Three Essays on Religion

JOHN STUART MILL

(1806-1873)

Contents

HOW TO READ THE TEXT

Helen Taylor's Introduction to the Essays

Nature

The Usefulness of Religion

Introduction

Second section

The social question

The individual question

Theism

Part 1: Introduction and Arguments

Theism

The evidence for theism

Argument for a first cause

Argument from the general consent of mankind

The argument from consciousness

The argument from marks of design in nature

Part 2: Attributes

Omnipotence

Omniscience

What limits god’s power?

God’s moral qualities

Part 3: Immortality

Part 4: Revelation

Part 5: General result

© Jonathan Bennett 2017

Three Essays on Religion

JOHN STUART MILL

1873

Early Modern Texts, 2017

COPYRIGHT

Three Essays on Religion

© Jonathan Bennett, 2017. All rights reserved.

Early Modern Texts

First launched: December 2006 (Nature & The Usefulness of Religion), September 2005 (Theism)

Last amended: April 2008 (Nature & Theism)

Contact: earlymodern31@gmail.com

www.earlymoderntexts.com

HOW TO READ THE TEXT

[Brackets] enclose editorial explanations. Small ·dots· enclose material that has been added, but can be read as though it were part of the original text. Occasional •bullets, and also indenting of passages that are not quotations, are meant as aids to grasping the structure of a sentence or a thought. Every four-point ellipsis . . . . indicates the omission of a brief passage that seems to present more difficulty than it is worth.

The division of Theism into five Parts is Mill’s; the further subdivision is not.

Helen Taylor's Introduction to the Essays

When the Three Essays on Religion were first published, after Mill’s death, they were prefaced by this ‘Introductory Notice’ written by Helen Taylor, Mill’s step-daughter (his wife’s daughter from a previous marriage).

* * *

The three following Essays on Religion were written at considerable intervals of time, without any intention of forming a consecutive series. They mustn’t be regarded as a connected body of thought, except insofar as they exhibit the Author's deliberate and exhaustive treatment of the topics under consideration.

The two first of these three Essays were written between 1850 and 1858, the interval between the publication of the Principles of Political Economy and that of Liberty. During that same period three other Essays - on Justice, on Utility, and on Liberty - were also composed. Of the five Essays written at that time, three have already been presented to the public by the Author. The one on Liberty was expanded into the now well-known work bearing the same title. Those on Justice and Utility were afterwards combined (with some alterations and additions) to make a single work that was published under the name of Utilitarianism. The remaining two - on Nature and on the Utility of Religion - are now presented to the public along with a third, on Theism, which was produced at a much later period. In these two first Essays there are clear indications of when they were composed, including the absence of any mention of the works of Mr. Darwin and Sir Henry Maine in passages where the thought expressed coincides with their views . . . .

The last Essay in the present volume belongs to a different period; it was written between 1868 and 1870, but wasn’t designed as a sequel to the two Essays that now appear along with it; the three weren’t intended to appear together at all. On the other hand it is certain that the Author regarded the opinions expressed in these different Essays as basically consistent. The evidence for this lies in the fact that in 1873, after completing his Essay on Theism, he intended to have the Essay on Nature published at once, with only such slight revision as might be thought necessary in preparing it for the press, but substantially in its present form. This shows that his manner of thinking hadn’t undergone any substantial change. Whatever discrepancies, therefore, may seem to remain after a really careful comparison between different passages, may be set down either to the fact that the last Essay had not undergone the many revisions which it was the Author's habit to make especially searching and thorough; or to the difference of tone, and of apparent estimate of the relative weight of different considerations, that results from taking a wider view and including a larger number of considerations in the estimate of the subject as a whole, than in dealing with parts of it only.

The fact that the Author intended to publish the Essay on Nature in 1873 is sufficient evidence, if any is needed, that the volume now given to the public was not withheld by him on account of reluctance to encounter whatever odium might result from the free expression of his opinions on religion. That he did not intend to publish the other two Essays at the same time was in accord with his habit in regard to the public utterance of his religious opinions. For at the same time that he was especially deliberate and slow in forming opinions, he had a special dislike for uttering half-formed opinions. He absolutely refused to be hurried into a premature decision on any point to which he did not think he had given sufficient time and labour to have exhausted it to the utmost limit of his own thinking powers. And, in the same way, even after he had arrived at definite conclusions, he refused to allow the curiosity of others to force him to express them before be had worked as hard as he could on expressing them properly, and before, therefore, he had subjected to the test of time not only the conclusions themselves but also the form in which he had expressed them. The same reasons, therefore, that made him cautious in the spoken utterance of his opinions in proportion as it was necessary to be at once precise and comprehensive in order to be properly understood, which in his judgment was pre-eminently the case in religious speculation, were the reasons that made him abstain from publishing his Essay on Nature for upwards of fifteen years, and might have led him still to withhold the others which now appear in the same volume.

From this point of view it will be seen that the Essay on Theism has both greater value and less than any other of the Author's works. The last considerable work that he completed, it shows the latest state of the Author's mind, the carefully balanced result of the deliberations of a lifetime. On the other hand, there had not been time for it to undergo the revision to which from time to time he subjected most of his writings before making them public. Not only therefore is the style less polished than that of any other of his published works, but even the matter itself, at least in the exact shape it takes here, has never undergone the repeated examination which it certainly would have passed through before he would himself have given it to the world.

Nature

‘Nature’, ‘natural’, and’ the group of words derived from them or derived with them from other words, have always loomed large in the thoughts of mankind and taken a strong hold on their feelings. This isn’t surprising when we consider what the words originally and most obviously meant; but it is unfortunate that a set of terms that play such a great part in moral and metaphysical theorizing should have acquired many meanings that •differ from the main one yet •are linked to it enough to create confusion. In this way ‘nature’ and its kin have come to stir up many extraneous associations, mostly very powerful and tenacious ones; and because of these associations the words have come to be symbols of feelings that their original meaning doesn’t at all justify—feelings that have turned these words into one of the richest sources of false taste, false philosophy, false morality, and even bad law.

The most important work done by the Socratic form of argument, as exhibited and improved by Plato, consists in •taking large abstractions such as the word ‘nature’, •pinning down precisely the meaning that they only vaguely gesture towards in common thought and talk, and then •questioning and testing the common maxims and opinions in which they play a part. It’s regrettable that among the instructive examples of this kind of inquiry which Plato has left us—and to which people in later centuries have been much indebted for whatever intellectual clearness they have attained—he hasn’t enriched us with a dialogue about nature. If the idea which ‘nature’ stands for had been put through his searching analysis, and the common platitudes in which it is used had been subjected to the ordeal of his powerful analysis, his successors probably wouldn’t have rushed, as in fact they speedily did, into ways of thinking and reasoning that were constructed on the basis of the fallacious use of that word—a kind of fallacy from which Plato himself was singularly free.

According to the Platonic method. . . .the first thing to be done with such a vague term is to find out precisely what it means. Another rule of that method is that the meaning of an abstract word is best looked for in concrete particular cases—seeking the universal in the particular. If we follow that rule with the word ‘nature’, we’ll start by asking such questions as: What is meant by the ‘nature’ of this flame? of that water? of these daffodils? of my cat? Evidently the thing’s nature is the totality of its powers or properties: •the ways it acts on other things (including the senses of the observer), and •the ways other things act on it; and also (if the thing is sentient) •its own powers of feeling, or being conscious. The nature of the thing means all this—its entire ability to exhibit phenomena [= ‘to present itself to our senses, to show up empirically’]. And although the phenomena that a thing exhibits may vary in different circumstances, they are always the same in the same circumstances; so they can be described in general forms of words, which are called the laws of the thing’s nature. For example: under average atmospheric pressure at sea level, water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit—that’s a law of the nature of water.

As the nature of any particular thing is the totality of its powers and properties, so Nature in the abstract is the totality of the powers and properties of all things. ‘Nature’ means the sum of all phenomena, together with the causes that produce them; including not only everything that happens but everything that could happen, because the •unused powers of causes are as much a part of the idea of Nature as are the powers that •come into play. All phenomena that have been examined thoroughly enough are found to take place in a regular way—invariably occurring when such-and-such positive and negative conditions are satisfied. That has enabled mankind to discover, either by direct observation or by reasoning based on observation, the •conditions of the occurrence of many phenomena; and the progress of science mainly consists in discovering those conditions. When discovered they can be expressed in general propositions, which are called laws of the particular phenomenon—·e.g. ‘laws of water’, ‘laws of memory’·—and also, more generally, ‘laws of Nature’. For example, this truth:

•All material objects tend to move towards one another with a force directly proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them

is a law of Nature. And the proposition:

•Air and food are necessary to animal life

—if it is true without exception, as we have reason to believe it is —is also a law of Nature, though the phenomenon of which it is the law is special, and not universal as gravitation is.

In this simplest meaning of it, then, ‘Nature’ is a collective name for (1) all actual and possible facts. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that it is a name for (2) the way in which—·i.e. the laws according to which·—everything happens. . . . That is better, because the word ‘Nature’ suggests not so much (1) the multitudinous details of the phenomena as (2) the conception that might be formed of them, as a unified whole, by a mind that had a complete knowledge of them. It is this conception that science aims to achieve by raising itself, by successive steps of generalization, from experience ·on the ground-floor·.

[We are about to meet the first of Mill’s many uses in this Essay of the word ‘art’. In his use of it (common enough in his day), ‘art’ covers every activity involving human planning, forethought, or skill. In this sense, plumbing and carpentry and dress-making are ‘arts’.] Well, that definition of ‘nature’ is correct, but it captures only one of the senses of that ambiguous word. It clearly doesn’t fit some of the ways in which the word is commonly used. For example, it flat-out conflicts with the common form of speech in which ‘nature’ is contrasted with ‘art’, and ‘natural’ with ‘artificial’. For in the sense of ‘nature’ that I have just defined, which is the true scientific sense, •art is as much •nature as anything else; and everything that is artificial is natural. Why? Because art has no independent powers of its own; it is merely the use of the powers of Nature for a particular purpose. Phenomena produced by human agency, just as much as ones that happen without any input from us, depend on the properties of •the elementary forces, or of •the elementary substances and their compounds. The united powers of the whole human race couldn’t create a new property of matter in general, or of any specific kind of matter. All we can do is to use for our own purposes the properties that we find. A •ship floats by the same laws of specific gravity and equilibrium as a •tree floats after being uprooted by the wind and blown into the water. The laws of vegetation by which men grow •corn for food are the very ones by which •the wild rose and •the mountain strawberry produce their flowers and fruit. A house stands and holds together by the natural properties—the weight and cohesion—of the materials that it is made of; a steam engine works by the natural expansion of steam, putting pressure on one part of a mechanism, which—by the mechanical properties of the lever—transfers the pressure to another part where it raises a weight or moves an obstacle. In these and all other artificial operations—·i.e. things that happen partly because of how things were arranged by human skill·—the role of man is a very limited one; all we do is to move things into certain places. By moving objects we bring separated things into contact, or pull adjacent things apart; such simple changes of place produce the desired effect by bringing into play natural forces that were previously dormant. We •decide to make those movements to get the desired effect, we •think out the movements we’ll make, and we •use our muscles to make them; and these three performances of ours are all exercises of powers of Nature.

So it seems that we have to recognize at least two principal meanings in ‘nature’. In one sense, it means •all the powers existing in the outer and the inner world—·all the powers of matter and of mind·—and everything that happens by means of those powers. In another sense, it means (not everything that happens, but merely) •everything that happens without the agency, or without the voluntary and intentional agency, of man. This very ambiguous word has more senses than just •those two, but •they are the key to most of the others that matter.

Those being the two principal senses of ‘nature’, let us ask: when it is used to convey ideas of commendation, approval, and even moral obligation, is it being used in either of those senses? and if so, in which? It has conveyed such ideas all through the centuries. Naturam sequi [Latin for ‘to follow nature’] was the basic principle of morals in many of the most admired philosophical systems. Among the ancients, especially during the period when ancient thought was past its best, it was the test to which all ethical doctrines were subjected. The Stoics and the Epicureans, though strongly disagreeing in most of their views, were alike in this: each group thought that it had to prove that its maxims of conduct were the dictates of Nature. Under their influence, the Roman theorists who were trying to systematize the law led off with a certain ‘natural law’—a law that ‘teaches all animals’, as Justinian declares in the Institutes. And modern makers of systems not only of law but also of moral philosophy have generally taken the Roman legal writers as their models, with the result that there have been many treatises on the so-called ‘law of Nature’, and references to this law as a supreme rule and ultimate standard have occurred all through the literature. The writers on ‘international law’ have done most to give currency to this style of ethical theorizing; not having any man-made law to write about, but wanting to bring the authority of ‘law’ to support the most approved opinions regarding international morality, they tried to find such an authority in Nature’s imaginary legal code. Christian theology during the period of its greatest ascendancy only partly accepted the ways of thinking that erected •Nature into the criterion of morals; they couldn’t fully do so because according to the creed of most Christian denominations (though certainly not according to Christ) man is by •nature wicked. But reactions against this doctrine have the deistic moralists almost unanimous in proclaiming that Nature is divine, and setting up its imagined dictates as an authoritative rule of action. [A deist—from the Latin deus = ‘god’—is someone who believes that a single higher power made the universe but doesn’t intervene in its workings; some deists deny that the higher power is in any way personal.] A reference to that supposed standard is the chief ingredient in the line of thought and feeling that was started by Rousseau and has infiltrated itself most widely into the modern mind—including the part that calls itself Christian. The doctrines of Christianity have always adapted themselves to the philosophy that happened to be prevalent at the time, and the Christianity of our day has borrowed much of its colour and flavour from deism. These days, ·the concept of· nature isn’t applied in the way it used to be, to deduce rules of action with lawyer-like precision, in an attempt to make all human activity coincide with what is ‘natural’. Nor is any other standard invoked for such a purpose. People today don’t commonly apply principles with any such careful exactness, or acknowledge such a binding allegiance to any standard. Rather, they live in a kind of confusion of many standards; which isn’t conducive to the formation of steady moral convictions, but is convenient enough for those whose moral opinions sit lightly on them, because it gives them a much wider range of arguments for defending the doctrine of the moment. But even though perhaps no-one could now be found who, like the ancient Roman legal theorists, adopts the so-called ‘law of Nature’ as the foundation of ethics and tries to reason from it consistently, ‘nature’ and its cognates must still be counted among the words that carry great weight in moral argumentation. The claim that a way of thinking, feeling, or acting is ‘according to Nature’ is usually accepted as a strong argument for its goodness. If it can be said with any plausibility that Nature tells us to do •something, most people think that this makes the case for •its being right for us to do it; conversely, the claim that •something is ‘contrary to Nature’ is thought to bar the door to any claim that •it should be tolerated or excused; and ‘unnatural’ is still one of the most fiercely critical adjectives in the language. Those who deal in these expressions may avoid committing themselves to any deep theorem about the standard of moral obligation, but they still imply such a theorem, and the theorem they imply must be essentially the one on which the more logical thinkers of a harder-working age based their systematic treatises on natural law.

Do these forms of speech involve a third distinct meaning of ‘nature’? Or can they be intelligibly connected with either of the two meanings I have already described? At first it may seem that we have no option but to admit that we have here a third meaning. There are two realms of inquiry:

•what is the case (e.g. science and history),

•what ought to be the case (e.g. art, morals and politics).

But the two senses of ‘nature’ that I first pointed out refer only to what is. In the first meaning, ‘Nature’ is a collective name for everything that exists or happens. In the second meaning ‘Nature’ is a name for everything that exists or happens without voluntary human intervention. But the use of ‘nature’ as a term in ethics seems to reveal a third meaning, in which ‘Nature’ stands not for what is but for what ought to be, or for the rule or standard of what ought to be. But if you think about it a little you’ll see that this is not a case of ambiguity; we don’t have a third sense of the word here. Those who set up Nature as a standard of action don’t intend to say something purely about a word; they don’t mean that the standard of action, whatever it may be, should be called ‘Nature’; they think they are giving information about what the standard of action really is. Those who say that we ought to act according to Nature don’t mean the mere identical proposition—·the mere tautology·—that we ought to do what we ought to do! They think that the word ‘Nature’ provides some external criterion ·or standard· of what we should do. If they lay down as a rule for what ought to be a word which in its proper meaning stands for what is, they do this because they have a notion that what is constitutes the rule and standard of what ought to be.

My purpose in this Essay is to examine this •notion. I shall inquire into the truth of the doctrines that •make Nature a test of right and wrong, good and evil, or that in any way and to any degree attach merit or approval to following, imitating or obeying Nature. What I have been saying about word-meanings was an indispensable introduction. Language is, as it were, the atmosphere of philosophical investigation, and we have to make it transparent before anything can be seen through it in its right shape and position. In the present case we have to guard against a further ambiguity which, though it is abundantly obvious, has sometimes misled people who should have known better; and it would be as well to pin-point it clearly before going on. No word is more commonly associated with ‘Nature’, than ‘law’; and the latter word has two quite distinct meanings. (1) In one of them it denotes some definite portion of what is. We speak of

•the law of gravitation,

•the three laws of motion,

•the law of definite proportions in chemical combination,

•the vital laws of organisms.

(2) In the other meaning it stands for a definite portion of what ought to be. We speak of

•the criminal law,

•the civil law,

•the law of honour,

•the law of truthfulness,

•the law of justice;

all of which are portions of what ought to be, or of somebody’s suppositions, feelings, or commands regarding what ought to be. •The first kind of laws, such as the laws of motion and of gravitation, are simply the observed uniformities in the occurrence of phenomena: uniformities in what follows what and in what accompanies what. These are what scientists and even ordinary laymen mean by ‘laws of Nature’. •Laws in the other sense are the laws of the land, the law of nations, or moral laws (and I have already noted that legal theorists and commentators drag something they call ‘the law of Nature’ into the ranks of the moral laws). A prime example of how liable these two meanings are to be confused with one another occurs in the first chapter of Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, where he •remarks that the material world has its laws, the inferior animals have their laws, and man has his laws; and •calls attention to how much more strictly the first two sets of laws are observed than the third—as if it were an inconsistency and a paradox that things always are what they are but men are not always what they ought to be! A similar confusion of ideas pervades the writings of George Combe [a well-known though not very competent 19th-century scientist], and from there it has overflowed into many non-technical books and articles written for the general reader, which continually tell us to obey the physical laws of the universe, as though they were obligatory in the same sense, and in the same way, as the moral laws. The idea of a close relation if not an absolute identity between what is and what ought to be—an idea implied by the ethical use of ‘Nature’—certainly gets some of its hold on the mind from the custom of labelling what is by the expression ‘laws of Nature’, while the same word ‘law’ is also used, even more commonly and emphatically, to express what ought to be.

When it is said or implied that we should conform to Nature or to the laws of Nature, is this a statement about ‘Nature’ in the first sense of the word, meaning all that is, the powers and properties of all things? But in this sense of the word, there’s no need to tell people to act according to Nature, because nobody can possibly help doing so, whether he acts well or badly. There isn’t any way of acting that doesn’t exactly conform to ‘Nature’ in this sense of the word. Every action is the exercise of some natural power, and all the effects of an action are just phenomena of Nature, produced by the powers and properties of some of the objects of Nature, in exact obedience to some law or laws of Nature. When I voluntarily use my organs to take in food, that act and its consequences happen according to laws of Nature; if instead of food I swallow poison, the case is exactly the same. It is absurd to urge people to conform to the laws of Nature when the only powers they have are ones that the laws of Nature give them, and it’s a physical impossibility for them to do anything otherwise than through some law of Nature. What they do need to be told is which law of Nature they should use in a particular case. For example, someone who is crossing a river by a narrow bridge with no parapet will do well to •regulate his conduct by the laws of equilibrium in moving bodies, instead of •conforming only to the law of gravitation—and falling into the river!

However, although it is idle to urge people to do what they can’t avoid doing, and absurd to prescribe as a rule of right conduct something that fits wrong conduct just as well, we can construct a rational rule of conduct—·one that is neither idle nor absurd·—out of the relation that conduct should have to the laws of ‘Nature’ in this widest sense of the word. Man necessarily •obeys the laws of Nature—i.e. the properties of things—but he doesn’t necessarily •guide himself by them. Though all conduct is •in conformity with laws of Nature, not all conduct is •based on knowledge of them and intelligently directed to getting things done by means of them. Though we can’t free ourselves from the laws of Nature as a whole, we can escape from any particular law of Nature if we can keep out of any circumstances in which it comes into play. Though we can’t do anything except through laws of Nature, we can use one law to counteract another. According to Bacon’s maxim, we can •obey Nature in a way that lets us •command it. Every alteration in our circumstances makes some difference, big or small, to which laws of Nature we act under; and every choice we make either of ends or of means puts us to a greater or lesser extent under one set of laws of Nature instead of another. So if the useless injunction ‘Follow Nature!’ were replaced by this:

‘Study Nature! Know and pay attention to the properties of the things you have to deal with, insofar as these properties can help or hinder you in achieving your purpose’,

we would have arrived at the first principle of all intelligent action, or rather at the definition of intelligent action itself. And I’m sure that a confused notion of this true principle is in the minds of many of those who set up the meaningless doctrine that superficially resembles it. They see that the essential difference between •wise and •foolish conduct consists in •attending or •not attending to the particular laws of Nature on which some important result depends. And they think that someone who attends to a law of Nature in order to shape his conduct by it may be said to obey it, while a person who disregards it and acts as if no such law existed may be said to disobey it—overlooking the fact that what they are calling ‘disobedience’ to a law of Nature is obedience to some other law or perhaps to the very same law they are said to ‘disobey’. For example, someone who goes into an explosives depot either not knowing or carelessly forgetting the explosive force of gunpowder is likely to do something that will cause him to be blown to atoms in obedience to the very law that he has disregarded.

But however much of its authority •the ‘Follow Nature!’ doctrine may owe to its being confused with the reasonable command ‘Study Nature!’, those who favour and promote •the former certainly mean much more by it than merely ‘Study Nature’. To learn about the properties of things, and make use of that knowledge for guidance, is a rule of •prudence—a guide to •adapting means to ends, •giving effect to our wishes and intentions whatever they may be. But the maxim of obedience to Nature or conformity to Nature is offered not as a simply prudential but as an ethical maxim; and those who offer it in this way are the ones who also talk of ‘the law of Nature’ as a law that is fit to be administered by law-courts and enforced by punishments. •Right action must be something more than—something other than—merely •intelligent action, yet the prudential injunction to study Nature is the only one that can be connected with ‘nature’ in the wider and more philosophical of its meanings. So we must try it in the other sense of ‘nature’—the sense in which ‘Nature’ is distinguished from ‘art’, and stands for (not the whole course of observable events, but only) the events that occur without humans’ having any part in them.

[We are about to encounter the first of Mill’s many uses of ‘spontaneous’ in this Essay. To call events ‘spontaneous’ in his sense is just to say that they occur without any help from or intervention by humans.] Well, then, can we attach any meaning to the injunction ‘Follow Nature!’ in this second sense of the word, in which ‘Nature’ stands for whatever happens without human intervention? Is the spontaneous course of events when left to themselves the rule we should follow in trying to adapt things to our use? Clearly not! It is perfectly obvious that the maxim ‘Follow Nature!’, taken in this sense, isn’t merely superfluous and unmeaning (like the other), but palpably absurd and self- contradictory. For while human action can’t help •conforming to ‘Nature’ in one meaning of the word, what human action is for is to •alter and •improve ‘Nature’ in the other meaning. If the natural course of things were perfectly right and satisfactory, to act at all would be pointless meddling that couldn’t make things better and would therefore be bound to make them worse. Perhaps that is too strong: perhaps action could be justified when it is in direct obedience to •instincts, since •these might perhaps be regarded as part of the spontaneous order of Nature, ·i.e. the course of events in which humans don’t intervene·. But to do anything with forethought and purpose would be a violation of that perfect order. If the artificial is not better than the natural, what’s the point of human skills? To dig, to plough, to build, to wear clothes, are direct infringements of the injunction to follow Nature.

Thus, everyone would say that to apply the ‘Follow Nature’ maxim in the ways I have just described would be to push it too far. (Everyone—even those who are most under the influence of the feelings that prompt the injunction to follow Nature.) Everybody claims to approve and admire many great triumphs of art over Nature [see note on ‘art’ here]:

building bridges to connect shores that •Nature had made separate,

draining •her marshes,

digging down to •her aquifers,

dragging into the light things that •she has buried deep in the earth,

diverting •her thunderbolts by lightning rods, •her floods by embankments, and •her ocean by breakwaters.

But to commend these and similar feats is to acknowledge that the ways of Nature are to be conquered, not obeyed; that her powers often relate to man as enemies, from whom he must by force and ingenuity get what •little he can for his own use, and deserves to be applauded when that •little is more than might be expected, given his physical weakness in comparison to the gigantic powers of Nature. All praise of civilization, or art, or invention, is so much dispraise of Nature—an admission of Nature’s imperfection, which it is man’s praiseworthy business to be always trying to correct.

People have been aware that whatever man does to improve his condition is a criticism of the spontaneous order of Nature, and a thwarting of it. Down through the centuries this awareness has brought new and unprecedented attempts at improvement under the shadow of religious suspicion, as being at least •uncomplimentary and very probably •offensive to the powerful Beings who were supposed to govern the various phenomena of the universe, and whose will was thought to be expressed in the course of Nature. (And when polytheism gave way to monotheism [i.e. when the number of gods that were believed in fell to one], the same religious shadow fell, but with ‘Beings’ replaced by ‘Being’.) Any attempt to shape natural phenomena to the convenience of mankind could easily seem to be an interference with the government of those superior Beings; and though life couldn’t have been maintained, much less made pleasant, without perpetual ‘interferences’ of this kind, each new one was presumably made in fear and trembling, until experience had shown that it could be ventured on without attracting the vengeance of the gods. The priests cleverly worked out ways to •explain the success of particular infringements while •maintaining the general dread of encroaching on the divine administration. They did this by representing each of the principal human inventions as the gift and favour of some god. The old religions also provided many ways of consulting the gods and getting their explicit permission for what would otherwise have seemed a breach of their privileges. When •oracles had ceased, any religion that recognized a •revelation provided ways for doing the same thing. The ·Roman· Catholic religion had the resource of an infallible Church, authorized to say which human interventions in the natural order were permitted or forbidden; and, failing this, there could always be appeals to the Bible to decide whether any particular practice had been allowed, explicitly or by implication. The notion remained that man was granted this liberty to control Nature only as a special favour, and only as far his real needs required it; and there was always a tendency, though it lessened through time, to think that anyone who tried to exert much power over Nature was going further than any man should go, and impiously trying to usurp divine power. The lines of ·the Latin poet· Horace in which he scolds the familiar arts of shipbuilding and navigation as ‘wicked crimes’ indicate that even in that sceptical age the old sentiment was still alive. [In Mill’s time, ‘sentiment’ could mean ‘belief’ and could mean ‘feeling’. He may sometimes be using it to straddle those two, wanting to steer clear of the argument about whether ‘the old sentiment’ (for example) was a feeling or a belief. So ‘sentiment’ will be left untouched throughout this version.] The intensity of the corresponding feeling in the middle ages was not quite the same thing, because it was mixed up with superstition about dealing with evil spirits; but the accusation of

•prying into the Almighty’s secrets

long remained a powerful weapon of attack against unpopular inquirers into Nature; and the accusation of

•presumptuously trying to defeat Providence’s designs

still retains enough of its original force to be thrown in as a make-weight, along with other objections, when there is a desire to find fault with any new effort of human forethought and inventiveness. [Mill uses ‘Providence’ sometimes to mean ‘God’ and sometimes to mean something like ‘God’s protective care of us’.] No-one says that God doesn’t want the spontaneous order of the created world to be altered, or even that he doesn’t want it altered in any new way. But there still exists a vague notion that •though it is quite all right to control this or that natural phenomenon, the general system of Nature is a model for us to imitate; that •we should on the whole be guided by the spirit and general conception of Nature’s own ways; that •those ways are God’s work, and are therefore perfect; that •man can’t rival their unapproachable excellence, and can best show his skill and piety by trying as best he can to reproduce their likeness; and that •some special parts (at least) of the spontaneous order of Nature are in a special sense expressions of God’s will—pointers showing the direction that things in general, and therefore our voluntary actions, are intended to take. (The particular parts will always be selected according to the speaker’s predilections!) •Feelings of this sort are suppressed on ordinary occasions by the current of life that runs against them; but •they are ready to break out whenever custom is silent, and the instinctive promptings of the mind have nothing opposed to them but reason; and speech-makers continually appeal to •them, perhaps not convincing opponents but at least strengthening the confidence of those who already hold the opinion that the speaker wants to recommend. It probably doesn’t often happen these days that

someone is persuaded to approve a course of action because he sees it as analogous to God’s government of the world;

but it does often happen that

that analogy exerts great force on someone who feels it to be a great support for anything that he is already inclined to approve.

If this notion of imitating the ways of Providence as manifested in Nature is seldom expressed plainly and downrightly as a generally valid maxim, it also is seldom directly contradicted. Those who find it blocking their way prefer to steer around the obstacle rather than to attack it: often they themselves have something of this feeling, and in any case they are afraid to draw accusations of impiety down on themselves by saying anything that might be thought to disparage God’s works. So they usually try to show that they have as much right to this religious argument as their opponents have, and that if the course they recommend seems to conflict with some part of the ways of Providence there is some other part that it agrees with better than does what the opponents are arguing for. When the great a priori fallacies are dealt with in this way, some progress is made by the clearing away of particular errors, but the causes of the errors are still left standing, and aren’t much weakened by each conflict. Still, a long series of such partial victories creates precedents that can be appealed to in subsequent arguments; and this creates a growing hope that the misplaced feeling ·of the obligation to follow Nature·, after so many partial retreats, may some day be compelled to an unconditional surrender. It is an undeniable fact that

the order of Nature, when not modified by man, is something that no just and benevolent Being would have made with the intention that his rational creatures should follow it as an example;

and however offensive many religious persons may find this proposition to be, it is undeniable and they should be willing to look it in the face. If the world were made wholly by a just and benevolent Being, and not partly by Beings with very different qualities, it could only be as a deliberately imperfect work which man, in his limited sphere, is to exercise justice and benevolence in amending. The best people have always held it to be the essence of religion that man’s chief duty on earth is to improve himself; and nearly all of them (the exceptions being monkish quietists) have associated this deep down in their minds (though they aren’t often willing to say it out loud, clearly) with the additional religious duty of improving the world—the human part of it and also the material part, the order of physical Nature.

We all have certain preconceptions that might fairly be called natural prejudices, because they arise from feelings that are natural and inevitable. But they intrude into matters that are none of their business, and when we are thinking about our present subject we should clear our minds of them. One of these feelings is the astonishment, rising to awe, that is inspired (even independently of all religious sentiment) by any of the greater natural phenomena. •A hurricane; •a mountain precipice; •the desert; •the ocean, either agitated or at rest; •the solar system, and the great cosmic forces that hold it together; •the boundless firmament, and to an educated mind •any single star—all these arouse feelings that make all human enterprises and powers appear so insignificant that while you are in this frame of mind it will seem to you intolerably cheeky for such a tiny creature as man to look critically at things so far above him, or dare to measure himself against the grandeur of the universe. But if you consult your own consciousness a little, you’ll see that what makes these phenomena so impressive is simply their vastness. Their sublimeness consists in their enormous extent in space and time, or their enormous power; and a sense of this vastness always arouses a feeling that is more like terror than like any moral emotion. The enormous scale of these phenomena may well arouse wonder, and it squashes any idea of rivaling them, but the feeling it inspires is of a totally different character from admiration of excellence. People whose awe turns into admiration may be aesthetically developed, but they are morally undeveloped. Our imaginative make-up has this remarkable feature: conceptions of •greatness and •power, when we vividly make them real in our minds, produce a feeling which, though in its higher intensities it’s close to pain, we prefer to most pleasures. But we are just as capable of having this feeling towards •power that could be harmful to us; indeed we have it most strongly towards •powers of the universe when we are most vividly aware of their capacity to harm us. It would be a great error to move from the fact that

•these natural powers overawe us by a •single attribute—namely enormous power—that we can’t imitate

to the conclusion that

•we should try to imitate their •other attributes, modelling our use of our small powers on the example that Nature sets us with her vast forces.

Consider the facts! When you look squarely at these cosmic forces, what strikes you most forcibly is their •greatness and—second only to that—their perfect and absolute •uncaringness. They go straight to their end without regard for what or whom they crush along the way. When optimists try to prove that whatever is, is right, they have to maintain not that •Nature ever turns one step from her path to avoid trampling us into destruction, but that •it would be very unreasonable to expect that she should. Pope’s line ‘Shall gravitation cease when you go by?’ may be a just rebuke to anyone who is silly enough to expect common human morality from Nature. But if the context was a confrontation between two men, rather than between one man and a natural phenomenon, Pope’s triumphant line would be regarded as an extraordinary bit of impudence. A man who persisted in hurling stones or firing cannon when another man ‘goes by’, and having killed him tried to excuse himself by a similar plea—·namely, that his actions are natural events, and one can’t expect Nature to change its ways in the interests of individuals·—the plea wouldn’t succeed and he would very deservedly be found guilty of murder.

In sober truth, nearly all the things that men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another are Nature’s everyday performances. Killing, the most criminal act recognized by human laws, is done once by Nature to every living being, and in most cases it kills after prolonged tortures such as only the greatest human monsters ever purposely inflicted on others. We might arbitrarily decide to count as murder only acts that end someone’s life before he has had what is supposed to be his allotted term; but Nature does that too, to all but a small percentage of lives, and does it in all the violent or sneaky ways in which the worst human beings take the lives of others. Nature impales men, breaks them as if on the wheel, throws them to wild beasts, burns them to death, crushes them with stones like the first Christian martyr, starves them to death, freezes them, poisons them by the quick or slow venom of her vapours, and has hundreds of other hideous deaths in reserve, such as the ingenious cruelty of the worst Roman emperor never surpassed. [The phrase ‘the wheel’ refers, like everything else in that catalogue, to a horribly painful method whereby humans executed other humans.] Nature does all this with the most lofty disregard both of mercy and of justice, firing her weapons indiscriminately at the best and noblest people along with the lowest and worst; at those who are engaged in the highest and worthiest enterprises, and often as the direct consequence of the noblest acts—as though Nature were punishing people for acting well! It can happen that

•the well-being of a whole people depends on one person’s staying alive,

•the long-term prospects of the human race depend on a second person’s staying alive,

•the death of a third person will bring him great relief,

•the death of a fourth person will be a blessing to the people he has been oppressing;

and Nature will mow down the first and second just as readily as the other two. Such are Nature’s dealings with life. Even when she doesn’t intend to kill, she inflicts those same tortures with what looks like reckless cruelty. Because Nature so briskly terminates the life of each individual animal, she has to make arrangements for the perpetual renewal of animal life; and her clumsy arrangements for that have the result that a human being can come into the world only through someone else’s being literally stretched on the rack for hours or days, quite often leading to death. [This refers to normal human child-birth.] ·In the catalogue of human crimes·, •taking the means of livelihood is second only to •taking life (and according to one high authority the two are first-equal). Nature does this too on the largest scale and with the most callous indifference. A single hurricane destroys the hopes of a season; a flight of locusts or a flood desolates a district; a trifling chemical change in an edible root starves a million people [this refers to the 1845–9 potato blight in Ireland, which killed about a million people]. The waves of the sea, like bandit gangs, seize and confiscate the wealth of the rich, and the miserable possessions of the poor, with the same accompaniments of stripping, wounding, and killing as their human counterparts. In short, everything that the worst •men do against life or property is perpetrated on a larger scale by •natural agents. Nature has noyades more fatal than those of Carrier; her explosions of fire damp are as destructive as human artillery; her plague and cholera far surpass the poison cups of the Borgias. [A noyade is a mass execution by drowning, such as was ordered by Jean-Baptiste Carrier during the French revolutionary terror. Firedamp is an explosive mixture of gases that accumulates in coal mines. The Borgias were a powerful and sometimes murderous Spanish-Italian family, variously influential in Italy in the 15th and 16th centuries.] Even the love of ‘order’ that is thought to be a •following of the ways of Nature is in fact a •contradiction of them. Everything that people deplore as ‘disorder’ and its consequences is precisely a counterpart of Nature’s ways. Anarchy and the reign of terror are overmatched in injustice, ruin, and death by a hurricane and an epidemic of plague.

‘All these things are for wise and good ends’ some people say. The first thing I have to say about this is that even if it is true it is altogether beside the point. Suppose it’s true that contrary to appearances these horrors lead to good ends when Nature perpetrates them, no-one thinks they would do so if we performed them following Nature’s example; so the course of Nature can’t be a proper model for us to imitate. Either

•it is right that we should kill because Nature kills, torture because Nature tortures, ruin and devastate because Nature does so,

or

•we should pay no attention to what Nature does and attend only to what it is good to do.

If there is such a thing as a reductio ad absurdum [i.e. an argument showing that P is true because not-P has consequences that are absurd], this surely amounts to one. If it is a sufficient reason for doing one thing that Nature does it, why not another thing? If not all things, why anything? The workings of the non-human world are full of things that would be deemed the greatest crimes if men did them, so it can’t be religious or moral in us to guide our actions by the analogy of how things work in Nature. This proposition remains true, whatever secret power of producing good may reside in the events of Nature that we see as most dreadful and that everyone thinks it would be a crime to produce artificially.

But really no-one consistently believes in any such secret power. The phrases ascribing perfection to the course of Nature have to be understood as exaggerations of poetic or devotional feeling, not intended to stand the test of being coolly thought about. No-one, either religious or irreligious, believes that Nature’s hurtful agencies, considered as a whole, lead to good results in any way other than by inciting human rational creatures to rise up and struggle against them. If we really believed that those agencies were set to work by a benevolent Providence as ways of accomplishing wise purposes that couldn’t be achieved otherwise, then everything we do that tends to hold down these natural agencies or to restrict the amount of harm they can do— everything from draining a disease-causing marsh right down to curing a toothache or opening an umbrella—ought to be regarded as impious; and though we can occasionally see undercurrents of sentiment tending in that direction, nobody actually thinks that such actions are impious. On the contrary, the improvements that the civilized part of mankind take most pride in consist in more successfully warding off the natural calamities which, if we really believed what most people say they believe, we would cherish as medicines that ·God in his· infinite wisdom had provided for our earthly state. [We are about to meet the phrase ‘natural evil’. This doesn’t use ‘evil’ as we do these days in application to people or actions, meaning ‘worse than merely wicked’. Natural evils are just events or states of affairs that are harmful to us, bad for us, on the negative side of the value-ledger.] Also, each human generation averts much more natural evil than its predecessors did, so that if the theory ·that natural disasters are designed by God for our own good· were true, we ought by now to have experienced some terrible and tremendous calamity—one that we had previously been protected by ·the supposed ‘medicine’ of· the physical evils we have learnt to conquer. But anyone who acted as if that were what he thought would be more likely, I think, to be confined as a lunatic than revered as a saint!

No doubt it does often happen that good comes out of evil; and when that happens it is so agreeable that many people are eager to go on about it. ·I have two things to say about this·. (1) It is true of human crimes as often as it is of natural calamities. The fire of London, which is believed to have had such a good effect on the health of the city, would have produced that effect just as much if it had been really the work of the furor papisticus [Latin, roughly = ‘Roman Catholic terrorism’] so long commemorated on the Monument ·to the fire in London·. The deaths of those whom tyrants or persecutors have made martyrs in a noble cause have done a service to mankind that wouldn’t have been obtained if they had died by accident or disease. Yet whatever incidental and unexpected benefits may result from crimes, they are still crimes. (2) If good frequently comes out of evil, it is equally common for evil to come out of good. For every case in which

•a public or private event was regretted at the time when it occurred, but was declared to be providential [roughly = ‘sent by God’] at a later period because of some unforeseen good consequence,

there is one in which

•an event was thought to be satisfactory at the time when it occurred, but turned out later to be calamitous or fatal to those whom it had appeared to benefit.

Such conflicts between the beginning and the end, or between the event and the outcome, are as frequent in the badout-of-seeming-good cases as in the good-out-of-seemingbad ones; and the former are just as often noticed and attended to as the latter. But there isn’t the same inclination to generalize about bad coming from seeming good; or at any rate such cases aren’t regarded these days (though they were in ancient times) as indicating God’s purposes in the way the good-out-of-seeming-bad cases are thought to do. When people think in a general way about bad out of seeming good, they settle for moralizing about the imperfect nature of our foresight, the uncertainty of events, and the futility of human expectations. The simple fact is this:

•Human interests are so complicated, and the effects of any event whatever are so many and various, that if the event affects mankind at all its influence on them is nearly always both good and bad.

If a majority of personal misfortunes have their good side, it hardly ever happens that one person receives some good fortune that doesn’t also include something for him or someone else to regret. Also, many •misfortunes are so overwhelming that any favourable side they may have is entirely overshadowed and made insignificant; whereas the corresponding statement can seldom be made concerning •blessings. The effects of every cause depend so much on the circumstances that accidentally accompany it that there are sure to be many cases where something initially good leads to consequences that are over-all bad, and where something initially bad leads to consequences that are over-all good; but neither of these is what generally happens. On the contrary, both good and evil naturally tend to bear fruit, each of its own kind, good producing good, and evil producing evil. It is one of Nature’s general rules, and part of her habitual injustice, that ‘to him that hath shall be given, but from him that hath not shall be taken even that which he hath’ [Matthew 25:29]. The ordinary and predominant tendency of good is towards more good. Health, strength, wealth, knowledge, virtue, are not only good in themselves but help one to acquire more good. It can be good of the same kind:

The person who can learn easily is the one who already knows a lot; it is the strong and not the sickly person who can do everything that most conduces to health; those who find it easy to make money are not the poor but the rich.

And of other kinds:

Health, strength, knowledge and talents are all means of acquiring riches; and riches are often an indispensable means of acquiring these.

And conversely, whatever may be said about evil turning into good, the general tendency of evil is towards further evil. •Bodily illness makes the body more susceptible to disease; it produces physical weakness, sometimes feebleness of mind, and often the loss of ability to earn a living. All •severe pain, whether bodily or mental, tends to make the person more liable to pain for ever after. •Poverty is the parent of a thousand mental and moral evils, What is still worse, when someone is habitually injured or oppressed, this lowers the whole tone of his character. One bad action leads to others, in the agent himself, in the bystanders, and in the sufferers. All bad qualities are strengthened by habit, and all vices and follies tend to spread. Intellectual defects generate moral ones, and vice versa; and every intellectual or moral defect generates others of the same kind, and so on without end.

I think that that much applauded class of authors, the writers on natural theology, have entirely lost their way, missing the only line of argument that could have made their speculations acceptable to anyone who can tell when two propositions contradict one another. They have exhausted the resources of bad argument to make it appear that all the suffering in the world exists to prevent greater—that misery exists to ward off ·greater· misery. However skillfully argued for, this thesis could help to explain and justify the works only of limited beings who have to labour under conditions independent of their own will; but it can’t apply to a Creator who is assumed to be omnipotent. If he bends to a supposed necessity, he himself makes the necessity which he bends to. [Mill means ‘If he bends. . . ’ etc. sarcastically. His point is that because God makes the necessity, it is absurd to think of him as ‘bending’ to it—e.g. doing bad x because that’s the only way to get good y. If x is the only way to y, that’s because God has made it so, and so it is open to him to revoke this ‘necessity’.] If the maker of the world can do anything he wants to, then he wants ·us to have· misery, and there’s no escape from that conclusion. The more consistent of those who have thought themselves qualified to ‘vindicate the ways of God to man’—·quoting from Alexander Pope·—have tried to avoid the alternative by hardening their hearts and denying that misery is an evil. [The ‘alternative’ here is presumably the view that God is not omnipotent.] The goodness of God, they say, consists in his willing not the •happiness of his creatures but their •virtue; and even if the universe isn’t happy, it is just. There are objections to this scheme of ethics, but I’ll set them aside because this approach doesn’t at all get rid of the difficulty we are now discussing. If the creator of mankind planned to make them all •virtuous, his designs are as completely thwarted as if he had planned to make them all •happy; the order of Nature is constructed with even less regard to the requirements of •justice than to those of •benevolence. If the law of all creation were justice, and the creator were omnipotent, then each person’s share of suffering and happiness would be exactly proportioned to that person’s good or evil deeds; no human being would have a worse lot than another unless he deserved worse; accident or favouritism would have no part in such a world, and every human life would be the playing out of a drama constructed like a perfect moral tale. No-one can blind himself to the fact that the world we live in is totally different from this! A sign of how different it is can be seen from the fact that the need to redress the balance has been regarded as one of the strongest arguments for another life after death—which amounts to an admission that the way things go in this life is unjust. You might want to object:

God doesn’t rate pleasure or pain highly enough to make them the reward of the good or the punishment of the wicked. Really, virtue is itself the greatest good and vice the greatest evil.

In that case, however, virtue and vice ought to be distributed among people according to what they have done to deserve them; ·but that is not what we find·. On the contrary, every kind of moral depravity is laid upon many people by the facts about where and when and by whom they were born— through the fault of their parents, of society, or of uncontrollable circumstances, and certainly through no fault of their own. Not even on the most distorted and shrunken theory of good that ever was constructed by religious or philosophical fanaticism can the government of Nature be made to resemble the work of a Being who is both good and omnipotent.

There is only one admissible moral theory of creation, namely this:

The force of good cannot subdue—completely and all at once —the powers of evil, either physical or moral. It couldn’t •place mankind in a world free from the need for an incessant struggle with the powers of evil, or •make men always victorious in that struggle; but it could and did •make them capable of carrying on the fight with vigour and with progressively increasing success.

Of all the religious explanations of the order of Nature, this is the only one that doesn’t contradict either •itself or •the facts that it is trying to explain. According to it, man’s duty is not simply

•to take care of his own interests by obeying irresistible power,

but rather

•to play his part as a somewhat useful helper for a perfectly well-intentioned God.

[That clause replaces Mill’s ‘standing forward a not ineffectual auxiliary to a Being of perfect beneficence’.] If we are looking for a faith that will stimulate a man to exert himself, this one will do it better than a vague and inconsistent reliance on an author of good who is supposed to be also the author of evil. And I venture to assert that this ·two-conflicting-powers doctrine· has really been the faith—sometimes unconsciously, perhaps—of all who have drawn strength and support of any worthy kind from trust in a superintending Providence. In the context of religion, the words men use to express their beliefs are far from indicating what they really believe. Many have imagined themselves to be favourites of an omnipotent but capricious and despotic god, and have derived an unadmirable confidence from that. But those who have been strengthened in goodness by relying on the sympathizing support of a powerful and good Governor of the world have, I am sure, never really believed this Governor to be strictly speaking omnipotent. They have always saved his goodness at the expense of his power. Perhaps they have believed that he could remove all the thorns from their individual path, but only by causing greater harm to someone else or frustrating some purpose of greater importance to the general well-being. They have believed that he could do •any one thing, but not •any combination of things; that his government, like human government, is a system of adjustments and compromises; that the world is inevitably imperfect, contrary to his intention.[1] And since the exertion of all his power to make the world as little imperfect as possible leaves it no better than this, they have to regard his power as not merely finite but extremely limited (though of course far greater than we can gauge). They have to suppose, for example, that the best he could do for his human creatures was to make an immense majority of all who have yet existed be born (without any fault of their own) as South American Indians or Eskimos or something nearly as brutal and degraded, but to give mankind capacities which—by being developed for very many centuries in toil and suffering, and after many of the best humans have sacrificed their lives for the purpose—have eventually enabled some chosen portions of the species to grow into something better, capable of being developed in further centuries into something really good, of which so far there have only been individual instances. It may be possible to believe, as Plato did, that perfect goodness, limited and thwarted in every direction by the stiff unworkableness of the material, has done this because it couldn’t do any better. But as for the thesis that the same perfectly wise and good Being had absolute power over the material, and freely chose to make it what it is—one might have thought that this couldn’t be accepted by anyone who had the simplest notions of moral good and evil! [Mill means ‘anyone who had even the simplest notions’ etc.—i.e. anyone who wasn’t a moral idiot.] And any such person, whatever kind of religious language he may use, must believe that if •Nature and •man are both the works of a perfectly good Being, that Being intended Nature as a scheme to be amended, not imitated, by man.

But even though they can’t believe that Nature as a whole manifests the designs of perfect wisdom and benevolence, men aren’t willing to give up the idea that •at least some part of Nature must be intended as an example or model; that •the moral qualities they are accustomed to ascribe to God must be exhibited in some portion or other of his works; that •if not everything that exists then at least something that exists must not only be a faultless model of what ought to be, but must be intended to be our guide and standard in correcting the rest of what exists. They won’t settle for believing that what tends to good is to be imitated and perfected, and what tends to evil is to be corrected; they are anxious for •some more definite indication of God’s designs; and being persuaded that this must be met with somewhere in his works, they take upon themselves the dangerous work of picking and choosing among his works in quest of •it. Any selection they make must be perfectly arbitrary unless it is guided by the general maxim that God intends all the good and none of the evil; and if their selection yields results that differ from what could be deduced from that maxim, it must be to exactly that extent pernicious.

No accredited doctrine has ever said what particular parts of the order of Nature are to be thought of as designed for our moral instruction and guidance; and accordingly each person’s individual preferences, or momentary convenience, have decided what parts of the divine government he will recommend us to take as models for our own behaviour. No such recommendation can be more valid than any other, because there’s no way of deciding that certain of God’s works are more truly expressions of his character than the rest; and the only selection that doesn’t lead to immoral results is the selection of the parts and aspects of Nature that are most conducive to the general good—i.e. ones that point to an end which, if the entire scheme expresses a single omnipotent and consistent will, is evidently not the end intended by it!

However, people on the look-out for special •indications of God’s will have thought—not without plausibility—that one particular element in the construction of the world is specially fitted to offer •them, namely the active impulses of human and other animate beings. One can imagine such people arguing that •when the Author of Nature was creating circumstances, he may not have meant to indicate how his rational creatures should cope with those circumstances; but that •when he implanted positive stimuli in the creatures themselves, stirring them up to a particular kind of action, we can’t doubt that he intended them to perform that sort of action. This reasoning, if followed out consistently, leads to the conclusion that God intended and approves everything that human beings do: everything they do is a consequence of some of the impulses with which God must have endowed them, so all must equally be considered as done in obedience to his will. As the people in question shrank from this practical conclusion, they had to pull back a little and say that •some but not •all of the active Nature of mankind points to a special intention of God’s regarding how men should behave. It seemed natural to suppose that these parts must be the ones in which God’s hand—rather than the man’s own—can be seen (that is why people often contrast ‘man as God made him’ with ‘man as he has made himself’). What is done with deliberation seems more the man’s own act than what he does from sudden impulse, and he is held more completely responsible for the former; and so the considered part of human conduct is apt to be set down as man’s share in the business, and the unconsidered as God’s. This leads to the strand of sentiment that is so common in the modern world (though unknown to the ancient philosophers) which exalts •instinct. at the expense of •reason—an aberration that is made even worse by an opinion that is commonly combined with it, namely that almost every feeling or impulse that acts promptly without waiting to ask questions is an instinct. Thus almost every kind of unreflecting and uncalculating impulse receives a kind of consecration, except for impulses which, though unreflecting at the moment, arise from previous habits of reflection. These are obviously not instinctive, so they don’t meet with the favour accorded to the rest. The result is that authority over reason is granted to all unreflecting impulses except the ones that have the best chance of being right! I don’t mean that anyone even claims to carry out this system of judgment consistently; life couldn’t go on if it weren’t admitted that impulses must be controlled, and that reason ought to govern our actions. What I am discussing is the proposal not to drive reason from the helm—·i.e. deprive it of its role as steersman of the human ship·—but rather to require it to steer only in a particular way. Instinct is not to govern, but reason is to practise some vague and unquantifiable amount of deference to instinct. Although the impression in favour of instinct as being a special exhibition of God’s purposes has not been shaped up into a •consistent general theory, it remains a •standing prejudice that can be roused into hostility to reason in any case where the dictate of the rational faculty hasn’t acquired the authority of prescription.

I shan’t here tackle the difficult psychological question about which impulses are instincts and which are not; that would require a book to itself. We don’t have to touch on any disputed theoretical points to be able to judge that the instinctive part of human nature is very unworthy to be held up as our chief excellence—as the part ·of creation· in which the hand of infinite goodness and wisdom is especially visible. ·To avoid disputes over where the line around instincts should be drawn·, let us allow that everything that anyone has ever claimed to be an instinct is an instinct; it is still true that nearly every respect-worthy attribute of humanity is the result not of •instinct but of •a victory over instinct; and that nearly all of what is valuable in the natural man consists of his capacities—a whole world of possibilities, none of which can generate realities except through discipline that is utterly artificial.

The idea that goodness is natural grew up in a highly artificialized condition of human nature. I don’t think it could have grown up otherwise, because ·no-one would have believed it· if it hadn’t been the case that good sentiments arose unprompted when there was occasion for them; that required that the good sentiments had come to predominate over bad ones, which happened because they were habitual, which came about through a long course of artificial education. Back when mankind were nearer to their natural state, cultivated observers regarded the natural man as a sort of wild animal, distinguished chiefly by being craftier than the other beasts of the field; and all the worth of anyone’s character was thought to result from a sort of taming—a term often applied by the ancient philosophers to the appropriate discipline of human beings. The truth is that almost every point of excellence belonging to human character is decidedly in conflict with the untutored feelings of human nature.

The virtue that we most expect to find and really do find in uncivilized men is courage. Yet courage is absolutely and totally a victory over one of the most powerful emotions of human nature. If there is any one feeling or attribute more natural than all others to human beings, it is fear; and no greater proof can be given of the power of artificial discipline than its conquest, at all times and places, of that mighty and universal sentiment. No doubt individual human beings differ enormously in how easy or hard it is for them to acquire this virtue ·of courage·. Difference of original temperament makes an enormous difference here—more than in almost any other department of human excellence. But it is reasonable to question whether any human being is naturally courageous. Many are naturally quarrelsome or irritable or excitable, and these passions when strongly aroused may make them unaware of fear. But take away the conflicting emotion ·in these cases· and fear comes back into command: consistent courage is always the effect of cultivation [= ‘development, training, upbringing, education’]. The courage that is occasionally—not generally—found among tribes of savages is as much the result of education as the courage of the Spartans or Romans. In all such tribes there is a most emphatic direction of the public sentiment into every channel of expression through which honour can be paid to courage and cowardice can be held up to contempt and derision. You may want to say:

Just as the expression of a sentiment implies the sentiment itself, so also the training of the young to be courageous presupposes a naturally courageous people.

No, it doesn’t. It presupposes only what all good customs presuppose —that there must have been individuals better than the rest, who set the customs going. Some individuals, who like other people had fears to conquer, must have had strength of mind and will to conquer them for themselves. They would obtain the influence belonging to heroes, for anything that is both astonishing and obviously useful is always admired; and partly through this admiration, partly through the fear they themselves arouse, these heroes would obtain the power of legislators, and could establish whatever customs they pleased.

Let’s think about cleanliness. It marks the most visible, and one of the most radical, of the moral differences between human beings and most of the lower animals; the lack of it does more than anything else to make men bestial. Can anything be more entirely artificial? Children and the lower classes of most countries seem to be actually fond of dirt; the vast majority of the human race don’t care about it, whole nations of otherwise civilized and cultivated human beings tolerate it in some of its worst forms, and only a very small minority are consistently offended by it. Indeed the universal law of dirt seems to be that uncleanliness offends only those who aren’t familiar with it, so that the only people who are disgusted by every sort of uncleanliness are the ones who have lived in such an artificial state that they are unused to it in any form. Of all virtues this is the most obviously not •instinctive but a •triumph over instinct. Assuredly neither cleanliness nor the love of it is natural to man; all that is natural in this area is the capacity to acquire a love of cleanliness.

So far I have given examples only of •personal virtues (Bentham called them ‘the self-regarding virtues’), because these might seem to be congenial even to the uncultivated mind ·and therefore to be natural rather than artificial·. I hardly need to say anything about the •social virtues, because our experience so firmly declares that selfishness is natural. I am not at all denying that sympathy is natural also. On the contrary, I believe that the possibility of developing goodness and nobleness, and the hope of their eventually coming to be uppermost ·in our natures·, rests entirely on the important fact that sympathy is natural. But ·for sympathy to have the role that we want it to have, artificial aid is needed·. If someone is left with his natural sympathy, and not helped to develop it in any way, he will in fact be as selfish as anyone else, differing from others only in the kind of selfishness that he has. What he will have is not •solitary selfishness but •sympathetic selfishness —two-person egoism, or three-person or four-person; he may be very amiable and delightful to those for whom he has sympathy, yet grossly unjust and unfeeling to the rest of the world. . . . Has there ever been anyone whose natural benevolence—without teaching by instructors, friends or books, and without intentional self-modelling according to an ideal—was a more powerful attribute than selfishness in any of its forms? We don’t need to answer that. Everyone must admit, at least, that such cases are extremely rare, and that’s all I need for my argument.

Let us now set aside the issue of self-control for the benefit of •others, and consider the commonest self-control for •one’s own benefit—the ability to sacrifice a present desire to a distant objective or a general purpose. A person must have this ability if he is to bring his actions into line with his individual good as he conceives it; but even this is most unnatural to the undisciplined human being, as can be seen in

•the long apprenticeship that children serve to it,

•the very imperfect manner in which it is acquired by people born to power, whose will is seldom resisted, and by all who have been early and much indulged, and

•the notable absence of it in savages, in soldiers and sailors, and in a somewhat less degree in nearly the whole of the poorer classes in this and many other countries.

The principal difference between this virtue and others (so far as the present discussion is concerned) is that although it requires a course of •teaching just as the others do, it is more capable than they are of being •self-taught. It is a cliché that self-control is only learnt by experience; so that this endowment is much nearer to being natural than the others I have discussed, in that it tends to be developed by personal experience, without external teaching. Nature doesn’t of herself give us •this virtue any more than she gives us •others; but she often administers the rewards and punishments that help prudence to grow—whereas for other virtues the appropriate rewards and punishments have to be created artificially for the specific purpose of developing virtues.

Truthfulness might seem to have a more plausible claim to being natural than any other virtue, because speech usually conforms to fact—or at least doesn’t intentionally deviate from it—unless the speaker has a motive for lying or misleading. And so we find writers like Rousseau happily decorating •savage life with the virtue of truthfulness, and contrasting this with the treachery and trickery of •civilization. Unfortunately, this is a mere fancy picture, contradicted by all the realities of savage life. Savages are always liars. They haven’t the faintest notion of truth as a virtue. They have a notion of not harming—and that includes not harming through lies— individuals to whom have some special tie of obligation: their chief, perhaps their guest, or their friend. These feelings of obligation are the taught morality of the savage state, and grow out of its circumstances. But savages haven’t the remotest idea of its being •honourable to respect truth for truth’s sale; and this holds ·not only for outright savages but also· for all the countries of the East, and the greater part of Europe: and in the few countries that are developed enough to have such a point of •honour, the only people to whom it makes a difference—i.e. the only ones who are truthful when seriously tempted to lie or deceive—are a small minority.

The expression ‘natural justice’ is commonly used; so I suppose that justice is a virtue that is generally thought to be directly implanted by Nature. I believe, though, that the sentiment of justice is entirely an artifact: the idea of natural justice doesn’t •precede that of conventional justice—it comes •after it. [see note on ‘sentiment’ here.] The further we look back into the human race’s early ways of thinking, whether we consider ancient times (including those of the Old Testament) or the parts of mankind who haven’t made any advance over ancient times, the more completely we find men’s notions of justice being defined and limited by the explicit provisions of ·human· law. A man’s ‘just rights’ have meant the rights that the law gave him; a ‘just man’ was someone who never infringed or tried to infringe the legal property or other legal rights of others. The notion of

a higher justice that has authority over all ·human· laws, and is binding on the ·human· conscience even on matters on which human laws say nothing,

is a later extension of the idea ·of law·, suggested by legal justice and constructed on an analogy with it. ‘Natural law’ tracks along with human law, running parallel to the latter through all the shades and varieties of the sentiment ·of law·, and borrowing nearly all its terminology from that source. The very words justus and justitia [Latin, = ‘just’ and ‘justice’] are derived from ·the Latin· jus = ‘law’. ‘Courts of justice’ and ‘administration of justice’ always refer to the ·human· law-courts.

You may want to say that there must be the seeds of all these virtues in human nature, otherwise mankind wouldn’t be able to acquire them. I agree about that, but there’s more to be said. The weeds that dispute the ground with these beneficent seeds are not themselves •seeds but •chokingly luxuriant growths. In all but about one case in a thousand they would entirely stifle and destroy the seeds of the virtues, if it weren’t so strongly the interest of mankind to •cherish the good seeds in one another that they always •do so as far as their imperfect degree of intelligence allows. Some fortunately placed specimens of the human race receive that kind of fostering from their childhood, and don’t have it counteracted by unfavourable influences; for them the most elevated sentiments of which humanity is capable become a second nature, stronger than the first, not so much subduing the original nature as merging it into itself. . . . This artificially created or at least artificially perfected ·second· nature of the best and noblest human beings is the only nature that it is ever commendable to follow. I need hardly say that even this can’t be set up as a ·basic· standard of conduct, because it is itself the result of training and development which (if rational and not accidental) must have been determined by a standard already chosen.

This brief survey is quite enough to show that the duty of man is the same with regard to •his own nature as it is with regard to •the nature of everything else—namely not to •follow but to •amend it. But some people who don’t deny that instinct ought to be subordinate to reason still defer to Nature in a certain way, by maintaining that every natural inclination must have some sphere of action granted to it, some opening left for its to be satisfied. ‘All natural wishes’, they say, ‘must have been implanted in us for a purpose’; and they push this argument so far that we often hear it maintained that for every wish that it is natural to have there must be a corresponding provision in the order of the universe for its gratification. Thus, many people believe that the •desire for an indefinite prolongation of existence is in itself a sufficient proof of the •reality of a future life!

What I have been discussing are attempts to discover in detail what the designs of Providence are so that we can help Providence to bring them about. I think there is a radical absurdity in all this. Those who argue from particular bits of evidence that Providence intends something-or-other either •believe that God can do anything that he wants to do or •believe that he can’t. If the first supposition is adopted—if Providence is omnipotent—then whatever happens is something Providence intended to happen; the fact of its happening proves that Providence intended it. In that case, everything that a human being can do is predestined by Providence and is a fulfillment of its designs. But if. . . .Providence doesn’t intend everything that happens, but only what is good, then indeed man has it in his power, by his voluntary actions, to aid the intentions of Providence; but he can learn what those intentions are only by considering

•what tends to promote the general good,

and not

•what man has a natural inclination to.

Why? Because on this view God’s power is limited by inscrutable but insurmountable obstacles; so for all we know man may have been created with desires that will never—perhaps that ought never to—be fulfilled. Man’s natural inclinations, like any of the other contrivances that we observe in Nature, may be the expression not of •God’s will but of •the chains that impede its free action; in which case, if we take hints from these for the guidance of our own conduct we may be falling into a trap laid by the enemy. The assumption that everything that infinite goodness can desire actually happens in this universe, or at least that we must never say or suppose that it doesn’t, is worthy only of those whose slavish fears make them offer the homage of lies to a Being who, they claim to think, can’t be deceived and loathes all falsehood!

With regard to this particular hypothesis, that

all •natural impulses, and all •propensities that are universal enough and spontaneous enough to be capable of being thought to be instincts, must exist for good purposes, and ought to be only regulated, not repressed

—this is of course true of the majority of •them, because the species couldn’t have survived unless most of its inclinations had been directed to things that are needed or useful for its preservation. But unless we define ‘instinct’ in such a way that there are very few instincts, it must be granted that we also have bad instincts, which education should aim not merely to regulate but to wipe out, or rather to starve by disuse. Those who understand ‘instinct’ broadly enough to allow that there are many of them usually include among the instincts one that they call ‘destructiveness’—an instinct to destroy for destruction’s sake. I can’t think of any good reason for preserving this, or for preserving another propensity that is at least very like an instinct—namely the so- called ‘instinct of domination’. This involves taking delight in exercising despotism, in holding other beings in subjection to one’s own will. A man who takes pleasure in the mere exercise of authority, apart from the purpose for which it is to be employed, is the last person one would willingly trust with authority. A third example: some people are cruel by character, or (as we sometimes say) ‘naturally cruel’; they have a real pleasure in seeing the infliction of pain or in inflicting it themselves. This kind of cruelty is not mere hardheartedness, absence of pity or remorse; it is a positive thing, a particular kind of voluptuous excitement. The East, and southern Europe, have provided plenty of examples of this hateful propensity, and they probably still do. I think it will be agreed that this is not one of the natural inclinations that it would be wrong to suppress. The only question relating to it would be: Ought we to suppress the man along with the inclination?

But even if it were true that every one of the elementary impulses of human nature has its good side, and can with enough •artificial training be made more useful than hurtful, this wouldn’t be much of a concession ·to the moral significance of Nature·, because it must be admitted that without •such training they would fill the world with misery—and I say this of all of them, even the ones that are necessary for our preservation. They would turn human life into a caricature of the odious scene of violence and tyranny that is exhibited by the rest of the animal kingdom, except where it is tamed and disciplined by man. People who pride themselves on being able to read the Creator’s purposes in his works ought to have seen in the animal kingdom grounds for inferences to conclusions that they hate. If there are any marks at all of special design in creation, one of the things most obviously designed is that a large proportion of all animals should spend their lives tormenting and devouring other animals. They have been well equipped with the instruments needed for that purpose; their strongest instincts push them towards it; and many of them seem to have been so constructed as to be incapable of supporting themselves by any other food. Think about all the trouble that has been taken to find benevolent adaptations in Nature; if a tenth as much trouble were taken to collect evidence that would blacken the character of the Creator, what a lot of material would be found in the way the lower animals have to live! They are divided with almost no exceptions into •devourers and •devoured, and are subject to a thousand ills from which they can’t protect themselves, not having been given the faculties necessary for that. All that saves us from having to believe the animal creation to be the work of a demon is the fact that we don’t have to suppose it to have been made by an infinitely powerful Being. If we accepted as a rule of action that we should imitate the Creator’s will as revealed in Nature, including the animal kingdom, the most atrocious crimes of the worst men would be more than justified by Providence’s apparent intention that all through animated Nature the strong should prey on the weak.

My discussion up to here is far from having exhausted the almost infinite variety of ways in which the idea of conformity to Nature is introduced as an element in the ethical evaluation of actions and dispositions. The same favourable prejudgment follows the word ‘nature’ through the numerous meanings in which it is used as a distinctive term for certain parts of the constitution of humanity as contrasted with other parts. I have so far confined myself to one of these meanings, in which ‘nature’ stands as a general label for those parts of our mental and moral constitution that are supposed to be •innate, as distinct from those that are •acquired, as when

•nature is contrasted with education, or when •a savage state, without laws, arts, or knowledge, is called a state of Nature, or when •we ask ‘Is benevolence, or the moral sentiment, natural or acquired?’, or ask •‘Is it true that some persons are poets or orators by nature and others are not?’

But •actions and states of human beings are often called ‘natural’ in another and weaker sense, meaning merely that •they are not taken on deliberately or purposely in the particular case; as when someone is said to move or speak ‘with natural grace’; or when someone’s ‘natural manner’ or ‘natural character’ is thus and so, meaning that that’s how it is when he isn’t trying to control or disguise it. In a still looser meaning, a person is said to be ‘naturally’ F (whatever F may be) if •he was F before some special cause had acted on him, or •it is thought that he would be F if such a special cause stopped operating. Thus it may be said that someone is ‘naturally dull’ but has made himself intelligent by study and perseverance, ‘naturally cheerful’ but soured by misfortune, ‘naturally ambitious’ but kept down by lack of opportunity. Finally, the word ‘natural’, when applied to feelings or conduct, often seems to mean no more than that they are of a kind ordinarily found in human beings; as when we say that on some particular occasion a person acted as it was ‘natural’ to do, or that a particular response to some sight, or sound, or thought, or incident in life, is ‘perfectly natural’.

In each of these senses of the term, the quality called ‘natural’ is very often known to be worse than the quality contrasted with it; but whenever it isn’t too obviously worse for this to be called into question, there seems to be a thought that by describing it as ‘natural’ we are saying something that counts considerably in its favour. Speaking for myself, I know of only one sense in which ‘nature’ and ‘natural’ as applied to human beings are really terms of praise, and then the praise is only negative. I’m talking about the use of ‘natural’ to stand for the absence of affectation. We use ‘affectation’ to refer to the effort to appear to be other than one really is, in cases where the motive or the situation doesn’t (on one hand) •excuse the attempt or (on the other) •fit it to bear the more odious label ‘hypocrisy’. I should add that in affectation the person is trying to deceive himself as well as others; he imitates the external signs of qualities that he would like to have, hoping to convince himself that he has them! Whether in the form of deception or of self-deception, or of something hovering between the two, ‘affectation’ is rightly regarded as a term of reproach, and ‘naturalness’, understood as the opposite of affectation, is rightly regarded as naming a merit. But a more accurate term by which to label this estimable quality is ‘sincerity’—a term that has fallen from its original elevated meaning, and now commonly refers only to a subordinate branch of the cardinal virtue that it used to designate as a whole. ·There was a time when we could speak of the •sincerity of a person’s conduct, but these days we can speak only of a person’s sincerity in what he says·. [In lists of the ‘cardinal virtues’—sometimes said to be seven in number, and to be the opposites of the ‘seven deadly sins’—‘sincerity’ is not usually included. But it is sometimes presented as one important part of a cardinal virtue, and when it does, it is ‘sincerity’ in the broad sense to which Mill refers here.]

. . . .Conformity to Nature has no connection whatever with right and wrong. It is never appropriate to bring the idea of nature into an ethical discussion except—in a minor role on a few occasions—when the discussion concerns degrees of guilt. To illustrate this point, let us consider uses of the word ‘unnatural’, which can be used to express a more intense condemnation than any other member of the ‘nature’ cluster. Something’s being ‘unnatural’, in any precise meaning that the word can be given, is not a reason for blaming it, because the most criminal actions are no more unnatural to a being like man than are most of the virtues. It has always been thought that the acquisition of virtue is laborious and difficult work, whereas it’s a common saying— ·quoted from the Latin poet Virgil·—that ‘The descent into Hell is easy’. In most people, certainly, becoming •notably virtuous requires a greater conquest of a greater number of natural inclinations than is needed to become •utterly vicious. But if we have already decided on some other grounds that an action or inclination is blamable, the case against it may be strengthened by its being unnatural, i.e. in conflict with some strong feeling usually found in human beings. Why? Well, we have evidence that the bad inclination that we are blaming is both strong and deeply rooted ·in the malefactor·, because it has won out in the conflict with a strong natural feeling. This line of thought fails, of course, if the person in question never had the conflict ·because he didn’t have the conflicting feeling·; and in that case the argument ·from ‘What he did was unnatural’ to ‘What he did was especially heinous’· is not appropriate unless the feeling that is violated by this kind of act when most people perform it is not only justifiable and reasonable but is a feeling that it is wrong not to have.

I don’t think we should ever regard a wrong act as somewhat excused by the plea that it was natural, or was prompted by a natural feeling. Almost every bad act ever performed has been perfectly natural, motivated by perfectly natural feelings; so ‘It was natural’ is no excuse, but people in general often regard it as one—and it’s natural that they should do so because what they mean when they say ‘What he did was natural’ is that they have a fellow feeling with the offender. When the average person says of some admittedly blamable act that it was nevertheless natural, he means that he can imagine the possibility of being himself tempted to commit it. Most people are fairly forgiving of acts of which they feel a possible source within themselves, and are strictly judgmental only about acts— perhaps less bad ones—·that they find unintelligible, i.e.) acts of which their view is ‘I can’t understand how anyone could do such a thing’·. If an action convinces them (which it often does on very inadequate grounds) that the person who performs it must be totally unlike themselves, they aren’t fussy about the precise degree of blame it should receive, or even about whether it should be blamed at all. They measure the degree of •guilt by the strength of their •antipathy, which is why differences of opinion, and even differences of taste, have been objects of as intense moral abhorrence as the most atrocious crimes. ·And it is why they don’t make fiercely negative moral judgments on actions by people they think of as utterly unlike themselves; possible feelings of antipathy or hostility towards those actions (and their agents) are drowned by the sense of strangeness, otherness, inexplicability·.

It will be useful to sum up in a few words the main conclusions of this Essay.

The word ‘nature’ has two principal meanings: in one it refers to •the entire system of things, with the aggregate of all their properties; in the other it refers to •things as they would be if it weren’t for human intervention.

In the first of these senses, the doctrine that man ought to follow Nature is meaningless, because man has no power to do anything but follow Nature; all his actions are done through, and in obedience to, one or more of Nature’s physical or mental laws.

In the second sense of the term, the doctrine that man ought to follow Nature—i.e. ought to make the spontaneous course of things the model of his voluntary actions—is equally irrational and immoral. [See note on ‘spontaneous’ here.]

Irrational, because all human action whatever consists in altering the spontaneous course of Nature, and all useful action consists in improving it.

Immoral, because the spontaneous course of Nature is full of events that would be utterly vile if human beings brought them about, so that anyone who tried in his actions to imitate the natural course of things would be seen and described by everyone as the wickedest of men.

The system of Nature, taken as a whole, can’t have had for its principal object—let alone its only object—the good of human or other sentient beings. What good it brings to them, is mostly the result of their own efforts. Anything in Nature that points to beneficent design proves that this beneficence is accompanied only by limited power; and the duty of man is to co-operate with the beneficent powers, not by imitating the course of Nature but by perpetually striving to amend it—and bringing the part of it that we can affect more nearly into conformity with a high standard of justice and goodness.

NOTES

[1] This irresistible conviction comes out in the writings of religious philosophers, in exact proportion to the general clearness of their thinking. It nowhere shines forth so distinctly as in Leibniz’s famous Théodicée, so strangely mistaken for a system of optimism, and, as such, satirized by Voltaire ·in his novel Candide· on grounds that don’t even touch the author’s argument. Leibniz maintains that this world is the best (not of all •imaginable worlds, but) of all •possible worlds; he argues that it must be that, because this is the world that God, who is absolute goodness, has chosen. On every page of the work he tacitly assumes an abstract possibility and impossibility, independent of the divine power; and although his pious feelings make him continue to label God’s power as ‘omnipotence’, his explanation makes it clear that he takes that term to mean ‘power extending to all that is within the limits of that abstract possibility’.

The Usefulness of Religion

Introduction

Second section

The social question

The individual question

Introduction

Friends of religion and its enemies have had a great deal to say about whether religion is true; but—as has sometimes been remarked —there has been very little discussion or controversy about whether and how it is useful. This might have been expected, because in matters that affect us so deeply truth is our first concern. If religion, or some particular religion, is true, there’s no need to argue for its usefulness. Having genuine knowledge about what kind of place the universe is and how it is governed—if that isn’t useful, it’s hard to imagine anything that is! Whether a person is in a pleasant or in an unpleasant place, a palace or a prison, it has to be useful for him to know where he is. And so for as long as men accepted the teachings of their religion as definite facts, no more open to doubt than their own existence or the existence of objects in their environment, it couldn’t possibly occur to them to ask whether or how it was useful to believe it. There was no need to insist that religion is •useful until people had to a large extent stopped being convinced by the arguments purporting to show that it is •true. Until people had stopped believing, or stopped relying on the belief of others, they couldn’t defend religion as useful without having a sense that they were lowering something that they were trying to raise. An argument for the usefulness of religion is an appeal

•to unbelievers, to get them to practise a well-meant hypocrisy, or

•to semi-believers to make them avert their eyes from what might possibly shake their unstable belief, or finally

•to people in general to abstain from expressing any doubts they may feel.

The last motivation would reflect the view that a structure of immense importance to mankind is so insecure at its foundations that men must hold their breath in its neighbourhood for fear of blowing it down!

At the present stage of history, however, we seem to have arrived at a time when among the arguments for and against religion the arguments concerning its usefulness have an important place. We are in an age of weak beliefs, and an age in which any ·religious· belief that men do have results more from their wish to believe than from any evaluation of evidence. The wish to believe doesn’t arise only from selfish feelings but often from ones that are entirely disinterested [= ‘not self -interested’, here and throughout]; and though this wish can’t produce the unwavering and perfect reliance that once existed, it puts a protective fence around the effects of early education; it often causes direct doubts to fade away through disuse; and, above all, it gets people to continue organizing their lives according to doctrines that have lost part of their hold on the mind, and to maintain towards the world the same—no, a more demonstrative attitude of belief than they thought it necessary to display when they had a real, complete, personal belief.

Second section

If religious belief really is as necessary to mankind as we are continually told that it is, we should find it very sad that the •intellectual grounds for it should have to be backed up by moral bribery or corruption of the understanding. Such a state of things is most uncomfortable even for those who can without actual insincerity describe themselves as ‘believers’; and is still worse for those who, though they are aware that they no longer find the case for religion’s truth convincing, are restrained from saying so because they are afraid of contributing to an irreparable harm to mankind. For a conscientious and cultivated mind it is most painful to be drawn in opposite directions by the two noblest of all objects of pursuit—•truth and •the general good. Such a conflict is bound to produce a growing indifference to one or other of these objects, and probably to both. Many people who could do terrific work on behalf of truth and of mankind if they thought they could serve one without loss to the other are either totally paralysed or led to confine their efforts to matters of minor detail; what does this is their sense that any real freedom of thought, or any considerable strengthening or broadening of the thinking capacities of mankind at large, might turn •men into unbelievers, which would (they think) be the surest way to make •them vicious and miserable. Many others, having observed in other people or experienced in themselves elevated feelings that they don’t think could come from any source except religion, are honestly opposed to anything that they think might dry up the fountain of such feelings. So they either dislike and disparage all philosophy, or throw themselves with intolerant zeal into the forms of philosophy in which intuition takes the place of evidence, and internal feeling is made the test of objective truth. The whole of the dominant metaphysics of the present [19th] century is a tissue of corrupted evidence in favour of religion; often only on behalf of deism, but always involving a misuse of noble impulses and capacities for theoretical thought. [Deism is a thin belief in a higher power, one that doesn’t intervene in human affairs and may not even be a person.] This is one of the most deplorable of those wretched wastes of human abilities that make it surprising that enough is left ·unwasted· to keep mankind making progress, however slowly. It is time to consider, more impartially and therefore more deliberately than is usually done, what we get out of all this straining to prop up beliefs that need so much intellectual toil and ingenuity to keep them standing. Are these efforts adequately repaid by gains to human well-being? Wouldn’t human well-being be better served by •frankly recognizing that some subjects are out of reach of our faculties, and by •applying those same mental powers to strengthening and enlarging the other sources of virtue and happiness ·that are open to us, sources· that don’t need the support of supernatural beliefs or the threat of supernatural penalties? [Mill writes of ‘the support or sanction of supernatural beliefs’. Oddly, ‘sanction’ can mean ‘penalty’ and can mean ‘permission’; Mill’s use of it in this Essay is closer to ‘penalty’, but on each of the six occasions of use ‘threat of penalty’ seems to be what he had in mind.]

Yet there are difficulties in this issue, and they can’t be brushed aside as promptly as sceptical philosophers sometimes tend to believe. It isn’t enough to assert in general terms that truth can never be in conflict with usefulness—that if religion is false the consequences of rejecting it must all be good. The knowledge of every •positive truth is indeed a useful acquisition, but the same doesn’t hold without qualification for •negative truth. Suppose we learn for certain that nothing ·else· can be known: knowing this doesn’t give us any new facts that can help us to guide ourselves; the most it can do is to undermine our trust in something that we used to take as a guide. And that •‘something’ may, though it is itself fallacious, have pointed in the same direction as the best guides we have, and if •it happens to be more conspicuous and legible it may be that •it would have kept us on the right path when the others had been overlooked. So it’s perfectly conceivable that religion is morally useful without being intellectually defensible; and it would be a very prejudiced unbeliever who denied that this has sometimes been the case, and that it is even now the case with regard to some nations and some individuals. Whether it is generally the case, and will go on being so, it is the question I shall examine in this Essay. Is religious belief, considered as a mere state of mind and apart from the question of its truth, really indispensable to the temporal welfare of mankind? [By ‘the temporal welfare’ Mill means ‘the welfare in this life’, i.e. setting aside any question of welfare in an after-life (which would not be ‘temporal’ because it would be eternal and thus outside time).] If religious belief is useful, is it •intrinsically and universally so, or only in some way •accidentally so and therefore useful only in certain places and at certain times? Could the benefits of religious belief be obtained in some other way without having mixed into them the very large ingredient of evil that comes with even the best form of religious belief? These are the questions I shall address. [In this essay ‘evil’ as an adjective means ‘bad, harmful’, and as a noun ‘something that is bad, harmful’. It doesn’t have, as it tends to these days, the sense of ‘worse than merely wicked’, applied to people or actions.]

We are all familiar with the arguments on one side of the question: religious writers have celebrated to the utmost the advantages both of religion in general and of their own religious faith in particular. But those who have held the contrary opinion have merely insisted on the more obvious and flagrant of the positive evils that have been caused by past and present forms of religious belief. And indeed mankind have been so unremittingly occupied in doing evil to one another in the name of religion—from the sacrifice of Iphigenia to the Dragonnades of Louis XIV, and worse—that for any immediate purpose there was little need to look further for arguments. [Iphigenia: daughter of Agamemnon, who slaughtered her as a sacrifice to the goddess Artemis whom he had offended, so that she would send a good wind to take his ships to the Trojan war. Dragonnades: a policy of the Catholic Louis XIV in which very crude and brutal soldiers— dragoons—were sent to live in the homes of Protestants and to behave as badly as they wished. There is a heart-breaking account of this in Julian Barnes’s short story ‘Dragons’, in his book Cross Channel.] But these disgusting consequences belong not to religion as such but to particular forms of it, and they aren’t evidence against the usefulness of any religions except the ones that encourage such horrible crimes. And the worst of these evils have already been to a great extent cleared out of the more improved forms of religion; and as mankind make progress in their ideas and feelings this process of cleansing continually goes on: the immoral or otherwise bad consequences that have been drawn from •religion are being abandoned, one by one, and after having been defended for centuries as being of •its very essence are found to be easily separable from it. Still, although these bad consequences lie in the past and can no longer be used as arguments against religion, they are still valid as arguments against its beneficial influence. What we learn from the history of such disgusting cases is that •some of the greatest improvements ever made in the moral sentiments of mankind have taken place without religion, indeed in spite of religion; and that •what we are taught to regard as the most important of all improving influences, namely religion, has fallen so far short of playing such a role that the other good influences on human nature have had as one of their hardest tasks the improvement of religion itself. However, the improvement has taken place; it is still proceeding, and for the sake of fairness we should assume it to be complete. We ought to suppose religion to have accepted the best human morality that reason and goodness can develop from philosophical, Christian, or any other elements. When religion has thus freed itself from the pernicious consequences of embodying this or that bad moral doctrine, the ground is clear for considering the question: Are the useful properties of •religion confined to •it, or can their benefits can be obtained in other ways?

This essential part of the ·whole· inquiry into the temporal usefulness of religion is my topic in this Essay. It is a part to which sceptical writers haven’t paid much attention. The only direct discussion of it that I know is a short work partly compiled from Bentham’s manuscripts; it is full of sound, deep views, though it seems to me to press many parts of the argument too hard. [This refers to Philip Beauchamp’s Analysis of the Influence of Natural Religion on the Temporal Happiness of Mankind.] This treatise, and occasional remarks scattered through Comte’s writings, are the only things I know that contribute much to the sceptical side of this argument. I shall use both of them freely in what follows.

My discussion will be divided into two parts, corresponding to the two aspects of the subject—

•its social aspect: What does religion do for society? What amount of benefit to social interests, in the ordinary sense of that phrase, arises from religious belief?

•its individual aspect: What does religion do for the individual? What influence does it have in improving and ennobling individual human nature?

Everyone is interested in the social question, but only the best people care about the individual question. But if either is more important than the other, the best people will judge the individual question to be the more important of the two. So I shall start with the other, because it has the better chance of being easily made precise and manageable.

The social question

In considering religious belief as an instrument of social good, we must start by drawing a distinction that is very often overlooked. It is usual to credit religion as such with the whole of the power inherent in any system of moral duties taught by education and enforced by opinion. Mankind would certainly be in a dreadful state if •no principles or precepts of justice, truthfulness, or beneficence were taught publicly or privately, and if •these virtues weren’t encouraged—and the opposite vices repressed—by the praise and blame. . . .of mankind. Nearly everything of this sort that actually happens does so in the name of religion; almost everyone who is taught any morality whatever is taught it as religion, and has it drummed into him throughout his life principally as religion. The result of this is that the effect that the teaching produces as teaching it is supposed to produce as religious teaching. This gives to religion the credit for all the •influence in human affairs that belongs to any generally accepted system of rules for the guidance and government of human life.

Few persons have sufficiently considered how great this •influence is—what vast power belongs naturally to

any doctrine that is •accepted by just about everyone and •impressed on the mind from the earliest childhood as duty.

I don’t think it needs much thought for one to conclude that this—·the state of affairs described in the indented passage just above·—is the great moral power in human affairs, and that religion seems powerful only because this mighty power has been under its command.

·AUTHORITY·

Consider first the enormous influence of authority on the human mind. (I am now speaking of influence on what men believe, on their convictions, on their thoughts and feelings—and not influence on their voluntary behaviour.) The mass of mankind believe everything that they are said to know, apart from facts taken in through their own senses, on the ‘evidence’ of authority. That is the evidence on which even the ablest people accept all the truths of science, or facts in history or in life, of which they haven’t personally examined the proofs. On any matter of opinion, the agreement of mankind has supreme power over the vast majority of people. If something is certified to them as agreed upon by all mankind, they believe it with a confidence that they don’t give even to the evidence of their senses when the general opinion of mankind stands opposed to it. Thus, when any rule of life and duty has conspicuously received general assent it obtains a hold on the belief of every individual, a stronger hold than it would have had even if he had reached it through the inherent force of his own understanding. And this holds true whether or not the rule in question is based on religion. If ·the German poet· Novalis could say ‘My belief has gained infinitely for me from the moment when one other human being begins to believe the same’, how much more when it’s not ‘one other person’ but all the human beings one knows of! You may want to object: ‘No scheme of morality can owe whatever power it has over the mind to universal assent, because no scheme of morality has universal assent.’ That is true as regards the present age, but that strengthens the argument that it might at first seem to controvert. Here is how. Exactly in proportion as the accepted systems of belief have been challenged, and it has become known that many people don’t accept them, their hold on the belief of people in general has been loosened and their influence on conduct has declined. And since this has happened to them despite the religious threat of penalties that has been attached to them, there can be no stronger evidence that they were powerful not •as religion but •as beliefs generally accepted by mankind. To find people who believe their religion as ·unshakably as· you believe that fire will burn your hand when thrust into it, we must look to the oriental countries where Europeans don’t yet predominate, or to the European world when it was still universally ·Roman· Catholic. Men often disobeyed their religion in those times, because their human passions and desires were too strong for it, or because the religion itself offered means of forgiveness for breaches of its obligations; but although they •disobeyed, they usually didn’t •doubt. There was in those days an absolute and unquestioning completeness of belief such as has not occurred generally in Europe ever since.

·EDUCATION·

That, then, is the power exercised over mankind by simple authority, the mere belief and testimony of their fellow-creatures. Now consider what a tremendous power education has—the indescribable effect of bringing people up from infancy in a belief, and in habits based on it. [The next sentence reflects the fact that in Mill’s time ‘education’ could mean merely ‘upbringing’, our meaning for the word being a ‘restricted’ one.] Consider also that in all countries, from the earliest ages down to the present, those who have from their earliest years been taught some kind of religious belief, and taught rules as the commands of the heavenly powers to them and to mankind, are not merely •those who have been ‘educated’ in the restricted sense of the word, but •almost all those who have been brought up by parents or other concerned adults. For young children, the commands of God are no weightier than the commands of their parents (or so I suppose; I can’t imagine that it would be otherwise); so it’s reasonable to think that •any system of social duty that mankind might adopt, even one divorced from religion, would have the same advantage of being drummed into people from childhood on; and that •this advantage will be possessed much more in the future than it is now, because society is much more inclined now than it used to be to take pains for the moral tuition of those numerous classes whose education it has previously left to chance. [In case it isn’t clear: Mill’s point is that moral doctrines will be more widely ingrained in the •future (because of widespread •present moral education) than they are •at present (because the present state of things results from less thoroughly spread •past moral education).] Now, the impressions of early education have something that it is much harder for later convictions to obtain—namely, command over the feelings. We see daily how powerful a hold these first impressions retain over the •feelings even of people who have given up the •opinions that they were taught when young. What about opinions that people acquire through their own investigations later in life? Well, sometimes those are woven in with the person’s feelings as forcefully as are opinions acquired in early childhood; but this happens only with people who are unusually sensitive and intelligent, and even then what enables them to bring their feelings into line with their opinions is a strong sense of moral duty and sincerity, courage and self-devotion—all of which are themselves the fruits of early-childhood impressions.

The power of education is almost boundless: there is no natural inclination that education isn’t strong enough to push around and if necessary to destroy by disuse. The greatest recorded victory that education has ever achieved over a whole host of natural inclinations in an entire people was the maintenance through centuries of the institutions of Lycurgus—·who in the 7th century BCE created the system of education, social conduct, and law that we all associate with Sparta centuries later·. This system owed little if anything to religion, for the Gods of the Spartans were the same as those of other Greek states. No doubt every state in Greece believed that its particular social-political set-up was first established with some sort of divine support (mostly that of the oracle at Delphi), and it was usually easy enough to obtain the same or an equally powerful support for a change. It wasn’t religion that gave the Spartan institutions their strength: the root of the system was devotion to Sparta, to the ideal of the country or State. If this were transformed into ideal devotion to a greater country—the world—it would achieve much nobler things than Sparta did. Among the Greeks generally, social morality was extremely independent of religion. Any dependence between them ran the other way: the worship of the Gods was inculcated chiefly as a social duty, because the Greeks thought that if the Gods were neglected or insulted their displeasure would fall not just on the offending individual but equally on the state or community that bred and tolerated him. Such moral teaching as existed in Greece had very little to do with religion. The Gods were not thought to care much about men’s conduct towards one another, except when men contrived to give the •Gods themselves a stake in some human project by placing an assertion or undertaking under the penalty-threat of a solemn appeal to •them. I grant that the sophists and philosophers, and even popular orators, did their best to press religion into the service of their special concerns, and to convince people that the sentiments—of whatever kind—that they busy drumming into people were particularly acceptable to the Gods; but this never seems to be the main consideration except in the special case of direct offence to the dignity of the Gods themselves. [Mill’s words ‘. . . press religion into the service. . . ’ are a metaphorical reference to an old system whereby the British navy acquired sailors: official ‘press gangs’ would roam the towns and countryside, arresting men and ‘pressing’ them into the service of the navy. The laws permitting this were still on the books in Mill’s time.] For the enforcement of human moralities, nonreligious inducements were almost exclusively relied on. I think that ancient Greece offers us the only example in which non-religious teaching has had the indescribably great advantage of forming the basis of education. Much can be said against the quality of some part of ·the content of· the teaching, but very little can be said against its effectiveness. The most memorable example of the power of education over conduct is, I repeat, this exceptional case ·of ancient Greece·; which gives us good reason to believe that in other cases •early •religious teaching has owed its power over mankind to its being •early rather than to its being •religious.

·PUBLIC OPINION·

We have now considered two powers, that of authority, and that of early education, which operate ·on men’s conduct· through their involuntary beliefs, feelings and desires, and which religion has always regarded as almost exclusively its business. Let us now consider a third power that operates directly on men’s actions, whether or not their involuntary sentiments go along with it. This is the power of public opinion—the effect on men of the praise and blame, favour and disfavour, of their fellow creatures—and is a source of strength inherent in any system of moral belief that is generally adopted, whether connected with religion or not.

Men usually give to the motives for their actions names that are more flattering than they are entitled to—so much so that they generally have no idea how much the parts of their conduct that they take most pride in (as well as some that they are ashamed of) are due to the motive of public opinion. Of course public opinion mostly commands the same things that are commanded by the accepted social morality; because that morality is really just the summary of how each individual person wants everyone else to behave towards him (whether or not he behaves like that towards them). So when people do things that their conscience approves, they can easily flatter themselves that they are acting from the motive of conscience though really they are driven by the inferior motive ·of wanting to conform·. We continually see how much power •opinion has in opposition to •conscience; how men ‘follow a multitude to do evil’ [Mill takes that phrase from Exodus 23:2]; how often opinion gets men to do things that their conscience disapproves, and still oftener prevents them from doing things that it commands. But when the motive of public opinion acts in the same direction as conscience, which it usually does (naturally, because public opinion is what made the conscience in the first place), then it is it is the most overpowering of all the motives that act on the bulk of mankind.

The strongest passions that human nature exhibits (except for the merely animal ones) each have a name that stands for just one part of the motive derived from what I am here calling ‘public opinion’. The parts of that motive— specifically of its •attractive power—include

the love of glory,

the love of praise,

the love of admiration,

the love of respect and deference,

the love of sympathy.

When we think that someone is excessively influenced by any one of these, our word for what moves him is ‘vanity’. The fear of shame, the fear of having a bad reputation or of being disliked or hated, are direct and simple forms of the •deterring power of public opinion. But the deterrent force of people’s unfavourable opinions doesn’t consist solely in the painfulness of knowing oneself to be their object; it also includes all the penalties that the public can inflict—

•exclusion from society and from the countless kinds of help that human beings require from one another,

•forfeiture of all that is called success in life,

•often the great diminution or total loss of income,

•positively nasty treatment of various kinds, sufficient to make life miserable, and in some states of society as far as actual persecution and death.

And again the influence of public opinion in pushing or pulling people to act in certain ways includes the whole range of what is commonly meant by ‘ambition’; because except in times of lawless military violence the •objectives of social ambition can only be achieved through the good opinion and favourable disposition of our fellow-creatures. Also, nine times out of ten those •objectives wouldn’t even be wanted if they didn’t bring with them power over the thoughts and feelings of mankind. In the great majority of people, even the pleasure of self-approval mainly depends on the opinion of others. That opinion has so much unwanted influence on ordinary minds that it would take an exceptionally sturdy person to be capable of confidence that he is in the right when the world—i.e. when his world—thinks him to be wrong; and for most men the most conclusive proof of their own virtue or talent is that people in general seem to believe in it. Through all branches of human affairs, regard for the thoughts and feelings of our fellow-creatures is, in one form or another, the pervading motive in almost everyone. (And we should note that this motive is naturally strongest in the most sensitive people—the ones whose natures are the most promising material for the formation of great virtues.) We all know from experience how far its power reaches; there is no need for me to prove or illustrate it here. As soon as the means of living have been obtained, the far greater part of the remaining ·human· labour and effort that takes place on the earth is aimed at acquiring the respect or the favourable regard of mankind—to be looked up to, or anyway not to be looked down upon, by them. The industrial and commercial activities that advance •civilization flow from that source, and so do the frivolity, extravagance, and selfish thirst for power and fame that hold •it back. If you want an example of the power exercised by the terrors derived from public opinion—we all know that many murders have been committed merely to remove a witness who knew and was likely to disclose some secret that would bring disgrace upon his murderer.

Anyone who fairly and impartially considers the subject will see reason to believe that the great effects on human conduct that are commonly ascribed to motives derived directly from religion mostly have for their immediate cause the influence of human opinion. Religion has been powerful not through its intrinsic force but because it has wielded that additional and more mighty power—·the power of public opinion·. Religion has had an immense effect on the direction of public opinion, which in many very important respects has been set by religion and nothing else. But ·when we consider the powers that religion wields directly, and not through public opinion, what we find is not impressive·: religion’s own threats of penalties, when not stiffened by the penalty-threats added by public opinion, have never had much influence except in the minds that were in special moods or that belonged to exceptional people. When I say ‘never’, I mean never since the times when people believed that God was frequently at work delivering temporal rewards and punishments [see note on ‘temporal’ here]. When a man firmly believed that if he violated the sacredness of a particular sanctuary he would be struck dead on the spot, or suddenly hit with a mortal disease, no doubt he took care not to incur the penalty; but as soon as someone was brave enough to defy the danger, and escaped unharmed, the spell was broken. The Jews, as much as any people who ever lived, were taught that they were subject to God’s rule and that unfaithfulness to their religion and law would be repaid by God with temporal punishments; and yet their history was nothing but a series of lapses into paganism! Their prophets and historians, who held fast to the ancient beliefs (though they interpreted them so loosely that they thought God might express his displeasure with a king by doing something nasty to his great-grandson), never ceased to complain that their countrymen turned a deaf ear to their prophecies; and hence, believing as they did in a divine government operating by temporal penalties, they couldn’t fail to anticipate. . . .a general overturn, which did in fact occur, luckily for the credit of their prophetic powers! (Unlike the only intelligible prophecy in the Revelations, the Apostle John’s prediction that Jerusalem would suffer a fate like that of Nineveh and Babylon; which still hasn’t happened.) In the course of time, experience forced all but the very ignorant to believe that divine punishments were not to be confidently expected in a temporal form; and there can be no doubt that this contributed greatly to the downfall of the old religions, and to the general adoption of a religion which, without absolutely ruling out God’s interfering in this life to punish guilt or reward merit, shifted the principal scene of God’s retribution to a world after death. But when. . . .punishments are that far in the future and never seen by the eye, they aren’t likely to have on ordinary minds a very powerful counter-force against strong temptation, even if they are infinite ·in intensity· and eternal ·in extent·. Their mere remoteness reduces enormously the effect that they—·or rather the threat of them·—has on the kinds of minds that most require the restraint of punishment. An even larger reduction ·in the effect of such threats· comes from their uncertainty, which belongs to them from the very nature of the case. Rewards and punishments administered after death must be based not on particular actions but on a general survey of the person’s whole life, and he easily convinces himself that whatever little sins he may have been guilty of, there will be a balance in his favour at the bottom line. All positive religions [= ‘all religions supposed to have been given by God’] aid this self-delusion. •Bad religions teach that God’s vengeance can be bought off by offerings or grovelling apologies; •the better ones want to avoid driving sinners to despair, and therefore emphasize God’s mercy so much that hardly anyone is compelled to think he is irrevocably condemned. The sole quality of these •punishments that might seem apt to make ·the threat of· them effective, namely their overpowering magnitude, is itself a reason why nobody (except the occasional hypochondriac) ever really believes himself to be in very serious danger of incurring •them. Even the worst evil-doer is hardly able to think that any crime he has been able to commit, any evil he can have inflicted in the short period of his existence, can have deserved torture extending through an eternity. And so we find religious writers and preachers continually complaining about how little effect religious motives have on men’s lives and conduct, despite the tremendous penalties that are threatened.

I have mentioned Bentham as one of the few authors who have written anything pointful about the effectiveness of the religious threat of penalties. He brings forward several cases to prove that •religious obligation, when not enforced by •public opinion, has almost no effect on people’s conduct. ·I shall mention three of them·. (1) Oaths. The oaths taken in courts of justice, and any others that public opinion rigidly enforces because of their obvious importance to society, are felt as real and binding obligations. But university oaths and custom-house oaths, though from a religious point of view equally obligatory, are in practice utterly disregarded even by men who are in other respects honourable. The oath to obey the university’s statutes—·including one requiring a certain religious belief·—has for centuries not been taken seriously by anyone; and utterly false statements ·about the value of the cargo in one’s ship· are (or used to be) daily and unblushingly sworn to at the custom-house by people who care as much as anyone else about all the ordinary obligations of life. In each case the explanation is that in these matters truthfulness wasn’t enforced by public opinion. (2) Duelling. Although it is now obsolete in this country, the practice of duelling continues in full vigour in several other Christian countries. It is thought and said to be a sin by almost all who are guilty of it; they have resorted to it in obedience to ·public· opinion, and to escape from personal humiliation. (3) Illicit sexual intercourse. This stands in the very highest rank of religious sins, for men and for women; but because it isn’t severely condemned by opinion in the male sex, they have in general very little scruple in committing it; whereas the religious obligation is commonly effective with •women, not because it is any stronger for them than for men but because in •their case it is backed in real earnest by public opinion.

[Mill goes on to concede that Bentham’s example of (1) oaths is not a good one, because people who go through the formalities of university or custom-house oaths regard them as a mere formality, and don’t think they are breaking their religious duties in swearing them. Then:] The same criticism doesn’t apply equally to Bentham’s other examples, (2) duelling and (3) sexual irregularities. Most of those who perform these acts, (2) by the command of public opinion and (3) with its permission, really do think they are offending God. No doubt they don’t think they are offending him so much that their salvation is seriously in danger. Their •reliance on his mercy prevails over their •dread of his resentment—which illustrates my earlier point that the inevitable uncertainty of religious penalties makes them feeble as a deterring motive. That holds true even for acts that human opinion condemns, and much more for acts that public opinion allows. What mankind think of as a trivial sin is hardly ever thought to be taken very seriously by God, at least by those who feel inclined to commit it!

·TWO KINDS OF EXTREME·

I wouldn’t dream of denying that in some states of mind the idea of religious punishment acts with overwhelming force. In people who are clinically depressed, and in ones whose thoughts and imaginations have been given an habitually melancholy cast by great disappointments or other human causes, the thought of God’s punishments hooks in with the pre-existing tendency of the mind and supplies images that could drive the unfortunate sufferer even to madness. Often, during a temporary state of depression, these ideas grip the mind so strongly that they have a permanent effect on the character; this is what has happened in most of the cases that the religious sects call ‘conversion’. But if the depressed state ceases after the conversion, as it often does, and if the convert doesn’t relapse but perseveres in his new course of life, the main difference between that and his old way of life is that now he guides his life by •the public opinion of his religious associates, whereas previously he had guided it by •the opinion of the non-religious world. Anyway, we get one clear proof of how little real fear of eternal punishments most people have—religious people and worldly ones—when we see how even at the approach of death, when the •remoteness of the threatened punishment (which deprived the threats of so much of their effect) has been exchanged for the closest •proximity, they are quite free from anxiety about their prospects in another world, and never for a moment seem to think themselves in any real danger of eternal punishment. This holds for almost everyone who •hasn’t been guilty of some enormous crime, and for many who •have.

What about the cruel deaths and bodily tortures that martyrs have so often undergone for the sake of religion? I don’t want to lessen the stature of this admirable courage and constancy by attributing any part of it to the influence of human opinion. (Human opinion does sometimes have that effect, producing similar firmness in people who are not otherwise distinguished by moral excellence—for example the North American Indian ·being burned to death· at the stake.) But granting that what upheld these heroic sufferers in their agony was not

•the thought of glory in the eyes of their fellow-religionists,

I don’t think that it was, for most of them,

•·the thought of· the pleasures of heaven or the pains of hell.

Their impulse was a divine enthusiasm—a self-forgetting devotion to an idea, a state of exalted feeling. Such a state is by no means restricted to religion; every great cause can inspire it. This phenomenon belongs to the critical moments of existence, not to the ordinary everyday life of human motives, and nothing can be inferred from it as to the effectiveness of the religious or non-religious ideas that it sprang from in overcoming ordinary temptations, and regulating the course of daily life.

We may now have done with this branch of the subject. . . . The value of religion as a supplement to human laws—a more cunning sort of police, an assistant to the thief-catcher and the hangman—is not the part of its claims that the more high-minded believers are fondest of insisting on; and they would probably be as ready as anyone to admit that if religion’s nobler work in the soul could be dispensed with, a substitute might be found for that coarse and selfish social instrument, the fear of hell. In their view of the matter, the best of mankind absolutely require religion for the •perfection of their own character, even if the •coercion of the worst could be accomplished without its aid.

But these nobler spirits (·these ‘high-minded believers’·) generally maintain that religion is needed for some aspects of social good that are more elevated ·than mere police-work etc.·. Specifically, they say that

•religion is needed as a teacher, if not as an enforcer, of social morality;

•only religion can teach us what morality is;

•all the high morality ever recognized by mankind was learnt from religion;

•the most sublime thoughts of the greatest nonreligious philosophers have stopped far short of Christian morality, and whatever inferior morality they may have reached (with the help, some think, of dim traditions derived from the Old Testament or from a primeval revelation), they could never induce their fellow-citizens to accept it from them;

•men in general won’t adopt a morality, rally round it, and lend their human system of penalty-threats for its enforcement, unless they think it has come from the gods; and

•even if human motives are sufficient to produce obedience to the rule ·of morality·, if it weren’t for the religious idea we wouldn’t have had the rule.

There is truth in much of this, considered as a matter of history. Most ancient peoples received their morals, their laws, their intellectual beliefs, and even their practical skills and techniques—in short, everything that tended either to guide or to discipline them—as revelations from the higher powers, and they couldn’t easily have been induced to accept them in any other way. This was partly the effect of their hopes and fears relating to those powers—hopes and fears that were stronger and more pervasive in early times ·than they are today·, because back then the agency of the gods was seen in the daily events of life, as men’s experience hadn’t yet revealed to them the fixed laws according to which physical phenomena follow one another. Also, these primitive minds couldn’t help feeling a certain deference for powers greater than their own, tending to think that beings with superhuman power must also have superhuman knowledge and wisdom; and this gave them a disinterested [= ‘not self -interested’] desire—quite apart from their personal hopes and fears—to behave in accordance with the supposed preferences of these powerful beings, and not to adopt any new practice unless the gods had authorized it.

But just because •when men were still savages they wouldn’t have accepted either moral or scientific truths unless they thought them to have been revealed supernaturally, does it follow that they would •now give up moral truths—any more than scientific ones—because they believed them to have no higher source than wise and noble human hearts? Aren’t moral truths clearly enough right for mankind at least to go on believing them once they had acquired them? Admittedly, some of the precepts of Christ as exhibited in the Gospels—rising far above the Paulism [= the doctrines propagated in Paul’s letters to local churches, in the New Testament] that is the foundation of ordinary Christianity—carry some kinds of moral goodness to a greater height than had ever been attained before; though much of what is supposed to be exclusive to them is equalled in the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, which we have no reason to think were in any way indebted to Christianity. But this benefit, whatever it amounts to, has been gained. Mankind have come to possess it. It has become the property of humanity, and can’t now be lost by anything short of a return to primitive barbarism. The noble moralities that can be found . . . . in the authentic sayings of Jesus of Nazareth are surely in harmony with the intellect and feelings of every good man or woman, to such an extent that there is no danger of their being let go once they have been acknowledged as the creed of the best and most advanced portion of our species. I mean

•the ‘new commandment to love one another’;[1]

•the recognition that the greatest are those who serve others, not those who are served;

•the reverence for the weak and humble, which is the basis for chivalry because they and not the strong have been pointed out as having the first place in God’s regard and the first claim on their fellow men;

•the lesson of the parable of the good Samaritan;

•the lesson of ‘he that is without sin let him throw the first stone’;

•the precept of doing as we would be done by;

and there are others as well (though with some poetical exaggerations, and some maxims whose precise point is hard to understand). For a long time to come there •will be, as there always •have been, plenty of shortcomings in acting on these items of morality; but we can regard it as downright impossible that they should be forgotten or should lose their effect on the human conscience, while human beings remain cultivated or civilized.

·So· the belief that the accepted maxims of morality have a supernatural origin ·doesn’t do anything good for us now; but it· has one very bad consequence. The supposed supernatural origin consecrates the whole of the accepted morality, and protects it from being discussed or criticized. So that if the moral doctrines that are accepted as a part of religion include any that are imperfect, these doctrines will be taken to be just as binding on the conscience as the noblest, most permanent and most universal precepts of Christ. An imperfect doctrine might be one that

•was erroneous from the outset, or

•was expressed without proper limits and qualifications, or

•was perfectly all right at one time, but no longer suited to the changes that have taken place in human relations;

and I firmly believe that so-called Christian morality contains instances of all of these kinds. Wherever morality is supposed to have a supernatural origin, morality is stereotyped; just as law is stereotyped, for the same reason, among believers in the Koran.

Belief in the supernatural, then, great as were its services in the early stages of human development, can’t be considered to be any longer required, either for enabling us to know what is right and what is wrong in social morality, or for providing us with motives to do right and to abstain from wrong. Such a belief, therefore, isn’t necessary for social purposes, at least in the coarse way in which these can be considered apart from the character of the individual human being. That less coarse branch of the subject now remains to be considered. If supernatural beliefs are indeed necessary for the perfection of the individual character, that makes them necessary also for the highest excellence in social conduct. . . . [From now on in this essay, ‘social’ and its cognates do not occur.]

NOTES

[1] Not, however, a new commandment, ·though that is what Jesus calls it (John 13:34)·. In fairness to ·Moses·, the great Hebrew lawgiver, it should always be remembered that the precept to ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’ already existed in the third book of the Old Testament (·Leviticus 19:18·)—and very surprising it is to find it there!

The individual question

Well, then, what is it in human nature that makes it require a religion? ·This breaks down into two questions·. What does the human mind lack that religion provides? What qualities does religion develop in the human mind? When we have answered these two questions, we’ll be better able to judge how far these lacks can be made up for in other ways ·than through religion·, and how far those qualities—or qualities equivalent to them—can be developed and brought to perfection by other means.

The old saying ‘What first created gods was fear in the world’ is not true, I think, or at any rate there isn’t much truth in it. [The ‘old saying’ is a much-quoted line from the Latin poet Statius, which Mill gives in Latin—Primus in orbe Deos fecit timor.] Belief in gods had a more honourable origin than that, I think, even in the most primitive minds. The universality of the belief has been very reasonably explained as arising from the human mind’s spontaneous tendency to attribute •life and •volition —like the life and volition it feels in itself—to any •natural object that appears to be self-moving. This was a plausible fancy, and at first no better theory could be formed. People naturally held onto this one for as long as the motions and operations of •these objects seemed to be arbitrary, and explainable only in terms of the free choice of the ·divine· Power itself. At first, no doubt, the objects themselves were supposed to be alive, and that’s what African fetish-worshippers still believe. But it must soon have seemed absurd ·to most primitive people· that things that could do so much more than man does couldn’t or wouldn’t do what man does—for example, couldn’t or wouldn’t speak. And so they shifted ·from supposing •that the object they saw was alive and full of desires· to supposing that it was inanimate but was the creature and instrument of an invisible being with a shape and organs similar to those of humans.

Once these beings had come to be •believed in, it necessarily followed that they were •feared. They were thought to be able to inflict great harm on human beings; and the sufferers didn’t know how to avert the harm or to foresee it, and their only recourse for such information was to ask the gods themselves. So it’s true that fear had much to do with religion; but belief in the gods evidently preceded fear and didn’t arise from it; though once the fear was established it was a strong support for the belief, because men couldn’t think of any greater insult to the gods than to doubt their existence. [Of course Mill doesn’t here mean ‘support’ in the sense of evidence or reasons for the truth of the belief; his topic is merely psychological ‘support’, i.e. a consideration that causes people to keep their minds away from doubts.]

I needn’t go further into the natural history of religion, because my present concern is to explain not its origin in primitive minds but its persistence in cultivated ones. A sufficient explanation of this can be found, I think, in •the limitedness of man’s certain knowledge and •the boundlessness of his desire to know. Human existence is hemmed in by mystery: the narrow region of our experience is a small island in a boundless sea, which at once •awes our feelings and •stimulates our imagination by its vastness and its obscurity. To add to the mystery, the domain of our earthly existence is an island not only in infinite space but also in infinite time. The past and the future are alike hidden from us: we don’t know the origin of anything that exists, or its final destination. ·The spatial challenge is no greater than the temporal one·. Given that

we feel deeply interested in knowing that there are myriads of worlds at an immeasurable (and to us inconceivable) distance from us in space; and that we are eager to discover what little we can about these worlds, and when we can’t know what they are we can never get enough of speculating about what they may be;

isn’t it a matter of even deeper interest to us

to learn—or even to conjecture—about where this unremote world that we inhabit came from, what cause or agency made it what it is, and on what powers its future fate depends?

Who wouldn’t want this knowledge more passionately than any other conceivable knowledge, so long as there seemed to be the slightest chance of getting it? What wouldn’t we give for any credible news from that mysterious region, any glimpse into it that might let us see light through its darkness, especially any credible theory of it that represented it as inhabited by a benign and not a hostile influence? But our only way into that region is through imagination, assisted by plausible but inconclusive analogies derived from human agency and design. Our imagination is free to fill the vacuum with whatever imagery is most congenial to it—sublime and elevating imagery for a lofty imagination, low and mean imagery for a grovelling one. [(1) The ‘region’ Mill is talking about is probably the whole of reality apart from ‘the narrow region of our experience’—most of past time, all future time, most of space, and. . . anything else there may be from which answers to our questions might come. (2) The ‘inconclusive analogies’ he speaks of are the ones that have led some people to argue that much of the natural world is similar (or ‘analogous’) to the products of human thought, which entitles us to infer that the natural world is also a product of thought—divine thought.]

Religion and poetry address themselves, at least in one of their aspects, to the same part of the human constitution: they both make up for the same lack in us—the lack of •ideal conceptions that are grander and more beautiful than any we see •realized [= ‘made real’] in the prose of human life. Religion, as distinct from poetry, results from the craving to know whether these imaginative conceptions have realities corresponding to them in some world other than ours. When the mind is caught up with this craving, it eagerly snatches at any rumours regarding other worlds, especially when they are delivered by people whom it thinks wiser than itself. To the •poetry of the supernatural, therefore, there comes to be added a positive •belief and expectation, which unpoetic minds can share with poetic ones. Belief in a god or gods, and in a life after death, becomes the canvas on which every mind paints, as well as it can, such ideal pictures as it can either invent or copy. Each person hopes to find in that other life the •good that he has failed to find on earth, or the •better that is suggested to him by the •good that he has partially seen and known on earth. More especially, this belief provides the finer minds with material for conceptions of beings more awe-inspiring than they can have known on earth, and also more excellent than they are likely to have known. So long as •human life is insufficient to satisfy human aspirations [= ‘desires and hopes and aims’], so long •there will be a craving for higher things, a craving that finds its most obvious satisfaction in religion. So long as •earthly life is full of sufferings, so long •will people need consolations: selfish people will be consoled by the hope of heaven, tender and grateful ones by the love of God.

So there’s no disputing that religion has been and still is of value to the individual as a source of personal satisfaction and of elevated feelings. But we still have a question:

The good that we get from religion—is the only way to get it to travel beyond the boundaries of the world we inhabit? Mightn’t we get a poetry and (in the best sense of the word) a religion out of the idealization of •our earthly life and the development of a high conception of what may be made of •it? Mightn’t such a ·this-worldly· religion do just as well in exalting our feelings, and (with aid from education) do better in ennobling our conduct, than any belief about the unseen powers?

At the bare suggestion of such a possibility, many will insist that •if our life is not prolonged beyond what we can see, it is too brief—too small and insignificant—for great and elevated feelings to be connected with it; •that a life confined to the natural life that we see can’t match with anything higher than Epicurean feelings, and with the Epicurean doctrine ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.’

The maxim of the Epicureans is certainly sound within certain limits, and can be applied to much higher things than eating and drinking. •To make the most of the present for all good purposes, including purposes of enjoyment; •to keep under control the mental dispositions that lead to undue sacrifice of present good for a future that may never come; •to develop the habit of deriving pleasure from things within our reach, rather than from too eagerly pursuing objects at a distance; •to think that any time you spend on anything other than your own pleasure or doing things that will be useful to others is time wasted—these are wise maxims. When the injunction Carpe diem! [Latin = ‘Seize the day!’] is understood as implying those maxims, it is a reasonable and legitimate thing to infer from the shortness of life. But the inference:

Life is short, so we shouldn’t care about anything beyond it,

is not legitimate; and the supposition that human beings in general can’t take a deep interest—even the deepest interest—in things they’ll never live to see is a view of human nature that is as false as it is low. Bear in mind that even though individual life is short, the life of the human species is not. When •the duration of our species—whose indefiniteness makes it practically equivalent to endlessness—is combined with •indefinite capacity for improvement, this provides the imagination and the sympathies a large enough objective to satisfy any reasonable demand for something grand to hope for. . . .

Don’t think that only people with most lofty minds and hearts are capable of identifying their feelings with •the entire life of the human race. This noble ability does indeed imply a certain level of development, but not a higher one than can be achieved—and will be achieved if human improvement continues—by everyone. Much smaller objectives than •this— ones confined within the limits of the earth though not within those of a single human life—have been found sufficient to inspire large masses of people, and long successions of people, with an enthusiasm that could govern their conduct, and colour their whole life. For the entire Roman people through many generations Rome was as much a religion as Jehovah was to the Jews—indeed, even more so, because the Romans never slackened in their worship as the Jews did in theirs. And the Romans, otherwise a selfish people with no very remarkable abilities except purely practical ones, nevertheless derived from this idea of Rome a certain greatness of soul. This shows itself in all their history where the idea of Rome is concerned (and nowhere else); it has earned for them the great admiration—not deserved in any other way—that has been felt for them by most noble-minded persons from that time to this.

When we consider how intense a feeling love of one’s country has become in favourable circumstances of education [see note here], we have to think it possible for the love of that larger country, the world, to be nursed into similar strength, both as a •source of elevated emotion and as a •principle of duty. If the whole course of ancient history doesn’t convince you of this, read Cicero’s book On Duties [Mill gives the Latin, De Officiis]. The standard of morals laid down in that celebrated work isn’t very high; it is too lax on many points (to our way of thinking), allowing for capitulations of conscience. But it doesn’t compromise on the subject of duty to our country. The thought that a man with even the smallest claim to be virtuous might hesitate to sacrifice his life, his reputation, his family, everything valuable to him, for the love of country is one that ·Cicero·, that eminent interpreter of Greek and Roman morality, can’t entertain for a moment. So we see that people could be trained not only to •believe in theory that the good of their country was an objective that everyone else ought to pursue, but to •feel this practically as the grand duty of life. Couldn’t they, then, be made to feel the same absolute obligation towards the universal good? Think of a morality based on broad and wise views about the good of the whole ·species·, not sacrificing the individual to the collective or the collective to the individual, but giving to duty on the one hand and to freedom and spontaneity on the other their proper province. In the better natures among mankind such a morality would get its power from •sympathy and •benevolence and •the passion for ideal excellence: in the less good natures its power would come from •the same feelings (developed to whatever level they were capable of) with •the added force of shame. This noble morality wouldn’t depend for its dominance on any hope of reward; but it would involve a reward that might be looked for, a reward the thought of which would be a consolation in suffering and a support in moments of weakness. It would be the reward not of existence in a problematic •future life, but of the approval in •this life of those whom we respect, and ideally of all those—dead or living—whom we admire or venerate. For the thought that our dead parents or friends would have approved our conduct is almost as strong a motive as the knowledge that our living ones do approve it: and the idea that Socrates or ·prison reformer John· Howard or ·George?· Washington or Marcus Aurelius or Christ would have sympathized with us, or that we are trying to do our part in the spirit in which they did theirs, has operated on the very best minds as a strong incentive to act in accordance with their highest feelings and convictions.

To call these sentiments ‘morality’ and nothing else is claiming too little for them. They are a real religion. What is ordinarily meant by ‘morality’ is something having to do only with outward good works; but in the religion I am proposing, as in other religions, good works are only a part, and really they are consequences of the religion rather than the religion itself. The essence of religion is the strong and earnest direction of the emotions and desires towards an ideal objective which is recognized as being of the highest excellence and as rightly superior to all selfish objects of desire. The Religion of Humanity ·which I have been proposing· satisfies this condition to as great an extent, and in as high a sense, as do even the best supernatural religions. . . .

I could say much more on this topic; but what I have said already is enough to show that the •sense of unity with mankind, and a •deep feeling for the general good, can be developed into a feeling and a principle that could fulfill every important function of religion and would itself be entitled to count as a religion. (Anyone who isn’t convinced of this—·presumably because it is so unlike anything that humankind ever has achieved·—must be unable to distinguish •the intrinsic capacities of human nature from •the forms in which those capacities happen to have been historically developed.) I further maintain that the Religion of Humanity not only could fulfill these functions but would fulfill them better than any supernatural religion. It is not only entitled to be called a ‘religion’: it is a better religion than anything else that has ever had that title. ·I have two reasons for saying this·.

(1) In the first place, it is disinterested [= ‘not self -interested’]. It carries the believer’s thoughts and feelings out of himself and fixes them on an objective that he loves and pursues not selfishly but as an end for its own sake. The •religions that deal in promises and threats regarding a future life do the exact opposite: •they pin the person’s thoughts to his own posthumous interests; •they tempt him to regard the performance of his duties to others mainly as a means to his own personal salvation; and •they are very serious obstacles to the great purpose of moral culture, the strengthening of the unselfish element in our nature and the weakening of the selfish element, because they present to the imagination such tremendous amounts and intensities of selfish good and evil that anyone who fully believes in their reality will find it hard to have any feeling or interest to spare for any other distant and ideal objective. It’s true that many of the most unselfish people have been believers in supernaturalism, because their minds haven’t dwelt on the threats and promises of their religion but chiefly on the idea of a Being to whom they looked up with a confident love, willingly leaving it to him to decide all matters relating to themselves in particular. But in its effect on ordinary minds, what now goes by the name ‘religion’ operates mainly through the feelings of self-interest. Even the Christ of the gospels directly promises reward from heaven as a primary motive for the noble and beautiful beneficence towards our fellow-creatures which he so impressively teaches. This makes ·even· the best supernatural religions radically inferior to the Religion of Humanity; because the greatest thing that moral influences can do to improve human nature is to develop our unselfish feelings in the only way any active element in human nature can be effectively developed, namely by habitual exercise: whereas the habit of expecting to be rewarded in another life for our conduct in this life makes even virtue itself no longer an exercise of the unselfish feelings.

(2) Secondly, the value of the old religions as means of elevating and improving human character is enormously reduced by the fact that it is nearly (if not entirely) impossible for them to produce their best moral effects unless the intellectual faculties are sluggish if not downright twisted. Anyone who habitually thinks, and who can’t blunt his inquiring intellect by trickery, can’t confidently ascribe absolute perfection to the author and ruler of such a clumsily made and capriciously governed creation as this planet and the life of its inhabitants. To adore such a being with your whole heart, you would need a heart that had first had trickery built into it. It is inevitable that either •the worship is greatly overclouded by doubt, and occasionally quite darkened by it, or •the moral sentiments sink to the low level of the ordinances of Nature—the worshipper must learn to think that blind favouritism, atrocious cruelty, and reckless injustice are not blemishes in an object of worship because there is so much of these in the commonest phenomena of Nature. Granted, the God who is worshipped is usually the God not only of •Nature but also of •some revelation; and the character of the revelation will greatly modify and may actually improve the moral influences of the religion in question. This is emphatically true of Christianity, because the Author of the Sermon on the Mount is assuredly a far more benign being than the Author of Nature. But unfortunately, the believer in the Christian revelation is required to believe that the same being is the author of both! If he doesn’t resolutely •avert his mind from this subject or •practise the act of quieting his conscience by sophistry, he will be involved in endless moral perplexities, because the ways of his Deity in Nature are often totally at variance with what he thinks to be the commands of that same Deity in the Gospel. Those who suffer the least moral damage from this tangle are probably those who never try to reconcile the two standards—·the one set by Nature, and the one set by Jesus in the Gospels·—with one another, but admits to himself that the purposes of Providence are mysterious, that its ways are not our ways, that its justice and goodness are not the justice and goodness that we can understand and that it is fitting for us to practise. When this is how the believer feels, however, the worship of God stops being the adoration of abstract moral perfection. It becomes a matter of the bowing down to a gigantic image of something not fit for us to imitate. It is the worship of pure power.

I say nothing of the moral difficulties and perversions involved in revelation itself; though even in the Christianity of the Gospels, at least in its ordinary interpretation, there are some that are so flagrant that they almost outweigh all the beauty and benignity and moral greatness that so clearly distinguish the sayings and character of Christ. For example, thinking ‘This is the object of highest worship!’ of a being who could make a Hell and create countless generations of human beings with the certain foreknowledge that he was creating them to be sent to Hell. Is there any moral atrocity that couldn’t be justified by the imitation of such a Deity? And could we possibly adore such a being without frightfully distorting the standard of right and wrong? Any other of the outrages to the most ordinary justice and humanity involved in the common Christian idea of God’s moral character sinks into insignificance beside this dreadful ·Hell-focused· idealization of wickedness.

Also, most of the other outrages are (fortunately) not so unambiguously derivable from Christ’s own words as to be indisputably a part of Christian doctrine. It may be doubted, for instance, whether Christianity is really responsible for ·the doctrines of· atonement and redemption, original sin and vicarious punishment. [Sin is ‘original’ if it is built into our very nature, implying that we are innately sinful. Vicarious punishment is the punishment of one person to pay for the crimes or sins of someone else—as Jesus is said to have died on the cross as punishment for our sins.] And the same may be said about the doctrine that salvation is possible only for those who believe in the divine mission of Christ. It is nowhere reported ·in the Bible· that Christ himself made this statement, except in the account of the resurrection that the gospel of St. Mark gallops through in its last chapter; and some critics (the best ones, I think) consider that to be a later addition. Again, the proposition that ‘the powers that be are ordained by God’, and the whole series of consequences deduced from it in the Epistles [i.e. in the letters Paul wrote to various Christians and churches], belong to St. Paul, and must stand or fall with Paulism, not with Christianity.

But one moral contradiction is inseparable from every form of Christianity; no ingenuity can resolve it, and no trickery can explain it away. It is that so precious a gift ·as eternal blessed life· should have been given to a few and withheld from the many; that countless millions of human beings should have been allowed to live and die, to sin and suffer, without the one thing they needed ·for salvation·, the divine remedy for sin and suffering, which the Divine Giver could as easily have given to everyone as to give it by special grace to a favoured minority. Furthermore, this divine message (if that’s what it is) has come with credentials that are so weak that they fail to convince a large proportion of the strongest and most cultivated minds, and the tendency to disbelieve them seems to grow with the growth of scientific knowledge and critical discrimination. Anyone who can believe that these—·God’s awarding salvation to only a few, and his not giving better evidence of his existence and his wishes·—are the intentional shortcomings of a perfectly good Being must silence every prompting of the sense of goodness and justice as human beings understand them.

Of course it can and quite often does happen that someone worships with the most intense devotion the God of Nature or the God of the Gospel without perverting his moral sentiments; but this requires him to fix his attention exclusively on what is beautiful and beneficent in the precepts and spirit of the Gospel and in the dispensations of Nature, setting aside everything that is ugly or harmful as though it didn’t exist. So, I repeat, this simple and innocent faith has to co-exist with a sluggish and inactive state of the intellectual faculties. Someone who has an intellect that he uses can’t possibly come anywhere near to this except by tricking up and perverting either his intellect or his conscience. It’s nearly always the case, regarding sects and individuals who derive their morality from religion, that the better logicians they are, the worse moralists!

Only one form of belief in the supernatural—only one theory respecting the origin and government of the universe—is completely free from intellectual contradiction and of moral perversity. It is the position that utterly gives up the idea of an omnipotent creator, and regards Nature and Life not as the expression throughout of the moral character and purpose of the Deity, but as the product of a struggle between •planning and designing goodness and either •an intractable material ·that goodness has to work with· (as Plato thought) or •a positive force for evil (which is what the Manicheans maintained). A creed like this, which I have known to be devoutly held by at least one cultivated and conscientious person of our own day, allows one to believe that all the mass of actual evil wasn’t designed by the Being whom we are called upon to worship, and hasn’t come into existence on his orders, but rather exists in spite of him . According to this ·theological· theory, a virtuous human being has the lofty role of fellow-labourer with ·God·, the Highest—a fellow-soldier in the great battle. He contributes a little, but he and his like jointly contribute a lot, towards that progressive ascendancy and eventually complete triumph of good over evil that history points to and that this doctrine teaches us to regard as planned by the Being to whom we owe everything good we can find in Nature. There can’t be any possible objection to the moral tendency of this creed; the only effect it can have on someone who succeeds in believing it is an ennobling one. The evidence for it (if you can call it ‘evidence’ at all) is too shadowy and unsubstantial, and the promises it holds out too are distant and uncertain, for it to be a permanent substitute for the Religion of Humanity. But the two can be held in conjunction: someone to whom ideal ·human· good, and the progress of the world towards it, are already a religion, can allow himself the pleasing and encouraging thought that the other—·active goodness vs. stubborn material, or good vs. evil·—might be true, even though there is no significant evidence for it. Apart from any dogmatic •belief, the region of the •imagination is a rich resource—for those who need it— of possibilities, of hypotheses that can’t be known to be false; and when such a •possibility is somehow favoured by nature as we experience it, we can legitimately indulge ourselves with thoughts about •it. These thoughts can play their part, along with other influences, in feeding and enlivening the tendency of the feelings and impulses towards good. (I said ‘when it is favoured by nature’, and in the present case—·of the belief that Nature is the scene of a struggle between planning and designing good on the one hand and obstinacy or evil on the other·—there are pointers to it in nature; for whatever force we attach to the analogies of Nature with the effects of human design, there is no disputing Paley’s remark that what is good in nature exhibits those analogies much oftener than what is evil.)

The supernatural religions must always have one advantage, such as it is, over the Religion of Humanity, namely the prospect they hold out to the individual of a life after death. ·The Religion of Humanity can involve some thought of an after-life·: the •scepticism of the •understanding doesn’t necessarily exclude the •theism of the •imagination and feelings ·that last clause is exactly as Mill wrote it·; and this imaginative theism provides opportunity for a hope that the power that has done so much for us may be able and willing to give us an after-life also. But such a vague possibility can’t ever come close to being an outright belief. It we have to estimate the value of this element —the prospect of a world to come—as a constituent of earthly happiness, I can’t help thinking that as the condition of mankind improves, as people become happier in their lives and more capable of deriving happiness from unselfish sources, they will care less and less for this gratifying expectation. As things now stand, those who are the most anxious either for a very long present life or for a life hereafter are not usually the happy ones, but rather those who never have been happy. People who have had their happiness can bear to part with existence, but it is hard to die without ever having lived! When mankind no longer need a future existence to console them for their sufferings in the present life, the after-life will have lost its chief value to them personally, ·though they will have plenty of other desires, concerns, and objectives concerning what happens after their death·. I am now speaking of people who are unselfish; and not of a person who is so wrapped up in himself that he can’t invest his feelings in anything that will survive him, and can’t feel that his own life is prolonged in the lives of his younger contemporaries and in all who help to carry on the progressive movement of human affairs. If this person is to keep up any interest in existence, he needs the notion of another life for himself beyond the grave, because his present life, as its end approaches, dwindles into something too insignificant to be worth caring about. But if the Religion of Humanity were •as diligently taught and maintained as the supernatural religions are (and it’s easy to imagine its being even •more so), all who had received the customary amount of moral education would, right up to the hour of their own death, live imaginatively in the life of those who are to follow them; and although no doubt many of them would like to survive as individuals for a much longer than the present duration of life, it seems to me likely that each of them would sooner or later have had enough of existence and would gladly lie down and take his eternal rest. But let us stop looking that far forward, and note a significant fact about how things stand now: people who believe in the immortality of the soul usually quit ·their earthly· life with every bit as much reluctance as those who don’t expect an after-life. The mere ending of existence is not an evil to anyone: if you find the idea of it formidable, that’s because your imagination is creating an illusion that makes you think of yourself as alive while feeling yourself to be dead! What is horrible about death is not death itself but the act of dying and the gloomy events that go with it, and a dying person has to go through these, whether or not he believes in immortality. So far as I can see, the sceptic loses through his scepticism only one real and valuable consolation, namely the hope of reunion with those dear to him who have ended their earthly life before him. There’s no denying that loss, and it oughtn’t to be minimized. In many cases it is too great to be estimated or compared ·with other losses·; and it will always be enough to keep alive in the minds of more sensitive people the imaginative hope of an after-life. ·This is a hope that can be rationally maintained because·, although in our knowledge and experience nothing •supports the thesis that there is an after-life, nothing •contradicts it either.

History, so far as we know it, confirms the opinion that mankind can perfectly well do without the belief in a heaven. The Greeks’ idea of a future state was anything but tempting! Their Elysian fields offered very little attraction to their feelings and imagination. In the Odyssey Achilles says that he would rather •be on earth as the slave of a poor master than •reign over the whole kingdom of the dead; which expressed a very natural attitude and no doubt a very common one. And the. . . .tone of the dying emperor Hadrian’s address to his soul gives evidence that the popular conception hadn’t changed much during that long interval. [From Homer to Hadrian—about 900 years. Hadrian’s poem to his soul has been translated thus: ‘Little soul, gentle and drifting, guest and companion of my body, now you will dwell below in pallid places, stark and bare; there you won’t make jokes as you used to do.’] Yet we don’t find that the Greeks enjoyed life less than other people, or that they feared death more. The Buddhist religion probably has today more believers than either Christianity or Islam. Buddhism recognises many kinds of •punishment in a future life—or rather future lives, through the transmigration of the soul into new bodies of men or animals. But the blessing from Heaven that it offers as a •reward, to be earned by persevering in the highest level of virtuous life, is annihilation, or anyway the ending of all conscious or separate existence. It is impossible not to see this religion as the work of legislators and moralists trying to provide supernatural motives for the conduct they wanted to encourage; and they could find nothing more utterly wonderful to hold out as the final prize, to be won through the mightiest efforts of labour and self-denial, than what we are so often told is the terrible idea of annihilation! Surely this proves that the idea of annihilation is not really or naturally terrible; that not only philosophers but people in general can easily reconcile themselves to it and even consider it as a good; and that a natural part of the idea of a happy life can be this:

•After the best that life can give has been fully enjoyed for a long time, •when all life’s pleasures—even those of benevolence—have become familiar, •when nothing untasted and unknown is left to stimulate curiosity and keep one wanting to prolong one’s existence, life is laid down.

It seems to me possible—indeed, probable—that in a higher and (above all) a happier condition of human life, the burdensome idea may be not annihilation but immortality; and that human nature, though pleased with the present and not in a hurry to leave it, would find comfort and not sadness in the thought that it isn’t chained through eternity to a conscious existence that it can’t be sure it will always wish to preserve.

Theism

Part 1: Introduction and Arguments

Theism

The evidence for theism

Argument for a first cause

Argument from the general consent of mankind

The argument from consciousness

The argument from marks of design in nature

Part 2: Attributes

Omnipotence

Omniscience

What limits god’s power?

God’s moral qualities

Part 3: Immortality

Part 4: Revelation

Part 5: General result

Part 1: Introduction and Arguments

The contest that has gone on for ages between believers and unbelievers in natural and revealed religion has varied considerably in its character from age to age, as permanent contests always do. The way the debate is conducted these days, at least in the higher regions of controversy, makes it look very different from how it was in the 18th and early 19th centuries. One feature of this change is so obvious that everyone agrees about it, namely the gentler spirit in which the debate is conducted on the part of unbelievers. The intolerance of the believers had provoked a reaction in the other side, a violence of tone and spirit; but that has pretty much exhausted itself. Experience has lessened the non-believers’ ardent hope for the regeneration of the human race by merely negative doctrine—by the destruction of superstition. [Mill is about to use ‘philosophical’ to mean something like ‘scientific’, with this understood in a broad sense.] The philosophical study of history, one of the most important creations of recent times, has enabled us to evaluate impartially the doctrines and institutions of the past, looking at them from a relative instead of an absolute point of view—seeing them as incidents of human development that it’s no use grumbling about and that may deserve admiration and gratitude for their effects in the past, even if we don’t think they can render similar services to the future. And among people who reject the supernatural, the better educated ones now regard Christianity (or theism) as •something that used to be of great value but can now be done without— rather than, as they did formerly, as •something that was misleading and noxious from the outset.

Along with this change in the moral attitude of thoughtful unbelievers towards the religious ideas of mankind, a corresponding difference has shown up in their intellectual attitude. The war against religious beliefs was conducted in the last century principally on the ground of common sense or of logic; in the present age it is conducted on the ground of science. The progress of the •physical sciences is thought to have established, by conclusive evidence, matters of fact that can’t be squared with the religious traditions of mankind; while the •science of human nature and history is thought to show that the creeds of the past are natural growths of the human mind at particular stages in its development, destined to be replaced by other convictions at more advanced stages. As the debate has progressed, this last class of considerations—·i.e. the view of religious beliefs as matters of psychology and history·—seems to have gone so far as to push aside the issue about whether such beliefs are true. Religions tend to be discussed, at least by those who reject them, less as intrinsically true or false than as products thrown up by certain states of civilization—products which, like the species of organisms produced in a given geological period, eventually die out because the conditions are no longer right for their survival.

This tendency in recent thought to look on human opinions (not only religious ones) primarily from an historical point of view, as facts obeying laws of their own and requiring, like other observed facts, an historical or scientific explanation, is a very good thing; not only because it draws attention to an important and previously neglected aspect of human opinions, but also because it has a real though indirect bearing on the question of their truth. If you have an opinion on some controversial subject, you can’t be completely sure that you are right unless you can explain why some people hold the opposite opinion. (I am assuming here that you are a cautious thinker.) You won’t be satisfied with the ‘explanation’ that the opposing opinion is a product of •the weakness of the human understanding, because you won’t comfortably assume that you have a smaller share of •that infirmity than the rest of mankind so that ·in any disagreement· your opponents are more likely to be wrong than you are. As you examine the evidence, one of the data of the case—one of the phenomena to be explained—is the fact about what other people, and perhaps even mankind in general, do in fact believe. [We are about the meet the word ‘presumption’, which is used often in this Essay in the sense of ‘weight of evidence’.] The human intellect is weak, but it isn’t essentially perverted; so when many people hold a certain opinion there is a certain presumption that it is true; and someone who rejects it needs to propose some •other real or possible cause for its being so widespread—·I mean, •other than its being true·. This matter is specially relevant to the inquiry into the foundations of theism, because the argument for the truth of theism that is most commonly invoked and confidently relied on is the general assent of mankind.

But while we should give full value to this •historical treatment of the religious question, we oughtn’t to let it push aside the •theoretical approach, ·i.e. the issue of religion’s truth·. The most important issue about an opinion on a big subject is whether it is true or false; and for us that comes down to the issue of whether it is supported by strong enough evidence. The subject of religion must sometimes be treated as a strictly scientific topic, with the evidence for and against it being tested by the same scientific methods, and on the same ·scientific· principles, as are involved in testing any theory in physical science. So I shall take this to be granted:

The legitimate conclusions of science are entitled to prevail over any opinions that conflict with them, however widely those opinions may be held; and rules and standards of scientific evidence that have become established through two thousand years of successes and failures are applicable to all subjects on which knowledge can be had.

On that basis, let us now consider what place there is for religious beliefs on the platform of science; what scientifically respectable evidence they can appeal to, and what basis there is for the doctrines of religion considered as scientific theses.

In this inquiry I shall of course begin with natural religion, the doctrine of the existence and attributes of God.

Theism

Though I have defined the problem of natural theology as the question of the existence of God or of a god, rather than of gods, there is abundant historical evidence that the belief in •many gods is much more natural to the human mind than the belief in •one author and ruler of nature; and that the latter more elevated belief is a relatively artificial product that can’t be reached without a good deal of intellectual development, except in those who had it drummed into them by early education. For a long time it seemed forced and unnatural to suppose that the variety we see in the operations of nature could all be the work of a single will. To the untaught mind, and to all minds in pre-scientific times, the phenomena of nature seem to be the result of utterly different kinds of forces, each going its own way quite independently of the others. It was entirely natural to attribute these to conscious wills, ·but that wasn’t a step towards monotheism, because· the natural tendency is to a separate independent will for each force that is important enough to have been noticed and named. Polytheism as such has no inherent tendency to transform itself spontaneously into monotheism. It’s true that in most polytheistic systems the god whose special attributes inspire the most awe is usually supposed to be able to control the other gods; and even in Hinduism, which may be the most degraded [Mill’s word] of all polytheistic systems, the worshipper piles monotheistic-sounding descriptions—ones customarily used by believers in a single God— onto the god who is the immediate object of his worship at that moment. But there’s no real acknowledgement of one ·divine· governor. Every god normally rules his particular part or aspect of the world, though there may be a still stronger one who could, if he chose, frustrate the purposes of the inferior god. There could be no real belief in one creator and governor until mankind had begun to see the apparently confused phenomena surrounding them as a system that could be viewed as the working out of a single plan. This conception of the world may have been anticipated (though less frequently than is often supposed) by individuals of exceptional genius; but it couldn’t become common until after a long-drawn-out development of scientific thought.

There’s no mystery about how scientific study operates to put monotheism in place of the more natural polytheism. The over-all effect of science is to show, by accumulating evidence, this:

•Every event in nature is connected by laws with one or more facts that preceded it, i.e. depends for its occurrence on some antecedent; but not so strictly on one antecedent that it couldn’t have been blocked or modified by others. •These distinct chains of causation are entangled with one another; the action of each cause, though it conforms to its own fixed law, is interfered with by other causes in such a way that every effect is truly the result of the totality of all the causes in existence rather than of only one.

(·If the mention of all the causes in existence seems to you extravagant, consider this·: Nothing takes place in the world of our experience without spreading a perceptible influence of some sort through a greater or less portion of Nature, and ·for all we know to the contrary· it may make every part of the world slightly different from what it would have been if that event hadn’t occurred. ·If that is so, then each place has events that affect what happens at each other place, from which it follows that what happens at any place is affected by events at every other place·.) Now, when men have acquired the double conviction •that every event depends on antecedents, and •that the occurrence of any event required a working-together of many antecedents, and perhaps of all the antecedents in Nature, they are led to believe that no one event—let alone all the events of some one kind—could be absolutely preordained or governed except by a Being who held in his hand the reins of •all Nature and not merely of •some part or aspect of it. Or, anyway, if a plurality of gods is still supposed, they must be assumed to be so collaborative in their actions and so agreed in their wills that there is no significant difference between this kind of polytheism and monotheism.

The reason, then, why monotheism may be accepted as the representative of theism in general is not so much that •it’s the theism of all the more developed portions of the human race as that •it’s the only theism that can claim to have any scientific basis. Every other ·religion, i.e. every other· theory of the government of the universe by supernatural beings, is inconsistent with one or other of the two most general results of science—that •the world is governed through a continual series of natural antecedents according to fixed laws, and that •each of these series depends on all the others.

So if we start from the scientific view of nature as a single connected system, held together not •like a web composed of separate threads passively lying in certain relations to one another, but rather •like an animal body, an apparatus kept going by perpetual action and reaction among all its parts—the question to which theism is an answer is at least a very natural one, and arises from an obvious lack in the human mind. So far as our means of observation permits, we are accustomed to finding for each individual event y a beginning, and where there’s a beginning we find an antecedent event x that we call a ‘cause’, an event such that if x hadn’t occurred y wouldn’t have occurred either. Given this finding, the human mind was absolutely bound to ask itself a question about •the whole system of which these particular phenomena are parts:

Did •it also have a beginning? If so, did that beginning have something antecedent to it, and thus antecedent to the whole series of causes and effects that we call ‘Nature’—something such that if it hadn’t existed Nature itself wouldn’t have existed?

From as far back as we can trace the history of thought, this question has always been answered by some hypothesis or other. The only answer that has given satisfaction for long periods is theism.

Looking at the problem merely as a scientific inquiry, it breaks down into two questions. (1) Is the theory that explains the origin of all the phenomena of nature in terms of the will of a creator consistent with the established results of science? (2) If it is consistent with them, how will the case for it stand up to being tested by the principles of evidence and rules for belief that we have found, through our long experience of scientific inquiry, to be indispensable guides?

There is one version of theism that is consistent, another that is radically inconsistent, with the most general truths that we have learned through scientific investigation.

The one that is inconsistent is the conception of a god governing the world by •acts of a variable will. The one that is consistent is the conception of a god governing the world by •invariable laws.

Primitive people have thought, and common people still do think, of God as ruling the world by special decrees, tailored to individual occasions. Although he is supposed to be omniscient as well as omnipotent, they think of him as not making up his mind until the moment of an action; or at least not making it up so conclusively that his intentions can’t be altered by appropriate prayers right up to the very last moment. It will be hard to reconcile this view about how God runs the world with the foreknowledge and perfect wisdom that he is credited with having; but I shan’t pursue that problem. The point I want to make here is that the view in question contradicts what experience has taught us about how things actually happen. The phenomena of Nature do take place according to general laws. They do originate from definite natural antecedents. So if their ultimate origin is derived from a will, it must be a will that established those general laws and willed those antecedents. If there is a creator, his intention must have been that events should depend on antecedents and be produced according to fixed laws. But once this is conceded, nothing in our scientific experience is inconsistent with the belief that those laws and sequences are themselves due to a divine will. And we don’t have to suppose that the divine will exerted itself once for all, •putting into the system a power that enabled it to go on by itself and then •leaving it alone. Nothing in science clashes with the supposition that every actual event results from a specific act of the will of the presiding power, provided that this power conforms its particular acts of will to general laws it has laid down. It has commonly been held that •this hypothesis tends more to the glory of God than •the supposition that the universe was made so that it could go on by itself. But some very eminent thinkers (of whom Leibniz was one) have protested against downgrading God by likening him to a clock maker whose clock won’t go unless he puts his hand to the machinery to keep it going. We aren’t concerned here with any such issues. We are approaching the subject from the point of view not •of reverence but •of science; and with science both these suppositions as to the mode of the divine action are equally consistent.

But now we must pass to the next question. There is nothing to disprove the thesis that Nature was created and is governed by a sovereign will; but is there anything to prove it? What is the evidence for it like? and weighed in the scientific balance what is its value?

The evidence for theism

The things that have been cited as evidence of a Creator are of several different kinds, and they are so different that they are adapted to minds of very different descriptions; it’s hardly possible that any single mind should be equally impressed by them all. The familiar division of them into •a priori proofs and •a posteriori ones indicates that when they are looked at in a purely scientific way they belong to different schools of thought. [A priori arguments for the existence of God wouldn’t ordinarily count as parts of ‘natural religion’ or ‘natural theology’ , which is how Mill labels his topic (see here). Those phrases are usually taken to refer to the support that theological beliefs can get from observing how things go in the natural world; Mill evidently understands them more broadly, as referring to any support other than what comes from divine revelation.] Unthinking believers whose belief really rests on authority give an equal welcome to all plausible arguments in support of the belief in which he has been brought up; but philosophers ·and scientists·, who have had to choose between the a priori and a posteriori methods in general science, nearly always speak disparagingly of the other ·method, i.e. the one they haven’t chosen, when it appears in arguments for the existence of God·. What we have to do here is to maintain complete impartiality, giving a fair hearing to both. At the same time I am strongly convinced that one of the two types of argument is in its nature scientific, while the other is not only unscientific but is condemned by science. The scientific argument is the one that reasons from the facts and analogies of human experience, as a geologist does when he infers the past states of our planet, or as an astronomer does when he draws conclusions about the physical composition of other planets and stars. This is the a posteriori method, the principal application of which to theism is the so-called ‘argument from design’. The type of reasoning that I call unscientific, though some thinkers regard it too as a legitimate mode of scientific procedure, is the one that infers external •objective factual conclusions from •ideas or convictions of our minds. In calling this unscientific I’m not relying on any opinion of mine about the origin of our ideas or convictions. ·Indeed the question of where our idea of God comes from is irrelevant to my present point·; whatever its origin, it is just an idea, and all you can prove from an idea is an idea, not an objective fact. (Unless we suppose—in line with the book of Genesis—that the objective fact has been handed down by tradition from a time when there was direct personal contact with God; and in that case the argument is no longer a priori!) The belief that an idea or a wish or a need proves the reality of a corresponding object—·something that the idea is an idea of, something that satisfies the wish or meets the need·—derives all its plausibility from one’s already believing that we were made by a benign Being who wouldn’t have given us a groundless belief or a want that he didn’t give us the means of satisfying. So it’s an obvious petitio principii to present the belief or want etc. to support the very belief that this argument presupposes. [The Latin petitio principii used to be rendered in English as ‘begging the question’, until recently when that phrase came to mean ‘raising the question’. However labelled, it is the fallacy of presenting an argument for the conclusion that P when some step in the argument doesn’t work unless P is true.]

Still, it must be admitted that all a priori systems, whether in philosophy or religion, do profess to be based on experience, because although they claim to be able to arrive at truths that go beyond experience, they start from facts of experience—and where else could they start? They are entitled to consideration to the extent that experience can be shown to give any kind of support either to them or to their method of inquiry. Many arguments that are offered as a priori are really of a mixed nature, being to some extent a posteriori. Often they can be said to be a posteriori arguments in disguise, with the a priori considerations acting chiefly to make some particular a posteriori element in them count for more than it should. This is emphatically true of the argument for theism that I shall first examine, the ·argument from the supposed· necessity of a first cause. For this really has a wide basis in experience, our experience of the universality of the cause-effect relation among the phenomena of nature, yet theological philosophers haven’t been content to let it rest on that basis but have affirmed causation—·by which I mean the thesis that whatever is the case is caused to be the case·—as a truth of reason, something one can see to be true just by thinking about it.

Argument for a first cause

The argument for a first cause is presented as a conclusion from the whole of human experience. Everything that we know (it is argued) had a cause, and owed its existence to that cause. So how can it not be the case that •the totality of everything we know, which we call •‘the world’, has a cause to which it owes its existence?

But the fact of experience is not that •everything we know gets its existence from a cause, but only that •every event or change does so. Nature has a permanent element, and also a changeable one; the changes are always the effects of previous changes, but so far as we know the permanent existences are not effects at all. Admittedly we often say not only of events but of objects that they are produced by causes—e.g. ‘Water is produced by the union of hydrogen and oxygen’. But all we mean by this is that the object’s beginning to exist is the effect of a cause; and a thing’s beginning to exist is not an •object, but an •event. You may want to object: ‘The cause of a thing’s beginning to exist can properly be called the cause of the thing itself.’ I shan’t quarrel with you about the form of words, ·but my point still stands·. What begins to exist in an object is what belongs to the •changeable element in nature—the outward form and the •properties depending on mechanical or chemical combinations of its component parts. Every object also has another element that is permanent, namely the specific elementary substance or substances of which it consists and their •inherent properties. [Mill is contrasting •the properties of a thing that result from how its parts are put together with •the properties a thing has as its basic nature, not derived from, or an upshot of, anything.] These are not known to us as beginning to exist: within the range of human knowledge they had no beginning, and therefore no cause; though they themselves are causes or collaborating causes [Mill says ‘causes or con-causes’] of everything that happens. So experience offers no evidence—not even ·suggestive· analogies—entitling us to take a generalization based only on our observation of the changeable and extend it to the apparently unchangeable.

As a fact of experience, then, causation can’t legitimately be extended to the material universe itself, but only to its •changeable phenomena; there is no exception to the generalization that •these all have causes. But what causes? The cause of every change is a previous change; and it has to be a change, because if there were no new antecedent there wouldn’t be a new consequent. If the state of affairs that brings the phenomenon into existence had existed always or for the past year (say), the effect would also have existed always or been produced a year ago. It is thus a necessary part of the fact of causation as we experience it that the causes as well as the effects had a beginning in time, and were themselves caused. So it would seem that our experience, instead of providing an argument for a first cause, conflicts with it, and that the very essence of causation—as it exists within the limits of our knowledge—is incompatible with a first cause.

But we must look into this matter in more detail, and analyse more closely the nature of the causes that mankind have experience of. For it might turn out that although all causes have a beginning, there is in all of them a permanent element that had no beginning. In that case, this permanent element might fairly be called a ‘first cause’ or ‘the universal cause’—·the cause of everything·—because without being able to be the whole cause of anything, it enters as a collaborating cause into all causation, ·i.e. as a partial cause of everything·. Now it happens that the latest conclusion that the scientists have reached, on the basis of converging evidence from all branches of physical science, does point to a conclusion of this sort so far as the material world is concerned. Whenever a physical phenomenon is traced to its cause, that cause turns out under analysis to be a certain quantity of force combined with certain collocations—·i.e. combined with certain facts about how particles of matter are spatially inter-related·. And the last great generalization of science, the ·principle of· conservation of force, teaches us that •the variety in the effects depends partly on •the amount of the force and partly on the •variety of the collocations. [By ‘the last great generalization’, Mill may mean that there will never again be any new physical doctrines with such scope; but may instead mean merely that the conservation-of-force thesis is the latest such doctrine.] The force itself is essentially one and the same, and nature contains a fixed quantum of it, which (if the theory is true) is never increased or lessened. So we find here, even in the changes of material nature, a permanent element that seems to be just the thing that we were looking for. If we have to award the role of first cause (or cause of the material universe) to anything, we’ll apparently have to award it to this quantity of force. For all effects can be traced back to it, whereas so far as our experience can tell us it can’t be traced back to anything. We can trace back its transformations, and the cause of any transformation of a force always includes the force itself—the very same quantity of force— in some previous form. [This use of ‘quantity’ requires care. The statement ‘I poured into the flask the very same quantity of water that I had taken out’ could mean (1) that I poured in the same amount—a pint, or gallon or what-not—that I had taken out or (2) that I poured into the flask the very same water—the same aggregate of water-molecules—that I had taken out. Mill is here using ‘very same quantity’ with meaning (2). Since force doesn’t consist in anything like molecules, there may be a problem about how to distinguish (2)-same-force from (1)-same force; but right now the point is that (2) is what Mill means. He earlier called it not a ‘quantity’ but a ‘quantum’, and he will soon speak of a ‘portion’ of force.] So it would seem that if we are to look to experience for support for the doctrine of a first cause—i.e. of a primeval and universal element in all causes—the first cause will have to be force.

But that doesn’t bring us to the end of the question—far from it. The crucial part of the argument is the one we have just reached. For it is maintained that mind is the only possible cause of force, or rather perhaps that mind is a force, and that all other force must be derived from •mind because •it is the only thing capable of originating change. This is said to be the lesson of human experience. In the phenomena of inanimate nature, the force at work is always a pre-existing one—a force that isn’t originated ·in the event in question·, but only transferred. One physical object x moves another y by giving to y the force by which x itself has first been moved. The wind passes on to the waves, or a windmill, or a ship, part of the motion that it has received from some other agent. Only in the voluntary action ·of a thinking being· do we see a start of motion, an origination of motion; all other causes appear incapable of thus originating motion. So experience is in favour of the conclusion that every episode of motion that ever occurred owed its beginning to this one ·kind of· cause, voluntary agency—if not the agency of man then the agency of some more powerful being.

This is a very old argument. It occurs in Plato; not (as might have been expected) in the Phaedo, where the arguments are ones that would now be dismissed as having no weight, but in his last work, the Laws. And metaphysicians who defend natural theology still regard it as one of the most telling arguments they have.

The first point to be made is this: if there is truth in the doctrine of the conservation of force—i.e. the constancy of the total amount of force in existence—this doctrine doesn’t change from true to false when it reaches the field of voluntary agency! The will doesn’t create force, any more than other causes do. It does originate motion, but its only way of doing that is to •take a portion of force that already exists in some other form and •convert it into motion. [(1) In the next sentence, the words ‘evolved’ and ‘liberated’ are Mill’s. (2) What he says about a ‘fund’ of force on which bodily processes write ‘drafts’ is a banking metaphor. The portion of force liberated by nutrition is put into a bank account, and bodily processes write cheques on it.] We know that the main and perhaps only source from which this portion of force is derived is the force evolved in the processes of chemical composition and decomposition that constitute nutrition; the force so liberated becomes a fund upon which every action of the muscles (and even every action of the nerves, such as what happens in the brain when a person thinks) is a draft. According to the best lights of science, it is only in this sense that volition is an ‘originating cause’. So volition doesn’t qualify as a first cause, because force must in every instance be assumed as prior to any volition; and our experience doesn’t convey the slightest hint that force itself is ever created by a volition. As far as we can tell from our experience, force has all the attributes of something that is eternal and uncreated.

But this still doesn’t close the discussion. Our experience leads us to judge that •will never originates •force, but what about the thesis that •force never originates •will? If we become sure that that is true, we’ll have to regard will as an agency that is eternal along with force. Furthermore, if these two things are true:

•will can originate (not force itself, but) the transformation of force from some other of its forms into mechanical motion, and •human experience doesn’t show us any other agency that can transform force in this way,

then we still have an unrefuted argument for the conclusion that a will was the originator (not of •the universe, but) of •the cosmos, i.e. the order of the universe.

But the basis laid out for that argument doesn’t fit the facts, ·because the second of the two displayed propositions is false·. Anything volition can do in the way of creating motion out of other forms of force, and generally of evolving hidden force into something visible, can be done by many other causes as well. For example:

chemical action, electricity, heat, the presence of a gravitating body

—all these cause mechanical motion on a much larger scale than any volitions that we know about from our own experience. (·I repeat, for emphasis·: when any of these things causes motion, it is hardly ever a mere passing on of motion from one body to another, but rather a transforming into motion of some force that existed in some form other than motion.) This means that volition’s privilege of originating motion is shared with many other things. It’s true that when any of those other agents •give out force in the form of motion, they must first have •received that force from elsewhere—but that is equally true of the force that volition transforms into motion. We know that this force comes from an external source, namely the chemical action of the food and air. The force by which the events of the material world are produced circulates through all physical agencies in a never-ending though sometimes interrupted stream. Our topic here, of course, is how volition affects the material world; we aren’t concerned with the will itself as a mental phenomenon, as in the much-debated question: ‘Does the will determine itself (which would mean that it is “free” or is it determined by causes ·other than itself·?’ Our present question concerns only the •effects of volition, not its •origin. ·There is, however, one way in which a proponent of freedom of the will might try to make his view about that relevant to the issue we are now discussing, as I shall now explain·. We are confronting the assertion that physical nature must have been produced by a will, because will is the only thing we know that has the power of originating the production of phenomena. I have pointed out that on the contrary any power over phenomena that will has is shared—as far as we can tell—by other and much more powerful agents, which therefore also ‘originate’ in the only sense in which will originates. Thus, our experience gives us no basis for claiming that volition has a special role, not shared by other natural agents, as a producing cause of phenomena. Someone who strongly believes in the freedom of the will ·might try to get into the act at this point: he· might say that volitions are themselves uncaused, which makes them—·or a special one of them·—uniquely fit to be the first cause, the cause of everything. But even if we grant that •volitions are not caused, •the properties of matter are also uncaused (so far as our experience discloses), and have an advantage over any particular volition, namely that they are eternal (so far as our experience can show). I conclude that theism, in so far as it rests on the necessity of a first cause, has no support from experience.

Some people, lacking support from experience, will say that the necessity of a first cause is known by intuition—·meaning that when you think about it accurately you’ll find it self-evident that there must have been a first cause·. Well, I say that in this discussion there is no need to challenge their premises; because even if we grant that there must have been a •first cause, I have shown that several agencies other than will can lay equal claim to •that title. Of the things that might be said at this point ·by someone wanting to defend the unique claim of will to be the first cause·, there is just one that I ought to discuss. It is the claim that among the facts of the universe that need to be explained there is the fact of mind; and it is self-evident that the only thing that could have produced mind is mind. ·This is an attempt to put the spotlight back on volition, sidelining its rivals such as chemical action, electricity and so on·.

What are the special features of mind that indicate that it must have arisen from intelligent planning? That question belongs to a different part of this inquiry [starting here], ·and needn’t be gone into here·. Our present topic simply isn’t advanced by the thesis that the mere existence of mind requires, as a necessary antecedent, another greater and more powerful mind; this merely pushes us one step back, because the •creating mind needs another mind to be the source of its existence just as much as the •created mind does. Bear in mind that we have no direct knowledge (at least apart from ·divine· revelation) of a mind that is even apparently eternal, in the way that force and matter are eternal; as far as the present argument is concerned, an eternal mind is simply an hypothesis to account for the minds that we know to exist. Now, an hypothesis shouldn’t be accepted unless it at least removes the difficulty and accounts for the facts. But one doesn’t account for mind when one says that it arose from a prior mind. The problem remains unsolved, the difficulty not lessened but increased.

Here is something that might be said in objection to this:

It is a matter of fact that every human mind is caused to come into existence, because we know that such minds have beginnings in time. We even know—or have the strongest grounds for believing—that the human species itself had a beginning in time; for there is a vast amount of evidence that •our planet was once a place where animal life was impossible, and that •human life began much more recently than animal life. So we should face the fact that there must have been a cause for the start of the first human mind, indeed a cause for the very first germ of organic life. No such difficulty exists in the supposition of an eternal mind. If we didn’t know that mind on our earth began to exist, we might suppose it to be uncaused; and it is still open to us to suppose this of the mind that we invoke to explain the existence of mind on earth.

Someone who argues in this way is shifting back into the territory of human experience, which makes him subject to its rules; so we are entitled to ask him ‘Where is your proof that nothing can have caused a mind except another mind?’ It’s only from experience that we can know what can produce what—what causes are adequate to what effects. That nothing but mind can consciously produce mind is self-evident, because it’s involved in the very meaning of the words; but we aren’t entitled to assume that there can’t be unconscious production, for that is the very point to be proved. [Mill is talking about what might be done by a being that isn’t conscious, not about what might be done unconsciously by a being who is conscious.] Apart from experience, and arguing on the basis of what is called ‘reason’, that is on supposed self-evidence, the idea seems to be that

•no causes can give rise to products of a more precious or elevated kind than themselves.

But this conflicts with the known analogies of nature. How vastly nobler and more precious, for instance, are the higher plants and animals than the soil and manure out of which, and through the properties of which, they are raised up! All recent ·scientific· theorising tends towards the opinion that the general rule of nature involves the •development of inferior kinds of being into superior ones, the •substitution of greater elaboration and higher organization for lower. Whether or not this is right, there are in nature ever so many facts that look that way, and this is sufficient for the argument.

Now ·at last· this part of the discussion can stop! What emerges from it is that the ‘first cause’ argument does no work towards establishing theism; because •no cause is needed for the existence of anything that has no beginning; •both matter and force, whatever metaphysical theory we may give of either of them, have had no beginning (so far as our experience can teach us), and •this can’t be said of mind. [This is first time Mill has brought in matter in this way, though he did remark above that the properties of matter seem to be eternal.] The phenomena or changes in the universe have indeed each of them a beginning and a cause, but their cause is always a previous change; and the analogies of experience don’t give us any reason to expect, from the mere occurrence of changes, that if we could trace the series back far enough we would arrive at a primeval volition—·a volition that was the start of all the other changes·. The world’s mere existence doesn’t testify to the existence of a god; if the world gives indications of a god, they must come ·not from its mere existence but· from relatively detailed facts about what goes on in the world—the details that resemble things done for a purpose—which I’ll discuss later. If, in the absence of evidence from experience, the evidence of intuition ·or self-evidence· is relied on, we can answer that if it is intuitively evident that

•mind, as mind, must have been created,

then it must also be intuitively evident that

•the Creative Mind, as mind, must have been created;

and so we are no nearer to the first cause than we were before. But if nothing in the nature of mind as such implies a creator, the minds that have a beginning in time—including all minds that are known to us through our experience—must indeed have been caused, but their cause needn’t have been a prior intelligence.

Argument from the general consent of mankind

Before proceeding to the argument from marks of design, which I think must always be the main strength of natural theism, we can quickly deal with some other arguments that don’t have much scientific weight but have greater influence on the human mind than much better arguments. Why? Because they’re appeals to authority; and it is by authority that the opinions of most people are principally and not unnaturally governed. The authority invoked is that of mankind generally, especially of some of its wisest men—and most especially ones who in other respects conspicuously broke away from commonly accepted prejudices. Socrates and Plato, Bacon, Locke, and Newton, Descartes and Leibniz, are examples commonly cited.

For someone who in matters of knowledge and cultivation isn’t entitled to regard himself as a competent judge of difficult questions, it’s good advice to content himself with regarding as true •anything that mankind generally believe, and believing it for as long as they do; or •anything that was believed by the people who are regarded as the most eminent among the minds of the past. But to a thinker the argument from other people’s opinions has little weight. It is merely second-hand evidence; all it does is to tell us to look out for the reasons on which this conviction of mankind or of wise men was based—to look out for them and then to evaluate them for ourselves. Accordingly, those who make any claim to philosophical treatment of the subject bring in this general consent mainly as evidence that the mind of man has an intuitive perception, or an instinctive sense, of deity. From the premise that

(1) the belief ·in God· is very widespread

they infer that

(2) the belief is built into our nature;

and from this they draw the further conclusion that

(3) the belief must be true.

This inference of (3) from (2) is very shaky, though it’s of a kind often used by those who philosophize in terms of what is ‘intuitive’ or self-evident. Anyway, as applied to theism this argument begs the question [see note here], because the only support it has ·for the move from (2) to (3)· is the belief that the human mind was made by a god who wouldn’t deceive his creatures.

But ·before that there is the inference of (2) from (1)·. What ground does the general prevalence of •the belief in God give us for inferring that •this belief is something we are born with, something built into us and not depending on evidence? Is there so little evidence—even seeming evidence—for the proposition that God exists? Is this belief so far from seeming to be based on facts that the only way we can explain it is by supposing it to be innate? We wouldn’t have expected theists to hold that the appearances of designing intelligence in nature are not only insufficient but are not even plausible, and can’t be supposed to have convinced either people in general or the wiser minds among them! If there are external evidences of theism, even if they aren’t perfectly conclusive, why do we need to suppose that the belief in theism was the result of anything else? The superior minds to whom theists appeal, from Socrates onwards, when they professed to give the grounds of their belief in God, didn’t say that they found the belief in themselves without knowing where it came from; rather, they ascribed it either to revelation or to some metaphysical argument or to those very external evidences that are the basis of the argument from ·the marks of· design.

This may be said by way of objection: ‘The belief in a god or gods is universal among (a) barbarous tribes, and among (b) the ignorant portion of civilized populations; and none of these people can be supposed to have been impressed by the marvellous adaptations of nature—·the apparent marks of design·—most of which are unknown to them.’ I answer that (b) ignorant people in civilized countries take their opinions from the educated, and that (a) in the case of savages, if the evidence is insufficient so is the belief! Savages don’t believe in the God of natural theology; their theism is merely a version of the crude generalization that ascribes life, consciousness and will to all natural powers of which they can’t perceive the source or control the operation. And the gods believed in are as numerous as those powers. Each river, fountain or tree has a divinity of its own. This is a blunder of primitive ignorance! To see it as the work of the supreme being, implanting in his creatures an instinctive knowledge of his existence, is a poor compliment to God! The religion of savages is fetishism [= ‘the worship of trivial idols’] of the grossest kind, ascribing life and will to individual ·inanimate· objects, and trying to win their favour by prayer and sacrifice. We won’t be surprised by this when we bear in mind that there’s no sharp boundary line separating conscious human beings from inanimate objects. Between •such objects and •man there is an intermediate class of objects. . . .that do have life and will, namely the •lower animals. In primitive societies •these play a very big part in human life, which makes it unsurprising that men should at first be unclear about the line separating the animate part of nature from its inanimate part. When they have observed more of nature, they come to see that the majority of outward objects have all their important qualities in common with entire classes or groups of objects that behave exactly alike in the same circumstances; and in these cases the worship of visible objects is replaced by worship of an invisible Being who is supposed to preside over the whole class. This move from the particular to the more general is made slowly, with hesitation and even with terror. We see this even today, in the case of ignorant populations—how hard it is for their experience to clear them of the belief in the supernatural powers and terrible resentment of a particular idol! It is chiefly through these terrors that the religious thoughts and feelings of barbarians are kept alive. . . .until the theism of cultivated minds is ready to take their place. And the theism of •cultivated minds, if we take •their own word for it, is always a conclusion reached either •through arguments they regard as reasonable or •from appearances in Nature.

There’s no need for me to emphasize the problems of the hypothesis of a •belief that is natural to human beings though they don’t all have it, or of an •instinct that isn’t universal. Of course it is conceivable that some men might be born without a particular natural faculty, as some are born without a particular sense—·it might be that some men lack the natural instinct for religion just as some men are born blind·. But when this is ·thought to be· the case, we ought to be very careful about the evidence that it really is a natural faculty. ·Don’t think that it must always be easy to know whether some ability is natural or not, as it is indeed easy to know that our eyesight is natural·. If the thesis that men can see were not a matter of observation but of theorizing; if they had no apparent organ of sight, and no perceptions or knowledge except what they could conceivably have acquired in some round-about way through their other senses, the fact that some men don’t even think they can see would be a considerable argument against the theory of a ·natural· visual sense. . . . Anyway, not even the strongest believer in innate, natural ideas and knowledge will claim an instinctive status for any belief that could—this being uncontroversial—be explained by real or apparent evidence for it. In our present case ·of the belief in a god or gods·, we have in addition to the

•force of evidence,

these other factors tending to cause men to have and retain the belief:

•various emotional or moral causes that incline men to the belief;

•the way the belief seems to answer the questions about the past that men persist in tormenting themselves with;

•the hopes that the belief opens up for the future; and also

•the fears that it causes,

because fear as well as hope encourages belief. And for people with very active minds, the belief must have been supported by their perception of

•the power that belief in the supernatural provides for governing mankind, whether for their own good or for the selfish purposes of the governors.

So the general consent of mankind doesn’t provide a basis for accepting, even just as an hypothesis, the status of something inherent and natural and instinctive for a belief that is so very easy to explain otherwise.

The argument from consciousness

There have been many arguments, indeed almost every religious metaphysician has one of his own, to prove •the existence and attributes of God from so-called •truths of reason that are supposed to be independent of experience. Descartes, who is the real founder of intuitional metaphysics [= ‘metaphysics based on propositions claimed to be known by intuition, i.e. known as self-evident’; that’s not what ‘intuitional metaphysics’ means these days], draws the ·theistic· conclusion immediately from the first premise of his philosophy, the celebrated assumption [Mill’s word] •that whatever he could very clearly and distinctly apprehend must be true. The idea of a god who is perfect in power, wisdom, and goodness, is a clear and distinct idea, so by •this principle it must correspond to a real object. This thesis:

•Any conception of the human mind proves the existence of the thing it is an idea of’

is a bold generalization! ·In fact, it is too bold·, and Descartes is obliged to make it safer by cutting it back to

•Any conception of the human mind, if it includes existence, proves the existence of the thing it is an idea of,

·but this still leaves Descartes with his theistic conclusion·. The idea of God implies the combination in one thing of all perfections, and existence being a perfection, the •idea of God proves his •existence. This very simple argument. . . .is not likely to satisfy anyone these days. Many of Descartes’s successors have made more elaborate though scarcely more successful efforts, trying to derive knowledge of God from an inward light, making it out to be a truth that doesn’t depend on external evidence, something known by direct perception or (as they usually say) by consciousness. . . . It would be a waste of time to examine any of these theories in detail. While each has its own particular logical fallacies, they have one weakness in common, namely that one man can’t convince other people that they see an object by proclaiming with great confidence that he perceives it! If he claimed to have a god-given faculty of vision that no-one else has been given, enabling him to know things that can’t be seen by people who don’t have his gift, the case might be different. Men have made such claims, and have led people to believe them; all that other people can do in such a case is to demand to see the credentials ·of the claim or the person who makes it·. [In the next sentence, the phrase ‘the prophet’ is a joking reference to the person who offers the argument to God’s existence from facts about the idea of God. Actually, Mill’s point here is that the person in question does not set up as a prophet—i.e. someone with special knowledge of God that others can’t have—but maintains that the basis for his argument is available to everyone.] But in our present case no claim is made to any special gift; we are told that we are all as capable as the prophet of seeing what he sees, feeling what he feels; indeed we are told that we actually do see and feel what he does—and yet our utmost efforts don’t make us aware in our own minds of what he says we perceive. This supposed universal faculty of intuition is merely

The dark lantern of the Spirit

Which none see by but those who bear it;

and ‘those who bear it’ may fairly be asked: ‘Isn’t it more likely that •you are mistaken about the origin of an impression in your mind than that •the rest of us are ignorant of the very existence of an impression in theirs?’ [The ‘dark lantern’ lines are from Samuel Butler’s Hudibras.] The logical weakness of all arguments from •the subjective notion of God to •the objective reality of God was well seen by Kant, the most discriminating of the a priori metaphysicians, who always kept questions about •the origin and composition of our ideas sharply separated from questions about •the reality of the corresponding objects. According to Kant,

the idea of God is ‘native to’ the mind in the sense that it is constructed by the mind’s own laws and not derived from anything outside the mind; but this idea. . . .can’t be shown by •any logical process, or perceived by •direct apprehension, to have a corresponding reality outside the human mind.

To Kant, God is neither an •object of direct consciousness nor a •conclusion of reasoning, but a necessary assumption—not logically necessary, but practically necessary because imposed by the reality of the moral law. Duty is a fact of consciousness: ‘Thou shalt’ is a command issuing from the depths of our being, and can’t be explained through any impressions derived from experience; and this command requires a commander, though it isn’t perfectly clear whether Kant means (1) that accepting a law involves believing in a lawgiver, or only that (2) it is very desirable that there should be a being whose will is expressed by the law. If (1) is right, the argument is based on an ambiguity in the word ‘law’, which may refer to •a rule to which we feel it a duty to conform or to •a law as commonly so-called, a law of the state. The two kinds of ‘law’ have something in common, namely that they both claim our obedience; but it doesn’t follow that the rule must originate, as the laws of the land do, in the will of a legislator or legislators external to the mind. We may even say that a feeling of obligation that is merely the result of a command is not what is meant by ‘moral obligation’. On the contrary, ‘moral obligation’ presupposes something that the internal conscience bears witness to as binding in its own nature. If God also commands it, he is conforming to it and perhaps declaring it, but he isn’t creating it. Well, then, let us for purposes of argument concede that the moral sentiment is •purely of the mind’s own growth, the obligation of duty •entirely independent of experience and impressions acquired from outside ourselves—as •purely and •entirely as Kant or any other metaphysician ever contended. This doesn’t require us to believe in a divine legislator merely as the source of the obligation. Indeed this feeling of obligation seems to conflict with that belief rather than implying it; and as a matter of fact many people who have no positive belief in God (though they may have a habit of referring to him as an ideal conception) fully •accept the obligation of duty as a matter of moral truth and also •strongly feel it in their practical lives. (2) But if the existence of God as a wise and just lawgiver is not a necessary part of the feelings of morality, it may still be maintained that those feelings make his existence highly desirable. No doubt they do, and that is the main reason why we find that good men and women cling to the belief in God, and are pained by its being questioned. But surely it isn’t legitimate to assume that the universe is organized in such a way that whatever is desirable is true! [The ‘optimism’ that Mill is about to mention is not a cheerful look-on-the-bright-side •attitude to the future; it is a •theory about how good the universe is.] Optimism is a thorny doctrine to maintain, even for someone who already believes in God. Leibniz had to take it in the limited sense that the universe, being made by a good Being, is

•the best universe possible

—not that it is, absolutely and without qualification,

•the best universe.

His view, in short, was that God’s power isn’t up to making the universe more free from imperfections than it is. But optimism prior to a belief in a god, and as a reason for that belief, seems one of the oddest of all theoretical delusions! And yet I think it is one of the main contributors to keeping up humanity’s belief in God—this feeling of its desirableness, ·this wanting it to be the case that God exists·. It is often produced in the form of an argument, but its argumentative value is nil. It’s merely a naive expression of the human mind’s tendency to believe what is agreeable to it.

Without spending longer on these or on any of the other a priori arguments for theism, I shall now turn to the far more important argument ·that makes use· of the appearances of design in nature.

The argument from marks of design in nature

We now at last we reach an argument of a really scientific character —one that doesn’t shrink from scientific tests, and claims to be judged by the established rules of induction. The argument from design is based entirely on experience. It goes like this:

Certain qualities are found to be typical of things that are made by an intelligent mind for a purpose. The order of nature, or some considerable parts of it, exhibit these qualities in a remarkable degree. From this great similarity in the effects we are entitled to infer similarity in the cause, and to believe that things that it’s beyond the power of man to make but that resemble the works of man in everything except the power ·needed to make them· must also have been made by intelligence, armed with a greater power than human beings have.

I have stated this argument in its fullest strength, as it is stated by the most thoroughgoing of its supporters. But it doesn’t take much thought to show that although the argument has some force, its force is very generally overrated. Paley’s ‘watch’ example puts the case much too strongly. If I found a watch on an apparently deserted island, I would indeed—·as Paley says·—infer that it had been left there by a human being; but I wouldn’t be inferring this from marks of design ·in the watch·; rather, I would be going by my knowledge—based on direct experience—that watches are made by men. I would just as confidently infer ‘That was left there by a human being’ if I saw a foot-print, or anything else, however insignificant, that experience has taught me to attribute to man. In the same way, geologists infer the past existence of animals from coprolites [= ‘pieces of fossilised dung’], though no- one sees marks of design in a coprolite. The evidence of design in creation can never reach the height of direct induction; it amounts only to the inferior kind of inductive evidence called analogy. Analogy agrees with induction in this: they both argue that a thing known to resemble another in certain respects A and B will resemble it in another respect C. But the difference is that in induction A and B are known, by a previous comparison of many instances, to be the very features that C depends on or is somehow connected with. When this has not been established, the argument amounts only to this:

•Since we don’t know which features C is connected with in the known case, they may as well be A and B as any others. Therefore there is a greater probability of C in cases where we know that A and B exist than in cases of which we know nothing at all.

It’s hard to make any estimate of the force of this argument, and a precise estimate is impossible. It may be very strong, when the known points of agreement—A and B etc.—are numerous and the known points of difference are few. . . .but it can never be equal in validity to a real induction. There are considerable resemblances between some of the arrangements in nature and some of those made by man, and even as mere resemblances they provide a certain presumption [see note here] of similarity of cause; but it’s hard to say how great that presumption is. All we can say for sure is that these likenesses make creation by intelligence considerably more probable than it would have been if there had been fewer likenesses or none at all.

This way of stating the argument, however, doesn’t do full justice to the evidence for theism. The premise of the argument from design is not merely

•the fact that some things in nature resemble somehow the works of human intelligence,

but rather

•a proposition about how things in nature resemble things designed by man.

The respects in which the ·natural· world is said to resemble the works of man are not taken at random; they are instances of something that experience shows to have a real connection with an intelligent origin, namely the fact of working together towards an end. So the argument is not one of mere analogy. As mere analogy it has some weight, but it is more than analogy. It surpasses •analogy exactly as induction surpasses •it. What we have here is an inductive argument.

This can’t be denied, I think; so we have now to test the argument by the logical principles that are appropriate to induction. I can do this best by tackling not the argument as a whole but just some one of the most impressive cases of it. I’ll take the structure of the eye (I could as well have taken the structure of the ear). It is claimed that the structure of the eye proves a designing mind. What kind of inductive argument is this? and how much force does it have? [The inductive methods that Mill is about to mention have been famous as ‘Mill’s Methods of Induction’: he presented and discussed them in his System of Logic, which appeared about forty years before the present Essay.] The species of inductive arguments are four in number, corresponding to the four inductive methods—the methods of

•agreement,

•difference,

•residues, and

•concomitant variations.

The argument we are considering now involves the first of these, the method of agreement. This is the weakest kind of the four (inductive logicians know why), but our particular argument is a strong one of that kind. It can be logically analysed as follows:

The parts of the eye have something very remarkable in common, and so do their various positions that add up to their arrangement. The common property is this: they all contribute to enabling the animal to see. Because the parts are as they are, the animal sees: if any one of them were different from what it is—·different in its nature or in its placing in relation to the others·—in most cases the animal either wouldn’t see or wouldn’t see as well as it does. And this is the only notable resemblance that we can find among the different parts of this structure, apart from the very general features of make-up and structure that they share with all other parts of the animal—·i.e. the features of the eye that mark it off as animal·. Now, every particular array of organic elements of the sort we call ‘an eye’ had a beginning in time, and must therefore have been brought together by a cause or causes. The principles of inductive logic require a large number of instances for an argument of this form, so as to •rule out the possibility that what we have is a merely chance co-occurrence of features that are not causally connected with one another. But in our present case the number of instances is immeasurably greater than anything inductive logic can insist on. So we are justified by the rules of induction in concluding that what brought all these elements together was some cause common to them all; and because the elements agree in the single feature of working together to produce sight, there must be some causal connection between •the cause that brought those elements together and •the fact of sight.

I regard this as a legitimate inductive inference; it’s the sum and substance of what induction can do for theism. The natural way to go on with it would be this:

We are explaining •the putting together of the organic structure of the eye in term of •sight. But sight comes after the structuring of the eye, not before it; so we can’t say that sight causally produces the structuring of the eye; so we’ll have to say that the idea of sight, the plan to create sight, is what caused the structuring of the eye. [Mill expresses this by saying that sight can’t be the ‘efficient cause’ of the structuring of the eye, and can only be its ‘final cause’.] And that means that an intelligent will was involved in the structuring of the eye.

I’m sorry to say that this second half of the argument is more vulnerable than the first half. The origin of the wonderful mechanism of the eye may be connected with the fact of sight in the way claimed here, i.e. through the mechanism’s being caused by creative forethought; but this is not the only possibility. [What comes next is presumably a reference to Darwin’s The Origin of Species, which was published in 1859, about ten years before Mill wrote this Essay.] Recent scientific theorizing has called attention to another connecting link; there’s no room for doubt that it is real, though there is (and probably will long continue to be) questions about whether this link is adequate to account for such truly admirable combinations as some of those in nature, ·e.g. the structure of the animal eye·. The ‘link’ I am talking about comes from the principle of ‘the survival of the fittest’.

This principle doesn’t claim to account for the origins of sensation or of animal or vegetable life. We start by assuming the existence of one or more very low forms of organic life, in which there are no complex adaptations and no notable appearances of design. Now, experience justifies us in thinking that many small variations from those simple types of organism would be thrown out in all directions and would be passed on to the variant organism’s offspring. Some of these variations would help the creature in its struggle for existence while others would hinder it; the forms with helpful variants would always tend to survive, and those with disadvantageous ones would tend to perish. And thus the type of organism in question would constantly though slowly improve as it branched out into many different varieties, adapting it to different environments and ways of life, until—perhaps—it eventually reached the level of the most advanced examples that now exist.

Admittedly there’s something very startling and prima facie improbable in this hypothetical history of nature. For one thing, it requires us to suppose that the primeval animal—whatever sort of organism it was—couldn’t see, and was only very slightly prepared to become able to see, perhaps by having cells that were structurally affected by some chemical action of light. One of the accidental variations that are liable to take place in all organisms would at some time or other produce a variety that could see, in some imperfect manner; this feature would be passed on by inheritance, while other variations continued to take place in other directions; so that eventually a number of races [Mill’s word] with eyesight would be produced, whose power of sight (even if imperfect) would have a great advantage over all other creatures that couldn’t see, and would in time wipe them out everywhere except perhaps in a few very special locations underground. Fresh variations adding themselves to the previous ones would give rise to races with better and better seeing powers, until we might at last reach a combination of structures and functions as impressive are found in the eyes of men and of the more important animals. When theory is pushed to that extreme point, the most we can say in its favour at present is that •it isn’t as absurd as it looks, and that the •analogies that have been empirically discovered and are favourable to its being possible far exceed what anyone could have supposed beforehand. Whether it will ever be possible to say more than this is at present uncertain. If the theory is accepted, that would be in no way whatever inconsistent with ·divine· creation, but there’s no denying that it would greatly weaken the evidence for it.

Leaving this remarkable theory to whatever fate the progress of science may have in store for it, I think it must be accepted that in the present state of our knowledge the adaptations in nature provide a large balance of probability in favour of creation by intelligence. It is equally certain that this is no more than a probability; and that the various other arguments of natural theology that I have discussed ·throughout Part 1 of this Essay· add nothing to its force. Apart from ·divine· revelation, any reason there is to believe in an author of nature is derived from the appearances in the universe. Their mere resemblance to the works of man, or to what man could do if he had the same power over the materials of organisms as he has over the materials of a watch, has some value as an argument by analogy; but the case is greatly strengthened by the properly inductive considerations which establish that there is some connection through causation between •the origin of the arrangements of nature and •the ends they fulfill. This line of thought carries little weight in many cases, but in others, and chiefly in the precise and intricate structures involved in plant and animal life, it has considerable strength.

Part 2: Attributes

Having shown in Part 1 where we have come to on the question— looked at in a purely scientific way—of the existence of a god, I now turn to the question: given the indications of a god, what sort of god do they point to? This is a question about the evidence that nature gives us of a creative mind: what attributes does that evidence entitle us to ascribe to that mind?

Omnipotence

It doesn’t need to be argued that the power if not the intelligence of God must be greater than man’s—so much greater that we have no measure for the difference. But there is a big gap between this and God’s being omnipotent and omniscient, ·i.e. his being able to do anything and his knowing everything·. And the gap has immense practical importance.

It’s not too much to say that every indication of design in the universe is evidence against the omnipotence of the designer. For what do we mean by ‘design’? Contrivance—the devising of means to an end. But the need for contrivance—the need to use means—is a consequence of the limitation of power. Who would use means to an end that he could achieve just by saying the word? The very idea of means implies that the means have an effectiveness that the direct action of the being who employs them doesn’t have. Otherwise they aren’t means, but merely clutter [Mill’s word is ‘encumbrance’]. A man doesn’t use machinery to move his arms! If he did, it would be because paralysis had deprived him of the power of moving them by volition. And if •the use of contrivances is in itself a sign of limited power, •the careful and skillful choice of contrivances is even more so. Can any wisdom be shown in the selection of means if the means owe all their effectiveness to the will of him who employs them, and when his will could have made any other means equally effective? •Wisdom and •contrivance are shown in overcoming difficulties, so there is no place for them in a Being for whom no difficulties exist. So the evidence of natural theology distinctly implies that the author of the cosmos worked under limitations—that he had to adapt himself to conditions that were independent of his will, and to attain his ends by whatever arrangements—·whatever contrivances·—were possible in those conditions.

This hypothesis agrees with what we have seen to be the tendency of the evidence in another respect. We found that the appearances in nature •point indeed to an origin of the cosmos, i.e. of order in nature, and •indicate that the origin involves design, but they don’t point to any beginning—still less any creation—of the two great elements of the universe, the passive element matter and the active element force. Nature gives us no reason whatever to suppose that either matter or force or any of their properties were made by the Being who was the author of the physical layout by which the world is made suitable for what we think to be its purposes, or that he has the power to alter any of those properties. It is only in the light of •this negative supposition—·i.e. •the supposition that God did not create matter or force or any of their properties·—that we see any need for wisdom and contrivance in the order of the universe. On •this hypothesis, God had to work out his ends by combining materials of a given nature and properties. Out of these materials he had to construct a world in which his designs would be carried out through given properties of matter and force, working together and fitting into one another. [The two uses of ‘given’ are Mill’s. Matter etc. are ‘given’ in the sense of being something that God finds or confronts, not something he makes.] This did require skill and contrivance, and the means by which it is brought about often arouse our wonder and admiration; but just because it requires wisdom, it implies limitation of power, or rather ‘wisdom’ and ‘limitation of power’ express different sides of the same fact.

You might want to say: ‘An omnipotent creator, though he didn’t need contrivances such as man must use, thought fit to use them in order to leave traces that would enable man to recognize his creative hand.’ I answer that this equally implies a limit to his omnipotence. For if he wanted men to know that •they and •the world are made by him, he in his omnipotence had only to will that they should be aware of it. Ingenious men have looked for reasons why God might choose to leave his existence to some extent a matter of doubt—so that men wouldn’t be absolutely compelled to know it, as they are compelled to know that three and two make five. These imagined reasons are very unfortunate specimens of special pleading; but even if we admit their validity, they don’t help the case for God’s omnipotence. If an omnipotent God didn’t want man to have a complete conviction of his (God’s) existence, nothing hindered him from making the conviction fall short of completeness by any margin he chose to leave, ·doing this by a simple act of will rather than through any contrivance·. Arguments of the present kind are usually brushed aside by giving the easy answer that ‘we don’t know what wise reasons the omniscient ·God· may have had for leaving undone things that he had the power to do’. Someone who says this doesn’t see that this reply itself implies a limit to omnipotence! When a thing is obviously good, and obviously in accordance with what all the evidence of creation implies to have been the creator’s design, and we say we don’t know what good reason he may have had for not doing it, we mean that we don’t know to what other still better objective—to what objective still more completely in line with his purposes—he may have seen fit to postpone it. But the need to postpone one thing in order to do another belongs only to limited power. An omnipotent Being could have made the objectives compatible. Omnipotence doesn’t need to weigh one consideration against another. If the creator, like a human ruler, had to cope with a set of conditions that weren’t of his making, it would be unphilosophical and out of line for us to •challenge him regarding any imperfections in his work, to •complain that he left anything in it contrary to what (judging by all the indications of design) he must have intended. He must at least know more than we know, and we can’t judge what greater good would have had to be sacrificed, or what greater evil allowed, if he had decided to remove this or that particular blot. [Throughout this Essay, the noun ‘evil’ is used to mean merely ‘something bad’. Here Mill contrasts •’the evils of life’ with •its meannesses and basenesses’, where the latter phrase refers to bad behaviour by people while the former does not.] But this doesn’t hold if he is omnipotent. If he is that, he must himself have willed that the two desirable objectives should be incompatible; he must himself have willed that the obstacle to his supposed design should be insuperable. So it can’t be what he wanted, after all. It won’t do to say that it is what he wanted but that he had other designs that interfered with it; for no one purpose puts necessary limitations on another in the case of a Being who ·is omnipotent and who therefore· isn’t restricted by conditions of possibility.

Omniscience

So the creator can’t be said to be omnipotent on the strength of natural theology. The basic principles of natural religion, as inferred from the facts of the universe, negate his omnipotence. They don’t in the same way •exclude omniscience: God’s having only limited power doesn’t contradict his having perfect knowledge and absolute wisdom. But there is nothing to •prove omniscience either. Someone who plans and carries out the arrangements of the cosmos certainly needs much more •knowledge than humans have, just as he needs much more •power. And the skill, the subtlety of contrivance, the ingenuity (as it would be called if this were a human work) is often marvellous. But nothing obliges us to suppose that either the knowledge or the skill is infinite. We don’t even have to suppose that the contrivances were always the best possible. If we venture to judge them as we judge the works of human skill, we find plenty of defects. The human body, for example, is a striking example of artful and ingenious contrivance, but we may well ask whether a complicated machine like this couldn’t have been made to last longer, and not to get out of order so easily and so often. We may ask why the human race should have been so constituted as to grovel in wretchedness and degradation for countless ages before a small portion of it was enabled to lift itself to the state of intelligence, goodness and happiness that we enjoy—still a very imperfect one. Perhaps God hadn’t the power to do better; the obstacles to a better arrangement of things may have been insuperable. But it is possible that they were not. We can’t tell whether the skill. . . .that produced the world as we see it reached the extreme limit of perfection compatible with the material it employed and the forces it had to work with. I don’t know how we can even satisfy ourselves, on natural-theology grounds, that God foresees all the future, knowing in advance all the effects that his contrivances will have. There may be great •wisdom without the power of •foreseeing and calculating everything; and human workmanship teaches us that the following can happen:

A workman’s knowledge of the properties of the things he works on enables him to make arrangements that are admirably fitted to produce a given result, yet he has very little power to foresee how forces of some other kind may modify or counteract the operation of the machinery he has made.

It may be that if we had the same power over the materials and the forces involved in organisms as we have over some inanimate things, we wouldn’t need a vastly increased knowledge of the laws of nature on which organic life depends—not much greater than the knowledge we do have of some other natural laws—to be able to create organisms that were as wonderful and as well adapted to their conditions of existence as those in nature.

What limits god’s power?

Assuming then that while we confine ourselves to natural religion we must settle for a creator who is less than omnipotent, the question arises—what limits are there to his power? Does the obstacle at which God’s power stops, the obstacle that says ‘You may go this far, but no further’, lie in •the power of other intelligent beings, or in •the inadequacy and stubbornness of the materials of the universe? Or must we resign ourselves to accepting that the wise and knowing author of the cosmos was not all-wise and all-knowing, and may not always have done the best that was possible under the conditions of the problem? The first of these suppositions has until quite recently been the prevalent theory even of Christianity, and in many quarters it still is. People who accept it say—and in a certain sense they say it sincerely—that God is omnipotent, but they also hold that for some inscrutable reason he tolerates the perpetual thwarting of his purposes by the will of another Being of opposite character and of great though inferior power, namely the Devil. The only difference on this matter between •the plain person’s form of Christianity and •the religion of Ormuzd and Ahriman—·the good and evil spirits of ancient Persian religion·—is that Christianity pays its good creator the bad ‘compliment’ of having made the Devil and of being at all times able to crush and annihilate him and his evil deeds and counsels, and yet not doing so. But, as I have already remarked, all forms of polytheism—this one included—are hard to reconcile with a universe governed by general laws. Obedience to law is a mark of a settled government, and not of a conflict always going on. When powers are at war with one another for the rule of the world, the boundary between them is not fixed but constantly fluctuating. This may seem to be the case on our planet—a conflict between the powers of good and evil—when we look only at the •results; but when we consider the •inner springs we find that both the good and evil take place in the common course of nature, by virtue of the same general laws—the same machinery turning out now good, now evil things, and oftener still the two combined. The division of power may appear to be variable, but really it is so regular that if we were speaking of human rulers we would be quite sure that the share of each must have been fixed by previous consent. . . .

But when we come to consider not •what hypothesis can be conceived and possibly reconciled with known facts, but •what supposition is pointed to by the evidence of natural religion, the case is different. The indications of design point strongly in one direction, the preservation of the creatures in whose structure the indications are found. Along with the preserving agencies there are destroying agencies, which we might be tempted to ascribe to the will of a different creator; but there is little evidence of intricately contrived means of destruction (except when the destruction of one creature is the means to the preservation of others). And it can’t be supposed that the preserving agencies are wielded by •one Being and the destroying agencies by •another. The destroying agencies are a necessary part of the preserving agencies; the chemical compositions by which life is carried on couldn’t take place without a parallel series of decompositions. The great agent of decay in both organic and inorganic substances is oxidation, yet it is only by oxidation that anything stays alive for even a minute. When there is evidence of a purpose that hasn’t been fully achieved, the imperfections don’t look as though they were designed. They are like •the unintended results of casual events that weren’t sufficiently guarded against, or •a bit too much or too little of some of the agencies by which the good purpose is carried on, or •consequences of the wearing out of a machine that wasn’t made to last for ever. They point either to shortcomings in the workmanship as regards its intended purpose, or to external forces not under the control of the workman, but not to forces that show any sign of being wielded and aimed by some other rival intelligence.

So we can conclude that there is no basis in natural theology for attributing intelligence or personality to the obstacles that partially thwart what seem to be God’s purposes. Two other possible sources of the limitation of his power are more probable. (1) They result from the qualities of the material: the substances and forces of which the universe is composed don’t admit of any arrangements by which his purposes could be more completely fulfilled. (2) God’s purposes could have been more fully attained, but he didn’t know how to do it: his creative skill, wonderful as it is, wasn’t perfect enough to accomplish his purposes more thoroughly.

God’s moral qualities

I pass now to the moral attributes of God, so far as they are indicated in his creation. Stating the problem in the broadest manner: What indications does nature give of the purposes of its author? This question looks very different to •us from how it looks to •the teachers of natural theology who carry the burden of having to accept the omnipotence of the creator. We don’t have to tackle the impossible problem of reconciling •infinite benevolence and justice with •infinite power in the creator of such a world as ours! The attempt to do so ·is doubly disgusting·: it involves absolute contradiction in an intellectual point of view, and presents the revolting spectacle of a jesuitical [here = ‘slippery, tricky’] defence of moral atrocities.

On this topic I needn’t add to the illustrations I gave in my essay on Nature. At the present stage of the present argument there is none of this moral perplexity. Grant that creative power was limited, by •conditions of whose nature and extent we know nothing at all, and the goodness and justice of the creator may be all that the most pious believe; everything in the work that conflicts with those moral attributes may be the fault of the •conditions that left God with only a choice of evils.

Well, then, what about those the devices in the construction of animals and plants that arouse the admiration of naturalists? ·What purpose do they appear to have? Or, to put the same question in another way·: to what end do they seem to tend? We have to face the fact that they tend principally to a rather lowly objective—merely to make the structure remain alive and in working order for a certain time, the individual for a few years, the species or race for a longer but still limited period. And the same is true for most of the similar though less conspicuous marks of creation that are recognized in inorganic nature. For example, the adaptations that appear in the solar system consist in placing it under conditions that enable it to maintain a stable system of causal inter-relations rather than flying apart. And even that ·modest state of affairs· holds for only for a period of time; it’s a vast period if measured against our short span of life, but even we can see that it is nevertheless limited; for even our feeble means of exploring the past provide—according to those who have examined the subject by the most recent lights—to yield evidence that the solar system was once a vast sphere. . . .of vapour, and is going through a process which in the long run will reduce it to a single not very large mass of solid matter, frozen up with more-than-arctic cold. If the machinery of the system is adapted to keep itself at work only for a time, still less perfect is the adaptation of it as a place where living beings can exist; because it is adapted to them, for each planet, only during the relatively short period between the planet’s being too hot to permit life and its being too cold for that (judging by our experience of the conditions under which life is possible). . . .

Thus, most of the design of which there are indications in nature, however wonderful its mechanism, is not evidence of any moral attributes because the end to which it tends—this being our only evidence that it is directed to any end at all—is not a moral end. It isn’t •the good of any sentient creature, but merely •the qualified permanence for a limited period of the work itself, whether living or not. If we want to infer the character of the creator from that, all we get is that he doesn’t want his works to perish as soon as he creates them; he wants them to have a certain duration. Nothing follows from this about his feelings or attitudes towards his animate or rational creatures.

After we set aside all the many adaptations that have no apparent purpose but •to keep the machine going, there remain some provisions •for giving pleasure to living beings, and some •for giving them pain. Perhaps all these should be included among the contrivances for keeping the creature or its species in existence; for both the pleasures and the pains have a conserving tendency, the pleasures being generally disposed to attract the creature to the things that will maintain the existence of itself or its species, the pains to deter from things that would destroy it.

When all these things are considered, it’s clear that ever so many bits of evidences of a creator are not evidence of a benevolent purpose in him—so many, indeed, that you may wonder whether there are any that are. But trying to look at the question without partiality or prejudice, and not letting our wishes influence our judgment, it does seem that on the assumption that there is design at work in the universe, the balance of evidence indicates that the creator wanted his creatures to have pleasure. This is indicated by the fact that pleasure of one sort or another is provided by almost everything. •The play of the faculties, physical and mental, is a never-ending source of pleasure; •even painful things give pleasure by the satisfaction of curiosity and the agreeable sense that one is acquiring knowledge. There is also the fact that when we experience pleasure, it seems to result from the normal working of the machinery, whereas pain usually arises from some external interference with it. . . . Even in cases where pain results, like pleasure, from the machinery itself, it doesn’t seem that the pain-causing contrivance was brought into play so as to produce pain; the pain points rather to a clumsiness in a contrivance that is employed for some other purpose. The maker of the machinery is no doubt responsible for having made it capable of pain; but this may have been a necessary condition for it to be capable of pleasure— a supposition that won’t work •if the creator is omnipotent, but is extremely probable •if the creator works under the limitation of unbreakable laws and unchangeable properties of matter. Given that the susceptibility ·to pain· was part of the design, actual pain itself usually seems undesigned—a casual result of the organism’s collision with some external force to which it wasn’t intended to be exposed. . . . So there is much evidence that pleasure is agreeable to the creator, and very little (if any) evidence that pain is so. There is, then, a certain amount of justification for inferring, purely on grounds of natural theology, that benevolence is one of the creator’s attributes. But to jump from this to the conclusion that •his sole or chief purposes are those of benevolence, and that •what the creation was for was the happiness of his creatures and nothing else, is not only not justified by any evidence but conflicts with such evidence as we have. If God’s motive for creating sentient beings was the happiness of the beings he created, we have to judge, taking past ages and all countries and races into account, that on this planet at least he failed utterly; and if he had no purpose but our happiness and that of other living creatures, it’s not credible that he would have brought them into existence with the prospect of being so completely thwarted. If man wasn’t able through the exercise of his own energies to improve both himself and his outward circumstances, doing for himself and other creatures vastly more than God did at the outset, he would owe God something very different from thanks for bringing him into existence! Of course it may be said that •the sufferings and wasted lives of entire geological periods are not too high a price to pay for the changes that man will eventually be able to bring about in human existence, and that •man’s ability to improve himself and the world was given to him by God. This may be so; but the supposition that God couldn’t have given man these blessings at a less frightful cost—isn’t that a very strange thing to suppose concerning God? It amounts to supposing that God couldn’t at the outset create anything better than a Bushman or an Andaman islander or something still lower, and yet was able to give the Bushman or Andaman islander the power to raise himself into a Newton or a Fenelon.´ We certainly don’t know what the barriers are that prevent God from being omnipotent; but it is a very odd notion of them to suppose that they enable God to give to an almost bestial creature the power of producing by a succession of efforts something that God himself had no other means of creating!

Such are the indications of natural religion regarding God’s benevolence. If we look for any other of the moral attributes that philosophers of a certain type distinguish from benevolence— justice, for example—we find a total blank. Nature offers no evidence whatever of divine justice, whatever standard of justice our ethical opinions may lead us to recognize. There is no shadow of justice in the general arrangements of Nature; and the imperfect instances of justice that there are in any human society (very imperfect so far) are the work of man himself, struggling upwards into civilization. He does this against immense natural difficulties, making for himself a second nature that is far better and less selfish than the one he was created with. But I have said enough about this in my essay Nature.

So here are the net results of natural theology on the question of God’s attributes. A Being

•of great but limited power, and we can’t even guess at how or by what he is limited;

•of great intelligence, perhaps unlimited but perhaps more narrowly limited than his power;

•who desires, and pays some regard to, the happiness of his creatures, but who seems to have other motives of action that he cares about more, and who can hardly be supposed to have created the universe for that purpose alone.

Such is the god indicated by Natural Religion; any idea of God more charming than this comes only from human wishes, or from the teaching of either real or imaginary revelation.

I shall next examine whether the light of nature gives any indications concerning the immortality of the soul, and a future life. [In Mill’s time and for centuries before that, the word ‘soul’ could be used with no religious overtones to it, as meaning ‘mind’ or ‘whatever it is in a man that does his thinking and feeling’.]

Part 3: Immortality

We can divide indications of immortality into two groups: •those that are independent of any theory concerning the creator and his intentions, and •those that depend on an antecedent belief about God. ·I shall discuss the former group first; my treatment of the latter group will begin here·.

Theorizing men down the centuries have put forward a considerable variety of arguments of the former type, ·i.e. arguments that don’t presuppose anything about God·. The arguments in Plato’s Phaedo are examples of that sort. But most of those arguments have no supporters now, and needn’t be seriously refuted. They are generally based on •preconceived theories about whatever it is in man that does the thinking, considered as something distinct and separable from the body, and on •other preconceived theories concerning death. For example: Death or dissolution is always a separation of parts; the soul is simple and indivisible, and therefore doesn’t have parts; so it can’t undergo this separation. Curiously enough, one of the speakers in the Phaedo brings against this argument just the point that would be brought against it today, namely:

Although thought and consciousness are mentally distinguishable from the body, they may not be in a substance that is separable from the body. Rather than that, they may be a result of the body, relating to it (the illustration is Plato’s) in the way a tune relates to the musical instrument on which it is played. And if that is the case, the arguments used to show that the soul doesn’t die with the body would equally show that the tune doesn’t die with the instrument, but survives its destruction and continues to exist apart.

In fact, modern philosophers who dispute the arguments for the immortality of the soul don’t generally •believe the soul to be an independent substance, but regard ‘the soul’ as the name of a bundle of attributes— feeling, thinking, reasoning, believing, willing, etc.—and •regard these attributes as a consequence of the organization of the body. They infer from this that the supposition

•the soul can survive when the organization of the body is dispersed,

is as unreasonable as the supposition that

•the colour or aroma of a rose can survive when the rose itself has perished.

Thus, anyone who wants to infer the immortality of the soul from its own nature has first to prove that feeling, thinking, etc. are attributes not of •the body but of •a separate substance. Well, what is the verdict of science on this point? It isn’t perfectly conclusive either way. In the first place, science doesn’t prove experimentally that some mode of organization has the power to produce feeling or thought. To conduct such a proof, we would have to be able to make an organism, and then test to see whether it could feel; and we can’t do this, because there’s no human way to make an organism from scratch; an organism has to be developed out of a previous organism. On the other hand, there is pretty well conclusive evidence that •all thought and feeling occurs along with or just after some event in the bodily organism; that •differences in the organization of brain and nerves, especially differences in how complex they are, correspond to differences in the development of the mental faculties; and though we have no positive evidence that mental consciousness ceases for ever when the brain stops working, we do know that •diseases of the brain disturb the mental functions, and that •decay or weakness of the brain weakens them. So we have good enough evidence that for us in our present state of existence brain-activity is, if not the cause of mental operations, then at least a necessary condition for them to occur. Combine that with the view that the mind is a distinct substance and you get this: the separation of the mind from the body would not be, as some have liked to think, a liberation from shackles and a return to freedom; rather, the separation would simply put a stop to the mind’s activities and send it back into unconsciousness. . . .

But it’s important to point out that these considerations only amount to lack of evidence for immortality; they provide no positive evidence against it. We must beware of giving a priori validity to the conclusions of an a posteriori philosophy. The root of all a priori thinking is the tendency to transfer to external •things a strong association between the corresponding •ideas in our own minds; and the thinkers who try hardest to limit their beliefs by experience, and honestly believe that they do so, aren’t always sufficiently on their guard against this mistaken transfer. Some regard it as a truth of reason that miracles are impossible; and similarly there are others who, because their experience always associates in their minds •the phenomena of life and consciousness with •the action of material organs, think it intrinsically absurd to think that those phenomena could exist under any other conditions. But they should remember that the uniform coexistence of one fact with another doesn’t make the one fact a part of the other, or identical with it, ·and that’s what is needed for them to be connected in a way that is absolutely or metaphysically necessary·. Thought isn’t tied to a material brain by metaphysical necessity; it’s simply a going-together that we have always found in our experience. And when things are analysed to the bottom on the principles of associative psychology, it turns out that the brain—like any material thing—is merely a set of actual or believed-possible human sensations, namely the ones the anatomist has when he opens the skull, and the impressions of molecular or other movements that we think we would receive when the brain was at work if there were no bony covering and our senses or our instruments were sufficiently delicate. Experience doesn’t provide us with any examples of a series of states of consciousness that doesn’t have this group of contingent sensations attached to it, ·and thus that doesn’t have a brain attached to it·; but it is as easy to imagine such a series of states without this accompaniment as to imagine them with it, and we don’t know any reason in the nature of things why these two shouldn’t be thus separated. We are free to suppose that the same thoughts, emotions, volitions and even sensations that we have here may continue or start again somewhere else under other conditions . . . .And in entertaining this supposition we needn’t be embarrassed by any metaphysical difficulties about a thinking substance. ‘Substance’ is merely a general name for the lastingness of attributes: wherever there is a series of thoughts connected together by memories, that constitutes a thinking substance. . . .

Thus, the only evidence science provides against the immortality of the soul is negative: it consists in the fact that there is no evidence for it. And even that negative evidence is not as strong as negative evidence often is. In the case of witchcraft, for instance, the fact that there is no unflimsy evidence that it ever existed is as conclusive as the most positive evidence of its non-existence would be; for if witchcraft exists, it exists on this earth, and if it had existed here the factual evidence would certainly have been available to prove it. But it’s not like that with the soul’s existence after death. That the soul doesn’t remain •on earth and move about visibly or interfere in the events of life is proved by the same weight of evidence that disproves witchcraft. But there is absolutely no evidence that it doesn’t exist •elsewhere. . . . Some may think that there is an additional and very strong presumption against the immortality of the soul from the analysis of all the other objects in Nature. All things in Nature perish, and, as philosophers and poets complain, the most beautiful and perfect are the most perishable. A flower of the most exquisite form and colouring grows up from a root, comes to perfection in weeks or months, and lasts only a few hours or days. Why should it be otherwise with man? Why indeed? But why, also, should it not be otherwise? Feeling and thought are not merely different from what we call inanimate matter, but are at the opposite pole of existence, and analogical inference has little or no validity from the one to the other. Feeling and thought are much more real than anything else; they are the only things that we directly know to be real, all other things being just the unknown conditions on which these . . . .depend. All matter. . . . has a merely hypothetical and unsubstantial existence: it’s a mere assumption to account for our sensations; we don’t perceive it, we aren’t conscious of it, but only of the sensations that we are said to receive from it. In reality, ‘matter’ is a mere name for our expectation of certain sensations when certain other sensations give signs of them. ·In the light of this analysis, we can see that •the fact that the things in Nature perish is really just the fact that· •certain contingent possibilities-of-sensation eventually come to an end and are replaced by others. Does that imply that the series of our feelings must itself be broken off? ·No, it does not·! Drawing that conclusion is not reasoning from •one kind of substantive reality to •another, but reasoning from •something that has no reality except in reference to something else to •something that is the only substantive reality. From a philosophical point of view, mind. . . . is the only reality of which we have any evidence; and no analogy can be recognized or comparison made between it and other realities, because there are no other known realities to compare it with. That is quite consistent with its being perishable; but the question of whether it is perishable stands on its own, untouched by any of the results of human knowledge and experience. This is one of those very rare cases where there is really a total absence of evidence on either side, and in which the absence of evidence for the affirmative does not, as so often it does, create a strong presumption in favour of the negative.

But the belief in human immortality, in the minds of mankind generally, is probably based not on any scientific arguments, whether physical or metaphysical, but on foundations that in most minds are stronger than such arguments would be. I mean the foundation of •the disagreeableness of giving up existence (at least for those to whom existence has so far been pleasant) and •of the general traditions of mankind. The natural tendency of belief to follow these two inducements—•our own wishes and •the general assent of other people—has been reinforced in this case by the utmost exertion of the power of public and private teaching. Rulers and teachers, wanting to increase people’s obedience to their commands (either from selfish motives or in the interests of the public good), have always done their utmost to encourage the belief that there is a life after death, a life in which we’ll have •pleasures or •sufferings far greater than on earth, depending on whether in this life we •do or •don’t act as we are commanded to in the name of the unseen powers. As causes of belief these various circumstances—·the desire not to go out of existence, and the force of indoctrination·—are most powerful. As reasons they carry no weight at all.

The pleasure it would give us to believe that P is called the ‘consoling nature’ of P. The view that an opinion’s consoling nature can be a reason for believing it is a doctrine that •is irrational in itself and that •would endorse half the mischievous illusions that have messed up private lives or been recorded in history. When it is applied to the belief in the immortality of the soul, the irrational doctrine is sometimes wrapped up in quasi-scientific language. We are told that the desire for immortality is one of our instincts, and that corresponding to every instinct there is a real object that can satisfy it: where there is hunger there is somewhere food, where there is sexual feeling there is somewhere sex, where there is love there is somewhere something to be loved, and so on. Similarly (they say), since there is the instinctive desire for eternal life, there must be eternal life. We can show what is wrong with this without digging deeply into the subject; we don’t have to go into intricate and obscure considerations concerning instincts, or discuss whether the desire in question is an instinct. Let us admit ·for purposes of argument· that wherever there is an instinct, there exists something of the sort that this instinct demands; how do we get from that to the conclusion that this ‘something’ exists in an unlimited quantity that is sufficient to satisfy the infinite craving of human desires? What is called ‘the desire for eternal life’ is simply the desire for life; and what this desire calls for does exist. There is life! To suppose that the desire for life guarantees to us personally the reality of life through all eternity is like supposing that the desire of food assures us that we shall always have as much as we can eat throughout our lives (and for as much longer as we can conceive our lives being stretched out to).

The argument from tradition or the belief of the human race in general, if we accept it as a guide to our own belief, must be accepted in its entirety; so it will commit us to believing that the souls of human beings not only •survive after death but •show themselves as ghosts to the living; for everyone who has •one belief also has •the other. Indeed it is probable that the former belief came from the latter, and that primitive men would never have supposed that the soul doesn’t die with the body if they hadn’t fancied that it visited them after death. Nothing could be more natural than such a fancy; it seems to appear in perfect detail in dreams, which in Homer and in all ages like Homer’s are supposed to be real apparitions. To dreams we have to add not merely waking hallucinations but the delusions . . . .of sight and hearing. Actually, these ‘delusions’ are really misinterpretations of those senses; sight or hearing supplies mere hints, on the basis of which the imagination paints a complete picture and fills in the details that make it ‘real’. These ‘delusions’ ·as they occurred in ancient times· should not be judged by a modern standard: in early times the line between imagination and perception was not at all clearly defined; there was little if any of the knowledge we now have concerning the actual course of nature, which makes us distrust or disbelieve any appearance that conflicts with known laws. At a time when men were ignorant about what were the limits of nature and what was or wasn’t compatible with it, no one thing seemed to be much less probable—less like ‘how the world goes’—than any other. So when we reject (as we have excellent reason to) the tales and legends about actual appearances of disembodied spirits, we deprive mankind’s belief in a life after death of what has probably been its chief ground and support. The fact that people in primitive times all believed in life after death never had much force as evidence for the truth of that belief, and now it has no force at all. It may be objected that this belief has maintained itself in ages that •have stopped being primitive and that •reject these superstitions that used to go along with it; to which I reply that the same can be said of many other opinions of primitive times, and especially opinions on the most important and interesting subjects, because those are the subjects on which the prevailing opinion, whatever it may be, is the most carefully drilled into all who are born into the world. This particular opinion, moreover, even if it has on the whole held its ground, has done so with a constantly growing number of dissentients, and those especially among people with developed minds. Finally, those mentally developed people who still have the belief presumably base it not on the belief of others but on arguments and evidence; and those arguments and that evidence are what we need to estimate and judge.

I have presented a sufficient sample of the arguments for a future life that don’t presuppose an antecedent belief in the existence of God or any about his attributes. Now let us consider what natural theology does for that great question—what arguments are supplied by the light it throws or by the bases for conjectures it provides.

We have seen that the light it throws is very faint! Natural theology provides only a balance of probability in favour of existence of a creator, and a considerably smaller balance of probability in favour of his benevolence. It provides some reason to think that he cares for the pleasures of his creatures, but emphatically not that this is all he cares about, or that other purposes don’t often take precedence over this one. His intelligence must be adequate to the contrivances apparent in the universe, but needn’t be more than adequate to them; and his power is not only not proved to be infinite, but the only real evidence in natural theology tends to show that it is limited, because any contrivance is a way of overcoming difficulties, and always presupposes that there are difficulties to be overcome.

Now, what inference can we legitimately draw from these premises in favour of a future life? It seems to me that, apart from explicit revelation, we can’t draw any. The common arguments are:

•the goodness of God;

•the improbability that he would ordain the annihilation of his noblest and richest work, ·man·, after most of his short life had been spent acquiring faculties that he didn’t have time to use properly; and

•the special improbability that God would have implanted in us an instinctive desire for eternal life, and doomed that desire to complete disappointment.

In a world where one could without contradiction accept ‘This world is the work of a Being who is both omnipotent and benevolent’, these ‘arguments’ might be arguments. But they aren’t arguments in a world like ours. God may be perfectly benevolent, but because his power is subject to unknown limitations we don’t know that he could have given us what we so confidently assert that he must have given—I mean, could have given it without sacrificing something more important. However sound the evidence is for God’s benevolence, it doesn’t indicate that benevolence is his only motivation; he may have other purposes as well, and we can’t tell to what extent those may have interfered with the exercise of his benevolence; so we don’t know that he •would have granted us eternal life even if he •could have done so. And the same thing holds for the supposed improbability of God’s having given us the wish for eternal life without enabling it to be gratified. The limits on his power, or conflicts among his purposes, may have compelled him to adopt a scheme requiring that we should have that wish even if it weren’t going to be gratified. One fact about God’s government of the world is quite certain, namely that he either couldn’t or didn’t want to grant to us everything we wish. We wish for life, and he has granted some life; some of us wish for a boundless extent of life, and that is not granted; and this is perfectly in line with God’s ordinary ways of governing the world. Many a man would like to be as •rich as Croesus or as •powerful as Augustus Caesar but has his wishes gratified only to the moderate extent of •a pound a week or •the Secretaryship of his Trade Union. Thus, natural religion provides no basis whatsoever for confidence that we shall have a life after death. But if you feel that hoping for a future state will make you either more satisfied or more useful, there is no reason why you shouldn’t go on hoping. There is empirical evidence for •the existence of a Being who has great power over us—all the power implied in the creation of the cosmos, or at least of the organisms in it—and for •his being good, though not for •that’s being his predominant attribute; and as we don’t know the limits either of his power or of his goodness, there is room to for us to hope that he may be powerful enough and good enough to grant us this gift, provided that it would really be beneficial to us. ·There is also the question of what the after-life, if there is one, will be like·. The same reasons that permit the hope justify us in expecting that if there is a future life it will be at least as good as our present life, and won’t be lacking in the best feature of the present life, namely improvability by our own efforts. Every estimate of probability that we know how to make flatly opposes the common idea of the future life as a state of rewards and punishments, except in the sense that the effects of our actions on our own character will follow us in the after-life as they have done in this life. Whatever the probability is that we shall have a future life, all the probabilities about what such a life will be like are in favour of this: whatever we have been made to be like, or have made ourselves to be like, before our death, that is what we’ll be like when we enter into the life hereafter. The fact of death won’t make any sudden break in our spiritual life, or influence our character differently from how any important change in our mode of existence can always be expected to modify it. Our soul—the thing that thinks in us—has its laws which in this life are invariable, and any analogies drawn from this life must assume that the same laws will continue. To imagine that at our death a miracle will occur by the act of God making perfect everyone whom he wants to include among his elect might be justified by a properly authenticated explicit revelation, but it is utterly opposed to every presumption that can be deduced from the light of Nature.

Part 4: Revelation

In discussing evidence for theism I have so far restricted myself to evidence derived from the light of Nature. What addition has been made to that evidence, and to what extent have the conclusions obtainable from it been strengthened or modified by the establishment of a direct communication with God? That is a different question, ·which I shall now address·. My purposes in this Essay •don’t require me to discuss claims about revelations that are specifically Christian or of any other religion in particular, but they •do require me to consider revelation generally. If I don’t do that, the results I have reached up to here may lose much of their practical bearing, ·because it will be open to people to ignore the weakness of the natural evidence for theism and pin everything on what they claim to be divine revelation·.

First point: the indications of a creator and of his attributes that we have found in Nature, though much fainter and less conclusive •as to his existence than the pious mind would like to think they are, and even less informative •about his attributes, still suffice to give to the supposition of revelation a standing point that it wouldn’t have had otherwise. The alleged revelation isn’t forced to build up its case from the foundation; it doesn’t have to prove the very existence of the Being from whom it claims to come. It claims to be a message from a Being whose existence, whose power, and to a certain extent whose wisdom and goodness, are at least indicated with more or less probability by the phenomena of nature. The sender of the alleged message isn’t a sheer invention; there are grounds independent of the message itself for believing that he is real. The grounds don’t amount to proof; but they do suffice to take away all antecedent improbability from the supposition that a message may really have been received from him. And the following point is important to my present project. The very imperfection of natural theology’s evidence regarding God’s attributes removes some of the main obstacles to believing in a revelation. Any objections grounded on imperfections in the revelation itself, even if they are conclusive against it if it is considered as recording the acts or expressing the wisdom of a Being with infinite power, wisdom and goodness, are no reason whatever against its having come from a Being such as the course of nature points to—one whose wisdom may be limited, whose power is certainly limited, and whose goodness, though real, is not likely to have been the only motive that actuated him in the work of creation.

(The argument of Butler’s Analogy of Religion is, from its own point of view, conclusive:

•the Christian religion is open to no objections, either moral or intellectual, that don’t count at least as strongly against the common theory of Deism [a thin belief in a higher power, one that doesn’t intervene in human affairs and may not even be a person];

•the morality of the Gospels is far higher and better than the morality that appears in the order of Nature; and

•what is morally objectionable in the Christian theory of the world is objectionable only when combined with the doctrine of an omnipotent God; and . . . . doesn’t count at all against the moral character of a Being whose power is supposed to be restricted by real though unknown obstacles that prevented him from fully carrying out his design.

Butler’s grave error was that he shrank from admitting the hypothesis of limited powers; so that his appeal amounts to this: ‘The belief of Christians is neither more absurd nor more immoral than the belief of Deists who acknowledge an omnipotent Creator; so let us believe both, despite their absurdity and immorality.’ He ought to have said: ‘Let us trim our belief in either Christianity or Deism down to what doesn’t involve absurdity or immorality, to what is neither intellectually self-contradictory nor morally perverted.’)

Returning now to the main subject: On the hypothesis of a god who made the world and in making it had regard for the happiness of his sentient creatures (however that regard may have been limited by other considerations), there is no antecedent improbability in the supposition that his concern for their good would continue, and that he might sometimes give proof of it by communicating to them some •knowledge of himself beyond what they could discover by their unaided faculties, and some •knowledge or precepts useful for guiding them through the difficulties of life. Also, on the hypothesis that God’s power is limited (which is the only tenable hypothesis), we can’t object that these helps ‘ought to have been more helpful’ or ‘ought to have been . . .’ different in some way from what they are. The only question to be considered, and we can’t let ourselves off from considering it, is about evidence. Can any evidence suffice to prove a divine revelation? If so, what sort of evidence—and how much of it—must there be? I shan’t consider directly the different question of whether the special evidences of Christianity, or of any other alleged revelation, come up to the mark. The questions I intend to consider are:

•What evidence is required?

•What general conditions ought it to satisfy?

•Given what we know of the constitution of things, can those conditions be satisfied?

Evidence of revelation is commonly divided into ‘external’ and ‘internal’. External evidence is the testimony of the senses or of witnesses. By ‘internal evidence’ is meant the indications that the revelation itself is thought to provide of its divine origin— indications supposed to consist chiefly in the excellence of its precepts, and its general suitability to the circumstances and needs of human nature.

It’s very important to consider this internal evidence, but its importance is mainly negative; it may provide conclusive grounds for rejecting a revelation, but it can’t unaided entitle us to accept ·a supposed revelation· as divine. If the moral character of the doctrines of an alleged revelation is bad and perverting, we ought to reject it, whoever it comes from, for it can’t come from a good and wise Being. But the excellence of the morality of an alleged revelation can never entitle us to credit it with a supernatural origin; for we can’t have conclusive reason for believing that human beings couldn’t •discover moral doctrines that human beings can •perceive and recognize as excellent. So if a revelation is to be proved to be divine it must be by external evidence—i.e. by the exhibition of supernatural facts. Well, then, is it possible to prove supernatural facts? If it is, what evidence is required to prove them? As far as I know, this question has been seriously raised only on the sceptical side, by Hume. It is the question involved in his famous argument against miracles, an argument that goes down to the depths of the subject. It may be that that great thinker didn’t perfectly grasp •the exact scope and effect of his argument, and •they have been utterly misconceived by those who have tried to answer him. [Mill briefly cites the example of a Dr. Campbell, and refers to writings of his own in which Campbell’s error is corrected. Then:] Let’s start from the beginning. It is obviously impossible to maintain that if a supernatural fact really occurs, human beings aren’t equipped to have proof of its occurrence. The evidence of our senses could prove this, as it can prove other things. To put the most extreme case: suppose that I actually saw and heard •a Being—either of the human form or of some form previously unknown to me—commanding a world to exist, and •a new world actually coming into existence and starting to move through space, at his command. This evidence ·of my senses· would certainly convert the creation of worlds from a •speculation into a •fact of experience. You may say: ‘But you couldn’t know that such a singular appearance was anything more than a hallucination of your senses.’ True; but the same doubt exists at first concerning every unsuspected and surprising fact that comes to light in our scientific researches. Our senses have been deceived ·and may be deceived again·; that is a possibility that has to be met and dealt with, and we do deal with it by several means. If

•we repeat the experiment, and get the same result again;

or if

•at the time of the observation the impressions of our senses are in all other respects the same as usual, making it extremely improbable that they have been defective regarding this one matter;

or if—above all—

•other people’s senses confirm the testimony of our own;

we conclude, with reason, that we can trust our senses ·with respect to the unusual experience that we have just had·. Indeed our senses are all that we have to trust to. Even when we are reasoning ·in a strictly logical way· we depend on our senses for our ultimate premises. The only appeal there can be against the decision of our senses is an appeal •from the senses without precautions •to the senses with all due precautions. When the evidence on which an opinion rests is of a sort that we base the whole conduct and safety of our lives on, we need ask no further. Objections that apply to all evidence are valid against none. All they prove is the abstract proposition that our senses are fallible.

But these days the evidence of miracles isn’t of this persuasive kind—at least to protestant Christians. It isn’t the evidence of our senses, but of witnesses, and even this we don’t get at first hand but have to rely on the testimony of books and traditions. And even in the case of the original eye-witnesses, the supernatural facts they are supposed to have testified to are not of the utterly elevated kind supposed in my example (·in which I actually see a Being bring a world into existence merely by his command·). There could be little room for doubt about the nature of that, or about the impossibility of its having had a natural origin. But the ·supposed· miracles of which we have records are not like that. For one thing, they have generally been such that it would have been extremely difficult to verify them as matters of fact; also, it has nearly always been within the bounds of possibility that they were brought about by human means or by the spontaneous agencies of nature. This is the sort of case that Hume was talking about in his argument against the credibility of miracles.

His argument is this (·though not in his exact words·):

The evidence of miracles consists in testimony. We rely on testimony because of our experience that under certain conditions testimony is generally truthful. But that same experience tells us that even under the best conditions testimony is frequently false, whether intentionally or unintentionally. So when someone testifies to something the occurrence of which would be more at variance with experience than the falsehood of this testimony, we ought not to believe it. All prudent persons conform to this rule in their everyday lives; and any who don’t are sure to suffer for their credulity.

Now, a miracle is in the highest possible degree contradictory to experience: if it weren’t, it wouldn’t be a miracle! The very reason for regarding it as a miracle is that it breaks some law of nature, that is, some otherwise invariable uniformity in the succession of natural events. So there’s a strong reason for disbelieving it—the strongest reason that experience can give for disbelieving anything. ·Whereas, on the other side of the equation·, lying or error on the part of witnesses— even when they are of good character, and there are many of them—is quite within the bounds of common experience. So that is the supposition that we ought to prefer,

There are two apparently weak points in this argument. One is that the evidence of experience that it appeals to is only negative evidence, which is not so conclusive as positive; since ·apparent· facts of which there had been no previous experience are often discovered, and proved by positive experience to be true, ·i.e. to be genuine facts·. The other seemingly vulnerable point ·in the argument· is this. The argument seems to assume that the testimony of experience against miracles is undeviating and indubitable; and so it would be if the whole question concerned the probability of future miracles with none having taken place in the past. But the position of those on the other side is that there have been miracles, and that the testimony of experience is not wholly on the negative side. All the evidence that has been brought forward in favour of any miracle ought to be reckoned as counter-evidence against the basis for the assertion that ·reports of· miracles ought to be disbelieved. If the question is to be stated fairly, ·it mustn’t be imply that there is some evidence against miracles and none in favour of them; rather· it should be stated as depending on a balance of evidence: a certain amount of positive evidence in favour of miracles, and a negative presumption [see note here] from the general course of human experience against them.

In order to support the argument when it has been doubly corrected in this way, it has to be shown that •the negative presumption against a miracle is very much stronger than •the negative presumption against a merely new and surprising fact. This, however, evidently is the case. A new physical discovery, even if it clashes with a well established law of nature, is only the discovery of another law that wasn’t previously known. There’s nothing in this that isn’t familiar to our experience: we were aware •that we didn’t know all the laws of nature, and •that one such ·apparent· law is liable to be counteracted by others. When the new phenomenon comes to light, it is found still to depend on law; it is always exactly reproduced when the same circumstances are repeated. So its occurrence is within the limits of variation in experience, which experience itself reveals to us. But a miracle, in the very fact of being a miracle, declares itself to be not

•one natural law superseding another ·seeming· natural law,

but rather

•something that supersedes the law that includes all other laws, the law that experience shows to be universal for all phenomena, namely that they depend on some law, i.e. that they are always the same when there are the same phenomenal antecedents—they don’t occur in the absence of their phenomenal causes, or fail to occur when the phenomenal conditions are all present.

[In this context, ‘phenomenal’ means ‘empirically detectable’.] We can see that this argument against belief in miracles had very little to ground to stand on until a fairly late stage in the progress of science. A few generations ago, the universal dependence of phenomena on invariable laws not only •wasn’t recognized by mankind in general but •couldn’t be regarded by educated people as a scientifically established truth. Many phenomena seemed quite irregular in their course, and apparently didn’t depend on any known antecedents. No doubt a certain regularity in the occurrence of the most familiar phenomena must always have been recognized, but even these regularities had frequent exceptions that hadn’t yet been studied in enough depth to be reconciled with the general rule. From ancient times onwards, the heavenly bodies were the most conspicuous examples of regular and unvarying order; yet even among them •comets were a phenomenon apparently starting without any law, and eclipses were a phenomenon that seemed to occur in violation of law. For that reason both comets and eclipses continued through many centuries to be regarded as miracles, intended as signs and omens of human fortunes. It would have been impossible in those days to prove to anyone that this supposition—·that comets and eclipses were miraculous·—was antecedently improbable. It seemed to fit appearances better than the ·rival· hypothesis of an unknown law.

But now, with the progress of science, all phenomena have been conclusively shown to be amenable to law; and even in the cases where the laws haven’t yet been exactly ascertained, delay in discovering them is fully accounted for by the special difficulties of the subject. So the defenders of miracles have adapted their argument to this altered state of affairs, by maintaining that a miracle needn’t necessarily be a violation of law. It may, they say, take place in accordance with a law that we don’t know.

There are two ways of taking this. (1) It may mean only that when God is using his power to interfere with and suspend his own laws, he guides himself by some general principle or rule of action. This, of course, can’t be disproved, and is in itself the most probable supposition. (2) But it may mean that a miracle can be in accordance with a law in the same sense in which the ordinary events of nature are in accordance with laws. If that is what is meant, it seems to indicate an imperfect grasp of what is meant by a ‘law’, and of what constitutes a ‘miracle’.

When we say that an ordinary physical event E always takes place according to some invariable law, we mean •that it is connected—either by following or by accompanying—some definite set S of physical antecedents; •that whenever S is exactly reproduced, E will occur unless it is counteracted by the similar laws of some other physical antecedents; and •that whenever E occurs it will always be found that S has existed beforehand (or some other set of antecedents, if E could be caused in more than one way). Now, an event that happens like that isn’t a miracle. To be a miracle it must be produced by a direct volition, without the use of means; or at least, without the use of any means which if simply repeated would produce it again. For there to be a miracle, ·properly so-called·, one or other of these must be the case:

•an event E occurs without having been preceded by any antecedent phenomenal conditions that would be sufficient to produce E again if they were repeated; or

•an event E, for the production of which the antecedent conditions exist, is delayed or prevented without the intervention of any phenomenal antecedents that would delay or prevent E in a future case.

The test of a miracle is this: Were there present in the case external conditions such that whenever these conditions or causes reappear the event will be reproduced? If there were, it isn’t a miracle; if there were not, it is a miracle, but it doesn’t happen according to ·any· law— it is an event produced without any law or even in spite of some law. [Mill calls these external causes ‘second causes’. That phrase is a technical term in theology. It refers to any causal mechanism that God might make use of, between his will and the desired upshot.] You might want to say: ‘A miracle doesn’t necessarily exclude the intervention of second causes. If God wanted to raise a thunderstorm by miracle, he might do it by means of winds and clouds.’ Undoubtedly; but ·let us break this down into two cases, and look at them separately·. (1) The winds and clouds were not sufficient to excite the thunderstorm without other divine assistance. In that case, the storm is not a fulfillment of law but a violation of it. (2) The winds and clouds were sufficient to excite the thunderstorm. In that case, there is a miracle, but it isn’t the storm; it’s the production of the winds and clouds, or whatever link in the chain of causation it was at which God first made use of physical antecedents. If

•there wasn’t any first-physical-antecedent, i.e. if

•the event called ‘miraculous’ was produced by natural means, and those in turn by others, and so on back to the beginning of things; in short, if

•the event is an ‘act of God’ only in the sense that he foresaw it and ordained it as a consequence of the forces he set going at the creation;

then there is no miracle at all. There is only the ordinary working of God’s providence.

Here is another example: Someone who claims to be under orders from God cures a sick person by rubbing some ointment on him. Would this treatment have cured the patient if it were administered by someone who wasn’t specially commissioned by God? If so, there is no miracle; if not, there is a miracle, but there is also a violation of law.

Here is a line of argument that some will use:

If these events are violations of law, then law is violated every time a physical event is produced by a voluntary act of a human being. Human volition constantly modifies natural phenomena, not by violating their laws but by using them. Why can’t divine volition do the same? The power of volitions over phenomena is itself a law—known and acknowledged as such before most other laws of nature. It’s true that when the human will exercises power over any object, it does so through the direct power it has over the human muscles and not over anything else. But God has direct power over everything that he has made. So the supposition that events are produced, prevented, or modified by •God’s action doesn’t involve supposing any violation of law, any more than this is involved in the supposition of that events are produced or modified by •man’s action. Both are equally parts of the course of nature, equally consistent with what we know of the government of all things by law.

Those who argue like this are mostly believers in free will, who develop the argument along these lines:

Every human volition starts up a new chain of causation. It is the first link of the chain, not connected by invariable sequence with any previous state of affairs. So even if God’s intervention did constitute a breaking-in on the connected chain of events, by introducing a new originating cause that has no root in the past, this would be no reason for discrediting it, since every human act of volition does precisely the same. If God breaks laws, then so does man. In fact, ·neither does, because· the start-up of volition is not governed by any laws.

Those who dispute the free will theory, and regard volition as no exception to the universal law of cause and effect, may answer:

Volitions don’t •interrupt the chain of causation; they •carry it on, because the connection of cause and effect is of just the same nature between motive and act as between a set of physical antecedents and a physical consequent.

But this, whether true or not, doesn’t really affect the argument—·i.e. doesn’t do any harm to the proposed likening of human volition to divine volition·. If anything saves the human will’s interference with the course of nature from being an exception to law, it is our including among laws the relation of motive to volition; and by parity of argument interference by the divine won’t be an exception to law either, because we can’t help supposing that God, in every one of his acts, is determined by motives.

So the alleged analogy holds good: but what it proves is only what I have maintained from the outset—that divine interference with nature could be proved if we had the same sort of evidence for it as we have for human interferences. The question of antecedent improbability arises only because we don’t have direct perceptual evidence of divine intervention ·as we do of human volitions·. That God has intervened in the world is always matter of inference, and somewhat speculative inference at that. And we don’t have to think hard to see that in these circumstances the antecedent presumption against the truth of the inference is extremely strong.

When the human will interferes to produce some physical effect other than the movements of the person’s own human body, it does so by using means, and it has to employ means that are by their own physical properties sufficient to bring about the effect. Divine interference is stipulated as proceeding in a different manner from this: it produces its effect without means, or with means that aren’t in themselves sufficient to produce the effect (·so that God’s part in this is to make up for the insufficiency·). In the •human case, all the physical phenomena except the first bodily movement are produced in strict conformity to physical causation; and that first movement is traced by positive observation to the cause—the volition—that produced it. In the •divine case, the event is supposed not to have been produced at all through physical causation, ·or anyway not through physical causation that is sufficient to account for it·, and there is no direct evidence to connect it with any volition. The grounds for ascribing it to a volition are only negative, because there is no other apparent way of accounting for its occurrence.

But in this merely speculative explanation there is always another hypothesis possible, namely that the event was produced by physical causes in some way that isn’t apparent to us. It may be due to •a law of physical nature that we don’t yet know, or to •the unknown presence of conditions necessary for producing it according to some law that we do know. Take a case where an event that is supposed to be miraculous reaches us not through the uncertain medium of human testimony but through the direct evidence of our own senses. And assume, of course, that we don’t have direct evidence that the event was produced by a divine volition, like the direct evidence we have that movements of our bodies are produced by human volitions. As long as the miraculous character of the event is merely an inference from the supposed inadequacy of the laws of physical nature to account for it, so long will the hypothesis of a •natural origin for the phenomenon be entitled to preference over that of a •supernatural one. The commonest principles of sound judgment forbid us to suppose for any effect a cause of which we have had absolutely no experience, unless we have discovered that all those of which we have had experience are absent. Now consider this kind of situation:

A physical state of affairs occurs which our knowledge doesn’t enable us to account for, because it depends either on •laws that empirical science hasn’t yet brought to light, or on •unsuspected facts about this particular case.

There aren’t many things of which we have had more frequent experience than we have of that! Accordingly, when we hear of an amazing event we always (in these modern times) believe that if it really did occur it wasn’t the work of God or of a demon, but a consequence of some unknown natural law or of some hidden fact. And each of these suppositions is still on the cards when (as in the case of a miracle properly so-called) the amazing event seemed to depend on the will of a human being. It’s always possible that

•there is at work some undetected law of nature that the wonder-worker has become able to call into action; or that

•the wonder has been brought about (as in the truly extraordinary feats of jugglers) by the applying ordinary laws in a way that we don’t notice.

In each of those cases, the person in question may not be aware of just what he is doing, so that neither case necessarily involves voluntary deception. And there is a third possibility. It may be the case that:

•The event had no connection with the volition at all; the coincidence between them was a result of craft or accident, the ‘miracle’-worker having seemed or claimed to produce by his will something that was already about to occur—e.g. ‘commanding’ an eclipse of the sun at the moment when he knows through astronomy that an eclipse is on the point of taking place.

In a case of this third sort, the miracle might be tested by a challenge to repeat it; but it should be noticed that recorded ‘miracles’ were seldom or never put to this test. No miracle-worker seems ever to have made a practice of raising the dead! The most notable ‘miraculous’ operations—including ‘raising the dead’—are reported to have been performed in only a few isolated cases, which may have been cunningly selected cases, or may have been accidental coincidences. In short, there is nothing to exclude the supposition that every alleged miracle was due to natural causes: and as long as that remains possible, no scientific observer—and no man of ordinary common sense—would conjecture a cause, ·namely a divinely caused miracle·, which there is no reason to think real, except its ability to account for something that is sufficiently accounted for without it.

If we stopped here, the case against miracles might seem to be complete. But when we look into the matter further, you’ll see that the considerations I have presented don’t entitle us to conclude without qualification that the ‘miracle’ theory of the production of any phenomenon ought to be summarily rejected. The most we can conclude is that no extraordinary powers that have ever been alleged to be exercised by any human being over nature can be evidence of miraculous gifts to anyone to whom the existence of God and his intervention in human affairs is not already accepted as a settled fact. The existence of God can’t possibly be proved through miracles, for unless a god is already recognized the apparent miracle can always be explained through an hypothesis that is more probable than the hypothesis that it is an interference by a Being of whose very existence it is supposed to be the sole evidence. Up to this point, Hume’s argument [see here] is conclusive. But it is less conclusive if we accept as a fact—or even as a probability resting on independent evidence—that a Being exists who created the present order of Nature and, therefore, may well have power to modify it. Once we admit a god, the thesis that some effect was directly produced by his direct volition is no longer •a purely arbitrary hypothesis to account for the given fact, but must be reckoned with as •a serious possibility. So now the question changes its character, and our answer to it should depend on what we know or reasonably guess concerning how God governs the universe. The options are:

•the event in question was brought about by the agencies through which God’s government of the universe is ordinarily carried on;

•the event in question is a result of a special and nonordinary interference by God’s will, over-riding those ordinary agencies.

Our question is: which of those two is more probable, given what we know or guess about how God governs the universe? Let us start here: Assuming as a fact the existence and providence of God, the whole of our observation of Nature gives us incontrovertible evidence that •he governs the universe by means of second causes [see note here]; that •all facts—or at least all physical facts— follow uniformly upon given physical conditions, and never occur except when the appropriate collection of physical conditions is realized. (I limit the assertion to physical facts so as to leave the case of human volition an open question; though actually I needn’t do so, for the following reason. If the human will is free, it has been left free by its creator, and isn’t controlled by him either directly or through second causes; it isn’t governed at all, so it isn’t an example of God’s way of governing.) Whatever God does govern, he governs by second causes. This wasn’t obvious in the infancy of science, but it came to be increasingly recognized as the processes of nature were more carefully and accurately examined, until it is now positively known for almost every class of phenomena. The exceptions are some obscure and complicated cases that our scientific processes haven’t yet been able completely to clear up and disentangle; a complete proof that these also are governed by natural laws can’t be given in the present state of science. Still, these cases also contribute something to the evidence that all physical events are governed by second causes; their contribution is negative, ·consisting in evidence that nothing other than second causes is at work·; but even that will count as conclusive evidence except in contexts where religion is the topic under discussion. When someone inquires into an event—whether for scientific or for practical purposes—he asks himself ‘What is its cause?’ and not, ‘Does it have any natural cause?’ A man would be laughed at if he took seriously the possible answer ‘The event’s only cause is the will of God’.

Against this weight of negative evidence we have to set whatever positive evidence there is for the occurrence of miracles. And I have already admitted that this evidence could conceivably have been strong enough to make the exception as certain as the rule—·i.e. to make it just as certain that •some events don’t fall under natural laws as it is that •most events do·. If we had the direct testimony of our senses to a •supernatural fact, it might be as completely authenticated and made certain as any •natural one. But we never do have that testimony. The supernatural character of the fact is always, as I have said, a matter of inference and speculation, and the mystery is always open to the possibility of a solution that isn’t supernatural. To someone who already believes in supernatural power, the supernatural hypothesis may seem more probable than the natural one; but only if it fits with what we know or reasonably guess concerning •how the supernatural agent goes about doing things. Well, everything we know about •this from the evidence of nature fits with the natural theory and clashes with the supernatural. So there is a vast preponderance of probability against a miracle; to counterbalance it we would need a case where a supposed miracle and its circumstances had a very extraordinary and indisputable fit with something we think that we know, or have grounds for believing, regarding God’s attributes.

This fit is supposed to exist when the purpose of the miracle is extremely beneficial to mankind, e.g. when it offers support for some highly important belief. Why? Well, God’s goodness is supposed to make it highly likely that for such an excellent purpose he would make an exception to his general rule of government. But for reasons that I have already discussed ·in Part 2 of this Essay·, any inference that we draw from •the goodness of God to •what he has or hasn’t actually done is utterly precarious. If we reason directly from God’s goodness to positive facts, there ought to be no misery or vice or crime anywhere in the world. We can’t see in God’s goodness any reason why

•if he deviated once from the ordinary system of his government in order to do good to man, he shouldn’t have done so on a hundred other occasions;

or any reason why

•if the benefit aimed at by some given deviation ·from natural laws· (such as the revelation of Christianity) was transcendent and unique, that precious gift should have been granted only after the lapse of many ages;

or any reason why

•when the gift was at last given, the evidence for it should have been left open to so much doubt and difficulty.

Bear in mind that God’s goodness doesn’t create a presumption in favour of a departure from his general system of government unless his good purpose in this couldn’t have been achieved without going against any natural laws. If God intended that mankind should receive Christianity, or any other gift, it would have agreed better with everything we know about his government if he had arranged, in his initial scheme of creation, for it to arise at the appointed time by natural development. To which I would add that everything we know concerning the history of the human mind indicates that that’s how it actually did arise.

In addition to all these considerations there is another, namely the extremely imperfect nature of the testimony that we have for the miracles (real or supposed) that accompanied the foundation of Christianity and of every other revealed religion. At best it is merely testimony, given without cross-examination, of people who were

•extremely ignorant,

•credulous, as ignorant people usually are,

•honourably credulous when the excellence of the doctrine or a proper reverence for the teacher makes them eager to believe,

•not used to distinguishing the perceptions of sense from what is floated in on top of them by the suggestions of a lively imagination, and

•unpractised in the difficult art of deciding between appearance and reality, and between the natural and the supernatural.

Furthermore, their testimony was given at a time when no-one thought it worthwhile to contradict any ·story about an· alleged miracle, because it was generally believed at that time that miracles in themselves proved nothing because they could be worked by a lying spirit as well as by the spirit of God. [Mill is not referring to ‘lying’ testimony about the occurrence of a miracle, but about the possibility that a reported miracle really did occur but came not from God but from some devil.] Such were the witnesses; and we don’t have the direct testimony even of them. The only history we have of these ·supposedly miraculous· events is in documents that •were written much later (even orthodox believers agree about that), and often •don’t even name the supposed eye-witnesses. It is only fair to admit that these gospels include the best and least absurd of the wonderful stories that were so plentifully current among the early Christians; but on the rare occasions when they do name someone as a subject or spectator of a miracle, they doubtless draw on this tradition, mentioning the names the story was connected with in the people’s minds. And that connection may have been accidental. Anyone who has observed how, even these days, a story grows up from some small foundation, taking on additional details at every step, knows very well how a story can begin as anonymous and then get names attached to it, For example, the name of someone who •told the story gets brought into the story itself, first as a •witness and still later as a •participant.

We should remember the very important point that •stories of miracles only grow up among ignorant people, and aren’t adopted by educated people until •they have become the belief of multitudes. The miracle-stories that Protestants believe started up at times and in places where there was hardly any understanding of probability, and miracles were thought to be among the commonest of all phenomena. The Catholic Church, indeed, holds as an article of faith that miracles have never ceased, and new ones continue to be, now and then, brought forth and believed, even in the present incredulous age— yet if in an incredulous generation certainly not among the incredulous portion of it, but always among people who, in addition to the most childish ignorance, have grown up (as does everyone who is educated by the Catholic clergy) trained to believe that

•it is a duty to believe and a sin to doubt;

•it is dangerous to be sceptical about anything that is offered for belief in the name of the true religion; and

•nothing is so contrary to piety as incredulity.

No-one but a Roman Catholic, and by no means every one of them, believes in these latter-day ‘miracles’. Yet the testimony in their favour often gives much better evidence than we have for any of the early miracles—better especially in one of the most essential respects, namely that in many cases the alleged eye-witnesses are known, and we have their story at first hand.

So that’s how the balance of evidence stands regarding the reality of miracles, assuming that the existence and government of God has been proved by other evidence. On one side:

•the great negative presumption arising from the whole of what the course of nature reveals to us of how God governs, namely through second causes and by invariable cause-effect regularities.

On the other side:

•a few exceptional cases, supported by evidence of a sort that wouldn’t justify belief in anything that was even slightly unusual or improbable; the eye-witnesses

•in most cases unknown,

•in no case competent by character or education to examine the real nature of the appearances that they may have seen,[1] and

•always having a combination of the strongest motives that can inspire human beings to persuade themselves, and then persuade others, that what they have seen was a miracle.

Furthermore, even if the reports of supposed miracles are entirely accurate, it is always on the cards that they were either mere coincidences or were produced by natural means—even when we can’t (and usually we can) suggest what those means might have been.

I conclude that ‘miracles’ have no claim whatever to the status of historical facts, and are utterly worthless as evidences of any revelation.

What can be said with truth on the side of miracles amounts only to the What can be said with truth on the side of miracles amounts only to the following. Considering

•that the order of nature provides some evidence of the reality of a creator, and of his having good will to his creatures though not for his being motivated, in his conduct towards them, solely by good will;

•that all the evidence of his existence is also evidence that he is not all- powerful; and

•that in our ignorance of the limits of his power we can’t positively decide that he was able to provide for us, by his initial plan of creation, all the good that he intended us to have, or to give us any part of it earlier than he in fact did;

—considering these things, and considering further that an extremely precious gift came to us which

•was helped but apparently not necessitated—·not outright caused·—by what had gone before, but

•appears to have been due to the particular mental and moral endowments of one man, who openly declared that it didn’t come from himself but from God through him,

then we are entitled to hope that what that man declared may be true. Such a hope isn’t disqualified by its being inherently impossible or absolutely incredible that the gift came from God through the man. I speak of hoping, no more than that, because I don’t think that any human testimony about this has any value as evidence. Not even the testimony of Christ on this subject, because he is never reported as offering any evidence except his own internal conviction . . . .; and everyone knows that in prescientific times men always supposed that any unusual abilities that they found themselves with were an inspiration from God; the best men always being the readiest to ascribe to that higher source, rather than to their own merits, any honourable special gift that they had.

NOTES

[1] There is in fact one—only one—known exception to the ignorance and lack of education of the first generation of Christians. It is St Paul. But the only miracle he reports is that of his own conversion ·on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:3-8)·; and of all the miracles of the New Testament this is the easiest to explain by natural causes.

Part 5: General result

The upshot of my examination of the evidence for theism, and of the evidence (assuming that theism is true) that there have been divine revelations, is this:

The rational attitude of any thoughtful person towards the supernatural, whether in natural or in revealed religion, is that of •scepticism—as distinct from •belief on the one hand and from •atheism on the other.

In this context I take ‘atheism’ to include not only •positive atheism, i.e. the dogmatic denial of God’s existence, but also •negative atheism, i.e. the denial that there is any evidence either for or against God’s existence, which ·I call a form of atheism because· for most practical purposes amounts to the same thing as if the existence of a god had been disproved. If I am right in the conclusions I have been led to by this inquiry, there is evidence, but not enough to count as a proof, and amounting only to one of the lower degrees of probability. What evidence there is points to the creation (not of the universe but) of the present order of the universe by

an intelligent mind •whose power over the materials was not absolute, •whose love for his creatures wasn’t his sole active motive, but •who nevertheless wanted them to thrive.

We should entirely reject the idea that the universe is under the providential government of an omnipotent Being who rules for the good of his creatures. Does the creator still exist? We have no guarantee of even that much, except that he can’t be subject to the law of death that affects living things on this planet, because he himself created the conditions that produce the mortality of any creatures that we know to be mortal. Consider the idea that this Being, not being omnipotent, may have produced a machinery that falls short of what he aimed at, so that he sometimes has to intervene ·to make corrections·. This is in itself neither absurd nor impossible, though in none of the cases in which God is thought to have intervened is the evidence anywhere near conclusive. It remains a mere possibility, to occupy the minds of those who find it comforting to suppose that blessings that ordinary human power is inadequate to attain may come not from extraordinary human power but from the generosity of a better-than- human mind which continuously cares for man. The possibility of a life after death has the same status: such life is a favour that this powerful Being, who wishes well to man, may have the power to grant; and indeed he has actually promised it—if the message alleged to have been sent by him really was sent by him. The whole domain of the supernatural is thus removed from the region of •belief into that of simple •hope; and it’s likely to remain there for ever, as far as we can see; for we can hardly expect either •that we’ll ever get positive evidence for the direct agency of God’s benevolence in human destiny, or ·on the other hand· •that we’ll ever find any reason to think that it’s quite impossible that human hopes on that subject should be realized.

Next question: Is it irrational to have hopes in a region of mere imagination, where there is no prospect that we’ll ever have a basis for thinking it probable that the hopes will be realized? Ought such hopes to be discouraged because they depart from the rational principle of regulating our feelings as well as our opinions strictly by evidence? Different thinkers are likely, for a long time at least, to give different answers to this, depending on their individual temperaments. What are the principles that ought to govern the development and management of the imagination? We don’t want our imagination to ·be •so active that it can· confuse the intellect or mislead actions and the will, or ·•so inactive that· no use is made of its power for increasing the happiness of life and improving one’s character. Philosophers have never seriously considered what principles would be best for achieving this double result, though some opinion on it is implied in almost all kinds of thinking about human character and education. I expect that in the future this will be regarded as a very important branch of study for practical purposes, and all the more so when the weakening of positive beliefs about higher-than-human states of existence lessens the imagination’s intake of material from that domain of supposed reality. My view about it is based on my belief that human life is a small and confined thing, and judging by the present it is likely to remain small and confined even if the progress of material and moral improvement eventually frees it from the greater part of its present calamities. I think that this human life greatly needs any help the imagination can give it in aiming further and higher—any help, that is, that doesn’t run counter to the evidence of fact. So I think it is a part of wisdom to make the most of any probabilities on this subject, even small ones, that give imagination any ground to stand on. I’m convinced that the development of such a tendency in the imagination, provided it stays in step with the development of severe reason, need not pervert the judgment. It is possible to form a perfectly sober estimate of the evidence on each side of a question while preferring to let one’s imagination dwell on the •most comforting and •most improving possibilities, without even slightly overrating the solidity of the grounds for expecting that these possibilities, rather than any others, will be actually realized. Though this is not one of the practical maxims handed down by tradition and recognized as rules for the conduct of life, a great part of the happiness of life depends on its being silently observed. Consider for example the phenomenon of a cheerful disposition. It is always regarded as one of the chief blessings of life, but what does it mean? It is just the tendency, either from constitution or from habit, to dwell chiefly on the brighter side of the present and the future. If every nice or nasty aspect of everything •ought to occupy exactly the same place in our imagination that it •does in fact occupy and therefore •ought to have in our practical planning, what we call a cheerful disposition would be merely one kind of folly, on a par with (though not as unpleasant as) the opposite disposition in which the gloomy and painful view of all things is habitually uppermost. But we don’t find in practice that those who take life cheerfully are less alive to real risks of evil or danger, and less careful to provide against them, than other people. The tendency is rather the other way, for a hopeful disposition gives a spur to the faculties and keeps all the active energies in good working order. When imagination and reason are developed, each in the appropriate way, they don’t take over one another’s work. For us to keep up our conviction that we must die, we don’t have to be always brooding over death. It’s far better for us to think no further about this inevitable event than is required for •observing the rules of prudence in regard to our own life and that of others, and •fulfilling whatever duties we have with regard to our death. The way to secure this is not to think perpetually about death, but to think perpetually about our duties and the rule of life. The true rule of practical wisdom is not

•In your habitual thinking, make all the aspects of things equally prominent;

but rather

•In your habitual thinking, give the greatest prominence to the aspects of things that depend on, or can be modified by, your own conduct.

In things that don’t depend on us, it is desirable to choose to look at things and at mankind on their pleasant side. Why? Not just because it makes life more enjoyable, but also because it helps us to love mankind better and to work with more heart for their improvement. After all, why should we feed our imaginations with the unlovely aspect of persons and things? Some dwelling on the evils of life is necessary—either in the sense that it can’t be avoided or in the sense that it is needed for the performance of our duties and for preventing our sense of the reality of those evils from becoming speculative and dim. I say, though, that any dwelling on the evils of life that isn’t necessary in one of those two ways is at best a useless expenditure of nervous energy. But if it is often a waste of strength to dwell on the •evils of life, it is worse than waste to dwell habitually on its •meannesses and •basenesses. [See note on ‘evil’ here.] One has to be aware of them; but living with active thoughts of them makes it almost impossible to maintain in oneself a high tone of mind. The imagination and feelings become tuned to a lower pitch; the daily objects and incidents of life come to be associated in one’s mind with degrading rather than elevating things, and these associations give their colour to one’s thoughts, just as associations of sensuality colour the thoughts of those who indulge freely in that sort of contemplation. Men have often experienced having their imaginations corrupted by one class of ideas, and I think they must have felt with the same kind of pain how mean associations can take the poetry out of the things that are most full of poetry—for example when a beautiful tune that had been associated with highly poetical words is heard sung with trivial and vulgar ones. I am saying all this just to illustrate the principle that in the management of the imagination literal truth of facts is not the only thing to be considered. Truth is the province of reason, and it is by the development of reason that one provides for truth’s being always known and often thought of —as often as is required by duty and the circumstances of human life. But when reason is strongly developed, the imagination may safely go its own way, doing its best to make life pleasant and lovely inside the castle, trusting to the fortifications that reason has built and still maintains around the perimeter.

On these principles it seems to me that it is legitimate and philosophically defensible to allow ourselves a hope concerning how the universe is governed and the destiny of man after death, while we recognize as a clear truth that we have no basis for anything more than a hope. The beneficial effect of such a hope is far from trifling. It makes life and human nature a far greater thing to the feelings, and gives greater strength as well as greater solemnity to all the thoughts and feelings that are awakened in us by our fellow-creatures and by mankind in general. It reduces our sense of nature’s irony—that painful feeling we have when we see the exertions and sacrifices of a person’s life culminating in the formation of a wise and noble mind, only to disappear from the world right at the time when the world seems about to begin reaping the benefit of it. [In the next sentence, ‘art’ is used first in something like our present sense of it, and then in the sense of ‘skill or technique or set of rules’. Mill may have thought of this as a mild pun.] The old truth that life is short and art is long is one of the most discouraging things about our condition; this hope ·for an after-life· admits the possibility that the art used in improving and beautifying the soul itself may do some good in some other life, even when it has seemed useless for this life. But the benefit consists less in •the presence of any specific hope than in •the enlargement of the general scale of the feelings; the loftier aspirations won’t be so much inhibited and cut down to size by a sense of the insignificance of human life—by the disastrous feeling of ‘not worthwhile ·because time is so short·’. It is obvious that there will be a great gain—I needn’t go into the details—from the increased inducement to work on improving one’s character right up to the end of life.

There’s another use of imagination—a most important one— that until now has been kept up principally by means of religious belief, and that is infinitely precious to mankind; so much so that human excellence greatly depends on how well this has been provided for. It involves the imagination’s •familiarity with the conception of a morally perfect being, and the •habit of taking the approval of such a being as the norm or standard to by which to judge our characters and guide our actions. This idealization of our standard of excellence in a person is quite possible even if the person is thought of as merely imaginary. But religion, ever since the birth of Christianity, has taught that our highest conceptions of combined wisdom and goodness exist in actual reality in a living being who has his eyes on us and cares for our good. Through its darkest and most corrupt periods, Christianity has still raised this torch on high—has kept this object of veneration and imitation before the eyes of man. Admittedly the image of perfection has been most imperfect, and in many respects it has had a perverting and corrupting tendency, not only from •the low moral ideas of the times, but also from •the mass of moral contradictions that the deluded worshipper was compelled to swallow because of the supposed necessity of

what Mill wrote next: complimenting the Good Principle with absolute power.

he may have meant: rounding out (completing) his account of the source of goodness by crediting it with absolute power.

or perhaps he meant: paying to the source of goodness the compliment of crediting it with absolute power.

[Two comments. (1) In Mill’s day the spelling ‘complimenting’ could be used in the manner of the first suggestion, for which we would now use ‘complementing’. (2) For several centuries up to Mill’s time, ‘principle’ very often meant ‘source’.] But human beings are capable of overlooking any amount of either moral or intellectual contradiction, and accepting propositions that are utterly inconsistent with one another, not only without being shocked by the contradiction but even allowing each of the contradictory beliefs to produce at least a part of its natural consequences in the mind. (This is one of the most universal as well as of the most surprising characteristics of human nature, and one of the most vivid proofs of the low level to which the reason of mankind in general has so far risen.) Pious men and women have gone on ascribing to God particular acts and a general course of will and conduct that are incompatible with even the most ordinary and limited conception of moral goodness; and many important parts of their own ideas of morality have been totally warped and distorted; and despite all this they have gone on conceiving their God as clothed with all the attributes of the highest ideal goodness that they have been psychologically able to conceive, and have had their own aspirations towards goodness stimulated and encouraged by that conception. And it’s beyond question that a complete belief in •the real existence of a Being who exemplifies our own best ideas of perfection, and in •our being in the hands of that Being as the ruler of the universe, gives to these feelings a force that they can’t get from reference to a merely ideal conception.

This particular advantage can’t be had by those who take a rational view of what and how much evidence there is for the existence and attributes of the creator. On the other hand, those people aren’t burdened with the moral contradictions that infect every form of religion that aims at giving a moral justification for how the universe is governed. This enables them to form a much truer and more consistent conception of ideal goodness than is possible for anyone who thinks he has to find ideal goodness in an omnipotent ruler of the world. Once the power of the creator is recognized as limited, there is nothing to disprove the supposition that his goodness is complete, and that the ideally perfect character—one that we would like to model ourselves on, and to whom we look for approval when we act well—may have a real existence in a Being to whom we owe all such good as we enjoy.

Above all, the most valuable part of the effect on the character that Christianity has produced by presenting a divine person as a standard of excellence and a model for imitation •is available even to the absolute unbeliever and •can never more be lost to humanity. For it is Christ, rather than God, whom Christianity has presented to believers as the pattern of perfection for humanity. It is the God incarnate [= ‘God made flesh’, referring to the man Jesus of Nazareth], more than the God of the Jews or the God of Nature, who upon being idealized has taken hold of the modern mind to such a good effect. Whatever else may be taken away from us by rational criticism, Christ is still left; a unique figure, unlike all his precursors and at least as much unlike all his followers, even those who had the direct benefit of his personal teaching. It’s no use saying that Christ as exhibited in the Gospels isn’t historical, and that we don’t know how much of what is admirable ·in his reported doings and sayings· has been added by the tradition of his followers. The tradition of followers suffices to insert any number of marvels, and may have inserted all the ‘miracles’ Christ is reported to have performed. But who among his disciples or among their pupils was capable of inventing the sayings ascribed to Jesus, or of imagining the life and character revealed in the Gospels? Certainly not the fishermen of Galilee; equally certainly not St. Paul, whose character and idiosyncrasies were of a totally different sort; still less the early Christian writers, whose most obvious characteristic is that all the good that was in them was derived, as they always said it was, from the higher source. What could be inserted into the story by a disciple we can see in the mystical parts of the Gospel of St. John—ideas borrowed from Philo and the Alexandrian Platonists, and put into the mouth of Christ in long speeches about himself. The other Gospels contain not the slightest hint of these speeches, though they are claimed to have been delivered on occasions of the deepest interest, with all Christ’s principal followers present; most prominently at the last supper. The East was full of men who could have stolen any quantity of this poor stuff, as the many Oriental sects of Gnostics afterwards did. But about the life and sayings of Jesus there is a stamp of personal originality, combined with profound insight, that must place the Prophet of Nazareth, even in the judgment of people who don’t think he was divinely inspired, in the very first rank of the men of sublime genius of whom our species can boast. (You won’t think so if you are looking for scientific precision in his utterances; but it’s not sensible to look for that when something very different was being aimed at.) When this pre-eminent genius is combined with the qualities of probably the greatest moral reformer, and martyr to that mission, who ever existed on earth, religion can’t be said to have made a bad choice in picking on this man as the ideal representative and guide of humanity. And it wouldn’t be easy—even now, even for an unbeliever—to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete, ·from the ideal into the real·, than to try to live in such a way that Christ would approve our life. And then there is this fact:

In the thoughts of the rational sceptic it remains a possibility that Christ actually was what he supposed himself to be—a man charged with a special, explicit and unique commission from God to lead mankind to truth and virtue.[1]

When we bear that in mind, we may well conclude that •after rational criticism has done its utmost against the evidence for religion, the influences of religion on the character that will remain—·the ones that survive the critical attack·—are well worth preserving, and that •what they lack in direct strength as compared with those of a firmer belief is more than made up for by the greater truth and rightness of the morality they sanction.

[In this paragraph the word ‘impressions’ presumably stands for the imaginings, hopes, aspirations and strivings that Mill has been talking about.] Impressions such as these, though not in themselves amounting to what can properly be called a ‘religion’, seem to me excellently fitted to aid and strengthen the real though purely human religion that sometimes calls itself the ‘Religion of Humanity’ and sometimes the ‘Religion of Duty’. [Mill presents the ‘religion of humanity’ in the closing pages of his essay The Usefulness of Religion; and a knowledge of that seems to be presupposed in what he says in this present essay.] This religion offers inducements for developing a religious devotion to the welfare of our fellow-creatures as •an obligatory limit to every selfish aim, and •an end for the direct promotion of which no sacrifice can be too great; and the impressions I have been describing add to this the feeling that in making devotion-to-the-welfare-of-our-fellowcreatures the rule of our life, we may be co-operating with the unseen Being to whom we owe everything that is enjoyable in life. This form of religious idea allows one to have the feeling that one is helping God—repaying him for the good he has given, by a voluntary co-operation •that he needs and •that may enable him to get a little nearer to the fulfillment of his purposes. (This elevated feeling isn’t possible for those who believe in the omnipotence of the source of good in the universe!) The conditions of human existence are highly favourable to the growth of such a feeling, and here is why:

There is a battle constantly going on between the powers of good and those of evil. Even the humblest human creature can take some part in this battle, and even the smallest help to the right side has value in promoting the very slow progress by which good is gradually gaining ground from evil. That progress is often so slow as to be almost undetectable; but when we compare the state of the battle at two times that are far apart, the progress of good over evil becomes visible to us, and that gives us a promise that the good will win the final victory—quite certainly, though not very soon.

The most animating and invigorating thought that can inspire a human creature is the thought of doing something, on even the humblest scale if nothing more is within reach, towards bringing this final victory a little nearer. And I am perfectly sure that it—·the religion of humanity·—is destined to be the religion of the future, whether or not supernatural sanctions are brought into it. But it appears to me that supernatural hopes, of the sort that rational scepticism (as I have called it) is willing to endorse, may still contribute quite a lot towards giving this religion the ascendancy it ought to have over the human mind.

NOTES

[1] ‘What about his supposing himself to be God?’, you may ask. He didn’t. He never made the smallest claim to divinity, and would probably have thought such a claim to be as blasphemous as it seemed to the men who condemned him.