Duke of Argyll, Reign of Law

The Reign of Law, 1867

George Campbell, Duke of Argyll

George Campbell, The Reign of Law, London, 1867.

This book by George Campbell, eighth Duke of Argyll and supporter of the Church of Scotland, was his best-known attack on the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and the powers ever more commonly attributed to natural laws. These powers seemed to leave no active role for a god and indeed were often articulated as evidence for the nonexistence of God. Campbell argues that if natural laws contrive the living world as Darwin argues then it is actually God acting through those laws. So the orthodox understanding of the world need change hardly at all. Natural laws are merely how God controls the world. This appropriation strategy was exactly what George Combe in The Constitution of Man (1828) and Robert Chambers in Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) had done before. Whereas Combe and the author of Vestiges were condemned for suggesting God could only act through natural laws. When the question had been between God controlling the world directly and his controlling it through laws, people like Campbell argued that God did it directly. (See [Campbell,] 'Phrenology: its place and relations', North British Review, 17, 1852, pp. 41-70.) Decades later, when Darwin stepped forward to give the elite scientific approval for the absolute control of natural laws, many were afraid that God would be pushed out of the picture altogether. Campbell endeavoured to show that this formidable alternative to God controlling the world was in fact only God's tool for doing so. The work remains an important example of Victorian attempts to reconcile belief in Christianity with belief in natural laws.

Compare this with the radically naturalistic and atheistical proclamation in John Tyndall's 1874 Belfast Address.

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John van Wyhe, Ph.D. Cambridge University.

Let knowledge grow from more to more,
But more of reverence in us dwell;
That mind and soul, according well,
May snake one music as before,
But vaster....
IN MEMORIAM.

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THE REIGN OF LAW

THE DUKE OF ARGYLL

ALEXANDER STRAHAN, PUBLISHER

56 LUDGATE HILL, LONDON

1867

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PREFACE.

SOME portions of this work have already appeared at various times in the Edinburgh Review, in Good Words, and in Addresses to the Royal Society of Edinburgh during the years in which I had the honour of being President of that Body. The deep interest of the matter dealt with in those Papers has induced me to expand them, to add new chapters on other aspects of the same subject, and to publish the whole in a connected form.

Among many other deficiencies which may be observed in this Volume, there is one which demands explanation, lest a serious misunder

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standing should arise. I had intended to conclude with a chapter on "Law in Christian Theology." It was natural to reserve for that chapter all direct reference to some of the most fundamental facts of Human nature.' Yet without such reference the Reign of Law, especially in the "Realm of Mind," cannot even be approached in some of its very highest and most important aspects. For the present, however, I have shrunk from entering upon questions so profound, of such critical import, and so inseparably connected with religious controversy. In the absence of any attempt to deal with this great branch of the inquiry, as well as in many other ways, I am painfully conscious of the narrow range of this work. I can only offer it as a very small contribution to the discussion of a boundless subject.

INVERARAY, October 1866.

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CONTENTS.

CHAP.