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{{Style P-HPB SB. Title continued |A Voice from Laodicea|10-339}} | {{Style P-HPB SB. Title continued |A Voice from Laodicea|10-339}} | ||
... | {{Style P-No indent|here a foundation for the legend of the great sea-monster from whom Perseus rescued Andromeda, for the Dragons whom Siegfried slew, and for Midgard, the sea snake of Scandinavian mythology. There could even be some found to maintain that when a few hiatuses in the manuscript had been filled up by skilful conjecture, the description of Behemoth, in the book of Job, could apply to none other than to the long lost Ichthyosaurus. I am sure that the Ichthyosaurists would have the best of the argument, and I am equally sure that, with all the weapons in the armoury of logic, they would fail to convince an incredulous world. And if the sceptics were shown to be right, their disbelief would be vaunted as due to a scientific instinct for the naturally possible and impossible; and if they should be wrong, it would be held up to reprobation as a mischievous and unscientific preconception. And yet the method would be the same, and by it, and not according to the issue, should they be judged worthy of praise or blame.}} | ||
{{Style S-HPB SB. Continues on|10-341}} | <center>{{Style S-Small capitals|scientific men versus logic.}}</center> | ||
Now this method is consciously adopted by many men of science in dealing with the allegations of Spiritualists, as we see from explicit statements in their writings. Professor Tyndall, in his well-known essay, “Science and the Spirits,” writes as follows:—Belief in Spiritualism “is a state perfectly compatible with extreme intellectual subtlety, and a capacity for devising hypotheses which only require the hardihood engendered by strong conviction to render them impregnable. The logical feebleness of science is not sufficiently borne in mind. It keeps down the weed of superstition, not by logic, but by slowly rendering the mental soil unfit for its cultivation.” And the same view is expressed in far stronger language by Dr. Beard, of New York, in an article entitled “Psychology and Spiritism,” in the ''North American Review'', for July, 1879. “Other factors,” he writes, “being the same, a commonplace man, without logic, or imagination, or education, or aspiration, would be less likely to be conquered by a delusion, than a successful lawyer, or judge, or scientific discoverer; for logical, well-trained, truth loving minds, the only security against Spiritism is in hiding or running away. If they venture a fair and open attack, and are true to their convictions and the necessities of logic, they must unconditionally surrender. If Sir Isaac Newton were alive to-day, he would not unlikely be a convert to Spiritism: the amount of human testimony in favour of Spiritualistic claims is a millionfold greater than that in favour of the theory of gravity. The late Judge Edmonds used to say that he sifted the evidence of spirit manifestations, just as he sifted the evidence in cases of law; and in accordance with the same principles, and from the standard of the law books and the universities his position was impregnable.” | |||
Truly, what he intended to curse, like Balaam, he has blessed altogether. For this is the utterance of a man who ascribes the whole of the phenomena to our old friends—expectancy, delusion, and the fallacy of non-observation. “My friends,” said Chadband, “what is truth? Is it a lie?” and Dr. Beard, I apprehend, would answer in the affirmative. The gauntlet is here boldly thrown down. Both these champions of modern science do deliberately, what the greater part of the civilized world do unconsciously: they decide against the claims of Spiritualism in defiance of the rules of formal logic. | |||
{{Style P-Poem|poem= “It aint by principles nor men | |||
their prudent course is steadied,”}} | |||
but in the words of Dr. Beard, “by the inspiration of the scientific sense.” It is this scientific sense which presumably withholds us from belief. What it is we shall best be enabled to judge if we consider the genesis of the kindred and better known moral and geometrical senses, as they are called. | |||
<center>{{Style S-Small capitals|the origin of the moral law.}}</center> | |||
Why is it that most civilised persons are as little likely to commit wilful murder, or to steal their neighbour’s goods, as they are to assert that two straight lines are capable of enclosing a space, or that two and two make five. In other words, what is it that makes men act according to the moral law, just as they think according to the mathematical law? Two answers have been given to this question. Some have maintained that there is a native, heaven-born instinct in man, independent of all experience, which compels him to do right. They have compared this instinct to the instinct for food, and have argued that as we eat from a craving for food, so we do right, because we have a hunger after righteousness, and that in neither case do we stop to consider that it will be to our advantage to do so. Others assert that we do right, and refrain from wrong, because we have found such, on the whole, to be the course most conducive to our physical welfare. They represent a man as arguing with himself: “If I punch his head now, he’ll punch mine next time, and two sound heads are better than two sore ones;” so he thinks better of it, and puts his hands in his pockets. And they shew that, as we should certainly act morally, whether we had a moral sense or not, because it is to our interest to do so, it is as absurd to invent such a moral sense to account for what can be so readily explained without it, as it would be to suppose that we had a wild-beast-avoiding sense, to teach us to run away from a grizzly bear. We act morally, say they, just as we run away from danger, because we have proved the contrary course to be productive of unpleasantness. | |||
Either answer fails to satisfy, because either is incomplete. The true solution of the problem is found by joining them. We act morally from instinct, but that instinct is itself derived from experience—the experience not of ourselves only, but of the whole race of man. Our cave-haunting ancestor having learnt by sharp penalties to refrain from direct violence to his fellow-men, transmits that experience as an unconscious instinct to his children, just as a retriever will transmit to her puppies the faculties she has acquired. The first men had to learn to live at peace with each other: we, thanks to them, feel but little inclination to live otherwise. Habit is not second nature—it is nature. What is natural for us to do, is simply what, for thousands of years, our ancestors have been in the habit of doing. Our morality has grown side by side with our physical conformation, and it has also developed in like manner with it; for that morality has sanctioned in times past such strange marriage customs, such wild justice, such bloody sacrificial rites, as we shudder even to record. And what now seems a God-given instinct for good is the hard-won teaching of experience, handed down from unheeding generation to generation as a legacy, more precious than silver, more durable than lands, which age cannot impair, nor violence take away. | |||
In like manner there are those who assert of the geometrical sense, that we believe that two straight lines cannot enclose a space, because we cannot believe otherwise, because our minds were originally so formed as to admit of no other conception. There are others who maintain that we believe such axioms only {{Style S-HPB SB. Continues on|10-341}} | |||