To Professor Lesley.

Cambridge, Jan. 19, 1865.

Thank you very much for your objection to one of my theological arguments, as well as for your expressions of approval. The theological arena is a new one for me, The reference is to an article on “Natural Theology as a Positive Science” in the “North American Review” for January, 1865; Philosophical Discussions, p. 35. ⁴⁰ and I am painfully conscious of being poorly armed for its contests. The study of exact sciences, where one cannot go astray without falling into absurdity and incomprehensibility, is not so good a discipline as is commonly supposed, for preparing the mind against inaccuracies of thought and expression in matters full of darkness and pitfalls. I have seen many illustrations of this in the arguments of mathematicians when out of their element.

The above confession must not be understood, however, in any other than that soothingly general sense in which confessions

are made in church, — “O Lord, we have grievously sinned, but not by this, that, or the other particular act, of which our uncharitable neighbor thinks us guilty.” My error is only that of being misunderstood, —a great and dangerous error, it is true, in a literary aspirant, — but then it comes also from a confusion which is in the readers as well as the writers of theological discourses.

In mathematics we attend principally to the reasons, and let the conclusions follow if they will; but in theology the conclusions are of the first importance, and the reasons are dragged after them. Now I erred in not pointing out with sufficient distinctness that my aim was to examine the arguments and not the conclusions of Natural Theology, — to examine the reasonings from physical facts to certain conclusions, and not the interpretation which might be legitimately put upon these facts, if the conclusions were granted or otherwise verified.

It is doubtless true, granting the conclusion, — the existence of a law-giver and designer, — that the laws and apparent designs which are discovered by science are the signs or symbols of final cause or purpose; but how, then, can we use them as proofs of what we have assumed in thus interpreting them? My argument against Paley is ad hominem. He says a law implies power, and so it does; but it does not determine the nature of that power, saving only that it is a power which acts according to law, or is manifested by an order.

Design, which is an antecedent in the order of human production, is illegitimately assumed to be a real and essential and not an incidental, phenomenal antecedent, unless intelligence is shown to be essential to all order. Put this is the point in question. The materialist assumes just as validly that design is an incident to the order of human contrivances, or is what the logicians call an “inseparable accident,” but not an essential antecedent to this order as such, and therefore

is not implied in order generally. When Paley and other theologians conclude that “the works of nature proceed from intelligence and design” on the ground of scientific evidence, they pervert language just as much as the materialist, when he argues that they proceed from law, — always supposing, of course, that we do not grant the conclusion of either side. To the theologian, who begs the question, law and design are the obverse and reverse of the same fact, — the objective and subjective aspects of the same nature,— intelligence. To the materialist, who also begs the question, design is the characteristic of the anticipating, reflective action of the human mind, rehearsing in its little world, the imagination, the acts by which it modifies the course of nature. The form of order which it thereby impresses on the powers of natural agents is not essentially different from the order which pervades the whole of nature, — the order of law,— the origin of which he does not profess to know or even conceive, but calls it substance, of which the type to his mind is the substance of the bodies which manifest this order or matter, and when he refers the order of nature to the “agency of law,” he means the agency of the power of which law is the manifestation, —just as the theologian, when referring any thing to design, means to refer it to a personal cause. The materialist refers the order of nature to an unknown and as he believes unknowable origin; and as far as physical evidence is concerned he is warranted in doing so, quite as much as the theologian is in drawing his conclusions from the same source, — unless, indeed, it be an axiom that “all order is designed order.”

But, if this is true, what need of argument? We do not prove axioms by argument.

But the conclusions of theology so fill the mind, answering to other than rational interests, that any one who would hold them in abeyance, and strictly follow the argument a posteriori,

seems to doubt or reject them, or to yield to motives other than rational ones for disbelief, while he is only examining their grounds as he would the reasons of a conclusion in physics or mathematics.

Starting from religious conclusions and interpreting nature in accordance with them, the theologian discovers “law” and “design” as symbols, and his proofs amount to pious circles, like those of the whirling dervish; and it seems to me he would perform a more substantial service to religion, if he would look straight at the origin of his faith, instead of such pious exercises, by which he gets so dizzy as to bring science and faith into conflict.

But I must stop lest you think me giddy, too, from so long a contemplation of such gyrations.

A glimpse of Chauncey among his associates at the office of the Nautical Almanac may be had from the following passages of a letter from Professor Simon Newcomb, late of the United States Naval Observatory at Washington: Since this was written, Professor Newcomb has been appointed Superintendent of the Nautical Almanac. ⁴¹ —

“My acquaintance with him,” he says, “began in 1857, when I became a computer for the Nautical Almanac, and hence a sort of scientific colleague. He had then an abominable habit of doing his whole year’s work in three or four months, during which period he would work during the greater part of the night as well as of the day, eat little, and keep up his strength by smoking. The rest of the year he was a typical philosopher of the ancient world, talking, but, so far as I know, at this period, seldom or never writing. His disciples were his fellow-computers on the almanac. He regarded philosophy as the proper complement of mathematics, — the field into which a thinking mathematician would naturally wander. Philosophic questions were our daily subjects of discussion. . . . My favorite subject was that to which the

enclosed correspondence relates, — the compatibility of freewill with absolute certainty regarding human acts, and the absence of any reason for supposing that human actions are any less determinate than the operations of nature. Wright was at first inclined to claim, in accordance with popular notions of free-will, that these propositions were not well founded, but at length was led to maintain that, considered simply as phenomena, they were correctly formulated; that is, that we have no reason to believe human acts, considered simply as phenomena, to be any less determinate than the operations of nature. This is the ground which you will see that we agree upon in the enclosed correspondence.

. . . “When Darwin’s ‘Origin of the Species’ appeared, it was the subject of a special discussion, extending over a considerable time, before the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. It was in following this discussion that his views of the philosophy of natural selection first seemed to assume a definite form in his mind. The fallacy involved in the popular arguments respecting the cell of the honey-bee was long his favorite theme, and at length led to his communicating a short note on the subject to the American Academy.”

The correspondence referred to by Professor Newcomb consisted of a letter from him to Chauncey, asking that he would suggest proper Greek or Latin phrases for certain philosophical discriminations, and of the following letter in reply: —