THE NATURALNESS OF THE SPIRITUAL WORLD 



When Henry Drummond's most famous book Natural Law in the 

 Spiritual JForlci first appeared,^ in 1883, it had a mixed reception for 

 this reason. The scientific world was on the whole glad to see religious 

 doctrines discussed in scientific terms, or at any rate correlated with 

 scientific ideas, but it was puzzled too, for the treatment of religion 

 was often far from psychological or objective. The religious world was 

 inclined to think that Drummond had in some way or other found 

 support for traditional religious doctrines from the facts revealed by 

 science, but it was very uneasy at finding the "supernatural" treated 

 as a sort of continuation of the "natural." It is safe to say that this 

 famous book has not been much better comprehended at any time 

 since then, though it has been very widely read. 



Natural Law in the Spiritual WorldP- is a naive book, but it has the 

 naivete of something fundamentally true, and something said a long 

 time before people were ready to appreciate it. To-day it must be 

 read with care, for it has many faults. There are far-fetched archaisms, 

 such as the discussion on gravitation^ or the extension of Spencer's 

 definition of life to "eternal life.""^ There are downright mistakes, 

 such as the too confident discussion of spontaneous generation^ due 

 to the absence of modem knowledge on the nature of the viruses and 

 similar forms on the borderline of the living and the dead; and again, 

 the persistent attribution of ethical values to the behaviour of the 

 lower animals,^ a level at which such values are not applicable. Then 

 there are dangerous passages, opening the way to deplorable social 

 activity, perhaps more recognisable in our day than they were in 

 Henry Drummond's. For example, the relations of "Nature" and 

 "Sin"' are insufhciendy safeguarded against the heresy of those who 

 would build human society purely upon a biological rather than 

 upon a sociological basis. Moreover, we must not be too hasty in 

 thinking that we can recognise either what constitutes sin or what is 

 natural to man. And the remarks on "love of life"^ err too much in 

 the direction of a grim and joyless puritanism. 



But when all criticisms have been made. Natural Law in the Spiritual 

 World remains a great book. At first sight, it appears to be devoted 

 to the attempt to show that there are analogies between those natural 



^ Abbreviations adopted in what follows: 



NLSW Natural Law in the Spiritual World. 



AOM The Ascent of Man. 

 2 Refs. to 47th edition. Hodder 8e: Stoughton, n.d. ^ NLSW, p. 43. 



4 NLSW, p. 214. ' NLSW, p. 64. « NLSW, pp. 319, 344. 



' NLSW, p. 105. 8 NLSW, p. 197. 



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