Jan. 1, 1886.] 



♦ KNOV\.^LEDGE ♦ 



73 



^ ILLUSTRATED MAGAZINE 1^ ' 

 }ENCE1ITERATURE,& ART, 



LONDON: JANUARY 1, 1886. 



THE UNKNOWABLE; 



OR, 



THE RELIGION OF SCIENCE. 



By Richard A. Proctor. 



THE BIRTH OF RELIGIOUS IMPRESSIONS. 



KS™22S22^LTH0UGH we may assign a definite posi- 

 tion, in the development of the religious 

 ideas of a race, to some particular class 

 of thoughts, it must not be forgotten that 

 there has been no process of religious 

 stratification. We cannot say even of 

 any man that in such and such a part of 

 his life ideas of one class prevailed, which 

 gave place liter to ideas of another class, and these in 

 turn to other ideas, and so forth ; for even where a man 

 has seemed to pass by quick transition from one " reli- 

 gion " to another, the transition has not in reality been 

 sudden. The views which seem new have been long 

 present ; it has been only by a mental struggle that the 

 older views have been maintained ; and all which has in 

 reality been sudden (if aught has) has been the cessation 

 of the long struggle by which the gradual encroachments 

 of more advanced ideas had been resisted. If this is so 

 in the case of a single mind, we may be assured that 

 there has been proportionate slowness of development, 

 which means a much longer and more complicated process 

 of change, in the religious ideas of races. "We cannot 

 truly say of any race, — at this part of its history the 

 people believed thus, but at such and such a time they 

 adopted this or that new belief. At every stage of the 

 progress from the infancy of the race to such develop- 

 ment as it may have attained, different forms of belief 

 have co-existed, even where an outward uniformity may 

 have been maintained. 



It will not be idle, indeed, to digress here for a moment 

 in order to consider the kindred lesson taught by the 

 study of other subjects than that with which we are here 

 dealing. In many departments of inquiry, perhaps in 

 all, the mistake of imagining an undue uniformity and 

 simplicity of arrangement has been made, and has 

 seriously affected the progress of research. The earlier 

 astronomers jiictured a solar system of so many similar 

 planets, — a galaxj- of uniformly distributed stars ; the 

 geologist clothed the earth with a series of layers like 

 the skins of an onion ; the biologist of old times pictured 

 races of animals as severally descended from single pairs ; 

 the histori;^n imagined each people descended (as the 

 biologist had imagined the whole race of man descended) 

 from a single pair ; the chemist had his four elements out 

 of which all things were formed : throughout the whole 

 range of what may be called the science of earlier times 

 we find the underlying idea that the phenomena of 



science, history, sociology, and religion, are uniform, and 

 the associated problems simple. 



With all the progress of modern inquiry we find the 

 old leaven apparent. In all departments of .■science, the 

 less philosophic and thoughtful — who are altogether the 

 more numerous — fall constantly into the mistake of over- 

 looking the diversity and complexity of the processes 

 which are taking place throughout the universe. In 

 astronomy men pretend to siy thus and thus did the 

 processes succeed each other by which the solar system, or 

 this or that part of the solar system, were formed, — when 

 doubtless not only those processes of which the evident 

 traces remain, but multitudes of others of which we have 

 no evidence and no conception even, have taken place in 

 varying degree at all times in the system, and are taking 

 place now. Consider geology again, — How neatly the 

 various eras of the earth's history are separated in the 

 mind of the ordinary student of geology ; how compla- 

 cently he distinguishes the Eocene, Miocene, Pliocene, 

 and other such periods (precisely as if all were actually 

 seen) from each other, as though at one time the whole 

 earth were clothed in one set of garments, at another in 

 an entirely distinct set, and at another in a set altogether 

 changed yet once more. 



Or take a specific part of geological study, the forma- 

 tion of mountain ranges, which illustrates well the 

 subject of religious evolution, — for we may aptly compare 

 man's religious ideas, inherited or developed, newly 

 formed or old and well worn, with the various forms of 

 the earth's surface-contour : — 



Even now, when geologists have learned to Irace the 

 actual processes by which a mountain range is formed, too 

 many students of geology have entirely erroneous (because 

 too simple) ideas of the way in which the mountain range 

 reached its actual condition. They picture to themselves 

 the various stages, when first the crust yielded and 

 molten matter was extruded, then next the region thus 

 broken and loaded sank gradually beneath the sea and 

 became a vast trough along which matter was deposited, 

 and after this trough had in the course of ages been filled 

 (steadily sinking all the time to depths of many miles) 

 the process was'reversed and the great seam thus formed 

 was gradaally squeezed upwards by the side pressures of 

 the yielding sea-floors around it, while lastly the action 

 of denuding forces carved out of the upraised mass the 

 peaks and pinnacles of the present mountain range. All 

 this is right enough. Of all these processes we have in 

 the Alps"and Apennines, the Himalayas and the Rocky 

 Mountains, very clear and decisive evidence. But the 

 processes were not neatly defined and separated as the 

 student is apt to imagine. The process of extrusion, for 

 instance, did not cease when the process of sinking began, 

 but went on still, at various places along the original 

 region of yielding. Again the process of sinking with 

 deposition was not uniform, nor did it give place every- 

 where to a process of uprising : both processes were going 

 on, intermittently and irregularly, at the same time, w hile 

 all the time the extrusion of matter was taking place, 

 though now in new regions. Yet once more, sub-aerial 

 denudation did not wait till the upheaval had been com- 

 pleted before it began its work, but went on in company 

 with the process of upheaval, with the process of sinking, 

 and even with tlie process of extrusion, all these pro- 

 cesses acting with ever varying degrees of energy and 

 efiiciency, and often intermitting their action. 



If a purely physical problem presents such comijlexity, 

 even where the records of evtry 2iart of the work are 

 more or less clearly legible in the earth's crust, we may 

 be w ell assured that the problem of religious evolution 



