in the Revue des Deux Mondes-articles that also treat the question of the supernatural. Now Littré is the one man of high position in literary France who has unreservedly accepted the doctrines of the late Auguste Comte. Others accept him in part, and partly reject him, as though he were like other men; Littré cannot treat him thus. He calls Comte master, and confesses himself obliged in respect to him to a disciple's duty. That yoke of bondage which J. S. Mill put from him, Littré exults to assume. Accordingly Renan joins them in rejecting the supernatural. Man knows only what comes under human inspection. Let us hear Renan himself:

The more we penetrate the origin of the human mind, the better shall we understand that miracles of every sort are only the unexplained; that to produce the phenomena of primitive humanity, there is no need of a God for ever meddling with the course of things, and that these phenomena are the regular development of laws as immutable as reason and perfection. . . . It is not from any one argument, but from the whole mass of the modern sciences, that the vast result proceeds that there is no supernatural. Since there has been existence, whatever has taken place in the world of phenomena has been the regular development of the laws of existence, laws which constitute but one order of government, nature, both physical and moral. Whoever says above or without nature, utters a contradiction, as though one should say superdivine in the order of substances. Littré well says, "In rejecting the supernatural, the modern world has not acted of set purpose, for it received its tradition with that of the fathers, always so dear and well guarded, but without desiring or seeking it, by the simple fact of a development of which that conclusion was the result. An experience which nothing has ever come to contradict has taught us, that whatever miraculous things have been told, constantly had their origin in a startled imagination, complacent credulity, and in ignorance of natural laws." Never has a miracle taken place where it could be observed and attested.* There are miracles only where men believe in them; it is faith that produces the supernatural. . . . It is not in the name of any given philosophy, it is in the name of a constant experience, that we banish miracles from history. We do not say "Miracles are impossible;" we say, "Hitherto no miracle has been attested." Let a thaumaturgist present himself to-morrow with guarantees serious enough for discussion; let him announce that he is able, say, to raise the dead; what would be done? A committee of physiologists, physicists, chemists, and persons trained in critical history, would be named. This committee would select the corpse, name the hall where the experiment should be made, regulate the precautions

* "Études d'Histoire Religieuse," pp. 199-206.

needful to leave no place for doubt. If, under such conditions, the resurrection were wrought, a probability almost equal to certitude would be acquired. Yet, as an experiment must always be capable of repetition, as men should be capable of repeating what they have once done, and as there can be no question in miracles of easy or difficult, the thaumaturgist should be invited to repeat his marvelous act under other circumstances, on other corpses, in other places. Every time the miracle succeeded two things would be proved: first, that supernatural facts take place in the world; second, that the power of producing them belongs or is delegated to certain persons. But miracles are never seen taking place under such conditions.*

There is evidently some fluctuation of thought here. When Renan says, that it results from the sum total of modern science that there is no supernatural, he is cut off from saying, under the necessities of his argument, "We do not deny the possibility of miracles." That is the very thing which is denied. Yet the reason presented for the rejection of miracles is worthy of consideration; it is, that experience is uniformly against them. It is a "constant experience," "an experience which nothing has ever come to contradict," that is the reason of this rejection. This experience, too, must be that of scientific men, since otherwise Renan himself would be the first to deny its validity in this question. Who are to conduct the experiments that shall settle the problem? Men. And what, pray, are men? Creatures of brief earthly existence, and who, one half their lives, are incompetent to observe as scientists. What portion of human history is to be included in scientific ages? Perhaps Greece, in the few generations when her civilization. opened in its high and unique perfection; perhaps Rome, in the Augustan period. That these, though civilized and literary periods of the highest character, would or should be accepted as scientific ages, we are by no means assured. But if they are not, then no nation or period of antiquity is entitled to that character. The Middle Ages, surely, were not scientific. Spain and Italy have never had such a period. Two centuries ago, England, Germany, and France were not scientific. Suppose, then, the scientific period to include the last century of the modern civilized world and a few generations of the highest Grecian and Roman intellectual development. The required experience

* "Vie de Jésus," Introduction, page xlii.

cannot be had apart from such times. Who are the men competent to undertake experiments of the nature proposed? Would England believe on the testimony of any other than a few of her most skillful scientists? Would the French Institute remit the matter to any ordinary hands? Would not the scientists of the world be summoned to sit as a jury should one now attempt to raise the dead? Suppose an ancient document was presented in confirmation of such a miracle done in Rome two thousand years, or in Athens twenty-five hundred years, ago. Let that document bear the signature of Aristotle and his co-laborers, or of Cicero and his intimate friends. Suppose the existence of such a parchment had been well known in ancient times, and its history down to the present moment familiar to all the learned, would the Institute then believe? Surely not. Virtually, then, the demand is that the modern world is not to believe in miracles because a few men of the last century have had no experience of them. But is this a "constant" experience, "an experience which nothing has ever come to contradict?" If we were asked to believe, on this ground, that for the last hundred years no miracles had appeared under the observation of the Institute, before the eyes of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons, or at the desire of the Berlin Faculty of Medicine, the demand would be just and acceptable: but when we are therefore invited to admit that none have occurred elsewhere within that period, we can only reply that we do not know. When we are asked to extend that conclusion backward, so as to cover all ages of this world's existence, and the existence of all the worlds in the universe, we say again that we cannot tell. Indeed, we have many questions to ask. Whence came matter with its marvelous laws? What produced and feeds the forces of nature? Whence came animal and vegetable life? What was the origin of man on the globe? Does not science deny that these have always existed? Is there the least evidence before any learned body that such things ever rise into being under the laws that now rule the world? Why should we not say that such facts never came to pass, since we have no experience of them? When Renan affirms that nature created them, he defies experience quite as much as those who say that God created them. Can any assert that creation by a personal God is

less comprehensible than creation by blind and impersonal nature?

It might also be hinted that while natural science has its rights, it has no right to encroach on other domains. Is man's spiritual nature nothing? Dare science say that the soul does not exist, because her fingers are too clumsy to catch it, her analysis too material to reveal its nature, her eyes too dim to descry its destiny? Is psychology nothing? Is the soul's instinctive belief in God nothing? On this side we reach a very real and important influence on Renan's thinking, whose fountain-head is Auguste Comte. That strange, half-crazed, halfsagacious teacher treats theology and psychology as vagaries of the childhood of our race, incapable of resulting in any good, and destined to yield the ground entirely to the study of matter and its laws. The range of all real knowledge is found in mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and sociology. Beyond these is the fantastic, unreal, and unhealthy, realm of dreams and chimera. It is something of a consolation to know that the dogma which compels Renan to reject Christian supernaturalism requires him to treat Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato, Locke, Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Cousin, and Hamilton as vain dreamers, whose science of the mind and of God has been without foundation in reality or beneficent influence on human happiness. If Renan will not go so far, it is not, as we shall see, because he ascribes any real, objective value to theology. True poet as he is, he knows the worth of imagination in its most varied forms.

From this stand-point we may easily perceive that the demand for the submission of miracles to scientific committees and tests cannot be very serious. The very terms of that demand prejudge the question in the most offensive way. The miracleworker is already branded as a thaumaturgist; he must bring serious guarantees to men to whom none can be serious that do not emanate from themselves; he is assumed to have power to repeat his wonders at will, and for the most frivolous causes. If any would see how adroitly a scientific man can deny the most fully attested results of science on pretendedly scientific grounds, let him read the account of Pasteur's experiments on the question of spontaneous generation, and then note for what reasons Herbert Spencer still denies creation. No men are

more completely proof-proof than scientific theorists; none more completely and more frequently show a lack of that scientific spirit which delivers itself, bound hand and foot, to facts to be dragged whither they will. Then, too, the acceptance of miraculous works on the basis of experiments made under strict conditions, in the presence of scientific men, would hardly answer the avowed object of those miracles. A miracle at Paris would silence so many doubts, insinuates Renan. But would it silence doubts in London, Berlin, Vienna, Boston, Jerusalem, Mecca, Pekin, Jeddo, and Timbuctoo? Why should Paris be favored above other localities? Would the Paris of to-day be convinced by the attestation of a miracle wrought before the elect minds of the Paris of the last, or any past, century? Would the Paris of the next, or any future century, believe on the evidence of any of the preceding ages? Science is constantly perfecting her instruments, extending the domain of knowledge, combining facts so as to produce the most unexpected results. Surely every successive age would easily find plausible defects in the experiments, for which the miraculous result might be declared null. Should God pity the weakness of scientific minds so far as to come at their call to work miracles in every generation, his work, despite such condescension, would be held to have lost all miraculous character. The resurrection of the dead would be no more miraculous, if they were raised wherever scientific men would have them raised, than the sunrise and the ebbing of the ocean-tides.

Renan somewhere speaks of the shabby idea of Deity implied in the supposition of a divine interference in the critical moments of the history of the world. But his notion of a God who should come at the call of scientific committees-wait in ante-rooms till they have perfected their arrangements to catch him should he attempt any tricks of imposture or evasion-who comes in when they give the signal-does his supernatural work meekly at their behest, stands patiently by while they wrangle over the event, renews his display at their request, and then spreads out before mankind the certificate of the French Institute that he is God-let Renan worship him if he can-most men could contrive a better and a more sensible Deity. Compared with such a figure, how crowned with sublimity is the Jesus of the Gospels!