INTUITIVE RELIGION

Religion has appeared in various forms, but whether Pagan or Christian, Catholic or Protestant, orthodox or unorthodox, it has always been understood to consist in the main of certain beliefs. Sentiments or emotions— such as wonder, reverence, aspiration — were supposed to accompany the beliefs as a matter of course, but their place was subordinate; belief was the essential thing. That was what religion really meant till about half a century ago, when a change began to take place which aims at reversing the order of its contents and obliterating the old sense. What is called the religious sentiment is exalted to the premier place, and belief is relegated to the background, or, rather, dispensed with altogether. The late Dr. Mathew Arnold, for instance, defines religion as "morality touched with emotion," without the slightest reference to belief of any sort. Professor Tyndall says, " It is wise to recognise man's religious sentiments as the forms of a force, mischievous if permitted to intrude on the region of knowledge, but capable of being guided to noble issues in the region of emotion, which is its proper sphere." Professor Seeley, of Cambridge, who is understood to be the author of a recent work on Natural Religion, defines it as "habitual and permanent admiration," and endeavors to show that the sentiment may get reasonable satisfaction in devotion to science, in the cultivation of art, in worship of this great and mysterious universe, even though there may be no Divine reality either within or beyond. Others, such as Comte in France and Mr. Frederick Harrison, his follower in England, have undertaken to construct a new religion on this emotional basis, a religion provided with a church and a form of worship, but with no god. The religious sentiment being, they say, ineradicable, must be satisfied somehow, and if we cannot get a god to worship we must be content to adore the noblest samples of human excellence we can find in the lives of the great and good of bygone ages. This they call the Religion of Humanity. Strange that men should care aught for a religion that dispenses with everything Divine. As Dr. Martineau observes :— " It is a pathetic thing to see how hard it is for the human soul to let its religion go ; to watch how those who, from loss of the Infinite Father, find themselves in an orphaned universe would fain attempt compensation by worshipping either each other or even, while its sacred look yet lingers, the mere scene where He was, and persuade themselves that it is still the same piety, though they stand alone, and no one reads their hearts or hears their orisons." It is not to a religion of this sort that Dr. Martineau invites our attention in the work before us— not a religion of sentiment merely, but religion in the old sense which the word invariably bore half a century ago ; religion, that is to say, in its theistic sense, implying the belief and worship of Supreme Mind and Will, directing the universe and holding moral relations with human life.
 The greater part of Dr. Martineau's work is devoted to an inquiry as to the origin of this belief and its sources in the constitution of human nature. The inquiry involves us at once in controversy with those who deny that we have in our mental constitution any valid sources of religious knowledge at all, and who therefore deny that we have any right to believe in God or to hope for a life to come. The agnostics, for instance, as their name indicates, utterly deny the possibility of religious or Divine knowledge. They admit that we may have notions, conceptions, ideas and what we call beliefs in regard to Divine things, but these do not constitute valid and verifiable knowledge ; they may be, for aught we can tell, mere subjective fancies, pure illusions, such "stuff as dreams are made of." The Positivist takes the same ground as the agnostic, only defining, perhaps, a little more precisely the limits of our knowledge. "We can know only phenomena, he says, things which admit of verification, because they can be seen, measured or weighed ; in other words, he admits that we may know nature or the aggregate of phenomena, but can know nothing whatever of the supernatural or producing cause of nature. Scepticism with some goes further still, for they have their doubts whether we are entitled to our belief in an external world at all. "We may have impressions of it in our consciousness, they say, but that the world outside is really in accordance with the impressions presented in consciousness we cannot by any means be sure. All these varying shades of agnostic doctrine, and more especially the phase of it last referred to, may be summed up in the dictum of J. S. Mill, that "we have cognisance only of feelings and states of consciousness." A doctrine like this, which would imprison us in our self-consciousness, and that so effectually as to deprive us of all possibility of getting into cognitive relations with the essential objects of religious belief, cannot be allowed to go unchallenged by a writer who aims at the establishment of religious belief on a natural and scientific basis. It is examined accordingly, and at great length, in Dr. Martineau's work. The various forms which the doctrine has assumed, all its ramifications, and all its modifications, from the days of Hobbes to Mill and Spencer, and from Kant to Comte, are here passed in review, and subjected to the keenest scrutiny. The result is to show that agnosticism or the doctrine of nescience in regard to Divine things is defective in every way it can be looked at, and that when agnostics insist upon the impossibility of attaining religious knowledge they create an obstacle which is entirely artificial, having no reasonable grounds to rest on, and which may therefore be put aside as a chimera. Dr. Martineau's own theory of knowledge is that known as the intuitional, and certainly it gives us a more satisfactory account of the constitution and range of our cognitive faculties than the agnosticism he repudiates ; for while the one would keep us "cabined, cribbed, confined," within the limits of self-consciousness, as in a mental prison, the other provides for us a means of egress, for it recognises the fact that in the very contents of consciousness itself we have witnesses of the existence of realities beyond. " All your self-consciousness is relative," he says, "and postulates the otherness of the objective term of the relation ; if you arbitrarily deny that postulate, I have nothing to say for it except that it is natural, inherently involved in the very law of thought itself. We have to trust something before we can know anything, and to assume the unveracity instead of the veracity of the primary relations of thought is to proclaim universal agnosticism, and reduce all intellectual procedure to the analysis of personal phenomena. For reasons already assigned we take the opposite course, and accept what each faculty reports as to its corelative term. That report is what we call an intuition." By this intuitive principle or law of thought we find ourselves so mentally constituted that we cannot know one thing without at the same time knowing something else which is co-relative to it. It is according to this law, for instance, that our cognitive faculties in making known to us phenomena oblige us to acknowledge also the existence of things which make phenomena. So with regard to nature and the supernatural — our knowledge of the one impels us to take cognisance of the other. " For all the changes within us and around us which constitute what we call nature," observes Dr. Martineau, "we are obliged to supply in thought a permanent ground. Change has no meaning and no possibility but in relation to the permanent, which is its prior condition ; and pile up as you may your co-existent and successive mutabilities, that patient eternal abides behind and receives an everlasting witness from them, whether unheeded or unguessed. . . . Nature, therefore, can never swallow up the supernatural any more than time can swallow up eternity ; they subsist and are intelligible only together, and nothing can be more mistaken than to treat them as mutually exclusive."
 Having thus cleared the way for a direct treatment of the Theistic problem, Dr. Martineau proceeds to deal with our belief in God as Cause. As we get our belief in God as Cause from the intellectual intuition of causality, we have first of all to determine what we mean by causality. It implies, of course, a relation between cause and effect ; but what do we mean by that relation? Is it merely a relation of customary sequence ? In other words, do we mean that the cause is just that which is customarily antecedent, and that the effect is just that which is customarily consequent ? Causality, we are told by Hume, MM. Kant and Comte and all the psychologists who take more or less an agnostic view of things, means just that and nothing more. In opposition to them all, but in perfect consistency with his own views of metaphysical truth, Dr. Martineau asserts that causality is more than customary sequence in the order of phenomena, and that we only get at the full meaning of the relation when we emphasise it as consisting in action or energy. That is to say, causality implies force or power, it being the very essence of the antecedent that it must be dynamic or operative in order to produce the effect. In support of this view of the case, he points to the fact that the very writers who seek to deprive causality of any dynamic meaning cannot help using language which conveys the dynamic idea. Dr. Martineau goes even further, than this, for he identifies causal energy or force with will. He maintains that we get our first notions of causality by our own exercise of it in willing. "We rest," he says, "on the position that power is known to us exclusively by our own exercise of it— not in the mere muscular delivery of an act, but in the internal intuition or direction of it; that in our intuitive belief of causality we mean that all phenomena as such issue from power which is not phenomenal ; that each phenomenon is determined to be this and not that by an act of will, immediate or mediate ; and that in thinking of causation we are absolutely limited to the one type known to us ; and so, behind every event, wherever its seat and whatever its form, must exist, near or far, the same idea taken from our own voluntary activity. This, it is plain, is tantamount to saying that all which happens in nature has one kind of cause, and that cause a will like ours; and the universe of originated things is the product of a supreme mind, and precisely thus, by no less immediate steps, are we carried by the casual intimation to the first truth of religion."
 It may be a surprise for some of his readers to find that Dr. Martineau attaches great importance to the argument from design. There is an idea abroad that evolution has somehow undermined the grounds of the argument, Paley employed it with much skill and force in his Natural Theology ; but as the principle of natural selection is incompatible, say evolutionists, with the idea of design the argument is now deemed worthless. Dr. Martineau is not opposed to evolution, so far as we can see; he appears to be rather in favor of it. At all events, he is thoroughly master of Darwinian principles, and it is certain that he has not on that account lost faith in design. It may be frankly admitted that our fuller knowledge of nature's method necessitates some modification of the crude conceptions and mechanical contrivances on which Paley based his argument ; but such admission furnishes no reason to conclude that "any expressions of mind which were present to Paley are lost to us."
 In the first volume of his great work, Dr. Martineau, as we have seen, treats of God as Cause ; in the second volume he proceeds to inquire into the grounds of our belief in God as a being of moral perfection, holding moral relations with human life. In dealing with this part of the Theistic problem he takes the same course as he had taken previously, his aim throughout being to find the grounds of our belief in the constitution of our nature. Starting from self-consciousness or self-knowledge, all that is required of us if we would find a pathway open to divine knowledge is that we should trust the veracity of our faculties, and accept what each reports as to its co-relative term. In other words, as we have to trust something before we can know anything, we may as well accept the guidance of our intuitions. Speaking of the trustworthiness of an intuition, he says : — "We have seen what it gives us in the case of volitional experience, viz., an objective causality ; by parallel presentation in the case of moral experience, we shall find it gives us an objective authority ; both alike being objects of immediate knowledge, on the same footing of certainty as the apprehension of the external world. This statement, however surprising to those who are unaccustomed to look into the ultimate grounds of human cognition, is deliberately made. I know of no logical advantage which the belief in finite objects around us can boast over the belief in the infinite and righteous cause of all."
 Step by step as we advance new difficulties arise. Having attained from the inward sources of knowledge the idea of God as the Highest, and having learned from the same source to attribute to Him supreme benevolence and justice, and all the other constituents of Divine perfection, we have now to carry our idea into the sphere of outward things for verification. But as soon as we proceed to apply the test we encounter problems which have sorely perplexed men in all ages;for the scheme of things in which we find ourselves placed is hardly such as we should expect from the benevolence and righteousness of an Infinite Being. "Why is there so much suffering in the world ? To say the very least of it this evil indicates imperfections somewhere. But what business have imperfections in the work of an Infinite Being? Has He not power to bar them out? The general answer is that we have to deal, not with unconditioned infinitude, but with a definite system conditioned by the laws of development, and embraced within some larger project, in whose ultimate perfection all present imperfections vanish. If this be so we may regard the liability of both animals and men to suffer pain as subservient to ulterior purposes of paramount good, and meanwhile with regard to the liability of animals, we may take refuge in the fact that in their case pain is not by any means preponderant, nor without alleviations and palliatives which greatly relieve its aspect. Man suffers more than animals, partly because of his intellectual endowment, and partly because of his moral nature, which, in some of its essentials, would be unmeaning without it. Suffering is also the discipline through which our moral nature gains its true elevation.
 Another difficulty in the moral aspect of the world is the apparent abandonment of human history to the conflict of rude force. This is a feature of history that must be looked at squarely, since the pessimist tries to make the most of it. Selecting historical phenomena of the most perplexing character, such as the extermination of tribes and races, the blight thrown upon superior civilisations by the invasion of barbarian hordes, the long prevalence of slavery and persecution, the baffled struggles of patriotism, and the martyrdoms of crushed faiths, the pessimist wants to know if these and other triumphs of might over right are at all compatible with the belief that a righteous will presides over human affairs. In opposition to this pessimistic view of things, Dr. Martineau thinks it "possible to show that, in human affairs, each lower form of character is intrinsically weaker than its immediate superior, so that the tendency, in the strife of parties, of politics, of races, of religion, and consequently of all historical development, is towards higher conditions and a more complete equipment of right with strength." Under the light and guidance of this tendency, which, may be called a law of history, he is able to show that the facts adduced in evidence of the reign of force admit of a very different interpretation ; and that history, so far from being a record of lost causes and triumphs of rude unscrupulous strength, attests the ever advancing development of reason and right. The section of his work in which he makes good this position is brilliant and impressive. As a contribution to what is called "the Philosophy of History," it is truly invaluable.
 The greater part of the second volume is occupied with disquisitions on three important topics, viz., the relative validity of Theism and Pantheism, the Psychology and Ethics of Determinism and Free Will, and finally the question of a Life to come. Of these three topics the latter seems to us to have most claim on our attention. The question of a life to come is always a pressing and momentous one, and the treatment of it by a thoroughly competent thinker is of special interest at the present day, when eminent men of science are advancing opinions which tend to deprive humanity of its dearest hope. Dr. Martineau's treatment of this great problem is sound and satisfactory so far as it goes, for though he does not pretend to settle it by positive demonstration, the subject not admitting demonstration of that sort, he is able to meet the scientists on their own ground, and to show that they have no right to prejudge the question in the summary way they have attempted. They confidently assert that it is impossible for our conscious life to survive the organic life, and if we ask, why impossible? they tell us the one is inseparably connected with the other; that thought is a function of the brain, and must therefore cease when the organ is gone. Dr. Martineau denies the assumption, availing himself of their own admissions to confute it. Professor Tyndall, for instance, is forced to admit that "the passage from the physic of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable; " that "definite trains of thought, and definite molecular actions in the brain occur simultaneously, but we do not know why." The admission is of far-reaching significance, for if scientists of such eminence are thus forced to confess profound ignorance as to the nature of the connection between the physic of the brain and the facts of consciousness, what warrant have they for pronouncing so positively against the possibility of our surviving death ? In further support of his view of the case, Dr. Martineau applies, with great effect, the law of conservation of energy.
 "In its physical aspect," he says, "death presents simply a case of transformation of energy ; the organic compounds of oxygen, hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen losing their precarious equilibrium and resolving themselves into more stable inorganic combinations, themselves destined hereafter to be partially taken up into new living forms. In crossing the mortal line, the total energy which had manifested itself in the heat and whole 'work' of the body is not altered, though every organ is cold and every function at rest ; part of it has become potential, locked up in durable substances that may remain idle for ages, and part is busy in setting up new chemical arrangement on a vast scale. This latter part is the exact equivalent of the muscular contractions which have gone out, and the nervous tension which has subsided, and, were it tested by a dynanomoter, would give account of these alone. But we should miss in it any element answering to the thoughts, the affections, the volitions, which were the concomitants of these in the living man ; they are unrepresented in the transformations. Consider the significance of this absence. If these mental activities are included in the category of 'energy,' then, since they are not transformed, they still continue, for were they extinct the law of conservation would be broken. If they are not included, if the cycle of energy is perfect without them, then they lie outside the physical world and are foreign to its fates. To treat consciousness as at once a superfluous appendage, and yet a liable partner of the perishable organism, is pure self-contradiction."
 Having thus warded off unfavorable presumptions against the possibility of a future life, Dr. Martineau proceeds to consider the moral aspects of the problem. His argument amounts to this : that the features characteristic of our nature are above the measure of our present lot, and irresistibly suggest an ulterior term of existence. Our intellectual faculties, for instance, are adequate to indefinitely more than the present term of life allows them to accomplish. Our affections also, and our aspirations, reach a depth of intensity far beyond the exigencies of the present, and if they are to be extinguished at death it cannot be said that our nature is framed in harmony with our condition, since it is overcharged with intensities of feeling that run to waste. Turning to our moral nature, we find that its vaticinations are in accordance with those of the intellectual and spiritual, "distinctly reporting to us that we stand in divine relations which indefinitely transcend the limits of our earthly years." The argument, as put by Dr. Martineau, is most impressive.
 Dr. Martineau's work is beyond all question, one of supreme value. It is a great work in every respect, whether we regard the vast importance of the subjects investigated or the learning, eloquence and intellectual power with which the investigation is conducted or the solid and satisfactory reasoning by which the conclusions are sustained. All the most difficult problems which the greatest thinkers have attempted to solve, from the days of Plato down to Darwin and Spencer, are here grappled with once more ; the most imposing theories of the German, French and English schools, and the latest speculations of modern science are subjected to the keenest scrutiny ; the whole question as to what is possible for us to know of the origin and the end of things is thoroughly threshed out, and the chaff separated from the wheat. We have no hesitation in saying that the work establishes its author's reputation as a match for the agnostic philosophers of the day, and we should like to know what they have to say in reply to him.

* A Study of Religion : Its Sources and Contents. By James Martineau, D.D., LLD., late Principal of Manchester New College, London. 2 vols. Oxford : Clarendon Press

Age (Melbourne, Vic. : 1854 - 1954), Saturday 11 August 1888, page 4