The Naturalness of the Spiritual World 



A B^eappraisement of Henry Drummond 



(Based upon an Introduction to a new edition of Henry 

 Drummond's Natural Law in the Spiritual IForld, 1939) 



Every age has its "dividers" and its "uniters." The dividers seek to 

 distinguish between things which they believe their predecessors have 

 confused. They are nauseated by the facile identification of ideas and 

 modes of experience which are by essence utterly different; they pull 

 apart in order to understand and to clarify. The uniters, on the other 

 hand, are always straining after some unifying hypothesis, some 

 "philosophia prima," some all-embracing world-view or some scien- 

 tific hypothesis bringing hitherto unrelated groups of facts or theories 

 into relation. The uniters fall into over-simplification; the dividers 

 expose their shallowness without, perhaps, being able to suggest 

 anything better. And so goes on the eternal swing between t^'O poles; 

 the world-view that is certainly wrong, or at least, incomplete; and 

 the critical scepticism that is certainly no world-view. Like the ideas 

 of continuity and discontinuity in fundamental physical theory, these 

 poles of philosophy and criticism provide perhaps the necessary 

 contradictions out of which the advances of human understanding 

 are for ever being born. 



Henry Drummond was certainly one of the uniters. In his all too 

 short life of forty-six years he sought to come to some synthesis of 

 the evangelical Christianity of his Scottish upbringing and the evolu- 

 tionary naturalism of the great Victorian expounders of science, 

 Spencer, Huxley, Tyndall and the rest. This interest manifested itself 

 in the nature of the official post he held for a time — lecturer in natural 

 science at the Free Church College in Glasgow. Drummond was as 

 much at home with the aggressive missionaries of the time as with 

 the students of science; thus in 1879 in a visit to America he fitted 

 in a geological tour in the Rockies with Geikie as well as a visit to 

 the evangelical preacher Moody at Cleveland. Later he conducted 

 scientific exploration himself in the lake region of Nyasa and Tan- 

 ganyika. His writings attracted great attention when they appeared, 

 and some of them became best-sellers, but in his own time they were 

 certainly not understood. 



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