The New Zealand TABLET THURSDAY, JULY 21, 1910. A PEDLAR IN CULTURE'

New Zealand Tablet, 21 July 1910, Page 1141

The New Zealand TABLET THURSDAY, JULY 21, 1910. A PEDLAR IN CULTURE'

—. ■ ♦ <feWalfc HE late George Jacob Holyoake, it appears, Mr J! Mu used to playfully speak of himself as ' a pedlar Mj_7 |j in opinions '; and Mr. Joseph McCabe, adaptJy H J&» ing his friend's phrase, has described himself Ssb-Jp- as ' a pedlar in culture.' A pedlar is one who U deals in small wares, usually of very doubtful qualityso Mr. McCabe's description of himV J&sffi self may be allowed to pass as sufficiently near Jf* the mark. The ' culture ' presented consisted of. an amalgam of cheap—very cheap— ' science,' and up-to-date, thorough-going, undiluted atheism. Even a pedlar may fill a useful place in the scheme of things if only the goods he brings are genuine. But an apostle of ' culture' who has nothing better to tell us than that we come from the beast, and die like the beast, is emphatically ' not worth while.' The two features of the lecturer's personality which would most impress the critical listener are his high development of the organ of selfesteem and his inordinate- perfectly diseased craving for speculation. He would rather any day have a ton of

vague, spacious, large-sounding theory or opinion, than an ounce of good, honest, solid fact. In these days, when the atmosphere is saturated with scepticism and materialism, religious belief at best is easily enough lost; and, with a mental make-up of this sort, it is not difficult to understand how our visitor lost his grip of the Christian faith. Nothing but strict fidelity to every grace could have saved him. Although his statements regarding the Church —no one Church was specified— wildly and grotesquely untrue, it is only just to Mr. McCabe to say that in Dunedin, at least, there was no offensiveness of tone, and his references to Catholic scientists and Catholic ecclesiastics were markedly respectful. Whether this considerateness was due to an improved temper on the part of the author of the hysterical Martyrdom of Ferrer, or to a proviso in the lecturer's pound, shillings, and pence agreement with the Rationalist Press Association, we are, of course, not in a position to say. * Although our lecturer has made a special point latterly of posing as a scientist, his ' science ' lectures were assuredly the weakest and most wishy-washy items in his repertoire. They were marked, from start to finish, by the wild play of what has been called 'the scientific imagination ' ; and all sorts of fanciful speculations and arrogant assumptions were set forth as the undoubted findings of true science. Such threadbare conceits and fantastic theories are (as a well-known American scientist remarks) merely ' a reflection of individual fancy, and not a mirror of the facts of nature.' And he likens them to the spectre of Brocken— ' an empty shadow of the mind's own throwing, a magnified, intangible, evanescent phantom projected on a background of cloud and mist,' but ' made plausible to an unsuspecting public, because they are presented with all the enchantments of persuasive speech.' The evolution of this curious type of pseudo-science may be thus described. A few—mostly second-handdealers in what is called ' popular science,' gifted with vivid imaginations and a pleasing style, dress up in all the garb of a fascinating probability ideas that appeal with special force to the natural: man. A little 'school' gathers around them. They get a hold on the public ear, produce what Balfour (in his Foundations of Belief) calls _' a psychological atmosphere ■ or climate ' favorable to their modes of belief, and succeed in-getting their fantastic, unscientific, and evanescent imaginings accepted by the unthinking as fundamental articles of scientific faith. A comic rhymester of our time has hit off the brain - seethings of the Lang-Clodd-Grant-Allen-McCabe school as follows: —■ Oh, the thoughts, the revelations of our age that lie enshrined in the cauldron of man's mind! How they seethe and. how they simmer, how they. swim, and how they swirl, How they wriggle, how they wrestle, how they whisk, and how they whirl!' * It would be an easy matter, did space allow, to present a tolerably lengthy list of positions once held as de fide by ' scientific materialists,' and which no investigator would now maintain any more than he would defend the proposition that the earth is flat and rests upon the back of a tortoise. As has been often said in these columns, Catholics have nothing but a voice of praise and words of welcome for every real advance made in the path of knowledge, and no Church or organised body on earth has furnished to the world so many men who, during the centuries, have attained honor and high fame in the realms of scientific research. The Church holds the sceptre of science; and 'science is the handmaid of religion.' The one God is the Author of both. In spite" of rationalist declamation, there can be no real conflict between them, although there may be between individuals: the mere private opinions or inferences of this or that theologian may be at loggerheads with some scientific fact, or an article of Christian faith with the empty hypotheses or fanciful and extravagant notions of some scientific man. One of the most peculiar characteristics of men of the McCabe type, who set up as ' authorities' in science, is ' the marvellous intellectual agility they display in jumping to conclusions, however wild, over philosophic "chasms," however impassable, in the interests of their hypotheses.' In the course of the ' evolutionary ' lectures to which we are referring, an intolerable deal of this kind of pseudo-scientific sack was served up to the audience. All sorts of wild and unchecked guesses were hazarded as to the ' evolution ' of life and of morality; and these were described, not as mere random theories, but in language such as might be used by one who had lived through the long ages and ■ phases of human history, and himself noted, checked, and investigated with the eye of an archangel all the visible structural work and the invisible formative forces and hidden activities that are alleged to have developed the great masterpiece Man. It would be difficult to get a more glaring

example of the gross misuse of the so-called scientific imagination.' A grain of fact is overlain by a ton of imaginative froth, and the iridescent and windy spume is advanced with much pomp and circumstance and drumbeating and horn-blowing as solid and tested scientific fact. Twain evidently had such pseudo-scientific bubble-blowing in his mind when, in his Life on the Mississippi, he wrote: ' There is something fascinating about scienceone gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.' And Carlyle knew the ways of the campfollower of ' popular science' when, in his Sartor Resartus, he said: 'lt has come about that now to many a Royal Society the creation of the world is little more mysterious than the cooking of a dumpling.' * In addition to lectures on evolution, Mr. McCabe gave two addresses on socialist-rationalist subjects, in the course of which he made what could not have been other than ' frigid and calculated' misstatements regarding the Church's attitude in respect to social progress and to slavery; and to these we hope to refer briefly in our next issue. We do not know how far the lecturer's rationalist friends are satisfied with the result of his tour : but we can safely say that so far as the Catholic Church is concerned the McCabe visitation has been a particularly harmless one. The papers showed him a certain courtesy which was due to him as a —even if a very humble citizen—in the republic of letters; but nowhere was there any dis- , position to take him at all seriously. In Wellington his capture of our erratic Chief Justice as chairman brought him somewhat into the limelight, but in the other centres —and very notably in Dunedin audiences were exceedingly small, and in the southern city he had to manage all his meetings as best he could without any chairman. And so far from his visit in any way weakening the Church's hold on any of her members the fact is that Mr. McCabe's present utterances and present position—rightly viewed are in the highest degree calculated to strengthen Catholic belief and make every Catholic in the country more and more thankful for the priceless blessing of the faith. For what, after all, has his rationalism and agnosticism done for him, and to what has it brought him? So far as this world is concerned, it has left him without helm or compass in the voyage of life, or a fixed star to guide his course; and in regard to the next, his very last word to a Dunedin audience was that there was no justification for the belief, nor even for the hope, that man's spirit survived the grave. The most unlettered peasant telling his beadsthe humblest child who knows his catechismis infinitely better off. For these have true knowledge. As a distinguished and highly intellectual convert to the Church puts it, when describing the impression produced on her by accidental contactin her non-Catholic days — a little child in the slums who was preparing for his -' first Communion : 1 Never shall I forget my feelings when, opening the book, I asked that tiny child the aim and object of man's creation, and when with undoubting conviction he replied, "To know and serve God in this world, and to be happy with Him in the next." Philosophers might wrangle, scientists might differ, but this little Catholic child knew.'' And Mr. McCabe, in setting himself adrift on the waters of unbelief, has in reality separated himself from the only true intellectualism. 'Those who care,' says one of the greatest living Catholic scientists, ' to take the trouble to study it in. the dry light of science will soon discover that our Church, from the intellectual standpoint, is just as much a matter for marvel and for thankfulness as it is from any of the many other standpoints from which it may be viewed. The intellectual man, the man of reading and thought, he, too, has every reason to join with the ignorant, the weary, and the afflicted, with the wanderer from home, with all the Church Militant, Suffering and Triumphant, in that heartfelt cry of gratitude: Thank God for our Holy Faith!'"