CHAPTER III. EFFECTS OF RECENT SCIENTIFIC CONCEPTIONS ON PHILOSOPHY. HOWEVER earnestly we may contend for such a notion of Philosophy as shall keep up the tradition of it as something more than Science, yet the perpetual liability of Philosophy to modifications at the hands of Science is a fact obvious to all. Not a new scientific discovery can be made, not a new scientific conception can get abroad, but it exercises a disturbing influence on the previous system of thought, antiquating something, disintegrating something, compelling some re-adjustment of the parts to each other, some trepidation of the axis of the whole. Sometimes the action is almost revolutionary. What a derangement in men's ideas about everything whatsoever, what a compulsion to new modes of thinking and to new habits of speech, must have been caused by the propagation of the Copernican Astronomy! What a wrench to all one's habits of thought, to be taught that the little ball which carries us rotates on itself, and is one of a small company of celestial bodies that perform their periodical wanderings round the sun, in lieu of the older astronomical faith, according to which the Earth was fixed in the centre, and the limitless azure with its fires was one vast spectacular sphere composed of ten successive and independent spherical transparencies, made to wheel round the Earth diurnally for her solitary pleasure! Man's thoughts, even about himself and his destinies, could not but be changed in some respects by this compulsion of his imagination to a totally new way of fancying physical immensity and our Earth's share in its proceedings. True, the great spiritualities and moralities that the human race held within it, and that constituted a millionfold more truly the real substance of its life than all its accompanying theories and imaginations of things physical-these survived intact and uninterrupted. We read the old poets now, the old historians, the old moralists, with no acquired sense that they, or their themes, or their teachings at the deepest, are appreciably removed from us because of their pre-Copernicanism. It hardly occurs to us to remember that they were pre-Copernicans. What does it matter, in respect of the power over our hearts and spirits as we read, what astronomical system we may fancy we detect in the Book of Job? And yet not the less true is it that even the spiritualities and moralities that constitute the essence of philosophy are tremulous to our imaginations of physical nature, and are ever re-adjusting the expressions of themselves to the new conceptions which Science makes imperative. It would be possible to point out in our greatest old poets, including Shakespeare, not only pervading peculiarities of phraseology, but even fashions of speculative thought, which might be debited to their pre-Copernicanism.* And so throughout * Although Copernicus died in 1543, it was not till the end of the seventeenth century that Copernicanism was the established belief even the whole history, and especially the recent history, of Philosophy. It is not every day, indeed, nor every century, that there occurs such a vast compulsory shifting of the very axis of men's conceptions of the physical universe as that which our ancestors had so reluctantly to submit to only a century or two ago. But every generation, every year, brings with it a quantum of new scientific conceptions, new scientific truths. They creep in upon us on all sides. Is Philosophy to stand in the midst of them haughtily and superciliously, taking no notice? She cannot do so and live. Whether she knows it or not, these are her appointed food. She must eat them up or perish. They do not constitute her vitality, any more than the food that men eat constitutes the life that is in them; but, just as men, in order merely to continue alive, must refresh themselves continually with food, so Philosophy, that she may not fall down emaciated and dead by the wayside, must not only not hold aloof from Science, but must regard what Science brings as her daily and delicious nutriment. Whatever definition of Philosophy we adopt—whether we call it simply and beautifully with Plato in one passage "a meditation of Death," or adopt some of the more laboured definitions that have been given expressly to indicate its relations to Science-it is equally certain that a philosophy that should be out of accord with any ascertained scientific truth or tendency to truth, or that should not in some efficient manner harmonize for the reason all the conceptions of educated European minds. If it was the Roman Inquisition that condemned Galileo, there were probably fewer persons at the time in Britain than in Italy who thought Galileo's opinion right. We are apt now to forget this. and informations of contemporary science, would be of no use for educated intelligences, and would exist as a refuge for others only by sufferance. Shall Philosophy pretend to regulate the human spirit, and not know what is passing within it-to supervise and direct Man's thinkings, and not know what they are? We can all admire, indeed, and understand the feeling of Wordsworth when he says:— "Great God! I'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn, Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn." But We can feel with the poet in this passionate outburst. need we be suckled in an "outworn creed" to hope for these glorious glimpses? Those mysterious sights and sounds that took the lightsome Greek with such quick awe and ravishment by the shore of some ancient bit of blue Ægean bay, rise they not yet, are they not to be heard yet, the same Proteus, the same horn of Triton, by the shore of a greyer and grander ocean? And what though the glimpses should not all be pleasant? What though they should make some of us, for a moment or so, consciously more forlorn! Is there not good in such sorrow itself? In no age so conspicuously as in our own has there been a crowding in of new scientific conceptions of all kinds to exercise a perturbing influence on Speculative Philosophy. They have come in almost too fast for Philosophy's powers of reception. She has visibly reeled amid their shocks, and has not yet recovered her equilibrium. Within those years alone which we are engaged in surveying there have been developments of native British science, not to speak of influxes of scientific ideas, hints, and probabilities from without, in the midst of which British Philosophy has looked about her scared and bewildered, and has felt that some of her oldest statements about herself, and some of the most important terms in her vocabulary, require reexplication. I think that I can even mark the precise year 1848 as a point whence the appearance of an unusual amount of unsteadying thought may be dated-as if, in that year of simultaneous European irritability, not only were the nations agitated politically, as the newspapers saw, but conceptions of an intellectual kind that had long been forming themselves underneath in the depths were shaken up to the surface in scientific journals and books. There are several vital points on which no one can now think, even were he receiving five thousand a year for doing so, as he might very creditably have thought not very long ago. There have been of late, in consequence of revelations by scientific research in this direction and in that, some most notable enlargements of our views of physical nature and of history-enlargements even to the breaking down of what had formerly been a wall in the minds of most, and the substitution on that side of a sheer vista of open space. But there is no need for dating from 1848, or from any other year in particular. In all that we have recently seen of the kind there has been but the prolongation of an action from Science upon Philosophy that had been going on for a considerable time before 1848. It had been going on before British Philosophy had assumed what I will now venture to call its penultimate H |