The Reign of Law “The Reign of Law. By the Duke of Argyll. Fifth Edition.” Alexander Strahan London. 1867. 8vo, pp. 435. ³⁴. [From The Nation 4.102 (13 June 1867): 470.] ³⁵

We think that it would he a profitable enterprise for some American publisher to reprint this book. It is one of the best of its class published in recent times. Popular treatises on natural theology and the theological bearings of modern scientific ideas have degenerated to such merely sermonical discourses, or else into partisan treatments of scientific questions (which seek to gain support from religious ideas rather than to give support to them), that a genuinely philosophical work of the olden stamp—showing power of thought and an earnest purpose, at least—has a peculiar claim to respect, even if it be not entirely successful in removing the difficulties which religious philosophy has encountered in the changed aspects of modern science.

That these difficulties are great it would be prejudice to deny. The idea of the “supernatural,” which is still the prevailing one, as a power of operating independently of orderly or natural causes—as one which interferes with them or sets them aside—such a supernatural power finds little favor with thinkers most advanced in scientific culture. To such thinkers the willingness to believe in an arbitrary exercise of creative power appears to indicate not so much the ripest discipline of faith as a defective discipline in science; and though miracles are not thereby excluded from a scientific conception of nature, yet their definition demands amendment. Miracles, as conceived by our author, involve not less than natural events the operation of natural causes, the use of natural means, and an observance of natural laws. To make an event miraculous it should involve, he thinks, a supermaterial instrumentality—that is, it should involve a special design or thought or have a purpose—and it should be superhuman either in its designs or in its command of means, though this command is not manifested by changing the laws of the means employed. It consists rather in a power which is not in its nature superhuman, a power to combine causes and make them means to an end through an observance of their laws. Interfering with laws thus signifies, according to this view, the power to convert them to use by combining them and turning their courses instead of arresting their operations. This implies, however, the existence of free causes which can so turn to use the forces of nature. But the human will is not, according to our author, a pure type of such a power, though the higher sentiments of the human heart appear to him to present such types. By the freedom of the will he does not mean freedom from motives. The reign of law which extends throughout nature, which requires that creation itself should be by means and according to the laws of already existing things, extends also over the “realm of mind.” “By freedom,” the author says, “we do not mean that any of the phenomena of mind, any more than any of the phenomena of matter, can arise without ‘ an antecedent,’” and he expresses his idea of the manner in which man is subject to the law of causation by these words from Mill’s “Examination” of Hamilton: “That his (man’s) volitions are not self-caused, but determined by spiritual antecedents in such sort that when the antecedents are the same the volitions will always be the same.” “But,” the author adds, “this word ‘ antecedent ’ is one of the many vain words in which metaphysicians delight. The highest antecedents which we can trace as determining conduct are to be found in the constitution of the mind itself. Love is an antecedent; so is reverence, so is gratitude, so is the hunger after knowledge, so is the desire of truth. Higher than these—further up the chain of cause and effect—we cannot go” (p. 811).

This passage discloses one of the most curious of the misunderstandings which are so common between the two great schools of philosophy. Our author obviously understands the words “spiritual antecedents” as if synonymous with the “spiritually antecedent”—that is, higher up in the hierarchy of moral worth and power—an interpretation natural enough to one versed in the conceptions of the ancient metaphysics. But if our author had been equally familiar with the tenets of positivism, he would hardly have chosen Mr. Mill’s words as expressing his idea of law in the “realm of mind,” for from the context and the general tenor of Mr. Mill’s writings it would have been evident to him that by spiritual antecedent Mr. Mill meant that state of the spirit—that is, of the mind and the character—which is immediately antecedent in time to an act of volition. The vagueness of the expression is not so much in Mr. Mill’s use of the word antecedent as in our author’s understanding of the word spiritual. He would also have known that the sentiments of love, reverence, gratitude are regarded by this school as also effects, the effects of inheritance, education, and the circumstances of life, and that the chain of cause and effect which this school contemplates reaches backwards and forwards in time indefinitely, not upwards and downward in the “spiritual” hierarchy.

This want of familiarity with the doctrines of the modern scientific philosophy has led our author into other still more curious misunderstandings in his criticisms of Mill and Comte, which we have not space to notice. We have commended his book in spite, therefore, of many serious blunders, because in this respect he is not much inferior to the best of the writers of his school, and because in freshness, liberality, and originality his book surpasses most similar recent treatises.

He allows to Mr. Darwin’s “Law of Natural Selection” some share in the origination of the adaptations in the organic world—a power, at least, to preserve and perfect the adaptations and contrivances of designing skill. He is also cautious not to ascribe intentions to nature in the sense of final causes or ultimate intentions. He contends, nevertheless, that immediate intention is shown in the structures and functions of organic beings, in contrivances and adaptations, which he appears, however, to ascribe to nature as a whole, rather than to the mental or tentative and contriving powers in the lives of the several races of animals and plants which these contrivances benefit.

With our author, as with all writers on natural theology, the natural evidences are read in the light of a metaphysical tenet, namely, that design is (or involves) a free power, is something more than taking advantage of circumstances in their empirical combinations. It is supposed to involve the power of making the combinations in the first instance, and independently of an empirical knowledge of causes or of acquired powers of combination in thought. And it is upon this tenet rather than upon the facts of natural science that the issue of the debate really turns; and the debate, it should be borne in mind, is not upon the tenableness of the positions meant to be established by these arguments, but rather on the validity of the proofs adduced.

Of the scientific merits of the book, we have but a word to say. The author contributes to the illustrations of design in nature an interesting discussion of the “machinery of flight” in the wings of birds, and by this and other scientific matters makes his book a very readable one.