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قراءة كتاب Essays in Rationalism
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Marsh road, Tenby.
Mr. Thomas Purnell, who says he had for years “the inestimable privilege of enjoying his close intimacy,” remarks, “never before or since have I met a man endowed with as rare an intellectual equipment.” Mr. Purnell thus describes his own first visit to the recluse: “He stood at the top of the topmost stair. I cannot imagine a more distinguished head and face. There was a touch of Mephistopheles in him. There was also a touch of Jupiter Olympius. Although dressed in ill-fitting clothes, and with a sort of blanket over his shoulders, he appeared to me to be the ideal of courtly grace. He bowed me without a word into his apartments. This was in the roof of the building, and the only light came from a window which opened with a notched iron bar. The room was as meagrely furnished as Goethe’s study in Weimar. A bed, a chest of drawers, a table and two or three chairs, with a few books, constituted the whole goods and chattels.” Mr. Purnell says “his health, means and inclination made him averse to society. The rector called on him, but was not admitted; visitors to the town who had known his brothers would send in their cards, but they received no response; local medical men, when they heard he was ill, volunteered their services, but they were declined with courteous thanks conveyed by letter.”
It appears he but seldom left his house, and when he went out he did not often enter the town, but took his exercise in the road which led into the country. Dressed in a pea-jacket, with a shawl or a rug thrown across his shoulders, and with a sou’-wester over his head, he marched erect, looking neither to left nor right. He wore shoes, and, as his trousers were short, displayed an interval of white socks. The lads and lasses were apt to regard such a figure with derision.
It was through Mr. Purnell that he communicated the papers here reprinted to the Reasoner. Although but of the character of fragments, they bespeak an original mind. The secret of the Cardinal’s great influence and strength was that what he spoke and wrote came not from books, but forthright out of his own head and heart. The topics with which his brother deals were those only needing the mind, and his treatment shows they were viewed in the dry light of an original intellect. The Reasoner ceased soon after the appearance of these papers, and thus closed the one opening for his literary activity. Francis William Newman was, at least till the present year, unaware that his arguments for Theism were challenged by his own brother under the signature of “A Recluse.” He informs me that he had never heard that anyone would publish anything from his pen, and that he heard that at his death, in March, 1884, he left a box full of manuscripts, which were destroyed as useless. Whether this was done by order of his relatives, whether the landlady decided the question, or whether the vicar or neighbors were called in, will perhaps remain as unknown as the worth of the manuscripts. The following specimens are all by which the latter question can be judged.
Mr. Meynell says that two years before he died he had a short visit from his eldest brother. It must have been a strange meeting, and one worthy the brush of a great artist. Surely in all England there were not two men of eighty whose thoughts were so divergent or two brothers whose lives were so diversified. The one a saintly cardinal, called by the Pope the Light of England, who, by his rare urbanity, had gained the respect of all, replete with all that should accompany old age—as honor, love, obedience, troops of friends: the other, fallen, too, into the sere and yellow leaf, and without them all—poor, solitary, unknown and despised, a scorn and wonderment to his nearest neighbors. And all from following his own thought that had made him a purus putus Atheist.
1 Wilfrid Meynell, in his John Henry Newman, erroneously speaks of Charles Robert as the “youngest son.” ↑
2 This is a mistake. Owen in 1817 renounced the religions of the world, and proclaimed that man’s character was formed for him not by him. But he was not an Atheist. ↑
CHARACTER OF CHARLES NEWMAN.
There is little to say and less need to add anything to what Mr. Wheeler writes, whose industry and discernment collect together all the accessible facts of his subject. My knowledge of Charles Robert Newman is confined to his correspondence, which, with my present engagements, I could not refer to and examine without delaying the printer longer than would be convenient to you, as Mr. Wheeler’s article is in type. The impression Mr. C. R. Newman conveyed to me by his letters is, I judge, sufficient for the purpose in hand. Charles Newman had an intermittent mind. He would write with great force and clearness, and in another letter, which was confused in parts, he would frankly say that his mind was leaving him, as was its wont as I understood him, and after a few months less or more, it would return to him, when he would write again. In this manly frankness and strong self-consciousness he resembled his two eminent brothers Francis and John. I trusted to his friend Mr. Purnell, who was the medium in communicating with me, to send me further letters when Mr. Charles was able or disposed to write them. I expected to hear from him again. Much occupied with debates and otherwise at the time, I neglected writing further to him myself. Afterwards thinking his disablement might have grown upon him with years, disinclined me from asking him to resume his letters. Mr. Wheeler seems ignorant of Charles Newman’s mental peculiarity, and does not recognise what may be generous delicacy on the part of his brothers in not referring to it. To do so would have subjected them to the imputation, very frequent formerly, of imputing difference of opinion to want of saneness. Even so liberal a preacher as W. J. Fox accounted, in 1841, for my disbelief in Theism by conjecturing the existence of some mental deficiency. No doubt many persons with whom Charles Newman had dealings in offices he held, would regard his Atheism—which it was contrary to his nature to conceal—as a personal disqualification. He avowed his opinions as naturally and as boldly as Professor Newman and the Cardinal avowed theirs. It is not conceivable that Cardinal Newman ever intermitted his aid—or Professor Newman either—on this account. They were both incapable of personal intolerance. They might deplore that their brother Charles’s opinions were so alien, so contrary to theirs; but this they would never make matter of reproach. It was doubtless a great trial to them that their brother, having fine powers like their own, making no persistent effort for his own maintenance, although he knew it must render independence impossible. Possibly the solitariness which he chose caused his tendency to unusualness of conduct, not to say eccentricity, to grow upon him—which they could not control or mitigate without an interference, which might subject them to resentment and reproach. Charles no doubt inherited his father’s sympathy for social improvement, which led to his sharing Robert Owen’s sociologic views. But he did not acquire his Atheism from Robert Owen—as Professor Newman has said—for Robert Owen was not an Atheist—always believing in some Great Power.
Professor Newman has told me that in any further edition of his little book upon his brother, the Cardinal, he will, on my authority, correct his description of Robert Owen as an Atheist. Charles owed his Atheism to himself, as his brothers owed their opinions to their own conclusions and reflections. Charles not taking a degree was less likely to be owing to means not being furnished to him than to his intermittent indecision of mind and his strong discernment, which produced satisfaction with the world, with others, and with himself.
TWO PRINCIPLES OF ORDER.
In my proof of the invalidity of that argument—it being indeed what is called “the Argument from Design”—I point out that our experience simultaneously informs us of two modes of producing order, otherwise called arrangement, relation of parts to each other and to the whole direction of means towards some recognisable end; or, to describe the phenomenon in the most summary, as well as the most practical, way—two modes of producing effects identical with those that proceed from design. I explain that, of these two principles of order, the one is Design itself, a modus operandi of intelligence (such as we find it here below, of which the human mind affords the best examples), while the other is something to which no name has been assigned, and which, consequently, we can only shortly describe by saying that it is not design. It becomes necessary, therefore, to give a farther periphrastic account of it as follows:—
This nameless principle of order, considered as a vague popular surmise, is as familiar to our experience as design. We all see, for instance, that water has a tendency to form a perfectly level and horizontal surface, that heavy bodies fall to the earth perpendicularly, that the plummet performs a straight line in just the same direction, that dew-drops and soap-bubbles assume a globular shape, that crystallisation observes similar artist-like rules, and so on. We are accustomed to say, “It is the nature of things,” and we ground our daily actions on a confidence in this regularity of proceeding, without generally attempting to explain it. Science comes to our help, and shows us that this orderly action of things around us may be traced to, and is the necessary result of, the operation of certain powers or properties inherent in these natural things. Grant that the property called gravitation belongs to moving bodies, and an innumerable quantity of orderly phenomena may be predicated as springing of their own accord by inevitable consequence from this datum; which same phenomena, moreover, intelligence is able coincidently to reproduce in its own special mental way.
Here, then, is a principle of order, less popularly appreciated, but not less certainly evidenced and known, than design. It is, no doubt, a principle infinitely inferior in dignity, for it is blind and unintelligent, while design sees and understands, but this is not the question. The question, superseded by an answer derived from human experience, is to this effect—that nature and natural things are, with no less propriety, assignable as the doers of a certain non-designing kind of order, than man is assignable as the doer of the designing kind; that we just as truly perceive that nature, in the exercise of certain powers that we find to be inherent in her, produces order in a dew-drop or in a crystal, as that man, in the exercise of certain powers that we find to be inherent in him, produces order in a poem or in a cathedral, and that, consequently, the argument from design, based as it is on the assertion that our experience assures us of only one principle of order, is invalid.
Mr. F. W. Newman’s argument is one of this erroneous class. He points to “Animal Instincts” as an effect, which, owing to our knowing of no other agency by which it could have been produced, can alone be accounted for by reference to a designer, and consequently as manifesting the objective existence of that designer, who could only be the theistic God. The question that Mr. F. Newman’s adduced instance required him to consider was, whether the non-designing principle of order, which, we are aware, is in many cases able to produce the same effects as the other, could have been thus operative here, and he had got to prove that it could not have been so, that there was something in the nature of the case that forced us exclusively to have recourse to the intelligent principle of order, and resisted any solution from the other principle. The result of a proof so conducted would have been, that Mr. F. Newman was entitled to conclude that (granting our earthly experience was a sufficient test of the matter) Design must have been the sole worker of the debated phenomenon. He would then have established his theistic argument. Instead of doing this, he simplifies his proceeding by being incognisant of a notorious fact, and ignoring the non-designing principle altogether.
1. The fact is, that there is not one way only of producing the phenomena of design (I am here using an ordinary elliptical mode of speaking, since literal metaphysical correctness is sometimes cumbrous)—but there are two ways: one, the mind of a designer, and the other (whatever may be its nature, which the present question does not call upon me to define) not the mind of a designer.
2. The shortest way of proving this theorem, is to state that there are two ways of your obtaining a facsimile of your own person. One is to have your portrait taken, and the other is to stand before a looking-glass, and that of these two ways the former is that of design, and the latter confessedly not design, being the well-known necessary effect of certain so-called second causes, whose operation in this instance is familiar to modern science.
3. Consequently, S. D. Collet is incorrect in the principle which she makes the foundation of her argument at p. 27, where it is said, “What the Theist maintains is this, that when we see the exercise of Force in the direction of a purpose, we, by an inevitable inference, attribute the phenomenon to some conscious agent.”
4. Force is seen to be exercised in the direction of a purpose—the purpose being that of producing similitude—with equal evidence in the two cases just compared; for though the force exercised in said direction is less in the case of the painter than it is in that of the looking-glass (for the resemblance produced by the former is in less degree a resemblance than that produced by the latter), the evidence cannot be said to be less, since it is no less able to convince. We are as perfectly sure that the painter could not have produced that lesser similitude of a man, and a particular man, by chance (the alternative of this supposition, according to our experience, being that he must have used design) as we are that the looking-glass could