THE SPECTATOR AND DR. WABD

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IX, Issue 468, 31 March 1882, Page 9

THE SPECTATOR AND DR. WABD

Dr. Wabd's essay on " Science, Prayer, Free-Will, and Miracles, says a contemporary, just repnblished in pamphlet from an old number of the Dublin Review, by Messrs. Burns and Oates, has called forth in the Spectator the following review, which has, besides the interest attaching to the subject of which it treats and to any utterance of Dr. Ward's, the additional interest of showing how much influence may be exerted by Catholic philosphers on a religious mmd — we use the term " religious " in its widesl sense — like that of Mr, R. R. Hutton, the editor of the Spectator, which our readers favourably know as a paper where Catholic subjects are treated with a tolerance and understanding not very usual in the general press : — We have always recognized in Dr. Ward — the author of " the ideal of a Christian Church," which more than a generation ago made such a Btir at Oxford, and till very recently the editor, of the Dublin Review — one of the ablest and clearest of the philosophical thinkers of the day, Little as we agree with his not merely Roman Catholic, but peculiarly Ultramontane theology, we believe that he has done more service to the cause of true philosophy in England than any thinker of the day, unless we except Dr. Martineau, who, indeed, has it in his power to do far more than he has actually done — in the sense at least of having given to the public — for English psychology and metaphysics. Bat greatly as we esteem Dr. Ward's writing, we question whether he has ever published anything weightier and more effective than a pamphlet which has just appeared. It would be impossible for us, of course, in a newspaper article, to deal with the whole of this remarkable paper ; and, indeed, we only contemplate touching what Dr. Ward says of the scientific view of the uniformity of Nature in relation to that Providential view of the Universe with which it is supposed to be more or less inconsistent. No one can deny that Dr. Ward states the pvima fade view of the unreasonableness of prayer with sufficient clearness and energy in the following hypothetical argument againßt it :—: — Your country is visited with famine or pestilence, and you supplicate your God for relief. Your only child lies sick of a dangerous fever ; and as a matter of course you are frequent in prayer. You are diligent, indeed, in giving her all the external help you can ; but your chief trust is avowedly in God. You entreat Him that He will arrest the malady and spare her precious life. What can be more irrational than this 1 Would you pray, then, for a long day in December ? Would you pray that in June the sun shall set at six o'clock ? Yet surely the laws of fever are no less absolutely fixed than those of sunset ; and were the case otherwise, no science of medicine could by possibility have been called into existence. The only difference between the two cases is, that the laws of sunset have been thoroughly mastered ; whereas our knowledge as to the laws of fever, though very considerable, is as yet but partial and incomplete. The " abstract power of prediction " — as Mr. Stuart Mill calls it — this is the one assumption, in every nook and corner of science. All scientific men take for granted — when they cease to do so they will cease to be scientific men — that a person of superhuman and adequate intelligence, who should know accurately and fully all the various combinations and propeities of matter which now exist, could predict infallibly the wholeseries of future phenomena. He could predict the fature course of the weather or of disease, with the same assurance with which men now predict the date of a coming eclipse. Pray God all day long - add fasting to your prayer, if you like, and let all your fellow-Christians add their prayer and fasting to yours — in order that the said eclipse shall come a week earlier : do yon suppose you will be heard ? Yet the precise date of an eclipse is not more peremptorily fixed by the laws of nature than is the precise issue of your daughter's fever. You do not venture to doubt speculatively this fundamental doctrine of science ; in our various scientific conversations, my friend, you have always admitted it. But, like a true Englishman, you take refuge in an illogical compromise. You assume one doctrine when you study science ; and another, its direct contradictory, when your child falls ill. And yet I ana paying you too high a compliment : for you do not profess that this latter doctrine is true ; you do not profess that your prayer to God is reasonable, or can possibly be efficacious ; your only defence is, that jour reason is mastered and overborne by the combined effect of your parental emotion. As though you could please God— if , indeed, there be a Personal God at all — by acting in a manner which your reason condemns. Well, the answer to this difficulty is given in a passage of some humour — and our readers may be surprised to hear that there is a good deal of humour in Dr. Ward — in which he propounds for us the view which philosophical mice imprisoned in a piano or some more complicated instrument of the same kind, might be likely to take of " the laws of Nature, " as represented by the sounds and vibrations of these instruments : — We begin, then, with imagining two mice, endowed however, with quasi-human or semi-human intelligence, enclosed within a grand pianoforte, but prevented in some way or other from interfering with the free play or. its machinery. Prom time to time they are delighted with the strains of choice music. One of the two considers these to result from some agency external to the instrument ; but the other having a more philosophical mind, rises to the conception of fixed laws and phenomenal uniformity. " science as yet, " he says, "is but fancy ; but I have already made one or two important discoveries. Every sound which reaches us is preceded by a certain vibration of these strings. The same string invariably produces the same sound ; and that louder or more gentle according as the vibration may be more or less intense. Sounds of a more composite character result when two or more of the strings vibrate together ; and here, again the sound produced, as fax as I am able to discover, is precisely a compound of those sounds which would have resulte 1 from the various component strings vibrating separately. Then there is a further sequence which I have observed : for each vibration is preceded by a stroke by a corresponding hammer ; and the string vibrates more in

tensely in proportion as the hammer's stroke is more forcible. Thus far I have already prosecuted my researches. And so much at least is evident even now ; viz., that the sounds proceed not from any external and arbitrary agency — from the intervention, e.g., of any higher will — bat from the uniform operation of fixed laws. These laws may be explored by intelligent mice ; and to their exploration I shall devote mj life." Even from this inadequate illustration, yon see the general conclusion which we wish to enforce. A sound has been produced through a certain intermediate chain of fixed laws ; but this fact does not tend ever so distantly to establish the conclusion, that there is no human pre-movement acting continuously at one end of that chain. Imagination, however, has no limits. We may v«ry easily suppose, therefore, that some instrument is discovered producing music immeasurably more heavenly and transporting than that of the pianoforte ; but for that very reason immeasurably more vast in size and more complex in machinery. We will call this imaginary instrument a " polychordon," as we are not aware that there is any existing claimant of that name. In this polychordon the intermediate links — between the player's pre-movement on the one hand and the resulting sound on the other — are no longer two, but two hundred. We further suppose — imagination, as before said, being boundless — that some human being or other is unintermittently playing on this polychordon ; but playing on it just what airs may strike his fancy at the moment. Well, successive generations of philosophical mice have actually traced one hundred aad fifty of the two hundred phenomenal sequences, through whose fixed and invariable laws the sound is produced. The colony of mice, shut up within, are in the highest spirits at the success which has crowned the scientific labour of their leading thinkers ; and the mo?t eminent of theße addresses an assembly. "We have long known that the laws of our musical universe are immutably fixed ; but we have now discovered a far larger number of those laws than our ancestors could have imagined capable of discovery. Let us redouble our efforts. I fully expect that our grand-children will be able to predict as accurately, for an indefinitely preceding period, the succession of melodies with which we are to be delighted, as we now predict the hours of sunrise and sunset. One thing, at all events, is now absolutely incontrovertible. As to the notion of there being some agency external to the polycbordon — intervening with arbitrary and capricious will to produce the sounds we experience — this is a long-exploded superstition ; a mere dream and dotage of the past. The progress of science has put it on one side, and never again can it return to disturb our philosophical progress." The reader may infer very easily what this reply really amounts to. it comes to this : that a very considerable power of tracing out the order of phenomena, and even of predicting the future order of phenomena from the past, may be acquired by creatures who are liable, nevertheless, to be entirely misled by the knowledge they so acquire as to the most important of all the causes at work in producing these phenomena. Just as tbe mice were certainly wrong in supposing that, because 150 steps in the phenomenal orier had been discovered, the remaining 50 would lead to no new kind of cause — no true initiative — so scientific men may be just as wrong in supposing that because they have discovered so many of the uniform links in the order of nature, there is no Divine hand beyond which moves the whole network of physical agencies as it will, so as to produce this or that result. The player outside the order of nature, counts none the less in determining that order, even though men who confine their minds to groping about within it, convince themselves that the chain of second causes is literally endless. Some one will at once ask whether, then, Dr. Ward means that it would be as rational (if there were any excuse for it) to pray for the lengthening of the day at Christmas or the hastening of an eclipse, as to pray for the recovery of a sick child ? Does the hand outside the great instrument really select all its melodies absolutely arbitrarily or are there some which so underlie all others that to expect their arrest is to expect that the musical instrument itself shall cease to be ? It is clear that Dr. Ward would answer the two first questions in the negative, and the last in the affirmative. He regards what he calls the cosmical laws as constituting a permanent framewoik for our universe, and though, of course, no less subject to the will of God than the others, yet as so framed that changes or modifications in them can neither be necessary nor desirable for tbe purpose of man's education in religious trust. What happens by cosmical law cannot be inconsisteut with any such spacial guidance of human lots as is needful to teach men to lean on God. W ithin the fixed framework of these laws there is plenty of compass for such a play of special Providence on the one side, and of trust on the other, as the religious life requires. Hence, though it is, of course, to be assumed that, the Divine pre-movement do.'S determine the courses of the stars, there is no reason why the laws determining them should be pliant, since their pliancy is not needful to teach man the necessity of trust in Go" 1 , and therefore, there can be no sense or piety in praying that they should be altered. After showing that Dr. Ward might have added, had he been writing now, that even the latest investigations iuto coamical laws suggest the intervention of causes existing on a very grand scale, and analogous, in some respects, to human volition, which do not seem to ba immanent in these laws as they are at present known, and after pointing out that, if this " Divine pre-movement" of which Dr. Ward speaks exists, it must be much more observed in tbe sphere of mind than in that of matter, the writer in The Spectator concludes by saying : — Dr. Ward has done the worl 1 of thought a real service by tbe hypothesis of his " philosophical mice ; " for he has cleared up by it a branch of his subject on which thought is very apt to become hazy, and even to lose its way.