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    Through Nature to God
    Through Nature to God
    Through Nature to God
    Ebook157 pages1 hour

    Through Nature to God

    By John Fiske

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    About this ebook

    This book explores the mystery of evil, the cosmic roots of love and self-sacrifice, and the eternal reality of religion in Mr. Fiske's large and luminous style. It belongs in the same category as his 'Idea of God' and 'Destiny of Man,' which have inspired and provided strength and light to a large number of readers."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGood Press
    Release dateApr 25, 2021
    ISBN4064066207502
    Through Nature to God

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      Book preview

      Through Nature to God - John Fiske

      John Fiske

      Through Nature to God

      Published by Good Press, 2022

      goodpress@okpublishing.info

      EAN 4064066207502

      Table of Contents

      PREFACE

      THE MYSTERY OF EVIL

      I The Serpent's Promise to the Woman

      II The Pilgrim's Burden

      III Manichæism and Calvinism

      IV The Dramatic Unity of Nature

      V What Conscious Life is made of

      VI Without the Element of Antagonism there could be no Consciousness, and therefore no World

      VII A Word of Caution

      VIII The Hermit and the Angel

      IX Man's Rise from the Innocence of Brutehood

      X The Relativity of Evil

      THE COSMIC ROOTS OF LOVE AND SELF-SACRIFICE

      I The Summer Field, and what it tells us

      II Seeming Wastefulness of the Cosmic Process

      III Caliban's Philosophy

      IV Can it be that the Cosmic Process has no Relation to Moral Ends?

      V First Stages in the Genesis of Man

      VI The Central Fact in the Genesis of Man

      VII The Chief Cause of Man's lengthened Infancy

      VIII Some of its Effects

      IX Origin of Moral Ideas and Sentiments

      X The Cosmic Process exists purely for the Sake of Moral Ends

      XI Maternity and the Evolution of Altruism

      XII The Omnipresent Ethical Trend

      THE EVERLASTING REALITY OF RELIGION

      I Deo erexit Voltaire

      II The Reign of Law, and the Greek Idea of God

      III Weakness of Materialism

      IV Religion's First Postulate: the Quasi-Human God

      V Religions Second Postulate: the undying Human Soul

      VI Religions Third Postulate: the Ethical Significance of the Unseen World

      VII Is the Substance of Religion a Phantom, or an Eternal Reality?

      VIII The Fundamental Aspect of Life

      IX How the Evolution of Senses expands the World

      X Nature's Eternal Lesson is the Everlasting Reality of Religion

      L'ENVOI

      THE WRITINGS OF JOHN FISKE

      THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA

      OLD VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBOURS

      THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW ENGLAND

      THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

      THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE

      THE CRITICAL PERIOD OF AMERICAN HISTORY, 1783-1789

      A HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES FOR SCHOOLS

      CIVIL GOVERNMENT IN THE UNITED STATES

      OUTLINES OF COSMIC PHILOSOPHY

      DARWINISM, AND OTHER ESSAYS

      THE UNSEEN WORLD

      EXCURSIONS OF AN EVOLUTIONIST

      MYTHS AND MYTH-MAKERS

      THE DESTINY OF MAN

      THE IDEA OF GOD

      PREFACE

      Table of Contents

      A single purpose runs throughout this little book, though different aspects of it are treated in the three several parts. The first part, The Mystery of Evil, written soon after The Idea of God, was designed to supply some considerations which for the sake of conciseness had been omitted from that book. Its close kinship with the second part, The Cosmic Roots of Love and Self-Sacrifice, will be at once apparent to the reader.

      That second part is, with a few slight changes, the Phi Beta Kappa oration delivered by me at Harvard University, in June, 1895. Its original title was Ethics in the Cosmic Process, and its form of statement was partly determined by the fact that it was intended as a reply to Huxley's famous Romanes lecture delivered at the University of Oxford in 1893. Readers of The Destiny of Man will observe that I have here repeated a portion of the argument of that book. The detection of the part played by the lengthening of infancy in the genesis of the human race is my own especial contribution to the Doctrine of Evolution, so that I naturally feel somewhat uncertain as to how far that subject is generally understood, and how far a brief allusion to it will suffice. It therefore seemed best to recapitulate the argument while indicating its bearing upon the ethics of the Cosmic Process.

      I can never cease to regret that Huxley should have passed away without seeing my argument and giving me the benefit of his comments. The subject is one of a kind which we loved to discuss on quiet Sunday evenings at his fireside in London, many years ago. I have observed on Huxley's part, not only in the Romanes lecture, but also in the charming Prolegomena, written in 1894, a tendency to use the phrase cosmic process in a restricted sense as equivalent to natural selection; and doubtless if due allowance were made for that circumstance, the appearance of antagonism between us would be greatly diminished. In our many talks, however, I always felt that, along with abundant general sympathy, there was a discernible difference in mental attitude. Upon the proposition that the foundation of morality is to ... give up pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence, we were heartily agreed. But I often found myself more strongly inclined than my dear friend to ask the Tennysonian question:—

      "Who forged that other influence,

      That heat of inward evidence,

      By which he doubts against the sense?"

      In the third part of the present little book, The Everlasting Reality of Religion, my aim is to show that that other influence, that inward conviction, the craving for a final cause, the theistic assumption, is itself one of the master facts of the universe, and as much entitled to respect as any fact in physical nature can possibly be. The argument flashed upon me about ten years ago, while reading Herbert Spencer's controversy with Frederic Harrison concerning the nature and reality of religion. Because Spencer derived historically the greater part of the modern belief in an Unseen World from the savage's primeval world of dreams and ghosts, some of his critics maintained that logical consistency required him to dismiss the modern belief as utterly false; otherwise he would be guilty of seeking to evolve truth from false-hood. By no means, replied Spencer: Contrariwise, the ultimate form of the religious consciousness is the final development of a consciousness which at the outset contained a germ of truth obscured by multitudinous errors. This suggestion has borne fruit in the third part of the present volume, where I have introduced a wholly new line of argument to show that the Doctrine of Evolution, properly understood, does not leave the scales equally balanced between Materialism and Theism, but irredeemably discredits the former, while it places the latter upon a firmer foundation than it has ever before occupied.

      My reference to the French materialism of the eighteenth century, in its contrast with the theism of Voltaire, is intended to point the stronger contrast between the feeble survivals of that materialism in our time and the unshakable theism which is in harmony with the Doctrine of Evolution. When some naturalist like Haeckel assures us that as evolutionists we are bound to believe that death ends all, it is a great mistake to hold the Doctrine of Evolution responsible for such a statement. Haeckel's opinion was never reached through a scientific study of evolution; it is nothing but an echo from the French speculation of the eighteenth century. Such a writer as La Mettrie proceeded upon the assumption that no belief concerning anything in the heavens above, or the earth beneath, or the waters under the earth, is worthy of serious consideration unless it can be demonstrated by the methods employed in physical science. Such a mental attitude was natural enough at a time when the mediæval theory of the world was falling into discredit, while astronomy and physics were winning brilliant victories through the use of new methods. It was an attitude likely to endure so long as the old-fashioned fragmentary and piecemeal habits of studying nature were persisted in; and the change did not come until the latter half of the nineteenth century.

      The encyclopædic attainments of Alexander von Humboldt, for example, left him, to all intents and purposes, a materialist of the eighteenth century. But shortly before the death of that great German scholar, there appeared the English book which heralded a complete reversal of the attitude of science. The Principles of Psychology, published in 1855 by Herbert Spencer, was the first application of the theory of evolution on a grand scale. Taken in connection with the discoveries of natural selection, of spectrum analysis, and of the mechanical equivalence between molar and molecular motions, it led the way to that sublime conception of the Unity of Nature by which the minds of scientific thinkers are now coming to be dominated. The attitude of mind which expressed itself in a great encyclopædic book without any pervading principle of unity, like Humboldt's Kosmos, is now become what the Germans call ein ueberwundener Standpunkt, or something that we have passed by and left behind.

      When we have once thoroughly grasped the monotheistic conception of the universe as an organic whole, animated by the omnipresent spirit of God, we have forever taken leave of that materialism to which the universe was merely an endless multitude of phenomena. We begin to catch glimpses of the meaning and dramatic purpose of things; at all events we rest assured that there really is such a meaning. Though the history of our lives, and of all life upon our planet, as written down by the unswerving finger of Nature, may exhibit all events and their final purpose in unmistakable sequence, yet to our limited vision the several fragments of the record, like the leaves of the Cumæan sibyl, caught by the fitful breezes of circumstance and whirled wantonly hither and thither, lie in such intricate confusion that no ingenuity can enable us wholly to decipher the legend. But could we attain to a knowledge commensurate with the reality—could we penetrate the hidden depths where, according to Dante (Paradiso, xxxiii. 85), the story of

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