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vol. title: vol. period: 1881 pages in vol.: 439 |
< Introduction to an Experiment Research (continued from page 11-289) >
but it had not met the earth with the final crash which would render the application of the principle of reversibility, an impossibility and an absurdity.
We do not do violence to our reason in Supposing a falling stone to become suddenly arrested, and have its direction of motion changed, nor do we object to accept the possibility of miracle either on account of its complexity or of its magnitude, but simply on account of any real contradiction to the order of Nature or continuity of thought upon which we can fix as of positive value in a destructive criticism, such as the fact of conscious perception assumed for a man after the destruction of his organ of thought. As nowhere in the Bible is the fact of restoration to life maintained after the decomposition of the body, we are permitted, as educated Christians, to handle the question of the restoration of the dead to life in the case of Lazarus, Jairus’ daughter and the son of the widow of Nain as involved in the more general physiological problem of the influence of one nervous system upon another, how possible and with what physical machinery most easily and truthfully represented.
I have not gone out of my way to say things hurtful to the feelings of any class, for even narrow-minded Christians I cannot help respecting, however I may differ from them, but from the strong conviction I hold that physical science, which deals with the inorganic world, must sit at the feet of the higher biological and psychological science and be content, after long waiting, to collect the data to which she may apply her mathematical methods in her efforts to say the last word about the Universe in terms of matter and motion; from this conviction it is that I am urged to use the words I have used regarding the cherished miracles of the Son of Man. I believe they are too precious to be cast idly aside, or swamped in the advancing tide of rationalistic scepticism, and therefore I say let them be brought within the domain of the physiology of the future.
As to the physical miracles, the turning of water into wine, the blasting of the fig tree, &c., they can very well wait until we pass from the interactions of living beings to the actions of living beings upon the unvitalized masses of inanimate world; the interactions of living beings, when reduced to a formulary, having supplied us with a fuller knowledge of the nature of matter and physical causation.
We are gradually settling down into the belief that feeling, and it may be life, underlies all matter. Be that as it may, the interactions of the most highly complex similars must give a higher knowledge than that of the interactions of the complex and the simple; but though the type of the interactions of the simple in Nature is that of an inviolate order it must bear translation into the language of the complex when the same Universal Law will provide the formula? necessary and sufficient to express the relationship existing between the complex and the simple, the psychical and the physical, the internal and the external.
Anything that Jesus said in word and did in act bad its physical aspect; it can be pictured, and therefore it may be reproduced. What Jesus felt— upon which feeling is founded the Christian Church and not upon the mere human institution of miracle as by many erroneously supposed—cannot be imitated, and cannot be reproduced; it is partaken of and it exists substantially as the foundation of His Church.
An earnest thinker, educated or otherwise, may enter into the consciousness of Jesus that man is the Son of God, but that knowledge is never divided; he becomes one with Christ, and can never depart from the brotherhood or break his vow—the process is irreversible.
This state, which is that of the believer, may be obtained in a more roundabout way by the philosopher who, free from the incubus of dogma, is satisfied that the claim of Jesus put forward in no feeble accent when he said “I and my Father are One,” embodies the ultimate theory of existence from the standpoint of substance.
The miracles of the New Testament, to fulfil the purpose of their being, must, now-a- days submit themselves to criticism, with the view of affording data to assist us in the prosecution of our researches into the arcana of Nature, the outcome of which we hope and believe will be the recognition of man’s heir-ship and vested authority as that of the Highest Organised Thought, the Absolute made manifest in the flesh, the Son of God, from the analogy of natural relationship.
Miracle has just the same meaning now that it had eighteen centuries ago, i.e. a departure from the ordinary course of events: they were not half learned in those days, they were content to trust the evidence of their senses than which even physicists travel nothing higher.
Then it was the custom to accept the actual; in the present it is the fashion to ignore the possible.
Everything miraculous has a physiological counterpart, “Know thyself,” of the Greek thinker is the open sesame to miracle as it is to the higher revelation. As a Christian thinking man, I do not look forward to a specific vision of the Lord upon the earth; such an idea is incongruous with the whole training of our modern school of thought. I cannot and I do not wish to en-<... continues on page 11-291 >