New Version!

      CHAPTER II — THE COPERNICAN REVOLUTION
      'Copernicus has the honour, perhaps scarcely deserved, of giving his name to the Copernican system. In the year 1500 he was a mathematical professor in Rome; three years later he returned to Poland, where he was employed in reforming the currency and combating the Teutonic Knights. His spare time in 1507 to 1530 was spent composing 'On the Revolutions of Heavenly Bodies' [sic; correct title surely 'De Revolutionibus'] published in 1543.'
      'Kepler's two laws were published in 1609 and the third one .. in 1619'
      'Father Clavius.. satellites of Jupiter.. to see.. men had to make an instrument..'
      Galileo's 'Dialogues on Two Systems of the World' completed 1630, published in 1632
      'Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Henry V.. take it for granted.. comets are heralds of disaster..'
      'Pope Calixtus III, Pope from 1455-1458.. greatly perturbed by the Turkish capture of Constantinople.. connected this disaster with the appearance of a great comet.. addition to the litany.. 'from the Turk and the comet, good Lord deliver us'
      'Cranmer wrote to Henry VIII in 1532 about a comet.. 'what strange things these tokens do signify'. .. In 1680 there was an unusually alarming one.. some Scottish divine said they were 'judgments for sins'
      'In 1673 father Augustine de Angelis rector of the Clementine College at Rome published a book on meteorology, saying that comets are not heavenly bodies.. they must originate in the earth's atmosphere.. everything heavenly is eternal and incorruptible, he thought..'
      '.. diary of Ralph Thoresby FRS in the year 1682.. when Halley's comet was making the appearance which enabled its orbit to be calculated.. fit us for whatever changes it may portend.. not ignorant that such meteors proceed from natural causes yet are they also frequently the presages of natural calamities..' [a British compromise, comments Russell]
      .. the final proof that comets were due to natural causes was due to three men.. a Swiss named Doerfel, showed the orbit of 1680 was approximately a parabola. Halley showed the 1682 comet, which aroused terror in 1066 and at Constantinople had a very elongated orbit .. period of 76 years. Newton's Principia in 1687 showed the laws of gravitation accounted for all this.
      '.. for Deists, everything without exception was regulated by natural law. Pope's Essay on Man: '.. general laws, the exceptions few'.. but when the demands of orthodoxy are forgotten, the exceptions disappear. 'From nature's chain whatever link you strike/ Tenth or ten thousandth breaks the chain alike.' The reign of law, as conceived in the time of Queen Anne, is associated with political stability and belief that the era of revolutions is past.'
      '.. 1755.. book by Kant.. called Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, or Investigation of the Constitution and Mechanical Origin of the Whole Structure of the Universe, treated according to Newtonian Principles .. very remarkable work.. in some respects anticipates the results of modern astronomy.. not well received.. Kant was only 31.. hadn't a particular reputation'
      '.. Laplace's nebular hypothesis 1796: Exposition du Systeme du Monde.. also wrote 'Celestial Mechanics


      CHAPTER III — EVOLUTION
THE sciences have developed in an order the reverse of what might have been expected. What was most remote from ourselves was first brought under the domain of law, and then, gradually, what was nearer: first the heavens, next the earth, then animal and vegetable life, then the human body, and last of all (as yet very imperfectly) the human mind. In this there is nothing inexplicable. Familiarity with detail makes it difficult to see broad patterns; the outlines of Roman roads are more easily traced from aeroplanes than from the ground. A man's friends know what he is likely to do better than he does himself; at a certain turn in the conversation, they foresee the dreadful inevitability of one of his favourite anecdotes, whereas to himself he seems to be acting on a spontaneous impulse by no means subject to law. The detailed acquaintance derived from intimate experience is not the easiest {49} source for the generalized kind of knowledge which science seeks. Not only the discovery of simple natural laws, but also the doctrine of the gradual development of the world as we know it, began in astronomy; but the latter, unlike the former, found its most notable application in connection with the growth of life on our planet. The doctrine of evolution, which we are now to consider, though it began in astronomy, was of more scientific importance in geology and biology, where, also, it had to contend with more obstinate theological prejudices than were brought to bear against astronomy after the victory of the Copernican system.
      It is difficult for a modern mind to realize how recent is the belief in development and gradual growth; it is, in fact, almost wholly subsequent to Newton. In the orthodox view, the world had been created in six days, and had contained, from that time onwards, all the heavenly bodies that it now contains, and all kinds of animals and plants, as well as some others that had perished in the Deluge. So far from progress being a law of the universe, as most theologians now contend, there had been, so all Christians believed, a terrible combination of disasters at the time of the Fall. God had told Adam {50} and Eve not to eat of the fruit of a certain tree, but they nevertheless did eat of it. In consequence, God decreed that they and all their posterity should be mortal, and that after death even their remotest descendants should suffer eternal punishment in hell, with certain exceptions, selected on a plan as to which there was much controversy. From the moment of Adam's sin, animals took to preying on each other, thistles and thorns grew up, there began to be a difference of seasons, and the very ground was cursed 80 that it no longer yielded sustenance to Man except as the result of painful labour. Presently men grew so wicked that all were drowned in the Flood except Noah and his three sons and their wives. It was not thought that man had grown better since, but the Lord had promised not to send another universal deluge, and now contented Himself with occasional eruptions and earthquakes.
      All this, it must be understood, was held to be literal historical matter of fact, either actually related in the Bible, or deducible from what was related. The date of the creation of the world can be inferred from the genealogies in Genesis, which tell how old each patriarch was when his oldest son {51} was born. Some margin of controversy was permissible, owing to certain ambiguities and to differences between the Septuagint and the Hebrew text; but in the end Protestant Christendom generally accepted the date 4004 B.C., fixed by Archbishop Usher. Dr. Lightfoot, Vice.Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, who accepted this date for the Creation, thought that a careful study of Genesis made even greater precision possible; the creation of man, according to him, took place at 9 a.m. on October 23. This, however, has never been an article of faith; you might believe, without risk of heresy, that Adam and Eve came into existence on October 16 or October 30, provided your reasons were derived from Genesis. The day of the week was, of course, known to have been Friday, since God rested on the Saturday.
      Within this narrow framework science was expected to confine itself, and those who thought 6,000 years too short a time for the existence of the visible universe were held up to obloquy. They could no longer be burned or imprisoned, but theologians did everything possible to make their lives unhappy and to prevent the spread of their doctrines.
      Newton's work . the Copernican system {52} having been accepted . did nothing to shake religious orthodoxy. He was himself a deeply religious man, and a believer in the verbal inspiration of the Bible. His universe was not one in which there was development, and might well, for aught that appeared in his teaching, have been created all of a piece. To account for the tangential velocities of the planets, which prevent them from falling into the sun, he supposed that, initially, they had been hurled by the hand of God; what had happened since was accounted for by the law of gravitation. It is true that, in a private letter to Bentley, Newton suggested a way in which the solar system could have developed from a primitive nearly uniform distribution of matter; but so far as his public and official utterances were concerned, he seemed to favour a sudden creation of the sun and planets as we know them, and to leave no room for cosmic evolution.
      From Newton the eighteenth century acquired its peculiar brand of piety, in which God appeared essentially as the Lawgiver, who first created the world, and then made rules which determined all further events without any need of His special intervention. The orthodox allowed {53} exceptions: there were the miracles connected with religion. But for the deists everything, without exception, was regulated by natural law. Both views are to be found in Pope's Essay on Man. Thus in one passage he says:

The first Almighty Cause Acts not by partial, but by gen'ral laws; The exceptions few.

But when the demands of orthodoxy are forgotten, the exceptions disappear:

From Nature's chain whatever link you strike,
Tenth, or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike.
And if each system in gradation roll
Alike essential to th' amazing whole,
The least confusion not in one, but all
That system only, but the whole must fall.
Let earth unbalanc'd from her orbit fly,
Planets and suns run lawless through the sky;
Let ruling angels from their spheres be hurl'd,
Being on being wreck'd, and world on world;
Heav'n's whole foundations to their centre nod,
And Nature tremble, to the throne of God!

The Reign of Law, as conceived in the time of Queen Anne, is associated with political stability and the belief that the era of revolutions is past. When men again began to desire change, their conception of the workings of natural law became less static. {54}
      The first serious attempt to construct a scientific theory of the growth of the sun, the planets, and the stars, was made by Kant in 1755, in a book called General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, or Investigation of the Constitution and Mechanical Origin of the Whole Structure of the Universe, treated according to Newtonian Principles. This is a very remarkable work, which, in certain respects, anticipates the results of modern astronomy. It begins by setting forth that all the stars visible to the naked eye belong to one system, that of the Milky Way or Galaxy. All these stars lie nearly in one plane, and Kant suggests that they have a unity not unlike that of the solar system. With remarkable imaginative insight, he regards the nebulae as other similar but immensely remote groups of stars . a view which is now generally held. He has a theory . in part mathematically untenable, but broadly on the lines of subsequent investigations . that the nebulae, the galaxy, the stars, planets, and satellites, all resulted from condensation of an originally diffuse matter about regions in which it happened to have somewhat more density than elsewhere. He believes that the material universe is infinite, which, he says, is the {55} only view worthy of the infinity of the Creator. He thinks that there is a gradual transition from chaos to organization, beginning at the centre of gravity of the universe, and slowly spreading outwards from this point towards the remotest regions . a process involving infinite space and requiring infinite time.
      What makes this work remarkable is, on the one hand, the conception of the material universe as a whole, in which the galaxy and the nebulae are constituent units, and on the other hand the notion of gradual development from an almost undifferentiated primal distribution of matter throughout space. This is the first serious attempt to substitute evolution for sudden creation, and it is interesting to observe that this new outlook appeared first in a theory of the heavens, not in connection with life on the earth.
      For various reasons, however, Kant's work attracted little attention. He was still a young man (thirty-one years old) at the time of its publication, and had as yet won no great reputation. He was a philosopher, not a professional mathematician or physicist, and his lack of competence in dynamics appeared in his supposing that a self-contained system {56} could acquire a spin which it did not originally possess. Moreover, parts of his theory were purely fantastic . for example, he thought that the inhabitants of the planets must be better the farther they were from the sun, a view which is to be commended for its modesty as regards the human race, but is not supported by any considerations known to science. For these reasons, Kant's work remained almost unnoticed until a similar but more professionally competent theory had been developed by Laplace.
      Laplace's famous nebular hypothesis was first published in 1796, in his Exposition du Système du Monde, apparently in complete ignorance that it had been in a considerable degree anticipated by Kant. It was, for him, never more than an hypothesis, put forward in a note, "with the mistrust which must be inspired by everything that is not a result of observation or calculation"; but, though now superseded, it dominated speculation for a century. He held that what is now the system of the sun and the planets was originally a single diffuse nebula; that gradually it contracted, and in consequence rotated faster; that centrifugal force caused lumps to fly off, which became planets; and that the same process, repeated, gave rise to {57} the satellites of the planets. Living, as he did, in the epoch of the French Revolution, he was a complete freethinker, and rejected the Creation altogether. When Napoleon, who conceived that belief in a heavenly Monarch encouraged respect for monarchs on earth, observed that Laplace's great work on Celestial Mechanics contained no mention of God, the astronomer replied: "Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis." The theological world was, of course, pained, but its dislike of Laplace was merged in its horror of the atheism and general wickedness of revolutionary France. And in any case battles with astronomers had been found to be rash.
      The development of a scientific outlook in geology was, in one respect, in a contrary direction to that in astronomy. In astronomy the belief that the heavenly bodies were unchanging gave place to the theory of their gradual development; but in geology belief in a former period of rapid and catastrophic changes was succeeded, as the science advanced, by a belief that change had always been very slow. At first, it was thought that the whole history of the earth had to be compressed into about six thousand years. In view of the evidence afforded by sedimentary rocks and deposits of lava and so on, it was necessary, in order to fit into the time scale, to suppose that catastrophic occurrences had formerly been common. How far geology lagged behind astronomy in scientific development may be seen by considering its condition in the time of Newton. Thus Woodward, in 1695, explained the sedimentary rocks by supposing the whole terrestrial globe to have been taken to pieces and dissolved at the flood, and the strata to have settled down from this promiscuous mass as any earthy sediment from a fluid." He taught, as Lyell says, [is this Russell's way of saying BR is quoting??] that "the entire mass of fossiliferous strata contained in the earth's crust had been deposited in a few months." Fourteen years earlier (1681), the Rev. Thomas Burnet, who subsequently became Master of Charterhouse, had published his Sacred Theory of the Earth; containing an Account of the Original of the Earth, and of all the general Changes which it hath already undergone, or is to undergo, till the Consummation of all Things. He believed that the Equator had been in the plane of the ecliptic until the flood, but had then been pushed into its present oblique position. (The more theologically correct view is that of Milton, that {59} this change took place at the time of the Fall.) He thought that the sun's heat had cracked the earth, and allowed the waters to emerge from a subterranean reservoir, thereby causing the flood. A second period of chaos, he maintained, was to usher in the millennium. His views should, however, be received with caution, as he did not believe in eternal punishment. More dreadful still, he regarded the story of the Fall as an allegory, so that, as the Encyclopaedia Britannica informs us, "the king was obliged to remove him from the office of clerk of the closet." His error in regard to the Equator, and his other errors also, were avoided by Whiston, whose book, published in 1696, was called: A New Theory of the Earth; wherein the Creation of the World in Six Days, the Universal Deluge, and the General Conflagration, as laid down in the Holy Scriptures, are shown to be perfectly agreeable to Reason and Philosophy. This book was partly inspired by the comet of 1680, which led him to think that a comet might have caused the flood. In one point his orthodoxy was open to question: he thought the Six Days of Creation were longer than ordinary days.
      It must not be supposed that Woodward, Burnet, and Whiston were inferior to the {60} other geologists of their day. On the contrary, they were the best geologists of their time, and Whiston, at least, was highly praised by Locke.
      The eighteenth century was much occupied by a controversy between two schools, the Neptunists, who attributed almost everything to water, and the Vulcanists, who equally over-emphasized volcanoes and earthquakes. The former sect, who were perpetually collecting evidences of the Deluge, laid great stress on the marine fossils found at great altitudes on mountains. They were the more orthodox, and therefore the enemies of orthodoxy tried to deny that fossils were genuine remains of animals. Voltaire was especially sceptical; and when he could no longer deny their organic origin, he maintained that they had been dropped by pilgrims. In this instance, dogmatic free thought showed itself even more unscientific than orthodoxy.
      Buffon, the great naturalist, in his Natural History (1749), maintained fourteen propositions which were condemned by the Sorbonne theological faculty in Paris as "reprehensible, and contrary to the creed of the Church." [Note: Russell doesn't actually say what 'condemned by the Sorbonne' means; was it legally binding in some way? Were there penalties?] One of these, which concerned geology, affirmed: "That the present mountains and {61} valleys of the earth are due to secondary causes, and that the same causes will in time destroy all the continents, hills, and valleys, and reproduce others like them." Here "secondary causes" means all causes other than God's creative fiat; thus in 1749 it was necessary to orthodoxy to believe that the world was created with the same hills and valleys, and the same distribution of land and sea, as we find now, except where, as in the case of the Dead Sea, a change had been wrought by miracle.
      Buffon did not see fit to enter into a controversy with the Sorbonne. He recanted, and was obliged to publish the following confession: "I declare that I had no intention to contradict the text of Scripture; that I believe most firmly all therein related about the creation, both as to order of time and matter of fact; I abandon everything in my book respecting the formation of the earth, and generally, all that may be contrary to the narration of Moses." It is evident that, outside the domain of astronomy, the theologians had not learned much wisdom from their conflict with Galileo.
      The first writer to set forth a modern scientific view in geology was Hutton, whose Theory of the Earth was first published in {62} 1788, and in an enlarged form in 1795. He assumed that the changes which have occurred in past times on the surface of the earth were due to causes which are now in operation, and which there is no reason to suppose more active in the past than in the present. Although this was in the main a sound maxim, Hutton carried it too far in some respects, and not far enough in others. He attributed the disappearance of continents to denudation, with consequent deposition of sediment on the bottom of the sea; but the rise of new continents he attributed to violent convulsions. He did not sufficiently recognize the sudden sinking of land or its gradual rise. But all scientific geologists since his day have accepted his general method of interpreting the past by means of the present, and attributing the vast changes which have occurred during geological time to those very causes which are now observed to be slowly altering coastlines, increasing or diminishing the height of mountains, and raising or lowering the ocean-bed.
      It was chiefly the Mosaic chronology that had kept men from adopting this point of view at an earlier date, and the upholders of Genesis made vehement onslaughts on Hutton and his disciple Playfair. "The {63} party feeling," says Lyell, [Principles of Geology, eleventh edition, Vol. I, p. 78.] "excited against the Huttonian doctrines, and the open disregard of candour and temper in the controversy will hardly be credited by the reader, unless he recalls to his recollection that the mind of the English public was at that time in a state of feverish excitement. A class of writers in France had been labouring industriously for many years, to diminish the influence of the clergy, by sapping the foundations of the Christian faith; and their success, and the consequences of the Revolution, had alarmed the most resolute minds, while the imagination of the more timid was continually haunted by dread of innovation, as by the phantom of some fearful dream." By 1795, almost all the well-to-do in England saw in every un-Biblical doctrine an attack upon property and a threat of the guillotine. For many years, British opinion was far less liberal than before the Revolution.
      The further progress of geology is entangled with that of biology, owing to the multitude of extinct forms of life of which fossils preserve a record. In so far as the antiquity of the world was concerned, geology and theology could come to terms by agreeing that the six "days" were to be interpreted {64} as six "ages." But on the subject of animal life theology had a number of very definite views, which it was found increasingly difficult to reconcile with science. No animals preyed on each other until after the Fall all animals now existing belong to species represented in the ark; [Footnote: This opinion was not without its difficulties. St. Augustine confessed himself ignorant as to God's reason for creating flies. Luther, more boldly, decided that they had been created by the Devil, to distract him when writing good books. The latter opinion is certainly plausible.] the species now extinct were, with few exceptions, drowned in the flood. Species are immutable, and each has resulted from a separate act of creation. To question any of these propositions was to incur the hostility of theologians.
      Difficulties had begun with the discovery of the New World America was a long way from Mount Ararat, yet it contained many animals not to be found at intermediate places. How came these animals to have travelled so far, and to have left none of their kind on the way? Some thought that sailors had brought them, but this hypothesis had its difficulties, which puzzled that pious Jesuit, Joseph Acosta, who had devoted himself to the conversion of the Indians, but was having difficulty in preserving his own {65} faith. He discusses the matter with much sound sense in his Natural and Moral History of the Indies (1590), where he says "Who can imagine that in so long a voyage men woulde take the paines to carrie Foxes to Peru, especially the kind they call 'Acias,' which is the filthiest I have seene? Who woulde likewise say that they have carried Tygers and Lyons? Truly it were a thing worthy the laughing at to thinke so. It was sufficient, yea, very much, for men driven against their willes by tempest, in so long and unknowne a voyage, to escape with their owne lives, without busying themselves to carrie Woolves and Foxes, and to nourish them at sea." [Footnote: Quoted from White's Warfare of Science with Theology.] Such problems led the theologians to believe that the filthy Acias, and other such awkward beasts, had been spontaneously generated out of slime by the action of the sun; but unfortunately there is no hint of this in the account of the ark. But there seemed no help for it. How could the sloths, for instance, which are as unhurried in their movements as their name implies, have all reached South America if they started from Mount Ararat?
      Another trouble arose from the mere {66} number of the species that came to be known with the progress of zoology. The numbers now known amount to millions, and if two of each of these kinds were in the ark, it was felt that it must have been rather overcrowded. Moreover, Adam had named them ail, which seemed a severe effort at the very beginning of his life. The discovery of Australia raised fresh difficulties. Why had all the kangaroos leapt across the Torres Straits, and not one single pair remained behind? By this time, the progress of biology had made it very difficult to suppose that sun and slime had brought forth a pair of complete kangaroos, yet some such theory was more necessary than ever.
      Difficulties of this kind exercised the mind of religious men all through the nineteenth century. Read, for example, a little book called The Theology of Geologists, as exemplified in the cases of Hugh Miller, and others by William Gillespie, author of The Necessary Existence of God, etc., etc. This book by a Scottish theologian was published in 1859, the year in which Darwin's Origin of Species appeared. It speaks of "the dread postulates of the geologists," and accuses them of a "head and front of offending fearful to contemplate." The main problem with which {67} the author is concerned is one raised by Hugh Miller's Testimony of the Rocks, in which it is maintained that "untold ages ere man had sinned or suffered, the animal creation exhibited exactly its present state of war." Hugh Miller describes vividly, and with a certain horror, the instruments of death and even torture employed against each other by species of animals which were extinct before man existed. Himself deeply religious, he finds it difficult to understand why the Creator should inflict such pain upon creatures incapable of sin. Mr. Gillespie, in face of the evidence, boldly reaffirms the orthodox view, that the lower animals suffer and die because of man's sin, and quotes the text, "By man came death," to prove that no animals died until Adam had eaten the apple. [Footnote: This was the view of all sects. Thus Wesley says that, before the Fall, "the spider was as harmless as the fly, and did not lie in wait for blood."] [Extraordinary stuff! - RW]
      After quoting Hugh Miller's descriptions of warfare among extinct animals, he exclaims that a benevolent Creator could not have created such monsters. So far, we may agree with him. But his further arguments are curious. It seems as though he were denying the evidence of geology, but in the end his courage fails him. Perhaps {68} there were such monsters, after ail, he says but they were not created directly by God. They were originally innocent creatures led astray by the Devil; or perhaps, like the Gadarene swine, they were actually animal bodies inhabited by the spirits of demons. This would explain why the Bible contains the story of the Gadarene swine, which has been a stumbling.block to many.
      A curious attempt to save orthodoxy in the field of biology was made by Gosse the naturalist, father of Edmund Gosse. He admitted fully all the evidence adduced by geologists in favour of the antiquity of the world, but maintained that, when the Creation took place, everything was constructed as if it had a past history. There is no logical possibility of proving that this theory is untrue. It has been decided by the theologians that Adam and Eve had navels, just as if they had been born in the ordinary way. [Footnote: Perhaps this was the reason why Gosse called his book Omphalos.] Similarly everything else that was created could have been created as if it had grown. The rocks could have been filled with fossils, and have been made just such as they would have become if they had been due to volcanic action or to sedimentary {69} deposits. But if once such possibilities are admitted, there is no reason to place the creation of the world at one point rather than another. We may have all come into existence five minutes ago, provided with ready.made memories, with holes in our socks and hair that needed cutting. But although this is a logical possibility, nobody can believe it; and Gosse found, to his bitter disappointment, that nobody could believe his logically admirable reconciliation of theology with the data of science. The theologians, ignoring him, abandoned much of their previous territory, and proceeded to entrench themselves in what remained.
      The doctrine of the gradual evolution of plants and animals by descent and variation, which came into biology largely through geology, may be divided into three parts. There is first the fact, as certain as a fact about remote ages can hope to be, that the simpler forms of life are the older, and that those with a more complicated structure make their first appearance at a later stage of the record. Second, there is the theory that the later and more highly organized forms did not arise spontaneously, but grew out of the earlier forms through a series of modifications; this is what is specially meant by {70} "evolution" in biology. Third, there is the study, as yet far from complete, of the mechanism of evolution, i.e., of the causes of variation and of the survival of certain types at the expense of others. The general doctrine of evolution is now universally accepted among biologists, though there are still doubts as to its mechanism. The chief historical importance of Darwin lies in his having suggested a mechanism . natural selection . which made evolution seem more probable; but his suggestion, while still accepted as valid, is less completely satisfying to modern men of science than it was to his immediate successors.
      The first biologist who gave prominence to the doctrine of evolution was Lamarck (1744.1829). [No titles named.] His doctrines, however, failed to win acceptance, not only on account of the prejudice in favour of the immutability of species, but also because the mechanism of change which he suggested was not one which scientific men could accept. He believed that the production of a new organ in an animal's body results from its feeling a new want; and also that what has been acquired by an individual in the course of its life is transmitted to its offspring. Without the second hypothesis, the first would {71} have been useless as part of the explanation of evolution. Darwin, who rejected the first hypothesis as an important element in the development of new species, still accepted the second, though it had less prominence in his system than in Lamarck's. The second hypothesis, as to the inheritance of acquired characters, was vigorously denied by Weissmann, [Russell mentions him again in this chapter - maybe the Germans had more importance here than nationalistic Brits incline to tell; name also spelt Weismann] and, although the controversy still continues, the evidence is now overwhelming that, with possible rare exceptions, the only acquired characters that are inherited are those that affect the germ cells, which are very few. The Lamarckian mechanism of evolution cannot therefore be accepted.
      Lyell's Principles of Geology, first published in 1830, a book which, by its emphatic statement of the evidence for the antiquity of the earth and of life, caused a great outcry among the orthodox, was nevertheless not, in its earlier editions, favourable to the hypothesis of organic evolution. It contained a careful discussion of Lamarck's theories, which it rejected on good scientific grounds. In later editions, published after the appearance of Darwin's Origin of Species (1859), the theory of evolution is guardedly favoured.
      Darwin's theory was essentially an extension to the animal and vegetable world of {72} laisser-faire economics, and was suggested by Malthus's theory of population. All living things reproduce themselves so fast that the greater part of each generation must die without having reached the age to leave descendants. A female cod-fish lays about 9,000,000 eggs a year. If all came to maturity and produced other cod-fish, the sea would, in a few years, give place to solid cod, while the land would be covered by a new deluge. Even human populations, though their rate of natural increase is slower than that of any other animals except elephants, have been known to double in twenty-five years. If this rate continued throughout the world for the next two centuries, the resulting population would amount to five hundred thousand millions. But we find, in fact, that animal and plant populations are, as a rule, roughly stationary; and the same has been true of human populations at most periods. There is therefore, both within each species and as between different species, a constant competition, in which the penalty of defeat is death. It follows that, if some members of a species differ from others in any way which gives them an advantage, they are more likely to survive. If the difference has been acquired, it will not be {73} transmitted to their descendants, but if it is congenital it is likely to reappear in at least a fair proportion of their posterity. Lamarck thought that the giraffe's neck grew long as a result of stretching up to reach high branches, and that the results of this stretching were hereditary; the Darwinian view, at least as modified by Weismann, is that giraffes which, from birth, had a tendency to long necks, were less likely to starve than others, and therefore left more descendants, which, in turn, were likely to have long necks . some of them, probably, even longer necks than their already long-necked parents. In this way the giraffe would gradually develop its peculiarities until there was nothing to be gained by developing them further. Darwin's theory depended upon the occurrence of chance variations, the causes of which, as he confessed, were unknown. It is an observed fact that the posterity of a given pair are not all alike. Domestic animals have been greatly changed by artificial selection: through the agency of man cows have come to yield more milk, racehorses to run faster, and sheep to yield more wool. Such facts afforded the most direct evidence available to Darwin of what {74} selection could accomplish. It is true that breeders cannot turn a fish into a marsupial, or a marsupial into a monkey; but changes as great as these might be expected to occur during the countless ages required by the geologists. There was, moreover, in many cases, evidence of common ancestry. Fossils showed that animals intermediate between widely separated species of the present had existed in the past; the pterodactyl, for example, was half bird, half reptile. Embryologists discovered that, in the course of development, immature animals repeat earlier forms; a mammalian foetus, at a certain stage, has the rudiments of a fish's gills, which are totally useless, and hardly to be explained except as a recapitulation of ancestral history. Many different lines of argument combined to persuade biologists both of the fact of evolution, and of natural selection as the chief agent by which it was brought about.
      Darwinism was as severe a blow to theology as Copernicanism. Not only was it necessary to abandon the fixity of species and the many separate acts of creation which Genesis seemed to assert; not only was it necessary to assume a lapse of time, since the origin of life, which was shocking to the {75} orthodox; not only was it necessary to abandon a host of arguments for the beneficence of Providence, derived from the exquisite adaptation of animals to their environment, which was now explained as the operation of natural selection, but, worse than any or all of these, the evolutionists ventured to affirm that man was descended from the lower animals. Theologians and uneducated people, indeed, fastened upon this one aspect of the theory. "Darwin says that men are descended from monkeys!" the world exclaimed in horror. It was popularly said that he believed this because he himself looked like a monkey (which he did not). When I was a boy, I had a tutor who said to me, with the utmost solemnity:
      "If you are a Darwinist, I pity you, for it is impossible to be a Darwinist and a Christian at the same time." To this day in Tennessee, it is illegal to teach the doctrine of evolution, because it is considered to be contrary to the Word of God.
      As often happens, the theologians were quicker to perceive the consequences of the new doctrine than were its advocates, most of whom, though convinced by the evidence, were religious men, and wished to retain as much as possible of their former beliefs. {76}
      Progress, especially during the nineteenth century, was much facilitated by lack of logic in its advocates, which enabled them to get used to one change before having to accept another. When all the logical consequences of an innovation are presented simultaneously, the shock to habits is so great that men tend to reject the whole, whereas, if they had been invited to take one step every ten or twenty years, they could have been coaxed along the path of progress without much resistance. The great men of the nineteenth century were not revolutionaries, either intellectually or politically, though they were willing to champion a reform when the need for it became overwhelmingly evident. This cautious temper in innovators helped to make the nineteenth century notable for the extreme rapidity of its progress.
      The theologians, however, saw what was involved more clearly than did the general public. They pointed out that men have immortal souls, which monkeys have not; that Christ died to save men, not monkeys; that men have a divinely implanted sense of right and wrong, whereas monkeys are guided solely by instinct. If men developed by imperceptible steps out of monkeys, at {77} what moment did they suddenly acquire these theologically important characteristics? At the British Association in 1860 (the year after The Origin of Species appeared), Bishop Wilberforce thundered against Darwinism, exclaiming "The principle of natural selection is absolutely incompatible with the word of God." But all his eloquence was in vain, and Huxley, who championed Darwin, was generally thought to have beaten him in argument. Men were no longer afraid of the Church's displeasure, and the evolution of animal and vegetable species was soon the accepted doctrine among biologists, although the Dean of Chichester, in a University sermon, informed Oxford that "those who refuse to accept the history of the creation of our first parents according to its obvious literal intention, and are for substituting the modern dream of evolution in its place, cause the entire scheme of man's salvation to collapse"; and although Carlyle, who preserved the intolerance of the orthodox without their creed, spoke of Darwin as an "apostle of dirt-worship."
      The attitude of unscientific lay Christians was well illustrated by Gladstone. It was a liberal age, although the Liberal leader did his best to make it otherwise. In 1864, {78} when an attempt to punish two clergymen for not believing in eternal punishment failed because the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council acquitted them, Gladstone was horrified, and said that, if the principle of the judgment was followed up, it would establish "a complete indifference between the Christian faith and the denial of it." When Darwin's theory was first published, he said, expressing the sympathetic feelings of one also accustomed to governing: "Upon grounds of what is termed evolution God is relieved of the labour of creation; in the name of unchangeable laws He is discharged from governing the world." He had, however, no personal feeling against Darwin; he gradually modified his opposition, and once, in 1877, paid him a visit, during the whole of which he talked unceasingly about Bulgarian atrocities. When he was gone, Darwin, in all simplicity, remarked: "What an honour that such a great man should come to visit me!" Whether Gladstone carried away any impression of Darwin, history does not relate.
      Religion, in our day, has accommodated itself to the doctrine of evolution, and has even derived new arguments from it. We are told that "through the ages one {79} increasing purpose runs," and that evolution is the unfolding of an idea which has been in the mind of God throughout. It appears that during those ages which so troubled Hugh Miller, when animals were torturing each other with ferocious horns and agonizing stings, Omnipotence was quietly waiting for the ultimate emergence of man, with his still more exquisite powers of torture and his far more widely diffused cruelty. Why the Creator should have preferred to reach His goal by a process, instead of going straight to it, these modern theologians do not tell us. Nor do they say much to allay our doubts as to the gloriousness of the consummation. It is difficult not to feel, as the boy did after being taught the alphabet, that it was not worth going through so much to get so little. This, however, is a matter of taste.
      There is another and a graver objection to any theology based on evolution. In the 'sixties [1860s] and 'seventies [1870s], when the vogue of the doctrine was new, progress was accepted as a law of the world. Were we not growing richer year by year, and enjoying budget surpluses in spite of diminished taxation? Was not our machinery the wonder of the world, and our parliamentary government a {80} model for the imitation of enlightened foreigners? And could anyone doubt that progress would go on indefinitely? Science and mechanical ingenuity, which had produced it, could surely be trusted to go on producing it ever more abundantly. In such a world, evolution seemed only a generalization of everyday life.
      But even then, to the more reflective, another side was apparent. The same laws which produce growth also produce decay. Some day, the sun will grow cold, and life on the earth will cease. The whole epoch of animals and plants is only an interlude between ages that were too hot and ages that will be too cold. There is no law of cosmic progress, but only an oscillation upward and downward, with a slow trend downward on the balance owing to the diffusion of energy. This, at least, is what science at present regards as most probable, and in our disillusioned generation it is easy to believe. From evolution, so far as our present knowledge shows, no ultimately optimistic philosophy can be validly inferred. {81} [end of chapter III]


      CHAPTER IV — DEMONOLOGY AND MEDICINE
      82: The scientific study of the human body and its diseases had to contend with a mass of superstition, largely pre-Christian, but supported until quite modern times by the whole weight of ecclesiastical authority. Sometimes a divine visitation was a punishment for sin; more often the work of demons. Much less support could be found in the gospels; the rest of the theory is developed by the Fathers, or grew naturally out of their doctrines. St Augustine maintained that "all diseases of Christians are to be ascribed to the demons; chiefly do they torment fresh baptised Christians, yea, even the guiltless new-born infants." It must be understood that, in the writings of the Fathers, "demons" mean heathen deities, who were supposed to be enraged by the progress of Christianity. The early Christians by no means denied the existence of the Olympian gods, but supposed them servants of Satan - a view which Milton adopted, in Paradise Lost. Gregory Nazianzen maintained that medicine is useless, but the laying on of consecrated hands is often effective. Similar views were expressed by other Fathers. [No source to that quotation]
      .. relics.. Middle Ages.. the bones of St Rosalia, which are preserved in Palermo, have for many centuries been found effective in curing disease; but when examined by a profane anatomist, they turned out to be the bones of a goat. Nevertheless, the cures continued. We now know that certain kinds of diseases can be cured by faith, while others cannot. No doubt "miracles" of healing do occur and unscientific atmosphere legends soon magnify the truth and obliterate the distinction between the hysterical diseases which can be cured in this way and the others which demand a treatment based upon pathology.

      White, Warfare of Science..: '.. An unusually complete instance, the supposed miracles of St Francis Xavier, the friend of Loyola, the first and most eminent of Jesuit missionaries in the east, who spent many years in India, China, and Japan, and died in 1552. .. [Letters complain about difficulties with the languages etc] In 1622 when he was canonized it became necessary to prove to the satisfaction of the Vatican authorities that he had performed miracles; without such proof no-one could become a saint. The Pope officially guaranteed the gift of tongues, and was specially impressed by the fact that Xavier made lamps burn with holy water instead of oil. This was the same Pope, Urban VIII, who found what Galileo said incredible. The legend continued to grow, till in the biography published by Father Bouhours in 1682 we learn that the saint raised fourteen persons from the dead. By 1872 Father Coleridge at the Society of Jesus reaffirmed the gift of tongues in a biography. From this example it is evident how little reliance can be placed upon the accounts of marvels in the periods when the documents are less numerous than in the case of St Francis Xavier. .. they were believed by Protestants as well as Catholics. .. Charles II touched about 100,000 persons for the King's Evil.. His Majesty's surgeon published an account of sixty cures thus effected, another surgeon himself saw, so he says, hundreds of cures due to the King's touch, many of them cases which had defied the ablest surgeons. There was a special service in the Prayer Book provided for occasions when the King exercised his miraculous power of healing. These powers duly descended to James II, William III, and Queen Anne, but apparently were unable to survive the Hanoverian Succession. .. Plagues and pestilences.. The chief practitioners of the scientific studies of medicine were Jews, who derived their knowledge from Mohammedans... Dissection was virtually forbidden, in consequence of a misunderstood Bull of Boniface VIII..
      The treatment of mental disorders, as may be imagined, was peculiarly superstitious, [Note: mental disorders? - could be brain damage, or genetic, or caused by maltreatment; or obsessive etc etc - difficult to generalise surely?] and remained so longer than any other branch of medicine. Insanity was regarded as due to diabolical possession - a view for which authority could be found in the New Testament. .. exorcism.. touching a relic.. holy man's command to the demon to come forth. ... 'spew-water'.. savouring of magic.. foul odours were used.. disgusting substances.. the formula of exorcism became longer and longer and more filled with obscenities. By such means, the Jesuits of Vienna, in 1583, cast out 12,652 devils. ... prevention of sleep was a recognized method.. Bible.. Exodus XXII, 18, 'thou shalt not suffer a witch to live'.. Wesley said that giving up of witchcraft is in effect giving up the Bible.. [Footnote: Unless we accept the view which was waged against belief in witchcraft when it was decaying that the word translated as 'witch' actually means 'poisoner', but this does not dispose of the Witch of Endor.]
      Rivers, 'Medicine, Magic and Religion' 1924: .. who tries to distinguish.. 'When I speak of magic, I shall mean a group of processes in which man uses rites which depend for their efficacy on his own power or on powers believed to be inherent in or attributes of certain objects or processes which are used in these rites. Religion on the other hand will comprise a group of processes the efficacy of which depends upon the will of some high power, some power whose intervention is sought by rites of supplication and propitiation.' Russell says this definition is suitable when dealing with people who, on the one hand, believe in the strange power of certain inanimate objects, such as sacred stones, and, on the other hand, regard all non-human spirits as superior to man. Neither of these is quite true of Medieval Christians or Mohammedans. Strange powers, it is true, were attributed to the philosopher's stone and the elixir of life, but these could almost be classed as scientific; they were sought by experiment, and their expected properties were scarcely more wonderful than those which have been found in radium. And magic as understood in the Middle Ages constantly invoked the aid of spirits, but of evil spirits. Among the Melanesians, distinction of good and evil spirits does not seem to exist, whereas in the Christian doctrine it was essential. Satan as well as the Deity could work miracles, but Satan worked them to help wicked men while the Deity worked them to help good men. This distinction as it appears from the Gospels was already familiar to the Jews from the time of Christ, since they accused him of casting out devils by the help of Beelzebub. Sorcery and witchcraft in the Middle Ages were primarily, though not exclusively, ecclesiastical offences, and their peculiar sinfulness lay in the fact that they involved an alliance with the infernal powers. Oddly enough, a devil could sometimes be induced to do things which would have been virtuous if done by anybody else. In Sicily there are (or recently were) puppet plays which have come down in unbroken tradition from medieval times. In 1908 I saw one of these at Palermo, dealing with the wars between Charlemagne and the Moors.. Pope secured the Devil's help.. the Devil was seen in the air giving victory to the Christians. In spite of this excellent result, the Pope's action was wicked and Charlemagne was shocked by it, though he took advantage of the victory.]
      It is held nowadays by some of the most serious students of witchcraft [Russell quotes no sources] that it was a survival in Christian Europe of pagan cults and the worship of pagan deities who had become identified with evil spirits of Christian demonology. While there is much evidence that elements of paganism became amalgamated with magic rites, there are grave difficulties in the way of attributing witchcraft mainly to this source. Magic was a crime punishable in pre-Christian antiquity. There was a law against it in the Twelve Tables in Rome. So far back as the year 1100 BC, certain officers of certain women of the harem [sic] of Rameses III were tried for making a waxen image of that king and pronouncing magic spells over it with a view to causing his death. Apuleius the writer was tried for magic in AD 150 because he had married a rich widow, to the great annoyance of her son. Like Othello, however, he succeeded in persuading the court that he had used only his natural charms. When Innocent VIII in 1484 issued a Bull against witchcraft he appointed two inquisitors to publish .. in 1489 Malleus Maleficarum, the hammer of female malefactors. They maintained that maintained that witchcraft is more natural to women than to men because of the inherent wickedness of their hearts. It is estimated that in Germany alone between 1450 and 1550 100,000 witches were put to death, mostly by burning. [Russell, perhaps typically, gives Germany as an example; why not England or Italy?] .. Towards the end of the 16 C Flade, Rector of the University of Trèves, Chief Judge of the Electoral Court, after condemning countless witches, began to think perhaps their confessions were due to the desire to escape from the tortures of the rack, with the result that he showed unwillingness to convict. He was accused of having sold himself to Satan.. tortured.. in 1589.. strangled.. burnt.
      Protestants were quite as much addicted as Catholics to persecution of witches. In this matter James I was peculiarly zealous. He wrote a book on demonology in the first year of his reign in England. Cope was Attorney-General and Bacon was in the House of Commons. He caused the law to be made more stringent by a statute which remained in force until 1736. Sir Thomas Browne who was a medical witness in a prosecution declared in Religio Medici 'I have ever believed, and do now know, that there are witches; they that doubt them do not only deny them, but spirits, they are bleakly and of consequence a sort, not of infidels, but of atheists'. [NB: I've read a later edition of Browne present the opposite opinion]
      Lecky, History of Rationalism in Europe .. Lecky pointed out a disbelief in ghosts and witches was one of the most prominent characteristics of scepticism in the 17 C, at first nearly confined to men who were avowedly freethinkers. In Scotland the persecution was much greater. Burton's History of Scotland.. tempests which had beset James I on his voyage from Denmark .. a certain Dr Fian confessed under torture they were produced by witches who had put to sea in a sieve from Leith. .. first invented the new torture of pulling out fingernails and thrusting needles in.. Dr Fian.. kept denying what he had formerly avouched and so he was burnt. .. 1736 Act repealed witchcraft in Scotland at the same time as in England though the belief was still vigorous. .. R quotes professional textbook of law of 1730.. 'nothing seems plainer to me than that there may be, and have been, witches and that perhaps such are now actually existing.' .. What happened in 1736.. there was a secession from the Established Church of Scotland.. their leaders in 1736 published a statement on the depravity of the age.. complained about dancing and the theatre, and the penal statutes which had been repealed contrary to.. Exodus. There is a remarkable simultaneity in the cessation of punishments. There were as many executions for witchcraft during the Commonwealth as in all the reigns of the Tudors and Stuarts. .. With the Restoration, scepticism became fashionable.. The last execution in 1682.. though it is said there were others as late as 1712.. 1712 trial in Hertfordshire.. the judge directed the jury to disbelief the possibility but they convicted him.. the conviction was quashed.. In Scotland it became rare after the end of the 17 C... the last burning of a witch was in 1722 or 1730. In France, the last burning was 1780. In New England there was a fierce outbreak of witch-hunting at the end of the 17 C. Everywhere the popular belief continued and still survives in some remote rural areas. The last case of the kind in England was in 1863 in Essex, when an old man was lynched by his neighbours as a wizard. Legal recognition of witchcraft as a possible crime survived longest in Spain and Ireland. In Ireland, the law against witchcraft was not repealed until 1821. In Spain a sorcerer was burnt in 1780
      .. Lecky points out the curious fact that belief in the possibility of black magic was not defeated by arguments on the subject, but by the general spread of the belief in the reign of law. He even goes so far as to say that, in the specific discussion of witchcraft, the weight of argument was on the side of its upholders. This is perhaps not surprising when you remember that the Bible could be quoted by the upholders, while the other side could hardly venture to say that the Bible was not always to be belief. Moreover the best scientific minds did not occupy themselves with popular superstitions, partly because they had more positive work to do, partly because they feared to arouse antagonism.
      .. Newton's work caused men to belief that God had originally created nature and decreed nature's laws so as to produce the results that He intended without fresh intervention, except on great occasions, such as the revelation of the Christian religion. Protestants held that miracles occurred during the first century or two of the Christian era and then ceased. If God no longer intervened miraculously, it was hardly likely that He would allow Satan to do so. There were hopes of scientific meteorology which would leave no room for old women on broomsticks as the causes of storms. ... Lightning and thunder.. 1755 Massachusetts earthquakes.. Rev Dr Price attributed them to the 'iron points invented by the sagacious Mr Franklin. There is no getting out of the mighty hand of God'. [This example I think in Gardner too]
      .. [Medicine; which I suppose is vaguely connected with demonology] Anatomy and physiology were necessary to start with.. these in turn were not possible without dissection, which the Church opposed.. Vesalius who first made anatomy scientific succeeded in escaping official censure because he was physician to the Emperor Charles V.. feared his health might suffer if he was deprived of his favourite practitioner.. during that reign the Conference of Theologians [who are these?] gave it as there opinion that dissection was not sacrilege. Philip II was less of a valetudinarian, and he saw no reason to protect a suspect, so Vesalius got no more bodies. The Church believe that there is in the human body one indestructible bone which is the nucleus of the resurrection body; Vesalius on being questioned confessed he had never found such a bone. This was bad, but perhaps not bad enough. The medical disciples of Galen, who had become as great an obstacle to progress in medicine as Aristotle in physics, pursued Vesalius with a relentless hostility and at length found opportunity to ruin him. .. Spanish grandee's corpse was being examined the heart supposedly showing some signs of life.. accused of murder and denounced to the Inquisition.. allowed to do penance by pilgrimage to the Holy Land.. on the way home he was shipwrecked and died of exhaustion. .. Fallopius was one of his pupils...
      Physiology developed later than anatomy, and may be taken as becoming scientific with Harvey 1578-1657. Like Vesalius, he was a court physician, to James I and then to Charles I, but he was not persecuted. In Spanish universities the circulation of the blood was still denied at the end of the 18 C, and dissection was still no part of medical education. .. The old theological prejudices reappeared when awakened by any startling novelties. [Note: cp VD, AIDS etc] Inoculation against smallpox aroused a storm of protest from divines. The Sorbonne protested against it on theological grounds. An Anglican clergyman published a sermon in which he said that Job's boils were caused by inoculation by the devil. And Scottish ministers joined in the manifesto saying that it was 'endeavouring to baffle the divine judgement.' .. The effect in diminishing the death rate was so notable that theological terrors failed to outweigh fear of the disease. The controversy began to die down when the discovery of vaccination revived it. Clergymen regarded vaccination as bidding defiance to heaven itself, even to the will of God, and at Cambridge University sermons preached against it. So late as 1885, when there was a severe outbreak of smallpox in Montreal, the Catholic part of the population resisted vaccination with the support of their clergy. One priest said that it was caused by having a carnival last winter, 'feasting with flesh which offended the Lord.'
      .. anaesthetics.. [information source not given; possibly White again] .. Simpson.. 1847.. was reminded that Genesis 3, 16 said 'in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children'; how could she sorrow if she is under the influence of chloroform? In any case, God put Adam into a deep sleep.. In Japan women are expected to endure the pains of labour.. It is difficult to resist the conclusion that to many men there is something enjoyable in the sufferings of women, and therefore a propensity to cling to any theological or ethical code which makes it their duty to suffer patiently even when there is no valid reason for not avoiding pain. The harm that theology has done is not to create cruel impulses but to give them the sanction of what professes to be a lofty ethic and to confer an apparently sacred character on practices which have come down from more ignorant and barbarous ages.
      106: .. Opinions on such subjects as birth control and the legal permission of abortion are still influenced by Biblical texts and ecclesiastical decrees. See, for instance, the encyclical on marriage, issued a few years ago by Pope Pius XI. "Those who practise birth control" he says "sin against nature and commit a deed which is shameful and intrinsically vicious. Small wonder therefore if Holy Writ bears witness that the divine Majesty regards with the greatest detestation this horrible crime and at times has punished it with death." .. goes on to quote Augustine, on Genesis 13, 8 to 10. No further reasons for the condemnation of birth control are thought necessary. As for economic arguments, "we are deeply touched but no difficulty can arise that justifies putting aside the law of God which forbids all acts intrinsically evil."
      .. Needham, 'History of Embryology'.. formerly held by theologians that the male embryo acquires a soul at the fortieth day and the female at the eightieth. Now the best opinion is that it is the fortieth day for both sexes. .. Interruption of pregnancy, even if it is considered necessary to save the woman's life, is no justification, because of the law of nature, the precept of God thou shalt not kill.. goes on at once to explain that this does not condemn war or capital punishment.. Over most of the field, the battle for scientific independence has been won. No-one now thinks it impious to avoid pestilences and epidemics by sanitation and hygiene, and though some still maintain that diseases are sent by God, they do not argue that it is therefore impious to try to avoid them. The consequent improvement in health and in increase of longevity is one of the most remarkable and admirable characteristics of our age. Even if science had done nothing else for human happiness, it would deserve our gratitude on this account. Those who believe in the utility of theological creeds would have difficulty in pointing to any comparable advantage that they have conferred upon the human race.


      CHAPTER V — SOUL AND BODY
      [This chapter is very largely philosophical, starting with the Pythagoreans who influenced Plato, and Aristotle; and Museus, Orpheus as quoted in the Republic by Plato; Aquinas; Descartes, Locke, Kant, Hegel..]
      Aquinas 1225-1274 [no books of his mentioned] .. Teachers and educational institutions controlled by the Vatican must make it clear that the only true system is that of the seraphic doctor. The utmost permissible licence is to suggest, as his translator does, that he is joking when he discusses what happens at the resurrection of the body to a cannibal whose father and mother were cannibals. Clearly the people whom he and his parents ate have a prior right to the flesh composing his body, so that he will be left destitute when each claims his own. This is a real difficulty for those who believe in the resurrection of the body, which is affirmed by the Apostles Creed. It is a mark of the intellectual enfeeblement of orthodoxy in our age that it should retain the dogma while treating as a mere pleasantry a grave discussion of awkward problems connected with it. .. Objection to cremation.. my brother.. cremated at Marseilles.. the undertaker had hardly any previous cases of it..
      115: .. 'Substance' is a notion derived from syntax, and syntax is derived from the more-or-less unconscious metaphysic of the primitive races who determined the structure of our languages. Sentences are analysed into subject and predicate and it is thought that, while some words may occur either as subject or predicate, that here are others which (in some not very obvious sense) can only occur as subjects; these words - of which proper names are the best examples - are supposed to denote "substances". The popular word for the same idea is "thing" or "person" when applied to human beings. The metaphysical conception of substance is only an attempt to give precision to what common sense means by a thing or a person. .. Socrates was wise, Socrates was Greek, Socrates taught Plato.. in all these statements we attribute different attributes to Socrates. .. Socrates has exactly the same meaning in all these sentences, and the man Socrates is thus something different from his attributes, something in which attributes are said to 'inhere'. Natural knowledge only enables us to recognise a thing by its attributes: if Socrates had a twin with exactly the same attributes we should not be able to tell them apart. Nevertheless a substance is something other than the sum of its attributes. This appears most clearly from the doctrine of the Eucharist. In transubstantiation the attributes of the bread remain but the substance belongs to the body of Christ. In the period of the rise of modern philosophy, all the innovators from Descartes to Leibniz except Spinoza took great pains to prove their doctrines were consistent with transubstantiation. The authorities hesitated for a long time but finally decided that safety was only to be found in scholasticism. It thus appeared that, apart from revelation, we could never be sure whether a thing or person seen at one time was or was not identical with a thing or person seen at another time. We were in fact exposed to the risk of a perpetual comedy of errors. Under Locke's influence, his followers took a step upon which he did not venture. They denied the whole utility of the notion of substance. Socrates, they said, insofar as we can know anything about him, is known by his attributes. When you have said when and where he lived, what he looked like, what he did and so on, you have said all there is to say about him. There is no need to suppose an entirely unknowable core, in which his attributes inhere, like pins in a pin-cushion. ... The conception of substance as something having attributes but distinct from any and all of them was retained by Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, also, though with greatly diminished emphasis, by Locke. It was however rejected by Hume, and has gradually been extruded both from psychology and from physics. ... [More of this in this chapter, but it doesn't seem to fit well in with the scheme of the book. Kant; Descartes; perception; memory; physics] ... the Roman Catholic belief that the soul survives the death of the body is a doctrine which has been widely held by Christians and non-Christians, by civilized men and by barbarians. The Pharisees believed in immortality among the Jews at the time of Christ, but the Sadducees who adhered to an older tradition did not. In Christianity the belief in the life everlasting has always held a very prominent place: the soul enjoyed felicity after a period of purifying suffering in purgatory. According to Roman Catholic belief, others endure unending torments in Hell..
      .. In modern times.. liberal Christians often incline to the view that hell is not eternal has come to be held by many clergymen in the Church of England since the Privy Council in 1864 decided that it was not illegal for them to do so. But until the middle of the 19 C very few professing Christians doubted the reality of eternal punishment. .. The fear of Hell was, and to a lesser extent still is, a source of the deepest anxiety, which much diminished the comfort to be derived from belief in survival. The motive of saving others from hell was urged as a justification of persecution; for if a heretic, by misleading others, could cause them to suffer damnation, no degree of earthly torture could be considered excessive if employed to prevent so terrible a result. For, whatever may now be thought, it was formerly believed, except by a small minority, that heresy was incompatible with salvation. The decay in the belief in hell was not due to any new theological arguments, nor yet to the direct influence of science, but to the general diminution of ferocity which took place during the 18th and 19th Cs. It is part of the same movement which led shortly before the French Revolution to the abolition of judicial torture in many countries and which in the early 19th C led to the reformation of the savage penal code by which England had been disgraced. In the present day, even among those who still believe in hell, the number of those who are condemned to suffer its torments is thought to be much smaller than was formerly held. Our fiercer passions nowadays take a political rather than a theological direction.
      It is a curious fact that, as the belief in hell has grown less definite, belief in heaven has also lost vividness. Although heaven is still a recognized part of Christian orthodoxy, much less is said about it in modern discussions than about evidences of divine purpose in evolution. Arguments in favour of religion now dwell more upon its influence in promoting a good life here on earth, than on its connection with the life hereafter. The belief that this life is merely a preparation for another, which formerly influenced morals and conduct, has now ceased to have much influence, even on those who have not consciously rejected it.
      [.. psychical research:] I have not myself sufficient knowledge on the subject to judge of the evidence already available, but it is clear that there could be evidence which would convince reasonable men. To this however certain provisos must be added. In the first place the evidence at the best would only prove that we survive death, not that we survive for ever. In the second place, where strong desires are involved, it is very difficult to accept the testimony even of habitually accurate persons; of this there was much evidence during the war, and in all times of great excitement. In the third place, if, upon other grounds, it seems unlikely that our personality is not dying with our body, we shall require much stronger evidence of survival than we should if we thought the hypothesis antecedently probable. Not even the most ardent believer in spiritualism could pretend to have as much evidence of survival as historians can adduce to prove that witches did bodily homage to Satan, yet hardly anyone now regards the evidence of such accounts as even worth examining.
      The difficulty for science arises from the fact that there does not seem to be such an entity as the soul or self. As we saw, it is no longer possible to regard soul and body as two "substances" having that endurance through time which metaphysicians regarded as logically bound up with the notion of substance. Nor is there any reason in psychology to assume a "subject" in contact with an "object". An atom is now merely the convenient way of grouping certain occurrences. ...
      140: .. These two ways of defining a person.. one of them being each person's private experience.. other derives from the body.. these two ways conflict in cases of what is known as dual personality. In such cases, what seems to outside observation to be one person is subjectively split in two. Sometimes neither knows anything of the other; sometimes one knows the other but not vice versa. In cases where neither knows anything of the other there are two persons if memory is used as the definition, but only one if the body is used. There is a regular gradation to the extreme of dual personality through absent-mindedness, hypnosis, and sleep-walking. This makes a difficulty in using memory as the definition of personality, but it appears that lost memories can be recovered by hypnotism or in the course of psycho-analysis, so perhaps the difficulty is not insuperable.
      ... habit.. personality being a matter of organisation.. We may regret the thought that we shall not survive..

      CHAPTER VI — DETERMINISM
      [Another very philosophical chapter, starting with the definition of 'science'] .. Determinism has a two-fold character. On the one hand it is a practical maxim for the guidance of scientific investigators; on the other hand it is a general doctrine as to the nature of the universe. The practical maxim may be sound even if the general doctrine is untrue or uncertain. .. The maxim advises men to seek causal laws, that is to say rules connecting events at one time with events at another. In our everyday life we guide our conduct by rules of this sort, but the rules that we use purchase simplicity at the expense of accuracy. If I press the switch, the electric light will come on, unless it is fused; if I strike a match, it will burn, unless the head flies off; and so on. Such rules will not do for science, which wants something invariable. This ideal was fixed by Newtonian astronomy, where, by the means of the law of gravity, the past and the future positions of the planets can be calculated throughout periods of indefinite vastness. ... smaller degree of regularity of periodic recurrence.. nevertheless, causal laws have been discovered in chemistry and electromagnetism, in biology and even in economics. This discovery of causal laws is the essence of science, and therefore there can be no doubt that scientists do right to look for them. [I'd assumed from one of his essays that he didn't believe in 'cause'; but perhaps it was 'first cause' that he regarded as obsolete; there's a letter in 'Dear Bertrand Russell' open to just the same ambiguity of interpretation] .. Causal laws themselves do not necessarily involve the complete determination of the future by the past. It is a causal law that the sons of white people are also white, but if this was the only law of heredity known we should not be able to predict much about the sons of white parents. Determinism as a general doctrine asserts that complete determination of the future by the past is always possible, theoretically, if we know enough about the past and about causal laws. It is difficult if not impossible to state this precisely: when we try to do so, we find ourselves asserting that this or that is "theoretically possible"; no-one knows what "theoretically" means, and it is no use to assert that "there are" laws which determine the future, unless we add that we may hope to find them out. The future obviously will be what it will be, and in that sense is already determined: an omniscient God such as the orthodox believe in, must now know the whole course of the future; there is, therefore, if an omniscient god exists, a present fact - namely its foreknowledge - from which the future could be inferred. This however lies outside what can be scientifically tested. If the doctrine of determinism is to assert anything that can be made probable or improbable by evidence, it must be stated in relation to our human powers. If we are to have a doctrine that can be tested, [note: relevant to Popper?] it is not enough to say that the whole course of nature must be determined by causal laws. This might be true, and yet indiscoverable - for example, if what is more distant had more effect than what is nearer, we should then need a detailed knowledge of the most distant stars before we could foresee what was going to happen on earth. If we are to be able to test our doctrine, we must be able to state it in relation to a finite part of the universe... We cannot know the whole universe... Things from outside may always crash in and have unexpected effects.. We could attempt to escape from this difficulty in the following manner. Let us suppose we know everything that is happening at the beginning of 1936, within a certain sphere of which we occupy the centre. We will assume, for the sake of definiteness, that the sphere is so large that it takes just a year for light to travel from the circumference to the centre; then, since nothing travels faster than light, everything that happens at the centre of the sphere in 1936 must, if determinism is true, be dependent only on what was inside the sphere at the beginning of the year. ... We can therefore now state the hypothesis of determinism, though I am afraid the statement is rather complicated. The hypothesis is as follows:
      There are discoverable causal laws such that, given sufficient (but not superhuman) powers of calculation, a man who knows all that is happening within a certain sphere at a certain time can predict all that will happen at the centre of the sphere during the time it takes light to travel from the circumference of the sphere to the centre.
      I want it to be clearly understood that I am not asserting this principle to be true; I am only asserting that it is what must be meant by determinism if there is to be any evidence either for it or against it. I do not know whether the principle is true, and no more does anybody else; it may be regarded as an ideal which science has held before itself, but it cannot be regarded, unless on some a priori ground, as either certainly true or certainly false. Perhaps, when we come to examine the arguments that have been used for and against determinism, we shall find that what people have had in mind was something rather less definite than the principle at which we have arrived.
      For the first time in history, determinism is now being challenged by men of science on scientific grounds.. through the study of the atom by the new methods of quantum mechanics. The leader of the attack has been Sir Arthur Eddington.. according to quantum mechanics, it cannot be known what an atom will do in given circumstances; there are a definite set of alternatives open to it, and it chooses sometimes one, sometimes another.. It now appears that all these laws may be merely statistical.. the atoms chose among possibilities in a certain proportion.. being, a giant who could not see individual men.. never became aware of an aggregate of less than a million.. he would notice that Mr Dixon was in bed and did not take his usual train, and the next day Mr Simpson.. the average is not affected..
      [several more examples:] ... mechanics.. large bodies.. behaviour is only probable and approximate.. 157: a determinist might say it is analogous to male and female births.. in Great Britain there are about 21 male for every 20 female births.. although not necessarily in any one family.. everybody believes that there are causes which determine sex in each separate case; we think that the statistical law.. proportion .. must be a consequence of laws which apply in individual cases.. tossing a penny.. the calculation is too complicated for us so we do not know what will happen in any particular case.. long before quantum mechanics were invented, statistical laws already played an important part in physics.. gas consists of vast number of molecules moving at random.. when the average speed is great, the gas is hot; when it is small the gas is cold..
      160: The theory of probability is in a very unsatisfactory state, both logically and mathematically; I do not believe there is any alchemy by which it can produce regularity in large numbers out of pure caprice in each single case. If the penny really chose by caprice whether to fall heads or tails, have we any reason to say that it would choose one about as often as the other? Might not caprice lead just as well always to the same choice? This is no more than a suggestion, since the subject is too obscure for dogmatic statements.
      163: [Other things vaguely related to religion:] The emotional importance supposed to belong to free will seems to me to rest mainly upon certain confusions upon thought. People imagine that, if the will has causes, they may be compelled to do things that they did not wish to do. This of course is a mistake; the wish is the cause of action, even if the wish itself has causes. We can't do what we would rather not do, but it seems unreasonable to complain of this limitation. It is unpleasant when our wishes are thwarted, but this is no more likely to happen if they are caused than if they are uncaused. Not does determinism warrant the feeling that we are impotent. Power consists in being able to have intended effects, and this is neither increased nor diminished by the discovery of causes of our intentions.
      Believers in free will always, in another mental compartment, believe simultaneously that volitions have causes. They think, for example, that virtue can be inculcated by good upbringing, and that religious education is very useful to morals. They believe that sermons do good, and that moral exhortation may be beneficial. Now it is obvious that, if virtuous volitions are uncaused, we cannot do anything whatever to promote them. To the extent to which a man believes that it is in his power, or in any man's power, to promote desirable behaviour in others, to that extent he believes in psychological causation and not in free will. In practice, the whole of our dealings with each other are based upon the assumption that men's actions will result from antecedent circumstances. Political propaganda, the criminal law, the writing of books urging this or that line of action, would all lose their raison d'etre if they had no effect upon what people do. The implications of the free will doctrine are not realised by those who uphold it. We say "Why did you do it?" and expect the answer to mention beliefs and desires which caused actions. When a man does not himself know why he acted as he did, we may search his unconscious for a cause, but it never occurs to us that there may have been no cause.
      ... It is said that introspection makes us immediately aware of free will. Insofar as this is taken in a sense which precludes causation, it is a mere mistake. What we know is that, when we have made a choice, we could have chosen otherwise - if we had wanted to do so. We cannot know by mere introspection whether there were or were not causes of our wanting to do what we did. In the cases of actions which are very rational, we may know their causes. When we take legal or medical or financial advice and act upon it, we know the advice is the cause of our action. But in general the causes of our acts are not to be discovered by introspection; they are to be discovered, like those of other events, by observing their antecedents and discovering some law of sequence. It should be said, further, that the notion of "will" is very obscure, and is probably one that would disappear from a scientific psychology. Most of our actions are not preceded by anything that feels like an act of will; it is a form of mental disease to be unable to do simple things without a previous decision. We may, for instance, decide to walk to a certain place, and then, if we know the way, the putting of one foot before another until we arrive proceeds of itself. It is only the original decision that is felt to involve "will". When we decide after deliberation, two or more possibilities have been in our minds, each more or less attractive, and perhaps each more or less repulsive; in the end, one has proved the most attractive, and has overpowered the others. When one tries to discover volition by introspection, one finds a sense of muscular tenseness, and sometimes an emphatic sentence: "I will do this". But I, for one, cannot find in myself any specific kind of mental occurrence that I could call "will". ... ...
      168: [Note: asymmetry:] Perennial controversies, such as that between determinism and free will, arise from the conflict of two strong but logically irreconcilable passions. Determinism has the advantage that power comes through the discovery of causal laws; science, in spite of its conflict with theological prejudice, has been accepted because it gave power. Belief that the course of nature is regular also gives a sense of security; it enables us up to a point to foresee the future and prevent unpleasant occurrences. When illnesses and storms were attributed to capricious diabolical agencies, they were much more terrifying than they are now. All these motives lead men to like determinism. But while they like to have power over nature, they do not like nature to have power over them. If they are obliged to believe that, before the human race existed, laws were at work which, by a kind of blind necessity, produced not only men and women in general but oneself with all one's idiosyncrasies, saying and doing at this moment whatever one is saying or doing - they feel robbed of personality, futile, unimportant, slaves of circumstances, unable to vary in the slightest degree the part assigned to them by nature from the very beginning. From this dilemma, some men seek to escape by assuming freedom in human beings and determinism everywhere else, others by ingeniously sophistical attempts at a logical reconciliation of freedom with determinism. In fact, we have no reason to adopt either alternative, but we also have no reason to suppose the truth, whatever it may be, is such as to combine the agreeable features of both, or is in any degree determinable by relation to our desires. [End of chapter]

      CHAPTER VII — MYSTICISM
      [First sentence:] The warfare between science and theology has been of a peculiar sort. At all times and places - except in late 18th C France and Soviet Russia - the majority of scientific men have supported the orthodoxy of their age. Some of the most eminent have been in the majority. Newton, though an Arian, was in all other respects a supporter of the Christian faith. Cuvier was a model of Catholic correctness. Faraday was a Sandymanian, [sic; surely Sandemanian] ... The warfare was between theology and science, not men of science. Even when the men of science held view which were condemned, they generally did their best to avoid conflict. Copernicus, as we saw, dedicated his book to the Pope; Galileo retracted; Descartes, though he thought it prudent to live in Holland, took great pains to remain on good terms with ecclesiastics, and by calculated silence escaped censure for sharing Galileo's opinions. In the 19th C most British men of science still thought that there was no essential conflict between their science and those parts of the Christian faith which liberal Christians still regarded as essential - for it had been found possible to sacrifice the literal truth of the Flood, and even of Adam and Eve. The situation at the present day is not very different from what it has been at all times since the victory of Copernicus. Successive scientific discoveries have caused Christians to abandon one after another of the beliefs which the Middle Ages regarded as integral parts of the faith, and these successive retreats have enabled men of science to remain Christians unless their work is on that disputed frontier which the warfare has reached in our day. Now, as at most times during the last three centuries, it is proclaimed that science and religion have become reconciled: the scientists modestly admit that there are realms which lie outside science, and the liberal theologians concede that they would not venture to deny anything capable of scientific proof. There is, it is true, still a few disturbers of the peace: on one side, fundamentalists and stubborn Catholic theologians; on the other side the more radical students of such subjects as biochemistry and animal psychology, who refuse to grant even the comparatively modest demands of the more enlightened churchmen. But on the whole, the fight is languid compared to what it was. The newer creeds of Communism and Fascism are the inheritors of theological bigotry; and perhaps in some region of the unconscious, bishops and professors feel themselves jointly interested in the maintenance of the status quo.
      173: ... [Point about the BBC - this of course was radio:] The present relations between science and religion as the State wishes them to appear may be ascertained from a very instructive volume, Science and Religion, a symposium consisting of twelve talks broadcast by the BBC in the autumn of 1930. Outspoken opponents of religion were of course not included since (to mention no other argument) they would have pained the more orthodox among the listeners. There was, it is true, an excellent introductory talk by Professor Julian Huxley, which contained no support for even the most shadowy orthodoxy, but it also contained little that liberal churchmen would now find objectionable. .. The speakers.. Professor Malinowski's pathetic avowal of a balked longing to believe in God and immortality.. Father O'Hara's bold assertion that the truths of revelation are more certain than those of science.. Canon Streeter.. "a remarkable thing about the foregoing lectures.. their general drift had been in the same direction.. the idea that science by itself is not enough." Whether this unanimity is a fact about science and religion, or about the authorities who control the BBC, may be questioned. .. J Arthur Thomson says science never asks why.. Professor J S Haldane holds that 'it is only within our selves, in our active ideals of truth, right, charity, and beauty, and consequent fellowship with others, that we find the revelation of God.'       [Russell doesn't quote theologians, 'since their concurrence is to be expected'] .. 175: When Canon Streeter says that science is not enough, in one sense he is uttering a truism: science doesn't include art or friendship or various other valuable elements in life but of course more than this is meant. There is another rather more important sense in which science is not enough, which seems to me also true. Science has nothing to say about values. It cannot prove such propositions as 'it is better to love than to hate' or 'kindness is more desirable than cruelty'. But the authors I have quoted certainly mean to assert something further, which I believe to be false. "Science does not pretend to be arbiter of truth" implies there is another non-scientific method of arriving at the truth. Dean Inge is explicit on revelation. The proof of religion then is experimental, he said, speaking of the testimony of the mystics. He says a progressive knowledge of God under the three attributes by which he has revealed to mankind what are sometimes called the absolute or eternal values, goodness or love, truth, and beauty. If that is all, you will say, there is no reason why religion should come into conflict with natural science at all. One deals with facts, the other values. This is not quite true. We have seen science poaching upon ethics, poetry, and what not. Religion cannot help poaching either. That is to say, religion must make assertions about what is and not only about what ought to be. This opinion, by Inge, is implicit in the words of Thomson and Malinowski.
      .. [Men of science's experiments; how the experiment was performed, so others can repeat it:] 179: Russell asserted in Mysticism and Logic that mystics vary greatly in the capacity for giving verbal expression. He thinks the following three points are maintained by all of them: 1. that all division and separateness is unreal, and that the universe is a single indivisible unity; 2. that evil is illusory, and that the illusion arises through falsely regarding a part as self-subsistent; 3. that time is unreal, that reality is eternal, not in the sense of being everlasting, but in the sense of being wholly outside time. I do not pretend this is a complete account of the matters on which all mystics concur, but the three propositions I have mentioned may serve as representatives of the whole. [.. what should we make of this, to a jury?] We shall find that, in the first place, while the witnesses agree up to a point, they disagree when that point is passed, although they are just as certain as when they agree. For example, visions in a which a virgin appears. Truths revealed by the archangel Gabriel, if you are Christian or Mohammedan, or the Taoists say that all government is bad. ... ... There is also a definite physical discipline called Yoga, which is practised in order to produce the mystic certainty. Breathing exercises are the most important feature.. [book he quotes is Waley, The Way and the Power, as regards yoga in China. At some point he also quotes William James on nitrous oxide, which produces a similar feeling. (Nothing on more recently publicised or discovered things like LSD, psilocybin). Great deal of stuff on what is 'unreal', with the meaning and distinctions of words:] There must be nothing in reality corresponding to the apparent distinction between earlier and later events. To say that we are born and then grow and die must be jut as false as to say that we die, then grow small and finally we are born. ... [Mostly concerned with Dean Inge, 'for whom on many grounds I have very high respect'.]
      184: [Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy on Parmenides, great tradition, from Parmenides to Hegel:] What is, is uncreated and indestructible, for it is complete, immovable, and without end. Also, Parmenides said, there is a vague Unknowable, as with Herbert Spencer. [Also mentions the Bishop of Birmingham]
      [Last few lines of the chapter:] I cannot admit any method of arriving at truth other except that of science, but in the realm of the emotions I do not deny the value of the experiences which have given rise to religion. Through association with false beliefs, they have led to much evil as well as good. Freed from this association, it may be hoped that good alone will remain.

      CHAPTER VIII — COSMIC PURPOSE
[Carries on from the previous chapter; Sir J Arthur Thomson. I thought I'd found a quote here to the effect that it's perfectly right that science has nothing to say on things like good and bad and so on, but then neither does anything else. Perhaps I was thinking of the end of Chapter IX]
      190: .. Cosmic purpose.. doctrines.. theistic.. pantheistic could not be considered emergent. The first, which is the simplest and most orthodox, holds that God created the world and decreed the laws of nature because he foresaw that in time some good would be evolved. In this view, the purpose exists consciously in the mind of the creator, but remains external to his creation. In the pantheistic form, god is not external to the universe, but is merely the universe considered as a whole. There cannot therefore be an act of creation but there is a kind of creative force in the universe. .. In the emergent form, the purpose is more blind. At an earlier stage, nothing in the universe foresees a later stage but a kind of blind impulsion leads to those changes to bring more developed forms into existence. [Mentions BBC talks again: Bishop of Birmingham [Dr Barnes] is theistic, Haldane is pantheistic, and Prof Alexander is the emergent form. 'Although Bergson and Professor Lloyd Morgan are perhaps more typical representatives.']
      .. Barnes.. rationality in the universe akin to the rational mind of man. This makes us doubt whether the cosmic process is not directed by mind. There has obviously in this vast panorama been progress which has culminated in the creation of civilised man. Is that progress the outcome of blind forces? It seems to be fantastic to say yes. [Russell continues with omnipotence and so on, and the conception of purpose being a natural one to apply to a human being..] But omnipotence is subject to no such limitations if God really thinks well of the human race - an unplausible hypothesis, it seems to me. Why not proceed as in Genesis to create man at once? What is the point of ichthyosaurs, dinosaurs [sic], diplodoci, mastodons, and so on. Dr Barnes himself confesses that the purpose of a tapeworm is a mystery. What about rabies and hydrophobia and so on? It is no answer to say that the laws of nature inevitably produce evil as well as good, for god decreed the laws of nature. ..
      .. [Dean Inge] .. Outspoken Essays.. at least two volumes.. presages Haldane's views are connected with Hegel, and like everything Hegelian, it is not very easy to understand. .. According to Haldane, there is no such thing strictly speaking as dead matter, or living matter. .. [Possibly something similar in Wells' Mind at the End of its Tether: idea that non-living matter is hot, energetic, radioactive, and it's only in the late decaying stage of matter that you get life. This is also in 'War of the Worlds']
      .. [Haldane. Russell opposes a book The Mechanistic Conception of Life by Jacques Loeb, French, 1912, talking about reproduction on purely mechanical principles.. also.. Encyclopedia Britannica.. pages and pages about memories, psychology, space, the mind, and so on. Here's a statement that leaves Russell gasping:] 208: Like all who follow Hegel, he is anxious to show that nothing is really separate from anything else. .. if one accepts this argument then each man's past and future should co-exist with his present, and that the space in which we all live is also inside each of us. He also has a further step to take in the proof that "personalities do not exclude one another". He says an active ideal of truth, justice, charity, and beauty is always present in us.. The ideal is moreover one ideal, although it has different aspects. It is these common ideals and the fellowship they create from which comes a revelation of god. That leaves me gasping. .. Does he really think that Hitler and Einstein have one ideal, though it has different aspects? Hitler's ideas come mainly from Nietzsche, in whom there is every evidence of complete sincerity. ..
      .. Professor Alexander.. the emergent view.. close affinity with that of Bergson's Creative Evolution.. Bergson holds that determinism is mistaken because in the course of evolution genuine novelties emerge, which could not have been predicted in advance, or even imagined. .. various difficulties make the philosophy of emergent evolution unsatisfactory. Perhaps the chief of these is that, in order to escape from determinism, prediction is made impossible, and yet the adherents predict the future existence of god. They are exactly in the position of Bergson's shellfish which wants to see, although it doesn't know what seeing is.
      Prof Alexander maintains that we have a vague awareness of "deity" in some experiences which he describes as "numinous". The feeling which characterises such events is, he says, "a sense of mystery at something which may terrify us or may support us in our helplessness, but at any rate, which is other than anything we know by our own senses or our own reflection. He gives no reason for attaching importance to this feeling, or for supposing that, as his theory demands, mental development makes it become a larger element in life. From anthropologists one would infer the exact opposite. ... The argument is extraordinarily thin. There have been, it is urged, three stages in evolution: matter, life, and mind. .. There is no reason to suppose that the world has finished evolving; there is very likely to be at some stage a 4th age and a 5th and 6th and so on, one would suppose. But no. With the fourth phase, evolution is to be complete. Now matter could not have foreseen life and life could not have foreseen mind, but mind can dimly foresee the next stage, particularly if it is the mind of a Papuan or a Bushman. It is obvious that all this is the merest guesswork. It may happen to be true, but there is no rational reason for supposing so. The philosophy of emergence is quite right in saying the future is unpredictable, but having said this it at once proceeds to predict the future.
      .. James Jeans.. considers it doubtful whether there is life anywhere else. If it is the purpose of the cosmos to evolve mind, we must regard it as rather incompetent in producing so little in such a long time. .. Second law of thermodynamics, telling us that on the whole energy is passing from the more concentrated to less concentrated forms, and that in the end it will have all passed into a form from which further change is impossible. Therefore life will cease. .. Jeans says 'the three centuries which have elapsed since Giordano Bruno suffered martyrdom for believing in the plurality of worlds have changed our conception of the universe almost beyond description. But they have not brought us appreciably nearer to understanding the relation of life to the universe. ... Throwing humility aside, shall we venture to imagine that it is the only reality which creates instead of being created by the colossal masses of the stars and the nebulae, and the almost inconceivably long vistas of astronomical time?' [Russell goes on to consider that, and also discusses what he calls 'the last question', which is 'are we really so splendid as to justify such a long prologue?' Isn't there something absurd in the spectacle of human beings holding a mirror before themselves and thinking what they behold is so excellent as to prove a cosmic purpose must have been aiming at it all along? Lions and tigers destroy fewer lives than we do, and they are much more beautiful. How about ants; they manage the corporate state much better than any fascist. What about nightingales, larks, and deer? They are not cruel, unjust, or war-mongering. Believers in cosmic purpose make much of our supposed intelligence, but their writings make one doubt it...
      .. Man as a curious accident in a backwater is intelligible; his mixture of virtues and vices is such as might be expected to result from a fortuitous origin; but only abysmal self-complacency can see in man a reason which Omniscience could consider adequate as a motive for the creator. ... [the Copernican revolution not having done its work yet.]

      CHAPTER IX — SCIENCE AND ETHICS
[Again, very philosophical; mentions Waley's book again]
      233: Let us take the legislator first. I will assume for the sake of argument that the legislator is personally disinterested. That is to say, when he recognises one of his desires as being concerned only with his own welfare, he does not let this influence him in framing the laws, for example his code is not designed to increase his personal fortune, but he has other desires which seem to him impersonal. He may believe in an ordered hierarchy from king to peasant, or from mine-owner to black indentured labour. He may believe that women should be submissive to men. He may hold that the spread of knowledge to lower classes is dangerous. .. He will then, if he can, so construct his code that conduct promoting the ends which he values shall as far as possible be in accordance with individual self-interest; that he will establish a system of moral instruction which will, where it succeeds, make men feel wicked if they pursue other purposes than his. Thus "virtue" will come to be in fact, though not in subjective estimation, subservience to the desires of the legislator, insofar as he considers these desires worthy to be universalized. [Footnote: Compare the following advice by a contemporary of Aristotle, Chinese not Greek, from Waley: A ruler should not listen to those who believe in people having opinions of their own, and in the importance of the individual. Such teachings cause men to withdraw to quiet places and hide away in caves or on mountains, there to rail at the prevailing government, sneer at those in authority, belittle the importance of rank and emoluments, and despise all who hold official posts.] The standpoint and method of the preacher are necessarily somewhat different, because he does not control the machinery of the State, and therefore cannot produce an artificial harmony between his desires and those of others. His only method is to try to rouse in others the same desires that he feels himself, and for this purpose his appeal must be to the emotions, as Ruskin caused people to like Gothic architecture, not by argument, but by the moving effect of his rhythmical prose. Uncle Tom's Cabin helped people think slavery an evil by causing them to imagine themselves as slaves. Every attempt to persuade people that something is good (or bad) in itself, not merely in its effects, depends upon the art of rousing feelings, not upon an appeal to evidence. In every case the preacher's skill consists in creating in others emotions similar to his own - or dissimilar, if he is a hypocrite. I am not saying this as a criticism of the preacher, but as an analysis of the central character of his activity.
      [Goes into subjective ethics:] 237: When a man says "This is good in itself" he seems to be making a statement just as much as if he said "This is square" or "This is sweet." I believe this to be a mistake. [This of course was what Santayana persuaded him of]. It is a form of the doctrine which is called the subjectivity of values. The doctrine consists in maintaining that if two men differ about values, there is not a disagreement as to any kind of truth, but a difference of taste. If one man says I think oysters are good and another says I think they are bad, we recognise that there is nothing to argue about. The theory in question holds that all differences in values are of this sort, although we do not naturally think them so, when we are dealing with matters that seem to us more exalted than oysters. The chief ground for adopting this view is the complete impossibility of finding any arguments to prove that this or that has intrinsic value. .. The consequences of this doctrine are considerable. In the first place, there can no such thing as sin in any absolute sense. What one man calls sin, another may call virtue, and though they may dislike each other on account of this difference, neither can convict the other of intellectual error. ..
      - 240: [Something I've been unable to follow:] Those who believe in "objective values" often contend that the view which I have been advocating has immoral consequences. This seems to me to be due to faulty reasoning. There are, as has already been said, certain ethical consequences of the doctrine of subjective values, of which the most important is the rejection of vindictive punishment and the notion of "sin", but the general consequences which are feared, such as the decay of all sense of moral obligation, are not to be logically deduced. Moral obligation, if it is to influence conduct, must consist not merely of a belief, but of a desire. A desire, I may be told, is the desire to be "good" in the sense which I no longer allow. But when we analyse the desire to be "good" it generally resolves itself into a desire to be approved, or alternatively, to act so as to bring about certain general consequences which we desire. We have wishes which are not purely personal, and if we had not, no amount of ethical teaching would influence our conduct, except through fear of disapproval. The sort of life that most of us admire is one which can be guided by large impersonal desires; now such desires can, no doubt, be encouraged by example, education, and knowledge, but they can hardly be created by the mere abstract belief that they are good, or discouraged by an analysis of what is meant by "good". ... human race etc..
      .. I conclude that, while it is true that science cannot decide questions of value, it is because they cannot be intellectually decided at all, and lie outside the realm of truth and falsehood. Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods; what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.

      CHAPTER X — CONCLUSION
[Short; eight pages]
      244: .. We have seen in the period since Copernicus whenever science and theology have disagreed, science has proved victorious. [NB: I'm not sure that he has actually proved that] We have seen also that where practical issues were involved, as in witchcraft and medicine, science has stood for a diminution of suffering while theology has encouraged man's natural savagery. [Russell notes at some point that the Black Death in 1348 caused superstition.. scientific medicine was practised by the Jews who had got their knowledge from the Mohammedans. He mentions Pope Pius V] The spread of the scientific outlook as opposed to theological has indisputably made, hitherto, for happiness. 244: The issue is now, however, entering upon a wholly new phase, and this for two reasons. First, that scientific technique is becoming more important in effects than the scientific temper of mind; secondly, that newer religions have taken the place of Christianity and are repeating the errors of which Christianity has repented.
      245: .. The scientific temper of mind is cautious, tentative, and piecemeal. It doesn't imagine that it knows the whole truth. But out of theoretical science, a scientific technique has developed, and a scientific technique has none of the tentativeness of the theory. Physics has been revolutionised during the present century by relativity and quantum theory, but all the inventions based upon the old physics are still found satisfactory. The application of electricity to industry in daily life including.. power stations, broadcasting.. and electric light is based on the work of Clerk Maxwell, published over sixty years ago, and none of these inventions has failed to work because .. Clerk Maxwell's views were in many ways inadequate. .. practical experts who employ scientific technique .. governments and large firms.. acquire a quite different temper from that of the men of science; a temper full of the sense of limitless power, of arrogant certainty, and a pleasure in manipulation even of human material. It is the very reverse of the scientific temper, but it cannot be denied that science has helped to promote it.
      246: .. The direct effects of scientific technique also have been by no means wholly beneficial. On the one hand they have increased the destructiveness of weapons of war, and the proportion of a population that can be spared from peaceful industry for fighting and the manufacture of munitions. On the other hand, by increasing the productivity of labour, they have made the old economic system which depended on scarcity very difficult to work, and by the violent impact of new ideas they have thrown ancient civilisations off their balance, driving China into chaos and Japan into ruthless imperialism on the western model. Russia, in a violent attempt to establish a new economic system, and Germany, in a violent attempt to maintain the old one. These evils of our time are all due in part to scientific technique, and therefore ultimately to science.
      .. [section apparently praising religion:] The warfare between science and Christian theology, in spite of an occasional skirmish on the outposts, is nearly ended, and I think most Christians would admit their religion is the better for it. Christianity has been purified of inessentials inherited from a barbarous age, and nearly cured of the desire to persecute. There remains among more liberal Christians, an ethical doctrine which is valuable: an acceptance of Christ's teaching that we should love our neighbours, and the belief that in each individual there is something deserving respect, even if it is no longer to be called a soul. There is also, in the churches, a growing belief that Christians should oppose war. But.. new religions have arisen with the persecuting zeal of vigorous youth [sic] and with this greater readiness to oppose science as characterised the Inquisition at the time of Galileo. If you maintain in Germany that Christ was a Jew or in Russia that the atom has lost its substantiality and become a mere series of events you are liable to very severe punishment. The persecution of intellectuals in Germany and in Russia has surpassed in severity anything perpetrated by the churches during the last 250 years.
      .. The science which in the present day bears the brunt of persecution most directly, is economics. In England - now, as always, an exceptionally tolerant country - a man whose views on economics are obnoxious to the government will escape all penalties if he keeps his opinion to himself, or expresses them only in books of a certain length. But even in England the expression of Communist opinions in speeches or cheap pamphlets exposes a man to loss of livelihood and occasional periods in prison. Under a recent Act, which so far has not been used to its full extent, not only the author of writings which the government considers seditious, but any man who possesses them, is liable to penalties, on the ground that he may contemplate using them to undermine the loyalty of His Majesty's Forces ...
      .. Germany.. Russia.. Galileo.. If there had been a country where the men of science could have persecuted Christians, perhaps Galileo's friends would not have protested .. intolerant.. only against that of the opposite party.. In that case his friends would have exalted his doctrines into a dogma..
      .. economics.. It may be urged that persecution nowadays is political and economic rather than theological, but that would be unhistorical. Luther's attack on indulgences caused vast financial losses to the Pope. Henry VIII's revolt deprived him of a large revenue which he had enjoyed since Henry III. Elizabeth persecuted Roman Catholics because they wanted to replace her by Mary Queen of Scots or Philip II. Science weakened the hold of the church and in many countries led to the confiscation of much ecclesiastical property. .. other new truth is often inconvenient to some vested interests. The Protestant doctrine that it is not necessary to fast on Fridays was vehemently resisted by Elizabethan fishmongers, but it is in the interest of the community at large that new truths should be freely promulgated. The threat to intellectual freedom is greater in our day than at any time since 1660, but it does not now come from Christian churches. It comes from governments which owing to the modern danger of anarchy and chaos have succeeded to the sacrosanct character formerly belonging to ecclesiastical authorities. It is the clear duty of men of science to protest against the new forms of persecution rather than congratulate them on the decay of older forms. .. [Comments on what's really happening in Russia, and Germany] .. New truth.. important.. most important of our intelligent but wayward species.