Morality as a Religion | Page 8

remains for us to complete our treatment of this aspect of

the ethical problem and determine the relations existing between
morals and science.
This question we conceive to be of vital importance. Just as we must be
inexorable in refusing to base our ethic on religion, and still less on
theology, so must we be equally determined in repudiating the claim
often put forward, that morality is a department of physics, or in any
way founded on physical science. The scientific professor, feeling the
ground strong under his feet, and sure of the applause of his very
numerous public, has made a bold bid for the control of the moral order.
He has made a serious attempt to capture the ethical world, and to
coerce morality into obedience to the inflexible formulae of physics.
The evolutionist, in particular, is consumed with an irresistible desire to
stretch the ethical ideal on his procrustean couch and to show how, like
everything else, it has been the subject of painfully slow growth and
development, and that when the stages of that growth have been
accurately ascertained by research into the records of the past, the
essence of morality is fully explained. Originally non-extant, it has
become at length, after aeons of struggle, the chief concern of man, the
"business of all men in common," as Locke puts it, all of which
philosophy is tantamount to saying, that morality is merely a flatter of
history. When you know its history, you know everything, very much
as a photographer might claim to exhaustively know an individual man,
because he had photographed him every six months from his cradle to
his grave. A very inadequate philosophy of ethic, this.
But, before coming to close quarters with this extremely interesting
problem, I would protest that we are sincere in our loyalty and
enthusiasm for physical science, sincere in our deep admiration for its
chief exponents. We claim to be students of the students of nature, for,
after all, nature herself is the great scientist. The secrets are all in her
keeping. The All-Mother is venerable indeed in the eyes of every one
of us. "The heated pulpiteer" may denounce modern science as the evil
genius of our day, the arch-snare of Satan for the seduction of unwary
souls and the overthrow of Biblical infallibility, but we are not in that
galley. As true sons of our age, we are loyal to its spirit, and that spirit
is scientific. The late Professor Tyndall said of Emerson, the veritable

prophet and inspiration of ethical religion: "In him we have a poet and
a profoundly religious man, who is really and entirely undaunted by the
discoveries of science, past, present and prospective, and in his case
poetry, with the joy of a bacchanal, takes her graver brother science by
the hand, and cheers him with immortal laughter. By Emerson
scientific conceptions are continually transmuted into the finer forms
and warmer lines of an ideal world." It is in no spirit, therefore, of
hostility to physical science or her methods that we venture to point out
that the term science is not synonymous with experimental research.
The most brilliant work of Darwin, Kelvin or Edison in no wise alters
the fact that there are more things in heaven and earth than are revealed
by their microscopes or decomposed in their crucibles. Mental science,
and above all moral or ethical science, have a claim to be heard as well
as physics. Philosophy, strictly speaking, working by the light, not of
the senses, as does physical science, but by the higher light of the
intelligence alone, must be reckoned with by the thoughtful man. Yet
this is precisely what so many of the lesser luminaries of science, the
popularisers of the great discoveries made by other and greater men,
appear to be wholly unable to see. They have borrowed their foot-rule
for the mensuration of the universe, and they apply it indiscriminately.
Everything, from the dead earth to the glowing inspiration of the
prophet's soul, must be labelled in terms of that infallible instrument. If
it cannot be reduced to their exiguous standard, so much the worse for
it. Science, or rather "the heated pulpiteer" of science (for these
inflammatory gentlemen are found both in the pulpit and at the
rostrum), can take no account of it, and that settles the matter once for
all.
We may proceed to offer a few illustrations of the attempt of the
scientist to capture the domain of ethics. The late Professor Huxley, of
whom we would speak with all the respect due to his high position as a
scientific expositor, roundly asserts that "the safety of morality is in the
keeping of science," meaning, of course, physical science. The same
authority considers science a far "better guardian of