The Christian Faith Under Modern SearchlightsJohnson, William Hallock
Religion
The Christian Faith Under Modern Searchlights
Johnson, William Hallock
Modernism (Christian theology)
3. The later stages in evolution, while connected with the earlier in
continuity of development, may contain elements that are essentially
new. A living being is "a reservoir of indetermination and
unforeseeability."[152] The new species cannot be explained, except by an
illegitimate process of thought, by what is presented in the old. The
appearance of a new species is something as new as the composition of a
symphony of Beethoven. Man, then, in his powers and destinies is not to
be judged by his likeness to the brutes, but by what he possesses over
and above the qualities of animal life, by those achievements and
endowments to which animals have failed to attain. Since man, and man
alone, has come so far, and in him alone consciousness has broken the
chains of mechanical necessity, "we shall have no repugnance in
admitting that in man, though perhaps in man alone, consciousness
pursues its path beyond this earthly life."[153]
152: "Life and Consciousness," _Hibbert Journal_, October, 1911, p. 34.
153: _Ibid._, p. 43.
4. Creative evolution is the antithesis of mechanical evolution. Bergson
protests that the conception of mechanism as applied to life is
inadequate, because (1) it is artificial, growing out of our habits of
controlling matter. It is an instrument of the intelligence, not giving
us an insight into life, which we must gain rather in intuition, the
higher faculty in Bergson's system. A mechanical representation of
nature is always a "representation necessarily artificial and
symbolic."[154] (2) Mechanical conceptions are inapplicable to living
beings, because of the irreversibility of the movements of living forms;
and (3) the mechanical theory is negatived by the facts of the
psychophysical connection. "The hypothesis of an equivalence between the
psychical state and the cerebral state implies a veritable absurdity, as
we tried to prove in a former work."[155] No mechanical theory and no
theory of accidental variations, whether insensible or abrupt, can
account for the production of so complex an organ as the eye.[156]
154: "L'Évolution Créatrice," 7th ed., 1911, p. iv.; E. T.,
"Creative Evolution," 1911, p. xii.
155: _Ibid._, p. 384; E. T., p. 355.
156: _Ibid._, pp. 82 ff.; E. T., pp. 75 ff.
His critique of other theories prepares the way for Bergson's own view
that the forms of living beings are due to an original vital impulsion,
not in the single organism, but in life as a whole, seeking, without
foresight of the result, to overcome the downward tendency of matter.
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