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Title: Philosophy and Religion

Author: Hastings Rashdall

Release date: July 4, 2007 [eBook #21995]

Language: English

Credits: E-text prepared by Al Haines

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E-text prepared by Al Haines

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PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION

Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge

by

HASTINGS RASHDALL

D. Litt. (Oxon.), D.C.L. (Dunelm.)
Fellow of the British Academy
Fellow and Tutor of New College, Oxford

London: Duckworth & Co.
3 Henrietta St. Covent Garden
1909
All rights reserved

{v}

GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES

Man has no deeper or wider interest than theology; none deeper, for however much he may change, he never loses his love of the many questions it covers; and none wider, for under whatever law he may live he never escapes from its spacious shade; nor does he ever find that it speaks to him in vain or uses a voice that fails to reach him. Once the present writer was talking with a friend who has equal fame as a statesman and a man of letters, and he said, 'Every day I live, Politics, which are affairs of Man and Time, interest me less, while Theology, which is an affair of God and Eternity, interests me more.' As with him, so with many, though the many feel that their interest is in theology and not in dogma. Dogma, they know, is but a series of resolutions framed by a council or parliament, which they do not respect any the more because the parliament was composed of ecclesiastically-minded persons; while the theology which so interests them is a discourse touching God, though the Being so named is the God man conceived as not only related to himself and his world but also as rising ever higher with the notions of the self and the world. Wise books, not in dogma but in theology, may therefore be described as the supreme {vi} need of our day, for only such can save us from much fanaticism and secure us in the full possession of a sober and sane reason.

Theology is less a single science than an encyclopaedia of sciences; indeed all the sciences which have to do with man have a better right to be called theological than anthropological, though the man it studies is not simply an individual but a race. Its way of viewing man is indeed characteristic; from this have come some of its brighter ideals and some of its darkest dreams. The ideals are all either ethical or social, and would make of earth a heaven, creating fraternity amongst men and forming all states into a goodly sisterhood; the dreams may be represented by doctrines which concern sin on the one side and the will of God on the other. But even this will cannot make sin luminous, for were it made radiant with grace, it would cease to be sin.

These books then,—which have all to be written by men who have lived in the full blaze of modern light,—though without having either their eyes burned out or their souls scorched into insensibility,—are intended to present God in relation to Man and Man in relation to God. It is intended that they begin, not in date of publication, but in order of thought, with a Theological Encyclopaedia which shall show the circle of sciences co-ordinated under the term Theology, though all will be viewed as related to its central or main idea. This relation of God to human knowledge will then be looked at through mind as a communion of Deity with humanity, or God in fellowship {vii} with concrete man. On this basis the idea of Revelation will be dealt with. Then, so far as history and philology are concerned, the two Sacred Books, which are here most significant, will be viewed as the scholar, who is also a divine, views them; in other words, the Old and New Testaments, regarded as human documents, will be criticised as a literature which expresses relations to both the present and the future; that is, to the men and races who made the books, as well as to the races and men the books made. The Bible will thus be studied in the Semitic family which gave it being, and also in the Indo-European families which gave to it the quality of the life to which they have attained. But Theology has to do with more than sacred literature; it has also to do with the thoughts and life its history occasioned. Therefore the Church has to be studied and presented as an institution which God founded and man administers. But it is possible to know this Church only through the thoughts it thinks, the doctrines it holds, the characters and the persons it forms, the people who are its saints and embody its ideals of sanctity, the acts it does, which are its sacraments, and the laws it follows and enforces, which are its polity, and the young it educates and the nations it directs and controls. These are the points to be presented in the volumes which follow, which are all to be occupied with theology or the knowledge of God and His ways.

A. M. F. 'O.'

{ix}

PREFACE

These Lectures were delivered in Cambridge during the Lent Term of last year, on the invitation of a Committee presided over by the Master of Magdalene, before an audience of from three hundred to four hundred University men, chiefly Under-graduates. They were not then, and they are not now, intended for philosophers or even for beginners in the systematic study of philosophy, but as aids to educated men desirous of thinking out for themselves a reasonable basis for personal Religion.

The Lectures—especially the first three—deal with questions on which I have already written. I am indebted to the Publisher of Contentio Veritatis and the other contributors to that volume for raising no objection to my publishing Lectures which might possibly be regarded as in part a condensation, in part an expansion of my Essay on 'The ultimate basis of Theism.' I have dealt more systematically with many of the problems here discussed in an Essay upon 'Personality in God and Man' contributed to Personal Idealism (edited by Henry {x} Sturt) and in my 'Theory of Good and Evil.' Some of the doctrinal questions touched on in Lecture VI. have been more fully dealt with in my volume of University Sermons, Doctrine and Development.

Questions which were asked at the time and communications which have since reached me have made me feel, more even than I did when I was writing the Lectures, how inadequate is the treatment here given to many great problems. On some matters much fuller explanation and discussion will naturally be required to convince persons previously unfamiliar with Metaphysic: on others it is the more advanced student of Philosophy who will complain that I have only touched upon the fringe of a vast subject. But I have felt that I could not seriously expand any part of the Lectures without changing the whole character of the book, and I have been compelled in general to meet the demand for further explanation only by the above general reference to my other books, by the addition of a few notes, and by appending to each chapter some suggestions for more extended reading. These might of course have been indefinitely enlarged, but a long list of books is apt to defeat its own purpose: people with a limited time at their disposal want to know which book to make a beginning upon.

The Lectures are therefore published for the most {xi} part just as they were delivered, in the hope that they may suggest lines of thought which may be intellectually and practically useful. I trust that any philosopher who may wish to take serious notice of my views—especially the metaphysical views expressed in the first few chapters—will be good enough to remember that the expression of them is avowedly incomplete and elementary, and cannot fairly be criticized in much detail without reference to my other writings.

I am much indebted for several useful suggestions and for valuable
assistance in revising the proofs to one of the hearers of the
Lectures, Mr. A. G. Widgery, Scholar of St. Catherine's College,
Cambridge, now Lecturer in University College, Bristol.

H. RASHDALL.

NEW COLLEGE, OXFORD,
  Jan. 6, 1909.

{xii}

CONTENTS

LECTURE I

MIND AND MATTER, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

1. Is Materialism possible? There is no immediate knowledge of Matter; what we know is always Self + Matter. The idea of a Matter which can exist by itself is an inference: is it a reasonable one?

2. No. For all that we know about Matter implies Mind. This is obvious as to secondary qualities (colour, sound, etc.); but it is no less true of primary qualities (solidity, magnitude, etc.). Relations, no less than sensations, imply Mind, . . . . . . . . . . . 8

3. This is the great discovery of Berkeley, though he did not adequately distinguish between sensations and intellectual relations, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

4. But Matter certainly does not exist merely for our transitory and incomplete knowledge: if it cannot exist apart from Mind, there must be a universal Mind in which and for which all things exist, i.e. God, . . . . . . . 16

5. But Theism is possible without Idealism. The impossibility of Materialism has generally been recognized (e.g. by Spinoza, Spencer, Haeckel). If the ultimate Reality is not Matter, it must be utterly unlike anything we know, or be Mind. The latter view more probable, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

6. It is more reasonable to explain the lower by the higher than vice versâ, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

LECTURE II

THE UNIVERSAL CAUSE, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

1. We have been led by the idealistic argument to recognize the necessity of a Mind which thinks the world. Insufficiency of this view.

{xiii}

2. In our experiences of external Nature we meet with nothing but succession, never with Causality. The Uniformity of Nature is a postulate of Physical Science, not a necessity of thought. The idea of Causality derived from our consciousness of Volition. Causality=Activity, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

3. If events must have a cause, and we know of no cause but Will, it is reasonable to infer that the events which we do not cause must be caused by some other Will; and the systematic unity of Nature implies that this cause must be One Will, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

4. Moreover, the analogy of the human mind suggests the probability that, if God is Mind, there must be in Him, as in us, the three activities of Thought, Feeling, and Will, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44

5. The above line of argument can be used by the Realist who believes matter to be a thing-in-itself; but it fits in much better with the Idealistic view of the relations between mind and matter, and with the tendency of modern physics to resolve matter into Force, . 48

6. Testimony of Spencer and Kant to the theory that the Ultimate Reality is Will, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51

7. Is God a Person? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54

LECTURE III

GOD AND THE MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58

1. The empirical study of Nature ('red in tooth and claw') can tell us of purpose, not what the purpose is. The only source of knowledge of the character of God is to be found in the moral Consciousness.

2. Our moral judgements are as valid as other judgements (e.g. mathematical axioms), and equally reveal the thought of God, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62

3. This does not imply that the moral consciousness is not gradually evolved, or that each individual's conscience is infallible, or that our moral judgements in detail are as certain as mathematical judgements, or that the detailed rules of human conduct are applicable to God, . . 63

{xiv}

4. Corollaries:

    (a) Belief in the objectivity of our moral judgements
        logically implies belief in God, . . . . . . . . . . . 69
    (b) If God aims at an end not fully realized here, we
        have a ground for postulating Immortality, . . . . . . 77
    (c) Evil must be a necessary means to greater good, . . 79

5. In what sense this 'limits God.' Omnipotence=ability to do all things which are in their own nature possible, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81

LECTURE IV

DIFFICULTIES AND OBJECTIONS, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87

1. Is the world created? There may or may not be a beginning of the particular series of physical events constituting our world. But, even if this series has a beginning, this implies some previous existence which has no beginning.

2. Is the whole-time series infinite? Time must be regarded as objective, but the 'antinomies' involved in the nature of Time cannot be resolved, . . . . . . . . 90

3. Are Spirits created or pre-existent? The close connexion and correspondence between mind and body makes for the former view. Difficulties of pre-existence—heredity, etc., . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93

4. An Idealism based on Pre-existence without God is open to the same objections and others. Such a system provides no mind (a) in which and for which the whole system exists, or (b) to effect the correspondence between mind and body, or (c) to allow of a purpose in the Universe; without this the world is not rational, . 96

5. The human mind (i.e. consciousness) not apart of the divine Consciousness, though in the closest possible dependence upon God. The Universe a Unity, but the Unity is not that of Self-Consciousness, . . . . . . . . . 101

6. There is no 'immediate' or 'intuitive' knowledge of God. Our knowledge is got by inference, like knowledge of our friend's existence, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106

{xv}

7. Religion and Psychology. It is impossible to base Religion upon Psychology or 'religious experience' without Metaphysics, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111

8. Summary: the ultimate nature of Reality, . . . . . . . . 118

Note on Non-theistic Idealism, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128

LECTURE V

REVELATION, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127

1. There is no special organ of religious knowledge, but religious knowledge has many characteristics which may be conveniently suggested by the use of the term 'faith,' especially its connexion with character and Will.

2. The psychological causes of religious belief must be carefully distinguished from the reasons which make it true. No logic of discovery. Many religious ideas have occurred in a spontaneous or apparently intuitive way to particular persons, the truth of which the philosopher may subsequently be able to test by philosophical reflection, though he could not have discovered them, but they are not necessarily true because they arise in a spontaneous or unaccountable manner, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134

3. False conceptions of Revelation and true. All knowledge is in a sense revealed, especially religious and moral knowledge: but spiritual insight varies. Need of the prophet or religious genius, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139

4. Reasoned and intuitive beliefs may both be 'revealed,' . . 143

5. Degrees of truth in the historical religions. Dependence of the individual upon such religions. Christianity occupies a unique position, because it alone combines an ethical ideal which appeals to the universal Conscience with a Theism which commends itself to Reason. The truth of Christianity is dependent upon its appeal to the moral and religious consciousness of the present, . . . . . . . 148

{xvi}

LECTURE VI

CHRISTIANITY, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157

1. The claim of Christianity to be the special or absolute Religion not dependent upon miracles.

2. Ritschlian Theologians right in resting the truth of Christianity mainly upon the appeal made by Christ to the individual Conscience: but wrong in disparaging (a) philosophical arguments for Theism, (b) the relative truth of non-Christian systems, (c) the value of Doctrine and necessity for Development, . . . . . 161

3. Christian doctrine (esp. of the Logos) is an attempt to express the Church's sense of the unique value of Christ and His Revelation. The necessity for recognizing development both in Christian Ethics and in Theology, . . 164

4. Some reflections on our practical attitude towards Christian doctrine. Some means of expressing the unique position of Christ wanted. The old expressions were influenced by philosophy of the time, but not valueless. Illustrations. Need of re-interpretation and further development, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168

5. The doctrine of continuous Revelation through the Spirit is a part of Christianity, and the condition of its acceptance as the final or absolute Religion, . . . 185

{1}

PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION

LECTURE I

MIND AND MATTER

I have been invited to speak to you about the relations between Religion and Philosophy. To do that in a logical and thoroughgoing way it would be necessary to discuss elaborately the meaning first of Religion and then of Philosophy. Such a discussion would occupy at least a lecture, and I am unwilling to spend one out of six scanty hours in formal preliminaries. I shall assume, therefore, that we all know in some general way the meaning of Religion. It is not necessary for our present purpose to discuss such questions as the definition of Religion for purposes of sociological investigation, or the possibility of a Religion without a belief in God, or the like. I shall assume that, whatever else may be included in the term Religion, Christianity may at least be included in it; and that what you are practically most interested in is the bearing of Philosophy upon the Christian ideas concerning the {2} being and nature of God, the hope of Immortality, the meaning and possibility of Revelation. When we turn to Philosophy, I cannot perhaps assume with equal confidence that all of you know what it is. But then learning what Philosophy is—especially that most fundamental part of Philosophy which is called Metaphysics—is like learning to swim: you never discover how to do it until you find yourself considerably out of your depth. You must strike out boldly, and at last you discover what you are after. I shall presuppose that in a general way you do all know that Philosophy is an enquiry into the ultimate nature of the Universe at large, as opposed to the discussion of those particular aspects or departments of it which are dealt with by the special Sciences. What you want to know, I take it, is—what rational enquiry, pushed as far as it will go, has to say about those ultimate problems of which the great historical Religions likewise profess to offer solutions. The nature and scope of Philosophy is best understood by examples: and therefore I hope you will excuse me if without further preface I plunge in medias res. I shall endeavour to presuppose no previous acquaintance with technical Philosophy, and I will ask those who have already made some serious study of Philosophy kindly to remember that I am trying to make myself intelligible to those who have not. I shall {3} not advance anything which I should not be prepared to defend even before an audience of metaphysical experts. But I cannot undertake in so short a course of lectures to meet all the objections which will, I know, be arising in the minds of any metaphysically trained hearers who may honour me with their presence, many of which may probably occur to persons not so trained. And I further trust the Metaphysicians among you will forgive me if, in order to be intelligible to all, I sometimes speak with a little less than the akribeia at which I might feel bound to aim if I were reading a paper before an avowedly philosophical Society. Reservations, qualifications, and elaborate distinctions must be omitted, if I am to succeed in saying anything clearly in the course of six lectures.

Moreover, I would remark that, though I do not believe that an intention to edify is any excuse for slipshod thought or intellectual dishonesty, I am speaking now mainly from the point of view of those who are enquiring into metaphysical truth for the guidance of their own religious and practical life, rather than from the point of view of pure speculation. I do not, for my own part, believe in any solution of the religious problem which evades the ultimate problems of all thought. The Philosophy of Religion is for me not so much a special and sharply distinguished branch or department of {4} Philosophy as a particular aspect of Philosophy in general. But many questions which may be of much importance from the point of view of a complete theory of the Universe can be entirely, or almost entirely, put on one side when the question is, 'What may I reasonably believe about those ultimate questions which have a direct and immediate bearing upon my religious and moral life; what may I believe about God and Duty, about the world and its ultimate meaning, about the soul and its destiny?' For such purposes solutions stopping short of what will fully satisfy the legitimate demands of the professed Metaphysician may be all that is necessary, or at least all that is possible for those who are not intending to make a serious and elaborate study of Metaphysic. I have no sympathy with the attempt to base Religion upon anything but honest enquiry into truth: and yet the professed Philosophers are just those who will most readily recognize that there are—if not what are technically called degrees of truth—still different levels of thought, different degrees of adequacy and systematic completeness, even within the limits of thoroughly philosophical thinking. I shall assume that you are not content to remain at the level of ordinary unreflecting Common-sense or of merely traditional Religion—that you do want (so far as time and opportunity serve) to get to the bottom of things, {5} but that you will be content in such a course as the present if I can suggest to you, or help you to form for yourselves, an outline—what Plato would call the hypotypôsis of a theory of the Universe which may still fall very far short of a finished and fully articulated metaphysical system.

I suppose that to nearly everybody who sets himself down to think seriously about the riddle of the Universe there very soon occurs the question whether Materialism may not contain the solution of all difficulties. I think, therefore, our present investigation had better begin with an enquiry whether Materialism can possibly be true. I say 'can be true' rather than 'is true,' because, though dogmatic Materialists are rare, the typical Agnostic is one who is at least inclined to admit the possibility of Materialism, even when he does not, at the bottom of his mind, practically assume its truth. The man who is prepared to exclude even this one theory of the Universe from the category of possible but unprovable theories is not, properly speaking, an Agnostic. To know that Materialism at least is not true is to know something, and something very important, about the ultimate nature of things. I shall not attempt here any very precise definition of what is meant by Materialism. Strictly speaking, it ought to mean the view that nothing really exists but matter. But the existence, in some sense or {6} other, of our sensations and thoughts and emotions is so obvious to Common-sense that such a creed can hardly be explicitly maintained: it is a creed which is refuted in the very act of enunciating it. For practical purposes, therefore, Materialism may be said to be the view that the ultimate basis of all existence is matter; and that thought, feeling, emotion—consciousness of every kind—is merely an effect, a by-product or concomitant, of certain material processes.

Now if we are to hold that matter is the only thing which exists, or is the ultimate source of all that exists, we ought to be able to say what matter is. To the unreflecting mind matter seems to be the thing that we are most certain of, the one thing that we know all about. Thought, feeling, will, it may be suggested, are in some sense appearances which (though we can't help having them) might, from the point of view of superior insight, turn out to be mere delusions, or at best entirely unimportant and inconsiderable entities. This attitude of mind has been amusingly satirised by the title of one of Mr. Bradley's philosophical essays—'on the supposed uselessness of the Soul.'[1] In this state of mind matter presents itself as the one solid reality—as something undeniable, something perfectly intelligible, something, too, which is pre-eminently {7} important and respectable; while thinking and feeling and willing, joy and sorrow, hope and aspiration, goodness and badness, if they cannot exactly be got rid of altogether, are, as it were, negligible quantities, which must not be allowed to disturb or interfere with the serious business of the Universe.

From this point of view matter is supposed to be the one reality with which we are in immediate contact, which we see and touch and taste and handle every hour of our lives. It may, therefore, sound a rather startling paradox to say that matter—matter in the sense of the Materialist—is something which nobody has ever seen, touched, or handled. Yet that is the literal and undeniable fact. Nobody has ever seen or touched or otherwise come in contact with a piece of matter. For in the experience which the plain man calls seeing or touching there is always present another thing. Even if we suppose that he is Justified in saying 'I touch matter,' there is always present the 'I' as well as the matter.[2] It is always and inevitably matter + mind that he knows. Nobody ever can get away from this 'I,' nobody can ever see or feel what matter is like apart from the 'I' which knows {8} it. He may, indeed, infer that this matter exists apart from the 'I' which knows it. He may infer that it exists, and may even go as far as to assume that, apart from his seeing or touching, or anybody else's seeing or touching, matter possesses all those qualities which it possesses for his own consciousness. But this is inference, and not immediate knowledge. And the validity or reasonableness of the inference may be disputed. How far it is reasonable or legitimate to attribute to matter as it is in itself the qualities which it has for us must depend upon the nature of those qualities. Let us then go on to ask whether the qualities which constitute matter as we know it are qualities which we can reasonably or even intelligibly attribute to a supposed matter-in-itself, to matter considered as something capable of existing by itself altogether apart from any kind of conscious experience.

In matter, as we know it, there are two elements. There are certain sensations, or certain qualities which we come to know by sensation, and there are certain relations. Now, with regard to the sensations, a very little reflection will, I think, show us that it is absolutely meaningless to say that matter has the qualities implied by these sensations, even when they are not felt, and would still possess them, even supposing it never had been and never would be felt by any one whatever. In a world in which {9} there were no eyes and no minds, what would be the meaning of saying that things were red or blue? In a world in which there were no ears and no minds, there would clearly be no such thing as sound. This is exactly the point at which Locke's analysis stopped. He admitted that the 'secondary qualities'—colours, sounds, tastes—of objects were really not in the things themselves but in the mind which perceives them. What existed in the things was merely a power of producing these sensations in us, the quality in the thing being not in the least like the sensations which it produces in us: he admitted that this power of producing a sensation was something different from, and totally unlike, the sensation itself. But when he came to the primary qualities—solidity, shape, magnitude and the like—he supposed that the qualities in the thing were exactly the same as they are for our minds. If all mind were to disappear from the Universe, there would henceforth be no red and blue, no hot and cold; but things would still be big or small, round or square, solid or fluid. Yet, even with these 'primary qualities' the reference to mind is really there just as much as in the case of the secondary qualities; only the fact is not quite so obvious. And one reason for this is that these primary qualities involve, much more glaringly and unmistakably than the secondary, something which is not mere sensation—something which {10} implies thought and not mere sense. What do we mean by solidity, for instance? We mean partly that we get certain sensations from touching the object—sensations of touch and sensations of what is called the muscular sense, sensations of muscular exertion and of pressure resisted. Now, so far as that is what solidity means, it is clear that the quality in question involves as direct a reference to our subjective feelings as the secondary qualities of colour and sound. But something more than this is implied in our idea of solidity. We think of external objects as occupying space. And spaciality cannot be analysed away into mere feelings of ours. The feelings of touch which we derive from an object come to us one after the other. No mental reflection upon sensations which come one after the other in time could ever give us the idea of space, if they were not spacially related from the first. It is of the essence of spaciality that the parts of the object shall be thought of as existing side by side, outside one another. But this side-by-sideness, this outsideness, is after all a way in which the things present themselves to a mind. Space is made up of relations; and what is the meaning of relations apart from a mind which relates, or for which the things are related? If spaciality were a quality of the thing in itself, it would exist no matter what became of other things. It would be quite possible, therefore, {11} that the top of this table should exist without the bottom: yet everybody surely would admit the meaninglessness of talking about a piece of matter (no matter how small, be it an atom or the smallest electron conceived by the most recent physical speculation) which had a top without a bottom, or a right-hand side without a left. This space-occupying quality which is the most fundamental element in our ordinary conception of matter is wholly made up of the relation of one part of it to another. Now can a relation exist except for a mind? As it seems to me, the suggestion is meaningless. Relatedness only has a meaning when thought of in connection with a mind which is capable of grasping or holding together both terms of the relation. The relation between point A and point B is not in point A or in point B taken by themselves. It is all in the 'between': 'betweenness' from its very nature cannot exist in any one point of space or in several isolated points of space or things in space; it must exist only in some one existent which holds together and connects those points. And nothing, as far as we can understand, can do that except a mind. Apart from mind there can be no relatedness: apart from relatedness no space: apart from space no matter. It follows that apart from mind there can be no matter.

It will probably be known to all of you that the {12} first person to make this momentous inference was Bishop Berkeley. There was, indeed, an obscure medieval schoolman, hardly recognized by the historians of Philosophy, one Nicholas of Autrecourt, Dean of Metz,[3] who anticipated him in the fourteenth century, and other better-known schoolmen who approximated to the position; and there are, of course, elements in the teaching of Plato and even of Aristotle, or possible interpretations of Plato and Aristotle, which point in the same direction. But full-blown Idealism, in the sense which involves a denial of the independent existence of matter, is always associated with the name of Bishop Berkeley.

I can best make my meaning plain to you by quoting a passage or two from his Principles of Human Knowledge, in which he extends to the primary qualities of matter the analysis which Locke had already applied to the secondary.

'But, though it were possible that solid, figured, moveable substances may exist without the mind, corresponding to the ideas we have of bodies, yet how is it possible for us to know this? Either we must know it by Sense or by Reason.—As for our senses, by them we have the knowledge only of our sensations, ideas, or those things that are immediately perceived by sense, call them what you will; but they do not inform us that things exist {13} without the mind, or unperceived, like to those which are perceived. This the Materialists themselves acknowledge.—It remains therefore that if we have any knowledge at all of external things, it must be by Reason inferring their existence from what is immediately perceived by sense. But what reason can induce us to believe the existence of bodies without the mind, from what we perceive, since the very patrons of Matter themselves do not pretend there is any necessary connexion betwixt them and our ideas? I say it is granted on all hands—and what happens in dreams, frenzies, and the like, puts it beyond dispute—that it is possible we might be affected with all the ideas we have now, though there were no bodies existing without resembling them. Hence, it is evident the supposition of external bodies is not necessary for the producing our ideas; since it is granted they are produced sometimes, and might possibly be produced always in the same order we see them in at present, without their concurrence.

* * * * * *

'In short, if there were external bodies, it is impossible we should ever come to know it; and if there were not, we might have the very same reasons to think there were that we have now. Suppose—what no one can deny possible—an intelligence without the help of external bodies, to be affected with the same train of sensations or ideas that you are, imprinted in the same order and with like vividness in his mind. I ask whether that intelligence hath not all the reason to believe the existence of corporeal substances, represented by his ideas, and exciting them in his mind, that you can possibly have for believing the same thing? Of this there can be no {14} question—which one consideration were enough to make any reasonable person suspect the strength of whatever arguments he may think himself to have, for the existence of bodies without the mind.'[4]

Do you say that in that case the tables and chairs must be supposed to disappear the moment we all leave the room? It is true that we do commonly think of the tables and chairs as remaining, even when there is no one there to see or touch them. But that only means, Berkeley explains, that if we or any one else were to come back into the room, we should perceive them. Moreover, even in thinking of them as things which might be perceived under certain conditions, they have entered our minds and so proclaimed their ideal or mind-implying character. To prove that things exist without the mind we should have to conceive of things as unconceived or unthought of. And that is a feat which no one has ever yet succeeded in accomplishing.

Here is Berkeley's own answer to the objection:

'But, say you, surely there is nothing easier than for me to imagine trees, for instance, in a park, or books existing in a closet, and nobody by to perceive them. I answer, you may so, there is no difficulty in it; but what is all this, I beseech you, more than framing in your mind certain ideas which you call books and trees, and {15} at the same time omitting to frame the idea of any one that may perceive them? But do not you yourself perceive or think of them all the while? This therefore is nothing to the purpose: it only shews you have the power of imagining or forming ideas in your mind; but it does not shew that you can conceive it possible the objects of your thought may exist without the mind. To make out this, it is necessary that you conceive them existing unconceived or unthought of, which is a manifest repugnancy. When we do our utmost to conceive the existence of external bodies, we are all the while only contemplating our own ideas. But the mind, taking no notice of itself, is deluded to think it can and does conceive bodies existing unthought of or without the mind, though at the same time they are apprehended by, or exist in, itself. A little attention will discover to any one the truth and evidence of what is here said, and make it unnecessary to insist on any other proofs against the existence of material substance.'[5]

Berkeley no doubt did not adequately appreciate the importance of the distinction between mere sensations and mental relations. In the paragraph which I have read to you he tends to explain space away into mere subjective feelings: in this respect and in many others he has been corrected by Kant and the post-Kantian Idealists. Doubtless we cannot analyse away our conception of space or of substance into mere feelings. But relations imply mind no less than sensations. Things are no mere {16} bundles of sensations; we do think of them as objects or substances possessing attributes. Indeed to call them (with Berkeley), 'bundles of sensations' implies that the bundle is as important an element in thinghood as the sensations themselves. The bundle implies what Kant would call the intellectual 'categories' of Substance, Quantity, Quality, and the like. We do think objects: but an object is still an object of thought. We can attach no intelligible meaning to the term 'object' which does not imply a subject.

If there is nothing in matter, as we know it, which does not obviously imply mind, if the very idea of matter is unintelligible apart from mind, it is clear that matter can never have existed without mind.

What then, it may be asked, of the things which no human eye has ever seen or even thought of? Are we to suppose that a new planet comes into existence for the first time when first it sails into the telescope of the astronomer, and that Science is wrong in inferring that it existed not only before that particular astronomer saw it, but before there were any astronomers or other human or even animal intelligences upon this planet to observe it? Did the world of Geology come into existence for the first time when some eighteenth-century geologist first suspected that the world was more than six thousand years old? Are all those ages of past {17} history, when the earth and the sun were but nebulae, a mere imagination, or did that nebulous mass come into existence thousands or millions of years afterwards when Kant or Laplace first conceived that it had existed? The supposition is clearly self-contradictory and impossible. If Science be not a mass of illusion, this planet existed millions of years before any human—or, so far as we know, any animal minds—existed to think its existence. And yet I have endeavoured to show the absurdity of supposing that matter can exist except for a mind. It is clear, then, that it cannot be merely for such minds as ours that the world has always existed. Our minds come and go. They have a beginning; they go to sleep; they may, for aught that we can immediately know, come to an end. At no time does any one of them, at no time do all of them together, apprehend all that there is to be known. We do not create a Universe; we discover it piece by piece, and after all very imperfectly. Matter cannot intelligibly be supposed to exist apart from Mind: and yet it clearly does not exist merely for our minds. Each of us knows only one little bit of the Universe: all of us together do not know the whole. If the whole is to exist at all, there must be some one mind which knows the whole. The mind which is necessary to the very existence of the Universe is the mind that we call God.

{18}

In this way we are, as it seems to me, led up by a train of reasoning which is positively irresistible to the idea that, so far from matter being the only existence, it has no existence of its own apart from some mind which knows it—in which and for which it exists. The existence of a Mind possessing universal knowledge is necessary as the presupposition both of there being any world to know, and also of there being any lesser minds to know it. It is, indeed, possible to believe in the eternal existence of limited minds, while denying the existence of the one Omniscient Mind. That is a hypothesis on which I will say a word hereafter.[6] It is enough here to say that it is one which is not required to explain the world as we know it. The obvious prima facie view of the matter is that the minds which apparently have a beginning, which develope slowly and gradually and in close connexion with certain physical processes, owe their origin to whatever is the ultimate source or ground of the physical processes themselves. The order or systematic interconnexion of all the observable phenomena in the Universe suggests that the ultimate Reality must be one Being of some kind; the argument which I have suggested leads us to regard that one Reality as a spiritual Reality. We are not yet entitled to speak of this physical Universe as caused {19} by God: that is a question which I hope to discuss in our next lecture. All that I want to establish now is that we cannot explain the world without the supposition of one universal Mind in which and for which all so-called material things exist, and always have existed.

So far I have endeavoured to establish the existence of God by a line of thought which also leads to the position that matter has no independent existence apart from conscious mind, that at bottom nothing exists except minds and their experiences. Now I know that this is a line of thought which, to those who are unfamiliar with it, seems so paradoxical and extravagant that, even when a man does not see his way to reply to it, it will seldom produce immediate or permanent conviction the first time he becomes acquainted with it. It is for the most part only by a considerable course of habituation, extending over some years, that a man succeeds in thinking himself into the idealistic view of the Universe. And after all, there are many minds—some of them, I must admit, not wanting in philosophical power—who never succeed in accomplishing that feat at all. Therefore, while I feel bound to assert that the clearest and most irrefragable argument for the existence of God is that which is supplied by the idealistic line of thought, I should be sorry to have to admit that a man {20} cannot be a Theist, or that he cannot be a Theist on reasonable grounds, without first being an Idealist. From my own point of view most of the other reasons for believing in the existence of God resolve themselves into idealistic arguments imperfectly thought out. But they may be very good arguments, as far as they go, even when they are not thought out to what seem to me their logical consequences. One of these lines of thought I shall hope to develope in my next lecture; but meanwhile let me attempt to reduce the argument against Materialism to a form in which it will perhaps appeal to Common-sense without much profound metaphysical reflection.

At the level of ordinary common-sense thought there appear to be two kinds of Reality—mind and matter. And yet our experience of the unity of Nature, of the intimate connexion between human and animal minds and their organisms (organisms governed by a single intelligible and interconnected system of laws) is such that we can hardly help regarding them as manifestations or products or effects or aspects of some one Reality. There is, almost obviously, some kind of Unity underlying all the diversity of things. Our world does not arise by the coming together of two quite independent Realities—mind and matter—governed by no law or by unconnected and independent systems of law. {21} All things, all phenomena, all events form parts of a single inter-related, intelligible whole: that is the presupposition not only of Philosophy but of Science. Or if any one chooses to say that it is a presupposition and so an unwarrantable piece of dogmatism, I will say that it is the hypothesis to which all our knowledge points. It is at all events the one common meeting-point of nearly all serious thinkers. The question remains, 'What is the nature of this one Reality?' Now, if this ultimate Reality be not mind, it must be one of two things. It must be matter, or it must be a third thing which is neither mind nor matter, but something quite different from either. Now many who will not follow the idealistic line of thought the whole way—so far as to recognize that the ultimate Reality is Mind—will at least admit that Idealists have successfully shown the impossibility of supposing that the ultimate Reality can be matter. For all the properties of matter are properties which imply some relation to our sensibility or our thought. Moreover, there is such a complete heterogeneity between consciousness and unconscious matter, considered as something capable of existing without mind, that it seems utterly impossible and unthinkable that mind should be simply the product or attribute of matter. That the ultimate Reality cannot be what we mean by matter has been admitted by the most naturalistic, {22} and, in the ordinary sense, anti-religious thinkers—Spinoza, for instance, and Haeckel, and Herbert Spencer. The question remains, 'Which is the easier, the more probable, the more reasonable theory—that the ultimate Reality should be Mind, or that it should be something so utterly unintelligible and inconceivable to us as a tertium quid—a mysterious Unknown and Unknowable—which is neither mind nor matter?' For my own part, I see no reason to suppose that our inability to think of anything which is neither matter nor mind but quite unlike either is a mere imperfection of human thought. It seems more reasonable to assume that our inability to think of such a mysterious X is due to there being no such thing.[7]

Our only way of judging of the Unknown is by the analogy of the known. It is more probable, surely, that the world known to us should exhibit something of the characteristics of the Reality from which it is derived, or of which it forms a manifestation, than that it should exhibit none of these characteristics. No doubt, if we were to argue from some small part of our experience, or from the detailed characteristics of one part of our experience to what is beyond our experience; if, for instance {23} (I am here replying to an objection of Höffding's), a blind man were to argue that the world must be colourless because he sees no colour, or if any of us were to affirm that in other planets there can be no colours but what we see, no sensations but what we feel, no mental powers but what we possess, the inference would be precarious enough. The Anthropomorphist in the strict sense—the man who thinks that God or the gods must have human bodies—no doubt renders himself liable to the gibe that, if oxen could think, they would imagine the gods to be like oxen, and so on. But the cases are not parallel. We have no difficulty in thinking that in other worlds there may be colours which we have never seen, or whole groups of sensation different from our own: we cannot think that any existence should be neither mind nor matter, but utterly unlike either. We are not arguing from the mere absence of some special experience, but from the whole character of all the thought and experience that we actually possess, of all that we are and the whole Universe with which we are in contact. The characteristic of the whole world which we know is that it consists of mind and matter in close connexion—we may waive for a moment the nature of that connexion. Is it more probable that the ultimate Reality which lies beyond our reach should be something which possesses the characteristics of mind, or that it should {24} be totally unlike either mind or matter? Do you insist that we logically ought to say it might contain the characteristics of both mind and matter? There is only one way in which such a combination seems clearly thinkable by us, i.e. when we represent matter as either in the idealistic sense the thought or experience of mind, or (after the fashion of ordinary realistic Theism) as created or produced by mind. But if you insist on something more than this, if you want to think of the qualities of matter as in some other way included in the nature of the ultimate Reality as well as those of mind, at all events we could still urge that we shall get nearer to the truth by thinking of this ultimate Reality in its mind-aspect than by thinking of it in its matter-aspect.

I do not believe that the human mind is really equal to the task of thinking of a Reality which is one and yet is neither mind nor matter but something which combines the nature of both. Practically, where such a creed is professed, the man either thinks of an unconscious Reality in some way generating or evolving mind, and so falls back into the Materialism which he has verbally disclaimed; or he thinks of a mind producing or causing or generating a matter which when produced is something different from itself. This last is of course ordinary Theism in the form in which it is commonly {25} held by those who are not Idealists. From a practical and religious point of view there is nothing to be said against such a view. Still it involves a Dualism, the philosophical difficulties of which I have attempted to suggest to you. I confess that for my own part the only way in which I can conceive of a single ultimate Reality which combines the attributes of what we call mind with those of what we know as matter is by thinking of a Mind conscious of a world or nature which has no existence except in and for that Mind and whatever less complete consciousnesses that may be. I trust that those who have failed to follow my sketch of the arguments which lead to this idealistic conclusion may at least be led by it to see the difficulties either of Materialism or of that kind of agnostic Pantheism which, while admitting in words that the ultimate Reality is not matter, refuses to invest it with the attributes of mind. The argument may be reduced to its simplest form by saying we believe that the ultimate Reality is Mind because mind will explain matter, while matter will not explain mind: while the idea of a Something which is neither in mind nor matter is both unintelligible and gratuitous.

And this line of thought may be supplemented by another. Whatever may be thought of the existence of matter apart from mind, every one will {26} admit that matter possesses no value or worth apart from mind. When we bring into account our moral judgements or judgements of value, we have no difficulty in recognizing mind as the highest or best kind of existence known to us. There is, surely, a certain intrinsic probability in supposing that the Reality from which all being is derived must possess at least as much worth or value as the derived being; and that in thinking of that Reality by the analogy of the highest kind of existence known to us we shall come nearer to a true thought of it than by any other way of thinking possible to us. This is a line of argument which I hope to develope further when I come to examine the bearing upon the religious problem of what is as real a part of our experience as any other—our moral experience.

I will remind you in conclusion, that our argument for the existence of God is at present incomplete. I have tried to lead you to the idea that the ultimate Reality is spiritual, that it is a Mind which knows, or is conscious of, matter. I have tried to lead you with the Idealist to think of the physical Universe as having no existence except in the mind of God, or at all events (for those who fail to follow the idealistic line of thought) to believe that the Universe does not exist without such a Mind. What further relation exists between physical nature and this Universal Spirit, I shall hope in the next lecture {27} to consider; and in so doing to suggest a line of argument which will independently lead to the same result, and which does not necessarily presuppose the acceptance of the idealistic creed.

LITERATURE

The reader who wishes to have the idealistic argument sketched in the foregoing chapter developed more fully should read Berkeley's Principles of Human Knowledge. For the correction of Berkeley's sensationalistic mistakes the best course is to read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason or the shorter Prolegomena to any future Metaphysic or any of the numerous expositions or commentaries upon Kant. (One of the best is the 'Reproduction' prefixed to Dr. Hutchison Stirling's Text-book to Kant.) The non-metaphysical reader should, however, be informed that Kant is very hard reading, and is scarcely intelligible without some slight knowledge of the previous history of Philosophy, especially of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, while some acquaintance with elementary Logic is also desirable. He will find the argument for non-sensationalistic Idealism re-stated in a post-Kantian but much easier form in Ferrier's Institutes of Metaphysic. The argument for a theistic Idealism is powerfully stated (though it is not easy reading) in the late Prof. T. H. Green's Prolegomena to Ethics, Book I. In view of recent realistic revivals I may add that the earlier chapters of Mr. Bradley's Appearance and Reality still seem to me to contain an unanswerable defence of Idealism as against Materialism or any form of Realism, though his Idealism is not of the theistic type defended in the above lecture. The idealistic argument is stated in a way which makes strongly for Theism by Professor Ward in Naturalism and Agnosticism—a work which would perhaps be the best sequel to these lectures for any reader {28} who does not want to undertake a whole course of philosophical reading: readers entirely unacquainted with Physical Science might do well to begin with Part II. A more elementary and very clear defence of Theism from the idealistic point of view is to be found in Dr. Illingworth's Personality Human and Divine. Representatives of non-idealistic Theism will be mentioned at the end of the next lecture.

[1] Mind, vol. iv. (U.S.), 1885.

[2] I do not mean of course that in the earliest stages of consciousness this distinction is actually made; but, if there are stages of consciousness in which the 'I' is not realized, the idea of matter or even of an 'object' or 'not-self' existing apart from consciousness must be supposed to be equally absent.

[3] I have dealt at length with this forgotten thinker in a Presidential Address to the Aristotelian Society, printed in their Proceedings for 1907.

[4] Principles of Human Knowledge, pt. i., Sections 18, 20.

[5] Principles of Human Knowledge, pt. 1., Section 23.

[6] See Lecture IV., pp. 96-101, 123-6.

[7] I have attempted to meet this line of argument somewhat more adequately, in the form in which it has recently been taken up by Professor Höffding in his Philosophy of Religion, in a review in the Review of Theology and Philosophy for November, 1907 (vol. iii.).

{29}

LECTURE II

THE UNIVERSAL CAUSE

In my last lecture I endeavoured to show that matter, so far from constituting the ultimate Reality, cannot reasonably be thought of as existing at all without mind; and that we cannot explain the world without assuming the existence of a Mind in which and for which everything that is not mind has its being. But we are still very far from having fully cleared up the relation between the divine Mind and that Nature which exists in it and for it: while we have hardly dealt at all with the relation between the universal Mind and those lesser minds which we have treated—so far without much argument—as in some way derived from, or dependent upon, that Mind. So far as our previous line of argument goes, we might have to look upon the world as the thought of God, but not as caused by Him or due to His will. We might speak of God as 'making Nature,' but only in the sense in which you or I make Nature when we think it or experience it. {30} 'The world is as necessary to God as God is to the world,' we are often told—for instance by my own revered teacher, the late Professor Green. How unsatisfactory this position is from a religious point of view I need hardly insist. For all that such a theory has to say to the contrary, we might have to suppose that, though God is perfectly good, the world which He is compelled to think is very bad, and going from bad to worse. To think of God merely as the Mind which eternally contemplates Nature, without having any power whatever of determining what sort of Nature it is to be, supplies no ground for hope or aspiration—still less for worship, adoration, imitation. I suggested the possibility that from such a point of view God might be thought of as good, and the world as bad. But that is really to concede too much. A being without a will could as little be bad as he could be good: he would be simply a being without a character. From an intellectual point such a way of looking at the Universe might be more intelligent or intelligible than that of pure Materialism or pure Agnosticism; but morally and religiously I don't know that, when its consequences are fully realized, it is any great improvement upon either of them.[1] {31} Moreover, even intellectually it fails to satisfy the demand which most reflecting people feel, that the world shall be regarded as a Unity of some kind. If God is thought of as linked by some inexplicable fate to a Nature over which He has no sort of control—not so much control as a mere human being who can produce limited changes in the world,—we can hardly be said to have reduced the world to a Unity. The old Dualism has broken out again: after all we still have God and the world confronting one another; neither of them is in any way explained by the other. Still less could such a world be supposed to have a purpose or rational end. For our own mere intellectual satisfaction as well as for the satisfaction of our religious needs we must go on to ask whether we are not justified in thinking of God as the Cause or Creator of the world, as well as the Thinker of it.

This enquiry introduces us to the whole problem of Causality. The sketch which I gave you last time of Bishop Berkeley's argument was a very imperfect one. Bishop Berkeley was from one point of view a great philosophic iconoclast, though he destroyed only that he might build up. He destroyed the superstition of a self-existing matter: {32} he also waged war against what I will venture to call the kindred superstition of a mysterious causal nexus between the physical antecedent and the physical consequent. On this side his work was carried on by Hume. Berkeley resolved our knowledge into a succession of 'ideas.' He did, no doubt, fall into the mistake of treating our knowledge as if it were a mere succession of feelings: he ignored far too much—though he did not do so completely—that other element in our knowledge, the element of intellectual relation, of which I said something last time. Here, no doubt, Berkeley has been corrected by Kant; and, so far, practically all modern Idealists will own their indebtedness to Kant. Even in the apprehension of a succession of ideas, in the mere recognition that this feeling comes after that, there is an element which cannot be explained by mere feeling. The apprehension that this feeling came after that feeling is not itself a feeling. But can I detect any relation between these experiences of mine except that of succession? We commonly speak of fire as the cause of the melting of the wax, but what do we really know about the matter? Surely on reflection we must admit that we know nothing but this—that, so far as our experience goes, the application of fire is always followed by the melting of the wax. Where this is the case we do, from the point of view of {33} ordinary life, speak of the one phenomenon as the cause of the other. Where we don't discover such an invariable succession, we don't think of the one event as the cause of the other.

I shall be told, perhaps, that on this view of the nature of Causality we ought to speak of night as the cause of day. So perhaps we should, if the result to which we are led by a more limited experience were not corrected by the results of a larger experience. To say nothing of the valuable correction afforded by the polar winter and the polar summer, we have learned by a more comprehensive experience to replace the law that day follows night by the wider generalisation that the visibility of objects is invariably coincident upon the presence of some luminous body and not upon a previous state of darkness. But between cases of what we call mere succession and what is commonly called causal sequence the difference lies merely in the observed fact that in some cases the sequence varies, while in others no exception has ever been discovered. No matter how frequently we observe that a sensation of red follows the impact upon the aural nerve of a shock derived from a wave of ether of such and such a length, we see no reason why it should do so. We may, no doubt, make a still wider generalization, and say that every event in Nature is invariably preceded by some definite complex of conditions, {34} and so arrive at a general law of the Uniformity of Nature. And such a law is undoubtedly the express or implied basis of all inference in the Physical Sciences. When we have once accepted that law (as the whole mass of our experience in the purely physical region inclines us to do), then a single instance of A B C being followed by D (when we are quite sure that we have included all the antecedents which we do not know from other experience to be irrelevant) will warrant our concluding that we have discovered a law of nature. On the next occasion of A B C's occurrence we confidently predict that D will follow. But, however often we have observed such a sequence, and however many similar sequences we may have observed, we are no nearer to knowing why D should follow ABC: we can only know that it always does: and on the strength of that knowledge we infer, with a probability which we do no doubt for practical purposes treat as a certainty, that it always will. But on reflection we can see no reason why a wave of ether of a certain length should produce red rather than blue, a colour rather than a sound. There, as always, we discover nothing but succession, not necessary connexion.

These cases of unvaried succession among phenomena, it should be observed, are quite different from cases of real necessary connexion. We don't want to examine thousands of instances of two {35} added to two to be quite sure that they always make four, nor in making the inference do we appeal to any more general law of Uniformity. We simply see that it is and always must be so. Mill no doubt tells us he has no difficulty in supposing that in the region of the fixed stars two and two might make five, but nobody believes him. At all events few of us can pretend to such feats of intellectual elasticity. No amount of contradictory testimony from travellers to the fixed stars, no matter whether they were Bishops of the highest character or trained as Professors of physical Science, would induce us to give a moment's credence to such a story. We simply see that two and two must make four, and that it is inconceivable they should ever, however exceptionally, make five. It is quite otherwise with any case of succession among external phenomena, no matter how unvaried. So long as we confine ourselves to merely physical phenomena (I put aside for the moment the case of conscious or other living beings) nowhere can we discover anything but succession; nowhere do we discover Causality in the sense of a necessary connexion the reversal of which is inconceivable.

Are we then to conclude that there is no such thing as Causality, that in searching for a cause of everything that happens, we are pursuing a mere will o' the wisp, using a mere vox nihili which has {36} as little meaning for the reflecting mind as fate or fortune? Surely, in the very act of making the distinction between succession and causality, in the very act of denying that we can discover any causal connexion between one physical phenomenon and another, we imply that we have got the idea of Causality in our minds; and that, however little we may have discovered a genuine cause, we could not believe that anything could happen without a cause.

For my own part, I find it quite possible to believe that a phenomenon which has been followed by another phenomenon 9999 times should on the 10,000th time be followed by some other phenomenon. Give me the requisite experience, and belief would follow; give me even any adequate evidence that another person has had such an experience (though I should be very particular about the evidence), and I should find no difficulty in believing it. But to tell me that the exception to an observed law might take place without any cause at all for the variation would seem to be pure nonsense. Put the matter in another way. Let us suppose an empty world, if one can speak of such a thing without contradiction—let us suppose that at one time nothing whatever had existed, neither mind nor matter nor any of that mysterious entity which some people find it possible to believe in which is {37} neither mind nor matter. Let us suppose literally nobody and nothing to have existed. Now could you under these conditions rationally suppose that anything could have come into existence? Could you for one moment admit the possibility that after countless aeons of nothingness a flash of lightning should occur or an animal be born? Surely, on reflection those who are most suspicious of a priori knowledge, who are most unwilling to carry their speculations beyond the limits of actual experience, will be prepared to say, 'No, the thing is utterly for ever impossible.' Ex nihilo nihil fit: for every event there must be a cause. Those who profess to reject all other a priori or self-evident knowledge, show by their every thought and every act that they never really doubt that much.

Now, it would be just possible to contend that we have got the bare abstract concept or category of Causality in our minds, and yet that there is nothing within our experience to give it any positive content—so that we should have to say, 'Every event must have a cause, but we never know or can know what that cause is. If we are to talk about causes at all, we can only say "The Unknowable is the cause of all things."' Such a position can be barely stated without a contradiction. But surely it is a very difficult one. Nature does not generally supply us with categories of thought, while it gives us no power {38} or opportunity of using them. It would be like holding, for instance, that we have indeed been endowed with the idea of number in general, but that we cannot discover within our experience any numerable things; that we have got the idea of 1, 2, 3, 4, etc., but have no capacity whatever for actually counting—for saying that here are three apples, and there four marbles. And, psychologically, it would be difficult to find any parallel to anything of the kind. Nature does not first supply us with clearly defined categories of thought, and then give us a material to exercise them upon. In general we discover these abstract categories by using them in our actual thinking. We count beads or men or horses before we evolve an abstract idea of number, or an abstract multiplication table. It is very difficult to see how this idea of Cause could possibly have got into our heads if we had never in the whole course of our experience come into any sort of contact with any actual concrete cause. Where then, within our experience, if not in the succession of external events, shall we look for a cause—for something to which we can apply this category or abstract notion of causality? I answer 'We must look within: it is in our experience of volition that we actually find something answering to our idea of causal connexion.' And here, I would invite you not to think so much of our consciousness of actually {39} moving our limbs. Here it is possible to argue plausibly that the experience of exercising causality is a delusion. I imagine that, if I will to do so, I can move my arm; but I will to stretch out my arm, and lo! it remains glued to my side, for I have suddenly been paralysed. Or I may be told that the consciousness of exerting power is a mere experience of muscular contraction, and the like. I would ask you to think rather of your power of directing the succession of your own thoughts. I am directly conscious, for instance, that the reason why I am now thinking of Causality, and not (say) of Tariff Reform, is the fact that I have conceived the design of delivering a course of lectures on this subject; the succession of ideas which flow through my mind as I write or speak is only explicable by reference to an end—an end which I am striving to bring into actual being. In such voluntarily concentrated purposeful successions of thought I am immediately exercising causality: and this causality does further influence the order of events in physical nature. My pen or my tongue moves in consequence of this striving of mine, though no doubt for such efforts to take place other physical conditions must be presupposed, which are not wholly within my own control. I am the cause, but not the whole or sole cause of these physical disturbances in external nature: I am a cause but not an uncaused cause. {40} My volition, though it is not the sole cause of the event which I will, is enough to give me a conception of a cause which is the sole cause of the events.

The attempt is of course sometimes made, as it was made by Hume, to explain away this immediate consciousness of volition, and to say that all that I immediately know is the succession of my subjective experiences. It may be contended that I don't know, any more than in the case of external phenomena, that because the thought of my lecture comes first and the thought of putting my pen into the ink to write it comes afterwards, therefore the one thought causes the other. Hence it is important to point out that I have a negative experience with which to contrast the positive experience. I do not always, even as regards my own inward experiences, assume that succession implies Causality. Supposing, as I speak or write, a twinge of the gout suddenly introduces itself into the succession of my experiences: then I am conscious of no such inner connexion between the new experience and that which went before it. Then I am as distinctly conscious of passivity—of not causing the succession of events which take place in my mind—as I am in the other case of actively causing it. If the consciousness of exercising activity is a delusion, why does not that delusion occur in the one case as much as in the other? I hold then that in the consciousness of {41} our own activity we get a real direct experience of Causality. When Causality is interpreted to mean mere necessary connexion—like the mathematical connexion between four and twice two or the logical connexion between the premisses of a Syllogism and its conclusion,—its nature is fundamentally misrepresented. The essence of Causality is not necessary connexion but Activity. Such activity we encounter in our own experience of volition and nowhere else.[2]

Now, if the only cause of which I am immediately conscious is the will of a conscious rational being, is it not reasonable to infer that some such agency is at work in the case of those phenomena which we see no reason to attribute to the voluntary actions of men and animals? It is well known that primitive man took this step. Primitive man had no notion of the 'Uniformity of Nature': it is only very gradually that civilized man has discovered it. But primitive man never doubted for one instant the law of Causality: he never doubted that for any change, or at least for any change of the kind which most frequently attracted his attention, there must {42} be a cause. Everything that moved he supposed to be alive, or to be under the influence of some living being more or less like himself. If the sea raged, he supposed that the Sea-god was angry. If it did not rain to-day, when it rained yesterday, that was due to the favour of the Sky-god, and so on. The world for him was full of spirits. The argument of primitive man's unconscious but thoroughly sound Metaphysic is well expressed by the fine lines of Wordsworth in the Excursion:

  Once more to distant ages of the world
  Let us revert, and place before our thoughts
  The face which rural solitude might wear
  To the unenlightened swains of pagan Greece.
  —In that fair clime, the lonely herdsman, stretched
  On the soft grass through half a summer's day,
  With music lulled his indolent repose:
  And, in some fit of weariness, if he,
  When his own breath was silent, chanced to hear
  A distant strain, far sweeter than the sounds
  Which his poor skill could make, his fancy fetched,
  Even from the blazing chariot of the sun,
  A beardless Youth, who touched a golden lute,
  And filled the illumined groves with ravishment.
  The nightly hunter, lifting a bright eye
  Up towards the crescent moon, with grateful heart
  Called on the lovely wanderer who bestowed
  That timely light, to share his joyous sport:
  And hence, a beaming Goddess with her Nymphs,
  Across the lawn and through the darksome grove,
  (Not unaccompanied with tuneful notes
  By echo multiplied from rock or cave),
{43}
  Swept in the storm of chace; as moon and stars
  Glance rapidly along the clouded heaven,
  When winds are blowing strong. The traveller slaked
  His thirst from rill or gushing fount, and thanked
  The Naiad. Sunbeams, upon distant hills
  Gliding apace, with shadows in their train,
  Might, with small help from fancy, be transformed
  Into fleet Oreads sporting visibly.
  The Zephyrs fanning, as they passed, their wings,
  Lacked not, for love, fair objects whom they wooed
  With gentle whisper. Withered boughs grotesque,
  Stripped of their leaves and twigs by hoary age,
  From depth of shaggy covert peeping forth
  In the low vale, or on steep mountain side;
  And, sometimes, intermixed with stirring horns
  Of the live deer, or goat's depending beard,—
  These were the lurking Satyrs, a wild brood
  Of gamesome Deities; or Pan himself,
  The simple shepherd's awe-inspiring God![3]

Growing experience of the unity of Nature, of the interdependence of all the various forces and departments of Nature, have made such a view of it impossible to civilized and educated man. Primitive man was quite right in arguing that, where he saw motion, there must be consciousness like his own. But we have been led by Science to believe that whatever is the cause of any one phenomenon (at least in inanimate nature), must be the cause of all. The interconnexion, the regularity, the order observable in phenomena are too great to be the result of chance or of the undesigned concurrence of a number of {44} independent agencies: and perhaps we may go on further to argue that this one cause must be the ultimate cause even of those events which are directly and immediately caused by our own wills. But that is a question which I will put aside for the present. At least for the events of physical nature there must be one Cause. And if the only sort of cause we know is a conscious and rational being, then we have another most powerful reason for believing that the ultimate reality, from which all other reality is derived, is Mind—a single conscious Mind which we may now further describe as not only Thought or Intelligence but also Will.[4]

Let me add this additional consideration in support of the conclusion that the world is not merely thought by God but is also willed by God. When we talk about thought without will, we are talking about something that we know absolutely nothing about. In all the consciousness that we know of, in every moment of our own immediate waking experience, we find thought, feeling, willing. Even in the consciousness of animals there appears to be something analogous to these three sides or aspects of consciousness: but at all events in developed human consciousness we know of no such thing as thinking without willing. All thought involves attention, and to attend is to will. If, therefore, on the grounds {45} suggested by the Hegelian or other post-Kantian Idealists, we have been led to think that the ultimate Reality is Mind or Spirit, we should naturally conclude by analogy that it must be Will as well as Thought and—I may add, though it hardly belongs to the present argument to insist upon that—Feeling. On the other hand if, with men like Schopenhauer and Edouard von Hartmann,[5] we are conducted by the appearances of design in Nature to the idea that Nature is striving after something, that the ultimate Reality is Will, we must supplement that line of argument by inferring from the analogy of our own Consciousness that Will without Reason is an unintelligible and meaningless abstraction, and that (as indeed even Hartmann saw) Schopenhauer's Will without Reason was as impossible an abstraction as the apparently will-less universal Thinker of the Hegelian:[6] while against Schopenhauer and his more reasonable successor, Hartmann, I should insist that an unconscious Will is as unintelligible a contradiction as an unconscious Reason. Schopenhauer and Hegel seem to have seen, each of them, exactly {46} half of the truth: God is not Will without Reason or Reason without Will, but both Reason and Will.

And here I must try to meet an inevitable objection. I do not say that these three activities of the human intellect stand in God side by side with the same distinctness and (if I may say so) irreducibility that they do in us. What feeling is for a Being who has no material organism, we can form no distinct conception. Our thought with its clumsy processes of inference from the known to the unknown must be very unlike what thought is in a Being to whom nothing is unknown. All our thought too involves generalization, and in universal concepts (as Mr. Bradley has shown us) much that was present in the living experience of actual perception is necessarily left out. Thought is but a sort of reproduction—and a very imperfect reproduction—of actual, living, sensible experience. We cannot suppose, then, that in God there is the same distinction between actual present experience and the universal concepts employed in thinking which there is in us. And so, again, willing must be a very different thing in a being who wills or creates the objects of his own thought from what it is in beings who can only achieve their ends by distinguishing in the sharpest possible manner between the indefinite multiplicity of things which they know but do not cause and the tiny fragment {47} of the Universe which by means of this knowledge they can control. Nevertheless, though all our thoughts of God must be inadequate, it is by thinking of Him as Thought, Will and Feeling—emancipated from those limitations which are obviously due to human conditions and are inapplicable to a Universal Mind—that we shall attain to the truest knowledge of God which lies within our capacity. Do you find a difficulty in the idea of partial and inadequate knowledge? Just think, then, of our knowledge of other people's characters—of what goes on in other people's minds. It is only by the analogy of our own immediate experience that we can come to know anything at all of what goes on in other people's minds. And, after all, such insight into other people's thoughts, emotions, motives, intentions, characters, remains very imperfect. The difficulty is greatest when the mind which we seek to penetrate is far above our own. How little most of us know what it would feel like to be a Shakespeare, a Mozart, or a Plato! And yet it would be absurd to talk as if our knowledge of our fellows was no knowledge at all. It is sufficient not merely to guide our own thoughts and actions, but to make possible sympathy, friendship, love. Is it not so with our knowledge of God? The Gnosticism which forgets the immensity of the difference between the Divine Mind and the human is not less unreasonable—not {48} less opposed to the principles on which we conduct our thinking in every other department of life—than the Agnosticism which rejects probabilities because we cannot have immediate certainties, and insists on knowing nothing because we cannot know everything.

The argument which infers that God is Will from the analogy of our own consciousness is one which is in itself independent of Idealism. It has been used by many philosophers who are Realists, such as Reid or Dr. Martineau, as well as by Idealists like Berkeley, or Pfleiderer, or Lotze. It does not necessarily presuppose Idealism; but it does, to my mind, fit in infinitely better with the idealistic mode of thought than with the realistic. If you hold that there is no difficulty in supposing dead, inert matter to exist without any mind to think it or know it, but that only a Mind can be supposed to cause change or motion, you are assuming a hard and fast distinction between matter and force which the whole trend of modern Science is tending to break down. It seems to imply the old Greek conception of an inert, passive, characterless hule which can only be acted upon from without. The modern Physicist, I imagine, knows nothing of an inert matter which can neither attract nor repel, even if he does not definitely embark on the more speculative theory which actually defines the atom or the electron {49} as a centre of force. Activity belongs to the very essence of matter as understood by modern Science. If matter can exist without mind, there is (from the scientific point of view) some difficulty in contending that it cannot likewise move or act without being influenced by an extraneous Mind. If, on the other hand, with the Idealist we treat the notion of matter without mind as an unintelligible abstraction, that line of thought would prepare us to see in force nothing but a mode of mental action. The Idealist who has already identified matter with the object of thought will find no difficulty in going on to see in force simply the activity or expression or object of Will. And if he learns from the Physicist that we cannot in the last resort—from the physical point of view—distinguish matter from force, that will fit in very well with the metaphysical position which regards thought and will as simply two inseparable aspects of the life of mind.

And now I will return once more for a moment to the idealistic argument. I have no doubt that many of you will have felt a difficulty in accepting the position that the world with which we come in contact is merely a state of our own or anybody else's consciousness. It is so obvious that in our experience we are in contact with a world which we do not create; which is what it is whether we like it or not; which opposes itself at every turn to our desires and {50} inclinations. You may have been convinced that we know nothing of any external world except the effects which it produces upon consciousness. But, you will say to yourselves, there must have been something to cause these effects. You are perfectly right in so thinking. Certainly in our experience of the world we are in contact with a Reality which is not any state of our own mind, a Reality which we do not create but simply discover, a Reality from which are derived the sensations which we cannot help feeling, and the objects which we cannot help thinking. So far you are quite right. But very often, when the Realist insists that there must be something to cause in my mind this appearance, which I call my consciousness of a table, he assumes all the while that this something—the real table, the table in itself—is there, inside or behind the phenomenal table that I actually see and feel; out there, in space. But if we were right in our analysis of space, if we were right in arguing that space is made up of intellectual relations[7] and that {51} intellectual relations can have no being and no meaning except in and for a mind which apprehends them, then it is obvious that you must not think of this Reality which is the cause of our experience of external objects, as being there, as occupying space, as being 'external.' If space be a form of our thought, or (in Kantian language) a form of our sensibility, then the Reality which is to have an existence in itself, cannot be in space. A reality which is not in space can no longer be thought of as matter: whatever else matter (as commonly conceived) means, it is certainly something which occupies space. Now we know of no kind of existence which is not in space except Mind. On the idealistic view to which I have been endeavouring to lead you, we are, indeed, justified in saying that there is a Reality which is the underlying cause or ground of our experiences, but that that Reality is one which we may describe as Thought no less than as Will.

It may interest some of you to know how near one who is often considered the typical representative of naturalistic, if not materialistic, modes of thought, ultimately came to accepting this identification. Let me read to you a passage from one of Mr. Spencer's later works—the third volume of his Sociology:—

'This transfiguration, which the inquiries of physicists continually increase, is aided by that other {52} transfiguration resulting from metaphysical inquiries. Subjective analysis compels us to admit that our scientific interpretations of the phenomena which objects present, are expressed in terms of our own variously-combined sensations and ideas—are expressed, that is, in elements belonging to consciousness, which are but symbols of the something beyond consciousness. Though analysis afterwards reinstates our primitive beliefs, to the extent of showing that behind every group of phenomenal manifestations there is always a nexus, which is the reality that remains fixed amid appearances which are variable;[1] yet we are shown that this nexus of reality is for ever inaccessible to consciousness. And when, once more, we remember that the activities constituting consciousness, being rigorously bounded, cannot bring in among themselves the activities beyond the bounds, which therefore seem unconscious, though production of either by the other seems to imply that they are of the same essential nature; this necessity we are under to think of the external energy in terms of the internal energy, gives rather a spiritualistic than a materialistic aspect to the Universe: further thought, however, obliging us to recognize the truth that a conception given in phenomenal manifestations of this ultimate energy can in no wise show us what it is.'[8]

Now, I think this is one of the passages which would justify Mr. Bradley's well-known epigram, that Mr. Herbert Spencer has told us more about the Unknowable than the rashest of theologians has ever ventured to tell us about God.

{53}

Even Kant, who is largely responsible for the mistakes about Causality against which this lecture has been a protest—I mean the tendency to resolve it into necessary connexion—did in the end come to admit that in the large resort we come into contact with Causality only in our own Wills. I owe the reference to Professor Ward, and will quote the paragraph in which he introduces it:—

'Presentation, Feeling, Conation, are ever one inseparable whole, and advance continuously to higher and higher forms. But for the fact that psychology was in the first instance studied, not for its own sake, but in subservience to speculation, this cardinal importance of activity would not have been so long overlooked. We should not have heard so much of passive sensations and so little of active movements. It is especially interesting to find that even Kant at length—in his latest work, the posthumous treatise on the Connexion of Physics and Metaphysics, only recently discovered and published—came to see the fundamental character of voluntary movement. I will venture to quote one sentence: "We should not recognise the moving forces of matter, not even through experience, if we were not conscious of our own activity in ourselves exerting acts of repulsion, approximation, etc." But to Maine de Biran, often called the French Kant, to Schopenhauer, and, finally, to our own British psychologists, Brown, Hamilton, Bain, Spencer, is especially due the merit of seeing the paramount importance of the active side of experience. To this then primarily, and not to any merely {54} intellectual function, we may safely refer the category of causality.'[9]

I may add that Professor Ward's Naturalism and Agnosticism, from which I have quoted, constitutes the most brilliant and important modern defence of the doctrine which I have endeavoured very inadequately to set before you in this lecture.

It is a remarkable fact that the typical exponent of popular so-called 'scientific' Agnosticism, and the founder of that higher metaphysical Agnosticism which has played so large a part in the history of modern Philosophy, should before their deaths have both made confessions which really amount to an abjuration of all Agnosticism. If the ultimate Reality is to be thought of as a rational Will, analogous to the will which each of us is conscious of himself having or being, he is no longer the Unknown or the Unknowable, but the God of Religion, who has revealed Himself in the consciousness of man, 'made in the image of God.' What more about Himself we may also hold to be revealed in the human spirit, I hope to consider in our next lecture. But, meanwhile, a word may be uttered in answer to the question which may very probably be asked—Is God a Person? A complete answer to the question would involve elaborate discussions, but for our present purpose the question may be answered very {55} briefly. If we are justified in thinking of God after the analogy of a human soul—if we are justified in thinking of Him as a self-conscious Being who thinks, feels, and wills, and who is, moreover (if I may a little anticipate the subject of our next lecture) in relation with, capable of loving and being loved by other such beings—then it seems most natural to speak of God's existence as personal. For to be a self-conscious being—conscious of itself and other beings, thinking, willing, feeling, loving—is what we mean by being a person. If any one prefers to speak of God as 'super-personal,' there is no great objection to so doing, provided that phrase is not made (as it often is) an excuse for really thinking of God after the analogy of some kind of existence lower than that of persons—as a force, an unconscious substance, or merely a name for the totality of things. But for myself, I prefer to say that our own self-consciousness gives us only an ideal of the highest type of existence which it nevertheless very imperfectly satisfies, and therefore I would rather think God is a Person in a far truer, higher, more complete sense than that in which any human being can be a person. God alone fully realizes the ideal of Personality. The essence of Personality is something positive: it signifies to us the highest kind of being within our knowledge—not (as is too often supposed) the mere limitations {56} and restraints which characterize human conscious life as we know it in ourselves. If we are justified in thinking of God after the analogy of the highest existence within our knowledge, we had better call Him a Person. The word is no doubt inadequate to the reality, as is all the language that we can employ about God; but it is at least more adequate than the terms employed by those who scruple to speak of God as a Person. It is at least more adequate and more intelligent than to speak of Him as a force, a substance, a 'something not ourselves which makes for righteousness.' Things do not 'make for righteousness'; and in using the term Person we shall at least make it clear that we do not think of Him as a 'thing,' or a collection of things, or a vague substratum of things, or even a mere totality of minds like our own.[10]

LITERATURE

As has been explained in this Lecture, many idealistic writers who insist upon the necessity of God as a universal, knowing Mind to explain both the existence of the world and our knowledge of it, are more or less ambiguous about the question whether the divine Mind is to be thought of as willing or causing the world, though passages occur in the writings of most of them which tend in this direction. 'God {57} must be thought of as creating the objects of his own thought' is a perfectly orthodox Hegelian formula. Among the idealistic writers (besides Berkeley) who correct this—as it seems to me—one-sided tendency, and who accept on the whole the view of the divine Causality taken in this Lecture, may be mentioned Lotze, the 9th Book of whose Microcosmus (translated by Miss Elizabeth Hamilton and Miss Constance Jones) or the third Book of his Logic (translation ed. by Prof. Bosanquet), may very well be read by themselves (his views may also be studied in his short Philosophy of Religion—two translations, by the late Mrs. Conybeare and by Professor Ladd); Pfleiderer, Philosophy and Development of Religion, especially chapter v.; and Professor Ward's Naturalism and Agnosticism.

Among the non-idealistic writers who have based their argument for the existence of God mainly or largely upon the consideration that Causality is unintelligible apart from a rational Will, may be mentioned—among older writers Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of Man, Essay I. (especially chapter v.), and among more recent ones Martineau, A Study of Religion. Flint's Theism may be recommended as one of the best attempts to state the theistic case with a minimum of technical Metaphysic.

Two little books by Professor Andrew Seth (now Seth Pringle-Pattison), though not primarily occupied with the religious problem, may be mentioned as very useful introductions to Philosophy—The Scottish Philosophers and Hegelianism and Personality.

[1] Of course deeply religious men like Green who have held this view did not admit, or did not realize, such consequences. The tendency here criticized is undoubtedly derived from Hegel, but passages suggestive of the opposite view can be extracted from his writings, e.g.: 'God, however, as subjective Power, is not simply will, intention, etc., but rather immediate Cause' (Philosophy of Religion, Eng. trans., ii. p. 129).

[2] The idea of Causality was by Kant identified with the idea of logical connexion, i.e. the relation of the premisses of a syllogism to its conclusion; but this does not involve time at all, and time is essential to the idea of Causality. For an admirable vindication of our immediate consciousness of Causality see Professor Stout's chapter on 'The Concept of Mental Activity' in Analytic Psychology (Book II. chap. i.).

[3] Excursion, Book IV.

[4] For the further development of this argument see Lecture IV.

[5] See especially the earlier chapters of The Philosophy of the Unconscious (translated by W. C. Coupland).

[6] Of course passages can be quoted from Hegel himself which suggest the idea that God is Will as well as Thought; I am speaking of the general tendency of Hegel and many of his disciples. Some recent Hegelians, such as Professor Boyce, seem to be less open to this criticism, but there are difficulties in thinking of God as Will and yet continuing to speak of ultimate Reality as out of Time.

[7] It may be objected that this is true only of 'conceptual space' (that is, the space of Geometry), but not of 'perceptual space,' i.e. space as it presents itself in a child's perception of an object. The distinction is no doubt from many points of view important, but we must not speak of 'conceptual space' and 'perceptual space' as if they had nothing to do with one another. If the relations of conceptual space were not in some sense contained or implied in our perceptions, no amount of abstraction or reflection could get the relations out of them.

[8] Sociology, vol. iii. p. 172.

[9] Naturalism and Agnosticism, vol. ii. pp. 191-2.

[10] For a further discussion of the subject the reader may be referred to my essay on 'Personality in God and Man' in Personal Idealism.

{58}

LECTURE III

GOD AND THE MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS

A course of purely metaphysical reasoning has led us up to the idea of God—that is to say, of a conscious and rational Mind and Will for which the world exists and by which that world and all other spirits are caused to exist. I have passed over a host of difficulties—the relation of God to time, the question whether or in what sense the world may be supposed to have a beginning and an end, the question of the relation in which God, the universal Mind, stands to other minds, the question of Free-will. These are difficulties which would involve elaborate metaphysical discussions: I shall return to some of them in a later lecture. It must suffice for the present to say that more than one answer to many of these questions might conceivably be given consistently with the view of the divine nature which I have contended for. All that I need insist on for my present purpose is—

(1) That God is personal in the sense that He is a {59} self-conscious, thinking, willing, feeling Being, distinguishable from each and all less perfect minds.

(2) That all other minds are in some sense brought into being by the divine Mind, while at the same time they have such a resemblance to, or community of nature with, their source that they may be regarded as not mere creations but as in some sense reproductions, more or less imperfect, of that source, approximating in various degrees to that ideal of Personality which is realised perfectly in God alone. In proportion as they approximate to that ideal, they are causes of their own actions, and can claim for themselves the kind of causality which we attribute in its perfection to God. I content myself now with claiming for the developed, rational human self a measure of freedom to the extent which I have just defined—that it is the real cause of its own actions. It is capable of self-determination. The man's actions are determined by his character. That is quite consistent with the admission that God is the ultimate cause of a self of such and such a character coming into existence at such and such a time.

(3) I will not say that the conception of those who regard the human mind as literally a part of the divine, so that the human consciousness is in no sense outside of the divine, is necessarily, for those who hold it, inconsistent with the conception of {60} personality both in God and man: I will only say that I do not myself understand such an assertion. I regard the human mind as derived from God, but not as being part of God. Further discussion of this question I reserve for my next lecture.

We have led up to the idea of God's existence. But so far we have discovered nothing at all about His character or purposes. And it is clear that without some such knowledge the belief in God could be of little or no value from any religious or moral point of view. How are we to learn anything about the character of God? I imagine that at the present day few people will attempt to prove the goodness or benevolence of God from an empirical examination of the facts of Nature or of History. There is, no doubt, much in History and in Nature to suggest the idea of Benevolence, but there is much to suggest a directly opposite conclusion. Few of us at the present day are likely to be much impressed by the argument which Paley bases upon the existence of the little apparatus in the throat by which it is benevolently arranged that, though constantly on the point of being choked by our food, we hardly ever are choked. I cannot help reminding you of the characteristic passage: 'Consider a city-feast,' he exclaims, 'what manducation, what deglutition, and yet not one Alderman choked in a century!' Such arguments look at the matter from the point {61} of view of the Alderman: the point of view of the turtle and the turkey is entirely forgotten. I would not for a moment speak disrespectfully of the argument from design. Darwinism has changed its form, but anybody who reads Edouard von Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious is not likely to rise from its perusal with the idea that the evidences of design have been destroyed by Darwinism, whatever he may think of Hartmann's strange conclusion that the design can be explained by the operation of an unconscious Mind or Will. The philosophical argument of Mr. R. B. Haldane in The Pathway to Reality,[1] and the purely biological argument of Dr. John Haldane in his two lectures on Life and Mechanism, and still more recently the brilliant and very important work of M. Bergson, L'Évolution Creatrice have, as it seems to me, abundantly shown that it is as impossible as ever it was to explain even the growth of a plant without supposing that in it and all organic Nature there is a striving towards an end. But the argument from design, though it testifies to purpose in the Universe, tells us nothing about the nature of that purpose. Purpose is one thing; benevolent purpose is another. Nobody's estimate of the comparative amount of happiness and misery in the world is worth much; but for my own part, if I trusted simply to empirical evidence, {62} I should not be disposed to do more than slightly attenuate the pessimism of the Pessimists. At all events, Nature is far too 'red in tooth and claw' to permit of our basing an argument for a benevolent deity upon a contemplation of the facts of animal and human life. There is but one source from which such an idea can possibly be derived—from the evidence of our own moral consciousness.

Our moral ideals are the work of Reason. That the happiness of many ought to be preferred to the happiness of one, that pleasure is better than pain, that goodness is of more value than pleasure, that some pleasures are better than others—such judgements are as much the work of our own Reason, they are as much self-evident truths, as the truth that two and two make four, or that A cannot be both B and not B at the same time, or that two straight lines cannot enclose a space. We have every right to assume that such truths hold good for God as well as for man. If such Idealism as I have endeavoured to lead you to is well founded, the mind which knows comes from God, and therefore the knowledge which that mind possesses must also be taken as an imperfect or fragmentary reproduction of God's knowledge. And the Theist who rejects Idealism but admits the existence of self-evident truths will be equally justified in assuming that, for God as well as for man, two and two must make {63} four. We have just as much right to assume that our moral ideas—our ideas of value—must come from God too. For God too, as for us, there must exist the idea, the ultimate category of the good; and our judgements of value—judgements that such and such an end is good or worth striving for—in so far as they are true judgements, must be supposed to represent His judgements. We are conscious, in proportion as we are rational, of pursuing ends which we judge to be good. If such judgements reveal God's judgements, God must be supposed to aim likewise at an ideal of good—the same ideal which is revealed to us by our moral judgements. In these judgements then we have a revelation, the only possible revelation, of the character of God. The argument which I have suggested is simply a somewhat exacter statement of the popular idea that Conscience is the voice of God.

Further to vindicate the idea of the existence, authority, objective validity of Conscience would lead us too far away into the region of Moral Philosophy for our present subject. I will only attempt very briefly to guard against some possible misunderstandings, and to meet some obvious objections:

(1) It need hardly be pointed out that the assertion of the existence of the Moral Consciousness is not in the slightest degree inconsistent with recognising its gradual growth and development. The {64} moral faculty, like every other faculty or aspect or activity of the human soul, has grown gradually. No rational man doubts the validity—no Idealist doubts the a priori character—of our mathematical judgements because probably monkeys and possibly primitive men cannot count, and certainly cannot perform more than the very simplest arithmetical operations. Still less do we doubt the validity of mathematical reasoning because not only children and savages, but sometimes even distinguished classical scholars—a Macaulay, a Matthew Arnold, a T. S. Evans,—were wholly incapable of understanding very simple mathematical arguments. Equally little do we deny a real difference between harmony and discord because people may be found who see no difference between 'God save the King' and 'Pop goes the Weasel.' Self-evident truth does not mean truth which is evident to everybody.

(2) It is not doubted that the gradual evolution of our actual moral ideas—our actual ideas about what is right or wrong in particular cases—has been largely influenced by education, environment, association, social pressure, superstition, perhaps natural selection—in short, all the agencies by which naturalistic Moralists try to account for the existence of Morality. Even Euclid, or whatever his modern substitute may be, has to be taught; but that does not show that Geometry is an arbitrary system {65} invented by the ingenious and interested devices of those who want to get money by teaching it. Arithmetic was invented largely as an instrument of commerce; but it could not have been invented if there were really no such things as number and quantity, or if the human mind had no original capacity for recognizing them. Our scientific ideas, our political ideas, our ideas upon a thousand subjects have been partly developed, partly thwarted and distorted in their growth, by similar influences. But, however great the difficulty of getting rid of these distorting influences and facing such questions in a perfectly dry light, nobody suggests that objective truth on such matters is non-existent or for ever unattainable. A claim for objective validity for the moral judgement does not mean a claim for infallibility on behalf of any individual Conscience. We may make mistakes in Morals just as we may make mistakes in Science, or even in pure Mathematics. If a class of forty small boys are asked to do a sum, they will probably not all bring out the same answer: but nobody doubts that one answer alone is right, though arithmetical capacity is a variable quantity. What is meant is merely that, if I am right in affirming that this is good, you cannot be likewise right in saying that it is bad: and that we have some capacity—though doubtless a variable capacity—of judging which is the true {66} view. Hence our moral judgements, in so far as they are true judgements, must be taken to be reproductions in us of the thought of God. To show that an idea has been gradually developed, tells us nothing as to its truth or falsehood—one way or the other.

(3) In comparing the self-evidence of moral to that of mathematical judgements, it is not suggested that our moral judgements in detail are as certain, as clear and sharply defined, as mathematical judgements, or that they can claim so universal a consensus among the competent. What is meant is merely (a) that the notion of good in general is an ultimate category of thought; that it contains a meaning intelligible not perhaps to every individual human soul, but to the normal, developed, human consciousness; and (b) that the ultimate truth of morals, if it is seen at all, must be seen immediately. An ultimate moral truth cannot be deduced from, or proved by, any other truth. You cannot prove that pleasure is better than pain, or that virtue is better than pleasure, to any one who judges differently. It does not follow that all men have an equally clear and delicate moral consciousness. The power of discriminating moral values differs as widely as the power of distinguishing musical sounds, or of appreciating what is excellent in music. Some men may be almost or altogether without such a power of moral discrimination, just as some men are wholly {67} destitute of an ear for music; while the higher degrees of moral appreciation are the possession of the few rather than of the many. Moral insight is not possessed by all men in equal measure. Moral genius is as rare as any other kind of genius.

(4) When we attribute Morality to God, it is not meant that the conduct which is right for men in detail ought to be or could possibly in all cases be practised by God. It is a childish objection (though it is sometimes made by modern philosophers who should know better) to allege with Aristotle that God cannot be supposed to make or keep contracts. And in the same way, when we claim universal validity for our moral judgements, we do not mean that the rules suitable for human conduct would be the same for beings differently organized and constituted. Our rules of sexual Morality are clearly applicable only to sexually constituted beings. What is meant in asserting that these rules are universally and objectively valid is that these are the rules which every rational intelligence, in proportion as it is rational, will recognize as being suitable, or conducive to the ideal life, in beings constituted as we are. The truth that permanent monogamous marriage represents the true type of sexual relations for human beings will be none the less an objectively valid ethical truth, because the lower animals are below it, while superior beings, {68} it may be, are above it. Universal love is none the less the absolute moral ideal because it would be absurd to say that beasts of prey do wrong in devouring other creatures, or because war is sometimes necessary as a means to the end of love at our present imperfect stage of social and intellectual development. The means to the highest good vary with circumstances; the amount of good that is attainable in such and such circumstances varies also; consequently the right course of conduct will be different for beings differently constituted or placed under different circumstances: but the principles which, in the view of a perfect intelligence, would determine what is the right course for different beings in different circumstances will be always the same. The ultimate principles of our moral judgement, e.g. that love is better than hate, are just as applicable to God as they are to us. Our conception of the highest good may be inadequate; but we certainly shall not attain to greater adequacy, or a nearer approach to ultimate truth, by flatly contradicting our own moral judgements. It would be just as reasonable to argue that because the law of gravitation might be proved, from the point of view of the highest knowledge, to be an inadequate statement of the truth, and all inadequacy involves some error, therefore we had better assume that from the point of view of God there is no difference whatever {69} between attraction and repulsion. All arguments for what is called a 'super-moral' Deity or a 'super-moral' Absolute are open to this fatal objection: moral judgements cannot possibly rest upon anything but the moral consciousness, and yet these doctrines contradict the moral consciousness. The idea of good is derived from the moral consciousness. When a man declares that from the point of view of the Universe all things are very good, he gets the idea of good from his own moral consciousness, and is assuming the objective validity of its dictates. His judgement is an ethical judgement as much as mine when I say that to me some things in this world appear very bad. If he is not entitled to assume the validity of his ethical judgements, his proposition is false or meaningless. If he is entitled to assume their validity, why should he distrust that same moral consciousness when it affirms (as it undoubtedly does) that pain and sin are for ever bad, and not (as our 'super-moral' Religionists suggest) additional artistic touches which only add to the aesthetic effect of the whole?

I shall now proceed to develop some of the consequences which (as it appears to me) flow from the doctrine that our belief in the goodness of God is an inference from our own moral consciousness:

(1) It throws light on the relations between Religion and Morality. The champions of ethical {70} education as a substitute for Religion and of ethical societies as a substitute for Churches are fond of assuming that Religion is not only unnecessary to, but actually destructive of, the intrinsic authority of the moral law. If we supposed with a few theologians in the most degenerate periods of Theology (with William of Occam, some extreme Calvinists, and a few eighteenth-century divines like Archdeacon Paley) that actions are right or wrong merely because willed by God—meaning by God simply a powerful being without goodness or moral character, then undoubtedly the Secularists would be right. If a religious Morality implies that Virtue means merely (in Paley's words) 'the doing good to mankind in obedience to the will of God and for the sake of everlasting happiness' (so that if God were to will murder and adultery, those practices would forthwith become meritorious), then undoubtedly it would be better to teach Morality without Religion than with it. But that is a caricature of the true teaching of Christ or of any considerable Christian theologian. Undoubtedly we must assert what is called the 'independence' of the moral judgement. The judgement 'to love is better than to hate' has a meaning complete in itself, which contains no reference whatever to any theological presupposition. It is a judgement which is, and which can intelligibly be, made by people of all religions or of none. But {71} we may still raise the question whether the validity of that judgement can be defended without theological implications. And I am prepared most distinctly to maintain that it cannot. These moral judgements claim objective validity. When we say 'this is right,' we do not mean merely 'I approve this course of conduct,' 'this conduct gives me a thrill of satisfaction, a "feeling of approbation," a pleasure of the moral sense.' If that were all that was meant, it would be perfectly possible that another person might feel an equally satisfactory glow of approbation at conduct of a precisely opposite character without either of them being wrong. A bull-fight fills most Spaniards with feelings of lively approbation, and most Englishmen with feelings of acute disapprobation. If such moral judgements were mere feelings, neither of them would be wrong. There could be no question of objective rightness or wrongness. Mustard is not objectively nice or objectively nasty: it is simply nice to some people and nasty to others. The mustard-lover has no right to condemn the mustard-hater, or the mustard-hater the mustard-lover. If Morality were merely a matter of feeling or emotion, actions would not be objectively right or objectively wrong; but simply right to some people, wrong to others. Hume would be right in holding the morality of an action to consist simply in the pleasure it gives to the person who {72} contemplates it. Rightness thus becomes simply a name for the fact of social approbation.[2] And yet surely the very heart of the affirmation which the moral consciousness makes in each of us is that right and wrong are not matters of mere subjective feeling. When I assert 'this is right,' I do not claim personal infallibility. I may, indeed, be wrong, as I may be wrong in my political or scientific theories. But I do mean that I think I am right; and that, if I am right, you cannot also be right when you affirm that this same action is wrong. This objective validity is the very core and centre of the idea of Duty or moral obligation. That is why it is so important to assert that moral judgements are the work of Reason, not of a supposed moral sense or any other kind of feeling. Feelings may vary in different men without any of them being in the wrong; red really is the same as green to a colour-blind person. What we mean when we talk about the existence of Duty is that things are right or wrong, no matter what you or I think about them—that the laws of Morality {73} are quite as much independent of my personal likings and dislikings as the physical laws of Nature. That is what is meant by the 'objectivity' of the moral law.

Now, the question arises—'Can such an objectivity be asserted by those who take a purely materialistic or naturalistic view of the Universe?' Whatever our metaphysical theories about the nature of Reality may be, we can in practice have no difficulty in the region of Physical Science about recognizing an objective reality of some kind which is other than my mere thinking about it. That fire will burn whether I think so or not is practically recognized by persons of all metaphysical persuasions. If I say 'I can cloy the hungry edge of appetite by bare imagination of a feast,' I try the experiment, and I fail. I imagine the feast, but I am hungry still: and if I persist in the experiment, I die. But what do we mean when we say that things are right or wrong whether I think them so or not, that the Moral Law exists outside me and independently of my thinking about it? Where and how does this moral law exist? The physical laws of Nature may be supposed by the Materialist or the Realist somehow to exist in matter: to the Metaphysician there may be difficulties in such a view, but the difficulties are not obvious to common-sense. But surely (whatever may be thought about physical laws) the moral law, {74} which expresses not any matter of physical fact but what ought to be thought of acts, cannot be supposed to exist in a purely material Universe. An 'ought' can exist only in and for a mind. In what mind, then, does the moral law exist? As a matter of fact, different people's moral judgements contradict one another. And the consciousness of no living man can well be supposed to be a flawless reflection of the absolute moral ideal. On a non-theistic view of the Universe, then, the moral law cannot well be thought of as having any actual existence. The objective validity of the moral law can indeed be and no doubt is asserted, believed in, acted upon without reference to any theological creed; but it cannot be defended or fully justified without the pre-supposition of Theism. What we mean by an objective law is that the moral law is a part of the ultimate nature of things, on a level with the laws of physical nature, and it cannot be that, unless we assume that law to be an expression of the same mind in which physical laws originate. The idea of duty, when analysed, implies the idea of God. Whatever else Plato meant by the 'idea of the good,' this at least was one of his meanings—that the moral law has its source in the source of all Reality.

And therefore at bottom popular feeling is right in holding that religious belief is necessary to Morality. Of course I do not mean to say that, were {75} religious belief to disappear from the world, Morality would disappear too. But I do think Morality would become quite a different thing from what it has been for the higher levels of religious thought and feeling. The best men would no doubt go on acting up to their own highest ideal just as if it did possess objective validity, no matter how unable they might be to reconcile their practical with their speculative beliefs. But it would not be so for the many—or perhaps even for the few in their moments of weakness and temptation, when once the consequences of purely naturalistic Ethics were thoroughly admitted and realized. The only kind of objective validity which can be recognized on a purely naturalistic view of Ethics is conformity to public opinion. The tendency of all naturalistic Ethics is to make a God of public opinion. And if no other deity were recognized, such a God would assuredly not be without worshippers. And yet the strongest temptation to most of us is the temptation to follow a debased public opinion—the opinion of our age, our class, our party. Apart from faith in a perfectly righteous God whose commands are, however imperfectly, revealed in the individual Conscience, we can find no really valid reason why the individual should act on his own sense of what is intrinsically right, even when he finds himself an 'Athanasius contra mundum,' and when his own personal likings and inclinations {76} and interests are on the side of the world. Kant was at bottom right, though perhaps he did not give the strongest reasons for his position, in making the idea of God a postulate of Morality.

From a more directly practical point of view I need hardly point out how much easier it is to feel towards the moral law the reverence that we ought to feel when we believe that that law is embodied in a personal Will. Not only is religious Morality not opposed to the idea of duty for duty's sake: it is speculatively the only reasonable basis of it; practically and emotionally the great safeguard of it. And whatever may be thought of the possibility of a speculative defence of such an idea without Theism, the practical difficulty of teaching it—especially to children, uneducated and unreflective persons—seems to be quite insuperable.[3] In more than one country in which religious education has been banished from the primary schools, grave observers complain that the idea of Duty seems to be suffering an eclipse in the minds of the rising {77} generation; some of them add that in those lands crime is steadily on the increase. Catechisms of civil duty and the like have not hitherto proved very satisfactory substitutes for the old teaching about the fear of God. Would that it were more frequently remembered on both sides of our educational squabbles that the supreme object of all religious education should be to instil into children's minds in the closest possible connexion the twin ideas of God and of Duty!

(2) I have tried to show that the ethical importance of the idea of God is prior to and independent of any belief in the idea of future rewards and punishments or of a future life, however conceived of. But when the idea of a righteous God has once been accepted, the idea of Immortality seems to me to follow from it as a sort of corollary. If any one on a calm review of the actual facts of the world's history can suppose that such a world as ours could be the expression of the will of a rational and moral Being without the assumption of a future life for which this is a discipline or education or preparatory stage, argument would be useless with him. Inveterate Optimism, like inveterate Scepticism, admits of no refutation, but in most minds produces no conviction. For those who are convinced that the world has a rational end, and yet that life as we see it (taken by itself) cannot be that end, the hypothesis {78} of Immortality becomes a necessary deduction from their belief in God.

I would not disparage the educative effect of the belief in a future life even when expressed in the crude and inadequate metaphor of reward and punishment. Few of us, I venture to think, have reached the moral level at which the belief—not in a vindictive, retributive, unending torment, but in a disciplinary or purgatorial education of souls prolonged after death—is without its value. At the same time it is a mere caricature of all higher religious beliefs when the religious motive is supposed to mean simply a fear of punishment and hope of personal reward, even of the least sensuous or material kind. Love of goodness for its own sake is for the Theist identical with the love of God. Love of a Person is a stronger force than devotion to an idea; and an ethical conception of God carries with it the idea of Immortality.

  The wages of sin is death: if the wages of Virtue be dust,
    Would she have heart to endure for the life of the worm
      and the fly?

  She desires no isles of the blest, no quiet seats of the just,
    To rest in a golden grove, or to bask in a summer sky;
  Give her the wages of going on, and not to die.[4]

Belief in human Immortality is, as I have suggested, the postulate without which most of us cannot {79} believe in God. Even for its own sake it is of the highest ethical value. The belief in Immortality gives a meaning to life even when it has lost all other meaning. 'It is rather,' in the noble words of the late Professor Sidgwick, 'from a disinterested aversion to an universe so irrationally constituted that the wages of virtue should be dust than from any private reckoning about his own wages,' that the good man clings to the idea of Immortality. And that is not all. The value of all higher goods even in this life, though it does not depend wholly upon their duration, does partly depend upon it. It would be better to be pure and unselfish for a day than to be base and selfish for a century. And yet we do not hesitate to commend the value of intellectual and of all kinds of higher enjoyments on account of their greater durability. Why, then, should we shrink from admitting that the value of character really is increased when it is regarded as surviving bodily death? Disbelief in Immortality would, I believe, in the long run and for the vast majority of men, carry with it an enormous enhancement of the value of the carnal and sensual over the spiritual and intellectual element in life.

(3) A third consequence which follows from our determining to accept the moral consciousness as containing the supreme revelation of God is this. From the point of view of the moral consciousness {80} we cannot say that the Universe is wholly good. We have only one means of judging whether things are good or bad: the idea of value is wholly derived from our own ethical judgements or judgements of value. If we distrust these judgements, there is no higher court to which we can appeal. And if we distrust our most ultimate judgements of value, I do not know why we should trust any judgements whatever. Even if we grant that from some very transcendental metaphysical height—the height, for instance, of Mr. Bradley's Philosophy—it may be contended that none of our judgements are wholly true or fully adequate to express the true nature of Reality, we at all events cannot get nearer to Reality than we are conducted by the judgements which present themselves to us as immediate and self-evident. Now, if we do apply these judgements of value to the Universe as we know it, can we say that everything in it seems to be very good? For my own part, I unhesitatingly say, 'Pain is an evil, and sin is a worse evil, and nothing on earth can ever make them good.' How then are we to account for such evils in a Universe which we believe to express the thought and will of a perfectly righteous Being? In only one way that I know of—by supposing they are means to a greater good. That is really the substance and substratum of all the Theodicies of all the Philosophers and all the {81} Theologians except those who frankly trample on or throw over the Moral Consciousness, and declare that, for those who see truly, pain and sin are only additional sources of aesthetic interest in a great world-drama produced for his own entertainment by a Deity not anthropomorphic enough to love but still anthropomorphic enough to be amused.

I shall be told no doubt that this is limiting God. A human being may, it will be urged, without loss of goodness, do things in themselves evil, as a means to a greater good: as a surgeon, he may cause excruciating pain; as a statesman or a soldier, he may doom thousands to a cruel death; as a wise administrator of the poor law, he may refuse to relieve much suffering, in order that he may not cause more suffering. But this is because his power is limited; he has to work upon a world which has a nature of its own independent of his volition. To apply the same explanation to the evil which God causes, is to make Him finite instead of Infinite, limited in power instead of Omnipotent. Now in a sense I admit that this is so. I am not wedded to the words 'Infinite' or 'Omnipotent.' But I would protest against a persistent misrepresentation of the point of view which I defend. It is suggested that the limit to the power of God must necessarily spring from the existence of some other thing or being outside of Him, not created by Him or under His {82} control. I must protest that that is not so. Everybody admits that God cannot change the past; few Philosophers consider it necessary to maintain that God could construct triangles with their angles not together equal to two right angles, or think it any derogation from his Omnipotence to say that He could not make the sum of two and two to be other than four. Few Theologians push their idea of Freewill so far as to insist that God could will Himself to be unjust or unloving, or that, being just and loving, he could do unjust or unloving acts. There are necessities to which even God must submit. But they are not imposed upon Him from without: they are parts of His own essential nature. The limitation by which God cannot attain His ends without causing some evil is a limitation of exactly the same nature. If you say that it is no limitation of God not to be able to change the past, for the thing is really unmeaning, then I submit that in the same way it may be no limitation that He should not be able to evolve highly organized beings without a struggle for existence, or to train human beings in unselfishness without allowing the existence both of sin and of pain. From the point of view of perfect knowledge, these things might turn out to be just as unmeaning as for God to change the past. The popular idea of Omnipotence is one which really does not bear looking into. If we supposed the world {83} to contain no evil at all, still there would be in it a definite amount of good. Twice such a world would be twice as good. Why is there not twice that amount of good? A being who deliberately created only a good world of limited quantity—a definite number of spirits (for instance) enjoying so much pleasure and so much virtue—when he could have created twice that number of spirits, and consequently twice that amount of good, would not be perfectly good or loving. And so on ad infinitum, no matter how much good you suppose him to have created. The only sense which we can intelligibly give to the idea of a divine Omnipotence is this—that God possesses all the power there is, that He can do all things that are in their own nature possible.[5]

But there is a more formidable objection which I have yet to meet. It has been urged by certain Philosophers of great eminence that, if we suppose God not to be unlimited in power, we have no guarantee that the world is even good on the whole; we should not be authorized to infer anything as to a future life or the ultimate destiny of Humanity from the fact of God's goodness. A limited God might be a defeated God. I admit the difficulty. This is the 'greatest wave' of all in the theistic {84} argument. In reply, I would simply appeal to the reasons which I have given for supposing that the world is really willed by God. A rational being does not will evil except as a means to a greater good. If God be rational, we have a right to suppose that the world must contain more good than evil, or it would not be willed at all. A being who was obliged to create a world which did not seem to him good would be a blind force, as force is understood by the pure Materialist, not a rational Will. That much we have a right to claim as a matter of strict Logic; and that would to my own mind be a sufficient reason for assuming that, at least for the higher order of spirits, such a life as ours must be intended as the preface to a better life than this. But I should go further. To me it appears that such evils as sin and pain are so enormously worse than the mere absence of good, that I could not regard as rational a Universe in which the good did not very greatly predominate over the evil. More than that I do not think we are entitled to say. And yet Justice is so great a good that it is rational to hope that for every individual conscious being—at least each individual capable of any high degree of good—there must be a predominance of good on the whole. Beings of very small capacity might conceivably be created chiefly or entirely as a means to a vastly greater good than any that they {85} themselves enjoy: the higher a spirit is in the scale of being, the more difficult it becomes to suppose that it has been brought into existence merely as a means to another's good, or that it will not ultimately enjoy a good which will make it on the whole good that it should have been born.

I could wish myself that, in popular religious teaching, there was a franker conception of this position—a position which, as I have said, is really implied in the Theodicies of all the Divines. Popular unbelief—and sometimes the unbelief of more cultivated persons—rests mainly upon the existence of evil. We should cut at the roots of it by teaching frankly that this is the best of all possible Universes, though not the best of all imaginable Universes—such Universes as we can construct in our own imagination by picturing to ourselves all the good that there is in the world without any of the evil. We may still say, if we please, that God is infinite because He is limited by nothing outside His own nature, except what He has Himself caused. We can still call Him Omnipotent in the sense that He possesses all the power there is. And in many ways such a belief is far more practically consolatory and stimulating than a belief in a God who can do all things by any means and who consequently does not need our help. In our view, we are engaged not in a sham warfare with an evil that is really {86} good, but in a real warfare with a real evil, a struggle in which we have the ultimate power in the Universe on our side, but one in which the victory cannot be won without our help, a real struggle in which we are called upon to be literally fellow-workers with God.

LITERATURE

The subject is more or less explicitly dealt with in most of the works mentioned at the end of the last two lectures, and also in books on Moral Philosophy too numerous to mention. Classical vindications of the authority of the Moral Consciousness are Bishop Butler's Sermons, and Kant's Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals and other ethical writings (translated by T. K. Abbott). I have expressed my own views on the subject with some fullness in the third book of my Theory of Good and Evil.

[1] See especially Book II. Lect. iii.

[2] 'We do not infer a character to be virtuous, because it pleases: but in feeling that it pleases after such a particular manner, we in effect feel that it is virtuous.' (Treatise, Part I, Section ii., ed. Green and Grose, vol. ii. p. 247.) 'The distinction of moral good and evil is founded in the pleasure or pain, which results from the view of any sentiment, or character; and as that pleasure or pain cannot be unknown to the person who feels it, it follows that there is just so much virtue in any character as every one places in it, and that 'tis impossible in this particular we can ever be mistaken.' (Ibid. vol. ii. p. 311.)

[3] There are no doubt ways of making Morality the law of the Universe without what most of us understand by Theism, though not without Religion, and a Religion of a highly metaphysical character; but because such non-theistic modes of religious thought exist in Buddhism, for instance, it does not follow that they are reasonable, and, at all events, they are hardly intelligible to most Western minds. Such non-theistic Religions imply a Metaphysic quite as much as Christianity or Buddhism. There have been Religions without the idea of a personal God, but never without Metaphysic, i.e. a theory about the ultimate nature of things.

[4] Tennyson's Wages.

[5] The doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas is 'Cum possit Deus omnia efficere quae esae possunt, non autem quae contradictionem implicant, omnipotens merito dicitur.' (Summa Theol., Pars I. Q. xxv. art. 8.)

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LECTURE IV

DIFFICULTIES AND OBJECTIONS

In the present lecture I shall try to deal with some of the difficulties which will probably have been arising in your minds in the course of the last three; and in meeting them, to clear up to some extent various points which have been left obscure.

(1) Creation. I have endeavoured to show that the world must be thought of as ultimately an experience in the mind of God, parts of which are progressively communicated to lesser minds such as ours. This experience—both the complete experience which is in His own mind and also the measure of it which is communicated to the lesser minds—must be thought of as willed by God. At the same time I suggested as an alternative view that, even if we think of things as having an existence which is not simply in and for minds, the things must be caused to exist by a rational Will. Now the world, as we know it, consists of a number of changes taking place in time, changes which are undoubtedly represented in thought as changes happening to, or {88} accidents of, a permanent substance, whether (with the Idealist) we suppose that this substance is merely the object of Mind's contemplation, or whether (with the Realist) we think of it as having some sort of being independent of Mind. But what of the first of these events—the beginning of the whole series? Are we to think of the series of events in time as having a beginning and possibly an end, or as being without beginning or end? What in fact are we to make of the theological idea of Creation, often further defined as Creation out of nothing? It is often suggested both by Idealists and by Realists that the idea of a creation or absolute beginning of the world is unthinkable. Such a view seems to me to be a piece of unwarrantable a priori dogmatism—quite as much so as the closely connected idea that the Uniformity of Nature is an a priori necessity of thought. No doubt the notion of an absolute beginning of all things is unthinkable enough: if we think of God as creating the world at a definite point of time, then we must suppose God Himself to have existed before that creation. We cannot think of an event in time without thinking of a time before it; and time cannot be thought of as merely empty time. Events of some kind there must necessarily have been, even though those events are thought of as merely subjective experiences involving no relation to space. A beginning of existence is, {89} indeed, unthinkable. But there is no difficulty in supposing that this particular series of phenomena which constitutes our physical Universe may have had a beginning in time. On the other hand there is no positive evidence, for those who cannot regard the early chapters of Genesis as representing on such a matter anything but a primitive legend edited by a later Jewish thinker, that it had such a beginning. It is no doubt more difficult to represent to ourselves a beginning of space; and the notion of an empty space, eternally thought but not eternally filled up by any series of phenomena of the space-occupying kind, represents a rather difficult, though not (as it seems to me) an absolutely impossible conception. The question, therefore, whether there was a beginning of the series of events which constitute the history of our physical world must (so far as I can see) be left an open one.

Of course if the argument of Lord Kelvin be accepted, if he is justified in arguing on purely physical grounds that the present distribution of energy in the Universe is such that it cannot have resulted from an infinite series of previous physical changes, if Science can prove that the series is a finite one, the conclusions of Science must be accepted.[1] Metaphysic has nothing to say for or against such a view. That is a question of Physics on which {90} of course I do not venture to express any opinion whatever.

(2) The time-series. I am incompetent to pronounce an opinion on the validity of such arguments as Lord Kelvin's. But, however we decide this question, there will still remain the further and harder question, 'Is the series of all events or experiences, physical or psychical (not merely the particular series which constitutes our physical Universe), to be thought of as finite or infinite? On the one hand it involves a contradiction to talk of a time-series which has a beginning: a time which has no time before it is not time at all; any more than space with an end to it would be space. On the other hand, we find equally, or almost equally, unthinkable the hypothesis of an endless series of events in time: a series of events, which no possible enumeration of its members will make any smaller, presents itself to us as unthinkable, directly we regard it as expressing the true nature of a positive reality, and not as a mere result of mathematical abstraction. Here then we are presented with an antinomy—an apparent contradiction in our thought—which we can neither avoid nor overcome. It is one of the classical antinomies recognized by the Kantian Philosophy—the only one, I may add, which neither Kant himself nor any of his successors has done anything to attenuate or to remove. {91} Kant's own attempted solution of it involved the impossible supposition that the past has no existence at all except in so far as it is thought by some finite mind in the present. The way out of this difficulty which is popular with post-Kantian Idealists is to say that God is Himself out of time, and eternally sees the whole series at once. But, in the first place, that does not get over the difficulty: even if God does see the whole series at once, He must see it either as limited or as endless, and the old antinomy breaks out again when we attempt to think either alternative. And secondly, when you treat a temporal series as one which is all really present together—of course it may all be known together as even we know the past and the future—but when you try to think of God as contemplating the whole series as really present altogether, the series is no longer a time-series. You have turned it into some other kind of series—practically (we may say) into a spacial series. You have cut the knot, instead of unravelling it. I have no doubt that the existence of this antinomy does point to the fact that there is some way of thinking about time from which the difficulty disappears: but we are, so far as I can see, incompetent so to resolve it. Philosophers resent the idea of an insoluble problem. By all means let them go on trying to solve it. I can only say that I find no difficulty in showing the futility {92} of any solution of the time-difficulty which I have so far seen. For the present at least—I strongly suspect for ever—we must acquiesce on this matter in a reverent Agnosticism. We can show the absurdity of regarding time as merely subjective; we can show that it belongs to the very essence of the Universe we know; we can show that it is as 'objective' as anything else within our knowledge. But how to reconcile this objectivity with the difficulty of thinking of an endless succession no Philosopher has done much to explain. For religious purposes it seems enough to believe that each member of the time-series—no matter how many such events there may be, no matter whether the series be endless or not—is caused by God. The more reflecting Theologians have generally admitted that the act of divine Conservation is essentially the same as that of Creation. A God who can be represented as 'upholding all things by the power of his word' is a creative Deity whether the act of creation be in time, or eternally continuous, or (if there were any meaning in that phrase) out of time altogether.[2]

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(3) The creation of spirits. It may seem to some of you that I may have so far left out, or too easily disposed of, an important link in our argument. I have given reasons for thinking that the material world cannot be explained without the assumption of a universal Consciousness which both thinks and wills it. I have assumed rather than proved that the lesser minds, in which the divine experience is partially reproduced, are also caused to exist and kept in existence by the same divine Will. But how, it may be said, do we know that those minds did not exist before the birth of the organisms with which upon this planet they are connected? The considerations which forbid our thinking of matter as something capable of existing by itself do not apply to minds. A consciousness, unlike a thing, exists 'for itself,' not merely 'for another': a mind is not made what it is by being known or otherwise experienced by another mind: its very being consists in being itself conscious: it is what it is for itself. It is undoubtedly impossible positively to disprove the hypothesis of eternally pre-existent souls. Sometimes that hypothesis is combined with Theism. It {94} is supposed that God is the supreme and incomparably the most powerful, but not the only, self-existent and eternal Spirit. This hypothesis—sometimes spoken of as Pluralism[3]—has many attractions: from the time of Origen onwards the idea of Pre-existence has seemed to many to facilitate the explanation of evil by making it possible to regard the sufferings of our present state as a disciplinary process for getting rid of an original or a pre-natal sinfulness. It is a theory not incapable of satisfying the demands of the religious Consciousness, and may even form an element in an essentially Christian theory of the Universe: but to my mind it is opposed to all the obvious indications of experience. The connexion between soul and body is such that the laws of the soul's development obviously form part of the same system with the laws of physical nature. If one part of that system is referred to the divine Will, so must the whole of it be. The souls, when they have entered animal bodies, must be supposed to be subject to a system of laws which is of one piece with the system of physical laws. If the physical part of the world-order is referred to the divine Will, the psychical part of it must be equally referred to {95} that Will. The souls might, indeed, conceivably have an independent and original nature of their own capable of offering resistance to the divine intentions. But we see, to say the least, no indications of a struggle going on between an outside divine Will and independent beings not forming a part of the divine scheme. At all events, the result of this struggle, if struggle there be, is (so far as we can observe) a system, complete and orderly, within the psychical sphere as much as within the purely physical sphere. And in particular the body is exactly fitted to the soul that is to inhabit it. We never find the intellect of a Shakespeare in connexion with the facial angle of a negro; bodies which resemble the bodies of their parents are connected with souls between which a similar resemblance can be traced. If the souls existed before birth, we must suppose those souls to be kept waiting in a limbo of some kind till a body is prepared suitable for their reception. We must suppose that among the waiting souls, one is from time to time selected to be the offspring of such and such a matrimonial union, so as to present (as it were) a colourable appearance of being really the fruit of that union. Further, before birth the souls must be steeped in the waters of Lethe, or something of the kind, so as to rid them of all memory of their previous experiences. Such a conception seems to {96} me to belong to the region of Mythology rather than of sober philosophical thought. I do not deny that Mythology may sometimes be a means of pictorially or symbolically envisaging truths to which Philosophy vaguely points but which it cannot express in clearly apprehensible detail. But such a Mythology as this seems to be intellectually unmotived and unhelpful. It is not wanted to explain the facts: there is nothing in our experience to suggest it, and much which is prima facie opposed to it. It really removes no single difficulty: for one difficulty which it presents some appearance of removing, it creates a dozen greater ones. It is a hypothesis which we shall do well to dismiss as otiose.

(4) Non-theistic Idealism. Somewhat less unmotived, if we look upon it from a merely intellectual point of view, is the theory of pre-existent souls without a personal God. Many, if not most, of you probably possess more or less acquaintance with the views of my friend, Dr. McTaggart. I cannot here undertake a full exposition or criticism of one of the ablest thinkers of our day—one of the very few English thinkers who is the author of a truly original metaphysical system. I can only touch—and that most inadequately—upon the particular side of it which directly bears upon our present enquiry. Dr. McTaggart is an Idealist; he recognizes the {97} impossibility of matter without mind. For him nothing exists but spirits, but he does not recognize the necessity for any one all-embracing or controlling Spirit: the only spirits in his Universe are limited minds like those of men and animals. He differs, then, from the Pluralist of the type just mentioned in getting rid of the hypothesis of a personal God side by side with and yet controlling the uncreated spirits. And he differs further from all Pluralists in not treating the separate spirits as so many centres of consciousness quite independent of, and possibly at war with, all the rest: the spirits form part of an ordered system: the world is a unity, though that unity is not the unity which belongs to self-consciousness. He recognizes, in the traditional language of Philosophy, an Absolute, but this Absolute is not a single spiritual Being but a Society: or, if it is to be called a single spiritual Being, it is a Being which exists or manifests itself only in a plurality of limited consciousnesses.

This scheme is, I admit, more reasonable than Pluralism. It does, nominally at least, recognize the world as an ordered system. It gets rid of the difficulty of accounting for the apparent order of the Cosmos as the result of a struggle between independent wills. It is not, upon its author's pre-suppositions, a gratuitous theory: for a mind which accepts Idealism and rejects Theism it is the only {98} intelligible alternative. But I must confess that it seems to me open to most of the difficulties which I have endeavoured to point out in Pluralism, and to some others. In the first place, there is one, to my mind, great and insuperable difficulty about it. As an Idealist, Dr. McTaggart has to admit that the whole physical world, in so far as it exists at all, must exist in and for some consciousness. Now, not only is there, according to him, no single mind in which the system can exist as a whole, but even all the minds together do not apparently know the whole of it, or (so far as our knowledge goes) ever will. The undiscovered and unknown part of the Universe is then non-existent. And yet, be it noticed, the known part of the world does not make a perfectly articulated or (if you like the phrase) organic system without the unknown part. It is only on the assumption of relations between what we know and what we don't know that we can regard it as an orderly, intelligible system at all. Therefore, if part of the system is non-existent, the whole system—the system as a whole—must be treated as non-existent. The world is, we are told, a system; and yet as a system it has (upon the hypothesis) no real existence. The systematic whole does not exist in matter, for to Dr. McTaggart matter is merely the experience of Mind. What sort of existence, then, can an undiscovered planet possess till it is {99} discovered? For Dr. McTaggart has not provided any mind or minds in and for which it is to exist. At one time, indeed, Dr. McTaggart seemed disposed to accept a suggestion of mine that, on his view, each soul must be omniscient; and to admit that, while in its temporal aspect, each soul is limited and fallible in its knowledge, it is at the same time supertemporally omniscient. That is a conception difficult beyond all the difficulties of the most arbitrary and self-contradicting of orthodox patristic or scholastic speculations. But, as Dr. McTaggart does not now seem disposed to insist upon that point, I will say no more about it except that to my mind it is a theory which defies all intellectual grasp. It can be stated; it cannot be thought.

Further, I would remind you, the theory is open to all the objections which I urged against the Pre-existence theory in its pluralistic form. I have suggested the difficulties involved in the facts of heredity—the difficulty of understanding how souls whose real intellectual and moral characteristics are uncaused and eternal should be assigned to parents so far resembling them as to lead almost inevitably to the inference that the characteristics of the children are to some extent causally connected with those of the parents.[4] Now the Pluralist can {100} at least urge that for this purpose ingenious arrangements are contrived by God—by the One Spirit whom he regards as incomparably the wisest and most powerful in the Universe. Dr. McTaggart recognizes no intelligence capable of grappling with such a problem or succession of problems. But this particular matter of the assignment of souls to bodies is only a particular application of a wider difficulty. Dr. McTaggart contends that the Universe constitutes not merely a physical but a moral order. He would not deny that the Universe means something; that the series of events tends towards an end, an end which is also a good; that it has a purpose and a final cause. And yet this purpose exists in no mind whatever, and is due to no will whatever—except to the very small extent to which the processes of physical nature can be consciously directed to an end by the volitions of men and similarly limited intelligences. As a whole, the Universe is purposed and willed by no single will or combination of wills. I confess I do not understand the idea of a purpose which operates, but is not the purpose of a Mind which is also a Will. All the considerations upon which I dwelt to show the necessity of such a Will to account for the Universe which we know, are so many arguments against Dr. McTaggart's scheme. The events of Dr. McTaggart's Universe are, upon the view of Causality which I {101} attempted to defend in my second lecture, uncaused events.

Nevertheless, as a Philosopher, I am deeply grateful to Dr. McTaggart. Not only does his scheme on its practical side seem to me preferable to many systems which sound more orthodox—systems of vague pantheistic Theism in which Morality is treated as mere 'appearance' and personal Immortality deliberately rejected—but it has done much intellectually to clear the air. Dr. McTaggart seems to me right in holding that, if God or the Absolute is to include in itself all other spirits, and yet the personality or self-consciousness of those spirits is not to be denied, then this Absolute in which they are to be included cannot reasonably be thought of as a conscious being, or invested with the other attributes usually implied by the term God.

And this leads me to say a few words more in explanation of my own view of the relation between God and human or other souls. To me, as I have already intimated, it seems simply meaningless to speak of one consciousness as included in another consciousness. The essence of a consciousness is to be for itself: whether it be a thought, a feeling, or an emotion, the essence of that consciousness is what it is for me. Every moment of consciousness is unique. Another being may have a {102} similar feeling: in that case there are two feelings, and not one. Another mind may know what I feel, but the knowledge of another's agony is (fortunately) a very different thing from the agony itself. It is fashionable in some quarters to ridicule the idea of 'impenetrable' souls. If 'impenetrable' means that another soul cannot know what goes on in my soul, I do not assert that the soul is impenetrable. I believe that God knows what occurs in my soul in an infinitely completer way than that in which any human being can know it. Further, I believe that every soul is kept in existence from moment to moment by a continuous act of the divine Will, and so is altogether dependent upon that Will, and forms part of one system with Him. On the other hand I believe that (through the analogy of my own mind and the guidance of the moral consciousness) I do know, imperfectly and inadequately, 'as in a mirror darkly,' what goes on in God's Mind. But, if penetrability is to mean identity, the theory that souls are penetrable seems to me mainly unintelligible. The acceptance which it meets with in some quarters is due, I believe, wholly to the influence of that most fertile source of philosophical confusion—misapplied spacial metaphor.[5] It seems easy to talk about a mind being {103} something in itself, and yet part of another mind, because we are familiar with the idea of things in space forming part of larger things in space—Chinese boxes, for instance, shut up in bigger ones. Such a mode of thought is wholly inapplicable to minds which are not in space at all. Space is in the mind: the mind is not in space. A mind is not a thing which can be round or square: you can't say that the intellect of Kant or of Lord Kelvin measures so many inches by so many: equally impossible is it to talk about such an intellect being a part of a more extensive intellect.

The theory of an all-inclusive Deity has recently been adopted and popularized by Mr. Campbell,[6] who has done all that rhetorical skill combined with genuine religious earnestness can do to present it in an attractive and edifying dress. And yet the same Logic which leads to the assertion that the Saint is part of God, leads also to the assertion that Caesar Borgia and Napoleon Buonaparte and all the wicked Popes who have ever been white-washed by episcopal or other historians are also parts of God. How can I worship, how can I strive to be like, how can I be the better for believing in or revering {104} a Being of whom Caesar Borgia is a part as completely and entirely as St. Paul or our Lord himself? Hindoo Theology is consistent in this matter. It worships the destructive and the vicious aspects of Brahma as much as the kindly and the moral ones: it does not pretend that God is revealed in the Moral Consciousness, or is in any exclusive or one-sided way a God of Love. If it be an 'ethical obsession' (as has been suggested) to object to treat Immorality as no less a revelation of God than Morality, I must plead guilty to such an obsession. And yet without such an 'obsession' I confess I do not see what is left of Christianity. There is only one way out of the difficulty. If we are all parts of God, we can only call God good or perfect by maintaining that the deliverances of our moral consciousness have no validity for God, and therefore can tell us nothing about him. That has been done deliberately and explicitly by some Philosophers:[7] the distinguished Theologians who echo the language of this Philosophy have fortunately for their own religious life and experience, but unfortunately for their philosophical consistency, declined to follow in their steps. A God who is 'beyond good and evil,' can be no fitting object of {105} worship to men who wish to become good, just, merciful. If the cosmic process be indifferent to these ethical considerations, we had better (with honest Agnostics like Professor Huxley) make up our minds to defy it, whether it call itself God or not.

But it is not so much on account of its consequences as on account of its essential unmeaningness and intellectual unintelligibility that I would invite you to reject this formula 'God is all.' Certainly, the Universe is an ordered system: there is nothing in it that is not done by the Will of God. And some parts of this Universe—the spiritual parts of it and particularly the higher spirits—are not mere creations of God's will. They have a resemblance of nature to Him. I do not object to your saying that at bottom there is but one Substance in the Universe, if you will only keep clear of the materialistic and spacial association of the word Substance: but it is a Substance which reveals itself in many different consciousnesses. The theory of an all-inclusive Consciousness is not necessary to make possible the idea of close and intimate communion between God and men, or of the revelation in and to Humanity of the thought of God. On the contrary, it is the idea of Identity which destroys the possibility of communion. Communion implies two minds: a mind cannot have communion with itself or with part of itself. The two may also in a {106} sense be one; of course all beings are ultimately part of one Universe or Reality: but that Reality is not one Consciousness. The Universe is a unity, but the unity is not of the kind which constitutes a person or a self-consciousness. It is (as Dr. McTaggart holds) the unity of a Society, but of a Society (as I have attempted to argue) which emanates from, and is controlled by and guided to a preconceived end by, a single rational Will.[8]

(5) The intuitive theory of religious knowledge. In other quarters objection will probably be taken to my not having recognized the possibility of an immediate knowledge of God, and left the idea of God to be inferred by intellectual processes which, when fully thought out, amount to a Metaphysic. It will be suggested that to make religious belief dependent upon Reason is to make it impossible to any but trained Philosophers or Theologians. Now there is no doubt a great attractiveness in the theory which makes belief in God depend simply upon the immediate affirmation of the individual's own consciousness. It would be more difficult to argue against such a theory of immediate knowledge or intuition if we found that the consciousness of all or most individuals does actually reveal to them {107} the existence of God: though after all the fact that a number of men draw the same inference from given facts does not show that it is not an inference. You will sometimes find Metaphysicians contending that nobody is really an Atheist, since everybody necessarily supposes himself to be in contact with an Other of which he is nevertheless a part. I do not deny that, if you water down the idea of God to the notion of a vague 'something not ourselves,' you may possibly make out that everybody is explicitly or implicitly a believer in such a Deity.

I should prefer myself to say that, if that is all you mean by God, it does not much matter whether we believe in Him or not. In the sense in which God is understood by Christianity or Judaism or any other theistic Religion it is unfortunately impossible to contend that everybody is a Theist. And, if there is an immediate knowledge of God in every human soul, this would be difficult to account for. Neither the cultivated nor the uncultivated Chinaman has apparently any such belief. The ignorant Chinaman believes in a sort of luck or destiny—possibly in a plurality of limited but more or less mischievous spirits; the educated Chinaman, we are told, is for the most part a pure Agnostic. And Chinamen are believed to be one-fifth of the human race. The task of the Missionary would be an easier one if he could {108} appeal to any such widely diffused intuitions of God. The Missionary, from the days of St. Paul at Athens down to the present, has to begin by arguing with his opponents in favour of Theism, and then to go on to argue from Theism to Christianity. I do not deny—on the contrary I strongly contend—that the rational considerations which lead up to Monotheism are so manifold, and lie so near at hand, that at a certain stage of mental development we find that belief independently asserting itself with more or less fullness in widely distant regions of time and space; while traces of it are found almost everywhere—even among savages—side by side with other and inconsistent beliefs. But even among theistic nations an immediate knowledge of God is claimed by very few. If there is a tendency on the part of the more strongly religious minds to claim it, it is explicitly disclaimed by others—by most of the great Schoolmen, and in modern times by profoundly religious minds such as Newman or Martineau. Its existence is in fact denied by most of the great theological systems—Catholic, Protestant, Anglican. Theologians always begin by arguing in favour of the existence of God. And even among the religious minds without philosophical training which do claim such immediate knowledge, their creed is most often due (as is obvious to the outside observer) to the influence of environment, of education, of social {109} tradition. For the religious person who claims such knowledge of God does not generally stop at the bare affirmation of God's existence: he goes on to claim an immediate knowledge of all sorts of other things—ideas clearly derived from the traditional teaching of his religious community. The Protestant of a certain type will claim immediate consciousness of ideas about the forgiveness of sins which are palpably due to the teaching of Luther or St. Augustine, and to the influence of this or that preacher who has transmitted those ideas to him or to his mother: while the Catholic, though his training discourages such claims, will sometimes see visions which convey to him an immediate assurance of the truth of the Immaculate Conception. Even among Anglicans we find educated men who claim to know by immediate intuition the truth of historical facts alleged to have occurred in the first century, or dogmatic truths such as the complicated niceties of the Athanasian Creed. These claims to immediate insight thus refute themselves by the inconsistent character of the knowledge claimed. An attempt may be made to extract from all these immediate certainties a residual element which is said to be common to all of them. The attempt has been made by Professor James in that rather painful work, the Varieties of Religious Experience. And the residuum turns out to be something so vague that, if not {110} absolutely worthless, it is almost incapable of being expressed in articulate language, and constitutes a very precarious foundation for a working religious creed.

The truth is that the uneducated—or rather the unanalytical, perhaps I ought to say the metaphysically untrained—human mind has a tendency to regard as an immediate certainty any truth which it strongly believes and regards as very important. Such minds do not know the psychological causes which have led to their own belief, when they are due to psychological causes: they have not analysed the processes of thought by which they have been led to those beliefs which are really due to the working of their own minds. Most uncultivated persons would probably be very much surprised to hear that the existence of the friend with whose body they are in physical contact is after all only an inference.[9] But surely, in the man who has discovered that such is the case, the warmth of friendship was never dimmed by the reflection that his knowledge of his friend is not immediate but mediate. It is a mere prejudice to suppose that mediate knowledge is in any {111} way less certain, less intimate, less trustworthy or less satisfying than immediate knowledge. If we claim for man the possibility of just such a knowledge of God as a man may possess of his brother man, surely that is all that is wanted to make possible the closest religious communion. It is from the existence of my own self that I infer the existence of other selves, whom I observe to behave in a manner resembling my own behaviour. It is by an only slightly more difficult and complicated inference from my own consciousness that I rise to that conception of a universal Consciousness which supplies me with at once the simplest and the most natural explanation both of my own existence and of the existence of the Nature which I see around me.

(6) Religion and Psychology. I do not deny that the study of religious history, by exhibiting the naturalness and universality of religious ideas and religious emotions, may rationally create a pre-disposition to find some measure of truth in every form of religious belief. But I would venture to add a word of caution against the tendency fashionable in many quarters to talk of basing religious belief upon Psychology. The business of Psychology is to tell us what actually goes on in the human mind. It cannot possibly tell us whether the beliefs which are found there are true or false. An erroneous {112} belief is as much a psychological fact as a true one. A theory which goes on, by inference from what we observe in our own minds, to construct a theory of the Universe necessarily involves a Metaphysic, conscious or unconscious. It may be urged that the reality of religious experience is unaffected by the question whether the beliefs associated with it are true or false. That is the case, so long as the beliefs are supposed to be true by the person in question. But, when once the spirit of enquiry is aroused, a man cannot be—and I venture to think ought not to be—satisfied as to the truth of his belief simply by being told that the beliefs are actually there.

It may be contended, no doubt, that religious experience does not mean merely a state of intellectual belief, but certain emotions, aspirations, perhaps (to take one particular type of religious experience) a consciousness of love met by answering love. To many who undergo such experiences, they seem to carry with them an immediate assurance of the existence of the Being with whom they feel themselves to be in communion. That, on the intellectual presuppositions of the particular person, seems to be the natural—it may be the only possible—way of explaining the feeling. But even there the belief is not really immediate: it is an inference from what is actually matter of experience. And it is, unhappily, no less a matter of well-ascertained {113} psychological fact that, when intellectual doubt is once aroused, such experiences no longer carry with them this conviction of their own objective basis. The person was really under the influence of an intellectual theory all along, whether the theory was acquired by hereditary tradition, by the influence of another's mind, or by personal thought and reflection. When the intellectual theory alters, the same kind of experience is no longer possible. I will not attempt to say how far it is desirable that persons who are perfectly satisfied with a creed which they have never examined should (as it were) pull up the roots of their own faith to see how deep they go. I merely want to point out that the occurrence of certain emotional experiences, though undoubtedly they may constitute part of the data of a religious argument, cannot be held to constitute in and by themselves sufficient evidence for the truth of the intellectual theory connected with them in the mind of the person to whom they occur. They do not always present themselves as sufficient evidence for their truth even to the person experiencing them—still less can they do so to others. Equally unreasonable is it to maintain, with a certain class of religious philosophers, that the religious experience by itself is all we want; and to assume that we may throw to the winds all the theological or other beliefs which have actually been associated {114} with the various types of religious experience, and yet continue to have those experiences and find them no less valuable and no less satisfying. If there is one thing which the study of religious Psychology testifies to, it is the fact that the character of the religious experience (though there may be certain common elements in it) varies very widely with the character of the theoretical belief with which it is associated—a belief of which it is sometimes the cause, sometimes the effect, but from which it is always inseparable. The Buddhist's religious experiences are not possible to those who hold the Christian's view of the Universe: the Christian's religious experiences are not possible to one who holds the Buddhist theory of the Universe. You cannot have an experience of communion with a living Being when you disbelieve in the existence of such a Being. And a man's theories of the Universe always at bottom imply a Metaphysic of some kind—conscious or unconscious.

Sometimes the theory of a Religion which shall be purely psychological springs from pure ignorance as to the meaning of the terms actually employed by the general usage of philosophers. Those who talk in this way mean by Psychology what, according to the ordinary philosophic usage, is really Metaphysic. For Metaphysic is simply the science which deals with the ultimate nature of the Universe. {115} At other times attempts are made by people of more or less philosophical culture to justify their theory. The most widely influential of such attempts is the one made by M. Auguste Sabatier.[10] This attempt has at least this much in its favour—that it is not so much to the ordinary experience of average men and women that M. Sabatier appeals as to the exceptional experiences of the great religious minds. He lays the chief stress upon those exceptional moments of religious history when a new religious idea entered into the mind of some prophet or teacher, e.g. the unity of God, the Fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of Man. Here, just because the idea was new, it cannot (he contends) be accounted for by education or environment or any other of the psychological causes which obviously determine the traditional beliefs of the great majority. These new ideas, therefore, he assumes to be due to immediate revelation or inspiration from God. Now it is obvious that, even if this inference were well grounded, it assumes that we have somehow arrived independently at a conception of God to which such inspirations can be referred. The Psychology of the human mind cannot assume the existence of such a Being: if we infer such a Being from our own mental experience, that is not immediate but {116} mediate knowledge. It is a belief based on inference, and a belief which is, properly speaking, metaphysical. The idea of a Religion which is merely based upon Psychology and involves nothing else is a delusion: all the great Religions of the world have been, among other things, metaphysical systems. We have no means of ascertaining their truth but Reason, whether it assume the form of a rough common-sense or of elaborate reasoning which not only is Metaphysic but knows itself to be so. Reason is then the organ of religious truth. But then, let me remind you, Reason includes our moral Reason. That really is a faculty of immediate knowledge; and it is a faculty which, in a higher or lower state of development, is actually found in practically all human beings. The one element of truth which I recognize in the theory of an immediate knowledge of God is the truth that the most important data upon which we base the inference which leads to the knowledge of God are those supplied by the immediate judgements or intuitions of the Moral Consciousness.

And here let me caution you against a very prevalent misunderstanding about the word Reason. It is assumed very often that Reason means nothing but inference. That is not what we mean when we refer moral judgements to the Reason. We do not mean that we can prove that things are right or {117} wrong: we mean precisely the opposite—that ultimate moral truth is immediate, like the truth that two and two make four. It might, of course, be contended that the same Reason which assures me that goodness is worth having and that the whole is greater than the part, assures us no less immediately of the existence of God. I can only say that I am sure I have no such immediate knowledge, and that for the most part that knowledge is never claimed by people who understand clearly the difference between immediate knowledge and inference. The idea of God is a complex conception, based, not upon this or that isolated judgement or momentary experience, but upon the whole of our experience taken together. It is a hypothesis suggested by, and necessary to, the explanation of our experience as a whole. Some minds may lay most stress upon the religious emotions themselves; others upon the experience of the outer world, upon the appearances of design, or upon the metaphysical argument which shows them the inconceivability of matter without mind; others, again, may be most impressed by the impossibility of accounting in any way for the immediate consciousness of duty and the conviction of objective validity or authority which that consciousness carries with it. But in any case the knowledge, when it is a reasonable belief and not based merely upon authority, involves {118} inference—just like our knowledge of our friend's existence. The fact that my friend is known to me by experience does not prevent his communicating his mind to me. I shall try to show you in my next lecture that to admit that our knowledge of God is based upon inference is not incompatible with the belief that God has spoken to man face to face, as a man speaketh to his friend.

At this point it may perhaps be well, for the sake of clearness, to summarize the position to which I have tried to lead you. I have tried to show that the material Universe cannot reasonably be thought of as having any existence outside, or independently of, Mind. It certainly does not exist merely in any or all of the human and similar minds whose knowledge is fleeting, and which have, there is every reason to believe, a beginning in time. We are bound then to infer the existence of a single Mind or Consciousness, which must be thought of as containing all the elements of our own Consciousness—Reason or Thought, Feeling, and Will—though no doubt in Him those elements or aspects of Consciousness are combined in a manner of which our own minds can give us but a very faint and analogical idea. The world must be thought of as ultimately the thought or experience of this Mind, which we call God. And this Mind must be thought {119} of as not only a Thinker, but also as a Cause or a Will. Our own and all other minds, no less than the events of the material Universe, owe their beginning and continuance to this divine Will: in them the thought or experience of the divine Mind is reproduced in various degrees; and to all of them is communicated some portion of that causality or activity of which God is the ultimate source, so that their acts must be regarded as due mediately to them, ultimately to God. But, though these minds are wholly dependent upon and in intimate connexion with the divine Mind, they cannot be regarded as parts of the divine Consciousness. Reality consists of God and all the minds that He wills to exist, together with the world of Nature which exists in and for those minds. Reality is the system or society of spirits and their experience. The character and ultimate purpose of the divine Mind is revealed to us, however inadequately or imperfectly, in the moral consciousness; and the moral ideal which is thus communicated to us makes it reasonable for us to expect, for at least the higher of the dependent or created minds, a continuance, of their individual existence, after physical death. Pain, sin, and other evils must be regarded as necessary incidents in the process by which the divine Will is bringing about the greatest attainable good of all conscious beings. The question whether our material Universe, {120} considered as the object of Mind, has a beginning and will have an end, is one which we have no data for deciding. Time-distinctions, I think, must be regarded as objective—that is to say, as forming part of the nature and constitution of the real world; but the antinomy involved either in supposing an endless succession or a beginning and end of the time-series is one which our intellectual faculties are, or at least have so far proved, incapable of solving. The element of inadequacy and uncertainty which the admission of this antinomy introduces into our theory of the Universe is an emphatic reminder to us of the inadequate and imperfect character of all our knowledge. The knowledge, however, that we possess, though inadequate knowledge, is real knowledge—not a sham knowledge of merely relative or human validity; and is sufficient not only for the guidance of life but even for the partial, though not the complete, satisfaction of one of the noblest impulses of the human mind—the disinterested passion for truth. 'Now we see in a mirror darkly'; but still we see.

The view of the Universe which I have endeavoured very inadequately to set before you is a form of Idealism. Inasmuch as it recognizes the existence—though not the separate and independent existence—of many persons; inasmuch as it regards both God and man as persons, without attempting {121} to merge the existence of either in one all-including, comprehensive consciousness, it may further be described as a form of 'personal Idealism.' But, if any one finds it easier to think of material Nature as having an existence which, though dependent upon and willed by the divine Mind, is not simply an existence in and for mind, such a view of the Universe will serve equally well as a basis of Religion. For religious purposes it makes no difference whether we think of Nature as existing in the Mind of God, or as simply created or brought into and kept in existence by that Mind. When you have subtracted from the theistic case every argument that depends for its force upon the theory that the idea of matter without Mind is an unthinkable absurdity, enough will remain to show the unreasonableness of supposing that in point of fact matter ever has existed without being caused and controlled by Mind. The argument for Idealism may, I hope, have at all events exhibited incidentally the groundlessness and improbability of materialistic and naturalistic assumptions, and left the way clear for the establishment of Theism by the arguments which rest upon the discovery that Causality implies volition; upon the appearances of intelligence in organic life; upon the existence of the moral consciousness; and more generally upon the enormous probability that the ultimate Source of Reality should resemble rather {122} the highest than the lowest kind of existence of which we have experience. That Reality as a whole may be most reasonably interpreted by Reality at its highest is after all the sum and substance of all theistic arguments. If anybody finds it easier to think of matter as uncreated but as always guided and controlled by Mind, I do not think there will be any religious objection to such a position; though it is, as it seems to me, intellectually a less unassailable position than is afforded by an Idealism of the type which I have most inadequately sketched.

Mr. Bradley in a cynical moment has defined Metaphysics as the 'finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct.' I do not for myself accept that definition, which Mr. Bradley himself would not of course regard as expressing the whole truth of the matter. But, though I am firmly convinced that it is possible to find good reasons for the religious beliefs and hopes which have in fact inspired the noblest lives, I still feel that the greatest service which even a little acquaintance with Philosophy may render to many who have not the time for any profounder study of it, will be to give them greater boldness and confidence in accepting a view of the Universe which satisfies the instinctive or unanalysed demands of their moral, intellectual, and spiritual nature.

{123}

NOTE ON NON-THEISTIC IDEALISM

It may perhaps be well for the sake of greater clearness to summarize my objections—those already mentioned and some others—to the system of Dr. McTaggart, which I admit to be, for one who has accepted the idealistic position that matter does not exist apart from Mind, the only intelligible alternative to Theism. His theory is, it will be remembered, that ultimate Reality consists of a system of selves or spirits, uncreated and eternal, forming together a Unity, but not a conscious Unity, so that consciousness exists only in the separate selves, not in the whole:

(1) It is admitted that the material world exists only in and for Mind. There is no reason to think that any human mind, or any of the other minds of which Dr. McTaggart's Universe is composed, knows the whole of this world. What kind of existence then have the parts of the Universe which are not known to any mind? It seems to me that Dr. McTaggart would be compelled to admit that they do not exist at all. The world postulated by Science would thus be admitted to be a delusion. This represents a subjective Idealism of an extreme and staggering kind which cannot meet the objections commonly urged against all Idealism.

(2) Moreover, the world is not such an intellectually complete system as Dr. McTaggart insists that it must be, apart from the relations of its known parts to its unknown parts. If there are parts which are unknown to any mind, and which therefore do not exist at all, it is not a system at all.

(3) If it be said that all the spirits between them know the world—one knowing one part, another another—this is a mere hypothesis, opposed to all the probabilities suggested by experience, and after all would be a very inadequate answer to our difficulties. Dr. McTaggart insists {124} that the world of existing things exists as a system. Such existence to an Idealist must mean existence for a mind; a system not known as a system to any mind whatever could hardly be said to exist at all.

(4) If it be suggested (as Dr. McTaggart was at one time inclined to suggest) that every mind considered as a timeless Noumenon is omniscient, though in its phenomenal and temporal aspect its knowledge is intermittent and always limited, I reply (a) the theory seems to me not only gratuitous but unintelligible, and (b) it is open to all the difficulties and objections of the theory that time and change are merely subjective delusions. This is too large a question to discuss here: I can only refer to the treatment of the subject by such writers as Lotze (see above) and M. Bergson. I may also refer to Mr. Bradley's argument (Appearance and Reality, p. 50 sq.) against the theory that the individual Ego is out of time.

(5) The theory of pre-existent souls is opposed to all the probabilities suggested by experience. Soul and organism are connected in such a way that the pre-existence of one element in what presents itself and works in our world as a unity is an extremely difficult supposition, and involves assumptions which reduce to a minimum the amount of identity or continuity that could be claimed for the Ego throughout its successive lives. A soul which has forgotten all its previous experiences may have some identity with its previous state, but not much. Moreover, we should have to suppose that the correspondence of a certain type of body with a certain kind of soul, as well as the resemblance between the individual and his parents, implies no kind of causal connexion, but is due to mere accident; or, if it is not to accident, to a very arbitrary kind of pre-established harmony which there is nothing in experience to suggest, and which (upon Dr. McTaggart's theory) there is no creative intelligence to pre-establish. The theory cannot be absolutely refuted, but all Dr. McTaggart's ingenuity has not—to my own mind, {125} and (I feel sure) to most minds—made it seem otherwise than extremely difficult and improbable. Its sole recommendation is that it makes possible an Idealism without Theism: but, if Theism be an easier and more defensible theory, that is no recommendation at all.

(6) Dr. McTaggart's whole theory seems to me to waver between two inconsistent views of Reality. When he insists that the world consists of a system or Unity, he tends towards a view of things which makes the system of intellectual relations constituting knowledge or Science to be the very reality of things: on such a view there is no impossibility of an ultimate Reality not known to any one mind. But Dr. McTaggart has too strong a hold on the conviction of the supremely real character of conscious mind and the unreality of mere abstractions to be satisfied with this view. If there is no mind which both knows and wills the existence and the mutual relations of the spirits, the supreme reality must be found in the individual spirits themselves; yet the system, if known to none of them, seems to fall outside the reality. The natural tendency of a system which finds the sole reality in eternally self-existent souls is towards Pluralism—a theory of wholly independent 'Reals' or 'Monads.' Dr. McTaggnrt is too much of a Hegelian to acquiesce in such a view. The gulf between the two tendencies seems to me—with all respect—to be awkwardly bridged over by the assumption that the separate selves form an intelligible system, which nevertheless no one really existent spirit actually understands. If a system of relations can be Reality, there is no ground for assuming the pre-existence or eternity of individual souls: if on the other hand Reality is 'experience,' an unexperienced 'system' cannot be real, and the 'unity' disappears. This is a line of objection which it would require a much more thorough discussion to develope.

(7) On the view which I myself hold as to the nature of Causality, the only intelligible cause of events is a Will. The events of Dr. McTaggart's world (putting aside the very {126} small proportion which are due, in part at least, to the voluntary action of men or spirits) are not caused at all. His theory is therefore open to all—and more than all—the objections which I have urged in Lecture II. against the theory which explains the Universe as the thought of a Mind but not as caused by that Mind.

(8) It is just possible that some one might suggest that the first of my objections might be met by the allegation that there is nothing in the scheme which forbids us to suppose that the whole of Nature is known to more than one of the spirits which make up Reality, though not to all, or indeed any, of the human and non-human spirits known to us. I should reply (a) that the considerations which lead to the hypothesis of one omniscient Being do not require more than one such spirit, and entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem; (b) such a scheme would still be open to Objection 7. If it is a speculative possibility that all Nature may exist in the knowledge of more than one spirit, it cannot well be thought of as willed by more than one spirit. If the Universe, admitted to form an ordered system, is caused by rational will at all, it must surely be caused by one Will. But perhaps a serious discussion of a polytheistic scheme such as this may be postponed till it is seriously maintained. It has not been suggested, so far as I am aware, by Dr. McTaggart himself.

(9) The real strength of Dr. McTaggart's system must be measured by the validity of his objections to a Theism such as I have defended. I have attempted to reply to those objections in the course of these Lectures, and more at length in a review of his Some Dogmas of Religion in Mind (N.S.), vol. xv., 1906.

[1] Cf. Flint's Theism, Ed. v., p. 117 and App. xi.

[2] The most illuminating discussion of time and the most convincing argument for its 'objectivity' which I know, is to be found in Lotze's Metaphysic, Book II. chap. iii., but it cannot be recommended to the beginner in Metaphysic. A brilliant exposition of the view of the Universe which regards time and change as belonging to the very reality of the Universe, has recently appeared in M. Bergson's L'Évolution Créatrice, but he has hardly attempted to deal with the metaphysical difficulties indicated above. The book, however, seems to me the most important philosophical work that has appeared since Mr. Bradley's Appearance and Reality, and though the writer has hardly formulated his Natural Theology, it constitutes a very important contribution to the theistic argument. Being based upon a profound study of biological Evolution, it may be specially commended to scientific readers.

[3] Such a view is expounded in Dr. Schiller's early work The Riddles of the Sphinx and in Professor Howison's The Limits of Evolution. The very distinguished French thinker Charles Renouvier (La Nouvelle Monadologie, etc.), like Origen, believed that souls were pre-existent but created.

[4] I use the word 'causally connected' in the popular or scientific sense of the word, to indicate merely an actually observed psycho-physical law.

[5] In part, perhaps, also to a mistaken theory of predication, which assumes that, because every fact in the world can be represented as logically a predicate of Reality at large, therefore there is but one Substance or (metaphysically) Real Being in the world, of which all other existences are really mere 'attributes.' But this theory cannot be discussed here.

[6] In The New Theology.

[7] E.g. by Mr. Bradley in Appearance and Reality and still more uncompromisingly by Professor A. E. Taylor in The Problem of Conduct, but I rejoice to find that the latter very able writer has recently given up this theory of a 'super-moral' Absolute.

[8] I think it desirable to mention here that Professor Watson's account of my views in his Philosophical Basis of Religion completely misrepresents my real position. I have replied to his criticisms in Mind, N.S. No. 69 (Jan. 1909).

[9] This is sometimes denied by Philosophers, but I have never been able to understand on what grounds. If I know a priori the existence of other men, I ought to be able to say a priori how many they are and to say something about them. And this is more than any one claims.

[10] In Esquisse d'une Philosophie de la Religion d'après La Psychologie et l'histoire.

{127}

LECTURE V

REVELATION

I have tried in previous lectures to show that the apprehension of religious truth does not depend upon some special kind of intuition; that it is not due to some special faculty superior to and different in kind from our ordinary intellectual activities, but to an exercise of the same intellectual faculties by which we attain to truth in other matters—including, however, especially the wholly unique faculty of immediately discerning values or pronouncing moral judgements. The word 'faith' should, as it seems to me, be used to express not a mysterious capacity for attaining to knowledge without thought or without evidence, but to indicate some of the manifold characteristics by which our religious knowledge is distinguished from the knowledge either of common life or of the physical Sciences. If I had time there would be much to be said about these characteristics, and I think I could show that the popular distinction between knowledge and religious {128} faith finds whatever real justification it possesses in these characteristics of religious knowledge. I might insist on the frequently implicit and unanalysed character of religious thinking; upon the incompleteness and inadequacy of even the fullest account that the maturest and acutest Philosopher can give of ultimate Reality; upon the merely probable and analogical character of much of the reasoning which is necessarily employed both in the most popular and in the most philosophical kinds of reasoning about such matters; and above all upon the prominent place which moral judgements occupy in religious thought, moral judgements which, on account of their immediate character and their emotional setting, are often not recognized in their true character as judgements of the Reason. Most of the mistakes into which popular thinking has fallen in this matter—the mistakes which culminate in the famous examination-paper definition of faith as 'a means of believing that which we know not to be true'—would be avoided if we would only remember, with St. Paul and most of the greater religious thinkers, that the true antithesis is not between faith and reason but between faith and sight. All religious belief implies a belief in something which cannot be touched or tasted or handled, and which cannot be established by any mere logical deduction from what can be touched or tasted or handled. So far from implying {129} scepticism as to the power of Reason, this opposition between faith and sight actually asserts the possibility of attaining by thought to a knowledge of realities which cannot be touched or tasted or handled—a knowledge of equal validity and trustworthiness with that which is popularly said to be due to the senses, though Plato has taught us once for all[1] that the senses by themselves never give us real knowledge, and that in the apprehension of the most ordinary matter of fact there is implied the action of the self-same intellect by which alone we can reach the knowledge of God.

It may further be pointed out that, though neither religious knowledge nor moral knowledge are mere emotion, they are both of them very closely connected with certain emotions. Great moral discoveries are made, not so much by superior intellectual power, as by superior interest in the subject-matter of Morality. Very ordinary intelligence can see, when it is really brought to bear upon the matter, the irrationality or immorality of bad customs, oppressions, social injustices; but the people who have led the revolt against these things have generally been the people who have felt intensely about them. So it is with the more distinctly religious knowledge. Religious thought and insight are largely dependent upon the emotions to which religious {130} ideas and beliefs appeal. The absence of religious thought and definite religious belief is very often (I am far from saying always) due to a want of interest in Religion; but that does not prove that religious thought is not the work of the intellect, any more than the fact that a man is ignorant of Politics because he takes no interest in Politics proves that political truth is a mere matter of emotion, and has nothing to do with the understanding. Thought is always guided by interest—a truth which must not be distorted with a certain modern school of thought, if indeed it can properly be called thought, into the assertion that thinking is nothing but willing, and that therefore we are at liberty to think just what we please.

And that leads on to a further point. Emotion and desire are very closely connected with the will. A man's moral insight and the development of his thought about moral questions depend very largely upon the extent to which he acts up to whatever light he has. Vice, as Aristotle put it, is phthartike arches—destructive of moral first principles. Moral insight is largely dependent upon character. And so is religious insight. Thus it is quite true to say that religious belief depends in part upon the state of the will. This doctrine has been so scandalously abused by many Theologians and Apologists that I use it with great hesitation. I have no sympathy {131} with the idea that we are justified in believing a religious doctrine merely because we wish it to be true, or with the insinuation that non-belief in a religious truth is always or necessarily due to moral obliquity. But still it is undeniable that a man's ethical and religious beliefs are to some extent affected by the state of his will. That is so with all knowledge to some extent; for progress in knowledge requires attention, and is largely dependent upon interest. If I take no interest in the properties of curves or the square root of -1, I am not very likely to make a good mathematician. This connexion of knowledge with interest applies in an exceptional degree to religious knowledge: and that is one of the points which I think many religious thinkers have intended to emphasize by their too hard and fast distinctions between faith and knowledge.

Belief itself is thus to some extent affected by the state of the will; and still more emphatically does the extent to which belief affects action depend upon the will. Many beliefs which we quite sincerely hold are what have been called 'otiose beliefs'; we do not by an effort of the will realize them sufficiently strongly for them to affect action. Many a man knows perfectly that his course of life will injure or destroy his physical health; it is not through intellectual scepticism that he disobeys his {132} physician's prescriptions, but because other desires and inclinations prevent his attending to them and acting upon them. It is obvious that to men like St. Paul and Luther faith meant much more than a mere state of the intellect; it included a certain emotional and a certain volitional attitude; it included love and it included obedience. Whether our intellectual beliefs about Religion are energetic enough to influence action, does to an enormous extent depend upon our wills. Faith is, then, used, and almost inevitably used, in such a great variety of senses that I do not like to lay down one definite and exclusive definition of it; but it would be safe to say that, for many purposes and in many connexions, religious faith means the deliberate adoption by an effort of the will, as practically certain for purposes of action and of feeling, of a religious belief which to the intellect is, or may be, merely probable. For purposes of life it is entirely reasonable to treat probabilities as certainties. If a man has reason to think his friend is trustworthy, he will do well to trust him wholly and implicitly. If a man has reason to think that a certain view of the Universe is the most probable one, he will do well habitually to allow that conviction to dominate not merely his actions, but the habitual tenour of his emotional and spiritual life. We should not love a human being much if we allowed ourselves habitually to {133} contemplate the logical possibility that the loved one was unworthy of, or irresponsive to, our affection. We could not love God if we habitually contemplated the fact that His existence rests for us upon judgements in which there is more or less possibility of error, though there is no reason why we should, in our speculative moments, claim a greater certainty for them than seems to be reasonable. The doctrine that 'probability is the guide of life' is one on which every sensible man habitually acts in all other relations of life: Bishop Butler was right in contending that it should be applied no less unhesitatingly to the matter of religious belief and religious aspiration.

The view which I have taken of the nature of faith may be illustrated by the position of Clement of Alexandria. It is clear from his writings that by faith he meant a kind of conviction falling short of demonstration or immediate intellectual insight, and dependent in part upon the state of the will and the heart. Clement did not disparage knowledge in the interests of faith: faith was to him a more elementary kind of knowledge resting largely upon moral conviction, and the foundation of that higher state of intellectual apprehension which he called Gnosis. I do not mean, of course, to adopt Clement's Philosophy as a whole; I merely refer to it as illustrating the point that, properly considered, faith is, or rather includes, a particular kind or stage {134} of knowledge, and is not a totally different and even opposite state of mind. It would be easy to show that this has been fully recognized by many, if not most, of the great Christian thinkers.

One last point. It is of the utmost importance to distinguish between the process by which psychologically a man arrives at a religious or other truth and the reasons which make it true. Because I deny that the truth of God's existence can reasonably be accepted on the basis of an immediate judgement or intuition, I do not deny for one moment that an apparently intuitive conviction of the truth of Christianity, as of other religions, actually exists. The religious belief of the vast majority of persons has always rested, and must always rest, very largely upon tradition, education, environment, authority of one kind or another—authority supported or confirmed by a varying measure of independent reflection or experience. And, just where the influence of authority is most complete and overwhelming, it is least felt to be authority. The person whose beliefs are most entirely produced by education or environment is very often most convinced that his opinions are due solely to his own immediate insight. But even where this is not the case—even where the religious man is taking a new departure, revolting against his environment and adopting a religious belief absolutely at variance with the established {135} belief of his society—I do not contend that such new religious ideas are always due to unobserved and unanalysed processes of reasoning. That in most cases, when a person adopts a new creed, he would himself give some reason for his change of faith is obvious, though the reason which he would allege would not in all cases be the one which really caused the change of religion. There may be other psychological influences which cause belief besides the influence of environment: in some cases the psychological causes of such beliefs are altogether beyond analysis. But, though I do not think M. Auguste Sabatier justified in assuming that a belief is true, and must come directly from God, simply because we cannot easily explain its genesis by the individual's environment and psychological antecedents, it is of extreme importance to insist that it is not proved to be false because it was not adopted primarily, or at all, on adequate theoretical grounds. A belief which arose at first entirely without logical justification, or it may be on intellectual grounds subsequently discovered to be inadequate or false, may nevertheless be one which can and does justify itself to the reflective intellect of the person himself or of other persons. And many new, true, and valuable beliefs have undoubtedly arisen in this way. Even in physical Science we all know that there is no Logic of discovery. It {136} is a familiar criticism upon the Logic of Bacon that he ignored or under-estimated the part that is played in scientific thinking by hypothesis, and the consequent need of scientific imagination. Very often the new scientific idea comes into the discoverer's mind, he knows not how or why. Some great man of Science—I think, Helmholtz—said of a brilliant discovery of his, 'It was given to me.' But it was not true because it came to Helmholtz in this way, but because it was subsequently verified and proved. Now, undoubtedly, religious beliefs, new and old, often do present themselves to the minds of individuals in an intuitive and unaccountable way. They may subsequently be justified at the bar of Reason: and yet Reason might never have discovered them for itself. They would never have come into the world unless they had presented themselves at first to some mind or other as intuitions, inspirations, immediate Revelations: and yet (once again) the fact that they so present themselves does not by itself prove them to be true.

I may perhaps illustrate what I mean by the analogy of Poetry. I suppose few people will push the sound-without-sense view of Poetry to the length of denying that poets do sometimes see and teach us truths. No one—least of all one who is not even a verse-maker himself—can, I suppose, analyse the intellectual process by which a poet {137} gets at his truths. The insight by which he arrives at them is closely connected with emotions of various kinds: and yet the truths are not themselves emotions, nor do they in all cases merely state the fact that the poet has felt such and such emotions. They are propositions about the nature of things, not merely about the poet's mental states. And yet the truths are not true because the poet feels them, as he would say—no matter how passionately he feels them. There is no separate organ of poetic truth: and not all the things that poets have passionately felt are true. Some highly poetical thoughts have been very false thoughts. But, if they are true, they must be true for good logical reasons, which a philosophical critic may even in some cases by subsequent reflection be able to disentangle and set forth. Yet the poet did not get at those truths by way of philosophical reflection: or, if he was led to them by any logical process, he could not have analysed his own reasoning. The poet could not have produced the arguments of the philosopher: the philosopher without the poet's lead might never have seen the truth. I am afraid I must not stay to defend or illustrate this position: I will only say that the poets I should most naturally go to for illustration would be such poets as Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning, though perhaps all three are a little {138} too consciously philosophic to supply the ideal illustration.

I do not think it will be difficult to apply these reflections to the case of religious and ethical truth. All religious truth, as I hold, depends logically upon inference; inference from the whole body of our experiences, among which the most important place is held by our immediate moral judgements. The truth of Theism is in that sense a truth discernible by Reason. But it does not follow that, when it was first discovered, it was arrived at by the inferences which I have endeavoured to some extent to analyse, or by one of the many lines of thought which may lead to the same conclusions. It was not the Greek philosophers so much as the Jewish prophets who taught the world true Monotheism. Hosea, Amos, the two Isaiahs probably arrived at their Monotheism largely by intuition; or (in so far as it was by inferential processes) the premisses of their argument were very probably inherited beliefs of earlier Judaism which would not commend themselves without qualification to a modern thinker. In its essentials the Monotheism of Isaiah is a reasonable belief; we accept it because it is reasonable, not because Isaiah had an intuition that it was true; for we have rejected many things which to Isaiah probably seemed no less self-evidently true. And yet it would be a profound mistake to assume that {139} the philosophers who now defend Isaiah's creed would ever have arrived at it without Isaiah's aid.

I hope that by this time you will have seen to some extent the spirit in which I am approaching the special subject of to-day's lecture—the question of Revelation. In some of the senses that have been given to it, the idea of Revelation is one which hardly any one trained in the school—that is to say, any school—of modern Philosophy is likely to accept. The idea that pieces of information have been supernaturally and without any employment of their own intellectual faculties communicated at various times to particular persons, their truth being guaranteed by miracles—in the sense of interruptions of the ordinary course of nature by an extraordinary fiat of creative power—is one which is already rejected by most modern theologians, even among those who would generally be called rather conservative theologians. I will not now argue the question whether any miraculous event, however well attested, could possibly be sufficient evidence for the truth of spiritual teaching given in attestation of it. I will merely remark that to any one who has really appreciated the meaning of biblical criticism, it is scarcely conceivable that the evidence for miracles could seem sufficiently cogent to constitute such an attestation. In proof of that I will merely appeal to the modest, apologetic, tentative tone in which {140} scholarly and sober-minded theologians who would usually be classed among the defenders of miracles—men like the Bishop of Ely or Professor Sanday of Oxford—are content to speak of such evidences. They admit the difficulty of proving that such miraculous events really happened thousands of years ago on the strength of narratives written at the very earliest fifty years after the alleged event, and they invite us rather to believe in the miracles on the evidence of a Revelation already accepted than to accept the revelation on the evidence of the miracles. I shall have a word to say on this question of miracles next time; but for the present I want to establish, or rather without much argument to put before you for your consideration, this position; that the idea of revelation cannot be admitted in the sense of a communication of truth by God, claiming to be accepted not on account of its own intrinsic reasonableness or of the intellectual or spiritual insight of the person to whom it is made, but on account of the historical evidence for miraculous occurrences said to have taken place in connexion with such communication. The most that can reasonably be contended for is that super-normal occurrences of this kind may possess a certain corroborative value in support of a Revelation claiming to be accepted on other grounds.

What place then is left for the idea of Revelation? {141} I will ask you to go back for a moment to the conclusions of our first lecture. We saw that from the idealistic point of view all knowledge may be looked upon as a partial communication to the human soul of the thoughts or experiences of the divine Mind. There is a sense then in which all truth is revealed truth. In a more important sense, and a sense more nearly allied to that of ordinary usage, all moral and spiritual truth may be regarded as revealed truth. And in particular those immediate judgements about good and evil in which we have found the sole means of knowing the divine character and purposes must be looked on as divinely implanted knowledge—none the less divinely implanted because it is, in the ordinary sense of the words, quite natural, normal, and consistent with law. Nobody but an Atheist ought to talk about the unassisted human intellect: no one who acquiesces in the old doctrine that Conscience is the voice of God ought either on the one hand to deny the existence of Revelation, or on the other to speak of Revelation as if it were confined to the Bible.

But because we ascribe some intrinsic power of judging about spiritual and moral matters to the ordinary human intellect, it would be a grievous mistake to assume that all men have an equal measure of this power. Because we assert that all moral and spiritual truth comes to men by {142} Revelation, it does not follow that there are not degrees of Revelation. And it is one of the special characteristics of religious and moral truth that it is in a peculiar degree dependent upon the superior insight of those exceptional men to whom have been accorded extraordinary degrees of moral and spiritual insight. Even in Science, as we have seen, we cannot dispense with genius: very ordinary men can satisfy themselves of the truth of a hypothesis when it is once suggested, though they would have been quite incompetent to discover that hypothesis for themselves. Still more unquestionably are there moral and spiritual truths which, when once discovered, can be seen to be true by men of very commonplace intellect and commonplace character. The truths are seen and passed on to others, who accept them partly on authority, by way of social inheritance and tradition; partly because they are confirmed in various degrees by their own independent judgement and experience. Here then—in the discovery of new spiritual truth—we encounter that higher and exceptional degree of spiritual and ethical insight which in a special and pre-eminent sense we ought to regard as Revelation or Inspiration. Here there is room, in the evolution of Religion and Morality, for the influence of the men of moral or religious genius—the Prophets, the Apostles, the Founders and Reformers of Religions: and, since {143} moral and spiritual insight are very closely connected with character, for the moral hero, the leader of men, the Saint. Especially to the new departures, the turning-points, the epoch-making discoveries in ethical and religious progress connected with the appearance of such men, we may apply the term Revelation in a supreme or culminating sense.

It is, as it seems to me, extremely important that we should not altogether divorce the idea of Revelation from those kinds of moral and religious truth which are arrived at by the ordinary working of the human intellect. The ultimate moral judgements no doubt must be intuitive or immediate, but in our deductions from them—in their application both to practical life and to theories about God and the Universe—there is room for much intellectual work of the kind which we commonly associate rather with the philosopher than with the prophet. But the philosopher may be also a prophet. The philosophically trained Greek Fathers were surely right in recognizing that men like Socrates and Plato were to be numbered among those to whom the Spirit of God had spoken in an exceptional degree. They too spoke in the power of the indwelling Logos. But still it is quite natural that we should associate the idea of Revelation or Inspiration more particularly with that kind of moral and intellectual discovery which comes to exceptional men by way {144} of apparent intuition or immediate insight. We associate the idea of inspiration rather with the poet than with the man of Science, and with the prophet rather than with the systematic philosopher. It is quite natural, therefore, that we should associate the idea of Revelation more especially with religious teachers of the intuitive order like the Jewish prophets than with even those philosophers who have also been great practical teachers of Ethics and Religion. But it is most important to recognize that there is no hard and fast line to be drawn between the two classes. The Jewish prophets did not arrive at their ideas about God without a great deal of hard thinking, though the thinking is for the most part unexplicit and the mode of expression poetic. 'Their idols are silver and gold; even the work of men's hands. . . . They have hands and handle not; feet have they and walk not: neither speak they through their throat.' There is real hard reasoning underlying such noble rhetoric, though the Psalmist could not perhaps have reduced his argument against Polytheism and Idolatry to the form of a dialectical argument like Plato or St. Thomas Aquinas. In the highest instance of all—the case of our Lord Jesus Christ himself—a natural instinct of reverence is apt to deter us from analysing how he came by the truth that he communicated to men; but, though I would not deny that the deepest {145} truth came to him chiefly by a supreme gift of intuition, there are obvious indications of profound intellectual thought in his teaching. Recall for a moment his arguments against the misuse of the Sabbath, against the superstition of unclean meats, against the Sadducean objection to the Resurrection. I want to avoid at present dogmatic phraseology; so I will only submit in passing that this is only what we should expect if the early Church was right in thinking of Christ as the supreme expression in the moral and religious sphere of the Logos or Reason of God.

The thought of great religious thinkers is none the less Revelation because it involves the use of their reasoning faculties. But I guarded myself against being supposed, in contending for the possibility of a philosophical or metaphysical knowledge of God, to assume that religious truth had always come to men in this way, or even that the greatest steps in religious progress have usually taken the form of explicit reasoning. Once again, it is all-important to distinguish between the way in which a belief comes to be entertained and the reasons for its being true. All sorts of psychological causes have contributed to generate religious beliefs. And when once we have discovered grounds in our own reflection or experience for believing them to be true, there is no reason why we should not regard all of them as {146} pieces of divine revelation. Visions and dreams, for instance, had a share in the development of religious ideas. We might even admit the possibility that the human race would never have been led to think of the immortality of the soul but for primitive ideas about ghosts suggested by the phenomena of dreams. The truth of the doctrine is neither proved nor disproved by such an account of its origin; but, if that belief is true and dreams have played a part in the process by which man has been led to it, no Theist surely can refuse to recognize the divine guidance therein. And so, at a higher level, we are told by the author of the Acts that St. Peter was led to accept the great principle of Gentile Christianity by the vision of a sheet let down from heaven. There is no reason why that account should not be historically true. The psychologist may very easily account for St. Peter's vision by the working in his mind of the liberal teaching of Stephen, the effect of his fast, and so on. But that does not prevent us recognizing that vision as an instrument of divine Revelation. We at the present day do not believe in this fundamental principle of Christianity because of that dream of St. Peter's; for we know that dreams are not always truth or always edifying. We believe in that principle on other grounds—the convincing grounds (among others) which St. Luke puts into St. Peter's mouth {147} on the following morning. But that need not prevent our recognizing that God may have communicated that truth to the men of that generation—and through them to us—partly by means of that dream.

The two principles then for which I wish to contend are these: (1) that Revelation is a matter of degree; (2) that no Revelation can be accepted in the long run merely because it came to a particular person in a peculiarly intuitive or immediate way. It may be that M. Auguste Sabatier is right in seeing the most immediate contact of God with the human soul in those intuitive convictions which can least easily be accounted for by ordinary psychological causes; in those new departures of religious insight, those unaccountable comings of new thoughts into the mind, which constitute the great crises or turning-points of religious history. But, though the coming of such thoughts may often be accepted by the individual as direct evidences of a divine origin, the Metaphysician, on looking back upon them, cannot treat the fact that the psychologist cannot account for them, as a convincing proof of such an origin, apart from our judgement upon the contents of what claims to be a revelation. Untrue thoughts and wicked thoughts sometimes arise equally unaccountably: the fact that they do so is even now accounted for by some as a sufficient proof of direct diabolic suggestion. When we have judged the {148} thought to be true or the suggestion to be good, then we, who on other grounds believe in God, may see in it a piece of divine revelation, but not till then.

From this point of view it is clear that we are able to recognize various degrees and various kinds of divine revelation in many different Religions, philosophies, systems of ethical teaching. We are able to recognize the importance to the world of the great historical Religions, in all of which we can acknowledge a measure of Revelation. The fact that the truths which they teach (in so far as they are true) can now be recognized as true by philosophic thought, does not show that the world would ever have evolved those thoughts, apart from the influence of the great revealing personalities. Philosophy itself—the Philosophy of the professed philosophers—has no doubt contributed a very important element to the content of the historical Religions; but it is only in proportion as they become part of a system of religious teaching, and the possession of an organized religious community, that the ideas of the philosophers really come home to multitudes of men, and shape the history of the world. Nor in many cases would the philosophers themselves have seen what they have seen but for the great epoch-making thoughts of the great religion-making periods. And the same considerations which show the importance of religious movements in the {149} past tend also to emphasize the importance of the historical Religion and of the religious community in which it is enshrined in modern times. Because religious truth can now be defended by the use of our ordinary intellectual faculties, and because all possess these faculties in some degree, it is absurd to suppose that the ordinary individual, if left to himself, would be likely to evolve a true religious system for himself—any more than he would be likely to discern for himself the truths that were first seen by Euclid or Newton if he were not taught them. To under-estimate the importance of the great historical Religions and their creators has been the besetting sin of technical religious Philosophy. Metaphysicians have in truth often written about Religion in great ignorance as to the real facts of religious history.

But because we recognize a measure of truth in all the historical Religions, it does not follow that we can recognize an equal amount of truth in all of them. The idea that all the Religions teach much the same thing—or that, while they vary about that unimportant part of Religion which is called doctrine or dogma, they are all agreed about Morality—is an idea which could only occur to the self-complaisant ignorance which of late years has done most of the theological writing in the correspondence columns of our newspapers. The real student of comparative {150} Religion knows that it is only at a rather advanced stage in the development of Religion that Religion becomes in any important degree an ethical teacher at all. Even the highest and most ethical Religions are not agreed either in their Ethics or in their Theology. Not only can we recognize higher and lower Religions; but the highest Religions, among many things which they have in common, are at certain points diametrically antagonistic to each other. It is impossible therefore reasonably to maintain that fashionable attitude of mind towards these Religions which my friend Professor Inge once described as a sort of honorary membership of all Religions except one's own. If we are to regard the historical Religions as being of any importance to our own personal religious life, we must choose between them. If we put aside the case of Judaism in its most cultivated modern form, a form in which it has been largely influenced by Christianity, I suppose there is practically only one Religion which would be in the least likely to appeal to a modern philosophical student of Religion as a possible alternative to Christianity—and that is Buddhism. But Buddhist Ethics are not the same as Christian Ethics. Buddhist Ethics are ascetic: the Christianity which Christ taught was anti-ascetic. In its view of the future, Buddhism is pessimistic; Christianity is optimistic. Much as {151} Buddhism has done to inculcate Humanity and Charity, the principle of Buddhist Humanity is not the same as that of Christianity. Humanity is encouraged by the Buddhist (in so far as he is really influenced by his own formal creed) not from a motive of disinterested affection, but as a means of escaping from the evils of personal and individual existence, and so winning Nirvana. We cannot at one and the same time adhere to the Ethics of Buddhism and to those of Christianity, though I am far from saying that Christians have nothing to learn either from Buddhist teaching or from Buddhist practice. Still less can we at one and the same time be Atheists with the Buddhist and Theists with the Christian; look forward with the Buddhist to the extinction of personal consciousness and with the Christian to a fuller and more satisfying life. To take an interest in comparative Religion is not to be religious; to be religious implies a certain exclusive attachment to some definite form of religious belief, though it may of course often be a belief to which many historical influences have contributed.

I have been trying to lead you to a view of Revelation which recognizes the existence and the importance of those exceptional religious minds to whom is due the foundation and development of the great historical Religions, while at the same time we refuse, in the last resort, to recognize any {152} revelation as true except on the ground that its truth can be independently verified. I do not mean to deny that the individual must at first, and may quite reasonably in some cases throughout life, accept much of his religious belief on authority; but that is only because he may be justified in thinking that such and such a person, or more probably such and such a religious community, is more likely to be right than himself. Rational submission to authority in this or that individual postulates independent judgement on the part of others. I am far from saying that every individual is bound to satisfy himself by personal enquiry as to the truth of every element in his own Religion; but, if and so far as he determines to do so, he cannot reasonably accept an alleged revelation on any other ground than that it comes home to him, that the content of that Religion appeals to him as true, as satisfying the demands of his intellect and of his conscience. The question in which most of us, I imagine, are most vitally interested is whether the Christian Religion is a Religion which we can accept on these grounds. That it possesses some truth, that whatever in it is true comes from God—that much is likely to be admitted by all who believe in any kind of Religion in the sense in which we have been discussing Religion. The great question for us is, 'Can we find any reason for the modern man {153} identifying himself in any exclusive way with the historical Christian Religion? Granted that there is some truth in all Religions, does Christianity contain the most truth? Is it in any sense the one absolute, final, universal Religion?'

That will be the subject for our consideration in the next lecture. But meanwhile I want to suggest to you one very broad provisional answer to our problem. Christianity alone of the historical Religions teaches those great truths to which we have been conducted by a mere appeal to Reason and to Conscience. It teaches ethical Monotheism; that is to say, it thinks of God as a thinking, feeling, willing Consciousness, and understands His nature in the light of the highest moral ideal. It teaches the belief in personal Immortality, and it teaches a Morality which in its broad general principles still appeals to the Conscience of Humanity. Universal Love it sets forth as at once the central point in its moral ideal and the most important element in its conception of God. In one of those metaphors which express so much more than any more exact philosophical formula, it is the Religion which teaches the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. And these truths were taught by the historical Jesus. No one up to his time had ever taught them with equal clearness and in equal purity, and with the same freedom from other and inconsistent teachings: {154} and this teaching was developed by his first followers. Amid all aberrations and amid all contamination by heterogeneous elements, the society or societies which look back to Christ as their Founder have never in the worst times ceased altogether to teach these truths; and now they more and more tend to constitute the essence of Christianity as it is to-day—all the more so on account of the Church's gradual shuffling off of so many adventitious ideas and practices which were at one time associated with them. Christianity is and remains the only one of the great historical Religions which has taught and does teach these great truths in all their fullness.[2] These considerations would by themselves be sufficient to put Christianity in an absolutely unique position among the Religions of Mankind.

I have so far been regarding our Lord Jesus Christ simply as a teacher of religious and ethical truth. I think it is of fundamental importance that we should begin by regarding him in this light. {155} It was in this light that he first presented himself to his fellow-countrymen—even before (in all probability) he claimed to be the fulfiller of the Messianic ideal which had been set before them by the prophets of their race. And I could not, without a vast array of quotation, give you a sufficient impression of the prominence of this aspect of his work and personality among the earlier Greek Fathers. Even after the elaborate doctrines of Catholic Christianity had begun to be developed, it was still primarily as the supremely inspired Teacher that Jesus was most often thought of. When the early Christians thought of him as the incarnate Logos or Reason of God, to teach men divine truth was still looked upon as the supreme function of the Logos and the purpose of his indwelling in the historical Jesus. But from the first Jesus appealed to men as much more than a teacher. It is one of the distinctive peculiarities of religious and ethical knowledge that it is intimately connected with character: religious and moral teaching of the highest kind is in a peculiar degree inseparable from the personality of the teacher. Jesus impressed his contemporaries, and he has impressed successive ages as having not only set before man the highest religious and moral ideal, but as having in a unique manner realized that ideal in his own life. Even the word 'example' {156} does not fully express the impression which he made on his followers, or do justice to the inseparability of his personality from his teaching. In the religious consciousness of Christ men saw realized the ideal relation of man not merely to his fellow-man but also to his heavenly Father. From the first an enthusiastic reverence for its Founder has been an essential part of the Christian Religion amid all the variety of the phases which it has assumed. The doctrine of the Christian Church was in its origin an attempt to express in the philosophical language of the time its sense of this supreme value of Christ for the religious and moral life of man. As to the historical success and the present usefulness of these attempts, I shall have a word to say next time. Meanwhile, I would leave with you this one thought. The claim of Christianity to be the supreme, the universal, in a sense the final Religion, must rest mainly, in the last resort, upon the appeal which Christ and his Religion make to the moral and religious consciousness of the present.

LITERATURE

See the works mentioned at the end of the next Lecture, to which, as
dealing more specially with the subject of Lecture v., may be added
Professor Sanday's Inspiration, and Professor Wendt's Revelation and
Christianity.

[1] Throughout his writings, but pre-eminently in the Theoetetus.

[2] If it be said that Judaism or any other Religion does now teach these truths as fully as Christianity, this may possibly apply to the creed of individual members of these Religions, but it can hardly be claimed for the historical Religions themselves. I should certainly be prepared to contend that even such individuals lose something by not placing in the centre of their Religion the personality of him by whom they were first taught, and the communities which have been the great transmitters of them. But in this course of lectures I am chiefly concerned with giving reasons why Christians should remain Christians, rather than with giving reasons why others who are not so should become Christians.

{157}

LECTURE VI

CHRISTIANITY

In my last lecture I tried to effect a transition from the idea of religious truth as something believed by the individual, and accepted by him on the evidence of his own Reason and Conscience to the idea of a Religion considered as a body of religious truth handed down by tradition in an organized society. The higher Religions—those which have passed beyond the stage of merely tribal or national Religion—are based upon the idea that religious truth of enduring value has been from time to time revealed to particular persons, the Founders or Apostles or Reformers of such religions. We recognized the validity of this idea of Revelation, and the supreme importance to the moral and religious life of such historical revelations, on one condition—that the claim of any historical Religion to the allegiance of its followers must be held to rest in the last resort upon the appeal which it makes to their Reason and Conscience: though the individual may often be {158} quite justified in accepting and relying upon the Reason and Conscience of the religious Society rather than upon his own.

The view which I have taken of Revelation makes it quite independent of what are commonly called miracles. All that I have said is quite consistent with the unqualified acceptance or with the unqualified rejection of miracles. But some of you may perhaps expect me to explain a little more fully my own attitude towards that question. And therefore I will say this much—that, if we regard a miracle as implying a suspension of a law of nature, I do not think we can call such a suspension a priori incredible; but the enormous experience which we have of the actual regularity of the laws of nature, and of the causes which in certain states of the human mind lead to the belief in miracles, makes such an event in the highest degree improbable. To me at least it would seem practically impossible to get sufficient evidence for the occurrence of such an event in the distant past: all our historical reasoning presupposes the reign of law. But it is being more and more admitted by theologians who are regarded as quite orthodox and rather conservative, that the idea of a miracle need not necessarily imply such a suspension of natural law. And on the other hand, decidedly critical and liberal theologians are more and more disposed to admit {159} that many of the abnormal events commonly called miraculous may very well have occurred without involving any real suspension of natural law. Recent advances in psychological knowledge have widened our conception of the possible influence of mind over matter and of mind over mind. Whether an alleged miraculous event is to be accepted or not must, as it seems to me, depend partly upon the amount of critically sifted historical evidence which can be produced for it, partly upon the nature of the event itself—upon the question whether it is or is not of such a kind that we can with any probability suppose that it might be accounted for either by known laws or by laws at present imperfectly understood.

To apply these principles in detail to the New Testament narratives would involve critical discussions which are outside the purpose of these lectures. I will only say that few critical scholars would deny that some recorded miracles even in the New Testament are unhistorical. When they find an incident like the healing of Malchus's ear omitted in the earlier, and inserted in the later redaction of a common original, they cannot but recognize the probability of traditional amplification. At the same time few liberal theologians will be disposed to doubt the general fact that our Lord did cure some diseases by spiritual influence, or that an appearance of our Lord to the disciples—of whatever nature—actually {160} did occur, and was the means of assuring them of his continued life and power. At all events I do not myself doubt these two facts. But at least when miracles are not regarded as constituting real exceptions to natural law, it is obvious that they will not prove the truth of any teaching which may have been connected with them; while, even if we treat the Gospel miracles as real exceptions to law, the difficulty of proving them in the face of modern critical enquiry is so great that the evidence will hardly come home to any one not previously convinced, on purely spiritual grounds, of the exceptional character of our Lord's personality and mission. This being so, I do not think that our answer to the problem of miracles, whatever it be, can play any very important part in Christian Apologetic. When we have become Christians on other grounds, the acts of healing may still retain a certain value as illustrating the character of the Master, and the Resurrection vision as proclaiming the truth of Immortality in a way which will come home to minds not easily accessible to abstract argument. The true foundation not merely for belief in the teaching of Christ, but also for the Christian's reverence for his Person, must, as it seems to me, be found in the appeal which his words and his character still make to the Conscience and Reason of mankind. This proposition would be {161} perhaps more generally accepted if I were to say that the claim of Christ to allegiance rests upon the way in which he satisfies the heart, the aspirations, the religious needs of mankind. And I should be quite willing to adopt such language, if you will only include respect for historic fact and intellectual truth among these religious needs, and admit that a reasonable faith must rest on something better than mere emotion. Fully to exhibit the grounds of this claim of Christ upon us would involve an examination of the Gospel narratives in detail: it would involve an attempt to present to you what was this teaching, this character, this religious consciousness which has commanded the homage of mankind. To attempt such a task would be out of place in a brief course of lectures devoted to a particular aspect of Religion—its relation to Philosophy. Here I must assume that you feel the spiritual supremacy of Christ—his unique position in the religious history of the world and his unique importance for the spiritual life of each one of us—; and go on to ask what assertions such a conviction warrants us in making about his person and nature, what in short should be our attitude towards the traditional doctrines of the Christian Church.

You may know something of the position taken up in this matter by the dominant school of what I may call believing liberal Theology in {162} Germany—the school which takes its name from the great theologian Ritschl, but which will be best known to most Englishmen in connexion with the name of Prof. Harnack, though it may be well to remember that Harnack is nearer to the left than to the right wing of that school. The fundamental principle of that school is to base the claims of Christianity mainly upon the appeal which the picture of the life, teaching, character, and personality of Christ makes to the moral and religious consciousness of mankind. Their teaching is Christo-centric in the highest possible degree: but they are almost or entirely indifferent to the dogmatic formulae which may be employed to express this supreme religious importance of Christ. In putting the personal and historical Christ, and not any doctrine about him, in the centre of the religious life I believe they are right. But this principle is sometimes asserted in an exaggerated and one-sided manner. In the first place they are somewhat contemptuous of Philosophy, and of philosophic argument even for such fundamental truths as the existence of God. I do not see that the subjective impression made by Christ can by itself prove the fact of God's existence. We must first believe that there is a God to be revealed before we can be led to believe in Christ as the supreme Revealer. I do not believe that the modern world will permanently accept a view of the Universe {163} which does not commend itself to its Reason. The Ritschlians talk about the truth of Religion resting upon value-judgements. I can quite understand that a value-judgement may tell us the supreme value of Christ's character and his fitness to be treated as the representative of God to us, when once we believe in God: but I cannot see how any value-judgement taken by itself can assure us of that existence. Value is one thing: existence is another. To my mind a Christian Apologetic should begin, like the old Apologies of Justin or Aristides, with showing the essential reasonableness of Christ's teaching about God and its essential harmony with the highest philosophic teaching about duty, about the divine nature, about the soul and its eternal destiny. The Ritschlian is too much disposed to underrate the value of all previous religious and ethical teaching, even of Judaism at its highest: he is not content with making Christ the supreme Revealer: he wants to make him the only Revealer. And when we turn to post-Christian religious history, he is apt to treat all the great developments of religious and ethical thought from the time of the Apostles to our own day as simply worthless and even mischievous corruptions of the original, and only genuine, Christianity. He tends to reduce Christianity to the ipsissima verba of its Founder. The Ritschlian dislikes Dogma, not because it may be at times a {164} misdevelopment, but because it is a development; not because some of it may be antiquated Philosophy, but simply because it is Philosophy.[1]

In order to treat fairly this question of doctrinal development, it must be remembered that what is commonly called dogma is only a part—perhaps not the most important part—of that development. Supreme as I believe to be the value of Christ's great principle of Brotherhood, it is impossible to deny that, if we look in detail at the moral ideal of any educated Christian at the present day, we shall find in it many elements which cannot explicitly be discovered in the ipsissima verba of Christ and still less of his Apostles. And development in the ethical ideal always carries with it some development in a man's conception of God and the Universe. Some of these elements are due to a gradual bringing out into clear consciousness, and an application to new details, of principles latent in the actual words of Christ; others to an infusion of Greek Philosophy; others to the practical experience and the scientific discoveries of the modern world. Christianity in the course of nineteen centuries has gradually absorbed into itself many ideas from various sources, {165} christianizing them in the process. Many ideas, much Hellenic Philosophy, many Hellenic ideals of life, many Roman ideas of government and organization have thus, in the excellent phrase of Professor Gardner, been 'baptized into Christ.' This capacity of absorbing into itself elements of spiritual life which were originally independent of it is not a defect of historical Christianity, but one of its qualifications for being accepted by the modern world as a universal, an absolute, a final Religion.

It does not seem to me possible to recognize the claim of any historical Religion to be final and ultimate, unless it include within itself a principle of development. Let me, as briefly as I can, illustrate what I mean. It is most clearly and easily seen in the case of Morality. If the idea of a universal Religion is to mean that any detailed code of Morals laid down at a definite moment of history can serve by itself for the guidance of all human life in all after ages, we may at once dismiss the notion as a dream. In nothing did our Lord show his greatness and the fitness of his Religion for universality more than in abstaining from drawing up such a code. He confined himself to laying down a few great principles, with illustrations applicable to the circumstances of his immediate hearers. Those principles require development and application to the needs and {166} circumstances of successive ages before they can suffice to guide us in the details of conduct. To effect this development and application has been historically the work of the Church which owes its origin to the disciples whom he gathered around him. If we may accept the teaching of the fourth Gospel as at least having germs in the actual utterances of our Lord, he himself foresaw the necessity of such a development. At all events the belief in the continued work of God's Spirit in human Society is an essential principle of the Christian Religion as it was taught by the first followers of its Founder. Take for instance the case of slavery. Our Lord never condemned slavery: it is not certain that he would have done so, had the case been presented to him. Very likely his answer would have been 'Who made me a judge or a divider,' or 'Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's.' No one on reflection can now fail to see the essential incompatibility between slavery and the Christian spirit; yet it was perhaps fourteen hundred years before a single Christian thinker definitely enunciated that incompatibility, and more than eighteen hundred years before slavery was actually banished from all nominally Christian lands. Who can doubt that many features of our existing social system are equally incompatible with the principles of Christ's teaching, and that the {167} accepted Christian morality of a hundred years hence will definitely condemn many things which the average Christian Conscience now allows?

And then there is another kind of development in Ethics which is equally necessary. The Christian law of Love bids us promote the true good of our fellow-men, bids us regard another man's good as equally valuable with our own or with the like good of any other. But what is this good life which we are to promote? As to that our Lord has only laid down a few very general principles—the supreme value of Love itself, the superiority of the spiritual to the carnal, the importance of sexual purity. These principles our consciences still acknowledge, and there are no others of equal importance. But what of the intellectual life? Has that no value? Our Lord never depreciated it, as so many religious founders and reformers have done. But he has given us no explicit guidance about it. When the Christian ideal embraced within itself a recognition of the value and duty of Culture, it was borrowing from Greece. And when we turn from Ethics to Theology, the actual fact of development is no less indisputable. Every alteration of the ethical ideal has brought with it some alteration in our idea of God. We can no longer endure theories of the Atonement which are opposed to modern ideas of Justice, though they were quite compatible with {168} patristic or medieval ideas of Justice. The advances of Science have altered our whole conception of God's mode of acting upon or governing the world. None of these things are religiously so important as the great principle of the Fatherhood of God, nor have they in any way tended to modify its truth or its supreme importance. But they do imply that our Theology is not and cannot be in all points the same as that of the first Christians.

Now with these presuppositions let us approach the question of that great structure of formal dogma which the Church has built upon the foundation of Christ's teaching. A development undoubtedly it is; but, while we must not assume that every development which has historically taken place is necessarily true or valuable, it is equally unphilosophical to assume that, because it is a development, it is necessarily false or worthless. Our Lord himself did, indeed, claim to be the Messiah; the fact of Messiahship was what was primarily meant by the title 'Son of God.' Even in the Synoptists he exhibits a consciousness of a direct divine mission supremely important for his own race; and, before the close, we can perhaps discover a growing conviction that the truth which he was teaching was meant for a larger world. Starting from and developing these ideas, his followers set themselves to devise terms which should express their own sense of their Master's unique {169} religious value and importance, to express what they felt he had been to their own souls, what they felt he might be to all who accepted his message. Even to St. Paul the term 'Son of God' still meant primarily 'the Messiah': but in the light of his conception of Jesus, the Messianic idea expanded till the Christ was exalted to a position far above anything which Jewish prophecy or Apocalypse had ever claimed for him. And the means of expressing these new ideas were found naturally and inevitably in the current philosophical terminology of the day. With the fourth Gospel, if not already with St. Paul, there was infused into the teaching of the Church a new element. From the Jewish-Alexandrian speculative Theology the author borrowed the term Logos to express what he conceived to be the cosmic importance of Christ's position. He accepted from that speculation—probably from Philo—the theory which personified or half-personified that Logos or Wisdom of God through which God was represented in the Old Testament as creating the world and inspiring the prophets. This Logos through whom God had throughout the ages been more and more fully revealing Himself had at last become actually incarnate in Jesus Christ. This Word of God is also described as truly God, though in the fourth Gospel the relation of the Father to the Word—at {170} least to the Word before the Incarnation—is left wholly vague and undefined.

From these comparatively simple beginnings sprang centuries of controversy culminating in that elaborate system of dogma which is often little understood even by its most vigorous champions. You know in a very general way the result. The Logos was made more and more distinct from God, endowed with a more and more decidedly personal existence. Then, when the interests of Monotheism seemed to be endangered, the attempt was made to save it by asserting the subordination of the Son to the Father. The result was that by Arianism the Son was reduced to the position of an inferior God. Polytheism had once more to be averted by asserting in even stronger terms not merely the equality of the Son with the Father but also the Unity of the God who is both Father and Son. The doctrine of the Divinity of the Holy Ghost went through a somewhat similar series of stages. At first regarded as identical with the Word, a distinction was gradually effected. The Word was said to have been incarnate in Jesus; while it was through the Holy Ghost that the subsequent work of God was carried on in human hearts. And by similar stages the equality of the Holy Ghost to Father and to Son was gradually evolved; while it was more and more strongly asserted that, in spite of the eternal distinction of {171} Persons, it was one and the same God who revealed Himself in all the activities attributed to each of them.

Side by side with these controversies about the relation between the Father and the Word, there was a gradual development of doctrine as to the relation between the Logos and the human Jesus in whom he took up his abode. Frequently the idea of any real humanity in Jesus was all but lost. That was at last saved by the Catholic formula 'perfect God and perfect man'; though it cannot be denied that popular thought in all ages has never quite discarded the tendency to think of Jesus as simply God in human form, and not really man at all. Even now there are probably hundreds of people who regard themselves as particularly orthodox Churchmen who yet do not know that the Church teaches that our Lord had a human soul and a human will.

What are we to make of all that vast structure, of the elaboration and complication of which the Constantinopolitan Creed which we miscall Nicene and even the so-called Athanasian Creed give very little idea to those who do not also know something of the Councils, the Fathers, and the Schoolmen? Has it all a modern meaning? Can it be translated into terms of our modern thought and speech? For I suppose it hardly needs demonstration—that such {172} translation is necessary, if it be possible. I doubt whether any man in this audience who has not made a special study of the subject, will get up and say that the meaning of such terms as 'substance,' 'essence,' 'nature,' 'hypostasis,' 'person,' 'eternal generation,' 'procession,' 'hypostatic union,' and the like is at once evident to him by the light of nature and an ordinary modern education. And those who know most about the matter will most fully realize the difficulty of saying exactly what was meant by such phrases at this or that particular moment or by this or that particular thinker. A thorough discussion of this subject from the point of view of one who acknowledges the supreme claims of Christ upon the modern mind, and is yet willing fairly to examine the traditional Creed in the light of modern philosophical culture, is a task which very much needs to be undertaken. I doubt if it has been satisfactorily performed yet. Even if I possessed a tithe of the learning necessary for that task, I could obviously not undertake it now. But a few remarks on the subject may be of use for the guidance of our personal religious life in this matter:

(1) I should like once more to emphasize the fact that the really important thing, from the point of view of the spiritual life of the individual soul, is our personal attitude towards our Lord himself and his teaching, and not the phrases in which we express {173} it. A man who believes what Christ taught about God's Fatherhood, about human brotherhood and human duty, about sin, the need for repentance, the Father's readiness to forgive, the value of Prayer, the certainty of Immortality—the man who finds the ideal of his life in the character of Jesus, and strives by the help which he has supplied to think of God and feel towards God as he did, to imitate him in his life, to live (like him) in communion with the Father and in the hope of Immortality—he is a Christian, and a Christian in the fullest sense of the word. He will find in that faith all that is necessary (to use the old phrase) for salvation—for personal goodness and personal Religion. And such a man will be saved, and saved through Christ; even though he has never heard of the Creeds, or deliberately rejects many of the formulae which the Church or the Churches have 'built upon' that one foundation.

(2) At the same time, if we believe in the supreme importance of Christ for the world, for the religious life of the Church and of the individual, it is surely convenient to have some language in which to express our sense of that importance. The actual personal attitude towards Christ is the essential thing: but as a means towards that attitude it is of importance to express what Christ has actually been to others, and what he ought to be to ourselves. Children {174} and adults alike require to have the claims of Christ presented to them before they can verify them by their own experience: and this requires articulate language of some kind. Religion can only be handed down, diffused, propagated by an organized society: and a religious society must have some means of handing on its religious ideas. It is possible to hold that under other conditions a different set of terms might have expressed the truth as well as those which have actually been enshrined in the New Testament, the Liturgies, and the Creeds. But the phrases which have been actually adopted surely have a strong presumption in their favour, even if it were merely through the difficulty of changing them, and the importance of unity, continuity, corporate life. It is easier to explain, or even if need be, alter in some measure the meaning of an accepted formula than to introduce a new one. Religious development has at all times taken place largely in this way. Our Lord himself entirely transformed the meaning of God's Fatherhood, Messiahship, the Kingdom of God, the people of God, the true Israel. At all events we should endeavour to discover the maximum of truth that any traditional formula can be made to yield before we discard it in favour of a new one. If we want to worship and to work with Christ's Church, we must do our best to give the maximum of meaning {175} to the language in which it expresses its faith and its devotion.

(3) We must insist strongly upon the thoroughly human character of Christ's own consciousness. Jesus did not—so I believe the critical study of the Gospels leads us to think—himself claim to be God, or to be Son of God in any sense but that of Messiahship. He claimed to speak with authority: he claimed a divine mission: he claimed to be a Revealer of divine truth. The fourth Gospel has been of infinite service to spiritual Christianity. It has given the world a due sense of the spiritual importance of Christ as the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Perhaps Christianity could hardly have expanded into a universal Religion without that Gospel. But we cannot regard all that the Johannine Christ says about himself as the ipsissima verba of Jesus. The picture is idealized in accordance with the writer's own conceptions, though after all its Theology is very much simpler than the later Theology which has grown out of it permits most people to see. We must not let these discourses blind us to the human character of Christ's consciousness. And this real humanity must carry with it the recognition of the thoroughly human limitations of his knowledge. The Bishop of Birmingham has prepared the way for the union of a really historical view of Christ's life with a reasonable interpretation of the Catholic {176} doctrine about him, by reviving the ancient view as to the limitation of his intellectual knowledge;[2] but the principle must be carried in some ways further than the Bishop himself would be prepared to go. The accepted Christology must be distinctly recognized as the Church's reflection and comment upon Christ's work and its value, not as the actual teaching of the Master about himself.

(4) It must likewise be recognized that the language in which the Church expressed this attitude towards Christ was borrowed from Greek Metaphysics, particularly from Plato and Neo-Platonism in the patristic period, and from Aristotle in the Middle Ages. And we cannot completely separate language from thought. It was not merely Greek technical phrases but Greek ways of thinking which were imported into Catholic Christianity. And the language, the categories, the ideas of Greek Philosophy were to some extent different from those of modern times. The most Platonically-minded thinker of modern times does not really think exactly as Plato thought: the most Catholic-minded thinker of modern times, if he has also breathed the atmosphere of modern Science and modern Culture, cannot really think exactly as Athanasius or Basil thought. I {177} do not suppose that any modern mind can think itself back into exactly the state of mind which an ancient Father was in, when he used the term Logos. This central idea of the Logos is not a category of modern thought. We cannot really think of a Being who is as distinct from the Father as he is represented as being in some of the patristic utterances—I say advisedly some, for widely different modes of thought are found in Fathers of equal authority—and yet so far one with him that we can say 'One God, one spiritual Being, and not two.' Nor are we under any obligation to accept these formulae as representing profound mysteries which we cannot understand: they were simply pieces of metaphysical thinking, some of them valuable and successful pieces of thinking, others less so. We must use them as helps, not as fetters to our thought. But, though we cannot think ourselves back into exactly the same intellectual condition as a fourth- or fifth-century Father, there is no reason why we should not recognize the fundamental truth of the religious idea which he was trying to express. A modern Philosopher would probably express that thought somewhat in this manner. 'The whole world is a revelation of God in a sense, and still more so is the human mind: all through the ages God has gone on revealing Himself more and more in human consciousness, especially through the prophets and other {178} exceptionally inspired men. The fullest and completest revelation of Himself was made once for all in the person and teaching of Jesus, in whom we recognize a revelation of God adequate to all our spiritual needs, when developed and interpreted by the continued presence of God's Spirit in the world and particularly in the Church which grew out of the little company of Jesus' friends.'

(5) I do not think at the present day even quite orthodox people are much concerned about the technicalities of the conciliar Theology, or even about the niceties of the Athanasian Creed. They are even a little suspicious sometimes that much talk about the doctrine of the Logos is only intended to evade a plain answer to the supreme question of the Divinity of Christ. You will expect me perhaps to say something about that question. I would first observe that the popular term 'divinity of Christ' is apt to give a somewhat misleading impression of what the orthodox teaching on the subject really is. For one thing, it is apt to suggest the idea of a pre-existent human consciousness of Jesus, which would be contrary to Catholic teaching. The Logos—the eternal Son or Reason of God—pre-existed; but not the man Jesus Christ who was born at a particular moment of history, and who is still, according to Catholic Theology, a distinct human soul perfectly and for ever united with the Word. {179} And then again, it is apt to suggest the heretical idea that the whole Trinity was incarnate in Christ, and not merely the Word. Orthodox Theology does not teach that God the Father became incarnate in Christ, and suffered upon the Cross. And lastly, the constant iteration of the phrase 'Divinity of Christ' tends to the concealment of the other half of the Catholic doctrine—the real humanity of Christ. To speak of the God-manhood of Christ or the indwelling of God in Christ would be a truer representation even of the strictest orthodox doctrine, apart from all modern re-interpretations. But even so, when all this is borne in mind, it may be asked, What is the real meaning of saying that a man was also God? I would answer, 'Whether it is possible to give a modern, intelligible, philosophically defensible meaning to the idea of Christ's Divinity depends entirely upon the question what we conceive to be the true relation between Humanity in general and God.' If (as I have attempted to show) we are justified in thinking of all human consciousness as constituting a partial reproduction of the divine Mind; if we are justified in thinking of human Reason, and particularly of the human Conscience, as constituting in some measure and in some sense a revelation by means of which we can rise to a contemplation of the divine nature; if Personality (as we know it in man) is the highest category within our knowledge; then {180} there is a real meaning in talking of one particular man being also divine; of the divine Reason or Logos as dwelling after a unique, exceptional, pre-eminent manner in him.

As Dr. Edward Caird has remarked, all the metaphysical questions which were formerly discussed as to the relation between the divine and the human nature in Christ, are now being discussed again in reference to the relation of Humanity in general to God. We cannot say intelligibly that God dwells in Christ, unless we have already recognized that in a sense God dwells and reveals Himself in Humanity at large, and in each particular human soul. But I fully recognize that, if this is all that is meant by the expression 'divinity of Christ,' that doctrine would be evacuated of nearly all that makes it precious to the hearts of Christian people. And therefore it is all-important that we should go on to insist that men do not reveal God equally. The more developed intellect reveals God more completely than that of the child or the savage: and (far more important from a religious point of view), the higher and more developed moral consciousness reveals Him more than the lower, and above all the actually better man reveals God more than the worse man. Now, if in the life, teaching, and character of Christ—in his moral and religious consciousness, and in the life and character which {181} so completely expressed and illustrated that consciousness—we can discover the highest revelation of the divine nature, we can surely attach a real meaning to the language of the Creeds which singles him out from all the men that ever lived as the one in whom the ideal relation of man to God is most completely realized. If God can only be known as revealed in Humanity, and Christ is the highest representative of Humanity, we can very significantly say 'Christ is the Son of God, very God of very God, of one substance with the Father,' though the phrase undoubtedly belongs to a philosophical dialect which we do not habitually use.

(6) Behind the doctrine of the Incarnation looms the still more technical doctrine of the Trinity. Yet after all, it is chiefly, I believe, as a sort of necessary background or presupposition to the idea of Christ's divine nature that modern religious people, not professionally interested in Theology, attach importance to that doctrine. They accept the doctrine in so far as it is implied by the teaching of Scripture and by the doctrine of our Lord's Divinity, but they are not much attached to the technicalities of the Athanasian Creed. The great objection to that Creed, apart from the damnatory clauses, is the certainty that it will be misunderstood by most of those who think they understand it at all. The {182} best thing we could do with the Athanasian Creed is to drop it altogether: the next best thing to it is to explain it, or at least so much of it as really interests the ordinary layman—the doctrine of three Persons in one God. And therefore it is important to insist in the strongest possible way that the word 'Person' which has most unfortunately come to be the technical term for what the Greeks more obscurely called the three huostaseis in the Godhead does not, and never did, mean what we commonly understand by Personality—whether in the language of ordinary life or of modern Philosophy. I do not deny that at certain periods Theology did tend to think of the Logos as a distinct being from the Father, a distinct consciousness with thoughts, will, desires, emotions not identical with those of God the Father. The distinction was at times pushed to a point which meant either sheer Tritheism, or something which is incapable of being distinctly realized in thought at all. But that is scarcely true of the Theology which was finally accepted either by East or West. This is most distinctly seen in the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas: and I would remind you that you cannot be more orthodox than St. Thomas—the source not only of the Theology professed by the Pope and taught in every Roman Seminary but of the Theology embodied in our own Articles. St. Thomas' explanation of the Trinity {183} is that God is at one and the same time Power or Cause[3] (Father), Wisdom (Son), Will (Holy Ghost); or, since the Will of God is always a loving Will, Love (Amor) is sometimes substituted for Will (Voluntas) in explanation of the Holy Spirit.[4] How little {184} St. Thomas thought of the 'Persons' as separate consciousnesses, is best seen from his doctrine (taken from Augustine) that the love of the Father for the Son is the Holy Spirit. The love of one Being for himself or for another is not a Person in the natural, normal, modern sense of the word: and it would be quite unorthodox to attribute Personality to the Son in any other sense than that in which it is attributed to the Holy Ghost. I do not myself attach any great importance to these technical phrases. I do not {185} deny that the supremely important truth that God has received His fullest revelation in the historical Christ, and that He goes on revealing Himself in the hearts of men, might have been otherwise, more simply, to modern minds more intelligibly, expressed. There are detailed features of the patristic or the scholastic version of the doctrine which involve conceptions to which the most accomplished Professors of Theology would find it difficult or impossible to give a modern meaning. I do not know for instance that much would have been lost had Theology (with the all but canonical writers Clement of Rome and Hermas, with Ignatius, with Justin, with the philosophic Clement of Alexandria) continued to speak indifferently of the Word and the Spirit. Yet taken by itself this Thomist doctrine of the Trinity is one to which it is quite possible to give a perfectly rational meaning, and a meaning probably very much nearer to that which was really intended by its author than the meaning which is usually put upon the Trinitarian formula by popular religious thought. That God is Power, and Wisdom, and Love is simply the essence of Christian Theism—not the less true because few Unitarians would repudiate it.

(7) Once more let me briefly remind you that any claim for finality in the Christian Religion must be based on its power of perpetual development. {186} Belief in the continued work of the Holy Spirit in the Church is an essential element of the Catholic Faith. We need not, with the Ritschlian, contemptuously condemn the whole structure of Christian doctrine because undoubtedly it is a development of what was taught by Christ himself. Only, if we are to justify the development of the past, we must go on to assert the same right and duty of development in Ethics and in Theology for the Church of the future. In the pregnant phrase of Loisy, the development which the Church is most in need of at the present moment is precisely a development in the idea of development itself.

But how can we tell (it may be asked), if we once admit that the development of Religion does not end with the teaching of Christ, where the development will stop? If we are to admit an indefinite possibility of growth and change, how do we know that Christianity itself will not one day be outgrown? If we once admit that the final appeal is to the religious consciousness of the present, we must acknowledge that it is not possible to demonstrate a priori that the Christian Religion is the final, universal, or absolute Religion. All we can say is that we have no difficulty in recognizing that the development which has so far taken place, in so far as it is a development which we can approve and accept, seems to us a development which leaves the {187} Religion still essentially the Religion of Christ. In the whole structure of the modern Christian's religious belief, that which was contributed by Christ himself is incomparably the most important part—the basis of the whole structure. The essentials of Religion and Morality still seem to us to be contained in his teaching as they are contained nowhere else. All the rest that is included in an enlightened modern Christian's religious creed is either a direct working out of the principles already contained there, or (if it has come from other sources) it has been transformed in the process of adaptation. Nothing has been discovered in Religion and Morality which tends in any way to diminish the unique reverence which we feel for the person of Christ, the perfect sufficiency of his character to represent and incarnate for us the character of God. It is a completely gratuitous assumption to suppose that it will ever lose that sufficiency. Even in the development of Science, there comes a time when its fundamentals are virtually beyond the reach of reconsideration. Still more in practical life, mere unmotived, gratuitous possibilities may be disregarded. It weakens the hold of fundamental convictions upon the mind to be perpetually contemplating the possibility or probability of fundamental revision. We ought no doubt to keep the spiritual ear ever open that we may always be hearing what the Spirit saith unto {188} the Churches. But to look forward to a time when any better way will be discovered of thinking of God than Jesus' way of thinking of Him as a loving Father is as gratuitous as to contemplate the probability of something in human life at present unknown being discovered of greater value than Love. Until that discovery is made, our Religion will still remain the Religion of him who, by what he said and by what he was, taught the world to think of God as the supreme Love and the supreme Holiness, the source of all other love and all other holiness.

LITERATURE

The literature is here too vast to mention even the works of the very first importance: I can only select a very few books which have been useful to myself. The late Sir John Seeley's Ecce Homo may be regarded as in the light of modern research a somewhat uncritical book, but it remains to my mind the most striking expression of the appeal which Christ makes to the Conscience of the modern world. It has proved a veritable fifth Gospel to many seekers after light. Bishop Moorhouse's little book, The Teaching of Christ, will serve as an introduction to the study of Christ's life and work. A more elaborate treatment of the subject, with which I am very much in sympathy, is Wendt's Teaching of Jesus. The ideal life of Christ perhaps remains to be written. Professor Sanday's Article on 'Jesus Christ' in Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible may be mentioned as a good representative of moderate and scholarly Conservatism or Liberal Conservatism. Professor Oscar Holtzmann's Life of Jesus is based on more radical, perhaps over-radical, criticism. Professor Harnack's {189} What is Christianity? has become the typical expression of the Ritschlian attitude. The ideas of extreme Roman Catholic 'Modernism' may be gathered from Loisy's l'Évangile et l'Église and Autour d'un Petit Livre. Professor Gardner's three books—Exploratio Evangelica, the shorter An Historic View of the New Testament, and The Growth of Christianity—may be especially commended to those who wish to satisfy themselves that a thorough-going recognition of the results of historical Criticism is compatible with a whole-hearted personal acceptance of Christianity. Dr. Fairbairn's Philosophy of the Christian Religion and Bousset's What is Religion? are especially valuable as vindications of the supreme position of Christianity combined with the fullest recognition of the measure of Revelation contained in all the great historical Religions. Allen's Continuity of Christian Thought suggests what seems to me the right attitude of the modern thinker towards traditional dogma, though the author's position is more decidedly 'Hegelian' than mine. I may also mention Professor Inge's contribution to Contentio Veritatis on 'The Personal Christ,' and some of the Essays in Lux Hominum. Though I cannot always agree with him, I recognize the high value of the Bishop of Birmingham's Bampton Lectures on The Divinity of Jesus Christ the Son of God and the accompanying volume of Dissertations.

[1] In their assertion of the necessity of Development, and of the religious community as the origin of Development, the teaching of the Abbe Loisy and the Roman Catholic Modernists seems to me to be complementary to that of the Kitschlians, though I do not always accept their rather destructive critical conclusions.

[2] In his Essay in Lux Mundi (1889). He has since developed his view in his Bampton Lectures on The Incarnation of the Son of God and a volume of Dissertations on Subjects connected with the Incarnation.

[3] I venture thus to translate 'Principium' (arche); in Abelard and his disciple Peter the Lombard, the famous Master of the Sentences, the word is 'Potentia' (L. I. Dist. xxxiv.): and St. Thomas himself (P. I. Q. xli. Art. 4) explains 'Principium' by 'Potentia generandi Filium.'

[4] Thus in Summa Theologica, Pars I. Q. xxxvii. Art. 1, the 'conclusio' is 'Amor, personaliter acceptus, proprium nomen est Spiritus sancti,' which is explained to mean that there are in the Godhead 'duse processiones: Una per modum intellectus, quae est processio Verbi; alia per modum voluntatis, quae est processio amoris.' So again (ibid. Q. xlv. Art. 7): 'In creaturis igitur rationalibus, in quibus est intellectus et voluntas, invenitur repraesentatio Trinitatis per modum imaginis, inquantum invenitur in eis Verbum conceptum, et amor procedens.' In a friendly review of my Essay in Contentio Veritatis, in which I endeavoured to expound in a modern form this doctrine, Dr. Sanday (Journal of Theological Studies, vol. iv., 1903) wrote: 'One of the passages that seem to me most open to criticism is that on the doctrine of the Trinity (p. 48). "Power, Wisdom, and Will" surely cannot be a sound trichotomy as applied either to human nature or Divine. Surely Power is an expression of Will and not co-ordinate with it. The common division, Power (or Will), Wisdom, and Love is more to the point. Yet Dr. Rashdall identifies the two triads by what I must needs think a looseness of reasoning.' The Margaret Professor of Divinity hardly seems to recognize that he is criticizing the Angelical Doctor and not myself. If Dr. Sanday had had the formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity, the result, if less metaphysically subtle, might no doubt have proved more easily intelligible to the modern mind; but the 'identification' of which he complains happens to be part of the traditional doctrine, and I was endeavouring merely to make the best of it for modern Christians. I add St. Thomas' justification of it, which is substantially what I gave in Contentio Veritatis and have repeated above: 'Cum processiones divinas secundum aliquas actiones necesse est accipere, secundum bonitatem, et hujusmodi alia attributa, non accipiuntur aliae processiones, nisi Verbi et amoris, secundum quod Deus suam essentiam, veritatem et bonitatem intelligit et amat' (Q. xxvii. Art. 5). The source of the doctrine is to be found in St. Augustine, who habitually speaks of the Holy Spirit as Amor; but, when he refers to the 'Imago Trinitatia' in man the Spirit is represented sometimes by 'Amor,' sometimes by 'Voluntas' (de Trin., L. xiv. cap 7). The other two members of the human triad are with him 'Memoria' (or 'Mens') and 'Intelligentia.'

With regard to the difficulty of distinguishing Power from Will, I was perhaps to blame for not giving St. Thomas' own word 'Principium.' The word 'Principium' means the pege theoteos, the ultimate Cause or Source of Being: by 'Voluntas' St. Thomas means that actual putting forth of Power (in knowing and in loving the Word or Thought eternally begotten by God the Father) which is the Holy Ghost. I am far from saying that the details of St. Thomas' doctrine are not open to much criticism: a rough correspondence between his teaching and any view of God's Nature which can commend itself to a modern Philosopher is all that I endeavoured to point out. The modern thinker would no doubt with Dr. Sanday prefer the triad 'Power, Wisdom, Love,' or (I would suggest) 'Feeling, including Love as the highest form of Feeling.' The reason why St. Thomas will not accept such an interpretation is that his Aristotelianism (here not very consonant with the Jewish and Christian view of God) excludes all feeling or emotion from the divine nature; 'Love' has therefore to be identified with 'Will' and not with 'Feeling.' I cannot but think that the Professor might have taken a little more trouble to understand both St. Thomas and myself before accusing either of us of 'looseness of reasoning.'

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