be found, nevertheless, sneaking towards a Mumbo-Jumbo that he is rather ashamed of. He will always have his luck and his unluck, with the signs and the means to see and foresee, to ward or forward accordingly. I suppose he will always count his sneezes, and wish them to end in an odd one! Such things as amulets, charms, luckarticles of a thousand descriptions, will never die out. Tokens, foretokens, and fortune-telling, Biblical or Vergilian lots-instances of such things will in no time be lost among us. We may depend upon it that our tableturnings, spirit-rappings, spectral apparitions, and what not, will not be without their successors even to the remotest ages. Superstition is the shadow of religion; and they will seldom be found separate, -quite as though there were two authorities, two ruling powers, two dominions: one of the heavens, and another of the earth; one of the light, and another of the dark; one of our hopes, and another of our fears. And so, doubtless, it really is. Here, again, it is but the cross, the contrarium, the contradiction, that crops up to us. Once more, as has been said, we have to look for a rationale to the Platonic duality. Religion shall go with the ταὐτόν, the identity; and superstition with the θάτερον, the difference. Or we may apply in the same way the two genera of causes. He who realizes final causes, and the intellectual side, is necessarily religious; while he who realizes physical causes, and the corporeal side, is necessarily superstitious. And as both causes go together, the same man, as in the case of Johnson, may be at once religious and superstitious; rather, perhaps, it belongs to man, as man, to be at once both. Now of physical causes the outcome is contingency. I know that the opposite of this is generally said. See the waves upon the shore, it is said; there is not one of them that, in its birth and in its end, and in its entire course between, is NECESSITY AND CONTINGENCY. 111 not the result of necessity. That is true; but it is also true that not one of these waves but is the result of infinite contingency. Every air that blows, every cloud that passes, every stray leaf, or branch, or feather of bird that falls, every contour of the land, every stone or rock in the sea-bottom, almost, we may say, every fish in the element itself, has its own effect; and the various waves, in their form, and size, and velocity, are the conjoint result. That is necessity; but it is also contingency. That is, the serial causal influences cross each other, and from their own infinitude, as well as from the infinitude of space and time, in both of which they are, they are utterly incalculable and beyond every ken. That is contingency. There are infinite physical trains in movement. Each taken by itself might be calculable; but these trains cross each other in the infinitude of space and time endlessly; and that is not calculable the contingency of them, the tingency con, the touching or falling together of them. This touching together is something utterly unaccountable. The outcome to us in the finite world, so to speak, in the terminal periphery, can only be that we are submitted to a ceaseless to and fro, to a boundless miscellaneousness, an infinite pêle-mêle. But that being, it is with infinite astonishment that I have heard necessity thrown at philosophy, as though the belief of philosophy must necessarily be necessity. Plato's intellectual world, the world of the ideas in hypothetical evolution the one from the other, may be a realm of necessity; but such necessity is already contingency the moment that this realm, the ideas themselves, have become externalized-got flung, that is, into otherness as otherness, externality as externality. And thus it is that, in philosophy, contingency is the category of the finite. Every crossing in the infinite pêle-mêle may be plain to a spaewife, possibly; but it offers no problem for any reason as reason. It is in this connection, too, that I have heard very competent people speak of the system of philosophy as, of necessity, a system of necessity, moral as well as metaphysical, and not of free will. That, to me, as before, gives again boundless astonishment. Why, it is only in a realm of contingency that there were any scope for free will; it is only against contingencies that free will has to assert itself; it is only in their midst that free will can realize itself. And here we have come at last, perhaps, to the very angle of the possible rationale of superstition. We have no power ourselves over contingency: it ramps, and frolics, and careers, in its blind way, independent of us. Of course, it is understood that I speak of things as they are open to the reason which is given us: to omniscience and omnipotence, there can be neither contingency nor necessity. But taking it just so as it is to mankind, here, it seems, there were a realm in which chance, and chance alone, ran riot. How, then, propitiate, conciliate, and, so to speak, win the soft side of chance? It is only so that one can explain or excuse the existence of superstition in so powerfully intelligent, and so religiously devout a mind as that of Samuel Johnson. And if we can so speak of the existence of superstition in his mind, we may similarly speak of its existence in those of most others. There is no doubt that Johnson prayed most reverently and fervently-there is no doubt that he trusted himself wholly to God; but yet, for all that, there seem to have been for him as well powers of contingency: he would render them favourable, too, and have even chance, luck on his side. The realm of the infinite, the realm of the ταὐτόν, the realm of the final causes, led him to God; but he could not ignore and turn his back upon the realm of the finite, the realm of the θάτερον and difference, the realm of the physical causes. Of course, this also is true: that it is just as the race or the individual advances in knowledge and in wisdom that the latter world disappears more and more from our conscience; and the former world alone has place. Far back in time the race had superstition only, and not religion; but as regards the individual, it is only some four hundred years since a king of France, Louis XI., knelt to a leaden image in his hatband on the ground, and invoked his "gentle mistress," his "only friend," his "good lady of Clery," to intercede with God Almighty for the pardon to him of his many murders, that of his own brother among them! No man can call that religion. To a Louis XI. heaven was peopled with contingencies, even as the earth was. To him final causes there were none; caprice was all. Plato, in his perception of physical as but the material for final causes, was quite in another region than the most Christian king of France. In fact, Plato's whole world view was that of a single teleological system with the Good alone as its heart, with the will of God alone as its creator and soul. Plato, then, in a way, but carries out and completes what Socrates began. Socrates was not content with right action only as action, he must see and know why it was right; action, as it were, he must convert into knowledge; that is, for man's action, as a whole, he must find general principles, and a general principle. Now all that involved, first, a dialectic of search; second, the ideas and the idea as a result; and third, the realization of the State as its practical application. But that is simply to name the work of Plato in its three moments. The State was his one practical result; the ideas and the idea the media of realization; and the dialectic the instrument of their discovery, limitation, and arrangement. The ideal system, then, was the centre of the Platonic industry. Sensible existences, the things of sense, have for Plato no real truth. All that we see and feel is in perpetual flux, a perpetual H mutation. The ideas alone are the truth of things; and things have truth only in so far as they participate in the ideas. For ideas are the paradeigmata of things, and things are but the sensible representations of these. What the ideas logically are, things ontologically are; but the logical element is alone true; while the ontological element, as representative, is but temporary show only. The only true ontological element, the ὄντως ὄν, is the Good. To the Good not only is the knowledge of things due, but it is the Good also that gives them being. It is for it, and because of it, and through it that all things are. It alone is the principle, and the ratio essendi, and the foundation of philosophy itself. Man, being in his constitution double, the truth of his senses is alone thought. The end-aim of everything, and the end-aim of the entire system of everything is thought. That alone is good, and the Good alone is God. And God is the creator of the universe. The Good, design is so absolutely the principle of all things for Plato, that whatever exists, exists just because it is better that it should be than not be. Design, the one principle of design, is the voῦς itself: ψυχὴ αἴτιον ἀπάντων, the soul is the cause of all things, and that amounts to this, that all things are first of all in the soul, only not externalized. I hope we have some conception of where Plato is historically as regards the proofs required by Natural Theology. |