WILLIAM K. CLIFFORD

LECTURES AND ESSAYS.*

The late Professor Clifford was a marked man in more respects than one. He was not only a mathematician of a very high order, but his grasp of physical science generally was singularly accurate, and whatever he knew he had the faculty of imparting in clear and vivid terms. But more than this he was in an exceptional degree the spokesman of the modern school of ethical atheism which smiles at the claims of all religious beliefs, and arrogates to itself the function of proving that God, the soul, and immortality are the baseless fabrics of a distempered dream, which must be replaced by an all embracing system of philosophy and the latest utterances of science. As an ardent disciple and a fearless exponent of the teachings of this school, Professor Clifford's Essays have a significance apart from their intrinsic value. But before dealing with his practical philosophy as a public teacher, we must briefly summarize the leading facts contained in Mr. Pollock's biographical introduction. William Kingdom Clifford was born at Exeter in 1845, and the first fifteen years of his life were passed in that city, where his father was one of the chief booksellers, and after his retirement from business an active and faithful Magistrate. Clifford received the best education his native city could offer. He distinguished himself in the University local examinations, and in 1860 he went to King's College, London, where he remained for three years. At the end of that time he went to Cambridge, and gained a minor scholarship at Trinity College. At the end of his fourth year he came out Second Wrangler, and was also Second Smith's prizeman. When he was but twenty-three he was elected Fellow of his College, and at twenty-six he was elected Professor of Applied Mathematics at University College, London. In the following year he married and his life seemed full of promise. But shortly afterwards, when he had been little more than a year married, signs of pulmonary disease showed themselves. Change and travel seemed for a time to ward off danger, but the fight was a losing one, and on March 3, 1879, Clifford died at the early age of thirty-four. The deep and tender regard in which he was held by his friends, bears testimony to his sincerity and constancy and to his genial unselfishness.
Whatever may be the sentiments awakened by his utterances as a teacher, it must be borne in mind that his character alike in public and in private life was high and blameless. "The real expression of Clifford's varied and fascinating qualities," says Mr. Pollock; "was in his whole daily life and conversation, perceived and felt at every moment in his words and looks, and for that very reason impossible to describe." The self-denying, laborious, truthful life of this professing atheist is held by Mr. Pollock to be a "rebuke" to the defenders of Christianity. When we turn, however, to the records of Clifford's early life, we find that during this plastic period of his existence, that period which more than any other determines the future character and feelings, he was in a pre-eminent degree moulded by religious influences. His father was a High Churchman, and young Clifford grew up a devout and earnest Anglican. One who knew him tells that when he was first a Fellow of his College a crucifix hung in his bedroom wall. When he conceived his theology was vulnerable to criticism, he set himself to study the Catholic faith, his problem now being to find a religion system which should be in harmony with science and history. For a time he maintained without compromise the authority of religious dogmas, and held that they should be received implicitly without demand for proof. "When or how," says Mr. Pollock. "Clifford first came to a clear perception that this position of quasi-scientific Catholicism was untenable I do not exactly know." This was in the twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth year of his age. When he finally broke with Christianity, he seems for a time to have imagined that in the doctrine of evolution, be found something that made up for his lost faith, "For two or three years," says Mr. Pollock, "the knot of Cambridge friends, of whom Clifford was the leading spirit, were carried away by a wave of Darwinian enthusiasm ; we seemed to ride triumphant on an ocean of new life and boundless possibilities." But though he assimilated the various teachings of science, and accepted Darwinism in all its conclusions with exultant enthusiasm, he did not, in his essays, during the five years that followed his removal to London as a Professor at University College, touch directly on the question of morals and religion and the practical hopes of the human race. In the essays "Theories of the Physical Forces," " Atoms," "Aims and Instruments of Scientific Thought," '"The Philosophy of the Pure Sciences," "Beginning and Ending of the Earth," and the "Connection of Body and Mind," he explained with forcible clearness the chief conclusions that modern science had come to concerning the constitution of matter, the history of the material universe, the connection of the brain with consciousness. The physical creed which is discussed in these essays is now familiar to most of us. A brief review of its more salient features will not be here out of place. "The universe," says Clifford, "in one place is made up of atoms and ether; there is no room in it for ghosts, all nature is uniform, there has never been in it anywhere any breach of continuity." To quote Clifford's words : — " The state at this moment of any detached fragment, say a particle of matter at the tip of my tongue, is an infallible record of the eternal past, an in fallible prediction of the eternal future. As the history of eternity is written in every second of time, so is the history of the universe written in every point of space." All that we can be allowed to believe of the eternal past is that at some immense distance of time — say one or two hundred millions of years ago — the earth was a liquid in a state of intense heat, but in a constant process of cooling. Then we came to a time when the earth began to assume its present state. At that there was on its surface so life nor consciousness, neither thought nor emotion, virtue or humanity, but there was the promise and the potency of them all ; there was what we commonly call matter, and what we call spirit was potentially contained in it ; and the first beginning of what we now call human life took place by spontaneous generation. It is open to a sceptic of advanced science to refuse to believe this, and to say that life came from elsewhere. But Clifford tells us that if he at any time contemplated this alternative, an invariable monitor, of which he could give no rational account, invariably whispered 'Fiddlesticks.' From the first simple beginnings of spontaneous generation through long processes of evolution, in which the survival of the fittest was the most important element, life became more complex, more organic, and more conscious, until at last from some non-human parents, the first human beings appeared on the earth's surface. Living and conscious man is derived from inanimate and unconscious matter, and we are once and again sternly warned from believing that any will or intelligence except those of men and animals has worked in the solar system." What the human will is Clifford makes a valiant if not very successful attempt at explaining. "The mind is to be regarded as a stream of feelings which runs parallel to, and is simultaneous with, the action of that particular part of the brain in which the cerebrum and the sensory tract are excited. The body is a physical machine which goes by itself, according to a physical law, that is to say is automatic. An automaton is a thing which goes by itself when it is wound up, and we go by ourselves when we have food." After meeting in a more or less satisfactory way the objection that if we are automata, we have no freedom of will and no moral responsibility, he says: — "If there is a certain point where the law of causation does not apply, where my action does not follow by regular physical causes from what I am, then I am not responsible for it, because it is not I that do it. So you see the notion that we are not automata destroys responsibility. Moreover, if we once admit that physical causes are not continuous, but that there is some break, then we leave the way open for the doctrine of a destiny, or a providence outside of us, overruling human efforts, and guiding human history to a foregone conclusion. I do think that if it is right to call any doctrine immoral, it is right so to call this doctrine, when we remember how often it has paralysed the efforts of those who were honestly climbing up the hill side towards the light and right, and how often it has nerved the sacrilegious aim of the fanatic, or the adventurer who was conspiring against society,"

Equally explicit are Clifford's utterances when he comes to treat of the source of morality. In common with his school, he holds that the theories of theology have hopelessly confused the mind of civilized mankind on this point. As life was generated at some stupendous distance in the past from mere specks of jelly, until in the process of time man appeared as the apex of the whole, so in the struggle for existence certain rules of conduct were involved, which, having relation to the well being of the individual, and the tribe gradually acquired the force of ethical laws, and gave rise to the feeling we call conscience. It is in the first and last catastrophe that Professor Clifford first gave mistakeable expression to his philosophic creed. In drawing this lecture to a close he said that the greatest of all our interests is bound up with the consciousness that exists upon the earth, and that corresponds part for part with the brain of the organised being. For all organised beings on the earth someday or other, there is in store a final destruction, and for those who can see the force of scientific evidence the conclusion seems inevitable that all human consciousness will be finally destroyed with them. " It is a very serious thing to consider," he says, " that not only the earth itself, and all that beautiful face of Nature that we see, but also the living things upon it, and all the consciousness of men and the ideas of society which have grown up upon the surface must come to an end. We who hold that belief must just face the fact and make the best of it. Do I seem to say, ' Let us eat and drink, for to morrow we die ?' Far from it. On the contrary, I say. ' Let us take hands and help, for this day we are alive together.' "
Still more unreservedly does Clifford speak a little further on, when in examining the arguments put forth in a work which strove to reconcile modern materialism with Christian theology, he said : — " Only for another half century let us keep our heavens and hells and gods. It is a piteous plea, and it has soiled the hearts of these prophets, great ones and blessed, giving light to their generation, and dear, in particular to our own mind and heart. These sickly dreams of hysterical women, and half starved men, what have they to do with the strength of the wide-eyed hero, who fears no foe with pen or club ? That which you keep in your heart, my brothers, is the slender remnant of a system which has made its red mark on history, and still lives to threaten mankind. The grotesque forms of its intellectual belief have survived the discredit of its moral teaching. Of what the kings could bear with the nations have cut down, and what the nations left the right heart of man by man revolts against day by day. You have stretched out your hands to save the dregs of the sifted sediment of a residuum. Take heed lest you have given soil and shelter to that awful plague which has destroyed two civilizations, and but barely failed to slay such promise of good as is now struggling to live among men."
We may feel startled or shocked at the virulence, the narrow one-sided habit of thought which these sentences display. But at the same time it is impossible not to see the ludicrous side which belongs to them. That a clever young man of thirty, with little practical experience of human life in its wide and sad aspects, with his social intercourse bounded between those he taught on the one side and those who admired on the other, should give expression to crude and hasty generalizations is not an event so unusual as to cause great amazement. But that he should take upon himself to pronounce passionate anathemas against the most sacred hopes, the holiest belief of mankind, and to characterise it as a "soiling power," the product of hysteria and disease, has in it something of the character of broad farce. "The dim and shadowy outlines," he says of the superhuman deity fade slowly away from before us ; and as the mist of His presence floats aside we perceive with greater and greater clearness, the shape of a yet grander and nobler figure— of Him who made all gods, and shall yet unmake them. From the dim dawn of history, and from the inmost depth of every soul, the face of our Father now looks out upon us with the fire of eternal youth in his eyes and says; " Before Jehovah. was I Am!" Throughout his essays and lectures Clifford frequently alludes to the extreme modesty of science, and contrasts it with the arrogance of theology. But the calm certainty with which he gives utterance to such sentiments as the above, offering ex cathedra verdicts on questions altogether beyond his scope, shows how foreign the alleged modesty of science was to his own speculations.

* Lectures and Essays, by the late Wm. K. Clifford. F R.S. with an introduction by F. Pollock. London, Macmillan and Co., 1875.


South Australian Register 17 March 1881,