Life and Matter Part 5

The influence of the divine on the human, and on the material world, has been variously conceived in different ages, and various forms of difficulty have been at different times felt and suggested; but always some sort of a.n.a.logy between human action and divine action has had perforce to be drawn, in order to make the latter in the least intelligible to our conception. The latest form of difficulty is peculiarly deep-seated, and is a natural outcome of an age of physical science. It consists in denying the possibility of any guidance or control,--not only on the part of a Deity, but on the part of every one of his creatures. It consists in pressing the laws of physics to what may seem their logical and ultimate conclusion, in applying the conservation of energy without ruth or hesitation, and so excluding, as some have fancied, the possibility of free-will action, of guidance, of the self-determined action of mind or living things upon matter, altogether. The appearance of control has accordingly been considered illusory, and has been replaced by a doctrine of pure mechanism, enveloping living things as well as inorganic nature.

And those who for any reason have felt disinclined or unable to acquiesce in this exclusion of non-mechanical agencies, whether it be by reason of faith and instinct or by reason of direct experience and sensation to the contrary, have thought it necessary of late years to seek to undermine the foundation of Physics, and to show that its much-vaunted laws rest upon a hollow basis, that their exact.i.tude is illusory,--that the conservation of energy, for instance, has been too rapid an induction, that there may be ways of eluding many physical laws and of avoiding submission to their sovereign sway.

By this sacrifice it has been thought that the eliminated guidance and control can philosophically be reintroduced.

This, I gather, may have been the chief motive of a critical examination of the foundations of Physics by an American author, J. B. Stallo, in a little book called the _Concepts of Physics_. But the worst of that book was that Judge Stallo was not fully familiar with the teachings of the great physicists; he appears to have collected his information from popular writings, where the doctrines were very imperfectly laid down; so that some of his book is occupied in demolis.h.i.+ng constructions of straw, unrecognisable by professed physicists except as caricatures at which they also might be willing to heave an occasional missile.

The armoury pressed into the service of Professor James Ward's not wholly dissimilar attack on Physics is of heavy calibre, and his criticism cannot in general be ignored as based upon inadequate acquaintance with the principles under discussion; but still his Gifford lectures raise an ant.i.thesis or antagonism between the fundamental laws of mechanics and the possibility of any intervention whether human or divine.

If this antagonism is substantial it is serious; for Natural Philosophers will not be willing to concede fundamental inaccuracy or uncertainty about their recognised and long-established laws of motion, when applied to ordinary matter; nor will they be prepared to tolerate any the least departure from the law of the conservation of energy, when all forms of energy are taken into account. Hence, if guidance and control can be admitted into the scheme by no means short of undermining and refuting those laws, there may be every expectation that the att.i.tude of scientific men will be perennially hostile to the idea of guidance or control, and so to the efficacy of prayer, and to many another practical outcome of religious belief. It becomes therefore an important question to consider whether it is true that life or mind is incompetent to disarrange or interfere with matter at all, except as itself an automatic part of the machine,--whether in fact it is merely an ornamental appendage or phantasmal accessory of the working parts.

Now experience--the same kind of experience as gave us our scheme of mechanics--shows us that to all appearance live animals certainly can direct and control mechanical energies to bring about desired and preconceived results; and that man can definitely will that those results shall occur. The way the energy is provided is understood, and its mode of application is fairly understood; what is not understood is the way its activity is _determined_. Undoubtedly our body is material and can act on other matter; and the energy of its operations is derived from food, like any other self-propelled and fuel-fed mechanism; but mechanism is usually controlled by an attendant. The question is whether our will or mind or life can direct our body's energy along certain channels to attain desired ends, or whether--as in a motor-car with an automaton driver--the end and aim of all activity is wholly determined by mechanical causes. And a further question concerns the mode whereby vital control, if any, is achieved.

Answers that might be hazarded are:

(_a_) That life is itself a latent store of energy, and achieves its results by imparting to matter energy that would not otherwise be in evidence: in which case life would be a part of the machine, and as truly mechanical as all the rest.

Experiment lends no support to this view of the relation between life and energy, and I hold that it is false; because the essential property of energy is that it can transform itself into other forms, remaining constant in quant.i.ty, whereas life does not add to the stock of any known form of energy, nor does death affect the sum of energy in any known way.

(_b_) That life is something outside the scheme of mechanics--outside the categories of matter and energy; though it can nevertheless control or direct material forces--timing them and determining their place of application,--subject always to the laws of energy and all other mechanical laws; supplementing or accompanying these laws, therefore, but contradicting or traversing them no whit.

This second answer I hold to be true; but in order to admit its truth we must recognise that force can be exerted and energy directed, by suitable adjustment of existing energy, without any introduction of energy from without; in other words, that the energy of operations automatically going on in any active region of the universe--any region where transformation and transference of energy are continuously occurring whether life be present or not--can be guided along paths that it would not automatically have taken, and can be directed so as to produce effects that would not otherwise have occurred; and this without any breakage or suspension of the laws of dynamics, and in full correspondence with both the conservation of energy and the conservation of momentum.

That is where I part company with Professor James Ward in the second volume of _Naturalism and Agnosticism_; with whom nevertheless on many broad issues I find myself in fair agreement. Those who find a real antinomy between "mechanism and morals" must either throw overboard the possibility of interference or guidance or willed action altogether, which is one alternative, or must a.s.sume that the laws of Physics are only approximate and untrustworthy, which is the other alternative--the alternative apparently favoured by Professor James Ward. I wish to argue that neither of these alternatives is necessary, and that there is a third or middle course of proverbial safety: all that is necessary is to realise and admit that the laws of Physical Science are _incomplete_, when regarded as a formulation and philosophical summary of the universe in general. No Laplacian calculator can be supplied with all the data.

On a stagnant and inactive world life would admittedly be powerless: it could only make dry bones stir in such a world if itself were a form of energy; I do not suppose for a moment that it could be incarnated on such a world; it is only potent where inorganic energy is mechanically "available"--to use Lord Kelvin's term,--that is to say, is either potentially or actually in process of transfer and transformation. In other words, life can generate no trace of energy, it can only guide its trans.m.u.tations.

It has gradually dawned upon me that the reason why Philosophers who are well acquainted with Physical or Dynamical Science are apt to fall into the error of supposing that mental and vital interference with the material world is impossible, in spite of their clamorous experience to the contrary (or else, on the strength of that experience, to conceive that there is something the matter with the formulation of physical and dynamical laws), is because all such interference is naturally and necessarily excluded from scientific methods and treatises.

In pure Mechanics, "force" is treated as a function of configuration and momentum: the positions, the velocities, and the accelerations of a conservative system depend solely on each other, on initial conditions, and on ma.s.s; or, if we choose so to express it, the co-ordinates, the momenta, and the kinetic energies, of the parts of any dynamical system whatever, are all functions of time and of each other, and of nothing else. In other words, we have to deal, in this mode of regarding things, with a definite and completely determinate world, to which prediction may confidently be applied.

But this determinateness is got by refusing to contemplate anything outside a certain scheme: it is an internal truth within the a.s.signed boundaries, and is quite consistent with psychical interference and indeterminateness, as soon as those boundaries are ignored; determinateness is not part of the _essence_ of dynamical doctrine, it is arrived at by the tacit a.s.sumption that no undynamical or hyperdynamical agencies exist: in short, by that process of abstraction which is invariably necessary for simplicity, and indeed for possibility, of methodical human treatment. Everyone engaged in scientific research is aware that if exuberant charwomen, or intelligent but mischievous students (who for the moment may be taken to represent life and mind respectively) are admitted into a laboratory and given full scope for their activities, the subsequent scientific results--though still, no doubt, in some strained sense, concordant with law and order--are apt to be too complicated for investigation; wherefore there is usually an endeavour to exclude these incalculable influences, and to make a tacit a.s.sumption that they have not been let in.

There is a similar tacit a.s.sumption in treatises on Physics and Chemistry; viz., that the laws of automatic nature shall be allowed unrestricted and unaided play, that nothing shall intervene in any operation from start to finish save mechanical sequent and antecedent,--that it is permissible in fact to exercise abstraction, as usual, to the exclusion of agents not necessarily connected with the problem, and not contemplated by the equations.

In text-books of Dynamics and in treatises of Natural Philosophy that is a perfectly legitimate procedure;[4] but when later on we come to philosophise, and to deal with the universe as a whole, we must forgo the ingrained habit of abstraction, and must remember that for a _complete_ treatment _nothing_ must permanently be ignored. So if life and mind and will, and curiosity and mischief and folly, and greed and fraud and malice, and a whole catalogue of attributes and things not contemplated in Natural Philosophy--if these are known to have any real existence in the larger world of total experience, and if there is any reason to believe that any one of them may have had some influence in determining an observed result, then it is foolish to exclude these things from philosophic consideration, on the ground that they are out of place in the realm of Natural Philosophy, that they are not allowed for in its scheme, and therefore cannot possibly be supposed capable of exerting any effective interference, any real guidance or control.

[4] It is on a similar basis that there is a science of rigid dynamics, with elasticity and fluidity excluded; and thus also can there be a hydrodynamics in which the consequences of viscosity are ignored.

My contention then is--and in this contention I am practically speaking for my brother physicists--that whereas life or mind can neither generate energy nor directly exert force, yet it can cause matter to exert force on matter, and so can exercise guidance and control: it can so prepare any scene of activity, by arranging the position of existing material, and timing the liberation of existing energy, as to produce results concordant with an idea or scheme or intention: it can, in short, "aim" and "fire."

Guidance of _matter_ can be affected by a pa.s.sive exertion of force without doing work; as a quiescent rail can guide a train to its destination, provided an active engine propels it. But the a.n.a.logy of the rail must not be pressed: the rail "guides" by exerting force perpendicular to the direction of motion, it does no work but it sustains an equal opposite reaction.[5] The guidance exercised by life or mind is managed in an unknown but certainly different fas.h.i.+on: "determination" can sustain no reaction--if it could it would be a straightforward mechanical agent--but it can utilise the mechanical properties both of rail and of engine; it arranged for the rail to be placed in position so that the lateral force thereby exerted should guide all future trains to a desired destination, and it further took steps to design and compose locomotives of sufficient power, and to start them at a prearranged time. It "employs" mechanical stress, as a capitalist employs a labourer, not doing anything itself, but directing the operations. It is impossible to explain all this fully by the laws of mechanics alone, that is to say, no mechanical a.n.a.lysis can be complete and all-embracing, though the whole procedure is fully subject to those laws.

[5] It is well to bear in mind the distinction between "force"

and "energy." These terms have been so popularly confused that it may be difficult always to discriminate them, but in Physics they are absolutely discriminated. We have a direct sense of "force,"

in our muscles, whether they be moving or at rest. A force in motion is a "power," it "does work" and transfers energy from one body to another, which is commonly though incorrectly spoken of as "generating" energy. But a force at rest--a mere statical stress, like that exerted by a pillar or a watershed--does no work, and "generates" or transfers no energy; yet the one sustains a roof which would otherwise fall, thereby screening a portion of ground from vegetation; while the other deflects a rain-drop into the Danube or the Rhine. This latter is the kind of force which constrains a stone to revolve in a circle instead of a straight line; a force like that of a groove or slot or channel or "guide."

To every force there is an equal opposite force or reaction, and a reaction may be against a live body, but it is never suspected of being against the abstraction life or mind--that would indeed be enlarging the scope of mechanics!--the reaction is always against some other body. All stresses as a matter of fact occur in the ether; and they all have a material terminus at each end (or in exceptional cases a wave-front or some other recondite etherial equivalent), that is to say something possessing inertia; but the timed or _opportune_ existence of a particular stress may be the result of organisation and control.

Mechanical operations can be thus dominated by intelligence and purpose. When a stone is rolling over a cliff, it is all the same to "energy" whether it fall on point A or point B of the beach. But at A it shall merely dent the sand, whereas at B it shall strike a detonator and explode a mine. Scribbling on a piece of paper results in a certain distribution of fluid and production of a modic.u.m of heat: so far as energy is concerned it is the same whether we sign Andrew Carnegie or Alexander Coppersmith, yet the one effort may land us in twelve months'

imprisonment or may build a library, according to circ.u.mstances, while the other achieves no result at all. John Stuart Mill used to say that our sole power over Nature was to _move_ things; but strictly speaking we cannot do even that: we can only arrange that things shall move each other, and can determine by suitably preconceived plans the kind and direction of the motion that shall ensue at a given time and place.

Provided always that we include in this category of "things" our undoubtedly material bodies, muscles and nerves.

But here is just the puzzle: at what point does will or determination enter into the scheme? Contemplate a brain cell, whence originates a certain nerve-process whereby energy is liberated with some resultant effect; what pulled the detent in that cell which started the impulse?

No doubt some chemical process: combination or dissociation, something atomic, occurred; but what made it occur just then and in that way?

I answer, not anything that we as yet understand, but apparently the same sort of pre-arrangement that determined whether the stone from the cliff should fall on point A or point B--the same sort of process that guided the pen to make legible and effective writing instead of illegible and ineffective scrawls--the same kind of control that determines when and where a trigger shall be pulled so as to secure the antic.i.p.ated slaughter of a bird. So far as energy is concerned, the explosion and the trigger-pulling are the same identical operations whether the aim be exact or random. It is intelligence which directs; it is physical energy which is directed and controlled and produces the result in time and s.p.a.ce.

It will be said _some_ energy is needed to pull a hair-trigger, to open the throttle-valve of an engine, to press the b.u.t.ton which shall shatter a rock. Granted: but the work-concomitants of that energy are all familiar, and equally present whether it be arranged so as to produce any predetermined effect or not. The opening of the throttle-valve for instance demands just the same exertion, and results in just the same imperceptible transformation of fully-accounted-for energy, whether it be used to start a train in accordance with a time-table and the guard's whistle, or whether it be pushed over, as if by the wind, at random. The shouting of an order to a troop demands vocal energy and produces its due equivalent of sound; but the intelligibility of the order is something superadded, and its result may be to make not sound or heat alone, but History.

Energy must be _available_ for the performance of any physical operation, but the energy is independent of the determination or arrangement. Guidance and control are not forms of energy, nor need they be themselves phantom modes of force: their superposition upon the scheme of Physics need perturb physical and mechanical _laws_ no whit, and yet it may profoundly affect the consequences resulting from those same laws. The whole effort of civilisation would be futile if we could not guide the powers of nature. The powers are there, else we should be helpless; but life and mind are outside those powers, and, by pre-arranging their field of action, can direct them along an organised course.

And this same life or mind, as we know it, is accessible to pet.i.tion, to affection, to pity, to a mult.i.tude of non-physical influences; and hence, indirectly, the little plot of physical universe which is now our temporary home has become amenable to truly spiritual control.

I lay stress upon a study of the nature and mode of human action of the interfering or guiding kind, because by that study we must be led if we are to form any intelligent conception of divine action. True, it might be feasible to admit divine agency and yet to deny the possibility of any human power of the same kind,--though that would be a nebulous and at least inconclusive procedure; but if once we are constrained to admit the existence and reality of human guidance and control, superposed upon the physical scheme, we cannot deny the possibility of such power and action to any higher being, nor even to any totality of Mind of which ours is a part.

I do not see how the function claimed can be resented, except by those who deny "life" to be anything at all. If it exists, if it is not mere illusion, it appears to me to be something whose full significance lies in another scheme of things, but which touches and interacts with this material universe in a certain way, building its particles into notable configurations for a time--without confounding any physical laws,--and then evaporating whence it came. This language is vague and figurative undoubtedly, but, I contend, appropriately so, for we have not yet a theory of life--we have not even a theory of the essential nature of gravitation; discoveries are waiting to be made in this region, and it is absurd to suppose that we are already in possession of all the data.

We can wait; but meanwhile we need not pretend that because we do not understand them, therefore life and will can accomplish nothing; we need not imagine that "life"--with its higher developments and still latent powers--is an impotent nonent.i.ty. The philosophic att.i.tude, surely, is to observe and recognise its effects, both what it can and what it cannot achieve, and to realise that our present knowledge of it is extremely partial and incomplete.

NOTE ON FREE WILL AND FOREKNOWLEDGE.

In the above chapter I must not be understood as pretending to settle the th.o.r.n.y question of a reconciliation between freedom of choice and pre-determination or prevision. All I there contend for is that no mechanical or scientific determinism, subject to special conditions in a limited region, can be used to contradict freedom of the will, under generalised conditions, in the Universe as a whole.

Nevertheless there are things which may perhaps be usefully said, even on the larger and much-worn topic of the present note. If we still endeavour to learn as much as possible from human a.n.a.logies, examples are easy:--

An architect can draw in detail a building that is to be; the dwellers in a valley can be warned to evacuate their homesteads because a city has determined that a lake shall exist where none existed before.

Doubtless the city is free to change its mind, but it is not expected to; and all predictions are understood to be made subject to the absence of disturbing, _i.e._ unforeseen, causes. Even the prediction of an eclipse is not free from a remote uncertainty, and in the case of the return of meteoric showers and comets the element of contingency is not even remote.

But it will be said that to higher and superhuman knowledge all possible contingencies would be known and recognised as part of the data. That is quite possibly, though not quite certainly, true: and there comes the real difficulty of reconciling absolute prediction of events with real freedom of the actors in the drama. I antic.i.p.ate that a complete solution of the problem must involve a treatment of the subject of _time_, and a recognition that "time," as it appears to us, is really part of our human limitations. We all realise that "the past"

is in some sense not non-existent but only past; we may readily surmise that "the future" is similarly in some sense existent, only that we have not yet arrived at it; and our links with the future are less understood. That a seer in a moment of clairvoyance may catch a glimpse of futurity--some partial picture of what perhaps exists even now in the forethought of some higher mind--is not inconceivable. It may be after all only an unconscious and inspired inference from the present, on an enlarged and exceptional scale; and it is a matter for straightforward investigation whether such prevision ever occurs.

The following article, on the general subject of "Free Will and Determinism," reprinted from the _Contemporary Review_ for March 1904, may conveniently be here reproduced:--

The conflict between Free Will and Determinism depends on a question of boundaries. We occasionally ignore the fact that there must be a subjective part.i.tion in the Universe separating the region of which we have some inkling of knowledge from the region of which we have absolutely none; we are apt to regard the portion on our side as if it were the whole, and to debate whether it must or must not be regarded as self-determined. As a matter of fact any part.i.tioned-off region is in general not completely self-determined, since it is liable to be acted upon by influences from the other side of the part.i.tion. If the far side of the boundary is ignored, then an observer on the near side will conclude that things really initiate their own motion and act without stimulation or motive, in some cases, whereas the fact is that no act is performed without stimulus or motive; even irrational acts are caused by something, and so also are rational acts. Madness and delirium are natural phenomena amenable to law.

But in actual life we are living on one side of a boundary, and are aware of things on one side only; the things on this side appear to us to const.i.tute the whole universe, since they are all of which we have any knowledge, either through our senses or in other ways.

Hence we are subject to certain illusions, and feel certain difficulties,--the illusion of unstimulated and unmotived freedom of action, and the difficulty of reconciling this with the felt necessity for general determinism and causation.

If we speak in terms of the part of the universe that we know and have to do with, we find free agencies rampant among organic life; so that "freedom of action" is a definite and real experience, and for practical convenience is so expressed. But if we could seize the entirety of things and perceive what was occurring beyond the range of our limited conceptions we should realise that the whole was welded together, and that influences were coming through which produced the effects that we observe.

Those philosophers, if there are any, who a.s.sert that we are wholly chained bound and controlled by the circ.u.mstances of that part of the Universe of which we are directly aware--that we are the slaves of our environment and must act as we are compelled by forces emanating from things on our side of the boundary alone,--those philosophers err.

This kind of determinism is false; and the reaction against it has led other philosophers to a.s.sert that we are _lawlessly_ free, and able to initiate any action without motive or cause,--that each individual is a capricious and chaotic ent.i.ty, not part of a Cosmos at all!

It may be doubted whether anyone has clearly and actually maintained either of these theses in all its crudity; but there are many who vigorously and cheaply deny one or other of them, and in so denying the one conceive that they are maintaining the other.