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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Philosophy and Religion, by Hastings Rashdall
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Philosophy and Religion
+ Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge
+
+
+Author: Hastings Rashdall
+
+
+
+Release Date: July 4, 2007 [eBook #21995]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Al Haines
+
+
+
+Transcriber's note:
+
+ Page numbers in this book are indicated by numbers enclosed
+ in curly braces, e.g. {99}. They have been located where page
+ breaks occurred in the original book.
+
+
+
+
+
+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 versa_, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 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 _hypotyposis_ 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 Hoeffding'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 Hoeffding 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'Evolution
+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.)
+
+
+
+
+{87}
+
+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]
+
+{93}
+
+(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'Evolution
+Creatrice, 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'apres 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'Evangile et l'Eglise_ 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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