3. Materialism, however, is not the last word of philosophy. It is inconsistent with any form of re- ligion, and need not be elaborately discussed here. All Theists recognize that the operation of spiritual forces is just as real, just as familiar, an experi- ence as the operation of material forces. An obvious illustration of the intervention of spiritual force in the phenomenal world is afforded by the consequences which ensue in the visible order every time we exert our free will. Mind is not a mere function of the bodily organism, and thought is something distinct from those movements of the grey matter of the brain which seem to accompany it perpetually in our present experience. But mind, νοῦς, reason, is a vera causa—a cause which produces effects in the physical order, effects which are often far-reaching and important. The action of man’s free will, of which the outward effect is the motion of his limbs, is not a violation of the law of causation: that law is true only of physical causes, and the physical sequence is perfectly observed, so far as we know. But the originating impulse comes from a region other than physical, even from the domain of spirit, where man lives
* Essays, p. 224.
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his highest life and from which he catches his highest inspirations. We shall see presently that there is no complete analogy between such inter. vention of human will in the physical order, and that intervention of the Divine volition which we shall find to be the characteristic of a ‘miracle’; but, although the analogy is incomplete, it is im- portant to recognize that we have experience of an intrusion into the physical by the moral order every time that we exert our wills to move our bodies. There are forces other than physical to be reckoned with.
4. Thus among the agents which can produce effects in the physical order spiritual agents must be counted ; and of these the highest is God. Our conception of the universe is partial and inadequate unless we realize that a great Spiritual Being is the ultimate source of all the manifold activities which it daily and hourly presents to our view. (See NATURE.) And if, with this in our minds, we approach an anomalous phenomenon which seems to us to interrupt the continuity of physical sequence, we shall have to enumerate among possible explanations this other, that it is due to the direct volition of the Deity. If we are satisfied that this is its explanation, we call it a miracle, and Mill’s definition of a miracle may be replaced by words of a thinker of a very different school. ‘Miraculum,’ said St. Thomas Aquinas, ‘est preter ordinem totius nature create; Deus igitur cum solus sit non creatura, solus etiam virtute propria miracula facere potest.’* It would not be easy to express oneself more succinctly than this. And it is important to observe that the very idea of a miracle, in this view, presupposes the existence of a supreme spiritual agent. To attempt to prove the existence of God by the aid of well-attested occurrences of ‘miracle’ is idle, because we have not any conception of the possibility of miracle apart from His existence and providence.
5. The possibility of miracle involves the exist- ence of God; it does not at once follow that the converse is true, and that the existence of God implies the possibility of miracle. And we have now to consider whether, granting the existence of a Supreme Being who stands to nature in the relation of Author and Governor, its Creator and its Life, at once immanent in it and transcending it, there are any grounds in reason for denying the possibility of His miraculous intervention in the universe which He has made. The argument by which Spinoza attempted to subvert this possi- bility has become famous, and, inasmuch as almost all a priori arguments on the negative side are but variations of it, a summary of it is essential to the present discussion. In the article NATURE, Spinoza’s view of the relation of God to the world is briefly explained. It was a kind of Pantheism, according to which the processes of the universe were the manifestations of its Spiritual Life, the exhibition, as it were, of the natura naturans unfolding itself in the natura naturata. Thus no place is left for free acts of the Divine volition. And Spinoza lays down as a thesis that ‘nothing happens in nature which is in contradiction with its universal laws.’ Proceeding, then, to define a miracle as an event in contradiction with the universal laws of nature, he has no difficulty in establishing the impossibility of any event of the miraculous order. The whole force of the argu- ment, and at the same time its whole fallacy, is found in the ambiguity of the word nature. Spinoza’s thesis that ‘nothing happens in nature which is in contradiction with its universal laws’ is true only if nature includes all that is, if it is understood as embracing the sum of all existence and of all force, material and spiritual, as including
* Summa, 1. ex. 4.
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not only physical movements but the energy of man and of God. But if nature be taken in this large sense, it is quite unjustifiable to assert with- out proof that ‘miracles are in contradiction with the universal laws of nature.’ They are only, as Aquinas has it, ‘preter ordinem totius nature create’; miracles are contrary to the order of nature, only if nature be regarded as exclusive and independent of God.* ‘The distinction is as old as Augustine, and must be carefully borne in mind: ‘Portentum fit, non contra naturam, sed contra quam est nota natura’ (de Civ. Dei. xxi. 8). Nature as we know it is not to be identified with nature as God knows it, with the ‘nature’ of which He is a part; and it is only of the latter that we can say that its laws are universally valid.