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The Unseen Universe

It’s a very queer world. It used to be so straightforward and simple; and now nobody seems to think and feel as they ought. Nothing has been right since that speech that Professor Tyndall made at Belfast.
— George Bernard Shaw: Man and Superman (1901-3) Act IV.

The growth of scepticism and the corresponding erosion of religious faith during the Victorian era have no single cause and may be viewed as the resultant of many different forces, intellectual, social, philosophical and political. The progressive shift of population to the cities was as significant a factor for the advancement of secularism as the development of scientific positivism; and both in turn were closely associated with the rise of new technologies, of which the coming of the railways, the invention of photography and the acceleration of communications were amongst the most potent in terms of their revolutionary impact upon society as a whole. Academic and clerical disputes might pass unregarded by the majority of the population; but the power of steam, the fixing of a photographic image or the miracle of the electric telegraph could not fail to be dramatically apparent to the most impoverished emigrant or the humblest day tripper.1 Technological diversification, moreover, necessarily stimulated a zest for learning amongst the urban artisan class, and the inexorable growth of working-class education is one of the most striking social phenomena of nineteenth century Britain. Early attempts in this direction, through the creation of Mechanics’ Institutes and Mutual Improvement Associations, were subsequently given added impetus from the enthusiasm of the younger universities, and still more so through the active interest and involvement of eminent men as diverse in temperament as Alexander Bain and John Ruskin, John Tyndall and James Clerk Maxwell, Thomas Huxley and Henry Sidgwick.2 The introduction of universal education, marked in particular by the Forster Education Act of 1870 in England,3 was challenged openly by few, yet the protracted debate around the provision of religious education in schools illustrated the underlying fear that faith might well be prejudiced – and young men corrupted – through the dissemination of materialistic doctrines conducive to the growth of scepticism.

The perceived threat to Christian faith was resisted stoutly by those who followed the traditional apologetic approach which had so dissatisfied Robertson Smith in his New College days, when he had opened his address to the Theological Society in January 1869 with the remark that “all theology is running into apologetics”.4 He had continued:

No one seems to grudge learning, ability, or labour bestowed on the defence of Christianity against unbelievers. We do not seem much interested in the internal development of Christian science. We either acquiesce in the traditional solution of nice theological questions, or regard the solution of the questions either way as unimportant; but the outposts as it were of theology – all points that touch on science, history, criticism, and in so far, on philosophy – are guarded with restless jealousy.5

On the one hand, the contemporary apologists clung to the definitive works of their predecessors, of whom Bishop Butler, William Paley and Thomas Chalmers retained the greatest esteem amongst believing readers of all denominations; at the same time, most of the upholders of orthodoxy now began to seek an accommodation of some kind with modern scientific thinking. The result, in terms of apologetic writing, was often an unhappy, weakly-argued and grudging compromise, as Smith had foreseen would be the case.

Mind and matter

One example out of many such writers addressing themselves to audiences of young men open to being seduced by the Zeitgeist6 is worth examining in some detail, especially as (like Smith) he had been nurtured within the Free Church of Scotland tradition and subsequently became a noted figure outwith the land of his birth. James McCosh had been appointed President of New Jersey College at Princeton in 1868 and in 1875 published his “Lectures to the Times on Natural Theology and Apologetics” (delivered in 1871 at New York) under the title Christianity and Positivism. McCosh’s style is eminently readable and displays a wide-ranging, if superficial, familiarity with the writings of Comte, J.S. Mill, Darwin, Tyndall, G.H. Lewes and Herbert Spencer – indeed he is at pains to accept as much of Darwin’s evolutionary theory as possible, acknowledging the evidences for a developmental process within nature which is for the most part progressive, while denying absolutely man’s affinity with “brute creation”.7 For McCosh, the scientific demonstration of natural laws served only to confirm the existence of a beneficent creator, purposefully (and indeed artistically) overseeing the gradual shaping of creation from its humblest origins towards its eventual perfection:8

There is proof of Plan in the Organic Unity and Growth of the World… . Every reflecting mind, in tracing the development of the plant or animal, will see a design and a unity of design in it, in the unconscious elements being all made to conspire to a given end, in the frame of the animated being taking a predetermined form; so every one trained in the great truths of advanced science should see a contemplated purpose in the way in which the materials and forces of life are made to conspire, to secure a progress through indeterminate ages.9

Natural selection, as described by Darwin, was an acceptable theory for explaining the lower orders of created nature but it was not, McCosh insisted, applicable to mankind; and the discovery of natural laws operating throughout time and space did not preclude the prior existence of “a law in the Divine mind”.10 For McCosh, the human mind constituted the decisive piece of evidence for a divine purpose, and he invoked the Cartesian assertion of self-consciousness as a self-evident proof of mind, as distinct from matter. Moreover, humanity’s moral sense – the Kantian categorical imperative – conclusively proved the existence of a non-corporeal entity, called “mind”, to which we owe all “those lofty affections and heroic resolutions which constitute the noblest characteristics of humanity”.11

McCosh conceded that he faced the opposition of “men of eminence” who were steadily fostering a spirit of unbelief and who already had the popular press as well as “some of the literary and scientific institutions of Great Britain very much in their own hands”.12 Such insidious materialism, which operated by fostering the spiritually sterile concepts of Relativism and Nescience,13 had emanated in part from the contaminating influence of German philosophy and physics, and in part from the licentious spirit of sensuality emanating from the France of Louis Napoleon.14 Ignoring the part played by the more openly atheistic secularists, McCosh reserved his opprobrium for J.S. Mill, Spencer and Huxley, all of whom were attempting to reduce mind to “molecular motion”.15 His riposte was of the simple “knock-down” kind: “I affirm that we know mind, directly and immediately, just as we know matter, directly and immediately”.16 Mind and matter are therefore distinct “substances” incapable of having a common origin:

… I believe it is impossible for him [the materialist] to demonstrate, that any modification of mere matter – be it electric, nervous or whatever else – can yield those peculiar phenomena of which we are conscious in the thinking and feeling mind; can give intelligence and choice, and the perception of the distinction between good and evil; or those lofty affections and heroic resolutions which constitute the noblest characteristics of humanity.17

Without mind, argued McCosh, turning to William Paley for support, we should not possess that “higher certitude” –

the guarantee of a mental principle looking to the very nature of things, and entitling us to argue, not merely within our experience, but beyond it, as to things in general and everywhere, that an effect must have a cause; not only that this watch must have a watch-maker, but that this orderly constructed world has had a world-maker.
If we had not a Spiritual Nature ourselves, we could not rise to the contemplation of God, who is a Spirit… Having ourselves a spiritual nature, we conceive of God as a spirit. As having a sense, or rather cognition, of power in ourselves, we are led to clothe with power the Being from whom we have sprung. If we believe that the God who made the eye does himself see, we must also believe that he who gave us our knowing powers must himself know.18

McCosh’s unashamedly anthropomorphic delineation of God’s nature19 enables him to call, on the one hand, upon current anthropology for evidence of the universality of the concept of divinity, no matter how primitive or inaccurate that might be; and, on the other, upon the Tyndallian acknowledgement of a “religious sentiment” which is the wellspring of civilized man’s imaginative creativity. He is aware that humanity’s diverse condition predisposes towards “an inclination to misrepresent him [God]”;20 but he has no doubts whatsoever as to the veracity of his own conception of the divine source of illumination as essentially male, intellectually superior and of sound Aryan stock:

… God’s light has broken forth as the morning, and to them that sat in darkness a great light has arisen. Already I see favoured spots illuminated by it: Great Britain and her spreading colonies; and Prussia, extending her influence; and the United States, with her broad territory and her rapidly increasing population, – stand in the light; and I see, not twenty, but a hundred points of light, striking up in our scattered mission stations, – in old continents and secluded isles and barren deserts, according as God’s grace and man’s heaven-kindled love have favoured them.21

The “new theology”, for McCosh, is no more than the old eighteenth century rationalism in its dying throes: Goethe, Carlyle and Coleridge promised much in their grand and mysterious utterances, yet ultimately were seen to have “nothing to utter”.22 For a brief time, the “party of Free Thought”, which goes by the name of Scientific Positivism, beguiles the modern youth of America, yet it too will decay and die, “like certain doomed Indian tribes”.23

Finally, McCosh turns yet again to the mind/body problem and to his earlier assertion that “we know body and mind by different organs: we know the body by the senses; we know mind by self-consciousness”. Bain’s doctrine of consciousness as a “double-faced unity” – mind and body operating in parallel – was “too materialistic” and McCosh’s own creed was reassuringly quite otherwise:

… I believe, and must ever believe, myself to have an individuality different not only from that hill and that tree, but from that changing body of mine, from those nerves and cells and brain currents. I can believe, on evidence being produced, that these parts of the body are intimately connected with mental action; I can believe that every particle of my body may be changed in seven years; but meanwhile I am assured as ever that I who think am different from that organ which I think about, and that I have a personality such as is not possessed by the cells or vesicles of the brain.24

The underlying problem, for McCosh as for so many of his contemporaries, was that of the immortality of the soul. If mind be no more than an emanation of the body, then, “Where,” he asks, “has the mind-force gone on the dissolution of the body?” He can accept the brain as an “instrument of the mind”; for the body provides the energy whereby the living brain functions and any disturbance in that source of energy will certainly impair the mind’s working:

But all this while the physical force is one thing, and mental action is another thing, – just as the mill machinery is one thing, and the water which it needs another thing. And though the one were to cease, it does not follow that the other must also cease.25

The animal’s vital power dies with the body – or rather returns to the soil. But: “When Newton died where did the intellectual force go? I know where: it went not down into the earth with the body, but up to God in heaven”.26

The spiritualist solution

Robertson Smith’s passing reference, in the course of his College lectures on prophecy, to Dr Henry Slade27 and his apparent predictive expertise is one indication of the consuming public interest at that time in spiritualistic phenomena. Having its origins in North America some decades earlier,28 spiritualism reached its peak of popularity in Britain during the 1870s and is notable for its broad appeal to all levels of society. In its particular Victorian manifestation, spiritualism comprised a variety of mysterious, dramatic and hence ostensibly supernatural phenomena – auditory, visual and tactile – actuated through the presence of a human “medium” allegedly possessing the means of communicating with departed spirits. In retrospect, the very theatricality of these performances and the characteristically trivial content of the spirit “messages” would seem sufficient to have deprived them of credibility29 and yet many of the most eminent scientists of the late nineteenth century found reason to devote years to the study of spiritualistic phenomena.30 The respectability of such research was guaranteed by the founding of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882, whose members included, by 1886, Gladstone, Arthur Balfour, Lewis Carroll, J.A. Symonds, John Ruskin and Alfred, Lord Tennyson.31

Though human curiosity may fairly be cited as a common motive for the Victorian fascination with spiritualism, it fails to account adequately for the gravity and dedication with which the topic was studied by those possessing legitimate intellectual and philosophical pretensions as well as sufficient leisure and financial resources – the group associated with Henry Sidgwick32 and F.W.H. Myers33 being the most active and persistent in their painstaking investigations of the paranormal during the last quarter of the nineteenth century.34 An earnest striving for alternative sources of religious conviction in the face of advancing scientific rationalism (of which the higher criticism of the Bible was seen to be very much a part) seems to have underlain much of this fervent activity, but the dominant driving force seems to have been the need to secure empirical evidence of continuing life after death.35 Sidgwick resented the prevailing scientific prejudice against so-called psychic phenomena and, in one of his Presidential addresses to the S.P.R., expressed his personal attitude thus:

We believed unreservedly in the methods of modern science … but we were not prepared to bow with equal docility to the mere prejudices of scientific men. And it appeared to us that there was an important body of evidence – tending prima facie to establish the independence of soul or spirit – which modern science had simply left on one side with ignorant contempt; and that in so leaving it she had been untrue to her professed method, and had arrived prematurely at her negative conclusions.36

At the same time, others took a less jaundiced view and held that mainstream science itself held out the prospect of discovering yet higher natural laws which would account for, and justify, the strength of mankind’s religious impulse; yet this very readiness to look to science for an explanation of supernatural aspects of religion contained an inherent paradox, which Robertson Smith himself had identified when he concluded that the scientific process of inductive investigation was inapplicable to divine revelation.37 One might legitimately study the various phenomena associated with religious experience but this afforded negative data for the elucidation of what were ultimately noumenal and “which yet refuse to be measured by any phenomenal standpoint”.38 Hence the systematic study of paranormal phenomena could shed no light whatsoever upon the purely transcendental nature and reality of God’s revelation.

It remained the somewhat illogical belief of the spiritualist investigators, however, that the careful observation and analysis of observable but hitherto inexplicable phenomena could lead, if not to an explanation, at least to a validation of religious faith – and in particular of that facet of most religious beliefs which involved the survival of the human soul or spirit after death. Any purported evidences of post-mortem existence, no matter how bizarre their manifestation, were therefore worthy of examination; and it followed that the techniques employed by self-styled “sensitives” offered a specious yet essentially illusory confirmation of life after death. Such evidence was prized as highly as any novel scientific specimen by those whose faith had been successively shaken by the geological conclusions of Charles Lyell and his colleagues as to the age of the earth, by Darwin’s Origin of Species, and above all by the physiological discoveries associated with the study of reflex action and the doubt thus cast upon the independent, non-material existence of mind or spirit.

Animula vagula blandula

Though the demonstration of reflex action in animals dates back as far as Galvani’s experiments in the eighteenth century39 and was foreshadowed by Descartes in the seventeenth, the definitive working out of its implications came in Thomas Huxley’s paper, “On the hypothesis that animals are automata, and its history”.40 Huxley drew attention to Descartes’ identification of the brain as “the organ of sensation, thought, and emotion” and as “the seat of consciousness”; and he pointed to Descartes’ observation that animal reactions, both sensory and motor, could occur “without volition, or even contrary to it”.41 Descartes had deduced therefrom that “the animal spirits, without the intervention of the soul, may take their course towards certain muscles”, citing eye-blinking as an obvious instance of such reflex action. Erroneously, Descartes had conceived the pineal gland to be the seat of the soul and the repository of memory but Huxley drew attention to the now widespread evidence for impairment of memory due to various forms of localised brain injury and thus to the role of the brain as a whole in controlling all aspects of thought, including volition and memory. Descartes had been right, however, Huxley concluded, to stress how much of the body’s functioning was autonomic and this insight (together with the evidence for reflex action) had led Descartes to infer that “brute animals are mere machines or automata”.42

Huxley now employed the Cartesian argument, in conjunction with current knowledge of the spinal reflexes and automatic movement in brain-damaged humans, to suggest that man (his greater complexity apart) would, except for his gift of self-consciousness, be as capable of being described as an unconscious automaton as any “brute” creature. With deliberate irony, Huxley rejected that hypothesis on the grounds that “the doctrine of continuity [i.e. evolution] is too well established” to imagine that consciousness first emerged with mankind. It would, he argues, be very convenient to assent to Descartes’ notion that animals are without conscious feeling, since that would eliminate “the frightful quantity of pain” which otherwise we must associate with the struggle for existence; but, since we bear some responsibility for the care of domestic creatures at least, we should be wise to assume that they do possess consciousness and thus feeling.

Given then that we apparently share consciousness with members of the animal kingdom, the operation of the brain in either case must be follow a similar pattern, and hence “brutes” must be endowed with both memory and free will – “for an agent is free when there is nothing to prevent him from doing that which he desires to do”.43 Huxley continues:

The hypothesis that brutes are conscious automata is perfectly consistent with any view that may be held respecting the often discussed and curious question whether they have souls or not; and, if they have souls, whether those souls are immortal or not… If the brutes have consciousness and no souls, then it is clear that, in them, consciousness is a direct function of material changes [in the brain]; while, if they possess immaterial subjects of consciousness, or souls, then, as consciousness is brought into existence as the consequence of molecular motion of the brain, it follows that it is an indirect product of material changes.44

As posed thus far, maintains Huxley, the question is “a perfectly open one”, running no risk of his incurring “either Papal or Presbyterian condemnation”,45 since he has not directly threatened belief in the non-material existence of the human soul. But the logical consequences of his argument are, first, that consciousness, whether in man or in beast, is merely a concomitant (and not the cause) of those changes of state within the brain which result in action and behaviour; and, second, that:

to take an extreme illustration, the feeling we call volition is not the cause of a voluntary act, but the symbol of that state of the brain which is the immediate cause of the act. We are conscious automata, endowed with free will in the only intelligible sense of that much-abused term – inasmuch as in many respects we are able to do as we like – but none the less parts of the great series of causes and effects which, in unbroken continuity, composes that which is, and has been, and shall be – the sum of existence.46

Robertson Smith took no part, so far as we know, in such vigorous debate, although in his Cambridge days he must have come to know Sidgwick47 and must have been familiar with Huxley’s secular proselytising. His own reference to Dr Henry Slade had been confined to the latter’s expertise in psychography or “spirit-writing” (usually on slates) and to Slade’s claim to make predictions of the future. It was part of Smith’s argument against what he described as Kuenen’s “bare empirical” approach to prophetic prediction that it ignored a fundamental characteristic of Old Testament prophecy – namely, the revelation of God’s purpose and heart. And he went on:

Suppose that Dr Slade, when brought into the London police court, had offered to prove his supernatural mission by telling the price at which Russian stocks would be quoted on the day when the Turkish conference broke up.48 The verification of this prediction would not have proved him a true prophet. It might prove him to be an accurate diviner, but the thing would have no religious value. It would not bring God closer to man, or in any sense confirm to us the reality of a divine purpose and guidance in human history. Though every prediction in Zadkiel’s Almanac for 1877 were fulfilled to the letter, Christianity would remain precisely where it is. We might have something to wonder at, but we should not have any right to welcome a new revelation from God.49

It is not hard to conclude from this illustration that Smith would have had little time for the more meretricious aspects of spiritualism. Indeed, he would have regarded the unflagging search by Sidgwick and Myers for the slightest evidence in support of immortality as an abnegation of trust in God’s wisdom and benevolence; and it is indicative of Smith’s conception of the relationship between God and man that he should go on to compare a wrong-headed insistence on prediction as the essential criterion of prophecy to a man’s trust in his best friend being founded upon being told “with literal precision the exact actions which he [the friend] is about to perform”.50

Yet by 1875 Smith had been caught up in what was to prove the most elaborate attempt ever made to establish the scientific credibility of a belief in immortality: the (initially anonymous) publication by P. G. Tait and Balfour Stewart51 of their book, The Unseen Universe.52 As Smith’s biographers explain, the book was largely prompted by Tait’s vehement displeasure at the sceptical tone of Tyndall’s 1874 B.A. Presidential address:

Tyndall’s address created a sensation both in the theological and in the scientific world which was quite out of proportion in its importance as a serious attack on the orthodox position. It gave special offence to a distinguished group of scientific men who, like Lord Kelvin and Clerk Maxwell and their great predecessor, Faraday, were staunch upholders of the truths of revealed religion. This feeling of irritation was probably the immediate occasion of The Unseen Universe, a work of some celebrity in its day, which may be regarded as an elaborate counterblast to Dr Tyndall’s provocative manifesto.53

Like McCosh, Tait and Balfour Stewart were concerned to reconcile science and religion:

Our object, in the present work, is to endeavour to show that the presumed incompatibility of Science and Religion does not exist. This, indeed, ought to be self-evident to all who believe that the Creator of the Universe is Himself the Author of Revelation. But it is strangely impressive to note how very little often suffices to alarm even the firmest of faith.54

– but their approach was far more sophisticated and drew upon the cutting edge of contemporary physics for its evidence of “unseen universes”; it purported indeed to offer a scientific theory capable of affording legitimacy to the age-old belief in the existence of a personal (but not necessarily non-material) soul and in the reality of human immortality. In their preface, the authors acknowledge the “ready and valuable assistance” provided by their friends, “theological as well as scientific”, amongst whom obviously Robertson Smith was prominent. His contributions, however, are nowhere identified, though a few clues are to be found in the text,55 and there are good reasons to suspect that Smith was quite strongly disinclined to be identified with the substance of the book.

The opening chapter of The Unseen Universe comprises a decidedly over-ambitious and inadequate sketch of the origins of a belief in immortality amongst the Egyptians, Jews, Greeks and Romans, together with an even more superficial glance (drawing largely on Max Müller’s work) at the concepts of an after-life in Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Islam and Hinduism. The chapter concludes with an equally cursory indication of the scientific and philosophical problems raised by a belief in bodily resurrection and with a reluctant dismissal of both Swedenborgian angelology and modern spiritualism.56 Tait clearly recognised the inadequacies of this section of the book, for he wrote to Smith only two months after its first publication:

Macmillan gives me private information that in a few weeks, a second edn of the U.U. will be wanted… Now, while I still most strongly hold to your kind promise to (someday soon) rewrite the first Chapter for us, I think Mac. is right – that there should be little material change in the 2nd edn – especially as but few of the great critics have yet spoken out, and we must not abandon our first essay as if afraid of what may ultimately be said of it. We must at first be a Lucretian Atom, not a vortex-ring, strong in solid singleness, not wriggling meanly away from the Knife! Will you therefore, by little instalments as it suits you, give me soon all the more vital improvements which occur to you as soon as possible without altering the pages &c (the types having been kept up – so as to save expense)?57

As Black and Chrystal observe, Smith was by now heavily involved in his first articles for the Encyclopaedia Britannica and did not honour his apparent earlier promise to rewrite the chapter. It is probable, however, that he was unwilling to collaborate further in a book so full of logical inconsistencies, let alone to accept any overt acknowledgement of his assistance.58

The scientific core of the book, while weak in its handling of chemical and physiological matters, stands as a decidedly interesting attempt to harness current theories in physics to the solution of the problem of post-mortem existence and the reality of other universes. Indeed, it bears the hallmark of all Tait’s debates with Maxwell and Sir William Thomson, while also being stamped with Tait’s characteristic personal prejudices.59 The essence of the argument is based upon the assumption of an all-pervading ether, existing as a perfect but entirely invisible medium through which molecular forces were transmitted. Considered as a near-perfect, incompressible and frictionless fluid, this notion supported Tait’s concept of atoms as vortices within the ether:

This is the vortex-atom theory of Sir W. Thomson, dimly foreshadowed in the writings of Hobbes, Malebranche, and others, but only made dimly conceivable in very recent times by the hydrokinetic researches of Helmholtz [who] proved . . .that those portions of the fluid [ether] which at any time possess rotation preserve it for ever … Hence Sir William Thomson’s idea that what we call matter may consist of the rotating portions of a perfect fluid, which continuously fills space.60

Conceiving matter in its ultimate form as vortical movement allowed Tait to postulate successive universes, distinct from one another, yet all permeable by the ubiquitous etherial, atom-bearing medium. In the visible universe, the ether was fractionally less than perfect, which accounted for the principle of entropy (the gradual dissipation of energy) and the eventual extinction of all material life. Immortality is therefore impossible within the known universe but may nevertheless exist within a parallel universe, theoretically accessible through an etherial medium common to both:

… the law of gravitation assures us that any displacement which takes place in the very heart of the earth will be felt throughout the universe, and we may imagine that the same thing will hold true of those molecular motions which accompany thought. For every thought that we think is accompanied by a displacement and motion of the particles of the brain, and somehow – in all probability by means of the medium – we may imagine that these motions are propagated throughout the universe. Views of this nature were long ago entertained by Babbage …61

Clerk Maxwell’s revolutionary but still tentative concept of the electro-magnetic spectrum as a fundamental force within the universe offered Tait a key to how molecular transfer between visible and invisible universes might operate. For Tait, electro-magnetism was sufficiently immaterial to embrace both body and mind without unduly impugning the theological idea of spirit or soul. The preservation of personal identity would be ensured by the molecular nature of memory traces and by the principle of conservation of energy. The fearful consequences of entropy would also be nullified. The actual process of interplay between visible and invisible universes – or, as Tait puts it, “the modus operandi of the intelligent developing agency” – could be understood dimly by the following hypothesis:

Let us begin by supposing an intelligent agent in the present visible universe, – that is to say a man – to be developing smoke-rings, let us imagine. Now each smoke-ring has in it a multitude of smaller particles of air and smoke, each of these particles being the molecules of which the present visible universe is composed. These molecules are of a vastly more refined and delicate organisation than the large smoke-ring; they have lasted many millions of years, and will perhaps last many millions more. Nevertheless, let us imagine that they had a beginning, and that they will also come to an end similar to that of the smoke-ring.62

Tait now conceived (in Ptolemaic fashion) of a number of concentric, non-visible, universes surrounding our material universe. Each was composed of “entities” which were ultimately ephemeral, though progressively less so, being successively formed of “some subtler and more enduring substance”; yet in the case of each contiguous universe that substance bore a sufficiently similar relation to that of its neighbour to permit of molecular transition (and thus of mind in some form) from one universe to the next.63 On this hypothesis, miracles present no difficulty, according to Tait and Stewart, since they are not absolute breaks in the principle of continuity but only apparent disturbances, caused by the occasional impact of the invisible universe upon the visible.64 On that basis therefore both Christ’s resurrection and supernatural occurrences of other kinds could be deemed explicable phenomena. The book concluded with a decidedly florid and self-congratulatory summary (which probably owes more to Stewart than to Tait) of its achievement in reconciling science with Christian doctrine:

Our readers are now in a position to perceive the result of questioning science in this manner, and of abandoning ourselves without mistrust or hesitation to the guidance of legitimate principles. It is that science so developed, instead of appearing antagonistic to the claims of Christianity, is in reality its most efficient supporter; and the burden of showing how the early Christians got hold of a constitution of the unseen universe, similar to that which science proclaims, is transferred to the shoulders of the opponents of Christianity.65

The book as a whole suffers badly from its dual authorship. It attempts to give a complete answer to the mysteries of “life, the universe and everything” as well as reassuring the cautious theologian that science is his best friend.66 In its aim it plainly fails, as surely as others of its kind have failed before and since. Having been compiled and written at great speed, it is awkwardly constructed, repetitious and of uneven quality, frequently superficial in its handling of those aspects of science outwith the authors’ particular areas of competence. Its temporary succès d’estime was nevertheless remarkable and is attributable to the awe with which an increasingly literate public viewed the astonishing achievements of the new physics – a public quite prepared to overlook the book’s many imperfections, inconsistencies and illogicalities. Others, more able to subject its argument to critical analysis, were severe in their judgment.

Amongst the first to attack The Unseen Universe, in a stinging criticism published in the Fortnightly Review of June 1, 1875, was W. K. Clifford,67 who presented a neatly-parodied abstract of Tait and Stewart’s entire thesis in his opening paragraphs:

If the ether loses energy, it must be because this energy is dissipated into a second ether. This we are obliged to believe, because there are positively only two other equally probable accounts to be given of the fact of ethereal friction just established. If then, as we have satisfactorily proved, there is a second ether, why not a third, and a fourth, and so on? … But if these ethers. successive universes as they may be called, exist, what may not be their structure and properties? Consequently, the Christian religion is true.
For in these new worlds within worlds of ever finer and more lively particles, there is room not only for deities to preside over their properties and functions, existence, energy and life, but for all other machinery of Christian mythology – spiritual bodies, replete with energy, angels, archangels, incarnation, molecular demons, miracles and “universal gehennas”. And it is a well-known peculiarity of these things that if the barest possibility of conceiving them, by any violence to the intellectual faculties, can be made out, there they are, established in triumph, to the satisfaction of every orthodox congregation.68

Robertson Smith’s loyalty to his friend and former mentor would have precluded him from making any open criticism of The Unseen Universe; nevertheless it is interesting to note the points of consonance between Clifford’s arguments and what has by now become evident as to the trend of Smith’s thinking. For Clifford, The Unseen Universe “has all the stamp of a Christian apologetic writing”; yet the writers, as respected physicists, have made deductions which “are sometimes wafted on theologic wings beyond the bounds of sober inference” but “will be welcomed and widely read by those whose dearly-loved convictions [the book] is designed once more to prop”.69 The widespread yearning for immortality, Clifford argued, is no evidence for its authenticity. Indeed, “endless life is an inconceivable thing” and the longing for deathlessness means “simply a shrinking from death”.70 The theological alternative to death, however, is “not orderly, not natural, not healthy, but monstrous or supernatural; whose cloudy semblance shall be eked out with the dreams of uneasy sleep or the crazes of a mind diseased”.71

Smith might not have accepted Clifford’s savage onslaught against the traditional Christian conception of heaven and hell,72 but he would have unquestionably agreed with that writer’s equally virulent assault on contemporary spiritualism:

Witches or wizards, whole impostors and half-dupes, support a criminal existence by preying on the credulity of simple creatures who would have knowledge and speech of the dead. To these, frightened or cajoled, they show such lying and pitiful wonders as the sun is ashamed to see. The spiritualism of our days is a mere survival of, or relapse into, the low cunning of savage times; none the less disgraceful to our generation because it may seem pardonable in more bestial and less human types … and at the bidding of such vulgar cheats must the poor dead play the fool to purblind believers with no more of manly and straight-forward thought in them than there is in our musical boxes and guitars.73

What most angered Clifford, however, was that scientific knowledge and reputation should be put to such mendacious purposes by the authors of The Unseen Universe. No matter that they personally rejected the more evident chicanery of spiritualism, for:

Put ever so innocent a breadknife into the hands of a maniac or a murderer, and it will be not a whit less dangerous because it was never intended to cut flesh. It cannot be doubted that the “spiritual body” of this book will be used to support a belief that the dead are either subject to the shame and suffering of a Christian heaven and hell, or to the degrading service of a modern witch.”74

All this, in any case, is merely Clifford’s prelude to the scientific indictment. He acknowledges Sir William Thomson’s “brilliant conjecture” that atoms may in fact be vortex-rings within the ether but notes the many unresolved questions as to the nature of the atom. More fundamentally, Clifford observes that:

all these questions of physical speculation abut upon a metaphysical question. We are describing phenomena in terms of phenomena; the objects we observe are groups of perceptions and exist only in our minds; the molecules and ether, in terms of which we describe them, are only still more complex mental images. Is there anything that is not in our minds of which these things are pictures or symbols? and if so, what?75

This, in essence was the problem faced by Robertson Smith when he concluded that the supernatural, by definition, was not susceptible of investigation by way of an inductive approach involving the empirical observation of measurable phenomena.76 Clifford makes the point with rather less clarity but his meaning is nevertheless unambiguous:

So the fact that matter, as a phenomenon, is not to be increased or diminished in quantity [under the law of conservation of energy] has nothing to say to the question about the existence of something which is not matter, not phenomenon at all, but of which matter is the symbol or representative.77

Throughout The Unseen Universe, Tait and Stewart had studiously avoided discussing the issue of whether mind and consciousness were material or non-material. If anything, their argument as to the continuity of the soul (with its attached memory component) from one etherial universe to another, by way of their hypothesised atomic vortex-rings, implied a monistic view of mind and matter. On the other hand, their notion of successively more “spiritual” ethers through which the soul or mind progressed assumed a Pauline process of transition “from glory to glory”.78 Clifford himself adopts an eclectic and somewhat idiosyncratic stance: beginning from a decidedly Berkeleyan conception of the subjectivity of all reality, he nevertheless holds closely to the psycho-physical parallelism espoused by Alexander Bain and essentially inverts Huxley’s interpretation of consciousness as the mere concomitant of nerve impulses. Clifford’s interpretation is that:

What we might perceive as a plexus of nerve-disturbances is really in itself a feeling; and the succession of feelings which constitutes a man’s consciousness is the reality which produces in our minds the perception of the motions of his brain.79

As to the matter of serial ethers and universes, Clifford is wholly dismissive of the Tait-Stewart hypothesis, adducing against it the then most advanced cosmological ideas of space-curvature and of relative inter-galactic emptiness to rebut the traditional belief in the uniform and unlimited distribution of stars throughout the universe.80 The fallacy of The Unseen Universe, Clifford rightly perceived, was that it failed to account adequately for the transformation of what was material into what would be “spiritual” in a second or subsequent ether:

Far greater, indeed, is the work which the second ether has to perform: nothing less than the fashioning of a “spiritual body”. While our consciousness proceeds pari passu with molecular disturbances in our brains, this molecular disturbance disturbs the first ether, which transfers a part of its energy to the second. Thus is gradually elaborated an organism in that second or unseen universe, with whose motions our consciousness is as much connected as it is with our material bodies. When the marvellous structure of the brain decays, and it can no more send or receive messages, then the spiritual body is replete with energy, and starts off through the unseen, taking consciousness with it, but leaving its molecules behind. Having grown with the growth of our mortal frame, and preserving in its structure a record of all that has befallen us, it becomes an organ of memory, linking the future with the past, and securing a personal immortality.81

By summarising Tait and Stewart’s argument in this fashion, Clifford effectively annihilates it. The authors doubtless would have complained that they had been misrepresented – and it is true that Tait and Balfour nowhere venture to assert in so many words that what had been material in this universe was transformed into something wholly spiritual. Nevertheless, such a conclusion is everywhere implied within the pages of The Unseen Universe and it seems probable that Tait’s caution prevailed over Balfour Stewart’s enthusiasm to the extent of holding back from that final assertion.

The closing section of Clifford’s essay is a renewed attack on what he regards as the unmitigated folly of mixing science and theology. “Our authors (he writes) ‘assume, as absolutely self-evident, the existence of a Deity who is the Creator of all things’ ”. Quoting their unacknowledged use of Clerk Maxwell’s idea, he ridicules their argument that, since atoms appear alike, are indestructible and have “the stamp of manufactured articles”,82 they must therefore have been created out of nothing by an intelligent being “not associated with a material organism”. Such an argument was, of course, an adaptation of Paley’s watch-maker’s analogy and, as Clifford put it, had as much logic to it as if one were to say:

Because the sea is salt and will put out a fire, there must at one time have been a large fire lighted at the bottom of it. This can only have been effected by the agency of a whale who lives in the middle of the Sahara.83

“Rather let us contemplate,” concludes Clifford with a distinctly sardonic gibe at Tait’s favourite experiment, “the reposeful picture of the universal divan, where these intelligent beings whiled away the tedium of eternity by blowing smoke rings from sixty-three kinds of mouths… How fertile of resource is the theologic method, when once it has clay for its wheel!”84

The End of the Ether

Clifford died in 1878, Clerk Maxwell in 1879. Within a decade, Michelson and Morley had carried out their famous experiment on two separate occasions85 and had failed to detect any sign whatsoever of the expected “ether drag” upon the earth; the concept of an all-pervasive, immanent lumeniferous ether had suddenly become a redundant hypothesis, as Einstein was unequivocally to demonstrate in his theory of Relativity in 1905.86 The whole saga illustrates nevertheless the heuristic value of an incorrect scientific hypothesis: In his epoch-making (1873) Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, Clerk Maxwell had not, however, committed himself fully to the idea of an ether87 and it was on the basis of his celebrated Equations that his successors in Britain and Germany88 went on to establish the true nature of electro-magnetism, to discover and develop the use of radio waves, and to pave the way for modern atomic physics. At the same time, with the discovery of the electron, Helmholtz and Thomson’s atomic vortex-rings were seen to be as chimerical as Tait and Stewart’s serial universes and The Unseen Universe abruptly became no more than a footnote in scientific history. Yet, as Smith’s biographers wrote perceptively as early as 1912: “No one who studies the history of ideas in England during the later nineteenth century can afford to neglect The Unseen Universe”.89

An easy accommodation between science and religion, such as McCosh had aimed for, could not be achieved by means of a superficial reconciliation of scriptural history with the Darwinian theory of evolution or with the findings of geology. Nor could the implications of scientific discovery be discounted by an ad hominem attack on the proponents of positivism or materialism. Still less could a traditional faith in the supernatural be buttressed by an appeal to spiritualism or, as in the case of The Unseen Universe, by an attempt to use the natural laws of physics to uncover the transcendental workings of God.90 Robertson Smith had wisely perceived that the supernatural was not capable of being investigated through the observation of natural phenomena, nor was the exploration of “things unseen” (in the spiritual sense) open to the methods of inductive science. Black and Chrystal ventured the view that: “Smith, who combined the character of a theologian and a man of science, was naturally on the side of the collaborators [Tait and Stewart]”91 – but this is possibly to misread the situation. Given those dual attributes, which his biographers rightly attest, and given also his logical incisiveness, Smith could not credibly have bestowed his whole-hearted support upon such a quixotic enterprise as Tait and Stewart had embarked upon. Instead, he increasingly directed his energies towards those fields of study where the scientific method might legitimately find application, while maintaining inviolate a sincerely evangelical and child-like faith in divine revelation.92