A Candid Examination of Theism. George John Romanes
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or supposed necessity of their own subjective thought. I say "real or supposed," because, in its bearing upon rational argument, it is of no consequence of which character the alleged necessity actually is. Even if the necessity of thought be real, all that the fact entitles the thinker to affirm is, that it is impossible for him, by any effort of thinking, to rid himself of the persuasion that God exists; he is not entitled to affirm that this persuasion is necessarily bound up with the constitution of the human mind. Or, as Mill puts it, "One man cannot by proclaiming with ever so much confidence that he perceives an object, convince other people that they see it too. … When no claim is set up to any peculiar gift, but we are told that all of us are as capable of seeing what he sees, feeling what he feels, nay, that we actually do so, and when the utmost effort of which we are capable fails to make us aware of what we are told, we perceive this supposed universal faculty of intuition is but
'The Dark Lantern of the Spirit
Which none see by but those who bear it.'"
It is thus, I think, abundantly certain that the present argument must, from its very nature, be powerless as an argument to anyone save its assertor; as a matter of fact, the alleged necessity of thought is not universal; it is peculiar to those who employ the argument.
And now, it is but just to go one step further and to question whether the alleged necessity of thought is, in any case and properly speaking, a real necessity. Unless those who advance the present argument are the victims of some mental aberration, it is overwhelmingly improbable that their minds should differ in a fundamental and important attribute from the minds of the vast majority of their species. Or, to continue the above quotation, "They may fairly be asked to consider, whether it is not more likely that they are mistaken as to the origin of an impression in their minds, than that others are ignorant of the very existence of an impression in theirs." No doubt it is true that education and habits of thought may so stereotype the intellectual faculties, that at last what is conceivable to one man or generation may not be so to another;[2] but to adduce this consideration in this place would clearly be but to destroy the argument from the intuitive necessity of believing in a God.
Lastly, although superfluous, it may be well to point out that even if the impossibility of conceiving the negation of God were an universal law of human mind—which it certainly is not—the fact of his existence could not be thus proved. Doubtless it would be felt to be much more probable than it now is—as probable, for instance, if not more probable, than is the existence of an external world;—but still it would not be necessarily true.
§ 7. The argument from the general consent of mankind is so clearly fallacious, both as to facts and principles, that I shall pass it over and proceed at once to the last of the untenable arguments—that, namely, from the existence of a First Cause. And here I should like to express myself indebted to Mr. Mill for the following ideas:—"The cause of every change is a prior change; and such it cannot but be; for if there were no new antecedent, there would be no new consequent. If the state of facts which brings the phenomenon into existence, had existed always or for an indefinite duration, the effect also would have existed always or been produced an indefinite time ago. It is thus a necessary part of the fact of causation, within the sphere of experience, that the causes as well as the effects had a beginning in time, and were themselves caused. It would seem, therefore, that our experience, instead of furnishing an argument for a first cause, is repugnant to it; and that the very essence of causation, as it exists within the limits of our knowledge, is incompatible with a First Cause."
The rest of Mr. Mill's remarks upon the First Cause argument are tolerably obvious, and had occurred to me before the publication of his essay. I shall, however, adhere to his order of presenting them.
"But it is necessary to look more particularly into this matter, and analyse more closely the nature of the causes of which mankind have experience. For if it should turn out that though all causes have a beginning, there is in all of them a permanent element which had no beginning, this permanent element may with some justice be termed a first or universal cause, inasmuch as though not sufficient of itself to cause anything, it enters as a con-cause into all causation."
He then shows that the doctrine of the Conservation of Energy supplies us with such a datum, and thus the conclusion easily follows—"It would seem, then, that the only sense in which experience supports, in any shape, the doctrine of a First Cause, viz., as the primæval and universal element of all causes, the First Cause can be no other than Force."
Still, however, it may be maintained that "all force is will-force." But "if there be any truth in the doctrine of Conservation of Force, … this doctrine does not change from true to false when it reaches the field of voluntary agency. The will does not, any more than other agencies, create Force: granting that it originates motion, it has no means of doing so but by converting into that particular manifestation, a portion of Force which already existed in other forms. It is known that the source from which this portion of Force is derived, is chiefly, or entirely, the force evolved in the processes of chemical composition and decomposition which constitute the body of nutrition: the force so liberated becomes a fund upon which every muscular and every nervous action, as of a train of thought, is a draft. It is in this sense only that, according to the best lights of science, volition is an originating cause. Volition, therefore, does not answer to the idea of a First Cause; since Force must, in every instance, be assumed as prior to it; and there is not the slightest colour, derived from experience, for supposing Force itself to have been created by a volition. As far as anything can be concluded from human experience, Force has all the attributes of a thing eternal and uncreated. …
"All that can be affirmed (even) by the strongest assertion of the Freedom of the Will, is that volitions are themselves uncaused and are, therefore, alone fit to be the first or universal cause. But, even assuming volitions to be uncaused, the properties of matter, so far as experience discloses, are uncaused also, and have the advantage over any particular volition, in being, so far as experience can show, eternal. Theism, therefore, in so far as it rests on the necessity of a First Cause, has no support from experience."
Such may be taken as a sufficient refutation of the argument that, as human volition is apparently a cause in nature, and moreover constitutes the basis of our conception of all causation, therefore all causation is probably volitional in character. But as this is a favourite argument with some theists, I shall introduce another quotation from Mr. Mill, which is taken from a different work.
"Volitions are not known to produce anything directly except nervous action, for the will influences even the muscles only through the nerves. Though it were granted, then, that every phenomenon has an efficient and not merely a phenomenal cause, and that volition, in the case of the particular phenomena which are known to be produced by it, is that cause; are we therefore to say with these writers that since we know of no other efficient cause, and ought not to assume one without evidence, there is no other, and volition is the direct cause of all phenomena? A more outrageous stretch of inference could hardly be made. Because among the infinite variety of the phenomena of nature there is one, namely, a particular mode of action of certain nerves which has for its cause and, as we are now supposing, for its efficient cause, a state of our mind; and because this is the only efficient cause of "which we are conscious, being the only one of which, in the nature of the case, we can be conscious, since it is the only one which exists within ourselves; does this justify us in concluding that all other phenomena must have the same kind of efficient cause with that one eminently special, narrow, and peculiarly human or animal phenomenon?" It is then shown that a logical parallel to this mode of inference is that of generalising from the one known instance of the earth being inhabited, to the conclusion that "every heavenly body without exception, sun, planet, satellite, comet, fixed star, or nebula, is inhabited, and must be so from the inherent constitution of things." After which the passage continues, "It is true there are cases in which, with acknowledged propriety, we generalise from a single instance to a multitude of instances. But they must be instances which resemble the one known instance, and not such as have no circumstance in common with it except that of being instances. … But the supporters of the volition theory ask us to infer that volition causes everything, for no other reason except that it causes one particular thing; although that one