1

disparaged.' ' But Earl Balfour frequently puts such powerful and eloquent speeches in the mouth of the plaintiff, that, although from time to time we hear most convincing arguments from the defendant, the judge has not always made up his mind as to what the verdict should be. And it must be remembered that the cause which is being tried is the very claim of Reason itself.

If the attitude of the Gifford lecturers is generally hostile to such systems as are inconsistent with the principles of Natural Theology it is equally opposed to the claims of Supernaturalism. Hence the importance of the question of Continuity as dealt with by Prof. PringlePattison, for instance. From such passages as the following one might feel justified in drawing the conclusion that the lecturer was not a believer in the theory of universal continuity.

To regard life and self-consciousness as no more than the emergence from antecedent conditions, as so many inorganic and non-rational phenomena, is the result of a process of abstraction which leaves out the characteristic features of the concrete fact supposed to be explained.' It is by a progressive abstraction of this kind and not by any real process of causal explanation that we arrive at such a formula of the worldprocess as Spencer's redistribution of matter and motion, and imagine ourselves to look on the moving particles of physical science as the ultimate reality of which all other phenomena are woven by cunning complication.2

The criticism is excellent, and it would seem to follow that we must seek for an explanation of the higher phenomena of nature in a higher principle than that of physical force or energy. Prof. Pringle-Pattison agrees with Prof. Lloyd Morgan, in repudiating as unphilosophical the idea of a supernatural hiatus between the inorganic and the organic'' but, as far as I am aware, no one holds such a hiatus. It is true that scientists such as A. R. Wallace teach that a break in continuity is implied, but there is

1 The quotations from the recent series of lectures are taken from the summaries in the Glasgow Herald, which Earl Balfour described as 'skilful' reports.

2 The Idea of God, p. 93.

3 Ibid. p. 98.

nothing supernatural about it, for the reason that it takes place in accordance with natural law. Prof. PringlePattison allows that there is an emergence of real differences,' which imply actual'increments' or 'lifts' in the process; yet he claims that while 'quantity may be said to pass into quality and difference of degree into difference of kind,'1 yet there is no 'break' or or' chasm.'

Earl Balfour expressly refers to the 'breach of continuity' involved in the appearance of life and, still more obviously, of feeling, at particular points in the long procession of causes and effects. But if 'sensibility,' as he contends, 'belongs to the world of consciousness not of matter' more so do intellect and will or 'the soul,' the existence of which he argued in his eighth lecture; and to it his words are still more applicable :

It is a new creation of which physical equations can give no account; nay, rather, which falsified such equations; which requires us to say that, before a certain date in the history of the universe, energy in one shape was converted into precisely the same amount of energy in another shape, and into nothing more; that matter in one position was transferred to another position without increase or diminution; but that after this date, the transformation of energy and the movements of matter were sometimes accompanied by epiphenomena, which differ from them in kind, which are incommensurable with them in amount, and which no equation can represent.2

In the last of his recent lectures, Earl Balfour referred to 'creation' and to 'God who was the author and sustainer of ethical values.' Now creation certainly implies a break in continuity. Consequently, if there are these three breaks, as held by A. R. Wallace, there can be nothing philosophically repugnant or scientifically absurd in postulating another.

6

There are too many assumptions made in Prof. PringlePattison's statement that the organism is developed and its powers perfected as an instrument of nature's purpose of self-revelation' (page 127). The deification of nature is a favourite resort of some philosophers. Pantheism may

be implied in the conclusion that what we have to deal with is the continuous manifestation of a single Power' (page 210). Thus to eliminate intelligence and personality is to apply the method of abstraction in the way which the lecturer so effectively criticized and condemned in the philosophic reasoning of others.

In his fourth lecture, Earl Balfour expressed his agreement with Mr. Bertrand Russell that all experience is the experience of particulars, and that no amount of them would ever give a general principle. Presumably, however, Earl Balfour does not adopt Mr. Russell's strange doctrine that universals have an objective reality. Certainly he is not a Neo-Realist, who would make reality to be formally what it appears to be, in which case appearances disappear altogether. To such a view Earl Balfour's philosophy is altogether opposed. 'The whole theory of the scientific view of perception makes the thing perceived quite different in its reality from what it was in its perception.' Nor is this a merely virtual difference. The vibrating molecules bring messages to the mind which may be wholly false, and can never be wholly true.' 1 The point he has argued at length on several occasions. Enough here to say that though it may be admitted that the objective world is not coloured red, for instance, yet it may be said to be equivalently red, inasmuch as the same objective conditions probably always, and certainly normally, produce the same sense-impressions. Hence an obvious distinction may be made to the statement that 'that which is beautiful is not the object as we know it to be the vibrating molecule and the undulating etherbut the object as we know it not to be--glorious with the qualities of colour and of sound.' ' But why not glorious with the qualities of order, of symmetry, of variety in unity-of such qualities as are the objective counterpart of the sense-knowledge of colour? And may not the object be transcendently 'glorious' to the mind that sees it behind the veil and understands its purpose in those * Ibid. p. 66.

1 Foundations of Belief.

movements the meaning of which we can only infer? Perhaps Earl Balfour would admit that, since he writes: 'We must believe that somewhere, for some Being, there shines an unchanging splendour of beauty of which in Nature and Art we see, each of us from our own standpoint, only passing gleams and stray reflections, whose different aspects we cannot now co-ordinate, whose import we cannot fully comprehend, but which at least is something other than the chance play of subjective sensibility.' 1

Prof. Pringle-Pattison is a thoroughgoing objectivist, following Prof. Laurie, whom he quotes to the effect that the process by which we become conscious of an external object, a cloud, for instance, exists for the very purpose of presenting that cloud, as I see it, to the subject as conscious'; whence he concludes that the secondary qualities of objects are just as real as space and time are' a view held by Dr. Schiller and some other modern philosophers. It may be that 'red, as a conscious fact, is from beginning to end a quality of objects,' but it would seem to be sufficient that they should be equivalently or virtually, though not formally, red.

We agree with Prof. Pringle-Pattison that' every evolutionary process must be read in the light of its last term' (page 219). This, as he says, is the true meaning of the Aristotelian doctrine of the Telos, or end, as the ultimate principle of explanation. The objective continuity of purpose, though not absolute or final at any stage, is merely the reign of law and order, under the guidance of a Director. It is not final, even at the stage of the ppearance of man, as he contends. There is man and nan-man in the embryo and man physically developednan moral and man immoral-man stable and man deca

lent; and are we to conclude that ultimate purpose is evealed equally in the appearance' of each or any of hem? Moreover, if the appearance of man were the final nd it would follow that the wonderful course which

1 Foundations of Belief, p. 70.

2

Synthetica, vol. 1. p. 83.

3 The Idea of God, p. 121.

evolution has run in order that man might appear, must be a failure; for on the day that he descends into the grave it comes to an end, having led nowhither, except into a cul-de-sac. Spiritualism and Pantheism are but abortive attempts to find a way out, while Naturalism makes no attempt at all.

The argument referred to above, which, such are Ear Balfour's powers of philosophic elaboration and his com mand of language, has made its appearance over and ove again in his writings, and which, in the last of his recen lectures, he admitted that he had insisted on ‘in season an out of season,' he has summed up as follows :—

The root-principle which, by its constant recurrence in slightly di ferent forms, binds together, like an operatic leit-motif, the most divers material, is, that if we would maintain the value of our highest belie and emotions, we must find for them a congruous origin. Beauty mu be more than an accident. The source of morality must be moral. Th source of knowledge must be rational. If this be granted you rule of Mechanism, you rule out Naturalism, you rule out Agnosticism, and lofty form of Theism becomes, as I think, inevitable.1

In his earlier work Earl Balfour includes both Mecha ism and Agnosticism in the term 'Naturalism,' which somewhat arbitrarily and, perhaps, not very appropriate used. The word 'Naturalist' was already in use with definite and different signification. Dr. James Ward, how ever, who adopted the term in his Gifford lectures (189 1898), criticizing Huxley's statement that the furth science advances, the more extensively and consistent will all the phenomena of Nature be represented by mate alistic formulae and symbols,' remarks: 'This nightma theory of knowledge, as regards its exclusion of everythi supernatural or spiritual, thus closely resembles the do trines which in the seventeenth century they called Natu alism. And the name has recently been revived.' ' then proceeds to point out that 'Naturalism and Agr sticism now go together.' The term, however, though it

1 Humanism and Theism, p. 250.

2 Naturalism and Agnosticism, p. 20.