek them not of the learned and grey-haired ; they have
lost them. Be docile and childlike ; seat yourself by the
cradle, at the feet of awful childhood, and look into babies*
eyes."

" What we want to cure the evils of society," broke in
Mr. Kerrison, — a tinker, I believe, — a small man in a snuff-
colored frock coat, with sharp grey eyes, lank cheeks, a short
nose, a pointed chin, and squeaking voice, " is a Children's
Protection Society; a society that shall protect children
from the indelicacy, the cruelty, and inhumanity of their
brutal parents. There is nothing more shocking to our fin
er sensibilities, or more outrageous to true philanthropy,
than to see a full-grown woman, tall and stout, with a red
face, fiery eyes, and a harsh voice, — or a full-grown man,
yet taller and stouter, stern and awful in his look, terrible
in his anger tones, — seize a poor helpless little boy or girl,—
yes, or girl, — not more than three or four years old it may
be, and taking him or her across the knee, strike on the very
seat of her or him, blow after blow, till the poor little thing
screams with pain and agony. It is indelicate, cruel, bar
barous. How would the father or mother like to be treated
in the same way ? It blunts the delicate sensibility of the
child, sours his temper, hardens his heart, develops and
strengthens all his harsh and angry feelings, and prepares him
to be, when he grows up, as bad as was his father or his
mother."

" Our friend." added Mr. Silliman, an amiable young min
ister, a Unitarian, I believe, or, as he said, a preacher of the
religion of humanity, "has, I think, gone to the root of the
matter. The evils of individuals and of society have their
origin in the harsh, cruel, unfeeling, and indelicate manner
in which parents bring up their children. Children should
never be restrained, should never be crossed ; they should

A LESSON IN WOKLD-RKFORM. 59"

always be caressed by the soft, delicate hand of love, be sur
rounded by sweet and smiling faces, by lovely and attractive
images, live in communion with fresh and fragrant nature,
and find life all one fairy day."

u Young America," interposed Mr. Merton, " will thank
you both, I have no doubt. The abolition of corporal chas
tisement will meet the decided approval of our little folks,
and perhaps of our patriots. It is questionable whether this
flogging of children is not an infringement upon equal rights.
I do not see what the father in my town, universal democrat
as he was, had to reply to the question put to him the other
day by Young America. A little rascal, some ten or twelve
years old, had done some mischief, for which his father
llogged him. Young America bore it with heroic fortitude^
as if the honor of his country and of the race was at stake
in his person, and when it was Over, with the calm and dig
nified air of a man and a freeman, folded his arms across his
breast, looked up to his father, and asked, — ' Father, is not
this a free country ? ' i Yes.' ' By what right, then, do you
flog me?"

''Parents," said a cross-grained old maid, "are wholly in
capable of bringing up their children. They have no judg
ment, no steadiness ; at one moment whipping them without
rhyme or reason, and the next soothing them with candy,
and smothering them with caresses. They impart to them
their own tempers, passions, weaknesses, and prejudices.
There should be established infant schools at the public ex
pense, where all the children, as soon as twelve months oldr
should be placed, and brought up by proper persons trained
and prepared in normal schools for that purpose."

" You will have to go farther back than that, my ^ood
woman," said Mr. Long, an English gentleman just arrived
in the country and announced as the prophet of the new
ness. " Children are born with an inclination to evil, and are
hardly born before they manifest vicious tempers and a fond
ness for doing precisely what they ought not to do. If suf
fered to have their own way, they would never live to grow
up. They must, as they are now born, be restrained and
even whipped, for their own good. Here the sins of the
parents are visited upon the children. We must begin with
the parents. We live in a depraved state, and children in
herit vitiated moral and physical constitutions from their
fathers and mothers. We must look to this fact, and sternly
prohibit all persons of obviously vitiated moral or physical

60 THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

constitutions from begetting or bearing children. After
thaf we must turn our attention to improving the breed, as
our English farmers have done in the case of their horses,
oxen, cows, sheep, swine, dogs, and hens."

" That may be rather difficult to manage in a free country,"
said Dr. Muzzleton, a prof essor of surgery in a western med
ical college, " and can hardly be tried, except by the master
with his negroes on our Southern plantations. The hopes
of philanthropists must rest on something more practical,
and less difficult to be accomplished. The philanthropist's
dependence is on dietetic reform. The vitiated moral and
ph}Tsical constitution of parents which they impart to
their children, comes unquestionably from the use of animal
food. It is necessary, therefore, to abolish the use of animal
food, and have people feed only on a vegetable diet. Nature
shows this in the very construction of the human teeth,
which are very different from those of the lion, the tiger,
and other carnivorous animals. Carnivorous animals have
no grinders, and their teeth are fitted only for tearing. Man
has incisors and molars, which shows that he was intended
to cut and grind his food."

" But which serve him very well, since he does not usu
ally eat flesh raw, but cooks it," remarked Mr. Merton.
"But the antediluvians eat no flesh. They lived on a vegeta
ble diet, were vegetarians, and yet they became so corrupt
that the Almighty sent a flood and destroyed them all, with
the exception of eight persons."

"Where did you learn that?" asked Dr. Muzzleton.

" From the Bible and tradition," replied Mr. Merton.

All stared, and many broke out into a loud laugh at
the joke of citing the Bible and tradition as authority in an
assembly of philanthropists and reformers. Dr. Muzzleton
looked round with great blandness, and said to Mr. Merton,
"You see, my young friend, the majority is against you. I
respect the Bible in matters pertaining" to another world,
but I am speaking now as a man of science, not as a theolo
gian. I leave theology to the clergy," bowing on his right
to Mr. Cotton, and on his left to Mr. Winslow.

" I respect the Bible in theology no more than I do in
science," said Miss Rose Winter, a strong-minded woman,
and a decided reformer, of Jewish descent. "The first
thing for all reformers to do is to destroy the authority of
the Bible, and emancipate the Christian world from its mo
rality. It is the great supporter of all abuses, and it and the

A I.KS>M.\ IN WORLD-REFORM. 61

church arc almost our only obstacle to overcome. It aano-
tions the use of wine ami animal food, slavery, and the res
titution of the fugitive slave, war and capital punishment.
It asserts the divine right of government, and forbids resist
ance to power. It is the fountain of superstition, and the
grand bulwark of priestcraft. It calls woman the weaker
vessel, forbids her to speak in meeting, and commands her
to be in subjection to her husband. We are fools and mad
men to talk of our reforms as long as we regard the Bible
as any thing more than a last year s almanac.

" In that I think you are right, my dear lady," said Mr.
Cotton, dryly.

" I esteem the Bible a good book," said Mr. Winslow. " It
contains more genuine and sublime poetry than any other
book I am acquainted with, not even excepting Homer. But
I do not accept its plenary inspiration, and I feel bound to
believe only the truths I find in it."

" And these," remarked Mr. Merton, " I suppose are
only what happens to accord with your own opinions for the
time being."

" The Bible," interposed Priscilla, " is a genuine book, and
faithfully records the real experience of prophets and seers
of old times, and is of no value to us save as interpreted by
the facts of each one's own inner life. Much of it is local,
temporary, colored by the nation and age that produced it,
and is no longer of any significance for us ; but what there
is in it universal, that is the genuine utterance of universal
nature, and true for all persons, times, and places, should
be accepted, as we accept every genuine word, by whomso
ever uttered."

Mr. Merton shrugged his shoulders and said nothing ; Mr.
Cotton looked black, was scandalized, and muttered, " Rank
infidelity." " And what else," said a very gentlemanly young
man, who had been talking nonsense for an hour to a bevy of
young ladies in a corner of the room, and apparently indif
ferent to the great matters under discussion, " and what else
did his reverence expect in a company of reformers ? Yet
we are not really infidels. We have only thrown off the
mask, and ceased to be hypocrites. Whatever man's pro
fession, ever since it was said, ' It is not good for man to be
alone,' and Eve was brought blushing to his bower, woman
has been the real shrine at which he has worshipped. This
is our ancestral religion, and true to the religion of my fa
thers, I make woman my Divinitv. and lay my offering at
Leila's feet."

THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

" Do not believe him," said a saucy young thing, with a
sparkling eye and pouting lips. " He worships only him
self. Here I have been this half hour trying to convince
him that there is something mystic in woman, and that sci
ence and religion, as now organized, are false and mischiev
ous, because they are the product of man's genius alone. I
have said all the nattering things I could to make him take
up the cause of woman's rights, and he has only laughed at

me.

a

You wrong me, fair and adorable Leila ; woman reigns
supreme now, and we are slaves ; what more can she ask ? "

" She should be elevated to be the equal of man," said
Leila.

" Lowered, my Leila would say," replied the young gen
tleman.

<' And placed in the possession of the same political fran
chises, have the right to vote at all elections, and be declared
eligible to any and every office political, civil, or military,"
continued Leila, without heeding the interruption.

"But that," said Mr. Merton, "would be hardly fair to us
men, and would moreover be dangerous to republican liber
ty. Mademoiselle Leila would of course be a candidate for
the Assembly. All the young men would vote for her, be
cause they would secure her good graces, and all the old men
would do the same, in order to prove that they are not old,
and have not yet lost their sensibility to female loveliness
and worth ; she would be elected unanimously. In the As
sembly she would rise to propose some measure, throw aside
her veil, beam forth upon us with all her charms, and for the
same reasons all would support her. She would reign as a
despot, which, as a republican, I must protest against"

" She might have rivals ; all men do not see with the same
eyes," sagely remarked a venerable spinster, with a dried
and withered form and face, puckering up her mouth, and
endeavoring to look killing.

:c That is well thought of," said Mr. Merton.

" Besides," added Mr. Winslow, " the votes of the women
would be as numerous as those of the men, and miff lit be
thrown for a candidate of the other sex."

" And you may trust to the women themselves to see that
no one of their own sex has a monopoly of power," added,
caustically, Mr. Cotton.

" You are hard upon us women," pleaded Priscilla. "Wom
en have their weaknesses as well as men theirs, but they

A LESSON IN WORLD-MI | <>RM. ..",

«an love and admire beauty in their own sex, as much as they
do ugliness in men. I do not suppose that plnHni: tln-m on
an equality in all respects with men will increase their
power as women, but it will increase their power as
reasonable human beings. I think woman would lose
much of her peculiar power as woman over man, and this I
should by no means regret. 1 would break down the tyr-
annv of sex as I would that of caste or class. I would have
men and women so trained, that they could meet, converse,
or act together as simple human beings, without ever recur
ring, even in thought, to the difference of sex."

" That," said the young worshipper of woman, " would
be cruel. It would be like spreading a pall over the sun, or
.extinguishing the lamp of life. Even the garden of Eden

was a wild,

And man the hermit sighed, till woman smil'd."

" As long as I remember my mother or my sister," said
Mr. Merton, " I would never meet a woman, however high
or however humble, without taking note of the fact that
she is a woman."

"Things are best as God made them," added Mr. Cotton.
" Men and women have each their peculiar character and
sphere. Women would gain nothing by exchanging the
petticoat for the breeches, or men by exchanging the
breeches for the petticoat."

"But I wish," said Leila poutingly, "to be treated as a
reasonable being, and that the young gentlemen who do me
the honor to address me would treat me as if I had common
sense. I do not want compliments paid to my hands and
feet, my face, lips, nose, eyes, and eyebrows."

"And yet," said I, "my sweet Leila, they are well worth
complimenting."

She smiled, and seemed not displeased.

" I suspect," remarked Mr. Cotton, with his Puritan sly
ness, " that the young lady finds the affluence of such com
pliments more endurable than she would their absence."

" I do riot deal much in compliments," said Mr. Merton,
"but I do not much fancy persons who are always wise, and
never open their mouths without giving utterance to some
grave maxim for the conduct of life. There is a time to be
silly as well as a time to be wise. Life is made up of little
things, and he is a sad moralist who has no leniency for tri
fles. I love myself to look upon a pretty face, and h'nd no

04 THE SPIRIT-RAPPEE.

great objection to those pleasant nothings which are the cur
rent coin of well-bred conversation between the sexes. Even
a gallant speech, a happily-turned compliment, when it brings
no blush to the cheek of modesty, is quite endurable."

"I thought you were a parson, Mr. Merton, "said Priscilla,
" and am surprised to find you so tolerant of what it is said
your cloth generally condemns."

" The fair Priscilla may have mistaken my cloth. I am a
man, and I hope a gentleman. I love society, and find an
exquisite charm in the social intercourse of cultivated men
and women. That charm would vanish were they to meet
and converse, not as men and women, gentlemen and ladies,
but as simple human beings. Could you carry out your doc
trine, your sex would, I fear, be the first to suffer from it."

" Perhaps they would," said Priscilla; " but it is woman's
lot to suffer, and she was born to redeem the race by her
private sorrows. She will not shrink from the sacrifice. You
need her at the polls, in the legislative halls, in the executive
chair, on the judge's bench, as well as in the saloon, to give
purity and elevation to your affections, disinterestedness and
courage to your conduct."

"Kather^let her be present to infuse noble qualities into*
our hearts in childhood, and to cherish and invigorate them
in our manhood," added Mr. Merton. " Let her mission be
by a sweet, quiet, and gentle influence to form us from our
infancy for lofty and heroic deeds, and let it be ours to do-
them."

" I do not like this discussion at all," broke in Thomas
Jefferson Andrew Jackson Hobbs, a thorough-going radical,
with an unshaved and unwasheri face, long, lank, uncombed
hair, and a gray, patched, frock-coat, leather trousers, a
red waistcoat, and a red bandanna handkerchief tied round
his neck for a cravat. " The world can never be reformed
by the instrumentality of government, whether in the hands
of man or woman. The curse of the world is that it has
been governed too much. That is the best government that
governs least, and a better is that which governs none at all.
We want no government, least of all a government made
up of female politicians and intriguers. There never yet
was a great crime or a great iniquity, but a woman had a
hand in it. The devil, when he would ruin mankind, al
ways begins by seducing woman, and making her his accom
plice. We must get rid of all government, break down
church and state, sweep away religion and politics, and ex-

A LESSON IN WORLD-REFORM. 65

terminate all priests and politicians, whether in trousers or
petticoats, in broadcloth or homespun, and bring back that
state of things which was inJudea, ' when there was no king
in Israel, and every man did what was right in his own
eyes.'"

" Boldly said," remarked Signor Giovanni IJrbini, a lead
er of young Italy, u but it is hardly wise. The people are
not yet, especially in my country, prepared for it. They
have so long been the slaves of power, and the tools of su
perstition, that they would be shocked at its bare announce
ment. They must have their Madonnas, their San Carlos,
their San Filippos, and their capucin frati. But a thorough
going democratic revolution is no doubt needed, and such a
revolution will necessarily result in a no less thorough and
radical revolution in religion ; but this last we had better
leave to come of itself. You cannot work with purely neg
ative ideas. You must have something positive, and^hatmust
be the positive idea of the age. Kings, princes, nobles, priests,
religions in our times are at a discount, and the secret, silent,
but irresistible tendency is to bring up the people. Assert,
then, boldly everywhere people-king, people-pontiff, people-
god. Fling out to the breeze the virgin banner of the PEOPLE.
Go forth to war in the name of the people, in the inspiration
of the people, and always and every where shout THE PEOPLE,
THE PEOPLE. Break the fetters which now bind the peo
ple, emancipate them from their present masters, assert their
supremacy, and establish their power, which of course in the
last analysis will be our power over them. They will then
re-organize society, religion, and politics, and every thing-
else, after the best model, and in the way which will best
meet our wishes."

"I am decidedly opposed to my friend Urbini's doctrine,"
frankly asserted M. Beaubien, from the sunny south of
France, "I want no king-people, and if I must be tyrannized
over, I prefer it should be by one man rather than the many-
headed and capricious multitude. The evil under which
society groans is individualism, which now exerts itself in
universal competition, so highly prized by your foolish and
stupid political economists. These evils can be removed by
no political or religious revolution, neither by your Luthers
nor your Robespierres. They can be removed only by the
pacific organization of labor, and the arrangement of labor
ers in groups and series according to their special tastes and

VOL. IX-5.

THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

capacities, on the newly-discovered principle that 'attrac
tions are proportional to destiny.' "

"A better plan," suggested M. Icarie, also from la belle
France, " is to abolish all private property, all private house
holds, industry, and economy, and have the whole commu
nity supported, lodged, fed, clothed, feasted or nursed, and
transported from place to place, from house to house, at the
public expense."

"Admirable," interposed Mr. Cotton, "but who will
support the public, and whence will the public draw its
funds ? "

/'Singular ^ questions," replied M. Icarie. "The public
will support itself, and draw the necessary funds from the
public treasury, as a matter of course."

"And where does the treasury get them ?" asked, with a
sneer, M. Le Prohne, a native of the ancient Dauphiny, who
towered head and shoulders above all the rest. " All your
schemes are idle and absurd ; property is robbery ; abolish
it, and all distinction between thine and mine, and establish
a grand people's bank, and give each one an equal credit on
its books."

" And who," sarcastically remarked M. Icarie, " will take
care of the bank, and be responsible for its managers, or see
that the drafts of individuals are duly honored ? "

"Why not," I asked in my enthusiasm, "make an equal
division of property among all the members of the commu
nity ? "

" That would do very well for a start," suggested Mr.
Cotton, but he was " afraid that come Saturday night, a
good^many would demand, like the sailor, that the property
be divided again, as they no longer retained their propor
tion."

This produced a smile, and as it was late, the company
broke up and departed. Those who had had an opportunity
of bringing forward their views were very much edified ;
others who had been obliged to listen, or to keep back their
own projects, thought the party exceedingly dull, and could
not help thinking that the evening had been spent very un-
profitably.

There were, indeed, persons there with plans of reform
as wise, as deep, and as practicable as those I have taken
notice of, and I owe an apology to their authors for my
omissions. These omissions are the result of no ill feel
ing, and of no intentional neglect ; and I certainly would

THE CONSPIRACY. 67

repair them, but as I am pressed for time, and am not writ
ing a history of reformers and projected reforms in a thou
sand volumes in-folio, the thing is absolutely out of the
question. Let it suffice for me to say, that I have by me
still some thousand and one of these projects, all of which
their authors did me the honor to send ine, with their re
spects, and all of which I examined with all the care and
diligence they deserved.

I returned to my lodgings, not so much enlightened or
edified by what I had heard as I might have desired, though
not much disappointed or discouraged. No plan had been
suggested that was not unsatisfactory, and, taken in itself
alone, that was not obviously either mischievous or absurd.
But under them all I saw one and the same spirit, the spirit
of the age, and all were striking indications of a great and
powerful movement in the direction of something different
from what is now the established order. No one of them
would be realized, but it was well to encourage this move
ment, to join with this free and powerful spirit. Some
thing, as Mr. Micawber was wont to say, " might turn up,"
and out of the seeming darkness light might at length
shine, and out of the apparent chaos order might finally
spring forth. I would lend myself to the spirit working,
and trust to future developments. With that I undressed,
went to bed, and dreamed of Leila, no, Priscilla ; no, yes,
—it was Priscilla. I was the victorious champion of re
form. She was binding my brow with the crown of laurel,
when I awoke, and was sad that it was only a dream.

CHAPTER IX. THE CONSPIRACY.

I SLEPT late the next morning, and it was the middle of
the forenoon before I awoke. I arose, made my toilette.
ili-aiik a cup of coffee, and went to arrange my future plans
with Priscilla. I found her sad and apprehensive. She
was a true woman, and had no misgivings as to the excellence
of the cause she had espoused, but she feared that the con
versations of the previous evening might have disheartened
me, and made me change my resolution. I set her mind at
rest on this point, and assured her that, though I might
often change my methods of effecting a resolution once
taken, yet nothing could prevent my persistence in it but an
absolute conviction of its wickedness, or its utter imp.^i-
bility. I had wedded myself to the spirit of the age for

68 THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

better or for worse, and would, if need be, devote myself
body and soul to the cause of world-reform.

On hearing me say this, her face brightened up, arid
shone with a radiance I had never seen it wear before. She
seemed perfectly happy, and turned to me with a look
of perfect satisfaction. " I will not say that at that moment
I had not forgotten the lady's husband, and I will not pre
tend to say what words of misplaced tenderness might have
been uttered or responded to, if we had been left" to our
selves. She was young, beautiful, fascinating, and I was a
man in the prime of life. Happily, as the interview was
becoming dangerous, Mr. Merton was announced. This
young man, who seemed to have thought beyond his years,
had deeply interested me the previous evening. I knew
not who he was, whence he came, or why he associated with
persons with whom he seemed to have very little sympathy.
He was evidently a gentleman, and well educated. His
dress was rich but plain, his manners were simple and un
pretending. He was tall and well proportioned, with a
classical head, a high, broad forehead, large, black eyes, and
very thick, dark hair. His features were open and manly,
and his voice low, rich, and musical. It was a pleasure to
hear him speak. His name was English, but he seemed to-
be of foreign descent, although I afterwards learned that he
was an American, and even a New Englander, but bred and
educated abroad. He apologized for calling, but he could
not refrain from paying his respects to his fair and amiable
hostess of the evening. He hoped that she had enjoyed
herself with her guests, and that she had suffered no incon
venience from the heat of the rooms occasioned by so great
a crowd. He was most happy also to meet me. He had
heard of me, knew and highly esteemed some of my
friends, and regretted that he had not previously had the
honor of making my acquaintance.

He was requested to be seated, and assured that his call
was most agreeable, and that we both hoped to meet him
often and cultivate a further acquaintance. The conversa
tion ran on for some time in an easy natural way, on a vari
ety of general topics, till Priscilla, whose soul was absorbed
in her philanthropic projects, asked Mr. Merton how it hap
pened that she had the pleasure of meeting him so often
among reformers. " You evidently," said she, " are not of
us. ^ The ^ quiet remarks, sometimes serious, sometimes sar
castic, which you every now-and-then make, prove that you
have no sympathy with us."

THE CONSPIRACY. 69

" I am not surprised, my dear Madam, at your question,"
replied Mr. Merton, " yet I too am a reformer, in my way,
perhaps not precisely in your way, nor on so large a scale as
that on which you and your friends propose to carry on re
form. I have not the talent, nor the disposition to engage
in any thing so magnificent. I think reform, like charity,
should begin at home."

" But not end there," said I.

" Certainly not," he replied ; " certainly not with those
who have leisure and means to carry it further. But I find
that it is more than I can do, by iny unassisted efforts, to
reform myself, and if I can succeed in saving my own soul,
I shall be quite contented. It is, I fear, more than I shall
be able to do."

" I see, sir, you are no philanthropist," said Priscilla.

" Perhaps not, I am comparatively a young man, but am
quite old-fashioned in many of my notions."

" One of those, I dare say, who have eyes only in the back
side of their heads, and live only among tombs," said I, in
a tone between jesting and earnest.

" I have not yet sufficiently mastered the wisdom of an
tiquity to be authorized to cry out against it," he replied.
" I make no doubt, however, but you, dear lady, and you
my learned friend, are quite competent to reject the old
wisdom for the new."

" On the contrary, I am inclined to think that my present
tendency is to reject the new for the old, the modern for
the ancient. Or, rather, it seems to me that the progress of
modern science is rapidly and surely leading us back to the
ancient wisdom."

" There were in the old world, as there are in the mod
ern, two wisdoms, the wisdom from above, and the wisdom
from below. May I be permitted to ask to which of these
you regard modern science as conducting ? "

" There has been in regard to these ancient wisdoms,"
said Priscilla, "much misconception. The world in its
nonage was imposed upon, and induced to call evil good
and good evil. The wisdom I assume, and am laboring to
diffuse, is that which the priests have branded as Satanic.
Satan is my hero. He was a bold and daring rebel, and the
first to set the example of resistance to despotism, and to
assert unbounded freedom. For this all the priests, all
rulers, despots, all who would hold their brethren in bond
age, have cursed him. I take his part, and hope to live to

TO

THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

see his memory vindicated, and amends made for the wrong
which has been done him."

" That is a candid avowal, my fair lady, and one which we
seldom, especially among your sex, hear made. I suspect,
that Madame Priscilla has listened or will listen to the mod
ern spiritualism, which seems to me to be a revival of de
monic worship. May I entreat you, dear lady, to pause and
reconsider the conclusion to which you have come ? The
ancient gentiles deserted the true God, the Creator of heav
en and earth, and all things visible and invisible, and fol
lowed strange gods, erected their temples and consecrated
their altars to devils, to fallen spirits, and I need not tell
you how their minds became darkened, and their hearts
corrupted. Do not, I entreat you, seek to revive the gross,
cruel, and obscene superstitions of the ancient gentiles, on
which Christianity has made an unrelenting war from the
first."

" I was sure, Mr. Merton, you were a parson. "Will you
deny it now ? " said Priscilla.

" I am not aware that I have said any thing but what any
honest Christian or fair-minded man, who really wishes well
to his fellow beings, and who has read history, might not
very well say. It is not necessary to be a parson, I should
hope, in order to have good sense and good feeling."

" I do not see, Mr. Merton," said I, " any tendency to su
perstition in modern spiritualism. Superstition is in charg
ing to supernatural intervention what is explicable on nat
ural principles."

" That is one form of superstition," replied Mr. Merton,
u but there is another, which consists in ascribing effects to
inadequate causes, as where one augurs good luck from see
ing the new moon over his right shoulder, or bad luck if on
the day he sets out on his travels a red squirrel crosses his
path. But I interrupt you."

"I believe the spirits which are evoked in our days
are real, but that they are the primal forces of nature, and
that it is on strictly natural principles that they are called
to our aid," I resumed. " There is no superstition in this."

i It is not improbable that the ancient gentiles thought as
much. I am by no means disposed to ascribe all the phe
nomena of mesmerism, table-turning, and spiritual rapping
to superhuman or preternatural agency. Satan can affect
us only through the natural, but through that he may carry
us beyond or drag us below nature. I believe mesmerism..

THE CONSPIRACY.

71

strictly speaking, is natural, but I believe also that its prac
tice is always dangerous, and that it throws its sub
jects under the power of Satan. In the so-called mes
meric phenomena there are those which are natural, and
those which are Satanic, although in the present state of
our science it may not be easy in all cases to distinguish be
tween them."

Here the conversation, which was beginning to interest
me, (for I had a lurking suspicion that Mr. Merton was
right,) was interrupted by the entrance of Signor Urbini,
who gave unequivocal signs that the presence of Mr. Mer
ton was very disagreeable to him. Mr. Merton, probably
not wishing to encounter young Italy, or to enter into a
contest with him at that time, after a few commonplace re
marks, took his leave. Young Italy was full of fire and en
thusiasm, but at the same time, well informed, subtile, and
clear-headed. He had been implicated in a conspiracy for
overthrowing the Austrian government in Milan, and had
escaped to England, where ^ he had concerted with the
friends of Italy a plan for revolutionizing the whole penin
sula. He had come to the United States to enlist as large a
portion of our own people as possible on his side, and to
obtain pecuniary aid in carrying out his revolutionary pro
jects. For himself he had no religion, and feared neither
God nor the devil. At heart, as does every Italian liberal,
he despised Protestantism, as a religion ; but his chief re
liance was on Protestant nations, and he made a skilful and
adroit appeal to the Protestant hatred of Popery. Italy
was the stronghold of Popery, and if Italy could be wrest
ed from the pope, the whole fabric of superstition and
priestcraft would fall to the ground. But this could not be-
done by any direct attacks on the national religion, or any
direct advocacy of the doctrines of the reformation. Out
of Italy the appeal might be made to the Protestant feel
ing, but in Italy, and by all the leaders of the Italian party
it must be made solely to the national sentiment as against
Austria, and to the love of liberty, the democratic senti
ment, as against the pope and the native princes. War
must be made on the pope indeed, but ostensibly on him
only as temporal prince. Overthrown as temporal prince,
and his states declared a republic, and maintained as^such,
the church, as the upholder of tyranny on the Continent,
would be annihilated, and universal democracy, and a pure
ly democratic religion could be established throughout the

72 THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

world ; and civilization, arrested by the Goths and Vandals,
who overturned the old Roman Empire, might resume its
triumphant march through the ages. Plans were forming
to make the democratic revolution as nearly simultaneous
as possible in France, Austria, Prussia, and Central Germa
ny ; at least to give these countries sufficient employment
at home to render them unable to go to the assistance of
the pope.

Subsidiary to his purpose, he proposed a grand world's
convention, composed of delegates from the whole Protes
tant world, to be holden as soon as possible at London. It
might be assembled ostensibly for the purpose of bringing
about a better feeling and closer union of the various Prot
estant sects, and none but those who could be safely trusted
should be initiated into its ulterior objects. Only the man
agers need know its real purpose, or modus operandi. It
might form a Protestant alliance, and recommend the for
mation of Protestant associations in all Protestant states for
the protection of the reformation against Popery, the con
version of the pope and his Italian subjects. These associ
ations would have nothing to do but to raise funds, and
meet once a year, hear reports, and listen to flaming speeches
in praise of the Bible and religious liberty, and against
the tyranny, idolatry, and superstition of Popery. Thus
they would, without knowing it, prepare the way and
furnish the means of driving the foreigner out of Italy,
dethroning the pope, establishing the Roman Republic,
and spreading liberty throughout the world, and in a
way, too, not to alarm the religious sensibilities of the
Italians, because those who showed themselves to Italians
w^ould have apparently no connection with the Protes
tant movement.*

The plan of Young Italy, communicated with further
details, and which was substantially carried out from 1845
to 1849, when, contrary to all human foresight, Republican
— not Imperial — France suppressed the Roman Republic,
and restored the pope, struck Priscilla and myself as ad
mirable, and we resolved to give it our hearty support. I
hoped, by the new power I had discovered, or was on the
point of discovering, to bring an unexpected force to its

*This is in the main historical, and was communicated to the writer
through a mutual friend, by a delegate from Connecticut to the World's
Convention, alluded to in the text.

THE CONSPIRACY.

73

aid. The Signore accepted our pledges, enrolled our names,
administered to us the oath, and gave us the signs and pass
words agreed upon by the government of Young Italy.

When Signer Urbini had taken his leave of us, we, that
is, Priscilla and myself, came to a mutual understanding of
the respective parts we were to perform. We agreed that
it was useless for either to attempt any thing without the
other. Our covenant was sealed. Poor Priscilla, little did
she foresee what the future had in store for her ! But let
me not anticipate. We separated, and I returned to my
lodgings, intending to leave the next day for my home in
western New York. Hardly had I regained the hotel,
wl len I was called upon by the stanch old puritan, Mr. Cot
ton. I have departed far enough from the stand-point of
my puritan ancestors, and have few traces in my moral con
stitution of my puritan descent ; but, I care not who knows
it, I am proud of these stern old men, the Bradfords, the
Brewsters, the Hookers, the Davenports, and the stout
Miles Standish, who came forth into a new world to battle
with the wilderness, the savage, and the devil. Stern they
were, stout-hearted, and strong of arm, yet not without a
touch of human feeling. They had their loves, their affec
tions, and their soft moments, when Jonathan or Ezekiel
wooed his Beulah or his Keziah, who blushingly responded
to his addresses, and the husband kissed his wife, the mother
her boy, if it was not on the Sabbath. Honor to their
memory ! They did man's work, and earned man's wages,
and as well might one of the modern Trasteverini blush for
his old Roman progenitors, as I for my old puritan ances
tors, who brought with them the bravest hearts and the best
laws and the noblest institutions of old England, which
they loved so tenderly, though she sent them forth as the
Patriarch's wife did Hagar and the dear Ismael into the
desert. I liked Mr. Cotton, too, for his great ancestor's
sake, for great, O Cotton Mather, thou wast in thy day ;
hard service didst thou against fiends and witches, and pow
ers invisible ; and a noble epic hast thou left us in thy Mag-
nalia. The college thou lovedst so well, and which thou
didst cherish in thy heart of hearts, "pro Christo et ecclc-
sia" may have ceased to cherish thy memory, and the Sec
ond Church, over which thou wast pastor as colleague with
thy father, has learned to blush at thy memory, and to im-
MLrine it shows its wisdom in calling thee a "learned fool."
I, who have as little sympathy with them as with thee, lion-

THE SPIRIT-KAPPER.

or thee as one of the worthies of my country, and as one*
who was not the least among the worthies of my native
land in thy day and generation. Men look upon "thee as
antiquated, and fancy that they have become wiser than
thou wast. "Would to Heaven they had a little of thy good
sense, and of the truth, which thou wast not ashamed to
profess and defend !

But this is quite aside from my purpose, and is, artistically
considered, a blemish in my narrative. But few are the
writers who, if they speak out from warm hearts their true,
deep, genuine feelings as they arise, but will violate some
canon of art. I love art, but I love nature more. I love a
smoothly shaven lawn ; I say nothing against your artificial
garden, trim and neat, where each plant and shrub grows
and flowers according to rule ; but the wild forest, with its
irregularities, decaying logs, huge trees, fresh saplings, and
tangled underbrush, was as a boy, when it was my home,
and is now I am a man, much more my delight. By the
same token, 1 love Boston, whose streets were laid out by
the cows going through the brushwood to drink, where
you cannot find a square corner, or a street a hundred
yards in length without a curve, better than the city of
Fenn, laid out by a carpenter's line and chalk, and present
ing only the dull monotony of the chess-board, without the
excitement of the game. Yet the city of Fenn has its
merits. Many a pleasant hour have I spent there, and many
a swreet association is entwined in my memory with its rect
angles, and its plain, uniform, drab-colored costume. But
I have left Mr. Cotton all this time standing. It was unin
tentional, for I was not displeased to see him. He knew
me as the son of an old friend, and he had, both as a friend
and as a minister of religion, called to expostulate with me.
He was sure that I was imperilling my soul, and he could
not answer it to his conscience, if he did not solemnly and
yet affectionately warn me of my danger.

I have been sadly remiss in my faith and in my conduct,
yet never have I allowed myself to treat with scorn or con
tumely any professed minister of religion /who addressed me
in tones of sincerity and affectionate earnestness. Mr. Cot
ton, I was sure, meant well, although I knew his expostula
tions would avail nothing, and his warning be unheeded. I
listened with respect, but untouched. At that time my
heart was hard. I was laboring under a perfect delusion,
and body and soul were under the power of the Evil One.

THE CONSPIRACY. 75

"You may not believe it, Doctor," said Mr. Cotton, "but I
tell you that you are forming a league with the devil. [
know you have grown wiser than your fathers were ; that
you deny the existence of a devil or of evil spirits, but you
are wise only in your own conceit, and you are now really
dealing with the devil, are plotting to do the devil's work,
under pretence of science and world-reform. I have watched
you these many months, and I see where you are going.
You are also permitting yourself to be seduced by a Moab-
itish woman, and allowing yourself to be cheated, with your
eyes open, out of your five senses by the sparkle of her eye,
and the ruby of her lip. "Why have you suffered her" to
bewitch you? Leave her, never see her or speak to her
again, or you are a lost man."

I am naturally a very mild-tempered man, and am not
and never was very sensitive to wounds inflicted by the
tongue ; and Mr. Cotton might have abused me or said all
manner of hard things against me till he was exhausted,
and I could have remained unmoved ; but when he alluded
to my relation with another, especially since I could not de
fend it, and called the beautiful, the lovely, the philan
thropic Priscilla, a Moabitish woman, and attacked her honor,
my blood was up, and I instantly resolved that he should
suffer for it. I however kept this to myself, assured him
that he was uncharitable, and judged an estimable lady
rasnly; that my relations with Priscilla were not precisely
a matter for his cognizance, as we were neither of us under
his parochial charge. I respected him as an old friend of
my father's, and as a descendant of one of the greatest men
of the early Massachusetts Colony. I had no doubt of his
good intentions, and affectionate interest in me and my fam
ily ; but I was of age, and competent to take care of my
self. What I was doing I was doing with my eyes open,
calmly, deliberately, and from wrhat I held to be justifiable
motives. I was prepared to take the responsibility. Warn
ings, expostulations, would avail nothing. I was resolved
to push my scientific investigations to the furthest limits
possible. I would, if I should be able, wrest from nature
her last secret, and avail myself of all her mysterious forces.
I did not pretend to say whether there were devils and evil
spirits or not, although I believed God made all things
good, very good ; but if there were, I had nothing to do
with them, for I invoked mysterious agencies only for a
good end, in the cause of philanthropy and human progress.

76 THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

If they were spirits I was dealing with, they must be white
spirits rather than black ; and if I studied and even prac
tised magic, I was sure it was not black magic, but white.

"All that is very well said," replied Mr. Cotton, "and
yet you know that you are carried away by indiscreet curi
osity, by an unholy ambition, and perhaps by lawless lust,
and you dare not, alone in your closet, ask the blessing of
God on your proceedings. Bear with me. I am an old
man, and let my gray hairs plead with you, if not my sacred
profession. I know that the young men of our time lose
their reverence for religion, and turn up their noses in pro
found disgust when we speak to them of duty and the sol
emn responsibilities of life. I know they are impatient of
restraint, and burning with a passion for liberty, as they
call it. I know they deem it wisdom to depart from the old
ways, to forsake the God of their fathers, and to hew out
to themselves cisterns, alas, broken cisterns, which will hold
no water. But let me tell you, my friend, that they are
only sowing the seeds of future sorrow, and will reap only
a too abundant harvest. No man in his old age ever re
gretted that he feared God and practised virtue in his
youth."

" All that may be very true, Mr. Cotton, but much of it
comes with no good grace from a Puritan who has allowed
himself the freedom of his own judgment in religious mat
ters. It is not long since your fathers forsook their fathers'
God, and hewed out cisterns for themselves ; whether brok
en cisterns or not, it is not for me to say ; certainly they
departed from the old ways, followed the new wisdom of
their times, and you honor them for it. Perhaps posterity
will in like manner honor me and my associates for daring
to follow the new wisdom of our times, and to incur re
proach for my adhesion to the work of human emancipa
tion. I am enlarging the boundaries of human knowledge,
laying open to view the invisible world, and proving that,
under the old doctrine of the communion of saints, there is
a great and glorious truth, cheering and consoling to us in
this life of labor and sorrow. I am freeing the world from
the monster, superstition, and delivering the people from
their gloomy fears and terrible apprehensions. They shall
no longer start and tremble at ghosts and hobgoblins, or be
obliged, with the Papists, to cross themselves, or with our
New England youth, to whistle Yankee Doodle to keep
their courage up, when, after dark, they go by a graveyard.

TIIK CONSPIRACY. 7T

"What torture did not my superstitious fears cause me in my
childhood ! I never have known what it was to fear any
living thing. I have been tried, and have always found my
courage and self-possession equal to the occasion, and I could
alone face an armed host without trembling ; but even now
I cannot open the door into a dark room without trepida
tion, without starting back till reason comes to my aid. I
never sit alone in my room reading till twelve o'clock at
night, without having a mysterious awe creep over me. I
am oppressed by the presence of the invisible, and my very
lamp seems to burn blue. All is the sad effect of the frights
I received in ray childhood, occasioned by the ghost and
witch stories which old people would meet together and tell
of a long winter's evening. I, a lad, listened with ears
erect, and hair standing on end. My blood seemed to freeze
in my veins, and I dared not look around me lest I should
see the invisible. I was ready to shriek with agony when
sent to bed in the dark, and unless watched would throw
myself into bed without taking off my clothes, and cover
up my head and face in the bed blanket. How terrible was
the dark ! The impression wears not out with time, and will
remain till death. Now I would free the mind from all these
idle fears, and save the people, especially children, from
these terrible sufferings. It is a good work, and none but
white spirits will aid me in it."

u Alas ! you seem not to have reflected that the devil,
when lie would seduce, can disguise himself as an angel of
light. Human nature is terribly corrupt, and yet the great
mass of mankind ordinarily are incapable of choosing evil,
for the reason that it is evil. Evil must be presented to
them in the guise of good, or they will not choose it. The
devil knows this, and knows the weak side of every one,
and he adapts his temptations accordingly. The weak side
of our age is a morbid sentimentality, a sickly philanthropy,
and the devil tempts us now by appealing to our dominant
weakness. He comes to us as a philanthropist, and his
mouth full of tine sentiments, and he proposes only what
we are already prepared to approve. Were he to come as
the devil in propria persona, and tell us precisely who and
what he is, there are very few who would not say, ' Get be
hind me, Satan.' Nothing better serves his purpose than to
have us deny his existence ; to ascribe his influence to imag
ination, hallucination, to natural causes or influences, or in
fine, to good spirits, for then he throws us off our guard.

78 THE SPIRIT-EAPPER.

and can operate without being easily detected. Never was
an age more under his influence than our own, and yet they
who pass for its lights and chiefs have reached that last in
firmity of unbelief, the denial of the existence of the devil.
Possessed persons are insane, epileptic, or lunatic persons,
and the wonderful phenomena they exhibit are produced
by an electric, magnetic, or odic fluid, and are to be ex
plained on natural principles, and such as cannot be so ex
plained, are boldly denied, however well attested, or ascribed
to jugglery, knavery, or collusion. The marvellous answers
of the ancient oracles are ascribed to knavery, as if the
whole world had lost their senses, and could not detect a
cheat practised before their very eyes, and so bunglingly,
that we who live two thousand or three thousand years af
ter, ignorant of all the circumstances of the case, can de
tect it, and explain how it was done, without the slightest
difficulty. The devil laughs at this. He would have it so.
Your natural explanations will hereafter create a suspicion
that you are little better than natural fools. But go your
way. I see by your incredulous smile that the devil has
you fast in his grip. I have done my duty. My garments
are clean of your blood ; and hereafter, when you are feel
ing the gnawings of that worm which never dies, and the
burning of that fire which is never quenched, say not, that
no one had forewarned you."

So saying, he took up his hat and cane, and, slightly
bowing, left my room without hearing a word in reply, or
giving me a parting greeting. When he was gone, I laughed
to myself at his solemn admonition, and renewed my res
olution that he should suffer for the manner in which he
alluded to my dear Priscilla. He should know whether she
was a Moabitish woman or not. Warn me ! Pray what
had I done ? Where was the harm ? Was it wrong to in
vestigate the principles of nature, to learn what nature re
ally is, and to call her forces into play, providing they were
not applied to a bad end ? Could it be a good spirit that
would debar us from acquiring science, or a bad spirit that
would bid us inquire, to learn our strength, and to use it ?
Would it be no slight service to relieve the more mysteri
ous parts of science from the reproaches cast upon them ?
Has it not been computed that more than a million of per
sons alone suffered as sorcerers and sorceresses, or for deal
ing with the devil, in the sixteenth century and seventeenth
alone ? What injury has not been done to genuine science

THE CONSPIRACY. 79

by the absurd legislation against magic, sorcery, and the so-
called black arts generally. No man could rise above the
vulgar herd, and produce some ingenious piece of mechan
ism, but the rabble accused him of magic, and it was lucky if
he escaped a criminal prosecution and conviction before the
-courts of justice. Was not that noble heroine, Joan of
Arc, who saved France from becoming an English province,
burnt as a witch ? Was not Friar Bacon, the father of mod
ern science, and the forerunner of his namesake of Yerulam,
accused of magic, imprisoned, and thus scientific discoveries
and useful inventions postponed for centuries ? Had not
hundreds of old women, who had nothing of sorcery about
them but their poverty, weakness, and imbecility, been drag
ged before the courts, and hung or burnt as witches ? What
more lamentable page in our own American history than
.that of Salem witchcraft '( Is it nothing to disabuse the
world, to save so many innocent victims, remove so great a
hinderanceto science and heroic deeds, by bringing the class
of facts, superstitiously interpreted, within the bounds of
nature and legitimate science ? Then, again, what may not
be finally obtained for the human race ? Are the resources
of nature exhausted ? They sought once the philosopher's
stone, the elixir of life, the fountain of youth; who knows
but these may one day, and that not far distant, be found, if
.not in the shape sought, in others, more simple and con
venient ?

Thus I resisted the admonitions of the good old man, and
confirmed myself in my resolution. I meditated a long time
as to my future procedure, and how I could bring my new
science, which I trusted soon to complete, to bear on the
great revolutionary movement which the active spirits of
the day had concerted, and which must soon break out. I
could discern my way only dimly, but I trusted the mist
would soon clear away, and my method be no longer
obscure or uncertain. Monarchy must be overthrown be
cause it upholds religion, and religion because it upholds
monarchy, and imposes vexatious restraints. So much was
clear, and determined on. Time and events would reveal
the rest.

Late in the evening I called at Priscilla's, saw her a mo
ment, whispered a word in her ear, gave her one or two
directions, pressed her hand, only as my accomplice, and
henceforth my slave. The next morning I left Phila
delphia, and returned home a much altered man. My body

80

THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

was light and buoyant, and I felt as if I was all spirit. I
simply greeted my mother, but felt that the strong tie
which bound me to her was broken ; my sister, whom I had
tenderly loved, was indifferent to me, and I hardly deigned
to notice her. I went into my laboratory, saw that all was
right there ; from that I passed into my library to resume
my experiments.

CHAPTER X. MR. COTTON IS PUZZLED.

I PROCEEDED to magnetize my table. It responded as
usual. I put my former questions, but could get no answer to
them, except that the time for the revelation I solicited was
not yet come. I asked, if there was not a more direct mode
of communication possible, and was told there was. By
speech ? Not yet. By writing ? Yes. I took a slate and
pencil, and placed my hand in the attitude to write. Im
mediately my hand was moved by an invisible force, and a
communication was made in the handwriting and signed
with the name of my father, who had been dead some eight
or nine years. The purport of it was not much. I did not
know but I unconsciously moved the pencil myself. I
wished a better test. I placed the slate on the table, laid
the pencil on it, and called up the power, whoever or what
it might be, to write without my assistance. Yery soon
the pencil rose fully up, then fell 'back, then rose again, and
after vacillating awhile, it became firm in its position and
was moved regularly backwards and forwards, as if directed
by the hand of a scribe. At length it flew up to the ceil
ing, whirled round there for a few seconds, and then placed
itself quietly on the slate. I examined the slate, found a
communication on it in the handwriting and signed with
the name of Benjamin Franklin. The communication con
sisted of one or two proverbs from Poor Eichard, and a
commonplace remark about electricity. All this was mar
vellous enough, but very little to my purpose. It was not
worth while taking so much trouble to get what was of no
use when got.

I sat down in my great arm-chair a few feet from my
table, and fell into a brown study. How long I remained
so I do not know, when I was aroused by a great racket in
my room. My table was cutting up capers, rising now to
the ceiling and now frisking round the room, anon bal
ancing itself on one leg, and then going off into a whirl,

MR. COTTON IS PUZZLED. 81

that would have broken the heart of the best waltzcr, all to
a tune which some invisible hand was playing upon my
guitar, — tune I say, but it was rather a capriccio, and a
medley of a dozen different melodies, thrown together in
the wildest disorder. Yery soon this stopped, and then
came thundering raps all about my room, making every
thing in it jar. I bid them be quiet, and not all speak at
once, like a lot of old women at a tea-party. They partially
obeyed me. One rapper however continued, but in a more
gentle and polite manner. I was willing to have some
conversation with him. I asked him who he was? He
would not answer. What did he want ? To communicate.
Yery well, I would listen ; and he told me I was not a good
medium myself, for I held the spirits in awe. Ah, spirits,
are you ? said I. " Yes." Yery well ; I shall be very
happy to make your acquaintance. " But you must find us
other mediums ; we cannot speak freely with you."

Close by me lived the Fox family. There were three
sisters; one was married, and the other two were simple,
honest-minded young girls, one fifteen, the other thirteen.
As I passed by their house, I saw them in the yard. I
greeted them, and offered them some flowers which I held
in my hand. The youngest took them, thanked me with a
smile, and I pursued my walk. These were the since world-
renowned Misses Fox. In a short time afterwards they be
gan to be startled by strange, mysterious knock ings, which
they could not account for, and which greatly annoyed
them. It is not by any means my intention to follow these
girls, in their course since, with whom I have had very
little direct communication ; but I owe it to them and to
the public to say, that they were simple-minded, honest

firls, utterly incapable of inventing any thing like these
nockings, or of playing any trick upon the public. The
knockings were and are as much a mystery for them as for
others, and they honestly believe that through them actual
communication is held with the spirits of the departed.
They are in good faith, as they some time since evinced by
their wish to become members of the Catholic Church,
which certainly they would not have wished, in this country
at least, if they looked upon themselves as impostors, and
had only worldly and selfish ends in view. They are no
doubt deceived, not as to the facts, as to the phenomena of
spirit-rappings, but as to the explanation they give or attempt

VOL. IX-6.

82 THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

to give of them. They have not always been treated, I fear,
with due tenderness, and sufficient pains has not been taken
to enlighten them as to the real nature of these phenomena.

But who need be surprised at this ? Received science re
jects every thing of the sort, for it recognizes no invisible
world, believes in neither angel nor spirit, and explains
every thing on natural principles. Even theologians have
to a great extent forgotten the terrible influence, in times
past, of demonic agencies, and, if they do not absolutely re
ject the instances recorded in the Bible, they are disposed
to treat all other cases as humbuggery, knavery, deception,
or to class them with epilepsy, insanity, hallucination, and
other diseases to which we are subject, and to dismiss them,
when they cannot be denied, with the physicians, under the
heads of mania, monomania, nymphomania, demonopathy,
<fec. I have before me the Dictionnaire Infernal of M.
Collin de Plancy, approved by the late archbishop of Paris, —
him who fell so gloriously on the barricades, June, 1848,
whither he had gone as a minister of charity and peace, —
in which, from beginning to end, there is a studied effort to
represent all these dark and mysterious phenomena as ex
plicable without any resort to superhuman or diabolical
agency. The excellent author seems to write on the sup
position that all the world, the physicians, the clergy, the
magistrates, the civil and ecclesiastical courts during all past
times were merely old grannies, and had no sound doctrine,
and no capacity for investigating the truth of facts obvious
to their senses. With his mode of reasoning, and with far
less violence, I can explain away all the miraculous or
mysterious relations in Biblical history. But so strong is
the current against Satanic agency in the production of
these phenomena, and such the prevailing and shortsighted
incredulity of our times, that even those who suspect the
true explanation are, for the most part, deterred from the
ridicule which would be showered upon them from avowing
it.

It is no wonder that no kind, considerate friend was
found to take these poor Fox girls by the hand, and attempt
to rescue them from their dangerous state. The great mass
of those who could have done so, either paid no attention at
all to the mysterious phenomena asserted, or looked upon
the whole matter as mere humbug. It was easier to crack
a joke at the expense of spirit-rappers, than it was to in
vestigate the facts alleged, or to offer the true and proper

MR. COTTON IS PUZZLED. 83

explanation. I had foreseen that it would be so, or at least,
had foreseen that they, whose duty it is to watch over the
interests of religion . arid morals, were unprepared to meet
the phenomena with success ; that they would at first deny
and laugh, and then vituperate and denounce, but would
hardly understand and explain till too late, or till immense
mischief had been done. Even now the first stage is hardly
passed, and the movement I commenced by a present of
flowers to these simple girls has extended over the whole
Union, invaded Great Britain, penetrated France in all
directions, carried captive all Scandinavia and a large part
of Germany, and is finding its way into the Italian Penin
sula. There are some three hundred circles or clubs in the
city of Philadelphia alone, and the Spiritualists, as they call
themselves, count nearly a million of believers in our own
country. Table-turning, necromancy, divination becomes a
religion with some, and an amusement with others. The
infection seizes all classes, ministers of religion, lawyers,
physicians, judges, comedians, rich and poor, learned and
unlearned. The movement has its quarterly, monthly, and
weekly journals, some of them conducted with great ability,
and the spirits, .through the writing mediums, nave already
furnished it a very considerable library, — yet hardly a seri
ous effort has as yet been made in this country to compre
hend or arrest it. It is making sad havoc with religion,
breaking up churches, taking its victims from all denomina
tions, with stern impartiality; and yet the great body of
those not under its influence merely deny, laugh, or cry out,
" humbug ! " " delusion ! " Delusion it is. I know it now,
but not in their sense.

The public never suspected me of having had any hand
in producing the Rapping-Mania ; and the Fox girls, even
to this day, suspect no connection between the flowers I
gave them and the mysterious knockings which they heard ;
and nobody has suspected Andrew Jackson Davis, the most
distinguished of the American mediums, of having any re
lations with me. He does not suspect it himself, yet he
has been more than once magnetized by me, and it has been
in obedience to my will that he has made his revelations.
The public have never connected my name with the move
ment, and even Priscilla has never known my full share in
it. I have had my instruments, blind instruments, in all
civilized countries, with whom I have worked, and yet but
few of them have known me, or seen me.

THE SPIRIT-RAPPEE.

My readers may indeed be incredulous as to the influence
conveyed by flowers ; but I shall satisfy them on that score
before completing my confessions. While the Fox girls
were annoyed by these mysterious knockings, and were
beginning to draw on them the attention of the curious and
the credulous, and while Andrew Jackson Davis, as yet only
a somnambulist, was dictating his wonderful revelations,
and learned doctors were disputing whether he received
them from a white or a black spirit, whether he really saw
what he professed to see in his clairvoyant state, or only
reported to the scribe the lesson which some cunning scamps
had previously taught him, and made him commit to mem
ory ; my old friend Mr. Cotton was made to suffer a severe
penalty for the slighting manner in which he had spoken of
Priscilla. Contrary to her usual custom, Priscilla went one
Sunday evening to his evening service. On leaving the
meeting-house, she mingled in the crowd, and so contrived
it as to rub against a granddaughter of Mr. Cotton, an in
teresting child of some twelve or thirteen years of age and
without anybody observing it. She then turned a little
aside, got into her carriage, which was waiting, and drove
home. The next day, the young girl, Clara Starkweather,
was singularly affected. Every thing she touched seemed
to stick fast to her fingers. All the dresses, cloaks, shawls,
in the house seemed to have an irresistible propensity to flv
to her, and arrange themselves on her back. She went into
the kitchen; the poker, shovel, and tongs, pots, kettles,
pails, basins, all set to dancing towards and around her, and
the frying-pan fastened itself on her head as a cap. ' Her
mother scolded her, and she, poor thing, began to cry and
declared that she did not do it, but that it was done by a
strange woman, very beautiful, but very wicked, whom she
did not know. The family were all in consternation. Mr,
Cotton was called upon to interpose. He concluded that it
was a case of witchcraft, or of diabolical obsession. He
summoned all the inmates of his family to his study. He
was a brave man, and nothing at all loath to come to hand
grip with the devil, for whom, with his orthodoxy, he fancied
himself more than a match. "We must," he said, "resist
the evil one ; we must wrestle in prayer." With that he
seated himself before his table, on which lay a splendid edi
tion of the Bible. He opened the book, intending to read
a chapter, before making his prayer. But he had hardly
opened it before it was violently closed, and rising, seem-

MR. COTTON i- IM://U-:I>.

85

ingly of itself, hit him a heavy blow in his face, which
knocked him from his chair, and nearly stunned him, and
then rested itself on the top of Clara's head. Mr. Cotton
soon recovered from the blow, and stood up, after the man
ner of his sect, to pray. He had hardly opened his mouth,
before there was heard such a knocking behind the walls,
against the doors, and under the floor, that every word he
attempted to utter was completely drowned. It was im
possible to proceed amid such a thundering din and racket,
which threatened to pull the house down about their ears.
Forthwith out marched from the library shelves a complete
edition of Scott's Family Bible. The several volumes drew
themselves up on the floor, and proceeded, with great skill
and even science, to knock one another down, while various
sounds, as of mockery and laughter, were heard from various
quarters. The brave old man was fain to resume his chair,
when lo ! he found himself seated on the heated gridiron.
He started up very quick, as may be imagined, but happily
received no serious injury.

For attraction now succeeded repulsion. All the objects
near Clara, instead of being drawn towards her, were re
pelled, and moved away from her. Soon one article of her
dress after another flew off, and it was with the utmost
difficulty that they could keep enough on her to hide her
.nakedness. This lasted an hour it may be, when all was
quiet, and every thing was found restored to its place, and
Mr. Cotton himself began to think that all was some optical
illusion, and to think that he might have been too hasty in
concluding that the devil was engaged in it.

However the annoyances were only suspended, they were
not removed. During the following night ah1 in the house
were awakened by tremendous kriockings heard on the walls
and under the floor of the apartment where Clara slept.
All rose, and in their night-clothes rushed to her room, and
found her lying on her bed sobbing, and apparently in the
greatest agony. The bedclothes and her own dresses were
scattered all about the room, cut into narrow strips, and
entirely ruined. The rappings then were heard in the
library. Mr. Cotton took a light, and went into the room,
and was not a little surprised to find it occupied with some
half a dozen figures of men and women fantastically dressed,
-all seated, and listening with grave faces to an inaudible
discourse from another hgure in Genevan gown and band,
standing before the table on which Mr. Cotton's great Bible

THE SPIRIT-RAPPEE.

lay open. Mr. Cotton was a little startled at first, but he
summoned up his courage and advanced. He went straight
up to the figure in gown and band, who seemed to have
usurped his functions, and boldly laid his hand upon his
shoulder. Immediately his candle was extinguished, and he
received a blow which felled him to the floor. In a moment
he recovered, passed into another room, obtained another
light, and returned. The phantoms were still there, but he
now saw what they were. The seeming minister was a huge
folio of theology, moulded into a human shape by pieces of
carpet, a coat and trousers of his own, and dressed in his-
own^gown and band. The other figures were volumes from
his library, elongated and stuffed out in a similar way, and
dressed in clothes belonging to different members of the
family. They were stripped, replaced on the book-shelves,
and the dresses returned to the several wardrobes where
they belonged. There was no more disturbance that night.

The next day, when the family were all at dinner/ the
table, with every thing on it, suddenly rose to the ceiling,
and then suddenly dropped upon the floor with a noise that
shook the whole house, but without any other injury, or any
thing on it being displaced. In the evening, while they
were all seated around the table, listening to a chapter which
Mr. Cotton was reading from the Bible, terrible knockings
were again heard all through the room, and Clara was seen
to^be raised as it were by some invisible hand towards the
ceiling, and to be borne with great force through the roomr
and set down standing on her head. Then, after a moment,
she rose again and hung suspended to the ceiling by her feet
and her head downwards. After an hour the annoyances
ceased, and the family were left quiet. The annoyances
continued, varying in their character from day to day, for
three weeks.

Priscilla sent me an account of them, and I thought my
old friend had been sufficiently punished. Moreover, I did
not wish too much eclat to be given at that time to the
fantastic tricks I was playing. Mr. Cotton was sure that it
was the ^work of the devil, that it was witchcraft, and he did
not hesitate to accuse Priscilla. He had tried to get the
authorities to arrest her as a witch, but in this he had failed ;
for, although the laws of Pennsylvania, at that time, if not
now, recognized witchcraft as a punishable offence, no
magistrate in the city could be found who did not look upon
w;tchcraft as imaginary, and suspect the good minister of

MR. COTTON IS 1T//I.KI).

87

being in need of physic and good regimen for entertaining
a belief in its reality. I however did not wish Priscilla's
name to become associated in the gossip of the day with
reported phenomena of the sort, and I sent her an order to
discontinue the annoyances, and to restore every thing which
had been injured to its previous condition. The night she
received my order, the noises ceased, Clara rested quietly,
and the family were undisturbed. On rising and going
through the house in the morning, no trace of the previous
disorder was discovered, every thing was in its place, and
the clothing and bedding which had been cut into ribbons,
were all restored, and not a mark of injury was to be found
on them. Clara was well, and retained no recollection of
any thing that had happened to her or to the family during
the period she had been so grievously afflicted. Even the
family, Mr. Cotton among the rest, began to doubt if they
had not been the sport of some strange hallucination, and
almost to persuade themselves that the annoyances had had
no objective character.

All this may strike many as wholly incredible, but a
thousand instances, as well attested as any facts can be, of
a similar character, can be adduced. Let me be permitted
to relate an instance still more marvellous, which occurred
in 184:9, at the presbytery or parsonage of Cideville, France,
in the Department of the Lower Seine, and which became
indirectly the subject of a judicial investigation. The cure
of Cideville encountered at the house of one of his sick
parishoners, an individual, a Mr. G , who had the rep
utation of curing diseases in a mysterious manner. He
reproved him severely, and sent him away. Shortly after,
^fn Gr was arrested and condemned for his malprac
tices in other cases, to two years' imprisonment. The
wretched man, recollecting the reproof he had received
from the cure, believed that it was owing to him that he
had been arrested and sent to prison, and, it is said, he
threw out threats of vengeance. One Thorel, a shepherd,

a friend and disciple of the Mr. G , was also heard to

say, that the cure would be made to repent of what he had
done, and that he (Thorel) would himself see that his mas
ter was avenged, and his orders executed.

Two boys, one twelve, the other fourteen, were boarded
and educated in the parsonage by the cure. They were
sons of honest, pious, and much esteemed schoolmasters of
the district, and appeared to have inherited the good quali-

88 THE SPIKIT-RAPPER.

ties of their parents. They were both intended for the
priesthood, and were a great 'comfort to the good cure, who
loved, cherished, and instructed them, and perhaps obtained
something for their board and tuition to eke out his scanty
means of living.

One day there was a public auction, where a great crowd
were collected, and these boys were present among the rest.
The shepherd, Thorel, was there, and seen to approach the
younger of the two, but nothing more was observed. Im
mediately on the return to the parsonage, a violent hurri
cane struck it, followed by blows as from a hammer in
every part of the house, under the floors, above the ceiling,
,and behind the wainscoting. Sometimes these blows were
weak, short, abrupt, sometimes so violent as to shake the
house, and to threaten to demolish it, as Thorel, in a
moment of rashness had foretold. The blows were heard
.at the distance of two kilometres, and a large portion of
the inhabitants of Cideville, a hundred and fifty at a time,
it is said^ surrounded the parsonage for hours, examining
it in all directions, and seeking in vain to discover whence
the blows proceeded.

This was not all. Whilst these mysterious knockings
continued, and made themselves heard on every point indi
cated, they reproduced the exact rhythm of whatever air
was demanded of them; the glass in the windows was
broken, and rattled in every direction; the tables were
overturned, or were seen walking about ; the chairs were
grouped together and suspended in the air ; the dogs were
thrown crosswise over one another or were hung by their
tails to the ceiling ; knives, brushes, breviaries, flew out by
one window and back through another on the opposite side ;
the shovel and tongs quit of themselves the fireplace and
walked alone into the room ; the andirons, followed by the
fire, recoiled from the chimney even to the middle of the
floor ; hammers flew in the air, and dropped as slowly and
as softly as a feather on the floor ; the utensils of the toilet
suddenly quitted the chambranle on which they were placed,
and as suddenly returned of their own accord ; enormous
desks rushed one against another and were broken, and one
loaded with books approached rapidly and horizontally
close to the forehead of M. R de Saint Y , and, with
out touching him, dropped perpendicularly upon its feet.

Madame de Saint Y , whose chateau was near to the

parsonage, whose testimony cannot be questioned, and who

MR. COTTON IS PUZZLED. 89

had witnessed a score of similar experiments, felt herself
drawn one day by the corner of her mantle, without per
ceiving the invisible hand that drew it. The mayor of
Cideville received a violent blow on his thigh, and at the
cry forced from him by this violence, he received a gentle
caress, which instantly relieved him from the pain.

A proprietor, residing fourteen leagues distant, and from
whom I hold this relation, came unexpectedly to Cideville,
wholly ignorant of the mysterious events which were tak
ing place. After a night spent in the chamber of the boys,
he questioned the mysterious knocking, made it strike in
different corners of the room, and established with it the
conditions of a dialogue. One blow, for example, would
say yes, two blows, no ; then the number of blows would
indicate the number of the letter in the alphabet, &c.
This settled, the witness caused to be rapped out his sur
name and Christian name, and those of his children, his age
and theirs, to the year, month, and day, — the name of his
commune, &c. All this was done with such rapidity that
he was obliged to conjure the rapper to proceed more
slowly, that he might have more leisure to verify the
answers, all of which he found perfectly exact. What is
more striking is, that this gentleman knew nothing at the
time of spirit-rapping, then beginning to excite attention
in the United States, and it was not till several weeks after
that he heard of it.

All this, the sceptics will allege, may be attributed to
jugglery, to the cunning and craft of the juggler, divinino-
the thoughts of the interrogator before he had detecteS
them himself. But there was something more still ; some
thing which the sceptics will hardly be able to explain. A
priest, a vicar of St. Koch, the Abbe L- , came acciden
tally, and wholly unlocked for, to Cideville. To similar
questions he received apparently through his brother, like
himself wholly unknown in the place, answers equally
prompt and exact, but with this singular difference : In one
instance the questioner himself was ignorant, and unable to
verify the details of the answer obtained. He was, indeed,
told the age and Christian name of his mother and his
brother, but he had either never known them or had for
gotten them. He however took a note of the answers, and,
on his return to Paris, consulted the registers, and found
them literally exact. What now becomes of the objection
against the previous witness, or the explanation insisted on,

90 THE SPIRIT-RAPPEE.

that the answer is given by the brain of the interrogator ?

Two landholders from the town of Eu came all express to
Cideville. They were told their names, Christian names, the
number of their dogs, their horses, &c. But still more
astonishing were the phenomena that accompanied the boy
believed to have been touched by the shepherd Thorel. He
perceived continually near him the shade, or appearance of
a man, in a blouse, whom he did not know, but whom he
identified with Thorel, the first time he was confronted
with that person. Even one of the ecclesiastics present^
when the boy said he saw the phantom, perceived distinctly
behind the lad a sort of grayish column or fluidic vapor, a
phenomenon of ten observed on similar occasions. One day
the boy fell into convulsions, then into a sort of ecstatic
syncope, from which for several hours nothing could rouse
him, and which caused a fear that he was dead. Another time
he said that he saw a black hand descending the chimney,
and he cried out that it struck him. Nobody could see the
hand, but those present heard the blow, and saw its mark
on the face of the child, who in his simplicity ran out doors,
thinking to see this hand come out the top of the chimney.

At length several ecclesiastics united at the parsonage,
and consulted how they might be disembarrassed of the
annoyance. One proposed one thing, another proposed
another, and a third remarked that he had heard it said that
those mysterious shades feared the point of a sword. At
the risk of a little superstition, they armed themselves with
swords, and stabbed with them wherever the noises were
heard. But it is difficult to hit an agent in constant and
rapid motion, and they were about to desist, when one of
them having more skilfully pursued one of the noises than
the others, all at once a flame flashed forth, followed by a
smoke so dense that they were obliged to open all the
windows to escape immediate suffocation. The smoke dis
sipated, and calm succeeding to so terrible an emotion, they
resumed their stabbing, and soon they heard a groan ; they
continued, the groaning redoubled, and at length they dis
tinctly heard pronounced the word " pardon." " Pardon !
yes, certainly, we will forgive you ; and more than that, we
will pass all the night in praying for you ; but on condition
that you come to-morrow, in person, and beg pardon of this
boy." " Will you forgive us all ? " " How many are
you ? " " We are five, including the shepherd." " We will
forgive you all." All then became quiet in the parsonage ;

MR. COTTON IS PUZZLKD. 91

and the rest of that terrible nigl.t was spent calmly in
prayer.

The next day, in the afternoon, Thorel presented himself
at the parsonage. His attitude was humble, his language
embarrassed, and he attempted to conceal with his hat cer
tain bloody excoriations on his face. The boy, as soon as
he perceived him, exclaimed, " That is the man, that is the
man who has followed me this fortnight." He pretended,
when questioned, that he came to get a small organ for his
master. " Not so, Thorel ; you know it is not for that that
you have come," he was answered. "But whence those
wounds on your face ? who has given them ? "

" That is no business of yours ; I will not tell."

" Tell us, then, what you want. Be frank. Have you
not come to beg this boy's pardon ? Do it, then. Down
on your knees."

^ " Well, be it so ; pardon then," said Thorel, falling upon
his knees, and even while begging the lad's pardon, drew
himself along, and tried to seize him by his blouse. He
succeeded ; and from that moment the sufferings of the boy,
an d^ the mysterious noises in the parsonage, redoubled. The
cure, however, persuaded him to go to the mayor's office.
He went, and as soon as he entered it, he fell three times on
his knees, without being required, and before all the wit
nesses, begged pardon ; but, at the same time, he drew him
self along on his knees, and endeavored to touch the cure,
as he had touched the boy. The cure, after retreating to a
corner ^ of the room, had, in self-defence, to beat him off
with his cane. He avowed that all was to be referred to

M. G , whom the cure had prevented from earning his

bread, and that he could easily disembarrass the parsonage
of the annoyances that were passing there, if made worth
his while.

The cure, in consequence of what had occurred, said, or
was reported to have said, that Thorel was a sorcerer, and
had practised sorcery on the boy at the parsonage. Thorel
brought, in consequence, an action against him for slander.
The cause came to trial ; the cure pleaded the truth in
justification, and was acquitted. On the trial, the facts I
have stated, as well as many others of no less importance,
were testified to under oath, by a large number of highly
intelligent and respectable witnesses, and not one of them
can be denied, if human testimony is in any case to be taken
as conclusive.

THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

Persons of sceptical and critical disposition may imagine
that Thorel was concealed behind the wainscot, but the
persons who used their swords had sense enough to ascertain
whether that was so or not ; besides, to suppose it, were
wholly inconsistent with other well-established facts in the
case. An hypothesis, to be acceptable, must meet and ex
plain all the facts, not merely a portion of them. It will
not do to adopt a theory, and then, after the manner of
learned academicians and philosophical historians, reject as
inadmissible all the details of the case not compatible with
that theory. But I have introduced this narrative to prove
the credibility of some of my own doings, not to prove that
there is such a thing as is commonly called sorcery — to
prove the validity of an alleged class of phenomena, not
their proper explanation. To this latter point I shall have
occasion, before I close, to speak at full length.

The annoyances, I may add, continued at the parsonage
for some time, in fine till the bishop removed|the boys, and
the malice of the persecutors had completed the ruin of the
cure. They then ceased, when the original reason for pro
ducing them had been answered.*

CHAPTER XI. WORTH CONSIDERING.

I FAILED for a long time yet to get any new light on the
essential nature of the agent with which I was operating,
and remained still undecided in rny own mind whether it
was a spiritual person, superhuman and invisible, or a simple
elemental force of nature, placed at the command of every
man who knows how to use his own powers. The answers
I obtained to my questions were vague, contradictory, and
unsatisfactory. I had no doubt that I was doing what in
the eyes of ignorance and superstition was called dealing
with the devil, and practising what had been denounced,
and in former times punished, by the civil law as sorcery
or witchcraft. So much was clear and undeniable. But
had not all the world misunderstood the real nature of what
it had condemned as witchcraft, sorcery, maleh'ce, and
magic? Had they not assumed unnecessarily a preter
natural agency, and an evil agent, where there was really
only a natural, a good, and a benevolent agent ?

The bearing of this question on the Christian religion was

*Pneumatologie: Des Esprits, par le Marquis Eudes de M

WORTH CONSIDERING.

very obvious, and 1 well understood the significance of what
Voltaire said, one day, to a theologian, "Sathanf c'est le
Christianisme tout entier ; PAS DE SATHAN, PAS DE SAUVEUR,"
and I felt that there was truth in what Bayle, the ablest
and acutest of all modern authors opposed to Christianity,
had said : " Prove to unbelievers the existence of evil
spirits, and you will by that alone force them to concede all
your dogmas." In any point of view, Christianity was
pledged to assert the existence of Satan and his intervention
in human affairs, for according to it, Christ was revealed
from heaven and came into the world that he might
destroy the devil and his works. If there was no devil, the
mission of Christ had no motive, no object, and Christianity
is a fable.

Moreover, all Christians, whether Catholics asserting the
infallibility and authority of the church, or Protestants as
serting simply the infallibility and authority of the Bible,
were bound to assert the existence of evil spirits, and the
reality of demonic obsession and possession, of witchcraft,
sorcery, and magic, in the common and opprobrious
sense of the terms. As to Catholics, there could be no
question. The church plainly and unequivocally recognizes
the existence of Satan, as may be gathered from the prayers
and ceremonies of baptism, as well as from the significance
of the sacrament itself ; and not only his existence, but his
power over the natural man, and even material objects.
Thus when the priest, in administering the Sacrament,
breathes gently three times in the face of the child, he ex
claims, " Exi ab eo, immunde spiritus, et da locum Spiritui
Sancto Paraclito : " Go out of him, impure spirit, and give
place to the Holy Ghost, the Paraclete ; and also after the
prayer Deus patrum nostrorum, : " Exorcizo te, immunde
spiritus, in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti, ut
exeas, et recedas ab hoc famulo Dei. Ipse enim tibi im-
perat, maledicte damnate, qui pedibus super mare ambula-
vit, et Petro mergenti dexteram porrexit. Ergo, maledicte
diabole, recognosce sententiam tuam, et da honorem Deo
vivo et vero, da honorem Jesu Christo Filio ejus, et Spiritui
Sancto ; et recede ab hoc famulo Dei, quia istum sibi Deus
et Dominus noster Jesus Christus ad suamsanctamgratiam,
et benedictionem, fonteinque baptismatis vocari dignatus
est." The candidate, before receiving baptism, is asked,
" Dost thou renounce Satan ? " and answers, " I renounce
him." " And all his works ? " "I renounce them." " And

THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

all his pomps ? " "I renounce them." So, in blessing the
salt which is used in administering the Sacrament, the
priest says, "Exorcizo te, creatura salis, in nomine Dei
Patris^ omnipotentis, et in charitate Domini nostri Jesu
Christi, et in virtute Spiritus Sancti, exorcizo te per Deum
vivum, per Deum verum, per Deum sanctum," &c. The
whole proceeds on the supposition that Satan is to be ex
pelled, Dislodged, and the Holy Ghost to be placed, so to
speak, in possession, or the grace of Jesus Christ is to be
infused, so that the Holy Ghost shall henceforth dwell in
the heart of the baptized, instead of Satan, who previously
held dominion over it. The church has also her exorcists,
and her forms of exorcising of evil spirits.

The Bible is no less clear and explicit on the subject than
the church. It teaches that Satan, in the form of a serpent,
seduced Eve to eat of the forbidden fruit ; it relates the
doings of the Egyptian magicians ; it forbids necromancy
and evocation of the dead, and commands the Jews not to
suffer a witch to live ; declares that all the gods of the gen
tiles are devils ; tells us that the devil is the prince of 'this
world, that he goeth about like a roaring lion, seeking whom
he may devour ; bids us resist the devil and he will flee
from^us. St. Paul speaks of the prince and the powers of
the air that besiege us, and against whom we must put on
the whole armor of ^God,. and do valiant battle. Moreover
it speaks of demoniacs, or persons possessed with devils ;
and among the marvellous works ascribed to Jesus Christ, is
that of expelling demons, or casting out devils. All Chris
tians, then, must admit that there is a devil, and that there
are evil spirits, who may, and who do, interfere with men,
harass them, and sometimes take literal possession of them.
A recent French author, a sincere Christian believer, has felt
this. " The question," he says, " at the Christian point of
view, is by no means indifferent, but is, as it were, the mother-
question, the question of questions. It is no less than to deter
mine whether the Bible and the church have or have not
been really mistaken in one of their fundamental principles.
For a man filled with Christian desires, and cherishing at
the same time a respect for evidence, the question is most
grave. It touches the whole of faith, neither more nor less ;
and as it will not do to admit in the sacred Scriptures'
whose language is assumed to be inspired, what is called
manners of speaking, or complaisances for the age, or re
mains of ignorance, we must be permitted to say,*that if it

WORTH CONSIDERING. 95

were proved that the Bible in the time of Pharaoh mistook
simple and miserable jugglers for real magicians, poor char
latans for enchanters, a few knavish and lying priests for
the false gods of the gentiles, simple mummeries for real
evocations, delirious cataleptics for spirits of Python, &c. ;
if it were proved that Jesus Christ, in granting to his dis
ciples the gift, and prescribing to them the rules, of ex
pelling demons, mistook a fact of pure physiology ; if it were
proved that the church, in instituting exorcism, and pre
scribing for it precise and learned formulas, and, moreover,
practising it for eighteen centuries, has been deceived
during all that period, — we should feel that it is all over
with Christianity ; we should regard it as condemned, and
hasten to renounce an authority so little judicious, and so
little to be depended upon." Christians may, undoubtedly,
dispute as to this or that particular case, and say that the
evidence of demonic intervention, in this or that particular
instance, is not conclusive ; but they cannot, without re
nouncing their faith, and becoming Sadducees, deny that
such intervention is possible, or assert that it is improbable.
They must concede its possibility, its probability, and its
susceptibility of proof ; and therefore when the evidence in
any particular instance is sufficient to establish the reality
of any other class of facts, they are bound, as reasonable
beings, to admit it. To them there is, and can be no a
priori difficulty, for they already believe in the reality of
demonic agents adequate to produce the mysterious phenom
ena that they are called upon to accept. Hence, in those
ages and countries in which nobody doubted Christianity, all
men of science, physicians, magistrates, as well as the clergy
and the people, readily admitted the demonic character of
the phenomena like those produced in our day by mesmer
ism.

But, if the belief in the reality of demonic intervention is
integral in Christianity, the most obvious way of getting rid
of Christianity and its restraints would be to deny that
reality, and to explain the phenomena commonly held as
evidence of such intervention, on physiological and other
natural principles. This has been the aim of science,
especially medical science, during the last two hundred
years. This aim was adopted by the so-called wits and
philosophers of the last century, and during this it has begun
to be adopted by jurisprudence, and even to be acquiesced
in by a large portion of professed Christian ministers.

96 THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

Literary men, like Sir Walter Scott ; founders of new sects,.
like the late Hosea Ballon, of Boston ; neologist theologians
everywhere ; and that " fourth estate," — journalism, have
all combined to reason, explain, or laugh away, every thing
pertaining to demonology, and to make the world believe
that there is no devil, that evil spirits are only the creatures
of a disordered brain, that apparitions or ghosts are only
hallucinations, possession a peculiar kind of madness or in
sanity, and magic mere charlatanry or sleight-of-hand. All
this, for an anti-Christian purpose, was admirable, since
even the conservative portion of the clergy seemed to
acquiesce in it.

[Nevertheless, this could suffice only to a certain extent.
It might serve to emancipate the intelligent classes, but
could not emancipate the people. The latter half of the
eighteenth century — a century of anti-Christian light, phi
losophy, physical science, and materialism — was more dis
tinguished for the mysterious phenomena, usually called de
moniacal, than any other period since the Christianizing of
the Roman Empire, with the single exception of the sixteenth
century. Weishaupt, Mesmer, Saint-Martin, and Cagliostro,.
did far more to produce the revolutions and convulsions of
European society at the close of that century, than was done
by Yoltaire, Rousseau, D'Alembert, Diderot, Mirabeau, and
their associates. These men had no doubt a bad influence,
but it was limited and feeble. It was not they who stirred
up all classes, produced that revolutionary madness, that
wild ungovernable fury of the people which we everywhere
witnessed, and nowhere more than in Paris, the politest
and most humane city in the world. The masses were pos
sessed, they were whirled aloft, were driven hither and
thither, and onward in the terrible work of demolition, by
a mysterious power they did not comprehend, and by a
force they were unable, having once yielded to it, to resist.

You feel this in reading the history of those terrible
events. It seems to you that Satan was unbound, and hell
let loose. The historians of that old French Revolution,
such as Mignet, Thiers, Lamajtine, Carry le, all feel that
there was something fatal in it, and have been led, at least
all except the last, to defend it on the ground of fatalism.
The royalist and Catholic historians, who oppose it, seem
never to seize its spirit. They declaim, denounce, find
fault here, find fault there, now with this action and now
with that, but they never explain any thing, solve any prob-

WORTH CONSIDERING. 97

lem which comes up, and they leave the whole a mystery,
or an enigma.

The same phenomena, only on a reduced scale, were ob
servable in the revolutions of 1848. Everywhere there
si'i-med to be an invisible power at work. Good, honest
Father Bresciani, would explain all this by the secret socie
ties. It is in vain. They did much, those secret societies ;
but how explain the existence of those societies themselves,
their horrible principles, and the fidelity of their members
in submitting to what they must know is a thousand times
more oppressive than the institutions they are opposing ? Tell
me not that all these revolutionists were incarnate devils ; that
they coolly, and deliberately, from ordinary human motives
and influences, planned and carried out their revolutionary
enterprise. There were in their ranks men of the highest
intelligence, the purest virtue, and the humanest feelings ;
men, ail of whose antecedents, whose tendencies, whose
studies, professions, interests, and, I may say, convic
tions, placed them in the ranks of the conservatives, were
carried away by an invisible force, and shouted out, Liberty,
Equality, Fraternity, and hurled the brand of the incendiary
at temple, palace, and castle, which sheltered them, as if it
were not they who did it, but a spirit that possessed them.
Men caught the infection, they knew not how, they knew
not when, they knew not where. The revolutionary spirit
seemed to float in the air, as it undoubtedly did.

Without Weishaupt, Mesmer, Saint-Martin, Cagliostro,
you can never explain the revolution of 1789, and without
me and my accomplices you can just as little explain those
of 1848. There was at work in the former a power that
the wits ridiculed, that science denied, philosophy dis
proved, and the clergy hardly dared assert. There was
there the mighty power, whatever it be, which it is said
once dared dispute the empire of heaven with the Omnipo
tent, and which all ages have called Satan, whether it is to
be called evil with the Christian, or good with the philan
thropist, a person with the believer, or a primitive and ele
mental force with the mesmerist. France, Europe was mes
merized. So was it again in 1848, though with less terrible
external convulsions.

It is impossible to bring the great body of the people of
any age to agree with our Voltairian philosophers — to be
genuine Sadducees. In the first place, the writings of the

VOL. IX-7.

THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

philosophers and academicians do not reach the mass ; and,
in the second place, there are constantly occurring phenom
ena which, in their apprehension, give the lie to Sadducism.
.At the very time when the philosophers of pagan Eome were
losing all faith in their national religion, doubting almost the
existence of the Divinity and the immortality of the soul,
and laughing at augurs and soothsayers, the people were
more superstitious than ever. It was then that magicians
from Asia and Africa flocked to the Eternal City, and that
Isiac, Bacchic, and other Eastern superstitions, with all their
impurities and ^ wild fanaticism, in comparison with which
the national religion was pure, reasonable, and moral, were
introduced, and. spread as an epidemic ; and the laws of the
earlier emperors show how hard and how ineffectually au
thority labored to suppress them.

The enemies of Christianity may accept the mysterious
phenomena, commonly regarded as diabolical, and explain
them and the miracles of the Bible and the alleged miracles
of the church on natural principles, and if they cannot ex
plain them on any known natural principles, they may
make them the basis of an induction of a new natural prin
ciple ; or, in other words, invent a natural principle to ex
plain them, as Baron Eeichenbach has done— a principle,
element, substance, or force, which he calls od. They may
do this, or they may recognize their real spiritual and super
human origin, but ascribe them to good, not to evil spirits,
or what is the same thing, maintain that what the world
has hitherto worshipped as good is evil, and what it has been
taught to avoid as evil is good. That is, that Satan is God,
and God is Satan.

Swedenborg, in founding his New Jerusalem, or New
Church, and Joe Smith, in founding the Church of the Lat
ter Day Saints, as Mahomet in the seventh century, virtually
adopted the latter course. Swedenborg became, in the
later years of his life, a somnambulist, and could throw
himself into the state which some mesmerists call sleep-
waking, in which he was a clairvoyant, and had the power
of second sight. He fancied himself a prophet, and capable
of teaching angels as well as men. But he held the power
he found himself able to exercise, to be good as well as
supernatural.

The same was the case with Joe Smith, an idle, shiftless
lad, utterly incapable of conceiving, far less of executing
the project of founding a new church. He was ignorant,

WORTH CONSIDERING. 91>

illiterate, and weak, and of bad reputation. I knew lii-
family, and even him also, in my boyhood, before he becamr
n prophet. He was one of those persons in whose hand the
divining-rod will operate, and he and others of his family
spent much time in searching with the rod for watercourses,
minerals, and hidden treasures. Every mesmerizer would
at once have recogized him as an impressible subject. He
also could throw himself, by artificial means, that of a pecu
liar kind of stone, which he called his Urim and Thummim,
into the sleep- waking state, in which only would he or could
he prophesy. In that state he seemed another man. Or
dinarily his look was dull, and heavy, almost stupid ; his eye
had an inexpressive glare, and he was rough, and rather pro
fane. But the moment he consulted his Urim and Thum
mim, and the spirit was upon him, his face brightened up,
his eye shone and sparkled as living fire, and he seemed in
stinct with a life and energy not his own. He was in those
times, as one of his apostles assured me, "awful to behold."
Much nonsense has been vented by the press about the
origin of his Bible, or the Book of Mormon. The most
ridiculous as well as the most current version of the affair
is, that the book was originally written as a novel, by one
Spalding, a Presbyterian minister in Pennsylvania, and that
Joe got hold of the manuscript and published it as a new
Bible. This version is refuted by a simple perusal of the
book itself, which is too much and too little to have had such
an origin. In his normal state, Joe Smith could never have
written the more striking passages of the Book of Mormon ;
and any man capable of doing it, could never have written
any thing so weak, silly, utterly unmeaning as the rest. No
man ever dreamed of writing it as a novel, and whoever
had produced it in his normal state, would have made it either
better in its feebler parts, or worse in its stronger passages.
The origin of the book was explained to me by one of
Joe's own elders, on [the authority of the person who, as
Joe's amanuensis, wrote it. From beginning to end, it
was dictated by Joe himself, not translated from plates,
;i> was generally alleged, but apparently from a peculiar
stone, which he subsequently called his Urim and Thum
mim, and used in his divination. He placed the stone in
his hat, which stood upon a table, and then taking a seat, he
roiicealed his face in his hat above it, and commenced dic
tating in a sleep-waking state, under the influence of the
mysterious power that used or assisted him. I lived near

100

THE SPIKIT-EAPPEK.

the place where the book was produced. I had subse
quently ample means of investigating the whole case, and!
availed myself of them to the fullest extent. For a consid
erable time the Mormon prophets and elders were in the
habit of visiting my house. They hoped to make me a con
vert, and they spoke to me with the utmost frankness and
unreserve.

Numerous miracles, or what seemed to be miracles — such
miracles as evil spirits have power to perform — and certain
marvellous cures were alleged to be wrought by the prayers
and laying on of the hands of the Mormon elders. Some
of these were wrought on persons closely related and well
known to me personally ; and I have heard others confirmed
by persons of known intelligence and veracity, whose testi
mony was as conclusive for me as would have been my own
personal observation. That there was a superhuman power
employed in founding the Mormon church, cannot easily be
doubted by any scientific and philosophic mind that has in
vestigated the subject ; and just as little can a sober man
doubt that the power employed was not divine, and that
Mormonism is literally the synagogue of Satan.

It matters little to the enemies of Christianity, whether
the public deny altogether the marvellous phenomena here
tofore regarded as diabolical, whether they accept and ex
plain them by means of a primitive force or primordial law
of nature, or simply ascribe them to satanic invasion, pro
vided it be held that Satan is a philanthropist, the friend
and benefactor of the race, not the enemy ; for in any case,
Christianity is denied or undermined. But the purely scep
tical theory answers only for the few, who, it is to be re
marked, never see any of these marvellous phenomena, and
who, if they did see them, might be led to embrace Christi
anity ; but it will never suffice for the many, and can never
subserve the views of reformers who would operate upon
the masses.

It however makes no practical difference which of the
other two hypotheses is adopted. For myself, I in some
sense adopted both, though, as I have said, I inclined to the
naturalistic theory. But even then I had begun to contem
plate an ulterior object, which might make it more conveni
ent to adopt the latter hypothesis, for it might become
necessary to overthrow Christianity by the introduction, ap
parently by supernatural means, of another religion — a
religion in harmony with the wants of the flesh. It is im-

WORTH CONSIDERING. l(ll

possible to overthrow a positive religion by a pure negation,
or to get rid of Christianity without substituting someth in-
positive in its place ; for it is to be remarked, that sceptical
ages are the most credulous, and that as Christian faith re
cedes, superstition advances. Hence we see in Scandinavia
unmistakable evidences of a revival of the worship of Odin ;
and only a short time since, the government had to adopt
measures to repress it in the north of Norway. In many
parts of Germany we see a decided tendency to revive the
superstition which Christianity supplanted. When men
have no longer religion, they take refuge in superstition ;
and when they cease to worship God, they begin to worship
the devil. The most interesting people to the Englishman
Layard that he found in the East, were the devil- worship
pers.

But all this is premature. World-reform, as I had
sketched it to myself, had for its object unbounded liberty,
and was to be accomplished, on the one hand, by the over
throw of all existing governments, and the complete disrup
tion of all political and civil society ; and on the other, by
the total demolition of the Christian Church, and extirpa
tion of the Christian religion. Of course it would not do
to avow all this, for if I did, I should defeat my own purposes.
Faith still lurked in many a heart ; and the persuasion
of the necessity of some kind of government, some kind
of political, civil, and even moral restraint was very gener
ally entertained, even by those whom I must make my ac
complices, and use as my tools. It was necessary to keep
one's own counsel, or to confide it to the smallest number
possible. To the world it would do to avow only the design
of divorcing religion from politics, and of democratizing the
church and society. This might be avowed without shock
ing the public at large. For this the public mind was in a
measure prepared. A pious priest could be persuaded to
advocate ecclesiastical democracy, as we have seen in the
work of the excellent Kosmini, on the Five Wounds of the
Church.

A popularizing tendency among Catholics had been much
encouraged by that powerful priest, the Abbe de La Men-
nais, and his enthusiastic associates. It is true, he had
fallen under censure, and had been excommunicated, eo
nomine, by Rome ; but the party he formed, though dis
avowing him, still retained somewhat of his spirit, and fol
lowed his tendency. There was a growing party in France,

102 THE SPIRIT-KAPPER.

even among the clergy, who wished to divorce the church
from the state, and induce her to abandon the courts,
and cement an intimate alliance with the people, and
lend her powerful influence to the democratic movements
of the day. They had much that was plausible in their
favor. The royal and nobiliaire governments of Europe
had always labored to convert the dignitaries of the
church into courtiers, and to make her their tool for enslav
ing and fleecing the people. The greatest injury religion
had ever received, it had received from courtier bishops, and
the tyranny of the state over the church, equally fatal to
her and to the people. The real interests of the church
would therefore seem to demand of her to make common
cause with the people against kings and aristocrats, and in
favor of democratic institutions. This conviction was be
coming very general among the more earnest and influential
Catholic laymen. A corresponding conviction was also be
coming general among the great mass of the Protestant
populations. It was possible, then, to labor to democratize
society without^ alarming religious convictions ; nay, it was
possible to enlist them to a great extent in the same work.
Nobody, it is well known, helped us on more effectually
in Europe than many of the most distinguished among the
Catholic clergy and laity. I need only mention Ventura
and Gioberti in Italy, Montalembert, Lacordaire, Cormenin,
Maret, and Archbishop Aifre, in France.

But, after all, great movements are never carried on by
simple human means alone, and never get beyond brilliant
theories unless inspired and sustained by a superhuman
power, either from heaven or from hell. Christianity
had taught us the weakness of human nature, and I found
that weakness confirmed by experience. Between the
power to conceive and to execute there is a distance. Men
might form the most brilliant ideals, bring out the sound
est, most attractive and perfect theories of reform, but it
would avail nothing, unless endued with a power not their
own, to realize them in practice. Here was the defect in
the plan ^of Signor Urbini and Young Italy. It was skil
fully devised, it had all of human wisdom on its side, but it
was ideal, and had no power or energy to realize itself. No
man lifteth himself by his own waistbands. Without the
"Whereon to stand, Archimedes, with all his mechanical con
trivances, cannot move the world. It is necessary to have
a support outside of man ; a source of power which is not

A MISSIONARY TOUR. 103

Inn nan, and as the world would say, either divine or satanic,
t<> IK' able to accomplish any thing.

But had I not this very power in the agent I [had been
experimenting with? What else was this mesmeric agent,
whether a primitive, an elemental force of nature, or in
deed a superhuman spirit endowed with intelligence and
will ? Mr. Winslow was, in the main, right. Mesmeric
clubs or circles must be formed on all points on which it is
necessary to operate, and batteries be erected everywhere,
so that anywhere, and at any moment, a mesmeric current
may be sent instantaneously through the masses, infusing
into them a superhuman resolution and energy, and making
them stand up and march as one man. This, then, was the
first thing to be done. I would erect my mesmeric batter
ies in every country in Europe, all connected by an invisible,
but unbroken, magnetic chain.

This plan, as far as I thought it prudent, I forthwith
communicated to Priscilla, without whose co-operation I
could not carry it into effect. She approved it, and was
ready to co-operate in any way I wished. The poor lady, I
may remark, had no longer any will of her own. She had
craved liberty, and had induced me to aid her in establish
ing it, and was now only my slave, bound to me in chains,
which, struggle as she might, she could not, of herself alone,
break or unfasten.

CHAPTER XII. A MISSIONARY TOUR.

THE civil and political revolution I wished to effect, had
apparently, to a considerable extent, been already effected
in my own country, and the principal theatre of my opera
tions must be in the Old World. There is no doubt, that,
at bottom, the American system does not differ from the
European. It is the same system of repression, and, though
it dispenses with kings and nobles, it asserts, with equal
emphasis, the necessity of government, of law, and morals.
The American, in making his revolution, had no socialistic
dreams, no thought of resolving society .into its original ele
ments, denying all authority, rejecting all government, abol
ishing all religion and morality, and leaving every man to
do freely whatever seems right in his own eyes, however
wrong it may seem in those of his neighbor. The authors
of the American ^Revolution, and founders of the American
states and the American Union, were any thing but demo
crats in the present prevailing sense of thr word.

104: THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

But the progress of ideas and events has so modified the
American system, and done so much towards restoring a
perfect democracy, where the demagogues have every thing
their own way, that the chance of getting up any consider
able revolutionary party, except to operate abroad, is not
worth counting. Indeed, it is not necessary to hasten the
march of things here, which is sufficiently rapid towards
that point where democracy resolves itself either into com
plete individualism or into an absolute social despotism. I
saw and felt this, and looked upon my own country as more
ready to assist me in my philanthropic or satanic efforts to
revolutionize foreign countries than in need of similar ef
forts on its own account.

Let me not, however, be misunderstood. Let me speak
as I think and feel as I lie here confined to my room, from
which I am to be removed only to my grave. I love not
democracy, which I regard as from below, not from above ;
but I love as little, perhaps much less, absolute or unlimited
monarchy, — your czarism, Csesarism, or imperialism. I may
think it unwise, wrong, wicked even, to attempt to over
throw by revolutionary violence, an absolute government,
where it exists, and is not intolerable in practice, for the
sake of introducing a republic, or even a constitutional
monarchy ; but I hold no government a good one, where
one man alone represents the will and the majesty of the
nation. I demand a government of estates, whenever that
is practicable, but always a representative body, with real
legislative power, capable of imposing real and effective re
straints on the administration. I demand for the nation the
means of making known freely and effectively, within the
limits of the moral law, its will. I demand the freedom of
the press, temperately, and answerable for its abuse (which,
however, must be a real abuse), to criticize publicly the acts
of political authority, to point out the defects of its policy,
and to suggest measures for the public good. I demand a
political constitution in which the nation governs through
a king or president, and parliament or legislative body or
bodies. I am, what is sneered at by your imperialists, a
parliamentarian, a constitutionalist, and have no sympathy
at all with the Csesarism of either France or Russia. I am
no radical, no revolutionist, no friend of sedition, but I love
a wise, prudent, well-regulated liberty, which leaves me all
my power to do good, arid therefore, necessarily, to some
extent, even to do evil ; for if you so bind me by the civil

A MISSIONARY TOUR. 1 ( ' ">

power that I can do no evil, you take fn.ni me my manhood,
make me an automaton, and deprive me of all power to do
good and to acquire merit. Such is my political creed, and
therefore let no man dare, because I favor not now the wild
radical movements of the age, accuse me of being an cix-niv
to liberty, or a worshipper of Csesarism, or what is culled
absolutism.

Not seeing much to be done in my own country, I re
solved to go abroad. I required Priscilla to make herx-lf
ivady to accompany me, and to take her husband along with
her. I know not whether this latter request pleased her or
not. Woman is woman even when under the power of the
Evil One ; and that Priscilla loved me, and loved me mad
ly, she hardly pretended to conceal. I had, perhaps, loved
her, too, for a moment, when I might do so innocently, and
I loved her still as much as remained in me the power to
love. But love or lust was not precisely my ruling passion,
and I would as soon have taken another with me as Priscilla,
could she have served my purpose as well. Even in my
worst days I was as much repelled as attracted by a woman
who could betray her husband's honor, and I always found
.a woman, mastered by her passion, and ready to give up all
for love, as it is called, a troublesome rather than an agree
able companion. A man wishes to find in the woman of
his affections a free soul, moral dignity, — a tender, loving
heart, indeed, but with sufficient strength to stand alone.
Lads and lasses in their teens have very i'alse notions of love,
and this is why love so seldom survives the honeymoon, and
why so many complain of unrequited affection and broken
hearts.

But I could not do without Priscilla, and I wished her
husband to accompany her to avoid scandal, and also to serve
as manager, to take charge of all the arrangements in trav
elling, residing in one place, or in going from that to anoth
er, for which lie was admirably adapted. I found him far
more intelligent, far more of a man than I had been led to
Mi>|>ect from his ready submission to petticoat government.
Priscilla had entirely mistaken him, and might one day find
him more than her master.

In a couple of months our arrangements were made for
the voyage to Europe, and for a longer or shorter residence
ahmad", us we should find it convenient. We embarked fn.m
Boston in one of theCunard sti-anu-rs for Liverpool, in May.
1SJ:3. We arrived at Liverpool after a pleasant voyage of

106 THE SPIRIT-KAPPER.

thirteen days, and as soon as we could land, and get our
baggage through the custom-house, we departed for London,
where we proposed stopping for some weeks. Let not the
reader fear that I am about to inflict on him a journal of
my travels in England and on the Continent. I did not go
abroad as a curious traveller, to see other lands, and study
the ways, manners, customs, institutions, laws, politics, or
religion of other nations. I went for a special object, and
to that I confined myself. I could, if I would, tell very
Iittle4more than I might have learned at home. My mis
sion was not to observe and learn, but to do, and to prepare,
and hasten on the grand movement I contemplated.

I did not find in England much remaining to be done, or
that I needed to do. I saw very few of her nobility, and
I was not even once invited to dine with the queen. The
middle classes I found very much like my own countrymen,
with very much the same culture, ideas, habits, and pursuits,
I found, as at home, a large number of philanthropists,
though less thoroughgoing than ours, and narrower, and less
comprehensive in their views. The common Englishman
is a little insular in his notions, and looks with disdain
or pity on all who do not happen to be natives of his own
island world. ^ The American is broad and expanded in his
views, like his extended prairies and boundless forests. No
pent up Utica confines him ; the globe is too small for him ;
and he seriously contemplates forming a joint-stock com
pany for the construction of a railroad to the moon. He
thinks it will prove a good speculation. They are both
proud, equally proud ; but with the Englishman, pride as
sumes the form of haughtiness, or a low estimate of others ;
while with the American, it assumes that of a conscious
superiority to all the rest of creation.

I did not see much chance of a reform or a democratic
revolution in England at present. True, she had at that
time a very considerable body of Chartists, and a numerous
canaille, but these I counted for nothing. No revolution is
ever made by the proletarian classes. Wat Tyler, Jack
Cade, and the Jacquerie of France have proved that. No
people can ever overthrow a government till the govern
ment betrays itself. In 1789, and in 1848, in every instance
the government, with a few whiffs of grape-shot, might
have dispersed the mob and suppressed the revolution.
Quern Deus vult perdere, prius dementat. I placed no re
liance on the democracy of England, yet I did not at all de-

A Mi — IO.NAKY mi K. 10T

spair of her. She had her Reform Bill of 1832, which in
due time would be followed by another, and another, till her
House of Commons would come to be regarded as repre
senting population, not an estate. The extension of her
commerce and manufactories was compelling Sir Robert
Peel, an able man, but a shortsighted statesman, to break
up the protective system, establish free trade, and throw the
power into the hands of the urban class. I did not need to
mesmerize him ; he was doing my work as fast as it could
be done with safety. Lord John Russell, Lord Palmergton,
and their friends, I found had been visited before me. Mr.
Gladstone needed a slight manipulation ; but I saw that he
was an impressible subject, and I foresaw that, when he
became Chancellor of the Exchequer, I should have every
reason to be satisfied with him. Lord Shaftesbury, then
Lord Ashley, I found amply mesmerized by nature and in
heritance.

As to aid from England, in carrying on democratic revo
lutions on the Continent, especially in Italy, if not in France,
I might count on it with entire confidence, so far as begin
ning the movements and getting into trouble were concern
ed. But I thought possibly I might find her aid like the
devil's, which suffices to help one into a scrape, but leaves
him to get out the best way he can. She had no interest in
helping the reformers to establish democracy, but she was
ready enough to throw the Continental states into confusion
and anarchy. Hers has of late years been only a half-way
genius. Nevertheless, I found in her a few choice spirits,
and erected a mesmeric battery, which has since done some
service to the cause I had at heart. Priscilla was still more
successful among the philanthropic ladies and women with
whom she was able to communicate. We made sure, with
out much difficulty, of Exeter Hall. It was a battery al
ready charged, and served, with skill and ability.

We prepared an agent to visit Liverpool, Manchester, Bir
mingham and other considerable English towns, and, upon the
whole, were very well satisfied with our mother country,
and in good spirits left England iur Dublin. We were receiv
ed there with true Irish hospitality. The Liberator was then
in his glory, and filled a large space in the eyes of the world.
He had obtained the Catholic Relief Bill, and opened to his
co-religionists of Great Britain and Ireland a political arena,
and was now agitating for the legislative independence of
his native country. A few months after he was arrested,

108 THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

and sentenced to a fine and a year's imprisonment, winch
virtually put an end to his movement. It broke his heart
both as a patriot and as a lawyer. He received us very coolly
at first, because we were Americans, and the Americans held
negro slaves ; but on learning that we were abolitionists and
philanthropists, he opened his large heart to us, and bid us
a hundred thousand welcomes. We could not, however,
make much of O'Connell. He was an admirable type of
the general Irish character, and not easily understood. He
struck us as a bundle of opposing qualities, not usually
thrown together in the same individual. A pious Catholic,
he was surrounded by unbelievers, and the patron of the
whole herd of philanthropists, whose chief aim was to rid the
world of his religion ; a man of impulse, as capricious as a
child, wily as a village attorney, and sub tie as the most crafty
lawyer, and acting always upon calculation ; a warm-hearted
patriot, a genuine lover of his country, yet with a sharp eye
to the " rint," and leaving it doubtful to many minds wheth
er he had any higher motives in what he did than to gain
personal distinction, and to elevate his family. He however
interested us as the inventor of " peaceful agitation," an in
vention which could have been made only by an Irish law
yer, and it was as a " peaceful agitator " that we chose to
think of him. We found his " peaceful agitation " might
be turned to good account in the constitutional states of the
Continent, and we took care to introduce it into' France,
when we visited that country, with what effect those who
remember the " Eeform Banquets " which preceded the rev
olution of February, 1848, need not to be informed.

From the Liberator, or, as we chose to call him, the Agi
tator, we went to meet the chiefs of the Young Ireland party,
still apparently acting in harmony with him. We formed
no great expectations of them. They talked too much, and
made too much noise and bluster. We found them in ex
cellent dispositions, but too unsubstantial for our purpose.
They were all ablaze, and no heat. The devil, having no
creative power, could not himself make much of them, and
gave them up in despair. Hence their miserable failure four
years later at Slievnamon. Indeed, Ireland was a country
by no means to our philanthropic and reforming purpose,
and we made no account of her in preparing our revolution
ary movements. We however erected a small battery in the
west, with a view to some ulterior operations, and which we
left in charge of Exeter Hall. It has produced some tern-

THE TOUR CONTINTKD. 1 > >'•>

porary effect ; but inasmuch as it lias served to arouse the P» >] >-
\>\\ bishops and clergy to a more diligent discharge of their
duties, iii regard to the religious and moral instruction of the
people in that hitherto somewhat neglected district, it is not
certain but it will, in the long run, produce an effect the re
verse of that intended. Rome, too. has sent a man after her
own heart to look after the Irish church, the present arch
bishop of Dublin and primate of Ireland; so the philanthro
pists have not much to hope from Ireland. Pat will some
times live and talk as an unbeliever, but he has a singular
propensity to die a Christian.

From Ireland we visited Edinburgh, Glasgow, the High
lands, and the Hebrides — the Highlands and Hebrides, for
the purpose of making observations on the "second sight"
of the natives. We were much pleased with Scotland. The
Scottish character has many admirable features, and there is
not upon the whole a finer race in Europe than the Scotch,
when unperverted. We found nothing to do among them.
There was no need of mesmerizing them. Their own " in-
yenium perfervidum" a sort of permanent mesmerization,
was amply sufficient for all our purposes. Besides, there
seemed to be a natural and ample supply of the odic fluid in
her own mountains and glens, which were still peopled by
brownies and fairies.

CHAPTER XIII. THE TOUR CONTINUED.

FINDING all right in Scotland, we visited Norway, Sweden,
and Denmark, the ancient Scandinavia, the land of Odin,
and home of the most strongly-marked devil-worship to be
found in history. With all my study and experiments, I was
far below many mesmerizers I found among the natives of
these countries. I found operative the spirit of the old
Vikings, the Berserkirs, and the Sagas, which had made the
Norsemen the nobility of Europe, and the plunderers of
every maritime district, which had precipitated Gustavus
Adolphus upon the empire to perish at Liitzen, and Charles
XII. upon liussian Peter, to meet his fate at Pultowa. It
still survives, hardly restrained by the Christian profession,
and capable of being kindled up anew, and set to work in
all its pristine vigor. Of these northern countries I felt sure,
and that I might safely leave them to themselves.

We passed on to St. Petersburg, and had an interview with
the czar of all the Eussias. We found him one of the no-

VTHE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

blest-looking men in Europe, simple, affable, intellectual, and
well-informed. He treated us with distinction on account
of our country, with' which he said he and his predecessors
had always been on friendly terms, and whose unexampled
prosperity he saw with pleasure. He could understand our
politics, and respected them, for they were based on a prin
ciple—a wrong principle he believed— nevertheless a prin
ciple, consistently carried out. He believed the Eussian
system, under which one man governs, is far preferable to
ours, under which all govern. However, we might honest
ly disagree with him. Apparently he was the most bitter
as well as the most powerful enemy of our revolutionary
plans ; but we did not despair of him. He seemed wedded
to the status quo ; but we felt that when once we had destroy
ed that, we could make him and his legions do our work, for
we found him a sort of pope in his own dominions, and not
indisposed to supplant the pope of Eome. He was, if a
friend to papacy, the enemy of the real pope, and that
was enough for us.

The czar, foreseeing the revolutionary movements which
would be attempted in western Europe, had for the moment
ceased to favor the Panslavic movement which he previouslv
set on foot; but we saw that the impulse had been given,
and that ultimately he must return to it, go on with it^or be
swept away by it. This Panslavic movement to unite the
whole Slavic race, numbering upwards of seventy millions,
and holding a territory capable of supporting twice, if not
three times that number of inhabitants, under one Slavic
government, imperial or republican, would operate, we
thought, altogether in our favor ; for it would ruin Austria,
the chief support of the papacy, and give a decided predom
inance to the anti-Catholic powers throughout all Europe.
"We therefore favored it, and took care to form various cir
cles in support of it, as we traversed the Empire from St.
Petersburg to Moscow, JSTijni Novgorod, Little Eussia, to
the Black Sea ; and also, among the Serbs of Bulgaria. Ser-
via, Bosnia, in European Turkey; Transylvania, the Banat,
Croatia, Slavonia, and Bohemia, in the Austrian Empire.

We visited, on leaving Eussia and Slavic Turkey, the king
dom of Hungary. There we found Kossuth, and he answered
our purpose. Priscilla formed a circle among the Magyar la
dies, but it was quite unnecessary. I initiated Kossuth into
my plan, and laid my hand on his head, and breathed into his
mouth, and left him to take care of the Magyar race. Hio-h-

THE TOUR CONTINUED. Ill

ly delighted, we passed from Presburg to Vienna, where we
-raved some weeks. The imperial family and high aristoc
racy were proof against our arts, but we found the burgh
ers, the employes of the government, and especially the stu
dents of the University, quite impressible, and we charged
them for a revolution.

From Vienna we passed through Cracow to Warsaw, and
from Warsaw we went to Berlin. In all these places we found
every thing favorable. We passed through the capitals of
several of the smaller German states and principalities, stop
ped a few days in the Grand Duchy of Baden, and then has
tened to take up our residence at Geneva, in Switzerland.
We did not visit Munich, but sent Lola Montes there, whom
Priscilla, at my order, had prepared. She did very well,
but not so well as I expected. She used her extraordinary
powers too much for her own aggrandizement. She should
never have suffered King Louis to have made her a count
ess. She was too vain and ostentatious.

We arrived in Geneva, late in the autumn of 1844, and
made it our principal residence till the spring of 1846. We
had made no prolonged stay in Poland, for we found the
Poles already mesmerized. Cold and callous as I had be-
•come, I yet had a tear for poor Poland, and, let my conserv
ative brethren say what they will, I still weep her fate. I
am not affected by the prevailing Russo-phobia, and in the
contest now raging between Russia and the Western powers,
I believe that she nas the advantage on the score of justice,
though now that they have been mad and foolish enough to
wage war against her, the interests of Europe perhaps de
mand their success ; for if they fail, she becomes quite too
powerful. There are traits in the Russian character I like,
but I can never forgive the murder of Poland. Catherine,
Frederick, and Maria Theresa, in that crime opened the way
to modern revolutions, and deprived crowned heads, to a
powerful extent, of the sympathy of the friends of justice
and order. The Poles had their faults, great and grievous,
but the partition of their kingdom by the three powers of
Russia, Prussia, and Austria, was a crime that no faults
could justify, and, what some would say is worse, a political
blunder. Since then, the Polish nobles have been, and will
long continue to be, their evil genius.

We did not long remain in Germany, for we found most
of the German states already prepared, and already in close
communication, after the German fashion, with the powers

112 THE SPIKIT-EAPPEB.

of the air. The German genius is mystic, and plunges either
into the profoundest depths of Christian mysticism, which
unites the soul with God, or into the demoniacal mysticism
which unites it in strictest union with Satan. The German,
whatever his efforts, can never make himself a pure ration
alist. He has too much religiosity for that. He must wor
ship, and when he worships not God, he worships the devil,
and either through the elevating power of the Holy Ghost
rises to heaven, or, through the depressing power of Satan,
sinks to hell. You never find him standing on the simple plane
of human nature, and he is always either superhumanly good
or superhumanly wicked. For an Englishman, an Ameri
can, an Irishman, there is a medium, a possibility of com
promise, a sort of split-the-difference character — now savin a-,
good Lord, and now saying, "good devil,"— a via media
genius, which offends both extremes, and satisfies nobody.
I like the German genius better. If the Lord be God, then
serve him, if Baal be God, then in Satan's name serve Baal.
Be either cold or hot, not lukewarm. Ernst is das Leben
is the German's motto, and whatever he proposes to do,
whether good or evil, he sets about it in downright earnest.
There is more to hope, and more to fear from the German
or Teutonic race than any other in Europe, for it has very
little of the Italian and French, or the English and Ameri
can frwolezza, that curse of modern society.

At Geneva we met Mazzini, a remarkable man, in his
way, the very genius of intrigue, and wholly sold to the
devil. We also met there the Abbate Gioberti, a Piedmon-
tese, who had been exiled as a .liberal by the government
of Carlo Alberto, the ci-devant Carbonaro. He was a Cath
olic priest, and though under the censure of the govern
ment, and distrusted by the Jesuits, nay, violently opposed
by them, he had not at that time, so far as I could learn,
fallen under the censure of his church. He was one of the
ablest men we met in our European travels, and a fine speci
men of the higher order of Italian genius. Though com
paratively young, not much over forty, he was deeply and
solidly learned, and as a writer on political and philosophi
cal subjects, had, saying nothing of his peculiar views, no
superior, and hardly an equal in all Italy, if indeed in all
Europe.

Gioberti affected to be an ultramontane, a rigid Catholic,
a thoroughgoing papist ; yet his sympathies were with the
liberal or revolutionary party. He was, first of all, an Ital-

Till-: Ton; . MNTINUED. 113

ian, and hold tliat the moral, civil, and political primacy of
the world belonged to Italy, and it was because God had,
from remote ages, given to her this primacy, that the papal
chair was established at Rome. The primacy belonged to
the successors of St. Peter in their quality of Roman pon
tiffs, who, as such, were heritors of the Italian primate.
The papal authority was founded in divine right, but medi
ately through the divine right of the Italians as heritors of
the old Roman sacerdocy, and Italo-Greek civilization.
According to him, the papacy did not so much continue the
synagogue, as the old Roman priesthood, or rather, the
Jewish and pagan priesthoods both meet and become one
in the papacy — the summit and representative of the Chris
tian priesthood.

His plan, therefore, was, first of all, Italian unity, not the
republican or democratic unity of Mazzini and Young Italy,
nor yet a monarchical unity, under a purely secular prince ;
but a federative union under the moderatorship of the pope
made one in the papacy. The Romans, he held, at least
from the time of Numa, had been an armed priesthood, and
should now resume, under the pope, their old character and
mission. Italy thus united, thus organized, under the mod
eratorship of the pope, could reassert her primacy, and carry
on the work of civilization. With her twenty-five millions
of inhabitants, the natural superiority of her genius, the
moral weight of the papacy, her peculiar geographical posi
tion, and the productiveness of her soil, she would be im
pregnable to attack, and more than able to cope single-
handed with any one of the great European powers. In
other words, he sought for the pope and the Italians what
Nicholas is supposed to seek for the czar and the Russians.

The rock on which he split, and I told him so at the time,
was in assuming the intrinsic compatibility of gentilism and
Christianity. He wished to combine the antique pagan and
the modern Christian spirit, and to train youth to be devout
Catholics, and yet, at the same time, proud, daring, and en
ergetic gentiles. He did not agree at all with the Abbe
Gaume and the party laboring to exclude the Greek and
Roman classics from our colleges and universities ; he had
no very high opinion of the fathers of the church, with the
exception of St. Augustine, and no patience with the med
iaeval knights and doctors. He waged unrelenting war on
the philosophy taught by the Jesuits, and, indeed, upon the
whole system of education pursued by those renowned re-

Vol. IX.--8

114: THE SPIRIT-KAPPER.

ligious, which, he contended, had practically emasculated
the European mind, deprived it of all depth and originality,
and of all free and vigorous activity. Its effect had been
to produce, in nearly all Europe, a universal frivolesza^ or
frivolity of thought and action.

But he forgot to note, that gentilism and Christianity are
directly opposed one to the other. Christianity educates
for heaven, gentilism for earth; the former is based on
pride, the latter on humility ; the one exalts God, the other
exalts man. The Gospel teaches us to despise what gentil
ism honors, and to honor what gentilism despises, and to
possess the world by rising above it, and trampling it under
our feet. A Christian discipline has for its end, to mortify
the flesh, and to make men live as if dead to the world, and
to overcome the world by dying, not by slaying; by relying
on the wisdom and power of God, not on their own. Gen
tile discipline trains men primarily for the world, develops
the nobility of pride, not the higher nobility of humility-
trains men to act, by their own wisdom and sagacity, on
men, to be artful and overreaching statesmen, intrepid sol
diers, able and invincible commanders. It is obvious to
every one that these two systems can never be combined,
and made to work harmoniously together. Ye cannot serve
God and Mammon.

Taking the gentile standard, taking a Fabricius, a Scipio,
a Cato, a Csesar, instead of a St. Bruno or a St. Francis of
Assisi, as a model man ; or a Cornelia instead of a St. Clara
or a St. Theresa, for a model woman, there can be no doubt
of the vast superiority of ancient gentilism over modern
Catholicity, or even Christianity itself, and, in this sense,
the devout Irishman was right when he said, " Religion has
been the ruin of us," and more especially as it regards Cath
olics. ISTon-Catholics, as to the empire of this world, dis
play a wisdom, an energy, and a decision, which you seldom
lind in strictly Catholic states, and the only cases in which
so-called Catholic states approach them, is when they put
their religion in their pocket, war on the pope, or for purely
secular ends, on purely eartMy principles. The French Re
public, in putting an end to the Mazzinian Reign of Terror,
and restoring Pius IX. to his temporal estates, professed no
religious motives, and would have failed if it had. It acted
from worldly policy, and avowedly for the purpose of
watching Austria and maintaining French influence in the
peninsula.

THE

< o.\ UNTKD. 1 1 •">

The question is not as Gioberti conceives it; if is not ;i
question of the fusion of Christian and gentile virtues, but
a question between ge?itilism and Christianity itself. It i-
not how to train our youth to be great, noble, energetic, ac-
rording to the Italo-Greek standard, but whether we are or
are not to be Christians. If Christianity be true, there can
be no question that our youth should be trained for heaven
and not for the world, and taught to be meek, humble, self-
denying, unworldly — to die to the world, and live only to
God — to prepare themselves for dying and living eternally
hereafter in heaven. If so trained, they will not exhibit
those traits of character which you so much admire in the
great men of pagan antiquity ; they will meditate when you
will think they should act, pray when you would have them
fight, and run to the church when you would have them run
against the enemy. But, at the same time, if Christianity
be true, there can be no question that the management of
earthly affairs on Christian principles and for a Christian
end, would be decidedly for the interests of society as well
as for the salvation of the soul. " Seek first the kingdom
of God and his justice, and all these things shall be added
unto you."

There is an innate and irreconcilable antagonism be
tween Italo-Greek gentilism and Christianity. According
to Christianity, the world by wisdom knows not God ;
and the whole economy of the Gospel is undeniably
to discard the wisdom of this world, and to rely solely
on the wisdom from above, to trust not ourselves, but
God alone. The Gospel reverses all the maxims of gentile
wisdom, and blesses what it curses, and curses what it
blesses. Gentilism had said, Blessed are the proud, the dis
tinguished, they who are honored and abound in this world's
goods ; the Gospel says, Blessed are the poor in spirit, that
is, they who are humble, lowly-minded, and despise riches
and honors. Gentilism had said, Blessed are they who are
quick to resent and avenge their real or imaginary wrongs ;
the Gospel says, Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit
the land. The former had said, Blessed are they that re
joice ; the latter says, Blessed are they that mourn. Gen
tilism had said, Blessed are they who thirst for fame, for
honor, power, and who live in 'luxury, who eat, drink, and
are merry ; the ( iospel says, Blessed are they who hunger
and thirst after justice, Blessed are the merciful, and. Ule-
sed are the clean of heart. Gentilism had said. Blessed is

116 THE SPIRIT-KAPPEfe.

the man who delights in arms, whom no one dares attack,.
whom none slander, revile, or persecute, and who, by his
force, craft, or wisdom, has triumphed over all his enemies,
and subjugated them to his will ; the Gospel says, Blessed
are the peacemakers, Blessed are they that suffer persecu
tion for justice's sake, Blessed are ye when men shall revile
you, and persecute you, and say all manner of evil against
you falsely for my sake : rejoice and be exceeding glad, for
great is your reward in heaven.

The principle of Christianity is humility, meekness, gen
tleness, forgiveness of injuries, love of enemies, self-denial,
detachment from the world, and a delight in living, suffer
ing, and dying for the glory of the cross. In every respect,,
the principle of gentilism is the direct contradictory. Look
at the Gospel as you will, and its direct denial of heathen
ism everywhere strikes you. Its Author came into the
world not in the pride, pomp, and power of an earth-born
majesty. He came in the form of a servant, a slave, the re
puted son of a poor carpenter, at whose craft he worked
with his own hands. The foxes of the earth have holes, and
the fowls of the air have nests, but poorer than they, he had
not where to lay his head. Of the rich, the proud, the
great, and honored, none were with him. His disciples were
poor fishermen and publicans. He sought and accepted no*
earthly honors ; and when the people, in a fit of momentary
enthusiasm, would make him perforce their king, he with
drew, retired into the mountains, concealed himself, and
prayed to his Father. When betrayed by one of his fol
lowers, and delivered into the hands of his enemies, he
made no resistance ; and permitted none to be made. He
patiently endures insults, mockeries, and revilings, and opens
not his mouth in his defence, when confronted with his ac
cusers before the bar of Pilate, but meekly submits to the
unjust sentence pronounced against him, suffers himself to
be led unresistingly, bearing his cross, to the place of execu
tion, and to be crucified between two thieves.

Here is the whole spirit, the whole economy of Christian
ity. If Christianity be from God, this means something,
and proves that, if Christians are sincere and in earnest, they
cannot adopt or even value the wisdom of the world ; and
it must always be true, that the children of this world are
wiser in their generation than the children of light. Con
cede the Gospel to be true, and you must own that Chris
tian asceticism is the highest wisdom, and gentile wisdom,.

THE TOUR CONTINUED. 117

or the wisdom of this world, the sublimest foolishness. This
St. Paul well understood, and hence he says, " We preach
•Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling-block, and to the
•Greeks foolishness ; but to them that are called, Jews and
-Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God.
The foolish things of the world hath God chosen to con
found the wise, and the weak things of the world hath God
chosen that he may confound the strong ; and base things
•of the world, and things contemptible hath God chosen, and
the things that are not, that he might bring to nought the
things which are."

There is no denying this, and hence the error of Gioberti.
He would be both a Christian priest and a gentile philoso
pher, at once a disciple of the Gospel and of the Portico,
und he labored with an ability and a subtlety to demonstrate
by means of a philosophy, considered apart from ^the use he
made of it, worthy of profound esteem, that this was not
only possible, but 'demanded by the deepest and truest prin
ciples of ontological science. "I do not think that he was
.at that time an unbeliever, or that he entertained any doubts
of the religion he professed. But he had little of the sacer
dotal character or the Christian spirit, and I think he was
disgusted with what he considered the weakness, tameness,
abjectness, the frivolezza of the Catholic populations of
France and Italy, and out of patience with seeing them
crouching before the haughty infidel, and the domineering
heretic or schismatic. He wished to see them men, men^of
lofty and daring souls, scorning to be trampled on, and in
dignantly hurling back the invading hosts of barbarians,
,and boldly and triumphantly asserting the proud preroga
tives which belong to them as possessors and guardians of
the truth of God. He was right after the wisdom of men,
but wrong after the wisdom of God, if Christianity is our
standard, and was animated by the spirit of gentilism, not
by the spirit of the Gospel. He failed, for he was too pa
gan for a Christian, and too Christian for a pagan.

The remedy, if remedy is needed, is the return of modern
society to real, earnest, living faith in the Gospel. The age
is frivolous, because it is educated to be Christian, and
at heart unbelieving. It is not heresy or schism that needs
now to be attacked, but unbelief— a moral and intellectual
scepticism, which books and schools do not teach us to at
tack successfully. Here schoolmen, men of routine, with
probos, respond eos. and olj, ,-•/ /,,/,,* *<>! r»,<fnrs, stand

THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

us in poor stead. Exquisite polish, gracefully-turned periods,
charming pleasantries, pretty conceits, and soft, sweet senti
mentality for boys and girls' in their teens, will stand us in
just as little. It is necessary to abandon routine, the
easy habit of speaking memowter, and learn to think, to
master, not merely repeat, what others have said, but to
master for ourselves the principles involved, and to speak
out in a tone of strong, impassioned reasoning, in free,
bold, and energetic language, in defence of the Gospel it
self.

CHAPTER XIV. - ROME AND THE REVOLUTION.

^ IN June, 1846, the death of Gregory XVL, and the elec
tion of Cardinal Mastai and his elevation to the papacy,
under the name of Pius IX., summoned us to Rome, the
Eternal City. I felt a momentary grief, as I saw the mould
ering ruins of pagan Rome, the ancient capital of gentilism,
and felt indignation at beholding the diminutive Rome that
had supplanted it ; but I felt sure that the old gods lingered
still in those ruins of the Capitoline and Palatine hills, and
that the time was drawing near when we might evoke Jup
iter Tonans and the n'ery Mars, and the Goddess of Victory,
from their slumber of centuries ; revive the old Roman
spirit, and re-establish the old Republic, so long triumphed
over by the barbarism of the cross. Never before had I
felt how thoroughly alienated from the Christian world, and
assimilated in my feelings to the old gentile world I had be
come. I was in the capital of the Christian world, the cen
tre of Christian art, and of the most glorious Christian asso
ciations for two thousand years, and my heart was touched
only at sight of the monuments of pagan antiquity, which
time and the still more destructive hand of man had spared.
But we had no leisure for sight-seeing, and still less for
sentimentalizing over the ruins of that stupendous supersti
tion of which Rome was the capital, and which had gradu
ally supplanted the patriarchal Christianity, only slightly
corrupted, of the primitive Romans. The superficial poli
ticians, Catholic and non-Catholic, regard the papacy as
comparatively of little political or social signincancy in our
times, but whoever looks a little below the surface of things,
knows very well that the pope, though weak as to his tem
poral states, is not only the oldest but the most influential
sovereign in Europe. The death of one pope and the acces-

ROME AND THK REVOLUTION.

119

sion of another, is an event which reverberates through the
whole civilized world ; and the policy of the sovereign pon
tiff, the feeble old man of the Vatican, with hardly a regi
ment of guards, has not seldom the preponderating weight
in the councils of princes, although unseen, unrecognized—
so much the more inexplicable, as there no longer remains
a truly Catholic government on the globe, and not a Catho
lic nation in whose heart lives and breathes the old Catholic
faith. Xot a nation in Europe would, to-day, for the sake
of religion alone, rush to the assistance of the pope ; yet the
papacy is everywhere, and not a court in Europe but
trembles when it thinks of the pope, even weak and unsup
ported as he is.

All the liberals throughout the world held a jubilee as
soon as they heard of the death of the old pope, who had,
no one could tell how, held them in check. The whole
world seemed to have been suddenly relieved of an invisible
burden, and bounded with a wild and frantic joy. The
good time that had been a-coming, now could come. This
joy grew wilder and more frantic still, when it was known
that Cardinal Mastai was the new pope. He was known to
be gentle and humane, kind-hearted and pious, and suspected
of leaning to liberal views, and of being a Giobertian ; and
nobody doubted that he would attempt a policy the reverse
of Gregory's. We, who were in the secret, knew that he
was not the choice of Austria, and had no doubt that he
would incline to France, and follow, to no inconsiderable
extent, the advice of Count Eossi, the French Ambassador,
and one of our friends.

At that time Guizot was at the head of the government
of France under Louis Philippe, a Protestant and a quasi-
conservative statesman, but with many sympathies with the
European liberals. He believed, or professed to believe,
that a change in the institutions of the monarchical states
in Europe, giving the people a moderate share in the gov
ernment, was demanded by the exigencies of European so
ciety, and if freely offered by authority, and not given as a
concession to the people in arms to effect it, would be a wise
and beneficial public measure, and in an eminent degree pol
itic too, as it would tend to extract the point from the dec
lamations of the radicals, and prevent, or at least indefinite
ly postpone, the revolution with which all western and cen
tral Europe was threatened. He had urged this policy upon
Prussia, perhaps upon Austria, certainly upon the smaller

^0 THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

German states which had not yet adopted the constitution
al regime, and upon the pope and the other Italian princes.

We were perfectly well aware of Guizot's policy, and knew
equally well how to turn it to onr account. Your doctrin
aire, juste-milieu, or via-media statesmen, who follow expe
diency, and govern without principle, are generally regard
ed as wise, prudent, and eminently practical, but they are
among the shortest-sighted mortals to be encountered, and
are as miserable humbugs as the Genevan banker, M. Neck-
er, who could never understand that government was any
thing more than a question of finance, or its administration
any thing more than the administration of a joint-stock bank.
When there is no serious discontent on the part of subjects,
and not the least danger of revolution or insurrection, au
thority may modify without danger, immediate danger at
least, the constitution, in favor of popular power, as the
English government did in 1832 ; but wrhen there is grave
discontent, with or without just cause, and a secret conspir
acy is forming in behalf of liberal or popular institutions,
nothing is less wise or statesmanlike than for authority to
make popular concessions with a view of forestalling and
disarming it. The disaffected attribute such concessions
solely to the weakness and fears of the government, and
only rise in their demands, and conspire with the more en
ergy and courage.

The government, in times of general discontent, as was
the case" in Europe from 1839 to 1848, should either concede
all and abdicate itself, or concede nothing, because, if it is
to defend itself it needs all its prerogatives and the concen
tration of all its powers. The advice of Guizot was fitted
only to weaken the powers that entertained it, and to render
them, in the hour of trial, timid and undecided ; and it is
only where authority is timid, hesitating, and undecided,
that a popular revolution can ever succeed. The only wise
and even merciful way in such times is, to make, on the first
outbreak, a free use of canister and the bayonet. There
will be no second outbreak, however powerful or well con
certed the conspiracy may have been. Napoleon under
stood this, and his nephew understands it, also, tolerably
well. No man understands it better than Nicholas, auto
crat of all the Russias, although his single unarmed pres
ence is ordinarily all that is necessary to quell an insurrec
tion in his capital.

There is no doubt that Pius IX., during the first days of his

AND THE REVOLUTION. 1-1

pontificate, followed, in temporal matters, the advice of the
French government, which, as far as I have been able to learn,
never, since Philip the Fair, has been guilty of giving the
pontiff advice not to his own hurt. France advised the fatal
amnesty and some sort of quasi-popular institutions. The
former was granted, the latter were promised, and the world
was made to believe that for once it had a liberal pope.
There was nothing heard but Evviva Pio Nono ! through
out Rome, Italy, France, England, and the United States.
Radicals, Infidels, Protestants, and even the Grand Turk,
united in one grand chorus of loud and prolonged exulta
tion. It seemed, to those who saw only the external mani
festation, that all hostility to the papacy had ceased, and
that all the world were on the eve of becoming Papists.
Rome became one perpetual festival. Songs, hymns, pro
fessions, benedictions, speeches, addresses, congratulations,
became the regular order of the day. Multitudes of Cath
olics, honest, simple souls, really felt that the day of heresy
.and schism, of conflict and trial, for the church, was over.
Some shrewd old cardinals at Rome took their pinch of
snuff, shrugged their shoulders, and retired to their palaces.
We, who knew what agencies were at work, laughed in our
sleeve, and, with all the chiefs of the liberal party, called
upon all the powers which we had prepared, visible and in
visible, to aid in increasing the general intoxication, not
doubting but the papacy was at its last gasp. For we felt
sure that if, by flattery, by enthusiasm, by loud, long, and
reiterated shouts of Evviva Pio Nono! we could get the
pope fairly to enter the path of reform, or what was, we
supposed, the same thing for us, make the Catholic world
believe he had entered it, it was all over with the papacy,
therefore with Christianity, law, and social order.

No doubt some of the enthusiasm manifested was real,
but a great deal of it was feigned, for the precise purpose
of imposing upon the public. We were not ourselves for
.a moment deceived. We felt sure that Mastai was a genu
ine pope, that he could hardly be deceived by the demon
strations which must have been painful to him ; which, in
fact, gave him no rest, and which, under pretence of un
bounded devotion to him, were becoming unmanageable,
secretly undermining his throne, and growing into a real
conspiracy against his freedom of action. We knew well
there must come a point beyond which he could make no
further concession, and our plan was to get the Catholic

122 THE SPIRIT RAPPER.

populations of Europe so committed to the cause we pre
tended he favored, that when that point was reached, we
could turn the popular enthusiasm against him, and he find
himself disarmed and powerless to resist it. In this it is
well known that we fully succeeded.

We should not have gone so far, and succeeded so rapidly,
perhaps, had we not been aided by English politics. Lord
John Russell and Lord Palmerston did not disappoint my
expectations. At the time of our visit to Rome, the gov
ernment of Louis Philippe was in the zenith of its glory.
The wily monarch seemed to have fully confirmed his-
throne, and his prime minister was successful in urging upon
a large number of princes constitutional reforms, and it
seemed likely, for a moment, that the revolutionary party
would spend its fury harmlessly under the lead of the sov
ereigns themselves. But he deeply offended England by
the Spanish match, the marriage of the Due de Montpen-
sier with an infanta of Spain. By this marriage he seemed
to have completed his circle of alliances, and to have made
himself too powerful for English politics, and was rendering
himself still more so by the constitutional reforms he was
urging upon German and Italian princes. It was necessary
to^thwart him, and put an end to his illegitimate reign.
Lord Minto was despatched, and other agents instructed to
confer with the chiefs of the revolutionary party in Italy,
and also in France, and encourage them to insist on reforms
effected by the people from below, and to refuse to be satis
fied with reforms effected from above by the princes. These
chiefs were assured of the sympathy, perhaps they were
promised the assistance, of the English government, which
makes it a point to support a revolutionary party in every
foreign state.

In the mean time, all the batteries we had erected were
opened. Exeter Hall, and the Protestant Alliance were in
full operation, and I thought it quite certain that a force
was accumulated and brought to bear on the Rock of Peter
that would shiver it into ten thousand atoms. Our presence
was no longer necessary at Rome, and after Easter of 1847,
we went to Paris, to fire a train in that city of combustibles.
"We were not needed there, for having had interviews with
the chiefs of the revolutionary party in Geneva, we had al
ready prepared them. They had more than profited by our
instructions ; they had even improved on them, and stood in
closer relation to the Unknown Force than we did ourselves.

KOMK AND T1IK KK\"| .moN. 1 'J.'J

All we could do to aid on the revolution which broke out
rlu- following February, was to persuade some of the lead-
in<r Liberals to introduce the " peaceful agitation," reduced
to so perfect a system by O'Connell in Ireland, which was
«l.Mu> in what were called the "Reform Banquets."

All France at that moment was, in some sense,"revolution-
ary. Guizot, at the head of the government, was a reform
er, as I have shown, but only on the condition that author
ity took the initiative. But, to admit the necessity or pro
priety of any reforms or changes was a tacit concession
altogether to the prejudice of the existing order. After
Guizot and his party, came the dynastique reformers, such
as Tliiers and Odillon-Barrot, who wished the Orleans fam
ily to possess the throne, but to deprive the throne of all
effective power, and to establish a parliamentary despotism.
The watchword of these at that moment was, the extension
of the electoral franchise. There were at that time, out of
a population of thirty-six millions, only about two hundred
thousand electors. After the dynastique reformers, came
the Catholic party, led on by the noble, learned, eloquent,
and singularly pure-minded Montalembert, a man of prin
ciple, ot faith and conscience, with whom religion was a
living and all-pervading principle. This party consulted,
first of all, the freedom and independence of the church,
and was comparatively indifferent to the dynastique ques
tion. Its drapeau was neither that of Henri Y. nor that of
the House of Orleans, but religion and social order. The
watchword at that time was, Freedom of Education, denied
by the monopoly secured to the University which educated
in a pantheistic, Voltairian, or an irreligious sense. As the
government sustained the University, and denied freedom
of education guarantied by the constitution, they opposed
the government.

Behind these came the Legitimists, the adherents of the
elder branch of the Bourbons, filled with old Gallican rem
iniscences, and whose watchword was Henri V. They were
opposed to the existing government, ready to take active
measures to overthrow it, and were ready to support the
church, in so far as she demanded nothing for herself, and
Avould lend all her [resources to uphold and decorate the
throne. They were a set of superannuated old gentlemen,
with polished manners and courtly address, decorated with
some very respectable prejudices, but wholly ignorant of
their times, and incapable of learning. They were a clog

THE SPIRIT-RAPPEE.

on the Catholic party, and were chiefly answerable for the
re-establishment of the Bonapartists and the present Napol
eonic Caesarism in their beautiful country. However, they
were opposed to Louis Philippe, and ready to effect a
change.

After the Legitimists, who were royalists and opposed to
the existing government, came the Republicans, moderate
and immoderate ; the moderates having for their organ Le
National, the immoderates La Reforme. These, however,
were all opposed to monarchy, whether in the elder or
younger branch of the Bourbons, and wished the republique,
— some, as Lamartine, Arago, with the Girondins, those
phrase-mongers of the old revolution, the republique of the
respectables, of the Bourgeoisie, attorneys, professors, and
hommes de lettres ; others, such as Ledru-Rollin, and the
Montagnards, a republique democratique, une et indivisible,
with Robespierre, Couthon, Saint-Just, Danton, and Marat ;
while others still, too numerous to mention, wished, with
Barbeuf , La Repiiblique democratique et sociale ; and not a
few wished no government, no political or social order at
all. These were the Subterraneans, reformers after our own
hearts, and on whom we chiefly operated, and through
whom we brought the odic force to bear on the revolution
ary movement.

Aside from all these, but ready to co-operate, for the mo
ment, with any or all of them, as would best serve their
purposes, were the Imperialists, the Bonapartists. After the
fall of Napoleon, and the restoration of the Bourbons, the
Bonapartists had affected liberal, I may say, democratic ideas,
and had lent their powerful influence throughout Europe to
democratize the public mind ; and at the time of which I
speak, the chief of the family was very nearly an avowed
socialist, and was hand-and -glove with the Subterraneans.
They knew well that they could be healed only when the
waters should be troubled ; and, whether they were troubled
by an angel of light or an angel of darkness, was a matter
of perfect indifference, unless, indeed, they had more con
fidence in the latter than in the former.

Add to these parties the intrigues of England, who could
not forgive the Spanish match, that crowning act of the
Philippine policy, also the illusions we were able to keep up
as to the views and intentions of Pius IX., and it required
110 messenger from another world to announce that France
was on the eve of a tremendous convulsion ; that the days of

KOMI: AND TIM-: KI:\ »«M 1 1<>\. 125-

the King of the Barricades wnv numlx-ivd ; and that, what-
ever might be the afterclap, the reigning dynasty must fall,
with a crash that would be reverberated throughout all Eu
rope. The only care of our party was to push forward in
front the more moderate reformers, more especially the
dynastique reformers, while we organized a Subterranean
force that would drive them, in the moment of their suc
cess, beyond the point at which they aimed, and compel
them to accept the Republique, which, if proclaimed at
Paris, we felt certain that we could, during the panic which
would succeed, fasten upon the nation.

The history of the events that followed is well known,
and need not be repeated. The old king, in the moment of
peril, proved that he was a true Bourbon, incapable of a
wise decision or an energetic act. All at once he had a
horror of bloodshed, sacrificed his ministry, called to his
council Thiers, Odillon-Barrot, and other dynastiques, who,
vainly imagining that their bare names would allay the storm
which they still more vainly imagined that they had con
jured up, ordered the troops back to their barracks, and gave
up the king and his dynasty to the armed and infuriated
mob. The king abdicated ; the Eegency, under the Duchess
of Orleans, was scouted ; the royal family scampered for
their lives towards England, that refugium peccatorum ;
monarchy was abolished ; the Republique was proclaimed ;
a provisional government was organized impromptu, and a
convention of delegates, to be chosen by universal suffrage,
was ordered to meet and give France a regular political or
ganization.

But a few days elapsed before the movement in Paris was
followed by insurrections in Berlin, Vienna, and a large
number of the smaller German states. The Italian peninsu
la was all in a blaze; democracy was in the ascendant in all
Europe, except Russia, Spain, Belgium, and Holland. Hun
gary demanded independence of Austria ; the Slavic popu
lations of the Austrian Empire at Prague and Agram were
preparing to join in a panslavic movement; Pius IX. was
deprived^of all freedom of action, and held virtually impris
oned ; Naples and Sicily were in full revolt, and the king
ready to concede every thing, and, Bourbon-like thwarting
every effort of his loyal subjects to 'protect him ; Charles
Albert declared himself the sword of the Holy See ; the
Lombardo- Venetian kingdom rejected Austrian supremacy,
and chose him for king. He marched at the head of his

126

THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

troops^ swelled by contingents from all Italy, to drive the
barbarians back over the mountains, and to clear the penin
sula of every vestige of foreign dominion.

We were elated ; we felt that success was sure, and that
our grand philanthropic world-reform was on the point of
being completely realized. But alas ! homo proppnit, Deus
disponit. The spirits had deceived us. Pius IX. displayed
a passive courage that we had not counted on, and nothing
could induce him to sanction the war against Austria ; and
in spite of all we could do, it finally leaked out, that he had
not sanctioned it, and that the revolutionists hacl belied him,
and entirely misrepresented his principles, conduct, and
wishes. Old Eadetzky, after retreating before Charles Al
bert till he had obtained re-enforcements, turned upon his
pursuer, defeated him, and drove him, with shame and loss
out of Lombardy. Prince Windischgratz beat the rebels in
Prague ; the lazzarorii flogged the republican heroes in Na
ples, and the people saved the throne, in spite of its weak
and pusillanimous occupant. In fine, Cavaignac, after four
days of hard fighting, prostrated the Subterraneans of Paris,
and became dictator of the republic. We were no longer in
the years of grace '91, '92, or '93. The age was not as far
gone in unbelief as we had reckoned, and the friends of re
ligion and society were more numerous and more energetic
than we had believed.

Our hopes were damped, but not extinguished. We had
thus far used the pope, but we could use him no longer, and
we must get rid of him, and completely secularize the Ro
man government. We had used the Italian princes ; we must
now reject them, and abandon Gioberti for Mazzini. We
succeeded in wresting the government entirely from the
pope, but he himself escaped us, and fled to Gaeta which
was a serious injury to our cause. The pope in exile is more
powerful than in the Vatican. We meant to have confined
him in his palace, and held him as a puppet in our hands
and still for a time continued the use of his name • but in
this his flight defeated us. We were obliged to proclaim
the Roman Republic, and the temporal deposition of the
pope, prematurely ; but still we hoped, as we took care not
to touch his person or his spiritual prerogatives, that we
should not lose the sympathy of the Catholic public.

But it was all in vain. Our magic failed us ; a more pow
erful magician than we intervened, and every where the re
action gained ground against us. Austria, whom we thought

ROMK ANTt THE RKVOLUTK i.N. 127

we had disposed of, rose AnhiMis-like from the ground ; the
Giobertians, predominant in the Snbalpine kingdom, would
not own us. Florence was deserting us; Venice holdout,
indeed, but Lombardy was chained by old Radetzky. Great
Britain wished us well, gave us good advice, but came not to
-our aid ; and Spain and Portugal, that we thought dead,
Middenly started into life against us. Russia, though she
loved not the papacy, detested us, and was ready to inter
pose to bring Prussia to her senses, and to assist Austria.
And last of all, the French Republic, which we had been
the principal agents in creating, fearing the preponderance
of Austria, and anxious to have an outpost in the Eternal
City, sent her troops against us.

It was in vain to struggle. I saw clearly that the battle
was against us, and that we should never succeed, by polit
ical and social revolutions, in effecting our purpose ; and I
made up my mind at once to have nothing more to do with
them. 1 resolved to return home, and fall back on what I have
hinted as an ulterior project. It was in the Autumn of 1849.
The abortive attempt to reorganize the German Empire had
failed, and not to our regret, since we saw, if reorganized at
all, it would not be on democratic principles ; the authority
of St. Peter was reestablished at Rome ; the Magyars were
forever prostrated in Hungary, and our friend Kossuth had
taken refuge with his friends the Mussulmans, and France
was becoming an orderly government under the Presidency
of Louis Napoleon and the conservative majority of the Leg
islative Assembly. There was nothing more that we could
do.

It is true, that many of our friends thought differently
from me, and wished to continue the struggle ; but I told
them that, if they did, they must do so without my active
.cooperation ; that I should leave them to their simple hu
man strength, and they would find all their plans miscarry.
The time is not opportune. Christianity has yet a stronger
hold on the European populations than you or I had calcu
lated, and the Christian party can no longer be duped and
made to fight for us. They thrill with horror now to hear
us say, "Christianity is democracy, and Jesus Christ was the
first democrat." They are beginning to see, as clearly as we
do, that all this is at best absurd, a.id that our movement is
essentially anti-Christian. They see, they admit, they de
plore a certain number of political and social abuses ; hut
rhry believe these abuses more tolerable than the reforms
we would effect.

128 THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

We have given the bishops, the clergy, and the pious laity
a horrid fright ; and you will see them, almost to a man, be
fore three years expire, exultingly consenting to the rees-
tablishment of pure Caesarism, in order to be relieved of their
fears of us. Louis Napoleon will succeed in making himself,
almost with the unanimous voice of France, proclaimed em
peror, with absolute, or virtually absolute power, with no-
effective check on his arbitrary will ; parliamentary govern
ment will be scouted, as hardly a step removed from Sub
terranean democracy ; free discussion of public affairs will
be closed ; the press will be muzzled, and no voice will be
heard throughout the empire, save a voice in praise or flat
tery of the new emperor.

But herein is our consolation and our hope for the future.
The new emperor will have to deal with Frenchmen ; and
he counts without his host, if he thinks he can, for any
great length of time, silence thirty-six millions of French
voices^ or make them all speak one way. Mortal man can
not do it. Satan himself could not do it ; and only One, whom
we name not here, could do it. Now they are afraid of us,
and have had even an excess of talk. They will consent for
a time, even as a^ novelty, to be silent, or shout, as an admir
able change, Vive VEmpereur, instead of Vive la Repub-
lique democratique et sociale, — d las les Democrats, instead
of d has les Aristocrats, or les Aristocrats d la lanterne,
and alas les socialistes, instead of d las les rois. But rely
upon it, that after a brief repose, these same Frenchmen will
be desirous of mouvement, and will by no means be pleased
to find themselves doomed to the silence and stillness of
death. Then will be our time once more, and perhaps then
we may be more successful. Till then I engage no more in
political and social reforms. I shall take myself to that
which underlies all political and social ideas, and slowly,
perhaps, but surely, prepare a glorious future. You will
hear from me again, or if not, you will feel the influence of
what I shall do.

With remarks like these, I took my leave of my Europe
an revolutionary friends. I communicated to Priscilla, who
had faithfully served me throughout the time I had been
abroad, and powerfully contributed to such successes as we
had had, my design of returning home. We were in Paris.
She would, perhaps, have rather returned to Eome. She
had, in fact, began to droop, and to be weary of the part I
had forced her to play. She had, during our stay in Eome,

1 UK I I.I KKInK I'Ko.JKCT.

become a mother, and new feelings and affections had been
;i wakened in her heart. Her husband had treated her
kindly, forbearingly, but he had much changed, and no
longer favored philanthropy or reform, and it was rumored
that he had become devout. Priscilla evidently began to
turn to him with something approaching the love and es-
Term she owed him, and would gladly have broken her liai-
* HI with me. But I would not hear of it; she must return
with me.

CHAPTER XV. - THE ULTERIOR PROJECT.

IT may be asked why I wished Priscilla to return with
me, against her will, since I had no passion for her, and re-
>jM'rted the honor of her husband. I wished it partly from
spite, and partly because it was necessary to my purpose.
She had induced me, or had had more influence to induce
me than any one else, to embark in a cause which I loathed,
and which at the same time I felt myself totally unable to
abandon, and I wished to make her suffer with me. Then,
again, I could do nothing without an accomplice, and that
accomplice a woman. I travelled abroad in the character of
a simple American gentleman, not as a mesmerizer, a ma
gician, or one who commands invisible powers. Nobody
abroad, or even at home, ever suspected me, unless it was
good old Mr. Cotton, of any thing of the sort. In all cases
when the mysterious force was to be exerted, as long as she
was connected with me, I employed Priscilla as my agent. I
gave her my orders, which she, without exciting any suspic
ion against her or myself, seldom failed to execute to the
letter.

Even after her own views and feelings began to change, and
she felt the slavery and degradation other position, she dared
not disobey me. "She stood in awe of my power, and knew
well the merciless punishment that awaited her. Often,
often has she begged me, with tears and in the deepest
agony, to undo my spell over her, and to let her go free. I
would not. Had she not declared her spirit eternally wed
ded to mine ? The truth is, I was half afraid to undo the
spell, and emancipate her. She knew too many of my se
crets, might expose me, and defeat all my plans ; and once
freed from me, once restored to the empire of reason, she
would feel herself bound in conscience to do so ; and when a
woman once takes it into her head to act from conscience, she

VOL. IX-9

130 THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

is, whether she have a good or false conscience, as unman
ageable as if she were in love. She is as headstrong under
conscience as under passion, and of course absolutely uncon
trollable, because in either case she uses her reason simply
in the service of her feelings. Then, again, I did not like
accepting a new accomplice.

Priscilla, not daring to resist, finally persuaded her hus
band to consent to return home. We crossed the Channel
to England, and hastened to embark at Liverpool on board a
steamer for New York. We had a stormy passage, and
came near being cast away ; but at length arrived in port,
and soon found ourselves in Philadelphia, after an absence
of six years and six months amidst scenes and events of the
most exciting character. We were all changed in looks, but
still more in feelings. The fire of our enthusiasm was ex
tinct, the freshness and sanguine hopes of youth had fled
forever ; our labor had been in vain, and there was no bright
or cheering prospect before us. I took my leave of Pris-
cilla at the public-house where we stopped. When I saw her
faded cheek, her sunken eye and withered form, the wrin
kles gathering on her brow, and heard her, in a broken voice,
renew her oft-repeated request, and remembered what she
was some ten or twelve years before, and thought of what I
was too at that time, and wThat I was now, I had a touch of
human feeling, and pressing her hand to my lips — I had not
the heart to refuse — I told ner I would consider it, perhaps
I would, and hurried out of the room, to conceal my emo
tion, not sorry, after all, to find that I had riot wholly ceased
to be human.

The next day, I started for my home in Western New
York. Home, alas ! no longer. The house was desolate.
During my prolonged absence, my mother and my only sis
ter had died, and all my family were gone. My library and
my laboratory remained as I had left them. They had no
charms for me now. I looked out upon the familiar scenes
of my childhood ; they seemed changed all, and were tame
and listless. I met some companions of my earlier life ; there
was nothing in common between them and me. Their voices
sounded strange, and grated on my ears. The sad conviction,
for the first time in my life, forced itself upon me, that I
was alone, and deeply I felt my loneness. I had lost my
childhood's faith, which, though meagre and but a shad
ow, yet was something. I had no Father in heaven, no
brother or sister on earth. I believed in neither angel nor

THE ULTERIOR PROJECT. 131

spirit. All existence, all being, had dwindled into one in
visible, elemental, impersonal Force, which indeed I could
wield, but to what end ?

In my loneness, I felt that the vulgar belief in the devil,
in ghosts, and goblins damned, would be a solace. They
would be something, and any thing is better than nothing.
Better is a living dog than a dead lion. Alas, I had sold my
self, and my redemption was far off. Strange enough, I felt
something like passion revive in my guilty breast. I felt, I
even regretted rriscilla's absence ; and it seemed that she
was dear to me, and that I could not endure life without her.
I pictured her to myself as I had first known her, and I
wept as I remembered how for long years I ^had enslaved
her. A voice whispered in my heart, emancipate her. A
momentary feeling of generosity possessed me. I summoned
her, as I knew how, to my presence. She appeared, instan
taneously.

" Priscilla," said I, " I am sad and weary. Life has lost
its charms for me, and I care not how soon I die. I have
nothing to live for. You are a wife and a mother. I ab
solve you from your pact ; be free ; return and devote your
self to your husband, who is worthy of you, and to your boy.
I have, and will no longer have, power over you."

A gleam of joy spread over her face, a smile of gratitude
played on her lips, and a look of love shot from her eyes,
and the place where she stood was vacant. She had vanished ;
but a chattering, as of a thousand mocking voices, filled my
room, and then impish, mocking faces were seen all around,
making mouths at me. I cared not for these. I silenced the
former, and sent away the latter with a word. I retained
my magic force still. But there was joy as well as sorrow
in that house in Arch street, Philadelphia. Priscilla, the
day of returning to her own house, had been taken ill ; her
husband was alarmed, and called a physician, who could un
derstand nothing of her case. She grew worse and worse ;
and during the time I had summoned her to me, she fell
into a sort of stupor, a complete trance, and to all except
her husband, who had seen her in that state before, and
knew that she was subject to trances, she seemed to be dead.
The moment I had absolved her, she came to herself, a sweet
smile on her face, with the hue of perfect health. She arose
in bed, embraced her husband with a warmth and sincerity
of affection which he had never before known, and for the
first time since his birth looked upon her boy with the glad

132 THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

joy of a mother- s heart. But at this moment her husband
was more to her than her babe. She hung on his neck, she
pressed him to her heart, she half smothered him with kiss
es, spoke^ in the terms and tones of the tenderest and sweet
est affection, and it seemed as if she would pour out upon
him, in a single moment, the loaded affections of a lifetime.
:'My dear husband, you must forget and forgive the past. I
am yours, yours now, yours alone ; heart, soul, and body,
forever. The spell is broken. The delusion is gone ; take
me, take me, dear James, to your heart."

James was a man. He had been dazzled by the beauty
and accomplishments of Priscilla, and thought it enough to
be accepted as her husband, without much scrutiny into the
state of her affections. She had, for a moment, imposed
upon him, and he had accepted her notions of woman's
rights, philanthropy, and world-reform. But he did not lack
good sense ; he had even a strong mind, firm principles at
bottom, and all the elements of an upright, manly character.
A few months' practical experience served to cure him of a
good deal of his philanthropy, and to damp the ardor of his
zeal for reform. He was, of course, displeased with my in
timacy with Priscilla, arid he owed me, it must be owned, no
good will. But his observation pretty soon satisfied him,
that whatever the bond of that intimacy, it was not what
directly affected his honor as a husband, and he resolved
that he would seem not to regard it. It was a bitter trial to
him.

His tour abroad, his observation, and his conversations
with gentlemen and ladies, not always of our clique, had
opened his eyes to many things, and made him a stanch con
servative. He abandoned all the loose notions he had pre
viously entertained, renounced his Quaker quietism, and had
become sincerely converted to a real objective Christian
faith. His first thought and care were to reclaim his wife,
and, if possible, to release her from the mysterious power
which I seemed to have over her. He found her as anxious
to be released as he was to release her, and he thought he
discovered in her, at times, a growing affection for himself.
It was a difficult case to manage, but he thought it best to
be prudent and discreet, and to avoid every thing that could
excite remark, or that he himself might afterwards regret.
Feeling now that he had himself not been entirely free
from blame, that he was bound to be forgiving, that Priscilla
was really his wife, the mother of his child, and that she:

THE ULTERIOR PBOJECT. 133

probably was freed, though lie knew not how, and did now
really love him, he responded with ;i warmth nearly c<ju;il
to her own, to her strong expressions of love, frankly for
gave her all, and pressed her to his heart as his own, his
truly beloved wife. It was for both the happiest moment
they had ever known, and in that one moment James seemed
to have been compensated for his patience, forbearance, and
suffering, for so many years.

Priscilla immediately regained her health and cheerful
ness, and resolved, if possible, to recover me from the bond
age in which she knew I was held. How she sped in this,
and what new trials, if any, awaited her, will appear as I
proceed in my narrative.

My own feeling of loneness, of desolation, was not relieved
by my release of the woman I had so long held spell-bound,
but was aggravated by the constant annoyance of a passion
which I had seldom before experienced, or which, without
much trouble, I had always been able to subdue. As Pris
cilla became purified and less unworthy of her husband, and
as she seemed the more completely to have escaped me and
to be lost to me forever, the more did I feel that I could not
live without her, and the more impossible did I find it
quietly to endure her absence. I was mad. I called her.
The charm was broken, and she came not ; I saw only a
vague, undefined form, flit before my eyes, and heard only
a wild mocking laugh.

Weeks passed, but they seemed ages. Priscilla, in all her
loveliness, in all her gracefulness and dignity, in all the
brilliancy of youth and beauty, was constantly present to my
morbid fancy by day, and to my dreams at night. I was
completely unmanned, — wept now as a child over a lost toy,
or now raved as a madman. I could not eat, I could not
sleep. I could endure it no longer. I sold my house and
furniture, disposed of my laboratory and scientific apparatus,
packed up my library, and resolved that henceforth I would
take up my residence in Philadelphia.

I had no sooner established myself in my new home, than
I called in Arch street to see Priscilla. Instead of her I
found James. He received me civilly, even kindly, con
versed with me of what we had seen abroad, but Priscilla
did not appear. No matter, I would call again. Did so ;
saw Priscilla only in presence of her husband. She was
looking well, was affectionate in her tone and manner, but
offered me not her hand, and seemed to take care that I

134 THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

should, not so much as touch her dress. Well, said I to my
self, be it so. The weakness shall last no longer. I will be
myself again, and resume the project I had contemplated,
I went home, not cured, but resolved, and immediately
commenced my evocation, and communicated my orders to-
all the circles I had established throughout Europe.

I have already hinted what this new project was. It was
clear to me, from my historical reading and my personal
observations amid the exciting scenes of the more recent
European revolutions, that the grand support of social order,
and what I have somewhere called the system of restraint
and repression, is Christianity, and that the political and
social reformers can never fully carry out their reforms till
they have totally rooted out from modern society all belief
in the Gospel, and all peculiar reverence for its Author,
This is more than hinted by Mazzini and Kossuth, although
the latter is a vice-president of the American Bible Societyr
boldly avowed by M. Proudhon, and stoutly contended for
by the German Turnverein and Freimanner. If vou con
cede the Christian idea of God, says Proudhon, you must at
once and forever abandon your idea of liberty.

It was equally clear to me, that the attempt, by means of
political organizations, and revolutions directed against the
papacy, or any church organization, Catholic or Protestant,
to root out Christianity from the hearts of the people, must
at last prove a failure. After all, there is a natural religios
ity in man, and though he will often restrain and mortify
it, and act only in view of purely secular ends, — practically
live as if there were no God, and no hereafter, — he will al
most always return to the order of religious ideas, and adopt
or institute some kind of religious worship to which he will
subordinate his political ideas, and his secular ends. An
Epicurus may deny providence, a Lucretius may sing, in no
mean poetry, that it is impossible, " revocare defunctos"
and even Cicero may laugh at augurs and aruspices, and
doubt the immortality of the soul, yet the sentiment of an
invisible Force, of a mysterious Power that overshadows us,
is universal, and the sceptical philosopher feels an indefina
ble shudder of awe, perhaps of fear, whenever he finds him
self alone in the dark. Everywhere the shades of Acheron
wander or flit around and before him.

^ Even in the midst of our pleasures the thought of the in
visible and the supernal intrude unbidden to mar our festiv
ities, and to dash our joy with an indefinable sadness, shamer

THE ULTERIOR PROJECT. K>5

and remorse. Even a Voltaire trembles and blasphemes in
dving, at the thought of being denied Christian burial, and
a'Voiney, who resolves God into blind nature, and Chris
tianity into astrology or astronomy, prays lustily to the God
he disowns, in a storm on Lake Erie. Do what we will, we
cannot divest ourselves of the belief or apprehension of in
visible powers, who hold our destiny in their hands ; and a
people absolutely without any religion, or at least supersti
tion, is never to be found.

^"ever had unbelievers a fairer chance for rooting out
Christianity by political and social revolutions, than in the
eighteenth century. The laugh was everywhere against re
ligion and the clergy, a decided materialistic and inridel
philosophy pervaded literature, possessed the schools, ruled
in the courts, and domineered over thought and intellect.
There was lukewarmness in the religious, there were scan
dals among the clergy, there were abuses in the state, and
therefore an imperious call for reform. The reformers di
rected all their movements against religion, and their means
were democratic and social revolution. They were strong,
they were overwhelming in their power. At their bidding,
down went throne and altar, and in ten years the religion
they had abolished was reestablished, the churches they had
closed were reopened at the order of the soldier they had
made their chief, and for democracy in the state they had
an incipient Csesarism, which, two years later, became a
fully developed and perfect Csesarism. The same result
had followed our own movement. In January, 1850, relig
ion was far more vigorous in Europe, than in January, 18-10,
and democracy at a far greater discount.

It was idle," then, to hope either to destroy political and
social authority in the name of absolute unbelief and irre-
ligion, or to root out Christianity by political and social
movements, Christianity could be eradicated only by
means of a rival religion, and a religion which could appeal
TO a supernatural origin, and sustain itself by prodigies, or
what the vulgar would regard as miracles. I had^suspected
this from the beginning, and resolved now, that instead of
working with the purely secular passions of men, I would
make my appeal to their religiosity. Mahomet, in the
seventh century, had done this admirably for his time and
the East, but had incautiously fixed his superstition in the
Koran, and made it unalterable, and therefore incapable of
adapting itself to the new face which things might assume

136 THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

in the vicissitude of events, the development of society, and
the progress of the race.

Swedenborg had done better, and so had Joe Smith, but
neither had sufficiently provided for the progress! veness of
the race, or with sufficient explicitness consecrated the prin
ciple of innovation and change, and both had retained too
many conceptions taken from the old religion. Yet Swed
enborg was to be taken as our starting point, and we were
only to avoid his mistakes, the principal of which was a too
strict and rigid church-organization.

When I returned from Europe, I found the directions I
had given, before going abroad, had been pretty faithfully
followed ; and mesmeric revelations, through Andrew Jack
son Davis, and spiritual communications, through the Foxes,
were beginning to attract public attention. The spirits
were becoming exceedingly anxious to communicate, and
made, as it was supposed, many important revelations. In
a few months, spiritual knockings were becoming quite
common, and mediums were found in all parts of the coun
try. At first, intercourse with the spirits was obtained only
in the somnambulant state, or through the slow and toilsome
medium of raps, but at the same time intimations and assur
ances were given that before a great while a more easy and
direct method of communication would be vouchsafed'; but,
as yet, the public and individuals were not prepared for that
more direct method. The spirits were willing, but the medi
ums were not sufficiently advanced, nor sufficiently spiritu
alized ; and the public was too gross, too materialistic, and
too sceptical. As soon as minds should become more re
fined, spiritual, and believing, open vision would be per
mitted them, and easy and regular communication would be
established, and whoever wished would have as free and
familiar intercourse with the spirit-world as with the world
of the flesh.

At first the great object was to establish the reality of the
spiritual communications. This was to be done by the com
munication of secrets, either known only to the inter rogator,
or incapable of being known to the medium in any ordinary
human or natural way. Sometimes the spirits played the
part of fortune-tellers ; sometimes they assumed to be proph
ets, and ventured to predict future events, but always
events which either depended on them, or lay in the nat
ural order, and which a knowledge of natural causes and
effects could easily enable them to foresee.

TIIK ULTERIOR PROJECT. 137

As the spiritual intercourse extended, and believers mul
tiplied, the BOmnambulic and rapping mediums ceased t<>
be the only mediums. The artificial somnambulic mediums,
or mesmerized mediums, disappeared almost wholly, and to
the rapping mediums were added writing mediums and
speaking mediums, and in some instances the spirits became
actually visible to the seers, and telegraphed their message
l.v visible symbols, and occasionally in words. Spiritual
telegraphing, in some one or all of these ways, became, in a
few months, common in all parts of the country ; and, at
the expiration of two years, there were three hundred spirit
ual circles or clubs in the single city of Philadelphia, and
more than half a million of believers in the United States.
The epidemic had broken out in the North of England and
Wales, had spread all over Norway, Denmark, and Sweden,
and northern and central Germany, penetrated France in all
directions, and made its appearance even at Rome. In
France and Italy, where the population is either profoundly
Christian or profoundly infidel, the spiritual manifestation
had to adopt more discreet and less startling forms than^ in
our own and some other countries, and to give place at first
to doubt whether it was not mere trickery, or explicable on
recognized scientific principles ; and confined itself, to a
great extent, to the phenomena of table-turning, which ex
cited curiosity without alarming conscience. In France, in
the most polished, fashionable, and, I may almost say, most
Catholic society, table-turning became an amusement.

The next point to be attended to, was the doctrines, the
philosophy or religion, that the spirits were to teach. It
would not do to attack the Gospel too openly^ and it was
necessary to undermine, rather than to bombard it. In some
iv>pectseven, it was advisable to seem to confirm, as it were
by one rising from the dead, some portions of Christian be
lief — SUch as the immortality of the soul, and the reality of
an invisible spirit-world. The latter was doubted by the
free-thinkers; but it was essential to my project that the
free-thinkers, in this respect, should be converted, for their
conversion and acknowledgment of belief in God and a
spirit- world would do much to commend our spiritualism
to a large body of silly and ill-informed Christian believers,
who, seeing such apparently good effects resulting from it,
would conclude that there could be nothing bad in it. By
their fruits shall ye know them.

In the American community, to a very great extent, the

138 THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

belief in the immortality of the soul is supposed to be iden
tical with the belief in the resurrection of the dead, taught
by Christianity ; and our Unitarians, with their rationalistic
erudition, very generally hold that the peculiar and distinc
tive doctrine taught by our Lord was the immortality of
the soul. But the immortality of the soul was believed by
the whole ancient world, gentile as well as Jewish ; and,
though questioned by some ancient and modern sophists,,
there never has been found a people who, as a body, were
ignorant of it, or that denied it. All the ancient, as all
modern superstitions recognize it. All believe the soul is
imperishable, though many suppose it will be absorbed in
the great Fountain of life, as a drop in the ocean — a misin
terpretation of the Christian doctrine of union with God in
the light of glory, as the ultimate end or final beatitude of
the just. The doubt was as to the body, or the umbra, ih&
material envelope and companion and external medium of
the soul in this life. The gross outward body they be
lieved returned to dust, and mingled with its kindred ele
ments ; but this umbra, shade, the manes of the dead, which,
all antiquity carefully distinguished from the soul, was also,
for the most part, believed to be imperishable ; but its re
union with the soul, I do not find the heathen world
ever clearly asserting. In other words, the ancient hea
then world, though it retained the primitive belief in the
immortality of the soul, had lost belief in the resurrection
of the body, and the reunion of soul and body, or at least
only retained some traces of it in their doctrine of metem
psychosis, or transmigration of souls.

The peculiar Christian doctrine, or the doctrine so insist
ed on by the apostles, was not the immortality of the soul,
which was always presupposed, but the resurrection of the-
dead, the return to life, not of that which had not ceased
to live, but of that which had died, to wit, the body.
Hence the article in the Apostles' Creed is not, I believe the
immortality of the soul, but, I believe the resurrection of
the body, resurrectionem carnis, the resurrection of the
flesh ; and to this belief, it must be remarked, that the spir
it-manifestations afford no confirmation, and indeed they
virtually contradict it.

The distinguishing trait of Christian morality is charity,
which is distinguished from philanthropy or benevolence, as
a supernaturally infused virtue is distinguished from a mere
human sentiment, but, in the minds of but too many of

IMK ULTERIOR PROJECT. 139

those who call themselves Christians, really confounded
with it. The spirits were then, under the name of charity.
to teach a philanthropic, sentimental, and purely human
morality, for in doing so, they would seem to the mass of
superficial Christians to be confirming the distinctive trait
of Christian morality, and at the same time appealing to
the morbid spirit of the age.

Bald, naked Universalism is not popular ; but there is a
verv general disbelief, among the leading men of the times,
in the old orthodox doctrines of heaven and hell, of the last
judgment, the everlasting punishment of the wicked, or
that our eternal state is fixed by that in which we die.
Swedenborg had greatly modified these doctrines, and
taught that the punishment of the wicked is purely nega
tive ; that men are in hell only inasmuch as they are not in
harmony with God ; and not to be in harmony with God,
that is, good, is to be out of the divine protection, and ex
posed to all the sufferings incident to our abandonment to
the natural order of things. He had also recognized dif
ferent heavens, rising one above another, and different
hells, one below another ; and had hinted or asserted the
possibility of the inhabitants of each improving, and ad
vancing in wisdom and virtue, by their intercourse with the
inhabitants of this world. He had himself even instructed
angels, and assisted feeble and undeveloped souls. Here
were the germs of all that was required. The spirits were
to teach that there are different circles in the other world,
into which souls are admitted according to their respective
tastes and degrees of development, with the chance to rise
in due time, if faithful, from the lowest to the highest. In
the lower circles, they are improved by intercourse with us,
as we are ourselves improved by intercourse with spirits of
the higher circle.

The dominant doctrine of our age is that of progress;
that the universe started from certain rude and imperfect
beginnings, and, by a continued series of developments and
transformations, is eternally advancing towards perfection,
without however reaching it ; and that man, beginning, if
not in the oyster or the tadpole, at least in a feeble and
helpless infancy, develops and advances towards per
fect manhood. This doctrine, which a few facts in nat
ural history, in geology, and anthropology, at first sight
seem to favor, is at bottom wholly repugnant to the Chris
tian doctrine of a fixed civ»'d. of final repose or beatitude

140 THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

in God, of final causes, and the final consummation of all
things. So the spirits are to accept it, systematize it, and
propose, as the highest reward of virtue, to be placed on
the plane of eternal progression.

The age is indifferent, syncretic, and disposed to accept
all religions and superstitions as true under certain aspects,
and as false under others, and to pronounce one about as
good and about as bad as another. The spirits, therefore,
make no direct war on any of them. In some places they
teach that the Catholic Church is the truest and best of pre
vailing religions, but that Protestantism is nevertheless a
safe way of salvation, and that the spirits do not, in the
other world, think so much about differences of churches
and creeds, as they did when in this world. In other places
they teach that the Catholic Church is false ; that it is wick
ed, the enemy of moral and social progress, and that effect
ual means should be taken to prevent its extension in the
United States. They do not deny the Bible, nor affirm its
inspiration, but take, to a great extent, the neological view
of it, conceding it to be truthful in many respects, but main
taining it to be unreliable in others. It was very well when
men had nothing better, and no surer means of information
in regard to the spirit-world.

Such is a brief outline of the new religion, which was in
tended to supplant Christianity, and to open the way for
that " good time a-coming," for which all our philanthro
pists and reformers are looking, as any one may satisfy him
self by reading the Sheki/nah, the Spiritual Telegraph, or
Judge Edmonds's work, from the prolific press of Partridge
& Brittan, New York. This new religion, which, indeed,
contains nothing new, and which it certainly needed no
ghost from the other world to teach or to suggest, would
amount to very little if promulgated on mere human au
thority, unsupported by any prodigies, mysteries, or marvel
lous facts; but, communicated mysteriously from alleged
denizens of another world, bearing the imposing names of
William Peim, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin,
Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine, assumes in the minds
of the vulgar a high importance, and can hardly fail to
be regarded as overriding Moses and the prophets, our
Lord and his apostles. It strikes at the foundation of Chris
tianity itself, and once accepted, it will seem to have a di
rectness arid a completeness of evidence that will entirely set
aside, in the minds of the spiritualists, that in favor of the
Gospel. This is what I intended, and what I hoped.

A K'KIU FF. 141

Having set the so-called spirits in motion, and through
them set afloat a system which I fancied would supplant
Christianity, whether in its Catholic or its sounder Protes
tant forms, my work seemed done, and I could retire from
my labors. My superintendence was no longer necessary,
and whether the agents I employed were really the spirits
or souls of the dead, as they themselves asserted, or mere
elemental forces of nature, as I was inclined to believe or
had wished to persuade myself, became to me a question of
no interest. The work would go on of itself now, and in
a few years Christianity and the church would be under
mined and fall of themselves. Then monarchy, aristocra
cy, republicanism, all forms of civil government, would
crumble to pieces, and universal freedom, leaving every one
to believe and do what seems right in his own eyes, will be
realized, and all here, as well as those not here, will be
placed on the plane of eternal progression — progression
towards — what ?

CHAPTER XVI. A REBUFF.

I ASKED not the question, for in fact it did not occur to
me ; but I asked another question, What shall I do with
myself ? A grave question this. Do what I would, turn
the matter over as I might, there was, now the novelty of
the idea had worn off, nothing inspiring in this idea of eter
nal progression ; — this ever learning, and never coming to
the knowledge of the truth — this everlasting chase after
good, and never coming up with it. Why continue a pur
suit which you know beforehand will bring you never any
nearer the object than you are, for, as you pursue, it flies.
Is not this evil rather than good, hell rather than heaven ?
Is not this the punishment of Ixion ? — That war of the
Titans upon the gods, has it not a deep significance ? The
Titans, the Giants, the Earth-born, I'errmfiiii, would de
throne the gods, the heaven-born, the divine, and were de
feated and doomed to punishment, to turn forever a wheel,
to roll a huge stone up the steep hill, and just as it is about
to reach the summit, have it slip from the hands and roll
down with a thundering sound ; to a task never completed,
and always to be renewed, or to hunger, with food ever in
sight, and always just beyond reach ; to thirst, standing to
the neck in water, and have it recede always as approached
with the lips. Is not, after all, this the doom that they

THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

bring on themselves who reject the wisdom from above and
follow what my friend Mr. Merton calls the wisdom from
below ?

I can very well understand progress towards an end,
towards a goal that is fixed and permanent, but a progress
towards nothing, or towards a movable goal, a goal that re
cedes as approached, is to me quite unintelligible, and, when
I think of it, it seems as absurd as the supposition of an in
finite series. Infinite progression is, in reality, an infinite
absurdity. The origin and end of all things must be per
fect, fixed, and immovable. Every mechanic knows that he
cannot generate motion without a something which is at
rest, which can cause or produce motion without moving
itself. Without the immovable, there is and can be no
movable. In like manner, no motion towards what is not
immovable, for if the two bodies remain in the same posi
tion relative to each other, neither, in relation to the other,
has moved.

Progress is morally motion towards an end, and if there
is no approximation to the end, there is no progress. As
progress is inconceivable without some end, so it is equally
inconceivable without a shortening of the distance between
the progressing agent and the end. If this distance can be
shortened, however little, if not more than a line in a mill
ion of ages, it is not infinite, and the progress cannot be
eternal. This infinite or eternal progression is, then, only
a lying dream.

At the bottom of this iVea of progress, which our mod
ern reformers prate about, is the foolish notion that man is
born an inchoate, an incipient God, and that his destiny is
to grow into or become the infinite God ; that he is to grow
or develop into the Almighty ; that, to be God, is his ulti
mate destiny ; and, as God is infinite, he is to be eternally
developing and realizing more and more of God, without
ever realizing him in his infinity. The bubble does not
burst and lose itself in the ocean, but by virtue of its bub-
bleosity it grows and absorbs more and more of the ocean
into itself.

I cannot understand this eternal absorbing process,
which, though always absorbing or assimilating, leaves
always the same quantity, physical or moral, to be absorbed
or assimilated. It is impossible to be satisfied with such a
destiny. To be always seeking and never finding, to be al
ways desiring, craving, and never filled, is not heaven, it is

A REBUFF. 143

hell, and the severest hell, in comparison with which the
pain of sense, or natural fire and brimstone were a solace.
Man is not moved to act by desire. His desire to attain
must become hope of attaining, before it can move him,
.and when you deprive him of that hope, you take from
him all courage, all energy, and all motive to act. Desire
to possess the beloved, may remain and torment the lover,
but it can never suffice to make him continue his pursuit
when all hope of success has been extinguished. I do not
.say love cannot survive hope, but I do say that love's efforts
cannot, and it is seldom that even love itself does.

The Christian is stimulated to constant activity, not by
•charity or love of God alone, but by hope : and the hope of
possessing God, of being filled witii his love, of reposing in
the arms of all-sufficing charity, stimulates onward from
grace to grace, and from one degree of perfection to an
other. Though he finds not yet perfect repose, though he
is not yet filled, though he has not yet attained, yet he is
upheld, buoyed up and onward by the sure promise, the
steadfast hope of attaining, of at last finding repose, rest
in the bosom of his love and his God. He may feel the
clogs of flesh, he may feel that he is absent from his love,
and sigh to reach his home and embrace the spouse of his
soul, but he grows not weary, faints not, and knows noth
ing of the ennui, that listlessness of spirit, that disgust of
life, and disrelish for every pursuit, which he feels who has
no object, no hope, and sees not even in the most distant
future any chance of finding that fulness and repose which
his soul never ceases in this life to crave. In losing sight
of God as final cause, in losing the hope of possessing God
as the supreme good, in substituting endless progression for
endless beatitude, full and complete, I had lost all stimu
lus to exertion, all motive to exert myself for any thing.

Why should I act ? What had I to gain ? Money I did
not want ; I had more than I could use. Fame I despised. It
was a mere word, born and dying in the very sound that
made it. Power, I had it. If I had more, it could procure
me nothing more than I already possessed. Pleasures? The
richest dishes and the most precious wines palled upon my
taste. There remained another kind of pleasure ; but we
can even grow weary of women, and loathe what the morbid
senses continue to crave. Still nothing else remained for me.
Yet I had outlived love in any virtuous or innocent sense of
the word, and early training, and some remains of self-re-

THE SPIRIT-RAPPEE.

spect, made any other love far more of a torment than a
pleasure.

The simple truth was, that I could reconcile myself nei
ther to the philosophy of the Portico nor the philosophy of
the Garden, and was alike disgusted with the Cynics and the
Academicians. I was a man, and could not live on air, or
feed on garbage ; I had a soul, and could not satisfy it by living
for the body alone, and having no God, no heaven, no hope
of beatitude, and no fear of hell, I saw nothing to seek, noth
ing to gain,f and I could only exclaim, Vanitas vanitatum, et
omnia vanitas. I could not say, with young and thought
less sinners, in the heyday of their youth, and the full flow
of their animal spirits,—'4 Come on, therefore, and let us en
joy the good things that are present, let us use the creatures
as in youth. Let us fill ourselves with costly wine and oint
ments, and let not the flower of the spring pass by us. Let
us crown ourselves with roses before they be withered, and
let no meadow escape our riot. Let none of us go without
his part in voluptuousness, and let us leave token of our
joy in every place, for this is our portion and our lot." For
of all vanities I had learned that this was the most empty.
Even the devil himself is said to loathe the sensualist, and to
find his stench intolerable. Still Priscilla — I had lost her
perhaps. That touched my pride. We often grieve that
lost, which possessed, was not valued.

CHAPTER XVII. - A GLEAM OF HOPE.

I HAD not seen Priscilla for over a year, and had struggled
hard against the madness that possessed me. Finding my
self out of work, having completed what I had undertaken,

. ,

and this time found her alone. She received me with ease
grace, and cordiality.

There are those who believe that a woman who has once
lost even the modesty and chastity of thought, can never re
gain them, and become a truly modest and'pure-rninded wo
man. They are greatly mistaken. The Magdalen had fallen
lower than that, and yet those were pure tears with which
she washed our Lord's feet, and but one purer heart than
hers beat in the breasts of those holy women who stood near
the cross, and heard the loud cry of the God-man, as he

A GLEAM OF HOPE.

bowed his head and consummated the world's redemption.
The Fountain, which that rude soldier opened with his spear
that day, suffices to cleanse from the deepest filth, to wash
away the foulest stains, and to make clean and fragrant the
most polluted soul. O ye fallen ones, whether women or
men, bathe in that fountain ! and if your sins be as scarlet,
they shall be as white as snow, and if they be red as crimson,
they shall be white as wool.

I had never seen Priscilla more beautiful. The bloom had
returned to her cheek ; her form had regained its roundness,
and her complexion its richness. Her eyes were serene and
tranquil, and her countenance wore a sweet, pure, and peace
ful expression. She had no need to fear me at that moment,
for I stood, not repelled, but awed, and felt myself in the
presence of virtue, not haughty, austere, and repellant, but
lovely, chaste, and affectionate ; natural, easy, and wholly
unconscious of itself.

" I am glad to see you, Doctor," said she, with a sweet smile.
" Sit down. I have been hoping that you would call, but I
was afraid that you had entirely deserted us."

" You are changed, Priscilla, since I last saw you ; arid I
should think my presence would now be even more disagree
able than then."

" Not at all. I was never more glad to see you in my life,,
and I never met you with kinder or more pleasant feel
ings."

I did not understand this speech, and began to draw, in
my own mind, certain very foolish conclusions.

" Yes," she resumed, " I wished to see you, and to see you
as I now do, alone. It is of no use referring to what we-
were for so many years to each other ; but I wanted to tell
rou that I did you no little wrong. You were not innocent*
ut I was the most guilty. We were both miserable ; and
you, you, my dear friend, are unhappy still."

" I make no complaint. Nobody has heard me whine or
whimper over my own lot. If I have suffered, I have done
so in silence."

" That may be. But you have not forgotten our sojourn
at Borne in the winter of 1848-9 ? "

" Forgotten it ? no, and shall not, as long as I live."

" Do you remember an old Franciscan monk, that my hus
band concealed in our house for some weeks ? "

"Ido."

" lie was an old man, nearly fourscore. His head was al-

VOL. IX-10.

I

THE SPIRIT-KAPPER.

most perfectly bald, only a few gray liairs escaped from be-
iieath his calotte, and partially shaded his temples ; his form,
which had been tall and manly, was now bent with years,
labors, and mortifications ; but his feelings seemed as fresh
and playful as those of a child ; and the expression of his face
was calm, sweet, and affectionate. It was a peculiar expres
sion, not often met with, but like that which, you may re
member, we one day remarked in the face of Pius IX. It
was an expression of exceeding peace and celestial love, of
a pure and holy soul shining through a pure and chaste body.
The expression is indescribable, but once seen, can never be
forgotten, and seems to be that which Italian painters seek
to give to their saints, especially to the Madonna.

" This venerable old man had, as you may recollect, been
denounced, by the Circulo del Populo, as an obscurantist, an
enemy to the republic, and an adherent to the pontifical au
thority. It was intended to include him in the number of
priests and religious massacred at San Callisto. My husband
had formed an acquaintance with him, and, having learned
his danger, smuggled him into our house, where it was pre
sumed nobody would think of looking for a proscribed
priest."

u I remember him ; I did not at all like him, and, had I
cared much about him, would have betrayed him to the
Club ; for I had the wish of Yoltaire in my heart, that ' the last
king might be strangled with the guts of the last priest.
But, as he seemed old and harmless, and generally kept out
of my way, I let him pass."

a He was a quiet, inoffensive man, and I own I was not
sorry that he should escape the cruel death to which philan
thropists and sworn friends of liberty doomed so many of
his brethren. I was not cruel by nature, and my soul re
coiled from the part I was often compelled to take. I thought
it was hardly consistent for us, who advocated unbounded
freedom of thought and action, to send the dagger to the
heart, or coolly sever the carotid artery in the neck of those
who chose to think and act differently from us ; but I was
held then by a force I could not resist."

" You mean, Priscilla, now to reproach me."

" !No, my friend, no ; I reproach only myself. Had I not
originally consented, no power could have held me in that
terrible thraldom. The agents you employed have no such
power over us against our will ; though, when we have once
assented to their dominion, it is not always in our own power

A GLEAM OF HOPE. 14:7

alone to reassert our liberty. My husband grew very fond
of the venerable old man, and they spent hours, and even
days, together. What was the subject of their conversation,
I knew not, and did not inquire.

" You returned to Paris, to prevent, if possible, the French
from interfering to suppress the Roman Republic, by organ
izing a new insurrection of the Subterraneans, and by remind
ing the prince-president of his previous republican and social
istic prof essions, and making it evident to him that the reestab-
lishment of the pope would be fatal to the supremacy of the
state, whether republican or imperial. During your absence
you left me tranquil, and I began, for the first time since
my marriage, to enjoy the sweets and tranquillity of domes
tic life. The good Franciscan would sometimes spend an
evening with me and my husband. He was of a childlike
simplicity, and of most winning manners, but a man of a
cultivated mind, extensive information, and various and pro
found erudition. He discoursed much on the old Roman
Republic and Empire, on the grasping ambition and tyranny
of the government, the hollo wness of the Roman virtues
and the old Roman people, the cruel and impure nature of
their religion, and the looseness and profligacy of their
manners.

" He sketched then the introduction of Christianity, showed
what enemies it had to encounter, why it was opposed, the
change it introduced into the moral and social life of the
people, its triumphs over paganism, its conversion and civiliza
tion of the northern barbarians, and the chastity, peace, and
happiness it had introduced into the cottage of the peasant,
the castle of the noble, and even the palace of the monarch.
His views seemed clear and precise, and his mind seemed
to be enlightened, and singularly free from the cant of his
profession, and from that credulity, ignorance, and supersti
tion which you and I had been accustomed to associate with
the name of monk. To every question I asked, he had a
clear and intelligent answer ; and he was always able to give
a reason, and what appeared a good reason, for whatever
judgment he hazarded. He was evidently a man of an order
of intellect, ideas, and culture entirely different from any that
had fallen under my observation ; and I must own that when
I listened to him, I was charmed. I seemed to be under the
gentle but superior influence of a good spirit. I felt calm
and tranquil, and I wished that I too might believe, be pure,
holy, a Christian like him.

THE SPIEIT-RAPPEE.

" Weeks passed on. At length we had a chance to send
him in safety to Portici, where the Holy Father then held
his court. The evening before he was to leave us, he came
into the sitting-room, and sat down by me. ' My dear lady,'
said ^ he, ' I leave you to-morrow, and I shall not see you after
to-night. You must permit me to thank you for your kind
ness to the poor old proscribed monk, and your evident desire
to procure him comfort ; all so much the more commendable
in you, since you are a stranger, and not of my religion. I
give you my thanks and my blessing ; they are all I have to
give ; and I shall not cease to pray the good God. who is no
respecter of persons, to reward you for your goodness, and
to grant you his grace.

" ' But, my dear lady, I am a priest ; I am also an old man,
and have not many days to tarry here. Let me speak to you
in all sincerity and freedom.'

" ' Do so, my father,' said I, as my eyes filled with tears.

" ' You are still young and beautiful,' said he ; /you have
naturally a kind and warm heart, an enthusiastic disposition,
and a sincere love of truth and justice. But, my dear child,
your education has been sadly neglected, and you have been
trained to walk in a path that leadeth where you would not go:
You have fallen among evil counsellors and evil doers, and you
are entangled in the meshes of the adversary of souls. This
cause, to which you give your heart, soul, and body, is not
what you think it. You sought liberty, you have found
slavery ; you sought love, and you have found only hatred ;
you sought virtue, disinterestedness, fidelity, — you have
found only vice, selfishness, and treachery ; you sought peace
and social regeneration, — you have found only strife, war,
murder, assassination, confusion, anarchy, and oppression.
For yourself personally, the only peaceful days you have
known for years have been during the last few weeks ; and
your present peace is disturbed by a mysterious dread, that I
need not name or explain to you.

" * Ask yourself, my child, and answer to yourself, honestly,
if you have not been deceived, and been acting under a fatal
delusion. Ask yourself if it was not a terrible mistake you
committed, when you took Satan for the principle of good,
and the Christian's God for the principle of evil.'

" i But, padre mio, what shall I do.? I have a suspicion
that what you say is true. I have been a proud, vain, rash,
wicked woman. But what shall I do ? I am bound in,
chains; I am damned.'

A GLF.AM OK Ilnl'K. 14:9

" l Damned, not yet, my child. As long as there is life,
there is hope. Those chains must bu broken.'

'• ' But they are too strong for me.'

" ' True, true, my child, but not too strong for the Lion
of the tribe of Judah. You must be assisted—

" At that moment the door was burst open ; a gang of
ruffians rushed in, and fell upon the aged monk. The old
man gave me one look, made rapidly the sign of the cross
over my head, as I had dropped on my knees to implore them
not to harm him. I might as well have pleaded to my mar
ble jambs. They threw him down. He rose upon his
knees, folded his hands across his breast, and with a bright,
celestial expression, exclaimed, *O God, pardon them, and lay
not this sin to their charge, for they know not what they do,'
— when the leader of the gang plunged a dagger to his heart.
His blood flowed out into my face, and over rny dress. After
a minute, they took up the body, and removed it and them
selves from my house. Though protected, to some extent,
by our American character, we did not think it prudent to
remain longer in Rome, under the Republic ; and the next
day we started for Paris, where we rejoined you."

" But you never told me of the fate of that old monk be
fore."

" True, why should I ? I could not, before we had sep
arated, have spoken of him to you without arousing your
indignation, and inducing you to send me again on some of
those terrible secret missions on which you had so often sent
me, and which I so abhorred. But lean speak calmly now,
and without fear ; and let me beg you to ask yourself the
question the old monk urged me to ask myself. Truth is
truth, let it be spoken by whom it may ; and there is no rea
son why we should not follow good advice, because given by
a monk, even if monks have been all our lifetime the object
of our wrath, or of our derision."

" Priscilla, I have asked myself that question ; but it is of
no use. I have pledged myself, body and soul, and sworn
that, come what might, I would never repent."

" But that oath was unlawful, and cannot bind. He who
has your pledge is a deceiver, had no right to ask it, has no
right to hold it."

" But I cannot free myself from these chains of death and
liell which bind me."

" Such as you have been, such as I fear you are, I am told
seldom find mercy ; but the deliverance is not impossible.
I, worse than you, have found it."

150

THE SPIRIT-KAPPER.

" That is not so certain. Yon are free, only because I, in
a sudden fit of despair, freed you. But I have but to will,
and you are as completely in my power as ever."

" That I doubt. Except when you called me to emanci
pate me, you have exerted no power over me, since the good
old priest was received into our house in Rome."

" That is owing to my forbearance."

" Will you swear that ? Will you swear that, within
twenty-four hours after you had declared me free, you did
not use all your art to enthrall me again ? Did you not call
again and again, within a month, at my house, for that very
purpose ? "

" But you avoided me, and I could not so much as touch
the hem of your robe."

" Very true, for I feared you, and I dare not defy you
even now ; but I feel very certain that, under the protection
of a name at which even devils must bow, I am safe from all
your arts."

As she said that I rose, walked once or twice across the
room, came up before her, took her hand unresistingly, and
placed my hand on her head. I trembled. I was struck
dumb, for I perceived at once that I had no power there ;
and. though I evoked them, no spirits came to my aid.
But before I had let go her hand, her husband came into
the room, saw us, feared what I might do, drew his dagger,
and before Priscilla could stop him, or offer a word of "ex
planation, aimed a blow at my heart. Priscilla attempted to
avert it, and so far succeeded, as to change somewhat its
direction. It penetrated, however, the chest, reached the
lungs, and inflicted a wound which, though it is apparently
healed, and I seem to myself to be suffering only from pul
monary consumption, which wastes me away slowly but
surely, my surgeon tells me will yet prove the occasion of
my death.

The moment James, a man of peace, and not at all given
to striking, had struck the blow, he was filled with terror
at what he had done. I assured him, for I retained my
presence of mind, which I never yet lost in any case in my
life, that so far as I was concerned, he need not blame him
self, for I deserved the blow, and had long foreseen that
sooner or later his hand must deal it ; but, had he delayed
a moment, he would have found it unnecessary, that his
wife was safe from my annoyances, and proof against any
art I possessed. Priscilla, as soon as she recovered from her

RELIGIOUS

151

fright, rather than swoon, told him as much ; and we both
did all in our power to reassure and console him. But the
mutter must not be bruited abroad, and he must conceal it
tor his and Priscilla's sake. It was concluded that I must
iv main for the present in their house. James did what he
could to stanch my wound, aided me to remove to another
room, and sent immediately for a surgeon whom we both
knew and could trust. For several weeks I lay at their
house, nursed with great care and tenderness, till I was able
to be removed to my own house. It was rumored that I
had been stabbed in the street, but such things not being
rare in our cities,- it excited very little remark ; and suspi
cion, though it fell on the secret societies known to exist, fell
upon no individual in particular, and no pains was taken
to ferret out the supposed assassin. The fact was noted in
the journals, and was instantly forgotten.

CHAPTER XVm. - RELIGIOUS MONOMANIA.

I HAD no sooner been removed to my own house, than
my old acquaintances and friends came to see me. Mr.
Cotton, the stern but well-meaning old Puritan, who had
infinitely more mind and heart than Young America, that
has learned to laugh at him, had indeed died during my
absence abroad. Mr. Winslow and the others whom I have
already introduced, remained. Poor Jack had recovered,
not his former gayety, but his health and tranquillity, and
was entirely freed from the vision which had haunted him,
and which I have no reason to believe was any thing more
than a simple hallucination, occasioned by a powerful shock
to his nerves, producing a diseased state of the imagination.
He had returned to Boston, given up mesmerism, confined
himself to the law, and had prospered in his profession.
When he heard of the accident which had befallen me, he
came immediately to see me, and to render me such assist
ance as his warm heart prompted. He is still my chief
nurse, and declares that he will not leave me as long as my
life lasts. I have remembered him in my will, and be
queathed him the bulk of my estate, though he knows it
not,— a poor compensation for the blight I brought upon
his early hopes.

Mr. Merton, returning to the city about the time ot my
being wounded, lost no time, after my removal to my own
house, in renewing our former acquaintance. Mr. Wins-

152 THE SPIRIT-RAPPEE.

low, and Mr. Sowerby, and Leila and her admirer, who had
become husband and wife, and a sober arid sensible couple,
were frequently in the sick man's room. Nobody deserted
me ; and never in my life have I had occasion to complain
of ingratitude, or the loss of a friend. The world is bad
enough, but after all not so bad as sometimes represented.
I have always been treated infinitely better than my deserts ;
and I have found good sense, warm hearts, and noble vir
tues, where least I expected them. I have reproaches onlv
for myselt. I have done a world of wrong, and no good";
and yet I have found myself, from my childhood, surround
ed by generous and disinterested affection. People, speak
ing generally, are far better individually than they are
collectively ; and many private virtues may be found, even
in bands of revolutionists, robbers, and assassins, — virtues
which do not rise above the natural order indeed, and have
no promise of reward in heaven, but which nevertheless are
virtues. My observation has taught me to distrust the cen
sorious, those who rail in good set terms at all mankind or
womankind, although no man living was ever further than
I am from believing in the sinlessness of the race, or from
joining in the modern worship of woman, prompted too often
by an innate pruriency unconscious of itself.

As I became able to bear conversation, and to take part
in it occasionally, mesmerism and the spirit-manifestations
were a frequent topic of discourse. Jack steadily main
tained that it was all humbug. There were indeed strange
things, some phenomena which he could not explain, but
he set his face against the whole movement, had no belief
in it, and would have nothing to do with it. There was,
though he might be unable to detect it, some cheat or
trickery at the bottom..

Mr. Winslow held fast to his belief in the connection
between mesmerism and all the marvellous, prodigious, or
miraculous facts recorded in history. He accepted those
facts substantially as related, but did not accept their usual
explanation. The miracles of sacred history, and the mar
vellous facts of profane history, were to be explained on
natural principles, by the mesmeric agent, or by whatever
other name we might call it.

Mr. Merton argued that, if the phenomena usually called
satanic, obsession, possession, witchcraft, black magic, ghosts
or apparitions, clairvoyance and second sight, could be ex
plained without resort to the supernatural, the other class

RELIGIOUS MONOMANIA. 153

of facts, the miracles of sacred history, could be also ex
plained without the supposition of the special intervention
of divine power. He thought, if we could account for the
former without Satan, we could for the latter without the
supernatural intervention of God.

Mr. Sowerby held with Mr. Winslow as to the reality of
the phenomena, and their natural explanation, but thought
they should be divided into two classes, one good and the
other bad, as produced for a good or a bad purpose. When
produced in a good cause, for a good end, they might be
called divine ; when in a bad cause, for a bad purpose, they
might be called satanic or diabolical. The agent is in both
cases the same, and the difference is in the mind or will that
employs it.

Dr. Coming, my physician, who was a distinguished
manigraph, and had written a work, highly esteemed by the
profession, on Insanity, was quite ready to concede the
phenomena called spiritual, or rather demoniacal, and
thought we were bound to do so, or to give up all human
testimony. He also conceded the connection contended for
by mesmerists between mesmerism and so-called demonic
phenomena, — a connection, in his judgment, very evident,
and wholly undeniable ; but he contended, with the most
eminent manigraphs of France, and indeed with the
members of the profession generally, that the marvellous
phenomena recorded were those of mania, monomania,
theosophania, nymphomania, demonopathy, and all to be
explained pathologically. He included them all under the
general head of insanity, and regarded their variety only as
so many different sorts of madness. He had himself wit
nessed the greater part of them in his practice, and treated
them as symptoms of mania.

" That," said Mr. Merton, " would be very satisfactory, if
the limits of madness or insanity were well denned, and if
physicians could never mistake, and treat as insane one who
is only possessed or obsessed by the devil. To include the
marvellous facts of history under the head of insanity,
without having first established their pathological character,
and settled it that there is no generic or specific difference
between them and acknowledged pathological symptoms, is
not to explain them. How do you prove that a person,
otherwise in perfect health, with no disturbance of the
pulse, of the digestive, or any other organs to be detected,
who on all subjects speaks rationally, but who tells you that

THE SPmiT-RAPPEK.

a spirit has possession of him, speaks through his organs,
throws him down, and otherwise maltreats him, is insane ?
I do not say that such a man is not insane, but how do you
prove him insane ? "

" Why, he exhibits the symptoms of insanity, for none
x)ut an insane man would utter such nonsense."

" Perhaps so, and perhaps not so. He exhibits symptoms
of what you are pleased to call insanity ; but how do you
know that you have not called insanity what you ought ta
call by another name, possession, for instance ? "

" I do not believe in possession."

" Precisely, and therefore when you meet what is called
possession or obsession, you call it insanity. That is a con
venient way of reasoning, and not uncommon with learned
physicians and physicists ; but it is a begging of the question
not its solution. You reason from a foregone conclusion.
As you yourself and all the profession treat insanity as a dis
ease, as symptomatic of some lesion or alteration of the phys
ical system, or of the organs on which the manifestations of
the mind depend, I should suppose it necessary to establish the
fact of such lesion or alteration, before 'concluding the
presence of actual insanity."

" Insanity, in such case, would be found to be very rare."

:'Yery possibly, and perhaps it is much rarer than is
commonly supposed. It is not impossible that a large pro
portion of those you call insane, and treat as lunatics, are
as sound of body or mind as you or I. Where we find,
physically considered, all the symptoms of health, we can
not, from purely mental phenomena, infer disease. That
the vulgar have often regarded as under the influence of
Satan ^ persons who were merely epileptic, cataleptic, or in
sane, is no doubt very true ; but it is not impossible that
the learned and scientific have committed not unfrequently
a contrary mistake, and regarded as insane, cataleptics, or
epileptics, persons who were totally free from all patholog
ical symptoms. How will you, dear Doctor, explain by
insanity a case taken from a thousand similar ones, which I
chanced to be reading this morning, and which is well
attested. Allow me to relate it as given by Dr. Calmeil,
one of your own profession, a learned and highly esteemed
manigraph, who entertains the same views that you do.
Missionaries who now, says M. Calmeil,* cross the seas to

*De la Folie, T. 2, p. 417.

RELIGIOUS MONOMANIA. 155

si MM! the light of faith in the New World, are frequently
surprised to meet energumens among their neophytes,
whilst they acknowledge that it is seldom that the devil takes
possession of the faithful in the mother country. The letter
which I am about to report, addressed to Wiiislow, a cele
brated physician, in 1738, by a worthy missionary, proves
that the delirium of dernonopathy may everywhere become
the lot of feeble and timorous souls.

" I cannot refuse, at your earnest request," writes the mis
sionary Lecour. " to write you a detailed account of what took
place in the case of the Cochin-Chinese who was possessed,and
of whom I had the honor to speak to you. In May or June,
1733, being in the province of Cham, in the kingdom of
Cochin China, in the church of a burgh called Cheta, about
half a league distant from the capital of the province, there
was brought to me a young man from eighteen to nineteen
years of age, and who was a Christian. His parents told
me that he was possessed by a demon. A little incredulous,
I might say to my confusion, quite too much so, in conse
quence of my little experience at that time in such things,
of which I had never seen an example, although I had often
heard other Christians speak of them, I examined them to
ascertain if there were not simplicity or malice in their
statement. The substance of what was gathered from them
was, that the young man had made an unworthy commun
ion, and after that had disappeared from the village, had
retired to the mountains, and called himself only the traitor
Judas.

" On this statement, and after some difficulties," resumes
the missionary, " I went to the hospital where the young
man was detained, fully resolved to believe nothing, un
less I saw marks of something superhuman. I began by
questioning him in Latin, a language of which I knew lie
had not the least tincture. Extended as he was on the
ground, frothing at his mouth, and violently shaken, he rose
immediately on his seat, and answered me very distinctly,
Ego nescio loqui Latine. I was so astonished and fright
ened that I withdrew, with no courage to question him any
further. ....

" However, some days after, I recommenced with some
probationary commands, taking care to speak always in
Latin, of which the young man was ignorant. Among other
commands, I ordered the demon to throw him forthwith
upon the floor. I was instantly obeyed, but he was thrown

156 THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

down with so much violence, all his limbs being stretched
out and rigid as a crowbar, that the noise was rather that of
a falling beam than of a man. Wearied and exhausted, I
thought I would follow the example of the bishop of Ti-
lopolis on a similar occasion. In the exorcism, I commanded
the demon, in Latin, to bear him to the ceiling of the
church, feet up and head down. Forthwith his body be
came stiff, he was drawn into the church to a column, his
feet joined together, his back set against the column, and,
without the aid of his hands, he was run up to the ceiling
in a twinkling, as if drawn up by a pulley, without any act
or motion of his own, suspended with his feet glued to the
ceiling, and his head hanging downwards. I made the
demon confess, as I intended to confound and humble him,
and to compel him to quit his hold, the falsity of the pagan
religion. I made him confess that he was a deceiver, and
at the same time compelled him to acknowledge the sanctity
of our religion. I held him suspended in the air, his feet
adhering to the ceiling and his head down, for more than
half an hour, but not having sufficient constancy, so much
was I frightened at what I saw, to continue him there for
a longer time, I ordered the demon to place him at my feet
without harming him. He forthwith cast him down, as a
bundle of dirty linen, but without his receiving the least
injury. From that day the young man, though not entirely
delivered, was much relieved, and his vexations daily dimin
ished, especially when I was in the house, and after about
five months he was wholly released, and is now perhaps the
best Christian in Cochin China."

" Pass over the effect of the exorcism, if you please,"
resumed Mr Merton, " and tell me what you think, Doctor,
of the facts in this case, which Dr. Calmeil concedes, and
which, if he did not, it would not amount to any thing, for
this is only one case out of a thousand."

" I will say," replied the Doctor. " with M. Calmeil, that
I am very much obliged to the good missionary, for not
withholding his account, for he has described, without
knowing it, the phenomena of religious monomania."

" It strikes me," replied Mr. Merton, " that Dr. Corning
has not well examined the case. That some of the phe
nomena may be regarded as symptoms of insanity, I do not
question, but if I understand insanity, it is a derangement,
an access of what properly belongs to one in his normal
state, but not the accession of something preternatural. It

KKLIGIOUS MONOMANIA. 157

may, in some respects, sharpen the senses, revive the mem
ory, and render the faculties, or at least some of them,
morbidly active ; but I have never understood that it could
unable a man to understand and speak a language which he
had never learned, and of which, in the full possession of
all his faculties, he knew not a word. I can easily under
stand that in delirium a man may fancy he is possessed, and
act on the conviction that he is, but I do not understand
how delirium alone can enable a man, however agile, to
climb to the ceiling of a church, his back against a column,
with his feet fastened together, and without using his hands
or arms, and to remain by the simple application of his feet
to the ceiling for one half an hour with his head down,
carrying on all the time a close controversy in this very
inconvenient position, and finally dropping upon the pave
ment without the least injury. Such a delirium would, to
say the least, be very extraordinary, and 1 suspect the doc
tor has never found a similar delirium amongst any of his
numerous patients who were unquestionably insane. I will
venture to say that however striking the delirium, the thing
is absolutely impossible without superhuman aid."

" Part of it is hallucination," said the doctor.

" Whose hallucination ? The young man's, or the mission
ary's?" asked Mr. Merton. "JSTot the missionary's, for
there is no pretence that he was insane ; and not the young
man's, because the question turns not on what he saw, or
fancied, or imagined, but on what another person, the mis
sionary, saw."

" Probably the facts are much exaggerated," replied Dr.
Corning. " The missionary confesses that he was greatly
frightened, and being so, he may, without impeachment of
his honesty, have failed to be strictly accurate as to the
details."

" Then you question the relation. That alters the case.
Let us take, then, the case, also well attested, of the nuns
of Uvertet, which, about 1550, caused for a long time so
much astonishment in Brandenburg, Holland, Italy, and
especially in Germany. The nuns were at first awakened
and startled by plaintive moan ings. . . . Sometimes
they were dragged from their beds, and along the floor, as
if drawn by their legs. . . . Their arms and lower ex
tremities were twisted in every direction. . . . Some
times they bounded in the air and fell with violence upon
the ground. . . . In moments in which they appeared

158 THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

to enjoy a perfect calm, they would suddenly fall backwards
and be deprived of speech. . . . Some "of them, on the
contrary, would amuse themselves in climbing to the tops
of trees, when they would descend, their feet in the air and
their heads down. These attacks began to lose their vio
lence after^ a duration of three years. A very singular
madness this, which, as the Dictionnaire des Sciences Med
icates says, * extended over all the convents of women in
Germany, particularly in Saxony and Brandenburg, and
gained even Holland,' and it might have added, also, Italy.
' All the miracles,' it continues, < of the Convulsionaries, or
of animal magnetism, were familiar to these nonnains, who
were regarded as possessed. They all foretold future events,
leaped and capered, ran up the sides of walls, spoke foreign
languages, &c.' You may read the fourteen well authenti
cated cases^ recorded by Cotton Mather in his Magnolia,
and you will find that all these, and similar phenomena,
were exhibited by the bewitched or possessed in Massachu
setts near the close of the seventeenth century, and known
under the name of ' Salem witchcraft,' though only a portion
of them occurred in that famous town. Do you include all
these under the head of insanity ? "

^ "Cotton Mather was a pedant, vain, arrogant, and am
bitious of power, and I did not expect to hear him cited as
an authority," replied the doctor, in evident vexation.

"Dr. Mather," Mr. Merton replied, "was one of the
most learned and distinguished men in ]STew England in his
time, and, though I am of another parish, I respect his
memory. I do not cite his opinions ; I merely cite him as
the recorder of facts which either he himself had witnessed
with his own eyes, or which had been confessed or proved
before the courts of the colony, and thus far at least his
authority is sufficient. But I will ask you to explain on
your hypothesis the phenomena exhibited by the Ursuline
Kuns of Lou dun, France, in the seventeenth century, and
the authenticity of which both Bertrand and Calrneil, as
well as others, admit were triumphantly vindicated."

"I know the case to which you refer," answered Dr.
Corning. " It is the case of a certain number of nuns who
took it into their heads that they were bewitched by one
Urbain Grandier,' whom they had refused to accept as their
director, — a man of a scandalous life, a great criminal, who
deserved to be executed as he was, if not for sorcery, at
least for his crimes. I see nothing in this case but the usual
symptoms of demonopathy, or religious monomania."

RELIGIOUS MONOMANIA. 159

"The physicians of the time thought differently, and
-there were then and there physicians of great eminence who
were consulted, and required to make to the authorities
twenty-five or thirty elaborate reports on the case. But let
us recall some of the facts.

" Shortly after Grandier, a bad priest, was refused by
these ladies as their director, he passed by the convent, and
threw a bouquet of flowers over the wall, which was taken
up and smelt of by several of the nuns. From that
moment the disorder commenced. Up to that moment
ail these ladies were in the enjoyment of the most perfect
health, and strictly correct in their deportment. They were
all connected with families of distinction and of high birth,
and had been carefully brought up, and yielded to none in
their education, their intelligence, their piety, their virtues,
.and their accomplishments.

" After some weeks of silence, in which they had sought
•relief from their vexations by religious exercises, prayers,
fasts, and macerations, without avail, recourse was had to
exorcism. The phenomena then assumed gigantic propor
tions. One religious, lying stretched out on ner belly, and
her arms twisted over her back, defied the priest who pur
sued her with the Holy Sacrament; another doubled over
backwards, contrived to walk with the nape of her neck
.resting on her heels ; another still, shook her head in the
most singular and violent manner. The exorcist says he
had frequently seen them bent over backwards, with the
,nape of their neck resting on their heels, walk with sur
prising swiftness. He saw one of them, rising from that
posture, strike rapidly her shoulders and breast with her
head. They cried out as the bowlings of the damned, as
enraged wolves, as terrible beasts, with a force that exceeds
the power of imagination. Their tongues hung out black,
swollen, dry, and hard, and became soft and natural the
moment they were drawn back into the mouth.

" During the intervals of repose, the afflicted ladies
sought to return to their religious exercises, to resume their
industry and the deportment proper to their rank and their
state. But on the arrival of the exorcist nothing was any
longer heard but blasphemies and imprecations. Then the
nuns would rise, pass their feet over their heads, throw
their legs apart, with entire forgetful ness of modesty.
Then came what Dr. Calmeil calls hallucinations, which
made them attribute their state to the presence and obses-

160

THE SPIRIT -RAPPER.

sion of evil spirits. The abbess, Madame Belfiel, while re
plying to the questions of the exorcist, heard a living being
speaking in her own body, as it were a foreign voice eman
ating from her pharynx. They all heard a voice distinctly
articulated, proceeding from within them, stating that evil
angels had taken possession of their person, and indicating
the names, the number, and the residences of the demons.

" In the month of August, 1635, Gaston, Duke of Or
leans, brother of Louis XIII., wishing to judge for himself
of the state of the Ursulines, went to'Loudun, and was pres
ent at several sessions of the exorcists. The superioress at
first worshipped the Holy Sacrament, giving all the signs
of a violent despair. The Abbe Surin, the exorcist, re
peated the command he had given her, and forthwith her
body was thrown into convulsions, running out a tongue
horribly deformed, black, and granulated as morocco, and
without being pressed at all by the teeth. Among other
postures they remarked an extension of the legs, so great
that there were seven feet from one foot to the other.
The superioress remained in this position a very long time,
with strange trembling, touching the ground only with her
belly. Having risen from this position, the demon was com
manded again to approach the Holy Sacrament, when she
became more furious than ever, biting her arms, &c. Then,
after a little time, the agitation ceased, and she returned to
herself, with her pulse as tranquil as if nothing extraordi
nary had happened.

" The Abbe Surin himself, while he was speaking to the
duke, and about to make the exorcism, was attacked and twice
thrown upon his back, and when he had risen and proceeded
anew to the combat, Pere Tranquille demanded of the sup
posed demon wherefore he had dared attack Pere Surin. He
answered with the organs of the latter and as if addressing
him : < I have done so to avenge myself on you.' Was the
Abbe Surin insane ? or did he simulate delirium ?

;< The superioress, at the end of the exorcism, executed an
order^which the duke had just communicated secretly to the
exorcist. In a hundred instances it appeared that the ener-
gumens read the thoughts of the priest charged with the
exorcism. They answered in whatever language they were
addressed, in Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, and Turkish.
They even answered M. de Launay de Eazelly in the dia
lects of several tribes of American savages, very pertinently,
and revealed to him things that had passed in America!

MESMERISM INSUFFICIENT. 101

Urbain Grandier, when commanded by his bishop to take
the stole and exorcise the mother superior, who lie said
knew Latin, refused, although challenged to do it, to
question her in Greek, and remained quite confused. Also,
the mother superior remained for some considerable time
suspended in the air, at an elevation of about two feet above
the ground. In about three months of exorcism the trouble
ceased, and the Ursulines were restored, and resumed in
peace their pious exercises and their usual labors."

"I see no reason to change my opinion," remarked the
doctor, at the conclusion of this recital. "It was a case of
monomania, if the facts were as stated."

"The facts," replied Mr. Merton, "are unquestionable.
They have all the authenticity that facts can have, and there
is not the least ground for suspecting the good faith of the
parties. They were all in perfect health, with no symptoms
of any disease about them. Now, as insanity, of whatever
variety, cannot render a man more than human, I demand,
if these facts can all be brought within the humanly pos
sible? Does insanity enable one to assume such difficult
postures as are described ? Does it enable one to bend over
backwards and walk rapidly with the nape of the neck rest
ing on his heels; to have the extraordinary extension of
legs mentioned ; to read the thoughts of others not ex
pressed ; to tell what is passing fifteen hundred leagues off ;
to understand and speak languages never learned or before
heard ; and to remain for some time suspended unsupported
in the air? And, above all, is insanity or madness cured by
exorcisms ? No, no, Doctor. The facts in the case, that is,
if you take not one or two, but all of them, are certainly
inexplicable without the presence of a superhuman power.*'

The doctor was not at all pleased with this conclusion,
which he would by no means admit. He said the conver
sation, if continued, might injure his patient, and giving me
a few directions, took his hat and cane and departed, ap
parently in a^very unpleasant humor, and muttering some
thing about superstition, Salem witchcraft, and the absurditv
of educated men in the nineteeth century believing in sucli
nonsense.

CHAPTER XIX. MESMERISM INSUFFICIENT.

INSANITY explains abnormal, but not superhuman phenom
ena. It is a disease of the body, not of the mind itself.
The mind, being a simple spiritual or immaterial substance,

VOL. IX— 11.

162 THE SPIKIT-EAPPEB.

is^ not^ susceptible of physical derangement, and mental
alienation proceeds from the lesion or alteration of the bod
ily organs or conditions on which the mind is dependent in
its manifestations. It is cured, when curable, by medical,
not by purely spiritual treatment ; by physic and good regi
men, not by exorcisms.

A few days after the conversation I have detailed, my
friends being again present, the subject was resumed. Dr.
Corning sustained his hypothesis triumphantly by selecting
such facts in the cases brought forward as it would explain,
and by denying all the rest, — a very convenient and com
mon practice of theorizers, — even out of the medical pro
fession.

Mr. Sowerby, who had made a fortune by mesmerism
and spirit-rapping, thought that only a monomaniac would
attempt to explain the mysterious phenomena in question by
insanity. There was in the cases not a symptom of mania,
and the ^ persons affected, in their moments of repose, and
even while the affection lasted, were in the normal exercise
of their faculties, and indicated no signs of mental alienation,
answering always, when answering at all, pertinently, never
at^ random, consecutively, never incoherently, as is the case
with the insane. He explained them, not by mental alien
ation, but by the accumulation or increased activity of a great
and all-pervading principle, perhaps the vital principle
itself, called the mesmeric or odic principle. He had him
self produced phenomena analogous to the most extraordi
nary recorded in history.

Mr. Dodson, an ex-Universalist minister, mentioned on a
former occasion, and who had just published a book on
spirit-manifestations, in refutation of Judge Edmonds's work
on the same subject, — a great and original thinker, and most
profound philosopher, — in his own estimation, — thought
that they were all to be explained by phreno-mesmerism, or
electro-psychology. He had an original theory, borrowed
in part from Gall and Spurzheim, who might, to a certain
extent, have borrowed it from the Timseus of Plato, that the
back part of the brain is the seat of involuntary motion,
instinct, and unconscious consciousness, that the anterior
part is the seat of voluntary motion and reflection. The
phenomena are artificially produced by psychologizing
the subject, or paralyzing the anterior lobe of the brain,
and leaving the posterior active, and, naturally, by a
person's sitting down quietly and suppressing 'the ac-

MESMERISM INSUFFICIENT. 163

tivity of the frontal brain, and giving free scope to the
occipital. There was no devil, and no odic agent in the
case. It was all explained by phreno-mesmerism, or by the
passivity of some, and the increased activity of other por
tions of the brain. But he was asked how this could enable
a person to foretell future events, to read the unexpressed
thoughts of others, to manifest extraordinary physical
strength, to understand and speak languages never learned,
to tell what is passing in distant places, and to remain sus
pended in the air in defiance of the laws of gravitation. He
said all these were psychological phenomena, or, as Dr.
Corning called them, hallucinations, nothing of the sort
really taking place.

Mr. Sowerby would not listen to him, and there was al
most a quarrel between the two ex-ministers. But their
rage being finally mollified by a witticism from Jack, the
conversation resumed its pacific character.

"You say, Mr. Sowerby," said Dr. Corning, k'that you
have produced phenomena analogous to those recorded in
history ? "

" Certainly," answered Mr. Sowerby.

" And by the mesmeric or odic principle ? "

« Undoubtedly."

" What is your evidence of the existence of such a prin
ciple ? or your proof that such a principle exists ? "

" The phenomena I produce or find produced by it."

" So, you take the phenomena to prove the principle, and
the principle to explain the phenomena," said Dr. Corning,
who could reason as well as anybody when it concerned the
refutation of a theory not his own.

" I am not disposed to question the existence of such a
rinciple," said Mr. Merton, " except in the form asserted
y Mr. Dodson, or when it is explained as the immediate
action of the mind or will of the mesmerizer upon the mes
merized. The fluid asserted by Mesmer, after the animal
magnetists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as
Wirdig, Fludd, Maxwell, Kircher, Yan Helmont, simply
revised by Baron Reichen bach with a great show of demon
stration, though denied by Deleuze and some other mes
merists, I have no good reason for doubting. I am willing
to concede the fact, that this fluid or agent exists and is em
ployed by Mr. Sowerby in his experiments. I am willing
to concede that there is a fluid or agent, not electricity,
not magnetism, but analogous to them, contended for by

i:

THE SPIRIT-KAPPEE.

Baron Keichenbach, that pervades a numerous class of
bodies, and may be artificially accumulated, or stimulated
to increased activity. But suppose this; suppose the
mesmerizer, wizard, sorcerer, witch, magician, actually
uses it, ^1 must still ask Mr. Sowerby to tell me how he
proves it to be the sole principle of the phenomena pro
duced ? That in most of the cases recorded, if not in all,
there are proper mesmeric or odic phenomena, naturally or
artificially produced, is, I think, undeniable. The flowers
used by Grandier, in the case of the nuns of Loudun, and the
fumigations and suiflations of the old magicians, all prove
the resort to magnetism. The rod and tub of Mesmer, and
the cumbrous machinery he used, though not indispensable,
every magnetizer knows are a useful mean. But as these
are only ^ subsidiary, how is it to be demonstrated that mes
merism itself is the sole efficient cause, not merely of some
of the accessory phenomena, but of them all ? In the phe
nomena of table-turning, so extensively witnessed, magnet
ism is not absolutely essential. They began, as all the
recent spirit-manifestations, in mesmerism, and at first the
table was mesmerized by a circle formed round it, joining
their hands arid resting them on it."

" The tables are turned," said Dr. Corning, "by the in vol
untary and unconscious muscular contraction of the hands
pressing upon it. This has been proved."

" So says a French Academician, and so also says Profes
sor Faraday, and tables, very likely, may be turned in some
such way ; but the table is frequently known to turn and
cut up its capers without any circle being formed, without
any person being near it, or visible hand touching it."

" That is true," said I, " for I have myself seen the most
extraordinary phenomena of table-turning when it was cer
tain no pressure, voluntary or involuntary, had been applied
to it by any person visible in the room. I have seen a table
turn in spite of the efforts of four strong men to hold it
still, rise up without any visible agency, fly over the heads
of the company, rush with violence from one end of the
room to the other, spin round like a top, balance itself on
one leg and then on another,— in fine, move along some
inches on the floor with the weight of a dozen men resting
on it, raise itself from the floor with them, and remain sus
pended a foot above it, for some minutes."

" There can be no doubt of that," said Mr. Merton. " In
Cochin China, we are told on good authority, that in the

MKSMFKI-M INSUFFICIENT. 165

time of the predecessors of Gia-long, it was a custom in the
province of Xu-Ngue", on certain solemnities, to invite the
most celebrated tutelar genii of the towns and villages of
the kingdom to games and a public trial of their strength.
A long and heavy bark, with eight benches of oars, was
placed'dry in the centre of a large hall, and the trial con
sisted in seeing which of these could move it farthest or
with the greatest ease. The judges and spectators took
their stand at a little distance, and saw, as they called the
names and titles of the genii placed on the bark, the huge
machine tip one side and then the other, and finally advance
and then recede. Some of the genii would push it forward
several feet, others only a few inches. But one who made
it come and go with the greatest facility, was the tutelar
genius of the maritime village of Ke-Chan, worshipped under
the name of Hon-Leo-Hanh, whose temple was in conse
quence thronged with pilgrims, and enriched with votive of
ferings."

" But conceding," continued Mr. Merton, " that mesmer
ism plays its part, I wish to know how Mr. Sowerby proves
that it alone suffices for the production of the phenomena ?
Is it not possible that another power steps in, and,
either alone or in concurrence, produces them ? May it not
be that mesmerism only facilitates or prepares the way for
the demonic action, produces the state or condition of the
human subject favorable to satanic invasion, and therefore
is to be regarded rather as the occasion than as the efficient
cause of the phenomena?"

" But I admit no devil ; I do not believe that there are
any demons," said Mr. Sowerby.

u I am aware of that," said Mr. Merton, " but I suppose
that, notwithstanding your disbelief, there may be a devil,
the prince of this world, as the Scriptures plainly teach. It
is possible that there are whole legions of devils, that the
air swarms with them, and that they have power to tempt
and to vex and harass those they would seduce from allegi
ance to the Most High. Their non-existence, at least their
non-intervention, must be proved before you are entitled to
conclude that your mesmeric or odic agent is the sole effi
cient cause of the phenomena."

" But that," said Mr. Dodson, " would overthrow all the
so-called inductive sciences."

" If so, I cannot help it," replied Mr. Merton. " The in
ductive philosophers have accumulated a muss of rich and

166 THE SPIKIT-RAPPEK.

valuable facts by their observations and experiments, for
which I am grateful to them ; but I set no great store by
the ever-changing theories which they imagine or invent to
explain ^ these facts. But let this pass. If Mr. Sowerby's-
mesmeric or odic force does not explain all the phenomena
in the case, I presume that he will concede that it is not the
sole principle of their production."

" Certainly," replied Mr. Sowerby.

" This odic agent, is it not a simple natural principle or
force, and without reason or intelligence ? "

" It is in itself unintelligent, I admit."

" But in the phenomena there are evident marks of intel
ligence, which proceed neither from the mesmerizer nor the
mesmerized. How do you explain that ? "

" The intelligence is the instinctive or involuntary intelli
gence proceeding from the back part of the brain," answered
Mr. Dodson.

" Back part of whose brain ? " asked Mr. Merton.

" The mesmerized or psychologized," replied that philo
sophic gentleman.

"But there cannot proceed, voluntarily or involuntarily,
instinctively or rationally, from the back brain or the front
brain, what is not in it, or an intelligence which its owner
does not possess. I do not now speak of the intelli
gence of either the operator or the one operated upon, but
of an intelligence of a third party. In the recorded and
undeniable phenomena to be explained there appears a third
party, which acts intelligently, and gives information un
known to either of the other parties. Take the case of the
spectre that appeared to Brutus before the battle of Phil-
ippi, or that which appeared to Julian on the eve of the
battle in which he fell mortally wounded, and hundreds of
similar cases."

:' They are mere hallucinations," interposed Dr. Corning.

" What proves the contrary," replied Mr. Merton, " is the
fact that they had accurate knowledge of future events,
which hallucinations have not. I place no stress on the
fact that a prediction was uttered, or seemingly uttered, for
that might be a hallucination ; the point to be attended to
is its literal fulfilment, showing a knowledge of the future
not possessed by the individual to whom the prediction was
made, nor, supposing mesmerism employed, by the mesmer
izer. Here was an intelligent third party.

" There is a very well authenticated case of a domestic in.

MESMERISM INSUFFICIENT.

the Germsin village of Kleische, who, returning one evening
from a place near by, where she had been sent of an er
rand, saw a little gray man, not larger than an infant, who,
because she would neither go with him nor answer him,
threatened her, and told her, as she readied the threshold of
her master's house, that she should be blind and dumb for
four days. The prediction was exactly fulfilled. Instances
enough are on record of persons afflicted, as they supposed,
by evil spirits, who have foretold the day and hour when
they would be delivered. In the case of the parsonage of
Cideville, which in 1849 made so much noise in France, the
agent that rapped was intelligent, for the raps gave distinct
and intelligent answers to the questions addressed to it, and
communicated facts unknown to the questioner and to all
the persons present.

" The ancient pagan oracles may be cited. They did not,
I concede, foretell what belongs exclusively to the super
natural providence of God, but they did foretell, clearly and
distinctly, events belonging to the natural order, beyond
the reach of ordinary human foresight. That many ol
the responses were false, that many of them were ambiguous
and suited to the event, let it turn out which way it
might, I by no means deny, but this cannot be said of aH of
them. Tlie contrary is evident from the great reputation
they enjoyed, and the long ages that they were consulted,
not by the vulgar only, but by kings, princes, nobles, and
philosophers, of the most learned and polite nations of gen
tile antiquity. Men are deceived, deluded, but never by
pure falsehood. It is the truth mingled with the falsehood
that deceives or misleads them."

" But the whole," said Jack, " was a system of jugglery,
cheaterv, and knavery, of the heathen priests."

" I do not defend,'* replied Mr. Merton. " the ancient pa
gan superstitions, nor the strict honesty, any more than the
immaculate purity, of the ancient priesthoods; but ^1 have
learned not to explain great effects by petty causes, like the
shallow-pated philosophers of the last century, and the his
torians of the school of Yoltaire, Hume, and Robertson, who
had no more comprehension of the real causes and concate
nation of events than a respectable goose. All^ heathenism
was founded on delusion, but not a delusion originating with,
and kept up by, the trickery and jugglery of priests, who
were often greater dupes than any others. Xo art, craft,
jugglery, or fraud, could be carried on for three thousand

168 THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

years in the bosom of cultivated nations without detection.
There were men in ancient heathendom as able and as will
ing to detect human imposture, as are our modern philoso
phers, who tell us so gravely in their elaborate works how
the priests contrived to work their miracles, and to keep the
people in subjection. The only sound philosophy proceeds
on the assumption of the general good faith of mankind, or
that they dupe and are duped, save in individual cases, with
out malice prepense.

" In these oracles there was a superhuman intelligence, and
an intelligence which was neither that of those who consult
ed nor that of those who gave the response, and it tells you
itself why the oracles after the birth of our Saviour and the
spread of Christianity, became mute.

Me puer Hebrseus, divos Deus ipse gubernans,
Cedere sede jubet, tristemque redire sub Orcum ;
Aris ergo dehinc tacitus abscedito nostris.

The Hebrew youth, himself God and master of the gods,
had reduced them to silence. Whence this third intelli
gence ? It cannot come from the odic agent, for that is un
intelligent."

" I do not agree with Mr. Sowerby," said Mr. Winslow.
" I believe all existence is intelligent, and all forces intelli
gent forces. God is infinite intelligence. He is the princi
ple and similitude of all things, and therefore every thing
must, like him, be intelligent."

" That was my view," said I, " or else I should have had
no hesitation in explaining a large portion of the mysterious
phenomena by the old notion of demonic invasion."

" Yet this view," replied Mr. Merton, " is decidedly un
tenable. God, in the sense of creator, is the principle of all
things, and in the sense that the ideas or types after which
he creates them are in his eternal reason, he is their simili
tude ; but it is not necessary to suppose that every creature
imitates him in all his attributes, which would suppose that
a cabbage has intellect and will, and a granite block is en
dowed with charity. The infinite intelligence of God sup
poses that all are created, ordered, and governed by, and ac
cording to, intelligence, but not that every creature is intel
ligent, or an intelligence. We might as well say that every
creature is infinite, for God is infinity, as well as intelligence.

" In the phenomena of demonopathy the patient is dis
tinctly conscious of an intelligence not his own. The mother

MK-MMJI-M WSUFFICIENT.

superior in the convent of Loudun was distinctly conscious
that tlie words spoken by her organs did not proceed fnun
licr intelligence, and that they were uttered, not by her will,
but against it. There is a thousand times more evidence of this
third intelligence, and that it is personal, than Baron Reichen-
bach has adduced in proof of his odic agent. The nuns of
Loudun knew what they did, and they struggled with all their
might against the power that afflicted them. They knew as
well that their words and actions proceeded from a foreign
personality, and not from themselves, as you know that my
words and actions do not proceed from you. They held in
the greatest horror the blasphemous words their organs were
made to utter, and the indecent postures they were made to
assume, and sought deliverance by prayer and pious practices.
That does not proceed from one's own will, which he holds
in horror, and struggles against." ^

" The will and intelligence was that of Grandier, who mes
merized them. He, by the mesmeric agent, had placed him
self in relation with them, and he moved them asamesmer-
izer does his somnambulist," said Mr. Sowerby.

" That Grandier persecuted them, and was in some sense
near them, is what they uniformly asserted, and what I am
not disposed to deny, but that it was he who possessed them,
and used their organs, is not to be supposed ; because one hu
man being cannot thus possess another, and because the in
telligence and will displayed surpassed his own. Grandier,
if he afflicted them, did it only by means of a foreign power,
foreign both to his personality and theirs, as even Mr. Sow
erby contends ; but this foreign power must have had, as is
evident from the recorded phenomena, intelligence and will
of its own."

After a long discussion on tliis point, which I had hardly
for a moment questioned, for I had proved it by my experi
ments with Priscilla, and with tables and inanimate objects,
time and again, though I saw not all that it involved, all ex
cept the doctor and Jack agreed that it must be so. The
doctor would not make an admission that required him to
modify what he had written and published on insanity, and
Jack would not hear a word on the subject. His experience
was explicable on the assumption of hallucination, and he
would not believe anybody had had a more marvellous ex
perience than his own.

" But," said Mr. Merton, " this wonder-working power, if
it have intelligence and will, must be a spirit, good or hud.

170 THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

and, also a superhuman spirit, since the phenomena are su
perhuman."

" So," said .Dr. Corning, "here we are in the middle of
the nineteenth century, in this age of science, after so much
has been said and written against the folly, ignorance, bar
barism, and superstition of past ages, back in the old super
stitious belief in demons, good and bad angels, ghosts and
hobgoblins, fairies and ghouls, witches and^witchcraft, sor
cery and magic. "Well, gentlemen, I have done. I am in
clined to believe there must be a devil, for if there were no
devil we could hardly have such poor success in bringing the
world to reason, and curing it of superstition."

"There may be more truth in what you say than you sus
pect," said Mr. Merton. " The devil is the father of igno
rance, credulity, and superstition, no less than of false science,
infidelity, and irreligion."

CHAPTER XX. SHEER DEVILTRY.

A FEW days after this last conversation, I was visited by
Judge Preston, whom I had slightly known in former years,
— a man of very respectable gifts and attainments, and of high
standing in the community. He had been a politician, law
yer, legislator, and was now a justice of the supreme court
of his native state. He was moral, upright, candid, and sin
cere, but like too many of his class, as well as of mine, had
grown up and lived without any fixed or determinate views
of religion. To say he had rejected Christianity, would be
hardly just ; but he had only vague notions""of what is Chris
tianity, and if he did not absolutely disbelieve a future state,
he had no firm belief in the immortality of the soul. He
rather wished than hoped to live again. He had not long
before lost his wife, whom he tenderly loved, and her death
had plunged him into an inconsolable grief. He wept, and
refused to be comforted. A friend drew him one evening
into a circle of spiritualists or spiritists, and after much per
suasion, induced him to seek through a medium an interview
with his deceased wife. What he saw and heard convinced
him, and he soon found that he was himself a medium — a
writing medium, I believe.

Judge Preston, in connection with a physician of some
eminence, and his friend Yon Schaick, formerly a member
of the United States Senate, a prominent politician a few
years since, and in religion a Swedenborgian, had just pub-

.-Ill 1 i: I>I YII.iUY. 171

lished a work, of large dimensions as well as pretensions, on
spiritualism and spirit-manifestations, very well written, and
not without interest to those who would investigate the sub
ject of demonic invasion.

lie said that he had called to see me in obedience to an
order given him by Benjamin Franklin, who assured him
that I could, if I chose, give him some information on the
subject of the spirit manifestations, for I had had more to do
Avith them than any man living.

I replied that I was very glad to see him ; but, as to the
conversation on spirit-manisiestations, I must decline taking
part in it myself. I was very weak, and I did not think I
could give him any information of importance. He could
probably learn much more from the shades of Franklin, Wil
liam Penn, or George Washington, than from me. George
Fox and Oliver Cromwell could tell him many things; Swe-
denborg and Joe Smith more yet. I advised him to call up
the Mormon prophet, who could probably give him more
light on the subject than any one who had gone to the spir
it-world since Mahomet. I should, however, be most happy
to hear him and my highly esteemed friend Mr. Merton,
who was present, converse on the subject.

" Mr. Merton," said the Judge, " I perceive is not a be
liever, and I am not fond of conversing with sceptics."

" Judge Preston," said Mr. Merton, " can hardly call me
a sceptic, and I think, were we to compare notes, he would
find me believing too much rather than too little."

u It may be so," said the Judge, " but I feel as if I was
in the presence of an unbeliever, and an enemy of the
spirits."

" We must not place too much reliance on our feelings ;
and the habit of carefully noting them, and taking them as
our guides, is not to be encouraged," answered Mr. Merton.
" Our feelings become warped, obscure our perceptions, and
mislead our judgment. I certainly do not deny the facts, or
the phenomena which you call spirit-manifestations, although
I may not, and probably do not, admit your explanation of
them, nor the doctrines concerning God, the universe, and
man and his destiny, which I find in your book."

" But do you believe that spirits from the other world do
really communicate with the living?"

"That there is in many of the phenomena, I say not in
all, which you call spirit-manifestations, a real spiritual in
vasion, I do not doubt ; but whether the spirits aiv the smils

172 THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

of the departed, or really demons or devils personating them,
is a question to which you do not seem to me, from your
book, to have paid sufficient attention. You are necroman
cers, diviners with the spirits of the dead. Necromancers
are almost as old as history. We find them alluded to in
Genesis. Moses forbids necromancy, or the evocation of
the dead, and commands that necromancers shall be put to
death. In all ancient and modern pagan nations, necroman
cy is found to be a very common species of divination. The
African magicans found at Cairo practise it even at the pres
ent time, as we find testified to by an English nobleman and
a French academician, though by a seeing medium, not, as
is the case with you, by rapping, talking, and writing me
diums. The famous Count di Cagliostro, or rather Giusep
pe Balsamo, at the close of the last century, professed to en
able persons of distinction to converse with the spirits of
eminent individuals, long since dead ; and evocation of the
dead has long been practised at Paris by students of the
University. You are real diviners, attempting, by means of
evoking the dead, to divine secrets, whether of the past or
the future, unknown to the living. You practise what the
world has always called divination, and that species of divi
nation called necromancy. Thus far, all is plain, certain, un
deniable, and therefore you do that which the Christian
world has always held to be unlawful, and a dealing with the
devils. This, however, is nothing to you, for you place the
authority of the spirits above that of Jesus Cnrist, and do
not hesitate to make Christianity give place to spiritism.
But what I wish you to tell me is, the evidence on which
you assert that the invading or communicating spirits are
really the souls of men and women who once lived in the
flesh?"

" They themselves expressly affirm it, and prove it by prov
ing that they have the knowledge of the earthly lives of the
persons they say they are, which we should expect them to
have in case they were those very persons."

" The question, you will perceive, my dear Judge, is one
of identity — a question with which, as a lawyer and a judge,
you must have often had occasion to deal. Is the evidence
you assign sufficient ? "

" On my professional honor and reputation, I say it is."
" Do you find the spirits always tell the truth ? "
" No. I have said in my book they frequently lie."
" Then the simple fact that a spirit says he is Franklin,

SHEER DEVILTRY. 173

Adams, Jefferson, Washington, George Fox, William Penn,
or Martin Luther, is not a sufficient proof that he is."

"I concede it. But I do not rely on his word alone. I exam
ine the spirit, and I conclude he is identically Franklin
only when I find that he lias that intimate acquaintance with
the earthly life of Franklin which I should expect to find in
case he really were Franklin."

" But that intimate acquaintance does not establish the
identity, unless you know beforehand that the spirit could
not have it, unless he were Franklin. The spirits, I find by
consulting your book, have told you the most secret things
of your own past life, and secrets which could by no human
means be known to any one but yourself. Yet the spirit
who knew these secrets was not yourself, but an intelligence
distinct from you. Now, if the spirit could show himself
thus intimately acquainted with your earthly life without
beinoj you, why might he not be intimately acquainted with
Franklin's earthly life without being Franklin ? "

" That is a point of view under which I have not consid
ered the question. But, nevertheless, I have subjected the
spirits to severe tests, and compelled them to confirm what
they say by extraordinary visible manifestations."

"But the difficulty Ijfind is, that there is nothing in those
manifestations that necessarily establishes the identity pre
tended ; for they do not necessarily establish the credibility
of the power exhibiting them, as you yourself allow, when
you acknowledge that the spirits are untruthful, and not un-
freqaently lie to you. Miracles accredit the miracle-worker,
establish his credibility, only when they are such as can be per
formed only by the finger of God. If they are such as can be
performed by a created power, without special divine inter
vention, or such as might be performed by a lying spirit,
they prove nothing as to the credibility of their author. A
messenger, or a person claiming to be a messenger from God,
performs a miracle which can be performed only by the
hand of God, and thus establishes his credibility, because he
proves by the miracle that God is with him, vouches for
what he says ; and God, we know, can neither deceive nor
be deceived, and therefore will not endorse a deceiver. But
prodigies, though superhuman, which do not transcend the
powers of created intelligence, do not accredit the agent who
performs them, certainly not when it is conceded tiie agent
can, and in many cases does, lie and deceive. I must think,
my dear Judge, that you have been hasty in concluding the

174 THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

identity pretended. All you can conclude, from the phe
nomena in the case, is, that there is present a superhuman
spirit, personating or pretending to be Bacon, Franklin,
Penn, Swedenborg, or some other well-known person who
has lived in the flesh, and is able to speak and act in the
character assumed."

" My attention, I grant, has not been so specially turned
to the question of identity of the spirit with the individual
personated, as it has been to establishing the reality of the
spiritual presence," said the judge.

" And you have been mainly intent on and carried away,
I presume, by the revelations you have received, or doc
trines on the greatest of all topics taught you by the spirits."

" That is true. I have been much more impressed and
confirmed by them than by the visible or physical manifes
tations which I have witnessed. The sublime doctrines and
pure morality which the spirits teach have chiefly won my
conviction."'

" But these, however much they may seem to you, are
very little to the Christian believer. In their most favorable
light, they do not approach in sublimity and purity, human
reason alone being judge, the Gospel of our Lord. There
is nothing new in your spiritual philosophy, and your mo
rality merely travesties a few principles of Christian morality.
You assert the immortality of the soul, never, in ancient or
modern times, denied by the heathen world ; but the pecu
liar Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, and
of future rewards and punishments, you do not recognize.
You hardly stand on a level with Cicero or Seneca. You
travesty the Christian doctrine of charity, or substitute for
it a watery philanthropy, or a sickly sentimentality. There
is in your system some subtilty, some cunning, some chi
canery, and ingenuity, but no deep philosophy, no lofty wis
dom, no broad, comprehensive principles, no robust, manly
virtue. The point on which you place the most importance
is that of infinite progression, which is an infinite absurdity ;
and inasmuch as it denies the doctrine of final causes, denies
God himself, and is, in the last analysis, pure atheism.

" That some true and good things are said by the spirits, I
do not deny. The devil can disguise himself and appear as an
angel of light. He is a great fool, no doubt,but not fool enough
to attempt to seduce men by evil as evil. He must present
falsehood in the guise of truth, and evil in the guise of good,
if he would do evil. It is not likely that he would begin by

SHEER DEVILTRY. 17~>

shocking the moral sense of the community, and we should
expect him to recognize and appeal to the moral sentiments
and dominant beliefs of the men of the age ; and this is all
that you can say of the teachings of the spirits. But, except
the confirmation of the fact taught by religion in all ages,
that there are spiritual beings, superior to man, who surround
us and may invade us, nothing they teach can be rjlicd on,
because their veracity is not established, and their unvera-
cious and lying character is conceded."

" There are lying spirits, I concede, but all are not," inter
posed the judge.

" Be that as it may, in what transcends your own knowl
edge, or is not verifiable by your own natural powers, you have
no means of distinguishing them, or of determining when
the communication is true, or when it is false. When a
spirit unfolds to you a system of the universe, — a system
which comes not within the range of scientific investigation,
— you cannot say that he is not deluding you, and giving
you fairy gold, which will turn out to be chips or vile stub
ble."

" You think us deluded, then ? "

" In what you see and hear, no ; in regard to what lies be
yond, yes. I believe you honest ; I believe you really receive
communications from invisible spirits; I believe you fabri
cate, simulate nothing. I give you full credit so far as re
gards the mysterious phenomena you relate ; I agree with
you in the conclusion that these phenomena are produced
by spirits ; but I regard as not proved the identity of these
spirits with the spirits who were once united as human souls
to bodies ; and what they teach of God, the universe, and hu
man destiny, I regard as a delusion — a satanic delusion, de
signed to seduce you from, or to prevent you from returning
to, your allegiance to God and his Christ."

" That this is the fact," said I, " I am quite sure. If any
proof of it were wanting, it might be found in the fact that
these spirit-manifestations are even by Judge Preston him
self identified with those which have always been opposed
to Christianity, and by it pronounced satanic; and by the
further fact, that they teach as truth the principal doctrines
which the movement party of the day oppose to the Gospel.
Take the doctrines set forth by the Seer Davis, those which
you find in the Shekinah, and even in Judge Preston's own
book, and you find them in substance the prevailing infidel
ity of the times, dressed out in a spiritual garb. I have very

176 THE SPIRIT-RAPPEE.

good reasons for knowing that these spirit-manifestations
have been started for the very purpose of overthrowing
Christianity by means of an infidel superstition. The prime
mover had precisely this object, and no other."

" We have," said the judge, " only your word for that. I
regard these phenomena from God."

"' So the devil wishes you to regard them, for he seeks, by
means of them, to carry on his war against the Christian's
God, and to get himself worshipped as God," said I.

" The devil," said Mr. Merton, " can go only the length of
his chain^and that chain is much shorter than it was in old
heathen times. He can do only what he is permitted, and
it is very possible that what he 'is now doing will turn out to
his signal discomfiture. It will give a serious blow to the
materialism and Sadducism of the age, lead men to believe
in the reality of the spirit-world, and when that is done, they
will have made one step towards believing in Christ. The
age is so infirm as to deny the existence of the devil ; and
even becoming able to believe once more in the reality of his
satanic majesty, will be a symptom, slight though it may be,
of convalescence."

< "We," remarked the judge, " are no Sadducees. We be
lieve in botli angel and spirit, in good angels and bad
angels."

"That is something," said Mr. Merton; "and, if you
open your hearts, and keep them open to the light, you may
in time believe more, and escape the meshes in which Satan
has now entangled you. Your great mistake is in supposing
that these good and bad angels are departed souls. I do not
say that departed souls may not revisit the earth ; they have
done so, arid they may continue to do so, but the human
soul never becomes an angel or a demon. It is all very well
to say of a departed dear one, he or she is an angel in heav
en, but taken literally, it is never true. In the resurrection,
our Lord says the just are like the angels of God, in the
respect that they are neither male nor female, and neither
marry nor are given in marriage, but he does not say that
they are angels ; and the Scriptures distinguish between the
company of the angels and the spirits of just men made per
fect. Men were created a little lower than the angels, and
they are of a different order. The demons or devils are not
wicked souls separated from their bodies, and wandering on
this or the other side of the dark-flowing Acheron, but the
angels who kept not their first estate, and were cast out of
heaven.

SPIRIT-MAX IKKSTATION8. 177

" These fallen angels, under tlieir chief, Lucifer or Satan,
carry on their rebellion against God by seeking to se<lu<-<-
men from tlieir allegiance to their rightful sovereign. They
can and do invade men, because they are superior to men,
and are malicious enough to do it. But the good angels
never do it, for they work not by violence, but by moral,
persuasive, peaceful, and gentle influences ; and human
souls cannot do it, for the strong keepeth the house till a
stronger comes and binds him. Nothing remains then, my
dear Judge, but to regard these spirit-manifestations, in so
far as real, as the invasions of Satan, as produced, not by
good angels or departed souls, but by the fallen angels, called
demons by the gentiles, and therefore, all these mysterious
phenomena, in so far as they are not produced by natural
agencies, as sheer deviltry. This is the only conclusion to
which I, as a Christian philosopher, can come respecting
them."

CHAPTER XXI. SPIRIT-MANIFESTATIONS.

MR. MERTON'S conclusion did not precisely please me, al
though I had suspected it from the first. Yet it troubled
me, and I would gladly have escaped it. The next day,
when Mr. Merton called to see me, as he did every day, I
told him that I did not like his conclusion, and I wished he
would give me his real thoughts on the subject.

" Without recurring to the teachings of Christianity,
which I have the happiness of believing, I could not," said
he, " explain these mysterious spirit-manifestations, and I
should not know what to think of them. I might be tempt
ed to deny them, as does our friend Jack — to believe them
produced by some inexplicable jugglery, even against my
better judgment ; or I might try to acquiesce in the belief
of our friend the judge, that they are the souls of the de
parted. Most likely, I should treat them simply as inex
plicable, and attempt to construct no theory for their solu
tion.

" I am unwilling to suppose the supernatural, and will not,
where I cannot satisfactorily demonstrate the insufficiency
of the natural. The whole history of our race bristles with
prodigies, with marvellous facts, clearly divisible into two
distinct and even opposite orders. The one seem to have for
tlieir object to draw men towards God, and assist them in
ascending to him as their last end and supreme good ; the
other seem to have for their object to draw men away from
VOL. IX— la.

178 THE SPIRIT-KAPPEE.

God, and to aid men in descending into the depths of night
and darkness. Man has a double nature, is composed of
body and soul, and on the one side has a natural aspiration
to God, and on the other a natural tendency from God, to
wards the creature, and thence towards night and chaos. A
supernatural power assists him to rise ; a preternatural power
assists him, so to speak, to descend. But whether in the as
cending or in the descending scale, it is not easy to say
where the natural ends and the supernatural begins, for in
both cases the foreign power presupposes the natural, and
blends in with it, and simply transforms the action.

" There is, no doubt, much in either order set down by
the vulgar to foreign intervention, that is really explicable
on natural principles. Good, pious people cry out ' a mira
cle,' not seldom where no miracle is ; and I should be sorry
to be obliged to make an act of faith in all the miracles re
corded in the legends of the saints. I should be equally
sorry to be obliged to believe every tale that is told of satan-
ic invasion. I have a deep and settled horror of scepticism,
but also a horror no less of superstition. I would no more
be credulous than incredulous. I do not like to undertake
the refutation of those who explain the facts of the night-
side of nature on natural principles, for it is hard to do it,
without giving more or less occasion in many minds to su
perstition. It is only in cases, like the present, where the
disease is an epidemic, more destructive than the cholera or
the plague, that I am willing to do what I can to draw at
tention to their real character.

" In regard to the dark prodigies, if I may so call them, I
think not.a few included by the vulgar under this head should
be dismissed as mere jugglery ; others may be explained by
animal magnetism, and imply neither fraud nor dealing with
devils, but are not innocent, because produced not by a jus
tifiable motive, and are in all cases to be discountenanced
because of dangerous tendency ; others still may, perhaps,
be explicable by natural causes, which science has not yet
investigated, and of which we are ignorant.

" But a residuum remains which it is impossible to explain
without the assumption of satanic [intervention. Such are
some of the cases which you have heard me relate. Such
are many of the phenomena which you yourself must have
witnessed, and perhaps been instrumental in producing.
Such, too, is the inspiration of Mahomet, if we may rely on
the account given us by his friends, as well as the demon of

SPIRIT-MANIFEST ATIONS. 179

Socrates, and such are evidently the well known cases of the
Camisards or Tremblers of the Cevennes in 1688, George
Fox and the early Quakers, Swedenborg, and the trance or
ecstacy of the Methodists, and finally Joe Smith and the
Mormon prophets. In all these cases there are evident
marks of superhuman intervention, and which no man in
his sober senses, and instructed in the Christian religion, can
pretend is the intervention of the Holy Ghost, or of good
angels. The perturbation, the disorder, the trembling, the
falling backwards, the foaming at the mouth, the violence
which always in these cases accompany the presence of the
spirit, are so many sure indications that it is an evil, not a
good spirit. The Lord was not in the strong wind that rent
the mountain ; he was not in the fire that wrapt it in flames ;
but in the still small voice that made the prophet step forth
from his cave to listen. When the Lord comes in his gra
cious visitations all is sweetness and peace. No disturbance
of the physical system, no whirling and howling, no storm
or tempest, no wringing and twisting of the arins and legs,
no violent or indecent postures, no abnormal development
or exercise of the faculties, mark the incoming of the Holy
Ghost. All is calm and serene; the understanding is illu
minated, the heart is warmed, the will is strengthened, and
the whole soul is elevated by the infusion of a supernatural
<*race. There is no crisis, no forgetfulness on awakening
from a trance. But whenever it is the reverse, wherever
there is violence, distortion, quaking, trembling, and disturb
ance, we know that if any spirit is present it is an evil spir
it, which delights in violence and disorder, and displays
power without love, force without goodness, knowledge
without gentleness.

" Everybody has heard, I suppose, of the prodigies
wrought by touching the tomb of the Deacon Paris, the fa
mous Jansenist saint, and the violent controversy they oc
casioned between the Jansenists and the Jesuits, the former
trying to magnify them into miracles to the honor of their
sect, and the Jesuits very unnecessarily and very unwisely,
in my judgment, laboring to disprove or discredit them as
facts. The prodigies are well authenticated, and I see no
way of denying them without throwing doubt on all human
testimony. Among them I select those which indicate, on
thu part of the affected, a surprising power of physical re
sistance, and among these, I select only one, that 01 Jeanne
Moulu, a young woman, from twenty-two to twenty-three

ISO THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

years of age, given by the Dictionnaire des Sciences Medi
cates. This young woman, in her convulsions, was placed
with her back against a wall, and a man of great strength
took an andiron weighing some twenty-five pounds, and
struck her on her stomach several blows in succession with
all his strength, sometimes to the number of one hundred
blows and over. A brother gave her sixty blows, and after
wards, trying his blows against the wall, it gave way at the
twenty-fifth blow. It was in vain, says Carre de Montgeron,.
a grave magistrate, that I struck with all my force, the con-
vulsionary complained that my blows brought her no relief,
and obliged me to place the andiron in the hands of a large
and very strong man found among the spectators. He
spared nothing, but put forth all his strength, and dealt
such terrible blows on the pit of her stomach that they
shook the wall against which she was supported. She
made him give her the hundred blows which she had de
manded at first, counting for nothing the sixty she had
received from me. When the andiron sunk so deep
into the pit of her stomach as to seem to reach her
back, the young woman would exclaim, c That relieves me.
Courage, my brother; strike harder, if you can.' The blows
were struck on the naked skin, but without bruising or
breaking it in the least. The convulsionary, after this, lay
on the floor, and there was placed upon her a heavy plank
on which stood a score or more of persons, weighing all to
gether at least four thousand pounds. Then a flintstone,.
weighing twenty-two pounds, was hurled with full force a
hundred times in succession upon her bosom. At each blow,
the whole room shook, the floor trembled, and the spectators
shuddered at the sound of the frightful blows.

u There were other phenomena of a character no less ex
traordinary, but I pass them over, all of which were notori
ous, and witnessed by half, one writer says all, Paris. Hume
says that they have all the authenticity that human testi
mony can give, and that we can deny them only on the
ground that such things are absolutely impossible. Human
ly impossible I concede, but, as they are not of a character
to come from God, I must believe them to be satanic, and
that the persons were really possessed and sustained by evil
spirits.

" The case of frequent occurrence among the lower class
of the lamas, related by M. Hue in his travels in Mongolia,
Thibet, and China, is one that cannot be explained save on the

SPIRIT- M ANIKI'Xl'ATIONS. 181

ground of satanic intervention, — that of a lama, a sort of
Boudhist monk, who opens his belly, takes out his entrails,
and places them before him, and then returns immediately
to his former state.

" ' When the appointed hour has arrived,' says M. Hue,
* the whole multitude of pilgrims repair to the great court
of the lama convent, where an altar is erected. At length
the bokte makes his appearance ; he advances gravely amid
the acclamations of the crowd, seats himself on the altar,
and taking a cutlass from his girdle, places it between his
knees, while the crowd of lamas, ranged in a circle at his
feet, commence the terrible invocations that prelude this
frightful ceremony. By degrees, as they proceed in their
recital, the bokte seems to tremble in every limb, and grad
ually fall into strong convulsions. Then the song of the lamas
becomes wilder and more animated, and the recitation is chang
ed for cries and howlings. Suddenly the bokte flings away the
scarf which he has worn, snatches off his girdle, and with
the sacred cutlass rips himself entirely open. As the blood
gushes out, the multitude prostrate themselves before the
horrid spectacle, and the sufferer is immediately interrogat
ed concerning future events and things concealed from hu
man knowledge. His answers to these questions are regard
ed as oracles.

" ' As soon as the devout curiosity of the pilgrims is satis-
fled, the lamas resume their recitations and prayers ; and
the bokte, taking up in his right hand a quantity of his
blood, carries it to his mouth, blows three times on it, and
casts it, with a loud cry, into the air. He then passes his
hand rapidly over his stomach, and it becomes whole as it
was before, without the slightest trace being left of the dia
bolical operation, with the exception of an extreme lassi
tude.'

" ' Occurrences like these are not rare, and I could fill vol
umes with phenomena equally extraordinary, which I can
not deny, and which cannot be explained without the as
sumption of. a superhuman agent, and' I mav add, a diabol
ical agent. Dupotet exhibits, by means of iiis magic ring,
almost daily in Paris, the most extraordinary magic won
ders, and he confesses that he does it by means of a mental
evocation, and by virtue of a PACT. .

"Now these, and facts like these, instructed as I am in
the Christian faith, and holding it without any doubt, pn.v,-
to me that the satanic invasion, demonic possession, and ob-

182

THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

session, are no fables, but facts not to be denied, though
each particular case must stand on its own merits, and be re
ceived or rejected according to the evidence. In general
I am slow to believe this or that particular case is diabolic,
and I require clear and irrefragable proof, strong and per
fectly reliable testimony.

" The criteria of demonic invasion or obsession, as laid
down by the Christian church, for the guidance of exorcists,
are seven :

1. Power of knowing the unexpressed thoughts of others.

2. Understanding of unknown languages.

3. Power of speaking unknown or foreign languages.

4. Knowledge of future events.

5. Knowledge of things passing in distant places.

6. Exhibition of superior physical strength.

7. Suspension of the body in the air during a consider
able time.

" Now I find all these in the recent spirit-manifestations,
clearly and distinctly testified to by such ocular witnesses as
Dr. Dexter, Judge Edmonds, and the Hon. E". P. Talmadge,
not to mention any others. The spiritualists or spiritists do
not deny, they assert that the manifestations they witness are
strictly analogous to the class of facts which have been always
regarded as satanic. At first, the spirits communicated by
rapping and moving furniture. But now, besides rapping
mediums, there are writing mediums, seeing mediums, and
speaking mediums. In these last three cases they admit the
fact of spiritual invasion, and even call it possession. In
the case of the speaking medium particularly, I find it con
tended that the spirit takes possession of the medium, gen
erally a woman, maltreats her at times, throws her down,
gives her convulsions, and forces her to do things which she
is unwilling to do, and compels her organs to utter words to
which she has the greatest repugnance.

" Hear Judge Edmonds. ' I have frequently known
mental questions answered, that is, questions merely framed in
the mind of the interrogator, and not revealed by him or
known to others. Preparatory to meeting a circle, I have
sat down alone in my room, and carefully prepared a series
of questions to be propounded, and I have been surprised to
find my questions answered, and in the precise order in which
I wrote them, without my even taking my memorandum out
of my pocket, and when I knew not a person present even
knew that I had prepared questions, much less what they were.

SPIRIT-MANIFESTATIONS. 183

My most secret thoughts, those which I never uttered to
mortal man or woman, have been freely spoken to, as if I had

uttered them. Purposes which I have privately entertained
have been publicly revealed, and I have once and again been
admonished that my every thought was known to, and
could be disclosed by, the intelligence which was thus man
ifesting itself.

" ' I have heard the mediums use Greek, Latin, Spanish,
and French, when I knew that they had no knowledge of
any language but their own ; and it is a fact that can be
attested by many, that often there has been speaking and
writing in foreign languages £nd unknown tongues by those
who were unacquainted with either.'

" Dr. Dexter is explicit to the same purpose. I need not
multiply citations. The books of the spiritualists are full
of instances in point. And as it is clear, from the phenom
ena presented, that the superhuman intelligence and power
manifested are not divine, I can, as a rational man, only
conclude that they are satanic. I believe the persons en
gaged in the unhallowed intercourse are, to a great extent,
in good faith, and have no suspicion that they are really
dealing with devils."

" I believe you are right," said I. " One thing is certain,
that even in mesmerizing, there is always an implicit men
tal evocation, and without it, I venture to say, no one was
ever able to exhibit the mesmeric phenomena. The effort
of the will which the mesmerizer makes, whether he uses
passes or not, is at bottom an evocation, a calling up of the
mesmeric spirit ; and he who set the spirits a-rapping, you
may be sure, had made a virtual, if not an explicit, a tacit,
if not an express compact with the devil. But there is one
thing further I would have you explain, that is, the con
nection of spirit-manifestations with so-called animal mag
netism."

" That is a great subject, and would lead me too far for
my time and for your strength. There are different spirits
that besiege us or invade us, but those that usually do so
probably, after the language of St. Paul, swarm in the air
and inhabit what the ancients called Ether. Many of the
fathers, and some later doctors of the church have believed
that they are created with and inhabit fine ethereal bodies.
However this may be, they no doubt, in their operation,
assume such bodies, and consequently find their operations
facilitated by a subtile material medium, such as the mefr

18-t THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

meric fluid. Hence I do not regard mesmerism itself as
satanic, but as facilitating demonic invasion.

u There is also in man what the ancients called the umbra,
the shade, which is not the soul, nor the body in its mere
outward sense. It is, as it were, the interior lining of the
body, capable, to a certain extent, of being detached from
it, without however losing its relation to it. Hence the
phenomena of bi-location, so frequently noticed in the
annals of sorcery or witchcraft, can be conceived as possible.
The body lies in a trance, and the soul with its umbra is
able to carry on, by the assistance of the demon, its devil
try, even at a distance ; and the wounds given to the shade
will reappear on the body, as has been often observed.

" But you must excuse me from entering further into this
intricate and mysterious subject. Many ingenious theories
have been devised, but I wish to deal as little with them as
possible. There is a laudable curiosity, there is also an un
lawful curiosity, and there is a science which is not desir
able. I have been obliged, in the way of my calling, to
study it ; but I never touch it, without regretting its neces
sity. Spare me. The knowledge that cannot enlighten,
that cannot aid virtue, and only leads astray, should never
be sought."

CHAPTER XXII. SUPERSTITION.

I HAD, from the first, suspected Mr. Merton's conclusion,
and should never for a moment have doubted it, had I not
grown up in the disbelief of evil spirits. Science, or what
passes for science, had long denied all supernatural and
all superhuman intervention in the affairs of mankind ; and
I, like the majority of rny contemporaries, had grown up a
complete Epicurean. There was, perhaps, a God who had
created the world, but having created it, and impressed
upon it certain fixed and invariable laws, he left it to take
care of itself. I denied his providence, or, what is the same
thing, resolved it into the uniform and inflexible laws of
nature, and like my friends of the French eclectic school,
saw the divine intervention only in the necessary and im
mutable elements of human history. God was for me simply
fate, invincible necessity, and therefore no free person, no
object of reverence, love, or worship.

Having excluded providence, I necessarily rejected the
ministry of angels. I resolved all nature into a 'collection
of forces operative by intrinsic and necessary laws. Man is

one of these forces, neither the strongest nor the weake>t.
In his own intrinsic strength he is not much, but by placing
himself in a right position with regard to the other forces
of nature, he may make them work in him and for him, and
thus increase nis strength by the whole of theirs, as the mill
wright makes use of the force of the stream to turn his mill,
the inventor of the magnetic telegraph of the lightning to
convey his messages, or as the sailor avails himself of the
wind to propel his ship.

Belief in the free or voluntary intervention of the Divin
ity in human affairs, I had been taught by received science
to regard as superstition. Religion," Christian or Mahome
tan, Jewish or pagan, inasmuch as it always presupposes
the supernatural, or the intervention of God extra natu ram,
or otherwise than in and through the laws of nature, was
superstition. The ministry of angels was superstition. The
assertion of satanic interposition was, beyond all doubt,
superstition. The facts which had led to the supposition of
divine providence, and of the ministry of good and evil
angels, were, no doubt, real; but ignorant of the laws of
nature, men had misinterpreted them, and assigned them
causes which are unreal. All religion has, I said, its origin
in ignorance, and necessarily recedes as science advances.
Hence I felt that it would be only a proof of my ignorance
and superstition to ascribe the mysterious phenomena to any
spiritual or supernatural agency. "

Even after the explanations of Mr. Merton, and after my
reason was silenced, I was unwillingto abandon my prej
udices, and accept his conclusion. What, should I, in this
nineteenth century, in this age of genuine science, which
has done so much to roll back the clouds and dissipate the
darkness which enveloped past ages, consent to adopt the
vulgar belief of the sixteenth century, when men were but
just escaping from the thraldom of Romanism — of the
thirteenth century, when they were but just beginning to
emerge from barbarism — of the first century, when still
buried in the night of heathenism? My pride of science,
my pride of intellect, revolted at the thought. What ridi
cule would ilot be showered upon me by the wits and free
thinkers of the age, should it be known, or even suspected !

I hesitated long, for I saw at once, that if I admitted the
existence and influence of Satan, I must go further, and
concede the Christian mysteries. I must abandon liberal
Christianity, deny the supposed progress of recent times in

186 THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

religious notions, and return to old-fashioned orthodoxy
Perhaps I should find it necessary to go even further back than
the orthodoxy of ray own country. This was no pleasant
thought. To unlearn all I had learned, to regard all my
most cherished convictions as so many delusions, to become
in reality as a little child, and to commence life anew, as
Jesus Christ taught we must do, if we would enter into the
kingdom of heaven, was too humiliating to be contemplated
with pleasure even on my dying bed, and when the world
was fast disappearing from my view. What would have
been the result of my internal struggle, if I had been left
wholly to myself, I will not pretend to say. But I was not
so left. Mr. Merton was with me almost daily, and seemed
always to read my thoughts before I expressed them, and to
comprehend my difficulties.

" Your great mistake," said he to me one day, when the
subject came up, " is in supposing that religion is the off
spring of ignorance, and stands opposed to science. Your
assumption that man began in ignorance, and has attained
to science only by long and patient research and laborious
experiment, is at best gratuitous. Some things, of course,
have been acquired only in process of time. Man has made
progress in the knowledge of all that which he himself ha&
done, or has suffered ; but nothing requires you to assume
that his progress in knowledge is any thing more than
progress in the knowledge of his own doing and suffering.
It is not likely that Adam knew the history of the battle of
Pharsalia, of Hastings, Bovines, or Waterloo ; it is not
probable that he was acquainted with the steam-engine, the
cotton-gin, the spinning-jenny, the power-loom, or the
lightning-telegraph. But he may have received from his
Maker, as religion teaches, a knowledge of the nature and
causes of things, and of his moral relations and duties,
equal to that possessed by the most enlightened of his pos
terity.

u Historically considered," proceeded Mr. Merton, " the
earliest belief of mankind was the existence, unity, and free
providence of God — a belief in strict accordance with the
deductions of genuine science in every age. Every language
under heaven bears indelible traces of that belief, and
would be unintelligible, absolutely insignificant, if it were
denied. Yet all languages are radically one and the same,
and must, in some form, have been given supernaturally to
man, for man speaks only as he has learned to speak ; audit
would have required language to invent language."

SUPERSTITION. 187

" But if all languages are radically the same, how do you
explain their manifest differences ?" I asked.

" That is a question which I leave to the philologists ;
but they, I believe, very easily prove that these differences
are not radical, and that they are due principally to the dif
ferences of pursuits, of circumstances, temperaments, and
pronunciation of different tribes having little or no inter
course with one another. However great or small they
miy be, or whatever their causes, it has been proved that
they are only modifications of one and the same original
tongue."

" But you know," said I, " that religion is progressive,
and that the earliest religion of mankind was a gross feti-
chism, a worship of animals and inanimate things. From
that gross superstition we can trace its gradual purification
and progress towards the sublime monotheism of Moses,
Socrates, Plato, and Jesus, moulded by the church fathers
into Christian theology."

"I know no such thing," replied Mr. Merton, "and St.
Paul, who was a good philosopher as well as an inspired
apostle, tells us that men left the true God to worship
creeping things and four-footed beasts. The monotheism
you speak of is historically older than the f etichism of which
you would make it a development. What you are pleased
to call the monotheism of Moses, was older than that law
giver. Moses, under divine inspiration and direction,
founded the Jewish state, or commonwealth, and instituted
the Jewish worship, but he did not introduce a new faith
or theology. The faith or doctrine he taught concerning
God and moral duty, was that of the old patriarchs, and the
same which had been held from Adam. Christian faith
and theology have come down to us through the line of the
patriarchs and the Jews, not through that of the gentiles,
and, if a development at all, is not a development of
heathenism, but of the earlier patriarchal religion preserved
in the synagogue. Hence St. Augustine says, that faith
has not changed ; as believed the fathers, so we believe-
only they believed in a Christ who was to come, and we be
lieve in a Christ who has come.

u Then, again, the monotheism, if monotheism it was, of
Socrates and Plato, was not a development or gradual puri
fication of fetichism or of the gross forms of nature- worship.
They themselves tell you as much, and always claim to be
restorers, not innovators. In asserting the unity of God,

188 THE SPIRIT-KAPPER.

they profess always to revive the belief or the wisdom of
the ancients. ~No one can have studied the various forms
of heathenism without finding in them ample evidence that
they are not primitive formations. They all bear witness
to a type which is not in themselves — a type from which
they have departed, not a type which they are approaching
or realizing. They bear the deep traces of corruption, and
are evidently travesties of the old patriarchal or primitive
religion, without a knowledge of which they are absolutely
inexplicable. The memory of the loss of its primitive per
fection, all heathenism retains in its heart. All heathenism
is imprinted with profound grief for a lost good, and never
does it show signs of a true joy. There is sadness in all its
rites, gay and joyous as it tries to make them. Its joy is a
drunken joy, and its boisterous mirtli is the wild laugh of
the maniac. But over the whole of heathenism, even in its
grossest forms, there hovers always the primitive monothe
ism. It retains always some reminiscence of the belief in
one supreme God, Father of gods and men. Anaxagoras,
Socrates, Plato, and others, acquainted with the Jewish
belief, and meditating on this reminiscence, undoubtedly
rose to sublimer and more rational views of the Divinity
than those which were entertained by the vulgar ; but this
says nothing in favor of that gradual development and puri
fication of heathenism, which you and a well known modern
school assert, and assert without one single fact to support
you.

" You must rely on history," continued Mr. Merton, " for
your theory professes to be historical, and to sustain itself
by facts. But history has been tolerably authentic for some
thousands of years. How happens it, if your theory be
•correct, that we find no instance of this gradual develop
ment and purification of heathenism ? In all the cases
where the history can be traced, it is undeniable that the
purest or the least deformed state of any heathen supersti
tion is its earliest ; and the grossest, the most corrupt and
revolting, is always its latest. Nothing in this world ever
reforms itself, arid the inevitable tendency of all error, as of
all vice, is from bad to worse. Compare the popular re
ligion of Rome under the kings, with the popular religion
under the pagan emperors, and you will find this proved.

" Indeed, my friend, your whole theory is false. Never
yet has religion receded before the advance of true science,
and religion, as you well say, has always asserted the super-

SUPERSTITION.

18ft

natural, the interposition of God in human affairs,
naturam. Always, too, has it asserted the existence of

food and bad angels, and their intervention on the one
and by divine command, and on the other by divine per
mission, in the affairs of mankind. This belief of all ages
is itself a phenomenon to be explained, accounted for ; and
yon will find it impossible to explain it, or account for it,
without admitting its substantial truth. Men may err in
supposing a supernatural or superhuman intervention where
none takes place, and undoubtedly they have so erred time
and again ; but they could not have so erred if they had not
already had the idea or belief of such interposition. Whence
comes that idea or belief ? If that is false, explain whence
comes the general error before the particular ? A general
a priori error is impossible. All error is in the misappli
cation of truth. A general error is nothing but a general
ization by way of induction of particular errors, or misap
plications of truth to particulars, and is therefore necessarily
subsequent to them. If there were in reality no true
religion, there could be no false religion, as if there were no
genuine, there could be no counterfeit coin. Always is the
true prior to the false ; and how then could mankind come
to assert a false supernatural interposition, if they had no
prior belief in a true supernatural interposition, or believe
in such an interposition,, if no such interposition had ever
taken place?"

" But how will you clear this belief in satanic interposition
from the charge of superstition ? " I asked.

" Superstition, my friend, is a word oftener used," replied
Mr. Merton, "than understood. The heathen religions
were all superstitions, I grant, because they all ascribed
effects to unreal or inadequate causes. To believe in the
existence of good and bad angels is not superstition, if good
and bad angels really exist, any more than it is to believe in
the existence of men and women, horses or oxen. Where
there is no error, there is no superstition. Suppose a fairy
really to exist, there is no superstition in believing the fact.
Suppose the ministry of angels to be a fact, there is
nothing superstitious, unreasonable, or unscientific in be
lieving it, or in ascribing to that ministry real effects. Sup
pose fallen angels or wicked spirits do really exist, dp really
tempt us, and by divine permission, do really besiege or
possess us, there is no superstition in believing it, in taking
the proper precautions against them, or the proper mcasiuv>

190

THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

to disperse or expel them. If the real origin of the phenom
ena we have been considering is diabolical, nothing is
more reasonable than to believe it ; and to ascribe them to
natural causes, would be unscientific, and itself a sort of
superstition. Undoubtedly, the spirit-rappers, or spiritual
ists, as they call themselves, are superstitious. "What they
<?all spiritualism is rank superstition, because they believe
the phenomena are produced by the shades or spirits of the
dead, and the word superstition was originally used, I be
lieve, to imply a belief in, and a dread of, the influence of
the departed on the living ; but to ascribe them to fallen
angels, if such they are, is no superstition at all, for then
they are ascribed to an adequate cause, and to their real
<?ause.

" There are two opposite errors," concluded Mr. Merton,
" both equally hostile to religion and to good sense, — super
stition and irreligion. Each is an abuse, as the schoolmen
say, an excess in a contrary direction ; and unhappily, the
tendency of most men is to one or the other. Nothing is
more certain than that in every age much superstition has
been connected with the doctrine 1 have contended for."

" That," said I, " is what makes me dread and hesitate to
accept it."

" I know," Mr. Merton replied, " all that you would say
on that score. I have myself read history, and, no less than
you, been shocked by these abuses. But there is no truth
that cannot be or that has not been abused. I am as much
opposed to these abuses as you are. It will not do to sup
pose that every event a little out of the range of our ordi
nary experience, is a miracle, or effected, if good, by angelic,
if bad, by satanic agency. Every time a murrain prevails
among the cattle, it will not do to ascribe it to sorcery, or
when the butter will not come, to lay the blame upon Kobin
Goodfellow. The tendency to do so is undoubtedly a
superstitious tendency. But the contrary, or Sadducean
tendency, to believe in neither angel nor spirit, is even more
dangerous. I do not believe every tale of witchcraft I
hear, and I am slow to believe in actual satanic invasion in
any particular case that may be alleged. The church has
always asserted the possibility of such invasion, but she does
not permit a resort to exorcism on every apparent instance
of it. She demands previous consultation, long examination,
and the judgment of the most rigid science. "While the
greatest caution should be exercised as to every case of sup-

SUPERSTITION 191

posed actual satanic invasion, we should guard equally
against running into the contrary error of denying that such
invasion ever takes place. An unreasonable scepticism is
as far removed from true wisdom and virtue, as an unrea
sonable belief. Modern science is sceptical ; and it is more
important just now to guard against scepticism and its irre-
ligion, than it is to guard against superstition.

' Yet we deceive ourselves, if we suppose that the scepti
cism of science has penetrated far into the popular mind, even
in our own country. Science can never root out popular
superstitions. While the few laugh at the superstition of the
vulgar, that^ superstition, though modified perhaps as to its
forms, continues to thrive, and attains, not unfrequently,
even a more vigorous growth. The old popular superstitions,
brought hither by our ancestors, still live in the heart of the
people, and in forms as gross and as revolting as in the seven
teenth century. Superstition is cured, not by a sceptical
science, denying altogether the spirit-world, but by religion,
which, while it recognizes that world, teaches us to draw ac
curately the line of demarcation between genuine and coun
terfeit spirit-manifestations. The people cannot live in ab
solute irreligion ; and where they have not religion, they will
have superstition. The tendency of modern science is to de
stroy all religious faith, and therefore to promote, indirectly,
the very evil it proposes to cure, — the common effect of all
unbaptized science, as of all unbaptized philanthropy."

" There is some truth in that, I must own," I remarked.
" I know not why it is so, but every effort made, although
with the purest and best intentions in the world, outside of
Christianity, seems always to fail, or to end only in aggra
vating the very evils it was intended to cure. There is less
real liberty in France to-day than there was before the meet
ing of the states-general in May, 1789. The revolutions
which, during the last sixty or seventy years, have so terri
bly raged on European soil, though made in behalf of liber
ty or of popular representation, have resulted only in depriv
ing each nation in which they have taken place of its former
too feeble checks on power, and in rendering the monarchy
more absolute. The same may be said in principle of all our
efforts at philanthropic reform on a smaller scale."

" Undoubtedly," replied Mr. Merton ; " and the reason is,
that the glory of whatever is good is due to God, and he will
suffer no plans to succeed that would rob him of his due.
He lias himself given us his law, and provided us the

THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

means of salvation, temporal and eternal; and whosoever
seeks salvation by anj other means, or in contempt of that
law, must fail, and shamefully fail."

CHAPTER XXIII. - DIFFICULTIES.

" WHAT you say, Mr. Merton," said Jack, " may be very
plausible, but you will never convince me that Almighty
God, the loving Father of us all, would ever permit his chil
dren to be exposed to satanic invasion. It would impeach
either his wisdom and love, or his power."

"Why more than his permission of the same vexations
and afflictions by any other agency ? " asked Mr. Merton,
very quietly. " The facts, the phenomena themselves are
undeniable, and must be produced by some agency, and by
divine permission too. While they remain tlie same, I can
not see how their production by Satan, any more than their
production by some other created or secondary cause, is in
compatible with the divine perfection."

" I do not pretend to be able to say how that is," replied
Jack, " but I will never believe that God will allow the devil,
or any other being subject to his power, to have such influ
ence over the children he loves. It is contrary to common
sense. It is nonsense, absurdity, blasphemy."

"I am very much of Jack's opinion," interposed Dr.
Corning, who had for a long time ceased to take any part in
our conversations. " If there is a God, a God who is Lord
Omnipotent, the devil, if devil there be, must be subject to
him, and unable to do any thing without his permission.
Can any reasonable man believe that God would permit the
devil to harass and afflict, besiege and possess his children ?
Would a human father permit, if he could help it, any enemy
to exercise a corresponding power over his own offspring ?
God is love, and love worketh no ill, and, as far as in its-
power to prevent, suffers no ill to be worked to any one."

"All that," replied Mr. Merton, "would be very conclu
sive, if the facts or phenomena did not exist to give it a flat
denial. Here are the facts, and whatever origin you assign
them, they remain, in themselves considered, the same. You
assign insanity as their origin. Be it so. But would a God
who is love, who is wisdom, who is omnipotence, suffer his
children to be afflicted with so grievous a disease as insan
ity, one so terrible and so humiliating in its effects ? In
sanity must be subject to his dominion ; and why then does
he suffer any to become insane ? "

DIFFICULTIES. 195

" Many of these facts, as you call them, are the result of
mere jugglery and sheer imposture," answered the doctor,
" and do not deserve a moment's consideration."

" Be it so," replied Mr. Merton. " But how can God per
mit such jugglery and imposture ? "

" They are the works 01 man, and the results of evil pas
sions," promptly replied Dr. Corning.

" Very good," said Mr. Merton ; " but whence these evil
passions ? and how can God, consistently with his perfections,
permit them to produce such pernicious effects ? You see,
my dear Doctor, turn which way you will, take what ground
you please, your argument can always be retorted. As far
as the divine perfection is concerned, it makes no difference,
since the facts really exist, whether you ascribe them to sa-
tanic invasion or to insanity, to the evil passions of man, or to
the elemental forces or inherent laws of nature ; for, on any
of these suppositions, you ascribe them to a created cause,
dependent on God as first cause for its very existence, and
therefore a cause that cannot operate without his permission.
The whole question resolves itself into the old question, then,
of the origin of evil. Evil certainly could not exist without
the permission of God ; and yet you yourself concede that
evil does exist. How can God, consistently with his perfec
tions, permit it ? This is the question ; and, if he can permit
it at all, he can as well permit it when produced by one
agent, as when produced by another."

" But that," said Dr. Corning, " is a question for you to an
swer, as well as for me."

" Not in the case before us," rejoined Mr. Merton, " be
cause your objection concedes the existence of evil, and only
denies" it as the work of a particular agent. But let that
pass. I can answer the question only in the light of Chris
tian theology. According to that theology, there is no real
evil but sin ; and sin is always voluntary on the part of the
sinner. God chose to create men and angels free moral
agents, that they might be capable of virtue, and of merit
ing the rewards of obedience. He could not so create ua
without making us capable of abusing our freedom, for obe
dience is not and cannot be meritorious where there is no
power of disobedience, as disobedience, is not culpable where
there is no power of obedience. Hence the saints in heaven,
having no longer the power of disobedience, do not merit
by their obedience, and simply enjoy the rewards of their
obedience in their state of probation on earth. If any do

VOL. IX-13.

194 THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

not obtain the rewards of obedience, the fault is their own,
and they have no one to blame but themselves. Their fail
ure is voluntary ; they fail only because they choose to fail.

" In regard to the satanic vexations," continued Mr.
Merton, " we must bear in mind that Satan has no power to
harm us — not even a hair of our head — against our free will
or deliberate assent. It is always in our power to resist him,
and even to turn his machinations and vexations against him,
and to make them occasions of merit. i Count it all joy, my
brethren,' says the blessed Apostle St. James, ' when ye fall
into divers temptations,' that is, trials and afflictions. The
evil is not in the temptation even to sin, but in the free, vol
untary assent ; it is not in the vexations and afflictions, ob
sessions and possessions, but in our voluntary abuse of them,
or failure to turn them to a good account. God suif ers no one
to be tempted or tried or harassed beyond what he can bear.
Always is his grace sufficient for all straits. Always stands
firm his promise, i My grace is sufficient for thee ; ' and this
sustains and consoles us in the midst of our greatest distress,
our severest trials, and our most perfect abandonment. We
may always, if we will, come forth from the furnace of af
fliction purified as gold tried in the fire. It depends on our
own free will whether the vexations of Satan shall do us
good or harm. If we choose, we can always prevent his
wiles from doing us evil, and derive profit from his malice.
This is a sufficient answer to the objection drawn from the
perfection of God. It is no impeachment of divine love to
let loose an enemy against us for our good, or to give us an
opportunity to acquire merit, any more than it is of divine jus
tice to permit an enemy to harass us as a punishment for our
sins. Satanic temptations and invasions are sometimes per
mitted for the one purpose, and sometimes for the other, and
in either case are perfectly compatible with the attributes of
God."

" I think I can understand that," I remarked, " and I think
also I can see in it a manifestation of divine love. God, in
permitting these vexations against the wicked, manifests his
justice ; but in permitting them against the good, he mani
fests his love, and turns the malice of Satan against himself.
"What Satan intends shall work our ruin, by the grace of God
is made to work our higher perfection ; and thus God over
comes Satan by educing good from evil."

"Undoubtedly," added Mr. Merton, " God often permits
Satan to afflict the faithful, to prove them, — sometimes to

DIFFICULTIES.

195

humble them, to chastise their spiritual pride, and to become
their occasion of rising to a purer and loftier virtue ; and in
such cases we may say he educes good from evil, and makes
the malice of Satan redound to his own glory. In the cases
where he permits Satan to harass by way of penalty, he
equally makes the satanic malice redound to his glory, for
God's glory is no less interested, so to speak, in justice than
in love. There is no discrepancy between the divine attri
butes ; and the manifestation of his justice is no less essential
to his glory, or the good of his creatures, than the manifes
tation of his love or mercy. The beginning of love is the love
of justice, equity, right."

" But be that as it may," said Jack, " I have heard it con
tended by theologians that Satan has been bound since the
Doming of Christ, and has no longer any power, since Christ
triumphed over him on the cross, to besiege or to possess
men, as it is supposed he had before."

" I am not answerable," replied Mr. Merton, " for what
you may have heard theologians maintain. I concede that
our Lord, on his part, triumphed over Satan on the cross ; I
also concede, that since the coming of our Lord, and the
spread of Christianity, the power of Satan has been greatly
curtailed ; but I know no authority for saying that he does
not continue to go about ' as a roaring lion, seeking whom
he may devour,' or that he has not power still to besiege
men, and literally take possession of them. The church,
whether Catholic or Protestant, has a form of exorcism, and
continues to practise it. The faithful are daily winning vic
tories over him, and if God gives them the grace of persever
ance, they will finally overcome him, and obtain a triumph ;
but their warfare with him ceases not so long as they remain
in the flesh. Satan, it is true, has no power to harm us against
our deliberate consent, and it is far easier to resist him now,
than it was before our Lord died on the cross, because grace is
more abundant ; but still he may besiege and actually possess
tin- holiest of men, the most devoted followers of the Lord,
at least so far as it is given to men to judge. He cannot harm
us without our own fault ; but he may vex, afflict, even pos
sess us, without any blame on our part, as a man may become
sick, or even insane, without any fault of his own.

" Out of the Christian society," continued Mr. Merton,
" where there are wanting the means which Christians have
to defend themselves against his approaches, and to drive him
away, his power is, no doubt, far greater. Among Mahom-

196 THE SPIRIT-RAPPEE.

etans, and among the pagan tribes of Asia, Africa, and
America, inhabiting a land which has, so to speak, never been
baptized, or sprinkled with holy water, his power is still very
great ; and, if we may credit the well-attested reports of our
missionaries, almost as great as ever. He recovers his power,
too, in Christian nations in proportion as they recede from
the faith and piety of the Gospel, and fall anew into heathen
ism."

" But there are some difficulties, under the point of view
of jurisprudence, in the way of yonr doctrine of satanic in
vasion," interposed Jack. " Suppose a man possessed by a
devil kills another, or commits some act which the law regards
as a crime, is the man guilty, and to be punished ? "

" You are a lawyer," replied Mr. Merton, " and nothing is
more natural than that you should ask that question. The
difficulties you suggest, however, are no greater on the sup
position of satanic invasion than on any other theory. They
are the same, whether we contend that the person is sub
jected by Satan or by mesmerism, by a primitive or element
al force of nature, or by what some manigraphs call madness
without delirium, or instinctive insanity. The question turns
on the fact whether the man is involuntarily and completely
subjugated, or whether he retains the exercise of his free will ;.
or, in other words, whether the actions are really his, or
those of the power that oppresses or subjugates him. For
myself, I think our courts ,are beginning to adopt a very
dangerous doctrine with regard to insanity, and are admit
ting the plea of insanity where it ought not to be entertained.
In an eastern city, not long since, it was gravely contended
by counsel, that a man must be held to be insane and irre
sponsible, because his crimes were so aggravated. Under
this lies a dangerous principle, which, in its development,
will lead to the conclusion that all great criminals are insane
and irresponsible. But in regard to another class of cases,
cases in which there obviously is no inebriety, ill health, or
delirium, and yet in which the person seems to himself to be
irresistibly urged by a foreign power, against his will, to the
commission of horrible acts, I think the law, or the practice
of the courts, is quite too severe. I take a case cited to my
hand by a respectable French writer, that of a father who
killed his young son. The father was an honest, temperate,
and industrious man, of a mild and affectionate disposition,
and it is clear that he loved his son with great tenderness.
" £ The night in which I did the deed,' says the unhappy

DIFFICULTIES. 197

father, <I was so agitated, that I trembled in my whole body

I am unable to conceive how I could commit a

•crime so atrocious. I was so agitated, so troubled in my
brain, and felt something within me so irresistible, that I
was obliged to commit the deed. I was fasting. 1 was not
sick ; and I am wholly unable to explain how it was possible
for me to do it. Twice before I had had the horrible incli
nation to kill my child. The first time was last winter, about
six weeks before Easter. I was at work making a sledge, and
my boy, as usual, was playing near me. In his playfulness,
he climbed upon my back, and clasped me round the neck.
My wife, thinking he would hinder me from working, called
him away ; but I loved him so much, that I patiently en
dured all his frolicsome tricks. I took him upon my knees
to play with him, and in that very moment I thought I heard
a voice within me, saying, u You cannot help it. Your child
must die, and you must kill him." I was startled, seized
with fear, my heart palpitated, and I instantly set him down,
rushed out of the room, and went to the mill, where I stayed
till nightfall, till my evil thought passed away.

" ' The second time was one morning a fe'w days before
Easter. My wife was busy with the affairs of the house, and
I was lying on the bed, with my child near me. He asked
me for some bread, and I gave him a cake, which he eat
with great pleasure. At that moment, as I was watching
him with tender affection, I thought I heard again a voice
within me, saying, in a low tone, " You must kill him." I
shuddered at myself, experienced violent palpitations, and
felt a heavy oppression within my breast. I instantly jumped
from the bed, and ran out of the house. I began saying my
prayers, went to the stable, and busied myself with various
labors, and did all in my power to drive away the evil
thoughts that beset me. I finally succeeded, but not till
midday, in regaining the mastery of myself, and in recover
ing my tranquillity. In neither of these cases was I drunk,
-or had been for many weeks previous ; nor was I at the third
access, when I took the life of my child.'*

" Now here was a man who was not sick, who was not in
liquor, who was not delirious, who was evidently a mild and
loving father, and who yet, in consequence of an impression,
killed his child, whom evidently he loved with all a father's
fondness. This man the courts condemn as a horrid mur
derer."

*Pneumatalogie: Des Esprit s, &c., p. 186, etseq.

198 THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

" And why not ? " said Jack. " It is evident his free will
remained. Twice he resisted the temptation, and regained
the mastery of himself ; and nothing proves that he might
not have done so the third time, if he had done his best."

" It is possible," replied Mr. Merton, " and therefore I
do not say the man was absolutely innocent. But we see he
did struggle against the evil thought, and twice successfully ;
and he yielded even at last only from an impression, all but
irresistible at the moment, and therefore he cannot be said
to have had the full possession of his freedom. In propor
tion as his power of external resistance was diminished by
the impression, or the mysterious influence that acted on
him, was diminished his responsibility. He who yields only
to a powerful temptation, is less guilty than he who does the
same deed under only a slight or feeble temptation. The
courts should take cognizance of the strength of the impres
sion under which the man acts, and take into the account the
more or less resistance that was possible. If the man suc
cumbs only after a long and severe struggle, that should go
to mitigate his guilt.

" Dr. Cazeauvielh relates the case of a woman who attempt
ed to kill her infant sleeping in the cradle. i I am,' said she
to the doctor, i the most miserable of beings. Never was
anybody like me. The other day I approached the cradle,
and I looked upon my darling. Fearing I should do him
harm, I went away to the house of my neighbor. hen, in
spite of myself, I returned, for something seemed to push
me. I went near my infant, and attempted to choke it with
my hands, but my legs failed me, and I became senseless.'
This woman, Dr. Cazeauvielh tells us, loved her relations
and her child, arid her intellectual faculties were not injured.
It is true he regards her as insane ; but how can there be in
sanity, with the full possession of the intellectual faculties ?
She struggled against the something that pushed her, and
had a horror of the crime ; the law ought, therefore, to treat
her with indulgence, yet it does not, because there really is
here no delirium. In the middle ages, which you regard as
so barbarous and cruel, she would not have been held respon
sible, because her act would have been, explained as the re
sult of a foreign power, which for the time being overcame
her resistance, and pushed her to do that for which she had
a natural horror.

" Yet a difference should no doubt be made between
cases like these, where the unhappy person commits a deed

DIFFICULTI I -.

199

for which he has a natural horror, and against which he
struggles, and those in which the criminal, so to speak, has
a natural relish for his crime, delights, and persists in it.
Take the case of Gilles Gamier, which occupied the atten
tion of all France in the reign of Louis XIII. ' This
man- wolf (loup-garou)] says Bod in, < carried away a girl
from ten to twelve years of age, killed her with his
hands and teeth, and eat the flesh from her thighs and arms.
Sometime afterwards he strangled a boy ten years old, and
eat his flesh. Still later he killed another boy, from twelve
to thirteen, with the intention of eating him, but was pre
vented.' He was arrested, convicted, and burnt alive.
There was here no insanity ; the horrid deeds were all
avowed with the minutest circumstances, the intention was
express, and the crime was repeated and persisted in. I
cannot regard this monster as innocent, for I cannot dis
cover that he resisted or struggled against the diabolical
impulse.

" Take the case of Leger, a recent case, related by Dr.
Cazeauvielh, from the monster's own confessions. He lived
in a cave, and had an unnatural craving to feed on hu
man flesh. One day he perceived a little girl, ran to her,,
passed a handkerchief around her body, threw her upon
his back, plunged into the woods and hastened to his caver
where he killed and buried her. Arrested three days after,
he immediately told his name, where he lived, and said
that having received a blow on his head, he had left hi&
country and his family. In his prison he related how he
had lived in caverns in the rocks. 'Wretch,' said^the phy
sician to him, ' you have eaten the heart of this little ojirl.
Confess the truth,' He then answered in trembling. ' Yes,
I did so, but not all at once.' After that he sought no
longer to conceal his crimes, and with great coolness and
indifference related a long series of horrible deeds which
he had committed. He revealed them, even to the minutest
particulars; he produced the proofs, and pointed out to
the court the place of the crime, and the manner in which
it had been consummated. The judge had no need to
<[iiestion him, for he himself disclosed all of his own ac
cord. On the trial, his features wore a mild and placid
aspect. lie seemed quite unconcerned and insensible, ex
cept his face assumed an air of gayety and satisfaction
during the reading of the indictment. After about half
an hour's deliberation, the court rejected the plea of in-

200 THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

sanity, and declared him guilty of homicide, with premed
itation and lying^ in wait. He heard his sentence with
the same placid indifference, and was executed a few days
after. This seems to me to prove that the middle ages
were not more severe than we are to-day."

"But Leger,'' said Dr. Corning, "was evidently a mad
man. Georget is right in saying that he was a madman,
because none but a madman would say that he had been
led to commit murder by a blind and irresistible will."

" That might do to sav, if we were certain of the truth
of the materialistic doctrines taught at Paris some forty
or fifty years ago, but which are now generally rejected.
Dr. Cazeauvielh, however, concedes that persons of this
description, without being deprived by their madness of
free will, are yet carried away, driven onward by an idea,
by something indefinable, which is precisely what theolo
gians mean ^ by obsession. The court decided correctly, I
think, in rejecting the plea of insanity in the case of the
monster Leger, and in condemning him to death, though
evidently under satanic influence when he committed his
horrible and disgusting crimes — crimes which recall the
ghouls of the Arabian Nights— because there was no strug-
.gle of the human person against the invading spirit.

" Satan can by divine permission enter our bodies, com
pel, as it were, the human person to stand aside, and use
our organs himself, and do whatever he pleases with them ;
but he cannot annihilate ,the human person, or take from
the soul free will. Always is it in the power of the pos
sessed to resist, morally and effectually, the evil intentions
of the devil. The possessed retains his own consciousness,
his own intellectual and moral faculties unimpaired, and
never confounds himself with the spirit that possesses him.
Always, then, does he retain the power of internal pro
test and struggle. Wherever this power is exercised, and
there is clearly a struggle, there is no responsibility at
taching to him, whatever the crimes the body, through
the possession of the devil, is made to commit. But^it
may often happen that this power to protest is not exer
cised, and the possessed yields his moral assent to the
crimes committed by the demon that possesses him. He
then becomes a partaker of their guilt. Wherever it is
clear that he has not internally resisted, that he has not
struggled against the demon, and protested against his
iniquity, the law should punish him for the crimes as

DIFFICULTIES. 201

severely as if there had been no possession at all. The
•error of modern jurisprudence is that, not recognizing the
fact of possession, it punishes alike both classes, or it lets
off both under the plea of insanity. In the latter case
justice becomes too lax, and the greater the criminal, the
more enormous his crime, the less likely is he to be pun
ished ; in the former case justice is too severe, and persons
really innocent, and meritorious even, arc condemned as
the basest of criminals. The law in the middle ages, or
before the wonderful progress of intelligence and humanity
in modern times, distinguished between the two classes,
.and knew how to acquit the innocent and to punish the
guilty. Now the tendency is either to acquit or to con
demn both indiscriminately."

Dr. Corning and Mr. Merton, after this, revived their
former discussion of the question of insanity ; but as noth
ing was really added on either side to what had been pre
viously said, I do not think it necessary to record their con
versation. For myself, it seemed to me that the question
between the theory which explains the phenomena by in
sanity, and that which explains them by satanic invasion,
is of immense practical importance. When the old doc
trine was rejected, the law became excessively severe, and
humanity was shocked. Philosophers and philanthropists
sought to mitigate it by asserting the doctrine of necessity,
uf materialism, of the inherent goodness of the soul, and by
ascribing all misdeeds to external influences, to the action
of nature, society, government, &c. In other words, they
sought to mitigate the law by denying all moral turpitude.

But latterly the older doctrine of spiritualism, as opposed
to materialism, and of freedom as opposed to necessity, has
revived, and the old severity of the law must return, unless
some new way can be discovered of escaping it. This new
way is the plea of insanity. The tendency now is to make
insanity a plea for every crime of some little magnitude.
Our lunatic hospitals are crowded ; new ones are construct
ed, and no inconsiderable portion of our population are
likely to become their inmates. Physicians, carried away
by tueir false science and mistaken humanity, discard all
the old criteria of lunacy, and the courts, following them,
will soon find that all persons brought before them for
trial are insane and irresponsible. The guilty will go un-
whipt of justice, because no guilt will be recognized. If
.the phenomena in question are to be explained by insanity,
I do not see what crime it will not cover.

202 THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

The subject deserves serious consideration. For my partr
I cannot recognize insanity where the person evidently re
tains his intellectual powers underanged or unimpaired,,
where he retains the faculty of reasoning and judging cor
rectly, however he may be driven by foreign influences to
this or that crime. When he tells me that he was obliged
by something to do this or that, and that when he did it, it
seemed to him that it was not he, but some power impelling
him, I raise no question of insanity, but simply, as Merton
suggests we should, the question of internal resistance, and
measure him by the greater or less energy and persistence
of that internal resistance.

CHAPTER XXIV. — LEFT IN THE LURCH.

THOUGH I remained an invalid, there were times when I
revived, and almost nattered myself that I might yet, in
spite of the prognostications of my physician, recover. I
was still comparatively young, and I did not precisely like
the thought of dying. The simple pain of dying did not
affright me ; nor had I much reluctance to leave the world,
where there was little that had any charm for me. But I could
not help sending now and then uneasy glances beyond the
tomb. There might be a spirit- world beyond, and death
might not after all extinguish the life of the soul. I might,
perhaps, live in that unknown world, retain rny personal
identity, and distinct consciousness and memory. I might,
too, at least I could not say it was impossible, be pun
ished there for my sins in this world, and be condemned to
have for my companions those very devils whose acquaint
ance I had so assiduously cultivated here. That might not
be pleasant. Indeed, I began to have many painful reflec
tions, and to ask myself if I had not been all my life mak
ing a fool of myself. I had been promised great things, but
what had I obtained ?

" Your experience, my dear friend," said Mr. Merton, " I
doubt not, proves the truth of the old saying, the devil al
ways, sooner or later, leaves his followers in the lurch. You
remember, probably, I called the morning after my intro
duction to you, to give you and Priscilla a warning as to
what awaited you. You were then too elated, too full of
hope, to listen to any thing I could say ; at least, so it seemed
to me at the time."

" Yet you were mistaken. The few words you said in-

LEFT IN THE LURCH.

203

terested me much, and I wished at the time to hear more."
" Alas ! it is one of the miseries of the world, that the
wicked are much more active for mischief, than the virtu
ous are for <rood. Would to God that the followers
of Christ had" a tithe of the industry and energy of the fol
lowers of Satan. If I had been more earnest, more ready
to sacrifice my own ease and my own pride, perhaps —
But that is idle. You will, I presume, readily concede now
that you were then laboring under a delusion, and indulged
hopes which have not been realized ? "
" Undoubtedly."

" So it is. Satan never keeps his promises."
" I wish you to explain," said Jack, who that moment
entered the room, — " I wish you to explain how it is, if Sa
tan is as powerful, and does as many marvellous things as
you pretend, that they who give themselves up soul and
body to him, always fail at last. Your mighty sorcerers and
magicians always find their master failing them when it
comes to the pinch. Ninety-nine times the devil^ enables
the sorcerer to open the prison doors, to become invisible
to the sight or impervious to the sword of his enemies, to
overwhelm them, or to escape them by flying away through
the keyhole ; but the hundredth time fails him, and leaves
him to be captured, to confess his crimes, and to be burnt
alive. According to all accounts, your witches are the most
miserable old hags one ever meets — wretched old crones,
living in the most abject poverty, and hardly able to pro
cure the food necessary to keep soul and body together.
The devil never comes when wanted, never makes his ap
pearance before competent and credible witnesses. He per
forms his wonders in the dark ; and when one would really
prove the fact of his presence, he is away, and nobody can
get a glimpse of him."

" And what else," replied Mr. Merton, " should be ex
pected of the devil ? And yet I would not treat your ob
jection lightly, for it is one which has at times raised doubts
'in my own mind, and it makes me rather sceptical as to
most" of the tales of witchcraft, ghosts, and hobgoblins I
hear or read of. But you should bear in mind that the
devils are capricious as well as malicious, or rather, their
malice itself is full of caprice. The devil, in all his inva
sions, seeks only to get himself worshipped, and to ruin
souls. When he has made a soul his slave, made sure. of its
destruction in hell, his end is answered. He is a liar from

204 THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

the beginning, and the father of lies. He is the inveterate
enemy of truth, and if he sometimes tells it, it is because
compelled by a higher power ; or if now and then, of his
own accord, it is only because it serves his purpose of de
ception better than falsehood. If he sometimes keeps his
promises, and seems to do the best he can for his slaves, it
is for the same reason. Then, again, he is not omnipotent,
he is not the supreme Lord ; and however powerful he may
be, there is One mightier than he, who can thwart him
when he pleases. He can, as I often say, go only the length
of his chain. It may comport with the purposes of God to
suffer him to do many marvellous deeds, but never to suf
fer him to do them so uniformly or in such a manner that
his victims shall not be able to detect the impostor, and
know, if they will, that it is a foul and lying spirit they
follow. Satan's delight is in deceiving, and he delights as
much in deceiving those already his slaves, as those he would
make such ; and God so orders it, that his deceptions shall
be discoverable by all not wilfully blind.

"The devil is called the prince of this world, but he
is not its absolute lord. He can even here do only what
he is, for the purposes of love or justice, permitted to do.
It may turn out, then, that he is forbidden to come to the
assistance of his servants in the nick of time, even when
he himself is disposed to do so. He may raise the storm,
but there is One asleep in the bark, who can at any in
stant awake, and say to the winds and the waves, Peace,
be still. It is not fitting that Satan should be able to
keep his promises in the" great majority of cases to the
last, for that would leave too little' chance of detecting
his delusions, and would confirm his worship. His fail
ures prove his malice, and also that his power is not his
-own, therefore that he is not God. They serve, too, as
punishments to his dupes, for it is fitting that they who,
through evil inclination and undue love of the world or
of pleasure, trust to him, should ultimately fail in the
very goods promised.

"The principles of God's providence are always and
everywhere the same, and there is a close analogy between
the natural and the supernatural. God has given to the
universe its law. He has placed before man a real, sub
stantial, and desirable good ; but he has made this good at
tainable only in one way, by obedience to his law, which is
not an arbitrary law, but a law founded in his own eternal

LEFT IN THE LURCH. 205-

reason, in his own infinite, eternal, and immutable justice.
He who attempts to attain to his good, his beatitude, by any
other means, invariably and inevitably fails. It is as our
Lord said, — 'I am the door;' and 'he that entereth not by
the door, but climbeth up another way, the same is a thief
and a robber.' Whoever seeks entrance into the fold of
happiness by another than the God-appointed way, what
ever that way may be, is predoomed to disappointment. All
experience proves it. The departure by the ancient gen
tiles from the patriarchal or primitive religion, led to the
confusion of their understandings, and to the adoption and
practice of the grossest and most abominable superstitions
— the extreme of moral or spiritual misery. The man who
seeks happiness, e.ven in this life, from acquiring or pos
sessing riches and honor, always fails, even when he appar
ently succeeds. The most miserable of men are they who-
make pleasure their sole pursuit. The reason is, that beat
itude is not promised to those pursuits, lies not on their
plane, and is not attainable by following them. He who-
attempts to attain it in any of those ways is no wiser than
those philosophers of Laputa who sought to extract sun
beams from cucumbers. It is only in accordance with the
same principle, that they who seek worldly felicity, by con
sorting with devils, should in like manner be disappointed."

u All that is very wise, and would do very well for a ser
mon," said Jack. " It may, for aught I know, be very true.
I have no knowledge on the subject, and no acquaintance
with the devil or his angels. But I wish you would tell
me how it happens that the witnesses to these marvellous
phenomena are seldom if ever men of real science, well
known, and of name in the scientific world ? "

" I thought you were one of those who would not admit
authority even in matters of faith, and yet you demand au
thority in matters of science," replied Mr. Merton, in a tone
slightly sarcastic. " You would have the French Academy,
for instance, in science what Rome claims to be in religion,
and admit a historical fact or a scientific conclusion only on-
academic authority."

"But you know," replied Jack, "that scientific commis
sions appointed to investigate and report on particular cases
in France, never succeed in getting a sight of those mar
vellous facts which are so readily exhibited to others. Is
not this a suspicious circumstance ? "

" Not in my mind," replied Mr. Merton. " Your learned-

206 THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

academicians generally commence their investigations with
the persuasion that all facts of the kind alleged are im
possible, and they seldom pay attention to the actual phe
nomena passing before them. They are busy only with their
scepticism, and do not see what really takes place. Their
study is simply how to explain away the phenomena they
do see, without admitting their supernatural or superhuman
character. Lawyers are said to be the worst witnesses in
the world. Academicians are the very worst people in the
world to observe facts. I would trust, in what depends on
the senses, a plain, honest, unscientific peasant, much quick
er than I would an Arago or a Babinet, for he has no theory
to disturb him, no conclusion to establish or refute. The
science of all your learned academies is infidel in regard to
religion. Babinet, of the Institute, has just written an Es
say in the Revue des Deux Mondes, in which he pronounces
the phenomena alleged by our recent spiritists impossible,
because they contradict the laws of gravitation. Poor man !
he reasons as if the phenomena repugnant to the laws of
gravitation are supposed to be produced by it, or at least
without a power that overcomes it. Why, the very marvel-
lousness of the phenomenon is that it is contrary to the law
of gravitation ; and because it is contrary to the law of
gravitation, we infer that it is preternatural. The learned
member of the Institute argues that the fact is impossible,
because it would be preternatural, and the preternatural is
impossible, because the preternatural would be preternat
ural ! When I see a man raised, without any visible means,
to the ceiling, and held there by his feet with his head
downwards for half an hour or more without a visible sup
port, I do not pretend that it is in accordance with the law
of gravitation, but the essence of the fact is precisely in
that it is not. Now, to deny the fact for that reason, is to
say that the law of gravitation cannot be overcome or sus
pended, and precisely to beg the question. When I throw
a stone into the air, my force, in some sense, overcomes that
of gravitation. How does M. Babinet know that there are
not invisible powers who can take a man and hold him up
with his feet to the ceiling, or a table, as easily as I can a
little child ? The fact of the rising of a table or a man to
the ceiling is one that is easily verified by the senses, and if
attested by witnesses of ordinary capacity and credibility,
must be admitted. That it is contrary to the law of gravi
tation, proves not that it is impossible, but that it is possible

LEFT IN THE LCTRCH. 207

only preternaturally. It would be a real relief to find a
distinguished academician who had learned practically the
elements of logic.

" The devils, again," continued Mr. Merton, " may not
choose to exhibit their superhuman powers before your
scientific commissions. It might be against their interest.
He is sure of the commissioners as long as he can keep them
in their scepticism ; but were he to suffer them to escape it,
he might lose them. Compelled to acknowledge the exist
ence of Satan, they might go further and acknowledge that
of Christ, and become Christians, and labor to harmonize
science with faith. Even God himself may choose to let
them remain in their scepticism as a just punishment of
their intellectual pride, their indocility, and their preferring
their own darkness to his light. They take pleasure in sin,
and he gives them up to their own delusions, and permits
them to believe a lie, that they may be damned, as they de
serve, for their sins. The malice, the cunning, the astute
ness, the caprice of the devils, the prepossessions of the
scientific, and the purposes of God are amply sufficient to
account for the fact that these commissions never succeed
in witnessing the preternatural or superhuman phenomena
said to be witnessed by others."

" But how am I," asked Jack, "to believe that a poor old
«rone, who is half dying of starvation, is in league with the
devil ? Why does she not make use of her power to procure
decent clothing and maintenance ? "

" The devil is by no means a trustworthy or a kind and
generous friend. He is a philanthropist, and never relieves
the suffering under his nose, or cares for that of individ
uals."

"I have .read," Jack went on, "a great many witch-stories,
and descriptions of witch-feasts, and I cannot discover what
there is in them to attach these hell-°ats to their alleged or
gies. I came across, yesterday, an account of the witches'
sabbath. I can conceive nothing more absurd, ridiculous,
or rather disgusting. The acquaintances of the devil gener
ally represent him as respectable at least for his intellect,
and many insist that he is a gentleman. But if all accounts
are true, he is very low and vulgar in his tastes, has very
little sense of dignity, and is in fact a very shabby fellow.
In these orgies he appears, it is said, sometimes in the form
of a big negro, more generally under the form of a black
ram with immense horns, and in that form is very inde-

208 THE SPIRIT KAPPEB.

cently kissed and worshipped by Mesdames the witches. We
know from Tarn O'Shanter that on these occasions there is
much fiddling and dancing, but I cannot conceive how there
can be much pleasure. The whole scene is fitted only to
turn one's stomach."

"^There is no doubt of that," replied Mr. Merton. " The
devil and his worshippers certainly cut a very sorry figure
in these nocturnal orgies, as they are represented ; but f am
not certain that that should be regarded as good ground of
scepticism. I never understood that the devil was a clean
spirit, and I should naturally expect some degree of filthi-
ness in his worshippers. You must know something of the
sins or moral diseases of mankind. Has it not sometimes
occurred to you that some apparently very respectable people,
—people who go well dressed and wear 'clean linen, — under
the influence of their passions, acting out their natures, cut,
to an impartial spectator, about as sorry a figure as Master
Leonard and his witches ? In the eyes of infinite Holiness,
I am inclined to think there is much that passes in refined
and cultivated society that does not appear at all more clean
and respectable than do these nocturnal orgies in yours. I
do not vouch for the correctness of the popular descriptions
of these orgies, but they are in accordance with the well-
known principles of depraved nature. The indulgence of
any of our morbid passions degrades us ; and in following
our lusts, there is no beastliness which is not for the m<>
ment charming to us. How much more, then, when to our
natural passions, rendered morbid by indulgence, is added
the superhuman influence of unclean spirits ! The sensualist
lives constantly in a state as disgusting as ever the nocturnal
orgies of witches were represented to be. It is the law of
all vice to descend, and consequently, the more intimate we
are with the devil, only the more rapid and deep is our de
scent. The moral of the witches' orgies is true, whether the
particular descriptions be or not. He who takes the devil
for God, must expect to have hell for his heaven."

" The academicians are right," I remarked, u in telling us
that the whole of the alleged diablerie is all a delusion or an
imposition."

" Not precisely in their sense, however," interrupted Mr.
Merton. " The whole is unquestionably a delusion, a sheer
imposture, but of the devil, not always of man. The devil
promises according to the respective inclinations of his ser
vants — to some riches and honors, to some sensual pleasures,

LEFT IN THE LURCH.

to others power, dominion over men, and the secrets of na
ture. I doubt not that he knows more than men, but he
can never be relied on, for he so mingles his lies with the
truth, that we cannot separate the one from the other."

" That is true," Iremarked; " and those secrets he prom
ises we never gain. We grow proud, we assume airs, we
feel that we are making marvellous discoveries ; we talk
large, use big, swelling words, and seem to penetrate the se-'
cret of the universe ; but we have only clutched at the air,
and when we open our hand, it is empty. We had made
no advance, we had found no vein of knowledge ; and when
the spell was broken, we found ourselves weaker and more
ignorant than ever. The fairy gold was chips and stubble,
the palace of wisdom we saw before us, and in which we
proposed to live with the Sultan's fair daughter, disappears,
carries her away in it, and leaves us only empty space.
I well remember some of my early aspirations. I
thought I was illumined by a more than natural light. The
clouds rolled back before my searching glance ; the dark
ness disappeared ; there was no dread Unknown to confront
rne ; I rose to the empyrean ; I was all intelligence ; I looked,
as a lady of my acquaintance expressed it, ' into the very
abyss of Being.' Yet it was all illusion — a devilish illusion
— and my understanding was all the time darkened, and my
eyes closed to the plainest and most obvious truths before
me."

" It was a deception practised upon you — a deception
practised alike upon all who would attain to a forbidden
knowledge, or to knowledge by ways not permitted by the-
supreme Intelligence — upon the Neo-platonists, the gnos
tics, the transcendentalists, and false mystics of every age,"
added Mr. Merton. " The light we hail in those forbidden'
ways or aspirations, is the light which we see when our eyes-
are shut. It is a preternatural hallucination, and he who-
follows it is sure not only to go astray, but to fall into the
greatest absurdities, and to utter the most ridiculous non
sense."

" The same principle," I added, " is true with regard to
the promised power over men. These satanic revolutions,
and the terrible doings of our revolutionary Berserkirs, all
prove failures in the end. Cromwell supplants Hampden,
and Napoleon Lafayette. The devil always leaves us in the
lurch."

" This fact should be borne in mind," added Mr. Merton,.

VOL. IX-14.

210 THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

46 and if so, might save the world from much superstition.
'The superstition is not in believing in the reality of demonic
invasions, or in believing that the devil sometimes exhibits
a superhuman power, tells us, in dreams, visions, necromancy,
or other forms of divination, facts of which we were igno
rant ; but in practising these forms,'in confiding in the com
munications, and in seeking to avail ourselves of the power
displayed. No reliance can ever be placed upon them, for
supposing the demonic presence real, we have still only a
lying spirit on which to depend. The dream of yester
night has come true, that of to-night will prove false. The
medium you consulted the other day foretold correctly what
was to happen ; to-day her familiar spirit is a lying spirit,
and her tale is false in all its parts. The predictions of the
fortune-teller last year have been fulfilled ; his predictions
of to-day are a tissue of lies. If Ahab goes up to battle, he
shall not die ; yet is shot by a bow drawn at a venture. To
trust in these things is gross superstition, and tends only to
degrade, to render immoral, weak, timid, and miserable.
The way of wisdom is to let them alone, turn your back on
them, and never suffer your mind or imagination to run on
them.

" It is worthy of remark, that the men who declaim the
most against superstition are unbelievers in Christianity,
and who, tinder pretext of making war on superstition, at
tack religion itself. And yet the church has always for
bidden all superstitious practices, and she commands her
children to have no dealings with the devil, to forbear all
resort to fortune-tellers or divination, and to pay 110 atten
tion to dreams, omens, &c. Of course all such things are
wrong, are sin, are treason against God ; but they are also,
and because treason against God and a dealing with the
enemy, unwise and degrading. There is no saying to what
depths he may fall who gives way to them, or the misery
and wretchedness he may bring upon himself, and even upon
those dear to him. I could, were I disposed, draw proofs
enough from my own experience, while I was a prey to the
superstitions still so rife in our country; but I will not
trouble you with them. But of this be sure, that you will
never root out that superstition by denying the existence
and influence of demons. The remedy is in religious faith.
in cultivating a firm trust in God, in obedience to his com
mands,— and in the firm persuasion that all dealing with
devils is unlawful, and that all regard paid to signs, dreams,

CONCLUSIONS.

and omens is superstitious and sinful, and, what will weigh
perhaps still more with our age, wholly unproti table. No
good can come from seeking knowledge by forbidden paths,
and much evil is sure to come."

" I am glad," said Jack, "that Mr. Merton has the grace
to admit so much. It would have been a blessed thing for
me, if I had been taught to regard mesmerism as unlawful ;
better still, if it had never been recommended to me as a
legitimate science. I do not believe in satanic invasions ;
but I do believe little good comes from departing from
the old ways, and attempting to be wiser than our fathers

CHAPTER XXV. CONCLUSIONS.

OUR conversations were continued, but they threw no addi
tional light on the main subject of our investigations, and I
may well dispense myself from the labor of recording them.
I found my early suspicion confirmed, and finally adopted Mr.
Morton's conclusion, that the class of phenomena which had
for several years occupied my attention, and to which, ac
cording to the spiritists themselves, the recent spirit-mani
festations belong, are real, are facts which actually take
place, and are, under certain relations and to a certain extent,
superhuman in their origin and character. As these phe
nomena cannot be ascribed to God or to good angels, they
must be ascribed to Satan, to evil spirits, the enemies of
God and man.

I am well aware that this conclusion will be received by
my brother savants with great derision, and that they will
look upon me as having lost my wits. Even many who are
not savants, who are sincere and firm believers in Christian
ity, and who, in a general way, admit the fact of satanic in
vasion, will laugh at the supposition that the phenomena of
spirit-rapping, table-turning, &c., are any thing more than
very bungling pieces of humbuggery and sleight-of-hand.
Be it so. Their good or bad opinion, their esteem or con
tempt, is of very little importance to me, who have not
many days to live, and who have so soon to face another and
a far different Judge. He who fears God, cannot fear man.
My conclusion has not been hastily adopted, and it is, as far
as I can see, the only conclusion to which a Christian phi
losopher can come.

Mr. Cotton had preserved, what so many have lost, the

212 THE SPIKIT-KAPFEE.

Christian tradition as to evil spirits, and was right in the
main. His error was in ascribing all the phenomena ex
hibited by the practice of mesmerism to the devil and his
angels. Mesmerism, though abnormal, is to a certain ex
tent susceptible of a satisfactory explanation on natural
principles. Man, as Mr. Merton, after the elder Gorres,.
maintained, has a twofold development, the one normal, in
which he rises to spiritual freedom by union with God, the-
other abnormal, in which he descends to spiritual slavery
by descending to union with created nature. In the former
he tends continually to escape from the fatalism of nature,
and to ascend to the pure and serene atmosphere of spiritual
freedom, in which the spirit becomes supreme over the-
body. In the latter he follows the laws of fatal or unfree
nature, loses his spiritual dominion, becomes, or tends to-
become, subject in his soul to his body, while the body falls
under the operation of the general forces of necessary na
ture, and responds fatally, or without freedom, to the pulses
of the external universe.

In the ascending development, by the aid of grace and
good angels, the man, the Christian mystic, like St. Cath
erine, St. Theresa, or St. Bernardine of Sienna, and so*
many others of the saints of the church, rises to spiritual
freedom, and even to a certain extent, liberates the body
from the fatalism of nature. The body itself seems to
enter into the freedom of the spirit, and, through the free
soul informing it, to be able to resist the action of necessary
or unfree nature, as the vital principle enables the living
body to resist and overcome the action of chemical affinity.
The body is as it were spiritualized, not absolutely indeed,
but partially, as if in anticipation of the resurrection, or
rather, as pointing to a resurrection and its glorious trans
formation hereafter. It is baptized, participates, if I may
so say, in the sanctifying grace infused into the soul,
becomes pure, and even when the soul leaves it, emits a
fragrant odor.*

In the descending development, that is, in the abnormal

* I do not forget here, nor do I intend to assert any thing against the
doctrine of the holy Council of Trent, that concupiscence remains after
baptism, for the combat, or ihefomes of sin remains, and as long as one
lives there is the possibility of sin. The body, in this life, is never
wholly liberated and restored to its integral state; but that it is liber
ated in some measure, and that it in the saints (in some saints at least),
in a degree participates, even this side the grave, in the freedom of the=
soul, I think is undeniable.

CONCLUSIONS. 213

development, in which we turn our backs on our Maker,
who is at once our original and end, our creator and our
supreme good, and tend in the direction from him, our soul
lets go its mastery, and our body falls under the dominion
of unfree nature, enters into the series of its laws, and is
exposed to all its necessary and invincible forces. We
become not merely sensual, but, in some sense, physical
men, and act under and with the great physical agents of
the universe. We become feeble and strong as the light
ning whose bolt rends the oak, and is turned aside by a
silken thread. Now to this abnormal development, mes
merism, in my judgment, belongs ; and therefore, though
abnormal, it is not necessarily preternatural. It belongs not
•to healthy but unhealthy nature, and its phenomena are
never exhibited except in a subject naturally or artificially
diseased. I have never known a person of vigorous consti
tution and robust health mesmerized. The experiments of
Baron Reichenbach were all made on persons in ill health,
for the most part on patients under medical treatment.
The seeress of Provost was sickly, and suffering from an
incurable malady ; and it may be asserted as a general rule,
that no one is a subject of mesmerism whose constitution,
especially the nervous constitution, is in its normal state.

I have no doubt that many of the phenomena regarded
by the vulgar as the effect of satanic invasion, are to be
explained by reference to this abnormal development, with
out the supposition of any direct agency of evil spirits.
The precise limits of the power of this abnormal develop
ment we do not know, and therefore we are always to be
exceedingly slow to assume the direct invasion of the devil
to explain this or that extraordinary phenomenon, as Mr.
Merton has already shown. The error of Mr. Cotton was
in not distinguishing between abnormal phenomena arti
ficially produced, and the phenomena of real demonic pres
ence. He asked too much of us, and we gave him nothing.
He failed to command from us the respect he deserved, and
I am sorry for it. He was a worthy man in his way, and
far less superstitious, and far more philosophical than those
who thought it a mark of their superiority to ridicule him.
But he is gone, and has in his own denomination left few
behind who are worthy to step into his shoes.

Nevertheless, it would be wrong to infer, from the fact
that the proper mesmeric phenomena are explicable on
natural principles, that the practice of mesmerism is lawful

214 THE SPIEIT-KAPPEB.

or not dangerous. It is an artificial disease, and injurious
to the physical constitution. It moreover facilitates the
satanic invasion. Satan has no creative power, and can
operate only on a nature created to his hands, and in accord
ance with conditions of which he has not the sovereign con
trol. Ordinarily, he can invade our bodies only as they
are in an abnormal state, and by availing himself of some
natural force, it may be some fluid, or some invisible and
imponderable agent like electricity, or what Baron Reichen-
bach calls od, and Mesmer animal magnetism, and the older
magnetists called spirit of the world. The practice of
mesmerism brings into play this force, and thus gives occa
sion to the devil, or exposes us to his malice and invasions.

But, though it is unwise, as well as unscientific, to ascribe
to Satan what is explicable on natural principles, the con
trary error is the one which in our times is the most neces
sary to be guarded against. Nothing is more un philosophi
cal than to treat the dark facts of human history as unreal,,
or to attempt to explain them all without resort to demonic
influence. Many of the facts recorded, no doubt, never
took place. Many were the result of fraud, imposture,
jugglery, and many are explicable by reference to the ab
normal development of human nature ; but after making all
reasonable deductions for these, there remains a residuum, as
Mr. Merton has said, which it is as absurd to attempt to
explain without the action of evil spirits, as to explain the
light of day without the sun, or the existence and preserva
tion of the universe without God. Not otherwise can you
ever succeed in explaining the introduction, establishment,,
persistence, and power of the various cruel, filthy, and
revolting superstitions of the ancient heathen world, or of
pagan nations in modern times. No genuine philosopher
will attempt to explain them on natural principles alone.

They reveal a more than human power, and we have no
alternative but to ascribe them either to God or to the
devil. We cannot ascribe them to God, for they were too
foul and filthy, too deleterious in their effects, too debasing
and enslaving in their influence, to be ascribed to a good
source. They were, then, from Satan, operating upon
man's morbid nature, and permitted by infinite Justice as a
deserved punishment upon the gentiles for their hatred of
truth, and their apostasy from the primitive religion. Men
left to themselves, to human nature alone, however low
they might be prone to descend, never could descend so-

CONCLUSIONS. 215

low as to worship wood and stone, four-footed beasts, and
creeping things. To do this needs satanic delusion.

The same must be said of Mahometanism. The old
theory, which made Mahomet an out-and-out impostor, who
said, deliberately, " with malice aforethought," " Go to
now, let us make a new religion and impose it upon the
world," no man, accustomed to philosophize, can for a
moment entertain. No man ever yet went to work delib
erately to devise and impose a false religion, or if any one
ever did, he never succeeded. He who fouftds a new relig
ion is never an impostor in his own eyes. He works " in a
sad sincerity," and imposes on himself before imposing on
others. Mahomet evidently believed in himself, in the
sanctity of his own mission, and worked from an earnest
conviction, not from simple craft or calculation. I am
pleased to find the author of that admirable poem, Moham
med, a Tragedy in Five Acts, a work of rare sagacity and
true poetic genius, rejecting the old theory of downright im
posture. The estimable author maintains that he was sincere
in part, and in part insincere. He was sincere in his asser
tion of the unity of God, and* in his hostility to idolatry,
but insincere in the assertion of his prophetic mission. I
am not, however, satisfied with this. I do not deny that
men may be half sincere, and half knavish, or that they be
sincere and earnest as to the end, and wholly unscrupulous
as to the means. But in nothing was Mahomet more sin
cere than in his belief in his own mission, and in the super
natural origin of the Koran. Never, without that conviction,
could he have inspired his followers with it, or have him
self persevered for so many years, amid the ill-success and
• discouragements that he experienced. His gratitude, evi
dently unfeigned, to Cadijah, his first consort, and to
Medina, which received him on his flight from Mecca,
cherished to the last moment of his life, proves that he
believed in his own mission.

The same thing is proved by his open vice and profligacy
after his success. A man conscious that he is playing a
part, that he has a character to sustain, that he is acting the
prophet, would have been more circumspect, more wary in
the indulgence of his lusts, and affected a life of more rigid
asceticism. He would have been on his guard against
scandalizing his followers, and would never have dared
insert in his Koran those scandalous provisions which spe
cially exempt him from obedience to the laws which he

•216 THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

professed, by divine authority, to impose upon his follow
ers. Imposture can never afford to abandon itself openly
to the empire of the passions. Heretics are usually more
careful than the orthodox in regard to appearances. They
usually affect great purity of life, a decorous exterior, and
a grave and sactimonious face and tone. Hypocrisy is aus
tere, maintains in its look and tone an awful gravity, and
never relaxes in public. It is only innocence that dares be
light and frolicsome, and yield to its varying impulses.
Nobody is so shocked with the imaginary impurities of
•convents and nunneries as your debauched old sinners,
steeped in corruption, and the miserable slaves of their own
morbid passions and prurient imagination.

What deceives the excellent and gifted author of the
tragedy, is the fact that so far as Mahomet asserted the
unity of God against the polytheism of the unconverted
Arabs, and opposed idolatry, he was on the side of truth and
religion, and consequently was so far opposed to Satan. He
thinks that thus far he could not have been under the influ
ence of an evil spirit. Has he forgotten the demon of Soc
rates ? Has he forgotten that the devil can disguise himself
as an angel of light ? Paganism, in its old form, was doom
ed. Christianity had silenced the oracles and driven the
devils back to hell. How was the devil to re-establish his
worship on earth, and carry on his war against the Son of
God ? Evidently only by changing his tactics, and turning
the truth into a lie. There is nothing to hinder us from
believing that Satan himself taught Mahomet the unity of
God, and inspired him with horror of the prevailing forms
of idolatry. The strong keeps the house, as our Lord says,
till a stronger binds him and enters into possession. The
devil would expel polytheism and the grosser forms of
idolatry, no longer in harmony with the spirit of the times,
that he might make the last state worse than the first ; and
whoever has studied history knows that Mahometanism has
proved a far more formidable enemy to Christianity than
was the paganism braved by the apostles. The truths of
the Koran are introduced only to sanction its errors, and its
moral precepts, many of which are good, only to give coun
tenance to its immorality, to its satanic abominations.

Mahomet in his life was subject to what we call in these
days the mesmeric trance, as was Socrates. He would often
be suddenly arrested, fall prostrate upon the earth, and in
this attitude and in these trances he professed to receive his

CONCLUSIONS. 217

^revelations. Here are evidently the mesmeric phenomena
which in some form always accompany the presence and in
vasion of demons. Mr. Miles has introduced these, and
-described them with great spirit, truth, and propriety, in the
-opening scene of his tragedy. The time is the night of Al
Kadir, the place is the Cave of Hara, three miles from
Mecca, where Mahomet was accustomed to resort and spend
much time alone. Mahomet is seen prostrate upon the
slope of a rock, resembling a rude pedestal, his face conceal
ed by his turban. He is visited by Cadijah, his affectionate
and beloved wife. To her he seems asleep. She calls him,
-she approaches him, she embraces him, and tries to awaken
him. All in vain. Finding her efforts fruitless, she ex-
• claims,

" Alas, this is not sleep 1 Some evil spirit
O'ershadows thee."

When finally the vision departs, and Mahomet awakes,
;he breaks out,

"Gone! gone! celestial messenger,
Angel of light !

Yes— 'twas there — 'twas there

The angel stood, in more than mortal splendor,
Before my dazzled vision ! — I have heard thee,
Ambassador from Allah to my soul,
Have heard and will obey."

To the question of Cadijah, " What mystery is this ? " he
.answers,

"Ah ! the tremendous recollection bursts
So vividly upon me, that my tongue
Grows cold and speechless. I was here alone,
Expecting thee. when, suddenly, I heard
My name pronounced, with voice more musical
Than Peri warbling in my ear.
Ravish'd, I turned, and saw upon that rock,
Resplendent hovering there, an angel form;
I knew 'twas Gabriel, Allah's messenger.
Celestial glories compassed him around ;
Arched o'er his splendid head, his glistening wings
Shed light, and musk, and melody. No more
I saw — no more my mortal eye could bear.
Proiie on my face I fell, and, from the dust,

218 THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

Besought him quench his superhuman radiance.
4 Look up,' he said; I stole a trembling glance;
And then, a beauteous youth, he stood and smiled.
Then, as his ruby lips unclosed, I heard—
* Go teach what mortals know not yet, — THERE is
No GOD BUT ONE — MOHAMMED is HIS PROPHET ! '
E'en as he spoke, his mantling glories burst
With such transporting brightness, that, o'erawed,
I sunk in dizzy trance, which still might thrall
My inmost soul, had not those impious names,
Breathing of hell, dispelled it."*

Here are presented, very clearly, the phenomena which
precede or accompany the demonic approach and invasion.
When the false god took possession of Balaam, he threw
him to the earth ; and it was in a sort of somnambulic state
that he prophesied, or rather that the demon in him was
compelled, against his will, to bless instead of cursing Israel,
and to prophesy his glory. " There is no God but one," in
the sense intended by Mahomet, and understood by his fol
lowers, is by no means a truth, for in that sense, it denies
not merely polytheism, but was intended more especially to
deny the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. The Koran re
peatedly so explains it, and therefore the unity of God, as
taught by the false prophet, is not a truth but a lie, and the
Mahometans worship not the true God, but a false god, as
do all who deny that God is at once three distinct persons
in one divine essence or being.

Nothing is less philosophical than the tendency in modern
times, especially since the time of Yoltaire, to explain great
effects by petty causes, as the peace of Utrecht by Mrs.
Masham's spilling a little water on the duchess of Marl-
borough's dress. The stream cannot rise higher than the
fountain, or the effect exceed the cause. A little fire
can kindle a great matter, but that little fire is the occasion,
not the cause of the wide-spread conflagration. Nothing
more surely indicates a narrow, superficial, and unphilosophi-
cal spirit than the attempt, as is the case with most writers,
to explain the origin, progress, and power of Mahornetanisrn
by the fanaticism, the cunning, the craft, or the superior
genius and ability of Mahomet, even though we suppose
him aided by a Jew and a Nestorian monk. There were
fraud, craft, trickery, and all the means of imposition em-

* Mohammed, a Tragedy in Five Acts. By GEORGE H. MILES. Boston:-
1850, pp. 1-6.

CONCLUSIONS. 219

ployed ; yet never can they suffice alone to account for the
terrible phenomena of Islamism, which for twelve hundred
years has waged battle with the cross, and possessed itself
of the fairest regions of the globe. Whoever studies it
calmly and profoundly must come to the conclusion that
there has been at work in it a more than human power, and
that, if not, as the Moslems believe, from God, it must be
from the devil.

Do not ascribe so much to mere human power, wisdom,
craft, fraud, dexterity, or skill. These are far feebler than it
is customary in our days to regard them. In general men are
duped themselves before they undertake to dupe others.
Never yet was there a noted heresiarch who did not believe
in his own heresy, and hence there is no instance on record
of a real heresiarch, the originator and founder of a new
heresy, being reclaimed to the orthodox faith, unless we
except the doubtful case of Berengarius. I have never been
able to sympathize with those Catholic writers who would
persuade us that the Protestant reformation originated in
petty jealousies and rivalries between the Dominican and
Augustinian monks. That view is too narrow and super
ficial ; nor can we ascribe it to the pride, the vanity, and the
ambition, or the intelligence, the virtue, the wisdom, and
the sanctity of the monk Luther. Luther was a man terri
bly in earnest, a genuine man, and no sham, as Carlyle would
say ; and so were all the prominent chiefs in that terrible
movement of the sixteenth century. The cool, subtle, dark,
persevering Calvin, the fiery, energetic, and ferocious John
Knox and their compeers were no petty tricksters, no
dilettanti, no shrewd calculating hypocrites. They were
terribly in earnest ; they believed in themselves ; they be
lieved in the spirit that moved them, that spoke in their
words, and struck in their blows against the old Papal
edifice. It is nonsense to repeat, age after age, that the
denial by the Holy See of the divorce solicited by Henry
YIIL, caused the separation of England from Catholic unity.
That wily and lustful monarch, who must live in history a$
the " wife-slayer," found in that denial only an occasion of
withdrawing his kingdom from its spiritual subjection to
Rome, and of uniting in the crown the pontifical with the
royal authority. Whoever looks beneath the surface of
things, whoever studies, in a true philosophical spirit, that
fearful Protestant movement, must recognize in it a super
human power, and say that either the finger of God, or the

520 THE SPIRIT-KAPPER.

hand of the devil is here, and that its chiefs must have been
inspired by the Holy Ghost, or driven onward by infuri
ated demons.

So, it seems to me, we must reason with regard to Crom
well and the stern old Puritans, fierce and terrible as the old
Berserkirs from the North. There was something super
human in the English rebellion and revolution of the seven
teenth century ; and if Cromwell and his party were not
.specially moved by the Holy Spirit, as they believed, they
must have been animated and driven on by the old Norse
demon. So also of the old French Revolution, and of all
those terrible convulsions which have ruined nations and
shaken the world. Men are indeed in them, with their
wisdom and their folly, their beliefs and their doubts, their
virtues and their vices, but there is more in them than these.
There is in them the fierce conflict of invisible powers, ever
renewing and carrying on that fierce and unrelenting war
which Lucifer and his rebel host dared wage against the
Most High, and which must continue till time be no more.
All history, if we did but understand it, is little else but the
history of the conflict between these invisible powers ; and
till we learn this fact, in vain shall we pride ourselves on
our philosophies of history.

Carlyle has well exposed the shallow philosophy and ab
surd theories of our popular historians. Would he had him
self gone deeper, and recognized the demonic and also the
providential element in history, and not attempted to
explain its philosophy on human nature alone. Your
Odins, Thors, Socrateses, Mahomets, Crom wells, Bonapartes,
.are not simply exponents of true, living, and energetic man
hood, and owe not their success, or their place in history to
their clear perception and their instinctive adherence to
the laws of true and genuine nature, as Carlyle would have
us believe. The nature he bids us worship is the devil, the
dark, subterranean demon, that seizes us, blinds our eyes,
jand carries us onward, whither we know not, and by a
power which we are not. It is the demon of the storm, the
whirlwind, and the tempest, the volcano and the earthquake,
.and the Carlylean heroes are energumens, Berserkirs, who
.spread devastation around them, who quaff the blood of
their enemies, from human skulls, in the orgies of Walhalla,
-and leave as their monuments the ruins of nations. Carlyle
has himself been touched with a German devil, and received
£L slight manipulation from the old Norse demon. But he

CONCLUSIONS. 221

has done well to say, " No sham can live ;" he might have
added, No sham is or can be productive. It is not by petty
passions and petty tricks that nations are shaken to their
centre, and fearful revolutions, which change the face of
the world, are effected. Only what is real is, and only what
is, can do. Under all the heavings and tossings of nature,
there is a reality of some sort ; and only by means of that
reality can you explain the historical phenomena that arrest
your attention.

I have just been reading, in order to relieve my weariness,
Sir Walter Scott's Woodstock, not surely one of his best,
but one of his most serious novels, in which he has endeav
ored to be something of the philosopher, as well as the un
rivalled romancer. Poor man ! wizard of the north, as he
has been called, his magician's wand fails him here. How
was he, wkh the shallow philosophy of the eighteenth
century, to explain such a phenomenon as Cromwell and
his major-generals, those furious Berserkirs, true descend
ants of the old Vikings of the North ? To say that Oliver
and the Independents were mere long-faced, psalm-singing
hypocrites, moved only by the ordinary motives and
passions of human beings, is a libel on history. Long-faced,
sanctimonious, and long-winded, famous for their dark
cloaks and steeple-crowned hats, their psalm-singing, their
Biblical phraseology, their speaking through the nose, and
turning up the white of the eye, they certainly were ; but
whoso supposes they were so by virtue of subtle, calculating
hypocrisy, knows them not. Whatever else Cromwell and
the^ Puritans were, they were no hypocrites; their manners,
their dress, and address, however objectionable we may
choose to regard them, were not affected to cloak conscious
vice or iniquity, or to deceive either their friends or their
enemies. Never were men more serious, more deeply in
earnest ; and it was in obedience to what they held to be
the voice of God that they preached, fasted, sung psalms,
prayed, and — kept their powder dry. It was not by their
snivel, their nasal twang, their Biblical phraseology, nor by
an affectation of piety and dependence on the Lord, nor bv
any form of hypocrisy or cant, that they made mincemea"t
of the drinking, swearing, rakehell, but brave and loyal
cavaliers at _ Marston Moor, Edgehill, and Worcester. A
chorus of spirits, black or white, joined in their psalm-sing
ing, and invisible powers sped their balls to the hearts of
their enemies, and gave force to the well-aimed strokes of
their swords.

222 THE SPIRIT-KAPPER.

Certainly the hand of Providence in the affairs of nations
is not to be denied, and certain it is that God visits nations
in mercy and in judgment. A sound theology, an enlight
ened piety sees the providence of God in the growth of the
infant colony, in the prosperity of states, and the revolutions
and fall of empires. But he works by ministries ; and the
most terrible exhibitions of his wrath, the most fearful of
his judgments are those in which he lets loose the demons,
and permits a people to fall under their power. These
demons work their own will, but are at the same time the
executors of his vengeance — of his justice. The good, even
in the greatest national calamities, are never injured, for
nothing but sin ever injures ; but the wicked are punished.
They had chosen the devil for their master, and it is fitting
that he whom they had falsely worshipped as God, who is no
God, should be made the instrument of their punishment.
The national sins of England were great ; her kings had be
trayed their trust — had led the people into error, and forgot
ten what they owed to the King of kings and Lord of lords.
The Lord had a controversy with them, and he permitted
the old Puritans to triumph over them ; and whether they
did so by simple human strength, or by the willing assist
ance of evil spirits, inflaming them with a preternatural
courage, and driving them on by a preternatural fury, the
principle is one and the same. So also of France, in her
terrible revolution of 1789, and of Europe in 1848.

I read with sorrow the puny attempts of the author of
Woodstock to explain away, as mere jugglery or trickery,
the strange phenomena which disturbed the sequestrators of
the Royal Lodge. He would, on the strength of an anony
mous pamphlet, explain them as a trick played off upon the
parliamentary commissioners by Dr. Roehecliff, Albert,
Tompkins, Joceline, and Phebe. It may have been so ; but
the machinery he supposes is clearly inadequate to explain all
the mysterious phenomena he acknowledges. The trick
could hardly have failed, if trick there was, to be detected
either by Colonel Everard or the Commissioners. But even,
if his explanation of that particular case is to be accepted,
or if a thousand instances are to be referred to trickery, it
says nothing as to the general fact of demonic vexations
and invasions. As Christians, we know that we are con
stantly beset by evil spirits, and the mysterious occurrences
at the Royal Lodge of Woodstock, even if real, are only a
step beyond ordinary satanic temptations, as possession is
only a further extension of obsession.

CONCLUSIONS. 223

If much harm is done by superstition, perhaps even more
is done by the denial of all demonic influence and invasion,
and the attempt to explain all the so-called satanic phenom
ena on natural principles. It generates a sceptical turn
of mind, and the rationalism resorted to will in the end be
turned against the supernatural facts of religion, and the
same process which is adopted to explain away the satanic
prodigies, will be made use of to explain away the miracles
of the Old and New Testaments. In fact it has been so
done, and we have seen grave commentators laboring, as
they believed, to explain these very miracles on natural prin
ciples ; thus reducing Christianity from its high character
of a supernatural religion to a system of mere naturalism, at
best a simple human philosophy, perhaps inferior to many
other systems. Jefferson, writing to Priestley, speaks, as he
supposes, very well of our Lord, but disputes his merits as
a philosoper, and says, in substance, " Jesus was a spiritual
ist, I am a materialist. " How many men in our days regard
themselves as very commendable Christians because they
recognize the beauty and worth of certain moral precepts
of the Gospel, precepts which are only the universal dic
tates of reason, and recognized by the common sense of all
nations — heathen as well as Christian ! Thomas Paine was
more honest, for though he could say Jesus taught very pure
morals, which have never been excelled, he refused to call
himself a Christian. I have met many a professed minis
ter of the Gospel who would find Tom Paine's creed, mea
gre as it was, too big for him : " I believe in one God and
no more, and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I be
lieve that religious duties consist in justice and mercy, and
endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy. " The
Gospel, as it is preached by some "godly" ministers in New
England, is too meagre to have satisfied a Rousseau, or even
a Voltaire.

In the case of the spiritists of our own times, much harm
is done by telling them the spirit-manifestations are all hum-
buggery, imagination, fraud, or trickery. These people
know that it is not so. They know that they are not knaves,
that they practise no trickery, and have no wish to deceive
or be deceived. They are not conscious gf any dishonest in
tentions, and they have no reason to think that they are less
intelligent or less sharp-sighted than they who abuse them
as impostors, or ridicule them as dupes. The worst way in
the world to convert a man from his errors is to begin by

224 THE 8PIEIT-RAPPER.

abusing him, and denying what he knows to be true. Ex
cept in the teachings of God, or what is the same thing, the-
teachings of men appointed, instructed, and supernaturally
assisted by him to teach, we never find unmixed truth, for
to err is human ; and on the other hand, we never find pure,
unmixed falsehood. Unmixed falsehood is universal nega
tion, and no negation is possible but by an affirmation.
Error is the misapplication of the true. These spiritists
are deceived, are deluded, I grant, for they are the sport of
a lying and deceiving spirit ; but they are not deceived or
deluded as to the phenomena to which they testify, nor, as
a general thing, do they wish to deceive others. Among
them there may be knaves and fools, there may be quacks
and impostors, but I have no reason to suppose that the mass
of them are not as intelligent and as honest as the common
run of men, as the world goes. Their error is in their ex
plication of the phenomena, not in asserting the reality of
the phenomena; and to begin by telling them that no such
phenomena have ever occurred, that the spirit-manifesta
tions are all humbug, is, to say the least, a very unwise pro
ceeding. If you are a minister of religion, by doing so you
are only playing into the hands of the devil, for you out
rage the natural sense of justice and truth which these peo
ple still retain, and dispose them in turn to look upon religion
itself, as held by the Christian Church, as a humbug.

I have known many apparently sincere and pious persons
driven to apostasy by the scepticism with regard to the
phenomena they have themselves seen. The very worst way
in the world to deliver ourselves or others from the power
of Satan, is to deny his existence. Resist the devil, and he
will flee from you ; laugh at him, if you will, and he will
hie himself back to hell, for he cannot endure contempt ;
but deny his existence, persuade yourselves that there exists
no devil, and he in turn will laugh at you, and take quiet
possession of you. Oppose the spiritists we certainly
should, but not where they are strong and we are weak.
The true way is to concede the facts, concede all that they
really and honestly observe, concede even their mysterious
and superhuman character, and then explain to them their
principle and origin, and show them that they proceed not
from good angels, even when apparently they are pure and
unobjectionable, but from the enemies of Christ, from Satan
and his angels carrying on, with devilish malice, their never-
ending war against Heaven.

CONVERSION. 225

Such at least are the conclusions which I have been forced
in my own mind to adopt, and such, it seems to me, all must
adopt who study the question in the light of Christian the
ology. I am at least honest in these conclusions, and, though
I may err now, as I have so often erred before, yet I am not
more likely to err than others. Err indeed I may, but, if
I must err at all, 1 would rather err on the side of supersti
tion, than on the side of scepticism and irreligion.

CHAPTER XXVI. CONVERSION.

MY story, like my life, draws to its close. The change
which my religious views have undergone has been more
than once hinted. On religion, as on most other subjects,
I no longer think or feel as I did in the day when I fancied
I possessed more than human science, and wielded a more
than human power.

I grew up without any decided religious doctrines, though
inclining to what was called liberal Christianity, that is, a
Christianity kept up with the times, and conformed to the
ever-changing spirit of the age. I was not an avowed un
believer ; I was not an open scoffer ; I even thought it well
to pay a decent external respect to religion, to attend church
when convenient, and to patronize the Gospel, providing it
was not preached with too much earnestness and devoted-
ness, and not promulgated as a law which must govern all
my thoughts, words, and deeds, but was proposed simply as
a speculation, as a theory, or as an opinion, which I was at
liberty to accept, modify, or reject, as seemed to me good.

Before my mesmeric experiments and acquaintance with
Priscilla, I was a sort of rationalist, accepting Christianity
in name, and explaining its miracles and mysteries on pure
ly natural principles. Afterwards, after my philanthropic
schemes had miscarried, my worship of humanity as God
had proved a failure, and my belief in progress had expired
in the crucible of experience, I fell into a sort of despair,,
and would fain have persuaded myself that I believed in
nothing. If I did not absolutely deny God, my belief in
him became so obscured by the mists of my speculations
and the corruptions of my heart, that I was in reality no
better than an atheist. The devil was a bugbear invented
by the priests, and men were mere motes in the sunbeam.
I have already described the state into which I fell — a state
from which I would risk my life to save my bitterest enemy

VOL. IX— 15.

226 THE SPIRIT-KAPPEB.

Prior to the absolute crushing of all my hopes, which fol
lowed my having finished all the work 1 had marked out
for myself to do, and found it nought, I regarded myself
as a free-thinker, because I had either allowed myself to
think, or had made myself acquainted with the thoughts of
others, against religion. My freedom and independence of
mind were in denying, not in believing. I was not free to
think in favor of religion, nor sufficiently independent to
believe Christianity, and labor in earnest to serve God and
save my own soul. To have done so would have been sheer
superstition, would have been sinking myself to the level of
the vulgar, and to have exposed myself to the gibes and
sneers of my scientific associates.

Nevertheless, my unbelief, my scepticism, and my radi
calism, were a sort of violence done to my own better feel
ings and graver judgment. They never came natural to me,
and I am sure I was never cut out for a philanthropist or a
world-reformer. There was always something in the views
and practices of my associates that disgusted me, and often
was I obliged to hold my nose when they were discussed, as
it is said Satan does when he encounters a confirmed sensu
alist. I had no natural relish for " the newness, " and when
at worst retained a secret reverence for the past, and dwelt
with pleasure on the time-hallowed, over which for ages had
floweol the stream of human affection, human joy, and hu
man sorrow. I stood in awe before the shadow of the hoary
Eld, and wished always to find myself bound by indissoluble
ties to what had gone before me, as well as to what might
come after me. Half in spite, and half under the charm
of Priscilla, I embraced philanthropy, but not inwardly, for
her sophistry never for a moment deceived me. Never was
there a moment when I did not see through the philanthro
pists, radicals, and revolutionists with whom I associated, or
when with a breath I could not have swept away their cob
web theories ; never for a moment was I deceived as to the
actual character of the devilish movements I myself set on
foot.

It may be thought strange, such being the fact that I
could or would have played the part I did. It might be
enough to say Satan had power over me ; but I associated
with the prophets of " the newness, " and led on the move
ment, partly because I did not know what else to do, and
partly because I could not endure absolute idleness. I saw
indeed the destructive character of my movements, but I

CONVERSION. 227

cherished a hope that by making things worse,! should pre
pare the way for making them better. You must demolish,
1 said, the old edifice, and clear away its rubbish, before you
can erect a new, a more beautiful, or a more convenient
structure on its site. I accepted, after a manner, the opin
ions and theories of the neologists, not because they satis
fied me, but because I knew not what else to accept ; and,
though not true, they might conduct me to truth. The
road to the temple of Purity runs through the Bower of
Bliss, the path to heaven crosses the devil's territory, and
error is the prodrome of truth. Such were the maxims I
adopted, not indeed because I believed them, but because
they were convenient, and because I saw not otherwise how
to justify myself, or solve the problem of experience. I
adhered to my philanthropy, infidelity, and radicalism, not
because I loved or believed them, but because 1 saw nothing
true in the principles and reasonings I was accustomed to
hear opposed to them. The religious and conservative peo
ple I knew, and I supposed them the most enlightened and
the least irrational of their class, seemed to believe and re
tain either too much or too little. On one side they seemed
to accept and act on the principles which I and my party
professed, and on the other to insist on conclusions which
could be logically obtained only from a contradictory set
of principles, and which they with one voice condemned
as false, mischievous, and leading only to superstition, idol
atry, and spiritual thraldom. Their denials struck me as
too sweeping for their affirmations, and their affirmations as
quite too broad for their denials. I found myself in the un
pleasant predicament, either of divinizing humanity, or of
embracing a religion which they held to be worse than the
rankest infidelity.

For a time, while I was in good health, while I possessed
and wielded a more than human power, and had not yet ex
hausted the world in which I did believe, or despaired of re
casting it after my own image, I got along without much dif
ficulty ; but when I no longer saw any object in life, when
there was from my own point of view no longer any work
for me to do, and I was thrown back on my own failing god-
ship, and left to devour my own heart, I became wretched,
more wretched than I can express. The blow which pros
trated me, and the disease which it developed, and brought
me to handgrips with Death, changed the current of my
thoughts, but unhappily only to render them for the time

228 THE SPIRIT-RAPPEE.

still more painful. " You know, O Socrates," says Cephalus
in Plato's Republic, " that when a man thinks that he is draw
ing near to death, certain things, as to which he had previ
ously been very tranquil, awaken in his bosom anxiety and
alarm. What has been told him of hell and the punishment
of the wicked, the stories at which he had formerly laughed
or mocked, now fill his soul with trouble. He fears that
they may prove true. Enfeebled by age, or brought nearer
to the frightful abodes, he seems to perceive them with great
er clearness and force, and is therefore disturbed by doubts
and apprehensions. He reviews his past life, and seeks
what evil he may have done. If he finds, on examination,
that his life has been iniquitous, he awakes often in the night,
agitated and shuddering, as a child, with sudden terrors,
trembles and lives in fearful expectation ; " or, as I may add
with St. Paul, " a certain fearful looking for of judgment
and fiery indignation." As I found myself on my dying
bed, things began to wear to me a very different aspect from
what they did when I was in the heyday of youth, in the full
flow of my animal spirits, or filled with the vain and delusive
hope of subjecting all nature to my will. The lessons which
I had heard in my childhood, and which I had ridiculed or
forgotten, came back with startling power ; and in my lonely
reflections I was forced to ask what, if that which they tell
us of death and judgment, of heaven and hell, the rewards of
the good and the punishment of the wicked, should turn out
to be true ?

My trouble, my anxiety, and my alarm increased in pro
portion as Mr. Merton forced upon me, by his conversations,
the full conviction that I had really been dealing with devils,
that Satan is really a personal existence, and that I had made
a covenant with him, and had acted under his influence. My
rationalism had led me to question his personal existence,
and to attempt to explain the demonic phenomena without
the supposition of his interposition. Denying Satan, I had
denied Christ ; and being now forced to recognize Satan, I
was forced to confess Christ, and all the Christian mysteries,
By the same process by which I had explained away the
demonic phenomena, I had explained away the miracles and
the supernatural character of Christianity. By that same
process of reasoning by which Mr. Merton compelled me to
admit the false miracles, the lying signs and wonders of
Satan, I was forced to admit the true miracles, therefore the
divine commission, and therefore the divinity of Christ, be
cause Christ claimed to be the Son of God.

CONVERSION. 229

Here is, I apprehend, the principal source of that difficul
ty which so many people find in admitting the reality of the
demonic phenomena. They cannot admit Satan and his
works, without admitting Christ and redemption, purchased
with his own blood on the cross, — in a word, without admit
ting all the Christian mysteries and dogmas, — Christianity
itself, and that not as an opinion, not as a speculation, but as
the law of God for conscience. Most men have, at least, a
dim perception of this fact ; and as they do not like to admit
Christianity in a Christian sense, they will not suffer them
selves to believe that there is any thing satanic in the dark
phenomena of human history. For, whatever may be the
professions we hear, whatever the apparent zeal displayed in
the cause of a bastard Christianity, our age is an unbelieving
age, and hates, I may say, with a perfect hatred, Christ and
his church. The age is blind to the perception of Christian
truth, but sharp-sighted to whatever is requisite to prevent
that truth from making its way to the heart. It sees very
clearly what it must concede, if it accepts Mr. Merton's doc
trine ; and therefore, with all its energy and astuteness, it in
sists on explaining the demonic phenomena on natural prin
ciples, or on denying them outright

But detached from the world by experience of its hollow-
ness, and by my mortal illness, I became less disposed to re
sist the grace of God, and in some measure prepared to lis
ten with candor to Mr. Merton's reasoning. I very soon be
came convinced that I had really fallen into the error of
calling good evil, and evil good. I had really substituted
Satan for God, and in doing so had committed the precise
error the Christian clergy had always laid to my charge. I
saw that they had been right in advocating what I called,
with Priscilla, the system of repression, and I wrong in ad
vocating the contrary system. I saw that, as a reasonable
man, I must abandon the whole order of ideas which I had
cherished in my satanic pride and lust, and embrace that or
der of ideas which I had hitherto rejected as false and mis
chievous. There was no room for compromise. I must say
decidedly either " Good Lord " or " Good Devil," and as I
could no longer say the latter, I must say the former.

Many people, knowing my order of thinking when I was
well and in the world, may blame a change so complete and
so universal ; but only because they are people of confused,
incomplete, and disjointed thought, whose views are always
dim, obscure, and incoherent, and who can never understand

230 THE SPIKIT-RAPPEK.

the operations of a mind that reduces all its views to their
fundamental principle, to a clear, well-defined, and self-
coherent whole, so that any change at all must be change of
principle, and involve an entire change of system. Philo
sophical and logical minds may err, but in their premises, not
in their conclusions from them. JSTo question with them is
ever a question of detail, and none ever turns on a collateral
issue. If they start from infidel premises, they will come
to the conclusion that Satan is God, and adjust their theory
of the universe accordingly. If they assume, as their point
of departure, that liberty is in the absence of all restraint,
and that liberty in this sense is good, they must come to the
conclusion so earnestly insisted upon by my instructress
Priscilla, and of course reject that whole order of ideas which
asserts the need of law, the utility of government, or the
necessity of restraint. That, in doing "so, they go against
common sense, they are as well aware as are their opponents ;
but that fact cannot move them, for the legitimate conclusion
from it, if their premises are right, is that so-called common
sense is wrong, and needs to be corrected. If the common
opinions, doctrines, or judgments of mankind are against
them, they are indemnified by finding a common feeling, a
secret but real feeling, of all men in their favor ; for the very
fact that restraint is necessary, proves that perverse nature
demands, when left to itself, universal liberty or unbounded
license. They have but to adopt the doctrine of the innate
purity and sanctity of nature, to call this natural feeling a
pure and holy instinct, and bid us follow nature, in order'to
make out their complete logical justification. They are sim
ply consequent, to use a logical term ; and their opponents,
who accept their premises but deny their conclusions, are in
consequent.

The common run of men, who oppose this class of think
ers and speculators, not by a complete and coherent system
constructed on the principle of law and authority, and who
are constantly saying Good Lord and Good Devil, Good
Devil and Good Lord, trying forever to conciliate both at
the same time, and endeavoring with all their might to serve
both God and Mammon, which He who " spake as never
man spake " declares to be impossible, whenever they are
hard pushed, cry out against them as logic-choppers, hair-
splitters, narrow-minded system-mongers, and represent
them as wanting in broad and comprehensive views, in lib
eral and generous feelings, as mere theorists, destitute of plain,.

CONVERSION.

231

practical common sense. What is really a merit in them, is
denounced as folly or crime, and the whole pack,

" Tray, Blanche, Sweetheart, little dogs and all,"

are let loose against them. This is wrong. Either our feel
ing, our sensitive and affective nature, is to be made sub
ordinate and subservient to our reason, or our reason is to
be subordinated and made subservient to feeling. To at
tempt to maintain them as two equal, coordinate, and mu
tually independent powers, after the manner of the Galli-
cans in relation to church and state, is only to prepare the
way for internal anarchy and disorder. The fool makes rea
son subservient to his feelings, emotions, affections, or pas
sions, and as to his proper manhood, lives as a slave ; the
wise man subjects these to his reason, that is, to understand-
ino- and will, and lives, moves, and acts as a freeman.

Now I had one of those minds which reduce their views
to system, or to their fundamental principle. My starting-
point, my fundamental principle was false, and therefore my
whole system or theory of the universe was false. This once
discovered, I necessarily embraced the opposing principle,
and as necessarily embraced it in all its legitimate conse
quences. I never was so constituted as to be able to
strike a balance between truth and falsehood, or to ac
cept a principle and deny its consequences. In matters
of practice, I can understand, where no principle is sacri
ficed, what are called compromises, and I have never need
ed to be told that true prudence usually forbids us to push
matters to extremes. When we act, we must consider the
practicable, and the expedient, as far as principle leaves us
any discretionary power ; but in asserting principles, in the
question between truth and falsehood, right and wrong, I
have always felt it necessary to be on one side or the other.
It ought not therefore to be considered strange that, forced
by Mr. Merton and my own serious reflections to deny that
Satan is God, I should swing round to the other extreme,
and assert that God is God ; or that, starting from this bold
proposition as a first principle, I should adjust, or endeavor
to adjust my whole order of thought to it. I am aware that
my having done so will, with the mass of my countrymen,
bring reproach upon my memory, and induce some who may
cherish a regard for me to attempt to apologize for my want
of inconsistency and incoherency ; but, happily, the praises
or the censures of men cannot affect me any longer, and I
shall soon be where they cannot reach me.

232 THE SPIRIT-KAPPER.

Brought back to an intellectual conviction of the truth of
Christianity, my trouble increased ; for if Christianity be
true, it is not simply the revelation of a truth to be believed,
but also of a truth to be practised — of a law to be obeyed. I
had not obeyed that law ; I had deliberately, systematically
violated all its precepts for years, and had taught others to
do the same. I had fallen under its condemnation, and had
incurred its severest penalties. The prospect that now opened
before me was not pleasing. There was a vision of blackness
and despair. The judgment I derided, the heaven I had
scorned, the hell I h'ad braved or treated as a fiction, were
all realities. I must soon appear before my Judge, loaded
with crimes and sins innumerable, and of the blackest dye.
It was impossible to imagine one more wicked or guilty than
myself. I could plead nothing in excuse or extenuation of
my guilt. I had proved myself the enemy of my race, a
foul-mouthed and black-hearted rebel against God, my sov
ereign, who had done nothing to me but load me with bene
fits. It was no pleasant thought. I had consorted with dev
ils. I had chosen them for my associates, and what more
fitting than that I should be left to my own choice, to reap
the fruits of my own doings, and be doomed to dwell eter
nally with them in hell ? It was what I deserved, what im
maculate Justice might well inflict. The thought was not
to be endured.

I had made a covenant with death. I had entered into an
agreement with hell, and had by a solemn pact given myself
to the devil, and who had ever heard that such a one had ever
received grace to repent ? Had I not blasphemed the Holy
Ghost, committed the unpardonable sin ? My accomplice
had been rescued, it was true, but she had been less guilty
than I. She had been deceived, seduced by the wiles of the
serpent, and struggled to break the meshes he had cast around
her as soon as she fully understood their real character.
Guilty she certainly had been, but there was some limit to
her guilt. I can hardly say that I was deceived. From the
first I suspected the truth, and when I remained blind, I re
mained so wilfully. I had acted deliberately ; — not from the
strength of feeling, or the heat of passion, but coolly, from
calculation, with full assent. There was a great difference
between us. What hope, then, remained for me ?

The world will laugh at me for all this, and wag their
heads at the mighty magician starting back with fear of death
and dread of hell. The world has no faith. If it can make

CONVERSION. 233

.sure of this life, it thinks we may jump, as Macbeth pro
posed, that which is to come. But the world is nothing to
me now, and I am not moved by its mockeries. I am not
ashamed to own my fears. I fear not dying. I fear what
may come after death. I fear the last judgment. I fear hell.
I fear being condemned to dwell forever with the damned.
The salvation of my soul to me now is the great, the all-ab
sorbing question — the question of questions.

Mr. Merton continued to visit me, and to unfold to me the
scheme of Christian redemption, and assured me that, if I
willed it, there was salvation even for me, for Christ had
died for all, had made ample satisfaction on the cross for
the sins of the whole world, and that great as my sins were,
they were surpassed by the divine mercy. He instructed me
in what I had to believe, and in what I had to do. The bap
tismal waters were poured over me, and I was confirmed by
the holy chrism, and I hope that my pact with Satan is bro
ken, and my soul delivered. But I know not whether it be
so or not ; I know not whether I deserve love or hatred. I
still fear and tremble, but will not despair. I am trying, as
far as in my power, to undo the wrong I have done, and have
dictated with that view these my confessions, which will see
the light as soon as may be after I am no more.

All are kind to me. My friends, those who have known
me in my pride and wickedness, strange to say, do not de
sert me ; and those I love best are constantly near me, and
do all they can to relieve my pain, and to strengthen my
good resolutions. Priscilla is not unfrequently my nurse,
and James is most kind and affectionate to me. If human
aid or sympathy could avail me, I should have nothing to
fear. But here I lie waiting my departure. How it will
fare with me hereafter, God only knows. His will be done.

My story is told. My confessions, as far as I can make
them to the public, are made. Let no man see in me an ex
ample to be followed, or regard me otherwise than as a mis
erable wretch who, in manhood and health, abused all God's
gifts, and has nothing to relieve his character from utter de
testation but a late death-bed repentance. My life can serve
as a beacon ; let it so serve. Yet I beg all whom I have
wronged to forgive me, for I would, as far as possible, die
in peace with all the world. I have nothing to forgive, for
I have received no wrongs. I have done wrong to the
world, but I have suffered no wrong from it. I cannot ask
that my memory should be cherished, for it deserves only to

234: THE SPIRIT-RAPPER.

be execrated. Yet is it pleasant to feel that there are some
who, bad as I have been, still love me, and will drop a tear
of sincere grief over my lifeless remains. There are, toor
some who, from the abundance of their charity, will, as they
pass by my final resting-place, breathe the prayer, so consol
ing to the living at least, — " May his soul rest in peace."
After all, good is greater than evil, and love stronger than
hell.

PRETENSIONS OF PHRENOLOGY/

[From the Boston Quarterly Review for April, 1839.]

PHRENOLOGY, properly speaking, is a physiology of the
brain ; and, as such, an interesting and useful branch of sci
ence. Considered solely in this light, we are disposed to
think favorably of it, — indeed, to believe it. But phrenolo
gists pretend that it is something more than this. They
claim for it the high merit of being a philosophy of the
human mind, and the only sound philosophy of the human
mind ever set forth. Mr. Combe recommends it on the ground
of its throwing a flood of light on the philosophy of mind ;
and we heard him declare positively, that, if it be not true,
mental philosophy cannot be understood. The American
Phrenological Journal grounds the utility of phrenology,
in part, on the assumed fact, that it forms the basis of a
more correct system of mental philosophy than has hitherto
been embraced. We are, therefore, called upon to examine
its pretensions, not merely as an account of the functions of
the brain, but as a system of metaphysics ; and an examina
tion of it, in this respect, will probably be acceptable to the
majority of our readers.

Phrenology, as defined by its advocates, treats of the
manifestations of mind, and of the physiological conditions
under which they take place ; but it is all embraced in the
four following facts or principles : 1. The brain is the organ
of the mind ; 2. The brain is a congeries of organs, and
each individual organ serves to manifest a special faculty of
the mind ; 3. The strength of a faculty, cceteris paribus, is
proportioned to the size of the organ ; 4. The size of the
organ, and therefore, with the above qualification, the
strength of the faculty may be ascertained by examining the
external head. As these four facts or principles embrace
the whole of phrenology, nothing can be claimed as phre
nology which does not come within their scope. "We accept
these four facts or principles, and all that necessarily grows
out of them. We, therefore, concede to phrenologists their
whole science. We controvert, at present, none of their

*A System of Phrenology. By GEORGE COMBE. Boston: 1835.

235

236 PRETENSIONS OF PHRENOLOGY.

facts. But though we make this concession, which is all
that they can in conscience ask of us, we are by no means
prepared to admit the inferences by which they erect it into
a complete system of mental philosophy.

Phrenologists offer us an enumeration and classification
of the primitive tendencies — faculties, they call them, — of
human nature. This enumeration they consider as nearly
complete, and this classification as just. In this ground,
.and in this alone, must they found their pretensions as meta
physicians. But we ask them, — 1st. If their account of the
primitive faculties of human nature be the true account?
2d. Admitting it is, does it take in the whole of mental sci
ence? and 3d. Admitting it does take in the whole of men
tal science, is it obtained by means of phrenological prin
ciples, instead of the method adopted by metaphysicians in
general ? These three questions are pertinent, and we re
gret that we do not find phrenologists giving them that dis
tinct consideration their importance demands.

We proceed to consider the last question first. Admitting
the phrenologist's account of the primitive faculties of
human nature is the true one, we ask how has he obtained
it. Grant his psychology ; how has he constructed it ? Has
he done it by means of his phrenological facts, or by simply
' noting the facts he is conscious of in himself ?

The simple fact, that a phrenologist is able to give, and
does give, us a true account of the faculties of the human
soul, IB not necessarily a proof that this account is involved
in, or that it grows out of the four phrenological principles
we have enumerated. It is not, then, a proof that this ac
count has any necessary connexion with phrenology. A
shoe-maker may chance to construct a true system of astron
omy, but it does not follow from this that astronomy is a
branch of shoe-making, or that it can be successfully prose
cuted by none but shoe-makers. Before the phrenologist
can claim his psychology as a part of phrenology, he must
show that it can be arrived at only by means of his four
phrenological principles ; and that, if these be denied, its
truth cannot be maintained.

The phrenologist has counted some thirty or forty primi
tive faculties of human nature, located, named, and described
them. We will, for our purposes, take but one of these,
that of Benevolence. Two things are to be considered : 1.
The faculty of benevolence ; 2. The cerebral organ by
which it is manifested. We presume the phrenologist does

PRETENSIONS OF PHRENOLOGY. 237

not intend to confound the faculty with the organ. "We do
not confound the sense of sight with the eye. The faculty
of benevolence is psychical — the organ physical. Now,
does a knowledge of the organ afford any clue to the nature
and character of the faculty of benevolence? Certainly
not. Knowledge of the fact, then, that each special faculty
of human nature has its appropriate cerebral organ, together
with manipulation of that organ, cannot lead to a knowledge
of the faculty. What aid, then, do we derive from phrenol
ogy in constructing our psychology ?

How, we ask, does the phrenologist come to the knowl
edge of the fact, that benevolence is one of the primitive
faculties of human nature ? Will he say, here is a cerebral
organ for benevolence, therefore there must be a faculty
for benevolence ? With his leave, this is not sound logic.
When he declares this or that portion of brain the organ of
benevolence, he assumes the existence of the faculty of
benevolence. How can he say this portion of brain is con
secrated to benevolence, if he be ignorant of the fact that
there is such a faculty as benevolence ? Man has an organ
for veneration, therefore veneration is the primitive faculty
of human nature. But how know that this is an organ of
veneration before we know that man venerates, and vener
ates by means of this portion of the cerebrum ?

We confess we cannot see how the phrenologist obtains
his psychology by means of his phrenological principles. He
does not pretend that the organs are distinctly marked on
the brain. There are no cerebral marks by which he
can tell where benevolence ends and veneration begins.
The number of the organs cannot be ascertained so as in re
turn to aid in determining the number of faculties. This
is evident from the fact that phrenologists do not agree^ in
their enumeration of one or the other; some reckoning
more faculties and organs, and others fewer. The portion
of brain, which Spurzheim and Combe devote to ideality,
others devote to ideality and sublimity, — thus dividing
what was regarded as one organ into two, and making two
primitive faculties out of what was at first pronounced to-
be but one. It is evident, from this, that the examination
of the skull can no more determine the number of our
primitive faculties, than it can their nature and character.
We ask again, then, what light does phrenology throw on
psychology ?

The phrenologist must determine the number and char-

238 PRETENSIONS OF PHRENOLOGY.

acter of our primitive faculties independently of his
craniology, or not determine them at all. How, then, does
he determine their number and character? We presume
by analyzing his own consciousness. Mr. Combe declared
in his lectures that a man destitute of conscientiousness
would be incapable of conceiving moral distinctions. He
differed from Dr. Spurzheim as to a particular faculty, and
claimed superior authority for his" own opinion, because the
organ of the faculty in question was large on his head, and
almost totally deficient on Dr. Spurzheim's. Phrenologists,
then, resort to consciousness. They turn their eyes in upon
themselves, and analyze the facts of the mental world. But
this is the way all psychologists do, and ever have done.
Phrenologists then, as"pyschologists, have nothing peculiar
in their method. Their psychology, then, is not obtained
by their phrenological principles, but by the usual process.
If anv one doubts this, let him ask if a phrenologist would
feel himself warranted in denying the existence of a faculty
he should be conscious of possessing, and which he should
see manifested in the lives of others, merely because he
could find no organ for it ? We do not believe he would.
We conclude this part of the subject, then, by saying that,
admitting that the phrenologist has accurately enumerated
and rightly classed the faculties of human nature, he has
not done it by virtue of his phrenology, but by virtue of
his superior psychological analysis.

But we go further. We deny both the completeness and
the justness of the phrenological psychology. Dr. Spurz
heim and George Combe enumerate and describe thirty-five
faculties, and speak of two more which are considered
doubtful, or not fully settled. But what they call faculties,
are evidently nothing but instinctive laws or tendencies of
human nature, and not at all deserving the name of
faculty. We accept the number and character of these
tendencies, as given by phrenologists, but they by no means
exhaust the consciousness.

These tendencies are all instinctive ; they are blind
cravings, and the causality at work in them is not our per
sonality. We are separate from them, and either obey them
or control them. The faculties proper, those powers by
which we control our instincts, are not accounted for by
phrenologists. Memory is unquestionably a faculty of the
numan soul, but the phrenologist has no organ for it. He
virtually denies memory. True he says each faculty re-

PRETENSIONS OF PHRENOLOGY. 239

members, — that eventuality remembers events, individuality
remembers individual facts, causality remembers causes,
comparison relations, and so on through the whole list. But
does he not see that this is all aside the mark ? It is not
this or that faculty that remembers, but we remember.
What he alleges merely explains why it is that we remem
ber some things rather than others ; but it says nothing of
why we remember at all. Memory is two-fold. Sometimes
the past comes up of its own accord, sometimes it comes up
only as we recall it. Now, how, if we have no faculty of
memory, are we able to recall the past ?

Sensibility is another faculty of which phrenologists give
a very unsatisfactory account. The feelings they speak of
are merely modes or variations of sensibility, not the capac
ity of feeling itself. Endowed as lam with the capacity of
feeling, I can easily understand that with the brain large in
the region of benevolence, I shall have that modification of
sensibility strong ; or if small in the region devoted to self-
esteem, I shall not be proud. But this does not explain the
capacity of feeling, nor give it a cerebral organ. There is
no organ for sensibility ; there are simply organs for its
modes.

The same difficulty occurs in relation to the faculty of
knowing, intelligence, or reason. We know well what
phrenologists say on this subject ; we know that they have
devoted to the intellect the anterior lobe of the brain, or at
least the larger portion of it ; and that they speak of percep
tive faculties and reflective faculties; but wherefore we
understand not. If true to their own system, they must
pronounce the intellectual faculties, as they call them,
instincts, desires, cravings, as well as the propensities and
sentiments. Comparison, in their account of the matter, is
nothing but a craving to know relations, causality to know
causes, individuality to know individual facts. The cere
bral organ of causality, with all deference to George Combe,
we must suggest, does not take cognizance of causes ; it is
merely the organ by which the man manifests his desire to
know causes. Similar remarks may be made of all the in
tellectual faculties, as they are called. They do not consti
tute the knowing faculty, but are merely its modes, and
simply account fo'r the fact that all kinds of knowledge are
not acquired by all men with equal facility. To know, is
the same, whether it be of causes, relations, facts, tunes,
times, colors, or events. It is a general power, which, if we

24:0 PRETENSIONS OF PHRENOLOGY.

choose, will be directed to an investigation of causes, of
ideas, of beauty, of religion, as causality, comparison, ideal
ity, or veneration is the larger organ on the head. But the
fact that it is directed to one class of facts rather than
another, in consequence of cerebral development, can by no
means destroy its unity, or make it not a faculty of the
human soul. The phrenologists, in rejecting it, appear to
us to make out but a very defective psychology.

The will, or personality, is also denied by phrenologists.
"We mean not to say that they have banished the word, but
the thing. Benevolence does this, causality does that, is
their way of speaking. The man, the person, does nothing.
There is no unity. Phrenologists even labor to disprove
all unity of consciousness ; and Dr. Spurzheim introduces a
man crazy on one side of his head, but sane on the other, to
prove the fact of double consciousness. One can hardly
refrain from adding that a man resorting to such testimony
for such a purpose must needs be crazy, not on one side of
his head only, but on both sides.

One while, the phrenologists confound will with desire ;
another while, with a decision of the understanding, and
generally, with the circumstances which influence it. Each
faculty is said to will its appropriate objects. Here by will
they mean desire. "When the intellect perceives that a cer
tain group of organs ought to be obeyed, there is a will to
obey them. Here will is taken for a decision of the under
standing. If a group of organs giving a determinate char
acter be predominant, there is a will to follow them. Here
will is confounded with both desire and the circumstances
which influence us. Are men, who can commit mistakes
like these, philosophers?

The will, we have shown elsewhere, is the ME, the person
ality, the power of acting, not the mere capacity of receiving
an action. The causality at work in the will is always the
person, the ME, myself. It is the power of self-determination.
Take away the will, and you destroy personality. The will
is always free. Indeed it is identical with freedom. A
necessary will, or a will that is not free, is a solecism. But
desire is not free. It does not spring up because I will it.
It takes place independently of my personality. The causal
ity at work in it, then, is not mine. If, then, there be no-
will but desire, there is no will at all ; then there is no per
sonality, then we re-enter into nature and necessity, and
fatalism is truth. The same remarks may be made on the

PRETENSIONS OF PHRENOLOGY. 24:1

decision of the understanding. I cannot control the de
cisions of my understanding. I see as I can, not as I will.
The decisions of the understanding are controlled by a
power which I am not. They are necessary, not free. If
we confound the will with them, we destroy it, efface per
sonality, and reduce man to a thing, at best, to an animal.
We reside eminently in our power of acting, and this power
of acting is what we mean by the will as a faculty of human
nature.

Now, we are conscious of possessing this power. We do
not seek to prove it, for we Know it as immediately and as
positively as we know that we exist. Our judgments may
decide one way, but we can resolve to go another. Desire
may prompt us to one deed, but we can will to do another.
Every man knows this, for every man repeats the experi
ment every day of his life. It is true, I may be overpow
ered by my appetite, my desires, my passions, and led into
sin ; nevertheless I retain ever the power of willing to re
sist. This power may not always manifest itself in outward
acts, but it exists and manifests itself, internally, in the
sphere of consciousness. A strong man may hold me to
the ground, so that I cannot rise ; but though I cannot rise,
I can will to rise. Here, then, is a faculty or power which
I unquestionably possess, or rather which is myself, of which?
phrenologists take no account. We can find no recognition,
of it in their psychology. By what authority, then, do they
say that they have constructed a complete psychology ?
Here is the man himself, of which they take no account,,
and for which they find no place.

" The knowing and reflecting faculties," says Mr. Combey
p. 467, " are subject to the will, or rather constitute will
themselves. " In his lectures he told us repeatedly that will
is seated in the anterior lobe of the brain, and is identical
with intellect. Consequently the power of preceiving is
identical with the power of willing, and to know is simply
to resolve ! This may be true philosophy, and deserving the
vote of thanks and piece of plate from Bostonians, which
Mr. Combe received for it ; but we confess that it is a phi
losophy which we are not yet prepared to embrace. We pre
tend not, however, to refute it ; for he who can see no dif
ference between knowing a thing, and resolving to do or not
to do a thing, though he win not conviction, must needs be
unanswerable.

What, again, do phrenologists mean by calling causality

Vol. IX.-16

242 PRETENSIONS OF PHRENOLOGY.

and comparison reflective faculties ? Have they analyzed
reflection ? In reflection there is both intelligence and will.
We will to reflect. In every act of reflection we turn the
mind in upon itself. But phrenologists deny will, they deny
activity, freedom; how, then, can they admit reflection?
And moreover, what are causality and comparison but sim
ple tendencies to inquire into causes and relations? They
do not, of themselves, take cognizance of causes and rela
tions, otherwise every man who has them large would be
sure to have an extensive knowledge of causes and relations,
without having ever inquired, which is not the fact. But
suppose causality knows causes, and comparison knows re
lations, we should like to know if they reflect in knowing
these, any more than individuality does in knowing facts,
or time in knowing dates ? Admit they do, how does the
phrenologist know the fact ? How does he learn that cau
sality is a reflective faculty, and individuality a simple know
ing faculty ?

Again, phrenologists boast much of phrenology as har
monizing with Christianity. Now, one of the plainest in
junctions of Christianity is that of self-denial. We should
like to see the phrenologist explain, on his principles, the
doctrine ^ of self-denial. He recognises no self, no ME, but
some thirty or forty faculties having no common spiritual
centre. What to him, then, will be self-denial ? To deny
one's self, we presume he will say, is to give predominance
to the moral and religious sentiments over the lower or ani
mal propensities. But two questions in reference to this
answer : 1. What is that which gives the predominance to
the moral and religious sentiments ? and 2. Is this predom
inance really a self-denial ? Are not the moral and religious
sentiments as much parts of self, in the view of phrenolo
gists, as the propensities themselves ? Why is it, then, any
more self-denial to bring the propensities into subjection to
the sentiments, than it would be to bring the sentiments into
subjection to the propensities ?

But what is it that brings the one into subjection to the
other? What is this which exerts this power? Is it the
ME, the personality, activity, liberty, which is not the tenden
cies, but their subject, their common centre ? Is it, in a
word, the will ? Why have phrenologists then neglected
to describe it, to give us an account of it? and why do they
give us such an account of the will as necessarily" excludes
it ? Will they say, as George Combe does, that it is the intel-

PRETENSIONS OF PHRENOLOGY. 2-1:3

lect? Well, what directs the intellect to that end? A
power which we are, or which is objective to us ? If objec
tive to us, as they imply in all they say, then it is not we
that subject our propensities to our moral and religious sen
timent, but something else. Then we do not deny our
selves, and cannot. Tlien the Christian duty of self-denial
is impracticable.

Once more. — Christianity teaches the doctrine of account
ability ; how will the phrenologist make this doctrine har
monize with his philosophy ? Mr. Combe took up this sub
ject in his lectures ; but his mode of treating it struck us at
the time as peculiarly vague and inconclusive. Christianity
represents man as placed under a law which he is morally
obliged to obey, and which he has the power to obey or not
to obey. We believe every man's conscience bears witness
to the truth of this Christian doctrine ; all languages imply
it, and all systems of morality and jurisprudence are based
upon it. But if a man be the slave of his instincts, if he be
not free to control them, to will the right, though they
would lead him to pursue the wrong, it is obvious that he is not
accountable for his actions, and therefore is not a subject
of moral discipline. Phrenologists say the character of the
man will be good, if the moral and religious sentiments and
intellect predominate, and bad if the animal propensities
predominate. The question which naturally arises is, has a
man with large organs for the animal propensities, and small
organs for the moral and religious sentiments and intellect,
the power to be a strictly moral and upright man ? Or has
a man with an organization the reverse of this, the power
to be a, bad man ? If not, then the man is controlled by an
exterior force ; his acts are not, strictly speaking, his acts,
but the acts of the force at work in his instinctive tenden
cies. If then you make him accountable, you make him ac
countable for deeds not his own. I am responsible only for
my own deeds. What is done in me, but not by me, is no
more my doing than what is done in a man of whom I never
heard, and with whom I have no relation. How then can I
be responsible ? Indeed does not phrenological psychology
destroy all responsibility ?

This is a grave question, and as such Mr. Combe gave it
a grave, but we are sorry to say, not an explicit answer. The
cautiousness so characteristic of his nation, seemed all the
while to be predominant. He did not say, man has the
power in question, nor that he has it not. He evaded the

24:4: PRETENSIONS OF PHEENOLOGY.

real question at issue, and introduced another, which was but
remotely related to it. He asked, What do we mean by re
sponsibility ? Responsibility to whom ? To God ? Do we
mean by the question to ask whether God will have a right
to punish us or not ? Phrenology has nothing to do with
such questions. Phrenology does not profess to answer the
ological questions, — although one of its chief recommenda
tions in the minds of many is, the aid it brings to scriptural
exegesis. We leave the question of responsibleness to Gody
and ask again, to whom are we responsible ? To society ?
But the question he should have asked, was not, to whom
we are responsible, nor to what we are responsible, but, if
our characters are determined by our cerebral development,
can we be accountable at all ? Yet this question, for reasons
best known to himself, he did not choose to ask or answer.
He considered merely our responsibleness to society, that isy
the right of society to punish us. He placed before us the
casts of three heads, one decidedly bad, one middling, and
one decidedly good. The first question is to determine who
are responsible. Now, persons with heads like this, — show
ing us the cast of the villain, — are not responsible. You
see, here are large propensities, feeble sentiments, and defi
cient intellect. Such a man should be treated as a moral
patient, and asylums should be built, in which all persons
with heads organized in this way, should be confined. Then
again, — showing us the middle head, — is this man responsi
ble ? You see the propensities are large, the moral and relig
ious sentiments rather small, though the intellect is considera
ble. Persons with heads organized in this manner will do very
well, if kept out of the way of temptation ; but if tempted,
they will assuredly fall. But here is a different head. Per
sons with heads like this are proof against temptation, and
maintain their integrity amidst all circumstances. Persons
of this class are responsible. You see here moderate pro
pensities, large moral and religious sentiments to perceive
the right, and large intellect to will it. If such a person
does not do right, he has no excuse.

But we wished Mr. Combe to tell us whether this man,
with the good head, had the power to neglect his duty,—
whether he did right by the force of instinct, or by volun
tary striving. We wished to know whether there be in man
a power or faculty, by which he controls his instinctive ten
dencies, and directs them to the fulfilment of the moral law,
or by which he can, if he choose, direct them to the breach

PRETENSIONS OF PHRENOLOGY. 24:5

of the moral law. If man has not this power, he is not a
moral being, and the accountability spoken of in the Chris
tian revelation is unfounded. Phrenology, then, instead of
being in harmony with Christianity, would be directly op
posed to it. If there be such a power, phrenologists have
uot given us a true philosophy of man, because they have
failed to recognize and describe it.

If the phrenological psychology be admitted, virtue is in
deed, as Brutus said, " an empty name." In none of the
phrenological lectures we have heard, in none of the phren
ological books we have read, have we found any thing on
which virtue can be based. We can conceive how a man,
on phrenological principles, may be good or bad, in the
sense in which we say a good or bad knife, but we cannot
conceive it possible for one to be virtuous or sinful. Yir-
tue is my own act ; it springs from my will, and can spring
from no other. 'No power can compel me to be virtuous ;
for the deeds I do through compulsion, I do not, but the
power that compels me, and therefore they are not mine,
and however good they may be, they are not virtuous.

Now, in the primitive instincts of my nature, I do not
act. In relation to these primitive tendencies, which the
phrenologists call faculties, I am passive, and hence they are
termed passions. The active force in them is not my ME,
my personality, but a force foreign to it. Admitting, then,
that all these tendencies are good, and that all which is done
through their impulsive force is in harmony with the law
of God, it does not follow that I am virtuous. The sun and
stars obey God's law, but are they virtuous ? Not at all.
Because they are not persons, are not active but passive, and
revolve in obedience to God's law only because a power
foreign to them makes them so revolve. The analogy holds
good in man. When I iind myself in harmony with the
law of God, by the force of my instinctive tendencies, I
am there by no act of mine, and consequently have no claim
to virtue. This distinction between virtue and goodness,
our phrenologists seem not to have made. Goodness is con
formity to the will of the Creator ; virtue is the voluntary
striving after that conformity. I may be forced to conform
and therefore forced into goodness ; but I cannot be forced
to will to conform, therefore cannot be forced into virtue.
Now, what I do in obedience to my instinctive tendencies,
I am forced to do as much as if the impelling power were
outside of my body; consequently, though forced to con-

24:6 PRETENSIONS OF PHRENOLOGY.

form by my instincts, I am only good, not virtuous, unless
I have also willed to conform. Phrenologists seem always
satisfied when the conformity is obtained, although in ob
taining it, they annihilate the man. They do not regard it
as essential that we should will that conformity, therefore
do not regard virtue itself as essential ; and as they do not
give us this power of willing, they represent virtue as im
possible.

But waiving all this, we must tell our phrenological
friends, that psychology does not embrace the whole of phi
losophy. Their views of mental science are low and narrow,
and make them physicians rather than metaphysicians.
They seem to imagine that mental philosophy is merely a
sort of natural history of the mind, — that when they have
enumerated and described the primitive tendencies, or laws,
of human nature, their work is done. But we must assure
them, that the mental philosopher has other and more im
portant matters than these to settle, and which, in our judg
ment, phrenology does not in the least aid him to settle.
There is the somewhat important question of the criterion
of truth, or ground of certainty. We should like to know
what light phrenology throws on this question. Does it
give us any clue to its answer ? Phrenologists assert many
things as true ; how do they know that what they assert is
true ? How do they know that the authority on which they
rely, and to which they appeal, is legitimate and safe?
How do they determine that all human knowledge is not
dream, or that our faculties are to be trusted ? They may
tell us that phrenology does not ask these questions, and
that it should not be called upon to answer them. Be it so.
But these are philosophical questions, and if they do
not bring them within the scope of phrenology, what right
have they to call phrenology a system of mental philosophy ?
Does it afford the basis of an answer to these questions?
Not at all. Then it does not embrace the whole of philos
ophy.

Men generally believe in something existing outside of
them ; but some philosophers contend that we cannot pass,
by any legitimate process, from the world within us to a
world" outside of us. We do not expect our phrenological
readers, generally, will comprehend the problem here im
plied, for they do not seem to possess the capacity of dis
tinguishing between the ME and the NOT-ME ; but still, we
trust some of them will understand what we mean, when

PRETENSIONS OF PHRENOLOGY. 24:7

we say that a few men have questioned the existence of an
external world ; have, like Berkeley, regarded it as a pic
ture stamped by God on the retina of the mind, or, like
Fichte, as the ME projected, taken as the object of itself. Now,
what light has the phrenologist to throw on this ^question ?
Are these philosophers right ; or shall we continue to be
lieve, with the great mass of mankind, that there is a real
world existing outside of us, and independent of us ? How,
out of the four phrenological principles we have enumer
ated, shall we extract an answer to this question? If
phrenology cannot answer it, how can its friends call it a
system, or the basis of a system, of mental philosophy ?

Mr. Combe touches, in his book (pp. 453, 454), upon this
question, but unfortunately he does not give it that direct
and explicit answer which its importance seems to demand.
He says Berkeley denied the external world, because he
could see no necessary connexion between the conception
or idea of it, which is a mental affection, and its existence.
But instead of informing us whether Berkeley was right or
not, or showing us how phrenology enables us to solve the
problem, he* merely undertakes to tell us how he can ex
plain, on phrenological principles, the fact that Berkeley
denied an external world, and also the fact that Reid as
serted it. "Individuality, aided by the other perceptive
powers, in virtue of its constitution, perceives the external
world, and produces an intuitive belief in its existence. But
Berkeley employed the faculty of causality to discover why
this perception is followed by belief ; and as causality could
give no account of the matter, and could see no necssary con
nexion between the mental affection, called perception, and
the existence of external nature, he denied the latter." This,
translated into the language of mortals, means, we suppose,
that Berkeley denied the existence of external nature, be
cause he could discover no reason for asserting it. This is
a very satisfactory reason, no doubt, why Berkeley denied
the existence of an external world, but Mr. Combe must
pardon us, if we cannot accept it as a satisfactory answer to
the question, whether Berkeley was justified in his denial
or not.

There are two other points in this answer deserving at
tention. "Individuality, aided by the other perceptive
powers, in virtue of its constitution, perceives the external
world, and produces an intuitive belief in its existence."
Translated, as we have said, into the language of mortals,

248 PRETENSIONS OF PHRENOLOGY.

this means, we suppose, that we perceive an external world,
or by the constitution of our nature, are led irresistibly to
believe in its existence. This is the doctrine of Reid, ad
vanced in reply to Hume and Berkeley. It is not, then,
necessarily, a phrenological doctrine. But this is of no
consequence. Does phrenology throw any additional light
on it, or give to it any additional certainty? Is our be
lief in an external world made more rational or philo
sophical, by saying that "individuality, by virtue of its
constitution, perceives the external world, and produces
an intuitive belief in its existence," than it was when we
said with Reid, we are irresistibly led, by the constitution
of our nature, to believe in an external world ?

Again, — how does Mr. Combe know that individuality
does actually perceive an external world? The percep
tion, we suppose he will admit with Berkeley, is a mental
affection ; how, then, by the aid of phrenology, pass from
the mental affection, the idea, to the object ? We wish he
would tell us what principle or fact phrenology has dis
closed, which enables him to do this. We cannot see that
he has advanced at all on Berkeley, or obtained any means of
legitimating our faith in an external world. Phrenology
appears to us to leave this question where it found it.

This answer of his also implies that we cannot legitimate
belief in the objective. He says that causality can assign
no reason why we should believe in the existence of exter
nal nature, — that is, we have no other ground for asserting
that existence, than that we believe it because it is our na
ture to believe it. Hume and Berkeley both said as much.
Phrenology, then, so far from legitimating the universal
belief of mankind in an external world, either leaves that
matter untouched, or, according to its greatest living ex
pounder, tells us that we cannot legitimate it. We should
like to know wherein phrenology decides that we can not
pass legitimately from the subjective to the objective ?

The friends of phrenology boast its value in settling the
great problems of natural theology. Some of them go so far
as to say that it puts the question of the existence of God at
rest. If it be a complete system of mental philosophy, it
ought to do this. Let us see, then, if it does. Mr. Combe
attempts, in his book, to show that it does ; but he merely
shows us why some men believe in God, and why others do
not. Men on whose heads the organ of causality is large,
believe in God, — those on whose heads it is small, do not.

PRETENSIONS OF PHRKXOLOGT. 249

Now this, in point of fact, is not true. Abner Kneeland
has large causality, and the Abbe Paris was almost entirely
deficient in it. Hume had large causality, and Reid, accord
ing to Mr. Combe, had small causality. But let this pass.
Suppose Mr. Combe is right, his remark no more proves
the legitimacy of theism than it does of atheism ; and the
argument which he introduces after this remark, and which
he represents as always silencing atheists, is nothing but the
old argument from Design, which is inconclusive, unless we
have first established the existence of a Designer. But be
it ever so conclusive, it derives no additional force from
phrenology.

But phrenologists profess, also, to find a proof of the ex
istence of God in the sentiment of veneration. " Destruc-
tiveness is implanted in the mind, and animals exist around
us to be killed for our nourishment ; adhesiveness and phi-
loprogenitiveness are given, and friends and children are
provided, on whom they may be exercised ; benevolence is
conferred on us, and the poor and unhappy, on whom it
may shed its soft influence, are everywhere present with us ;
in like manner, the instinctive tendency to worship is im
planted in the mind, and, conformably to these analogies of
nature, we may reasonably infer that a God exists whom we
may adore." (p. 261.) That is, man is disposed to venerate,
therefore there is a God for him to venerate. Supposing
you had first proved a God, who has implanted in us the
tendency to venerate, you might then take the existence
of the tendency as a proof that it is God's will that we
should venerate him; but that the tendency, of itself,
supposes God, is more than we can conceive. The logic, by
which we conclude from the existence of the tendency to
the object, is, we presume, peculiarly phrenological.

But the evidence of a God, to be derived from this source,
is taken away b}r the very persons who adduce it. " Man,"
says Dr. Gall, "adores every thing, fire, water, earth, thun
der, lightning, meteprs, grasshoppers, crickets." The exist
ence of the fact, that man worships, is, then, according^ to
phrenologists themselves, no better evidence of the exist
ence of God, than it is that God, if he exists, is a cricket or
a grasshopper. After this, we hope they will cease to boast
of the new light their science throws on the fundamental
truths of natural theology.

But passing over this ; — phrenologists have only told us
what we all knew before, that men have a disposition to

250 PRETENSIONS OF PHRENOLOGY.

venerate, to adore. All have admitted this. The only ques
tion in dispute is, Is there a God to be adored ? This ques
tion phrenologists leave where it was before. They have
merely, by pointing out an organ of veneration, led people
to reflect, perhaps, more on the fact that man is naturally
religious, than they otherwise would have done; but
whether ^religion is grounded in truth, or whether it be an
illusion, is a question they have not answered, nor increased
our means of answering.

One great object of philosophy is to demonstrate the fact,
that man is a moral being, — that there is above him a law
he ought to obey, and that he is in the way of his duty
when he obeys it, and sinful when he disobeys. That
man is under such a law, is the universal sentiment of the
race, as the universal presence of conscience testifies. But
some men have questioned this law, in fact denied its real
ity. This has led others to seek to establish it. Now, if
phrenology be a complete system of philosophy, it must
settle this question. Does it do it ? So say the phrenol
ogists. How does it do it ? Why, there is on man's head
an organ of conscientiousness, and those who have it large
are disposed to be honest, upright, moral; and those who
have^ it very small, are incapable of perceiving moral dis
tinctions. We shall not laugh at this answer, for we sup
pose it is given in good faith ; but, taking it in its most
favorable light, we must ask what it amounts to ? Sim
ply to the fact, that men are so organized, or so consti
tuted, that they do believe in moral distinctions. Is this
belief well founded? Is there that moral world actually
existing, which it implies ? Here is a question our phren
ological ^ friends do not answer. Can they answer it?

The immortality of the soul is another philosophical
question, and one which philosophy ought to settle. Does
phrenology throw any light on this question ? Not at all.
It professes to leave this, and all similar questions, by the
way. Very well. We do not ask it to answer them, only
we say, if it does not, it takes in but a small part of what
we understand by the philosophy of the human mind ; and
therefore its friends should not claim for it the high merit
of being the foundation of all correct mental science.
We do not complain of phrenology, because it does not
do more, but of its friends for representing it as being
more than it is.

Mr. Combe speaks of phrenology as exalting the dignity

PRETENSIONS OF PHRENOLOGY. 251

of human nature. It teaches, he said, in his lectures, that
all our faculties are in themselves good, and given by our
Creator for useful purposes, and that they become the oc
casion of evil only when abused. Phrenologists teach this,
we admit, and perhaps to recommend their science ; but
how they deduce this from their phrenological principles, is
to us a mystery. It is a conclusion to which they doubtless
arrive by reasoning from certain notions of justice which
they entertain ; but do they derive those notions from
phrenological facts, or from sources in no sense dependent
on the truth or falsity of phrenology ?

Phrenologists speak of the moral and religious sentiments
as the higher nature of man. Is this because their organs
are located on the upper part of the head 1 They say the
moral and religious sentiments ought to govern the propen
sities. We admit it ; but will they tell us how they verify
this fact by phrenology ? Is there any thing to be discover
ed by manipulation to establish it ? Or do they establish it
by consulting the revelations of consciousness, just as all
philosophers do ? But Mr. Combe ridicules the idea of
knowing any thing of the mind, by the study of conscious
ness. " The human mind," he^says, " in this world, cannot,
by itself, be an object of philosophical investigation." The
mind, then, cannot investigate itself, — thought cannot be an
object of thought, and we can never turn our minds in upon
themselves, and study the facts of consciousness ! This, we
confess, is a novel view of the matter, and one which, we
presume, no mental philosopher ever suspected before Gall,
Spurzheim, and George Combe.

But enough. We wish our readers distinctly to under
stand that we make no war upon phrenology, when restricted
to its legitimate sphere. As a physiological account of the
brain, a treatise on its functions, and as enabling us to ex
plain the causes of the differences we meet with in indi
vidual character, we believe it, and value it. Within these
limits, within which Gall usually confined it, it is, as we
have said, a useful and interesting branch of science. The
mischief of it lies in attempt! ng,"as Spurzheim and Combe
do, to make it a system of mental philosophy, which it is
not, and never can be. The fundamental principles of
phrenology are easily reconcilable with a sound spiritual
philosophy, and on some future occasion we may attempt to
show this. The objections we have brought forward, do
not bear against those principles, but against the doctrines

252 PRETENSIONS OF PHRENOLOGY.

phrenologists profess to derive from them. We war, then,
not against the science, but against what its friends have
superinduced upon it, or alleged it to be.

They, who oppose phrenology by controverting its physi
ological facts, do no seem to us to act very wisely. Mr.
Combe's Lectures, we confess, tended to weaken our faith
in the reality of those facts, and to induce us to class phrenol
ogy with the other humbugs of the day; but our own obser
vations have been somewhat extended, and we are satisfied
that the phrenologists have really made some physiological
discoveries not altogether worthless; and their assertion" of a
connexion between the instinctive tendencies of our nature,
and cerebral organization, has led to a kind of observation
on the different traits of individual character, which has en
larged our stock of materials for a Natural History of Man.
They have, also, made many valuable observations on edu
cation, and the means of preserving a sound mind in a sound
body; and induced many to turn their attention to the study
of mental^ science, who, but for them, might never have done
it. This is considerable ; enough to give them an honorable
rank among the benefactors of their race, — and a rank they
should be permitted peaceably to enjoy, unless they claim
one altogether higher, and to which no man of any tolerable
acquaintance with mental science can believe them entitled.

Admitting all the facts phrenologists allege, all that legiti
mately belongs to their science, we contend that it throws
no light on the great problems of mental philosophy. In
relation to all those problems, we stand unaffected by the
discoveries of Gall and Spurzheim ; and had phrenologists
clearly preceived the nature of these problems, they would
never have dared to put forth the claims they have, and
which we have Contested. Phrenology is a physical, not a
metaphysical science, and all it can, with any propriety, pre
tend ^ to do, is to point out and describe the physiological
conditions to which, in this mode of being, the mental affec
tions are subjected. This it has, to some extent, done ; but
this does not amount to so much as they imagine. In doino-
it?< they do not approach the boundaries of metaphysical
science, and therefore we have felt it necessary to show
them that they claim for it more than it is or can be.

We are grateful to all laborers in the field of science, and
to every man who discovers a new law or a new fact.
But we confess we are a little impatient with arrogant pre
tensions. Let the discoverer of the new law or the new

PRETENSIONS OF PHRENOLOGY. 253

fact, describe it to us, and claim the merit that is his due ;
but let him not fancy his merit must needs be so great as to
sink out of sight the merit of everybody else. We could
bear with our "phrenological friends altogether better, were
they not perpetually addressing us, as if all wisdom was
born with Gall and Spurzheim. To believe them, before
these two German empirics Plato and Aristotle, Bacon and
Descartes, Leibnitz and Locke, Reid and Kant, sink into
insignificance. Now, this is more than we can bear.
" Great men lived before Agamemnon," — and we believe
there were philosophers, before Gall and Spurzheim set out
with a cabinet of skulls on their wanderings from Yienria.
It is because phrenologists lose sight of this fact, and would
fain make it believed that nothing can be known of the
human mind, but by means of their four principles, (hat
we have deemed it necessary to rebuke thun. We hope
they will bear our reproof with the meekr.oss of philoso
phers.

We honor the man who has the courage to proclaim a new
doctrine, one which he honestly believes, and which he
knows is in opposition to the habitual faitli of his age and
country ; but we always distrust both the capacity and the at
tainments of him, who can see nothing to venerate in his fore
fathers, and who bows not before the wisdom of antiquity.
Progress there may be, and there is ; but no man can ad
vance far on his predecessors, — never so far that they shall
sensibly diminish in the distance. These arrogant reform
ers with the tithe of an idea, who speak to us as if they had
outgrown all the past, and grasped and made present the
whole future, are generally persons who, having advanced
on their own infancy, imagine therefore, that they have ad
vanced on the whole world. But the more we do really ad
vance, the more shall we be struck with the greatness of those
who went before us, and the more sincere and deep will be our
reverence for antiquity. The darkness we ascribe to remote
ages is often the darkness of our own minds, and the igno
rance we complain of in others may be only the reflex of our
own. Progress we should labor for, progress we should de
light in, but we should beware of underrating those who
have placed us in the world. " There were giants in those
days."

Phrenologists must attribute the ridicule and opposition
they have encountered to themselves. Their method of
propagating their science, their character of itinerant lectur-

254: SCIENCE AND THE SCIENCES.

ers, and their habit of manipulating heads, likening their
science so much, in its usages and effects, to the science of
palmistry, together with their uncouth terminology, and the
absurd statements which they are continually making, betray
ing at once their ignorance and simplicity, can hardly be
expected not to excite a smile of pleasantry, or of contempt,
in every man of ordinary discernment and information. But
f they will betake themselves to their cabinets, and study
their science in the modest, unpretending manner, physiolo
gists in general do, instead of perambulating the country,
manipulating skulls at so much a-piece, or treating their
science in a way^that encourages the ignorant and designing
to do it, they will find the public ceasing to oppose them,
and gratefully accepting the fruits of their labors. Let them
lay aside their pretensions as system-makers, reformers,
revolutionists, and throw into the common mass the facts or
principles they discover, and suffer them to go for what
they are worth, and, in common with all studious men, they
will contribute something to the well-being of the race, and
deserve well of humanity.

SCIENCE AND THE SCIENCES.

[From Brownson's Quarterly Review for July, 1863.]

THERE are many Catholics, and very good Catholics too,
we learn from the New York Tablet, who care very little
for the objections to our faith drawn from the discoveries,
or alleged discoveries, and inductions of modern science,
especially the science of geology, and regard it as a waste of
time even to listen to them. There can be, they say, no
conflict, if both are true, between faith and science. We
know our faith is from God, and that it is true, and there
fore that whatever science conflicts with it is false science,
and should be dismissed without ceremony, as an impudent
pretender. There is, no doubt, truth in this argument, and
we might justly content ourselves with it if we had to deal
only with sciolists and cavillers, or if all Catholics were good
and stanch Catholics like those described by The Tablet ; if
there were no weak Catholics ; if there were no non-Catho-

SCIENCE AND THE SCIENCES. 255

lies ; if Catholics had no interest in science and owed no du
ties to civilization ; if only the whole needed a physician ;
or if charity were a vice or weakness, and not a Christian
virtue. The argument is conclusive for all those who care
nothing for science or civilization, for human intelligence
and social well-being, and whose faith having been enter
tained without reason, no reason] can disturb; but these
Catholics, however numerous and respectable they may be,
are not all the world, nor all who are Catholics, and their
wants are not the only wants to be consulted. The argu
ment, in point of fact, is more appropriate in the mouth of
a boasting pharisee, or an arrogant scribe, than in the mouth
of a docile, modest, humble, and truth-loving Christian. It
is far better fitted to raise doubts in the minds of thoughtful
men, than it is to remove them, and far more likely to repel
the cultivators of science from the church, than it is to keep
or draw them within her fold.

The argument is, also, one that can be retorted, and used
with as much practical effect against faith as against science.
There can, if both are true, be no conflict between science
and faith. We know our science is true, and therefore that
your faith, so far as it conflicts with it, is a false faith, an
impudent pretender. It will be difficult to persuade the
man of science that the argument is not as valid for him as
it is for you, or even to satisfy all who are inside of the
church that it is not a fair retort. Few Catholics, we appre
hend, can see their faith clearly contradicted by the alleged
discoveries and inductions of science without being more or
less disturbed ; and many, we know, have been led to aban
don their faith by objections drawn from the sciences,
which they had no scientific means of refuting. In both
Catholic and non-Catholic countries, we find the sons of be
lieving fathers and devout mothers, brought up in the
Oatholic faith, trained in Catholic schools even by priests and
religious, who yet, as they go out into the world, abandon
their childhood's faith, the faith of their fathers, and fall
into the ranks of its most bitter and determined enemies. It
is idle to attempt to deny or to conceal the fact, for all the
world knows it ; and useless to attempt to explain it away
by attributing it to perverse inclination, to licentiousness, or
to any species of moral depravity, for they are not seldom
the most innocent, the most ingenuous, the most gifted, and
the most^noble-minded of our youth. Science, or what pass
es for science, is, and for a long time has been extra eccle-

250 SCIENCE AND THE SCIENCES.

tiam, and in its spirit and tendency contra ecclesiam. The
public opinion of the scientific world is against us, and car
ries away not a few of our own children, and prevents those
not in the church from ever listening to our argument in
her favor.

It is certainly true that science does not and never can
conflict with the revelation of God, and whenever an appar
ent conflict arises we must always conclude that either what
is alleged as science is not science, but the opinion and con
jectures of scientific men ; or that what passes for faith is,
after all, only the opinion or conjectures ^of theologians.
Personally we feel no uneasiness on the subject, because we
have brought our faith and science into harmony, and know
that what science, so far as science it is, contradicts, is not
faith, but opinion ; not the teaching of the church, but the
opinions of the schools, or the constructions put upon the
word of God by fallible men. Yet it is well to bear in mind
that the certainty of faith neither objectively nor subjec
tively surpasses the certainty of science. Men have been able
to deny the true faith, which they have once believed ; no
man ever denies or abandons what he sees and knows to be
scientifically true. The believer who finds his science con
tradicting his faith, yields his faith rather than his science ;
for, in such a case, to continue to believe would be to cease
to reason, would be to deny the very intellect, without which
not even faith would be possible.

Then, again, we must bear in mind that, through faith
and science can never be in contradiction, yet much that
passes for faith may be in contradiction with science, arid
much that passes for science may be in contradiction with
faith. This contradiction, indeed, affects neither what is
really faith nor what is really science, but in minds not suf
ficiently instructed to draw sharply, on the one hand, the
line between what is faith and what is only theological opin
ion, and, on the other, between what is science and what is
only the opinion or conjecture of scientific men, it lias the
inevitable effect of creating, on the one side, a prejudice
against science and, on the other, a prejudice against faith.
Hence the good Catholics, of whom The Tablet speaks, are
really opposed to all scientific investigations, to all exercise
of reason, and seek their only natural support for faith in ig
norance and pious affection. It is therefore the church comes
to be looked upon as the enemy of intelligence, as in some
sense an institution for the perpetuation of ignorance and

SCIENCE AND THE SCIENCES. 257

diffusion of general stupidity. She thus loses her hold on
the intelligence of the age, on a large portion of the free,
independent, ingenuous, and cultivated young men, even in
her own communion, and fails almost entirely to command
the respect or the attention of a similar class brought up in
heterodoxy or unbelief. Therefore it is that the modern
world has lapsed into unbelief, and remains outside of the
church and bitterly prejudiced against her.

We owe it to the generous and noble youth growing up
in the church, and who, as things go, are sure one of these
days of being found among her enemies, to these immortal
souls whom our Lord hath redeemed with his precioua
blood, to show them what we are constantly telling them i*
true, namely, that science never is and never can be in con
flict with faith ; that there really is no conflict between*
what we are required by our church to receive as the word
of God, or hold as divine faith, and real science, whether
physical or metaphysical, whether ethical or historical. We
must not simply say there is none, but we must show it, and
enable them to see and know that there is none ; not merely
assert it ex cathedra* and consign to the flames of hell all
who do not believe us, but prove that what we assert is true,
either by showing scientifically that what is alleged as sci
ence is not science, or by showing theologically that what
science contradicts is not any part of faith, or any thing we
are required to receive as divine revelation, but is simply
the opinion, the honest opinion it may be, of fallible men.
We must make ourselves masters of science, not simply as
it was before the flood, or as it was in the ages of barbar
ism, but as it is now, as held by the recognized masters of
to-day, and thus gain the ability to meet the scientific on
their own ground. We must not, in order to save their
faith, discourage our youth from cultivating either science
or the sciences, or content ourselves with merely declaim
ing against modern science as anti-Catholic, as infidel, and
with refuting it with a condemnation pronounced by author
ity against it, or declaring it contra fidem. We must go
further, and meet it scientifically, with superior science, and
refute it, where it errs, on scientific principles, by scientific
reasons.

It is not enough to show that what passes for science is in
contradiction with systems constructed by eminent theolo
gians, which have widely obtained in the church, and which
are still held by multitudes in her communion without cen-

VOL. IX-17.

258 SCIENCE AND THE SCIENCES.

sure or reproof ; for theologians, even the most eminent,
are men and fallible as all men are, and it is well known
that there are opinions in the church which are not the
opinions of the church, — sententice in ecclesia, not sententice
ecdesicB. We must either show theologically that what is
contradicted is not of faith, and has never been taught as of
faith by the church in her official teaching, or scientifically
that what contradicts is not science, or no just induction
from the real facts in the case. "We owe this to those whom
the writer in The Tablet would probably call weak Catho
lics, bad Catholics, or no Catholics at all, though nominally
in the church. There are many such, and we who are strong
must endeavor to strengthen them. It will not do for us,
if we would secure the approbation of our Lord, to congrat
ulate ourselves that we are free from their infirmities, and
to give them the cold shoulder because they are not such as
we are, or with sublime self-complacency tell them that they
must believe or be damned. We must love them, and help
them, especially since the greater part of their difficulties
are created by us.

We owe this also to the heterodox and the unbelieving
outside of the church. They are men as well as we, and God
assumed their nature as well as ours. He died for them as
well as for us, and he is as much glorified in their salvation
as in our own. Be it they are sick, but they who are sick,
not they who are whole, need the physician. Our Lord seeks
their recovery, for he came not to call the righteous, but
sinners to repentance ; and there is more joy in heaven over
one sinner that repenteth than over ninety and nine just
persons who need not repentance. Charity is a Christian, a
divine virtue, for Deus charitas est, God is charity or love.
Charity is also a comprehensive virtue, embracing God and
man in its affection. If it begins at home, it does not end
there, nor is it, as too many seem to imagine, confined to
the household of faith. Our Lord died for sinners ; while
we were yet sinners and his enemies, he loved us, and gave
his life for us. Superb contempt for or even cold indiffer
ence to those who are out of the way may comport with the
Pharisee, who says, " Stand aside, I am holier than thou ;"
but not with the Christian, who knows that it is by no mer
it of his own that he has been called while others have been
left behind. The Scribes and Pharisees are hardly less rife
in the church than they were in the synagogue ; and now,
as in the time of our Lord, they hold places of honor and

SCIENCE AND THE SCIENCES. 259

influence. They are regarded as the flower of Catholics,
and to pass for good Catholics amongst men, we must be
like them. Yet our faith was not given us solely for our
own benefit, nor to be wrapped in a clean napkin, and bur
ied in the earth. We, who fancy heaven was made for us
alone, and thank God that we are not like these poor per
plexed, doubting, heterodox, infidel sinners outside of the
church, and look down on them with sovereign contempt
from the heights of our spiritual pride, should bear in mind
that we are answerable for all who are kept out of the way
of salvation by the public opinion that has grown up in mod
ern times hostile to the church of God. That public opin
ion grew up and remains uncorrected through our fault. All
the world, a few centuries back, was Catholic, public opin
ion was Catholic, power and all the means of social influence
were in the hands of Catholics ; Catholics had the control of
education, the universities, the schools, the colleges; they
had the mastery of the scientific mind, and were the leaders
in all that pertains to civilization. How, save through our
fault, could a public opinion grow up hostile to us, or the
conviction obtain that the church is hostile to science, and
unfavorable to civilization ?

There can be no question that Catholics have lost the van
tage-ground they once held, and lost it through their own
fault. To a fearful extent, they have failed to comprehend
their mission, and proved unfaithful to their trust. They
have incurred the reproach of our Lord, that of failing to
^discern the signs of the times." They have in their prac
tice too often confounded the human with the divine, and
done evil by endeavoring to give to political institutions and
scientific theories and opinions of an ignorant and semi-bar
barous age the stability and immutability which belong only
to the church of God, or to Catholic faith. Faith is stable,
invariable, permanent ; opinion is fickle, variable, transito
ry. But we have held on to opinions in the church and as
sociated with faith, though confessedly human, and staked
as far as possible, the Catholic cause on their maintenance.
When advancing science assails them we cry out infidelity,
and instead of calmly re-examining them, and modifying them
as demanded by the new light thrown on them by the inves
tigations and discoveries oi the scientific, we declaim against
the arrogant pretensions of the cultivators of science, and
get off any number of wise saws against the uncertainty of
science, the weakness of human reason, and the folly and sin

260 SCIENCE AND THE SCIENCES.

of setting up its conclusions above the word of God, forget
ting that what we are defending is itself only human opinion
in the church, not the divine faith the church teaches.
Hence is created a public opinion hostile to the church, and
which, as against her, is unjust, and wholly unwarranted.
This hostile public opinion, a mere prejudice as against the
church, and yet not wholly unfounded' as against "Catholics,
tends to keep the heterodox and unbelieving out of the way
of salvation, and to deprive them of the divine light of the
gospel. It is our duty to correct that public opinion, and
to remove that prejudice for which we are ourselves answer
able, not by words only, but by deeds ; not by showing
what the church did for civilization in the barbarous ages
that followed the downfall of Grseco-Roman civilization,
but by proving practically that we are to-day the real friends
of science ; that if we reject any of the alleged facts or con
clusions of modern science, we do it by a superior scientific
knowledge, andf or scientific reasons, which the scientific world
must hear and respect. We must beat the heterodox and
unbelieving on their own ground, with their own weapons.
We must be more scientific than they, and more perfect
masters of the sciences.

We owe this, finally, to science itself. We must not sup
pose because we have the revelation of the eternal things of
God, are Catholic believers, and seeking eternal rest in heav
en, that we are withdrawn from the affairs of this world, and
that we have no concern with society and its interests, or
with science and civilization. God has not made it necessary
that the great majority of mankind should be heretics or infi
dels in order to take care of the earth, and leave us believers
free to devote ourselves solely to ascetic exercises and the
salvation of our souls. This world has its place in the Chris
tian economy, and is God's wrorld, not Satan's. The earth,
according to the Copernican system, is one of the celestial
bodies. Natural society is not our end, but it is as neces
sary to it as the cosmos is to palingenesia. Civilization is in
itial religion. Science is an essential element of civilization,
which is the supremacy of faith and knowledge, of intelli
gence and love, over ignorance, rudeness, barbarism, and su
perstition. If we as Catholics have no duties to civilization,
pray, tell us who have ? If we are not bound to labor for
its progress, who is ? If we neglect modern civilization,
what right have we to stand and declaim against it as he
retical or infidel ? If we denounce science, or refuse to cul-

SCIENCE AND THE SCIENCES. 261

tivate it, what right have we to complain that it becomes
our enemy instead of our friend and ally ? If the spirit
of the writer in The Tablet were to become universal in the
church, and all the world were to become Catholics, society
would come to a stand-still, nay, would cease to exist ; sci
ence would cease to be cultivated ; the arts would perish ;
there would be an end to human development ; and the hu
man race would sink into the lowest form of barbarism and
savagism, giving a most terrible significance to the oportet
hcereses esse.

It is of the last importance that Catholics should learn, or
should practically remember, that Catholicity embraces both
religion and civilization ; for Catholics are the only people
who can give to civilization its normal development and
really aid its progress. They and they alone have in their
faith the true divine ideal in its integrity and universality,
the real system of the universe, the dialectic key to the rec
onciliation of all opposites, even Creator and creature.
Since Catholics have ceased to take the lead in science and
civilization there has been everywhere except in the purely
material order, or in the simple accumulation of material
facts, a decided deterioration. There has been a great en-
feeblement of character, a terrible loss of elevated principle
and high moral aims. Modern civilization, in the higher,
nobler, and more comprehensive sense of the word, has not
advanced, and has in many respects fallen below what it was
in the ancient gentile world. It is every day becoming
more pagan and less Christian. It wants Christian baptism,
Christian instruction, the infusion of Catholic life. Of all
people in the world, then, we Catholics are the most blame
worthy, if we neglect science, or the sciences on which civil
ization more immediately depends. We have no excuse ;
the world can be saved only by the faith which we, and we
alone, have in its unity and integrity, and God will demand
a strict reckoning of us for the use we make of it. A terri
ble judgment awaits us.

Nevertheless, though we urge upon Catholics the duty of
laboring for the continuous progress of civilization, and of
making themselves able to meet and master the scientific on
their own special grountj, yet we are far from accepting as
science all that passes for science, or from conceding that
there has been in our times any thing like that wonderful
progress in science or the sciences, which is very generally
asserted. Modern cultivators of science have pushed their

262 SCIENCE AND THE SCIENCES.

investigations far into the material order, and amassed a
considerable body of tolerably well ascertained facts in the
history of the globe and its inhabitants, but these facts,
though of great value to science, indispensable to it, if you
will, are not themselves science. Science does not consist
in the simple observation of facts and inductions therefrom ;
but in their explanation and coordination under the dialec
tic law of the universe, which has not been done, and cannot
be done on the so-called Baconian method, the method mod
ern science boasts of adopting and rigidly following. That
method is that of observation and induction, — a good meth
od for investigating nature, when one has science to start
with, but a very bad method when one is without science,
and is groping his way in the dark to science. Lord Bacon
was, no doubt, right when he maintained that the sciences
cannot be constructed a priori, but we have not found that
anybody ever maintained the contrary. His secret of re
storing and augmenting the sciences was an open secret be
fore as well as since he wrote. In all the sciences there is a
contingent element, and that element can nowhere be
learned or ascertained except by the method of experience, or
of observation, experiment, and induction. We can success
fully cultivate the sciences by no other method. But the
sciences so-called are not in themselves science, and from
them 'alone we never do and never can attain to science.
Hence we find that the most rigid disciples of Lord Bacon
usually proceed by way of a preliminary hypothesis which
directs their investigations, and which controls their experi
ments. Their experiments are all for the purpose of con
firming or exploding some hypothesis or preconceived theo
ry. They cannot, ii they would, do otherwise, for the sci
ences demand science as the condition of their construction,
and in the absence of science, apodictic science, we mean,
the human mind must resort to hypothesis.

The error of our men of science is not in adopting the
Baconian method, but in adopting it as an exclusive meth
od, and in attempting by it alone*to attain to science. That
method begins by the study of phenomena, and gives us at
best only an arbitrary classification of appearances. But the
simple study and classification of phenomena is not science,
for the excellent reason that nothing exists as pure phenom
enon or appearance. Appearance without something that ap
pears is nothing, a sheer nullity. There is no phenomenon
without its noumenon, no appearance without that which ap-

SCIENCE AND THE SCIENCES. 263

pears, no particular without the universal, no mimesis with
out methexis, no individual without the genus or species, no
universe without God ; and Kant, after Leibnitz, the great
est of German philosophers, has proved once for all that the
second series of terms can never, either by way of deduc
tion or of induction, be rationally concluded from the first ;
that neither by way of deduction nor of induction is
God obtainable from the universe, the methexic from
the mimetic, the universal from the particular, the noume-
non from the phenomenon. This is the real significance of
that little understood and much misunderstood work, the
Critik der reinen Vernunft. The two terms must be given
as they exist, not analytically, but synthetically. God, in
deed, is complete in himself, and in no sense dependent in
order to be on the universe, but even he can be known to
us only in synthesis with the universe, united to him by his
creative act. He cannot be concluded from the universe,
for the universe is from him, not he from it. To attempt
to obtain by logical deduction or induction the noumenon
from the phenomenon, the universal from the particular,
God from the universe, is to attempt to get something from
nothing, and to plunge at last into pure nihilism. To re
verse the method, and to attempt to conclude logically the
phenomenon from the noumenon, the contingent from the
necessary, the universe from God, is to confound creature
and creator, the contingent and the necessary, the empirical
and the ideal, to deny creation, and to fall into pantheism.
And hence all modern science so called tends inevitably
either to pantheism or to nihilism.

Here is the grand difficulty. We can construct the sci
ences on a scientific basis neither a priori, nor a posteriori
alone, because in all the sciences there are both contingent
and ideal or necessary elements. The true scientific method
combines in a real synthesis the two methods. Either is ob
jectionable when taken exclusively, and each is good when
adopted in connection with the other. The sciences cannot
be constructed without science, — the science of the ideal, or
philosophy, nor without careful observation of contingent
facts. The fault of modern science is in separating, — not
simply distinguishing, but separating, — in its method the
contingent from the necessary, the empirical from the ideal,
or the mimetic from the rnethexic, and hence its inductions
and generalizations are nothing but unscientific and arbitra
ry classifications of phenomena or particulars. Our com-

264 SCIENCE AND THE SCIENCES.

plaint of the modern cultivators of science, whether in or
out of the church, is that they have no philosophy, as our
pretended philosophers have no theology. It is our com
plaint of the modern world itself. Our age has no philoso
phy, and having no philosophy it has no genuine science.
We have separated the sciences from philosophy, that is,
from science, and philosophy from theology, reason from
revelation, and have therefore been compelled to attempt
the construction of science and the sciences empirically, by
the study and classification of particulars. We have thus
eliminated from the science we study every ideal or non-
contingent element, and attempted to explain the universe
with the contingent alone, without God or his creative act,
as may be seen in the Cosmos of Alexander von Humboldt,
and in the positivism of Auguste Comte.

All truth is in relation. All things exist in the real syn
thesis instituted by the creative act of God, and nothing can
be truly seen, observed, and known except in the real rela
tions, or the relations in which it actually exists. Even what
we call facts, cannot be understood, or represented, cannot be
seen, as they are, detached from these relations, taken in de
tail, and studied in their isolation, because as isolated, de
tached, they are no facts at all. Hence the science of geol
ogy, zoology, physiology, philology, ethnology, ethics, or'
history can never be completed and mastered as a separate
and detached science. Each of these sciences, to be success
fully studied, must be studied in its real relations, and not
one of them can deserve the name of science, if constructed
l)j the effort to rise from the particular to the universal.
We must begin with the real beginning, the creative act of
God, and descend from the whole to the parts. No matter
what science we are studying, the human mind must oper
ate as it is, use its synthetic light, — as blended in one light,
the light derived from immediate idea, intuition, or a priori
reason, supernatural revelation, and experience, or observation
and induction. Not that in matters of science the mind
must blindly submit to either revelation or philosophy as an
extrinsic or foreign authority, restraining its freedom, or
prohibiting it from using its own eyes, and following its own
inherent constitution and laws; but that to operate freely and
scientifically, according to the intrinsic laws of intelligence,
it must avail itself of all the light with which it is furnished,
— all the means of grasping the universe as a whole and in
its parts at its command.

SCIENCE AND THE SCIENCES,

What we insist upon is that the human mind never
has its normal action when compelled by false or ex
clusive theories to operate with only a small portion of
the light furnished it. We found not science on revela
tion, but we maintain that it is impossible to attain to
the true system of the universe without the light of rev
elation. We demand the free normal action of reason,
but reason never does and never can have its free normal
action, when left to itself alone, with no aid from the revealed
word of God. In all that is contingent, reason has need of
experience, observation. experiment, investigation; but with
these alone, we can never rise above the empirical, or attain
to scientific results. Reason cannot operate without prin
ciples, and these must be given it a priori ; for if it cannot
operate without principles, it cannot without principles en
gage in the search after principles. In the superintelligible
order, on which the intelligible order depends, and without
which it would not and could not be, supernatural revelation
must supply the want of direct intuition and sensible ap
prehension. Ideal science, — philosophy, — and revelation
are both necessary to the successful cultivation of the sci
ences ; and the reason why the sciences make so little real
progress, why they are so uncertain, and why they are re
ceived with so much distrust by metaphysicians and theologi
ans, is that the men who cultivate them insist on cultivating
them as separate and independent sciences, and will accept
no aid from philosophy or from faith. Descartes ruined
philosophy when he separated it from theology, and made it
a creation of reason isolated from faith ; Bacon ruined the
sciences as sciences, when he separated them from philoso
phy or ideal science and made them purely empirical. Facts
or one side of facts may have been exajnined, and the scien
tific men of to-day have no doubt, in their possession a larg
er mass of materials for the construction of the sciences,
than had their predecessors, but they have less science than
had the great mediseval doctors and professors. St. Thomas
had more science than Sir Charles Lyell, or Professor Owen.
The recent work of Sir Charles on the Antiquity of Man,
as well as that of Darwin on the Origin of Species, shows
not the progress, but the deterioration of science. The same
thing is shown by Agassiz in his elaborate essay on Classifi
cation, and by the trouble naturalists have to settle the proper
classification of man. The naturalists are unwearied in their
investigations, and shrink from no sacrifice to advance their

266 SCIENCE AND THE SCIENCES.

respective sciences, but we meet not one of their works that
does not prove that they have lost the true key to the scien
tific sense of the universe. They are men whose ability,
whose patience, whose labors we respect ; they do all that
men can do with their method ; they do much for which we
are grateful to them, and we are by no means among those
who detract from their merits, or denounce them as the en
emies of religion ; but we must tell them that they will
never, in the way they proceed, attain to the science to which
their lives are so generously devoted. Civilization separated
from religion, science separated from revelation, reason sep
arated from faith, can never flourish, and under this separa
tion, though men may fancy they are still believers on one
side of the soul, society goes to ruin, and a gross material
ism, pure selfishness becomes predominant, as we have seen
and still see, especially in Great Britain and the United
States, who, though they have been for some time at the
head of modern civilization, which has collapsed in our civil
war, are hardly up to the level of the ancient Greece-Roman
world.

Yet we are not asserting revelation as a foreign authority,
or insisting that the naturalists,[or physicists, are in their own
departments to bow to the dicta of the metaphysicians. We
would impose no fetters on reason, no trammels on science ;
for the assertion of revelation as a trammel on reason, or
philosophy as a restraint on science, would be to assert that
very separation we complain of, that very divorce of relig
ion and civilization which Bacon and Descartes so success
fully inaugurated, and from which all modern society now
suffers. What we assert is the synthesis of religion and
civilization, of revelation and science, of faith and reason.
The human mind operates in all, and operates freely, ac
cording to its own intrinsic laws. Faith does not restrain
reason in matters of science ; does 'not say to it, Thus far?
but no further ; but bids it use all the light it has, and aids
it to go further than by its own light it could go. We are
not contending that reason should cease to be reason, or that
reason should close her eyes, fold her hands, and fetter her
feet, but that she keep both of her eyes open, and use both
of her hands, and both of her feet. We do not wish her to
extinguish her own light and envelop herself in darkness, in
order to see by the light of revelation. If to attain to true
science reason needs immediate intuition of principles and
the supernatural revelation of the superintelligible, it is rea-

SCIENCE AND THE SCIENCES. 267

son that receives and uses them. In the field of science
as distinguished from that of faith, revelation is adjutative
rather than imperative. Its light and that of reason coalesce
and shine as one light. The naturalist studies man, for in
stance, as an animal, and can give no scientific account of
him, and is at a loss how or where to class him, whether in
a distinct order of animals by himself, or in the family of
baboons. This must be so, because man is not a pure ani
mal, and cannot be classed as such. We know from reve
lation that he is composed of body and soul, or body and
spirit, and that the animal in him is the animal transformed.
The animal when separated from the soul or spirit is not a
living, but a dead animal. Take this fact from revelation,
not as a dogma, unless you please, but as a theorem, and you
will find all the facts you can observe in the case harmonize
with it, and tend to confirm it. So universally, in every
department of science. The key to the scientific classifica
tion and explanation of the phenomena of nature is in the
superintelligible, and is furnished only by supernatural rev
elation.

It is because revelation places the mind in the true posi
tion, or gives it the true point of departure, for the study of
nature, and enables the naturalists or physicists to pursue
their investigations scientifically, according to a rule, not at
random, that we so strenuously urge upon Catholics the duty
of taking the sciences into their own hands. They and they
only can cultivate them scientifically, for they and they only
have the revelation of God in its unity and integrity, and
occupy a position from which the universe can be seen as it
is. At present, the men of science pursue one and the same
method, whether in or out of the church/and there is in the
minds of Catholics themselves a fatal schism between their
faith and their science. Catholics are in the sciences follow
ers of the Baconian method, and forego all the advantages
their faith and their superior theological science give them.
They follow the lead of non-Catholics, and seldom surpass
them, seldom equal them. Hence both in and out of the
church the sciences are un-Catholic, and, in fact, anti-Cath
olic. For this reason the more believing and devout among
Catholics either neglect them or declaim against them. But
let Catholics themselves study the sciences in the light of
their own faith and their higher theology, and conquer by
their superior science, the mastery of the scientific world,
and they would speedily place the sciences on a scientific

268 FAITH AND THE SCIENCES.

track, and make them friends and allies of religion, never
again to be enlisted on the side of its enemies. Our faith
is of no use to the sciences even if cultivated by Catholics,
if these Catholics pursue in their cultivation a non-Catholic
or exclusive method. What we must do is to combine our
faitli and science, unite, without confounding them in our
method, the light of revelation and the light of reason. Were
we to do this as did the great Greek and Latin fathers, and
as did the more eminent mediaeval doctors and professors,
we could soon, with the vast body of facts or materials ac
cumulated by modern students and at our disposal, heal the
deplorable schism between faith and reason, revelation and
science ; reunite what should never have been separated, and
render civilization really Catholic. We could place the pub
lic opinion of the civilized world once more on the side of
the church, and our youth would grow up believers, and de
mand reasons for not believing instead as now of demand
ing reasons for believing. This is an end worthy of the
noblest and most earnest efforts of Catholics. Let them
not, we pray them, lose sight of it.

FAITH AND THE SCIENCES.

[From the Catholic World for December, 1867.]

IN the last half of the seventeenth century and the first
half of the eighteenth, the so-called free-thinkers defended
their rejection of the Christian mysteries on the alleged
ground that the mathematicians had exploded them. Thus
Dr. Garth, in his last illness, resisted the efforts of Addison
to persuade him to die as a Christian, by saying, " Surely,
Mr. Addison, I have good reason not to believe those trifles,
since my friend Dr. Halley, who has dealt much in demon
stration, has assured me that the doctrines of Christianity
are incomprehensible, and the religion itself an imposture."

In this assurance of Dr. Halley, we see a trace of Cartes-
ianism which places certainty in clearness of ideas, and as
sumes that what is incomprehensible, or what cannot be
clearly apprehended by the mind, is false ; as if the human
mind were the measure of the true, and as if there were

FAITH AND THE SCIENCES. 269

not truths too large for it to comprehend ! But since Berke
ley, the Protestant Bishop of Cloyne, exposed in his An
alyst, and Letters in its defence, the confused and false rea
soning of mathematicians, especially in fluxions or the dif
ferential calculus, in which, though their conclusions are
true, they are not obtained from their premises, the free
thinkers have abandoned the authority of mathematicians,
and now seek to justify their inh'delity by that of the so-
called physicists. They appeal now to the natural sciences,
chiefly to geology, zoology, and philology, and tell us that
the progress made in these sciences has destroyed the au
thority of the Holy Scriptures and exploded the Christian
dogmas. Geology, we are told, has disproved the chronol
ogy of the Bible, zoology has disproved the dogma of crea
tion, and ethnology and philology have disproved the unity
of the species ; consequently the dogma of original sin, and
all the dogmas that presuppose it. Hence our scientific
chiefs, whom the age delights to honor, look down on us,
poor, benighted Christian believers, with deep pity or su
preme contempt, and despatch our faith by pronouncing the
word " credulity " or " superstition " with an air that antici
pates or admits no contradiction. It is true, here and there
a man, not without scientific distinction, utters a feeble
protest, and timidly attempts to show that there is no dis
crepancy between the Christian faith and the facts really
discovered and classified by the sciences ; but there is no
denying that the predominant tendency of the modern scien
tific world is decidedly unchristian, even when not decid
edly anti-christian.

The most learned men and profoundest thinkers of our
age, as of every age, are no doubt, believers, sincere and
earnest Christians ; but they are not the men who represent
the age, and give tone to its literature and science. They
are not the popular men of their times, and their voice is
drowned in the din of the multitude. There is nothing
novel or sensational in what they have to tell us, and there
is no evidence of originality or independence of thought or
character in following them. In following them we have
no opportunity of separating ourselves from the past, break
ing with tradition, and boldly defying both heaven and
earth. There is no chance for war against authority, of
creating a revolution, or enjoying the excitement of a
battle ; so the multitude of little men go not with them.
And they who would deem it gross intellectual weakness to

270 FAITH AND THE SCIENCES.

rely on the authority of St. Paul, or even of our Lord him
self, have followed blindly and with full confidence an
Agassiz, a Huxley, a Lyell, or any other second or third-rate
physicist, who is understood to defend theories that under
mine the authority of the church and the Bible.

We are not, we frankly confess, learned in the sciences.
They have changed so rapidly and so essentially since our
younger days, when we did take some pains to master them,
that we do not know what they are to-day any more than
we do what they will be to-morrow. We have not, in our
slowness, been able to keep pace with them, and we only
know enougli of them now to know that they are continu
ally changing under the very eye of the spectator. But, if
we do not know all the achievements of the sciences, we
claim to know something of the science of sciences, the
science which gives the law to them, and to which they must
conform or cease to pretend to have any scientific character.
If we know not what they have done, we know something
which they have not done.

We said, in our article on the Cartesian Doult* that the
ideal formula does not give us the sciences ; but we add
now, what it did not comport with our purpose to add then,
that, though it does not give them, it gives them their law
and controls them. We do not deduce our physics from
our metaphysics ; but our metaphysics or philosophy gives
the law to the inductive or empirical sciences, and prescribes
the bounds beyond which they cannot pass without ceasing
to be sciences. Knowing the ideal formula, we do not know
all the sciences, but we do know what is not and cannot be
science.

The ideal formula, being creates existences, which is only
the first article of the creed, is indisputable, certain, and the
principle alike of all the real and all the knowable, of all
existence and of all science. This formula expresses the
primitive intuition, and it is given us by God himself in
creating us intelligent creatures, because without it our
minds cannot exist, and, if it had not been given us in the
very constitution of the mind, we never could have obtained
it. ^ It is the essential basis of the mind, the necessary con
dition of all thought, and we cannot even in thought deny
it, or think at all without affirming it. This we have here
tofore amply shown ; and we may add here that no one ever

*Vol. II., p. 374.

FAITH AND THE SCIENCES. 271

thinks without thinking something the contrary of which
cannot be thought, as St. Anselm asserts.

As Berkeley says to the mathematicians, " Logic is logic,
and the same to whatever subject it is applied." When,
therefore, the cultivators of the inductive sciences allege a
theory or hypothesis which contradicts in any respect the
ideal formula, however firmly persuaded they may be that
it is warranted by the facts observed and analyzed, we tell
them at once, without any examination of their proofs or
reasonings, that their hypothesis is unfounded, and their
theory false, because it contradicts the first principle alike
of the real and the knowable, and therefore cannot possibly
be true. We deny no facts well ascertained to J>e facts,
but no induction from any facts can be of as high authority
as the ideal formula, for without it no induction is possible.
Hence we have no need to examine details any more than
we have to enter into proofs of the innocence or guilt of a
man who confesses that he has openly, knowingly, and in
tentionally violated the law. The case is one in which
judgment a priori may be safely pronounced. No induc
tion that denies all science and the conditions of science can
be scientific.

The ideal formula does not put any one in possession of
the sciences, but it enables us to control them. We can
entertain no doctrine, even for examination, that denies any
one of the three terms of the formula. If existences are
denied, there are no facts or materials of science ; if the
creative act is denied, there are no facts or existences ; and
finally, if God is denied, the creative act itself is denied.
God and creature are all that is or exists, and creatures can
exist only by the creative act of God. Do you come and
tell me that you are no creature ? What are you, then ?
Between God and creature there is no middle term. If,
then, you are not creature, you must be God or nothing.
Well, are you God ? God, if God at all, is independent,
necessary, self-existent, immutable, and eternal being. Are
you that, you who depend on other than yourself for every
breath you draw, for every motion you make, for every
morsel of food you eat, whom the cold chills, the fire burns,
the water drenches ? No ? do you say you are not God ?
What are you, then, we ask once more ? If you are neither
God nor creature, then you are nothing. But nothing you
are not, for you live, think, speak, and act, and even reason,
though not always wisely or well. If something and not

272 FAITH AND THE SCIENCES.

God, then you are creature, and are a living assertion of the
ideal formula. Do you deny it, and say there is no God?
Then still again, what are you who make the denial ? If
there is no God, there is no real, necessary, and eternal be
ing — no being at all ; if no being, then no existence, for all
existence is from being, and if no existence, then what are
you who deny God ? Nothing ? Then your denial is noth
ing, and worth nothing.

It is impossible to deny any one of the three terms of the
formula, for every man, though he may believe himself an
atheist or a pantheist, is a living assertion of each one of
them, and in its real relation to the other two. We have
the right, then, to assert the formula as the first principle
in science, and oppose it as conclusive against any and every
theory that denies creation, and asserts either atheism or
pantheism. Do not think to divert attention from the in
trinsic fallacy of such a theory by babbling about natural
laws. Nature, no doubt, has her laws, according to which,
or, if you please, by virtue of which, all natural phenomena
or natural effects are produced, and it is the knowledge of
these laws that constitutes natural science or the sciences.
But these laws, whence come they ? Are they superior to
nature, or inferior ? If inferior, how can they govern her
operations ? If superior, then they must have their origin
in^ the supernatural, and a reality above nature must be ad
mitted. Nature, then, is not the highest, is not ultimate, is
not herself being, or has not her being in herself ; is, there
fore, contingent existence, and consequently creature, exist
ing only by virtue of the creative act of real and necessary
being, which brings us directly back to the ideal formula,
God denied, nature and the laws of nature are denied.
^ The present tendency among naturalists is to deny crea
tion and to assert development — to say with Topsy, in Uncle
Torres Cabin, only generalizing her doctrine, "Things
didn't come ; they growed" Things are not created ; they
are developed by virtue of natural laws. Developed from
what? From nothing? Ex nihilo nihil fit. From noth
ing nothing can be developed. A universe self -developed
from nothing is somewhat more difficult to comprehend
than the creation of the universe from nothing through the
word of his power by One able to create and sustain it.
You can develop a germ, but you cannot develop where
there is nothing to be developed. Then the universe is not
developed from nothing : then from something. What is

FAITH AND THE SCIENCES.

that something ? "Whatever you assume it to be, it cannot
be something created, for you deny all creation. Then it is
eternal, self-existent being, being in itself, therefore being
in its plenitude, independent, immutable, complete, perfect
in itself, and therefore incapable of development. Develop
ment is possible only in that which is imperfect, incomplete,
for it is simply the reduction of what in the thing developed
is potential to act.

There is great lack of sound philosophy with our modern
theorists. They seem not to be aware that the real must
precede the possible, and that the possible is only the
ability of the real. They assume the contrary, and place
possible being before real being. Even Leibnitz says that
St. Anselm's argument to prove the existence of God,
drawn from the idea of the most perfect being, the contrary
of which cannot be thought, is conclusive only on condition
that most perfect being is first proved to be possible.
Hegel makes the starting-point of all reality and all science
to be naked being in the sense in which it and not-being are
identical ; that is, not real, but possible being, the abyssus
of the Gnostics, and the void of the Buddhists, which Pierre
Leroux labors hard, in his IJHumanite and in the article
Le Ciel in his Encydopedie Nouvelle, to prove is not
nothing, though conceding it to be not something, as if
there could be any medium between something and nothing.
In itself, or as abstracted from the real, the possible is sheer
nullity ; nothing at all. The possibility of the universe is
the ability of God to create it. If God were not himself
real, no universe would be possible. The possibility of a
creature may be understood either in relation to its creability
on the part of God, or in relation to its own perfectibility.
In relation to God every creature is complete the moment
the divine mind has decreed its creation, and, therefore, in
capable of development ; but, in relation to itself, it has
unrealized possibilities which can be only progressively
fulfilled. Creatures, in this latter sense, can be developed
because there are in them unrealized possibilities or
capacities for becoming, by aid of the real, more than
they actually are, that is, because they are created, in relation
to themselves, not perfect, but perfectible. Hence, crea
tures, not the Creator, are progressive, or capable, each after
its kind, of being progressively developed and completed
according to the original design of the Creator.

Aristotle, whom it is the fashion just now to sneer at,

VOL. IX-18.

FAITH AND THE SCIENCES.

avoided the error of our modern sophists ; he did not place
the possible before the real, for he knew that without the
real there is no possible. The principium, or beginning,
must be real being, and, therefore, he asserted God, not as pos
sible, but real, most real, and called him actus purissimus^
most pure act, which excludes allunactualized potentialities
or unrealized possibilities, and implies that he is most pure,
that is, most perfect being, being in its plenitude. God
being eternally being in himself, being in its plenitude, as
he must be if self-existent, and self-existent he must be if
not created, he is incapable of development, because in him
there are no possibilities not reduced to act. The develop-
mentists must, then, either admit the fact of creation, or
deny the development they assert and attempt to maintain ;
for, if there is no creation, nothing distinguishable from the
uncreated, nothing exists to be developed, and the un
created, being either nothing, and therefore incapable of
development, or self -existent, eternal, and immutable
being, being in its plenitude, and therefore from the very
fulness and perfection of its being also incapable of develop
ment. If the developmentists had a little philosophy or a
little logic, they would see that, so far from being able to
substitute development for creation, they must assert crea
tion in order to be able to assert even the possibility of
development. Is it on the authority of such sciolists, soph
ists, and sad blunderers as these developmentists that we
are expected to reject the Holy Scriptures, and to abandon
our faith in Christianity ? We have a profound reverence
for the sciences, and for all really scientific men ; but really
it is too much to expect us to listen, with the slightest
respect, to such absurdities as most of our savants are in the
habit of venting, when they leave their own proper sphere
and attempt to enter the domain of philosophy or theology.
In the investigation of the laws of nature and the
observation and accumulation of facts they are respectable,
and often render valuable service to mankind ; but, when
they undertake to determine by their inductions from facts
of a secondary order what is true or false in philosophy or
theology, they mistake their vocation and their aptitudes,
and, if they do not render themselves ridiculous, it is be
cause their speculations are too gravely injurious to permit
us to feel toward them any thing but grief or indignation.
None of the sciences are apodictic ; they are all as special
sciences empirical, and are simply formed by inductions

FAITH AND THE SCIENCES. 275

.<•

from facts observed and classified. To their absolute cer
tainty two things are necessary : First, that the observatior
of the facts of tlie natural world should be complete, leaving
no class or order of facts unobserved and unanalyzed ; ano!,
second, that the inductions from them should be infallible,
excluding all error, and all possibility of error. But we say
only what every one knows, when we say that neither of
these conditions is possible to any mortal man. Even New
ton, it is said, compared himself to a child picking up shells
on the beach ; and after all the explorations that nave been
made it is but a small part of nature that is known. The in
ductive method, ignorantly supposed to be an invention of
Lord Bacon, but which is as old as the human mind itself,
and wras always adopted by philosophers in their investiga
tions of nature, is the proper method in the sciences, and all
we need to advance them is to follow it honestly and
strictly. But, every day, facts not before analyzed or ob
served come under the observation of the investigator, and
force new inductions, which necessarily modify more or less
those previously made. Hence it is that the natural sciences
are continually undergoing more or 1 ess important changes.
Certain principles, indeed, remain the same ; but set aside,
if we must set aside, mathematics and mechanics, there is
not a single one of the sciences that is now what it was in
the youth of men not yet old. Some of them are almost
the creations of yesterday. Take chemistry, electricity,
magnetism, geology, zoology, biology, physiology, philology,
ethnology, to mention no more ; they are no longer what
they were in our own youth, and the treatises in which we
studied them are now obsolete.

It is not likely that these sciences have even as yet reached
perfection, that no new facts will be discovered, and no
further changes and modifications be called for. We by no
means complain of this, and are far from asking that investi
gation in any field should be arrested, and these sciences re
main unchanged, as they now are. No : let the investiga
tions go on, let all be discovered that is discoverable, and
the sciences be rendered as complete as possible. But, then,
is it not a little presumptuous, illogical even, to set up any
one of these incomplete, inchoate sciences against the primi
tive intuitions of reason or the profound mysteries of the
Christian faith? Your inductions to-day militate against
the ideal formula and the Christian creed; but how know
you that your inductions of to-morrow will not be essentially

276 FAITH AND THE SCIENCES.

modified by a fuller or closer observation of facts ? Your
conclusions must be certain before we can on their authority
reject any received dogma of faith or any alleged dictamen
of reason.

We know a priori that investigation can disclose no fact
or facts that can be incompatible with the ideal formula.
ISTo possible induction can overthrow any one of its three
terms. It is madness to pretend that from the study of
nature one can disprove the reality of necessary and eternal
being, the fact of creation, or of contingent existences. The
most that any one, not mad, does or can pretend is, that
they cannot be proved by way of deduction or induction
from facts of the natural world. The atheist Lalande went
no further than to say, " I have never seen God at the end
of my telescope." Be it so, what then ? Because you have
never seen God at the end of your telescope, can you logi
cally conclude that there is no God ? For ourselves, we do
not pretend that God is, or can be asserted, by way of de
duction or induction from the facts of nature, though we
hold that what he is, even his eternal power and divinity,
may be clearly seen from them ; but the fact that God can
not be proved in one way to be does not warrant the con
clusion that he cannot in some other way be proved, far less
that there is no God.

We do not deduce the dogmas of faith from the ideal
formula, for that is in the domain of science ; but they all
accord with it, and presuppose it as the necessary preamble
to faith. We have not the same kind of certainty for faith
that we have for the scientific formula ; but we have a cer
tainty equally high and equally infallible. Consequently,
the inductions or theories of naturalists are as impotent
against it as against the formula itself. The authority of
faith is superior, we say not to science, but to any logical
inductions drawn from the facts of the natural world, or
theories framed by natural philosophers, and those then,
however plausible, can never override it. JSTo doubt the
evidences of our faith are drawn in part from history, and
therefore from inductive science ; but even as to that part
the certainty is of the same kind with that of any of the
sciences, rests on the analysis of facts and induction from
them, and is at the very lowest equal to theirs at the highest.

But let,' us descend to matters of fact. We will take
geology, which seems just now to be regarded as the most
formidable weapon against the Christian religion. Well,

FAITH AND THE SCIENCES. 277

what has geology done ? It lias by its researches proved an
antiquity of the earth and of man on the earth which is far
greater than is admissible by the chronology of the Holy
Scriptures. It has thus disproved the chronology of the
Bible ; therefore it has disproved the divine inspiration of
the Bible, and therefore, again, the truth of the Christian
dogmas, which have no oilier authority than that inspira
tion. But have you, geologists, really proved what you
pretend? You have discovered certain facts, fossils, &c.,
which, if some half a dozen possible suppositions are true,
not one of which you have proved or in the nature of the
case can prove, render it highly probable that the earth is
somewhat more than six thousand years old, and that it is
more than five thousand eight hundred and sixty-seven
years since the creation of man. As to the antiquity of
man, at least, you have not proved what you pretend.
Your proofs, to be worth any thing, must destroy all possi
ble suppositions except the one you adopt, which they do
not do, for we can suppose many other explanations of the
undisputed facts besides the one you insist on our accepting.
Moreover, the facts on which you rely, if fairly given by
Sir Charles Lyell in his Antiquity of Man, by no means
warrant his inductions. Suppose there is no mistake as to
facts, which is more than we are willing to concede, espe
cially as to the stone axes and knives, which, according to the
drawings given of them, are exactly similar to hundreds
which we have seen when a boy strewing the surface of the
ground, the logic by which the conclusion is obtained is
puerile, and discreditable to any man who has had the
slightest intellectual training.

But suppose you have proved the antiquity of the earth
and of man on it to be as you pretend, what then ? In the
first place, you have not proved that the earth and man on
it were not created, that God did not in the beginning create
the heavens and the earth, and all things therein. You
leave, then, intact both the formula and the dogma which
presupposes and reasserts it as a truth of revelation as well
as of science. But we have disproved the chronology of
the Bible. Is it the chronology of the Bible or chronology
as arranged by learned men that you have disproved ? Say
the chronology as it actually is in the Bible, though all
learned men know that that chronology is exceedingly diffi
cult if not impossible to make out, and we for ourselve's have
never been able to settle it at all to our entire satisfaction,

278 FAITH AND THE SCIENCES.

is it certain that the Scriptures themselves even pretend
that the date assigned to the creation of the world is given
by divine revelation and is to be received as an article of
faith? There is an important difference between the
chronology given in the Hebrew Bible and that given in the
Septuagint used by the apostles and Greek fathers, and still
used by the united as well as by the non-united Greeks, and
we are not aware that there has ever been an authoritative de
cision as to which or that either of the two chronologies must
be followed. The commonly received chronology certainly
ought not to be departed from without strong and urgent
reasons ; but, if such reasons are adduced, we do not under
stand that it cannot be departed from without impairing
the authority of either the Scriptures or the church. We
know no Christian doctrine or dogma that could be affected
by carrying the date of the creation of the world a few or
even many centuries further back, if we recognize the fact
of creation itself. Our faith does not depend on a question
of arithmetic, as seems to have been assumed by the Angli
can Bishop Colenso. Numbers are easily changed in tran
scription, and no commentator has yet been able to reconcile
all the numbers as we now have them in our Hebrew Bibles,
or even in the Greek translation of the Seventy.

Supposing, then, that geologists and historians of civiliza
tion have found facts, not to be denied, which seem to
require for the existence of the globe, and man on its face,
a longer period than is allowed by the commonly received
chronology, we do not see that this warrants any induction
against any point of Christian faith or doctrine. We could,
we confess, more easily explain some of the facts which we
meet in the study of history, the political and social changes
which have evidently taken place, if more time were allowed
us between Noah and Moses than is admitted by Usher's
chronology ; it would enable us to account for many things
which now embarrass our historical science ; yet whether we
are allowed more time or not, or whether we can account for
the historical facts or not, our faith remains the same ; for we
have long since learned that, in the subjects with which science
proposes to deal, as well as in revelation itself, there are many
things which will be inexplicable even to the greatest,
wisest, and holiest of men, and that the greatest folly which
any man can entertain is that of expecting to explain every
thing, unless concluding a thing must needs be false because
we know not its explanation is a still greater folly. True

FAITH AND THE SCIENCES. 279

science as well as true virtue is modest, humble indeed, and
;il ways more depressed by what it sees that it cannot do than
elated by what it may have done.

Science, it is further said, has exploded the Christian doc
trine of the unity and the Adamic origin of the species,
and therefore the doctrines of Original Sin, the Incarnation,
the Redemption, indeed the whole of Christianity so far as
it is a supernatural system, and not a system of bald and
meagre rationalism. Some people perhaps believe it. But
science is knowledge, either intuitive or discursive ; and who
dares say that he knows the dogma of the unity of the hu
man species is false, or that all the kindreds and nations of
men have not sprung from one and the same original pair ?
The most that can be said is that the sciences have not as yet
proved it, and it must be taken, if at all, from revelation.

Take the unity of the species. The naturalists have un
doubtedly proved the existence of races or varieties of men,
like the Caucasian, the Mongolian, the Malayan, the Ameri
can, and the African, more or less distinctly marked, and
separated from one another by greater or less distances ; but
have they proved that these several races or varieties are dis
tinct species, or that they could not all have sprung from
the same original pair ? Physiologists, we are told, detect
some structural differences between the negro and the white
man. The black differs from the white in the greater length
of the spine, in the shape of the head, leg, and foot and
heel in the facial angles, the size and convolutions of the
brain. Be it so ; but do these differences prove diversity of
species, or, at most, only a distinct variety in the same
species ? May they not all be owing to accidental causes ?
The type of the physical structure of the African is unde
niably the same with that of the Caucasian, and all that can
be said is, that in the negro it is less perfectly realized, con
stituting a difference in degree, indeed, but not in kind.

But before settling the question whether the several races
of men belong to one and the same species or not, and have
or have not had the same origin, it is necessary to determine
the characteristic or differentia of man. Naturalists treat
man as simply an animal standing at the head of the class
or order mammalia, and are therefore obliged to seek his
differentia or characteristic in his physical structure ; but if
it' be true, as some naturalists tell us, that the same type runs
through the physical structure of all animals, unless insects,
reptiles, and Crustacea form an exception, it is difficult to

280 FAITH AND THE SCIENCES.

find in man's physical structure his differentia. The school
men generally define man, a rational animal, animal rationale,
and make the genus animal, and the differentia reason.
The characteristic of the species, that which constitutes it,
is reason or the rational mind, and certainly science can
prove nothing to the contrary. Some animals may have a
degree of intelligence, but none of them have reason, free
will, moral perceptions, or are capable of acting from con
siderations of right and wrong. We assume, then, that the
differentia of the species homo, or man, is reason, or the
rational soul. If our naturalists had understood this, they
might have spared the pains they have taken to assimilate
man to the brute, and to prove that he is a monkey devel
oped.

This point settled, the question of unity of the species is
settled. There may be differences among individuals and
races as to the degree of reason, but all have reason in some
degree. Reason may be weaker in the African than in the
European, whether owing to the lack of cultivation or to
other accidental causes, but it is essentially the same in the
one as in the other, and there is no difference except in de-

§ree ; and even as to degree, it is not rare to find negroes
lat are, in point of reason, far superior to many white men.
Negroes, supposed to stand lowest in the scale, have the
same moral perception and the same capacity of distinguish
ing between right and wrong and of acting from free will,
that white men have ; and if there is any difference, it is
simply a difference of degree, not a difference of kind or
species.

But conceding the unity of the species, science has, at
least, proved that the several races or varieties in the same
species could not have all sprung from one and the same
original pair. Where has science done this ? It can do it
only by way of induction from facts scientifically observed
and analyzed. What facts has it observed and analyzed that
warrant this conclusion against the Adamic origin of all
men ? There are, as we have just said, no anatomical, phys
iological, intellectual, or moral facts that warrant such con
clusion, and no other facts are possible. Wherever men are
found, they all have the essential characteristic of men as
distinguished from the mere animal; they all have sub
stantially the same physical structure ; all have thought,
speech, and reason, and, though some may be inferior to
others, nothing proves that all may not have sprung from

FAITH AND THE SCIENCES. 281

the same Adam and Eve. Do you say ethnology cannot
trace all the kindreds and nations of men back to a common
origin ? That is nothing to the purpose ; can it say they
•cannot have had a common origin ? But men are found
everywhere, and could they have reached from the plains of
Shinar continents separated from Asia by a wide expanse
of water, and been distributed over America, New Holland,
and the remotest islands of the ocean, when they had no
fihips or were ignorant of navigation ? Do you know that
the v had. in what are to us ante-historical times, no ships and
no knowledge of navigation, as we know they have had
them both ever since the first dawn of history ? No ? Then
you allege not your science against the Christian dogma, but
your ignorance, which we submit is not sufficient to over
ride faith. You must prove that men could not have been
distributed from a common centre as we now find them be
fore you can assert that they could not have had a common
origin. Besides, are you able to say what changes of land
and water have taken place since men first appeared on the
face of the earth ? Many changes, geologists assure us,
have taken place, and more than they know may have oc
curred, and have left men where they are now found, and
where they may have gone without crossing large bodies of
water. So long as any other hypothesis is possible, you can
not assert your own as certain.

But the difference of complexion, language, and usage
which we note between the several races of men proves that
they could not have sprung from one and the same pair.
Do you know they could not ? Know it ? No ; not abso
lutely, perhaps ; but how can you prove they could and
have ? That is not the question. Christianity is in posses
sion, and must be held to be rightfully in possession till real
science shows the contrary. I may not be able to explain
the origin of the differences noted in accordance with the
assertion of the common origin of all men in a single primi
tive pair ; but my ignorance can avail you no more than
your own. My nescience is not your science. Your busi
ness is by science to disprove faith ; if your science does not
do that, it does nothing, and you are silenced. We do not
pretend to be able to account for the differences of the sev
eral races, any more than we pretend to be able to account
for the well-known fact that children born of the same par
ents have different facial angles, different sized brains, dif
ferent shaped mouths and noses, different temperaments,

282 FAITH AND THE SCIENCES.

different intellectual powers, and different moral tendencies.
We may have conjectures on the subject, but conjectures
are not science. If necessary to the argument, we might,
perhaps, suggest a not improbable hypothesis for explaining
the difference of complexion between the white and the col
ored races. The colored races, the yellow, the olive, the
red, the copper-colored, and the black, are inferior to the
Caucasian, have departed further from the norma of the
species, and approached nearer to the animal, and therefore,
like animals, have become more or less subject to the action
of the elements. External nature, acting for ages on a race,
enfeebled by over-civilization and refinement, and therefore
having in a great measure lost the moral and intellectual
power of resisting the elemental action of nature, may, per
haps, sufficiently explain the differences we note in the com
plexion of the several races. If the Europeans and their
American descendants were to lose all tradition of the Chris-
tain religion, as they are rapidly doing, and to take up with
spiritism or some other degrading superstition, as they seem
disposed to do, and to devote themselves solely to the luxuries
and refinements of the material civilization of which they
are now so proud, and boast so much, it is by no means im
probable that in time they would become as dark, as deform
ed, as imbecile as the despised African or the native New
Hollander. We might give very plausible reasons for re
garding the negro as the degraded remnant of a once over-
civilized and corrupted race; and perhaps, if recovered,
Christianized, civilized, and restored to communication with
the great central current of human life, he may in time lose
his negro hue and features, and become once more a white
man, a Caucasian. But be this as it may, we rest, as is our
right, on the fact that the unity of the human species and
its Adamic origin are in possession, and it is for those who
deny either point to make good their denial.

But the Scriptures say mankind were originally of one
speech, and we find that every species of animals has its pecu
liar song or cry, which is the same in every individual of the
same species ; yet this is not the case with the different kind
red and nations of men ; they speak different tongues, which
the philologist is utterly unable to refer to a common original.
Therefore there cannot be in men unity of species, and the as
sertion of the Scriptures of all being of one speech is untrue.
If the song of the same species of birds or the cry of the same
species of animals is the same in all the individuals of that

FAITH AND THE SCIENCES. 283

species, it still requires no very nice ear to distinguish the song
or the cry of one individual from that of another ; and there
fore the analogy relied on, even if admissible, which it is
not, would not sustain the conclusion. Conceding, if you
insist on it, that unity of species demands unity of speech,
the facts adduced warrant no conclusion against the Scrip
tural assertion ; for the language of all men is even now one
and the same, and all really have one and the same speech.
Take the elements of language as the sensible sign by which
men communicate with, one another, and there is even now,
at least as far as known or conceivable, only one language.
The essential elements of all dialects are the same. You
have in all the subject, the predicate, and the copula, or the
noun, adjective, and verb, to which all the other parts of
speech are reducible. Hence the philologist speaks of uni
versal grammar, and constructs a grammar applicable alike
to all dialects. Some philologists also contend that the signs
adopted by all dialects are radically the same, and that the
differences encountered are only accidental. This has been
actually proved in the case of what are called the Aryan or
Indo-European dialects. That the Sanskrit, the Pehlvi or
old Persic, the Keltic, the Teutonic, the Slavonic, the Greek,
and the Latin, from which are derived the modern dialects
of Europe, as Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Eng
lish, Dutch, German, Scanian, Turk, Polish, Eussian, Welsh,
Gaelic, and Irish, all except the Basque and Lettish or Fin
nish, have had a common origin, no philologist doubts.
That the group of dialects called Semitic, including the He
brew^ Chaldaic, Syriac, Coptic, and Ethiopic, have an origin
identical with that of the Aryan group is, we believe, now
hardly denied. All that can be said is, that philologists
have not proved it, nor the same fact with regard to the so-
called Turanian group, as the Chinese, the Turkish, the Bas
que, the Lettish or Finnish, the Tataric or Mongolian, &c.,
the dialects of the aboriginal tribes or nations of America
and of Africa. But what conclusion is to be drawn from
the fact that philology, a science confessedly in its infancy,
and hardly a science at all, has not as yet established an iden
tity of origin with these for the most part barbarous dia
lects ? From the fact that philology has not ascertained it,
we cannot conclude that the identity does not exist, or even
that philology may not one day discover and establish it.

Philology may have also proceeded on false assumptions,
which have retarded its progress and led it to false conclu-

284: FAITH AND THE SCIENCES.

sions. It has proceeded on the assumption that the savage
is the primitive man, and that his agglutinated dialect rep
resents a primitive state of language instead of a degenerate
state. A broader view of history and a juster induction
from its facts would, perhaps, upset this assumption. The
savage is the degenerate, not the primeval man ; man in his
second childhood, not in his first ; and hence the reason why
he has no growth, no inherent progressive power, and why,
as Niebuhr asserts, there is no instance on record of a savage
people having by its own indigenous efforts passed from the
savage to the civilized state. The thing is as impossible as
for the old man, decrepit by age, to renew the vigor and
elasticity of his youth or early manhood. Instead of study
ing the dialects of savage tribes to obtain specimens of the
primitive forms of speech, philologists should study them
only to obtain specimens of worn-out or used up forms, or
of language in its dotage. In all the savage dialects that
we have any knowledge of, we detect or seem to detect
traces of a culture, a civilization, of which they who now
speak them have lost all memory and are no longer capable.
This seems to us to bear witness to a fall, a loss. Perhaps,
when the American and African dialects are better known,
and are studied with reference to this view of the savage
state, and we have better ascertained the influence of cli
mate and habits of life on the organs of speech and there
fore on pronunciation, especially of the consonants, we shall
be able to discover indications of an identity of origin where
now we can detect only traces of diversity. As long as phi
lology has only partially explored the field of observation, it
is idle to pretend that science has established any thing
against the scriptural doctrine of the unity of speech. The
fact that philologists have not traced all the various dialects
now spoken or extinct to a common original amounts to
nothing against faith, unless it can be proved that no such
original ever existed. It may have been lost and only the
distinctions retained.

Naturalists point to the various species of plants and ani
mals distributed over the whole surface of the globe, and
ask us if we mean to say that each of these has also sprung
from one original pair, or male and female, and if we main
tain that the primogenitors of each species of animal were
in the garden of Eden with Adam and Eve, or in the Ark
with Noah. If so, how have they become distributed over
the several continents of the earth and the islands of the

FAITH AND THE SCIENCES.

285

ocean ? Argumentum a specie ad speciem non valet, as say
the books on logic. And even if it were proved that in
case of plants and animals God duplicates, triplicates, or
quadriplicates the parents by direct creation, or that he cre
ates anew the pair in each remote locality where the same
species is found, as prominent naturalists maintain or are
inclined to maintain, it would prove nothing in the case of
man. For we cannot reason from animals to man, or from
flora to fauna. Nearly all the arguments adduced from so-
called science against the faith are drawn from supposed
analogies of men and animals, and rest for their validity on
thf assumption that man is not only gene rically, but specifi
cally, an animal, which is simply a begging the question.

Species again, it is said, may be developed by way of
selection, as the florist proves in" regard to flowers, and the
shepherd or herdsman in regard to sheep and cattle. That
new varieties in the lower orders of creation may be attain
ed by some sort of development is not denied, but as yet
it is not proved that any new species is ever so obtained.
Moreover, facts would seem to establish that, at least in the
case of domestic animals, horses, cattle, and sheep, the new
varieties do not become species and are not self-perpetuat
ing. Experiments in what is called crossing the breed have
proved that, unless the crossing is frequently renewed, the
variety in a very few generations runs out. There is a per
petual tendency of each original type to gain the ascendency,
and of the stronger to eliminate the others. Cattle-breed
ers now do not relv on crossing, but seek to improve their
stock by selecting "the best breed they know, and improving
it by improved care and nourishment. The different varie-
ties^of men may be, perhaps, improved in their physique
by selection, as was attempted in the institutions of Lycur-
gus ; but, as the moral and intellectual nature predominates
in man and is his characteristic, all conclusions as^ to him
drawn from the lower orders of creation, even in his physi
cal constitution, are suspicious and always to be accepted
with extreme caution. The church has defined what no
physiologist has disproved, that anima es^ forma corporis.
The soul is the informing or vital principle of the body,
which modifies all its actions, and enables it to resist, at
least to some extent, the chemical and other natural laws
which act on animals, plants, and unorganized matter. The
physiological and medical theories based on chemistry, which
were for a time in vogue and are not yet wholly abandoned,

286 FAITH AND THE SCIENCES.

contain at best only a modicum of truth, and can never be
safely followed, for in the life- of man there is at work a
subtiler power than a chemical or any other physical agent.

We do not deny that man is through his body related to the
material world, or that many of the laws of that world, mineral,
vegetable, and animal, are in some degree applicable to him ;
but, as far as science has yet proceeded, they are so only with
many limitations and modifications which the physician — we
use the word in its etymological as well as in its conventional
sense — can seldom determine. The morale every physician
knows has an immense power over the physique. The
higher the morale, the greater the power of the physical
system to resist physical laws, to endure fatigue, to bear up
against and even to throw off disease. Physical disease is
often generated by moral depression, and not seldom thrown
off by moral exhilaration. What is called strength of will
at times seems not only to subject disease to its control, but
to hold death itself at bay. In armies the officer, with
more care, more labor, more hardship, and less food and
sleep, will survive the common soldier, vastly his superior
as to his mere physical constitution. These facts and innu
merable others like them justify a strong protest against
the too common practice of applying to man without any
reservation the laws which we observe in the lower orders
of creation, and arguing from what is true of them what
must be true of him. Tear off the claw of a lobster, and
a new one will be pushed out ; cut the polypus in pieces,
and each piece becomes a perfect polypus, at least so we are
told, for we have not ourselves made or seen the experiment.
But nothing of the sort is true of man, nor even of the
higher classes of animals in which organic life is more com
plex. We place little confidence in conclusions drawn from
the assumed analogies between man and animals, and even
the developments of species in them by selection or other
wise, if proved, would not prove to us the possibility of a
like development in him. We must see a monkey by de
velopment grow into a man before we can believe it.

But why, even in the case of animals that can be propa
gated only by the union of male and female, we should sup
pose the necessity of duplicating the parents of the species
is more than we are able to understand. The individuals
of the species could go where man could go. Suppose we
find a species of fish in a North American lake, and the
same species in a European or Asiatic lake which has no

FAITH AND THE SCIENCES. 287

water communication with it, can you say the two lakes have
never been in communication, you who claim that the earth
has existed for millions of ages ? Much of what is now land
was once covered with water, and much now covered with
water it is probable was once land inhabited by plants, ani
mals, and men. Facts even indicate that the part of the
earth now under the Arctic and Antarctic circles once lay
nearer to the Equator, if not under it, and that what are
now mountains were once islands dotting the surface of the
ocean. No inductions which exclude these probabilities or
indications are scientific, or can be accepted as conclusive.

Take, then, all the facts on which the naturalists support
their hypotheses, they establish nothing against faith. The
facts really established either favor faith or are perfectly
compatible with it ; and if any are alleged that seem to mil
itate against it, they are either not proved to be facts, or
their true character is not fully ascertained, and no conclusion
from them can be taken as really scientific. We do not pre
tend that the natural sciences, as such, tend to establish the
truth of revelation, and we think some over-zealous apolo
gists of the faith go further in this respect than they should.
The sciences deal with facts and causes of the secondary
order ; and it is very certain that one may determine the
quality of an acorn as food for swine without considering
the first cause of the oak that bore it. A man may ascertain
the properties of steam and apply it to impel various kinds
of machinery, without giving any direct argument in favor
of the unity and Adamic origin of the race. The atheist may
be a good geometrician ; but, if there were no God, there
could be neither geometry nor an atheist to study it. All
we contend is, that the facts with which science deals are
none of them shown to contradict faith or to warrant any
conclusions incompatible with it.

Hence it may be assumed that, while the sciences remain
in their own order of facts, they neither aid faith nor im
pugn it, for faith deals with a higher order of facts, and
moves in a superior plane. The order of facts with which
the sciences deal no doubt depends on the order revealed by
faith ; and no doubt the particular sciences should be con
nected with science or the explanation and application of the
ideal formula or first principles, what we call philosophy, as
this formula in turn is connected with the faith ; but it does
not lie within the province of the particular sciences as such
to show this dependence or this connection, and our savants

288 FAITH AND THE SCIENCES.

invariably blunder whenever they attempt to do it, or to rise-
from the special to the general, tne particular to the univer
sal, or from the sciences to faith. Here is where they err,
What they allege that transcends the particular order of facts-
with which the sciences deal is only theory, hypothesis, con
jecture, imagination, or fancy, and has not the slightest sci
entific value, and can warrant no conclusions either for or
against faith. There is no logical ascent from the particular
to' the universal, unless there has been first a descent from
the universal to the particular. Jacob saw, on the ladder
reaching from heaven to earth, the angels of God descend
ing and ascending, not ascending and descending. There
must be a descent from the highest to the lowest before there
can be an ascent from the lowest to the highest. God becomes
man that man may become God. The sciences all deal with
particulars and cannot of themselves rise above particulars,
and from them universal science is not obtainable.

He who starts from revelation, which includes the prin
ciples of universal science, can, no doubt, find all nature har
monizing with faith, and all the sciences bearing witness to
its truth, for he has the key to their real and higher sense ;
but he who starts with the particular only can never rise
above the particular, and hence he finds in the particulars, or
the nature to which he is restricted, no immaterial and im
mortal soul, and no God, creator, and upholder of the uni
verse. His generalizations are only classifications of facts,
with no intuition of their relation to an order above them
selves ; his universal is the particular, and he sees in the plane
of his vision no steps by which to ascend to science, far less-
to faith. Saint-Simon and Auguste Cornte both understood
well the necessity of subordinating all the sciences to a gener
al principle or law, and of integrating them in a universal
science ; but starting with the special sciences themselves,
they could never attain to a universal science, or a science that
accepted, generalized, and explained them all, and hence each
ended in atheism, or, what is the same thing, the divinization
of humanity. The positivists really recognize only particu
lars, and only particulars in the material order, the only order
the sciences, distinguished from philosophy and revelation,
do or can deal with. Alexander von Humboldt had, prob
ably, no superior in the sciences, and he has given their
resume in his Cosmos ; but, if we recollect aright, the word
God does not once appear in that work, and yet, except when
he ventures to theorize bevond the order of facts on which

FAITH AND THE SCIENCES. 289

the sciences immediately rest, there is little in that work that
an orthodox Christian need deny. Herbert Spencer, really
a mail of ability, who disclaims being a follower of Anguste
Comte or apositivist, excludes from the knowable, principles
and causes, all except sensible phenomena ; and although
wrong in view of a higher philosophy than can be obtained
by induction from the sensible or particular facts, yet he is
not wrong in contending that the sciences cannot of them
selves rise above the particular and the phenomenal.

Hence we do not agree with those Christian apologists who
tell us that the tendency of the sciences is to corroborate the
doctrines of revelation. They no more tend of themselves
to corroborate revelation than they do to impair it. They
who press them into the cause of infidelity, and hence con
clude that science explodes faith, mistake their reach, for we
can no more conclude from them against faith than we can-
in favor of faith. The fact is, the sciences are not science,,
and lie quite below the sphere of both science and faith.
When arrayed against either, their authority is null. Hence
we conclude, a priori, against them when they presume to
impugn the principles of science as expressed in the ideal
formula, or against faith which is, considered in itself ob
jectively, no less certain than the formula itself ; and we have
shown, a posteriori, by descending to the particulars, that
the sciences present no facts that impugn revelation or con
tradict the teachings of faith. The conclusions of the savants
against the Christian dogmas are no logical deductions or in
ductions from any facts or particulars in their possession, and
therefore, however they may carry away sciolists, or the half-
learned, or little minds, greedy of novelties, they are really
of no scientific account.

All that faith demands of the sciences as such is their si
lence. She does not demand their support, she only demands
that they keep in their own order, that the cobbler should
stick to his last, ne sutor ultra crepidam. Faith herself is
in the supernatural order, and proceeds from the same source
as nature herself ; it presupposes science indeed, and elevates
and confirms it, but no more depends upon it than the creator
depends on the creature. The highest science needs faith
to complete it, and in all probability never could have been
attained to without revelation ; but neither science nor the
sciences, however they may need revelation, could ever, with
out revelation, have risen to the conception of a divine and
supernatural revelation. It is idle, then, to suppose that

VOL. IX-19.

290 FAITH AND THE SCIENCES.

without revelation we could find by the sciences the demon
stration or evidence of revelation. Lalande was right when
he said he had never seen God at the end of his telescope,
and his assertion should weigh with all natural theologians,
so-called, who attempt to prove the existence of God by way
of induction from the facts which naturalists observe and ana
lyze ; but he was wrong and grossly illogical when he con
cluded from that fact, with the fool of the Bible, there is no
God, as wrong as those chemists are who conclude against the
real presence in holy eucharist, because by their profane anal
ysis of the consecrated host they find in it the properties of
bread. The most searching chemical analysis cannot go be
yond the visible or sensible properties of the subject analyzed,
and the sensible properties of the bread and wine nobody pre
tends are changed in transubstantiatiou. None of the revealed
dogmas are either provable or disprovable by any empirical
science, for they all lie in the supernatural order, above the
reach of natural science, and while they control all the em
pirical sciences they can be controlled by none.

But when we have revelation and with it, consciously or un
consciously, the ideal formula, which gives us the principles
of all science and of all things, and descend from the higher
to the lower, the case is essentially different. We then find
all the sciences so far as based on facts, and all the observa
ble facts or phenomena of nature, moral, intellectual, or phys
ical, both illustrating and confirming the truths of revelation
and the mysteries of faith. "We then approach nature from
the point of view of the Creator, read nature by the divine
light of revelation, and study it from above, not from below ;
we then follow the real order of things, proceed from prin
ciples to facts, from the cause to the effect, from the uni
versal to the particular, and are, after having thus descended
from heaven to earth, able to reascend from earth to heaven.
In this way we can see all nature joining in one to show forth
the being and glory of God, and to hymn his praise. This
method of studying nature from high to low by the light of
first principles and of divine revelation enables us to press
all the sciences into the service of faith, to unite them in a
common principle, and do what the Saint-Simonians and
positivists cannot do, integrate them in a general or univer
sal science, bring the whole intellectual life of man, as we
showed in our article on Rome or Reason, into unison with
faith and the real life and order of things, leaving to rend
our bosoms only that moral struggle symbolized by Rome

FAITH AND THE SCIENCES. 291

and the World, of which we have heretofore treated at
length.*

But this can never be done by induction from the facts ob
served and analyzed by the several empirical or inductive
sciences. We think we have shown that the pretension, that
these sciences have set aside any of the doctrines of Chris
tianity, or impaired the faith, except in feeble and un in
structed minds, is unfounded ; we think we have also shown
that they not only have not, but cannot do it, because they
lie in a region too low to establish any thing against revela
tion. Yet as the sciences are insufficient, wnile restricted to
their proper sphere, to satisfy the demand of reason for apo-
dictic principles, for unity and universality, there is a per
petual tendency in the men devoted exclusively to their cul
ture to draw from them conclusions which are unwarranted,
illogical, and antagonistic both to philosophy and to faith.
Against this tendency, perhaps never more strongly mani
fested than at this moment, there is in natural science alone
no sufficient safeguard, and consequently we need the super
natural light of revelation to protect both faith and science
itself. With the loss of the light of revelation we lose, in
fact, the ideal formula, or the light of philosophy ; and with
the light of philosophy, we lose both science and the sci
ences, and retain only dry facts which signify nothing, or
baseless theories and wild conjectures, which, when substi
tuted for real science, are far worse than nothing.

* Vol. III., pp. 298 and 324.

PROFESSOR DRAPER'S BOOKS.*

[From the Catholv World for May, 1868.]

PROFESSOR DRAPER'S works have had, and are having, a
very rapid sale, and are evidently very highly esteemed by
that class of readers who take an interest, without being very
profoundly versed, in the grave subjects which he treats.
He is, we believe, a good chemist and a respectable physiolo
gist. His work on Human Physiology, we have been as
sured by those whose judgment in such matters we prefer ta
our own, is a work of real merit, and was, when first pub
lished, up to the level of the science to which it is devoted.
We read it with care on its first appearance, and the impres
sion it left on our mind was, that the author yields too much
to the theory of chemical action in physiology, and does not
remember that man is the union of soul and body, and that the
soul modifies, even in the body, the action of the natural
laws ; or rather, that the physiological laws of brute matter,
or even of animals, cannot be applied to man without many
important reserves. The professor, indeed, recognizes, or
says he recognizes, in man a rational soul, or an immaterial
principle ; but the recognition seems to be only a verbal
concession, made to the prejudices of those who have some
lingering belief in Christianity, for we find no use for it in
his physiology. All the physiological phenomena he dwells
on he explains without it, that is, as far as he explains them
at all. Whatever his personal belief may be, his doctrine i&
as purely materialistic as is Mr. Herbert Spencer's, which
explains all the phenomena of life by the mechanical, chem
ical, and electrical changes and combinations of matter.

It is due to Professor Draper to say, that in this respect
he only sins in common with the great body of modern phys
iologists. Physiology — indeed, all the inductive sciences — •

*l. Human Physiology, Statical and, Dynamical; or, Conditions and Course
of the Life of Man. By J. W. DRAPER, M. D., LL. D., Professor of
Chemistry and Physiology in the University of New York. New York:
1856. 2. History of the Intellectual Development of Europe. By the same.
Fifth edition. 1867. 3. Thoughts on the Civil Policy of America. By the
same. Third edition. 1867. 4. History of the American Civil War. By
the same. In three volumes. Vol. I. 1867.
292

PROFESSOR DRAPER'S BOOKS. 293

have been for a long time cast in a materialistic mould, and
men of firm faith, and sincere and ardent piety, are mate
rialists, and, therefore, atheists, the moment they enter the
field of physical science, and deny in their science what they
resolutely affirm and would die for in their faith. Hence
the quarrel between the theologians and the savants. The
savants have not reconciled their so-called science with ^the
great theological truths, whether of reason or revelation,
which only the fool doubts, or in his heart denies. This
proves that our physicists have made far less progress in the
sciences than they are in the habit of boasting. That cannot
be true in physiology which is false in theology; and a phys
iology that denies all reality but matter, or finds no place
in it for God and the human soul, is no true physiological
science. The physiologist has far less evidence of the exist
ence of matter than we have of the existence of spirit ; and
it is only by spirit that the material is apprehensible, or
can be shown to exist. Matter only mimics or imitates
spirit.

The continual changes that take place from time to time
in physiology show — we say it with all deference to physiol
ogists — that it has not risen as yet to the dignity of a science.
It is of no use to speak of progress, for changes which trans
form the whole body of a pretended science are not progress.
We may not have mastered all the facts of a science ; we may
be discovering new facts every day ; but if we have, for in
stance, the true physiological science, the discovery of new
facts may throw new light on the science — may enable us to
see clearer its reach, and understand better its application,
but cannot change or modify its principles. As long as your
pretended science is liable to be changed in its^ principles, it
is a theory, an hypothesis, not a science. Physiologists have
accumulated a large stock 'of physiological facts, to which
they are daily adding new facts. We willingly admit these
facts are not useless, and the time spent in collecting them
is not wasted ; on the contrary, we hold them to be valuable,
and appreciate very highly the labor, the patient research,
and the nice observation that has collected, classified, and
described them ; but we dare assert, notwithstanding, that
the science of physiology is yet to be created ; and created
it will not be till physiologists have learned and are able to
set forth the dialectic relations of spirit and matter, soul and
body, God and nature, free-will and necessity. Till then
there may be known facts, but there will be no physiological

294: PROFESSOR DRAPER'S BOOKS.

science. As far as what is called the science of human life,
or human physiology, goes, Professor Draper's work is an
able and commendable work ; but he must permit us to say
that the real science of physiology he has not touched, has
not dreamed of ; nor have any of his brethren who see in the
human soul only a useless appendage to the body. The soul
is fo& forma corporis, its informing, its vital principle, and
pervades, so to speak, and determines, or modifies, the whole
life and action of the human body, from the first instant of
conception to the very moment of death. The human body
does not exist, even in its embryonic state, first as a vegeta
ble, then as an animal, and afterward as united to an immate
rial soul. It is body united to soul from the first instant of
conception, and man lives, in any stage of his existence, but
one and the same human life. There is no moment after
conception when the wilful destruction of the foetus is not the
murder of a human life.

Man, though the ancients called him a microcosm, the uni
verse in little, and he contains in himself all the elements of
nature, is neither a mineral nor a vegetable, nor simply an
animal, and the analogies which the physiologist detects be
tween him and the kingdoms below him, form no scientific
basis of human physiology, for like is not same. There may
be no difference that the microscope or the crucible can de
tect between the blood of an ox and the blood of a man : for
the microscope and chemical tests are in both cases applied
to the dead subject, not the living, and the human blood
tested is withdrawn from the living action of the soul, an
action that escapes the most powerful microscope, and the
most subtile chemical agent. Comparative physiology may
gratify the curiosity, and, when not pressed beyond its legit
imate bounds, it may even be useful, and help us to a better
understanding of our own bodies ; but it can never be the
basis of a scientific induction, because between man and all
animals there is the difference of species. Comparative phys
iology is, therefore, unlike comparative philology ; for,
however diverse may be the dialects compared, there is no
difference of species among them, and nothing hinders
philological inductions from possessing, in the secondary
order, a true scientific character. Physiological inductions,
resting on the comparative study of different individuals, or
different races or families of men, may also be truly scien
tific ; for all these individuals, and all these races or families
belong to one and the same species. But the comparative

PROFESSOR DRAPER'S BOOKS. 295

physiology that compares men and animals, gives only anal
ogies, not science.

We do not undervalue science ; on the contrary, what we
complain of is, that our physiologists do not give us science ;
they give ' us facts, theories, or hypotheses. Facts are not
science till" referred to the principles that explain them, and
these principles themselves are not science till integrated in
the principles of that high and universal science called the
ology, and which is really the science of the sciences. The
men who pass for savants, and are the hierophants and law
givers of the age, sin not by their science, but by their
want of science. Their ideal of science is too low and grov
elling. Science is vastly more than they conceive it; is
higher, deeper, broader than they look ; and the best of
them are, as Newton said of himself, mere boys picking up
shells on the shores of the great ocean of truth. They, at
best, remain in the vestibule of the temple of science ; they
have not entered the penetralia and knelt before the altar.
We find no fault with Professor Draper's science, where
science he has ; we only complain of him for attempting to
palm off upon us his ignorance for science, and ^ accepting,
and laboring to make us accept as science what is really no
science. Yet he is not worse than others of his class.

The second work named in our list is the professor's at
tempt to extend the principles of his human physiology to
the human race at large, and to apply them specially to the
intellectual development of Europe ; the third is an attempt
to apply them to the civil policy of America, and the fourth
is an attempt to get a counter-proof of his theories in the
history of our late civil war. Through the four works we
detect one and the same purpose, one and the same doctrine,
of which the principle data are presented in his work on
human physiology, which is cast in a purely materialistic
mould. They are all written to show that all philosophy,
all religion, all morality, and all history are to be physiologi
cally explained, that is, by fixed, inflexible, and irreversible
natural laws. He admits, in words, that man has free-will,
but denies that it influences events or any thing in the life
and conduct of men. He also admits, and claims credit for
admitting, a Supreme Being, as if there could be subordi
nate beings, or any being but one who declares himself I AM
THAT AM ; but a living and ever-present God, Creator, and
upholder of the universe, finds no recognition in his physio
logical system. His God, like the gods of the old Epicure-

296

ans, has nothing to do, but, as the witty author of the
Ointment for the Bite of the Black Serpent, happily ex
presses it, to " sleep all night and to doze all day." He is
a superfluity in science, like the immaterial soul in the
author's Human Physiology. All things, in Professor
Draper's system, originate, proceed from, and terminate in,
natural development, with a most superb contempt for the
ratio sufficiens of Leibnitz, and the first and final cause of
the theologians and philosophers. The only God his system
recognizes is natural law, the law of the generation and
death of phenomena, and distinguishable from nature only
as the natura naturans is distinguishable from the natura
naturata of Spinoza. His system is, therefore, notwith
standing his concessions to the Christian prejudices which
still linger with the unscientific, a system of pure natural
ism, and differs in no important respect from the Religion
Positive of M. Auguste Comte.

The Duke of Argyll, a man well versed in the modern sci
ences, in his Reign of Law, sought, while asserting the uni
versal reign of law, to escape his system of pure naturalism, by
defining law to be " will enforcing itself with power," or mak
ing what are called the laws of nature the direct action of the
divine will. But this asserted activity only for the divine be
ing, therefore denied second causes, and bound not only na
ture, but the human will fast in fate, or rather, absorbed man
and nature in God ; for man and nature do and can exist only
in so far as .active, or in some sense causative. The passive
does not exist, and to place all activity in God alone is to
deny the creation of active existences or second causes,
which is the very essence of pantheism. Professor Draper
and the positivists, whom he follows, reverse the shield, and
absorb not man and nature in God, but both God and man
in nature. John and James are not Peter, but Peter is
James and John. There is no real difference between pan
theism and atheism ; both are absurd, but the absurdity of
atheism is more easily detected by the common mind than
the absurdity of pantheism. The one loses God by losing
unity, and the other by losing diversity, or every thing dis
tinguishable from God. The God of the atheist is not, and
the God of the pantheist is as if he were not, and it makes
no practical difference whether you sav God is all or all is
God.

To undertake a critical review of these several works
would exceed both our space and our patience, and, more-

PROFESSOR DRAPER'S BOOKS. 297

over, were a task that does not seem to be called for. Pro
fessor Draper, we believe, ranks high among his scientific
brethren. He writes in a clear, easy, graceful, and pleasing
style, but we have found nothing new or profound in his
works. His theories are almost as old as the hills, and even
older, if the hills are no older than he pretends. His work
on the Intellectual Development of Europe, is in substance,
taken from the positivists, and the positivist philosophy is
only a reproduction, with no scientific advance on that of
the old physiologers or hylozoists, as Cud worth calls them.
He agrees perfectly with the positivists in the recognition
of three ages or epochs, we should rather say stages, in hu
man development ; the theological, the metaphysical, and
the scientific or positivist. In the theological age, man is
in his intellectual infancy, is filled with sentiments of fear
and wonder ; ignorant of natural causes and effects, of the
natural laws themselves, he sees the supernatural in every
event that surpasses his understanding or experience, and
bows before a God in every natural force superior to his
own. It is the age of ignorance, wonder, credulity, and su
perstition. In the second the intellect has been, to a cer
tain extent, developed, and the gross fetichism of the first
age disappears, and men no longer worship the visible apis,
but the invisible apis, the spiritual or metaphysical apis ;
not the bull, but, as the Norm American Indian says, " the
manitou of bulls ;" and instead of worshipping the visible
objects of the universe, as the sun, moon, and stars, the
ocean and rivers, groves and fountains, storms and tempests,
as did polytheism in the outset, they worship certain meta
physical abstractions into which they have refined them,
and which they finally generalize into one grand abstraction,
which they call Zeus, Jupiter, Jehovah, Theos, Deus, or
God, and thus assert the Hebrew and Christian monothe
ism. In the third and last age there is no longer fetichism,
polytheism, or monotheism ; men no longer divinize nature,
or their own abstractions, no longer believe in the supernat
ural or the metaphysical or any thing supposed to be supra-
mundane, but reject whatever is not sensible, material, posi
tive as the object of positive science.

The professor develops this system with less science than
its inventor or reviver, M. Auguste Comte and his European
disciples ; but as well as he could be expected to do it, in
respectable English. He takes it as the basis of his History
of the Intellectual Development of Europe, and attempts

298

to reconcile with it all the known and unknown facts of
that development. We make no quotations to prove that
we state the professor's doctrine correctly, for no one who
has read him, with any attention, will question our state
ment ; and, indeed, we might find it difficult to quote pas
sages which clearly and expressly confirm it, for it is a grave
complaint against him, as against nearly all writers of his
school, that they do not deal in clear and express statements
of doctrine. Had Professor Draper put forth what is evi
dently his doctrine in clear, simple, and distinct propositions,
so that his doctrine could at once be seen and understood,
his works, instead of going through several editions, and
being commended in reviews and journals, as scientific,
learned, and profound, would have fallen dead from the
press, or been received with a universal burst of public in
dignation ; for they attack every thing dear to the heart of
the Christian, the philosopher, and the citizen. Nothing
worse is to be found in the old French Encyclopedists, in
the Systeme de Id Nature of D'Holbach, or in VHomme-
Plante, and U Homme- Machine of La Mettrie. His doc
trine is nothing in the world but pure materialism and athe
ism, and we do not believe the American people are as yet
prepared to deny either God, or creation and providence.
The success of these authors is in their vagueness, in their
refusal to reduce their doctrine to distinct propositions, in
hinting, rather than stating it, and in pretending to speak
always in the name of science, thus : " Science shows this,"
or " Science shows that ;" when, if they knew any thing of
the matter, they would know that science does no such
thing. Then, how can you accuse Professor Draper of athe
ism or materialism ; for does he not expressly declare his be
lief, as a man of science, in the existence of the Supreme
Being, and in an immaterial and immortal soul ? What Dr.
Draper believes or disbelieves, is his affair, not ours ; we
only assert that the doctrine he defends in his professedly
scientific books, from beginning to end, is purely physiolog
ical, and has no God or soul in it. As a man, Dr. Draper
may believe much ; as an author, he is a materialist and an
atheist, beyond all dispute : if he knows it, little can be said
for his honesty ; if he does not know it, little can be said
for his science, or his competency to write on the intellect
ual development of Europe, or of any other quarter of the
globe.

But to return to the theory the professor borrows from

PROFESSOR DRAPER'S BOOKS. 299

the positivists. As the professor excludes from his physiol-
<>:rv the idea of creation, we cannot easily understand how
lu- determines what is the infancy of the human race, or
when the human race was in its infancy. If the race had
no beginning, if, like Topsy, " it didn't come, but grow'd,"
it had no infancy ; if it had a beginning, and you assume'Jts
earliest stage was that of infancy, then it is necessary to
know which sta^e is the earliest, and what man really was
in that stage. Hence, chronology becomes all-important,
and, as the author's science rejects all received chronology,
and speaks of changes and events which took place millions
and millions of ages ago, and of which there remains no rec
ord but that chronicled in ^the rocks, but, as in that record
exact dates are not given, chronology, with him, whether
of the earth or of man, must be very uncertain, and it seems
to us that it must be very difficult for science to determine,
with much precision, when the race was, or what it was, in
its infancy. Thus he says :

"In the intellectual infancy of the savage state, man transfers to na
ture his conceptions of himself, and, considering that every thing he does
is determined by his own pleasure, regards all passing events as depend
ing on the arbitrary volition of a superior but invisible power. He gives
to the world a constitution like his own. The tendency is necessarily to
superstition. Whatever is strange, or powerful, or vast, impresses his
imagination with dread. Such objects are only the outward manifesta
tions of an indwelling spirit, and, therefore, worthy of his veneration.'
(Intellect. Devel. p. 2.)

We beg the professor's pardon, but he has only imper
fectly learned his lesson. In this which he regards as the
age of fetich worship, and the first stage of human develop
ment, he includes ideas and conceptions which belong to the
second, or metaphysical age of his masters. But let this
pass for the present. The author evidently assumes that
the savage state is the intellectual infancy of the race. But
how knows he that it is not the intellectual old age and de
crepitude of the race ? The author, while he holds, or ap
pears to hold, like the positivists, to the continuous prog-
reae of the race, does not hold to the continuous progress
of any given nation.

" A national type," he says (ch. xi.), "pursues its way physically
and intellectually through changes and developments answering to those
of the individual represented by infancy, youth, manhood, old age, and
death respectively."

300 PROFESSOR DRAPER'S BOOKS.

How, then, say scientifically that your fetich age, or the
age of superstition, the theological age of the positivists, in
stead of being the infancy of the nation, is not its last stage
next preceding death ? How determine physiologically or
scientifically that the savage is the infant man and not the
worn-out man ? Then how determine that the superstition
of which you have so much to say, and which, with you,
means religion, revelation, the church, every thing that
claims to be, or that asserts, any thing supernatural, is not
characteristic of the last stage of human development, and
not of the first ?

Our modern physiologists and anti-christian speculators
seem all to take it for granted that the4savage gives us the
type of the primitive man. We refuted this absurd notion
in our essay on Faith and the Sciences. There are no
known historical facts to support it. Consult the record
chronicled in the rocks, as read by geologists. What does
it prove \ Why, in the lowest and most ancient strata in
which human remains are found, along with those of extinct
species of animals, you find that the men of that epoch used
stone implements, and were ignorant of metals or unable to
work them, and, therefore, must have been savages. That
is, the men who lived then, and in that locality. Be it so.
But does this prove that there did not, contemporary with
them, in other localities or in other quarters of the globe,
live and flourish nations in the full vigor of the manhood of
the race, having all the arts and implements of civilized life ?
Did the savages of New England, when first discovered, un
derstand working in iron, and used they not stone axes, and
stone knives, many of which we have ourselves picked up ?
And was it the same with Europeans ? From the rudeness
and uncivilized condition of a people in one locality, you
can conclude nothing as to the primitive condition of the
race.

. The infancy of the race, if there is any justice in the an
alogy assumed, is the age of growth, of progress ; but noth
ing is less progressive, or more strictly stationary, in a mor
al and intellectual sense, than the savage state. Since his
tory began, there is not only no instance on record of a sav
age tribe rising by indigenous effort to civilization, but none
of a purely savage tribe having ever, even by foreign assist
ance, become a civilized nation. The Greeks in the earliest
historical or semi-historical times, were not savages, and we
have no evidence that they ever were. The Homeric poems

301

were never the product of a savage people, or of a people
just emerging from the savage state into civilization, and
they are a proof that the Greeks, as a people, had juster
ideas of religion, and were less superstitious in the age of
Homer than in the age of St. Paul. The Germans are a
civilized people, and if they were first revealed to us as what
the Greeks and Romans called barbarians, they were never,
as far as known, savages. We all know how exceedingly
difficult it is to civilize our North American Indians. In
dividuals now and then take up the elements of our civiliza
tion, but rarely, if they are of pure Indian blood. They re
coil before the advance of civilization. The native Mexicans
and Peruvians have, indeed, received some elements of
Christian civilization along with the Christian faith and
worship ; but they were not, on the discovery of this conti
nent, pure savages, but had many of the elements of a civil
ized people, and that they were of the same race with the
savages that roamed our northern forests, is not yet proved.
The historical probabilities are not on the side of the hypoth
esis of the modern progressivists, but are on the side of
the contrary doctrine, that the savage state belongs to the
old age of the race — is not that from which man rises, but
that into which he falls.

Nor is there any historical evidence that superstition is
older than religion, that men begin in the counterfeit
and proceed to the genuine, — in the false, and proceed by
way of development to the true. They do not abuse a thing
before having it. Superstition presupposes religion, as false
hood presupposes truth ; for falsehood being unable to stand
by itself, it is only by the aid of truth that it can be assert
ed. " Fear made the gods," sings Lucretius ; but it can
make none where belief in the gods does not already exist.
Men may transfer their own sentiments and passions to the
divinity; but they must believe that the divinity exists be
fore they can do it. They must believe that God is, before
they can hear him in the wind, see him in the sun and stars,
or dread him in the storm and the earthquake. It is not
from dread of the strange, the powerful, or the vast, that
men develop the idea of God, the spiritual, the supernatu
ral ; the dread presupposes the presence and activity of the
idea. Men, again, who, like the professor's man in the in
fancy of the savage state, are able to conceive of spirit and
to distinguish between the outward manifestation and the
indwelling spirit, are not fetich-worshippers, and for them

302

the fetich is no longer a god, but if retained at all, it is as
a sign or symbol of the invisible. Fetichism is the grossest
form of superstition, and obtains only among tribes fallen
into the grossest ignorance, that lie at the lowest round of
the scale of human beings ; not among tribes in whom intel
ligence is commencing, but in whom it is well-nigh extin
guished.

Monotheism is older than polytheism, for polytheism, as
the author himself seems to hold, grows out of pantheism,
and pantheism evidently grows out of theism, out of the
loss or perversion of the idea of creation, or of the relation
between the creator and the creature, or cause and effect,
and is and can be found only among a people who have once
believed in one God, creator of heaven and earth and all
things visible and invisible. Moreover, the earliest forms
of the heathen superstitions are, so far as historical evidence
goes, the least gross, the least corrupt. The religion of the
early Romans was pure in comparison with what it subse
quently became, especially after the Etruscan domination or
influence. The Homeric poems show a religion less corrupt
than that defended by Aristophanes. The earliest of the
Yedas, or sacred books of the Hindoos, are free from the
grosser superstitions of the latest, and were written, the
author very justly thinks, before those grosser forms were
introduced. This is very remarkable, if we are to assume
that the grossest forms of superstition are the earliest !

But we have with Greeks, Egyptians, Indians, no books
that are of earlier date than the books of Moses, at least
none that can be proved to have been written earlier ; and
in the books of Moses, in whatever light or character we
take them, there is shown a religion older than any of the
heathen mythologies, and absolutely free from every form
of superstition, what is called the patriarchal religion, and
which is substantially the Jewish and Christian religion.
The earliest notices we have of idolatries and superstitions
are taken from these books, the oldest extant, at least none
older are known. If these books are regarded as historical
documents, then what we Christians hold to be the true re
ligion has obtained with a portion of the race from the cre
ation of man, and, for a long series of years, from the crea
tion to Nimrod, the mighty hunter or conqueror, was the
only religion known ; and your fetichisms, polytheisms,
pantheisms, idolatries, and superstitions, which you note
among the heathen, instead of being the religion of the in-

PROFESSOR DRAPER'S BOOKS. 303

fancy of the race, are, comparatively speaking, only recent
innovations. If their authenticity as historical documents
be denied, they still, since their antiquity is undeniable,
prove the patriarchal religion obtained at an earlier date
than it can be proved that any of the heathen mythologies
existed. It is certain, then, that the patriarchal, we may
gay, the Christian religion, is the earliest known religion of
the race, and therefore that fetichism, as contended by the
positivists and the professor after them, cannot be asserted
to have been the religion of the human race in the earliest
stage of its existence, nor the germ from which all the va
rious religions or superstitions of the world have been de
veloped.

But we may still go further. The attempt to explain the
origin and course of religion by the study of the various
heathen mythologies, and idolatries, and superstitions, is as
absurd as to attempt to determine the origin and course of
the Christian religion by the study of the thousand and one
sects that have broken off from the church, and set up to be
churches themselves. They can teach us nothing except
the gradual deterioration of religious thought,^and the de
velopment and growth of superstition or irreligion among
those separated from the central religious life of the race.
In the ancient Indian, Egyptian, and Greek mythologies, on
which the author dwells with so much emphasis^ we trace no
gradual purification of the religious idea, but its continual
corruption and debasement. As the sects all presuppose the
Christian Church, and could neither exist'nor be intelligible
without her, so those various heathen mythologies presup
pose the patriarchal religion, are unintelligible without it, and
could not have originated or existed without it. The pro
fessor having studied these mythologies in the darkness of
no-religion, understands nothing of them, and finds no sense
in them — as little sense as a man ignorant of Catholicity
would find in the creeds, confessions, and religious observ
ances of the several Protestant sects ; but if he had studied
them in the light of the patriarchal religion, which they
mutilate, corrupt, or travesty, he might have understood
them, and have traced with a steady hand their origin and
course, and their relation to the intellectual development of
the race.

We have no space to enter at length into the question here
suggested. In all the civilized heathen nations, the gods
are divided into two classes, the dii majores and the dii

304 PROFESSOR DRAPER'S BOOKS.

minores. The dii m,ajores are only the result of a false
effort to explain the mysterious dogma of the Trinity, and
the perversion of the Christian doctrine of the eternal gen
eration of the Son, and the eternal procession of the Holy
Ghost. The type from which these mythologies depart, not
which they realize, is undeniably the mystery of the Trinity
asserted, more or less explicitly, by the patriarchal religion ;
and hence, we find them all, from the burning South to the
frozen North, from the East to the "West, from the Old
World to the New, asserting in some form, in the Divinity
the sacred and mysterious Triad. The dii minores are a
corruption or perversion of the Catholic doctrine of saints
and angels, or that doctrine is the type which has been per
verted or corrupted, by substituting heroes for saints, and the
angels that fell for the angels that stood, and taking these for
gods instead of creatures. The enemies of Christianity have
sufficiently proved that the common type of both is given in
the patriarchal religion, hoping thereby to get a conclusive
argument against Christianity ; but they have forgotten to
state that, while the one conforms to the type, the other de
parts from it, perverts or corrupts it, and that the one that
conforms is prior in date to the one that corrupts, perverts
or departs from it. No man can study the patriarchal relig
ion without seeing at a glance that it is the various forms
of heathenism that are the corrupt forms, as no man can
study both Catholicity and Protestantism without seeing that
Protestantism is the corruption, or perversion — sometimes
even the travesty of Catholicity. The same conclusion is
warranted alike by Indian and Egyptian gloom and Greek
gayety. The gloom speaks for itself. The gayety is that of
despair — the gayety that says : " Come, let us eat, drink,
and be merry, for to-morrow we die." Through all heathen
dom you hear the wail, sometimes loud and stormy, some
times low and melodious, over some great and irreparable
loss, over a broken and unrealized ideal, just as you do in the
modern sectarian and unbelieving world.

But why is it that the professor and others, when seeking
to give the origin and course of religion, as related to the in
tellectual development of the race, pass by the patriarchal,
Jewish or Christian religion, and fasten on the religions or
superstitions of the gentiles ? It is their art, which consists
in adroitly avoiding all direct attacks on the faith of Chris
tendom, and confining themselves, in their dissertations on
the natural history of the pagan superstitions, to establishing

PROFESSOR DRAPER'S BOOKS. 305

principles which alike undermine botli them and Christian
ity. It is evident to every intelligent reader of Professor
Draper's Intellectual Development of Europe, that he means
the principles he asserts shall be applied to Christianity as
well as to Indian, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman mythology,
and he gives many broad hints to that effect. What then ?
Is he not giving the history of the intellectual development
of Europe? Can one give the history of that development
without taking notice of religion ? If, in giving the natural
history of religion, showing whence and how it originates,
what 'have been its developments, its course, its modifica
tions, changes, decay, and death, by the influence of natural
causes, science establishes principles which overthrow all re
ligions, and render preposterous all claims of man to have
received a supernatural revelation, to be in communion with
the Invisible, or to be under any other providence than that
of the fixed, invariable, and irresistible laws of nature, or
purely physiological laws, whose fault is it? Would you
condemn science, or subordinate it to the needs of a crafty
and unscrupulous priesthood, fearful of losing their influencer
and having the human mind emancipated from their despot
ism ? That is, you lay down certain false principles, repu
diated by reason and common sense, and which all real sci
ence rejects with contempt, call these false principles science,
and when we protest, you cry out with all your lungs, aided
by all the simpletons of the age, that we are hostile to science,
would prevent free scientific investigation, restrain free man
ly thought and would keep the people from getting a glimpse
of the truth that would emancipate them, and place them on
the same line with the baboon or the gorilla ! A wonderful
thing, is this modern science ; and always places, whatever
it asserts or denies, its adepts in the right, as against the theo
logians and the anointed priests of God !

The mystery is not difficult to explain. The physiologists,
of course, are good Sadducees, and really, unless going
through a churchyard after dark, or caught in a storm at sea,
and in danger of shipwreck, believe in neither angel nor
spirit. They wish to reduce all events, all phenomena, in
tellectual, moral, and religious, to fixed, invariable, inflexi
ble, irreversible , and necessary laws of nature. They exclude
in doctrine, if not in words, the supernatural, creation, provi
dence, and all contingency. Every thing in man and in the
universe is generated or developed by physiological or natural
laws, and follows them in all their variations and changes.

VOL. IX-20.

306 PROFESSOR DRAPER'S BOOKS.

Religion, then, must be a natural production, generated by
man, in conjunction with nature, and modified, changed, or
destroyed, according to the physical causes to which he is
subjected in time and place. This is partially true, or, at
least, not manifestly false in all respects of the various pagan
superstitions, and many facts may be cited that seem to
prove it ; but it is manifestly not true of the patriarchal,
Jewish, and Christian religion, and the only way to make it
appear true, is not to distinguish that religion from the
others, to include all religions in one and the same category,
and conclude that what they prove to be partially true of a
part, is and must be true of the whole. That this is fair or
logical, is not a matter that the physiologists, who, where they
detect an analogy, conclude identity, Trouble themselves at
all about ; besides, nothing in their view' is illogical or un
fair that tends to discredit priests and theologians. Yery
likely, also, such is their disdain or contempt of religion, that
they really do not know that there is any radical difference
between Christianity and Gentooism. We have never en
countered a physiologist, in the sense we use the term here,
that is, one who maintains that all in the history of man and
the universe proceeds from nature alone, who had much
knowledge of Christain theology, or knowledge enough to be
aware that in substance it is not identical with the pagan
superstitions. Their ignorance of our religion is sublime.
We have thus far proceeded on the supposition that the
professor means by the infancy of the savage state the in
fancy of the race ; we are not sure, after all, that this is pre
cisely his thought, or that he means any thing more than the
infancy of a particular nation or family of nations is the sav
age state. He, however, sums up his doctrine in his table of
contents, chapter i., of his Intellectual Development, in the
proposition : " Individual man is an emblem of communi
ties, nations, and universal humanity. They exhibit epochs
of life like his, and like him are under the control of physi
cal conditions, and therefore of law ;" that is, physical or
physiological law, for " human physiology " is only a special
department of universal physiology, as we have already in
dicated. It would seem from this that the author makes the
savage state, as we have supposed, correspond, in the race,
in universal humanity, as well as in communities, to the
epoch of infancy in the individual. But does he mean to
teach that the race itself has its epoch of infancy, youth, man
hood, old age, and death ? He can, perhaps, in a loose sense,

307

predicate these several epochs of nations and of political or
civil communities ; but how can he predicate them of all the
race ? " Individuals die, humanity survives," says Seneca ;
and are we to understand that the professor means to assert
that the race is born like the individual, passes through child
hood, youth, manhood, to old age, and then dies? Who
knows what he means ?

But suppose that he has not settled in his own mind his
meaning on this point, as is most likely the case ; that he
has not asked himself whether man on the earth has a begin
ning or an end, and that he regards the race as a natural
evolution, revolving always in the same circle, and takes,
therefore, the infancy he speaks of as the infancy of a nation
or a given community. Then his doctrine is, that the earliest
stage of every civilized nation or community is the savage
state, that the ancestors of the civilized in every age are
savages, and that all civilization has been developed under
the control of physical conditions from the savage state.
The germ of all civilization then must be in the savage, and
civilization must then be evolved from the savage as the
chicken from the egg, or the egg from the sperm. But of
this there is no evidence ; for, as we have seen, there is no
nation known that has sprung from exclusively savage ances
tors, no known instance of a savage people developing, if we
may so speak, into a civilized people. The theory rests on
no historical or scientific basis, and is perfectly gratuitous.
In the savage state we detect reminiscences of a past civiliza
tion, not the germs of a future civilization, or if germs —
germs that are dead, and that never do or can germinate.
There are degrees of civilization ; people may be more or
less civilized ; but we have no evidence, historical or scien
tific, of a time when there was no civilized people extant.
There are civilized nations now, and contemporary with
them are various savage tribes, and the same may be said of
every epoch since history began. The civilized nations
whose origin we know have all sprung from races more or
less civilized, never from purely savage tribes. The physi
ologists overlook history, and mistake the evening twilight
for the dawn.

But pass over this. Let us come to the doctrine for which
the professor writes his book, namely, individuals, communi
ties, nations, universal humanity, are under the control of
physical conditions, therefore of physical law, or law in the
sense of the physiologists or the physicists. If this means any

308

thing, it means that the religion, the morality, the intellectual
development, the growth and decay, the littleness and the
grandeur of men and nations depend solely on physical
causes, not at all on moral causes — a doctrine not true
throughout even in human physiology, and supported by no-
facts, except in a very restricted degree, when applied to
nations and communities. In the corporeal phenomena of
the individual the soul counts for much, and in morbid phys
iology the moral often counts for more than the physical ;
perhaps it always does, for we know from revelation that the
morbidity of nature is the penalty or effect of man's trans
gression. It is proved to be false as applied to nations and
communities by the fact that the Christian religion, which
is substantially that of the ancient patriarchs, is, at least as
far as science can go, older than any of the false religions,,
has maintained itself the same in all essential respects, un
varied and invariable, in every variety of physical changer
and in every diversity of physical condition, and absolutely
unaffected by any natural causes whatever.

The chief physical conditions on which the professor relies
are climate and geographical position. Yet what we hold
to be the time religion, the primitive religion of mankind,
has prevailed in all climates, and been found the same in all
geographical positions. $~ay, even the false pagan religions
have varied only in their accidents with climatic and geo
graphical positions. We find them in substance the same in
India, Central Asia, on the banks of the Danube, in the
heart of Europe, in the ancient Scania, the Xorthem Isles,
in Mexico and Peru. The substance of Greek and Roman
or Etrurian mythology is the same with that of India and
Egypt. M. Kenan tells us that the monotheism so firmly
held by the Arabic branch of the Semitic family, is due to-
the vast deserts over which the Arab tribes wander, which
suggests the ideas of unity and universality ; and yet for cen
turies before Mohammed, these same Arabs, wandering over
the same deserts, were polytheists and idolaters ; and not
from contemplating those deserts, but by recalling the primi
tive tradition of mankind, preserved by Jews and Christians,
did the founder of Islamism attain to the monotheism of the
Koran. The professor is misled by taking, in the heathen
mythology he has studied, the poetic imagery and embellish
ments, which indeed vary according to the natural aspects,
objects, and productions of the locality, for their substancey
thought or doctrine. The poetic illustrations, imagery,

PROFESSOR DRAPER'S BOOKS. 309

and embellishments of Judaism are all oriental ; but the
Jew in all climates and in all geographical positions holds
one and the same religious faith even to this day ; and his
only real difference from us is, that he is still looking for a
Christ to come, while we believe the Christ he is looking for
has come, and is the same Jesus of Nazareth who was cruci
fied at Jerusalem, under Pontius Pilate.

We know the author contends that there has been from
the beginning a radical difference between the Christianity
of the East and that of the West ; but we know that such is
not and never has been the fact. The great Eastern fathers
and theologians are held in as high honor in Western Chris
tendom as they ever were in Eastern Christendom. Near
ly all the great councils that defined the dogmas held by
the Catholic Church throughout the whole world were held
in the East. The Greeks were more speculative and more
addicted to philosophical subtilties and refinements than the
L'itins, and therefore more liable to originate heresies ; but
nowhere was heresy more vigorously combated, or the one
faith of the universal church more ably, more intelligently,
or more fervently defended than in the East, before the
Emperors and the Bishop of Constantinople drew the
Eastern Church, or the larger part of it, into schism. But
the united Greek ChurclT, the real Eastern Church, the
church of St. Athanasius, of the Basils, and the^Gregories, is
one in spirit, one in faith, one in communion with the
Church of the West.

The author gravely tells us that Christianity had three
primitive forms, the Judaical, which has ended ; the Gnos
tic, which has also ended ; the African, which still continues.
But he has no authority for what he says. Some Jewish
observances were retained for a time by Christians of Jew
ish origin, till the synagogue could be buried with honor ;
but there never was a Jewish form of Christianity, except
among heretics, different from the Christianity still held by
the church. There are some phrases in the Gospel of St.
John, and in the Epistles of St. Paul that have been
thought to be directed against the gnostics ; and Clemens
of Alexandria writes a work in which he uses the terms
gnosis, knowledge, and gnostic, a man possessing knowl
edge or spiritual science, in a good sense ; but, we
suspect, with a design of rescuing these from the bad
sense in which they were beginning to be used, as some of
our European friends are trying to do with the terms liberal

310

and liberalist. Nevertheless, what Clemens defends under
these terms is held by Catholics to-day in the same sense in
Avhich he defends it. There never was an African form of
Christianity distinct from the Christianity either of Europe
or Asia. The two great theologians "of Africa are St.
Cyprian and St Augustine, both probably of Roman, or, at
least, of Italian extraction. The doctrine which St. Cypri
an is said to have maintained on baptism administered by
heretics, the only matter on which he differed from Rome,
has never been, and is not now, the doctrine of the church.
St. Augustine was converted in Milan, and had St. Ambrose,
a Roman, for his master, and differed from the theologians
either of the East or the West only in the unmatched
ability and science with which he defended the faith com
mon to all. He may have had some peculiar notions on
some points, but if so, these have never been received as
Catholic doctrine.

The professor might as well assert the distinction, assert
ed in Germany a few years since, which attracted some at
tention at the time, but is now forgotten, between the
Petrine gospel, the Pauline gospel, and the Johannine gos
pel, as the distinction of the three primitive forms of Chris
tianity which he asserts. We were told by some learned
German, we forget his name, that Peter, Paul, and John
represent three different phases or successive forms of
Christianity. The Petrine gospel represents religion, based
on authority ; the Pauline, religion as based on intelligence ;
and the Johannine, religion as based on love. The first was
the so-called Catholic or Roman Church. The reformation
made an end of that, and ushered in the Pauline form, or
Protestantism, the religion of the intellect. Philosophy,
science, Biblical criticism, and exegesis, the growth of liberal
ideas, and the development of the sentiments and affections
of the heart, have made an end of Protestantism, and are
•ushering in the Johannine gospel, the religion of love, which
is never to be superseded or to pass away. The advocate
of this theory had got beyond authority and intelligence,
whether he had attained to the religion of love or not ; yet
the theory was only the revival of the well-known heresy of
the Eternal Evangel of the thirteenth century. So hard is
it to invent a new heresy. It were a waste of words to at
tempt to show that this theory has not the slightest founda
tion in fact. Paul and John assert authority as strenuously
as Peter ; Peter and John give as free scope to the intellect

PROFESSOR DRAPER'S BOOKS. 311

as Paul ; and Peter and Paul agree with John in regard to
love or charity. There is nothing in the Gospel or Epistles
of John to surpass the burning love revealed, we might al
most say concealed, so unostentatious is it, by the inflamed
Epistles of Paul. As for Protestantism, silence best be
comes it, when there is speech of intelligence, so remark
able is it for its illogical and unintellectual character. Prot
estants have their share of native intellect, and the ordinary
degree of intelligence on many subjects ; but in the science
of theology, the basis of all the sciences, and without which
there is, and can be, no real science, they have never yet
excelled.

Nor did the reformation put an end to the so-called
Petrine gospel, the religion of authority, the church found
ed on Peter, prince of "the apostles. It may be that Prot
estantism is losing what little intellectual character it once
had, and developing in a vague philanthropy, a watery sen
timentality, or a blind fanaticism, sometimes called Meth
odism, sometimes Evangelicalism ; but Peter still preaches
and governs in his successor. The Catholic Church has sur
vived the attacks of the reformation and the later revolution,
as she survived the attacks of the persecuting Jews and
pagans, and the power and craft of civil tyrants who sought
to destroy or to enslave her, and is to-day the only religion
that advances by personal conviction and conversion. Mo
hammedanism can no longer propagate itself even by the
sword ; the various pagan superstitions have reached their
limits, and are recoiling on themselves ; and Protestant
ism has gained no accession of territory or numbers
since the death of Luther, except by colonization and
the natural increase of the population then Protes
tant. The Catholic Church is not only a living religion,
but the only living religion, the only religion that
does, or can, command the homage of science, reason, free
thought, and the uncorrupted affections of the heart. The
Catholic religion is at once light, freedom, and love — the
religion of authority, of the intellect, and of the heart, em
bracing in its indissoluble unity Peter, Paul, and John.

The professor's work on the intellectual development of
Europe proves that religion in some form has constituted a
chief element in that development. It always has been, and
still is, the chief element in the life of communities and
nations, the spring and centre of intellectual activity and
progress. Even the works before us revolve around it, or

312 PROFESSOR DRAPER'S BOOKS.

owe their existence to their relation to it, and would have
no intelligible purpose without it. The author has written
them to divest religion of its supernatural character, to re
duce it to a physiological law, and to prove that it origi
nates in the ignorance of men and nations, and depends
solely on physical conditions, chiefly on climate and geo
graphical ^ position. But in this patriarchal, Jewish, Chris
tian religion there is something, and that of no slight influ
ence on the life of individuals and nations, on universal
humanity, that flatly contradicts him, that is essentially one
and the same from first to last, superior to climate and geo
graphical position, unaffected by natural causes, indepen
dent of physical conditions, and in no sense subject to physi
ological laws. This suffices to refute his theory, and that of
the positivists, of whom he is a distinguished disciple ; for
it proves the uniform presence and activity in the life and
development of men and nations, ever since history began,
of a power, a being, or cause above nature and independent
of nature, and therefore supernatural.

The theory that the rise, growth, decay, and death of
nations, depend on physical conditions alone, chiefly on
climate and geographical position, seems to us attended
with some grave difficulties. Have the climate and geo
graphical positions of India, Persia, Assyria, Egypt, Greece,
and Rome, essentially changed from what they were at the
epoch of their greatness ? Did not all the great and renown
ed nations of antiquity rise, grow, prosper, decline, and die,
in substantially the same physical conditions, under the same
climate, and in the same geographical position ? Like causes
produce like effects. How could the same physical causes
cause alike the rise and growth, and the decay and death of
one and the same people, in one and the same climate, and
in one and the same geographical position ? Do you say,
climate and even physical geography change with the lapse
of time ? Be it so. Be it as the author maintains, that
formerly there was no variation of climate on this continent,
from the equator to either pole ; but was there for Rome
any appreciable change in the climate and geography from
the time of the third Punic war to that of Honorius, or
even of Augustulus, the last of the emperors ? Or what
change in the physical conditions of the nation was there
when it was falling from what there was when it was ris
ing?

Nations, like individuals, have, according to the professor,

BOOKS. 313

their infancy, youth, manhood, old age, and death. But
why do nations grow old and die ? Tne individual grows
old and dies, because his interior physical machinery wears
out, and because he must die in order to attain to the end for
which he lives. But why should this be the case with
nations? They have no future life to which death is the
passage. The nation does not rise or fall with the individuals
that found it. One generation of individuals passes away,
and another comes, but the nation survives ; and why, if
not destroyed by external violence, should it not continue
to survive and thrive to the end of time ? There are no
physical causes, no known physiological laws, that prevent
it. Why was not Rome as able to withstand the barbarians,
or to drive them back from her frontiers, in the fourth cen
tury, as she was in the first ? Why was England so much
weaker under the Stuarts than she had been under the
Tudors, or was again under the Protector ? Or why have
we seen her so grand under Pitt and Wellington, and so
little and feeble under Palmerston and Russell ? Can you
-explain this by a change of climate and geographical posi
tion, or any change in^the physical conditions of the nation,
that is, any physical changes not due to moral causes ?

We see in several of the states of the Union a decrease, a
relative, if not a positive decrease, of the native population,
and the physical man actually degenerating, and to an ex
tent that should alarm the statesman and the patriot. Do
you explain this fact by the change in the climate and the geo
graphical position ? The geographical position remains un
changed, and if the climate has changed at all, it has been
by way of amelioration. Do you attribute it to a change in
the physical condition of the country ? Not at all. There
is no mystery as to the matter, and though the effects may
be physical or physiological, the causes are well known to
be moral, and chief among them is the immoral influence of
the doctrine the professor and his brother physiologists are
doing their best to diffuse among the people. The cause is
in the loss of religious faith, in the lack of moral and relig
ious instruction, in the spread of naturalism, and the rejec
tion of supernatural grace — without which the natural can
not be sustained in its integrity — in the growth of luxury,
and the assertion of material goods or sensible pleasures, as
the end and aim of life. There is always something morally
wrong where prizes need to be offered to induce the young
to marry, and to induce the married to suffer their children
to be born and reared.

314: PROFESSOR DRAPER'S BOOKS.

So, also, do we know the secret of the rise," prosperity,
decline, and death of the renowned nations of antiquity.
The Romans owed the empire of the world to their temper
ance, prudence, fortitude, and respect for religious principle,
all of them moral causes ; and they owed their decline and
fall to the loss of these virtues, to their moral corruption.
The same may be said of all the ancient nations. ^ Their
religion, pure, or comparatively pure, in the origin, be
comes gradually corrupt, degenerates into a corrupt and cor
rupting superstition, which hangs as a frightful nightmare
on the breasts of the people, destroying their moral life and
vigor. To this follows, with a class, scepticism, the denial of
God or the gods, an Epicurean morality, and the worship
of the senses ; the loss of all public spirit — public as well as
private virtue, and the nation falls of its own internal moral
imbecility and rottenness, as our own nation, not yet a cen
tury old, is in a fair way of doing, and most assuredly will
do, if the atheistic philosophy and morality of the physiolo
gists or positivists become much more widely diffused than
they are. The church will be as unable, with all her super
natural truth, grace, life, and strength, to save it, as she was
to save the ancient Grseco-Koman Empire, for to save it
would require a resurrection of the dead.

The common sense of mankind, in all ages of the world,
has uniformly attributed the downfall of nations, states,
and empires, to moral causes, not to physiological laws,
climatic influences, or geographical position. The wicked
shall be turned into hell, and all the nations that forget God.
Righteousness exalteth a nation, and sin is a reproach to
any people. This is alike the voice of inspiration and of
universal experience. The traveller who visits the sites of
nations renowned in story, now buried in ruins, of cities
once thronged with a teeming population, the marts of the
world, in which were heard, from morning till night — till
far into night — the din of industry, and marks the solitude
that now reigns there ; the barren waste that has succeeded
to once fruitful fields and vineyards, and observes the poor
shepherd that feeds a petty flock on the scanty pasturage,
or the armed robber that watches for a victim to plunder,
receives a far less vivid impression of the dependence of
nations on physical causes and conditions, than of the influ
ence of the moral world on the natural, and reads in legible
characters the meaning of that fearful penalty which God
pronounced, when he said to the man : "And the earth for

PROFESSOR DRAPER S BOOKS.

315

thy sake shall be cursed." The physical changes that have
come over Assyria, Syria, Lybia, Egypt, and Palestine, are
the effects of the moral deterioration of man, not the cause
of that deterioration.

The professor, after dilating almost eloquently, and as a
sage, on the changeability, the transitoriness, the evanescent
nature of all visible forms of things, says : " if from visible
forms we turn to directing law, how vast the difference !
We pass from the finite, the momentary, the incidental, the
conditional, to the illimitable, the eternal, the necessary, the
unshackled. It is of law I am to speak in this book. In a
world composed of vanishing forms, I am to vindicate the
imperishability, the majesty of law, and to show ho w man
proceeds in his social march in obedience to it." (Ibid. p.
16.) This sounds well ; but, unhappily, he has told us that
communities and nations, like individuals, are under the
control of physical conditions, and therefore of law. If
therefore of law, then under the law of physical conditions,
and consequently of a physical or physiological law. He
dwells on the grandeur of this conception, and challenges
for it our deepest admiration. But we see not much to ad
mire in a purely physical law manifesting itself in ceaseless
instability, metamorphosis, and death. W ill the author for
give us, if we hint that he possibly does not very well under
stand himself, or know precisely what it is that he says ?
Hear him. " I am to lead my reader, perhaps in a reluctant
path, from the outward phantasmagorial illusions which sur
round us and so ostentatiously obtrude themselves on our
attention, to something that lies in silence and strength be
hind. I am to draw his thoughts from the tangible to the
invisible, from the limited to the universal, from the change
able to the invariable, from the transitory to the eternal ;
from the expedients and volitions so largely amusing in
the life of man, to the predestined and resistless issuing of
law from the fiat of God." (Ibid, p 16, 17.) Very respect
able rhetoric, but what does it mean? If it means any
thing, it means that the visible universe is unreal, an illu
sion, a phantasmagoria ; that nothing is real, stable, perma
nent, but law, which lies in silence and strength behind ^the
phantasmagoria, and that this law producing the illusion,
dazzling us with mere sense-shows, is identically God, from
whose fiat the phantasmagorial world issues. Is not this
grand ? is it not sublime ?" The scientific professor forgets
that he may find readers, who can perceive through his

316

rhetoric that he makes law or God the reality of things, in
stead of their creator or maker, simply their causa essenti-
alis, the causa immanens of Spinoza, and therefore asserts
nothing but a very vulgar form of pantheism, material pan
theism, indistinguishable from naked atheism ; for his doc
trine recognizes only the material, the sensible, and by law
he can mean only a physiological law like that by which
the liver secretes bile, the blood circulates through the
heart, seeds germinate, or plants bear fruit — a law which
has and can have no indivisible unity.

If the professor means simply that in the universe all pro
ceeds according to the law of cause and effect, he should
bear in mind that there are moral causes and effects as well
as physical, and supernatural as well as natural ; but then
he might find himself in accord with theologians, some of
whom, perhaps, in his own favorite sciences are able to be
his masters. It is not always safe to measure the ignorance
of others by our own. No theologian denies, but every one
asserts the law of cause and affect, precisely what no atheist,
pantheist, or naturalist does do, for none of them ever rise
above what the schools call causa essentialis, the thing
itself, that which, as we say, makes the thing, makes it itself
and not another, or constitutes its identity. Every theolo
gian believes that God is logical, logic in itself, and that all
his works are dialectical and realize a divine plan, which as
a whole and in all its parts is strictly and rigidly logical.
If the professor means simply to assert- not only that all
creatures and all events are under the control of the law
of cause and effect, but also under the law of dialectic,
there need be no quarrel between him and us ; but in
such case, if he had known a little theology, he might
have spared himself and us a great deal of trouble, for we
believe as firmly in the universal reign of law as he or his
Grace of Argyll. But he would have gained little credit for
original genius, depth of thought, profound science, or rare
learning, and most likely would not have lived to see any
one of his volumes reach a fifth edition.

But we must not be understood to deny in the develop
ment of nations or individuals all dependence on physical
conditions, or even of climate and geographical position.
Man is neither pure spirit, nor pure matter ; he is the union
of soul and body, and can no more live without communion
with nature, than he can without communion with his like
and with God. Hence he requires the three great institu-

PROFESSOR DRAPER'S BOOKS

317

tions of religion, society, and property, which, in some form,
are found in all tribes, nations, or civil; communities, and
without which no people ever does or can subsist. Climate
and geographical influences, no doubt, count for something,
for how much, science has not yet determined. There is a
difference in character between the inhabitants of moun
tains and the inhabitants of plains, the dwellers on the sea-
coast and the dwellers inland, and the people of the north
and the people of the south ; yet the Bretons and the Irish
have not lost perceptibly any thing, in three thousand years,
of their original character as a southern people, though
dwelling for that space of time, we know not how many
centuries longer, far to the north. Among the Irish you may
find types of northern races, some of whom have overrun
the Island as conquerors ; but amid all their political and
social vicissitudes, the Irish have retained, and still retain,
their southern character. The English have received many
accessions from Ireland and from the south, but they remain,
the great body of them, as they originally were, essentially
a northern people, and hence the marked difference between
the Irish character and the English, though inhabiting
very nearly the same parallels of latitude, and subject to
much the same climatic and geographical influences. The
character of both the English and the Irish is modified on
this continent, but more by amalgamation, and by political
and social influences, than by climate or geography. The
Irish type is the most tenacious, and is not" unlikely in time
to eliminate the Anglo-Saxon. It has a great power of ab
sorption, and the American people may ultimately lose their
northern type, and assume the characteristics of a southern
race, in spite of the constant influx of the Teutonic element.
What we object to is not giving something to physical caus
es and conditions, but making them exclusive, and thus re
jecting moral causes, and reducing man and nature to an
inexorable fatalism.

In the several volumes of the professor, except the first
named, we are able to detect neither the philosophical his
torian nor the man of real science. The respectable author
has neither logic nor exact, or even extensive, learning, and
the only thing to be admired in him, except his style, is the
sublime confidence in himself with which he undertakes to
discuss and settle questions, of which, for the most part, he
knows nothing, and perhaps the sublimer confidence with
which he follows masters that know as little as himself.

318 PRIMEVAL MAN.

We own we have treated Professor Draper's work with
very little respect, for we have felt very little. His Intel
lectual Development of Europe is full of crudities from be
ginning to end, and for the most part below criticism, or
would be were it not that it is levelled at all the principles of
individual and social life and progress. The book belongs
to the age of Leucippus and Democritus, and ignores, if we
may use an expressive term, though hardly English, Chris
tian civilization and all the progress men and nations have
effected since the opening of the Christian era. It is a
monument not of science, but of gross ignorance.

Yet in our remarks we have criticised the class to which
the author belongs, rather than the author himself. Men of
real science are modest, reverential, and we honor them,
whatever the department of nature to which they devote
their studies. We delight to sit at their feet and drink in
instruction from their lips ; but when men, because they
are passable chemists, know something of human physiology,
or the natural history of fishes, undertake to propagate
theories on God, man, and nature, that violate the most
sacred traditions of the race, deny the Gospel, reduce the
universe to matter, and place man on the level with the
brute, theories, too, which are utterly baseless, we cannot
reverence them, or listem to them with patience, however
graceful their elocution or charming their rhetoric.

PRIMEVAL MAN.1

[Prom the Catholic World for September, 1869.]

THERE are few more active or able members of the Eng
lish House of Lords or of the British ministry than the
Scottish Duke of Argyll, and, if we could forget the treason
to the Stuarts and the Scottish nation of some of his ances
tors, there are few scholars and scientific men in the United
Kingdom whom we should be disposed to treat with greater
respect. He is at once a statesman, ascientist, and a the-

* Primeval Mian. An Examination of some recent Speculations. By
the DUKE OP ARGYLL. New York: 1869.

PRIMEVAL MAN.

319

ologian ; and in all three capacities has labored earnestly to
serve his country and civilization. In politics, he is, of
course, a whig, or, as is now said, a liberal ; as a theologian,
he belongs to the Kirk of Scotland, and may be regarded as
a Calvinist ; as a man of science, his aim appears to be to
assert the freedom and independence of science, without
compromising religion. His work on the Reign of Law,
reviewed and sharply criticised by us,* was designed to com
bat the atheistic tendencies of modern scientific theories, by
asserting final causes, and resolving the natural laws of the
physicists into the direct and immediate will of God.

In the present work, quite too brief and sketchy, he treats
of the primeval man, and maintains man's origin in the
creative act of God, against the developmentists and natural
selectionists, which is well, as far as it goes. He treats,
also, of the antiquity of man, and of his primeval condition.
He appears disposed to allow man a higher antiquity than
we think the facts in the case warrant ; but, though he dis
sents, to some extent, from the theory of the late Anglican
Archbishop of Dublin, we find him combating with great
success the savage theory of Sir John Lubbock, who main
tains that man began in the lowest form of barbarism in
which he can subsist as man, and has risen to his present
state of civilization by his own spontaneous and unassisted
efforts — a theory just now very generally adopted in the
non-Catholic world, and assumed as the basis of the modern
doctrine of progress — the absurdest doctrine that ever
gained currency among educated men.

The noble duke very properly denies the origin of species
in development, and the production of new species by
" natural selection," as Darwin holds, and acceded to by Sir
Charles Lyell and an able writer in The Quarterly for last
April. The duke maintains that man was created man, not
developed from the lower species, from the tadpole or mon
key. But, while he asserts the origin of species in the cre
ative act of God, he supposes God supplies extinct species
by creating new species by successive creative acts ; thus
losing the unity of the creative act, placing multiplicity in
the origin of things, and favoring that very atheistical ten
dency he aims to war against. His Reign of Law, though
well-intended, and highly praised by our amiable friend, M.
Augustin Cochin, of Le Correspondant, showed us that the
noble author has failed both in his theology and philosophy.

*Vol. III., p . 375.

320 PRIMEVAL MAN.

In resolving the natural laws into the will of God enforcing
itself by power, he fails to recognize any distinction be
tween first cause and second cause, and, therefore, between
the natural and the supernatural. God does all, not only as
first cause, or causa eminens, as say the theologians, but as
the direct and immediate actor, which, of course, is panthe
ism, itself only a form of atheism. Yet we know not that
his grace could have done better, with Calvinism for his
theology, and the Scottish school, as finished by Sir William
Hamilton, for his philosophy. To have thoroughly refuted
the theories against which he honorably protests, he must
have known Catholic theology, and the Christian view of
the creative act. We have no disposition, at present, to
discuss the antiquity either of man or the globe. If the
fact that God, in the beginning, created heaven and earth,
and all things therein, visible and invisible, is admitted and
maintained, we know not that we need, in the interest of
orthodoxy, quarrel about the date when it was done. Time
began with the externizatioh of the divine creative act, and
the universe has no relation beyond itself, except the re
lation of the creature to the creator. Considering the late
date of the Incarnation, we are not disposed to assign man a
very high antiquity, and no geological or historical facts are,
as yet, established that require it for their explanation.
We place little confidence in the hasty inductions of geolo
gists.

But the primitive condition of man has for us a deeper in
terest ; and we follow the noble duke with pleasure in his
able refutation of the savage theory of Sir J. Lubbock. Sir
John evidently holds the theory of development, and that
man has been developed from a lower species. He assumes
that his primitive human state was the lowest form of bar
barism in which he could subsist as man. With regard to
man's development from lower animals, it is enough to say
that development cannot take place except where there are
living germs to be developed, and can only unfold and
bring out what is contained in them. But we find in man,
even in the lowest form of savage life, elements, language
or articulate speech, for instance, of which there are no
germs to be found in the animal kingdom. We may dis
miss that theory and assume at once that man was created,
and created man. But was his condition in his primitive
state that of the lowest form of barbarism ? Is the savage
the primitive man, or the degenerate man ? The former is

PRIMEVAL MAN.

321

assumed in almost every scientific work we meet ; it is de
fended by all the advocates of the modern doctrine that man
is naturally progressive. Saint -Simon, in his Nouveau
Christianisine, asserts that paradise is before us, not behind
us ; and even some who accept the Biblical history have ad
vanced so little in harmonizing their faith with what they call
their science, that they do not hesitate to suppose that man
began his career, at least after the prevarication of Adam,
in downright savagism. Even the learned Dollinger so far
falls in with the modern theory as to make polished gentil-
ism originate in disgusting fetichism.

The noble duke sufficiently refutes the theory of Sir John
Lubbock, but does not seem to us to have fully grasped and
refuted the assumptions on which it is founded. u His two
main lines of argument," he says, " connect themselves with
the two following propositions, which he undertakes to
prove, First, that there are indications of progress even
among savages ; and second, that among civilized nations
there are traces of barbarism."

The first proposition is not proved or provable. The
characteristic of the savage is to be unprogressive. Some
tribes may be more or less degraded than others. The
American Indian ranks above the New Hollander; but,
whether more or less degraded, we never find savages liftirio-
themselves, by their own efforts into even a comparatively
civilized state. ^ Niebuhr says there is no instance on record
of a savage tribe having become a civilized people by its
own spontaneous efforts ; and Heeren remarks that the
description of the tribes eastward of the Persian Gulf along
the borders of the Indian Ocean, by the companions o?
Alexander, applies perfectly to them as we now find them.
No germs of civilized life are to be found among them, or,
if so, they are dead, not living germs, incapable of devel
opment. The savage is a thorough routinist, the slave of
petrified customs and usages. He shows often great skill
in constructing and managing his canoe, in making and
ornamenting his bow or his war-club ; but one generation
never advances on its predecessor, and the new generation
only reproduces the old. All the arts the savage has have-
come, as his ideas, to a stand-still. He is stern, sad, gloomy,
as if oppressed by memory, and exhibits none of the joyous-
ness or frolicsomeness which we might expect from his
fresh young life, if he represented the infancy or childhood
of the race, as pretended.

VOL. IX-21.

322 PRIMEVAL MAN.

Even in what are called civilized heathen nations we find
a continual deterioration ; but no indication of progress in
civilization, or in those elements which distinguish civilized
from barbaric or savage life. Culture and polish may be
the concomitants of civilization, but do not constitute it.
The generations that built the pyramids, Babylon, .Nineveh,
Thebes, Rome, were superior to any of their successors.
'No subsequent Greek poet ever came up to Homer, and the
oldest of the Yedas surpass the powers of the Indian people
in any generation more recent than that which produced
them. The Chinese cannot to-day produce new works to com
pare with those of Confucius. Where now are the once re
nowned nations of antiquity whose ships ploughed every
sea, and whose armies made the earth tremble with their
tread? Fallen, all have fallen, and remain only in their
ruins, and the page of the historian or song of the bard. If
these nations, so great and powerful, with so many elements
of a strong civilization, could not sustain themselves from
falling into barbarism, how pretend that the lowest and
most degraded savages can, without any foreign assistance,
lift themselves into a civilized state ?

The second proposition, that civilized nations retain
traces of barbarism, proves nothing to the purpose. These
traces, at most, prove only that the nations in which we de
tect them have passed through a state of barbarism, as we
know modern nations have ; not that barbarism was, in any
form, the primitive condition of the race. It is not pre
tended that no savage tribe has ever been civilized ; what is
denied is, that the race began in the savage state, or that, if
it had so begun, it could ever have risen by its own natural
forces alone to civilization. There is no evidence that the
cruel and bloody customs, traces of which we find in civ
ilized nations, were those of the primeval man. The
polished and cultivated Romans were more savage in their
customs than the northern barbarians who overthrew their
civilization, much to the relief of mankind. When the late
Theodore Parker drew a picture of the New Zealander in
order to describe Adam, he proceeded according to his the
ory of progress, but without a shadow of authority. We
find a cruelty, an inhumanity, an oppression, bloody and
obscene rites, among polished nations — as Rome, Syria,
Phoenicia, and modern India — that we shall look in vain for
among downright savages ; which shows that we owe them
to cultivation, to development, that is, to "development,"
as the noble duke well says, " in corruption."

PRIMEVAL MAN. 323

Hut these traces of so-called barbarism among civilized
nations are more than offset by remains of civilization which
we find in savage tribes. Sir J. Lubbock and others take
these remains as indications of progress among savages ;
but they mistake the evening twilight deepening into dark
ness, for that of the morning ushering in the day. This is
evident from the fact that they are followed by no progress.
They are reminiscences, not promises. If germs, they never
germinate ; but have been deprived of their vitality. To
us, paganism bears witness in all its forms that it has degener
ated from its norma, or type ; not that it is advancing toward
it. We see in its incoherence, its incongruities and inequali
ties, that it is a fall or departure from something higher, more
li ving and more perfect. Any one studying Protestantism, in
any of its forms, may see that it is not an original system of
religion ; that it is a departure from its type, not an ap
proach to it ; and, if we know well the Catholic Church, we
see at once that in her is the type that Protestantism loses,
corrupts, or travesties. So paganism bears unmistakable
evidence of what we know from authentic history, that,
whether with polished gentiles or with rude savages and
barbarians, its type, from which it recedes, is the patriarchal
religion. We know that it was an apostasy or falling away
from that religion, the primitive religion of the race, as
Protestantism is an apostasy or falling away from the Cath
olic Church. Protestantism, in the modern world, is what
gentilism was in the ancient ; and as gentilism is the re
ligion of all savage or barbarian tribes, we have in Prot-
testantism a key for explaining whatever is dark or obscure
in their history. We see in Protestant nations a tendency
to lose or throw off more and more of what they retained
when they separated from the church, and which, before
the lapse of many generations, if not arrested, will lead
them to a hopeless barbarism. The traces of Catholic faith
we find in them are reminiscences, not prophecies.

We find with the lowest and most degraded savages, lan
guage, and often a language of great richness, singular beauty
and expressiveness. Terms for which savages have no use
may sometimes be wanting, but it is rare that the language
cannot be made to supply them from its resources. In the
poorest language of a savage tribe, there is always evidence of
its having been the language of a people superior in ideas
and culture to the present condition of those who speak it.
Language, among savage tribes, we take to be always indie-

324

PRIMEVAL MAN.

ative of a lost state far above that of barbarism; and it
not only refutes the theory of natural progress, but, as far
as it goes, proves the doctrine of primitive instruction by
the Creator, maintained by Dr. Whately, and only partially
accepted by his Grace of Argyll.

^ Language is no human invention, nor the product of in
dividual or social progress. It requires language to invent
language, and there is no individual progress out of society,
and no society is possible without language. Hence, ani
mals may be gregarious, but not sociable. They do not, and
never can, form society. Max Miiller has disposed of the
bow-wow theory, or the origin of language in the imitation
of the cries of animals, and also of the theory that supposes
it to originate in the imitation of the sounds of nature, as
buzz, rattle, &c.; for if a few words could originate in this
way, language itself could not, since there is much more in
language than words. The more common theory, just now,
and which has respectable names in its favor, is that God is-
indeed the author of language, but as causa eminens, as he
is of all that nature does ; that is, he does not directly teach
man language, but creates him with the power or faculty
of speaking, and making himself understood by articulate
speech. But this theory will not bear examination.

^ Between language and the faculty of using it there is a
difference, and no faculty creates its own object. The fac
ulty of speaking could no more be exercised without
language, than the faculty of seeing without a visible ob
ject. Where there is no language, the faculty is and must
be inoperative. The error is in supposing that the faculty
of using language is the faculty of creating language, which
it cannot be ; for, till the language is possessed and held in
the mind, there is nothing for the faculty of speech to oper
ate on or with. To have given man the faculty of speech,
the Creator must have begun by teaching him language, or
by infusing it with the meaning of its words into his mind.
We misapprehend the very nature and office of language, if
we suppose it can possibly be used except as learned
from or taught by a teacher. Man, as second cause, can
no more produce language than he can create something
from nothing. If God made us as second causes capable o?
creating language, why can we not do it now, and master it
without a long and painful study? Since the faculty must
be the same in all men, why do not all men speak one and
the same dialect ?

PRIMEVAL MAN. 325

We will suppose man had language from the first. But
there is no language without discourse of reason. A parrot
or a crow may be taught to pronounce single words, and
even sentences, but it would be absurd to assert that either
has the faculty of language. To have language and be able
to use it, one must have Knowledge, and the sense of the
word must precede, or at least be simultaneous with the word.
Both the word and its meaning must be associated in the
mind. How then could the Creator give man the faculty
of language, without imparting to him in some way the
ideas and principles it is fitted to express, and without ex
pressing which it cannot be language ? He must do so, or
there could be no verbum mentis, and the word would be
spoken without meaning. Moreover, all language is pro
foundly philosophical, and conforms more nearly to the
reality of things than any human system yet attained to, not
only by savages, but by civilized and cultivated men ; and
whenever it deviates from that reality, it is when it has
been corrupted by the false systems and methods of philos
ophers. In all languages, we find subject, predicate, and cop
ula. The copula is always the verb to be, teaching those who
understand it that nothing existing can be affirmed except
by being and in its relation to being, that is God, who is
QUI EST. Were ignorant savages able distinctly to recognize
and embody in language the ideal formula, when no philos
opher can ever apprehend and consider it unless represented
to him in words ? Impossible.

We take language, therefore, as a reminiscence among
savages of a previous civilization, and a conclusive proof
that, up to a certain point at least, the primeval man, as Dr.
Whately maintains, was and must have been instructed by
his Maker. As language is never known save as learned
from a teacher, its existence among the lowest and most
degraded barbarians is a proof that the primeval man was
not, and could not have been an untutored savage. The
Anglican archbishop, having, as the Scottish duke, no
proper criterion of truth, may have included in the primi
tive instruction more than it actually contained. An error
of this sort in an Anglican should surprise no one. Truth
or sound philosophy from such a source would be the only
thing to surprise us. We do not suppose Adam was direct
ly instructed in all the mechanic arts, in the whole science
and practice of agriculture, or in the entire management of
flocks and herds, nor that he had steam-engines, spinning-

326 PRIMEVAL MAN.

jennies, power-looms, steamboats, railroads, locomotivesr
palace-cars, or even lightning-telegraphs. We do not sup
pose that the race, in relation to the material order, received
any direct instructions, except of the most elementary kind,
or in matters of prime necessity, or high utility to its phys
ical life and health. The ornamental arts, and other matters
which do not exceed man's natural powers, may have been
left to man to find out for himself, though we have in
stances recorded in which some of them were taught by
direct inspiration, and many modern inventions are only
the reproduction of arts once known, and subsequently lost
or forgotten.

It is not difficult to explain how our modern advocates of
progress have come to regard the savage as the primeval
man, and not as the degenerate man. Their theory of nat
ural progress demands it, and they have always shown great
facility in accommodating their facts to their theories.
They take also their starting-point in heathenism of com
paratively recent origin, and study the law of human devel
opment in the history of gentilism. They forget that gen-
tilism originated in an apostasy from the patriarchal or
primitive moral and religious order, and that, from the first,
there remained, and always has remained, on earth a people
that did not apostatize, that remained faithful to tradition,
to the primitive instruction and wisdom. They fail to con
sider that, language confounded and the race dispersed,
those who remained nearest the original seats of civiliza
tion, and were separated by the least distance from the peo
ple that remained faithful, became the earliest civilized or
polished gentile nations, and that those who wandered fur
ther into the wilderness — receding further and further from
liffht, losing more and more of their original patrimony, cut
off from all intercourse with civilization by distance, by dif
ference of language, and to some extent, perhaps, by phys
ical changes and convulsions of the globe, degenerated
gradually into barbarians and savages. Occasionally, in the
course of ages, some of these wandering and degenerate
tribes were brought under the influence of civilization by
the arts, the arms, and the religion of the more civilized
gentile nations. But in none has the gentile civilization,
in the proper sense of the term, ever risen above what the
gentiles took with them from the primitive stock, when
they apostatized. Protestant nations are below, not above,
what they were at the epoch of the reformation. The re
formers were greatly superior to any of their successors.

PRIM I VAI. MAX. 327

Bat our philosophic historians take no account of these
things, nor of the fact that history shows them no barbaric
ancestors of the Egyptians, Indians, Assyrians, Babylon-
inn-, Syrians, Phoenicians, etc. They find, or think they
find, from the Greek poets and traditions, that the ances
tors of the Greeks and Romans, each a comparatively mod-
en i people, were really savages, and that suffices them to
prove that the savage state is the primeval state of the race !
They find, also, that a marvellous progress in civilization,
under Christianity has been effected, and what hinders
them from concluding that man is naturally progressive, or
that the savage is able, by his own efforts, to lift himself
into civilized life ? Have not the northern barbarians, who
overthrew the Roman empire of the west, and seated them
selves on its majestic ruins, become, under the teachings
and the supernatural influences of the church, the great civ
ilized nations of the modern world ? How, then, pretend
to deny that barbarians and savages can become civilized by
their own spontaneous efforts and natural forces alone ?

Whether any savage tribe was ever civilized under gen-
tilism is, perhaps, doubtful ; but if the philosophers of
history would take the right line, instead of a collateral
line or bastard branch of the human family, and follow it
from Adam down, through the patriarchs, the synagogue,
and the Catholic Church, they would find that there has
always been a believing, a faithful, an enlightened, and
a civilized people on earth, and they never would and
never could^ have imagined ' any thing so untrue as
that man began "in the lowest form of barbarism in
which he can subsist as man." We have no indication of
the existence of any savage or barbarous tribes before the
flood ; nor after the flood, till the confusion of language at
Babel, and the consequent dispersion of the human race ;
that is, till after the gentile apostasy, of which they are one
of the fruits. Adam, by his fall, lost communion with
God, became darkened in his understanding, enfeebled in
his will, and disordered in his appetites and passions ; but
he did not lose all his science, forget all his moral and re
ligious instruction, and become a complete savage. Besides,
his communion with God was renewed by repentance and
faith in the promised Messiah, or incarnate Son of God,
who should come to redeem the world, and enable man to
fulfil his destiny, or attain to his end.

We do not by any means deny progress. We believe in

328 PRIMEVAL MAN.

it with St. Paul, and struggle for it in individuals and in
society. We only do not believe in progress or perfectibil
ity by the simple forces of nature alone, or that man is nat
urally progressive. Existences have two movements or
cycles : the one, their procession, by way of creation, from
God as first cause ; the other, their return, without absorption
in him, to God as their final cause or beatitude, as we have
on several occasions very fully shown. In the first cycle,
man is explicated by natural generation, and his powers are
determined by his nature, or the physical laws of his exist
ence. In the second cycle, his explication is by regenera
tion, a supernatural act ; and his progress is directed and
controlled by the moral law prescribed by God as final
cause, and is limited only by the infinite, to which he as
pires and, by the assistance of grace, may attain. The first
cycle is initial, and in it there is no moral, religious, or
social progress ; there is only physical development and
growth. It is under the natural laws of the physicists, who
never look any further. The second cycle is teleological,
and under the moral law, or the natural law of the theolo
gians and the legists. In this teleological cycle lies the
whole moral order, as distinguished from the physical ; the
whole of religion ; its means, influences, and ends ; and,
consequently, civilization, in so far as it has any moral or re
ligious character, aims, or tendency.

Civilization, we are aware, is a word that has hardly a
fixed meaning, and is used vaguely, and in different senses.
It is derived from a word signifying the city — in modern lan
guage, the state— and relates to the organization, constitu
tion, and administration of the commonwealth or republic.
It is used vaguely for the aggregate of the manners, cus
toms, and usages of city life, and also for the principles and
laws of a well-ordered and well-governed civil society. We
take it chiefly in the latter sense, and understand by it the
supremacy of the moral order in secular life, the reign of
law, or the subjection of the passions and turbulent ele
ments of human nature in the individual, the family, and
society to the moral law ; or, briefly, the predominance of
reason and justice over passion and caprice in the affairs of
this world, and therefore coincident with liberty, as distin
guished from license. The race began in civilization, be
cause it began with a knowledge of the law of human ex
istence, man's origin and destiny, and of the means and
conditions of gaining the end for which he exists ; and be-

PRIMEVAL MAN. 329

cause he was placed in the outset by his Maker in posses
sion of these means and conditions, so that he could not
fail except through his own fault. Those who reject, neg
lect, or pervert the moral order, follow only the natural
laws, separate from the communion of the faithful, and re
main in the initial cycle, gradually become barbarians, su
perstitious, the slaves of their own passions, cruel and mer
ciless savages, even if still cultivated, refined, and mild-
mannered.

We place civilization, then, in the second cycle or move
ment of existences, under the moral law, and must do so or
deny it all moral basis or moral character. What is not
moral in its aims and tendencies, or is not in the order of
man's return to God as his last end, we exclude from civil
ization, as no part of it, even if called by its name. There
is no civilization where there is no state or civil polity ; and
there can be no state or civil polity, though there may be
force, tyranny, and slavery, out of the moral order. The
state lies in the moral or teleological order, and is under the
moral law — the law prescribed by God as final cause. It
derives all its principles from it, and is founded and gov
erned by it. Its very mission is the maintenance of justice,
freedom, and order ; and, as far as it goes, to keep men's
faces towards the end for which they are created. And
hence the concord there is, or should be, between the state
and the church.

Most of those things, it will be seen from this, after
which the gentiles seek, and which the moderns call civil
ization, may be adjuncts of civilization, in the sense of our
Lord, when he says, " Seek first the kingdom of God and
his justice, and all these things shall be added unto you ; "
but they do not constitute civilization, are not it, nor any
part of it. Here is where modern gentilism errs, no less
than did the ancient. Take up any of the leading journals
of the day, and you will find what with great emphasis is
called modern civilization is in the initial order, not the tel
eological ; and is only a development and application of the
natural laws of the physicists, not the natural or moral law
of the theologians and legists. The press and popular ora
tors called, a few years ago, Cyrus W. Field, who had taken
a leading share in laying a submarine telegraph from the
western coast of Ireland to the eastern coast of Newfound
land, a "second Messiah." When, after much urging and
fiome threats, President Lincoln proclaimed, as a war meas-

330 PRIMEVAL MAN.

ure, the emancipation of the slaves in certain states and
parts of states then at war with the general government,
the pi-ess and orators that approved, both at home and
abroad, forthwith pronounced him also a " second Messiah,"
and without stopping to inquire whether the emancipation
would be any thing more than the exchange of one form of
compulsory physical labor for another, perhaps no better,
!N"ow, when a new Atlantic cable is laid from France to
Massachusetts, we are told in flaring capitals arid lofty peri
ods that it is another and a glorious triumph of modern civ
ilization — of mind over matter, man over nature. If our
San Francisco friend succeeds in constructing an aerial ship,
with which he can navigate the air, it will be a greater tri
umph still of modern civilization, and the theologians and
moralists will have to hide their heads. All this shows that
civilization, by the leaders of public opinion in our day, is-
placed wholly in the physical order, and consists in the de
velopment and application of the natural laws to the ac
complishment of certain physical ends or purposes of util
ity only in the first cycle of our existence, and without the
least moral significance. So completely have we become
devoted to the improvement of our condition in the initial
order, that we forget that life does not end with it, or that
the initial exists only for the teleological, and that our de
velopment and application of the physical laws of nature
imply no progress in civilization, or the realization of a
moral ideal.

But whatever success we may have in developing and ap
plying to our own purposes the physical laws of man and
the globe he inhabits, we must remember that no success of
that sort initiates us into the second cycle, or the life of our
return to God. To enter that life we must be regenerated,
and we can no more regenerate than we can generate our
selves. Here, we may see why even to civilization the in
carnation of the Word is necessary. The hypostatic union
of the divine and human natures in the divine person of
the Word carries the creative act to its summit, completes
the first cycle, and initiates the second, into which we can
enter only as we are reborn of Christ, as we were born in
the first cycle of Adam. Hence, Christ is called the second
Adam, the Lord from heaven. Civilization, morality, sal
vation, are in one sense in the same order and under one
and the same law.

Progress being possible, except in the sense of physical

I'KIMEVAL MAN. 331

development, only in the movement of return to God as
final cause, and that movement originating in the Incarna
tion only, it follows that those nations alone that are united
to Christ by faith and love, either united to him who was
to come, as were the patriarchs and the synagogue, before
the Incarnation, or to him in the church or the regenera
tion, as are Catholics since, are or can be progressive, or
even truly civilized nations. They who assert progress by
our natural forces alone, confound the first cycle with the
second, generation with regeneration, and the natural laws,
which proceed from God as first cause, with the natural or
moral law which is prescribed by God as final cause. It is
a great mistake, then, to suppose, as many do, that the mys
teries of faith, even the most recondite, have no practical
bearing on the progress of men and nations, or that it is
safe, in studying civilization, to take our point of departure
in gentilism.

In accordance with our conclusion, we find that gentile
nations, ancient or modern, are really unprogressive, save in
the physical or initial order ; which is of no account in the
moral or teleological order. We deny not the achievements
of Protestant nations in the physical order ; but, in relation
to the end for which man exists, they not only do not ad
vance beyond what they took with them from the church,
but are constantly deteriorating. They have lost the condi
tion of moral and spiritual progress, individually and col
lectively, by losing communion with Christ in his church ;
they have lost Christ, in reality, if not in name ; and by
losing the infallible word preserved by the church alone,
they have lost or are losing the state, civil authority itself,
and finding themselves reduced to what St. Paul calls " the
natural man." They place all their hopes in physical suc
cess, always certain to fail in the end, when pursued for its
own sake.

We have raised and we raise here no question as to what
God might have done, or how or with what powers he might
have created man, had he chosen. We only take the plan
he has chosen to adopt ; and which, in his providence and
grace, he carries out. In the present decree, as say the
theologians, he has subjected the whole teleological order to
one and the same law ; and civilization, morality, and Chris
tian sanctity are not separable in principle, and depend on
one and the same fundamental law. Gentilism divorces re
ligion and the state from morality ; and modern heresy rec-

332 SPIRITISM AND SPIRITISTS.

ognizes no intrinsic relation between them. It tells us re
ligion is necessary to the stability of the political order ;
that Christianity is the basis of morality, and that it is the
great agent of progress ; but it shows us no reason why it is
or should be so, and in its practical doctrine it teaches that
it is not so. Every thing, as far as it informs us, depends
on arbitrary appointment, and without any reason of being
in the system of things which God has seen proper to cre
ate. Hence, people are unable to form to themselves any
clear view of the relation of religion and morality, of mo
rality and civilization, or to arrive at any satisfactory under
standing of the purpose and law of human existence ; and
they either frame to themselves the wildest, the most fanci
ful, or the most absurd theories, or give the whole up in de
spair, sink into a state of utter indifference, and say, " Let
us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." They simply veg
etate in vice or crime, or, at best, only take themselves to
the study of the physical sciences, or the cultivation of the
fine arts. We have shown that their difficulties and dis
couragements are imaginary, and arise from ignorance of
the divine plan of creation, and the mutual relation and de
pendence of all its parts. One divine thought runs through
the whole, and nothing does or can stand alone. We study
things too much in their analysis, not enough in their syn
thesis.

SPIRITISM AND SPIRITISTS.1

[From the Catholic World for June, 1869.]

WORCESTER, in his dictionary, gives as the second meaning
of the word spiritualism, " the doctrine that departed spirits
hold communication with men," and gives as his authority

*1. Planchette; or, tlie Despair of Science. Being a full Account of
Modern Spiritualism, its Phenomena, and the various Theories regarding
it. With a Survey of French Spiritism. Boston: 1869.

2. Des Rapports de VHomme avec le Demon. Essai Historique et Philos-
ophique. Par JOSEPH BIZOUARD, Avocat. Paris: 1863 et 18 14.

3. Spiritualism Unveiled, and sJiown to be the Work of Demons. Bj-
MILES GRANT. Boston.

SPIRITISM AND SPIRITISTS. 335

O. A. Brownson. We think this must be a mistake ; for Dr.
Brownson uses in his Spirit- Rapper •, the term spiritism,
which is the more proper term, as it avoids confounding the
doctrine of the spiritists with the philosophical doctrine
which stands opposed to materialism, or, more strictly, sens-
ism, and the moral doctrine opposed to sensualism. We
generally use the word spiritual in religion as opposed to
natural, or for the life and aims of the regenerate, who walk
after the spirit, in opposition to those who walk after the
flesh, and are carnal-minded. To avoid all confusion or am
biguity which would result from using a word already other
wise appropriated, we should use the terms spiritism, spirit
ists, and spirital.

The author of Planchette has availed himself largely of
the voluminous work of the learned Joseph BizouaVd, the
second work named on our list, and gives all that can be
said, and more than we can say, in favor of spiritism. He
has given very fully one side of the question, all that need
be said in support of the reality of the order of phenomena
which he describes, while the French work gives all sides ;
but he passes over, we fear knowingly and intentionally, the
dark side of spiritism, and refuses to tell us the sad effects on
sanity and morality which it is known to produce. A more
fruitful cause of insanity and immorality and even crime
does not exist, and cannot be imagined.

We have no intention of devoting any space specially to
Planchette, or the " little plank," which so many treat as a
harmless plaything. It is only one of the forms through
which the phenomena of spiritism are manifested, and is no
more and no less the " despair of science," than any other
form of alleged spirital manifestations. Contemporary
science, indeed, or what passes for science, has shown great
ineptriess before the alleged spirit-manifestations; and its
professors have, during the twenty years and over since the
Fox girls began to attract public attention and curiosity,
neither been able to disprove the alleged facts, nor to ex
plain their origin and cause ; but this is because contempo
rary science recognizes no invisible existences, and no intel
ligences above or separate from the human, and because it
is not possible to explain their production or appearance by
any of the unintelligible forces of nature. To deny their
existence is, we think, impossible without discrediting
all human testimony ; to regard them as jugglery, or as the
result of trickerj7 practised by the mediums and those asso-

334 SPIRITISM AND SPIRITISTS.

elated with them, seems to us equally impossible. Mr. Miles
Grant in his well-reasoned little work on the subject, says
very justly, it " would only show that we know but little
about the facts in the case. " We think," he says, p. 3,

" No one, after a little reflection, would venture to say of the many
thousands and even millions of spiritualists, among whom are large num
bers of men and women noted for their intelligence, honesty, and verac
ity, that they are only playing tricks on each other I . . . Can any one
tell what object all these fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, children,
dear friends, and loved companions can have in pretending that they have
communications from spirits, when they know, at the same time, that
they are only deceiving each other by means of trickery? "

In our judgment such an assumption would be a greater
violation of the laws of human nature or the human mind
and belief, than the most marvellous things related by the
spiritists, especially since the order and form of the phenom
ena they relate are nothing new, but have been noted in
all lands and ages, ever since the earliest records of the race,
as is fully shown by M. Bizouard.

The author of PlancheUe says the Catholic Church con
cedes the facts alleged by spiritists. This, as he states it,
may mislead his readers. The church has not, to our knowl
edge, pronounced any official judgment deciding whether
these particular facts are real facts or not ; for we are not
aware that the question has ever come distinctly before her
for decision. She has had before her, from the first, the
class of facts to which the alleged spirit-manifestations be
long, and has had to deal with them, in some place, or in
some form, every day of her existence ; but we are not aware
that she has examined and pronounced judgment on the par
ticular facts the modern spiritists allege. She has, undoubt
edly, declared the practice of spiritism, evocation of spirits,
consulting them, or holding communication with them — that
is, necromancy — to be unlawful, and she prohibits it to all her
children in the most positive manner, as may be seen in the
case of the American, or rather Scotchman, Daniel Home,
the most famous of modern mediums, and the most dan
gerous.

For ourselves, we have no doubt of the order of facts to
which in our view the spirit-manifestations so called belong ;
we have no difficulties, a priori , in admitting them, though
we do not accept the explanation the spiritisfs give of them ;
but when it comes to any particular fact or manifestation
alleged, we judge it according to the generally received

SPIRITISM AND SPIRITISTS. 335

rules of evidence, and we require very strong evidence
to convince us of its reality as a fact. We adopt, in re
gard to them, the same rule that we follow in the case of
alleged miracles. We have not a doubt, nor the shadow of
a doubt, that miracles continue to be wrought in the church,
and are daily wrought in our midst ; but we accept or reject
this or that alleged miracle according to the evidence in the
•case ; and, in point of fact, we are rather sceptical in regard
to most of the popularly received miracles we hear of. Cre
dulity is not a trait of the Catholic mind. It is the same
with us in relation to this other class of alleged facts. We
believe as firmly in the fact that prodigies are wrought as
we do that miracles are ; but do not ask us to believe this or
that particular prodigy, unless you are prepared with the
most indubitable evidence. We are far from believing every
«vent which we know not how to explain is either a miracle
or a prodigy.

We have examined with some care the so-called spirit-
manifestations which the spiritists relate, and we have come,
according to our best reason, to the conclusion that much in
them is trickery, mere jugglery ; that much is explicable on
natural principles, or is to be classed with well-known mor
bid or abnormal affections of human nature ; but, after all
abatements, that there is a residuum inexplicable without
the recognition of a superhuman intelligence and force.
We say superhuman, not supernatural. The supernatural
is God and what he does immediately or without the inter
mediation of natural laws, as we have more than once ex
plained. The creation of Adam was supernatural ; the gene
ration of men from parents is not supernatural, for it is done
by the Creator through the operation of natural laws or
second causes. What is done by created forces or intelli
gences, however superior to man, is not supernatural, nor pre
cisely preternatural, but simply superhuman, angelic, or de
moniac. There is a smack of paganism in calling it, as most
contemporary literature does, supernatural ; for it carries
with it the notion that the force or intelligence is not a crea
ture, but an uncreated numen.

Now, what is this superhuman intelligence and force re
vealed by these spirit-phenomena ? We know that many
who admit the phenomena refuse to admit that they reveal
any superhuman force or intelligence. They explain all by
imagination or hallucination. These, no doubt, play their
part, and explain much ; but the author of Planckettc, as

336 SPIRITISM AND SPIRITISTS.

well as M. Bizouard, has, it seems to us, fully proved that
they do not and cannot explain all, even if they themselves
did not need explanation ; others again, to explain them, have
recourse to what they call animal magnetism, or to a force
which they call od, odyle, odyllic, or odic force ; but these
explain nothing, for we know not what animal magnetism
or what odic force is, nor whether either has any real
existence. These terms do but cover our ignorance. Mr,
Grant ascribes them to demons, and endeavors to show that
the demon mesmerizes the medium who wills with his will,
and acts with his force and intelligence ; but our modern
science denies the existence of demons.

The spiritists themselves pretend that the phenomena are-
produced by the presence of departed spirits. But of this-
there is no proof. It is acknowledged on all hands that the
spirits can assume any outward form or appearance at will.
What means, then, have we, or can we have, of identifying
the individuals personated by the pretended spirits? The
author of Planchette says, in a note, p. 62 :

"If spirits have the power, attributed to them by many seers, of as
suming any appearance at will, it is obvious that some high spiritual
sense must be developed in us before we can be reasonably sure of the
identity of any spirit, even though it come in bearing the exact resem
blance of the person it may claim to be. We think, therefore, that the
fact that the spirit . . . bore the aspect of, Franklin, and called it
self Franklin, is no sufficient reason for dismissing all doubts as to it»
identity. It may be that we must be in the spiritual before we can real
ly be wisely confident of the identity of any spirit."

That is, we must be ghosts ourselves before we can iden
tify a ghost, or die in the flesh, and enter the spirit-land, be-
fore we can be sure of the identity of the spirits, or of the
truth of any thing they profess to communicate not other
wise verifiable !

It is pretended that the spirits have latterly rendered them
selves visible and tangible. Mr. Livermore, of this city, sees-
and embraces his deceased wife, who caresses and kisses him,
and he feels her hands as warm and fleshlike as when she
was living. Suppose the phenomena to be as related, and
not eked out by Mr. Livermore's imagination ; the visible
body in which she appeared to him could have been only as
sumed, and no real body at all, certainly not her body dur
ing life — that lies mouldering in the grave. And all the
spirits teach that the body thrown off at death does not rise
again. They nowhere, that we can find, teach the resurrec-

SPIRITISM AND SPIRITISTS. 337

tion of the flesh, but uniformly deny it. If the spirits, then,
do really render themselves 'visible and tangible to our
senses, it must be in a simulated body ; and why may they
not simulate one form as well as another ? The senses of
sight and touch furnish, then, of themselves, no proof that a
departed spirit or a human spirit once alive in the flesh, is
present, communicating through the medium with the living.

The assertion of the pretended spirit of its identity counts
for nothing, whether made by knocks or table-tipping, bv
writing or by audible voice and distinct articulation ; for the
spiritists themselves concede that some of the spirits, at least,
are great liars, arid that they have no criterion by which to
distinguish the lying spirits from the others, if others there
are, that seek to communicate with the living. Conceding
all the phenomena alleged, there is, then, absolutely no proof
or evidence that there are any departed spirits present, or
that any communication from them has ever been received.
The spirit of a person may be simulated as well as his voice,
features, form, handwriting, or any thing else characteristic
of him. Spiritism, then, contrary to the pretensions of the
spiritists, proves neither that the dead live again, nor that
the spirit survives the body. It does not even prove that
there is in man a soul or spirit distinct from the body. We
call the special attention of our readers to this point, which
is worthy of more consideration than it has received.

The spiritists claim that the alleged spirit-manifestations
have proved the spirituality and immortality of the soul, in
opposition to materialism. This is their boast, and hence it
is that they call their doctrine spiritualism, and seek to es
tablish for it the authority of a revelation, supplementary to
the Christian revelation. Their whole fabric rests on the as
sumption that the manifestations are made by human spirits
that have once lived in the flesh, and live now in the spirit-
world, whatever that may be. Set aside this assumption, or
show that nothing in the alleged spirit-manifestations sus
tains it, and the whole edifice tumbles to the ground. There
is nothing to support this assumption but the testimony of
spirits that often prove themselves lying spirits, and whose
identity with the individual they personate, or pretend to be,
we have no means of proving. Unable to prove this vital
point, the spiritists can prove nothing to the purpose. The
spirits all say there is no resurrection of the dead, and there
fore deny point-blank the doctrine that the dead live again.
If we are unable, as we are, to identify them with spirits

VOL. IX-22.

338 SPIRITISM AND SPIRITISTS.

that once lived united with bodies that have mouldered of
are mouldering in their graves, what proof have we, or can
they give, that they are, or ever were, human spirits at ail ?
If they are not proved to be or to have been human spirits,
they afford no proof that the soul is distinct from the body,
or that it is not material like the body, and perishes not with
it. If, then, the men of science have shown themselves little
able to explain the origin and cause of the phenomena, the
spiritists have shown themselves to be very defective as in
ductive reasoners.

" But the phenomena warrant the induction that they are
produced by spirits of some sort, or that there are intelli
gences not clothed with human bodies between whom and
us there is more or less communication." Of themselves
alone they warrant no induction at all, but are simply inex
plicable phenomena, the origin and cause of which lie
beyond the reach of scientific investigation ; but, taken in
the light of what we know aliunde, they warrant the con
clusion that they proceed from a superhuman cause, and
that there are spirits which are, in some respects, stronger
and more intelligent than men ; but whether the particular
spirits to whom the spirit-manifestations in question are to
be ascribed are angelic or demoniac, must be determined by
the special character of the manifestations themselves, the
circumstances in which they are made, and the end they
.are manifestly designed to effect.

We make here no attack on the inductive method fol
lowed in constructing the physical sciences. We only
maintain that the validity of the induction depends on a
principle which is not itself obtained or obtainable from
induction. Hence Herbert Spencer and the positivists who
follow very closely the inductive method, relegate princi
ples and causes to the " unknowable." The principle on
which the inductive process depends cannot be attained to
by studying the phenomena themselves, but must be given
immediately, either in a priori intuition or in revelation.
Books have been written, like Paley's Natural Theology
and the Bridgewater Treatises, to prove, by way of induc
tion, from the phenomena of the universe, the being and
attributes of God, and it is very generally said that every
object in nature proves that God is, and that no man ever
is or can be really an atheist ; but no study of the phenom
ena of nature could originate the idea or the word in a
mind that had it not. Men must have the idea expressed

SPIRITISM AND 8PIRITI>TS.

in language of some sort before they can find proofs in the
observable phenomena of nature that God is. Ilence, th<»>r
xavants who confound the origination of the idea or belief
with the proofs of its truth, and who see that the idea or
belief is not obtainable by induction, are really atheists, and
say with the fool in his heart, God is--not. We do not
assert that God is, on the authority of revelation ; for we
must know that he is before we have or can have any
means of proving the fact of revelation ; yet if God had
not himself taught his own being to the first man, and
given hini a sign signifying it, the human race could never
have known or conceived that he exists. The phenomena
or the facts and events of the universe which so clearly
prove that God is, and find in his creative act their origin
and cause, would have been to all men, as they are to the
atheist, simply inexplicable phenomena.

So it is with the spirit-manifestations, whether angelic or
demoniac. The existence of spirits must be known to us,
either by intuition or revelation, before we can assign these
phenomena a spiritual origin and cause. We do not and
cannot know it intuitively ; and therefore, without recur
ring to what revelation teaches us, these manifestations,
however striking, wonderful, or perplexing they might be,
would be to us and to all men inexplicable, and we could
not assign them any origin or cause. Eevelation — become
traditionary, and so embodied in the common intelligence
through language as to control, unconsciously and unsus
pected, the reasonings even of individuals who pride them
selves on denying it — furnishes the principle needed as the
basis of the induction of the principle and cause of the spirit-
manifestations. Revelation teaches that God has created
an order of intelligences superior to man, called angels, to
be the messengers of his will. Some of these remained
faithful to their Creator, always obedient to his command ;
others kept not their first estate, rebelled against their sov
ereign Lord, were, with their chief, cast out of heaven into
the lower regions, and became demons or evil spirits.

The spiritists complain of our scientific professors, but
without just reason; for, on the principles of modern sci
ence, the proofs they offer of their doctrines prove nothing
but their own logical ineptness. Science, if it will accept
no revelation, and recognize no principle not obtained by
the inductive method, has no alternative but to deny the
manifestations as facts, or to admit them only as inexpli-

340 SPIRITISM AND SPIRITISTS.

cable phenomena. The class of facts are as well authenti
cated, as facts, as any facts can be ; but the explanation of
them by the spiritists is utterly inadmissible, and sound in
ductive reasoners, who exclude all revealed principles, must
reject it. The professors are not wrong in rejecting that
explanation as unscientific; for it would be even more
unscientific to admit it ; and perhaps, it' compelled to do
one or the other, we should hold it more unreasonable to
admit it than to deny outright the facts themselves.

The fault of the professors is in denying the necessity to
the validity of induction of principles neither obtainable
nor provable by induction, and in supposing that we can
construct an adequate science of the universe without the
principles which are given us only by divine revelation.
Without these principles we can explain nothing, and the
universe is a vast assemblage of inexplicable phenomena ;
for^it is only in those principles we do or can obtain a key
to its meaning. Hence, modern science, which excludes
both revelation and intuition a priori, explains nothing,,
reduces nothing to its principle and cause, and only gen
eralizes and classifies observable phenomena, which, we
submit, is no science at all. Certainly, we do not pretend
that science is built on faith, as the traditionalists do, or are
accused of doing; but we do say that, without the light
of revelation, we cannot construct an adequate science of
the universe, or explain the various facts and events of his
tory. ^ If we did not know from revelation that the devil
and his angels exist, we might observe the facts of satan-
ophany, but we should not know whence they came, or what
they mean. We might be tempted, vexed, harassed, be
sieged, possessed, by evil spirits as the spiritists are ; but
we should be ignorant of the cause, and utterly unable to
explain our trouble, or to ascribe it to any cause, far less to
satanic invasion. The prodigies would be for us simply
inexplicable prodigies. But, taught by revelation that the
. air swarms with evil spirits, the enemies of man, and ene
mies of man because enemies of God, we can see at once
the explanation of the spirit-manifestations, and assign
them their real principle and cause.

We know that many who call themselves Christians are
disposed to doubt, if not to deny, the personal existence of
Satan, and to maintain that the word, which means an
enemy or adversary, is simply a general term for the sum
of the evil influences to which we are exposed, if not sub
jected. As if a generalization were possible where there is-

SPIRITISM AND SPIRITISTS. 341

nothing concrete ! We get rid of no difficulty by thin
explanation. Influence supposes some person or principle
from whom or from which proceeds the influence or in
flowing. If you deny Satan's personal existence, you have
no option but either to deny evil altogether or to admit an
original eternal principle of evil warring against the prin
ciple of good, that is, Manicheism, or Persian dualism,
which, though Calvinism, indeed, in teaching that evil or
sin is something positive, may imply it, is neither good
philosophy nor sound Christian theology. According to
sound philosophy and theology, God alone hath eternity,
and by his word has created heaven and earth, and all things
therein, visible and invisible. All the works of God are
good, very good ; and as there is nothing in existence ex
cept himself that he hath not made, it follows necessarily
that evil is not a positive existence, but is simply negative,
the negation or absence of good. It originates and can
originate only in the abuse of his faculties by a creature
whom God hath created and endowed with intelligence and
free-will, and therefore capable of acting wrong as well as
right. To assert that man is subjected or exposed to evil
influences leads necessarily to the assertion of a personal
devil who exerts it. You must, then, either deny all evil
influences from a source foreign to or distinguishable from
man's own intrinsic nature, or else admit the personal exist
ence of Satan and his hosts.

Satan and his hosts having rebelled against God, and in
refusing to worship the incarnate Son as God, were cast out
of heaven, and became the bitter enemies of him and the
human race. Satan, as the chief of the fallen angels, evil
demons, or devils, carries on incessant war against God, and
seeks to draw men away from their allegiance to him, and
to get himself worshipped by them in his place. Hence, he
seeKS by lying wonders to deceive them ; by his prodigies
to rival in their belief real miracles ; and, by his pretended
revelations of the spirit-world, to substitute belief in his
pretended communications for faith in divine revelation,
and thus reestablish in lands redeemed by Christianity from
his dominion the devil-worship which has never ceased to
obtain in all heathen countries. The holy Scriptures assure
us that all the gods of the heathen are demons or devils.
These took possession of the idols made of wood or stone,
gold or silver,* had their temples, their priests and priest-

*This explains Plauchette, which is a step toward the revival of
heathen idol-worship.

SPIRITISM AND SPIRITISTS.

esses, their service, and were worshipped as gods. They
gave forth oracles, and were consulted, through their medi
ums, in all great affairs of state, and their omens and
auguries, which the people consulted to learn the future, ae
the spiritists do their mediums. Spiritism belongs to the
same order. The spirits, as Mr. Grant well proves, are
demons, and the whole thing has for its object to reestab
lish, perhaps in a modified form, the devil-worship which
formerly obtained among all nations but the Jews or chosen
people of God, and still obtains among all nations not yet
Christianized. It began in the grand apostasy of the gen
tiles from the patriarchal religion, which followed the con
fusion of tongues at Babel; and the spiritists are doing
their best to revive it in the grand apostasy from the
Christian church, which took place in the sixteenth century,
and of which we have such clear and unmistakable predic
tions in the ISTew Testament. So adroitly has Satan man
aged, that, if it were possible, the very elect would be
deceived. So much we say of the origin and cause of the
spirit-manifestations.

If we examine more closely these manifestations, we
shall find evidence enough of their satanic character. All
satanic invasions bring trouble or perturbation, while the
angelic visitations always bring calm, peace, and order.
The divine oracles are clear, precise, distinct, free from all
ambiguity ; for he wTho gives them knows all his works
from their beginning to their end. Satan's oracles are
always ambiguous, stammering, and usually deceive or mis
lead those who trust them. Satan is a creature, and his
power and intelligence, though superhuman, are not unlim
ited. The universe has secrets he cannot penetrate, and he
can do no more than his and our Creator permits. He has
no prophetic power, for God keeps his own counsels. He
can only guess or infer the future from his knowledge of
the present. He has no creative power, and can never
produce any thing as first cause. Hence, he can operate
only with materials fitted to his hand. The spiritists tell
us that it is not every one that can be a medium. It is only
persons of a certain temperament, found much oftener
among women than among men, and, among men, only
with those of a feminine character, and wanting alike in
manly vigor and robust health. The spirits can communi
cate only through such as nature or habit has fitted to be
mediums, and the communications have always something

-I'IIMI1-M AND SPIRITISTS.

343

of the character of the medium through which they are
made. The limited power of Satan, his inability to know
the future, which exists only in the divine decree, and his
lack of power to form his own medium, render the spirit-
communications extremely vague, uncertain, obscure, and
feeble.

The dependence of Satan on the medium is manifest.
The spirits will not communicate if any thing disturbs the
medium, or puts the pythoness out of humor, like the
presence of hard-headed sceptics, or a too critical examina
tion by keen-sighted scientific professors determined not to
be deceived. Their communications, oral or written, from
the pretended spirits of distinguished authors, poets, phi
losophers, statesmen, are by no means creditable to Satan as
a scholar or a gentleman. Then again, the spirits really
tell us nothing that amounts to any thing of the spirit-
world. Their representations make it a dim and shadowy
region, in which the spirits of the departed wander about
hither and thither, without end or aim, apparently worse
off than in the Elysian fields of the ancients, which resem
ble more the Christian hell than the Christian's heaven.
There is an air of unreality about them; they are the
umbrae of heathen philosophy, not living existences; and
their region, or, more properly, their state, would be dis
tressing, if one believed at all in the representations
given by them.. One thing is evident — the spirits know or
can say nothing of the beatific vision, which proves that
they are not blessed angels. They do not see God, and are
clearly banished from his presence. He forms not the light
nor the blessedness of their state. They seem, like troubled
ghosts, to linger around the places where they lived in the
body, pale, thin, shadowy, miserable, anxious to^ communi
cate with the living but only occasionally permitted to do
so, and even then only to a feeble extent. Friends and
acquaintances in this life may recognize, we are told, each
other in the spirit-world, but whether with pleasure or pain,
it is difficult to say. The picture of their disembodied life
is very sad, and the Christian soul finds it dark, hopeless,
cheerless, and depressing ; as the condition of those doomed
to take up their abode with the devil and his angels must
necessarily be.

The doctrines the spirits teach and confirm with lyin^
wonders are what the apostle calls " the doctrines of devils.
They are unanimous in declaring that there is no devil and

344 SPIRITISM AND SPIRITISTS.

no hell. God may not be absolutely denied, but his per
sonality is obscured, and he appears only in the distance, as
an infinite abstraction, being only in the sense in which,
Hegel might say, being and not-being are identical— remote
from all contemplation, indifferent to what is going on in
the world below ^ him, asking neither prayers nor worship,
love nor veneration, praise nor thanksgiving, and receiving
none. The spirits echo the dominant sentiments of the
age, and especially of the circle with which they communi
cate. They are, where they are not held in check by the
lingering respect of the circle for Christianity, furious radi
cals, great sticklers for progress without divine aid, and of
development without a created germ. Yet the doctrines
they teach are such as they find in germ, if not developed,
in the minds of their mediums. They sometimes deny
every distinctively Christian doctrine, and are sure to per
vert what of the faith they do not expressly deny. In gen
eral, they assert that the form of religion called Christianity
has had its day, and that there is a new and subliiner form
about to be developed, and that they come to announce it,
and to prepare the way for it. The new form of religion
will free the world from the old church, from bondage to
the Bible, to creeds and dogmas, the old patriarchal systems
and governments, and place the religious, social, and polit
ical world on a higher plane, and moved by a more energetic
spirit of progress. This is the mission of spiritism. It is
destined to carry on and complete the wort commenced by
Christ, but which he left unfinished, and inchoate.

The special object of the spirits, it is pretended, is to con
vince the world of the immortality of the soul ; but in what
form, what condition, what sense ? The immortality of the
soul, or its survival of the body, was generally believed by
the heathens, however addicted to demon-worship they
might be ; but the life and immortality brought to light by
the Gospel they did not believe, and the spirits do not teach
it or affirm it. The spirits seem to know nothing of im
mortal life in God, and into which the sanctified soul enters
when it departs this life, and is purified from all the stains
it may have contracted in the flesh.

The only immortality they offer is the immortality of
evil demons or the angels who kept not their first estate.
But even of such an immortality for the human soul, thev
offer no proof. They are lying spirits, and their word is
worthless, and their identity with human souls once united

SPIRITISM AND SIMKITI-IX

to human bodies which they personate, is not and cannot be
established. They deny the resurrection of the dead, which
St. Paul preached at Athens, and they give, as we have seen,
no proofs that the soul does not die and perish with the
body. Their doctrines are simply calculated to deceive the
unwary, to draw them away from their allegiance to the
Lord of heaven, and to drag them down to the region where
dwell the angels that fell.

The ethical doctrines of the spirits are as bad as can be
imagined, and the morals of the advanced spiritists would
appear to be of the lowest and most revolting sort. It mat
ters not that the spirits give, now and then, some good ad
vice, and say some true things ; for the object of satttn is
to deceive, and his practice is usually to lie and deceive by
telling the truth. The truth he tells gains him credit, and
secures confidence in him as a guide. But he takes good
care that the truth he tells shall have all the effect of false
hood. He gives good moral advice, but he removes all
motives for following it, and takes away all moral restraints.
He wars against authority in matters of faith and morals, as
repugnant to the rights of reason, and in political and domes
tic life as repugnant to liberty and the rights of women
and children. All should do right and seek what is good,
but no one should be constrained ; only voluntary obedience
is meritorious; forced obedience is no virtue. The sen
timents and affections should be as free as the air we
breathe, and to attempt to restrain them is to war against
nature herself. They are not voluntary either in their ori
gin or nature, and therefore are riot and should not be sub
jected to an outward law. Love, the apostle tells us, is the
fulfilling of the law, the bond of perfection. How wrong,
then, to undertake to put gyves on love, to constrain it, or
to subject it to the petty conventionalities of a moribund
society, or the rules of an antiquated morality ! Taking no
note of the distinction between the supernatural love, which
Christians call charity, and love as a natural sentiment, and
as little of the distinction between the different sorts of love
even as a natural sentiment, as the love of parents for chil
dren and children for parents, the love of friends, the love
Of country, the love of truth and justice, and the love of
the sexes for each other, or simply sexual love, Satan lays
the foundation, as we can easily see, if not blinded by his
delusions, for the grossest corruption and the most beastly
immorality.

346 SPIRITISM AND SPIRITISTS.

Hence the spiritists very generally look upon the marriage
law as tyrannical and absurd, and assert the doctrine of free
love. The marriage is in the love, and when the love is no
more, the marriage is dissolved. None of our sentiments
depend on the will ; hence, self-denial is unnatural, and im
moral. Prostitution is wrong, for no love redeems and hal
lows it ; and for the same reason it is immoral for a man
and woman to live together as husband and wife, after they
have ceased to love each other. It is easy to see to what
this leads, and we cannot be surprised to find conjugal fidel
ity not reckoned as a virtue by spiritists ; to find wives
leaving their husbands, and husbands their wives, or the
wife choosing a new husband as often as she pleases or wills ;
and the husband taking a new wife when tired of the old,
or an additional wife or two, Mormon-like, when one at a
time is not enough. Indeed, Mormonism is only one form
and the most strictly organized form, of contemporary spir
itism, and woman's-rightism is only another product of the
same shop, though doubtless many of the women carried
away by it are pure-minded and chaste. But the leaders are
spiritists or intimately connected with them. The animus
of the woman -movement is hostility to the marriage law,
and the cares and drudgery of maternity and home life. It
threatens to be not the least of the corrupting and danger
ous forms of spiritism.

Mr. Grant, who is a stanch Protestant, and hates Catho
licity with a most hearty hatred, gives, on adequate author
ity, a sketch of the immorality of sm'ritists wThich should
startle the community : we make an extract :

"We pass to notice some further facts relative to the 'moral tendency
of spiritualism. We have read its ckiims, and found them very high;
but there is abundant proof to show that, instead of its being ' ancient
Christianity revived,' it is the worst enemy Christianity ever had to
meet. We believe it to be satan's last grand effort to substitute a false
for the true Christianity. His snares are laid most ingeniously; and,
unless very watchful, ere people are aware of it, they will be caught in
some of his traps. Thousands and millions are already his deluded vic
tims, and, like a terrible tornado, he is sweeping with destruction on
every side. Occasionally we hear a warning voice from one who has
escaped from his power, like a mariner from the sinking wreck ; but
most, after they once get into the spiritualist ' circle,' are like the boat
man under the control of the terrible whirlpool on the coast of Norwaj
— destruction is sure.

" The next witness we introduce is Mr. J. F. Whitney, editor of the

SPIRITISM AND SPIRITISTS. 347

New York Pathfinder. He was formerly a warm advocate of spiritual
ism, and published much in its favor. He says:

"'Now, after a long and constant watchfulness, seeing for months
and years its progress and its practical workings upon its devotees, its be
lievers, and its mediums, we are compelled to speak our honest convic
tion, which is, that the manifestations coming through the acknowledged
mediums, who are designated as rapping, tipping, writing, and entranced
mediums, have a baneful influence upon believers, and create discord
and confusion ; that the generality of these teachings inculcate false ideas,
approve of selfish, individual acts, and endorse theories and principles
which, when carried out, debase and make them little better than the
brute, '

" Again he says: ' Seeing as we have the gradual progress it makes
with its believers, particularly its mediums, from lives of morality to
those of sensuality and immorality, gradually and cautiously undermining
the foundation of good principles, we look back with amazement to the
radical change which a few months will bring about in individuals. '

" He says in conclusion: ' We desire to send forth our warning voice;
and if our humble position as the head of a public journal, our known
advocacy of spiritualism, our experience, and the conspicuous part we
have played among its believers; the honesty and the fearlessness with
which we have defended the subject, will weigh any thing in our favor,
we desire that our opinions may be received, and those who are moving
passively down the rushing rapids to destruction, should pause, ere it be
too late, and save themselves from the blasting influence which those
manifestations are causing.'

"FORBIDDING TO MARRY.

"Among other instructions of the spirits, the apostle Paul has assured
us that they will be opposed to the marriage laws, ' forbidding to marry/
1 Tim. iv. 3.

"At the Rutland (Vt.) Reform Spiritualist Convention, held in June,
1858, the following resolution was presented and defended:

" 'Resolved, That the only true and natural marriage is an exclusive
conjugal love between one man and one woman; and the only true home
is the isolated home, based upon this exclusive love.'

" The careless reader may see nothing objectionable in the resolution ;
but please read it again and observe what constitutes marriage, accord
ing to the resolution, ' an exclusive conjugal LOVE between one man and
one woman.' The poison sentiment is covered up by the word 'one.'
What constitutes marriage now, according to the laws of the land? Do
we understand that, when we see a notice of a marriage in a paper, which
took place at a certain time and place, that then the parties began to
love each other exclusively? Certainly not; but at that time their love
was sanctioned by the proper authorities, and thus they became husband
and wife. But the resolution states that the itvirriage should consist in
the 'exclusive conjugal love.' Then it follows, when either party loves

34:8 SPIRITISM AND SPIRITISTS.

another exclusively, the first marriage is dissolved, aiid they are married
again; and if the other one does not happen to find a spiritual ' affinity,'
then there is no alternative left but to make the best of it, as many have
been compelled to do. According to this resolution, one is married as
often as his love becomes ' exclusive ' for any particular individual. This
is one item in the boasted ' new social order,' which the spirits propose
to establish when the political power is in their hands. It is called by
them the 'Divine Law of Marriage.' A large number of spiritualists
are already carrying out this resolution practically, regardless of the
laws of the land.

' ' A similar resolution was presented at the National Spiritual Conven
tion held in Chicago, from Aug. 9th to 14th, 1864. It was offered by
Dr. A. G. Parker, of Boston, chairman of the committee on social re
lations. This point is strongly urged by the spirits and spiritualists.

" At the Rutland Reform Convention, which closed June 27th, 1858,
the resolution under consideration was earnestly advocated by able men
and women. Said Mrs. Julia Branch, of New York, as reported in The
Banner of Light, July 10th, 1 858, when speaking on the resolution : ' I
am aware that I have chosen almost a forbidden subject; forbidden from
the fact that any one who can or dare look the marriage question in the
face, candidly and openly denouncing the institution as the sole cause of
woman's degradation and misery, are objects of suspicion, of scorn, and
opprobrious epithets. '

" She further remarked in the defence of the resolution, and the rights
of women, ' She must demand her freedom ; her right to receive the equal
wages of man in payment for her labor; her right to have children when
she will, and by whom.' "

Much more to the same effect, and even more startling,
we might quote ; we might give the account of the spiritist
community at Berlin, Ohio ; but we have no wish to disgust
our readers, and this is enough for our purpose ; it is suffi
cient to prove to all, not under the delusion, that spiritism
is of satanic origin, and to be eschewed by all who wish to
remain morally sane, and to lead honest and upright lives.
We are not disposed to be alarmists, and, like the majority
of our countrymen, are more likely to err on the side of op
timism than of pessimism ; but we cannot contemplate the
rapid spread of spiritism since 1847, when it began with the
,Fox girls, without feeling that a really great danger threat
ens the modern world, and that there is ample reason for
all who do not wish to see demon- worship supplanting the
worship of God throughout the land, to be on their guard.
Mr. Grant, who seems to be well informed on the subject,
tells us that since that period, spiritism "has become world
wide in its influence, numbering among its ardent supporters

SPIRITISM AND SPIRITISTS. 349

many of the first men and women of both continents. Min
isters, doctors, lawyers, judges, congressmen, governors,
presidents, queens, kings, and emperors, of all religions, are
bowing to its influence, and showing their sympathy with
its teachings."

Mr. Grant should not say, " of all religions ;" some Cath
olics may have become spiritists, but they cannot become so,
and persist in following spiritism without severing them
selves from the church. Some spiritists have been told by
the spirits to become Catholics ; but the church has required
them to give up spiritism, and they have either done so, or
left her communion, like Daniel Home, and returned to
their communion with the demons. The church forbids
her children to have any dealings with devils. But with
this rectification the statement is not exaggerated. The
spread of spiritism has been prodigious, and proves not only
the power and cunning of Satan, but that the way for his
success had been well prepared, arid that no small portion
of the modern world were in the moral condition of the
old world at the epoch of the great gentile apostasy, and
ready to return to the heathen darkness and superstition,
the vice and corruption, from which the Gospel had res
cued them, or, at least, had rescued their ancestors.

We know not the number of spiritists in our country.
We have seen it stated that they reckon their numbers by
millions ; but there can be no doubt that they include a
very large portion of our whole population. Has this fact
any thing to do with the astounding increase of vice and
crime in our country within the last few years, the undeni
able corruption of morals and manners, and the growing
frequency of murder and suicide? Senator Sprague, an
honorable and an honest man and a true patriot, stated, the
other day, in his place in the Senate of the United States,
that our country is morally and politically more corrupt than
any other country in the civilized world. We hope he is
mistaken, but we are afraid that he is not wholly wrong. It
is idle to attribute this corruption to the influences of the late
civil war, and still idler or worse than idle, to attribute it,
as some do, to the heavy influx of foreigners ; for, though
among those are many old-world criminals, the great body
of the foreigners, when they land here, are far more moral,
honest, upright, conscientious, than the average of native
Americans ; and though they soon prove that " evil com
munications corrupt good manners," much of the patriot's

350 SPIRITISM AND SPIRITISTS.

hope for the future depends on them, especially the Catho
lic portion of them, if, in due season, their children can be
brought under the influence of the church, and receive a
proper Catholic training.

Unhappily, the simple, natural virtues of former times,
such as existed in ancient Greece and Rome, and exist even
now in some pagan and Mohammedan countries, have, to a
fearful extent, been lost with us, and the sects have nothing
with which to supply their place, or which to oppose to this
terrible satanic invasion. They have indeed done much to
prepare the wav for it, and are doing still more, by their
opposition to the church, to render it successful. But,
though the danger is great and pressing, we are not disposed
to think, with Mr. Grant, that we are in what he calls the
" world's crisis." The danger is far less than it was ; be
cause the satanic origin and character of the so-called spirit-
manifestations are widely suspected, and are beginning to
be exposed. Satan is powerless in the open day. He is
never dangerous when seen and known to be Satan. He
must always disguise himself as an angel of light, and ap
pear as the defender of some cause which, in its time and
place, is good, but, mistimed and misplaced, is evil. He has
done wonders in our day as a philanthropist, and met with
marvellous success as a humanitarian, and will, perhaps,
meet with more still as the champion of free love and
women's rights. But he has no power over the elect, and,
though he may besiege the virtuous and the holy, he can
captivate only the children of disobedience, who are already
the victims of their own pride, vanity, lust, or unbelief.

The end of the world may be at hand, and these lying
signs and wonders may be the precursors of Antichrist ; but
we do not think the end is just yet. Faith has not yet
wholly died out, and the church lias seen, perhaps, darker
days than the present. The power of Christ, or his patience,
is not yet exhausted ; the gospel of the kingdom has not
yet been preached to all nations ; three-fourths of the human
rase remain as yet unconverted, and we cannot believe that
the church has as yet fulfilled her mission, and Christianity
done its work. Too many of the sentinels have slept at
their posts, and there has been a fearful lack of vigilance
and alertness of which the enemy has taken advantage. The
sleepers in Zion are many; but these satanic knocks and
raps, and these tippings of tables, and this horrid din and
racket of the spirits to indicate their presence, can hardly

SPIRITISM AND SPIRITISTS. 351

fail to awaken them, unless they are really sleeping the
sleep of death. The church is still standing, and if her
children will watch and pray, she can battle with the enemy
as successfully as she has done so many times before.

Many Catholics have had their doubts of the reality of the
alleged spirit-manifestations, and, even conceding them as
facts, have been slow to recognize their satanic origin and char
acter. But those doubts are now generally removed. The
fearful moral and spiritual ravages of spiritism have dis
pelled or are fast dispelling them, and it will go hard but
here and now as always and everywhere, what Satan regards
as a splendid triumph shall turn out against him and bring
him to shame. Thus far in his war against the Son of God
all his victories have been his defeats.

One thing is certain, that the only power there is to resist
this satanic invasion is the Catholic Church ; and there is,
unless we greatly deceive ourselves, a growing interest in
the Catholic question far beyond any that has heretofore
been felt. Thinking and well-disposed men see and feel
the impotence of the sects ; that they have no divine life,
and no divine support ; that they stand in human folly,
rather than even in human wisdom. Eminent Protestant
ministers eloquently proclaim and conclusively show that
Protestantism was a blunder, and has proved a failure ; and
there springs up a growing feeling among the more intelli
gent and well-disposed of our non-Catholic countrymen, that
the judgment rendered against the church by the reformers
in the sixteenth century was hasty, and needs revision, per
haps a reversal. This feeling, if it continues to grow, can
augur but ill for the ultimate success of Satan and his fol
lowers.

OWEN ON SPIRITISM/

[From the Catholic World, for March, 1872.]

MR. OWEN, though he has since been a member of Con
gress, and an American minister at Naples, was formerly
well known in this city as associated with Frances Wright in
editing the Free Enquirer, as the author of an infamous
work on moral physiology, and as an avowed atheist. He
now claims to be a believer in the existence of God, and in the
truth of the Christian religion ; but his God has no freedom
of action, being hedged in and bound hand and foot by the
laws of nature, and his Christianity is a Christianity without
Christ, and indistinguishable from unmitigated heathenism.
How much he has gained by his conversion, through the in
tervention of the spirits, from atheism to dernonism and gross
superstition, it is not easy to say, though it is better to believe
in the devil, if one does not mistake him for God, than it
is to believe in nothing.

Mr. Owen makes, as do hundreds of others, a mistake
in using the word spiritualism for spiritism, and spiritual
for spirital or spiritalistic. Spiritualism is appropriated
to designate a system of philosophy opposed to sensism
or materialism, and spiritual stands opposed to sensual
or carnal, and is too holy a term to be applied to spirit-
rapping, table-tipping, and other antics of the spirits.
Mr. Owen is unhappy in naming his books. He holds that
the universe is governed by inflexible, immutable, and im
perishable physical laws ; that all events or manifestations
take place by the agency of these laws ; that the future is
only the continuation and development of the present ; and
that death is only the throwing off of one's overcoat, and
the life after death is the identical life, without any inter
ruption, that we now live. We see not well how he can
assert another world, or a debatable land between this world
and the next. If all things and all events^are produced by
the agency of natural laws, and those laws are universal and

*1. The Debatable Land between thts.World and the Next. With Illus
trative Narratives. By ROBERT DALE OWEN. New York: 1872.

2. Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World. With Narrative Illus
trations. By ROBERT DALE OWEN. Philadelphia: 1860.

352

OWEN ON SPIRITISM. 353

unchangeable, we are unable to conceive any world above
or beyond nature, or any world in any sense distinguishable
from the present natural world. His books are therefore
decidedly misnamed, and so named as to imply the existence
of another world and a world after this, which cannot on
his principles be true.

Mr. Owen's first book was mainly intended to establish
the fact and to show the character of the spirit-manifesta
tions ; in his last work, his design is to show that these mani
festations take place by virtue of the physical law of the
universe, that they are of the same nature and origin with
the Christian miracles, inspiration, and revelation, and are
simply supplementary to them, or designed to continue,
augment, and develop them; and to show, especially to
Protestants, that, if they mean to make theology a progres
sive science, and win the victory over their enemy the
Catholic Church, they must call in the spirits to their aid,
and accept and profit by their inspirations and revela
tions.

This shows that the author leans to Protestantism, and
seeks its triumph over Catholicity ; or that he regards Prot
estantism as ottering a more congenial soil for the seed he
would sow than the old church with her hierarchy and in
fallibility. Certainly, he holds that, as it is, Protestantism
is losing ground. In 1580 it held the vast majority of the
people of Europe, but is now only a feeble minority. Even
in this country, he says, if Catholics continue to increase for
a third of a century to come in the same ratio that they have
for the last three-fourths of a century, they will have a de
cided majority. As things now go, the whole world will
become Catholic, and the only way to prevent it, he thinks,
is to accept the aid of the spirits. We are not so sure that
this aid would suffice, for Satan, their chief, has been the
fast friend of Protestants ever since he persuaded Luther to
give up private masses, and has done his best for them, and
it is difficult to see what more he can do for them than he
has hitherto done.

Mr. Owen, since he holds the spirit-manifestations take
place by a natural law, always operative, and always pro
ducing the same effects in the same or like favorable cir
cumstances, of course cannot recognize in them any thing
miraculous or supernatural ; and, as he holds the alleged
Christian miracles, the wonderful things recorded in the
Jld and Xew Testaments, are of the same order, and pro-

VOL. IX— 83.

354:

OWEN ON SPIRITISM.

duced by the same agency, he, while freely admitting them
as facts, denies their miraculous or supernatural character.
He thinks that the circumstances when these extraordinary
events occurred were favorable to spirit-manifestations ; the
age was exceedingly ignorant, superstitious, and semi-bar
barous, and needed new accessions of light and truth, and the
spirits, through our Lord and his apostles as medium— God
forgive us for repeating the blasphemy— made such revela
tions as that age most needed or could bear or assimilate
This age also needs further revelations of truth, especially
to enable it to throw off the incubus of a fixed, permanent,
non-progressive, infallible church, and secure an open field,
and a final victory for the rational religion and progressive
theology implied in the Protestant reformation. So the
spirits once more kindly come to our assistance, and reveal
to us such further portions of truth as man is prepared for
and especially needs. Yery generous in them.

This is the doctrine, briefly and faithfully stated, of Mr.
Owen's Debatable Land, which he sets forth with a charm
ing naivete, and a self-complacency little short of the sub
lime. There is this to be said in liis favor : the devil speaks
better English through him than through the majority of
the mediums he seems compelled to use; yet not much
better sense. But what new light have the spirits shed over
the great problems of life arid death, time and eternity,
good and evil, or what new revelations of truth have they
made ? Here is the author's summary of their teaching :

" 1. This is a world governed by a God of love and mercy, in which
all things work together for good to those who reverently conform to
his eternal laws.

"2. In strictness there is no death. Life continues from the life
which now is into that which is to come, even a& it continues from one
day to another ; the sleep which goes by the name of death being but a
brief transition-slumber, from which, for the good, the awakening is
immeasurably more glorious than is the dawn of earthly morning, the
brightest that ever shone. In all cases in which life is well-spent, the
change which men are wont to call death is God's last and best gift to
his creatures here.

"3. The earth-phase of life is an essential preparation for the life
which is to come. Its appropriate duties and callings cannot be
neglected without injury to human welfare and development, both in
this world and in the next. Even its enjoyments, temperately accepted,
are fit preludes to the happiness of a higher state.

" 4. The phase of life which follows the death-change is, in strictest
eense, the supplement of that which precedes it. It has the same variety

OWEN ON SPIRITISM.

of avocations, duties, enjoyments, corresponding, in a measure, to those
of earth, but far more elevated ; and its denizens have the same variety
of character and of intelligence; existing, too, as men do here, in a state
of progress. Released from Jbodily earth-clog, their periscope is wider,
their perceptions more acute, their spiritual knowledge much greater,
their judgment clearer, their progress more rapid, than ours. Vastly
wiser and more dispassionate than we, they are still, however, fallible;
and they are governed by the same general laws of being, modified only
by corporal disenthralmvnt, to which they were subjected here.

"5. Our state here determines our initial state there. The habitual
promptings, the pervading impulses, the life-long yearnings, in a word
the moving spirit, or what Swedenborg calls the ' ruling loves ' of man —
these decide his condition on entering the next world: not the written
articles of his creed, nor yet the incidental errors of his life.

"6. We do not, either by faith or works, earn heaven, nor are we
sentenced, on any day of wrath, to hell. In the next world we simply
gravitate to the position for which, by life on earth, we have fitted our
selves; and we occupy that position because we are fitted for it.

"7. There is no instantaneous change of character when we pass from
the present phase of life. Our virtues, our vices; our intelligence, our
ignorance; our aspirations, our grovellings; our habits, propensities,
prejudices even — all pass over with us, modified, doubtless (but to what
extent we know not), when the spiritual body emerges, divested of its
fleshly encumbrance; yet essentially the same as when the death slumber
came over us.

"8. The sufferings there, natural sequents of evil-doing and evil-
thinking here, are as various in character and in degree as the enjoy
ments; but they are mental, not bodily. There is no escape from them,
except only, as on earth, by the door of repentance. There as here,
sorrow for sin committed and desire for an amended life are the indis-
pi-M-able conditions-precedent of advancement to a better state of being.

"9. In the next world love ranks higher than what we call wisdom;
being itself the highest wisdom. There deeds of benevolence far out
weigh professions of faith. There simple goodness rates above intellec
tual power. There the humble are exalted. There the meek find their
heritage. There the merciful obtain mercy. The better denizens of that
world are charitable to frailty, and compassionate to sin far beyond the
dwellers in this: they forgive the erring brethren they have left behind
them, even to seventy times seven. There, is no respect of persons.
There, too, self-righteousness is rebuked and pride brought low.

"10. A trustful, childlike spirit is the state of mind in which men are
most receptive of beneficent spiritual impressions; and such a spirit is
the best preparation for entrance into the next world.

"11. There have always existed iutermundane laws, according to
which men may occasionally obtain, under certain conditions, reveal-
ings from those who have passed to the next world before them. A

350 OWEN ON SPIRITISM.

certain proportion of human beings are more sensitive to spiritual per
ceptions and influences than their fellows; and it is usually in the pres
ence, or through the medium, of one or more of these, that ultramundane
intercourse occurs.

"12. When the conditions are favorable, and the sensitive through
whom the manifestations come is highly gifted, these may supply im
portant materials for thought and valuable rules of conduct. But
spiritual phenomena sometimes do much more than this. In their high
est phases they furnish proof, strong as that which Christ's disciples
enjoyed — proof addressed to the reason and tangible to the senses — of
the reality of another life, better and happier than this, and of which
our earthly pilgrimage is but the novitiate. They bring immortality to
light under a blaze of evidence which outshines, as the sun the stars, all
tiaditional or historical testimonies. For surmise they give us convic
tion, and assured knowledge of wavering belief.

' ' 13. The chief motives which induce spirits to communicate with
men appear to be — a benevolent desire to convince us, past doubt or
denial, that there is a world to come; now and then, the attraction of
unpleasant memories, ^such as murder or suicide; sometimes (in the
worldly-minded) the earth-binding influence of cumber and trouble : but,
far more frequently, the divine impulse of human affections, seeking the
good of the loved ones it has left behind, and, at times, drawn down,
perhaps, by their yearning cries.

"14. Under unfavorable or imperfect conditions, spiritual communi
cations, how honestly reported soever, often prove vapid and valueless;
and this chiefly happens when communications are too assiduously
sought or continuously persisted in: brief volunteered messages being
the most trustworthy. Imprudence, inexperience, supineness, or the
idiosyncrasy of the recipient may occasionally result in arbitrary control
by spirits of a low order; as men here sometimes yield to the infatuation
exerted by evil associates. Or, again, there may be exerted by the in
quirer, especially if dogmatic and self-willed, a dominating influence
over the medium, so strong as to produce effects that might be readily
mistaken for what has been called possession. As a general rule, how
ever, any person of common intelligence and ordinary will can, in either
case, cast off such mischievous control: or, if the weak or incautious
give way, one who may not improperly be called an exorcist — if pos
sessed of strong magnetic will, moved by benevolence, and it may be
aided by prayer, can usually rid, or at least assist to rid, the sensitive
from such abnormal influence." — (Debatable Land, pp. 171-176.)

We have no intention of criticising this creed of the
spirits as set forth by their learned medium. It is heathen,
not Christian, and we have discovered in it nothing new,
true or false. It denies the essential points of the Christian
faith, and what few things it affirms that Christianity denies

OWEN ON SPIRITISM. 357

are affirmed on no trustworthy or sufficient authority. A
man must have little knowledge of human nature, and have
felt little of the needs, desires, and aspirations of the human
soul, who can be satisfied with this spirits-creed. In it all
is vague, indefinite, and as empty as the shades the heathen
imagined to be wandering up and down on this side the
Styx. But in it we find a statement that dispenses us from
the necessity of examining and refuting it. In Article 4
we find it said : " Vastly wiser and more dispassionate than
we, they [the spirits] are still, however, fallible"

Whether the spirits are wiser and more dispassionate
than we or not may be questioned ; they do npt seem to be
so in the author's illustrative narrations, and the fact that
they have undergone no essential change by throwing off
their overcoat of flesh, and living the same life they lived
here, and are in the sphere for which they were fitted before
entering the spirit-land, renders the matter somewhat doubt
ful, to say the least. But it is conceded that they are
fallible. Who or what, then, vouches for the fact that they
are not themselves deceived, or that they do not seek to
deceive us ? By acknowledging the fallibility of the spirits,
Mr. Owen acknowledges that their testimony, in all cases,
when we can have nothing else on which to rely, is perfectly
worthless. We can bring it to no crucial test, and we have
no vouchers either for their knowledge or their honesty.
Even supposing them to be what they profess to be, which
we by no means concede, it were sheer credulity to take
their word for any thing not otherwise verifiable-
Mr. Owen and all the spiritists tell us that the spirrt-
manifestations prove undeniably the immortality of the soul ;
but they prove nothing of the sort. We need, in the first
place, no ghost from hell to assure us that the immortality
of the soul follows necessarily from the immateriality of
the soul ; for that is demonstrable from reason, and was
generally believed by the heathen. What was not believed
by the heathen, and is not provable by reason, is the
Christian doctrine of the resurrection ; and this, and super
natural life and immortality, the spirits do not even pre
tend to teach. Look through Mr. Owen's statement of
their teaching, and you will find no hint of the " resurrec-
tionem carnis " or " vitam seternam " of the apostolic symbol.
Are we to reject the doctrine of the resurrection of the
body, and the life and immortality brought to light
through the Gospel — which is something far different

358 OWEN ON SPIRITISM.

from a simple continuation of the soul's physical existence
— a doctrine so necessary to virtue, and so dear and con
soling to the afflicted, on the authority of fallible spirits,
whose knowledge or veracity nothing vouches for, and who
prove themselves not seldom to be lying Vpirits ?

In the second place, what proof have we that those rap
ping or table-tipping spirits are the spirits of men and women
once in the flesh ? Mr. Owen undertakes to establish their
identity, but he does not do it and cannot do it ; for no
proof in the case is possible except by a miracle, and miracles
the author rejects, and declares the argument from them in
all cases a non-sequitur. The spirit-manifestations of which
the spiritists make so much, and in which they fancy they
have a new inspiration and revelation, are nothing new in
history, and are not more frequent now than they have been
at various other epochs. They were more common amongst
the polished pagan Greeks and Romans than they are in any
really or nominally Christian nation now. They are nothing
new or peculiar to our times. Tertullian speaks of them, the
author of the Clementine Recognitions was acquainted with
them, and so was St. Augustine. The trance was one of the
live faculties or states of the soul recognized by the Neo-
Platonists, and was the principle of the Alexandrine theurgy.
The church has in every age encountered them, been
obliged to deal with them, and she has uniformly ascribed
them to Satan and his angels. She has had from the first,
and still has, her forms of exorcism against them, to cast
them out, and relieve those who are troubled by them.
Every day she in some locality even now exorcises them,
compels them to acknowledge the power of the name of
Jesus, and sends them back discomfited to hell.

The spiritists cannot say the doctrine of the church is im
possible or prove that it is not true. It certainly is a possi
ble hypothesis, if nothing more. Then spiritists cannot say
that Satan does not personify the spirits of the departed, or
that it is not Satan or some one of his angels that speaks in
those pretending to be the spirit of Washington, of Jeffer
son, of Franklin, of Shakespeare, of Milton, of Byron, or
of some near and dear deceased relative? You must
prove that it is not so, before you can affirm the identity
claimed. The great Tichborne case now before the English
courts proves that it is no easy matter to establish one's own
identity even while in the flesh, and it must be much more
difficult for a ghost, which is not even visible.

OWEN ON SPIRITISM. 359

The spiritists admit that the spirits are fallible ; that there
are among them lying, malevolent spirits. A gentleman
with whom we were well acquainted, a firm believer in the
spirits, and himself a medium, holding frequent communi
cations with them, assured us that he held them to be evil
spirits, and knew them to be lying spirits. " I asked them,"
he said, " at an interview with them, if they could tell me
where my sister then was. ' Your sister,' I was answered,
' has some time since entered the spirit-world, and is now in
the third circle.' It was false : my sister was alive and well,
and I knew it. I told them so, and that they lied ; and they
laughed at me : and then I asked whose spirit was speaking
with me. I was answered, 6 Voltaire.' ' That is a lie, too,
is it not ? ' Another laugh, or chuckle rather. I assure
you," said our friend, " one can place no confidence in what
they say. In my intercourse with them, I have found them
a pack of liars."

This pretension of the spiritists that the spirits that
manifest themselves through nervous, sickly, half-crazy
mediums, or mediums confessedly in an abnormal or
exceptional state, are really spirits who once lived in the
flesh, is not sustainable ; for they cannot be relied on,
and nothing hinders us from holding them to be devils
or evil demons, personating the spirits of deceased persons,
as the church has always taught us. This, certainly, is very
possible, and the character of the manifestations themselves
favors such an interpretation ; for only devils, and very silly
devils too, dealing with very ignorant, superstitious, and
credulous people, would mingle so much of the ludicrous
and ridiculous in their manifestations, as the thumping,
knocking, rollicking spirits, tipping over chairs and tables,
and creating a sort of universal hubbub wherever they come.
The spirits of the dead, if permitted at all to communicate
with the living for any good purpose, we may well believe,
would be permitted to do it more quietly, more gravely, and
in a more open and direct way ; it is only the devil or his
subjects that would turn all their grave communications
into ridicule by their antics or comic accompaniments.
These considerations, added to the fact that the spirits com
municate nothing not otherwise known or knowable, that is
not demonstrably false, and that they tell us nothing very
clear or definite about the condition of departed souls, noth
ing but what their consultors are predisposed to believe,
convince us that, if they prove the existence of powers in

360 OWEN ON SPIRITISM.

some sense superhuman, they prove nothing for or against
the reality of a life after this life. They leave the question
of life and immortality, of good and evil, rewards arid pun
ishments, heaven and hell, where they were.

Mr. Owen places the spirit-manifestations, and the Biblical
miracles, and Christian inspiration and revelation, in the
same category, attributes them all alike to the agency of the
spirits, and thinks he has discovered a way in which one
may accept the extraordinary events and doings recorded in
the Old and New Testaments as historical facts, with
out being obliged to recognize them as miracles. This
is absurd. The resemblance between the two classes of
facts is far less than honest Fluellen's resemblance of
Harry of Monmouth to Alexander of Macedon, "There
is a river in Macedon, so is there a river also in Wales."
The man who can detect any relation between the two
classes of facts, but that of dissimilarity and contrast, is
the very man to believe in the spirit-revelations, to mistake
evil for good, darkness for light, and the devil for God.
We find both classes of facts in the New Testament. The
Christian miracles are all marked by an air of quiet power.
There is no bluster, no rage, no foaming at the mouth,
no fierceness of look or gesture, no falling, or rending, as in
the case of the demoniacs ; and no rapping, no table-tipping,
no antics, no stammering, no half -utterances, no convulsions,
no disturbance, as in the case of the spirit-manifestations
described by Mr. Owen in his books. In the one case, all
is calm and serene, pure and holy ; there is no effort, no
straining, but a simple, normal exercise of power. Our Lord
rebukes the winds and the waves, and there comes a great
calm ; he speaks, the leper is cleansed, the blind see, the
deaf hear, the lame walk, the dead live. What like this is
there in Mr. Owen's ghostly or ghastly narratives of trances,
thundering noises, and haunted houses ? Everyone of his
narratives shows, so far as it showrs any thing not explicable
by simple psychical states and powers, the marks which the
church has always regarded as signs of the presence of the
devil. Some of the cases he describes are clearly cases of
possession, and others are as clearly cases of obsession. Un
happily, Mr. Owen, who formerly believed in no God, now
takes, knowingly or not, the devil to be God.

Mr. Owen bat hardly improved on the heathen Celsns,
who was refuted by Origen. Celsus charged the miracles
of our Lord to magic. Mr. Owen ascribes them to necro-

OWEN ON SPIRITISM. 361

mancy, and regards the apostles and saints each as a person
with a familiar spirit, or, in the language of the spiritists,
a medium. The Jews also ascribed the miracles of our
Lord to the agency of the devil, and charged that it was by
Beelzebub, the prince of devils, that he did his wonderful
works. But there is a striking difference between the Jews
and Celsus and our late minister to Naples. They sought
to prove the satanic origin of the miracles of our Lord as a
reason for rejecting him and his teaching ; he attempts to do
it as a reason for believing him and reverencing his doctrine
and character. But they lived in an age of darkness, super
stition, and semi-barbarism, and he in an age of light, rea
son, and civilization, and the distance between him and them
is the measure of the progress the world has made since
their time — a mighty progress indeed, but a progress back
ward. The Bible tells us all the gods of the heathen were
devils, and Mr. Owen agrees and takes the devil for God,
and demon- worship as true divine worship. What the Jews
and Celsus falsely alleged against our Lord as an objection,
he reasserts as a recommendation. He has discovered that
evil is good.

The class of facts which the spirits call spirit-manifesta
tions are recognized in the Bible from beginning to end,
but always as the works of the devil or evil spirits, always
as works to be condemned and to be avoided ; and any com
munication with those who do them is forbidden. Necro
mancers, or those who consult the spirits of the dead, are
mentioned and condemned in the book of Genesis. The
Mosaic law ordained that a witch or a woman with a famil
iar spirit — that is, a medium, whether a rapping or a clear-
seeing, a talking or a writing, medium— should not be suf
fered to live. The church has always condemned every
thing of the sort, and requires a candidate for baptism to
renounce the devil and his works, and expels the devil from
him by her exorcisms, before receiving the postulant to her
communion. And yet Mr. Owen would have us believe
that the Bible and the church sanction his doctrine, that the
Christian miracles and the spirit-manifestations are produced
by one and the same agency ! Verily, Mr. Owen throws a
strong light on the origin of the great gentile apostasy,
and shows us how easily men who break from the unity of
divine tradition, and set up for themselves, can lose sight
of God, and come step by step to worship the devil in his
place. The tiling seemed incredible, and we had some dif-

362 OWEN ON SPIRITISM.

ficulty in taking the assertion of the Holy Scriptures liter
ally, " All the gods of the gentiles are devils ; " but since
we see apostasy from the church running the same career,
and actually inaugurating the worship of demons, actually
exalting the devil above our Lord, the Mystery of Iniquity
is explained, and the matter becomes plain and credible.

It is curious to see what has been the course of thought
in the Protestant apostasy in regard to the class of facts in
question. Having lost the power of exorcism with their
loss of the true faith, the Protestant nations had no resource
against the invasions of the spirits but to carry out the in
junction of the Mosaic law, " Thou shall not suffer a witch"
— that is, a medium — ato live." Hence we find their an
nals in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries blackened
with accounts of the trials and cruel punishments of per
sons suspected of witchcraft, sorcery, or dealings with the
devil, especially in England, Scotland, and the Anglo-Amer
ican colonies. Having no well-defined and certain criteria,
as the church has, by which to determine the presence of
Satan, many persons, no doubt, were put to death who were
innocent of the offences of which they were accused. This
produced a reaction in the public mind against the law^s and
against the execution of persons for witchcraft or dealing
with the devil. This reaction was followed by a denial of
witchcraft, or that the devil had any thing to do with matters
and things on earth, and a shower of ridicule fell on all who
believed in any thing of the sort. Then came the general
doubt, and then the denial of the existence of the devil and
all infernal spirits, save in human nature itself. Finally
came the spirit-manifestations, in which Satan is no longer
regarded as Satan, but is held to be divine, and worshipped
as God, by thousands and millions.

We must be excused from entering into any elaborate re
futation of Mr. Owen's blasphemous attempts to bring the
Christian miracles under the general law, as he regards it,
of spirit-manifestations. He has proved the reality of no
such law, and if he had, the spirit-manifestations themselves
would prove nothing more than a gale of wind, a shower of
rain, a flash of lightning, or the growth of a spire of grass.
Could we prove the Christian miracles to be facts in the or
der of nature, or show them as taking place by a general
law, and not by the immediate act of God, and therefore no
miracles at all, we should deprive them of all their impor
tance. The value of the facts is not in their being facts, but

OWEN ON SPIRITISM. 363

in their being miraculous facts, which none but God can
work. The author does not understand this, but supposes
that he has won a victory for Christianity when he has
proved the miracles as facts, but at the same time that they
are no miracles.

It is clear from his pages that the author does not know
what Christians understand by a miracle. He cites St. Au
gustine to prove that a miracle is something that may take
place by some law of nature to us unknown, but St. Augus
tine, in the passage he cites, is not speaking of miracles at
all ; he is speaking of portents, prodigies, or extraordinary
events, which the ignorant, and the superstitious ascribe to
a supernatural agency ; but which may, after all, however
wonderful, be produced by a natural cause, as in our days
not a few believe to be the case with the spirit-manifesta
tions themselves, and no doubt is the case with most of the
wonders the spiritists relate. The devil may work portents
or prodigies, but not miracles, because he has no creative
power, and can work only with materials created to his hand.

It is necessary also to distinguish between what is simply
superhuman and what is supernatural. Whatever is creature
is in the order of nature. Nature embraces the entire crea
tion—whatever exists that is notGod or is distinguishable from
him. Whether the created powers are above man or below
him in the scale of existence, they are equally natural, and
so is whatever they are capable, as second causes, of doing.
The angels in heaven, the very highest as the lowest, are
God's creatures, distinguishable from him, and therefore in
cluded in nature. The same must be said of the devils in
hell, or the ghosts, if the spirits of the departed, and hence
whatever they do is within the natural order. The devil is
superior, if you will, by nature to man — for man is made
little lower than the angels, and the devil is an angel fallen ;
he may know many things beyond human intelligence, and
do many things beyond the power of man ; but what the
devil does, is, if superhuman, not in any sense supernatural,
but as natural as what man himself does. We agree with
Mr. Owen, though not for the same reason, that there is
nothing miraculous in the spirit-manifestations, even suppos
ing them to be facts, and therefore they are of no value in
relation to the truth or falsehood of Christianity as a revela
tion of and by the supernatural.

God alone, and what he does immediately by his direct
and immediate act, is supernatural. God alone can work

364: OWEN ON SPIRITISM.

a miracle, which is a supernatural effect wrought without
any natural medium, law, or agency, in or on nature, and is,
as far as it goes, a manifestation of creative power.

Miracles do what portents, prodigies, spirit-rappings, &c.,
do not — they manifest the supernatural, or the existence of
a real order above nature. They do not indeed directly
prove the truth of the Christian mysteries, but they do ac
credit our Lord as a teacher sent from God. As Nicodemus
said when he came by night to Jesus, " Rabbi, we know that
thou art come a teacher from God, for no man can do the
miracles thou doest, unless God were with him. " God in
the miracles accredits the teacher, and vouches for the truth
of what he in whose favor they are wrought teaches. What
our Lord teaches, then, is true. If he teaches that he is
perfect God and perfect man in hypostatic union, then he
is so, and then is to be believed, on his own word, whatever
he teaches, for " it is impossible for God to lie. " The facts,
then, are of no importance if not miracles. Hence the
" natural-supernaturalism " of the Sartor Resartus is not
only a contradiction in terms, but utterly worthless, as are
most of the admired utterances of its author, and aid us not
in solving a single problem for which revelation is needed.

Deprive us of the prophecies under the Old Law and the
miracles under the New, and we should be deprived of all
means of proving Christianity as a supernatural religion, as
supernaturally inspired and revealed, and should be reduced,
as Mr. Owen is, to naked rationalism, or downright demon-
ism. The prodigies of the devil do not carry us above na
ture. They are indeed Satan's efforts to counterfeit genu
ine miracles, but at best they only give us the superhuman
for the supernatural. If the author could prove the Chris
tian miracles are not miracles, though credible as facts, or
if he could bring them into the category of the spirit-mani
festations, he would in effect divest Christianity of its su
pernatural character, and render it all as worthless as any
man-constructed system of ethics or philosophy. His Chris
tianity, as set forth in his pages, has not a trace of the Chris
tianity of Christ, and is as little worthy of being called
Christian as the bald Unitarianism of Channing, or the
Deism of Rousseau, Tom Paine, or Yoltaire, or the Free
Religion of Emerson, Higginson, and Julia Ward Howe.

What Mr. Owen regards as a highly important fact, and
which he urges Protestants to accept as the means of triumph
ing over the Catholic Church, namely, that the Christian

THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE.

365

miracles and the spirit-manifestations are worthy of pre
cisely the same respect and confidence in a Christian point
of view, is far less important than he in his profound igno
rance of Christianity imagines. How far he will be success
ful with Protestants we know not ; but his success, we
imagine, will be greatest among people of his own class,
who having no settled belief in any religion, who know
little of the principles of Christianity, are, as all such
people are, exceedingly credulous and superstitious. These
people hover on the borders of Protestantism, have certain
sympathies with the reformation, but it would be hardly
just to call them in the ordinary sense of the term Prot
estants. Yet Protestantism, being substantially a revival
in principle of the ancient gentile apostasy which led to the
worship of the devil in the place of God before our Lord s
advent, there can be no doubt that Protestants are peculiarly
exposed to satanic invasions, and there is no certainty that
they may not follow Mr. Owen back to the devil-worship
from which Christianity rescued the nations that embraced
it. But we have said enough for the present. Perhaps we
may say more hereafter.

THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE.*

[From the Catholic World for July, 1869.]

WE know this rather remarkable discourse only as repub-
lished in the columns of The New York World, where it
had a sensational title which we have abridged. Professor
Huxley's name stands high among English physicists or
scientists, and his discourse indicates considerable natural
ability, and familiarity with the modern school of science
which seeks the explanation of the universe and its phe
nomena without recognizing a creator, or any existence but
ordinary matter and its various combinations. I he imme
diate purpose of the professor is to prove the physical or

*New Theory of Life. Identity of the Powers and Faculties of all
Living Mutter A Lecture by Professor T. H. HUXLEY. New York
World, Feb. 18th, 1869.

366 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE.

material basis of life, and that life in all organisms is iden
tical, originating in and depending on what Tie calls the pro
toplasm.

The protoplasm is formed of ordinary matter ; say, car
bon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. These elements com
bined in some unknown way give rise to protoplasm ; the
protoplasm gives rise to the plant, and, through the plant, to
the animal ; and hence all life, feeling, thought, and reason
originate in the peculiar combination of the molecules of
ordinary, inorganic matter. The plant differs from the ani
mal, and the animal from the man, only in the different
combinations of the molecules of the protoplasm. We see
nothing in this theory that is new, or not as old as the phys
ics of the ancient Ionian school.

The only novelty that can be pretended is the assumption
that all matter, even inorganic, is, in a certain sense, plastic,
and therefore, in a rudimentary way, living. The same law
governs the inorganic and the organic world. But even this
is not new. Many years ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson assert
ed the identity of gravitation and purity of heart, and we
ourselves are by no means disposed to deny that there is
more or less analogy between the formation of the crystal
or the diamond and the growth of the plant. It is not, per
haps, too much to say that the law of creation is one law,
and we have never yet been convinced of the existence of
absolutely inert matter. Whatever exists is, in its order and
degree, a vis activa, or an active force. Matter, as the poten-
tia nuda of the schoolmen, is simple possibility, and^np real
existence at all. There is and can be no pure passivity in
nature, or purely passive existences. We would not there
fore deny a certain rudimentary plasticity to minerals, or
what is called brute matter, though we are not prepared to
accept the plastic soul, asserted by Plato, and revived and
explained in the posthumous and unfinished works of Gio-
berti under the term methexis, which is copied or imitated
by the mimesis, or the individual and the sensible. Yet
since, as the professor tells us, the animal can take the pro
toplasm only as prepared by the plant, must there not be in
inorganic matter a preparation or elaboration of the proto
plasm for the use of the plant ?

The professor speaks of the difficulty of determining the
line of demarcation between the animal and the plant ; but
is it difficult to draw the line between the mineral and the
plant, or between the plant and the inorganic matter from

THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIKK.

367

which it assimilates its food or nourishment ? Pope sings,

" See through this air, this ocean, and this earth,
All matter quick, and bursting into birth ; "

but We soould like to have the professor explain how ordi
nary matter, even if quick, becomes protoplasm, and how the
protoplasm becomes the origin and basis of the life of the
plant. Every plant is an organism with its central life with
in. Yirchow and Cl. Bernard by their late discoveries have
proved that every organism proceeds from an organite, ovule,
or central cell, which produces, directs, and controls or gov
erns the whole organism, even in its abnormal developments.
They have also proved that this ovule or central cell exists
only as generated by a pre-existing organism, or parent, of
the same kind. The later physiologists are agreed that there
is no well authenticated instance of spontaneous generation.
Now this organite must exist, live, before it can avail itself
of the protoplasm formed of ordinary matter, which is ex
terior to it, not within it, and cannot be its life, for that
moves from within outward, from the centre to the circum
ference. Concede, then, all the facts the professor alleges,
they only go to prove that the organism already living sus
tains its life by assimilating fitting elements from ordinary
matter. But they do not show at all that it derives its life
from them ; or that the so-called protoplasm is the origin,
source, basis, or matter of organic life ; or that it generates,
produces, or gives rise to the organite or central cell ; not
that it has any thing to do with vitalizing it. Hence the
professor fails to throw any light on the origin, matter, or
basis of life itself.

It may or it may not be difficult in the lower organisms
to draw the line between the plant and the animal, and we
shall urge no objections to what the professor says on that
point ; we will only say here that the animal organism, like
the vegetable, is produced, directed, and controlled by the
central cell, and that this cell or ovule is generated by ani
mal parents. There is no spontaneous generation, and no
well authenticated instance of metagenesis. Like generates
like, and even Darwin's doctrine of natural selection con-
tirms rather than denies it. It is certain that the vegetable
organism has never, as far as science goes, generated an ani
mal organism. Arguments based on our ignorance prove
nothing. The protoplasm can no more produce or vital i/e
the central animal than it can the central vegetable cell, and,

368 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE.

indeed, still less ; for the animal cannot, as the professor
himself asserts, sustain its life by the protoplastic elements
till they have been prepared by the vegetable organism.
Whence, then, the animal germ, organite, or ovule ? What
vitalizes it and gives it the power of assimilating the pro
toplasm as its food, without which the organism dies and dis
appears ?

Giving the professor the fullest credit for exact science in
all his statements, he does not, as far as we can see, prove
his protoplasm is the physical basis of life, or that there
is for life any physical basis at all. He only proves that
matter is so far plastic as to afford sustenance to a generated
organic life, which every farmer who has ever manured a
iield of corn or grass, or reared a flock of sheep or a herd
of cattle, knows, and always has known, as well as the illus
trious professor.

We can find a clear statement of several of the con
ditions of life, both vegetable and animal, but no demon
stration of the principle of life, in the professor's very elab
orate discourse. Indeed, if we examine it closely, we shall
find that he does not even pretend to demonstrate any thing
of the sort. He denies all means of science except sensible
experience, and maintains with Hume that we have no sen
sible experience of causes or principles. All science, he as
serts is restricted to empirical facts with their law, which,
in his system, is itself only a fact or a classification of facts.
The conditions of life, as we observe them, are for him the
essential principle of life in the only sense in which the
word principle has, or can have, for him, an intelligible
meaning. He proves, then, the physical basis of life, by
denying that it has any intelligible basis at all. He proves,
indeed, that the protoplasm, which he shows, or endeavors
to show, is universal — one and the same, always and every
where — is present in the already existing life of both the
plant and the animal ; but that, whatever it be, in the
plant or animal, which gives it the power to take up the
protoplasm and assimilate it to its own organism, which is
properly the life or vital power, he does not explain, account
for, or even recognize. With him, power is an empty
word. He nowhere proves that life is produced, furnished,
or generated by the protoplasm, or has a material origin.
Hence, the protoplasm, by his own showing, is simply no
protoplasm at all. He proves, if any thing, that in inorganic
matter there are elements which the living plant or animal

TIIK PHYSICAL !!.\>I> oF l.H-'i:. 369

assimilates, and into which when dead, it is resolved. Tin's
is all he does, and in fact, all he professes to do.

The professor makes light of the very grave objection,
that chemical analysis can throw no light on the principle
or basis of life, because it is or can be made only on the
dead subject. He of course concedes that chemical analysis
is not made on the living subject ; but this, he contends,
amounts to nothing. We think it amounts to a great deal.
The very thing sought, to wit, life, is wanting in the
dead subject, and of course cannot by any possible analysis
be detected in it. If all that constituted the living body
is present in the dead body, why is the body dead, or why
has it ceased to perform its vital functions? The proto
plasm, or what you so call, is as present in the corpse as in
the living organism. If it is the basis of life, why is the
organism no longer living ? The fact is, that life, while it
continues, resists chemical action and death, by a higher
and subtler chemistry of its own, and it is only the dead
body that falls under the action of the ordinary chemical
laws. There is, then, no concluding the principle or basis
of life from any possible dissection of the dead body.

The professor's answer to the objection is far from being
satisfactory.

"Objectors of this class," he says, " do no seem to reflect ....
that we know nothing about the composition of any body as it is. The
statement that a crystal of calc-spar consists of carbonate of lime is quite
true, if we only mean that, by appropriate processes, it may be resolved
into carbonic acid and quicklime. If you pass the same carbonic acid
over the very quicklime thus obtained, you will obtain carbonate of
lime again; but it will not be calc-spar, nor any thing like it. Can it
therefore be said that chemical analysis teaches nothing about the chem
ical composition of calc-spar? Such a statement would be absurd; but
it is hardly more so than the talk one occasionally hears about the use-
lessness of applying the results of chemical analysis to the living bodies
which have yielded them. One fact, at any rate, is out of reach of such
refinements and this is, that all the forms of protoplasm which have yet
been examined contain the four elements, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen,
and nitrogen, in very complex union, and that they behave similarly
toward several reagents. To this complex combination, the nature of
which has never been determined with exactness, the name of protein
has been applied. And if we use this term with such caution as may
properly arise out of comparative ignorance of the things for which it
stands, it may be truly said that all protoplasm is proteinaceous ; or, as-
the white, or albumen, of an egg is one of the commonest example of a
VOL. IX-24.

370 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE.

nearly pure proteine matter, we may say that all living matter is more or
less albuminoid. Perhaps it would not yet be safe to say that all forms
of protoplasm are affected by the direct action of electric shocks; and
yet the number of cases in which the contraction of protoplasm is
shown to be affected by this agency increases every day. Nor can it
be affirmed with perfect confidence that all forms of protoplasm are
liable to undergo that peculiar coagulation at a temperature of 40 de
grees — 50 degrees centigrade, which has been called "heat-stiffening,"
though Kuhne's beautiful researches have proved this occurrence to
take place in so many and such diverse living beings, that it is hardly
rash to expect that the law holds good for all."

This long extract proves admirably how long, how learned
ly, how scientifically, a great man can talk without saying any
thing. All that is here said amounts only to this : the conclu
sions obtained by the analysis of the dead body cannot be de
nied to be applicable to the living body, because we know noth
ing of the composition of any body organic or inorganic, as it
is. Therefore all life has a physical basis ! Take the whole
extract, and all it tells you is, that we know nothing of the
subject it professes to treat. " All the forms of protoplasm,
which have yet been examined contain the four elements,
carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen in very complex
union." When chemically resolved into these four ele
ments, is it protoplasm still ? Can you by a chemical pro
cess reconvert them into protoplasm ? 'No. Then what
does the analysis show of the nature of your physical basis
of life? "To this complex union, the nature of which has
never yet been determined, the name of protein has been ap
plied." Yery important to know that. Yet this name
protein names not something known, but something the
nature of which is unknown. What then does it tell
us ? " If we use this term [protein] with such caution as
may properly arise out of our comparative ignorance of the
things for which it stands, it may truly be said that all pro
toplasm is proteinaceous." Be it so, what advance in
knowledge, since we are ignorant of what protein is ? It is
wonderful what a magnificent structure our scientists are
able to erect on ignorance as the foundation.

The professor, after having confessed his ignorance of
what the alleged protoplasm really is, continues :

"Enough has, perhaps, been said to prove the existence of a general
uniformity in the character of the protoplasm, or physical basis of life,
in whatever group of living beings it m&y be studied. But it will be
-understood that this general uniformity by no means excludes any

«.

THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE. oil

amount of special modifications of the fundamental substance. The
mineral, carbonate of lime, assumes an immense diversity of characters,
though no one doubts that under all these protean changes it is one and
the same thing. And now, what is the ultimate fate, and what the ori
gin, of the matter of life? Is it, as some of the older naturalists sup
posed, diffused throughout the universe in molecules, which are inde
structible and unchangeable in themselves; but, in endless transmigra
tion, unite in innumerable permutations, into the diversified forms of
life we know? Or is the matter of life composed of ordinary matter,
differing from it only in the manner in which its atoms are aggregated!
Is it built up of ordinary matter, and again resolved into ordinary mat
ter when its work is done? Modern science does not hesitate a moment
between these alternatives. Physiology writes over the portals of life,

' Debemur morti nos nostraque, '

with aprofounder meaning than the Roman poet attached to that melan
choly line. Under whatever disguise it takes refuge, whether fungus or
oak, worm or man, the living protoplasm, not only ultimately dies and
is resolved into its mineral and lifeless constituents, but is always dying
and, strange as the paradox may sound, could not live unless it died.''

Suppose all tins to be precisely as asserted, it only proves
that there is diffused through the whole material world ele
ments which in certain unknown and inexplicable combina
tions, afford sustenance to plants, and through plants to
animals, or from which the living organism repairs its waste
and sustains its life. It does not tell us how carbon, hydrogen
oxygen, and nitrogen are or must be combined to form the
alleged protoplasm, whence is the living organism nor the
origin or principle of its life. It, in fact, shows us neither
the origin nor the matter of life, for it is only an actually
living organism that uses or assimilates the alleged proto
plasm. There is evidently at work in the organism a vital
iprce that is distinguishable from the irritability or contrac
tility of the protoplasm, and not derived from or originated
by it. Undoubtedly, every organism that falls under our
observation, whether vegetable or animal, has its physical
conditions, and lives by virtue of a physical law ; but this,
even when we have determined the law and ascertained the
conditions, throws no light on the life itself. The life es
capes all observation, and science is impotent, if it leaves
out the creative act of God, to explain it, or to brino- U8 a
step nearer its secret. Professor Huxley tells us no more,
with all his science and hard words, than any cultivator of
the soil, any shepherd or herdsman, can tell us, and knows as
well as he, as we have already said.

!

372 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE.

In the last extract, the professor evidently prefers, of the
two alternatives he suggests, the one that asserts that "the
matter of life [protoplasm] is composed of ordinary matter,
is built np of ordinary matter, and resolved again into ordi
nary matter when its work is done." This the professor
applies to man as well as to plants and animals. Hence, he
cites the Eoman poet,

"Debemur morti nos nostraque."

But we have conceded the professor more than he asks,
We have conceded that all matter is, in a certain sense,
plastic, and living, in the sense of being active, not passive.
But the professor does not ask so much. We inferred from
some things in the beginning of his discourse that he
intended to maintain that his protoplasm is itself ele
mental, and pervading all nature. But this is not the case ;
he merely holds it to be a chemical compound formed by
the peculiar chemical combination of lifeless components.
Thus he says :

"But it will be observed that the existence of the matter of life de
pends on the pre-existence of certain compounds, namely, carbonic acid,
water, and ammonia. Withdraw any one of these three from the world,
and all vital phenomena come to an end. They are related to the proto
plasm of the plant, as the protoplasm of the plant is to that of the
animal. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen are all lifeless bodies
Of these, carbon and oxygen unite in certain proportions and under cer
tain conditions, to give rise to carbonic acid ; hydrogen and oxygen pro
duce water; nitrogen and hydrogen give rise to ammonia. These new-
compounds, like the elementary bodies of which they are composed, are
lifeless. But when they are brought together, under certain conditions
they give rise to the still more complex body, protoplasm, and this
protoplasm exhibits the phenomena of life. I see no break in this series
of steps in my secular complication, and I am unable to understand why
the language which is applicable to any one term of the series may not
be used" in any of the others."

But here is a break or a bold leap from a lifeless to a
livino- compound. No matter how different are the several
cheimcal compounds known from the simple components,
the new compound is always, as far as known, as lifeless as
were the several components themselves. Hydrogen and
• oxygen compounded give rise to water, but water is lifeless.
Hydrogen and nitrogen, brought together in certain pro
portions, give rise to ammonia, still a lifeless compound.
No chemist has yet, by any combination of the minerals,car-

TIIK PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE. 373

bon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, the constituents of
protoplasm, been able to produce a living plant or a living
organism of any sort. How then conclude that their com
bination produces the matter of life, or gives rise to the
living organism ? There seems to us to be a great gulf be
tween the premises and the conclusion. Certain combinations
of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen produce certain
lifeless compounds different from themselves, therefore a
certain other combination of these same elements produces
the living organism, plant, or animal, or originates the mat
ter, and forms the physical basis of life. If the professor
had in his school days reasoned in this way, his logic-mas
ter, we suspect, would have set a black mark against his
name, or, more likely, have rapped him over the knuckles,
if not over his head, and told him that an argument that
has no middle term, is no argument at all, and that trans-
•itio ci genere ad genus, as from the lifeless to the living, is a
sophism.

The professor is misled by his supposing that what is true
of the dead body must be true of the living. Because
chemical analysis resolves the dead body into certain lifeless
elements, he concludes that the living body is, while living,
only a compound of these same lifeless elements. That is,
from what is true of death, he concludes what must be
true of life. But for this fallacy, he could never have
fallen into the other fallacy of concluding life is only the
result of a certain aggregate or amalgam of lifeless min
erals. Our scientists are seldom good logicians, and we have
rarely found them able, when leaving traditional science,
to draw even a logical induction from the facts before them.
This is wherefore they receive so little respect from philos
ophers and theologians, who are always ready to accept their
facts, but, for the most part, unable to accept their induc
tions. The professor has given us some valuable facts,
though very well known before ; but his logical ineptness
is the best argument he has as yet offered in support of his
favorite theory that man is only a monkey developed.

In the extract next before the last, the professor revives
an old doctrine long since abandoned, that life is generated
from corruption. " Under whatever disguise it takes
refuge, whether fungus or oak, worm or man, the living
protoplasm not only ultimately dies and is resolved into its
mineral and lifeless constituents, but is always dyimj* <m<l,
strange as the paradox may sound, could not live unless it

THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE.

died." We know that some physiologists regard the waste
of the body, which in life is constantly going on, and which
is repaired by the food we take, as incipient death ; but this
is only because they confound the particles or molecules of
matter of which the body is externally built up, and which
change many times during an ordinary life, with the body
itself, and suppose the life of the body is simply the result
ant of the aggregation of these innumerable molecules or
particles. But the life of the organism, we have seen, is
within it, and its action from the centre, and it is only its
life, not its death, that throws off or exudes as well as assim
ilates the material particles. The exudation as well as the
assimilation is interrupted by death. Why the protoplasm
could not live unless it died is what we do not understand.

The professor, of course, not only denies the immortality of
the soul, but the existence of soul itself. There is for him
no soul but the protoplasm formed of ordinary matter. All
this we understand very well. We understand, too, that on
his theory the protoplasm assimilated by the organism to
repair its waste, renews literally, not figuratively, the life
of the organism. But how he extracts life from death, and
concludes that the protoplasm must die, as the condition of
living, passeth our comprehension. We suppose, however,
the professor found it necessary to assert it in order to be
able to reason from the dead subject to the living. If the
protoplasm were not dead, he could not by chemical analy
sis determine its constituents ; and if the death of the pro
toplasm were not essential to its life, he could not conclude
the constituents of the living protoplasm from what he finds
to be the constituents of the dead protoplasm. But this
does not help him. In the first place, the waste of the liv
ing organism is not death nor dying, though death may re
sult from it. And the supply of protoplasm in the shape
of food does not originate new life, nor replenish a life that
is gone, but supplies what is needed to sustain and invigo
rate a life that is already life. In the second place, the
vital force is not built up by protoplastic accretions, but
operates from within the organism, from the organite or cen
tral cell, without which there could be no accretions or
secretions. The food does not give life ; it only ministers
sustenance to an organism already living. No chemical
analysis of the food can disclose or throw any light on the
origin, nature, or constitution of the organic life itself.

It is this fact that prevents us from having much confi-

THE PHYSICAL MA sis (»K I. IKK. 375

dence in chemical physiology, which is still insisted on by
our most eminent physiologists. In every organism there
is something that transcends the reach of chemical analysis,
and which no chemical synthesis can reproduce. Take the
professor's protoplasm itself. He resolves it into the min
erals, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen : but no chem
ist can by any possible recombination of them reproduce pro
toplasm. How then can one say that these minerals are its
sole constituents, or that there are not other elements enter
ing it which escape all chemical tests and, indeed, are
not subject to chemical laws ? Chemistry is limited, and
cannot penetrate the essence of the material substance any
more than the eye can. It never does and never can go be
yond the sensible properties of matter. Life has its own
laws, and every physiologist knows that he meets in the
living organism phenomena or facts which it is impossible
to reduce to any of the laws which are obtainable from the
analysis of inorganic or lifeless matter. It is necessary then
to conclude that there is in the living organism present and
active some element which, though using lifeless matter,
cannot be derived from it, or explained by physical laws, be
they mechanical, chemical, or electrical. The law of life is
a law sui generis, and not resolvable into any other. We
must even go beyond the physical laws themselves, if we
would find their principle.

As far as human science goes, there is, where the nucleus
of life is wanting, no conversion of lifeless matter into liv
ing matter. The attempt to prove that living organisms,
plants, animals, or man are developed from inorganic and
lifeless matter, though made as long ago as Leucippus and
Democritus, systematized by Epicurus, sung in rich Latin
verse by Lucretius, and defended by the ablest of modern
British physico-philosophers, Mr. Herbert Spencer, in his
Biology, has by the sane part of the human race in all times
and everywhere been held to be foolish and absurd. It
has no scientific basis, is supported by no known facts, and
is simply an unfounded, at least, an unsupported hypothesis.

Life to the scientist is an insolvable mystery. We know
no explanation of this mystery or of any thing else in the
universe, unless we accept the creative act of God ; for the
origin and cause of nature are not in nature herself. We
have no other explanation of the origin of living organisms
or of the matter of life. God created plants, animals, and
man, created them living organisms, male and female ere-

376 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE.

ated he them, and thus gave them the power to propagate
and multiply each its own kind, by natural generation. The
scientist will of course smile superciliously at this old solu
tion, insisted on by priests and accepted by the vulgar ; but
though not a scientist, we know enough of science to say
from even a scientific point of view that there is no alterna
tive : either this or no solution at all. The ablest men of
ancient or modern times, when they reject it, only fall into
endless sophisms and self-contradictions.

Professor Huxley admits none but material existences,
concedes that the terms of his proposition are unquestion
ably materialistic, and yet denies that he is individually a
materialist.

"It may seem a small tiling to admit that the dull vital actions of a
fungus, or a f oraminifer, are the properties of their protoplasm, and are
the direct results of the nature of the matter of which they are com
posed. But if, as I have endeavored to prove to you, their protoplasm
is essentially identical with, and most readily converted into, that of any
animal, I can discover no logical halting place between the admission
that such is the case, and the further concession that all vital action may,
with equal propriety, be said to be the result of the molecular forces of
the protoplasm which displays it. And if so, it must be true, in the
same sense and to the same extent, that the thoughts to which I am now
giving utterance, and your thoughts regarding them, are the expression
of molecular changes in the matter of life which is the source of other
vital phenomena. Past experience leads me to be tolerably certain that,
when the propositions I have just placed before you are accessible to
public comment and criticism, they will be condemned by many zealous
persons, and perhaps by some of the wise and thoughtful. I should not
wonder if ' gross and brutal materialism ' were the mildest phrase ap
plied to them in certain quarters. And most undoubtedly the terms of
the propositions are distinctly materialistic. Nevertheless, two things
are certain: the one, that I hold the statement to be substantially true;
the other, that I, individually, am no materialist, but on the contrary
believe materialism to involve grave philosophical error."

If what he has been from the first endeavoring to prove,
and here distinctly asserts, is not materialism and conse
quently by his own confession, "a grave philosophical
error," we know not what would be. " This union of ma
terialistic terminology with the repudiation of the material
istic philosophy," he says, further on, " I share with some of
the most thoughtful men with whom I am acquainted."
His terminology is, then, better fitted to conceal his thought
than to express it. He may repudiate this or that material-

THK IMlVtSiCAL ISASIS OF LIFE. ^77

istic system ; lie may repudiate all philosophy, which lie, of
course does, yet not his terminology only, but his thought,
a> far as thought he has, is materialistic. Nothing can be
more materialistic than the conception of life, sense, si'iiti-
ment, affection, thought, reasoning, all the sensible, intel
lectual, and moral phenomena we are conscious of, as the
product of the peculiar arrangement or combination of the
molecules of the protoplasm, itself resolvable into the min
erals, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen.

The scientific professor defends himself Irom materialism,
by asserting that both materialism and spiritualism lie with
out the limits of human science, and by denying the neces
sity of a substance, whether spirit or matter, to underlie and
sustain — we should say, produce — the phenomena, and the
necessary relation of cause and effect, or that we do or can
know things under any relation but that of juxtaposition in
space and time. He falls back on the scepticism of Hume,
and takes refuge behind his ignorance. He is too ignorant
either to assert or to deny the existence of spirit, and though
he may not be able to prove the phenomena in question
are the product of material forces, nobody knows enough of
the nature and essence of matter to say that they are not ;
and in fine, he in the first part of his discourse is only stat
ing the direction in which physiology has for some time been
moving. After all, what is the difference, or rather, what
matters " the difference between the conception of life as
the product of a certain disposition of material molecules,
and the old notion of an Archaeus governing and directing
blind matter within each living body?"

But if matter lies out of the limits of science, and the pro
fessor is unable to say whether it exists or not, what right
has he to call any thing material, to speak of a material basis
of life, or to represent life and its phenomena as the product
of "a certain disposition of material molecules"? "What,
indeed, has he been laboring to prove through his whole dis
course, but that the phenomena of life are the product of ordi
nary matter ? After this, it will hardly answer to plead
ignorance of the existence and properties of matter. If matter
be relegated to the region of the unknowable, his whole thesis,
terminology and all, must be banished with it, for it retains,
and can retain, no meaning.

ISTor will it answer for the professor to take refuge in
Hume's scepticism, and say he is not a materialist, because
he admits no necessary relation between cause and effect, nor

378 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE.

that there is within the limits of science, any power or force,
or vis activa, which men in their ignorance call " cause,"
actually producing something which men call " effect." If
he says this, what becomes of his thesis, that life and even
mind are the product of a certain disposition of material
molecules, or of "the peculiar combination of the molecules
of the protoplasm " ? If he denies the existence, or even the
knowledge of causative, that is, productive force, his thesis
has no meaning, and all his alleged proofs of a physical basis
of the vital and mental phenomena must count for nothing.
Every proof, every argument, presupposes the relation of
cause and effect. When that relation is denied, and the two
things are assumed to have with each other only the relation
of juxtaposition, no proposition can be either proved or dis
proved. The professor, after having asserted and attempted
to prove his materialistic thesis, cannot, without gross self-
contradiction, plead the scepticism of Hume, he should have
kept his mouth shut, and never stated or attempted to prove
his thesis.

Whether we are or are not able to prove that life, senser
and reason do not originate in the peculiar " combination of
the molecules of the protoplasm," is nothing to the purpose.
It is for the professor to prove that they do. He must not
base his science on our ignorance, any more than on his
own.

But taken, as we have taken him, on what he must con
cede to be purely scientific ground, and brought to a strictly
scientific test, the professor's thesis must be declared not
proven, and to be destitute of all scientific value. We have
met him on his own ground, and have urged no arguments
against him drawn from religion or metaphysics ; we have
simply corrected one or two mistakes in his science, and as
sailed his inductions with pure logic. If he has not reasoned
logically, that is his fault, not ours, and neither he nor his
friends have any right to complain of us for showing that
his inductions are illogical, and therefore unscientific. Yet
we are bound to say that the professor reasons as well as any
of his class of scientists that we have met with. No man
can reason logically who rejects the koyos, that is, logic it
self, and nothing better than Professor Huxley's discourse
can be expected from a scientist who discards all causes and
seeks to explain the existence and phenomena or facts of the
universe, without rising from seco»d causes to the first and
final cause of all.

SPIRITUALISM AND MATERIALISM. 379

Two questions are raised by this discourse, of great and
vital importance. The one as to the nexus between cause
and effect, in answer to Hume's scepticism, and the other as
to spirit and matter, and their reciprocal relation. We have
not attempted the discussion of either in this article ; but
should a favorable occasion offer, we may hereafter treat
them both at some length.

SPIRITUALISM AND MATERIALISM.

[From the Catholic World for August, 1869.]

PROFESSOR HUXLEY, as we saw in a late number of this
magazine, in the article on The Physical Basis of Life, while
rejecting spiritualism, gives his opinion that materialism
is a philosophical error, on the ground of our ignorance
of what matter is, or is not. There is some truth in the as
sertion of our ignorance of the essence or real nature of mat
ter or material existence, though the professor had no
logical right to assert it, after ha ving~ adopted a materialistic
terminology, and done his best to prove the material ori
gin of life", thought, feeling, and the various mental phe
nomena. Yet we are far from regarding what is called
materialism as the fundamental error of this age, nor do
we believe that there is any necessary or irrepressible an
tagonism between spirit and matter, either intellectual or
moral. In our belief, a profound philosophy, though it does
not identify spirit and matter, shows their dialectic har
mony, as revelation asserts it in asserting the resurrection of
the flesh, and the indissoluble reunion of body and soul in
the future life.

The fundamental error of this a°je is the denial of crea
tion, and, theologically expressed, is, with the vulgar, athe
ism, and with the cultivated and retined, pantheism. Athe
ism is the denial of unity, and pantheism the denial of
plurality or diversity, and both alike deny creation, and seek
to explain the universe by the principle of self-generation or
self-development. What is really denied is God THE CREA
TOR.

There are, no doubt, moral causes that have led in part to

380 SPIRITUALISM AND MATERIALISM.

this denial, but with them we have at present nothing to do.
The assertion of moral causes is more effective in preventing
men from abandoning the truth and falling into error than
in recovering and leading back to the truth those who
have lost it, or know not where to find it. We lose our
labor when we begin our efforts, as philosophers, to convert
those who are in error by assuring them that they have erred
only through moral perversity or hatred of the true and the
good, the just and the holy, especially in an age when con
science is fast aleep. "We aim at convincing, not at convict
ing, and therefore take up only the intellectual causes which
lead to the denial of creation. Among these causes, we shall,
no doubt, find materialism and a pseudo-spiritualism both
playing their part ; but the real causes, we apprehend, are
in the fact that the philosophic tradition, which has come
down to us from gentilism, has never been fully harmonized
with the Christian tradition, which has come down to us
through the church.

Gentilism had lost sight of God the Creator, and con
founded creation with generation, emanation, or formation.
Why the gentiles were led into this error would be an in
teresting chapter in the history of the wanderings of the hu
man mind ; but we have no space at present for the inquiry.
It is enough, ^f or our p/esent purpose, to establish the fact
that the gentiles did fall into it. The conception of creation
is found in none of the heathen mythologies, learned or un
learned, of which we have any knowledge ; and that they do
not recognize a creative God, may be inferred from the fact
that in them all, so far as known, were worshipped, under ob
scure symbols, the generative forces or functions of nature.
In no gentile philosophy, not even in Plato or Aristotle, do
you find any conception of God the Creator. Pere Gratry,
indeed, thinks he finds the fact of creation recognized by
Plato, especially in the Timceus ; but though we have read
time and again that most important of Plato's dialogues, we
have never found the fact of creation in it ; all we can find
in it bearing on this point is what Plato, as we understand
him, uniformly teaches, the identity of the idea with the es
sence or causa essentialis of the thing. As, for instance, the
idea of a man is the real, essential man himself ; and is sim
ply the idea in the divine mind, impressed on a preexisting
matter, as the seal upon wax. God creates neither the idea
nor the matter. The idea is himself; the matter is eternal.
Aristotle does not essentially differ from Plato on this point.

SPIRITUALISM AND MATERIALISM.

381

The individual existence, according to him, is composed of
matter and form ; the form alone is substantial, and matter is
simply its passive recipient. The substantial forms are sup
plied, but not created by the divine intelligence. In no form
of heathenism that existed before the Christian era have we
found any conception of creation. The conception or tradi
tion of creation was retained only by the patriarchs and the
synagogue, and has been restored to the converted gentiles
by the (Christian church alone.

St. Augustine, and after him the great medigeval doctors
—especially the greatest of them all, the Angel of the
Schools— labored assiduously, and up to certain point suc
cessfully, to amend the least debased gentile philosophy so
as to make it harmonize with Christian theology and tradi
tion. They took from gentile philosophy the elements it
had retained from the ancient wisdom, supplied their defects
with elements taken from the Christian tradition, and formed
a really Christian philosophy, which still subsists in union
with theology.

This work of harmonizing faith and philosophy, or, per
haps, more correctly, of constructing a philosophy in har
mony with faith and theology, was nearly, if not quite com
pleted by the great western scholastics or medigeval doctors ;
but, unhappily, the East, separated from the centre of unity,
or holding to it only loosely and by fits and starts, did not
share in the great intellectual movement of the West. It
made little or no progress in harmonizing gentile philoso
phy and Christian theology. It retained and studied the
gentile philosophers, especially of the Platonic and Neopla-
tonic schools ; and when the Greek scholars, after the taking
of Constantinople by the Turks, in 1453, sought refuge in
the West, they brought with them, not only their schism,
but their unmitigated gentile philosophy, corrupted the west
ern schools, and unsettled to a fearful extent the confidence
of scholars in the scholastic philosophy. We owe the false
systems of spiritualism and materialism, of atheism and pan
theism, to what is called the Eevival of Letters in the fif
teenth century, or the Greek invasion of western Christen
dom.

The scholastics, especially St.. Thomas, had transformed
the peripatetic philosophy into a Christian philosophy ; but
the other Greek schools had remained pagan ; and it was pre
cisely these other schools, especially the Platonic, and Neo-
platonic, or Alexandrian eclecticism, that now revived in

382 SPIRITUALISM AND MATERIALISM.

their unchristianized form, and were opposed to the Aristo
telian philosophy as modified by the schoolmen. Some of
the early fathers were more inclined to Plato than to Aris
totle, but none of these, not Clemens Alexandrinus, Origen,
or even St. Augustine, had harmonized throughout Plato's
philosophy with Christianity, and we should greatly wrong
St. Augustine, at least, if we called him a systematic Pla-
tonist.

With the study of Plato was revived in western Europe a
false and exaggerated spiritualism, and a philosophy which
denied creation as a truth of philosophy, and admitted it onlv
as a doctrine of revelation. The authority of the scholastic
philosophy was weakened, a decided tendency in pantheistic
direction to thought was given, and the way was prepared
for Giordano Bruno, as well as for the Protestant apostasy.
"We say apostasy, because Luther's movement was really an
apostasy, as its historical developments have amply proved.
With Plato was revived the Academy with its scepticism,
Sextus Empiricus, and after him Epicurus ; and before the
close of the sixteenth century, Europe was overrun with false
mystics, sceptics, pantheists, and atheists, who abounded all
through the seventeenth century, in spite of a very decided
reaction in favor of faith and the church. What is worthy
of special note is, that in all this period of two centuries and
a half it was no uncommon thing to find men who, as philos
ophers, denied the immortality of the soul, which as be
lievers they asserted; or combined a childlike faith with
universal scepticism, as we see in Montaigne.

Gradually, however, men began to see that, while they ac
knowledged a discrepancy between what they held as philos
ophy and the Christian faith, they could not retain both ;
that they must give up the one or the other. England, in
the latter half of the seventeenth century, swarmed with free
thinkers who denied all divine revelation ; and France, in the
eighteenth century, rejected the church, rejected the Bible,
suppressed Christian 'worship, rebuilt the Pantheon, and
voted death to be an eternal sleep. But the eighteenth cen
tury was born of the seventeenth, as the seventeenth was
born of the sixteenth, as the sixteenth was born of the revi
val of Greek letters and philosophy, thoroughly impregnated
with paganism, supposed by unthinking men to be the most
glorious event in modern history, saving, always, Luther's
reformation.

In the seventeenth century, Descartes undertook to reform

SPIRITUALISM AND MATERIALISM. 383

and reconstruct philosophy after a new method. He under
took to erect philosophy into a complete science in the ra
tional order, independent of revelation. If he recognized
the creative act of God, or God as creator, it was as a theo
logian, not as a philosopher ; for certainly he does not start
with the creative act as a first principle, nor does he, nor can
he, arrive at it by his method. God as creator cannot be de
duced from cogito, ergo sum ; for, without presupposing
God as my creator, I cannot assert that I exist. Gentilism
had so far revived that it was able to take possession of phi
losophy the moment it was detached from Christian theolo
gy and declared an independent science ; and as that has no
conception of creation, the tradition preserved by Jews and
Christians was at once relegated from philosophy to theolo
gy, from science to faith. Hence we fail to find creation
recognized as a philosophical truth in the system of his dis
ciple Malebraiiche, a profounder philosopher than Descartes
himself. The prince of modern sophists, Spinoza, adopting
as his starting point the definition of substance given by Des
cartes, demonstrates but too easily that there can be only one
substance, and that there can be no creation, or that nothing
does or can exist except the one substance and its attributes,
modes, or affections. Calling the one substance God, he
arrived at once at pantheism, now so prevalent.

That Descartes felt a difficulty in asserting creation in its
proper sense, may be inferred from the fact that he always
calls the soul la pensee, thought ; never, if we recollect aright,
a substance that thinks, which was itself a large stride to
wards pantheism, for pantheism consists precisely in deny
ing all substantive existences except the one only substance,
which is God. Spinoza developed his principles with a log
ic vastly superior to his own, and brought out errors which
he probably did not foresee. Indeed, we do not pretend that
Descartes intended to favor or had any suspicion that he was
favoring pantheism ; but he most certainly did not recognize
any principle that would enable his disciples to oppose it, and
in former days, before we knew the church, we ourselves
found, or thought we found, pantheism flowing logically
from his premises, and we escaped it only by rejecting the
Cartesian philosophy.

Descartes revived in modern philosophy that antagonism
between spirit and matter which was unknown to the scho
lastic philosophy, and which renders the mutual commerce
of soul and body inexplicable. The scholastic doctors had

384: SPIRITUALISM AND MATERIALISM.

recognized, indeed, matter and form ; but with them matter
was simply possibility, existing only in potentia adformam,
and was never supposed to be the basis or substratum of any
existence whatever. The real existence was in the form, the
forma or the idea. They distinguished, certainly, between
corporeal and incorporeal existences ; but not, as the moderns
do, between spiritual and material existences, and the ques
tion between spiritualism and materialism, as we have it to
day, did not and could not come up with them. ^ The dis
tinction with them was between sensibles and intelligibles, the
only distinction that philosophy by her own light knows.
Spirit was a term very nearly restricted to God, and spiritual
meant partaking of spirit, living according to the^spirit ; that
is, living a godly life begotten by the Holy Spirit, as in the
inspired writings of St. Paul.

Even the ancients did not distinguish, in the modern sense,
between spirit and matter. Their gods were corporeal, but
ordinarily impassible. The spirit was not a distinct exist
ence, but was the universal principle of life, thought, and
action, and the spirit of man was an emanation from the uni
versal spirit, which at death flowed back and was reabsorbed
in the ocean from which it emanated. Their ghosts were
not disembodied spirits, as ours are, were not departed spirits,
but the umbra or shade — a thin, aerial apparition, bearing
the exact resemblance of the body, and had formed during
life, if I may so speak, its inner lining, or the immediate en
velope of the spirit. It is the body that after death still in
vests the soul, accordingly to Swedenborg, who denies the
resurrection of the flesh. According to ancient Greek and
Koman gentilisrn it was not spirit, nor body, but something
between the two. It hovered over and around the dead
body, and it was to allay it, and enable it to rest in peace that
the funeral rites or obsequies of the dead were performed,
and judged to be so indispensable. The "Marquis de Mir-
ville, in his work on The Fluidity of Spirits, seems to think
the umbra was not a pure imagination, and is inclined to as
sert it, and to make it the basis of the explanation^' many
of the so-called spirit-phenomena. He supposes it is capable
of transporting the soul, or of being transported by the soul,
out of the body, and to a great distance from it, and that the
body itself will bear the^ marks of the wounds that may^be
given it. In this way he also explains the prodigies of bilo-

&
cation.

But however this may be, the ghost of heathen supersti-

SPIRITUALISM AND MATERIALISM. 385-

tiou is never the spirit returned to earth, nor is it the spirit
that is doomed to Tartarus, or that is received into the El ys-
iaii Fields, the heathen paradise. Hades, which includes
both Tartarus and Elysium, is a land of shadows, inhabited
by shades that are neither spirit nor body ; for the heathen
knew nothing, and believed nothing, of the resurrection of
the flesh, and the reunion of soul and body in a future life.
The spirit at death returns to its fountain, and the body,
dissolved, loses itself in the several elements from which it
was taken, and only the shade or shadow of the living man
survives. Even in Elysium, the ghosts that sport on the
flowery banks of the river, repose in the green bowers, or
pursue in the fields the mimic games and pastimes that they
loved, are pale, thin, and shadowy. The whole is a mimic
scene, if we may trust either Homer or Yirgil, and is far
less real and less attractive than the happy hunting-grounds
of the red men of our continent, to which the good, that isr
the brave Indian is transported when he dies. The only
distinction, we find, with the heathen, between spirit and
matter, is the distinction between the divine substance, or
intelligence, and an eternally existing matter, as the stuff
of which bodies or corporeal existences, the only existences
recognized, are formed or generated.

But Descartes distinguished them so broadly that he
seemed to make them each independent of the other.
Why, then, was either necessary to the life and activity of
the other ? And we see in Descartes no use that the soul is
or can be to the body, or the body to the soul. Hence, phi
losophy, starting from Descartes, branched out in two oppo
site directions, the one toward the denial of matter, and
the other toward the denial of spirit ; or, as more common
ly expressed, into idealism and materialism, but as it would
be more proper to say, into intellectisrn and sensism. The
spiritualism of Descartes, so far as it had been known in
the history of philosophy, was only the Neoplatonic mysti
cism, which substitutes the direct and immediate vision, so-
to speak, of the intelligible, for its apprehension through
sensible symbols and the exercise of the reasoning faculty.
From this it was an easy step to the denial of an external
and material world, as was proved by Berkeley, who held
the external world to consist simply of pictures painted on
the retina of the eye by the creative act of God ; and be
fore him by Collier, who maintained that only mind exists.
It was an equally short and easy step to take the other di-

VOL. IX-25.

386 SPIRITUALISM AND MATERIALISM.

rection, assert the sufficiency of the corporeal or material,
and deny the existence of spirit or the incorporeal, since the
senses take cognizance of the corporeal and the corporeal
only. Either step was favored by the ancient philosophy
revived and set up against the scholastic philosophy. It
was hardly possible to follow out the exaggerated and ex
clusive spiritualism of the one class without running into
mystic pantheism, or the independence of the corporeal or
material, without falling into material pantheism or athe
ism. These two errors, or rather these two phases of one
and the same error, are the fundamental or mother error of
this age — perhaps, in principle, of all ages.

It is no part of our purpose now to refute this error ; we
have traced it from gentilism, shown that it is essentially
pagan, and owes its prevalence in the modern world to the
revival of Greek letters and philosophy in the fifteenth cen
tury, the discredit into which the study of Plato and the
Neo-platonists threw the scholastic philosophy, and espec
ially to the divorce of philosophy from theology, declared
by Descartes in the seventeenth century. Yet we do not
accept either exclusive materialism or exclusive spiritual
ism, and the question itself hardly has place in our philosophy,
as it hardly had place in that of St. Thomas. It became a
question only when philosophy was detached from theolo
gy, of which it forms the rational as distinguishable but not
separable from the revealed element, and reduced to a mere
Wissenschaftslehre, or rather a simple methodology. True
philosophy joined with theology is the response to the ques
tions, "What is, or exists ? What are the principles and causes
of things ? What are our relations to those principles and
causes \ What is the law under which we are placed ? and
what are the means and conditions within our reach, natural
or gracious, of fulfilling our destiny, or of attaining to our
supreme good ? Not a response to the question, for the
most part an idle que'stion, How do we know, or how do we
know that we know ?

Many of the most difficult problems for philosophers, and
which we confess our inability to solve, may be eluded by a
flank movement, to use a military phrase. Such is the
question of the origin of ideas, of certitude, and the passage
from the subjective to the objective, and this very question
of spiritualism and materialism. All these are problems
which no philosopher yet has solved from the point of view
of exclusive psychology, or of exclusive ontology, or of any

SPIRITUALISM AND MATERIALISM. 387

philosophy that leaves them to be asked. But we are much
mistaken if they do not cease to be problems at all, when
one starts with the principles of things, or if they do not
solve themselves. We do not find them, in the modern
sense, raised by Plato or Aristotle, nor by St. Augustine or
St. Thomas. When we have the right stand-point, if Mr.
Richard Grant White will allow us the term, and see things
from the point of view of the real order, these problems do
not present themselves, and are wholly superseded. Pro
fessor Huxley is right enough when he tells us that we
know the nature and essence neither of spirit nor of mat
ter. We know from revelation that there is a spirit in man,
and that the inspiration of the Almighty giveth him un
derstanding, but we know neither by revelation nor by rea
son what spirit is. God is a spirit ; but if man is a spirit,
it must be in a very different sense from that in which God
is a spirit. Although the human spirit may have a certain
likeness to the divine spirit, it yet cannot be divine, for it
is created ; and they who call it divine, a spark of divinity,
or a particle of God, either do not mean, or do not know
what they literally assert. They only repeat the old gentile
doctrine of the substantial identity of the spirit witli divin
ity, from whom it emanates, and to whom it returns, to be
reabsorbed in him — a pantheistic conception. All 'we can
say of spiritual existences is, that they are incorporeal intel
ligences ; and all we can say of man is, that he has both a
corporeal and an incorporeal nature ; and perhaps without
revelation we shojild be able to say not even so much.

We know, again, just as little of matter. What is mat
ter? Who can answer? Nay, what is body? Who can
tell ? Body, we are told, is composed of material elements.
Be it so. What are those elements? Into what is matter
resolvable in the last analysis? Into indestructible and in
dissoluble atoms, says Epicurus; into entelecheiae, or self-
acting forces, says Aristotle ; into extension, says Descartes ;
into monads, each acting from its centre, and representing
the entire universe from its own point of view, says Leib
nitz ; into centres of attraction and gravitation, says Father
Boscovich ; into pictures painted on the retina of the eye
by the Creator, says Berkeley, the Protestant bishop of
Cloyne, and so on. We may ask and ask, but can get no
final answer.

Take, instead of matter, an organic body ; who can tell
us what it is ? It is extended, occupies space, say the Car-

388 SPIRITUALISM AND MATERIALISM.

tesians. But is this certain ? Leibnitz disputes it, and ft is
not easy to attach any precise meaning to the assertion " it
occupies space," if we have any just notion of space and
time, the pom asinorum of psychologists. What is called
actual or real space is the relation of co-existence of crea
tures ; and is simply nothing abstracted from the related.
It would be a great convenience if philosophers would learn
that nothing is nothing, and that only God can create some
thing from nothing. Space being nothing but relation, to
say of a thing that it occupies space, is only saying that it
exists, and exists in a certain relation to other objects. This
relation may be either sensible or intelligible ; it is sensible,
or what is called sensible space, when the objects related am
sensible. Extension is neither the essence nor a property of
matter, but the sensible relation of an object either to some
other objects or to our sensible perception. It is, as Leib
nitz very well shows, only the relation of continuity. Whirl
a wheel with great force and rapidity, and you will be unr-
able to distinguish its several spokes, and it will seem to be~
all of one continuous and solid piece. Intelligible space as-
distinguished from sensible space is the logical relation of
things, or, as more commonly called, the relation of cause-
and effect. When we conform our notions of space to the
real order, and understand that the sensible simply copies,,
imitates, or symbolizes the intelligible, we shall see that we
have no authority for saying extension is even a property of
body or of matter.

That extension is simply the sensible relation of body,
not its essence, nor even a property of matter, is evident
from what physiologists tell us of organic or living bodies.
There can be no reasonable doubt that the body I now have
is the same identical body with which I was born, and yet
it contains, probably, not a single molecule or particle of
sensible matter it originally had. As I am an old man, all
the particles or molecules of my body have probably been
changed some ten or twenty times over ;. yet my body re
mains unchanged. It is evident, then, since the molecular
changes do not affect its identity, that those particles or
molecules of matter which my body assimilates from the
food I take to repair the waste that is constantly going on,
or to supply the loss of those particles or molecules con
stantly exuded or thrown off, do not compose, make up, or
constitute the real body. This fact is commended to the
consideration of those learned men, like the late Professor

SPIRITUALISM AND MATERIALISM. 389

George Bush, who deny the resurrection of the body, on
the ground that these molecular changes which have been
going on during life render it a physical impossibility. This
fact also may have some bearing on the Catholic mystery of
Transubstantiation. St. Augustine distinguishes between
the visible body and the intelligible body — the body that is
seen and the body that is understood — and tells us that it is
the intelligible, or, as he sometimes says, the spiritual, not
the visible or sensible, body of our Lord that is present in
the Blessed Eucharist. In fact, there is no change in the
sensible body of the bread and the wine, in Transubstantia
tion. The sensible body remains the same after consecra
tion that it was before. The change is in the essence or
substance, or the intelligible body, and hence the appropri
ateness of the term transubstantiation to express the
change which takes place at the words of consecration.
Only the intelligible body, that is, what is non-sensible in
the elements bread and wine, is transubstantiated, and yet
their real body is changed, and the real body of our Lord
takes its place. The non-sensible or invisible body, the in
telligible body, is then, in either case, assumed by the sacred
mystery to be the real body ; and hence, supposing us right
in our assumption that our body remains always the same in
spite of the molecular changes — which was evidently the
-doctrine of St. Augustine — there is nothing in science or
the profoundest philosophy to show that either transubstan
tiation or the resurrection of the flesh is impossible, or that
God may not effect either consistently with his own immu
table nature, if he sees proper to do it. Nothing aids the
philosopher so much as the study of the great doctrines and
mysteries of Christianity, as held and taught by the church.
The distinction between seeing and intellectually appre
hending, and therefore between the visible body and the
intelligible body, asserted and always carefully observed by
St. Augustine when treating of the Blessed Eucharist, be
longs to a profounder philosophy than is now generally cul
tivated. Our prevailing philosophy, especially outside of
the church, recognizes no such distinction. It is true, we
are told, that the senses perceive only the sensible proper
ties or qualities of things ; that they never perceive the es
sence or substance ; but then the essence or substance is
supposed to be a mere abstraction with no intelligible
properties or qualities, or a mere substratum of sensible
properties and qualities. The sensible exhausts it, and be-

390 SPIRITUALISM AND MATERIALISM.

yond what the senses proclaim the substance has no quality
or property, and is and can be the subject of no predicate.
This is a great mistake. The sensible properties and quali
ties are real, that is, are not false or illusory ; but they are
real only in the sensible order, or the mimesis, as Gioberti,
after. Plato and some of the Greek fathers, calls it in his
posthumous works. The intelligible substance is the thing
itself, and has its own intelligible properties and qualities,
which the sensible only copies, imitates, or mimics. All
through nature there runs, above the sensible, the intelligi
ble, in which is the highest created reality, with its own at
tributes and qualities, which must be known before we can
claim to know any thing as it really is or exists. "We do not
know this in the case of body or matter ; we do not and
cannot know what either really is, and can really know of
either only its sensible properties.

We know that if matter exists at all, it must have an es
sence or substance ; but what the substance really is human
science has not learned and cannot learn. We really know,
then, of matter in itself no more than we do of spirit, ex
cept that matter has its sensible copy, which spirit has not.
Matter, as to its substance, is supersensible, and as to the
essence or nature of its substance is superintelligible, as is
spirit ; and we only know that it has a substance ; and of
substance itself, we can only say, if it exists, it is a vis
activa, as opposed to nuda potentia, which is a mere possi
bility, and no existence at all. Such being the case, we
agree with Professor Huxley, that neither spiritualism nor
materialism is, in his sense, admissible, and that each is a
philosophical error, or, at least, an unprovable hypothesis.

But here our agreement ends and our divergence begins.
The Holy See has required the traditionalists to maintain
that the existence of God, the immateriality of the soul,
and the liberty of man can be proved with certainty by rea
son. We have always found the definitions of the church
our best guide in the study of philosophy, and that we can
never run athwart her teaching without finding ourselves
at odds with reason and truth. We are always sure that
when our theology is unsound our philosophy will be bad.
There is a distinction already noted between spirit and mat
ter, which is decisive of the whole question, as far as it is a
question at all. Matter has, and spirit has not, sensible prop
erties or qualities. These sensible properties or qualities-
do not constitute the essence or substance of matter, which

SPIRITUALISM AND MATERIALISM. 391

we have seen is not sensible, but they distinguish it from
spirit, which is non-sensible. This difference, in regard to
sensible qualities and properties, proves that there must be a
difference of substance, that the material substance and the
immaterial substance are not, and cannot be one and the
same substance, although we know not what is the essence
or nature of either.

We take matter here in the sense of that which has prop
erties or qualities perceptible by the senses, and spirit or
spiritual substance as an existence that has no such proper
ties or qualities. The Holy See says the immateriality, not
spirituality, of the soul, is to be proved by reason. The
spirituality of the soul, except in the sense of immateriality,
cannot be proved or known by philosophy, but is simply a
doctrine of divine revelation, and is known only by that an
alogical knowledge called faith. All that we can prove or
assert by natural reason, is, that the soul is immaterial, or not
material in the sense that matter has for its sign the mimesis,
or sensible properties or qualities. We repeat, the sensible
is not the material substance, but is its natural sign. So that,
where the sign is wanting, we know the substance is not pres
ent and active. On the other hand, where there is a force
undeniably present and operating without the sign, we know
at once that it is an immaterial force or substance.

That the soul is not material, therefore is an immaterial
substance, we know ; because it has none of the sensible signs
or properties of matter. We cannot see, hear, touch, smell,
nor taste it. The very facts materialists allege to prove it
material, prove conclusively, that, if any thing, it is imma
terial. The soul has none of the attributes or qualities that
are included, and has others which evidently are not includ
ed, in the definition of matter. Matter, as to its substance,
is a vis activa, for whatever exists at all is an active force ;
but it is not a force or substance that thinks, feels, wills, or
reasons. It has no sensibility, no mind, no intelligence, no
heart, no soul. But animals have sensibility and intelli
gence ; have they immaterial souls ? Why not ? We have
no serious difficulty in admitting that animals have soulsy
only not rational and immortal souls. Soul, in them, is not
spirit, but it may be immaterial. Indeed, we can go further,
and concede an immaterial soul, not only to animals but to
plants, though, of course, not an intelligent or even a sensi
tive soul; for if plants, or at least some plants, are contractile
and slightly mimic sensibility in animals, nothing proves-

392 SPIRITUALISM AND MATERIALISM.

that they are sensitive. We have no proof that any living'
organism, vegetable, animal, or human, is or can be a pure
ly material product. Professor Huxley has completely
failed, as we have shown, in his effort to sustain his theory
of a physical or material basis of life, and physiologists pro
fess to have demonstrated by their experiments and discov
eries that no organism can originate in inorganic matter, or
in any possible mechanical, chemical, or electrical arrange
ment of material atoms, and is and can be produced, unless
by direct and immediate creation of God, only by genera
tion from a preexisting male and female organism. This is
true alike of plants, animals, and man. Nothing hinders
you, then, from calling, if you so wish, the universal basis of
life anirtia or soul, and asserting the psychical basis, in op
position to Professor Huxley's physical basis, of life ; only
you must take care and not assert that plants and animals
have human souls, or that soul in them is the same that it is
in man.

There are grave thinkers who are not satisfied with the
doctrine that ascribes the apparent and even striking marks
of mind in animals to instinct, a term which serves to cover
our ignorance, but tells us nothing ; still less are they satis
fied with the Cartesian doctrine that the animal is simply a
piece of mechanism moved or moving only by mechanical
springs and wheels like a clock or watch. Theologians are
reluctant chiefly, we suppose, to admit that animals have
souls, because they are accustomed to regard all souls, as to
their substance, the same, and because it has seemed to them
that the admission would bring animals too near to men, and
not preserve the essential difference between the animal na
ture and the human. But we see no difficulty in admitting
as many different sorts or orders of souls as there are different
orders, genera, and species of living organisms. God is spirit,
and the angels are spirits ; are the angels therefore identical in
substance with God ? The human soul is spiritual ; is there
no difference in substance between human souls and angels ?
We 'know that men sometimes speak of a departed wife,
child, or friend as being now an angel in heaven ; but they
are not to be understood literally, any more than the young
man in love with a charming young lady who does not ab
solutely refuse his addresses, when he calls her — a sinful
mortal, not unlikely — an angel. In the resurrection men
are like the angels of God, in the respect that they neither
marry nor are given in marriage ; but the spirits of the just

SPIRITUALISM AND MATERIALISM. 393

made perfect, that stand before the throne, are not angels ;
they are still human in their nature. If, then, we may ad
mit spirits of different nature and substance, why not souls,
.and, therefore, vegetable souls, animal souls, and human souls,
agreeing only in the fact that they are immaterial, or not
material substances or forces ?

It perhaps may be thought that to admit different orders
-of souls to correspond to the different orders, genera, and
species of organisms, would imply that the human soul is
generated with the body ; contrary to the general doctrine
of theologians, that the soul is created immediately ad hoc.
The Holy See censured Professor Frohschammer's doctrine
on the subject ; but the point condemned was, as we under
stand it, that the professor claimed creative power for man.
But it is not necessary to suppose, even if plants and animals
have souls, that the human soul is generated with the body,
in any sense inconsistent with faith. The church has defined
that " anima est forma corporis," that is, as we understand
it, the soul is the vital or informing principle, the life of the
body, without which the body is dead matter. The organ
ism generated is a living not a dead organism, and therefore
if the soul is directly and immediately created ad hoc, the
-creative act must be consentaneous with the act of genera
tion, a fact which demands a serious modification of the
medical jurisprudence now taught in our medical schools.
.Some have asserted for man alone a vegetable soul, an ani
mal soul, and a spiritual soul, but this is inadmissible ; man
has simply a human soul, though capable of yielding to the
grovelling demands of the flesh as well as to the higher
promptings of the spirit.

But we have suffered ourselves to be drawn nearer to the
borders of the land of impenetrable mysteries than we in
tended, and we retrace our steps as hastily as possible. Our
readers will understand that what we have said of the souls
-of plants and animals is said only as a possible concession,
but not set forth as a doctrine we do or design to maintain ;
for it lies too near the province of revelation to be settled by
philosophy. All we mean is that we see on the part of rea
son no serious objection to it. Perhaps it may be thought
that we lose, by the concession, the argument for the im
mortality of the soul drawn from its simplicity ; but, even if
BO, we are not deprived of other, and to our mind, much
stronger arguments. But it may be said all our talk about
.souls is wide of the mark, for we have not yet proved that

SPIRITUALISM AND MATERIALISM.

man is or has a soul distinguishable from the body and
which does or can survive its dissolution, and that our -inni
ment only proves that, if a man has a soul, it is immaterial
I he materialist denies that there is any soul in man distinct
trom the body, and maintains that the mental phenomena
which we ascribe to an immaterial soul, are the effects of
material organization. But that is for him to prove, not for
us to disprove. Organization can give to matter no new
properties or qua ities, as aggregation can o-ivo only the sum
Of the individuals aggregated. Matter we have 'taken all
along, as all the world takes it, as a substance that has prop-
erties and qualities perceptible bv the senses, and it has no
meaning except so far as so perceptible. Any active force
that has no mimesis or sensible qualities, properties or attri
butes is an immaterial, not a material substance. That man
is or has an active force that feels, thinks, reasons, wills we
know as well as we know any tiling ; indeed, better than we
know anv thing else. These acts or operations are not ope
rations ot a material substance. AVe know that they are not,
trom the tact that they are not sensible properties or quali
ties, and therefore there must be in man an active force or
substance that is not material, but immaterial. Material sub
stance is, we grant, a r^ aetira ; but if it has properties or
qualities, it has no faculties. It acts, but it acts only ad fl'nem
or to an end, never 'iw^rnuw. or for an end foreseen and
deliberately willed or chosen. Kut the force that man has
or is, lias faculties, not simply properties or qualities, and
can and does act deliberately, with foresight and choice, for
Hence, it is not and cannot be a substance included
in the definition of matter.

That this immaterial soul, now united to body and active-
only m union with matter, survives the dissolution of the
body and is immortal, is another question, and is not proved
m our judgment, by proving its immateriality. There is aii
important text in Ecclesiastes, iii, i>i, which would seem to
have some bearing on the assumption that the immortality
ot the soul is really a truth of philosophy as well as of reve
lation. " \\ ho knoweth if the spirit of the children of Vdam
ascend upward and if the spirit of the beasts descend down-
ward '. The doubt is not as to the immortality of the soul
but as to the ability of reason without revelation to demon
strate it. Certainly, reason can demonstrate its possibility
and that nothing warrants its denial. The doctrine, in some
form, has always been believed by the human race/whether

n AND MAI i IM AI.I-M. :;:»:»

savage or civili/ed, l»arl>an>us or refined, ;ui<l has heen denied
only by exceptional individuals in except ioiial epochs. This
proves eit her that it is a, dictate of universal reason, or a doc
trine of a revelation made to man in tbe beginning, before
the dispersion of the human race commenced. In either
the reason for believing the doctrine would be sullieient ;
but we are disposed to take the latter alternative, and to
hold that the belief in the immortality of the soul, or of an
existence after death, originated in revelation made to our
first parents, and has been perpetuated and diffused by tra
dition, pure and integral with the patriarchs, the synagogue,
and the church ; but mutilated, corrupted, and travestied
with the cultivated as well as with the uncultivated heathen.
With the heathen Satan played his pranks with the tradi
tion, as he is doing with it with the spiritists in our own
times.

Hut if the belief originated in revelation and is a doctrine
of faith rather than of science, yet is it not repugnant to sci
ence, and reason has much to urge in its support. The im
materiality of the soul implies its unity and simplicity,«md
therefore it cannot undergo dissolution, which is the death of
the body. Its dissolution is impossible, because it is a mon
ad, having attributes and qualities, but not made up by the
combination of parts. It is the form of the body, that is, it
vivifies the organic or central cell, and gives to the organism
its life, instead of drawing its own life from it. Science,
then, has nothing from which to infer that it ceases to exist
when the body dies. The death of the body does not neces-
sarily imply its destruction. True, we have here only nega
tive proofs, but negative proofs are all that is needed, in me
case of a doctrine of tradition, to satisfy the most exacting
reason. The soul may be extinguished with the body, but
\ve cannot say that it is without proof. Left to our unassist
ed reason, we could not say that the soul of the animal ex-
pi n-s with its body. Indeed, the Indian does not believe it,
and therefore buries with the hunter his favorite dog, to ac
company him in the happy hunting-grounds.

The real matter to be proved is not that the soul can or does
^urvive the body, but that it dies with the body. We have
Been that it is distinguishable from the body, doesnotdraw its
life from the bodv, but imparts life to it ; how then conclude
that it die> with it? We have not a particle of proof, and
not a single fact from which we can logically infer that it
does so die. What right then has any one to say that it doe- '.

•396 SPIRITUALISM AND MATERIALISM.

The laboring oar is in the hands of those who assert that the
soul dies with the body, and it is for them to prove what
they assert, not for us to disprove it. The real affirmative
in the case is not made by those who assert the immortality
of the soul, but those who assert its mortality. The very
term immortal is negative, and simply denies mortality.
Life is always presumptive of the continuance of life, and
the continuance of the life of the soul must be presumed in
the absence of all proofs of its death.

We have seen that the immateriality, unity, and simplic
ity of the soul prove that it does not necessarily die with
the body, but that it may survive it. The fact that God has
written his promise of a future life in the very nature and
destiny of the soul, is for us a sufficient proof that the soul
does not die with the body. That God is, and is the first and
final cause of all existences, is a truth of science as well as
•of revelation. He has created all things by himself, and for
himself. He then must be their last end, and therefore their
supreme good, according to their several natures. He has
•created man with a nature that nothing short of the posses
sion of himself as his supreme good can satisfy. In so creat
ing man, he promises him in his nature the realization of this
good, that is, the possession of himself as final cause, unless
forfeited and rendered impossible by man's own fault. To
return to God as his supreme good without being absorbed
in him, is man's destiny promised in his very constitution.
But this destiny is not realized nor realizable in this life, and
therefore there must be another life to fulfil what he prom
ises, for no promise of God, however made, can fail. This
argument we regard as conclusive.

The resurrection of the flesh, the reunion of the soul and
body, future happiness as a reward of virtue, and the misery
•of those who through their own fault fail of their destiny,
as a punishment for sin, &c., are matters of revelation or
theology as distinguished from philosophy, and do not re
quire to be treated here, any further than to say, if reason
has little to say for them, it has nothing to say against them.
They belong to the mysteries of faith which, though never
•contrary to reason, are above it, in an order transcending its
domain.

We have thus far treated spiritualism and materialism from
the point of view of philosophy, not from that of psycholo
gy, or of our faculties. The two doctrines, as they prevail
to-day, are simply psychological doctrines. The partisans

SPIRITUALISM AND MATERIALISM. 39T

of the one say that the soul has no faculty of knowing any
but material objects, and therefore assert materialism ; the
partisans of the other say that the soul has a faculty by which
she apprehends immediately immaterial or spiritual objects
or truths, and hence they assert what goes by the name of
spiritualism, which may or may not deny the existence of
matter. Descartes and Cousin assert the cognition of both
spirit and matter, but as independent each of the other ;
Collier and Berkeley deny that we have any cognition of mat
ter, and therefore deny its existence, save in the mind. The
truth, we hold, lies with neither. The soul has no direct in
tuition of the immaterial or intelligible. We use intuition
here in the ordinary sense, as an act of the soul — knowing by
looking on, or immediately beholding ; that is, in the sense
of intelligible as distinguished from sensible perceptions-
intellection, as some say, as distinguished from sensation.
This empirical intuition, as we call it, is very distinct from
that intuition a priori by which the ideal formula is affirm
ed, for that is the act of the divine Being himself, creating
the mind, and becoming himself the light thereof. But that
constitutes the mind, and is its object, not its act. No
doubt, the intellectual principles of all reality and of all sci
ence are affirmed in that intuition a priori, and hence these
principles are ever present to the soul as the basis of all in
telligible as well as of all sensible experience. Yet they are
asserted by the mind's own act only as sensibly represented,
according to the peripatetic maxim, " Nihil est in intellectu,
ojuod prius non fuerit in sensu." The mind has three facul
ties, sensibility, intellect, and will, but it is itself one, a sin
gle vis or force, and never acts with one faculty alone, wheth
er it feels, thinks, or wills ; and, united as it is in this life
with the body, it never acts as body alone or as spirit alone.
There are then no intellections without sensation, nor sensa
tions without intellection ; purely noetic truth, therefore,
can never be grasped save through a sensible medium.

We have already explained this with regard to material
objects, in which the substance, though supersensible, has its
sensible sign, through which the mind reaches it. But im
material or ideal objects are, as we have seen, precisely those
which have no sensible sign of their own — properties or
qualities perceptible by the senses. For this order of truth
the only sensible representation is language, which is the
sensible sign or symbol of immaterial or ideal truth. We ar
rive at this order of reality or truth only through the m«>-

398 SPIRITUALISM AND MATERIALISM.

dium of language which embodies it ; that is to say, only
through the medium of tradition, or of a teacher. So far we
accord with the traditionalists. We do not believe that, if
God had left men in the beginning without any instruction
or language in which the ideas are embodied, they would
ever have been able to assert the existence of God, the im
materiality of the soul, and the liberty or free will of man —
the three great ideal truths which the Holy See requires us
to maintain can be proved with certainty by reason ; and we
do not hold that, like the revealed mysteries, they are supra-
rational truth, and to be taken only on the authority of a
supernatural revelation. If God had not infused the knowl
edge of them into the first of the race along with language,
which he also infused into Adam, we should never by our
reason and instincts alone have found them out, or distinctly
apprehended them ; but being taught them, or finding them
expressed in language, we are able to verify or prove them
with certainty by our natural reason, in which respect we
accord with those whom the traditionalists call rationalists.
We have studiously avoided, as far as possible, the meta
physics of the subject we have been considering, and perhaps
have, in consequence, kept too near its surface ; but we think
we have established our main point, that neither spiritualism
nor materialism, taken exclusively, is philosophically defen
sible. We are able to distinguish between spirit and matter,
but we can deny the existence or the activity, according to
its own nature, of neither. We know matter by its sensible
properties or qualities. We know spirit only as sensibly rep
resented by language. Let language be corrupted, and our
knowledge of ideal or non-sensible truth, or philosophy, will
also be corrupted, mutilated, or perverted. This will be still
more the case with the superintelligible truth supernaturally
revealed, which is apprehensible only through the medium
of language. Hence, St. Paul is careful to admonish St.
Timothy to hold fast " the form of sound words," and hence,
too, the necessity, if God makes us a revelation of spiritual
things, that he should provide an infallible living teacher to
preserve the infallibility of the language in which it is made.
We may see here, too, the reason why the infallible church
is hardly less necessary to the philosopher than to the theo
logian. Where faith and theology are preserved in their
purity and integrity, philosophy will not be able to stray far
from the truth, and where philosophy is sound, the sciences
will not long be unsound. The aberrations of philosophy

SPIRITUALISM AND MATERIALISM.

are due almost solely to the neglect of philosophers to study
it in its relation with the dogmatic teaching of the church.

Some of our dear and revered friends in France and else
where are seeking, as the cure for the materialism which is
now so prevalent, to revive the spiritualism of the seven
teenth century. But the materialism they combat is only
the reaction of the mind against that exaggerated spiritualism
which they would revive. Where there are two real forces,
each equally evident and equally indestructible, you can only
alternate between them, till you find the term of their syn
thesis, and are able to reconcile and harmonize them. The
spiritualism defended by Cousin in France has resulted only
in the recrudescence of materialism. The trouble now is,
that matter and spirit are presented in our modern systems
as antagonistic and naturally irreconcilable forces. The duty
of philosophers is not to labor to pit one against the other,
or to give the one the victory over the other ; but to save
both, and to find out the middle term which unites them.
We know there must be somewhere that middle term ; for
both extremes are creations of God, who makes all things by
number, weight, and measure, and creates always after the
logic of his own essential nature. All his works, then, must
be logical and dialectically harmonious.

Whether we have indicated this middle term or not, we
have clearly shown, we think, that it is a mistake to suppose
the two terms are not in reality mutually reconcilable.
Nothing proves that, as creatures of God, each in its own or
der and place is not as sacred and necessary as the other.
We do not know the nature or essence of either, nor can we
say in what, as to this nature and essence, the precise differ
ence between them consists ; but we know that in our pres
ent life both are united, and that neither acts without the
other. All true philosophy must then present them not as
opposing, but as harmonious and concurring forces.

We do not for ourselves ever apply the term spiritualism
to a purely intellectual philosophy. We do not regard the
words spirit and soul as precisely synonymous. St. Paul,
Heb. iv. 12, says : " The word of God is living and effect
ual, . . . reaching unto the division of the soul and the
spirit, or, as the Protestant version has it, " quick and pow
erful, .... piercing even to the dividing asunder of
soul and spirit." There is evidently, then, however closely
related they may be, a distinction between the soul and the
spirit. Hence there may be soul that is not spirit, which

400 SPIRITUALISM AND MATERIALISM.

was generally held by the ancients. The Greeks had their
Wvxij and Hvevjua, and the Latins their anima and spiritus.
The term spirit, when applied to man, seems to us to desig
nate the moral powers rather than the intellectual, and the-
moral powers or faculties are those which specially distin
guish man from animals. St. Paul applies the term spiritual
uniformly in a moral sense, and usually, if not always, to men
born again of the Holy Ghost, or the regenerated, and to the
influences and gifts of the Holy Spirit ; that is, to designate the
supernatural character, gifts, graces, and virtues of those who
have been translated into the kingdom of God and are fel
low-citizens of the commonwealth of Christ, or the Christian
republic. Hence, we shrink from calling any intellectual
philosophy spiritualism. If it touches philosophy, as it un
doubtedly does — since grace supposes nature, and a man
must be born into the natural order before he can be born
again into the supernatural order, or regenerated by the
Spirit — it rises into the region of supernatural sanctity, into
which no man by his natural powers can enter ; for it is a
sanctity that places one on the plane of a supernatural destiny.
But even taken in this higher sense, there is no antago
nism between spirit and matter. There is certainly a strug
gle, a warfare that remains through life ; but the struggle is-
not between the soul and the body ; it is, as is said, between
the higher and inferior powers of the soul, between the spir
it and concupiscence, between the law of the mind, which
bids us labor for spiritual good which will last for ever, and
the law in the members, which looks only to the good of the
body, in its earthly relations. The saints, who chastise, mor
tify, macerate the body by their fastings, vigils, and scourg-
ings, do not do it on the principle that the body is evil, or
that matter is the source of evil. There is a total difference
in principle between Christian asceticism and that of the Pla-
tonists, who hold that evil originates in the intractableness-
of matter, that holds the soul imprisoned as in a dungeon,
and from which it sighs and struggles for deliverance. The'
Christian knows that our Lord himself assumed flesh and re
tains for ever his glorified body. He believes in the resur
rection of the body and its future everlasting reunion with
the soul. Christ, dying in a material body, has redeemed
both matter and spirit. Hence we venerate the relics of
our Lord and his saints, and believe matter maybe hallowed.
In our Lord all opposites are reconciled, and universal peace
is established.

HEREDITARY GENIUS.'

[From the Catholic World for September, 1870.]

MR. GALTON is what in these days is called a scientist, or
cultivator of the physical sciences, whose pretension is to
confine themselves strictly to the field of the sciences as dis
tinguished from science ; to assert nothing but positive facts
and the laws of their production arid operation, ascertained
by careful observation and experiment, and induction there
from. Their aim would seem to be to explain all the facts
or phenomena of the universe by means of second causesr
and to prove that man is properly classed with animals, or is-
only an animal developed or completed, not an animal trans
formed and specificated by a rational soul, which is defined
by the church to be forma corporis.

Between the scientists and philosophers, or those who cul
tivate not the special sciences, but the science of the sciences,
and determine the principles to which the several special sci
ences must be referred in order to have any scientific char
acter or value, there is a long-standing quarrel, which grows
fiercer and more embittered every day. We are far from
pretending that the positivists or Comtists have mastered all
the so-called special sciences ; but they represent truly the
aims and tendencies of the scientists, and of what by a strange
misnomer is called philosophy ; so called, it would seem, be
cause philosophy it is not. Philosophy is the science of prin
ciples, as say the Greeks, or of first principles, as say the
Latins, and after them the modern Latinized nations. But
Herbert Spencer, Stuart Mill, and the late Sir William Ham
ilton, the ablest representatives of philosophy as generally re
ceived by the English-speaking world, agree witn the Comt
ists or positivists in rejecting first principles from the do
main of science, and in relegating theology and metaphysics-
to the region of the unknown and the unknowable. Their
labors consequently result, as Sir William Hamilton himself
somewhere admits, in universal nescience, or, as we say, ab
solute nihilism or nullism.

*1. Hereditary Genius, its Laws and its Consequences. By FRAN ci 9-
GALTON, F. II. S., &c. New York: 1870.

2. Hereditary Genius. An Analytical Review. From the Journal of
Psychological Medicine, April, 1870. New York : 1870.

Vol. IX.- 26 401

402 HEREDITARY GENIUS.

This result is not accidental, but follows necessarily from
what is called the Baconian method, which the scientists fol
low, and which is, in scholastic language, concluding the uni
versal from the particular. Now, in the loojic we learned as
a school-boy, and adhere to in our old age, this is simply im
possible. To every valid argument it is necessary that one
of the premises, called the major premise, be a universal
principle. Yet the scientists discard the universal from their
premises, and from two or more particulars, or particular
facts, profess to draw a valid universal conclusion, as if any
conclusion broader than the premises could be valid ! The
physico-theologians are so infatuated with the Baconian meth
od that they attempt, from certain facts which they dis
cover in the physical world, to conclude, by way of induc
tion, the being and attributes of God, as if any thing con
cluded from particular facts could be any thing but a partic
ular fact. Hence, the aforenamed authors, with Professor
Huxley at their tail, as well as Kant in his GritiJc der rei-
nen Vernunft, have proved as clearly and as conclusively as
any thing can be proved that a causative force, or causality,
cannot be concluded by way either of induction or of deduc
tion from any empirical facts, or facts of which observation
can take note. Yet the validity of every induction rests on
the reality of the relation of cause and effect, and the fact
that the cause actually produces the effect.

Yet our scientists pretend that they can, from the obser
vation and analysis of facts, induce a law, and a law that will
liold good beyond the particulars observed and analyzed. But
they do not obtain any law at all ; and the laws of nature,
about which they talk so learnedly, are not laws, but simply
facts. Bring a piece of wax to the fire and it melts, hence
it is said to be a law that wax so brought in proximate rela
tion with fire will melt ; but this law is only the particular
fact observed, and the facts to which you apply it are the
identical facts from which you have obtained it. The inves
tigation, in all cases where the scientists profess to seek the
law, is simply an investigation to find out and establish the
identity of the facts, and what they call the law is only the
assertion of that identity, and never extends to facts not iden
tical, or to dissimilar facts.

Take mathematics ; as far as the scientist can admit mathe
matics, they are simply identical propositions piled on iden
tical propositions, and the only difference between Newton
and a plough-boy is, that Newton detects identity where the

HEREDITARY GENIUS. 403

plough-boy does not. Take what is called the law of gravi
tation ; it is nothing but the statement of a fact, or a class of
facts observed, and the most that it tells us is, that if the
facts are identical, they are identical — that is, they bear such
and such relations to one another. But let your positivist
attempt to explain transcendental mathematics, and he is all
at sea, if he does not borrow from the ideal science or philos
ophy which he professes to discard. How will the geome
trician explain his infinitely extended lines, or lines that may
be infinitely extended ? A line is made up of a succession
of points, and therefore of parts, and nothing which is made
up of parts is infinite. The line may be increased or dimin
ished by the addition or subtraction of points, but the infinite
cannot be either increased or diminished. Whence does the
mind get this idea of infinity ? The geometrician tells us
the line may be infinitely extended — that is, it is infinitely
possible ; but it cannot be so unless there is an infinite ground
on which it can be projected. An infinitely possible line
can be asserted only by asserting the infinitely real, and there
fore the mind, unless it had the intuition of the infinitely
real, could not conceive of a line as capable of infinite exten
sion. Hence the ancients never assert either the infinitely
possible or the infinitely real. There is in all gentile science,
or gentile philosophy, no conception of the infinite; there is
only the conception of the indefinite.

This same reasoning disposes of the infinite divisibility of
matter still taught in our text-books. The infinite divisibil
ity of matter is an infinite absurdity ; for it implies an infin
ity of parts or numbers, which is really a contradiction in
terms. We know nothing that better illustrates the unsound-
ness of the method of the scientists. Here is a piece of mat
ter. Can you not divide it into two equal parts ? Certainly.
Can you do the same by either of the halves? Yes. And
by the quarters ? Yes. And thus on ad infinitum f Where,
then, is the absurdity ? None as long as you deal with only
finite quantities. The absurdity is in the fact that the infi
nite divisibility of matter implies an infinity of parts ; and
an infinity of parts, an infinity of numbers ; and numbers
and every series of numbers may be increased by addition,
and diminished by subtraction. An infinite series is im
possible.

The moment the scientists leave the domain of particulars
or positive facts, and attempt to induce from them a law,
their induction is of no value. Take geology. The geolo-

404: HEREDITARY GENIUS.

gist finds in that small portion of the globe which he has ex
amined certain facts, from which he concludes that the globe
is millions and millions of ages old. Is his conclusion scien
tific ? Not at all. If the globe was in the beginning in a
certain state, and if the structural and other changes which
are now going on have been going on at the same rate from
the beginning — neither of which suppositions is provable —
then the conclusion is valid ; not otherwise. Sir Charles
Lyell, if we recollect aright, calculated that, at the present
rate, it must have taken at least a hundred and fifty thousand
years to form the delta of the Mississippi. Officers of the
United States army have calculated that a little over four
thousand years would suffice.

So of the antiquity of man on the globe. The scientist
finds what he takes to be human bones in a cave along with
the bones of certain long since extinct species of animals,
and concludes that man was contemporary with the said ex
tinct species of animals ; therefore man existed on the globe
man}T, nobody can say how many, thousand years ago. But
two things render the conclusion uncertain. It is not cer
tain from the fact that their bones are found together that
man and these animals were contemporary; and the date
when these animals became extinct, if extinct they are, is not
ascertained nor ascertainable. They have discovered traces
in Switzerland of lacustrian habitations; but these prove
nothing, because history itself mentions " the dwellers on the
lakes," and the oldest history accepted by the scientists is
not many thousand years old. Sir Charles Lyell finds, or
supposes he finds, stone knives and axes, or what he takes to
be stone knives and axes, deeply embedded in the earth in the
valley of a river, though at some distance from its present bed;
and thence concludes the presence of man on the earth for
a period wholly irreconcilable with the received biblical
chronology. But supposing the facts to be as alleged, they
do not prove any thing, because we cannot say what changes
by floods or other causes have taken place in the soil of the
locality, even during the period of authentic history. Others
conclude from the same facts that men were primitively sav
ages, or ignorant of the use of iron. But the most they prove
is that, at some unknown period, certain parts of Europe
were inhabited by a people who used stone knives and axes ;
but whether because ignorant of iron, or because unable from
their poverty or their distance from places where they were
manufactured to procure similar iron utensils, they give us no*

HEREDITARY GENIUS. 405

information. Instances enough are recorded in history of
the use of stone knives by a people who possessed knives
made of iron. Because in our day some Indian tribes use
bows and arrows, are we to conclude that firearms are un
known in our age of the world ?

What the scientists offer as proof is seldom any proof at
all. If an hypothesis they invent explains the known facts
of a case, they assert it as proved, and therefore true. What
fun would they not make of theologians and philosophers,
if they reasoned as loosely as they do themselves? Before
we can conclude an hypothesis is true because it explains the
known facts in the case, we must prove, 1st, that there are
and can be no 'facts in the case not known ; and, 2d, that
tin TO is no other possible hypothesis on which they can be
explained. We do not say the theories of the scientists with
regard to the antiquity of the globe and of man on its sur
face, nor that any of the geological and astronomical hypoth
eses they set forth are absolutely false ; we only say that
their alleged facts and reasonings do not prove them. The
few facts known might be placed in a very different light
by the possibly unknown facts ; and there are conceivable
any number of other hypotheses which would equally well
explain the facts that are known.

The book before us on Hereditary Genius admirably il
lustrates the insufficiency of the ^method and the defective
logic of the scientists. Mr. Galton, its author, belongs to the
school of which such men as Herbert Spencer, Darwin, Sir
John Lubbock, and Prof. Huxley are I3ritish chiefs, men
who disdain to recognize a self-existent Creator, and who see
no difficulty in supposing the universe self-evolved from
nothing, or in tracing intelligence, will, generous affection,
and heroic effort to the mechanical, chemical, and electrical ar
rangement and combination of the particles of brute matter.

Mr. Galton has written his book, he says, p. 1, to show
"that a man's natural abilities are derived from inheritance, under ex
actly the same limitations as are the form and the physical features of
the whole organic world. Consequently, as it is easy, notwithstanding
those limitations, to obtain by careful selection a permanent breed of
dogs or horses, gifted with peculiar powers of running, or of doing any
thing else, so it would be quite practicable to produce a highly-gifted race
[breed] of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive genera-
tions."

Mr. Galton, with an air of the most perfect innocence in
the world, places man in the category of plants and animals,

406 HEREDITARY GENIUS.

and in principle simply reproduces for our instruction the
Man-Plant, from which there is but a step to the Man-
Machine of the cynical La Mettrie, the atheistic professor
of mathematics in the university of Berlin, and friend of
Frederick the Great. The attempt to prove it is a subtle at
tempt to prove, in the name of science, that the soul, if soul
there be, is generated as well as the body, and that a man's
natural abilities are derived through generation from his or
ganization. The author from first to last gives no hint that
his doctrine is at war with Christian theology, with the free
dom of the human will, or man's moral responsibility for his
conduct, or that it excludes all morality, all virtue, and all sin,
and recognizes only physical good or evil. He would no
doubt reply to this that science is science, facts are facts, and
he is under no obligation to consider what theological doc
trines they do or do not contradict ; for nothing can be true
that contradicts science or is opposed to facts. That is op
posed to actual facts, or that contradicts real science, con
ceded ; for one truth can never contradict another. But the
author is bound to consider whether a theory or hypothesis
which contradicts the deepest and most cherished beliefs of
mankind in all ages and nations, and in which is the key to
universal history, is really science, or really is sustained by
facts. The presumption, as say the lawyers, is against it, and
for its acceptance it requires the clearest and the most irref
ragable proofs, and we are not sure that even any proofs
would be enough to overcome the presumptions against itr
founded as they are on reasons as strong and as conclusive
as it is in any case possible for the human mind to have.
The assertion that man's natural abilities originate in his or
ganization, and therefore that we may obtain a peculiar breed
of men as we obtain a peculiar breed of dogs or horces, is re
volting to the deepest convictions and the holiest and most
irrepressible instincts of every man, except a scientist, and
certainly can be reasonably received only on evidence that
excludes the possibility of a rational doubt.

Mr. Galton proves, or attempts to prove, his theory by
what he no doubt calls an appeal to facts. He takes from a
biographical dictionary the names of a few hundreds of men,
chiefly Englishmen, during the last two centuries, who have
been distinguished as statesmen, lawyers, judges, divines,
authors, &c., and finds that in a great majority of cases, as-
far as is known, they have sprung from families of more
than average ability, and, in some cases, from families which

HEREDITARY GENIUS. 407

Lave had some one or more members distinguished for sev
eral consecutive generations. This is really all the proof Mr.
Galton brings to prove his thesis ; and if lie has not adduced
more, it is fair to conclude that it is because no more was to
be had.

But the evidence is far from being conclusive. Even if
it be true that the majority of eminent men spring from fam
ilies more or less distinguished, it does not necessarily fol
low that they derive their eminent abilities by inheritance ;
for in those same families, born of the same parents, we find
other members whose abilities are in no way remarkable,
and in no sense above the common level. In a family of
half a dozen or a dozen members one will be distinguished
and rise to eminence, while the others will remain very or
dinary people. Of the Bonaparte family no member ap
proaches in genius the first Napoleon, except the present
Emperor of the French. Why these marked differences in
the children of the same blood, the same breed, the same
parents and ancestors ? If Mr. Galton explains the inferior
ity of the five or the eleven by considerations external or
independent of race or breed, why may not the superiority
of the one be explained by causes alike independent of
breed? Why are the natural abilities of one brother in
ferior to another's, since they are both born of the same par
ents? If a man's natural abilities are derived by inheritance
from organization, why is one superior to the other ? Every
day we meet occasion to ask similar questions. This fact
proves that there are causes at work, on which man's emi
nence or want of eminence depends, of which Mr. Galton's
theory takes no note, which escape the greatest scientists,
and at best can be only conjectured. But conjecture is not
science.

This is not all. As far as known, very eminent men have
sprung from parents of very ordinary natural abilities, as of
social position. The founders of dynasties and noble fami
lies have seldom had distinguished progenitors, and are usu
ally not only the first but the greatest of their line. The
present Sir Robert Peel cannot be named alongside of his
really eminent father, nor the present Duke of Wellington
be compared with his father, the Iron Duke. There is no
irivater name in history than that of St. Augustine, the emi
nent father and doctor of the church, a man beside whom in
genius and depth, and greatness of mind as well as tender
ness of heart, your Platos and Aristotles appear like men of

408 HEREDITARY GENIUS.

ordinary stature ; yet, though his mother was eminent for
her sanctity, his parents do not appear to have been gifted
with any extraordinary mental power. Instances are not rare,
•especially among the saints, of great men who have, so to
speak, sprung from nothing. Among the popes we may
mention Sixtus Quintus, and Hildebrand, St. Gregory YIL;
and among eminent churchmen we may mention St. Thomas
of Canterbury, Cardinal Ximenes, and Cardinal Wolsey.
The greatest and most gifted of our own statesmen have
sprung from undistinguished parents, as Washington, the
elder Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Jackson, Webster, Cal-
houn. Who dares pretend that every saint has had a saint
for a father or mother; that every eminent theologian or
philosopher has had an eminent theologian or philosopher
for his father ; or that every eminentT artist, whether in
painting, architecture, sculpture, or music, has been the son
•or grandson of an eminent artist ?

Then, again, who can say how much of a great man's
greatness is due to his natural abilities with which he was
born, and how much is due to the force of example, to fam
ily tradition, to education, to his own application, and the
concurrence of circumstances ? It is in no man's power to
tell, nor in any scientist's power to ascertain. It is a com
mon remark that great men in general owe their greatness
-chiefly to their mothers, and that, in the great majority of
•cases known, eminent men have gifted mothers, this, if a
fact, is against Mr. Gralton's theory ; for the father, not the
mother, transmits the hereditary character of the offspring,
the hereditary qualities of the line, if the physiologists are
to be believed. Hence nobility in all civilized nations fol
lows the father, not the mother. The fact of great men
owing their greatness more to the mother is explained by
her greater influence in forming the mind, in moulding the
•character, in stimulating and directing the exercise of her
son's faculties, than that of the father. It is as educator in
the largest sense that the mother forms her son's character
,and influences his destiny. It is her womanly instincts, af
fection, and care and vigilance, her ready sympathy, her love,
her tenderness, and power to inspire a noble -ambition, kin
dle high and generous aspirations in the breast of her son,
that do the work.

Even if it were uniformly true that great men have al
ways descended from parents remarkable for their natural
abilities, Mr. Galton's theory that genius is hereditary could

HEREDITARY GENIUS. 409

not DC concluded wiiu scieiiun
transmission of genius might ir
the empirical principles of the
sorted. All that could be asse

not be concluded with scientific certainty. The hereditary

" t indeed seem probable ; but, on
scientists, it could not be as-
asserted would be the relation of
concomitance or of juxtaposition, not the relation of cause
iind effect. The relation of cause and effect is not and can
not, as the scientists tell us, be empirically apprehended.
II«»\v can they know that the genius of the son is derived
hereditarily from the greatness of his progenitors ? From
the juxtaposition or concomitance of two facts empirically
apprehended there is no possible logic by which it can be in
ferred that the one is the cause of the other. Hence, Her
bert Spencer, Stuart Mill, Hamilton, Huxley, and the posi-
tivists follow Hume, and relegate, as we said, causes to the
region of the unknowable. In fact, the scientists, if they
speak of the relation of cause and effect, mean by it only
the relation of juxtaposition in the order of precedence and
consequence. Hence, on their own principles, though the
facts they assert and describe may be true, none of their con
clusions from them, or hypotheses to explain them, have or
can have any scientific validity. For, after all, there may
be a real cause on which the facts depend, and which de
mands an entirely different explanation from the one which
the scientists offer.

We refuse, therefore, to accept Mr. Galton's hypothesis
that genius is hereditary, because the facts he adduces are
not all the facts in the case, because there are facts which are
not consistent with it, and because he does not show and
cannot show that it is the only hypothesis possible for the
explanation even of the facts which he alleges. Even his
friendly and able reviewer, Dr. Meredith Clymer, concludes
his admirable analysis by saying, " A larger induction is nec
essary before any final decision can be had on the merits of
the question." This is the verdict of one of the most sci
entific minds in the United States, and it is the Scotch
verdict, not proven. Yet Mr. Galton would have us accept
his theory as science, and on its strength set aside the teach
ings of revelation and the universal beliefs of mankind. This
is the way of all non-Christian scientists of the day, and it is
because the church refuses to accept their unverified and un-
verifiable hypotheses, and condemns them for asserting them
.as true, that they accuse her of being hostile to modern sci
ence. They make certain investigations, ascertain certain
facts, imagine certain hypotheses, which are nothing but

410 HEREDITARY GENIUS.

conjectures, put them forth as science, and then demand
that she accept them, and give up her faith so far as incom
patible with them. A very reasonable demand indeed !

Press these proud scientists closely, and they will own
that as yet their sciences are only tentative, that as yet they
are not in a condition to prove absolutely their theories, oV
to verify their conjectures, but they are in hopes they soon
will be. At present, science is only in its infancy, it has
only just entered upon the true method of investigation ;.
but it is every day making surprising progress, and there is
no telling what marvellous conclusions it will soon arrive at.
All this might pass, if it did not concern matters of life and
death, heaven and hell. The questions involved are too se
rious to be sported with, too pressing to wait the slow and;
uncertain solutions of the tentative science which, during
six thousand years, has really made no progress in solving
them. The scientists retard science when they ask from it
the solution, either affirmative or negative, of questions-
which confessedly lie not in its province, and dishonor and
degrade it when they put forth as science their crude con
jectures, or their unverified and unverifiable hypotheses.
They, not we, are the real enemies of science, though it
would require a miracle to make them see it. Deluded mor
tals ! they start with assumptions that exclude the very pos
sibility of science, and then insist that what they assert or
deny shall be accepted by theologians and philosophers as
established with scientific certainty ! Surely the apostle must
have had them in mind when he said of certain men that,
" esteeming themselves wise, they became fools."

Genius is not hereditary in Mr. Galton's sense, nor are a
man's natural abilities derived by inheritance in the way he
would have us believe ; for both belong to the soul, not
to the body ; and the soul is created, not generated. Only the
body is generated, and only in what is generated is there natu
ral inheritance. All the facts Mr. Galton adduces we are pre
pared to admit ; but we deny his explanation. We accept,
with slight qualifications, his views as summed up by Dr.
Clymer in the following passage :

"The doctrine of the pretensions of natural equality in intellect, which
teaches that the sole agencies in creating differences between boy and
boy, and man and man, are steady application and moral effort, is daily
contradicted by the experiences of the nursery, schools, universities, and
professional careers. There is a definite limit to the muscular powers of
every man, which he cannot by any training or exertion overpass. It is-

Ill KEDITARY GENIUS. 411

only the novice gymnast who, noting his rapid daily gain of strength and
skill, believes in illimitable development; but he learns in time that his
maximum performance becomes a rigidly-determinate quantity. The
same is true of the experience of the student in the working of his men
tal powers. The eager 'boy at the outset of his career is astonished at
his rapid progress; he thinks for a while that every thing is within his
grasp; but he too soon finds his place among his fellows; he can beat
such and such of his mates, and run on equal terms with others, while
there will be always some whose intellectual and physical feats he cannot
approach. The same experience awaits him when he enters a larger field
of competition in the battle of life; let him work with all his diligence, he
cannot reach his object; let him have opportunities, he cannot profit by
them; he tries and is tried, and he finally learns his guage — what he can
do, and what lies beyond his capacity. He has been taught the hard les
son of his weakness and his strength; he comes to rate himself as the
world rates him; and he salves his wounded ambition with the conviction
that he is doing all his nature allows him. An evidence of the enormous
inequality between the intellectual capacity of men is shown in the pro
digious differences in the number of marks obtained by those who gain
mathematical honors at the University of Cambridge, England. Of the
four hundred or four hundred and fifty students who take their degrees
each year, about one hundred succeed in gaining honors in mathemat
ics, and these are ranged in strict order of merit. Forty of them have
the title of ' wrangler,' and to be even a low wrangler is a creditable
thing. The distinction of being the first in this list of honors, or ' sen
ior wrangler ' of the year, means a great deal more than being the fore
most mathematician of four hundred or four hundred and fifty men tak
en at haphazard. Fully one half the wranglers have been boys of mark
at their schools. The senior wrangler of the year is the chief of these
as regards mathematics. The youths start on their three "years' race
fairly, and their run is stimulated by powerful inducements; at the end
they are examined rigorously for five and a half hours a day for eight
days. The marks are then added up, and the candidates strictly rated
in a scale of merit. The precise number of marks got by the senior
wrangler, in one of the three years given by Mr. Galton, is 7634; by the
second wrangler, 4123; and by the lowest man in the list of honors, 237.
The senior wrangler, consequently, had nearly twice as many marks as
the second, and more than thirty-two times as many as the lowest man.
In the other examinations given, the results do not materially differ. The
senior wrangler, may, therefore, be set down as having thirty-two timea
the ability of the lowest men on the lists; or, as Mr. Galton, puts it, 'he
would be able to grapple with problems more than thirty-two times as
difficult; or, when dealing with subjects of the same difficulty, but in
telligible to all, would comprehend them more rapidly in, perhaps, the
square root of that proportion.' But the mathematical powers of the ul.
timate man on the honors-list, which are so low when compared with

412 HEREDITARY GENIUS.

those of the foremost man, are above mediocrity when compared with
the gifts of Englishmen generally; for, though the examination places
one hundred honor-men above him, it puts no less than three hundred
' poll-men ' below him. Admitting that two hundred out of three hun
dred have refused to work hard enough to earn honors, there will remain
one hundred who, had they done their possible, never could have got
them.

"The same striking intellectual differences between man and man
are found in whatever way ability may be tested, whether in statesman
ship, generalship, literature, science, poetry, art. The evidence furnished
by Mr. Galton's book goes to show in how small degree eminence in
.any class of intellectual powers can be considered as due to purely spe-
.cial faculties. It is the result of concentrated efforts made by men wide
ly gifted — of grand human animals ; of natures born to achieve great -
ness."

We are far from pretending that all men are born with
equal abilities, and that all souls are created with equal possi
bilities, or that every child comes into the world a genius in
germ. We believe that all men are born with equal natu
ral rights, and that all should be equal before the law, how
ever various and unequal may be their acquired or adven
titious rights ; but that is all the equality we believe in. No
special effort or training in the world, under the influence
of the most favorable circumstances, can make "every child
a St. Augustine, a St. Thomas, a Bossuet, a Newton, a Leib
nitz, a Julius Caesar, a Wellington, a Napoleon. As one star
differeth from another in glory, so does one soul differ from
another in its capacities on earth as in its blessedness in
heaven. Here we have no quarrel with Mr. Galton. We
are by no means believers in the late Robert Owen's doc
trine, that you can make all men equal if you will only sur
round them from birth with the same circumstances, and
•enable them to live in parallelograms.

We are prepared to go even further, and to recognize
that the distinction between noble and ignoble, gentle and
.simple, recognized in all ages and by all nations, is not
wholly unfounded. There is as great a variety and as great
,an inequality in families as in individuals. Aristocracy is
not a pure prejudice ; and though it has no political
privileges in this country, yet it exists here no less than else
where, and it is welLf or us that it does. No greater evil could
befall any country than to have no distinguished families
rising, generation after generation, above the common level;
no born leaders of the people, who stand head and shoui-

HEREDITARY GENIUS. 41 3:

ders above the rest ; and the great objection to democracy is,
that it tends to bring all down to a general average, and to
place the administration of public interests in the hands of
a low mediocrity, as our American experience, in some
measure, proves. The demand of the age for equality of
conditions and possessions is most mischievous. If all were
equally rich, all would be equally poor; and if all were at
the top of society, society would have no bottom, and would
be only a bottomless pit. If there were none devoted to
learning, no strength and energy of character above the mul
titude, society would be without leaders, and would soon
fall to pieces, as an army of privates without officers.

There is no doubt that there are noble lines, and the de
scendants of noble ancestors do, as a rule, though not invari
ably, surpass the descendants of plebeian or undistinguished
lines. The Stanleys, for instance, have been distinguished
in British history for at least fifteen generations. The pres
ent Earl Derby, the fifteenth earl of his house, is hardly-
inferior to his gifted father, and nobly sustains the honors
of his house. We expect more from the child of a good
family than from the child of a family of no account, and1
hold that birth is never to be decried or treated as a matter
of no importance. But we count it so chiefly because it secures
better breeding, and subjection to higher, nobler, and purer
formative influences, from the earliest moment. Example
and family traditions are of immense reach in forming the
character, and it is not a little to have constantly presented
to the consideration of the child the distinguished ability,
the eminent worth and noble deeds of a long line of illus
trious ancestors, especially in an age and country where blood
is highly esteemed, and the honorable pride of family
is cultivated. The honor and esteem in which a family has
been held for its dignity and worth through several genera
tions is a capital, an outfit for the son, secures him, in start
ing, the advantage of less well-born competitors, and all the
aid in advance of a high position and the good-will of the
community. More is exacted of him than of them ; he is
early made to feel th&t noblesse oblige, and that failure would
in his case be dishonor. He is thereby stimulated to greater
effort to succeed.

Yet we deny not that there is something else than all this
in blood. A man's genius belongs to his soul, and is no more
inherited than the soul itself. But man is not all soul, any
more than he is all body; body and soul are in close and

414 HEREDITARY GENIUS.

mysterious relation, and in this life neither acts without the
other. The man's natural abilities are psychical, not phys
ical, and are not inherited, because the soul is created, not
generated; but their external manifestation may depend, in
a measure, on organization, and organization 'is inherited.
Mr. G-alton's facts may, then, be admitted without our being
obliged to accept his theory. The brain is generally consid
ered by physiologists as the organ of the mind, and it may
be so, without implying that the brain secretes thought, will,
affection, as the liver secretes bile, or the stomach secretes
the gastric juice.

The soul ^is distinct from the body, and is its form, its
life, or its vivifying and informing principle; yet it uses the
body as the organ of its action. Hence, De Bonald defines man,
an intelligence that serves himself by organs, not an intelli
gence served by organs, as Plato said. The activity is in the
soul, not in the organs. The organ we call the eye does not
see ; the soul sees by means of the eye. So of the ear, the
smell, the taste, the touch. We speak of the five senses ;
but we should speak more correctly if we spoke, not of five
senses, but of five organs of sense ; for the sense is psychi
cal, and is one like the soul that senses through the organs.
In like manner, the brain appears to be the organ of the
mind, through which, together with the several nerves that
centre in it, the mind performs its various operations of
thinking, willing, reasoning, remembering, reflecting, &c.
The nature of the relation of the soul, which is one, simple,
and immaterial, with a material body with its various
organs, nervous and ganglionic systems, is a mystery
which we cannot explain. Yet we cannot doubt that
there is a reciprocal action and reaction of the soul and
body, or, at least, the bodily organs can and do offer,
at times, an obstacle to the external action of the soul.
We cannot by our will raise our arm, if it be paralyzed,
though our psychical power to will to raise it is not there
by effected. If the organs of seeing and hearing, the eye
and the ear, are injured or originally defective, our exter
nal sight and hearing are thereby injured or rendered de
fective ; but not in other psychical relations, as evinced by
the fact that when the physical defect is removed, or the
physical injury is cured, the soul finds no difficulty in man
ifesting its ordinary power of seeing or hearing. So we
may say of the other organs of sense, and of the body gener
ally, in so far as it is the organ of the soul, or used by the
soul in its external display or manifestation of its powers.

HEREDITARY GENIUS. 4:15

No doubt the organization may be more or less favorable
to this external display or manifestation, or that, under cer
tain conditions, and to a certain extent, the organization is
hereditary, or transmitted by natural generation. There may
be transmitted from parents or ancestors a healthy or dis
eased, a normal or a more or less abnormal organization ; and
so far, and in this sense, genius may be hereditary, and a
man's natural abilities may be derived by inheritance, as are
the form and features ; but only to this extent, and in this
sense — that is, as to their external display or exercise ; for a
man may be truly eloquent in his soul, and even in writing,
whose stammering tongue prevents him from displaying any
eloquence in his speech. Tne organization does not deprive
the soul of its powers. A man's power to will to raise his
arm is not lessened by the fact that his arm is paralyzed.
And in all ordinary cases, the soul is able, at least by the
help of grace, freely given to all, to overcome a vicious tem
perament, control, in the moral order, a defective organiza
tion, and maintain her moral freedom and integrity. It has
been proved that the deaf-mute can be taught to speak, and
that idiots or natural-born fools can be so educated as to be
able to exhibit no inconsiderable degree of intelligence.

We do not believe a word in Darwin's theory of natural
selection, for all the facts on which he bases it admit of a
different explanation ; nor in its kindred theory of develop
ment or evolution of species. One of our own collaborators
has amply refuted both theories, by showing that what these
theories assume to be the development or evolution of new
species, whether by natural selection or otherwise, is but a
reversion to the original type and condition, in like manner
as we have proved, over and over again, that the savage is
the degenerate, not the primeval man. It is not improba
ble that your African negro is the degenerate descendant of
a once over-civilized race, and that he owes his physical pe
culiarities to the fact that he has become subject, like the
animal world, to the laws of nature, which are resisted and
modified in their action by the superior races. "We do not
assert this as scientifically demonstrated, but as a theory
which is far better sustained by well-known facts and incon
trovertible principles than either the theory of development
or of natural selection.

Yet the soul as forma corporis has an influence, we say
not how much, on organization ; and high intellectual and
moral culture may modify it, and, other things being equal,

4:16 HEREDITARY GENIUS.

render it in turn more favorable to the external manifesta
tion of the inherent powers of the soul. This more favora
ble organization may be transmitted by natural generation
from parents to children, and, if continued through several
consecutive generations, it may give rise to noble families
and to races superior to the average. Physical habits are
transmissible by inheritance. This is not, as Darwin and
Gal ton suppose, owing to natural selection, but to the origi
nal mental and moral culture become traditional in certain
families and races, and to the voluntary efforts of the soul,
as is evident from the fact that when the culture is neglect
ed, and the voluntary efforts cease to be made, the superior
ity is lost, the organization becomes depraved, and the fam
ily or race runs out or drops into the ranks of the ignoble.
The blood, however blue, will not of itself alone suffice to
keep up the superiority of the family or the race ; nor will
marriages, however judicious, through no matter how many
consecutive generations, without the culture, keep up the
nobility, as Mr. Galton would have us believe ; for the su
periority of the blood depends originally and continuously
on the soul, its original endowments, and its peculiar train
ing or culture through several generations.

It is in this same way we explain the origin and contin
uance of national characteristics and differences. Climate
and geographical position count, no doubt, for something ;
but more in the direction they give to the national aims and
culture than in their direct effects on bodily organization.
It is not probable that the original tribes of Greece had any
finer organic adaptation to literature and the arts than had
the Scythian hordes from which they sprang ; but their cli- •
mate and geographical position turned their attention to
cultivation of the beautiful, and the continual cultivation of
the beautiful through several generations gave the Greeks
an organization highly favorable to artistic creations. Then,
again, Kome cultivated and excelled in the genius of law
and jurisprudence. But under Christian faith and culture,
the various nations of Europe became assimilated, and the
peculiar national characteristics under gentilism were in a
measure obliterated. They also revive as the nations under
Protestantism recede from Christianity and return to gen
tilism, and are held in check only by the reminiscences of
Catholicity, and by the mutual intercourse of nations kept
up by trade and commerce, literature and the arts.

The facts alleged by Mr. Galton and his brother material

HEREDITARY GENIUS. 417

ists are, therefore, explicable without impugning the doc
trine of the simplicity and immateriality of the soul, and
that the soul is created, not generated as is the body. They
are perfectly explicable without supposing our natural abili
ties originate in or are the result of natural organization.
They can be explained in perfect consistency with revela
tion, with the teachings of the church, and with the univer
sal beliefs of mankind. Thus it would be supreme unreason
to require us to reject the Gospel, or our holy religion, on
the strength of the unverified and un verifiable "hypoth
eses of the scientists, and degrade man, the lord of this low
er creation, to the level of the beasts that perish. The quar
rel we began by speaking of is in no sense a quarrel between
faith and reason, or revelation and science ; but simply a quar
rel between what is certain by faith and reason on the one side,
and the unverified and unverifiable hypotheses or conjectures
of the so-called scientists on the other. "We oppose none
of the real facts which the scientists set forth ; we oppose only
their unsupported theories and unwarranted inductions. We
conclude by reminding the scientists that others have studied
nature as well as they, and are as familiar with its facts and
as able to reason on them as they are, and yet have no diffi
culty in reconciling their science and their faith.

VOL. TT-27.

ORIGIN OF CIVILIZATION.*

[From the Catholic World for July, 1871.]

SIR JOHN LUBBOCK, though his name is not euphonious,
is, we understand, an English scientist, highly distinguished
and of no mean authority in the scientific world, as his father
was before him. He certainly is a man of large pretensions,
and of as much logical ability and practical good sense as we
have a right to expect in an English scientist. He, of course,
adopts the modern theory of progress, and maintains that
the savage is the type of the primitive man, and that he has
emerged from his original barbarism and superstition to his
present advanced civilization and religious belief and worship
by his own energy and persevering efforts at self -evolution
or development, without any foreign or supernatural instruc
tion or assistance.

One, Sir John contends, has only to study and carefully
ascertain the present condition of the various contemporary
savage tribes, or what he calls the " lower races," to know
what was the original condition of mankind, and from which
the superior races started on their tour of progress through
the ages; and one needs only to ascertain the germs of
civilization and religion which were in their original con
dition, to be able to comprehend the various stages of that
progress and the principles and means by which it has been
effected and may be carried on indefinitely beyond the point
already reached. Hence, in the volume before us the author
labors to present us a true picture of the present mental and
social condition of contemporary savages as that of the
primeval man. He assumes that the mental and social con
dition is that of the infancy of the human race, and by
studying it we can attain to the history of " pre-historic "
times, assist, as it were, if we may be pardoned the Gallicism,
at the earliest development of mankind, and trace step by
step the progress from their first appearance on the globe
upward to the sublime civilization of the nineteenth cen
tury — the civilization of the steam-engine, the cotton spinner

*The Origin of Civilization and the Primitive Condition of Man : Mental
and Social Condition of Savages. By Sir JOHN LUBBOCK, Bart., M. P., F.
R. 8., &c. New York: 1871.
418

ORIGIN OF CIVILIZATION. 419

and weaver, the steamboat, the steam-plough, the railway,
and the lightning-telegraph.

This theory, that finds in the savage the type of the
primitive man, is nothing very new. It was refuted by the
Lite Archbishop Wliately, by the Duke of Argyll in his
Primeval Man, and on several occasions by ourselves. The
facts Sir John adduces in the support of this theory, as far
as facts they are, had been adduced long ago, and were as
well known by us before we abandoned the theory as un
tenable, as they are by Sir John Lubbock or any of his
compeers. They may all, so far as they bear on religion, be
found summed up and treated at length in the work of
Benjamin Constant, La Religion consideree dans sa Source,
ses Developpements, et ses Formes, published in 1832, as
well as in a mass of German writers. Sir John has told us
nothing of the mental and social condition of savages that
we had not examined, we had almost said, before he was
born, and which we had supposed was not known by all men
with any pretension to serious studies. In fact, we grow
rather impatient as we grow old of writers who, because
they actually have learned more than they knew in their
cradles, imagine that they have learned so much more than
all the rest of mankind. No men try our patience more
than our scientific Englishmen, who speak always in a de
cisive tone, with an air of infallibility from which there
would seem to be no appeal, and yet utter only the veriest
commonplaces, old theories long since exploded, or stale
absurdities. We have no patience with such men as Herbert
Spencer, Huxley, and Darwin. We are hardly less impatient
of the scientists who in our own country hold them up to
our admiration and reverence as marvellous discoverers,
and as the great and brilliant lights of the age. We love
science, we honor the men who devote their lives to its
cultivation, but we ask that it be science, not hypothesis
piled on hypothesis, nor simply a thing of mere conjectures or
guesses.

The modern doctrine of progress or development, which
supposes man began in the lowest savage, if not lower still,
is not a doctrine suggested by any facts observed and classi
fied in men's history, nor is it a logical induction from any
class of known facts, but a gratuitous hypothesis invented
and asserted against the Biblical doctrine of creation, of
Providence, of original sin, and of the supernatural instruc
tion, government, redemption, and salvation of men. The

420 ORIGIN OF CIVILIZATION.

hypothesis is suggested by hostility to the Christian revela
tion, prior to the analysis and classification of any facts to
sustain it, and the scientists who defend it are simply in
vestigating nature, not in the interests of science properly
so-called, but, consciously or unconsciously, to find facts to
support an hypothesis which maybe opposed to both. Any
facts in nature or in history, natural or civil, political or
religious, that seem to make against Christian teaching, are
seized upon with avidity, distorted or exaggerated, and
paraded with a grand fanfaronade, sounding of trumpets,
beating of drums, and waving of banners, as if it were a
glorious triumph of man to prove that he is no better than
the beasts that perish ; while the multitude of facts which
are absolutely irreconcilable with it are passed over in
silence or quietly set aside, as of no account, or simply
declared to be anomalies, which science is not yet in a con
dition to explain, but, no doubt, soon will be, since it has
entered the true path, has found the true scientific methods,
and is headed ^ in the right direction. Science is yet in its
infancy. In its cradle it has strangled frightful monsters,
and, when full-grown, it will not fail to slay the hydra, and
rid the world of all its " chimeras dire." But while we do
not complain that your infantile or puerile science has not
done more, we would simply remind you, men of science,
that it is very unscientific to reason from what you confess
science has not yet done as if it had done it. Wait till it
has done it, before you bring it forward as a scientific achieve
ment.

"We confess to a want of confidence in this whole class of
scientists, for their investigations are not free and unbiassed \
their minds are prejudiced ; they are pledged to a theory in
advance, which makes them shut their eyes to the facts which
contradict it, and close their intelligence to the great prin
ciples of universal reason which render their conclusions in
valid. There are other scientists who have pushed their
investigations as far into nature and history as they have,
perhaps even further, who know and have carefully analyzed
all the facts they know or ever pretended to know, and yet
have come to conclusions the contrary of theirs, and find
nothing in the facts or phenomena of the universe that
warrant any induction not in accordance with Christian
faith, either as set forth in the Holy Scriptures or the defini
tions of the church. Why are these less likely to be really
scientific than they ? They are biassed by their Christian

ORIGTX OF CIVILIZATION. 421

faith, you say. Be it so : are you less biassed by your anti-
christian unbelief and disposition ? Besides, are you able to
gav that these have not in their Christian faith a key to the
real sense or meaning of the universe and its phenomena
which you have not, and therefore are much more likely to
be right than you ? Do you know that it is not so ? There
is no science where knowledge is wanting.

The unchristian scientists forget that they cannot conclude
against the Biblical or Christian doctrine from mere possi
bilities or even probabilities. They appeal to science against
it, and nothing can avail them as the basis of argument
against it that is not scientifically proved or demonstrated.
Their hypothesis of progress, evolution, or development is
unquestionably repugnant to the whole Christian doctrine
and order of thought. If it is true, Christianity is false.
They must then, before urging it, either prove Christianity
untrue or an idle tale, or else prove absolutely, beyond the
possibility of a rational doubt, the truth of their hypothesis.
It is not enough to prove that it may, for aught you know,
be true ; you must prove that it is true, and cannot be false.
Christianity is too important a fact in the world's history to
be set aside by an undemonstrated hypothesis. And it is
any tiling but scientific to conclude its falsity on the strength
of a simply possible or even probable hypothesis, not as yet
indeed proved, and of which the best you can say is that
you trust science will be able to prove it when once it is out
of its nonage. You cannot propose it at all, unless you have
scientifically demonstrated it, or previously disproved ali-
un<1<>- the Christian revelation. So long as you leave it
possible for me to hold the Christian faith without contra
dicting what is demonstrated to be true, you have alleged
nothing to the purpose against it, and cannot bring forward
your theory even as probable, far less as scientific ; for, if
it is possible that Christianity is true, it is not possible that
your hypothesis can be true, or even scientifically proved.
The scientists seem not to be aware of this, and seern to sup
pose that they may rank Christianity with the various heathen
superstitions, and set it aside by an unsupported theory or
a prejudice.

Let the question be understood. Christianity teaches us
that in the beginning God created heaven and earth, and all
things therein, visible and invisible, that he made man after
his own image and likeness, placed him in the garden of
Eden, gave him a law, that is, made him a revelation of his

422 ORIGIN OF CIVILIZATION.

will, instructed him in his moral and religious duty, estab
lished him in original justice, in a supernatural state, under
a supernatural providence, on the plane of a supernatural
destinv : that man prevaricated, broke the law given him,
lost his original justice, the integrity of his nature attached
thereto, and communion with his Maker, fell under the
dominion of the flesh, became captive to Satan, and subject
to death, moral, temporal, and eternal ; that God, of his own
goodness and mercy, promised him pardon and deliverance,
redemption and salvation, through his own Son made man,
who in due time was born of the Virgin Mary, suffered
under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, was dead and buried,
and on the third day rose again, ascended into heaven,
whence he shall come again, to judge the living and the
dead. This doctrine, in substance, was made to our first
parents in the garden, was preserved in the tradition of the
patriarchs, in its purity in the synagogue, and in its purity
and integrity in the Christian church founded on it, and
authorized and assisted by God himself to teach it to all
men and nations.

According to this doctrine, the origin of man, the human
species, as well as of the universe and all its contents, is in
the creative act of God, not in evolution or development.
The first man was not a monkey or a tadpole developed, nor
a savage or barbarian, but was a man full grown in the in
tegrity of his nature, instructed by his Maker, and the most
perfect man of his race, and as he is the progenitor of all
mankind, it follows that mankind began not in " utter bar
barism," as Sir John asserts, but in the full development
and perfection of manhood, with the knowledge of God and
providence, of their origin and destiny, and of their moral
and religious duty. Ignorance has followed as the penalty
or consequence of sin, instead of being the original condi
tion in which man was created ; and this ignorance brought
on the race 4 by the prevarication of Adam, the domina
tion of the flesh, and the power of Satan acquired thereby,
are the origin and cause of barbarism of individuals and
nations, the innumerable moral and social evils which have
afflicted mankind in all times and places.

Now, to this doctrine Sir John opposes the hypothesis of
the origin of man in "utter barbarism," and his progress by
natural evolution or self-development. But what facts has
he adduced in its support, or that conflict with Christain
teaching, that prove that teaching false or even doubtful ?

ORIGIN OF CIVILIZATION.

423

He has adduced, as far as we can see, none at all, for all the
facts that he alleges are, to say the least, as easily explained
on the supposition of man's deterioration as on the supposi
tion of progress, development, or continuous melioration.
Some of the facts he adduces might, perhaps, be explained
on his hypothesis, if there were no reason for giving them a
contrary explanation ; but there is not one of them that
must be so explained. This is not enough for his purpose,
though it is enough for ours. He must go further, and
prove that his facts not only may but must be explained on
his hypothesis, and can be explained on no other. If we are
able to explain, or he is unable to show positively that we
cannot explain, all known facts in accordance with the
Christian doctrine, he can conclude nothing from them
against Christianity or in favor of his naturalism. "We do not,
he must remember, rely on those facts to prove the Chris
tian doctrine, but he relies on them to disprove it, by prov
ing his hypothesis ; and if he cannot show that they abso
lutely do disprove it, or positively prove his hypothesis, he
proves nothing to his purpose.

Sir John dwells at great length on the real or supposed
rites, forms, and barbarous customs observed by outlying
savage tribes or nations, but, before he can draw any conclu
sion from them in favor of his theory of progress, he must
prove that they were primitive. He knows them only as
contemporaneous with what he would himself call civilized
marriage : how then, without having first proved that the
race began in " utter barbarism," conclude from them that
they preceded civilized marriage? One thing is certain, we
never find them without finding somewhere in the world
contemporary with them the civilized marriage. There is
no history, historical intimation, or tradition of any custom
or conception of marriage older than we have in the Book of
Genesis, and in that we find the true idea of marriage was
already in the world at the earliest date of history, and the
vices against it are plainly condemned in the decalogue,
contemporary with these very usages, customs, and notions
of savages on which Sir John dwells with so much apparent
delight, and which are barbarous, and lax enough to satisfy
even our women's rights men ; and, so far as history goes,
preceding them, the true idea of marriage as something
sacred, and as the union of one man with one woman, was
known and held, and therefore could not have been, at
least so far as known, a development of barbarian marriages.

424 ORIGIN OF CIVILIZATION.

The same answer applies to the question of religion.
Contemporary with the savage and barbarous superstitions
of the heathen, and even prior to them, we find practised in
its fervor and purity the true worship of the true God. True
religion is not developed from the impurities and absurd su
perstitions of the heathen, and is by no means the growth of
the religious sentiment becoming gradually enlightened and
purifying itself from their grossness, for it is historically as
well as logically older than any of them. Men worshipped
God the creator of heaven and earth before they worshipped
the fetish, the elements, or the hosts of heaven. Religion
is older than superstition, for superstition is an abuse of re
ligion, as the theologians say, by way of excess, as irreligion
is its abuse by way of defect ; but a thing must exist and be
entertained before it can be abused. Nothing can be more
certain than that true religion has never been developed from
false religions, or truth from falsehood ; for the true must
precede the false, which is simply the negation of the true.
Christianity is, if you will, a development, the fulfilment of
the synagogue or the Jewish religion ; Judaism was also, if
you will, a development of the patriarchal religion ; but in
neither case a self -development ; and in neither case has the
development been effected except by supernatural interven
tion. It would be absurd to suppose the patriarchal relig
ion was a development of heathenism, since it is historical
ly prior to any form of heathenism, and every known form of
heathenism supposes it, and is intelligible only by it. So far
was Judaism from being self-evolved from the superstitions
of the heathen, that it was with the greatest difficulty that the
Israelites themselves, as their history shows, were kept from
adopting the idolatry and superstition of the surrounding
nations, which shows that their religion was not self-evolved,
and that it was above the level of the moral and religious life
of the people. Christianity develops and perfects Judaism, but
by supernatural agency, not by the natural progress or self-
development of the Jewish people ; for if it had been, the
bulk of the nation would have accepted it, and we know that
the bulk of the Jewish people did not accept it, but re
jected it, and continue to reject it to this day.

We know, also, that the progress of the heathen nations
was very far from raising them to the level of the Christian
religion. Traces of some of its principles and several of its
moral precepts may be found with the gentile philosophers,
as we should expect, since they pertained to the primitive

ORIGIN OF CIVILIZATION. 425

revelation ; but these philosophers were not the first, but
rather the last to accept it. Nowhere amongst the heathen
<li<l any Christain communities spring up spontaneously or
were 01 indigenous origin. Christianity sprang out of Judea,
and the nations adopted it, in the first instance, only as it
was carried to them by Jewish missionaries. And who were
these missionaries? Humble fishermen, publicans, and
mechanics. Who first received them, and believed their
message? Principally the common people, the unlettered,
the poor, and slaves of the rich and noble. " For see your
vocation, brethren." says St. Paul (1 Cor. iv. 26), " that not
many are wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not
many noble." Were the fishermen of the Lake Genesareth,
and the slaves of the Roman Empire, we may ask with Mgr.
Maret, " the most enlightened and advanced portion of man
kind ? " Who dare maintain it, when it is a question of
natural development or progress ? Had Christianity been
the natural evolution of the human mind, or the product of
the natural growth of human intelligence and morality, we
.should have first encountered it not with the poor, the
ignorant, the unlettered and wretched slaves, but with the
higher and more cultivated classes, with the philosophers,
the scientists, the noble, the great generals and the most
eminent orators and statesmen, the elite of Greek and Roman
.society, those who at the time stood at the head of the civil
ised world. Yet such is not the fact, but the fact is the very
reverse.

The Biblical history explains the origin of the barbarous
superstitions of heathendom in a very satisfactory way, and
shows us very clearly that the savage state is not the primi
tive state, but has been produced by sin, and is the result of
what we call the great gentile apostasy, or falling away of
the nations from the primitive or patriarchal religion. When
language was confounded at Babel, and the dispersion of
mankind took place, unity of speech or language was lost,
anil with it unity of ideas or of faith, and each tribe or na
tion took its own course, and developed a tribal or national
ivligion of its own. Gradually each tribe or nation lost the
conception of God as creator, and formed to itself gods made
in its own image, clothed with its own passions, and it bowed
down and worshipped the work of its own hands. It was
not that they knew or had known no better. St. Paul has
settled that question. " For the wrath of God is revoalod
from heaven against all impiety and injustice of those men

It

4:26 OKIGIN OF CIVILIZATION.

that detain the truth of God in injustice. Because that
which is known of God is manifest in them. For God hath
manifested it to them. For the invisible things of him,
from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being under
stood by the things that are made : his eternal power also
and divinity ; so that they are inexcusable. Because when
they had known God, they glorified him not as God, nor
gave thanks ; but became vain in their thoughts, and their
foolish heart was darkened ; for, professing themselves
wise, they became fools. And they changed the glory of
the incorruptible God into the likeness of the image of a
corruptible man, and of birds, and of four-footed beasts, and
of creeping things. Wherefore God gave them up to the
desires of their hearts, to uncleanliness ; to dishonor their
own bodies among themselves, who changed the truth of God
into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature rather
than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen." (Horn,
i. 18-25.)

St. Paul evidently does not believe Sir John Lubbock's
doctrine that the race began in " utter barbarism," and have
been slowly working their way up to the heights of Chris
tian civilization. He evidently ascribes the superstitions,
and consequently the barbarism, of the heathen to apostasy.
Sir John, of course, does not accept the authority of St.
Paul ; but, if he cannot prove St. Paul was wrong, he is de
barred from asserting his own hypothesis, even as probable.
If it is possible to explain the facts of the savage state on the
ground of apostasy or gradual deterioration, the hypothesis
of development, of self-evolution or natural and unaided
progress, falls to the ground as wholly baseless. His hypoth
esis becomes probable only by proving that no other hy
pothesis is possible.

But all the known facts in the case are against our sci
entific baronet's hypothesis. Take Mohammedanism. It
sprang up subsequently to both Moses and the Gospel. It
is a compound of Judaism and Christianity, more Jewish
than Christian, however, and is decidedly inferior to either,
How explain this fact, if the several races of men never fall
or retrograde, but are always advancing, marching through
the ages onward and upward ? Many of the ancestors of
the present Mussulmans belonged to highly civilized races,
and some of them were Christians, and not a few of them
Jews. Yet there is always progress, never deterioration.

But we need not go back to the seventh century. There

ORIGIN OF CIVILIZATION.

427

has been a modern apostasy, and we see right before our
eyes the process of deterioration, of falling into barbarism,
going on among those who have apostatized from Christi
anity. The author regards as an evidence of the lowest bar
barism what he calls u communal marriage," that is, mar
riage in which the wife is common to all the males of her
husband's family. We do not believe this sort of marriage
was ever any thing more than an exceptional fact, like
polyandry; but suppose it was even common among the
lowest savage tribes, how much lower or more barbarous is
the state it indicates, than what the highly civilized Plato
makes the magistrates prescribe in his imaginary Republic ?
How much in advance of such a practice is the free love
advocated by Mary Wolstonecroft and Fanny Wright ; the
recommendation of Godwin to abolish marriage and the
monopoly by one man of any one woman ; than the de
nunciation of marriage by the late Robert Owen as one of
the trinity of evils which have hitherto afflicted the race,
and his proposal to replace it by a community of wives, as
he proposed to replace private property by a community of

foods; or, indeed, than we see actually adopted in practice
y the Oneida Community ? Sir John regards the gynocracy
which prevails in some savage tribes as characteristic of a
very low form of barbarism ; but to what else tends the
woman's-rights movement in his country and ours ? If suc
cessful, not only would women be the rulers, but children
would follow the mother's line, not the father's, for the ob
vious reason that, while the mother can be known, the father
cannot be with any certainty. Does not free love, the main
spring of the movement, lead to this ? And are not they
who support it counted the advance party of the age, and
we who resist denounced as old fogies or as the defenders of
man's tyranny ?

Sir John relates that some tribes are so low in their intel
ligence that they have none or only the vaguest conceptions
of the divinity, and none at all of God as creator. He need
not go amongst outlying barbarians to find persons whose in
telligence is equally low. He will search in vain through
all gentile philosophy without finding the conception of a
creative God. Nay, among our own contemporaries he can
find more who consider it a proof of their superior intelli
gence and rare scientific attainments that they reject the
fact of creation, relegate God into the unknown and the un
knowable, and teach us that the universe is self -evolved, and

428 ORIGIN OF CIVILIZATION.

man is only a monkey or gorilla developed. These men re
gard themselves as the lights of their age, and are so re-
firded, too, by no inconsiderable portion of the public,
eed we name Augusts Comte and Sir William Hamilton,
among the dead ; E. Littre, Herbert Spencer, J. Stuart Mill,
Professor Huxley, Charles Darwin, not to say Sir John him
self, among the living? If these men and" their adherents
have not lapsed into barbarism, their science, if accepted,
would lead us to the ideas and practices which Sir John tells
us belong to the lowest stage of barbarism. Sir John
doubts if any savage tribe can be found that is absolutely
destitute of all religious conceptions or sentiments, but, if
we may believe their own statements, we have people
enough among the apostate Christians of our day who have
none, and glory in it as a proof of their superiority to the
rest of mankind.

Sir John sees a characteristic of barbarism or of the
early savage state in the belief in and the dread of evil spirits,
or what he calls deinonism. The Bible tells us all the gods
of the heathens are devils or demons. Even this charac
teristic of barbarism is reproduced in our civilized com
munities by spiritism, which is of enlightened American
origin. This spiritism, which is rapidly becoming a relig
ion with large numbers of men and women in our midst,
is nothing but demonism, the necromancy and witchcraft
or familiar spirits of the ancient world. 'Men who reject
Christianity, who have no belief in God, or at least do not
hold it necessary to worship or pay him the least homage or
respect, believe in the spirits, go to the medium, and con
sult her, as Saul in his desperation consulted the "Witch of
Endor. If we go back a few years to the last century, we
shall find the most polished people on the globe abolishing
religion, decreeing that death is an eternal sleep, and per
petrating, in the name of liberty, virtue, humanity, and
brotherly love, crimes and cruelties unsurpassed if not un
equalled in the history of the most savage tribes ; and we
see little improvement in our own century, more thoroughly
filled with the horrors of unprincipled and needless wars
than any other century of which we possess the history.
Indeed, the scenes of 1792-3-i are now in process of
reproduction in Europe.

We must remember that all these deteriorations have
taken place or are taking place in the most highly civilized
nations of the globe, whose ancestors were Christians, and

ORIGIN OF CIVILIZATION.

421)

with persons many of whom were brought up in the belief
of Christianity. Take the men and women who hold, on
marriage and on religion, what are called " advanced views "

free-lovers and free-religionists — remove them from the

restraints of the church and of the state, not yet up to their
standard, and let them form a community by themselves in
which their views shall be carried out in practice ; would
thev not in two or three generations lapse into a state not
aboVe that of the most degraded and filthy savages? We
see this deterioration going on in our midst and right
before our eyes, as the effect of apostasy from our holy
religion. This proves that apostasy is sufficient to explain
the existence of the savages races, without supposing the
human race began in " utter barbarism." If apostasy in
modern times, as we see it does, leads to " utter barbarism,"
why should it not have done so in ancient times ?

We might make the case still stronger against the au
thor's hypothesis, if necessary, by referring to the great
and renowned nations of antiquity, that in turn led the
civilization of the world. Of the nations that apostatized
or adhered to the great gentile apostasy, not one has sur
vived the lapse of time. To every one of them has suc
ceeded barbarism, desolation, or a new people. The Egypt
of antiquity fell before the Persian conqueror, and the
Egypt of the Greeks was absorbed by Rome, and fell with
her. Assyria leaves of her greatness only long since buried
and forgotten ruins, while the savage Kurd and the pred
atory Arab roam at will over the desert that has succeeded
to her once nourishing cities and richly cultivated fields.
Syria, Tyre, Carthage, and the Greek cities of ^Europe and
Asia have disappeared or dwindled into insignificance, and
what remains of them they owe to the conservative power
of the Christianity they adopted and have in some measure
retained. So true is it, as the Psalmist says, " the wicked
shall be turned into hell, and all the nations that forget
God." How explain this fact, if these ancient nations
could by their own inherent energy and power of self-de
velopment raise themselves from " utter barbarism " to the
civilization they once possessed, that they could not pre
serve it; that, after having reached a certain point, they
began to decline, grew corrupt, and at length fell by their
own internal rottenness? If men and nations are naturally
progressive, how happens it that we find so many individ
uals and nations decline and fall, through internal corrup
tion 2

430 ORIGIN OF CIVILIZATION.

Another fact is not less conclusive against Sir John's
hypothesis, that in all the nations of the heathen world
their least barbarous period known to us is their earliest
after the apostasy and dispersion. The oldest of the sacred
books of the Hindus are the profoundest and richest in
thought, and the freest from superstition and puerilities so
characteristic of the Hindu people to-day. The earliest
religion of the Romans was far more spiritual, intellectual,
than that which prevailed at the establishment of the em
pire and the introduction of Christianity. Indeed, wher
ever we have the means of tracing the religious history of
the ancient heathen nations, we find it is a history of almost
uninterrupted deterioration and corruption, becoming con
tinually more cruel, impure, and debasing as time flows on.
The mysteries, perhaps, retained something of the earlier
doctrines, but they did little to arrest the downward ten
dency of the national religion ; the philosophers, no doubt,
retained some valuable traditions of the primitive religion,
but so mixed up with gross error and absurd fables that they
had no effect on the life or morals of the people. One of
the last acts of Socrates was to require Crito to sacrifice a
cock to Esculapius. If Sir John's hypothesis were true,
nothing of this could happen, and we should find the relig
ion of every nation, as time goes on, becoming purer and
more refined, less gross and puerile, more enlightened and
intellectual, and more spiritual and elevating in its influence.

The traditions of some, perhaps of all heathen nations,
refer their origin to savage and barbarian ancestors, and
this may have been the fact with many of them. Horace
would seem to go the full length of Sir John's theory. He
tells us that the primitive men sprang like animals from
the earth, a mute and filthy herd, fighting one another for
an acorn or a den. Cicero speaks somewhat to the same
purpose, only he does not say it was the state of the pri
meval man. Yet the traditions of the heathen nations do not
in general favor the main point of Sir John's hypothesis,
that men came out of barbarism by their own spontaneous
development, natural progressiveness, or indigenous and
unaided efforts. They rise, according to these traditions,
to the civilized state only by the assistance of the gods, or
by the aid of missionaries or colonies from nations already
civilized. The goddess Ceres teaches them to plant corn
and make bread ; Bacchus teaches them to plant the vine
and to make wine ; Prometheus draws fire from heaven and

ORIGIN OF CIVILIZATION.

teaches them its use ; other divinities teach to keep bees,
to tame and rear flocks and herds, and the several arts of
peace and war. Athens attributed her civilization to Mi
nerva and to Cecrops and his Egyptian colony ; Thebes, hers
to Orpheus and Cadmus, of Phoenician origin ; Rome
claimed to descend from a Trojan colony, and borrowed her
laws from the Athenians — her literature, philosophy, her
art and science, from the Greeks. The poets paint the
primitive age as the age of gold, and the philosophers
always speak of the race as deteriorating, and find the past
superior to the present. What is best and truest in Plato
he ascribes to the wisdom of the ancients, and even Homer
speaks of the degeneracy of men in his days from what
they were at the siege of Troy. We think the author will
search in vain through all antiquity to find a tradition or a
hint which assigns the civilization of any people to its own
indigenous and unassisted efforts.

Sir John Lubbock describes the savages as incurious and
little given to reflection. He says they never look beyond
the phenomenon to its cause. They see the world in which
they are placed, and never think of looking further, and ask
ing who made it, or whence they themselves came or whith
er they go. They lack not only curiosity, but the power
of abstraction and generalization, and even thought is a bur
den to them. This is no doubt in the main true ; but it
makes against their natural progressiveness, and explains
why they are not, as we know they are not, progressive, but
remain always stationary, if left to themselves. The chief
characteristic of the savage state is in fact its immobility.
The savage gyrates from age to age in the same narrow cir
cle — never of himself advances beyond it. Whether a tribe
sunk in what Sir John calls " utter barbarism," and which
he holds was the original state of the human race, has ever
been or ever can be elevated to a civilized state by any human
efforts, even of others already civilized, is, perhaps, proble
matical. As far as experience goes, the tendency of such a
tribe, brought in contact with a civilized race, is to retire
the deeper into the forest, to waste away, and finally be
come extinct. Certain it is, no instance of its becoming a
civilized people can be named.

In every known instance in which a savage or barbarous
people has become civilized, it has been by the aid or influ
ence of religion, or their relations with a people already
civilized. Hie barbarians that overthrew the Roman Em-

432 ORIGIN OF CIVILIZATION.

pire of the West, and seated themselves on its ruins, were
more than half romanized before the conquest by their rela
tions with the Romans and service in the armies of the em
pire, and they rather continued the Roman order of civili
zation in the several kingdoms and states they founded than
destroyed it. The Roman system of education, and even
the imperial schools, if fewer in number and on a reduced
scale, were continued all through the barbarous ages down to
the founding of the universities of mediaeval Europe. Their
civilization was carried forward, far in advance of that of
Greece or Rome, by the church, the great civilizer of the
nations. The northern barbarians that remained at home,
the Germans, the Scandinavians, the Sclaves, were civilized
by the labors of Christian monks and missionaries from Rome
and Constantinople, from Gaul, England, and Ireland. In
no instance has their civilization been of indigenous origin
and development.

Sir John Lubbock replies to this as he does to Archbishop
"Whatelv's assertion that no instance is on record of a savage
people having^ risen to a civilized state by its own indigen
ous and unassisted efforts, that it is no objection, because we
should not expect to find any record of any such an event,,
since it took place, if at all, before the invention of letters,,
and in "prehistoric times." We grant that the fact that
there is no written record of it is not conclusive proof that,
no instance of the kind ever occurred ; but if so important
an event ever occurred, we should expect some trace of it in
the traditions of civilized nations, or at least find some tenden
cies to it in the outlying savage nations of the present, from
which it might be inferred as a thing not improbable in it
self. But nothing of the sort is found. The author's appeal
to our ignorance, and our ignorance only, cannot serve his
purpose. He arraigns the universal faith of Christendom,
and he must make out his case by positive, not simply
negative proofs. Till his hypothesis is proved by positive
evidence, the faith of Christendom remains firm, and nothing
can be concluded against it.

But how really stands the question ? Sir John finds in
the various outlying savage tribes numerous facts which he
takes to be the original germs of civilization, and hence he
concludes that the primitive condition of the human race was
that of " utter barbarism," and the nations, or, as he says, the
races, that have become civilized, "have become so by their
indigenous and unaided efforts, by their own inherent energy

OF CIVILIZATION.

433

and power of self-development or progress." But the facts
he alleges may just as well be reminiscences of a past civili
zation as anticipations of a civilization not yet developed ;
and in our judgment — and it is not to-day that for the first
time we have studied the question — they are much better ex
plained as reminiscences than as anticipations, nay, are not
explicable in any other way. The facts appealed to, then,
can at best count for nothing in favor of the hypothesis of
natural progress or development. They do not prove it or
render it probable.

He is able, and he confesses it, to produce no instance of
the natural and unassisted progress of any race of men from
barbarism to civilization, and even his own facts show that
barbarous or savage tribes are not naturally progressive, but
stationary, struck with immobility. "Where, then, are the
proofs of his hypothesis ? He has yet produced none. Nowr
on the other hand, we have shown him that, in all known
instances, the passage from barbarism into civilization ha&
been effected only by supernatural aid, or by the influence
of a previously civilized race or people. We have shown
him also that the gentile apostasy, which the Bible records
and our religion asserts, sufficiently explains the origin of
barbarism. vVe have also shown him nations once civilized
falling into barbarism, and, in addition, have shown him the
tendency of an apostate people to lapse into barbarism ex
isting and operating before our very eyes, in men whose an
cestors were once civilized and even Christians. The chief
elements of barbarism he describes exist and are encouraged
and defended in our midst by men who are counted by them
selves and their contemporaries as the great men, the great
lights, the advanced party of this advanced age. Let the apos
tasy become more general, take away the church or deprive
her of her influence, and eliminate from the laws, manners,
and customs of modern states what they retain of Christian
doctrine and morality, and it is plain to see that nations the
loudest in their boast of their civilization would, if not super-
naturally arrested, in a very short space of time, sink to the
level of any of the ancient or modern outlying savage tribes.

Such is the case, and so stands the argument. Sir John
Lubbock brings forward an hypothesis, not original with him
indeed, and the full bearing of which we would fain believe
he does not see, for which he adduces and can adduce not a
single well-authenticated fact, and which would not be fa
vored for a moment by any one who understands it, were it

VOL. IX— 28

434: ORIGIN OF CIVILIZATION.

not for its contradiction of the Biblical doctrine and Chris
tian tradition. But while there is absolutely no proof of the
hypothesis, all the known facts of history or of human nature,
as well as all the principles of religion and philosophy, with
one voice pronounce against it as untenable. Is not this
enough ? Nothing is more certain than Christian faith ; no
fact is or can be better authenticated than the fact of reve
lation ; we might then allege that the hypothesis is disproved,
nay, not to be entertained, because it is contrary to the Chris
tian revelation, than which nothing can be more certain.
We should have been perfectly justified in doing so, and
so we should have done ; but as the author appeals to science
and progress to support himself on facts, we have thought it
best, without prejudice to the authority of faith, to meet him
on his own ground, to show him that science does not enter
tain his appeal, and that his theory of progress is but a base
less hypothesis, contradicted by all the known facts in the
case and supported by none ; and therefore no science at all.

Sir John's theory of progress is just now popular, and is
put forth with great confidence in the respectable name of
science, and the modern world, with sciolists, accept it, with
great pomp and parade. Yet it is manifestly absurd.
Nothing cannot make itself something, nor can any thing
make itself more than it is. The imperfect cannot of itself
perfect itself, and no man can lift himself by his own waist
bands. Even Archimedes required somewhere to stand out
side of the world in order to be able to raise the world with
his lever. Yet we deny not progress ; we believe in it, and
hold that man is progressive even to the infinite ; but not by
his own unaided effort or by his own inherent energy and
natural strength, nor without the supernatural aid of divine
grace. But progress by nature alone, or self-evolution,
though we tried to believe it when a child, we put away
when we became a man, as we did other childish things.

Thus much we have thought it our duty to say in reply
to the theory that makes the human race begin in utter bar
barism, and civilization spring from natural development or
evolution, so popular with our unchristian scientists or — but
for respect to the public we would say — sciolists. We have
in our reply repeated many things which we have said be
fore, and which have been said by others, and better said.
But it will not do to let such a book as the one before us go
unanswered in the present state of the public mind, debauch
ed as it is by false science. If books will repeat the error,
we can only repeat our answer.

HERBERT SPENCER'S BIOLOGY.'

[From the Catholic World for June, 1868.]

WE have omitted from the title page the long list of works
of which Herbert Spencer is the author, works of rare abil
ity in their way, but essentially false in the philosophical
principles on which they are based. Mr. Herbert Spencer
is naturally one of the ablest men in Great Britain, far su
perior to the much praised Buckle, and not surpassed, if
equalled, by John Stuart Mill, now Member of Parliament.
W"e have heretofore considered him as belonging to the posi-
tivist school of philosophy, founded by Auguste Comte, and
the ablest man of that school ; abler, and less absurd than
even M. Littre. But in a note to the work before us he dis
claims all affiliation with positivism, declares that he does not
accept M. Comte's system, and says that the general princi
ples, in which he agrees with that singular man, he has drawn
not from him, but from sources common to them both.
This we can easily believe, for in the little we have had the
patience to read of M. Comte's unreadable works, we have
found nothing original with him but his dry ness, d illness,
and wearisomness, in which, if he is not original, he is at
least superior to most men. Yet we have not been able to
detect any essential difference of doctrine or principle be
tween the Frenchman and the Englishman, and to us who
are not positivists, M. Comte, M. Littre, George H. Lewes,
Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, Miss Evans, and Har
riet Martineau belong to one and the same school.

It is but simple justice to Herbert Spencer to say that he
writes in strong, manly, and for the most part classical Eng
lish, and has made himself master of the best philosophical
style that we have met with in any English or American
writer. He understands, as far as a man can with his prin-

*The Principles of Biology. By HERBERT SPENCER. Author of
" First Principles," &c., New York: I860. [This short article appeared
among the notices of "New Publications," and was not intended to be
an elaborate review of Herbert Spencer's book; but as it is referred to in
the next article, and on account of the matter it contains, it has been in
serted here. A further criticism of the cosmic philosophy may be found
in the Refutation of Atheism, in the second volume of these works. ED.]

4:35

436 HERBERT SPENCER?S BIOLOGY.

ciples, the philosophy of the English tongue, and writes it
with the freedom and ease of a master, though not always
with perfect purity. He must have been a hard student and
evidently is a most laborious thinker and industrious writer.
But here ends, we are sorry to say, our commendation. It is
the misfortune, perversity, or folly of Herbert Spencer to
spend his life in attempting to obtain, or at least to explain,
effects without causes, properties without substance, and
phenomena without noumena or being. In his Principles
of Philosophy ', he divides the real and unreal into the know-
able and the unknowable, without explaining, however, how
the human mind knows there is an unknowable ; and to the
unknowable he relegates the principles, origin, and causes of
things ; that is, in plain English, the principles, origin, and
causes of things are unreal, at least to us, and are not only
unknown, but absolutely unknowable, and should be banish
ed as subjects of investigation, inquiry, or thought. Hence
the knowable, that to which all science is restricted, includes
only phenomena, that is to say, the sensible or material world.

Biology, which is the subject of the volume before us, is
the science of life, but, on the author's principles, is neces
sarily confined to the statement, description, and classifica
tion of facts, or phenomena of organic as distinguished from
inorganic matter. He can admit, on his philosophy, no vital
principle, but must explain the vital phenomena without it,
by a combination, brought about nobody knows how, of
chemical, mechanical-, and electric changes, forces, action,
and reaction — as if there can be changes, forces, action, or
reaction where there is no relation of cause and effect ! But
after all his labor, and it is immense, to show what chemical,,
mechanical, and electric changes and combinations, binary,
tertiary, &c., are observed in a living subject, he explains
nothing ; for life, while it lasts, is neither mechanical, chem
ical, nor electrical, but to a certain extent resists and counter
acts all these forces, and the human body falls completely
under their dominion only when it has ceased to be a living
body, when by chemical action it is decomposed, and returns
to the several elements from which it was formed.

Mr. Spencer describes very scientifically the entire process
of assimilation ; but what is that living power within that
assimilates the food we eat, and converts it into chyle, blood,
and flesh and bone ? You see here a principle operating of
which no element is found in mechanics, chemistry, or elec
tricity, or any possible combination of them. The muscles

HERBERT SPENCERS BIOLOGY.

437

raise it ? That I will to raise it, and in willing to do so per
form an immaterial act, I know better than you know that
" percussion produces detonation in sulphide of nitrogen,"
or that " explosion is a property of nitro-mannite," or " ni
tre-glycerine. "

The simple fact is that the physical sciences are all good
and useful in their place and for purposes to which they
are fitted ; but they are all secondary sciences, and without
principles higher than themselves to give dialectic validity
to their inductions, they are no sciences at all. There is no
approach to the science of life in Herbert Spencer's Biology ;
there is only a painfully elaborate statement of the principal
external facts which usually accompany it and depend on it.
Indeed, we had the impression that our most advanced phys
iologists, while admitting in their place chemical and elec
tric forces as necessary to the phenomena of organic life, had
abandoned the attempt to expound the science of physiology
on chemical, electric, or mechanical principles, or any possi
ble combination of them. Even Dr. Draper, if he makes
no great use of it in his physiology, recognizes a vital princi
ple, even an immaterial soul, in man. We had also the im
pression that the medical profession were abandoning the
chemical theory of medicine, so fashionable a few years ago.
We may be wrong, but as far as we have been able to keep
pace with modern science, Mr. Spencer is a quarter of a cen
tury behind his age.

The chapter on genesis, generation, multiplication, or re
production, is as unscientific as it is unchristian. We mere
ly note that the author insists on metagenesis as well as
parthenogenesis, that is, that the offspring may differ in
kind from the parents, and that there are virgin, or rather
sexless, mothers. Some years ago, in conversing with a
scientific friend, I ventured to deny this alleged fact, on the
strength of the theological and scriptural doctrine that every
kind produces its like. He laughed in my face, and brought
forward certain well-known facts in the reproduction of the
aphid, or cabbage-louse. I assured him that, if he would
take the pains to observe more closely, he would find that
his metagenesis and parthenogenesis are only different stages
in the entire process of the reproduction of the aphid. Of
course he did not believe a word of it ; but a few days af-

438

terwards he came and informed me that he had seen his
friend, Dr. Burnham, of Boston, a naturalist of rare sagaci
ty, who told him that naturalists were wrong in asserting
metagenesis in the case of aphids. " I have," said he, " been
making my observations for some years on these little or
ganisms, and I find that what we have taken for metagene
sis is only one of the different stages in the process of re
production, for I have discovered the young aphid properly
formed and enveloped in the so-called virgin or sexless
mother." The naturalist is dead, but his friend, my in
formant, is living.

We have no space to enter into any detailed review of
this very elaborate volume. It contains many curious ma
terials of science, but the author rejects the doctrine of
creation, generation, formation, and emanation, and adopts
that of evolution. Life is evolved from various elements
which are reducible to gases, and, upon the whole, he gives-
us a gaseous sort of life. His theory seems to be that of
Topsy, who declared she didn't come, but growed. We can
not perceive that Mr. Herbert Spencer has made any serious
advance on Topsy. The universe is evolution, and evolu
tion is growth, and he must say of himself with Topsy, " I
didn't come, I growed." At any rate, he must be classed
with those old philosophers who evolved all things from mat
ter, some from fire, some from air, and some from water,
and made all things born from change or corruption ; or
rather, with Epicurus, who evolved all from the fortuitous
motion, change, and combination of atoms. Those old
philosophers were unjustly ridiculed by Hermias, or our re
cent philosophers have less science than they imagine. Yeri-
ly, there is nothing new under the sun, and false science on
ly travels a narrow circle, constantly coming round to the
absurdities of its starting-point. Yet Herbert Spencer's
book has profited us. It has made us feel more deeply than
ever the utter impotence of the greatest man to explain any
thing in nature without recognizing God and creation.

THE COSMIC PHILOSOPHY;

[From the Catholic World for February, 1872.]

HERBERT SPENCER has often been alluded to in our pages,
and one of his works, that on Biology, has been specially no
ticed by us. He is usually classed with the positivists, and
we have ourselves so classed him ; but he protests against
this classification, and, after studying carefully, or as care
fully as our patience would permit, the volume before us,
we confess the classification appears to be inexact, and even
unjust to the positivists. There are considerable differences
between his philosophy and the Philosophie Positive as we
find it set forth by M. E. Littre, its greatest living chief;
for, as set forth by its founder, M. Auguste Comte, in his
own works, we would rather not speak, for, to confess the
truth, we have never had the patience to read them so as to
master their doctrines. Yet, as far as we do know the system,
it differs on several points, and much to its advantage, from
the Cosmic philosophy set forth in Mr. Spencer's First Prin
ciples, especially as to the relativity of knowledge and the
theory of evolution. It is the product of a higher order of
mind than Mr. Spencer can boast, and of a mind originally
trained in a better school.

Mr. Herbert Spencer is a man of considerable native abil
ity, of respectable attainments in what is called modern
science, and a fair representative of contemporary Eng
lish thought and mental tendencies ; but he has made a sad
mistake in attempting to be a philosopher, for he lacks en
tirely the ingegno filosofico, and we have not discovered a
single trace of a philosophic principle, thought, or concep
tion in any or all of his several works. He is or might be a
physicist, or what old Ralph Cud worth terms a physiologer,
perhaps not much inferior to old Leucippus or Democritus,
but he has not in him the makings of a philosopher, and his
cosmic theories are not even plausible to a philosophic mind.

"In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed is king."
The not inconsiderable reputation Mr. Herbert Spencer

* First Principles of a New System of Philosophy. By HERBERT SPEN
CER. Second Edition. New York: 1871.

440 THE COSMIC PHILOSOPHY.

seems to have acquired is probably due not to his merits so
much as to the low state into which philosophical studies
have fallen in the Anglo-Saxon world, and the tendency to
anti-Christian and anti-religious theories and speculations
which Protestantism, when it begins to examine its own
foundation and to account for itself, everywhere encourages.
The party we meet here and in England, with " advanced
views " as they are called, and which every day grows in
numbers and strength, welcomes with enthusiasm any and
every writer who helps or promises to help them to explain
the problem of the universe on physical principles, without
recurring to the supernatural or the fact of creation. The
party, profoundly ignorant of Christian theology and philos
ophy, and devoted to the study of physical facts and phe
nomena alone, have persuaded themselves that Christianity
is unscientific, and that it tends to degrade men, to enfee
ble reason, and to prevent the free expansion of thought ; and
they regard as their benefactor whoever is able to strength
en their cosmic or atheistic tendency. Such a man they
esteem Mr. Herbert Spencer. He is apparently just the man
to be accepted as the chief of the sect, or the philosopher of
negation. Its adherents wish not for their leader an avowed
atheist or pantheist, for the world is not just yet advanced
enough for that, but they do wish one who is skilful in dis
guising his atheism or pantheism in the forms and terms of
science ; and who can do this more successfully than Herbert
Spencer ?

Mr. Spencer divides his book into two parts. In Part I.
he treats of what he calls " The Unknowable "; in Part II.
he treats of what he calls " The Knowable." Under the
head of " The Unknowable" he seeks the relation of science
and religion, to ascertain the ultimate verity or ideas of each,
and to show the ground on which they meet and are recon
ciled. He asserts that all knowledge is relative, is knowledge
of phenomena alone, which are nothing outside of their rela
tion to consciousness, itself phenomenal, and to a something
underlying them, and of which they are the appearances or
which they manifest. We are compelled to admit, he says,
this something, because the phenomena cannot be thought
without it ; and as we can assign no limit to these manifes
tations, we are compelled to assert this something, power,
being, or reality is infinite. But this infinite something
which is the reality of the cosmos is absolutely unknowable
and even unthinkable. How, then, can it be asserted ?

TIIK COSMIC PHILOSOPHY.

441

Every religion seeks the solution of the problem of the
universe, the explanation of the great cosmic mystery that
surrounds us on all sides, and all religions agree that the so
lution is in this infinite reality or something, which is abso
lutely unknowable, absolutely inscrutable. The ultimate re
ligious ideas or highest and most comprehensive generaliza
tions of religious conceptions are, first, the assertion of this
incognizable and incogitable something ; and, second, that
the solution of the problem exceeds all human powers.

Science deals with the same cosmic problem, and, rising
by generalization to generalization of the cosmic phenomena
up to the highest and broadest possible, is compelled to admit
the same infinite something, and to admit that it is not cog
nizable nor cogitable. Consequently, the ultimate scientific
ideas are identical with the ultimate religious ideas. Both
religion and science are fused together, and reconciled with
out any compromise, and the old feud between them extin
guished, in the bosom of the infinite unknowable.

" He makes a solitude, and calls it peace."

As we have no predisposition to accept the new system of
philosophy, we cannot find this conclusion perfectly satisfac
tory. The cosmists object to the Comteans or positivists
that they absorb the cosmos in man and society ; the cos-
mists, on the other hand, seem to us to absorb man and so
ciety in the cosmos, and subject them to the same physical
law Mr. Emerson does when he asserts the identity of grati
tude and gravitation. By asserting that only phenomena are
cognizable, and subjecting man to the common cosmic law,
they include him in the cosmic phenomena, and make him
simply an appearance or manifestation of the unknowable,
without any real or substantive existence of his own. We
thus lose in the infinite variety of the cosmic phenomena
both the thinking subject and the object thought. The soul
is a cosmic appearance.

Furthermore, by declaring the phenomenal cannot be
thought in and by itself without the infinite something that
underlies it as its ground or reality, and then declaring that
something to be unknowable, unthinkable even, the new sys
tem declares that there is no knowable, and consequently no
science or knowledge at all. The new system of philosophy,
then, reconciles science and religion only in a universal ne
gation, that is, by really denying both. This can hardly sat
isfy either a scientist or a Christian.

44:2 THE COSMIC PHILOSOPHY.

In the second part, Mr. Spencer defines philosophy to us,
as near as we can come at his sense, to be the unification of
the several religions and several sciences in their respective
or special generalizations in a generalization that compre
hends them all. Generalization with him means the elimi
nation of the differentia, or abstraction. He therefore, in
making philosophy a generalization, makes it an abstraction,
and, so to speak, the abstraction of all particular abstrac
tions. But abstractions in themselves are nullities, and con
sequently philosophy is a nullity, and science and religion
are nullities. Mr. Spencer maintains that we have " sym
bolic conceptions," in which nothing is conceived — symbols
which symbolize nothing. Is his " new system of philoso
phy " any thing but a generalization and unification of these
" symbolic conceptions ? "

Mr. Spencer starts with the assumption that all religions,
including atheism, have a verity in common as well as an
error. The verity must be that in which they all agree ;
the error, in their differences, or in the matters in which
they do not agree. Eliminate the differences and take what
is common to them all, and you will have the universal ver
ity which they all assert. But what verity is common to
truth and falsehood, to theism and atheism ? The verity
common to religion and science, that the solution of the cos
mic mystery is unknowable ? But that is not a verity ; it
is a mere negation, and all truth is affirmative.

Atheism is not a religion, but the negation of all relig
ion. Exclude that, take all religions from f etichism to Chris
tianity inclusive ; eliminate the differentia, and take what
they all agree in asserting. Be it so. All religions, with
out a single exception, however rude or however polished,
agree in asserting the supernatural, and that, if the cosmic
mystery is inexplicable by human means, it is explicable by
supernatural means. A true application of Mr. Spencer's
rule, the consensus hominum, would assert as the common
verity the supernatural, that is, the supercosmic, which is
precisely what the cosmic philosophy denies and is invented
to deny. Mr. Spencer does not appear to be master of his
own tools.

All religions concede that the cosmic mystery is inexplica
ble by our unassisted powers, by secondary causes, or by
physical laws ; but none of them admits that it is absolutely
inexplicable, for each religion professes to be its explanation.
Mr. Spencer is wrong in asserting that all are seeking to

THE COSMIC PHILOSOPHY.

solve the cosmic mystery ; for each proposes itself as its so
lution, and it is only as such that it claims to be or can be
called a religion. The question for the philosopher is, Do any
of these religions give us a solution which reason, in the
freest and fullest exercise of its powers, can accept, and, if
so, which one is it ?

Mr. Spencer tells us, p. 32 : " Kespecting the origin of
the universe, three verbally intelligible suppositions may be
made. We may assert that it is self-existent, or that "it is
self -created, or that it is created by an external agency. '*
The second supposition he rejects as the pantheistic hypothe
sis, which is a mistake, for no pantheist or anybody else as
serts ^that the universe creates itself. The pantheist denies
that it is created at all ; and the philosopher denies that it
creates itself; for, since to create is to act, self-creation
would require the universe to act before it existed The
third supposition, which the author calls " the theistical
hypothesis," he denies, because it explains nothing, and
is useless. He explains it to mean that the universe is-
produced by an artificer, after the manner of a human artif-
icei in producing a piece of furniture from' materials fur
nished to his hand. " But whence come the materials ? " The
question might be pertinent if asked of Plato or Aristotler
neither of whom was a theist ; but not when asked of a
Christian theologian, who holds that God creates or created
all things from nothing, that is, without pre-existing mate
rials, by " the sole word of his power. "

The first supposition, the self-existence of the universe,.
the author denies, not because the universe is manifestly
contingent and must have had a beginning, and therefore a
cause or creator ; but because self-existence is absolutely in
conceivable, an impossible idea. He says, p. 35 : " The
hypothesis of the creation of the universe by an external
agency is quite useless ; it commits us to an infinite series of
such agencies, and then leaves us where it found us. " " Those
who cannot conceive of the self-existence of the universe,
and therefore assume a creator as the source of the universe,
take it for granted that they can conceive a self-existent
creator. The mystery of the great fact surrounding them
on every side they transfer to an alleged source of this great
fact, and then suppose they have solved the mystery. But
they delude themselves, as was proved in the outset of the
argument, ^Self-existence is rigorously inconceivable, and
this holds true whatever be the nature of the object [sub-

44A THE COSMIC PHILOSOPHY.

ject] of which it is predicated. Whoever argues that the
atheistical hypothesis is untenable because it involves the im
possible idea of self -existence, must perforce admit that the
theistical hypothesis is untenable if it contains the same im
possible idea." But who ever argued that the atheistical
hypothesis is untenable because it involves the idea of self-
existence? Atheism is denied because it asserts the self-
existence of that which cannot be, and is known not to be,
self-existent.

But it is evident that the author rejects alike self-existence
and creation ; that the cosmos is self-existent, or that it is
created by an independent, self-existent, and supercosmic
creator. How, then, can he assert the existence of the cos
mos, real or phenomenal, at all? The cosmos either exists
or it does not. If it does not, that ends the matter. If it
does, it must be either created or self-existent; for the
author rejects an infinite series as absurd, and self-creation
as only an absurd form of expressing self-existence. But
as the author denies self-existence, whatever the subject of
which it is predicated, and also the fact of creation, it fol
lows rigorously, if he is right, that the cosmos does not
exist. The author cannot take refuge in his favorite nescio,
or say we do not know the origin of the cosmos, for he has
positively denied it every possible origin, and therefore has
by implication denied it all existence. A moment ago, we
showed that he denied by implication all science or knowl
edge, and now we see that, if held rigorously to his system as
he explains it, he denies all existence, and, by implication
at least, asserts absolute nihilism. Surely there is no occa-
sidn to apply to his new system of philosophy the reductio
ad absurdum.

The author is necessarily led to the assertion that at least
nothing is knowable by his doctrine, that all knowledge is
relative. The Comtists restrict, in theory, all knowledge to
sensible things, their mutual relations, dependencies, and the
conditions and laws of their development and progress ; but
they at least admit that these may be objects of science and
positively known. But our cosmic philosopher denies this,
and asserts the relativity of all knowledge. We know and
can know only the relative, that is, only what is relative to
the absolute, and relative to our own consciousness. In
this he follows Sir William Hamilton, J. Stuart Mill, and
the late Dr. Mansel, Anglican Dean of St. Paul's. But
relative knowledge is simply no knowledge, because in it

THE COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. 445

nothing is known. The relative is not cognizable nor cog
itable in and by itself, because it in and by itself, or pre
scinded from that to which it is relative, does not exist, and is
simply nothing. What neither is nor exists is not cogniz
able nor cogitable. The relativity of all knowledge, then, is
simply the denial of all knowledge. It is idle, then, for Mr.
Spencer to talk of science. His science is only a laborious
ignorance.

Mr. Spencer labors hard to prove the relativity of all knowl
edge. He either proves it or he does not. If he does not,
he has no right to assert it ; if he does, he disproves it at
the same time. If the proof is not absolute, it does not
prove it ; if it is abolute, then it is not true that all knowl
edge is relative ; for the proof must be absolutely known,
or it cannot be alleged. We either know that all knowledge
is relative, or we do not. If we do not, no more need be
said ; if we do know it, then it is false, because the
knowledge of the relativity of knowledge is itself not rela
tive. The assertion of the relativity of all knowledge, there
fore, contradicts and refutes itself. No man can doubt that
he doubts, or that doubt is doubt, and therefore universal
doubt or universal scepticism is impossible, and not even as-
sertable. The same argument applies to the pretence that
all knowledge is relative.

The relativists are misled by their dealing with the abstract
and not the concrete. They regard all that is or exists either
as relative or absolute. But both absolute and relative are
abstract conceptions, and formed by abstraction from the
concrete intuitively presented or apprehended. They exist,
as St. Thomas tells us, only in mente, cum fundamento in
re. There are no abstractions in nature or the cosmos, and
there is and can be neither abstract science nor science of ab
stractions, for abstractions, prescinded from their concretes,
are simply nullities. The absolute is, we grant, unknowa
ble, and so also is the relative, for neither has any existence
in nature, or a parte rei. They are both generalizations,
and nature never generalizes. Whatever exists, exists in
concrete*, not in genere. Hence, the ens in genere of Ros-
mini is no ens reale, but simply ens possibile, like the reines
Sein of Hegel, which is the equivalent of das Nichtsein ;
for the possible is only the ability of the real.

Now, because the abstract absolute is unknowable, unthink
able even, it by no means follows that the concrete, real and
necessary being, cannot be both thought and known, or that

446 THE COSMIC PHILOSOPHY.

things cannot be both thought and known in their relations
to it, without reducing it to the category of the relative.
Sir William Hamilton says the absolute is the unconditioned,
and is incogitable, because our thought necessarily condi
tions it. This would be true if the absolute is an abstrac
tion or mental conception, but is false and absurd if applied
to real, necessary, infinite, and self-existent being, which, as
independent of us and of all relation, is and must be the same
whether we think it or not. The thought does not impose
its own conditions and limitations on the object ; certainly
not when the object is real and necessary being, and in every
respect independent of it. We cannot, of course, think in
finite being infinitely or adequately, but it does not follow
that we cannot think it, though finitely and inadequately.
The human mind, being finite, cannot comprehend infinite
being ; but, nevertheless, it may and does apprehend it, or
else Mr. Spencer could not assert the infinite something,
which he says we are compelled to admit underlies the cos
mic phenomena and is manifested in them. The human mind
•can apprehend more than it can comprehend, and nothing
that is apprehensible, though incomprehensible, is unthink
able or unknowable, except in Mr. Spencer's New System
of Philosophy.

Sir William Hamilton says, in defending the relativity of
all knowledge : " Only relations are cogitable. Relation is
cogitable only in correlation, and the relation between cor
relatives is reciprocal, each is relative to the other. Thought
is dual, and embraces at once subject and object in their mu
tual opposition and limitation. " This merely begs the ques
tion. Besides, it is not true. Relations are themselves cog
itable only in the related ; correlatives connote each other,
so that the one cannot be thought without thinking the other ;
but not therefore are all relations reciprocal, as the relation
between phenomenon and noumenon, cause and effect, crea
tor and creation. Here are two terms and a relation between
them, but no reciprocity. When we think cause and effect,
we do not think them as mutually opposing and limiting
<each other. The effect cannot oppose or limit the cause, or
the creature the creator, for the creature depends on the
creator and is nothing without his creative act, and the effect
is nothing without the cause which produces and sustains it.
The creature depends on the creator, but not the creator on
the creature ; the effect depends on the cause, but not the
cause on the effect. There may, then, be relation without
reciprocity.

THE COSMIC PHILOSOPHY.

447

It is true, Mr. Spencer denies creation, and relegates all
causative power to the dark region of the unknowable, and
calls the origin of the universe in the creative act of being or
God " an ^hypothesis, " and rejects it with ill-concealed scorn ;
jet creation is not " an hypothesis, " but a scientific fact,
and a necessary principle of all science. Without it the cos
mos would not be cognizable, for it would have no dialectic
constitution. It could not even be thought, for every thought
is a judgment, and no judgment is possible where there is
no copuia that joins the predicate to the subject. Keject-
ing creation, the author cannot assert the relation of cause
and effect ; rejecting cause and effect, he cannot assert even
the cosmic phenomena. They are not able to stand on their
own bottom, and therefore not at all, unless the something
of which they are, as he says, manifestations, is a cause prcT-
ducing and sustaining them. We submit, then, that Mr.
Spencer's doctrine of the unknowable, and the relativity of
all knowledge, estops him from asserting any thing as know-
able, for it really denies all the knowable and all the real—
omne scibile et omne reale.

The second part of Mr. Spencer's work on " The Knowa
ble " we might well omit, but as it is that in which he claims
to be original, and in which he supposes he has made most
valuable contributions to the philosophy of the cosmos, an
omission to examine it might seem ungracious. Besides, the
inventors of new systems of philosophy must not be held
too rigidly to the logical consequences of their own doctrines.
Non omnia possumus. It is impossible for the founder to
foresee all that his doctrine involves, and it is but fair, if he
really has said any thing new that is true, that it should be
recognized, and he receive due credit for it, even if it is an
anomaly in his general system of philosophy. We proceed,
therefore, to consider Part II.

In this second part, the author professes to treat the know-
able, not indeed in its several details, but in its first princi
ples, or ultimate generalizations. The generalization of a
group of phenomena is science ; the generalization of the
several groups of phenomena observable in the cosmos con
stitutes the several special sciences ; and the combination of
these special sciences into one higher and more comprehen
sive generalization, which embraces them all, is philosophy.
In constructing philosophy, the author, be it observed, like
the coral insect, begins below and works upward, and bases
the universal on the particular.

448 THE COSMIC PHILOSOPHY.

The great point, or novelty, in this second part, however,
is unquestionably, as the author claims, the doctrine of
Evolution. By evolution, the author does not understand
evolving or unfolding, as do ordinary mortals ; but the
aggregation or contraction and diffusion, according to certain
laws which he has determined, of matter, motion, and force.
Evolution consists, therefore, of two processes, contraction
and diffusion, and is either simple or compound. Simple
evolution is where concentration and diffusion follow each
other alternately ; compound evolution is where the two
processes go on simultaneously in the same subject, which
may be said to be growing and decaying, or living and dying,
at one and the same time.

Minerals, plants, and animals, including man, are all
formed by the evolution of matter, motion, and force. The
elimination or loss of motion, mechanical, chemical, or elec
trical, is followed by the concentration of matter and force,
which may assume the form of a pebble, a diamond, a nettle,
a rose, an oak, a jelly-fish, a tadpole, a monkey, a man. Life
is simply the product of " the mechanical, chemical, and
electrical arrangement of particles of matter." The concen
tration of motion is followed by a diffusion or dispersion of
matter and force, and the disappearance of the several groups
of phenomena we have just named ; but as matter is inde
structible, and as there is always the same quantity of
motion and force, they disappear only to reappear in new
groups or transformations. The diffusion of the mineral
may be the birth of the plant ; of the plant, the birth of the
animal ; of the ape, may be a new concentration which gives
birth to man. Nothing is lost. The cosmos is a ceaseless
evolution ; is, so to speak, in a state of perpetual flux and
reflux, in which diffusion of one group of phenomena is fol
lowed by the birth of another, in endless rotation, or life
from death, and death from life. Dissolution follows con
centration " in eternal alternation," or both go on together.
This is not a new doctrine, but substantially the doctrine of
a school of Greek philosophers, warred against both by Plato
and Aristotle, that all things are in a state of ceaseless
motion, of growth and decay, in which corruption proceeds
from generation, and generation from corruption, in which
death is born of life, and life is born of death. Our cosmic
philosophers only repeat the long since exploded errors of
the old cosmists. But pass over this.

The author is treating of the knowable. We ask him,

THE COSMIC PHILOSOPHY.

449

then, how he contrives to know that there is any such evo
lution as he asserts ? He assumes that matter, motion, and
force are the constituent elements of the cosmos ; but he can
neither know it nor prove it, since he maintains that what
matter is, or what motion is, or what force is, is unknown
and unknowable. He denies the relation of cause and effect,
or at least that it is cognizable ; how, then, can he assert the
cosmic phenomena are only concentrations and diffusions
of matter, motion, and force ? A certain elimination of
motion and a corresponding concentration of matter and
force produces the rose, another produces an ape, another
produces a man, says the author of this new system of
philosophy. Does he know that he is only a certain con
centration of matter and force, resulting from a certain
diffusion or loss of motion ? Can he not only think, but
prove it? But all proof, all demonstration, as all reasoning,,
nay, sensible intuition itself, depends on the principle of
cause and effect ; for, unless we can assert that the sensation
within is caused b}7 some object without that affects the
sensible organism, we can assert nothing outside of us, not
even a phenomenon or external appearance. How does the
author know, or can he know, that he differs from the ape
only in the different combination of matter, motion, and
force ?

Mr. Spencer, in his work on Biology, asserts that life
results from the mechanical, chemical, and electrical ar
rangement of the particles of matter. If this were so, it
would, on the author's own principles, explain nothing. It
would be only saying that a certain group of phenomena is
accompanied by another group, which we call life, but not
that there is any causal relation between them. That the
supposed arrangement of the particles of matter originates
the life Mr. Spencer cannot assert without the intuition of
causes, and causes he either denies or banishes to the un
knowable. Analytical chemistry resolves, we are told, the
diamond into certain gases ; but is synthetic chemistry able
to recoinbine the gases so as to produce a diamond? Pro
fessor Huxley finds, he thinks, the physical basis of life in
protoplasm. Protoplasm is not itself life, according to him,
but its basis. How does he know, since he denies causality,
that life is or can be developed from protoplasm ? Proto
plasm, chemically analyzed, is resolved into certain well-
known gases ; but it is admitted that synthetic chemistry is
unable to recoinbine them and reproduce protoplasm,

VOL. IX-29.

450 THE COSMIC PHILOSOPHY.

Evidently, as in the case of the diamond, there is in the pro
duction of protoplasm some element which even analytic
chemistry fails to detect. ~No synthetic chemistry can ob
tain the protoplasm from protein, and there is no instance in
which life, feeling, thought and reason, are known, or can
be proved, to result from dead matter, or from any possible
combinations of matter, motion, and force. If it could so
result, the fact could not be proved, and would remain for
ever in the unknowable.

The new philosophy resolves all the cosmic phenomena
into the concentration and diffusion of the unknowable ele
ments called matter, motion, and force. The quantities of
these elements remain always the same, but they are in a
state of constant evolution, and all the cosmic phenomena
result from this evolution, and are simply changes or trans
formations of the same force. Now, the evolution either
has had a beginning or it has not. If it has not, we must
assume an infinite series of evolutions, or concentrations and
diffusions ; but an infinite series is absurd, and the author
himself denies it. Then it must have had a beginning ; but
no phenomenon can begin to exist without a cause inde
pendent of the phenomenon, or the causatum. But the
author denies the cause in denying the origin of the cosmos
in creation, or its production by a supercosmic creator. We
are sadly at loss, then, to conceive how he contrives, con
sistently with his new system, to assert either the law of
evolution, or even evolution itself. Will he tell us how he
does it ?

We need not follow the author through the alleged facts
and illustrations by which he seeks to explain and sustain
his system of evolution ; because evolution is not assertable
on his own principles, nor is it provable aliunde by any pos
sible deductions or inductions of science. So far from being
science, it is not even an admissible hypothesis ; because it
•contradicts and refutes itself. Mr. Spencer has attempted
to construct a system of philosophy or explication of the
cosmic phenomena, and the law of their production or trans
formation, without recurrence to any metaphysical princi
ples, and from physical principles alone, or by the general
ization of the physical phenomena as they appear to the
human consciousness in space and time, and has necessarily
failed ; because the physical principles themselves, and con
sequently the physical phenomena, are inexplicable and in
conceivable even, without the principles discarded as meta-

THE COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. 4:5 L

physical The author's whole theory of evolution depends
on the assumed fact of the indestructibility of matter, the
continuity of motion, and the persistence of force, not one
of which can be asserted without the ideal intuition of
being, substance, and cause, all three metaphysical princi
ples, and as such relegated by the author to the region of
the unknowable. The indestructibility of matter can be de
duced or induced from no possible observation of sensible
phenomena. The continuity of motion or the persistence
of force is no fact of consciousness. Mr. Spencer himself
says, to science or the explication of phenomena, the present
must be linked with the past and with the future, and hence
he argues the indestructibility of matter, the continuity of
motion, and the persistence of force ; but not one of them is
a fact of consciousness. Consciousness is the recognition of
one's self as subject in the present act of thought, and looks
neither before nor after, takes cognizance neither of the
past nor of the future, and consequently of no link connect
ing them with the present. Indestructibility, continuity,
persistence, all of which imply cognitions of the past and
future, are not and cannot be facts of consciousness, which
is cognition only of the present. Matter and motion, the
author says, are derivative, derived from force, which alone
is primitive. The indestructibility of matter and the con
tinuity of motion depend, then, solely on the persistence of
force, and are apprehensible, therefore, only in apprehend
ing that persistence ; but that persistence is not a fact of
consciousness. How, then, can it be asserted, unless force
is, and is apprehended as, a persistent substance ? But sub
stance is unknowable.

The author adopts the method of the physicists, the so-
called inductive method, and proceeds from particular
phenomena to induce by generalization their law ; but no
induction is valid that is not made by virtue of a general
principle, which is not itself inferable from the phenomenal,
•and must be given and held by the mind before any induc
tion is possible. This is the condemnation of the method
of the physicists, for, from phenomena alone, only phe
nomena can be obtained. A method without principles is
null, and leads only to nullity. The author does not under
stand that the reason why the cosmic phenomena are not
cogitable without the assumption of the cosmic reality under
lying them, is because the mind intuitively apprehends
them as dependent on something which they are not, and at

452 THE COSMIC PHILOSOPHY.

the same time, and in the same intellectual act, intuitively
apprehends a reality beyond them, which by its causative
act produces and sustains them. He is wrong in declaring
that the something real is unknowable ; it may be incompre
hensible, but, as we have seen, it must be cognizable, or
nothing is cognizable.

That the men who follow in the physical sciences the
physical or, as they say, the inductive method, inducing
general conclusions from particular facts or phenomena, have
really advanced those sciences, and by their untiring labors-
and exhaustless patience achieved all but miracles in the
application of science to the mechanical and productive arts
from which trade and industry have so largely profited, we
by no means deny ; but they have done so because the mind,
in their investigations and inductions, has all along had the
intuition of the ideal principle which legitimates their
generalizations, that of being or substance, and its creative
or causative act, but of which they take no heed, or to which
they do not advert ; as St. Augustine says, the mind really
has cognition of God in the idea of the perfect, but does not
ordinarily advert to the fact. They suppose they obtain
the law they assert by logical inference from the phe
nomena, because they do not observe that the mind has intui
tion of the causative or creative act, which is the ideal
principle of the induction. The mind is superior to their
philosophy, and they reason far better than they explain
their reasoning. "We may apply to them the advice Lord
Mansfield gave to a man of good sense and sound judgment,
but of little legal knowledge, who had been recently ap
pointed a judge in one of the British colonies : " Give your
decisions," said his lordship, " without fear or hesitation ;
but don't attempt to give your reasons." So long as they
confine themselves to the proper field of scientific investi
gation, they are safe enough ; but let them come out of that
field and attempt to explain the philosophy or the princi
ples of their physical science, and they are pretty sure to
make sad work of it. Ne sutor ultra crepidam.

Mr. Spencer protests against being regarded as an atheist,
for he denies the self -existence of the universe, and neither
affirms nor denies the existence of God. But atheist means
simply no-theist, and, if he does not assert that God is, he
certainly is an atheist. It is not necessary, in order to be
an atheist, to make a positive denial of God. His disciple,
Professor John Fiske, who has been lecturing on the cosmic

THE COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. 4:53

philosophy before Harvard College, contends that the cosmic
philosophy is not atheistical, because it asserts in the un
knowable an infinite power, being, or reality, that underlies
the cosmic phenomena, of which they are the sensible mani
festations ; yet this does not relieve it, because what is as
serted is not God, and is not pretended to be the God of
theism, but the reality or substance of the cosmos and in
distinguishable from it. It is the real, as the phenomena
are tlie apparent, cosmos.

The author denies that he is a pantheist, for he denies
the hypothesis of self-creation ; but, if he is not a pantheist,
it is only because he does not call the unknowable infinite
power or being he asserts as the reality of the cosmic, that
is, the real cosmos, by the name of God, Deus, or Theos.
But asserting that power as the reality or substance of the
•cosmic phenomena is precisely what is meant by pantheism.
Pantheism, in its modern form, is the assertion of one only
substance, which is the reality of the cosmic phenomena,
and the denial of the creation of finite substances, which are
the real subject of the cosmic manifestations. Pantheism
denies the creation of substances or second causes, and
asserts that all phenomena are simply the appearances of the
one infinite and only substance ; and this is precisely what
Mr. Spencer undeniably does. The only difference between
atheism and pantheism is purely verbal. The atheist calls
the reality asserted cosmos or nature, and the pantheist calls
it God, but both assert one and the same thing. The power
Mr. Spencer asserts is simply the natura naturans of
Spinoza, and that is nothing the atheist himself does not
accept, and, indeed, assert. Neither asserts, nor does Mr.
Spencer assert, any supercosmic being, or power on which
the cosmos depends, and the power they do assert is as much
cosmic as the phenomena themselves. Mr. Spencer's pro
test betrays rare theological and philosophical ignorance, or
is a mere verbal quibble, unworthy a man who even pre
tends to be a philosopher.

Mr. Spencer hardly once refers to Christian theology,
and, without ever having studied it, evidently would have us
think that he considers it beneath his attention. Yet he, as
evidently, has constructed his system for the purpose of
undermining and disposing of it once for all. This may be
seen in the fact that, when he refers to religion at all, it is
always to some heathen superstition, which he assumes to be
the type or germ of all religion, carefully ignoring the

454 THE COSMIC PHILOSOPHY.

patriarchal, Hebrew, or Christian religion. He tells us " the-
earliest traditions represent rulers as gods or demigods."
This is not true even of heathenism, which is in fact an
apostasy from the patriarchal or primitive religion, or its cor
ruption. The apotheosis of Romulus, according to tradition,,
took place only after his death, and it is only at a later
period that the pagan emperors were held to be gods during
their lifetime. Mr. Spencer's real or affected ignorance of
the whole order of religious thought is marvellous, and we
cannot forbear saying :

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

There is no philosophy or science, if God and his creative
act are excluded or ignored, because there is no cosmos lefty
and neither a subject to know nor an object to be known.

Mr. Spencer misapprehends the relations of religion and
science, and consequently the conditions of their reconcilia
tion. He says they are the two opposite poles of one and
the same globe. This is a mistake. Religion and science
are indeed parts of one whole ; but religion, while it in
cludes science, supplements it by the analogical knowledge
called faith. The truths of faith and of science are always
in dialectic harmony, and between the Christian faith and
real science there is no quarrel, and can be none ; for religion
only supplies the defect of science, and puts the mind in
possession of the solution of the problem of man and the
universe, not attainable by science.

There is a quarrel only when the scientists, in the name
of science deny or impugn the supplementary truths of
revelation, and which are at least as certain as any scientific
truths or facts are or can be ; or when they reject the great
principles of reason itself, which are the basis of all science.

Let the scientists confine themselves, as we have said, to
the study and classification of facts, or the development and
application to them of the undoubted principles of the in
tuitive reason, and not attempt to go beyond their province
or the proper field of scientific investigation, and there will
be no quarrel between them and the theologians. The
quarrel arises when men like Spencer, Darwin, Huxley, and
others, profoundly ignorant both of philosophy and of
theology, or the teachings of revelation, ignoring them,,
despising them, or regarding them with sovereign contempt,
put forth baseless theories and hypotheses incompatible
\vith the truths alike of reason and faith ; and it will continue

THE COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. 455

till they learn that an unproved and improvable theory or
hypothesis is not science, nor a scientific explanation of the
facts either of the soul or of the cosmos, and is quite insuf
ficient to warrant a denial of the belief of the great bulk of
mankind from the first man down to our own day. Then
there may be peace between the theologians and the scien
tists, but not till then.

We said, or intended to say, that a philosopher is known
by his principles. We add that he is also known by his
method. The physical method is unscientific and illogical ;
for it seeks through phenomena to arrive at being, and from
particulars to obtain general or universal conclusions. In
duction that is not based on a universal principle can never
attain to any thing but the particular. Generalizations of
particulars are only abstractions, and abstractions, prescinded
from their concretes, are nullities, as the possible, without
the real to actualize it, is nothing. There is no rising from
particulars to the universal unless we start with a universal
principle intuitively given. It is impossible to conclude, by
logical inference, substance or being from phenomena. The
reality which Mr. Spencer says we are compelled to assert,
though itself unknowable, as underlying the cosmic phenom
ena, is no deduction or induction from these, but is given
intuitively as the ideal or intelligible in the very act in
which the phenomena themselves are apprehended. Mr.
Spencer is wrong in asserting it, as we have said, to be un
knowable, and still more so in asserting it as the subject of
the cosmic phenomena, which is simply pantheism These
phenomena are not the appearances or manifestations of the
infinite power or being which Mr. Spencer asserts as unknow
able, but of the finite and dependent substances which God,
the infinite being, creates and upholds as second causes.

The universal is not contained in the particular, the in
finite in the finite, the identical in the diverse, the immut
able in the mutable, the persistent in the transitory, unity in
plurality, or the actual in the possible, and therefore cannot
be concluded from it. The two categories are not obtain
able, either from the other, by any possible logical inference,
and therefore must be given intuitively or neither is cog
nizable ; for, though not reciprocal, they connote, as all
correlatives, each the other, since neither is knowable with
out the other. This is the condemnation of the physical or
inductive method, when followed as a method of obtaining
the first principles either of the real or of the knowable. We

456 THE COSMIC PHILOSOPHY.

say only what Bacon himself said. He said and proved
that the inductive method is inapplicable in philosophy, 01
out of the sphere of the physical sciences. The great erroi
has been in attempting to follow it in philosophy, or the
science of the sciences, where it is inapplicable, for no
science can start without first principles.

We feel that some apology is due our readers .for solicit
ing their attention to any thing so absurd as Herbert
'Spencer's New System of Philosophy ; but they must bear
in mind that Mr. Spencer is a representative man, and has
only attempted to bring together and combine into a sys
tematic whole the anti-Christian, anti-theistical, and anti-
rational theories, hypotheses, and unscientific speculations
which, under the name and forms of science, govern the
thought of the modern non-Catholic world. Mr. Spencer's
book, which is a laborious eifort to give the philosophy or
science of nothing, and ends only in a system of " symbolic
conceptions," in which nothing, according to the author, is
conceived, has, after all, a certain value, as showing that
there is no medium or middle ground between Catholicity
and atheism, as there is none between atheism and nihilism
Mr. Spencer, we should think, is a man who has read com
paratively little, and knows less, of Christian theology or
philosophy ; he seems to us to be profoundly ignorant of his
own ignorance, as well as of the knowledge other men have.
He is only carrying out the system of Sir William Hamilton
or Dr. Mansel, and providing a philosophy for the Darwins,
the Huxleys, the Galtons, the Lubbocks, the Tyndalls, et id
omne genus, and has succeeded in proving that no advance
has been made by the non-Catholic world on the system of
old Epicurus, which is rapidly becoming the philosophy of
the whole world outside of the church, and against which
the Bascoms, the Hodges, and the McCoshes, with honorable
intentions and a few fragments of Catholic theology and
philosophy, protest in vain. This is our apology for de
voting so much space to Herbert Spencer's inanities.

THE PRIMEVAL MAN NOT A SAVAGE.*

[From Brownson's Quarterly Review for April, 1873 ]

CARDINAL WISEMAN'S Lectures on the Connection between
Science and Revealed Religion, originally written and de
livered in Rome nearly forty years ago, are too well known
and too highly appreciated to render any review of them by
us either necessary or proper. It is to be regretted that his
Eminence was not able to find time to revise them before
his lamented death, and to bring them up to the level of
science at the latest date possible ; for the sciences treated
have no fixedness, and have undergone many and important
changes since these lectures were originally prepared and
delivered. Yet we are not aware that any thing has been
discovered and established that requires any serious modifica
tion of their principles, or that invalidates their general con
clusion, that the investigations of science in its several de
partments tend upon the whole to confirm the historical
accuracy and authenticity of the Scriptural narratives, and
therefore prove a valuable auxiliary to Christian apologetics.
Yet this is hardly true of the actual theories and speculations
of contemporary science, though it is true, if restricted to
what scientific investigations have really discovered and
settled. The theories and speculations of the scientists held
in highest repute, are just now decidedly antiscriptural and
materialistic in their tendencies, while philosophy, adopting
their inductive method, is as decidedly pantheistic or athe
istic, though the Spencerians, or cosmists, concede that
science is as yet in no condition to demonstrate what the
fool says in his heart, non est Deus, or that there is no God.

His Eminence has more confidence in scientists than we

*1. CARDINAL WISEMAN'S Works. The Connection between Science
and Revealed Religion. New York: 1872.

2. Origin of Civilization, and tJie Primitive Condition of Man. TJie
Mental and Social Condition of Savages. By SIR JOHN LUBBOCK Bart
M. R,F. R. S. New York: 1871.

3. Tradition : Principally with reference to Mythology and the Law of
Nations. By LORD ARUNDEL OF W ARDOUR. London: 1872.

4. The Primeval Man : An Examination of sotne Recent Speculations
By the DUKE OF ARGYLL. New York: 1869.

458 THE PRIMEVAL MAN NOT A SAVAGE.

have, and estimates the results of their investigations more
highly than we do ; but we are happy to find him maintain
ing that the Christian faith does not depend on external
evidences, that it has its internal grounds of certainty, which
nothing drawn from foreign sources can shake, or is needed
to confirm. Christianity is herself the key to both history
and science, she is the touchstone of truth ; and whatever in
history or science is found in conflict with her is, by that
fact alone, proved to be neither genuine science, nor authentic
history. History and science must plead before her; not
she before them. His Eminence knows this and insists on
it, but, perhaps, with less emphasis than is desirable. We
hold that Christians should plant themselves on the rights
of religion, and yield in these times, even by way of argu
ment, no advantages which they may justly claim. We
think that his Eminence overrates the aid which the sciences
he treats have furnished to Christian apologetics, hermeneu-
tics, and Biblical criticism. The early commentators under-
sood these matters as well as we do, and they as yet stand
unrivalled. But he knew infinitely more of such matters
than we do ; and, in a case of difference, the probabilities in
the case are that he is right, and we wrong. We make 110
pretentions to any proficiency in the study of what passes
for science. Indeed we have never been able to get any
thing more than a smattering of the sciences so-called ; for
they have none of them remained unchanged long enough
for us to master them. We have tried our hand at most of
them first or last ; but they all changed so rapidly, we had
so often to unlearn to-day what we learned yesterday as
undoubted science, that we gave the matter up in despair.
Yet we are and always have been fond of the study of philol
ogy, ethnology, archaeology, mythology, history, and espec
ially that old mystic East ; but we have never been able to
convince ourselves that the present knows any thing of
much importance that was unknown to the early fathers and
great doctors of the church. We consult the scientists, they
are in ecstasies over the progress they have made ; we press
them, each confesses that his science is as yet only in its in
fancy ; but, for the first time in the history of the world,
each has hit upon the true principles and method of in
vestigation, and the most magnificent results are to be here
after obtained. Well, well, so be it.

' ' Hope springs eternal in the human breast ;
Man never is, but always to be blest."

THE PRIMEVAL MAN NOT A SAVAGE.

We must wait till the infant science has become an adult,
and the magnificent results are obtained. When the scien
tists have succeeded in extracting sunbeams from cucum
bers, in showing us how nothing can make itself something,,
or how there can be effects without causes, or the cosmos
can exist without a maker, we will listen reverently to their
instructions, and confide in their speculations.

Let us not be misapprehended. Cardinal Wiseman does
not rest the claims of revealed religion on what is called
science. He contends not only that science raises no objec
tion to revealed religion that science, when really science,,
does not itself refute ; and he certainly shows that in many
cases it has clearly done so. Hence he concludes, that the
fears which many good people have of certain sciences on
account of their supposed infidel tendencies, are unfounded ;
for the presumption is, that, if science in a large number of
cases refutes its own objections and removes the embarrass
ments it creates, it will ultimately do so in all cases. We
doubt it. We are not authorized to conclude, because it has-
done so in some important cases, it will do so in all ; nor do-
facts tend to justify the presumption. The sciences are far
more decidedly antichristian to-day, than they were when
Cardinal Wiseman first delivered his lectures. The answers
he gives to the scientific objections raised in his day, are for
the most part quietly ignored by subsequent scientists, and
the sacred books of the Jews and Christians, denied all
historical value, are quietly placed in the same category with
the sacred books of the Hindus, Persians, and Chinese ; arid
Christianity is assumed to be only one form among a thousand
other forms of religion which the race has developed, or
with which its natural religious sentiment has clothed itself.
The most honored and revered scientists in public estimation
in our day are the Huxleys, Tyndalls, Lyells, Lubbocksr
Darwins, Spencers, the Cornteans, and the cosmists, or
evolutionists, men who might make a Lamarck, a La Met-
trie, or even a Cabanis, who defined man to be "a digestive
tube open at both ends," die of envy.

His Eminence finds traces of the deluge every wherer
scientific, historical, traditional. His scientific arguments
are based on the marks which geology discloses of a power
ful cataclysm or convulsion the earth at no remote period
underwent, most probably by water, displaced, perhaps, by
the upheaval of the Andes. But a geologist of some note
informed us the other day, that the theory of convulsions or

460 THE PRIMEVAL MAN NOT A SAVAGE.

•cataclysms, save such as are produced by causes now in
operation, is at present very generally rejected by geologists.
Take away the historical account of the deluge recorded in
(renesis, and nothing, as Lord Arundel admits, could be
made of the traditions of nations, which, holding the account
in Genesis for authentic history, we refer unhesitatingly to
Noah's flood. We assume the truth, as we have the right
to do, of the Scriptural narratives, and content ourselves
with requiring those who bring objections from science to
prove, first of all, that what they allege is genuine science,
not simply an induction, a theory, an hypothesis, or a con
jecture ; and till they do that, we sturdily refuse to reply to
their objections, however specious or damaging they may
seem. It is the only course that is just alike to religion,
and to those who object to it. His Eminence is more con
descending. He undertakes to prove to them that it is not
science ; we ask them to prove that it is ; for we have little
patience with scientists, whom we seldom find able to reason.
The second book on our list is a pretended scientific work,
by Sir John Lubbock, one of the great lights of modern
English science. He is a baronet, a fellow of the Royal
Society, a member of parliament, and author of a history of
prehistoric times, that is, history, if not evolved from his
own " inner consciousness," at least written by way of in
duction from mutilated phenomena and unintelligible
monuments. His account of the mental and social condition
of savages, though it tells us little that we have not known
almost from our boyhood, is not devoid of interest, and,
except as to inferences and one important point, is in the
main, we believe, correct. Sir John holds that the human
race began its career in the lowest barbarism in which
it is possible for man to exist as man, and has by its own in
digenous and unassisted efforts, after ages of toil and strug
gle, worked its way up to the high civilization, say, of Eng
land in the nineteenth century, even to that of Sir John
Lnbbock himself, who stands at the summit of that civiliza
tion. This theory, which assumes that the primitive state
of man as man, that is, when he by development has got rid
of his monkey appendages and emerged into a man, is that
of the savage state or lowest barbarism, — we propose to ex
amine with some degree of thoroughness before we close,
but must first turn our attention to the third book on our
list, Tradition, by Lord Arundel of Wardour, which con
tains, in fact, a very full and satisfactory refutation of the
savage theory of Sir John Lubbock and others.

THE PRIMEVAL MAN NOT A SAVAGE.

461

Lord Arundel of Wardour aims, in this really erudite
volume, to refute the Benthamites and diplomates, who
substitute what they call international law for the law of
nations, and which they hold to be of human and conven
tional origin, founded on pacts and precedents to be inter
preted by each nation for itself, according to its own judg
ment of utility or expediency. As there is and can be no
international sovereign, there can be no international law
except by a figure of speech, and consequently no inter
national 'court, judge, or umpire, whose judgments arc-
legally binding on either party, or capable of execution, ex
cept by an appeal to arms. Consequently each party is his-
own judge and jury, and is free to do whatever under the
circumstances it judges expedient or useful, if it has the
power. If the king of Sardinia judges it expedient or use
ful to him and his people, to invade and annex the kingdom
of the Two Sicilies, the Italian duchies, and the Pontifical
States, and imprison their legitimate sovereign, there is-
nothing to prevent him if he has the power to do it. There
being no law of nations, there is no law or rule of right or
justice that he would violate in doing it. This practically
resolves right into might, the favorite doctrine of Thomas-
Carlyle, and places the weaker party always in the wrong.
He is always in the right who has the stronger force, and
success is the test of merit.

Yet there is no "untutored" savage that would not in
stinctively revolt at a doctrine so favorable to tyrants and
robbers, to the assassins and plunderers of nations and of
individuals ; for even the most degraded savage has at least
a rude sense of justice, which he never confounds with
simple physical force. However, the doctrine follows legiti
mately from Bentham's 'denial of the rule of right, and put
ting in its place the rule of utility, pleasure, or happiness.
It is openly defended by Carlyle in his glorification of
Mirabeau, Danton, Napoleon I., and Frederic II., miscalled
the Great. It is the doctrine acted on by the Subalpine
government, and by virtue of which it has effected the unity
of Italy ; it is the doctrine on which Prince von Bismarck
has acted in creating the present German empire ; and it is
the doctrine approved by the diplomacy of all nations, ex
cept its victims. Russia, Austria, Germany, Denmark,.
Sweden, Great Britain, France, Spain, the United States^
hold friendly diplomatic relations with the Subalpine robber
iind usurper, and not one of them has protested against hi&

462 THE PRIMEVAL MAN NOT A SAVAGE.

robbery. France cannot protest against the new German
empire, for she is its victim ; but the diplomacy of Europe
.and America renders homage to the new kaiser, and adorns
with the laurel wreath the brow of his unprincipled and un
scrupulous chancellor. A prince wants to annex a neigh
boring state to his own possessions. Let him do it, if able,
-and diplomacy will sanction his robbery, by calling it un
fait accompli, or justify it by " the logic of events."

Now, against this abominable doctrine which makes phys
ical force the measure of right, and justifies the vce metis
of the Romans, Lord Arundel protests in the name of
liberty and civilization, and asserts the law of nations, or the
jus gentium of Roman jurisprudence and universal tradition.
The jus gentium was not simply the portion of Roman law
common to all nations, but was coincident with the law of
nature, natural right, superior to all municipal laws, eternal
and immutable, sacred and inviolable, and held to bind the
.nation, not only in its intercourse and relations with others,
but in its entire national action, whether relating to foreign
ers or to its own citizens or subjects. Any municipal legis
lative act in contravention of the jus gentium, Roman
jurisprudence held to be null and void from the beginning.
" Unjust laws," says St. Augustine, speaking as a Roman
jurist as well as a Christian theologian, " are violences rather
than laws." The Romans held the jus gentium to be im
posed, not by men or by the nations themselves by mutual
.agreement, but by divine authority, and therefore binding
on the conscience of the nation itself, and on the con
sciences of all nations. It was of divine, not of human
•origin, and therefore under the protection of the avenging
gods. The Athenians evidently distinguished between jus
tice and utility. Aristides, appointed to examine a project
concocted by Themistocles, reported that " nothing could
be more useful to Athens, but at the same time nothing
<jould be more unjust." The Athenians, it is said, therefore
refused to entertain the project. The Athenians had a
higher civilization, if the anecdote may be credited, than
the princes and diplomates of the last century and of the
present. It would be an insult to pagan Greece or Rome
to call that solemn Englishman and ethical and juridical re
former, Jeremy Bentham, a pagan. The pagans were hardly
<ever such utter apostates from religion, morals, and common
sense, as he was. The most sophistical of the Greek sophists
.never became more utterly unable to distinguish between
right and wrong, or befogged by their sophistry.

THE PRIMEVAL MAN NOT A SAVAGE. 463

International law, divorced from ethics, founded on utility,
and interpreted by precedent, favors only the strong, and
affords no protection to the weak. The law of nations is
the eternal and immutable law of justice, which binds the
nation and governs the intercourse of nations with one
another, and interposes the shield of sacred and inviolable
right between the weak and the- strong, and enables small
states to subsist in peace and security by the side of great
and powerful states. The pope, for Christian nations, is
the divinely-appointed guardian and judge of the law of
nations, and his is the only voice among sovereigns that now
rings out in its defence. He presents at this moment, when
past his fourscore years, a sublime example of fidelity to
justice where all are faithless, and which the world must ere
long admire, and yield to it the homage that is its due. He
stands and speaks, and his enemies one by one drop into
their graves. Palrnerston is dead ; Cavour is dead ; Mazzini
is dead ; Louis Napoleon is dead ; Garibaldi is sick, eaten up
by chagrin, and impotent ; Victor Emmanuel would make
his peace to-day, if his government would let him ; Bismarck
alone remains in full vigor, but all does not go smooth even
with him, and his turn may come soon. If men for the
moment turn a deaf ear to the voice of the vicar of Christ,
God hears him and avenges the violated law of nations, and
summons to his own judgment-seat those who prided them
selves on their power and craft, and thought that they could
trample on his justice with impunity. It is not with a
weak, trembling old man that they have to account, but
with the omnipotent God. Let them tremble before his
justice which they have despised, for he in his wrath will
scatter them as the chaff of the summer threshing-floor be
fore the wind: " I have seen the wicked highly exalted and
lifted up like the cedars of Libanus. And I passed by, and
lo ! he was not : and I sought him, and his place was not to
be found." Ps. xxxvi, 35, 36.

Lord Arundel, knowing well that man has no power to
invent or to make the law of nations obligatory, aims, in the
second place, to trace its origin in tradition back to Noah,
and through him to Adam in whom it was infused by his
Maker, and from whom it has been tradited to all the
families, tribes, and nations of his posterity, spread as they
are over the whole face of the earth, This leads him to an
examination of the mythologies of nations, in which are em
bodied and preserved the traditions of the race. His lord-

464: THE PRIMEVAL MAN NOT A SAVAGE.

ship finds that, in these mythologies, the people are repre
sented as owing their civilization to the gods who taught
them the use of fire, to plant corn and the vine, and the
various arts of husbandry, to rear flocks and herds, who
gave them laws, and raised them to a state of civilization.
From the character of the principal feasts in honor of the
services rendered the people by the gods, and the symbols
and emblems used in them, he identifies these gods some
times with Adam and his sons, Seth and Cain ; sometimes,
and more frequently, with Noah and his three sons, Sem,
Cham, and Japhet, through whom the race was continued,
its traditions preserved, and the earth repeopled after the
flood. Hence, he contends that the mythologies and
traditions of the heathen, when properly explained, agree in
ascribing the law of nations and civilization which it founds
and sustains, to Adam, who received the law directly from
his Maker, and its preservation and transmission through
Noah and his three sons, to the several families, tribes, and
nations, until their posterity became divided. This accords
with the Scriptural tradition, and is the only historical sense
of which the mythological traditions and symbols are sus-.
ceptible.

The only point here that we are not prepared to accept is,
that the heathen mythologies originated in hero-worship, as
his lordship contends, and that the nucleus of the myth is a
real historical personage. The Scriptures tell us that all
" the gods of the gentiles are devils," and we do not find
that the heathen ever raised deified kings and heroes to the
rank of their greater gods or principal deities. But we
agree that the devils worshipped by the heathen as gods, as
they are now by the spiritists in our own country, gathered
around them and appropriated to themselves, and set forth
in their own distorted way, real historical traditions and
events ; and it is this fact, in our judgment, that has misled
the majority of our most eminent mythologists. They seem
to us to overlook the fact, that all the gods of the heathen,
and therefore all the mythological gods, were literally
devils, which is the real key to the false religions and my
thologies of the gentiles. But the point is not essential to
his lordship's argument. All that it requires in order to
stand firm is, that the historical events, celebrated or com
memorated in the worship of the devils, should be events,
though distorted and disguised, ascribed to Adam, Noah,
and other scriptural personages in authentic tradition ; and

THE PRIMEVAL MAN NOT A SAVAGE.

465

this much we think his lordship, as well as other mytholo-
gists, has sufficiently proved.

The noble author very justly rejects the practice so com
mon of late, of writing history by induction from isolated
facts and monuments, like the pretended histories of pre
historic times. He maintains that any attempted historical
inductions from the facts or particulars disclosed by the
analytical investigations of the various mythologies and
mutilated and distorted traditions of the heathen, can give
110 trustworthy historical result. We can study them with
advantage only when we have authentic tradition for our
guide. This authentic tradition is recorded in the Script
ures, and has come down to us in its purity and integrity
through the patriarchs, the synagogue, and the church. The
mythologies can add nothing to it ; but, studied in its light,
they bear witness to its universality, and tend to confirm it.
This study is not necessary to our faith as Christians, but is
very useful, as Cardinal Wiseman shows, in repelling a
certain class of objections urged by infidels.

The fourth work on our list, by the Duke of Argyll, is a
brief examination of the theory of the origin of civilization
by Sir John Lubbock. and of the speculations of Charles
Darwin on the origin of species and the descent of man. It
is able, but too brief and sketchy to be generally satisfactory.
His Grace, as does the late Dr. Whately, Protestant arch
bishop of Dublin, denies that the primeval man was a
savage, or that the human race began in the lowest form of
barbarism, and have risen to the highest civilization as yet
attained to, by their own indigenous and unaided efforts.
But his Grace relies very little on tradition, which, as a
Presbyterian, it might be inconvenient for him to do ; he
is also disposed to concede a much greater antiquity both to
the earth and to man, than we think there is any reason for
doing. He maintains, against Darwin's theory of the de
velopment of new species by natural selection, that, as old
species become extinct, God creates new species, and that
not development, but creation is constantly going on. But
as we intend to pay ere long our respects especially to Mr.
Darwin, we connne what more we have to say in this article
to the savage theory of Sir John Lubbock.

Sir John holds that man began in the lowest barbarism in
which he can exist as man, and, as we have said, has risen
by force of nature or his own indigenous efforts to civiliza
tion, as he had probably previously risen from some lower

VOL. IX-30.

466 THE PRIMEVAL MAN NOT A SAVAGE.

animal, the ape, perhaps, to man ; though we believe he
does not actually assert that man is an ape or some other
animal developed, but leaves us to believe it. We are per
fectly familiar with Sir John's theory. We held and defend
ed it for years, and pronounced it " the evangel of the nine
teenth century " ; for if it is not the theory of progress
itself, it is built on that theory, and derives all its support
from it. The theory makes two assumptions : 1. That the
primitive state of the human race was the savage state, or
that of utter barbarism ; and 2. That men have risen from
that state and advanced to the highest and most refined civ
ilization yet reached, by their own inherent energy and
indigenous efforts, without any supernatural instruction or
foreign assistance. The first part is refuted by Lord Arundel
in his conclusive proofs, that the law of nations, which we
take it is the basis of all real civilization, is and can be no
human invention, but is a universal tradition, handed down
from Adam through Noah to us, embodied in all languages,
and borne witness to by the consciences of all men and
nations. Till this fact of universal tradition is overruled,
Sir John's theory cannot be even entertained ; for it is con
demned by a higher authority than any that can possibly
be alleged in its support. There is and can be no higher
authority on the question than that of Genesis, which we
cannot suffer to be disputed.

It is alleged that science is science, and therefore certain
and indisputable, and, consequently, that whatever conflicts
with it is manifestly false ? We reply, that nothing that con
flicts with Genesis or Christian tradition, is or can be science.
What is alleged as to the primitive state of the human race is
not science, is only a theory or hypothesis. This is all that
the scientists can even pretend. They must vindicate it,
prove it to be science, before they can claim a hearing, or
have any standing in the court.

Sir John alleges that the primitive state of the human
race was that of barbarism, but he does not and can not
allege this as a fact historically known or verifiable ; he
can and does allege it only as an inference or induction from
certain isolated facts and monuments that in his judgment
warrant it. But his judgment may be at fault ; he may
mistake the true sense of the facts and monuments on which
he bases his theory, and consequently present only a baseless
hypothesis. History cannot be evolved from one's " inner
consciousness," or written by way of logical induction.

THE PRIMEVAL MAN NOT A SAVAGE. 46 T

Indeed, without the Biblical traditions, as Lord Arundel
maintains, Sir John has and can have no key to the sense of
the facts and monuments on which he relies, and no test to
which he can bring his inductions and inferences for ver
ification. The common practice of those who pretend to
controvert Christian tradition in the name of science, of
bringing forward an unproved and improvable theory or
hypothesis, which, if true, might be a serious objection,
and then insist on our disproving it, or else giving up Chris
tian tradition, is not logical nor scientific, and cannot be tol
erated. It is for them to prove, not for us to disprove, their
theories, hypotheses, conjectures, guesses. Till they are
proved, they are not science and make nothing against us,
even should we be unable to disprove them. A man may
assert that the dogs that licked up Jezabel's blood were
ringstreaked, and we could by no means disprove it. It is
for Sir John to prove his savage or barbaristic theory, not for
us to disprove it ; and till he proves it, he cannot make it
the basis of any valid argument or statement unfavorable to
Christian tradition. Unhappily, the most unscientific and
illogical reasoners we have ever encountered are precisely
our professed scientists. Logic is a science which they seem
by common consent to eschew as not necessary or useful to
them.

The theory in question is based on another theory, that
of progress, or that the race or species is naturally progres
sive, ever advancing in its march through the ages, from
the imperfect towards the perfect. This being so, it is evi
dent that the race must have begun in the deepest ignorance
and the grossest barbarism. Hence the late Theodore Parker,
a champion of progress, in undertaking to give in one of his
sermons an account of the state of Adam, or the primeval
man, gave a graphic and not untruthful picture of the average
New Zealander. The slight defect was in omitting to prove
that the New Zealander is the type of the primitive man.
Sir John gives a very elaborate, and, with one rather im
portant exception, so far as our knowledge goes, a very true
account of the mental and social condition of savages ; but
he also forgets to produce the proof that the primeval man
was a savage. The conclusion drawn from the theory of
progress is worthless, because that theory is itself not only
unproved, but improvable, nay, demonstrably false. It is
unscientific, unphilosophical, and unhistorical.

Individual growth there is from infancy to manhood.

468 THE PRIMEVAL MAN NOT A SAVAGE.

Progress of individuals and even nations in culture, wisdomT
virtue, religion, by the study of tradition, by foreign influ
ences, or supernatural instruction and aid, there has been and
may be ; but none of the species, nor of the individual even,
by his own inherent energy, or unassisted indigenous efforts.
As far as there is any evidence touching the question, it
proves not the progress of the species, but, if any thing, its-
deterioration. Even in the case of the lower animals, there
is, aided by the science and art of man, no permanent, if any
improvement at all, of the species or even of the breed. A
better breed may be selected, but a new breed is never
created ; for, in crossing, there is always a reversion, after a
few generations, to one or another of the original types-
crossed : which would seem to indicate the permanence and
immutability of original species against the speculations of
Darwin on the origin of species by natural selection, since
it proves that they cannot be originated even by intelligent
artificial selection.

The theory of progress on which Sir John relies, is inad
missible ; for it asserts effects without causes, that nothing
can make itself something, or, what is the same thing, that
the stream can rise higher than its fountain, the effect surpass
the cause, that man in and of himself can make himself
more than he is. All growth is by accretion and assimila
tion from without. The germ of the oak containing the law
of its development, is in the acorn ; but, without air, light,
heat, and moisture derived from without, the acorn will not
germinate and grow into the oak. The law is universal. The
human body grows and attains its maturity only under proper
external conditions, and by assimilating its appropriate food.
The soul can grow or advance only by assimilating spiritual
instruction and moral truth, nor elevate itself to a higher
condition without assimilating a grace from a source above
itself. So, if man had begun in the savage state, he could
never by his own indigenous and unassisted efforts have risen
above it. He could have got out of it only by the supernat
ural assistance of his Maker, which amounts to the same thing
that Christian tradition asserts, and which the mythologies
of all nations bear witness to, in ascribing the origin of their
laws and civilization to the gods.

The theory is unhistorical. There is no record on instance
of a savage tribe becoming by its own spontaneous and un
assisted efforts a civilized people. All the historical author
ities known to us agree in this ; and we, who have been read-

THE PRIMEVAL MAN NOT A SAVAGE. 469

ing history all our life, have not been al)le to find an instance
of the kind. Theorists who assert it, do not pretend that they
have any strictly historical authority for it. It is not, they
will own, a strictly historical fact, but an induction. If the
primeval man was a savage, how has he become civilized, if
the race is not progressive ? The question reveals the true
spirit of our modern scientists. They imagine a theory, then
imagine another, equally baseless, to prove it. They prove
that man began in the savage state, by the theory of pro
gress ; and the theory of progress, by the theory that man
was originally a savage, and, consequently, could not become
civilized if not progressive. Save in those physical sciences,
where a crucial test is practicable, what is called modern sci
ence, or science in an absolute manner, and opposed to
Christian tradition, is really nothing but hypothesis piled on
hypothesis. It is gravely called science, so far as we can
•discover, only for the reason that it is not science. Yet we
are gravely asked to give up our faith on its authority.

There may be instances in which a savage tribe has become
a civilized people ; but none in which it nas become so by
spontaneous development. It has always been by coming
into relations, more or less intimate, with a people already
civilized through missionaries, colonists, or conquest. We
add not trade, for that exhausts savage and barbarous tribes,
but, so far as history goes, never civilizes them. The Greeks
attributed their civilization to Egyptian and Phoenician col
onies, — Cecrops in Athens, Cadmus in Thebes, &c. Mod
ern historians have tried, indeed, to prove that both the
Greek civilization and the Greek religion were indigenous ;
but this is more than the Greeks themselves pretended. In
later times, the Grecian genius influenced the form of their
civilization and of their mythology ; but the Eastern, origin
of both is written on their very face. The ancestors of the
English, that is, Britons, Kelts, and Teutons, were by no
means savages. When we first catch some historical glimpse
of them, they are unlettered, it is true ; but they have a very
copious unwritten literature, if we may use the expression,
considerable cultivation, and the principal elements of civili
zation. Nobody can say when the Irish civilization began,
and the Britons, as painted by Caesar, might want some of
the elements of Greek and Roman civilization, but were not
by any means a savage people. The Teutons or Germans,
the descendants, we take it, of the white Sc}7thians of
Herodotus, and known in early history as Massagetse, Geta3,

470 THE PRIMEVAL MAN NOT A SAVAGE.

Gettones, and later, as Gottones, Guttones, Goths, and Teu-
tones, are never presented as pure savages, or an absolutely
uncivilized people. They appear to have been, according to
Ozanam, in his Etudes Germaniques, in part an agricultural
and sedentary people, with cities and villages, under a reg
ular government, and civil and religious laws ; and, in part,
a nomadic people of the same race, leading a pastoral life,
and uniting with the sedentary population in case of mili
tary or predatory expeditions. Old Jorriandes, a Christian
Goth, in his history of his nation, indignantly repels the as
persion that they were uncivilized. Indeed they were not
more superstitious than the Greeks and Romans, were far
less cruel than the Romans, less unchaste, held marriage in
greater respect, were far more truthful, and more faithful to
their word, if we may credit the ecclesiastical writers who
were contemporary with their invasion and conquest of the
empire. Indeed, except in literary, artistic, and scientific
culture, it may be doubted if the Prussians, not Christian
ized till the twelfth century, are to-day much in advance
of the Marcomans, the Allemanni, the Franks, the Goths,
and Yandals, who overthrew the Empire of the West, and
seated themselves on its ruins.

History presents us, or preserves for us the memory of no
savage ancestors of the oldest civilized nations, the Egyp
tians, Assyrians, Syrians, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Ethio
pians, Abyssinians, Chaldeans, Persians, and Indians. Where
then are the people or nations, civilized to-day, whose ances
tors were savages, an ignoble herd roaming in the forest,
living in dens and caves, on nuts or wild roots, which they
disputed with the swine ; naked, without arms either of of
fence or defence except their fists, ignorant of the use of fire,
and of the simplest agricultural or mechanical arts ? The
Greek and Latin poets describe their own ancestors in simi
lar terms, it is true ; but they never describe that condition
as their primitive condition, or as that of the human race.
It had, according to them, been preceded by the Saturnian
Age of Gold. Their traditions are worth as much for the one
state as for the other. Not only is there no instance on rec
ord of a savage people having attained to a civilized state
by its own unaided efforts, but it is even doubtful if any
tribe sunk in the lowest barbarism has ever by any means be
come a civilized people at all. We may well say Sir John
Lubbock's theory is unhistorical.

Sir John, in his description of the mental and social condi-

THE PRIMEVAL MAN NOT A SAVAGE. 471

tion of savages, fails to note that the most striking character
istic of the savage is precisely his stationariness or unpro-
gressiveness. Ages on ages roll over him, and bring no
change in his habits or in his condition. Heeren remarks
truly that the description given by the companions of Alex
ander the Great, of the Fisheaters along the coast of Kera-
mania, eastward of the Persian Gulf, answers equally for
them to-day : a fact which affords a passable comment on the
theory, that fish-eating tends to increase the power and ac
tivity of the brain on account of the phosphorus so abundant
in fish. The savage is the greatest routinist in the world.
Generation after generation follows in the track of its pred
ecessor, fishes, hunts, makes war in the same manner, as reg
ularly as the bee constructs her cell, or the beaver builds
his dam, to-day as did the bee or the beaver four thousand
years ago. The savage has to perfection the nil admirari of
^English high life. He has no wonder, no curiosity, no aspi
rations, no " inward questionings." His senses are acute,
and he is a keen observer ; but he never speculates or in
quires into the meaning of facts beyond their direct bearing
on his condition or pursuits in life, — fishing, hunting, cir
cumventing an enemy, or eating and sleeping. His life runs
from generation to generation in the same unalterable
groove, unless something external to him intervenes to lift
him to a higher plane and divert his course. He is in some
sort a man petrified. No thing is more absurd than to suppose
him capable, without assistance from abroad or from above,
of changing his state for that of civilization, which repels
rather than attracts him, as all who have studied his charac
ter well know.

Sir John Lubbock seeks to gain credence for his theory
of the origin of civilization, by alleging certain anticipations
among savages of civilization, and certain reminiscences of
previous barbarism among the civilized. But the facts he
adduces as anticipations of a coming civilization, may, as
the Duke of Argyll very well observes, just as easily be ex
plained as reminiscences of a lost civilization ; and there is
no objection to regarding the other class of facts as reminis
cences of a vanishing barbarism. Though we deny that the
race began in the lowest barbarism, we hold that no small
portion of the human family, after the confusion of tongues
at Babel, the apostasy of the gentiles, and their dispersion
in the days of Phaleg, lapsed into barbarism, into wnat the
poets call the Iron Age. Those who wandered farthest from

472 THF PRIMEVAL MAN NOT A SAVAGE.

tlie original seats of the race, when all " were of one tongue
and the same speech," fell the lowest, and, perhaps, are still
savages. Others who wandered less far, and remained near
the original seats of the race, deteriorated indeed, but not to
so great a degree, and have been recovered to civilization,
though retaining traces of the barbarism or semi-barbarism,
into which after the apostasy and dispersion they had fallen.
This explains both classes of facts noted by Sir John, and
accords with Christian tradition, as well as with the gentile
traditions preserved and transmitted in the heathen mythol
ogies and by the heathen poets, as Lord Arundel, guided by
the historical light of the Mosaic records, has amply proved,
whether we accept the doctrine which his lordship holds in
common with the most learned and generally approved
mythologists, that the greater gods of the gentiles were
Adam and Noah and their sons deified ; or whether we reject
it ; for, as we have seen, these gods gather round them the
Scriptural traditions, and appropriate to themselves the
events and facts in the historical personages of that tradition
celebrated or commemorated in their memorial festivals,
sacrifices, and offerings. The devils cannot create ; they can
only use and corrupt what already exists.

The history of the human race on this globe is a history
of deterioration rather than of progress. Progress there has
been by the supernatural teaching and assistance of Chris
tianity, and where the Christian tradition has been preserved
and conformed to in its purity arid integrity. There was a
marvellous progress in Europe from the sixth century to the
sixteenth of our era under the powerful influence of the
church, the disinterested, self-denying, and persevering
labors of her devoted pontiffs, clergy, missionaries, and
religious. But I find deterioration rather than progress in
the gentile world, both before and since the commencement
of the Christian era. Great monarchies grew up, the Egyp
tian, the Assyrian, the Medo-Persian, the Macedonian, but
by conquest, annexation, robbery, and violence, like modern
Prussia, or the present so-called kingdom of Italy ; not by
the internal growth of intelligence and virtue, by the strict
observance of justice or the law of nations, nor by any
elevation of the standard of civilization. They were all
great tyrannies, a curse to the human race, and have all
fallen through internal weakness and decay, and have either
lapsed into barbarism, or have been superseded by barbarous
tribes which they once held in subjection without civilizing

THE PRIMEVAL MAN NOT A SAVAGE.

473

them, and which now roam over the desolate sites of their
former power, pitch their tents, or rob the unwary traveller
among the mouldering ruins of their greatness. So, too,
mighty Rome rose, became the haughty mistress of the
world, but, like her predecessors, fell to pieces from her own
rottenness ; and it is due to the church she persecuted and
sought to destroy, that her memory is not as completely lost
as that of the great robber empires that once flourished in
the East.

The history of these great empires that once grasped the
world in their hands, is not the history of a progress in civili
zation, of social amelioration, nor of an advance in the arts and
sciences. We find always their earliest civil constitution the
most favorable to liberty and social well-being, to intelligence
and individual growth. The oldest works of art are the
best, the earliest literature is the richest and the soundest.
The oldest of the Hindu sacred books are the freest from
superstition, and approach nearest to the Biblical doctrines
and traditions ; the two great poets of Greece, Homer and
Hesiod, are the earliest known ; the soundest elements of
Greek philosophy are confessedly derived from the wisdom
of the ancients, and the oldest laws are the wisest, the just-
est, and the most salutary ; and the changes introduced,
which tend not to restore primitive legislation, are the ef
fects and causes of deterioration in morals, manners, or social
and political condition. The people who founded the city
of Rome and gave it its renown, were less superstitious, less
immoral, and had higher civic virtues as well as domestic,
than the Romans under the Caesars, whose corruption, lux
ury, and effeminacy, as well as cruelty and superstition,
made holy men look upon their conquest by the German
barbarians as a blessing to mankind.

The history of the apostate nations before the Christian
era is a history of deterioration, of political and social cor
ruption, of the progress of tyranny and oppression, of moral
and religious degradation. We witness the same tendency
in the modern nations that have apostatized from Christiani
ty, and rejected the authority of Christian tradition. True
religion and real civilization are inseparable ; or, rather, true
religion is civilization, or, at least, includes it. No people
who believes and practises true religion, is or can be an un
civilized people. Adam received from his Maker the true
religion, preserved by the patriarchs to Xoah, and through
him down to the building of the Tower of Babel ; and so

474 THE PEIMEVAL MAN NOT A SAVAGE.

long as the race remained of "one tongue and the same
speech," Genesis xi, they held and, externally at least, ob
served the true religion, the Christian religion (for there is
and never has been but one religion properly so-called), and
were civilized. With Nemrod, " the stout hunter before the
Lord." probably commenced the great gentile apostasy, and
simultaneously the deterioration which resulted in the igno
rance, superstition, devil-worship, and barbarism of the
heathen. The conversion of a family, tribe, or nation to
Christianity, brings it within the pale of civilization. Be
fore the opening of the sixteenth century the church had
converted and, therefore, civilized the various families,
tribes, and nations of Europe, with the exception of the
Turks encamped on its southeastern margin, whom the
schismatic Greeks, severed from the source of Christian life
and power, were impotent either to convert or to expel ; she
had opened the route to the East by way of the Cape of
Good Hope, and had also discovered this Western Continent,
and was preparing to convert and, therefore, to civilize the
barbarians and savages of the other three-quarters of the
globe, when came the so-called reformation, favored by
the sovereign princes, to renew the great .gentile apostasy,
and caused that " falling away," predicted by St. Paul.

The history of these modern apostate nations is the exact
counterpart of that of the ancient gentile nations. They
reject the law of God, and therefore the law of nations,
recognize no law that comes from a source above the nation,
or which man himself does not make. They are every day
losing sight of the moral order and of the divine govern
ment. They exclude God from the affairs of this world,
and make either Caesar or the people supreme and indepen
dent. They recognize no authority but that of the prince or
that of the majority, and no measure of right, as we have
seen, but might or physical force. They may recognize in
some extramundane region a divinity that dozes all day and
sleeps all night, and takes no care how the world wags.
They may even admit his supreme authority, but only in a
vague and indeterminate sense, as an abstraction, without
visible organization or organs, and therefore without any prac
tical efficacy in the government of men or nations. They
worship Fortune as the supreme goddess, and hold Success
to be the test of merit Losing causes are always wrong,
and God is always on the side of the strong, just now on the
side of Prince von Bismarck and Victor Emmanuel ; as in

THE PRIMEVAL MAN NOT A SAVAGE.

my boyhood, when the pope was held a prisoner at Savona
or Fontainebleau, he was said by the preachers to be on the
side of Napoleon I., who was identified with the Man-Child
of the Apocalypse. These nations are laboring with might
and main to make education purely secular, to exclude re
ligion from the^schools, and to train up the rising generation
in atheism, which they call science, as they call religion
superstition. They boast of their " enlightenment," but
their enlightenment consists in forgetting or despising the
wisdom and common sense of their ancestors ; they boast of
their progress, but in the moral and spiritual order, in re
ligion and the basis of civilization, their progress, as we said
years ago, is in losing, in unclothing, and reducing them
selves to utter nakedness. The only progress they can boast
is in the purely material and mechanical order. Their moral,
social, political, and educational reforms are all failures, or
rapid strides towards barbarism. But even in their mechan
ical and material progress, the good gained is more than
counterbalanced by the evil that accompanies it. It enriches
a few, but trebles the burdens of the poor. What gain is
it to the poor man that he can buy a coat for one-fourth of
the price paid by his great-grandfather, when he must have
six coats where his great-grandfather needed but one? They
boast of the progress of liberty. When was there less
liberty in Germany or Italy than now? They boast of de
mocracy, but democracy 'only substitutes the mob for Ccesar,
or the irresistible tyranny of soulless corporations for the
prince, as we see in our own country, where the cost of liv
ing for poor people is greater that in any other country on
earth, and where corporations govern the government.

When the people have lost the sense of the moral order,
when religion has lost its hold on them, or when it is at best
only a disembodied idea, without organs through which to
make known and apply the divine law, and is practically
only what each one's own fancy, prejudices, interests, pas
sions, or caprice make it, or, if organized at all, subordinated
to the prince, as the imperial government of Germany and
the robber government of Italy contend that it should be ;
when the law of nations is reduced to a mere convention,
pact, or agreement between nations, which in practice is only
what the will of the stronger party dictates; and when the
government has no authority from God to govern, and has no
powers but such as it holds from the governed, — there is no
3ivilization, and society is undeniably on the declivity to the

476 THE PRIMEVAL MAN NOT A SAVAGE.

lowest barbarism, whether we believe it or not. Such is the
state towards which modern society is at least tending, and
which it has well-nigh already reached. The modern apos
tate nations may not have, in all respects, as yet sunk to the
lowest depths of the ancient world, but in some respects
they have sunk lower than Greece or Rome.

These considerations are sufficient to refute Sir John's
theory in both its parts, and to prove that man is not natu
rally progressive, or capable in and of himself of emerging
from the savage state, and that, when left to himself, to his
own strength alone, he deteriorates instead of advancing.
And it must be so, for man is not in a state of pure nature,
but is always either lifted above nature, or dragged by Satan
below it. The moment a man abandons religion, turns his
back on Christ the Lord, he does not fall back on pure
nature, but he falls under the influence of Satan, becomes
captive to the devil, who leads him socially into barbarism,
and individually, or, as to his soul, down to hell. Hence the
reason why the secular order cannot stand without the spir
itual, and why educating and disciplining the natural powers
in relation to a natural end never suffices to secure it. When
ex -P ere Hyacinthe represented a distinguished American
priest, a convert, as denying that he had ever been a Prot
estant, and claiming that, prior to his conversion, he was
simply a natural man, he overlooked the fact, that nature is
in bondage to Satan, till liberated by regeneration in Christ.
We are, in hac providentia, never simply natural men
standing on the level of nature, but always below that level,
if not raised by grace above it. Hence, as Gorres writes in
his Christlicke Mystik, "Man is always either ascending
under divine influence, or descending under demoniacal or
satanic influence." Who does not ascend, descends. By the
prevarication of Adam, as we read the Council of Trent,
man lost the supernatural justice in which he was originally
constituted, and the integrity of his nature annexed thereto,
became darkened in his understanding, enfeebled in his will,
and fell into bondage to the devil. Hence, when not liber
ated by grace from bondage to the devil, or when they
apostatize from Christ the Liberator, men and, through
them, nations cease to ascend or to aspire, and come under
the power of Satan who drags them downward, downward,
till they recognize and worship him as God, as did the
heathen, and as do again in our own community the modern
spiritists.

THE PRIMEVAL MAN NOT A SAVAGE. 477

The modern doctrine of progress is not vet a century old,
and yet we told the truth when, some thirty years ago, we
pronounced it the " creed of the nineteenth century." It is
held by almost everybody with unquestioning faith, or,
rather, with the blind credulity of the fanatic. It pervades
all popular literature, even most scientific treatises; it is
iterated and reiterated ad nauseam by the press, from the
stately quarterly, the infallible daily, down to the seven-by-
nine weekly ; it is in the air, it is truly the Welt-Geist, and
who sings not its praises is outlawed, insulted, laughed at,
denounced, is one of the oscurantisti, an old fogie with his
eyes on the backside of his head, a dweller among tombs, a
spectre, a shadow, not a living, breathing man. It is one of
the strangest delusions that has ever seized and carried
away the^iuman mind, and in it Satan would seem to have
outdone himself. With not a particle of evidence to sustain
it, treading on an earth covered all over with ruins, we know
not how many layers deep, with the unmistakable signs of
deterioration, weakness and decay everywhere staring us in
the face, we yet are deluded enough to assert that man is
naturally progressive, and that the nations would pursue a
steady march towards the realization of an earthly paradise,
much more desirable than the heaven hoped for by Chris
tians, but for the priests, but for the pope, just now but for
the Jesuits ! Well, it is rather characteristic of insane per
sons to be spiteful towards their best friends, and to be the
most enraged at those whom they, when sane, love best and
esteem the most.

What has no reason can hardly be said to admit of a
rational explanation. There are men who, because conscious
of knowing more than they did when first breeched,
fancy that they know so much more than the rest of man
kind. Mr. Herbert Spencer has hit upon the theory of
evolution, and forthwith puts it out as a new system of
philosophy, as a decisive fruit of progress, although it is
only the revival of the flux and reflux of old Heraclitus,
exploded ages ago. Men made certain discoveries in chem
istry and electricity new to them and their contemporaries,
and immediately proclaimed them as new discoveries in
science ; yet no chemist can tell us even how Titian, not a
very ancient painter, compounded his colors, or of what
materials. The ancients, it is probable, knew as much of
electricity as we do ; they certainly understood ground-light
ning, of which our electricians knew nothing a few yuurs

478 THE PRIMEVAL MAN NOT A SAVAGE.

since. But have not the moderns discovered steam and its
uses, invented the steam-engine, the steamboat, the steam
spinner and weaver, the steam-mill, the railroad, the loco
motive, and the lightning-telegraph ? We concede it. But
then they are in the material and mechanical order, an order
below, not above, man. They may or may not be useful
results of the application of the mind to particular branches
of science bearing on material production, transit, and com
munication, but they do not elevate man, and are no progress
in religion, sanctity, morality, truth, justice, the law of
nations, which form the basis of civilization, and without
which civilization would be only a polished barbarism. To
worship steam is, after all, not much in advance of the wor
ship of his fetish, Mumbo Jumbo, by the African negro.

But no matter. There has certainly been progress in one
thing, of some sort ; therefore man is progressive by the
inherent force of his nature ; therefore might, by his own
indigenous and unassisted efforts, have risen from barbarism
to civilization. If he might or could, he of course did. So
that point is settled. Futhermore, the English in pursuit
of gain opened up India and eastern Asia, and the French
expedition opened up Egypt and her long-forgotten lore to
the scholars of the West, who commenced creating a sci
ence of comparative religion. The examination of the
Egyptian, Hindu, Chinese, and other mythologies, did not
present any evidences of progress in themselves, they even
gave unmistakable signs of a deterioration, and that their
purest period was their earliest. But this counted for noth
ing ; for these were evidently superior, on the one hand, to
the fetishism of the lowest barbarians or savages, and infe
rior, on the other, to Christianity, or the sublime monotheism
of the synagogue and the church. Assuming that the race
began in utter barbarism, and that religion is a fact in the
natural history of man, fetishism must have been the prim
itive religion, the earliest form with which the religious
sentiment clothed itself. Thus from fetishism to the
mythologies of the mystic East, Egypt, Chaldea, China, and
India, there is manifestly a progress, although in them all
traces or reminiscences of primitive fetish-worship are
found. The religious sentiment, which is man's natural
aspiration to the true, the beautiful, and the good, gradually
separates as men's ideas of truth, beauty, and goodness
become purified, expanded, and elevated, from these forms
become too gross, too narrow, " too strait " for it, and it

THE PRIMEVAL MAN NOT A SAVAGE.

479

clothes itself with new forms that give it more room im<l
freedom to expand, and thus advances to polished Greek
and Roman polytheism, the most graceful, the broadest, and
the most advanced of the gentile religions. But still refin
ing, purifying, and enlarging itself, the religious sentiment
takes another step forward, and develops and realizes in
fixed institutions Jewish and Christian monotheism, of
which the Catholic Church embodies the highest ideal as
yet realized. Clearly, then, man is progressive, and is for
ever advancing towards the true, the beautiful, and the
good, but to which he never fully attains.

This is substantially the reasoning by which men, not
absolutely in need of physic and good regimen, sustain their
doctrine of the natural or inherent progressiveness of the
human race. But there is a difficulty in the way of this
conclusion. It assumes that fetishism and the various
mythologies successively developed, are all older than Chris
tianity, and that whatever is detected in any of them coin
cident with Christian doctrine or practice, is an anticipation
of Christianity, or an indication of the goal towards which
the race is advancing with what speed it can. This dif
ficulty, very slight, no doubt, in the estimation of modern
scientists, who treat religion simply as a fact in the natural
history of man, a physiological or psychological fact, but
rather serious in the estimate of an old fogie like ourselves,
— is, that Christianity, under the patriarchal form, is at least
two thousand years older than the oldest of the heathen
mythologies or superstitions, and is itself the primitive re
ligion. The oldest historical document in existence is the
Hebrew book of Genesis, and in it we find that the Chris
tian religion, under the patriarchal form — differing from
Christianity, as held by the church, only in the respect that
the patriarchs believed in Christ who was to come, and the
church in Christ who has come and done the things neces
sary to perfect their faith, Heb., xi, 40 — was the religion of
Adam and his posterity before and after the deluge, till the
building of the Tower of Babel, the confusion of tongues,
the dispersion of mankind, and the gentile apostasy. The
earliest of these heathen mythologies and superstitions date
only from a period long subsequent to Noah's flood, and
consequently cannot have been the germs from which Chris
tianity has been developed. This is established by Lord
Arundel, who shows that in them all are reminiscences of
Noah, the Ark, and the destruction caused by the deluge.

480 THE PRIMEVAL MAN NOT A SAVAGE.

This chronological difficulty upsets the whole theory, that
man is naturally progressive even in religion, and shows that
the heathen religions in any form are not primitive, but depart
ures from and corruptions of the primitive religion, as
Protestantism is a corruption, by way of mutilation and
travesty, of Christianity as taught by the church authorized
by God himself to teach it. As nobody who knows both
Protestantism and Catholicity can for a moment doubt that
the latter is older than the former, or that Protestantism is
a corruption of the Catholic type ; so no one who knows the
patriarchal religion and the several forms of heathenism,
can have any doubt as to which is primitive, or that heathen
ism is a corruption of the patriarchal type.

The modern theory, that religion is a fact of the natural
history of man, as carnivorousness is a fact of the natural
history of the lion or tiger ; or if understood to mean any
thing else than that wherever and in whatever condition we
lind him, savage or civilized, he has some form of religion, —
is untenable. The human soul does not secrete religion as
the liver secrets bile, or the stomach the gastric juice, be
cause even in the grossest superstition the human will inter
venes. Man is no more capable of inventing religion than
he is of inventing language, and it has been well said that,
to invent language, language itself is necessary. To pretend,
as it is the fashion at present to do, that man has by nature
the faculty of speech, and attains to language by its spon
taneous exercise, is equally unsatisfactory. The faculty of
speech is simply the faculty of using language which one
has learned from a teacher, not the faculty of creating or
producing language; as is evident from the case of born
deaf-mutes, who want neither the faculty nor the organs of
speech, and who, if cured of their deafness, can learn to
speak. Besides, language embodies ideas, the profoundest
philosophy, which comparatively few of those who use it
are capable of grasping. Men could have language only by
learning it, or by its being infused into Adam along with
the knowledge it embodies, or the ideas which it signifies or
expresses.

Keligion could not have originated as a function or a
spontaneous operation of human nature, for it is objective
as well as subjective. Schleiermacher, so long court-preacher
at Berlin, and whose Glaubenslehre is yet, we believe, held
in some repute, makes the essence of religion purely sub
jective, and defines it to be "the sense of dependence."

THE PRIMEVAL MAN NOT A SAVAGE.

481

That man has the sense of dependence, or the consciousness
that lie does not suffice for himself, is unquestionably a
fact ; but this is not religion till it is bound to some object
independent of one's nature, on which one believes himself
dependent, and which he holds to be able to do him good or
to do him harm. This implies the idea or conception of the
objective, and therefore of something which is neither sense
nor sentiment. In all religion there is an act of belief in
the divine, in the relation of the soul to it, and in its obliga
tion to adore it, as well as the act of adoration itself. Those
two acts require the exercise of both intellect and will, and
hence religion is not and cannot be a simple spontaneous, or
a blind and indeliberate, product of human nature. The
essential nature of religion is such that it could not have
been a human invention, nor a spontaneous expression of
human nature. The object presented is not in man, and
therefore could not be developed, as say the heterodox
Germans, from his " inner consciousness." It depends on
an object not only independent of man, but above him ;
and in no case does or can the human mind seek and find
its object, for in no case can it act without it. To every
thought both subject and object are necessary, and both can
not concur in the production of thought, unless both are
given. The object on which all religious thought depends
is the divinity, and the divinity can be given only by its
own act. All religion implies God, and God can be thought
only through his own act affirming or revealing himself.
Religion could then never have existed without God, or
have had any but a divine origin. False religions are there
fore impossible without the true.

The primitive religion, since divinely given, must hav&
been not a false, but the true religion, recognizing the true
God in his true character, and the true relation ot man and
nature to him. Men may corrupt or falsify religion or the
divine tradition of religion, but could never originate it ; for
the inward sentiment, however you define it, can of itself
attain to nothing even in conception or imagination beyond,,
above, or distinct from itself. The fetish-worshipper must
have believed that God is and is to be worshipped, before
he could have identified him with his fetish, whether an
animal, a block, or a stone. He who has no conception of
God cannot identify him with the wind, the storm, the ele
mental forces of nature, or adore him in the sun, the moon,
and stars, or in images made by men's hands. Not one of

VOL. IX-31.

482 THE PRIMEVAL MAN NOT A SAVAGE.

the heathen mythologies, idolatries, terrible and abominable
superstitions, could have existed, if they had not been pre
ceded by the true religion, of which they are human and
satanic corruptions. The theory, then, that the race began
in the lowest and grossest fetishism, and that in the various
heathen mythologies, idolatries, and superstitions, we can
trace the upward progress of the human mind to the Chris
tian church, — is absolutely untenable, as unphilosophical as
it is unhistorical. The very fact that it can find currency
with the leaders or would-be leaders of the science and
erudition of the nineteeth century, is a striking proof of its
falsity, of the deterioration instead of the progress! veness of
the race.

We think we have said enough to show that Sir John
Lubbock's theory, that the savage is the type of the primeval
man, and which is, except with those who receive the En
cyclical and Syllalyis of Pius IX., dated December 8, 186-i,
iind the decrees of the Vatican, and perhaps a few laggard
Protestants, the generally received theory of our times, cer
tainly of the so-called movement party, — is as baseless as a
castle in the air, and not only incapable of proof, but de-
monstrably false and absurd. The theory of progress to
which it appeals for support, is equally baseless, we think
~we have shown it to be so in this article ; and we had previ
ously shown it to be so, when urged against the immobility
of the church and the unchangeableness of the Catholic
faith, in the little wrork entitled Conversations on Liberalism
and the Church, to which we take the liberty to refer the
reader, as well as to our previous articles on the same sub
ject.

We have treated our modern scientists, sciolists they
should be called, and their theories and speculations, it may
be thought with scant courtesy, but we hope not with un
fairness. We think it is time that the interests of truth,
religion, society, civilization, should be consulted rather than
the feelings or reputation of such pretended scientists as
Professors Tyndall and Huxley, as Charles Darwin and Sir
'Charles Lyell, Sir John Lubbock and Herbert Spencer, and
•others who, under the honorable name of science, are doing
their best to sap, in the cultivated classes as well as in the
popular mind, the very foundations of religion, morality,
civilization, even society itself. The earlier works of Sir
Charles Lyell may be excepted from this censure ; but his
Antiquity of Man, and his acceptance of Darwin's origin

THE PRIMEVAL MAN NOT A SAVAGE. 483

of species in natural selection, authorize us to class him
with the common herd of antichristian scientists. These
men, who set up what they call science as the test of revela
tion, or of moral and religious truth, are the enemies of
both religion and science, and the friends of either should
keep no terms with them. They serve neither God nor
man, neither the interests of time, nor those of eternity.
Christian tradition is the test of truth, and nothing can be
science that is opposed to it, or incompatible with it. He
who knows Christian tradition has no need to examine a
theory that contradicts it, or to weigh the facts and reasons
alleged in its support ; he knows beforehand that it cannot
be true, and is to be indignantly rejected at once.

We reverse the common way of putting the question. Of
course, there can be no conflict between real science and
divine revelation ; therefore we say, if what you call science
conflicts with revelation, it is false and no science at all ; but
they say, therefore if your alleged revelation conflicts with
science, it is false, no real revelation, but a gross imposition.
Some Christians consent to this way of putting it, which is
making science the test of revelation, not revelation the
touchstone of science. We object to this. It is so-called
science, not revelation or Christian tradition, that is on trial.
The thing questioned is the alleged science, and it is for it to
prove that it accords with Christian tradition, or does not
conflict in any respect with revelation. We do not pretend
to construct science a priori ; we leave to scientists their
method of induction without any interference or obstruction,
to find out all the truth they can, and set forth and defend
it without let or hindrance from theology ; but if any of their
inductions come athwart Christian tradition, we pronounce
them at once unscientific and false ; for theology is the queen
of the sciences. The Holy Father does not undertake to
teach the sciences ; he leaves the scientists themselves to do
that ; but he is the infallible judge of faith, and knows that
no proposition, false in faith or theology, can be true in
science. So when they allege as science what is false in
faith or theology, he condemns it, and forbids it to be
defended or even entertained by Christian men.

In answering, as we have done, certain theories and specu
lations of scientists, we make no war on science or scientific
pursuits. We may not believe the results of science are as
great or as valuable as the scientists pretend ; we may even
doubt whether society has upon the whole gained any thing

484: THE PRIMEVAL MAN XOT A SAVAGE.

by the marvellous inventions of labor-saving machinery, by
the various applications of steam as a motive power, or from
railroads and magnetic telegraphs; but we are ourselves
fond of scientific pursuits, and we honor science, and even
scientists in their place, and when they do not conclude,
because they know something of granite, gneiss, feldspar,
mica, silex, and slate, and can talk flippantly of old red
sandstone, and the different geological ages of the globe,
that they are therefore qualified to judge of theology, ethics,
history, and civilization ; or any better qualified than simple
men like ourselves who know little of such things, but who>
do know our catechism, and knowing that, know enough,
when the scientists bring forward inductions, theories, hy
potheses, and speculations that conflict with it, to know that
they are not science, but are baseless and false. "We know
enough of science to know that a man cannot lift himself
by his own waistband, or make himself more^than he is, and
therefore that the alleged law of progress is not science ;,
and when one asserts the identity of gratitude and gravita
tion, and therefore denies all distinction between physics
and ethics, we know enough to tell him that he knows less
of science than he imagines.

There are some scientific men whom we love and honor ;
but they are men of real science and learning, modest and
humble, who do not imagine that all science was born with
them or their generation. They know the present and are
not ignorant of the past. They believe Horace when he
says, 'k Brave men lived before Agamemnon." They know
the traditions of the race and respect them ; and distrust all
theories, speculations, or inductions of their own which con
flict with Christian tradition, as defined by the divinely
appointed and infallible authority. They try their science
and erudition by authentic tradition, not this by them, feel
themselves honored in doing so, and supremely blest in
having an unerring standard of truth to which they can ap
peal, or an unfailing light to guide them in their researches,,
and to save them from falling into dangerous or destructive
errors. These men have not less science or learning, but
they have less pride and arrogance, than the men we have
named ; nay, surpass them in their science and learning as
much as they do in their modesty and humility. We think
they should take up the proud and boastful sciolism now so-
popular and so menacing, and not leave the task of rebuking
and refuting its pretensions in such unskilful and incompe
tent hands as ours.

DARWIN'S DESCENT OF MAN.

But we may say, in conclusion, we have uttered and
recorded anew our protest against Sir John Lubbock's theory,
which was our own in earlier years, and which we defended
•earnestly till the end of 1842. It was the discovery of its
unscientific character, its utter untenableness, that converted
us from the rabid radicalism which we had defended all our
life, to conservatism, and prepared the way by divine grace for
.a further conversion, that to the Catholic, the Christian, faith.
We learned then that the spirit of the age is not necessarily
divine, nor always an infallible criterion of truth and error,
or of right and wrong ; that, if popular sentiment is in general
on the side of justice, popular opinion is not seldom simply
a popular delusion. We have in this article combated a
popular delusion, not with any hope of recovering the de
luded, for no one can be reasoned out of a delusion, but in
the hope of guarding those yet in their senses from losing
them. The recovery of the deluded can be effected only by
divine grace.

DARWIN'S DESCENT OF MAN:

[From Brownson's Quarterly Review for July, 1873.]

MR. DARWIN'S theory of the descent of man from the ape
or some other of the monkey tribe depends on his theory
of the origin of species by means of natural selection.
Which in its turn depends on the theory of progress, which
we refuted in our review of Sir John Lubbock's theory of
the origin of civilization ; or, perhaps, more remotely on
Herbert Spencer's theory of evolution as set forth in his
First Principles of a New Syste7n of Philosophy^ which
itself depends on the theory of the correlation of forces. If
Sir John's theory of the origin of civilization is untenable,
or if Herbert Spencer's theory of evolution is evidently
false, unproved, and unprovable, Darwin's theory of the
origin of species is an untenable hypothesis, and his theory
of the descent of man falls to the ground.

*1. Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection. 2. Descent of Man
and Selection in Relation to Sex. By CHARLES DARWIN, A.M., F.R.S.,
&c. New York: 1872.

486 DARWIN'S DESCENT OF MAN.

We preyed, in our review of Sir John Lubbock's theory,
that man did not begin and could not have begun in utter
barbarism, and that the savage is the degenerate, not the
primitive man ; for man, when deprived both of foreign and
supernatural assistance, either deteriorates or remains sta
tionary. We will only add here, that progress is motion
forward, if taken literally, and is, if taken figuratively, an
advance from the imperfect towards the perfect, and neces
sarily demands a principle or a beginning, a medium, and
an end, none of which can be asserted without the supposi
tion of the Creator, who in his creative act is at once all
three. You must have a starting-point from which progress
moves, an end towards which it moves, and a medium in
and by which it moves. These three things are essential,
and without them progress is inconceivable : and these three
are all independent of the progressive subject. There can,
then, be no progress without God as its first and last cause,
and the divine creative act as its medium, and even then
progress only in the line of the specific nature of the pro
gressive subject, whether man or animal. The transformation
of one species into another, no matter by what means, would
not be progress, but the destruction of one species and the
production of another, a higher species if you will, but not
the progressive development of a lower species.

Herbert Spencer's doctrine of evolution is open to the
same objection. In all evolution there must be motion, and
then somewhere a starting-point, an evolving subject, and a
medium of evolution, for there can be no motion, unless we
have forgot our mechanics, without a first mover at rest.
Herbert Spencer denies creation, or a creator distinct from
the cosmos. He must then assume the cosmos is self-exist
ent, eternal, then immovable, immutable, and consequently
incapable of evolving any existences or forms of existence
not eternal in itself. The cosmos, instead of being in a
state of ceaseless flux and reflux, as old Heraclitus taught,
and as Mr. Spencer holds, would be at rest and immovable,
both as a whole and in all its parts. There could then be no
change of phenomena any more than of substance, no new
combination of matter, motion, and force, no alterations of
concentration and dispersion of forces. All the forms and
phenomena of the cosmos must be absolutely unchangeable
and eternal as the cosmos itself. Consequently there could
be no evolution, for evolution necessarily implies change of
some sort, and change of no sort is admissible. If the cos-

DARWIN'S DESCENT OF MAN. 48?

inos is not created by God, who is distinct from the cosmos,
it is eternal and, if eternal, no change of any sort is admis
sible in it, as theologians tell us, none is admissible in God.
The theory of evolution, like the modern theory of progress,
is untenable, and must be dismissed.

Yet, without assuming one or the other of these theories,
Mr. Darwin cannot assert his origin of species by means of
natural selection, or by any other means, except that of
creation, which it is his purpose to avoid ; and what is worse
if he accepts either, he is still unable to assert his theory,
for the evolution theory denies all change, and the origina
tion of any new forms ; and progress is predicable only of
the specific subject in the line of its own specific nature.
We have read Mr. Darwin's books with ^some care, and,
though not an absolute stranger to the subjects he treats, or
to the facts he narrates, we are a little surprised that even
a professed scientist could put forth such a mass of unwar
ranted inductions and unfounded conjectures as science.
Xot one nor all of the facts he adduces, prove that species
originate in natural or artificial selection. In all his
inductions he is obliged to assume the progress of the spe
cies as the principle of his induction, while he ought ^ to
know that the assumption of the progress of the species
negatives the origin of species in selection. But, and this
is fatal to his theory, he nowhere adduces a single fact that
proves the species is progressive, or a single instance in which
a lower species by its struggles for life, as he pretends, ap
proaches a higher species, or in which the individuals of a
lower specieslose any of the characteristics of their species,
and acquire those of a higher or a different species.

The theory of natural selection assumes the Malthusian
principle, that population has a tendency to outrun the
means of subsistence, and applies the principle to every
species, vegetable, animal, and human. Hence, follows with
individuals of every species a struggle for life, in^which the
wraker go to the wall, and only the stronger survive. Well,
be it so ; what then ? Why, these the stronger individuals
give rise, or the struggle for life, in which only the stronger
survive, going on for a long series of ages, gives birth to a
new and higher species. Is it so? What is the proof?
We have found no proof of it, and Mr. Darwin offers no
proof of it. Because only the stronger survive, it^ by no-
means follows that these in any series of ages give rise to a
new and distinct species, that these stronger individuals

488 DARWIN'S DESCENT OF MAN.

acquire any new characteristics, or that they lose any of the
characteristics of their original species.

The gardener knows that plants and flowers are affected
by climate, soil, and cultivation ; but he knows also that the
changes or improvements produced in this way, if they give
rise to new varieties in the same species, do not, so far as
known, give rise to a new species. Mr. Darwin compares
domestic animals with what he assumes to be wild animals
of the same original species, or the species from which he
assumes they have descended. But this proves nothing to
his purpose ; for it is impossible for him to say which is the
primitive, which the derivative, whether the domestic races
have sprung from the wdld, or the wild from the domestic,
or whether the differences noted are the result of develop
ment of the primitive type, or of reversion to it. The
assumption that the domestic races have been tamed, or
domesticated from the wild, is a mere assumption of which
there is no historical or scientific evidence : at least Mr.
Darwin adduces none. There is no authority for assuming
that the domestic goose has sprung from the wild goose.
Why not say the wild goose has sprung from the domes
tic goose ? The wild duck from the tame duck ? The wild
boar from the domestic pig ? Some naturalists contend that
the several varieties of the dog family have descended from
the wolf, the fox, and the jackal ; but supposing them to be
only varieties of the same species, of which we are not
assured, why not make the dog primitive, and the wolf, fox,
and jackal derivative ? There are no known facts in the
case that render it necessary to suppose them, rather than
the dog, the parent stock of the whole species. Indeed,
scientists have no criterion by which they can determine
whether the tame variety or the wild represents the primi
tive type, and their only reason is the assumption, that all
species begin at the lowest round of the ladder, and reach
their perfect state only by progressive development. But
this is a perfectly gratuitous assumption. Mr. Darwin ad
duces no facts that prove it.

So far as there are any known facts or certain principles
in the case, species are immutable, and their only develop
ment is in the explication of individuals. So far as our
scientists have any knowledge on the subject, there is no
progress of species. Individuals may find a more or less
favorable medium, and vary from one another, but the
specific type remains always the same as long as it remains

DARWIN'S DESCENT OF MAN. 489

at all, and is reproduced essentially unaltered in each new
generation. It is even doubtful if" abnormal types are ever
rcully transmitted by natural generation. Cardinal Wiseman
inclines to believe "they are, at least to some extent. We
doubt it, and explain the facts which seem to favor it, by
the continued presence and activity of the causes which tirst
originated them. There are monstrous births, but they are
not perpetuated. The cardinal mentions a family with six
fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot, ani we have
ourselves known at least one six-iingered and six-toed indi
vidual, but, if perpetuated through three generations, as the
cardinal asserts, there did not arise from the family a dis
tinct variety in the human species ; and, in the case that
came under our own observation, neither the parents of the
man nor his children had more than the normal number of
fingers and toes. In any case, after two or three generations,
if reproductive, the abnormal individuals revert to the
original type. The breed may be crossed, but not perma
nently improved by crossing. The crossing, as every
herdsman or shepherd knows, must be kept up, or the
hybrid, after a few generations, eliminates the weaker and
reverts to the stronger of the original types.

There is no evidence, as we have already said, of the pro
gress of the species. The sponge to-day does not differ from
the sponge of four thousand years ago ; and if the wild
peach of Persia is poisonous, our cultivated peach, the fruit
of which is so delicious, if neglected and suffered to become
wild, would most likely, under the same conditions of climate
and soil, become as poisonous as is the Persian wild peach :
thereby proving that, whatever the effects of cultivation or
changes of its habitat, the species remains always unchanged.
Even in the cultivated peach traces of its original poisonous
qualities are found, if not in its pulp, at least in its meat,
of which it is unsafe for any to partake largely, unless proof
against prussic acid. The florist produces, by culture and
proper adjustment of soil, great and striking changes in the
size, color, and beauty of many varieties and species of
flowers, all of which, if neglected and suffered to run wild,
revert, after a while, to their original type, which neither
natural nor artificial selection alters or impairs.

Then the survival of the strongest, in the struggle for
life, does not affect the species, far less originate a new
species. There is no evidence that the rat is more intelli
gent to-day than was the rat any number of centuries ago,

490 DARWIN'S DESCENT OF MAN.

although, according to Mr. Darwin, we must suppose only
the strongest have survived, and the process of natural
selection has been constantly going on. The bee constructs
her cell, and the beaver his house and dam, not otherwise
nor more perfectly than did either at the remotest period in
which man has observed the habits of either. Wheat
grown from grains deposited in Egyptian mummies three
thousand years ago, is as perfect as that which is grown
from the seed subject to three thousand years of additional
culture and struggle for life.

These observations, which might be indefinitely extended
prove that, whatever effect natural or artificial selection may
have on individuals of the species, it has none on the species
itself, and in no case originates, so far as human observa
tion goes, a new species. Consequently all the facts and
arguments Mr. Darwin adduces in support of his theory of
the descent of man from the ape, or to prove the species
ape by natural selection has generated or developed the
species man, count for nothing. If no instance can be
adduced of the development of a new species by natural
selection, and no instance of the progress of a lower species
towards a higher, there is and can be no proof that man has
originated in a lower species. All the analogies between
man and the lower animals, physical or intellectual, ad
duced by Mr. Darwin, prove simply nothing to the purpose.
It was in bygone days a favorite theory with us, as it per
haps still is with many others, that man, while he is some
thing more, is also the resume of the whole lower creation,
or of all orders of existences below him. When we were
engrossed with the study of the comparative anatomy and
physiology of the brain, we conjectured that there is a just
gradation in its convolutions and relative size, from the
lowest animal that has a brain distinct from mere ganglia,,
up to man. We regarded man, in fact, as including in
himself, in his physical and animal nature, the elements of
the entire creation below him, and hence rightly named its
lord. So that our Lord, in assuming human nature, a
human soul and a human body, assumed the elements of
the entire cosmos, and, in redeeming man, redeemed the
whole lower creation and delivered the earth itself, which
had been cursed for man's salve, from bondage. In being
made fiesh and redeeming the body, he redeemed all animal
and material nature, which returns to God as its last end in
man for whom this lower world was made, and over which

DARWIN'S DESCENT OF MAN. 491

lie received the dominion from his and its Maker. But we
never saw in this any evidence that man had been devel
oped from the world below him, or that any animal race
by transformation had become man. Supposing the grada
tion assumed, which we are rather inclined to accept even
yet, it by no means follows that the higher grade is in any
case the development of the next grade below. Indeed it
cannot be, for development of any grade or species can only
unfold or bring out what is already in it, or what it contains
wrapped up, enveloped, or unexplicated. Therefore its
development cannot carry it out of itself, or lift it to the
grade next above it. The superior grade is a superior grade
by virtue of something which it has that the highest inferior
grade has not, and therefore is not and cannot be developed
from it.

Say what you will, the ape is not a man ; nor, as far as our
observations or investigations can go, is the ape, the gorilla,
or any other variety of the monkey tribe, the animal that
approaches nearest to man. The rat, the beaver, the horse,
the pig, the raven, the elephant surpass the monkey in
intelligence, if it be intelligence, and not simply instinct;
and the dog is certainly far ahead of the monkey in moral
qualities, in affection for his master and fidelity to him, and
so is the horse when kindly treated. But let this pass. There
is that, call it what you will, in man, which is not in the
ape. Man is two-footed and two-handed ; the ape is four-
handed, or, if you choose to call the extremity of his limbs
feet, four-footed. In fact, he has neither a human hand nor
a human foot, and, anatomically considered, differs hardly
less from man than does the dog or the horse. I have never
been able to discover in any of the simian tribe a single human
quality. As to physical structure, there is some resemblance.
Zoologists tell us traces of the same original type may be
found running through the whole animal world ; and, there
fore, the near approach of the ape to the human form counts
for nothing in this argument. But here is the point we
make ; namely, the differentia of man, not being in the ape,
cannot be obtained from the ape by development.

This sufficiently refutes Darwin's whole theory. He does
not prove the origin of new species either by natural or
artificial selection ; and, not having done that, he adduces
nothing that does or can warrant the induction, that the
human species is developed from the quadrumanic or any
other species. In reading Mr. Darwin's books before us.

492

while we acknowledge the vast accumulation of facts in the
natural history of man and animals, we have been struck
with the feebleness of his reasoning powers. He does not
seem to possess, certainly does not use, the simplest elements
of the logical understanding, and apparently has no concep
tion of what is or is not proof. He does not know how to
reduce his facts to their principles, and never, so far as we
have been able to discover, contemplates them in the light
of the principles on which they depend ; but looks at them
only in the light of his own theories, which they as often
contradict as favor. Patient as an observer, he is utterly
imbecile as a scientific reasoner. Two-thirds of his work on
the " Descent of Man" is taken up with what he calls
Sexual Selection. Many of the facts and details are curious,
and neither uninteresting nor uninstructive to the student
of the natural history of beasts, birds, fishes, reptiles, and
insects, or even of man ; but, as far as we can see, they prove
nothing in favor of his theory of the origin of species by
means of natural selection, nor of his theory of the descent
of man from the ape or any other animal. We could con
cede all his alleged facts, and deny in toto his theory. Some
of them we might be unable to explain, as for instance, the
mammae of the male ; but we could explain them no better
with than without his theory.

Mr. Darwin, though his theory is not original with him,
and we were familiar with it even in our youth, overlooks
the fact that it denies the doctrine of the creation and immu
tability of species, as taught in Genesis, where we read that
God said : " Let the earth bring forth the green herb, and
such as may seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after its
kind, which may have seed in itself upon the earth. And
it was so done."' " And God created the great whales and
every living and moving creature which the waters brought
forth, according to their kinds, and every winged fowl accord
ing to its kind:\ " And God made the beasts of the earth
according to their kinds, and cattle, and every thing that
creepeth on the earth." Genesis i, 11, 21, 25. Now this
doctrine, the doctrine of the whole Christian world, and
which stands directly opposed to Mr. Darwin's theory, is, as
say the lawyers, in possession, and therefore to be held as
true till the contrary is proved. It is not enough, then,
for Mr. Darwin to set forth his theory and ask us as Chris
tians, as believers in Genesis, to accept it, unless able to dis
prove it ; nor is it enough for him even to prove that it may

493

be true. The onus probandi is on him who arraigns the
faith and convictions of the Christian world, which are the
faith and convictions of enlightened and living mankind.
He must prove his theory not only may be, but is, true, and
prove it with scientific or apodictic certainty, for only by so-
doing can he oust the Christian doctrine from its possession,
or overcome the presumption in its favor ; and till he has
ousted and made away with that doctrine, his theory cannot
be legally or logically entertained even as a probable hypo
thesis. This he hardly pretends to have done. As far as
we can discover, he does not claim apodictic certainty for
his theory, or profess to set it forth for any thing more than
a probable hypothesis, which he leaves us to suspect he hardly
believes himself. But in the present case he must prove it
to be true and indubitable, or he has no right to publish it
at all, not even as probable ; for probable it is not, so long
as it is not certain that the Christian doctrine in possession
is false.

This principle, which is the principle both of ethics and
logic, is disregarded by nearly the whole herd of contempo
rary scientists. They make a point of ignoring Christianity,
and proceed as if they were perfectly free to put forth as
science any number of theories, hypotheses, conjectures,
guesses, which directly contradict it, as if they were under
no obligation to consult the universal faith of mankind ; and
theories too, not one of which, even if plausible, is proved
to be true, or deserving the name of science. We by no
means contend that the general belief of mankind, or the
consensus hominum, is in itself an infallible criterion of truth;
but we do maintain that it is, as the lawyers say, prima facie
evidence, or a vehement presumption of truth, and that no
man has the moral right to publish any opinions, or uncer
tain theories or hypotheses, that are opposed to it. It can
be overruled only by science that is science, by the truth that
is demonstrated to be truth, and which cannot be gainsaid.
He who assails it may plead the truth, if he has it, in justifi
cation ; but not an uncertain opinion, not an unproved the
ory, or an unverified hypothesis, however plausible or even
probable it may appear to himself. Sincerity, or firmness
of conviction on the part of the defenders of the adverse the
ory or hypothesis, is no justification, no excuse even ; and no
one has any right to assail or contradict the Christian faith,
unless he has infallible authority for the truth of what lie
alleges in opposition to it. And this no scientist has or can
have.

494

We respect science and bow to its authority, if it really be
science ; but the theories, hypotheses, and even the inductions
of the scientists from the few facts they have observed, are
not science, are at best only unverified opinions. Induction
is simply generalization, and cannot of itself give any thing
beyond the simple facts generalized. It can only attain to
what scientists call a law, which is itself only a fact, not a
principle. We can never attain the principle by induction,
because without it no valid induction is possible, any more
than there is a valid conclusion without a medius terminus.
Without the principle of causality no induction is possible,
and this principle is either falsified or denied by all professed
scientists with whom we have any acquaintance. We there
fore treat as uncertain ail their inductions and theories so in
solently put forth as science, whenever they go beyond the
sphere in which they can be brought to a crucial test and
practically verified : and such are all those which oppose the
doctrines of divine revelation, as believed and taught by the
Holy Scriptures and the church of God.

Men are as morally responsible for the opinions they pub
lish as they are for any of their deeds : and no man has the
moral right to publish any thing that he knows to be false,
or any thing against Christianity that he does not know to be
absolutely true and unquestionable. We say nothing of a
man's opinions, so long as he keeps them to himself, for we
know nothing of them ; they are matters between his own
conscience and his sovereign judge, and society can take no
cognizance of them. But when a man publishes his opin
ions, he performs an act, — an act for which he should be held
responsible in the exterior court as well as in the interior,
as much as for any other act he performs. If he has not an
infallible authority for his opinion, and if it is an opinion
against Christian dogma or morals, he commits by publish
ing it a grave oifence against society, whether the civil law
takes cognizance of it or not. It is no excuse that he sincere
ly 'believes it, or that it is his own honest opinion, so long
as he does not know it to be true, or has not infallible author
ity for asserting it. False or erroneous opinions, if published,
are not harmless things. He who leads us into error, who
robs us of the truth, or of our Christian faith, harms us more
than he who picks our pocket, and commits a greater outrage
on society than he who takes the life of a brother.

We are discussing the question from the point of view of
ethics, not from the point of view of the civil law, though

DAU WIN S DKSCEXT OF MAN.

1:95

we utterly repudiate the doctrine, that every man is ;m<!
should be free to form and publish his own opinions whatever
their character, and that he can do so without committing
any offence against society. We utterly repudiate the doc
trine, that no one is morally or socially responsible for the
< 'pinions he forms and publishes. But, where society has no
infallible authority to determine what is true and what is
not, what is and what is not the law of God, or the truth
God has revealed and commanded us to believe, it has no
right to punish any one for opinion's sake ; for it can act only
on opinion, and, therefore, on no higher authority than that
of the opinions i; punishes. What is called freedom of opin
ion and of publication, or, briefly, the freedom of the press,
although incompatible with the rights of truth, and the safety
of society, as our own experience proves, must be protected,
because modern society, by rejecting the infallible authority
of the church of God, has deprived itself of all right to dis
criminate in matters of opinion, and therefore of the right
<3ven of self-protection. The fact is, society, uninstructed
by an authority that cannot err, is incompetent to deal with
opinions, or to impose any restrictions on their publication ;
but we cannot so far stultify ourselves as to pretend that this
is not an evil, or to maintain with Milton and our own
Jefferson, that " error is harmless where truth is free to com
bat it." " Error," says the Chinese proverb, " will make the
circuit of the globe while Truth is pulling on her boots."
The modern doctrine is based on the assumption that truth
is not ascertainable, is only an opinion.

But from the point of view of morals, or tried by a rigid-

Z ethical standard, such scientists as Darwin, Sir Charles
yell, Sir John Lubbock, Taine, Buclmer, Professor Hux
ley, Herbert Spencer, and others of the same genus, who
publish opinions, theories, hypotheses, which are at best
only plausible conjectures under the imposing name of
science, and which unsettle men*s minds, bewilder the half-
learned, mislead the ignorant, undermine the very bases of
society, and assail the whole moral order of the universe,
are fearfully guilty, and a thousand times more dangerous
to society and greater criminals even than your most noted
thieves, robbers, burglars, swindlers, murderers, or midnight
assassins. Instead of being held in honor, feted, and lauded
as the great men of their age and country, and held up as
the benefactors of their race, they richly deserve that public
opinion should brand them with infamy as the enemies of

496

God and man, of religion and society, of truth and justice,
of science and civilization. They are such men as,' if we
followed the injunction of St. John, the apostle of love, we
should refuse to receive into our houses, or even to bid
good-day : >Si quis venit ad vos, et hano doctrinam nor
affert, nolite recipere eum in domum, nee AVE dixeritis.-
2 John, 10.

We are thus severe against these men, not because we are
narrow-minded and bigoted, not because we have an over
weening confidence in our own opinions or hold them to be
the measure of the true and the good, nor because we dis
like science that is science, or dread its light ; but because
they do not give us science, but their own opinions and
speculations, which they can neither know nor prove to be
true, and which we know cannot be true, unless the religion
of Christ is false, God is not, and heaven and earth a lie.
We condemn them, because the truth condemns them ; be
cause, instead of shedding light on the glorious works of the
Creator, they shed darkness over them, and obscure their
fair face with the thick smoke that ascends at their bidding
from the bottomless pit of their ignorance and presumption^
Their science is an illusion with which Satan mocks them,
deludes and destroys souls for whom Christ has died, and it
comes under the head of the endless "genealogies" and
" vain philosophy," against which St. Paul so solemnly
warns us. It is high time that they be stript of their
prestige, and be treated with the contempt they deserve for
their impudent pretension, and be held in the horror which
all men should feel for the enemies of truth, and whose
labors tend only to the extinction of civilization, the abase
ment of intelligence, to fix the affections on the earth, ta
blunt the sense of moral obligation, and to make society
what we see it every day becoming. They are Satan's most
efficient ministers.

TRUE AND FALSE SCIENCE:

[From Brownson's Quarterly Review for July, 1873.]

WE have paid our respects to the professed scientists in
our brief article on Darwin's "Theory of the Origin of
Species and the Descent of Man," but our attention has
been called further to their method and the unscientific
character of their theories or pretended science, by the ad
dress of Parke Godwin, Esq., at the banquet at Delmonico's,
the criticism on it in the Popular Science Monthly, and
Mr. Godwin's remarkable letter in explanation and vindica
tion of the address, published in the same periodical for
May last. We cannot accept either Mr. Godwin's address
or his letter without some reserves ; but he showed, what no-
other of the gentlemen did who spoke at the banquet, that
without the science of principles, the science of the finite-
and phenomenal of facts, can be only a sham science.

Mr. Godwin is not a professed scientist, but he is proba
bly as well versed in real science as any of the gentlemen
present at the banquet, unless certain specialties are to be
excepted ; and he has, what none of them seems to have in
the slightest degree, a philosophical genius, liberal philosoph
ical culture, and no little philosophical knowledge. He
understands, what the mere scientists do not, that the in
ductive method demands principles as the condition of con
ducting the investigator to real science, and that the prin
ciples, on which the validity of the induction depends, are
not obtainable by induction. He sees that the inductive

*1. Proceedings at the Farewell Banquet to Professor Tyndall. Given at
Delmonico's: New York. February 4, 1873.

2. Popular Science Monthly. Conducted by E L. YOUMANS. May,
1873.

3. On the Genesis of Species. By ST. GEORGE MIVART, F. R. S. New-
York: 1873.

4. The Catholic World. New York: May, 1873.

5. First Principles of a new System of Philosophy. By HERBERT SPEN
CER. New York: 1871.

6. The Correlation and Conservation of Forces. A series of Exposition*
by Prof. Grove, Prof. Helmholtz, Dr. Mayer, Dr. Faraday, Prof. Liebig,
and Dr. Carpenter. With an Introduction and brief Biographical
Notices of the chief promoters of the New Views. By EDWARD L. YOU
MANS, M. D. New York: 1873.

VOL. IX-32.

497

498 TRUE AND FALSE SCIENCE.

method enables us only to classify and generalize phenomena,
and that the simple classification and generalization of
phenomena is not science. This is the sense of what he
says in his letter in vindication of his address, as we think
the following extract, if attentively read, will amply prove.
After dwelling on the grand results achieved, or to be
achieved, by science, Mr. Godwin proceeds : —

"But then I said — and it was the whole purport of my speech, made
in the interests of science as well as religion — that we can only expect
these results from true science, which investigates what Nature really is,
and not from a hasty and presumptuous science, which pretends to give
us what Nature may be supposed to be. And my criterion of true science,
suggested in a phrase, was, that the methods and results of it bear the
impress of exactitude or certainty. You remark, as if you did not receive
these simple and fundamental principles, that the " exact sciences " are
exact, while others are not. There I think we differ, or misunder
stand each other. I am aware that none of the sciences are exact
in the mathematical sense of the word, save the ideal or abstract
sciences; but it is none the less true that the real or concrete sciences are
exact, in the usual sense of the word, both in their methods and pro
ducts. If they are not exact, where does the inexactness come in? In
the observation of facts? Then the induction is vitiated. In the induc
tion itself? Then the law arrived at is imperfect. In the deductive veri
fication or proof? Then we have no reason for trusting our process.
Biology, psychology, and sociology, you say, are sciences and certain
sciences ; to which my reply is, that, to the extent in which they are not
precise, they are not sciences. Indeed, saving in a popular and conven
ient sense, I should be disposed to doubt whether they are yet to be
ranked as more than inchoate sciences. They belong to the domain of
science, have gathered some of the richest materials for science, and have
attained to some extent a scientific value; but there is yet so much un.
certainty hanging over broad regions in each, that we must await the
future for the resolution of many unresolved questions, which may give
a new aspect to the whole. Biology is the most advanced, but rather in
its natural history and classification, than in its knowledge of the pro-
founder laws of life, that are yet to be found. Psychology is so little of
a science, that the teachers of it hardly agree on the fundamental points;
or, if it be a science, whose exposition of it are we to accept, Sir William
Hamilton's or Mr. Mill's, Herbert Spencer's or Dr. Porter's, who all pro
fess to be experimental and inductive, and all disagree? As to sociol
ogy, the name for which was invented only a few years since by Comte,
it is still in a chaotic condition; and, unless Mr. Spencer, whose few in
troductory chapters are alone made public, succeeds in giving it consist
ency and form, it can hardly be called more than a hope. But, be the
truth what it may, in respect to these particular branches of knowledge,

TRUE AND FALSE SCIENCE. 499

I still insist that certainty is the criterion of true science, and that, if we
give that criterion up, science loses its authority, its prestige, its assur
ance of march, and its position as an arbiter in the varying struggles of
doctrine.

" Well, then the examples I gave, without mentioning names, of what
I considered false science, were, first, the gross materialism of Biichner,
who derives all the phenomena of life from simple combinations of
matter and force; second, the atheism of Comte, whose scientific pre
tensions Mr. Huxley ridicules, and whose results Mr. Spencer impugns;
third, the identification of mind and motion by Mr. Taine, which Tyn-
dall, in one of his most eloquent passages, says explains nothing, and is,
moreover, utterly "unthinkable;" and, fourthly, Mr. Spencer's evolu
tionism, which, in spite of the marvellous ingenuity and information
with which it is wrought out, seems to me, after no little study, as it
does to others more capable than I am of forming a judgment, after
greater study, to be full of unsupported assumptions, logical inconsist
encies, and explanations that explain nothing, while in its general char
acter it tends to the sheerest naturalism. Now, was I right or wrong in
regarding these systems as speculative merely, and not scientific? Am
I to infer, from your objections to my remarks, that Tlie Popular
Science Monthly holds materialism, atheism, and naturalism to be the
legitimate outcome of science? Else why am I arraigned for designat
ing them as unworthy of science, and as having no rightful claims to
the name, under which their deplorable conclusions are commended to
the public?

" My object in these allusions was to indicate two capital distinctions,
which it is always important to keep in view when estimating the scien
tific validity of a doctrine. The first is, that many questions determin-
able by science are not yet determined by it; and, until they are so de
termined, are to be regarded only as conjectural opinions, more or less
pertinent or impertinent. Of this sort I hold the Nebular, the Darwin
ian, and the Spencerian views to be, i. e., hypotheses entirely within the
domain of scientific theory, and capable, to a certain extent, of explain
ing the phenomena to which they refer; highly plausible and probable
even at the fii^t glance; but disputed by good authority, and not at all
so verified as to be admissible into the rank of accredited science. They
are suppositions to which the mind resorts to help it in the reduction of
certain appearances of Nature to a general law; and, as such, they may
be simple, ingenious, and even beautiful ; but thus far they are no more
than suppositions not proved, and therefore not entitled to the authority
of scientific truth. You are probably too' familiar with the history of
scientific effort — which, like the history of many other kinds of intellect
ual effort, is a history of human error — not to know that, while hypothe
sis is an indispensable part of good method, it is also the part most liable
to error. The records of astronomical, of geological, of physical, of
chemical, and of biological research, are strewn with the debris of

500 TRUE AND FALSE SCIENCE.

abandoned systems, all of which once had their vogue, but none of
which now survive, and many of which are hardly remembered. Recall
for a moment the Ptolemaic cycles and epicycles; recall Kepler's nineteen
different hypotheses, invented and discarded, before he found the true
orbital motion of Mars; recall in geology Werner and Hutton, and the
Plutonians and the Neptunians, superseded by the uniformitarians and
the catastrophists, and now giving place to the evolutionists; recall in
physics the many imponderable fluids, including Lamark's resonant
fluid, that were held to be as real as the rocks only a few years ago; re
call in chemistry, not to mention the alchemists and phlogistion, a dozen
different modes of accounting for molecular action ; recall in biology the
animists and the vitalists, the devotees of plastic forces, of archei, of or
ganizing ideas, and of central monads, all of them now deemed purely
gratuitous assumptions that explained nothing, though put forth as
science.

"Even in regard to the question, so much discussed at present, of the
gradual progression and harmony of being, the old monadology of Leib
nitz, which endowed the ultimate units with varying doses of passion,,
consciousness, and spontaneity, and which built up the more complex
structures and functions of organisms, from the combination of these, —
this theory, I say, somewhat modified and stripped of its mere metaphys
ical phases, could be made quite as rational and satisfactory as the more
modern doctrines of development. Indeed, some eminent French phil-
osophs — Renouvier, a first-class thinker, among the rest — have gone back
to this notion; Darwin's suggestion of pangenesis, and Mr. Spencer's
physiological units, look towards it; and its adherents maintain that, be
set with difficulties as it is, though not more so than others, it has yet
this merit, that it leaves a way open to speculative thought, alike removed
from the vagaries of mere ontological abstraction and the entire subjec
tion of mind to a muddy and brute extraction. They might add, also,
that this theory shows that, in the interpretation of the serial progress
of being, we are not altogether shut up to a choice between specific and
spasmodic creations, and his own theory of evolution, as Mr. Spencer
triumphantly assumes throughout his argument. Indeed, nothing is-
more easy than to make theories; but the difficulty is to get them adopt
ed into Nature as the satisfactory reason of her processes. But, until
they are so adopted, they are no more than the scaffolding of science —
by no means the completed structure. Now, have the Darwinian and
Spencerian hypotheses been so adopted? Can we say that any questions
on which such cautious observers and life-long students as Darwin,
Owen, Huxley, Wallace, and Agassiz, still debate, are settled questions?
Prof. Tyndall, for example, says: 'Darwin draws heavily upon the
scientific tolerance of the age;' and again, that 'those who hold the
doctrine of evolution are by no means ignorant of the uncertainty of
their data, and they yield no more to it than a provisional assent.' With
what propriety, then, can a merely provisional conclusion be erected in-

TRUE AND FALSE SCIENCE. 501

to an assured stand-point whence to assail traditionary beliefs as if they
were old wives' fables?

" More than that, a theory may be far more advanced than any of
those; maybe able to account satisfactorily for all the phenomena with
in its reach, as the Ptolemaic theory of the sidereal appearances did, even
to the prediction of eclipses, or as the emanation theory of light did, up
to the time of Dr. Young, and yet turn out altogether baseless. Nature
is a prodigious quantity and a prodigious force ; with all her outward
uniformities, she is often more cunning than the Sphinx; and, like Emer
son's Brahma, she may declare to her students —

' They know not well the subtle ways

I keep and pass and turn again.'

We have looked into her face a little, measured some of her ellipses
and angles, weighed her gases and dusts, and unveiled certain forces far
and near — all which are glorious things to have done, and some of them
seemingly miraculous; but we are still only in her outer courts. Hum-
boldt's 'Cosmos,' written thirty years ago, is said to be already an
antiquated book ; and Comte, who died but lately, and whom these eyes
of mine have seen, could hardly pass a college examination in the sciences
he was supposed to have classified for ever. Let us not be too confident,
then, that our little systems of natural law will not, like other systems
of thought spoken of by Tennyson, ' have their day.'

" The other distinction I had in mind, in my speech, was that, while
there are some problems accessible to scientific methods, there are others
that are not; and that any proffered scientific solution of the latter,
either negative or affirmative, is most likely an imposition. What I
meant was that science, according to its own confession, that is, accord
ing to the teachings of its most accredited organs, pretends to no other
function than to the ascertainment of the actual phenomena of
Nature and their constant relations. The sphere of the finite and the
relative, i. e., of existence, not of essence, and of existence in its mutual
and manifested dependencies in time and space, not in its absolute
grounds, circumscribes and exhausts its jurisdiction. Was I wrongly
taught. Mr. Editor ? Does science assert for itself higher and broader
pretensions ? Does it propose to penetrate the supernatural or meta
physical realms, if there be any such ? Does it intend to apply its
instruments to the measurement of the infinite, and its crucibles to the
decomposition of the absolute ?

" You as a man of excellent sense, will promptly answer, No ! But,
then, I ask, is thought, whose expatiations are so restless and irrepres
sible, to be for ever shut up to the phenomenal and relative ? Is it to
be for ever stifled under a bushel-measure, or tied by the logs with a
surveyor's chain ? May it not make excursions into the field of the
Probable, and solace itself with moral assurance when physical certain
ties fail ? May it not, mounting the winged horse of analogy, when the

502 TRUE AND FALSE SCIENCE.

good old drudge horse induction gives out, fly through tracts of space
and time, not yet laid down on the map ? May not some men have
insights into the workings of laws yet unexplored, such as Mozart had
into the laws of music, and Shakespeare into the laws of the human
heart ? Assuredly you cannot say nay, in the name of science, which,
as we agree, being confined to the phenomenal and relative, has no right
to pronounce either one way or the other, as to what, by supposition,
lies beyond the phenomenal and relative. That supposed beyond may
be wholly chimerical ; but it is not from science that we shall learn the
fact, if it be a fact. In other words, I contend — and here I hit upon
the prime fallacy of many soi-disant scientists — that science has no right
to erect what it does contain into a negation of every thing which it does not
contain. Still less has it a right to decide questions out of its confessed
province, because it cannot reach them by its peculiar methods, or sub
ject them to its peculiar tests.

"Fortunately for me, though you take me especially to task for it, I
am sustained in this position by some of the most eminent men of science
of the day, and, I may say, by great numbers of them, as I have reason
to know. You yourself published, only a little while since, Dr.
Carpenter's address, as President, to the British Association for the
Advancement of Science, in which, after expounding very clearly
man's rightful function as the 'interpreter of Nature,' he said: 'The
science of modern times, however, has taken a more special direction.
Fixing its attention exclusively on the order of Nature, it has separated
itself wholly from theology, whose function it is to seek after its cause.
. . . But, when science, passing beyond its own limits, assumes to take
the place of theology, and sets up its own conception of the order of
Nature as a sufficient account of its cause, it is invading a province of
thought to which it has no claim, and not unreasonably provokes the
hostility of those who ought to be its best friends.'

"In the same number you published Dr. Gray's address, as President
of the American Association, wherein, after quoting Miss Cobbe's remark,
that ' it is a singular fact, that when we find out how any thing is done,
our first conclusion is, that God did not do it,' he adds that such a con
clusion is ' premature, unworthy, and deplorable, ' and concludes with
the hope ' that, in the future, even more than in the past, faith in an
order which is the basis of science will not (as it cannot be reasonably)
be dissevered from faith in an ordainer which is the basis of religion.
And my old friend, and honored teacher, Dr. Henry, from whose enthus
iasm for natural studies I imbibed whatever taste for them I have
retained, in a letter addressed to this Tyndall banquet, and published in
your last number, wrote : ' While we have endeavored to show that
abstract science is entitled to high appreciation and liberal support, we
do not claim for it the power of solving questions belonging to other
realms of thought. . . . Much harm has been done by the antagonism
which has sometimes arisen between the expounders of science on the

TRUE AND FALSE SCIENCE. 503

one hand, and those of theology on the other, and we would deprecate
the tendency which exhibits itself in certain minds to foster feelings
antagonistic to the researches into the phenomena of Nature, for fear
they should disprove the interpretations of Holy Writ made long before
the revelations of physical science, which might serve for a better
exegesis of what has been revealed; and also the tendency in other minds
to transcend the known, and to pronounce dogmatically as to the possi
bility of modes of existence on which physical research has not thrown,
and we think never can throw, positive light.' Now, here is precisely,
though not all, my meaning, and yet you rap me over the knuckles for
it, while you publish the praises of Carpenter, Gray, and Henry.

" All these illustrious men admit the limits of Science, and also the
possibility of passing beyond them. As men of j good common-sense,
and no less as philosophers and scientists, they are perfectly aware that,
while the scope of Science lies within the contents of experience, and of
the inductions drawn from that experience, it is hazarding the character
of it to go further. They feel too, no doubt, what I certainly do, that
there are certain broad, deep, ineradicable instincts of the human mind,
which, however they originated, whether implanted there by creative
act, or formed kby the slow growth of thousands of years, are now
become the inexpugnable basis of all human credence and all human
action. The convictions of the reality of Nature, of the independence
of Mind, and of the being and authorship of God, in spite of every
effort of Philosophy to get rid of them, either by declaring them un
thinkable, or by merging one in the other, always return as tJie final no
less than the initial postulates of thought. Any scheme of the universe,
therefore, which leaves any of them out. declares itself impotent, like
the project of an edifice which makes no provisions for the corner-stones.
Innumerable such schemes have gone before, and floated as bubbles
for a while, but the first touch of these Realities broke them into
thin air.

" What the relations of these grand primal factors of the problem of
existence are, or how they are to be harmonized with each other, we do
not know; perhaps we never shall know; but I think we shall learn
more and more of them, and, in due time, by the instrumentalities that
are given us. We shall learn of Nature, and of Man, so far as he is
a dependent and denizen of Nature by that digesting of experience
which is the peculiar work of science. We shall learn of Man, so far
a- In- has a deeper spring of life than observation reaches, from its
wellings-up into consciousness at those rare moments of insight which
often seem so mysterious; and we shall learn of God through both; i.e.,
as he works with the stupendous forces of time and space, which sym-
. bolize him, and as he inspires our feeble loves and wisdoms, which are
no less symbols of him, with an intenser sense of his own supernal love
and wisdom.

"But we shall learn little of either, if we haughtily and peremptorily

504 TKUE AND FALSE SCIENCE.

dismiss any of the elements out of the inquiry. Neither Nature nor
Man is to be understood without God, nor can God bo apprehended by
pure intuition alone, or save as he writes his hieroglyphics in objects and
events, or imparts new impulses of goodness to the innermost soul.
Tyndall, doubtless, caught a glimpse of the inseparableness of these
elements when he said, ' The passage from facts to principles is called
induction, which, in its highest form is inspiration;' nor was he free
from the same overshadowing truth, when, speaking of the possible so
lution of the ultimate physical problem, he remarks that, when it comes,
'it will be one more of spiritual insight than of observation.' For, if
deity [God] be, as it is sometimes said, the Spiritual Sun, the intellectual
Light, he may evade scrutiny, as the common light evades vision. It
is the condition of vision, 'the light of all our seeing,' in which^all
objects are seen, though itself unseen. Besides, we know that, even in
the common light, there are rays which the physical eyes do not see,
which the inward eyes of reason alone behold, but which, if the physical
eyes could be made sensitive to their swift pulsations, might disclose,
according to Tyndall's exquisite suggestion, a new heaven and a new
earth, immediately around us, and ' as far surpassing ours as ours sur
passes that of the wallowing reptiles which once held possession of this
planet." ' — Popular Science Monthly, pp. 106-110.

It is clear enough from this, that the writer holds that the
inductive sciences are restricted to the finite and phenom
enal, and that it is impossible to rise by induction above the
classifications and laws, to principles, causes, or as he says,
the " reality of nature, the independence of mind, and the
being and authorship of God," which " always return as the
jmal no less than the initial postulates of thought ; " that is
to say, no thought, therefore no induction, is possible with
out them ; for surely there is and can be no thought where
both its final and initial postulates are wanting. The final
and initial postulates of thought, or principles of thought as
we call them, Mr. Godwin holds transcend the finite and
phenomenal, and therefore the reach of inductive science,
and are grasped by "insight," not by observation and
induction. Say they are given in intuition, or immediately
presented or affirmed, not by, but to, the mind, as the nec
essary principles of all empirical thought or cognition, and
you have what we hold to be the true solution of the funda
mental problem of philosophy.

Professor Youmans in The Popular Science Monthly
says :—

" We quite agree with Mr. Godwin that Science is inexorably shut up
in the finite and the phenomenal — the sphere of relation and law; but she
must have the liberty of the whole domain. Nor do we think there is

TRUE AND FALSE SCIENCE.

505

much danger of Science wasting her energies in trying to transcend these
bounds, for she has plenty to do to get even partial possession of what
confessedly belongs to her. She has won her ground, inch by inch, by
hard fighting from the beginning, and even yet it is conceded to her only
in name. Everybody will admit that it is the right of Science to inquire
into all changes and effects in physical Nature. Yet, for suggesting that
a given class of alleged physical effects be inquired into in the same man
ner as are other effects, Professor Tyndall has been posted through
Christendom as a blasphemer. Mr. Godwin yields to Science the realm
of the finite and the relative, and in the same breath he speaks of the re
lations of Mozart to the laws of music, and of Shakespeare to the laws
of the human heart, as examples of the transphenomenal. But we thought
laws and relations had been made over to Science. No reservation will
here be tolerated. Science is providing for its ever-increasing army of
research through a long future. Half a thousand years have been spent
in getting on the track; another thousand will suffice to get under head
way; she stipulates now only for room. Her sphere is the finite, but the
nebulosities of ignorance must not be mistaken for the walls of the infi
nite. If mystics will lose themselves in the tangled recesses of unresolved
phenomena, they must expect to be hunted out and have the place re
claimed to order and annexed to the provinces of all-harmonizing law.
Nor can any pretext that they are nested in the unapproachable essences
and subtleties of being, and ensphered in the absolute, and guarded by
cunning sphinxes, avail them. The thing must inexorably be inquired of.
It is the destiny of Science to pierce the unknown; if her spear is blunted
upon the unknowable, she will of course accept the results of the experi
ment." — Popular Science Monthly, May, 1873, p. 18.

But the scientific professor fails to seize the point in Mr.
Godwin's argument, and mistakes as a concession Mr. God
win's acceptance of the fact asserted by the scientists, as the
basis of his argument against the sufficiency of the inductive
method alone for. genuine science. The scientists contend
that science is restricted to the finite and phenomenal, as the
inductive sciences certainly are ; but if science is restricted
to the finite and phenomenal, science is impossible, for the
final as well as the initial postulates of thought, given by in
sight, not obtained by induction, are in an order above the
finite and phenomenal. What the professor takes as a con
cession to the scientists, is, in fact, a very conclusive refuta
tion of what they present as science. If, as you^say, science
is restricted to the finite and the phenomenal, science is a de
lusion. There is no science without thought, and no thought
without its initial and final postulates, neither of which can
be supplied by induction from the finite and phenomenal ;
for there can be no induction without thought. Consequent-

506 TKUE AND FALSE SCIENCE.

ly, there can be, on your own principles, no science. Such
is Mr. Godwin's argument, as we understand it.

The mother error of the scientists is not precisely in their
giving us as science, unproved theories or unverified hypoth
eses, though that they often do ; but in their assuming that
science is restricted to the field of the finite and phenome
nal, and that it can be constructed, without going out of that
field, by induction from the finite and phenomenal alone.
But this is impossible. The finite and phenomenal are neith
er cognizable nor cogitable alone, for the conclusive reason
that they do not exist alone; and the non-existent is in-
cogitable, and therefore, of course, incognizable. The phe
nomenal, prescinded from the substance or being that under
lies it, or appears in it, is nothing, not even an appearance
or a shadow. Finite things are neither self -existent nor self-
sufficing, for whatever is self -existent or self-sufficing is in
dependent, necessary, immutable, eternal, and infinite being,
and therefore not finite. The finite is then contingent, de
pendent, and has not the reason, principle, or cause of its ex
istence in itself, consequently is apprehensible only in the
apprehension of its relation with the infinite on which it de
pends. It cannot be known or thought out of that relation,
because it does not exist out of that relation ; and relation is
cognizable only in the cognition of both its terms. To think
the finite and phenomenal, Mr. Godwin tells the learned
professor very truly, the mind needs as its postulates that
which is neither finite nor phenomenal. The professor has-
fallen, we repeat, into the slight error of mistaking the ref
utation for a concession. Perhaps he would do well to re-
examine Mr. Godwin's argument, and ascertain the princi
ples on which it rests.

The editor of The Popular Science Monthly swears by
and defends d outmnce* hisprotege, Herbert Spencer, whom
he has been chiefly instrumental in bringing before the
American public ; but it is possible, without fully understand
ing his New System of Philosophy. Mr. Spencer in his sys
tem divides the cosmos into the Knowable and the Unknow
able. In the Knowable, he includes the finite and the phe
nomenal, or, more accurately, phenomena alone ; to the Un
knowable, he relegates whatever is back of the phenomenal,
that is, being, substance, reality, principles, causes, God, if
God there be, creation, — all that Mr. Godwin terms "the
final as well as the initial postulates of thought." Yet he
gravely tells us that the phenomenal is " unthinkable " with-

TRUE AND FALSE SCIENCE.

50T

out the real or non-phenomenal. "What is not thinkable is
not knowable ; consequently the Knowable is not knowable
without cognition of the Unknowable ! But as only the
phenomenal is knowable, and as that is not knowable with
out knowing the reality that underlies it, which is unknow
able, it would seem to follow that nothing is knowable, and
science is impossible, — is, if Herbert Spencer is right, blank
ignorance. Professor Youmans has great reason to be proud
of his English protege.

If, as Professor Youmans, Herbert Spencer, and most pro
fessional scientists maintain, " science is shut up in the finite
and phenomenal," Mr. Godwin tells them, they have and
can have no science. This is what Prof essor Youmans mis
apprehends. Mr. Godwin makes two points against the sci
entists ; 1 : They put forth as science, uncertain, unproved,
or unverified theories and hypotheses ; 2 : They confine sci
ence to the field of the finite and the phenomenal, the only
field in which induction or the inductive method is appli
cable, and exclude from science the science of principles,
without which induction cannot operate, and the inductive
sciences cannot be constructed. Mr. Godwin concedes, or
asserts rather, that the inductive sciences, which the scien
tists call science, are shut up within the finite and phenom
enal ; but he by no means holds that science is so shut up,
but asserts the science of principles, which rest on insight,
which transcend the finite and phenomenal, and furnish
thought both its initial and final postulates. The scientists
or inductive philosophers take no note of this science of prin
ciples, which does not rest on induction, — this higher sci
ence, really the science of sciences, and without which there
can be no inductive sciences, since it is precisely on this
higher science that the science of the finite and phenomenal
depends : as we have explained in our remarks on Professor
Bascom's Science, Philosophy, and Religion*

Professor Youmans does not recognize this distinction be
tween the science of principles resting on insight, or intui
tion, and the science of facts and their laws, constructed by
observation and induction. It is a distinction foreign to
English philosophy, and is hardly conceivable by the ordi
nary English or American mind, which applies the Baconian
method to the science of principles as well as to the science
of facts and their laws; but as that method is really appli-

*Vol. II., p. 448.

508 TRUE AND FALSE SCIENCE.

cable, as Bacon himself maintained, only in the field of the
finite and the phenomenal, it comes, as we find in Sir Wil
liam Hamilton and the late Dr. Mansel, to restrict science
to that field, and either to deny the reality of the world of
principles, the subject-matter of the higher science, philos
ophy properly so-called, or to relegate it to the dark region
of the Unknowable. It understands by science only the spe
cial sciences of the finite and the phenomenal ; and, if it ad
mits any thing beyond, it admits it as a matter of faith, not
of science. The outcome of the whole is, as to science, ma
terialism and atheism ; the real, the spiritual, the ontological,
the ideal, the divine, are banished from science, and admit
ted, if at all, only as truths of revelation. But the scientists
have no right to conclude, from the fact that their science
does not extend beyond the finite and phenomenal, either
that nothing beyond exists, or that, if any thing beyond does
exist, it is unknowable or even unknown. Mr. Godwin says
truly, that " science has no right to erect what it does con
tain into the negation of what it does not contain."

Professor Youmans rejects the thought, that the outcome
of the inductive sciences, or the inductive method applied
without the principles derived from insight or intuition, and
on which both the possibility and scientific validity of the
induction depend, is materialism and atheism. He indig
nantly repels the insinuation. He says :

"Mr. God win says: 'Am I to infer from your objections to my re
marks that the Popular Science Monthly holds materialism, atheism, and
naturalism, to be the legitimate outcome of science? ' Exactly the con
trary. We do not believe that the legitimate outcome of science is ma
terialism or atheism, and our attempt was to show that certain problems
and procedures, which Mr. Godwin declared to be spurious science and
obnoxious to these charges, were genuine science, and not obnoxious to
them. We objected, in order to rescue a portion of science from an as-
persive charge to which all science is equally liable, Buchner may be a
materialist, and Comte an atheist, and Taine may be both, although it
does not follow, because he affirms the correlation of mind with nervous
motion, that he is either. What moved us to protest was the gross injus
tice of branding Mr. Spencer's expositions of the doctrine of Evolution as
sham science, and then loading it with the opprobrium which its associa
tions and the argument implied. Of Spencer's system, Mr. Godwin says
on his own and higher authority, that it is "full of unsupported assump
tions, logical inconsistencies, and explanations which explain nothing,
while in its general character it tends to the sheerest naturalism.' We
do not deny that it contains defects — it would be, indeed, surprising if

TRUE AND FALSE SCIENCE. 509

so vast and original a discussion did not; but to say that it is ' full ' of the
vices alleged, or that they characterize it, is a reckless exaggeration. As
a set-off to this opinion, we refer the reader back to page 32, where he will
find the latest estimate of Mr. Spencer's philosopy by a man who is an au
thority upon the question he discusses." — Ibid., p. 119.

Yet, if science is restricted to the finite and phenomenal,
as the professor holds, that is, to sensible facts and their
laws, by what process can it escape materialism and atheism,
and give us as its outcome the exact contrary ? Our old
logic-master taught us that a conclusion, that concludes be
yond what is contained in the premises, does not avail.
How from the finite and sensible, that is, the material alone,
for premises, conclude the spiritual and the infinite ? We
know there have been attempts made by very excellent men
to prove the existence of God, the spirituality of the soul,
and the liberty or free will of man, by the inductive method ;
but we know, also, that they have not succeeded, because
they begin, and are obliged to begin, by assuming, as the
medium of proof, the very principle or point to be proved,
or, in plain English, by begging the question. We have
read Paley, the Bridgewater Treatises, and any number
more of works written on the inductive method, to prove
the three great fundamental principles of what is called
natural religion, have read them as an unbeliever, as a Prot
estant, and as a Catholic, and always with the feeling that
they take for granted the very point to be proved. They
all proceed on the supposition that principles, being, cause
and effect, or universal and necessary ideas, on which the
proof or demonstration of natural theology depends, are
obtained by way of induction : which is so far from being true,
that no induction, as we have said, is valid or possible with
out them. We have found in the wrhole range of English
science, philosophy, or literature, no scientific refutation of
materialism or atheism, and the decided tendency of all
English science is in a materialistic and an atheistic direc
tion. Professor Huxley, indeed, disclaims being a material
ist, but only on the ground that he knows neither what mat
ter nor what spirit is ; and yet he cannot escape the charge
of atheism, for he denies that we have any cognition of the
principle of causality, or of any YQ&inexus between so-called
cause and effect. The protests of some Englishmen are hon
orable to them, but are unavailing, because they are based
on no scientific principle.

The cosmists, or disciples of Herbert Spencer, whose

510 TRUE AND FALSE SCIENCE.

school Professor Youmans sturdily defends, deny, indeed,
that they are atheists. They tell us that the phenomenal is
unthinkable without an in finite Being, Reality, or Something,
which underlies the phenomena and appears in them, or of
which they are phenomena ; but this does not help the mat
ter, for this infinite Something is only the substance of
which the cosmic phenomena are the appearance, and is
therefore only the real cosmos in distinction from the phe
nomenal cosmos : and besides, they declare this real cosmos
to be not only unkiiown, but unknowable. Professor Fiske,
of Harvard college, declares expressly that science — that is,
the cosmic theory — is in no condition to prove or disprove
& personal God, or God distinct from the cosmos or nature.
An impersonal God is a blind force, acting from the necessity
of its own nature, — is no God at all. Professor Fiske
avows it, when he says this infinite Something, from the
point of view of religion, may be called God ; but from the
point of view of science, it is nature. Atheism is not only
in saying with the fool, " God is not," but, also, in failing
to say with the theist, " God is." He who refuses or fails
to recognize or affirm that God is, is just as much an atheist
as he who positively denies his existence, for atheist says
simply, non-theist. He who denies the supracosmic God,
or identifies him with the cosmic substance or reality, is a
pantheist, and therefore an atheist, and nothing else.

Professor Fiske confesses that science, if unable to demon
strate that God is not, is equally unable to demonstrate that
God is ; and his master, Herbert Spencer, confesses the
same. Mr Spencer, we grant, does not in just so many
words deny that God is, but he recognizes no God, and no
necessity of a supracosmic God, Being, or Power, on whom
or on which the cosmos is dependent for its existence. He
denies creation by a supracosmic power, and declares it
" absolutely inconceivable." He finds no place, no office,
either for God or his creative act, and attempts to explain
the cosmic facts or phenomena by evolution, the correlation
of forces, or the continuous process of concentration and
dispersion of matter, force, and motion, resolvable into force
alone, in which the quantity and direction of force remain
always the same. The concentration of force gives us a
potato, a cabbage, or a rose ; its dispersion and reconcentra-
tion give us the phenomenon we call a pig, a donkey, or an
ape. Another dispersion, and concentration give us the
phenomenon we call man. It is, whatever the phenomenon,

TRUE AND FALSE SCIENCE. 511

the same matter, force, and motion, or rather, the same blind
•cosmic force, the quantity and direction of which, on the
correlation of forces, are always the same. Suppose this
theory, virtually that of the flux and reflux of old Hera-
clitus, reproduced in the recently invented theory of the
correlation of forces, and tell us," Prof essor Youmans, how
you contrive to show that its " outcome is the exact contrary
of materialism and atheism?" Will you adopt Huxley's
subterfuge, and plead ignorance of both matter and spirit ?
That will hardly help you, for Huxley agrees with Hume in
pleading ignorance of any principle of cause and effect, and
in denying that science can recognize any nexus between
them, which excludes God and his creative act from the do
main of science : and a science which excludes God and his
creative act from its domain, is unquestionably atheistic.

Professor Youmans takes in high dudgeon^Mr. Godwin's
assertion that the Spencerian theory is only u sham science;"
and his declaration, that the theory is " full of unsupported
assumptions, logical inconsistencies, and explanations that
explain nothing, while in its general character it tends to
the sheerest naturalism." This brings us back to Mr. God
win's first point. The second point controverts the suf
ficiency of the inductive method of science. This first
point, which we have chosen to treat last, asserts that theories,
constructed by that method alone, give, as illustrated in the
Spencerian theory, only sham or false science. We do not
think the professor has any right to take offence, for, to be
consistent with himself, he must agree with Mr. Godwin that
the Spencerian theory is not genuine science, since he holds,
or says he holds, that genuine science leads to the exact con
trary of " materialism and atheism." He should then join
Mr. Godwin in denouncing it, as well as Darwinism, as a
false or pretended science, and as a gross imposition upon
honest but unscientific minds.

The professor appears to us to hold that science is not
necessarily " exact or certain," and assumes that Mr. God
win, because he admits that " the Nebular, the Darwinian,
and the Spencerian hypotheses are within the domain of
scientific theory, and capable, to a certain extent, of explain
ing the phenomena to which they refer, " concedes their
legitimacy, and admits them to be genuine science. But
he forgets that Mr. Godwin has told him, what every philos
opher Knows, that a theory may explain all the phenomena,
at least, all the known phenomena in a given case, and yet

512 TRUE AND FALSE SCIENCE.

be false; and that an hypothesis, while it remains hypothetic
and unverified, is not science, though it may pertain to a
field which is open to scientific investigation. Mr. Godwin
admits, as we ourselves do, that these hypotheses refer to

Ehenomena, open, in some degree, to scientific inquiry ; but
e denies, as we deny, that they are science, and because they
are not " exact and certain," which all science is and must
be, or it is not science. Professor Youmans agrees that they
may as yet be inexact and uncertain, but that, nevertheless,
they are truly scientific and belong to the domain of science,
not simply, as Mr Godwin says, "to the domain of scien
tific theory" When a theory or hypothesis has been veri
fied and become science, it ceases to be a theory or an
hypothesis : a fact which seems to have escaped the science
of Professor Youmans.

It is precisely here that the quarrel between the scientists
and the philosophers and theologians arises. No philoso
pher, no theologian ever did or ever does object to scientific
investigation in the proper field of observation and induc
tion ; nor to any science, which really is science. Thus Car
dinal Bellarmine, who may be regarded as speaking with
authority for both philosophers and theologians, said to
Galileo's friend : " Tell your friend to pursue his mathe
matical studies without meddling with the interpretation of
Scripture, and when he has proved his theory, it will then be
time enough to consider what changes, if any, in the inter
pretation of the sacred text will be necessary." The troub
le the Florentine experienced grew out of the fact that he
insisted, while his heliocentric theory was still only a theory,
an unproved hypothesis, on publishing it and having it re
ceived as science. In all the cases, in which the scientists
complain of having been, or of being, persecuted by phi
losophers and theologians, or in which they do really en
counter opposition from them or the church, it is never for
their science or their scientific discoveries ; but for publish
ing as science, theories and hypotheses opposed to the belief
of mankind, and in demanding, while they are as yet un
proved or unverified, and are only conjectures more or less
plausible, that they shall be received as certain, and phi
losophy, theologj7, religion, politics, social order, all that
has hitherto been held as settled, as true and sacred, shall
be altered or modified so as to conform to them. Let their
authors pursue their investigations in quiet, and not disturb
the public with their hypotheses till they have proved them,

TRUE AND FALSE SCIENCE. 513

converted them into exact and certain science, and nobody
will oppose them ; and both the church and society, theolo
gians and philosophers, will accept with gratitude, and gen
erously reward, their patient labors and unwearied investi
gations. But this is precisely what the Huxleys, the Biich-
ners, the Taines, the Darwins, the Spencers, the Tyndalls
refuse to do ; and hence they are opposed by all sensible
men, not, as they would have the world believe, for their
science, but for their lack of science, and their attempt to
impose on society as science, what is not science, what has
no scientific validity, and springs only from their own delu
sions or distempered brains. Professor Youmans knows as
well as we do, and probably much better then we do, that
" the Nebular, the Darwinian, and the Spencerian theories"
have nothing like the exactness and certainty of science, and
yet he insists on their being received and obeyed as gen nine
science, and devotes the Popular Science Monthly to their
propagation and defence.

Professor Youmans is so wrapped up in his protege, Mr,
Herbert Spencer, and is so intent on defending him through
thick and thin, that he even contends that his system \&
eminently religious. Thus he says : —

"As to the religious 'tendencies' of the system, although they are
charged with being all that is bad, and although the charge would
undoubtedly be sustained by a popular vote, we are of opinion that it is
bound to be very differently viewed in the future. Mr. Spencer is a
profound believer in religion, and at the very threshold of his system,
he has shown the ultimate harmony of science and faith. Yet he has
not tried merely to patch up a transient truce between religion and sci
ence ; but, foreseeing the intenser conflicts that are inevitable as science
advances, he has labored to place their reconciliation upon a basis that
no extension of knowledge can disturb. When the method of science
is raised to its rightful supremacy in the human mind, and the rule of
science is recognized as supreme throughout the sphere of the phenom
enal, and when the distractions of theology become unbearable, it will
then be found that Mr. Spencer has proved that science, so far from
being its destroyer, is itself the promoter of the profoundest faith,
while the central truth of all religion is saved to humanity. Malignant
zealots will probably continue to secrete their vitriolic criticism, as if
stopped, they would probably die of their own acridities ; but there are
not wanting indications that many religious men of candor and discern
ment are already recognizing the claims of Mr. Spencer's system upon
the serious consideration of their class. For example, a late number of
the Nonconformist, the organ of the English dissenters, and an orthodox.

Vol.. IX -33.

514 TRUE AND FALSE SCIENCE.

paper of high influence, says of Spencer: 'He is not an idealist, nor is
he a materialist. Like Goethe, he believes that man is not born to solve
the problem which the universe presents.' Yet the writer holds his
views to be of very great importance, and speaks of it as ' an impor
tance, in our opinion, so great, that the future, not only of English
philosophy, but of practical theology, will be determined by its accept
ance or rejection.'" Ibid., pp. 119, 120.

Tlio Nonconformist is for us no more authoritative in
matters of religion than is the Popular Science Monthly
itself ; and we have no reason for respecting the judgment,
in a theological question, of either. We have heard even
preachers maintain that the poet Shelley was a devout wor
shipper of God ; and the late Victor Cousin maintained that
Spinoza was devout to a fault, that he was " even intoxicated
with God." We should like to have Professor Youmans
tell us what he himself understands by religion, and explain
to us how a man can be religious, who recognizes no God
distinct from nature, and who understands by God, if any
thing, the unknown and unknowable being, substance, or
reality, of which the cosmic phenomena are simply mani
festations or appearances? Mr. Spencer's system is as
decidedly atheistic as is the De 1} Esprit of Helvetius, or the
Systeme 'de la Nature of Baron cTHolbach. Mr. Spencer
does not in words deny religion, we grant, but the only
religious truth or idea he admits is a generalization, or the
union of the highest generalizations of certain phenomena
that man attains to, that is, an induction from finite and
phenomenal, either physical or physiological. But general
izations are abstractions, and abstractions are nullities, and,
consequently, Mr. Spencer admits no real basis for religion.

It is not easy to say what Mr. Spencer understands by
religion, for he evidently does not very well know himself.
He gives us nowhere a clear and full definition of what he
means by it ; he gives us only a series of statements, no one
of which is complete or final, and, leaves the last summing
up to the reader's own conjecture. " A religious creed," he
says, " is definable as an a-priori theory of the universe,"
as if a theory could be a creed, or a creed a theory ! Yet
the relation of the creed to religion, he does not define ;
but he unquestionably holds that religion may coexist with
every possible diversity of creed, therefore with every pos
sible error. In what he places the essential principle of
religion, he nowhere tells us. He asserts that all religions,
as all errors, u have a soul of truth or a verity in them."

TRUE AND FALSE SCIKN <'!•:.

515

This truth or verity is common to all religions, and common
alike to theism and atheism. Find by abstraction what is
common to all creeds and no-creeds, to all religions and no-
religions, to theism and atheism, and you will have the
essential religious verity. But, after all, what is this verity ?
It is that "the Power the universe manifests to us is utterly
inscrutable ! " * That is, all religions and no-religions, theists
and atheists, agree that the universe manifests a power, and
that what that power is, is utterly inscrutable, unknown,
and unknowable. But this is a negation, not a truth or a
principle, and assumes that the soul of all religions, the
universal verity which theism and atheism agree in recog
nizing, or which reconciles them all with one another and
with science, is their common denial that the great cosmic
power that underlies the cosmic phenomena, and which is
their substance, is intelligible. Even supposing the cos
mic power were God, and not the cosmos itself, this would
found religion and science alike on ignorance. Is it possible
more absolutely to deny all religions, to express a more
thorough contempt for all religion and science ? What sort
of religion can that be which is based on ignorance, or that
science which excludes from the knowable or intelligible
being, reality, substances, principles, causes, and includes
only appearances, revealing nothing of that which is back
of the appearance ? Yet Herbert Spencer is a scientist, and,
if we may believe Professor Youmans, an eminently relig
ious man, whose system is the " exact contrary of materialism
and atheism ! " Refutation is unnecessary.

Herbert Spencer may or may not suppose his " New
System of Philosophy" is compatible with religion — we do
not presume to judge the secrets of his heart ; but we need
hardly say that he utterly fails in his analysis to detect the
universal and essential principle of religion. All religions,
even the grossest, agree in recognizing a supernatural or
supercosmic Power, distinct from and independent of both
the cosmos and its phenomena, that intervenes in human
affairs, and may be rendered propitious by prayer and sac
rifice. The lirst part Mr. Spencer denies, in identifying
the Power he asserts with the cosmos, and making it the
unknowable substance that underlies its phenomena, or the
reality that appears in them ; the second part he denies, in
denying the personality of this unknowable Power, as well

*" First Principles," p. 11, 2d ed.

516 TRUE AND FALSE SCIENCE.

as in denying its supramundane existence. His religion we
have said is an abstraction, and abstractions are nullities.
He professedly arrives at it by generalization, and gene
ralization is nothing, prescinded from the particulars
generalized. Theism and atheism are not of the same

f3nus, and cannot be included in the same generalization,
hey are contradictories, and therefore mutually irreconcil
able. If God is, atheism is false ; if it is true that God is
not, then theism is false. There is no medium between
them, no principle common to both, in which both may be
integrated and made one. The very pretence is an avowal
of atheism.

Mr. Spencer seems to be ignorant of the most elementary
principles of both philosophy and theology, and is certainly
no master of his subject. He divides his work on First
Principles, &c., into two parts ; the first part is devoted to the
Unknowable ; the second part to the Knowable. Yet we find
him attempting in the first part to give a scientific exposi
tion of the laws of the Unknowable ! If the Unknowable
is unknowable, how can he know, determine, or describe its
laws? This, it seems to us, goes beyond the attempt of the
philosophers of Laputa to extract sunbeams from cucumbers.
Is Mr. Spencer ignorant of the very obvious distinction
between the incomprehensible and the unknowable ? Noth
ing is unknowable, or unknown even, that is known to be
or to exist, though a thing may be known to be or to exist,
which is neither comprehended nor comprehensible by the
human mind. I know Mr. Spencer's ignorance of philoso
phy and religion, but I do not comprehend it : it passes
my comprehension. I know, but do not comprehend my
own existence ; I know that God is, that he is supercosmicy
independent, self -existent, self -sufficing, eternal, immutable,
necessary being, — being in its plentitude, therefore one and
infinite, free and voluntary creator, upholder, and governor
of the universe, but I cannot comprehend him; he is not
unknowable, for he turns an intelligible face towards me
and there is nothing I know better than that he is, and is
my Creator and sovereign Lord ; but he is immense and to
me neither apprehensible nor comprehensible in his es
sence ; or as he is in himself.

Mr. Spencer calls his work First Principles of a new sys
tem of Philosophy. Philosophy is the science of principles,
on which the special sciences depend for their character and
validity as science, and is rightly termed the science of sci-

TRUE AND FALSE SCIENCE.

517

ences. Now you will search in vain in Mr. Spencer's vol
ume for the recognition of any philosophy in this sense ;you
will also search in vain for the recognition of a first princi
ple, or any principle at all, whether of science or of things,
of the real or of the knowable. You may find facts which the
scientists have the vicious habit of calling phenomena, thus
denying all reality to the mimesis, as Plato calls it, or the
individual and sensible, — and the alleged laws of their evo
lution, appearance or disappearance, concentration or disper
sion ; but no principle or cause, either primary or secondary.
And how should we, since principles and causes, if any there
are, Mr. Spencer avowedly exiles to the Unknowable ? By
what right, then, does Mr. Spencer call his work the First
Principles of Philosophy, since it treats neither of princi
ples nor of philosophy ? What the scientists call laws are not
principles, but are in the domain of fact, or, as they say, the
phenomenal, for with ihem all facts are phenomenal, and are
themselves as phenomenal as the facts observed, and simply
mark the order in which the facts occur, or the phenomena
appear, and are arranged in relation to one another, not prin
ciples in which the facts or phenomena originate, and on
which they depend. The law is only the facts generalized,
for induction is only generalization. It is a law that wax in
proximity to fire melts, but this is only the fact stated in
general terms, and adds nothing to it ; for, from the fact ob
served, no induction can enable you to say that wax in pro
ximity to fire will always melt. ' To be able to do that, you
must connect the fact with the principle of causation, and
assert that the fire melts the wax when in a certain proxim
ity to it, and, therefore, with a principle which ^is universal
and independent of the fact, and which produces it. But prin
ciples in this sense both Huxley and Spencer, following
Hume, deny ; or, what is, in relation to science, the same
thing, declare them to be unknowable. It is only by a man
ifest contradiction, then, that the so-called cosmic laws can
count for any thing in the explanation of the cosmic facts
or phenomena.

Herbert Spencer's whole system culminates in his theory
of evolution, which, with all deference to Professor Youmans
is compatible neither with religion nor with science. No
theory is compatible with religion, that denies or that does
not assert God and his creative act. We do not escape athe
ism by relegating God and his creative act to the Unknow
able, for it is as much atheism to declare God to be unknow-

518 TKUE AND FALSE SCIENCE.

able, as it is to deny that he is. He is an atheist who is not
a theist, and no one is a theist who does not assert and hold
that God is and is creator of the heavens and the earth and
all things visible and invisible : which no one can do, if God
and his creative act are absolutely unknowable or even un
known. He denies God who identifies him with the cosmos
or nature, and makes him the being, substance, or underly
ing reality of the cosmic phenomena, as do, undeniably, the
cosmists, if we may take Professor John Fiske of Harvard
college, or Mr. Spencer himself, as authority. Mr. Spencer
recognizes only an inscrutable power, who has created the
cosmos from nothing by the word of his power 1 No, but
that is manifested or appears in the cosmic phenomena, He
asserts that creation is " absolutely inconceivable,"* as we
amply proved, in our review of the Spencerian system, which
we pronounced " an elaborate system of ignorance."f His-
theory is not, as some people suppose,- a system of develop
ment, or of the evolution, even by natural or secondary causes,
of created germs, or the explication and completion of gen
era and species by the agency of second causes or natural
laws, as in the case of natural generation, which nobody
denies. It denies such created germs, all creation even
in potentia, for it denies creation itself as " absolutely
inconceivable." The denial of the creative act denies
the possibility of science, for it is only through his creative
act that we can know that God is, or that there are any ex
istences to be known. God and creature are all that is or
exists, and what is neither God nor creature is nothing, and
nothing is not intelligible. As creatures are nothing except
in their relation to God the creator, they can be known only
as creatures in their relation to him ; and therefore Mr. God
win tells Professor Youmans, with a philosophy as profound
as it is rare, that nothing can be understood without God.
Mr. Spencer's theory of evolution involves, then, the reduc
tion of science to nescience, and religion, like Comtism, to-
atheism, which is only another name for nihilism. Pro
fessor Youmans must be mistaken then, if he takes the
Spencerian theory for science, in asserting that the outcome
is " the exact contrary of materialism and atheism."

We feel it due to Mr. Godwin to thank him in the name
of both religion and science for the signal service he has

* " First Principles," p. 11, 2d ed.

f See The Cosmic Philosophy iinte p. 439.

TRUE AND FALSE SCIKNCK.

rendered them by his timely address, and by his remarkable
letter in explanation and vindication of it, which evinces a
writer of rare grace and polish, lucidity and vigor, and a
philosophical genius of the first order. Professional scientists,
like Drs. Carpenter, Henry, and Gray, whom he cites, hayu
made honorable protests against the admission of any dis
crepancy between science and religion ; but, being scientists,
their protests may be thought to be a not disinterested con
cession to popular prejudice. Besides, they do not base their
protests on principles', or show any principle on which relig
ion and science are seen to be reconcilable. Mr. Godwin is
above suspicion ; and in distinguishing between the science
of principles resting on insight or intuition, and which supply
the initial and final postulates of thought, and the sciences
constructed by observation, or experiment and induction, he
has given to those who understand him the true basis and
method of science, and the principle of the perfect concord
of science — if science — and religion.

Thus far had we written, and had, indeed, concluded all
we judged it necessary to say on the subject, when our at
tention was called to an able article in that highly esteemed
magazine, the Catholic World, on Evolution of Life, con
densed in the main from St. George Mivart's work on the
Genesis of Species, in which it may be thought the contrary
view is taken to that which we have maintained against Pro
fessor Youmans. The writer follows in all respects, except
as to the development of the human body, St. George Miv-
art, who says expressly that " the general theory ^of Evolu
tion ... is, without any doubt, perfectly consistent with
the strictest and most orthodox Christian theology."* The
writer says also : " There is nothing in the Darwinian the
ory, or the more general theory of Evolution countenanced
l>y facts bearing on the development of life, that a Catholic
may not accept if he wishes to do so."f But this only means
that a Catholic is free to accept the Darwinian theory aa far
as it is supported by facts, and that a theory of evolution of
life may be perfectly consistent, as St. George Mivart says,
with the strictest and most orthodox Christian theology ; not
that the Spencerian theory of Evolution is, or that of the
modern scientists who explain all the facts or phenomena of
the universe, by the correlation of forces, or the ceaseless con-

* " Genesis of Species," p. 15.

f Catholic World, May, 1873, p. 154.

520 TRUE AND FALSE SCIENCE.

centration and dispersion of matter, force, and motion, which
is the theory that we have condemned as atheistic, that is,
nihilistic. The same writer tells us he does not mean to as
sert that " naked Darwinism is compatible with Catholic
faith." All he maintains is, that the theory has a "kind of
truth " in it ; which is no more than can be said of every
false or heretical theory, and asserts nothing in contradiction
to our conclusion.

The article in the Catholic World is so indistinct, so in
direct, and confused in its statements, that we ourselves on a
first reading mistook its drift ; but we find that its doctrine
on the point in question is, that, " with respect to all organ
isms lower than man, the doctrine of the fathers is that
Catholic faith does not prevent any one from holding the
opinion that life, both vegetable and animal, was in the
world at its creation, and afterwards developed by regular
process into all the various species now on the earth ; there
fore, that all living things, up to man exclusively, were
-evolved by natural laws out of minute life-germs primarily
created, or even out of inorganic matter, is an opinion which
a Catholic may consistently hold if he thinks fit to do so."
But the development or evolution here asserted, is the de
velopment or evolution of life-germs created by God im
mediately from nothing by the word of his power, which is
by no means that of Darwin or Herbert Spencer, who both
deny the fact of creation, since they recognize no supracos-
mic power, or creator.

Yet it is hardly true to say that this is " the doctrine of
the fathers," or that the fathers generally agree in asserting
it. Indeed, none of those cited by St. George Mivart in
proof, as we understand them, assert the origination of spe
cies by natural law, or the evolution of life from inorganic
matter. Here are the principal authorities, omitting for the
moment the reference to Suares, which St. George Mivart
•cites from the fathers and theologians to sustain him, and
on which the Catholic World appears to rely :—

"Now, St. Augustine insists in a very remarkable manner on the
merely derivative sense in which God's creation of organic forms is to
be understood ; that is, that God created them by conferring on the mate
rial world the power to evolve them under suitable conditions. He says
in his book on Genesis: ' Terrestria animalia, tanquam ex ultimo ele-
mento mundi ultima; nihilominus potentialiter, quorum numeros tempus
postea visibiliter explicaret. n

1 "De Genesi ad Lit.," lib. v, cap. v, No. 14. In Ben. Edition, vol.
iii, p. 186.

TRUE AND FALSE SCIENCE. 521

"Again he says:

" ' Sicut autem in ipso grano invisibiliter erant omnia simul, quae per
tempera in arborem surgerent; ita ipse mundus cogitandus est, cum
Deus simul omnia creavit, habuisse simul omnia quae in illo et cum illo
facta sunt quando factus est dies; non solum ccelum cum sole et lun& et
sideribus . . . ; sed etiam ilia quae aqua et terra produxit potentialiter
atque causaliter, priusquam per temporum moras ita exorirentur, quo-
modo nobis jam nota sunt in eis operibus, quae Deus usque nunc ope-
ratur.'1

'" Omnium quippe reruin quse corporaliter visibiliterque nascuntur,
occulta qusedam semina in istis corporeis mundi hujus elementis la
tent/2

"And again: ' Ista quippe originaliter ac primordialiter in quadam
textura elementorum cuncta jam creata sunt; sed acceptis opportunitatibus
prodeunt.'3

" St. Thomas Aquinas, as was said in the first chapter, quotes with ap
proval the saying of St. Augustine, that in the first institution of Nature
we do not look for Miracles, but for the laws of Nature : ' In prima insti-
tutione naturae non quaeritur miraculum, sed quid natura reruin habeat,
ut Augustinus dicit. '4

"Again, he quotes with approval St. Augustine's assertion that the
kinds were created only derivatively, ' potentialiter tantum.'*

" Also he says: ' In prima autem rerum institutione fuit principium
activum verbum Dei, quod de materia elementari produxit animalia vel
in actu vel mrtute. secundum Aug. lib. 5 de Gen. ad lit. c. 5. 6

"Speaking of ' kinds ' (in scholastic phraseology 'substantial forms')
latent in matter, he says: ' Quas quidam posuerunt non incipere per action
cm naturae sed prius in materia exstitisse, ponentes latitationem formarum.
Et hoc accidit eis ex ignorantia materise, quia nesciebaut distinguere in
ter potentiam et actum. Quia enim formae praeexistunt eas simpliciter
praeexistere. '7

"Also Cornelius & Lapide8 contends that at least certain animals were
not absolutely, but only derivatively created, saying of them, ' Non fue-
runt creata formaliter, sed potentialiter.' "—Genesis of Species, pp. 281-
282.

These citations are not fairly made, and those from St.

1 Lib. cit., cap. xxii, No. 44.

i "De Trinitate," lib. iii, cap. viii, No. 14.

3 Lib. cit., cap. ix, No. 16.

4 St. Thomas, Summa, i, quest. 67, art. 4, ad 3.
6 Primae Partis, quest. 74, art. 2.

4 Lib. cit., quest. 71, art. 1.
1 Lib. cit., quest. 45, art. 8.
* Vide In Genesim Comment., cap. i.

522 TRUE AND FALSE SCIENCE.

Thomas are hardly honest, for in them St. Thomas is giving
simply the opinion of St. Augustine, not his own ; nor does
lie support it, or decide in its favor against different opinions
held, as he says, "by other saints," which he also gives.
The question arises in the discussion of the works of the
six days of Genesis. St. Augustine holds that the whole
creation, heaven and earth, and all creatures were created
simultaneously at once, and that the succession expressed by
days, which are divisions of time, is to be understood of the
origin, or nature, of created things. Thus he denies that
the materia informis, which is simply matter in po-
tentia ad receptionem formce, precedes in time materia
formata, or matter in actu, or actual matter, and contends
that when the Scripture says the " earth was void and empty,"
or without form, it is not to be understood that the earth
was iirst created without form and afterwards formed, but
is to be understood of the origin of existence in which
the possible is placed before the actual. It is so St Thomas
explains St. Augustine ; and, so explained, his opinion, if it
does not actually exclude the opinion he is cited to sustain,
certainly does not favor it. If matter, as both St Augustine
and St. Thomas teach, was created in aetu, not simply in
potently that is, as actual, not simply possible matter, there
can be, by natural laws, no evolution of material forms or
species, but only the explication of existing species or forms.
St. Augustine, no doubt, teaches, while he holds that the
creation of all things was completed simultaneously at once,
in one divine creative act, without any duration or succes
sion of time, since time begins with creation, that they were
created causaliter or potentialiter, that is, in their principles
or causes, and explicated in time by natural laws. But they
are explicated, he says, secundum suum genus, an important
sentence omitted by St. George Mivart, and his disciple in
the Catholic World. This shows that the explication, devel
opment, or evolution can proceed only according to the
genus or nature of the germ to be explicated or evolved.
Hence it follows, according to St. Augustine, that the kind,
genus, species, nature, the differentia of creatures, is deter
mined, not by mediate or derivative creation, that is, by
second causes, but by the primary creation of the direct act
of the first cause. The evolution, then, admitted by St.
Augustine, is not the evolution or production of new species,
but the explication of the individuals included causaliter or
potentialiter in the primary creation or the direct creation

TKt'E AND FALSE SCIENCE. 523

from nothing according to their respective natures, genera,
or species, which is against the Catholic World as well as
against Darwin and Spencer. Species is evolved in the
sense of the explication of the individuals contained causal-
iter in it, but not in the sense of being itself originated.

This seems to us to be taught or plainly implied by St.
Thomas, in his answer to the question, " Utrum una sit
materia informis omnium corporalium ? " After giving the
opinions of various philosophers, he says: "Sequiturde ne
cessitate quod non sit eadern materia corporum corruptibil-
ium et incorruptibilium. Materia enim est secundum id quod
est in potentia ad formam. Oportet ergo quod materia secun
dum se considerata sit in potentia ad formam omnium illorum
quorum est materia communis." ' AVhich supposes that there
may be other things to which the same matter is not com
mon, or, in other words, that things of a diverse nature have
not the same matter, or that the same matter is in 2>otentia
ad formam only in relation to those things which have a
common nature, that is, are of the same kind. Mr. Mivart
himself seems to hold the same view, for he holds that the
evolution is not only by natural laws or causes, but is subject
to law, and can take place only in a certain order and in cer
tain fixed lines, as suggested by Dr. Asa Gray. But what
is this law, this order, these lines, but precisely what is meant
by genera and species, in which individuals exist causaliter
or in principle, and are explicated by natural generation, as
we ourselves contend ?

St. George Mivart refers us to Suares.f We have examined
the passages referred to, but find nothing in favor of the
evolution, origination of new species by natural laws, second
causes, or the plastic power of nature. The discussion
referred to is of substantial forms, by which St. George
Mivart understands species ; and Suares, who undoubtedly
teaches that while in immaterial existences they are created
directly by God himself, holds that in material existences
they are educed or developed ex materia, that is, generated ;
yet not from matter that is simply in potentia ad formam,
but from matter which contains them in potentia ad indi
viduates, that is, the species or matter specificated : at least,
so we understand his distinction. To say the substantial
forms are contained potentialiter in matter, is to assert in

* Snm Theol P. 1. Q. 66.- Art. 2. in c.

f .M t<(physica. vol. i, disp. xv, sect. 2-9, and also sect. 13-15.

524 TBUE AND FALSE SCIENCE,

matter the power to develop or evolve, that is, generate
them, and therefore to develop only the likeness of its own
substantial forms, or forms of its own species, of which it
contains the principles ; otherwise, the eduction would not
be an evolution but a creation. To suppose matter endowed
with the power to produce, no matter by what process, a
new and distincfspecies, would be to suppose in it the power
to make something from nothing, which Suares tells us only
God can do. Therefore we sum up his doctrine as it is in
the margin of our edition of his works : Formm substan
tiates omnes* rationali excepta, ex subjectopra&jacente fiunt"
The Schoolmen mean by " formse substantiales " species,
what Suares calls causa intrinseca, what we ourselves are
accustomed to call causa essentialis, and which Plato calls
idea. It is that by which any thing is what it is. The
schoolmen regard all actual existences as composed of matter
and form. We understand this very well in the case of
Aristotle and Plato, who assert the preexistence, and even
the eternity, of matter ; for they hold that matter existed
in actu and in potentia adformam, only as to this or that
form impressed on it from'and by the divine Intelligence.
It is easy then to understand how all particular existences
are composed of matter and form. But we do not very
well understand how the scholastics can maintain that all
actual existences are composed of matter and form, or
rather, what they can mean by it. With them materia
informis is no real existence, and exists only in potentia ad
formam, that is' to say, a pure passivity, or a mere possibil
ity ; and possibility is not in the matter, but in the power
that is able to reduce it to act. It cannot be created, for in
itself it is nothing ; and St. Augustine denies it, and main
tains that matter was created materia formata, as do really
St. Thomas and Suares. The possible has no power to
reduce itself to act, and is actual by the union with it of the
substantial form. Our puzzle is how the substantial form
can be united with the materia informis, which is only an
abstraction, and therefore null. The whole existence must
consequently be in the substantial form. What is meant by
the union or composition ? It seems to us that we have no
alternative but to assume with St. Augustine that matter was
created, not as materia informis, or mere possibility, but as
materia for mata, that is, with its substantial forms; or that
all things were created at once and primarily in actu, that is,
in principle, or, as St. Augustine says, causaliter or poten-

TRUE AND FALSE SCIENCE. 525

tialiter, which Snares takes pains to distinguish from mere
possibility, or, as say the schoolmen, in potetitia adformam.
It means, as the Catholic World and St. George Mivart
understand it, the active power of explication or evolution,
but within the limits, as we say, of the created substantial
forms, not the power of evolving new substantial forms or
new species from materia informis, or nothing, which is
simply creation. In this sense we accept the authorities
cited by St. George Mivart, and relied on by the Catholic
World ; but we reject their conclusion so far as it asserts
the evolution of new species, or new substantial forms, for
that contradicts the maxim, ex nihilo nihil fit, which is true,
as Snares says, except in relation to God only. "We must
do so, for we can lind in the authorities cited, in the scho
lastic philosophy, or in reason, no principle on which to
assert such evolution. Substantial forms below man are
generable by substantial forms as generators.

Another point in the summing up, from the Dublin
Review by the Catholic World, of the theory of develop
ment or evolution, which it maintains, is, that a Catholic is
free to hold if he wishes to do so, " that all living things up
to man now on the face of the earth have been evolved by
natural laws not only from minute life-germs directly
created, but even from inorganic matter." We do not
believe the fathers teach this, or any principle that permits
us to hold it. Certainly neither St. George Mivart nor the
Catholic World gives us any proof of it. If some father
had emitted such an opinion, it would not be a proof that
the fathers agreed in holding it, nor a sufficient authority
for holding such an opinion is compatible with Catholic
faith. That Snares says, in speaking of the opinion, that in
dividuals of kinds like the mule, &c., must have been created
from the beginning, the contrary is the more probable opin
ion, amounts to nothing ; for they are not Devolved from
inorganic matter, nor do they form distinct kinds or species.
They are hybrids, and the products by generation of two
different species already existing, and cease with the first
generation, showing that they do not constitute a species ;
as we have shown in our review of Darwin's Origin of
Species. No new species is obtained from crossing. That
all individuals were created from the beginning, nobody
contends, for that would deny generation. But can any
species generate individuals, that is not itself individualized ?
The mule is the product of two living individuals of differ-

526 TRUE AND FALSE SCIENCE.

ent species, and partakes through generation of the nature
of both, but does not constitute or originate a hybrid species.
The development or explication of genera and species, as
the horse, the ass, the dog, the cow, already individualized,
nobody denies. The individual hybrid was created from
the beginning in the two species which have generated it,
just as all men were created from the beginning in the one
human species and were individualized in Adarn, who was
at once both the species arid an individual man, as we are
taught by the mystery of original sin, the Incarnation, and
Redemption. Hence are we obliged as Catholics to hold
the unity of the human race or species, and the oneness of
the origin of all men.

There can be no evolution of life where there are no life-
germs to be evolved. God can create new species if he
chooses, and the Duke of Argyll maintains that he does ;
but not even God can evolve new life-forms or new species
except from germs in which the life or species is already
contained in principle, because it would imply a contradic
tion in terms. It would be creation, not evolution. Even
in that Mystery of mysteries, Transubstantiation, the ex
planation commonly given is, that the substance of the
elements is removed and that of our Lord's body substi
tuted. We do not affirm that this explanation is orthodox ;
we only know that it is the one that was given us by more
than one eminent theologian. JSTo forms of life, at any
rate, can be evolved by natural laws, nor even by a miracle,
from inorganic matter, unless it contains them in principle,
musaliter, or in germ ; and if it does contain them, it is not
inorganic, but organic. As for spontaneous generation,
there is no known law by which it is possible, and as yet no
well authenticulated fact of the sort has been discovered.
As far as science has penetrated, all living organisms are
founded by an organite or central cell, which must either be
immediately created or generated by a parent organism. To
hold otherwise would, it seems to us, be false in science,
and, at least, an error against faith, and contrary to the
Scriptures.

But the Catholic World and St. George Mivart object to
Darwin's theory of the origin of species by means of
natural selection, chiefly on the ground that it does not ex
plain all the facts in the case, but neither gives any hint
that, if it did, it would still be no proof of its truth. The
inability of a theory or hypothesis to explain all that it is

TRUE AND FALSE SCIENCE. 527

required to explain, is a valid reason for rejecting it ; but
the fact that it does, is no valid reason for accepting it.
This is one of the grand mistakes of the false scientists. It
is necessary to prove not only that the theory or hypothesis
explains all the facts in the case, but that no other theory or
hypothesis is ^supposable that does, before concluding its
truth. This is not observed by Darwin, nor in general by
the f ramers of our ever-shifting geological theories. These
theories explain most of the known facts in the case ; but
other theories or hypotheses are supposable that explain them
equally well. In all cases of theoretical or hypothetical
reasoning, you must remove all other possible theories or
hypotheses before you can conclude the truth of your own.
Mr. Darwin pays no attention to this rule, and draws con-
elusions he intends shall be received as apodictic, from what
he takes to be "most likely," "probably," or "very proba
bly." Herbert^Spencer undertakes to remove all suppositions
inconsistent with his own ; but, in doing it, he is so success
ful as to render his own impossible.

Both the Catholic World and St. George Mivart commit
the mistake of supposing a Catholic is free to hold any
opinion that he finds emitted by some father or theologian,
or authorized by the principle some father has asserted!
although an isolated opinion, "never accepted by the church^
for which no consensus theologorum can be pleaded, and
which has no ratio theologica to support it. Both seem to
proceed on the supposition, that no error in science is repug
nant to Catholic faith, unless it is opposed to what has been
explicitly declared to be de fide. This is a mistake. Noth
ing is defined till it is controverted; and Pope St. Leo
Magnus, in one of his letters, states, if we remember rightly,
that the Arians were culpable heretics before the condemna
tion of Arianism by the Council of Nicsea, as well as
afterwards. Both also seem to hold that scientists are not
responsible to the church for errors which do not directly
impugn the revealed truth. This again is a mistake, and
smacks of Gallicanism. The pope condemns errors in
science as well as in faith. The field of science is within
the papal jurisdiction, as well as the field of revelation. It
is well that it is so, for the enemies of the church are now
waging their war against her for her extermination under
the mask of science, which they pretend is independent of
her authority.

The writer in the Catholic World has aimed to separate the

528

"kernel of truth," or rather, what a Catholic may hold,
which he supposes to be contained in Darwin's theory of
natural selection, and the more general theory of Evolution,
from the mass of error in which it is enveloped ; but he
seems to us to be not completely successful, and to have
retained some of the elements, indeed, the seminal princi
ple of the errors of both theories. He has, probably, been
misled by his confidence in St. George Mivart, who, as a
scientist himself, very naturally sought to interpret the
theologians in a sense as favorable to dominant scientific
theories as possible. But we think the writer's aim ques
tionable. The theories in question may contain some truth,
as does every error into which the human mind can fall, for
all error consists in the misapprehension, misapplication,
or perversion of truth ; but, as theories, both are false,
irredeemably false, and are to be as unqualifiedly condemned
as any erroneous theories ever broached. We, in our efforts
to conciliate the professional scientists, are likely to be suc
cessful only in weakening the cause of truth, of obscuring
the very truth we would have them adopt. If we are
Catholics let us be Catholics, and be careful to make no-
compromises, and seek no alien alliances. The spirit as
the tendency of the age is at enmity with God, and must be
fought, not coaxed. No concord between Christ and Belial

i"i /

is possible.

TYNDALL'S ADDRESS/

[From Brownson's Quarterly Review for January, 1875.]

IF any proof were wanted of the anti-Christian sentiments
and tendencies of contemporary scientists, and the neglect
of the higher branches of a thorough education, the general
ignorance of the simplest elements of religion, and the fearful
intellectual abasement, we might almost say intellectual im
becility, of the leaders of the age, we might find it in the

^Inaugural Address before the British Association. By PROP. JOHN TYN-
DAT.L, D.C.L., L.L.B., F.R.S., President. New York: Popular Science
Monthly for October, 1874.

TYNDALL'S ADDRESS.

fact that such an address as this by Professor Tyndall could
be delivered before an association of professedly scientific
men, and when published should produce a profound impres
sion, and be received with no little favor by public opinion,
The address, aside from a certain pomp of diction, an em
phasis, and an air of superiority and assurance witli which
Englishmen usually conceal their ignorance and poverty of
thought, has nothing remarkable about it. It contains noth
ing new or striking, and tells us nothing that we have not
heard in substance over and over again, ad nauseam, from our
very boyhood. We discover in it a passable rhetorician, but
no logician, no thinker, no scholar, nor even an ordinarily
well -informed gentleman, outside of certain of the special sci
ences, which he may have cultivated with more or less suc
cess. In regard to the subjects treated in this address, what
ever he knows or thinks he has picked up at third or fourth
hand ; and in reality he knows simply nothing, not even
that he knows nothing of them, and only makes a fool of
himself in the eyes of all who have studied them and really
do know something of them. Yet John Tyndall is a great
man, one of the demigods of the scientific world in this
nineteenth century, the inventor of a smoke respirator !

Before proceeding to any particular examination of this
very pretentious, but really flimsy, address itself, whose tin
sel the public mistake for solid gold, we wish to call attention.
to an unwarrantable assumption with regard to the religions-
history of mankind, on which the author and his infidel
brother-scientists base their theorizing on religion and the
ology. This assumption is, that the gross heathen supersti
tions were the earliest forms with which the religious senti
ment clothed itself ; and that the history of the developments,
changes, and ^modifications these superstitions undergo from
nation to nation and from age to age, presents the complete
religious history of the race. Deprive them of this assump
tion, and all their theorizing on the subject of religion falls
to the ground. Yet for this assumption there is not only
not one particle of historical proof, but the direct and posi
tive testimony of history to the contrary. History shows-
us the human race in possession of a pure and holy religion,
the worship of the one living and true God, Creator of
heaven and earth, before a single trace of any of these hea
then superstitions is discoverable. These superstitions aiv
one and all of them fruits of the great gentile apostasy from
the primitive and true religion ; and their developments

VOL. IX —24

530

changes, and modifications are due to the efforts of men and
nations who have lost the true system of the universe, and
find themselves without clothing or shelter in this wintry
world, to construct out of their reminiscences and their own
" inner consciousness " some sort of covering for their naked
ness, and some sort of protection from the winter's blast,
just as we see individuals and nations that have apostatized
from Christ and protested against the papacy, now doing.
Having forsaken the Fountain of living waters, they are
fain " to hew out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that
will hold no water." The origin, developments, and changes
of the heathen superstitions may be read in the origin, de
velopments, and changes of your modern Protestant sects.
The world outside of the church travels in a circle, and ever
and anon comes round to its starting-point, as does the poor
lad who has lost his head in the w^oods. There is progress
only in the church ; only in her does a man recover his lost
head, and find his way home.

Not only do our scientists take the history of the heathen
superstitions for the history of religion, but they take the
theology, to which they oppose their scientific deductions or
inductions, from Protestant theologians. The only class of
scientists we have any acquaintance with, who give any
indications even of the most superficial knowledge of Chris
tian theology, are the positivists ; and they speak of it, as of
Christianity itself, with less disrespect than do the other
classes of infidel scientists. There is little in Protestant
theology that we can ourselves respect ; and there can be no
greater mistake, although it may recognize some fragments
of Christian truth, than to confound it with Christian the
ology. Protestant theologians are floundering about to find
truth as were the heathen philosophers, and are equally un
trustworthy as guides, or as interpreters of the cosmos and
religion. Even a victory of the scientists over Protestant
theology would count for nothing with us. Professor Tyn-
dall may batter away as much as he pleases against the An
glican bishop Butler, for whom we have not and never had
the least respect. "We only pray the professor not to mistake
the Anglican bishop for a Catholic theologian. His much
praised Analogy is at best only a retort of the deist's silly
objection, that Christian faith asserts incomprehensible mys
teries : and the retort proves nothing. When the scientist
wishes to attack Christianity, he should take an authentic
statement of it, and aim his blows at the very heart of the

TYNDALL'S ADDRESS. 531

Christian system, not at its mere accessories. Christianity
is a whole and must be refuted as a whole, that is, in its
principles, if refuted at all. Protestantism is not a whole,
is only a jumble of fragments.

But in turning to the address itself, we are struck with its
vagueness, indecision, and emptiness. It lacks method, dis
tinctness of aim, and explicitness of doctrine. The orator
seems to have a good deal of tight in him, but is not quite
certain as to his enemy, or at what head he is to strike. He
appears to be dealing fearful blows at some formidable, but
invisible, foe ; yet whether against a real foe or only a spectre
of his own fancy, is more than we can determine. What
he wants we know not, and what obstacles he encounters,
or imagines he encounters, we see not ; only this is certain,
that he nowhere in his address speaks as a scientist, in the
proper sense of the term ; but from beginning to end he is
out of the field of science and in that of philosophy or the
ology, both of which he professes to despise, and of both of
which he is as innocent of knowing any thing as the child
not yet born. He who opposes or tries to make away with
philosophy and theology, is as much in their province as he
who defends them. He treats of religion who seeks to
overthrow it, no less than he who labors to vindicate it.

The address defies analysis. It has no unity, no principle,
no thesis, which it labors to develop, elucidate, and defend ;
and it proves nothing but the orator's ignorance, arrogance,
and hostility to religion. It sets forth no scientific truth,
but simply reproduces as science — and does not understand
that — the old exploded theory of materialism, as taught by
the heathen Democritus, and as subsequently held by Epi
curus, and sung by Lucretius. He denies the soul and its
immortality, and the existence of a supercosmic, intelligent,
and creative God ; that is, he says with " the fool in his heart,
NON EST DEUS," — there is no God : therefore, " let us eat,
drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die." This is all we
have found in this marvellous address, over which Professor
Youmans, of the Popular Science Monthly, is in raptures,
and even bewildered by the very general favor with which
it has been received. But the worthy professor must be par
doned, for he does not know the difference between panthe
ism or atheism and theism, and believes fully that Herbert
Spencer is not only a great philosopher, but a marvellously
devout Christian !

The N. Y. Herald calls upon the theologians to give Pro-

532

fessor Tyndall's utterances a serious refutation. But why
should it make such a call, as if Tyndall had brought forward
any thing which the theologians have not refuted a hundred
times over, any time during the last eighteen centuries?
Then, who is this Professor Tyndall ? What mighty claims-
has he to public consideration ? In his own line, in some
one or more of the special sciences, he may have been a suc
cessful student ; but in this address he is not treating any one
of the special sciences ; he is not in his own line of study,
in which he has acquired whatever distinction he has at
tained to in the scientific world, but trenches on the province
of the theologian, of which he knows nothing. Because he
has some reputation in some of the physical sciences, has
invented a smoke respirator, has he thereby proved his
ability to instruct us in philosophy, in theology, theogony,
cosmogony, or in sciences that lie entirely above his line, and
on which his studies throw not a single ray of light ? We
let him answer for us : —

' ' When the human mind has achieved greatness and given evidence of
extraordinary power in any domain, there is a tendency to credit it with
similar power in all other domains. Thus theologians have found com
fort and assurance in the thought that Newton dealt with the question
of revelation, forgetful of the fact that the very devotion of his powers,
through all the best years of his life, to a totally different class of ideas,
not to speak of any natural disqualification, tended to render him less in
stead of more competent to deal with theological and historic questions."

This is his own protest against his being cited as author
ity in the domain in which lies his address. Whatever ex
traordinary power he may or may not have shown in some
other domain, he has shown none in that ; and, accord
ing to his own reasoning, his very studies have unfitted him,
in some degree at least, to do it. We wish our scientists
would heed Professor Tyndall's admonition, and especially
we wish that he had heeded it himself.

Science, the Popular Science Monthly tells us, deals only
with second causes, and leaves the first cause to religion, or
the theologians. This use of the term science, which the scien
tists affect, is in some degree censurable, and not warranted by
the genius of our mother-tongue. It is a misnomer, for what
is meant is not science in its unity and universality, but
the sciences, sometimes called " the inductive sciences," " the
exact sciences," and sometimes " the physical sciences," as
distinguished from the mental and moral sciences, that isy

533

from philosophical and theological science. What is meant
to be asserted is, if we charitably suppose the scientists or
physicists know what they mean, that the sciences treat
only of second causes, not of the first cause, or of secondary,
not of first, principles. We will accept this statement, if
they will faithfully adhere to it. This statement, which has
Professor Youmans for its authority, supposes that there is
a first cause, and that there are second causes. But second
causes are and can be only created causes, since necessarily
dependent on the first cause ; and if with Democritus, Em-
pedocles, Epicurus, Lucretius, Herbert Spencer, and Profes
sor Tyndall, we deny creation, or that the first cause is a
creative God, there are and can be no second causes, and,
consequently, no science, for then there will be no subject
for the sciences to treat. Somebody has said : " An atheist
may be a geometrician ; but if there were no God, that is, no
Creator, there could be no geometry."

But, assigning to the sciences second causes as their domain,
which we are told is all they claim, we assign them simply
the observation and classification of facts ; for second causes
are themselves only facts, not real causes or principles, except
in a relative and subordinate sense, since they are created
and dependent on the first cause, from whom they hold all
they are, can be, or do. They are causes only in relation to
their own effects. They have no original or independent
causative power, no proper creative force or energy, and can
only explicate the potentialities of the productions of the
first cause, while, in relation to the first cause, they are nei
ther causes nor principles, but simply facts. As long as the
scientists confine themselves to the investigation of facts and
their classification according to their second causes or their
generic principles, which, as being only secondary or rela
tive, are themselves in the order of facts, they are ^in their
proper domain ; and philosophers, and even theologians who
deal with first or absolute principles, will maintain them in
it, respect and defend their rights and independence, and
count them useful and even indispensable allies or auxilia
ries. But the quarrel breaks out, not from the attempt of
philosophy or theology to encroach on the domain of the sci
ences, or to construct them by a priori reasoning, as Profes
sor Tyndall falsely or ignorantly pretends ; but from the
persistence of the scientists to extend their inductions beyond
the order of facts to the order of first principles, and thus
to usurp the province of philosophy or theology.

534:

This is precisely what Professor Tyndall attempts in this
address before the British Association. He seeks to absorb
the first cause in the second, the primary in the secondary,
principles in the facts which proceed from them, and are
dependent on them. Thus he asserts materialism, that is,
denies the spiritual element in man, and maintains that life,
thought, feeling, love and hatred, joy and grief, hope and
fear," are produced by the mechanical combinations of mate
rial atoms, themselves without life, thought, or sense. This,
of course, is a mere theory, without the slightest scientific
value, for it transcends the order of facts or of second
causes. It is of no more value than the astronomer Lalande's
assertion, " I have never seen God at the end of my tele
scope." Suppose you have not, what then ? "What right have
you to conclude, because you have not seen him, there is no
God ? Your conclusion is invalid ; first, because it is not in
the order of facts, or in the order of your premises ; and
second, because, from a simple negation, nothing can be con
cluded. Professor Tyndall must show it possible for lifeless,
senseless, brute matter to generate animal motion, life, sense,
thought, reason, before he can assert his materialism, or the
Democritan doctrine of the origin of life and sense in the me
chanical, chemical, or electric combination of lifeless and
senseless atoms. JEx nihilo nifiilfit ; to which may be added
that other axiom, Nemo dat quod non habet. You cannot
in the compound get what is not in the components, as you
can have in the whole only the sum of the parts. In your
chemical compounds you get new forms, no doubt, but no
new elements or substance, as every chemist is well aware.
How, then, from your combinations of atoms, get what, con
fessedly, they do not contain ? The professor, in his im
aginary discussion between a materialist and the Anglican
bishop Butler, permits the bishop, who, by the way, is no
favorite of ours, to press in substance this objection ; but he
takes good care not to attempt to solve it, yet he pretends to
oppose science to theology, and by science to explode spirit !

The professor denies creation ; and yet he adduces and
can adduce no facts from which the denial of the origin of
all things in creation is a logical induction. The induction
transcends the domain of the sciences, transcends the order
of second causes, and is an hypothesis, conjecture, or guess in
the order of the first cause or ultimate principles — any thing
but science. The professor himself dares not pretend that
he has discovered and scientifically verified any facts that

535

prove that there is no God ; that the universe with all it
contains has not been created from nothing ; that there is
no soul distinct from matter, the forma corporis, or that the
soul is not immortal. The professor's doctrine of materi
alism and pantheism or atheism is not, then, a scientific in
duction, and is not scientifically verified or verifiable. It is
no more a scientific induction than is the assertion, the
moon is made of green cheese. The objection here is, not
that the professor cultivates the field of science and inves
tigates the facts of nature, and classifies them according to
the laws of their production and changes, or their generic
principles in the order of second causes ; but that he makes
inductions or draws conclusions which he insists we shall re
ceive as valid, and therefore as science, in the order of the
first cause or ultimate principles : that is. his conclusions are
broader than his premises, and in a different order, which is
very bad logic, and certainly not very good science.

We maintain that no induction from facts observed is of
any scientific value beyond the order of the facts themselves.
Hence we deny the validity of the argument from observa
tion and induction for the existence of God as well as for
the denial of that existence. We deny that the existence
of God can be either proved or disproved by induction, and
are as far from agreeing with Doctor M'Cosh as we are from
agreeing with Professor Tyndall, Herbert Spencer, or Pro
fessor Fiske. We do not accept the teleolo^ical argument,
or the argument from design, as of the least logical or scien
tific value, when taken independently, as we have shown in
our Essay in Refutation of Atheism, under the head of
Inconclusive Proofs* A certain class of theologians trained in
the school ot the inductionists try to assimilate theology and
philosophy to the physical sciences, and adopt for both the
inductive method; but only to the destruction of both.
God and creation can no more be proved than disproved by
induction, which is of no value save in the order of facts, as
Bacon himself maintained ; and any induction from facts to
be applied beyond the order of facts is an abstraction, a gen
eralization, and, therefore, a sheer nullity.

We have, in our Essay in Refutation of Atheism, refuted
Professor TyndalFs atheism and his denial of creation, by
proving, we"venture to say, unanswerably, the being of God
and the fact of creation. No man who denies either has

*Vol. II., p. 32.

536

any right to pretend to an}7 real science of -principles, or of
the origin or end of things. The professor's materialism
needs no refutation, for no fact is adduced or can be ad
duced to prove it. It suffices to answer the professor, as
the artist Fuseli answered a materialist in his day, who was
arguing that man has no soul : " That you have a soul, I
will not say ; but by God I know / have a soul." If the
professor believes that he has been evolved from the aphid,
and differs not essentially from the pig, we see not much
use in attempting to correct his belief. If he should dis
cover that he has a soul he would hardly know what to do
with it ; it would be for him a great embarrassment, only
disturb his serenity, and make him very discontented to
lodge any longer in the sty with his brother pigs. He
takes pride in belonging to " the sty of Epicurus," and we
.are not sure that it is not the pigs that should resent
the affinity claimed. One of the strangest things in the
world is to find men, educated men, held in high esteem by
the leaders of public opinion, who fancy they are laboring
for the honor and dignity of human nature, the emancipa
tion, the intellectual and moral elevation of the human race,
by doing their best to degrade man to the level of the
beasts that perish ! And this, too, under pretext of deliver
ing society from superstition, as if the worst possible super
stition could be a deeper degradation, sink man lower in the
scale of being, than their false and infamous theories would
sink him, if true or acted on. Even the most loathsome
African fetichism is less degrading than the doctrine of
Professor Tyndall & Co.; for fetichism leaves to the human
heart something to reverence held to be superior to man,
while Tyndall & Co.'s doctrine leaves it nothing.

But while we refuse to undertake a formal refutation of
the materialism revived from old Democritus, Epicurus, and
Lucretius, we may note and dispose of a few of the false
charges the professor brings against the theologians. To
read his address, one would suppose that the sciences had
been opposed from the beginning by the theologians, and
have had to fight their way at every step they have taken.
Now we have been reading history all our lifetime, but we
have found no evidence of this grave charge ; and we chal
lenge the professor to name an instance in which the theolo
gians have opposed or hindered the study of nature.
Socrates, we concede, was condemned to death, but not for
his scientific doctrines, or his cultivation of the natural

TYNDALL'S ADDRESS. 537

sciences, to which in his earlier life he appears to have been
-devoted. He was tried and condemned for his moral and
theological teachings, which, imperfect as they were, were
yet purer and far more elevated, because more in ac
cordance with the primitive traditions of the race, than
those held by the Athenian state. Indeed, scientific culture
received its first encouragement, unless all history is a fable,
in the temples ; the first developments of the sciences were
due to the priests, and were continued in the heathen world,
for the most part, by the sacerdotal caste. To the sacerdotal
caste the world owed the study of astronomy and mathemat
ics, mechanics and physics, for a certain degree of knowl
edge of all these was necessary in the temple service ; and
it is doubtful if our knowledge of these has much advanced
beyond theirs. The heathen mythologies, although they are
in part susceptible of an historical explication, as old
Euhemerus maintained, yet only in part, and that a very
small part, as the superstition common to them all is the
worship of nature originating with the pantheists and the
pseudo-philosophers, are to be explained chiefly by the facts
and principles of natural science, — what the English call
natural philosophy, — grouped around some prominent his
torical person or event, together with some distorted or mu
tilated traditions of the primitive religion of mankind.
Whoever studies them and is capable of comprehending
them, will be struck with the profound knowledge of the nat
ural sciences they conceal, or which must have been possess
ed by the sacerdotal corporations in which they originated.
The professor is ill-informed when he asserts that the
ancient heathen attributed the origin of the phenomena, if
he means the facts, of nature to the caprices of the gods,
that is, to the direct creative act of the divine power. They
did no such thing. The heathen ascribed no creative power
to their gods, any more than Christians do to Satan and his
angels. Even the heathen philosophers never recognize the
fact of creation ; they recognize no creative God. The gen
tiles, or the nations and tribes that shortly after the confu
sion of tongues at Babel apostatized from the patriarchal re
ligion, fell into idolatry, originated the various mythologies
and superstitions of profane history, and completely lost
the tradition of the fact of creation. The gentile philoso
phers explained the origin of things, as do still the Hindus,
the Japanese, and Buddhists, by emanation, generation,
formation, development or evolution. Democritus did not

538 TYND ALL'S ADDRESS.

differ from the other Greek philosophers in denying crea
tion after a human manner, as the professor asserts, or in any
other manner; but in practically denying all supernal or
divine influence or interference in the government of man
and nature. He was a downright atheist, and explained the
origin of things, the cosmos and its contents, by the blind
workings of mechanical forces — by the mechanical and
fortuitous combination of lifeless and senseless atoms.

The professor is as enraged as a mad bull at sight of a red
rag, at the bare mention of a personal cause, or personal
causes, and he stigmatizes as anthropomorphous even Chris
tian theology. He embraces, with all the affection of hi&
heart old Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, and other mate
rialists, because they reject all personal cause, and attribute
all the facts and phenomena of nature to the workings of
impersonal and blind force or energy, directed by no intelli
gence and moved by no will. His class of scientists, who
write in English, do not like to say out bluntly, " There is-
no God," for, adepts in hypocrisy, the English-speaking
people would hardly bear that ; so they soften it, and say,
" There is no personal or anthropomorphous God," as if
personal and anthropomorphous meant one and the same
thing. But an impersonal God is simply no God at all ; it is
a simple force operating without intelligence, reason, or
volition, from the intrinsic necessity of its own nature ; for
the moment you add to force intelligence, or reason and
will, it is a person, and such we have heretofore demonstrat
ed, is God, the only living and eternal being, SUM QUI
SUM. But he is an infinitely free, independent, divine
person, not a limited, finite, dependent human person.
Anthropomorphous means human-shaped, and has nothing
to do with personality or impersonality ; for, though the
body has shape or figure, the person, that which says I am,
I know, or I will, has none.

The Greeks represented their gods — not the Divinity
which, in all their mythology, hovers above all the gods, and
holds in its hand the destines of both gods and men — under
a human form ; but the Egyptians, the Assyrians, and
Hindus did not, except when it concerned an avatar, or in
carnation of Vishnu or of some other god ; nor did the
Romans represent their gods as anthropomorphous, at least
not until after they took to imitating the Greeks, who wor
shipped the beauty of form. The professor's brother-mate
rialists, the Mormons, make their God anthropomorphous.

539

One of their twelve apostles explained to us one day their
theology, according to which God is material, organized of
the finest part of matter, and has the human shape or figure.
The Swedenborgians give to their God the human form, the
configuration and all the parts of a man. But the Christian
theologians, though they assert the personality, even the tri-
personality of the Godhead, never represent the Divinity as
anthropomorphous, for they hold him to be without body or
parts, that is pure spirit. It is God in his human nature,
the eternal Word incarnate, assuming flesh and becoming
truly man without ceasing to be God, that bears the human
form. We do not expect the professor to understand any
thing of this, for the eyes of his understanding have re
mained closed for more than nine days from his birth. We
make the remarks for our Christian readers, not for him.

According to the professor, science, that is, materialism,
went on swimmingly from old Democritus, in spite of the
shallow and feeble opposition of Plato and Aristotle, till it
was interrupted by the rottenness and corruption of the
Roman Empire, and the introduction and establishment of
Christianity or ecclesiasticism suspended its culture and pro
gress for nearly two millenniums. Christianity, which he
calls ecclesiasticism, is the inveterate enemy, it would seem,
of all scientific progress. Thus he says :

" What, then, stopped its victorious advance? Why was the scien
tific intellect compelled, like an exhausted soil, to lie fallow for nearly
two millennia before it could regather the elements necessary to its
fertility and strength? Bacon has already let us know one cause;
Whewell ascribes this stationary period to four causes, — obscurity of
thought, servility, intolerance of disposition, enthusiasm of temper ; and
he gives striking examples of each.

"But these characteristics must have had their causes, which lay in
the circumstances of the time. Rome, and the other cities of the Em
pire, had fallen into moral putrefaction. Christianity had appeared,
offering the Gospel to the poor, and, by moderation, if not asceticism
of life, practically protesting against the profligacy of the age. The
sufferings of the early Christians, and the extraordinary exultation of
mind which enabled them to triumph over the diabolical tortures to
which they were subjected, must have left traces not easily effaced.
They scorned the earth, in view of that ' building of God, that house
not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.' The Scriptures, which
ministered to their spiritual needs, were also the measure of their science.
When, for example, the celebrated question of antipodes came to be
discussed, the Bible was with many the ultimate court of appeal.

54:0

Augustine, who flourished A. D. 400, would not deny the rotundity of
the earth, but he would deny the possible existence of inhabitants at the
other side, ' because no such race is recorded in Scripture among the
descendants of Adam.' Archbishop Boniface was shocked at the as
sumption of a ' world of human beings out of the reach of the means of
salvation.'

"Thus reined in, science was not likely to make much progress.
Later on, the political and theological strife between the church and
civil governments, so powerfully depicted by Draper, must have done
much to stifle investigation. Whewell makes many wise and brave re
marks regarding the spirit of the Middle Ages. It was a menial spirit.
The seekers after natural knowledge had forsaken that fountain of living
waters, the direct appeal to nature by observation and experiment, and
had given themselves up to the remanipulation of the notions of their
predecessors. It was a time when thought had became abject, and when
the acceptance of mere authority led, as it always does in science, to in
tellectual death. Natural events, instead of being traced to physical
were referred to moral causes ; while an exercise of the phantasy, almost
as degrading as the spiritualism of the present day, took the place of
scientific speculation."

Professor Tyndall adds nothing to strengthen his cause by
citing such authors as Whewell and Draper, who are no bet
ter authority than himself on the intellectual history of
mankind. The historian who can characterize the period
from the downfall of the Roman Empire in the sixth ceti-
tury to the sixteenth as a " stationary " period, a period of
" servility," of abjectness, or intellectual inactivity, proves
only his own ignorance of that period, and utter incapacity
to write its history. There is no known, period of history
which less deserves the title of " stationary ;" no one in
which men have displayed greater physical energy, or a
more marvellous moral and intellectual activity ; or in which
society has made in all directions such great and astonishing
progress. That period, in which the barbarians who had
overturned the corrupt and rotten Roman Empire, which
had grown into the most oppressive despotism that ever
weighed on the human race, under which freemen, to
escape the burden imposed by the imperial fisc, actually sold
themselves and their children into slavery, were Christian
ized and civilized, and formed into the great and
leading nations of the modern world, could not have
been a stationary period ; nor could it have been remarkable
for its tameness and servility, especially when it is consider
ed that the Protestant revolt in the sixteenth century found

TYNDALI/S ADDRESS.

541

every European state organized with a free and vigorous
constitution, which three hundred years, with a century of
revolutions, have been able only partially to destroy. There
can be no question that Europe was in possession of far
greater political and civil freedom, as well as of a higher
moral and intellectual culture, when Luther was born, than
it is now, or has been since the rise of Protestantism. There
is nothing witnessed now in the world to equal the en
thusiasm of men in the middle ages for knowledge, and
knowledge on all subjects. The curriculum of the schools
was that of the great imperial schools of Rome, and was
not less extensive than that of our most renowned contem
porary universities. The scholars may have been inferior
in purely literary grace and polish to the Ciceros, Yirgils,
Horaces, Sallusts, Livys, or the classical writers of Athens ;
but we hazard nothing when we say they were vastly supe
rior to them in the breadth of their culture, the extent and
variety of their knowledge, and in depth and vigor of
thought. The scholastics may have made many unnecessary
distinctions, and spent much time in discussing questions
which seem to us trifling or frivolous ; but no one who has
studied them can deny that no philosophers ever lived who
also discussed so many really important questions, or dis
cussed them so thoroughly and well.

Undoubtedly, the mind was less taken up in those ages
with the mechanical and physical sciences than with philo
sophical and theological sciences, in which are to be found
the principles and law of the natural sciences ; for in those
ages men believed in revelation, in the immortality of
the soul, and the reality of the spiritual world, and there
fore placed the kingdom of heaven in their affections above
the kingdoms of this world. But they did not neglect the
study 01 the physical sciences, nor were they ignorant of
the true method of studying them, that of observation and
induction. . Bacon's pretence, that they adopted the a priori
method in the study of nature, has no foundation in fact.
They recognized a first cause, causa causarum* and did not
consider natural facts and events were fully ^ explained by
being traced to their second causes; but nothing is further
from the truth than the rash assertion, that "natural events,
instead of being traced to physical, were referred to moral,
causes." The professor will search in vain to find a single
instance to sustain him. Doubtless, the scholastics held, and
rightly held, that the ultimate cause of all natural events is

542

God, for so Christianity teaches ; yet was this never so un
derstood as to exclude or to impair the action of physical or
second causes. The error of the scientists is, that they ex
tend the action of second causes so far as to exclude or
absorb the first cause, and make their physical causes super
sede the moral cause of the universe. But the study of
nature was by no means neglected ; and many remarkable
discoveries and inventions were made during that period
which have changed the face of the modern world, and are
the basis of the material progress we so loudly boast. It
was in these same decried middle ages that gunpowder and
fire-arms, paper and printing on movable types, and the
mariner's compass, were invented, the power of steam was
discovered, and its use as a motive power foreseen and pre
dicted. It was also in this alleged stationary period, this
period of inactivity and "mental stagnation," that occurred
the remarkable travels of Marco Polo, and the geographical
discoveries of Yasco da Gama and Christopher Columbus.
The period in which such inventions and discoveries were
made, was not, assuredly, a period of mental inactivity and
stupidity.

Yet during all this period in which these inventions and
discoveries were made, and this mighty progress in civiliza
tion was effected, ecclesiasticism was in the ascendant ; and
the church, if often resisted and thwarted by the barbarism
inherited from the empire or introduced from the forests
of Germany, if she found herself obliged frequently to be-

fin her work anew from the devastating irruptions of new
ordes of barbarians from the East, the South, and the
]STorth, Huns, Saracens, and Northmen, led society in its
grand work of civilization, directed its labors, and rendered
them efficient. Professor Tyndall applauds Democritus,
Epicurus, and Lucretius in maintaining materialism, because
their motive was to rid the world of superstition. Yet they
did not rid the world of that fearful evil ; and the world
was never sunk deeper in superstition than it was at the
moment when their doctrine, which the professor calls
science, was most in vogue. The only remedy for supersti
tion is the predominance in society of the true religion ;
and under the influence of mediaeval ecclesiasticism, super
stition had almost entirely disappeared from Christian
Europe.

Outside of the influence of ecclesiasticism there was really
no scientific or other progress during the period in question ;
for even the professor will hardly claim as scientists the old

ADDRESS. 543

alchemists, astrologers, and various classes of unchristian
mystics : indeed he expressly excludes them. Yet they
were not subjected to ecclesiastical authority which opposed
them, and were as independent in their speculations as is
the professor himself. Emancipation from ecclesiasticism
does not appear to insure scientific progress. The profes
sor cites, indeed, the Arab Alhazen, of Spain, who would
seem to be as true a scientist as Professor Tyndall himself,
which is not saying much ; for if his doctrine of material
ism were true, his science would not surpass that of the ox
or the horse. His account of the scientific progress of the
Arabs rests on the authority of our own Dr. Draper, a good
chemist for aught we know, and a passable physiologist, we
believe, if we accept, as is the fashion just now, the chemi
cal explanation of physiological facts; but, in historical
matters, of no authority at all. Whoever has studied the
question knows perfectly well that the accounts of the
Arabic science and literature in the middle ages, widely
credited and insisted on by those whose position requires
them to depreciate the church and her influence, have been
grossly exaggerated. They had no philosophy, and very
little, if any, science, except what they borrowed from the
Greeks and Hindus, conquered by the armies of the prophet
or his lieutenants.

The struggle between the pope and emperor, or between
the spiritual power and the secular, had, no doubt, a dis
astrous effect on the scientific as well as the moral prog
ress of the middle ages ; but for that struggle ecclesiasticism
is not responsible. Who is ignorant, to-day, that the strug
gle originated in the encroachments of the secular power
on the rights and independence of the spiritual, as we shall
show in a subsequent article ? In that long struggle, not
yet ended, and renewed and rendered as fierce as ever to
day by Kaiser Wilhelm and his chancellor, Prince von Bis
marck, whatever hindrances science had to encounter, must
be charged, not to ecclesiasticism, but to caesarism which
warred against it.

The pretence that the church opposes, or ever has oppos
ed, science or the study of the natural sciences, can be set
up only by deplorable ignorance or satanic malice. The pro
fessor cites but two facts, and they prove nothing to the
purpose. They are, that St. Augustine and St. Boniface
rejected the doctrine of the. antipodes, which, in their time,
was supposed to imply that there is a race of men not re
deemed by the blood of Christ : which was not and could

544

not be true. All that can be said of them is, that they, as
well as those who asserted inhabitants on the other side of
the earth, erred in supposing them necessarily separated
from us. The church always leaves scientific questions to
scientific men, even in enacting her own canons; astro
nomical questions to astronomers, mathematical questions to
mathematicians, physiological questions to physiologists,
chemical questions to chemists, and so on. Wlien she would
correct the calendar and determine the true time for keeping
Easter, she relied on the calculations of astronomers and
mathematicians ; and every theologian knows that there are
not a few questions in moral theology bearing on physiology,
that are solved by the teachings of the physiologists, as in
speculative theology purely rational questions are solved by
dicta of accredited philosophers. Every reader of the
" Sum " of St. Thomas will readily recollect the " dicit
philosophus." There is, as we have said, no quarrel be
tween the theologians and scientists, so long as the scientists
confine themselves to the proper domain of science, and do
not, by their inductions, theories, and hypotheses, attempt
to invade the territory of faith, or revealed theology. The
quarrel begins only when they leave their own domain, and
claim, in the name of science, the right to take charge of
faith and morals. So long as they remain in their own
legitimate sphere, they meet from the church only honor and
encouragement.

We do not feel that it is necessary to follow this preten
tious, but shallow, address any further. The author does
not give us, nor even profess to give us, science ; he gives
simply his opinions, not in the field of science, but on faith
and morals, and in opposition to the beliefs and hopes, in
dividuals here and there excepted, of the human race in all
as;es and nations : and we tell him very frankly that he is
not a man sufficiently learned or distinguished to make his
opinions on the topics he introduces worthy of the slightest
consideration. He has never seriously studied one of them ;
and his conclusions, as given in his address, are in no in
stance the result of his own thorough scientific investigation.
He cannot be consulted as an expert on one of them. The
Scriptures classify him when they say, " Dixit insipiens in
corde suo : Non est Deus." We must say of him, still in
the language of Scripture, " Ephraim is joined to his idols,
let him alone." He is wedded to his false science, and to it
we leave him, praying God to have mercy on his soul.

TYNDALL'S ADDRESS. 545

The address, and the reception it has met from no small
portion of the public, bear us out in the assertion we so fre
quently make, out which few appear to heed, that the liv
ing issue we have now to meet is between Catholicity and
atheism. "We have to meet it here in the form of indepen
dent morality, there in the form of csesarism or independent
politics. Secularism is only a polite name for atheism, and
secularism is the enemy we have everywhere to fight, — secu
larism in education, secularism in science, secularism in re
ligion, secularism in morals, in politics, in the family, and
in society. " The Four Great Evils of the Times," so pow
erfully set forth by the illustrious Archbishop of Westmin
ster, are only four phases of one and the same evil, namely,
secularism or atheism, — the substitution of the creature for
the Creator, man for God.

In this war the sects, even though professing to recognize
God and Christ, and to believe in the immortality of the
soul, or an eternal life beyond the grave, their belief is so-
uncertain and variable, so weak and timid, cannot aid us.
One half of each sect never think — are, intellectually con
sidered, mere nullities ; the other half are asking, often in
agony of soul, Whence come we, why are we here, whither
go we, who will show us any good ? Those among them
who think, doubt ; the problem of life rises dark and im
penetrable before them, and despairing of a solution, or of
arriving at any tenable life-plan, they immerse themselves
in business, in politics, or in pleasure — any thing that stifles
thought and memory. Then, they all start from an atheis
tic principle, that of PRIVATE JUDGMENT. Private judgment
assumes the sovereignty of the individual, that man is
supreme ; and the assumption of the supremacy of man,
whether individually or collectively, is the denial of the
sovereignty of God, and, therefore, of God himself. The
logical development of the sectarian principle, or rule of
private judgment, is pure atheism. How, then, can the
sects aid us in combating the atheistic tendency of contem
porary scientists ? In the heat of the battle they would turn
against us, and fight; on the side of the enemy. Do we not
see that, in the estimation of the sects, a Catholic who apos
tatizes and turns atheist, is preferable to an Anglican even
who turns Catholic ? Does not this prove that the affinity
of the sects with atheism is far closer than their affinity with
Catholics ? What, then, can be more preposterous than to
suppose the sects can successfully combat, or aid in combat-

546

ing, atheism or the dominant secularism ; or that they can
maintain Christianity in its life and vigor ? Indeed some
of them have gone so far already as even to repudiate the
Christian name, like our so-called free religionists.

This is what gives to Professor Tyndall's Address its sig
nificance. In itself it is insignificant ; but, as following out
the tendency of the non-Catholic world, or as the expres
sion of the logical development of the principles held in
common by all the sects and enemies of our Lord Jesus
Christ, it becomes terribly significant. The secular press,
if they do not openly approve its abominable doctrines, are
not shocked by them, and treat the professor himself with
great tenderness and respect ; the sectarian press combat his
doctrines indeed, but so feebly, that one can hardly help
suspecting them of being in secret league with him, and
quite willing to yield him the victory. President M'Cosh
of Princeton, the great gun of the Presbyterians, has come
to an interviewer with a tremendous flourish against the
professor, but concedes so much to the atheistic school, that
he reserves nothing worth defending against it. Such a
friend as he to religion, whether sincere or not, is practi
cally worse than an open enemy.

]No, we Catholics, with the help of God, must fight this
battle alone ; and we must bear in mind that it is not against
Professor Tyndall, nor against any other single professor.
We have to fight the secularism of the age, the whole spirit
and tendency of the entire non-Catholic world, and of not a
few who are in the church of God without being of it.
Catholic watchmen cannot be permitted now to sleep at their
posts. The citadel is assailed from all quarters by innumer
able foes, some open and avowed, some invisible and unsus
pected, even disguised as friends — the most to be dreaded
of all. We must be vigilant, arid constantly clad in armor,
in the whole armor of God, as described by St. Paul. The

Greatest danger of the times does not come from without,
ut is in our own camp, and is to be found in the large
numbers in our own ranks who place the national question
above the Catholic question, although most of them will
swear, and, perhaps, honestly believe, they do no such thing,
and are willing to strike hands with the hereditary enemies
of their faith, if they show a willingness to favor their na
tional aspirations. We count these, whatever their nation
ality, the real enemies of the Catholic cause. The church
is catholic, not national, and Christ can have no concord

THE CONFLICT OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 54:7

with Belial. If our human arm in this fight had to win the
victory, we should despair. But ours is the cause of God
and he is on our side if we are faithful, and he will defeat
and scatter our enemies.

THE CONFLICT OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION.'

[From Brownson's Quarterly Review for April, 1875.]

IT was the elder D'Israeli, the author of the Calamities
of Authors, if our memory is not at fault, who has, in some
one of his numerous works, a chapter entitled " The His
tory of Events which never happened. " Professor Draper
seems to have taken from it a hint for the title of this vol
ume. He professes to give in it the history of the conflict
between religion and science, or of a conflict that has never
occurred, and never can occur. A conflict between science
and superstition or various mythologies there may have been,
and also between so-called scientists and the theologians ;
but, between religion and science, never. Such a conflict is
impossible, for religion and science are simply two parts of
one dialectic whole. Truth can never be in conflict with
itself, nor can one truth be more or less true, if a truth at
all, than another. Eeligion, if religion, is true, and science,
if science, is also true : how, then, is it possible that there
can be any conflict between them ?

Dr. Draper nowhere shows in his volume any trace of
the conflict of which he professes to write the history. It is
worthy of note that he nowhere tells us what he means either
by religion or by science, nor does he ever deign to tell us
what are for him the tests by which he distinguishes science
from its counterfeit, or religion from superstition. His method
is as unscientific as it is possible to imagine, and bears no
trace of ^ scientific culture on the part of the author, or of
any habit of scientific investigation. He seems to be inca
pable of a logical or scientific conception. He has a fine
command of language, and a rare facility in stringing words

* History of Uie Conflict between Religion and Science. By JOHN WILLIAM
DRAPER, M. D., LL. D., Professor in the University of New York

IN PW YnrL-' 1 ft 7/1

New York: 1874.

548 THE CONFLICT OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

into sentences, without violating any of the recognized laws
of s}mtax or rhetoric ; but he appears to have considered it
quite beneath his dignity to attach any meaning to them, or,
when they happen to mean something, to inquire whether
what they mean is true or false. His book is a jumble of
not badly constructed sentences, of high-sounding words and
rounded periods, but for the most part meaningless, or,
when not meaningless, glaringly false.

Who are the parties to the conflict of which he professes
to write the history, or what is the matter in dispute, the
professor nowhere clearly and distinctly tells us ; but from
the general tone and drift of his remarks, we are led to con
clude that the conflict is between those who recognize and
assert an intelligible and spiritual, or a supersensible, world,
and those who deny such world, and confine all reality, or at
least all knowabie reality, to the sensible or material. The
assertion of the former he calls religion ; and its denial, and
the assertion and development of the latter, he calls science.
This, in the most general point of view, we take it, is his
doctrine ; but the special end and aim of his book is to show
the conflict between Christianity, or, more strictly, Catho
licity and modern thought, or so-called modern civilization.
His"history, as far as history it is, is a history of the conflict
of the church with the world, with infidelity, materialism,
and atheism ; and the author would seem to justify himself
for taking sides against the church or Christianity, by as
suming that she is only the continuation and development
of the absurdities and abominations of the old pagan super
stitions. The author ranks all religions so called, true or
false, Jewish, Christian, and gentile, in one and the same
category, and reasons of them and from them as if they
were one and the same thing, with no radical difference be
tween the gross fetichism of the grovelling African, and
the sublime spiritualism of the Hebrew prophet, the gross
polytheism of the Hindu, or the polished but equally base
and debasing polytheism of the Greek and Roman, and the
sublime monotheism of the Jew and Christian. If he finds
an absurd fable or an obscene rite in Egyptian or Gentoo
mythology or ritual, he holds Christianity responsible for it,
and adduces it as an argument against the Catholic Church,
and the claims of the pope to be the vicar of Christ. It is
reason enough for him to deny the divine Sonship of Christ,
that Alexander the Great claimed to be the son of Jupiter-
Ammon ; and for rejecting the incarnation of the Word,

THE CONFLICT OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 549

that the Hindus assert the avatar of Vishnu. It is hard to
say of a writer who confounds, or treats as identical, things
€0 radically different, so heterogeneous, which is most to be
deplored : his ignorance or his malice, his mental or his moral
obliquity. In any case, he proves his utter incapacity to be
a teacher of science.

It is one of the arts of our advanced thinkers, like Tyn-
dall, Huxley, Herbert Spencer, Draper, and others, to class
heathenism, varying from nation to nation, from tribe to
tribe, and Christianity together, and to derive their notions
of the latter from their superficial study of the former. It
may be that they are led to this in part from their famili
arity with what is called Protestant Christianity, itself sim
ply a form of paganism. Nothing can be more unscientific.
Christianity teaches that gentilism is apostasy from God
and from his truth, and that, so far from being his worship,
it is the worship of devils. We protest, therefore, against
the logic that concludes that what it finds true of gentilism,
is and must be true of Christianity. We protest also against
concluding that, because Protestantism is a congeries of Ab
surdities, Catholicity is unreasonable and false. Gentilism
and Protestantism may stand in the same category, or be
simply varieties of the same species ; but they are specifi
cally, and even generically, different from Christianity. They
belong to another genus, and we were taught that " argu-
mentum a genere ad genus non valet. " Dr. Draper and the
rest of our advanced thinkers appear to have never been
taught logic at all : certain it is they have never learned to
practise it.

Under pretence of giving a history of the alleged con
flict between religion and science, Dr. Draper really makes
a coarse and vulgar attack on the Catholic Church, and proves
in his attack that he is alike ignorant of her doctrine, her
history, and her worship. He has the temerity to charge
her with hostility to science, for the conflict he speaks of,
he says, is chiefly a conflict with the Catholic Church. He
doubtless considers Protestantism too weak and insignificant
an affair to be counted as a representative of religion. He
probably does not regard it as a religion at all, and most
likely feels instinctively that it can offer no obstacle to the
" advanced thought of the age. " It is not an organized
power, and is not worth counting as an enemy ; it is rather a
friend, for does it not wage a deadly war against the church '.
But the Catholic Church is an organized power, and pre-

550 THE CONFLICT OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

sents the strongest organization on earth; and when she
speaks, her voice is potent, and millions listen and obey in
spite of kings and kaisers, statesmen and scientists, bonds
and imprisonment, exile and death. She alone is to be

dreaded, she alone is to be warred against, and crushed if

possible.

Well, is it a fact that the church opposes, or ever has op
posed, the cultivation of science or the sciences ? Let us
come to the proof. Cease your vague declamations, and
come to definite and specific charges. We challenge you, we
challenge the whole world, to name one single scientific
truth that she opposes, or ever has opposed. The alleged con
flict is,the author himself avows,between the Catholic Church
and science. He himself exonerates Greek and Eoman
paganism in the glowing pages in which he details the mar
vellous victories of Greek science in Greece, the Greek
Islands, the Greek colonies in Asia Minor, in Italy, and in
Egypt,— victories rivalling, if not surpassing, those achieved
by our modern scientists, and sending the favorite doc
trine of progress to the dogs. He also exonerates from the
charge of hostility to science the sublime, pure, and elevat
ing religion of the Arabian prophet, which he holds to be a
protest against Christianity in behalf of science. So it is
only the Catholic religion that comes into conflict with
science. The Catholic religion is not something intangible,
uncertain,*vague, and indefinite. We know what it teaches,
what it exacts, and what it opposes. But we cannot say as
much of what our advanced thinkers call science. Science
is a good word, and science, if science, is always and every
where respectable. But it is never vague, uncertain, but
always certain, definite, fixed, unchangeable, and indisputa
ble. Let us now descend to particulars. We demand of our
advanced thinkers, champions of modern thought, and boast
ers of modern civilization, in a word, of our un belie vino-
scientists, the Huxleys, the Tyndalls, the Spencers, the
Comtes, the Littres, the Darwins, the Lyells, the Youmans,
the Fiskes, the Drapers, to name a single doctrine the church
teaches that science has demonstrated or proved to be un
true ; or a single scientific truth, or truth scientifically de
monstrated to be truth, that the church forbids, or has ever
forbidden, to be held or taught ? Let us, gentlemen, have
no evasion, no subterfuge, no vague declamation, but give
us a plain, frank, specific statement. We know, as we told
your representative, the Metropolitan Editor, in our Conver-

THE CONFLICT OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 551

sations on Liberalism and the Church, that you have a great
dislike to descending to particulars, and to making specific
and definite statements, or distinct and definite charges. But
we demand a " bill of particulars ; " and if you have any
claim to be regarded as honorable men, as lovers of truth
and fair dealing, or as friends and advocates of science, you
will not refuse to render it.

Well, gentlemen, what truth of science do you allege the
church prohibits, opposes, or contradicts in her teaching ?
We do not ask what theory, hypothesis, conjecture, or guess
of so-called scientists she refuses to accept ; but what fact
or truth that you yourselves dare pretend is scientifically
certain and unquestionable, that conflicts with her teaching,
or which she anathematizes. Think, gentlemen, examine
your own minds and precise your own thoughts. Can you
name one ? Suffer us to tell you that you cannot. We take
no pride in the fact, but we belonged to your party before
we became a Christian, and we find, in reading your works,
nothing, no thought, no theory, no hypothesis, or conjecture
even, bearing on the conflict you speak of, that we were not
familiar with before any of you were heard of, and before
some of you, it may be, were born. You are none of you
original thinkers ; you are notorious plagiarists. Our own
youth was fed with the literature from which you pilfer, and
our young mind was nourished with the absurd and blas
phemous theories and speculations which you are putting
forth at present as something new, original, and profound —
as science even, — but which had become an old story with
us long before you reproduced them. We know, minus a
few details or variations of phrase, all you can say in favor
of your pretended science, and all you can maintain against
the church. Were we not trained in Boston, " the Hub of
the Universe," at a time when it was really the focus of all
sorts of modern ideas, good, bad, and indifferent ? What
have any of you to teach one who participated in the Boston
intellectual movement from 1830 to 1844 ? We Bostonians
were a generation ahead of you. We have the right to speak
with confidence, and we tell you beforehand that you have
no truth the church denies, and that you have disproved or
demonstrated the falsity of no doctrine the church teaches.

But let us come to the test. The church teaches us to
" believe in one God, Creator of heaven and earth and of
all things visible and invisible." Have the scientists, who
say with the fool in his heart, " Non est Deus," demonstrated

552 THE CONFLICT OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

that her teaching in this respect is erroneous? Can they
say that it is scientifically proved that God and creation are
untruths ? Certainly not. They confess the impotence of
science to prove there is no God ; and both Herbert Spen
cer and Professor Tyndall deny that they are atheists. The
most advanced scientists or thinkers pretend to prove by
their sciene, not that there is no God, but that he is the un
knowable. Atheism is in no sense a proved or a provable
hj^pothesis, and till it is scientifically established it cannot be
claimed as science, that is, certain knowledge. It cannot,
then, be alleged that the doctrine of the church conflicts
with any truth of science. Nor has it ever been scientifically
demonstrated that God is unknowable. Herbert Spencer
makes the assertion indeed, but he only proves that God is
incomprehensible, not that we cannot know that he is;
while, on the other hand, it has been proved over and over
again that the existence of God and his essential attributes
are, to a certain extent at least, knowable and known. We
have ourselves proved it in our brief Essay in Refutation
of Atheism.

But the church, in asserting God as creator, denies the
scientific doctrine of evolution. St. George Mivart, a
scientist of no mean repute, thinks not : and certainly there
can be no evolution where there is nothing to evolve. What
or whence is that something which precedes the process of
evolution as its necessary condition precedent, and therefore
cannot be the result of evolution ? Herbert Spencer evolves
the universe from matter and force. But whence the mat
ter and force ? They are eternal ? But that is an hypothesis,
not a truth of science. So you do not get rid of the neces
sity of creation by your theory of evolution. But your doc
trine of evolution is not science ; it is only an unverified
hypothesis, an unproved theory, and a very absurd theory
at that. Even that prince of modern English humbugs,
Herbert Spencer, did not originate it, but plagiarized it from
the old Greek sophists refuted by both Plato and Aristotle,
and laughed out of countenance by old Hermias. It is pos
sible, as it often has been done, to prove the origin of the
universe in the creative act of God ; but it is not possible to
prove the contrary, or to prove that the church in teaching it
conflicts with any scientific truth, or truth scientifically es
tablished.

The advanced thinkers of the age, called thinkers because
they do not think, and are incapable, through their own fault,

THE CONFLICT OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

553

of thinking, if they are not avowed materialists, restrict all
our knowledge to the material order, and exclude from the
domain of science the whole supersensible world. Matter
and its laws constitute for them the whole field of science.
Because the church insists on the recognition, partly by sci
ence and partly by faith, of not only a supersensible, but a
supernatural and superintelligible world, they cry out against
her as the enemy of science. But has she ever denied mat
ter or any of its laws scientifically established ? Certainly
not. The assertion of the spiritual or the intelligible does
not negative the material, any more than the assertion of the
supernatural denies the reality of the natural. That matter-
is the only reality, or that nothing but matter is or exists, is
the assumption of the materialists ; but nobody can pretend
that it is a scientific truth. It is theory, opinion, not science.
In teaching the contrary, or in asserting a spiritual or intel
ligible world above the material or the sensible world, and
which the sensible imitates and on which it depends, the
church in no sense conflicts with science.

That matter or the sensible alone is cognizable, assumed by
our advanced thinkers, and therefore alone should be the
object of our affections and our studies, is not a truth of sci
ence. The sensible is not cognizable without the intelligi
ble, any more than the senses are cognitive without the in
tellect or mind — the noetic faculty. Matter is, to say the
least, as unintelligible, as difficult to know in itself, as spirit.
Berkeley and Collier deny the existence of a material world
out of or distinct from the mind. Berkeley held that what
we call external or material objects are simply pictures paint
ed by the hand of God on the retina of the eye, and have
no existence out of it. Fichte makes all objects, whether
material or spiritual, the Ego projected or protended ;
Leibnitz resolves matter into force, or vis activa, acting al
ways from its centre outward ; Father Boscovich regards
matter as centres of attraction ; and Huxley denies that he
is a materialist, because he does not know what matter is.
From the disputes of philosophers we should conclude that
nothing is less cognizable or further from being an object of
science than matter, which our advanced thinkers hold to be
the only thing knowable at all, nay, as the only reality. Cer
tain it is that science has not yet demonstrated that so-called
material existences are the only existences, or justified the
Sadducees who believed in neither angel nor spirit.

The present article having for its object only to show

554 THE CONFLICT OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

that the church in her teaching does not conflict with science,
we are not required to establish the truth of her teaching,
or even to raise the question whether her teaching is true
or false. All we are required to do here in order to refute
Dr. Draper's charge is, to show that her teaching in no in
stance conflicts with any scientific truth, or truth which
scientific investigation has established or can establish. If
the scientists can establish no truth which she denies, or
which does not deny any doctrine she teaches, there obvious
ly is no conflict between religion as she presents it, and sci
ence. There may be differences, but difference is not neces
sarily antagonism. Spirit and matter may differ, or be di
verse ; but the assertion of the one does not deny the other,
for both may be real existences. We do not deny matter or
its laws as far as scientifically determined ; what we deny is,
that science has proved or can prove that matter and its-
laws are the only reality, and that matter and its laws explain
the existence of the universe with all its forms and phenom
ena, especially life, feeling, thought, reason, and moral af
fection, or conscience. Science has never yet shown that
any possible combination of lifeless atoms can originate life,
or that gravitation and gratitude are the result of one and the
same physical law, as Mr. Emerson teaches. It is enough
for our present purpose to say, — what cannot be denied, — that
the materialism defended by Tyndall and Spencer as science,
in which Dr. Draper seems to agree, is not science, and is at
best only an opinion, and in our judgment, a very absurd
opinion, held by some so-called scientists. "We may say the
same of every theory of the so-called scientists rejected by
the church.

But it is the recent so-called science of geology, that af
fords the most ample proofs of the conflict between religion
and science. But we are aware of no geological facts that
the church denies. That there are geological theories, and
deductions from those theories, which do not accord with
the teachings of the church, or at least with the teaching of
some theologians, is not denied. In matters of pure science,
theologians are simply scientists, and have no more author
ity than they to bind the church by their theories. The only
thing to be said in their favor is, that knowing the teaching
of the church, which is rarely, if ever the case with pro
fessed scientists, they are better judges of what theories or
explanation of facts do or do not conflict with that teaching.
It has been attempted to show that the facts disclosed by the

THE CONFLICT OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION1. 555

investigation of geologists conflict with the account of the
creation given in the first chapter of Genesis. We will only
say here that the church lias never, as far as we are inform
ed, defined in what sense that chapter is to be understood,
whether it is to be understood in a literal or an historical
sense ; in a philosophical sense, as Josephus tells us it was
understood by the Jews ; or in a moral sense, as marking the
moral order of the work of creation, as it was explained by
St. Augustine. But we see no conflict between it, taken
historically, and any geological facts we are aware of. We
are told that the earth was at first without form, and void ;
that is, as we understand it, was not created in its complete
or perfect state, but only in its principles or elements, which
gives room for its development and completion, so to speak,
by the agency of second causes, though always by force of
the original principle which determines the nature, the direc
tion, and limit of the development. This gives room for all
those changes, variations, and modifications geology shows
the earth has undergone from physical causes. So here is
no conflict, at least no necessary conflict.

But these changes could not have taken place in the brief
space of time allowed by the Biblical chronology. We an
swer to this : 1. That many of the changes the earth is
supposed to have undergone, and which are assumed to re
quire millions of ages for effecting them, are geological
theories, hypotheses, conjectures, guesses, not scientifically
verified facts. The reality of the several geological periods
as distinct and successive periods, remains to" be proved.
Several of them may have been contemporaneous, as, for
instance, the so-called stone period may have been contem
porary, if not in the same locality, in different localities, with
the so-called bronze period or the iron period. The North-
American Indians, when New England was first settled by
Europeans, used stone axes, stone knives, and other imple
ments made of stone. We have often, in our own boyhood,
picked them up in the fields we were traversing. They
were called Indian axes, Indian knives, &c. The discovery
of stone implements in a given locality proves nothing as to
the age of the world, nor either of the orgin or of the suc
cessive stages of civilization. Dr. Draper, in some one of
his works, tells us as an unquestionable fact that there was a
time when all parts of the North- American continent were iso
thermal, had one and the same mild and equable climate,
wlm-li we are sure is more than he knows or can scientifically

556 THE CONFLICT OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

establish. It is an unverified and an un verifiable hypothesis.
We can conclude nothing against the church, if we find her
teaching conflicting with such conjectures or hypotheses.

2. To the alleged " chronicles 01 the rocks," and the long
period that the earth was in preparation for the abode of
man, we have little to say till geologists prove to us that they
have the key to those chronicles, and rightly interpret them.
But if they demand more time than the Biblical chronology
allows, we would remind them that chronology begins with
the first day. How long a period elapsed between the crea
tion of the heavens and the earth and the first day, we do not
know — perhaps long enough to answer all the reasonable de
mands of the geologists.

3. We reply still f urther, that the church, we believe, has
never given any authoritative decision of the question of
chronology, and it rests with learned and scientific men. It
is a question of science and erudition, not a question of faith,
at least so far as we have been taught. For ourselves," we
are content to receive the chronology of the Septuagint ; but
we do not regard the age of the world as very important to
be known, for time began with its creation. Before it was
created, there was no time to be reckoned. The important
thing to be recognized is the fact itself of creation, that " God
in the beginning created the heavens and the earth." Created
we say, not evolved, generated, or projected them. He who
admits the fact of creation of all things from nothing by the
sole energy of the divine Word, admits what is essential,
whether he counts a few centuries more or less since the
world began. And that such is the mind of the church we
infer from the fact, that she leaves the chronological question
undetermined.

The church's teaching conflicts with the Spencerian doc
trine of evolution, and so does plain common-sense, for it
denies both God and creation. We have not read all the
publications of Mr. Herbert Spencer, but we have read the
second edition of his Principles of a new Philosophy, and
the first volume of his Biology, and looked through some of
his other works. When we have learned an author's princi
ples arid method, we have learned all of any importance he
has to tell us. We take no interest in his elaboration of his
system, or its details. No truth in the details can redeem
the falsity of the principles, or atone for the viciousness of
the method. Spencer may have some acquaintance with the
physical sciences, but he has not a spark of philosophical

THE CONFLICT OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 557

genius, and his mind is essentially unscientific. He is tur
gid, verbose, wearisome, and dull, as a writer ; shallow, nay,
imbecile, as a thinker ; inept, as a reasoner ; and conceited
and ignorant almost beyond conception, as a man ; who, be
cause he perhaps has advanced in some respects beyond
what he knew in his own childhood, fancies that he knows
more than all the rest of mankind. There is not a page of
his writings that we have read in which we do not discover
a total lack of insight, and a most deplorable ignorance of
what others know. He found a new philosophy, and revolu
tionize the world of thought ! He become a teacher of man
kind ! Bah ! The man is a humbug, a more unmitigated
humbug than was even Jeremy Bentham.

The new philosophy divides all things into the knowable
and the unknowable. To the unknowable it relegates all
principles, substances, and causes, and restricts the knowable
to the phenomenal. Yet it writes a volume on First Prin
ciples ! First principles of the new philosophy indeed, not
of the real, nor of nature. Be it so. That only confesses that
the new philosophy is unreal, and has nothing to do with the
explanation of the real cosmos. What is unknowable is to
us as if it were not how, then, treat of the unknowable at
all ? Yet a whole division of Mr. Spencer's First Princi
ples is devoted to the unknowable. But pass to the know-
able. The knowable is restricted to the phenomenal. ^ Phe
nomena have no subsistence in themselves, but are simple
appearances or manifestations, and are, as Mr. Spencer, or,
if not he, his disciple, a much brighter intellect, Mr. John
Fiske, justly asserts, unthinkable without thinking a sub
stance, a reality, or a Something of which they are manifesta
tions, or which appears in them. What is thinkable is know-
able, so there is no knowable without knowing the unknow
able ! Brave philosophers, these fellows, and worthy of the
admiration and patronage of Professor Youmans and the
great publication house of D. Appleton & Co. The new
philosophy teaches us that science deals only with the^ phe
nomenal, and it includes in the phenomenal the entire mimet
ic order of Plato, the whole individual and sensible universe,
thus reducing sensible facts themselves, historical events, and
the results of scientific experiment and investigation, to phe
nomena or appearances ; and then tells us very gravely that
the phenomenal is unthinkable without the real, which in
all cases is unknowable and, therefore, unthinkable ! ^ Suppose
the church does come in conflict with this new philosophy,
is it any thing to her discredit ?

558 THE CONFLICT OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

Both Spencer and his disciple Fiske deny that they are
atheists, on the ground that they recognize a real and sub
stantial cosmos that appears or manifests itself in the cosmic
phenomena. This substance, reality, something, that is to
say, the real cosmos manifested in the cosmic phenomena,
Mr. Fiske says, may be called either God or nature, as looked
at from the religious or from the scientific point of view.
The cosmists are not aware, we suppose, that a clearer and
more decided avowal of atheism it would be impossible to
make. Mr. Draper is chary of professing atheism, as are most
of our English and American advanced thinkers ; but after
commending the Mahometan Averrhoes for his successful
cultivation of science and his scientific views of God, he tells
us his conceptions of God were pantheistic. We suppose
the professor is ignorant that pantheism is only a form of
atheism. Atheism identifies God with the cosmos, panthe
ism identifies the cosmos with God, and both hold him to be
the force, substance, or reality of the cosmic phenomena, and
neither recognizes any supercosmic Being. Men who know
any thing of theology know that, however our advanced
thinkers may deceive themselves or try to deceive others,
they are neither more nor less than pitiable atheists, and
therefore both blasphemers and fools according to the Holy
Scriptures.

But we have already seen that atheism is an unproved and
an un provable hypothesis, and therefore not a scientific truth.
Equally removed from established science are all the theories
constructed to explain the existence and various and chang
ing forms of the universe or cosmos without the act of crea
tion. The Orientals and the earlier Greeks, after the great
gentile apostasy, or the introduction of national, or rather
gentile, tribal, or family religions, appear to have held the
origin of the universe in generation, and hence they repre
sented their gods as male and female. Later we find, with
the Brahmins and Buddhists, the theory of emanation.
Plato and Aristotle, though failing to recognize the creative
act, adopted what comes nearest to it : the theory of forma
tion, or the formation of the cosmos and its contents, by an
intelligent Mind detaching from itself ideas or substantial
forms and impressing them on preexisting matter. Spinoza
made the cosmos and all existences modes or affections of
one infinite and only substance. Epicurus, Leucippus, and
Democritus made all things, life, thought, love, hatred, &c.,
originate in the fortuitous combination of material, lifeless,

THE CONFLICT OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 559

and senseless atoms ; but whence caine the atoms, they forget
to tell us. Spencer, Huxley, Tyndall, and others agree in
many respects with the Epicurean cosmogony. Spencer
differs from Epicurus only in the respect that the combination
is not fortuitous, but by force of law ; but whence came the
law, he does not inform us : very likely he does not know
himself. He attempts to explain the origin and all the facts
of the cosmos or universe, man and nature, religion, morality,
the state, and society, by what he calls evolution. Yet he
confesses that the word evolution does not exactly express
his meaning, and, in fact, what he attempts to express by it is
no evolution at all, for it evolves nothing. Given matter
and motion, he can produce the cosmos. As we understand
him, there is no evolution in the case, but simple concentra
tion and dispersion of force, in " eterne alternation," to
borrow a phrase from Ralph Waldo Emerson. There is a
ceaseless ebb and flood of material force in endless alterna
tion or succession. The concentration which takes place
by a fixed and invariable law is life, and its dispersion is
death ; as what is concentration on the one side or in one
place is dispersion on the other side or in another place, so
life springs from death, and death from life. What is life here
is death there, and what to us is death is to others life. This
is mere theory, and not even Dr. Draper will pretend that
it is established science. We do not pretend that the church
teaches that the world was created in the beginning precisely
as we now find it, any more than she teaches that the infant
is born a full-grown man. We do not deny the fact of very
great physical changes, as well as moral ; nor do we deny
evolution or development in every sense. All we maintain
is, that neither evolution nor development can operate with
out something to operate upon, and it can only evolve or
develop the germs deposited in the matter created. Hence
we reject Darwinism, not because it directly denies the crea
tive act of God, but because it assumes that species may be
originated and formed without any created germ from
which they are developed. It, therefore, supposes that
natural causes can do what our advanced thinkers deny that
God can do, — create something from nothing. But Dar
winism is a mere hypothesis, and in no sense established
science. We have read Darwin on the " Origin of Species
by natural Selection," and on " the Descent of Man." He
presents us a considerable array of facts pertaining to natural
history, some of them both interesting and important; but

560 THE CONFLICT OF SCIENCE AND BELIGION.

they fail, as far as we can see, to warrant his inductions*
They may all be conceded without those inductions, for
there is no necessary connection between them and the-
theory they are adduced to establish.

But the real offence of the church is, not that she rejects
any facts or truth of science, proved to be such, but that she
steadily refuses to accept mere theories, hypotheses, conject
ures, guesses, as science, because put forth in the name of
science, and by men who have devoted themselves not un
successfully, it may be, to some one or more of the special
sciences ; and does not proceed forthwith to indorse them
and to modify her time-honored doctrine to conform to them,
that is, to change her entire doctrine to make it conform to
unfounded and generally absurd assumptions. The greater
part of what our advanced thinkers call science, consists not
only of assumptions, but of assumptions hardly made before
they are modified or rejected for others equally baseless, to-
be in their turn modified or rejected. We know nothing so-
uncertain and changeful as this so-called science, which our
author holds the church very blamable for riot accepting
and teaching. Professor John Fiske, after setting forth
with an air of perfect conviction the leading features of the
cosmic or new philosophy, which he had accepted only the-
preceding year, adds : " Such is the teaching of science to
day ; but what it will be fifty years hence, what changes or
modifications the investigations continually going on in all
quarters will necessitate, no one can say." Indeed, our
scientists regard science, as our free-lovers regard marriage,
as simply provisory, and would be disgusted with it if not
at liberty to be constantly changing it. They regard truth
as variable as their own views and moods. Then these
advanced thinkers, these "prophets of the newness," as a
witty friend of ours happily termed them, shrink with hor
ror from the unchangeable, or the invariable and the per
manent. They wish to be able to change their science as
of ten as the fashionable lady changes the style of her bonnet.
Their greatest and most crushing objection to the church
is, that she does not change with the times or with men's
opinions, but teaches the same doctrines to the nineteenth
century that she did to the first, the tenth, or the thirteenth
century. They hold that truth except in pure mathematics,
which is a purely analytical science, is a variable quantity.
Or rather, like the Grod of the Hegelians, it is a becoming^
das Werden, not something that is. They never attain to-

THE CONFLICT OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 50 1

truth ; they are only in hopes that by continued and more
extended investigations, with more ample means and better
instruments, they will — attain it? ^Nb, but solve provisorily
Mime problems, which science is not now in a condition to
solve even provisorily. Yet they insist that their theories,
hypotheses, conjectures, and guesses shall be received and
treated as unquestionable science. Can it be any serious
objection to the church that she refuses to do so ?

Many of the theories the church condemns or refuses to
entertain are grossly immoral and blasphemous, and strike
at the foundation of public order and social well-being.
Such is the new philosophy concocted by Herbert Spencer
and indorsed by Professor Youmans. The cosmists are not
mere harmless theorizers and speculators. They, — and in
this respect Tyndall, Huxley, Draper, and other atheistic
writers are to be classed with them, — in the name of science
deny science itself. They reject the principles on which all
science as well as religion rests. If they are right there is-
and can be no truth, no right or wrong, no moral order, no
society, no government, as we see in Prussianized Germany,
except that of brute force, no state, no public or private
virtue ; for these all suppose a distinction between moral
laws and physical laws, between gratitude and gravitation,
between a virtuous act and a handsome face, between vice
and a deformed leg, and in the cause as well as in the effect.
The questions involved are not comparatively idle questions,
such as, Are there inhabitants in the moon? or, Has the
earth, as Dr. M'Cosh maintains, been moulded out of star
dust ? They strike at the very basis of all held dear and
sacred by mankind in all ages and nations of the world.
These men scatter firebrands and death, and would have us
believe them in sport ; and a shallow and unreasoning age,
like this nineteenth century, decrees them, its highest honors,
and runs in crowds after them, and listens to them with open
ears and gaping mouths. What would become of the nations,,
of the human race itself, if the church were not in the world
to cover the great elemental truths of science and virtue
with her sacred aegis, and to brand these enemies of God
and man with her anathema ?

The instances we. have adduced are amply sufficient to
prove that while there is no conflict between her and genuine
science, the church has been and is fully justified in her
condemnation of the immoral and false theories, assumptions,
and speculations of our advanced thinkers or prophets of the

VOL. IX -30.

562 THE CONFLICT OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

newness, who pretend to be men of science. We hold that it
is false to allege that error is harmless while truth is free to
combat it. " Error," says the Chinese proverb, " will make
the circuit of the globe, while Truth is pulling on her boots."
A man is as morally responsible for the opinions he emits
as he is for any other of his acts. A thousand highway-
robberies or a thousand cold-blooded murders would be but
a light social offence in comparison with the publication of
one such book as this before us. Men of science should
honor and defend truth, not disparage and deny, or labor to
undermine it. They should study the syllabus of our Holy
Father, Pius IX., and try to profit by its condemnation of
their more prominent errors. It unquestionably condemns
much that is called, by people who have lost all conception
of the spiritual life, modern civilization, but it condemns
nothing that science does or can verify, and nothing but such
theories, assumptions, and crude opinions as tend, in propor
tion as they are received and acted on, to undermine and
destroy civilization itself. Civilization, as we understand it,
is the predominance in society of reason over passion,
knowledge over ignorance, moral power over brute force,
which is not possible without the predominance of those
truths the church teaches, and the influence she exerts.
Her freedom and independence is the indispensable condi
tion of all real civilization. This freedom and independence
of the church is religious liberty. But the religious liberty
of modern civilization, though it bears the name, — and that
fact deceives many, — is a very different thing. It does not
mean the freedom and independence of the church of God,
but freedom of the individual, society, and the state from the
church, and therefore from the divine sovereignty and from
all the obligations and restraints of religion, that is to say, of
mural truth, of reason, and eternal justice. The pope, then, in
condemning this sort of religious liberty, which indirectly, as
we see in Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and elsewhere, paves
the way for the despotism of the state and the oppression of
conscience, is not warring against civilization, but in its favor,
and doing all in his power to save it from the theories and
influences at work to destroy it. So with regard to all the
other points on which the syllabus conflicts with modern
ideas and tendencies.

The church holds that there is a higher order of reality
than the sensible,, and higher and more imperative interests
than material interests, — the only real interests regarded with

THE CONFLICT OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 563

favor by modern civilization. But it is a mistake to suppose
that she has opposed or discouraged the study of nature or
the cultivation of the physical sciences. She does not <nve
them the highest rank, but she includes them in her curric
ulum ; and we know of no Catholic college or university in
which they do not hold an honorable place. They were
formerly called by the general name of mathematics ; and if
they did not receive as much attention as they receive at
present since the would-be scientists, in their theories, have
narrowed the universe down to the world of matter and its
laws, that is, material facts and their generalization, they
were studied, and the true method of investigating nature
was as well understood in the great Catholic schools of the
middle ages as it is now. St. Thomas was acquainted with
the teachings of Averrhoes, Dr. Draper's pet, and refutes
them with a far superior science wherever they come in con
flict with the teachings of the church or sound philosophy.
Friar Bacon was superior as a physicist to Francis Bacon,
my Lord Yerulam. The pretence of the later and meaner
Bacon, that the mediaeval students solved all questions of
natural science by a priori reasoning, is a pure, unmitigated
falsehood, as he would have known if he had known anv
thing of them. Most of them studied and followed Aristotle";
and Dr. Draper contends that Aristotle understood and
practised the inductive method. Bacon was another and an
earlier English humbug, though less of a humbug than most
of those who profess to follow him. The English mind
lost its integrity when it lost its Catholic faith, and it seems
impossible for it since either to discern or to speak the
truth where religion is in question. Dr. Draper, we are
t<>l<l, is an Englishman born and bred, not, we are happy to
think, an American. But all nations and races have their
humbugs, though no people have them in so great a profu
sion^, or are so easily humbugged, as the apostate English.

The whole trouble with the scientists, and which brings
them into conflict with religion, is their neglect to distin
guish between assumptions, hypotheses, or conjectures, and
what they have scientifically demonstrated or verified.

All in modern science so called, to which the church or
religion objects, is assumption or unverified hypothok
^ 1m has ever found the church objecting to any certain
knowledge in the natural order, the axioms of the mathe
matician, or the definitions of the geometer, for instance ?
We have never found her wan-ing against the properties of

564: THE CONFLICT OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

the screw or lever, as taught us in mechanics. Where there is-
real science, or certain knowledge in the natural order, she
includes it in the preamble to faith, and censures its denial.
If scientists would be careful to distinguish between fact
and conjecture, knowledge and opinion, and insist only on
what they have demonstrated or is scientifically verifiable,
there would be no conflict between them and the theolo
gians. Galileo's troubles arose from his demanding of the
church her indorsement of his heliocentric theory, which
was not then, even if it be now, anything but an undemon-
strated hypothesis. What he wanted was, not liberty to
pursue his investigations as a scientist or physicist, for that
he had in its plenitude, but that the church should inter
vene, and by her authority silence his contradictors. A very
modest request !

Let the scientists pursue their investigations into every
department of nature to the full extent of their means and
ability, but if they wish to avoid all conflict with religion,
let them scrupulously refrain from asserting as science what
is not science, and from denying the teachings of the church,
which they have not disproved and cannot disprove by sci
ence. There may be more things in heaven and earth than
are dreamt of in their philosophy. Lalande proved nothing
in favor of atheism when he said he "had never seen God
at the end of his telescope." Nor does Herbert Spencer
disprove the existence of an intelligible world, or prove that
the sensible is the only reality by relegating being, substance,,
principles, and causes to the unknowable, especially since he-
is obliged to confess that the sensible, which he asserts, is
knowable only by virtue of the intelligible, the physical
only through the metaphysical. Huxley does not prove
that protoplasm is the physical basis of life, or that life
originates in dead matter, for he cannot say what other ele
ment than the chemical constituents, into which he resolves
Erotoplasm, is operative in the production and support of
fe. Because the principle of life escapes all chemical
analysis, he cannot say there is no such principle, or that
it is identical with proteine, itself a hypothetical existence.
Tyndall finds only matter, but it does not follow therefore
that spirit is not as real and as intelligible as matter. The
blind man, because he cannot see the light, has no right to
deny the existence of light. Our advanced thinkers have
no right to measure the capacity of the human mind by the
narrow dimensions of their own ; or, because they, are pur-

THE CONFLICT OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 565

blind, that no one sees or can see farther than they themselves.
How do they know that they do not, in their purblindness
and lack of insight, exclude from their universe the greater
and more important part of reality, and, if not sensible, yet
very intelligible? Nay, how do they know that there is not
a supernatural order, supernatu rally revealed to the human
race, and taught to all who will hear her by the church ?
They, therefore, must not presume to deny and reject as
unreal or as a fable what the race has always held, unless
they have certain proof that it is false. So, on the other
hand, they must take care to affirm nothing as science which
is only opinion, conjecture, or mere theory; such as that
the earth is constructed from a fragment of an exploded
comet, or from " star dust," the existence of said star dust
being itself exceedingly problematical.

The prophets of the newness, or our advanced thinkers,
are greatly scandalized if any one presumes to question
" modern ideas," or to doubt the infallibility of " modern
civilization." Their whole labor is to draw off the affec
tions from the heavenly, and fix them on the " earthly."
They assign the highest rank to material interests or sensible
goods : nay, hold them to be the only real interests, the only
solid goods. They would have us live for this life alone,
and this they would persuade us is the teaching of science.
But experience is playing sad pranks with this sort of sci
ence. What is called modern civilization is based on it ;
and it is only the wilfully blind that do not see that it is as
destructive to material interests as it is to spiritual interests,
to the goods of this life as to the hopes of heaven. The
greatest conceivable folly is that which gives up heaven for
earth, the unseen and the eternal for the temporal and the
perishing. All true science teaches us that the goods of
this life, as religion herself teaches, are secured only by
self-denial, by turning our back on them as the end 01 our
labors, and living only for the goods of the life to come.

England is the best representative of modern civilization,
and, after England or Great Britain, comes our own Repub
lic. England is precisely the country in which we find the
greatest poverty and the most squalid wretchedness ; and
hundreds and thousands of workingmen and women in our
own country are out of work because there is no work for
them to do, and must starve unless kept alive by public or
private charity. Moral principles are sacrificed to material
interests, and with them the material imnv>ts themselves.

566 ANSWER TO DIFFICULTIES.

The sad result of modern civilization in the material order,
in relation to the well-being of the laboring classes, as
evinced by the frequent strikes and destructive combina
tions to which they are driven, is a sad commentary on
" modern civilization " and the " modern ideas."

ANSWER TO DIFFICULTIES.

[From the Catholic World for December, 1870.]

THE following letter, suggesting certain difficulties
which many well-disposed and earnest-minded persons
find in the way of accepting the Catholic faith speaks
for itself, and deserves a respectful consideration ;

"NEW YORK, October 6, 1870.

"MY DEAR SIR: Pardon me for intruding upon you, whom I
have never seen. I do so in obedience to an impulse which urges
me to communicate with you, by letter or otherwise. Without fur
ther preface, allow me to state a case.

"My parents and nearly all my friends are Protestants, and I
never had a suspicion that I was not one until recently. Of course,
I have always taken it for granted that the Roman Catholic Church
was an imposition. I have often felt uneasy about my religious
state, but have failed to be converted according to the Protestant
formula. About two years ago, more or less, I began to feel unusual
interest in these things, and, after due deliberation, I concluded to join
a church, which I thought would be a certain remedy for my mental in
quietude. I acted upon this resolution, and, though I felt disappointed
at the result, still I hoped that all would come right in time. My views
were so ' liberal ' that I thought it did not make any difference which
church I joined, provided only that the intention was right. I did not
believe that any special church was the true church more than another,
and I was careful only to select one as free as possible from restrictions
of all kinds. I knew there was much diversity of opinion among Prot
estants, but I had always thought it was on ' minor points.' I have been
much surprised, however, to find myself mistaken in this respect. I
have noticed that no one sect seems to comprehend all that is taught by
the blessed Founder of Christianity; one sect laying stress on a particu
lar doctrine, while a rival sect insists on some other.

ANSWER TO DIFFICULTIES. 567

4 ' Without going into tedious details, I may say at once that I discov
ered to my consternation that a suspicion had crept into my mind that I
might be in error. I began to suspect that the Roman Catholic Church
might be what it claims, namely, 'the true church,' for it seems to in
clude and explain all. But this caused me much distress, for I had
always looked upon this church as the very fountain of error and super
stition. I have been looking into the subject more critically of
late, and I find my suspicion, instead of being removed, is being
more and more confirmed. It does really seem that the arguments are
unanswerable, and yet I am loth to take the final step, and try to con
vince myself that it is not necessary for me to become a Catholic. I
have been hesitating thus for several months, 'almost persuaded,' but
not quite.

' ' I have always been in favor of ' progress, ' so-called, and it seems to
me that the doctrines of your church are incompatible with it. I ask
myself: ' Suppose all the world was Catholic, what would become of na
tions and governments ? Would not the pope become temporal ruler ?
And if all men were really Christians according to the Catholic standard
— not nominally, but actually — what would become of science and art?'
Science teaches that the way to benefit mankind is to ' find out some
thing new.' Christianity teaches that the most important thing to learn
is self-denial : ' If thou wilt be perfect, sell all. If thou wilt possess a
biassed life, despise this present life.' Self-denial, therefore, and high
culture — civilization, in other words-— seem to be incompatible; for civ
ilization multiplies our wants and gives us the means of gratifying them,
while the highest form of Christianity reduces our wants to a minimum
and is opposed to all superfluities. It is happy in a cell, clothed in hair
cloth. So also with learning and art. I know that the fine arts flour
ished before Protestantism, but those who excelled in these were not
eminent as saints or even Christians, so far as I am informed.

"If one looks forward, then, to the conversion and actual Christian-
ization of all men according to the highest Catholic standard of Chris
tianity, it would seem that he must also contemplate the downfall of sci
ence, literature, and art, as well as the extinction of all nationalities,
leaving only the Catholic Church. This may be an extreme view, but it
appears more impossible than illogical. Jesus Christ said, ' If any one
will follow me, let him deny himself,' &c. Now, why should it be
proper for some persons to practise self-denial, and improper for others?
If there is greater virtue in entire devotion to religion, why should not
all devote themselves entirely to religion ? The only reason that I can
see why they should not do so is that it would produce just the result, I
have spoken of. Would this be 'a consummation devoutly to be
wished?'

"There are doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church which are by no
means clear to me, of the truth of which, to speak caadidly, I am not
convinced; the doctrine of ' transub^tantiution ' being one. But I feel

568 ANSWER TO DIFFICULTIES.

that, where I have found so much that is true, I may safely trust in re
gard to those matters that I cannot comprehend.

' ' In conclusion, I will only say that my present condition is most un
satisfactory. As I intimated, I have found that I am not a Protestant.
In fact, I am nothing unless Catholic, but I am outside of any church.
Please tell me, at your earliest convenience, what I had better do. I am
like a certain timid man who went to Jesus by night to seek instruction,
and I beg you to excuse me for wishing to remain incognito for the
present.

"I am, dear sir,

"Very respectfully yours."

Nothing is more important in settling any question
than to define one's terms, and indeed little more than
the definition of the terms in which it is expressed is
needed to settle any question that reason can settle.
Most disputes originate in the habit most^ people have
of using words in a vague, loose, and indeterminate
sense. There are few words used in a looser or more
indeterminate sense than the word "progress." In one
sense, which we hold to be the true sense, the Catholic
Church not only does not oppose progress, but favors it and
demands it, and is that without which no^ real progress is
possible. In another sense, and a sense in which certain
theorists and dreamers use it, the church not only does not
favor it, but undoubtedly condemns it, anathematizes it, not
indeed because it is progress, but because it is not progress.
It is necessary, then, in order to settle the question raised
by our correspondent, to agree on the meaning we are to
attach to the word " progress."

Progress means literally a step forward ; that is, toward
the journey's end, or the goal it is proposed to reach ; fig
uratively, or in a moral sense, it means improvement, meli
oration, or an advance from the imperfect toward ^the per
fect. It is a step forward toward the end to be gained. It
implies change, but always change for the better. Three
things are essential to all progress : principle, medium, and
end, or a starting-point, the point of arrival, or point to be
gained, and the means or agencies by which it is to be
gained. The denial of any one of these is the denial of
progress and of the possibility of progress. Progress is
always from a point to a point by the proper medium or

means.

Our correspondent undoubtedly uses the word progress
not in its literal sense, but in its figurative or moral sense,

ANSWER TO DIFFICULTIES. 569

as expressing not simple locomotion, but the advance of
man or society toward perfection, or from the less perfect
to the more perfect. Society is for man, not man for soci
ety. Progress, then, must be taken as the progress of man
toward perfection. The perfection of man is in fulfilling
his destiny, in attaining to the end for which he exists. Soci-
oty is more or less perfect in proportion as it more or less
aids man in attaining to that end. Then, to be able to deter
mine what is or is not progress, or what does or not favor
it, we must know the principle, medium, and end of man,
or, more simply, man's origin, whence he begins, the end
for which he exists, and the means by which mat end is or
can be attained to. Without this threefold knowledge, it is
impossible to say what church or institution does or does
not favor progress, or what are the proper means of effect
ing it.

The Catholic Church professes to supply by divine au
thority this threefold knowledge. She teaches what is the
origin and end of man, whence he starts, and whither he
should arrive ; and not only teaches, but supplies, the means
of arriving there. That is, she tells us what is true prog
ress, and supplies to her faithful and obedient children the
means of effecting it. How, then, can she be said to deny
progress, or to require her children to deny that man, with
the divine help, is progressive? She teaches that man -not
only is progressive, but that it is his duty to be constantly
progressive till by the help of grace he fulfils his destiny,
or attains to the end for which he exists. She claims to have
been instituted solely for the purpose of conducting and as
sisting him in this progress, the only real progress of man
that can be maintained or even conceived. How, then, can
she deny progress, or any thing that can really contribute
to it?

It is no proof that the church is hostile to progress that
she condemns or anathematizes certain theories of progress
put forth by sciolists and dreamers, and which may happen
to be just now in vogue. One of these theories, at present
very widely received, is that man is naturally progressive,
or that bv his own natural powers alone lie is able to attain
to his end. But this theory, whether put forth under the
name of Pelagianism or semipelagianism, rationalism or
naturalism, the church cannot accept, because it is not true.
Man's origin and end are both supernatural, since God, who
is above nature, creates him, and creates him for himself ;

570 ANSWER TO DIFFICULTIES.

and nature is inadequate as the medium of a supernatural
end, that is, an end above itself, and therefore beyond its-
reach. Man is progressive by grace obtained for him by
the Incarnation, but not without it ; and hence in the gen
tile world, ignorant alike of creation and the Incarnation,,
we never find even the idea or conception of progress.

Another theory of progress, that of Mistress Ann Leer
foundress of Shakerism, is that we keep travelling on, on-
for ever, without ever arriving at home or reaching our jour
ney's end. This theory is generally held and taught, we
believe, by the spiritists; but it is absurd, for it denies-
progress itself, Progress is going toward an end, and,
where there is no end to be obtained, there is and can be no-
progress. Man may be progressive to the infinite, and the
church teaches that he is, that through the Incarnation he
can be united to the infinite God, and possess him as his last
end ; but he cannot be infinitely or even indefinitely pro
gressive, as some pretend, for that implies progress without
an end, which is a contradiction in terms.

A third theory of progress, the Topsyist theory, much
favored by modern scientists, is that of progress, or growth,
by self-evolution or development. Topsy, when asked who
made her or whence she came, answered, " 1 didn't come f
I grow'd." This answer is accepted as eminently scientific
by ihe Comtists, Herbert Spencer, Darwin, Sir John Lub-
bock, Professor Huxley, and many other lights of science ;
but the church, as well as common-sense, rejects it,
because it denies progress by denying it a starting-
point. One gets by simple evolution or development only
what is in the germ evolved or developed, and, if we have
not the germ to start with, or if we are to obtain the germ
by evolution or development, no evolution or development
can take place. "What does not exist cannot grow, evolve,
or develop, and where there is no growth there is no prog
ress. The church, in condemning the Topsyist theory and
asserting the origin of man and" the world in the creative
act of God, does not deny progress, but asserts its possibil
ity and the conditions of its possibility. She asserts a start
ing-point, namely, what man is as he comes from the hands
of his Creator ; and a point of arrival, or what he is when?
he has attained to the full perfection or complement of his na
ture in attaining to his end or final cause. According to the
teaching of the church, progress is possible, and even neces
sary, if man is not to remain forever a simply initial, incho
ate, or unfulfilled existence.

ANSWER TO DIFFICULTIES. 571

The Topsyists or evolutionists are like the poor wretch in
a treadmill. They step, step unceasingly, but never get a
step forward. They seek effects without causes, and, while
denying that God by his own power creates all things from
nothing, they are trying with might and main to prove that
nothing can make itself something, which by evolution ami
development grows into this varied and beautiful universe.
into man its lord, with the feeling heart and reasoning head,
even into an Eire Supreme, whom all should love and
adore. That is, nothing can not only make itself some
thing, but it can even make itself God, which they who
will may find asserted or implied in Comt j's Philosophie
Positive. But nothing is mure absurd than to suppose that
nothing can make itself something, or that any thing can
make itself more or other than it is. • Even God cannot
make himself, or make himself more or other than he is,
and therefore theologians call him necessary, self-existent,
eternal, and immutable being. The acorn is neither self-
produced, nor self-developed into the oak. It must be given
to start with, and then must be given also soil, light, heat,
and moisture, in relation with which it is placed, or it will
not germinate and grow. Professor Huxley derives all
thought, feeling, will, and understanding from protoplasm,
formed by the chemical and electrical combination of dead
matter. But one cannot get from a thing, however it is
manipulated, what is not in it. From dead matter, even sup
posing you have it, you can get only dead matter. How
from it, then, get living protoplasm? We cannot do it
now, we are told, and the professor says, organic life can
now be evolved only from organic life ; but in some remote
and unknown period, long ages before history began, when
the world was young and its juices were fresher than at
present, dead matter could and did evolve living proto
plasm. And this is science ! The church can hardly be
censured for rejecting it, and we do not think the world
would suffer an irreparable loss were such science as this
to become extinct.

Our correspondent thinks that, if all the world should
become Catholic, christianized according to the highest
standard, nationalities would be extinguished, only the
Catholic Church would be left us, and the pope would be
come the temporal ruler ; we must bid adieu to science, lit
erature, and art, and devote our entire life to religion
and spiritual exercises. The Christian maxim, .Deny thy-

572 ANSWER TO DIFFICULTIES.

self, would reduce our wants to the minimum, and leave us
neither room nor motive for any thing else. We do not
share his apprehensions. National hostilities, we doubt
not, would be extinguished, and the nations learn war no
more ; but we can see no reason why distinct nations, each
with its own territorial limits and its own distinctive civil
government, should not continue to exist, and with far
greater security and far surer guaranties than now. As far
as we can see, the reasons for national distinctions, separate
governments, and different forms of government would re
main unaffected ; only there would then be no good reasons
for the huge centralized states and empires which now ex
ist, and wliich have been created by absorbing their weaker
neighbors. Were it not for the sake of protection against
wars from European nations, or with one another, that is,
if all the world were Catholics, and there was a spiritual
authority recognized by all competent to make the rights of
nations or international law respected without a resort to
arms, it would be far better that each one of the states of
this Union should be an independent sovereign state by it
self than that they should all be united under one general
government. Diversities of soil, climate, geographical posi
tion, create a diversity of local interests which are better
looked after and promoted by small states than bv large.
United Italy will never be so prolific in great men^ distin
guished for art, science, literature, and statesmanship, nor
will she stand as high for her industry and commerce, or
her people be individually as free and as manly, as when she
was divided, as prior to the reformation, into a dozen or
more independent states. German unity, if effected, will
most likely retard instead of advancing the progress of Ger
man literature, science, and art, by suppressing the liberty
of the German people, and destroying the emulation and
activity created by the large number of capitals she has
hitherto had.

There is no danger of the pope's becoming the temporal
ruler of mankind, for his office by its very constitution is
spiritual, not temporal. The papacy is instituted for the
spiritual government of mankind on earth, not for their
temporal government. All that would follow, if all the
world were Catholic, would be that the pope as the vicar of
Christ would be able to use, and would use effectively, his
spiritual authority to induce all civil governments to re
spect the rights and independence of each other, and each

ANSWER TO DIFFICULTIES.

573

to govern its own subjects according to the law of God ;
that is, he would use his supreme pastoral authority to
maintain, what now is nowhere done, Christian morals in
politics ! This was partially the case in Christian Europe
after the downfall of Rome and the conversion of the bar-
barian conquerors, and is what many see and feel the need
of now, and which is poorly substituted by Evangelical
conferences, world's conventions, peace congresses, or con
gresses of diplomats, sovereigns, or nations. The sects may
preach peace, even preach the law of God, and the necessi
ty of maintaining Christian morals in politics, but they have
no authority to enforce them by spiritual pains or ecclesias
tical discipline, either on sovereigns or on subjects. They
are themselves carried away, or, if not, their admonitions
are unheeded, by the political passions and tendencies of the
age or nation. We find them with ourselves impotent to
preserve the Christian family, the necessary basis of Chris
tian society. Marriage is becoming a farce, and binds no
body.

We see nothing in the doctrines or influence of the
church that tends to relax efforts by science, literature, art,
and industry to benefit mankind, or to render them less
effective. The progress of society, of civilization, and the
material well-being of nations and individuals, are desirable
or lawful only as they contribute to man's progress toward
the end for which he is created. The earth with what per
tains to it is never to be sought as the ultimate end, or as in
itself a good ; but, as the medium of the end, it is neither
to be despised nor rejected. We are only to reject it as the
end for which we are to live and labor. Our correspondent
fails to recognize the distinction which the Gospel makes
between what is of precept and what is of counsel, or what
is necessary in order to inherit eternal life and what is
necessary in order to be perfect. The young man of large
possessions asked our Lord, u Master, what shall I do to in
herit eternal life ? " He was answered, " Keep the com
mandments." "But all these have I kept from my youth
up ; what lack I yet ? " "If thou wouldst be perfect, go
sell what thou hast, give it to the poor, and come and fol
low me." For eternal life, it suffices to keep the command
ments, that is, to do what the law prescribes ; but for per
fection, it is necessary to go further, and keep the evangeli
cal counsels. But only those who freely and voluntarily
accept the counsels as their rule of life are obliged to keep

574: ANSWER TO DIFFICULTIES.

them. ISTo one is obliged or permitted to take them as the
rule of life unless he choose, nor unless he has a special
vocation thereto, which is not the case with the generality
of mankind. The monastic state is a more perfect state,
and imposes greater sacrifices and more arduous duties than
the ordinary Christian state ; but it is a state only for the
elite of the race, and is not adapted to nor intended for all
men. Only those who have no duties of family or society
which they are bound to discharge are free to enter religion
or the monastic state. ~No one, so long as he has any duties
to his family or to the world that are incompatible with his
monastic vows, is free to retire from the world and its
interests, and seek perfection in the monastery or the
coenobitical life. The church does not permit it, and always
takes care that the duties to our neighbor and the real in
terests of society shall not be neglected. No one who has
any one dependent on his care or labor for support, a parent,
a child, a brother, or a sister, can, so long as the dependence
remains, enter religion or take the vows required by the
more perfect state. That state for such a one would not be
a more perfect state.

But even those who are free to enter this more perfect
state, to retire from the world, and are vowed to the practice
of Christianity according to the highest standard, do not
cease from labors beneficial to mankind. Men, because
they love God more, do not love their neighbor less. Even
Adam, before he sinned, was not permitted to live in idle
ness, but was required to keep and dress the garden in
which he was placed. The fathers of the desert made mats.
The old monks themselves adopted as their motto, " Laborare
est orare." and made their labor a prayer. Never was there
a class of men less idle or lazy, or more industrious or
thriving, than those same old monks who retired from the
world and lived for God alone. We see it in the rich and
costly monuments they dedicated to religion, in their finely
cultivated fields, and the bountiful harvests they gathered.
"With the labor of their own hands, they cleared away
forests, reclaimed barren wastes, subdued the most ungrate
ful soil, turned the wilderness into fruitful fields, and made
the desert blossom as the rose. Not in the whole history
of the race will you find a class of men who have done
more to serve man, and advance society in agriculture, in
dustry, the useful arts, literature, the fine arts, theologv,
philosophy, science, civilization, than those old religious

ANSWER TO DIFFICULTIES.

575

who were vowed to Christian perfection. The greatest
theologians, philosophers, artists, popes, bishops, preachers,
statesmen, and reformers the world has ever known lived
and were trained in monasteries, and were eminent as
religious. This should satisfy our correspondent that men
need not be and are not lost to mankind because they live
for God, and devote their lives to self-denial, prayer, and
contemplation.

Our age forgets that earthly goods, social reform, or
progress, even civilization, are never to be sought for their
own sake, and that when so sought they are not gained.
When we act on the principle — the old gentile principle —
that man is for society, not society for man, our efforts are
fruitless or worse than fruitless. The would-be religious
and church reformers of the sixteenth century, the authors
of the so-called glorious reformation, made a great noise,
created a great commotion, but they have only reduced the
nations that followed them to the condition of the Grseco-
Roman world before the Incarnation. In the Protestant
and non-Catholic world, you find the same order of thought
obtain, the same questions come up to agitate and torture
men's souls, the same old problems to be solved ; and men
find the same darkness behind, before, and within them.
There is the same old obscurity gathering over man's origin
and end, and men ask now as then, in agony of soul,
Whence come we ? whither go we ? why are we here ? arid
find no answer. The departed are wept over as lost, and
•death is sung by the poets as an eternal sleep. Creation is
-denied, and God is either denied outright or is resolved into
an irresistible, impersonal force, or identified with the
universe ; the scientists in vogue do little else than repro
duce the long-since-exploded theories of Leucippus, Demo-
-critus, Epicurus; and the more advanced philosophers only
reproduce the dreams of the Buddhists or the fancies of
the old Gnostics. The church is gone, and the state is
going.

The political and social reformers, children of the same
parentage, have gained no more for society and government
than the Protestant reformers have gained for religion and
the church. What has France gained by her century of
infidel and anti-Catholic revolutions, her violent changes of
dynasties and institutions, but to lie prostrate under the
iron heel of the Prussian, and to struggle in confusion and
despair, and perhaps in vain, for her very existence ? Where

576 ANSWER TO DIFFICULTIES.

goes her boasted civilization, her refinement, her arts, her
science, her wealth and material well-being ? And Prussia,
what has she gained in freedom for her people, in moral
progress, or social well-being by her victory of Sadowa ?
What has Germany gained, but the privilege of being used
by divine Providence to crush France, and, when France is
crushed, of being in turn crushed herself 1 Even in this
country, with our savage love of liberty and zeal for
political and social reform of every kind and sort, we are
fast losing the freedom and manliness, the purity of heart
and strength of mind and body, which we inherited from
our fathers. We have a general government enacting from
three to five hundred, and thirty-six states, each enacting
from a hundred to a thousand, new laws every year, with
vice, crime, and corruption daily increasing, while it is be
coming harder and harder every year for the poor man and
people of small means to live.

Things good and useful in their origin or at the time they
are adopted become abuses, evil and hurtful, by the changes
which time and events bring with them, to individual virtue
or to public liberty and social prosperity. Reforms in all
things human thus, from time to time, become urgent and
necessary ; but, if attempted to be obtained by noise and
agitation, by violence and revolution, they either are not
obtained at all, or are obtained only by the introduction of
other abuses or evils worse than those warred against. In
general, if not always, the remedy so sought proves to be
worse than the disease. All real reforms needed in political
or social arrangements are quietly effected, if effected at all,
by the regular development and application of the great
principles essential to the existence and order of society,
and the stability and efficiency of government. It is a free
people that makes a free government, not the free govern
ment that makes a free people. You can get no more free
dom in the state than you have in the people as individuals.
A so-called popular government secures no more freedom
than absolute monarchy for a people enslaved by their
lasts, bent only on earthly goods, or not thoroughly imbued
with the liberty wherewith the Son makes us free. There
is no security for liberty, political or personal, in the
heathen republic, based on the principle, " I am as good as
you, arid therefore I'll cut your throat if you attempt to
rule over me ;" the only security is in a republic based on
this Christian principle, " You are my brother, as good as I,

ANSWER TO DIFFICULTIES.

577

and I will die sooner than tyrannize over or wrong you."
The foundation and security of all liberty that is not
license or anarchy are in the development and application
to private and public life of the principles taught in the
child's catechism.

All the reforms or changes beneficial to mankind or use
ful to man and society have been effected by earnest individ
uals intent only on the glory of God and the salvation of
their own souls — earnest, self-denying men, working in
secrecy and obscurity, unknown or unheeded, who have
nothing of their own to carry out, who are moved by no
splendid dream of world-reform, who sound no trumpet be
fore them, but in their ardent charity devote themselves to
the work nearest at hand, who receive Christ our Lord in
the stranger, give him drink in the thirsty, feed him in the
hungry, clothe him in the naked, nurse him in the sick,
and visit and minister to him in the prisoner, and silently
cover the land over with hospitals for the infirm, and
foundations for the poor and needy. Slavery was struck a
mortal blow when the solitary monk, in imitation of his
Lord, ransomed the slave by making himself a slave in his
place for the love of God. The priest, the Sisters of
Chanty, and Brothers of Mercy were on the battle-field to
care for the wounded and dying, long before the Interna
tional Committee were heard of.

It is a law of divine Providence that we live for man
only in living for God, and serve mankind only in seeking
to serve God. Our Lord says, " Be not solicitous, saying :
What shall we eat : or what shall we drink, or wherewith
shall we be clothed? For after all these things do the
heathen seek. For your heavenly Father knoweth that ye
have need of these things. Seek ye therefore first the
kingdom of God and his justice, and all these things shall
be added unto you." St. Matt. vi. 31-33.

The heathen make these things, the adjicienda, the
primary object of their pursuits, the end and aim of their
life, and miss them, or gain them to their own hurt ; the
Christian seeks, as first and last, the kingdom of God and
his justice, and all these things are added unto him. We
secure the good things of this life not by seeking them or
living for them, but by turning our back on them, and Jiv
ing only for God and heaven. He that will save his life
shall lose it, and he that will lose his life for Christ's sake
shall find it. They who give up all for Christ arc rewarded

VOL. IX-37.

578 ANSWER TO DIFFICULTIES.

a hundred-fold even in this world, and with life everlasting-
in the world to come. The principle that underlies these
assertions is as true in the material order as in the spiritual.
If all the world were Catholics and obeyed the Christian
law to live for God and for man only in God, there would
not be less, but more, well-being in the world ; for all
would then live a normal life, and' the gains of toil and in
dustry would not be squandered or swept away by the evil
passions of men, never by the wars and fightings which
originate in men's lusts, and waste in a single day the ac
cumulations of years of peaceful labor. The world has yet
to learn that the true principle of political as well as
domestic economy is self-denial — precisely the reverse of
what our correspondent would seem to hold.

The apprehension of our correspondent that, if all the
world were Catholic, there would be no motive for the cul
tivation of science, we do not regard as well-founded. The
love of God does not diminish, but increases, our love of
man and of the Creator's works. There is nothing in the
Catholic faith that induces indifference to any thing that
God has made or that is really for the benefit of the individ
ual or of society. The assumption that science benefits
mankind by "finding out something new" can be taken
only with important qualifications. Science does not bene
fit mankind by teaching new truths or new principles, but
by enabling us the better to understand and apply to prac
tical life here and now the truths or principles asserted by
reason and revelation from the first. The Catholic faith
does not supersede reason, the principle and medium of all
human science, nor render its exercise unnecessary. Revela
tion gives us the principles and causes of the 'universe —
principles and causes which lie above reason, above nature,
and which must guide and assist us in our study of nature
—but it leaves the whole field of nature to our observation
and scientific investigation. There is, to say the least, as
much work for reason under revelation as there would be if
no revelation had been given, Revelation only does that
which reason cannot do, and which is beyond the reach of
science. What would be within the reach of science if
there were no revelation is equally within its reach under
revelation. The field of science is not restricted by revela
tion, but enlarged rather ; for revelation places the mind of
the Christian in a position, an attitude, that enables it to see
more clearly and comprehend more fully rational or scien-

ANSWER TO DIFFICULTIES. 579

tific principles, and things as they really are in God's own
world. As is often said, revelation is to reason what the
telescope is to the eye. We see not, then, how faith can
extinguish science or hinder us from benefiting mankind by
finding out all the new things in our power, or that would
or could be in our power without the Catholic faith.

The church has never discouraged science or the sciences.
She approves and provides for the cultivation to the fullest
extent of the science of theology, the queen of sciences,
and of philosophy, the science of the sciences ; and no
where has philosophy been so successfully cultivated as in
the schools founded by churchmen and religious, with her
approval and authorization. Nearly all the celebrated uni
versities of Europe were founded by Catholics before
Protestantism was born, and their most eminent professors,
far more eminent than are to be found in non-Catholic
colleges and universities, were monks, religious men vowed
to Christian perfection. The church has only encourage
ment for the physical sciences, for mathematics, astronomy,
geography, history, geology, philology, paleontology, zo
ology, botany, chemistry, electricity, &c. She does not indeed
teach that proficiency in these sciences is the end of man,
or that they are worth any thing without proficiency in the
practice of the moral and Christian virtues. She teaches
us to value them only as they redound to the glory of God
in a better knowledge of his works, and in honoring him
serve his creature man either for time or eternity ; but so
far as they are true — are really science, not merely theories
of science — and aid the real progress of man, she approves
and encourages their cultivation, and presents the strongest
motives for cultivating them.

But the sciences are never to be cultivated for their own
sake. Their cultivation is desirable or lawful only for the
sake of the true end of man. To cultivate them for the
sake of gratifying an idle or a morbid curiosity is not by
any means a virtue or a good. They should be subordi
nated and made subservient to the divine purpose in our
existence and in the existence of the universe. And so far
as so subordinated and made subservient, their cultivation
cannot be carried too far ; for it is a religious, a spiritual
exercise, a prayer. But in our day the importance of these
sciences is exaggerated, and men look to their cultivation
for the discovery of new solutions of the mystery of the
universe, and a new life-plan which will Klpersede that

580 ANSWER TO DIFFICULTIES.

given ns in the Christian revelation. In these respects,
science has and can have nothing new to offer ; and, so far
as the scientists pretend to be able to supersede or set aside
revelation, they give us not science, but their theories,
hypotheses, conjectures, guesses, which are warranted by no
scientific induction from any real facts they do or can dis
cover. Scientists may explode the theories of scientists, or
disprove much which has passed for science ; but they can
not disprove revelation or explode faith, for faith cannot be
false. Faith is the gift of God, not possible without super
natural grace ; and God, who is true, truth itself, can no-
more bestow his grace to accredit a falsehood than he can
work a miracle to accredit a false prophet or a false teacher.
Beliefs, opinions, theories, hypotheses, though put forth as
science, may be false, and often are false ; but faith, either
objectively or subjectively, never.

But the applications of the sciences in our day to the
mechanic and productive arts, or the scientific inventions
which our age so loudly boasts, are far from being an un
mixed good. They tend to materialize the mind, to fix it
on second causes to the forgetfulness of the first and final
cause, the cause of all causes ; and to fasten the affections
on things earthly and perishable instead of things spiritual
and ^eternal. The introduction of steam as a motive-power,
the invention of labor-saving machinery, by which the pro
ductive power of the race is increasing a million-fold or
more, have their attendant evils. They diminish the real
value in the same degree of human labor. You lessen the
value of the working man or woman in the economy of life-
just in proportion as you supersede him or her by machin
ery. Machinery on an extensive scale can be set up and
worked only by large capital, which reduces men of no-
means, of small means, or of light credit to abject depend
ence on capital, or those who are able to command it. How-
is the small cultivator to compete proportionally with the
large cultivator who is able to introduce the steam-plough,
the patent reaper and mower, the horse-rake, and the steam
threshing and winnowing machine, which demand an outlay
which the other is unable to make ? How are individuais-
of small means to compete for travel or freight with the
railroad, which can be constructed and worked only by an
individual or a corporation that commands millions ? These
instances are enough to illustrate our meaning. The full
effects of steam and machinery are not yet manifest except

ANSWER TO DIFFICULTIES.

•

to those who are able to foresee effects in their causes ; but
to the careful observer they prove that " all is not gold that
glisters." The nations do not grow any richer under the
new system than they did under the olcl. Hard times are
of none the less frequent occurrence, the independence of
the laboring classes is not increased, nor the number or the
wretchedness of the poor diminished. Evidently the utility
to mankind of the achievements of modern science has
been greatly exaggerated by our age. Whatever diminishes
the value of hand-labor or supersedes its necessity is a grave
evil. Man's physical, intellectual, and moral health require
that he should earn his bread by the sweat of his face. It
was the penalty imposed on man for original sin, and, like
all the penalties imposed by our heavenly Father, really a
blessing.

There is also a knowledge which can neither benefit him
who possesses it nor others, and is very properly forbidden,
Buch as the knowledge of necromancy, spiritism, magic, and
the various real or pretended arts of fortune-telling ; for
such knowledge is satanic, and can be used to no good pur
pose whatever. There are other kinds of knowledge, too,
not satanic, but useful and good for those whose duty it is
to teach, which are not desirable or suitable for the generality,
because the generality can only partially acquire it, and a
little smattering of it only serves to mislead and bewilder,
to unsettle faith, to make foolish men and women wise in
their own conceit, to puff them up with pride and vanity,
and render them unbelieving and disobedient. Such are
the mass of those who deny revelation, sneer at Christianity,
make war on the church, eulogize science, denounce time-
honored customs and institutions, and spout infidelity and
nonsense. As these cannot know more, it would be much
better for them if they knew less, and never aspired to a
knowledge beyond their capacity or their state. But the Cath
olic faith approves all science and all knowledge that is or can
be made useful to the great purposes of our earthly existence.
There is room enough for the activity of the sublimest in
tellect to learn the great mysteries of faith in their relation
to one another, and to understand their various applications
to man and society in both ideal and practical life.

We are surprised that our correspondent should fear that,
if all the world were Catholic, art would become extinct.
The world would indeed lose profane art, all that which, if
it tends to refine, tends also to corrupt, and marks the moral

582 ANSWER TO DIFFICULTIES.

decline and effeminacy of an age or nation ; but no other.
Art is not religion, nor is the worship of the beautiful the
worship of God ; but the church makes use of art in her
services. She uses the highest art she can get in the con
structing and adorning of her temples, her convents and
abbeys, and in teaching the mysteries of her faith. The
grandest architecture and the rarest sculpture, painting,
music, poetry, and eloquence have been inspired by the
church and pressed into her service. Most of the great
artists she has employed were, like Fra Angelico and Fra
Bartolomeo, saintly men, and those who were not, yet held
the faith and lived in a Catholic atmosphere. On this point,
we differ from our correspondent. Protestantism and
modern infidelity have nothing to boast of in the way of
art, and cannot have, for neither is either logical or intellect
ual, or has any great idea for art to embody. What of art
either has is a pale and feeble imitation of ancient pagan
art, or a still paler and feebler imitation of Catholic art.
Nothing seems to us more strange or unfounded than our
correspondent's opinion that, " if we look forward to the
conversion and actual christianization of all men according
to the highest standard, we must also contemplate the
downfall of science, literature, and art, as well as the ex
tinction of all nationalities, leaving only the Catholic
Church." Even if this were so, it would be no proof that
the church is not true ; and, if she is true, it could be no
damage, since nothing not true or in accordance with the
church of God can really benefit mankind here or hereafter.
But it is not true, as we have seen ; and all that would fol
low were all men Catholic according to the highest standard
would be not the downfall, but the christianizing of all
national governments, and making science, literature, art,
all that is included in the word civilization, subsidiary to
the service of God, and of man in God. Our correspond
ent says there are doctrines of the church which he cannot
believe, but where he has found so much that is true he
feels he may safely trust for the rest. We assure him he
may ; but we beg him to pardon us if we remind him that
faith is the gift of God, and to be able to grasp Catholic
truth firmly, and hold it without doubt or wavering, we need
the grace of God to incline the will and to illuminate the
understanding. Without that grace we have and can have
only simple human belief, which is never strong enough to
exclude all doubt or difficulty. That grace may always be

ANSWER TO DIFFICULTIES.

583

obtained by prayer, and the grace of prayer is given to all
men. " Ask, and ye shall receive ; knock, and it shall be
opened unto you." What seems obscure and doubtful to
him now will then be clear and certain, and grow clearer
and more certain as he advances toward the perfect day.

We think our correspondent exaggerates the difficulties
he experiences. Every Catholic, if lie lives according to
the standard of his faith, denies himself, and devotes him
self exclusively to religion ; but the denial of self is not
the annihilation of self. It is the moral not the physical
denial of self, and means living for God, and for self only
in God. Being exclusively demoted to religion does not,
however, mean that we must stand on our knees from
morning till night, and from night till morning, in prayer
and meditation, without eating, drinking, or sleeping, or
attending to our bodily wants or the wants of others. We
are taught that he who provides not for his own household
is worse than an inn' del, and hath denied the faith. Relig
ion covers all the duties of our state in life, and requires a
strict performance of them for God's sake, whether they
are the duties of husband or wife, of parent or child, of
priest or religious, a lawyer or a doctor, a statesman or an
artist. What God requires of us is that we give him our
hearts, and, in whatever we do or refrain from doing, that
we act from the intention of serving and glorifying him.
Undoubtedly, Cnristianity diminishes our material wants
to the minimum, which is a good, not an evil ; but it multi
plies infinitely our moral and spiritual wants, and furnishes
the means of satisfying them.

END OF VOLUME IX.

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UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO LIBRARY

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1882

v.9

Brownson, Orestes Augustus
The works of Orestes A.
Brownson