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+Project Gutenberg's God the Known and God the Unknown, by Samuel Butler
+
+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: God the Known and God the Unknown
+
+Author: Samuel Butler
+
+Posting Date: December 14, 2008 [EBook #2513]
+Release Date: February, 2001
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GOD THE KNOWN AND GOD THE UNKNOWN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Elliot S. Wheeler
+
+
+
+
+
+GOD THE KNOWN AND GOD THE UNKNOWN
+
+By Samuel Butler
+
+
+
+
+Prefatory Note
+
+"GOD the Known and God the Unknown" first appeared in the form of a
+series of articles which were published in "The Examiner" in May, June,
+and July, 1879. Samuel Butler subsequently revised the text of his
+work, presumably with the intention of republishing it, though he
+never carried the intention into effect. In the present edition I have
+followed his revised version almost without deviation. I have, however,
+retained a few passages which Butler proposed to omit, partly because
+they appear to me to render the course of his argument clearer, and
+partly because they contain characteristic thoughts and expressions of
+which none of his admirers would wish to be deprived. In the list of
+Butler's works "God the Known and God the Unknown" follows "Life and
+Habit," which appeared in 1877, and "Evolution, Old and New," which was
+published in May, 1879. It is scarcely necessary to point out that the
+three works are closely akin in subject and treatment, and that "God the
+Known and God the Unknown" will gain in interest by being considered in
+relation to its predecessors.
+
+R. A. STREATFEILD
+
+
+
+
+GOD THE KNOWN AND GOD THE UNKNOWN
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION
+
+MANKIND has ever been ready to discuss matters in the inverse ratio of
+their importance, so that the more closely a question is felt to touch
+the hearts of all of us, the more incumbent it is considered upon
+prudent people to profess that it does not exist, to frown it down, to
+tell it to hold its tongue, to maintain that it has long been finally
+settled, so that there is now no question concerning it.
+
+So far, indeed, has this been carried through all time past that the
+actions which are most important to us, such as our passage through the
+embryonic stages, the circulation of our blood, our respiration, etc.
+etc., have long been formulated beyond all power of reopening question
+concerning them--the mere fact or manner of their being done at all
+being ranked among the great discoveries of recent ages. Yet the analogy
+of past settlements would lead us to suppose that so much unanimity was
+not arrived at all at once, but rather that it must have been preceded
+by much smouldering [sic] discontent, which again was followed by open
+warfare; and that even after a settlement had been ostensibly arrived
+at, there was still much secret want of conviction on the part of many
+for several generations.
+
+There are many who see nothing in this tendency of our nature but
+occasion for sarcasm; those, on the other hand, who hold that the
+world is by this time old enough to be the best judge concerning the
+management of its own affairs will scrutinise [sic] this management with
+some closeness before they venture to satirise [sic] it; nor will
+they do so for long without finding justification for its apparent
+recklessness; for we must all fear responsibility upon matters about
+which we feel we know but little; on the other hand we must all
+continually act, and for the most part promptly. We do so, therefore,
+with greater security when we can persuade both ourselves and others
+that a matter is already pigeon-holed than if we feel that we must use
+our own judgment for the collection, interpretation, and arrangement
+of the papers which deal with it. Moreover, our action is thus made to
+appear as if it received collective sanction; and by so appearing it
+receives it. Almost any settlement, again, is felt to be better than
+none, and the more nearly a matter comes home to everyone, the more
+important is it that it should be treated as a sleeping dog, and be let
+to lie, for if one person begins to open his mouth, fatal developments
+may arise in the Babel that will follow.
+
+It is not difficult, indeed, to show that, instead of having reason to
+complain of the desire for the postponement of important questions, as
+though the world were composed mainly of knaves or fools, such fixity as
+animal and vegetable forms possess is due to this very instinct. For if
+there had been no reluctance, if there were no friction and vis inertae
+to be encountered even after a theoretical equilibrium had been upset,
+we should have had no fixed organs nor settled proclivities, but should
+have been daily and hourly undergoing Protean transformations, and have
+still been throwing out pseudopodia like the amoeba. True, we might have
+come to like this fashion of living as well as our more steady-going
+system if we had taken to it many millions of ages ago when we were
+yet young; but we have contracted other habits which have become so
+confirmed that we cannot break with them. We therefore now hate that
+which we should perhaps have loved if we had practised [sic] it. This,
+however, does not affect the argument, for our concern is with our likes
+and dislikes, not with the manner in which those likes and dislikes have
+come about. The discovery that organism is capable of modification
+at all has occasioned so much astonishment that it has taken the most
+enlightened part of the world more than a hundred years to leave off
+expressing its contempt for such a crude, shallow, and preposterous
+conception. Perhaps in another hundred years we shall learn to admire
+the good sense, endurance, and thorough Englishness of organism in
+having been so averse to change, even more than its versatility in
+having been willing to change so much.
+
+Nevertheless, however conservative we may be, and however much alive to
+the folly and wickedness of tampering with settled convictions-no matter
+what they are-without sufficient cause, there is yet such a constant
+though gradual change in our surroundings as necessitates corresponding
+modification in our ideas, desires, and actions. We may think that we
+should like to find ourselves always in the same surroundings as our
+ancestors, so that we might be guided at every touch and turn by
+the experience of our race, and be saved from all self-communing or
+interpretation of oracular responses uttered by the facts around us.
+Yet the facts will change their utterances in spite of us; and we, too,
+change with age and ages in spite of ourselves, so as to see the facts
+around us as perhaps even more changed than they actually are. It has
+been said, "Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis." The passage would
+have been no less true if it had stood, "Nos mutamur et tempora mutantur
+in nobis." Whether the organism or the surroundings began changing first
+is a matter of such small moment that the two may be left to fight it
+out between themselves; but, whichever view is taken, the fact will
+remain that whenever the relations between the organism and its
+surroundings have been changed, the organism must either succeed in
+putting the surroundings into harmony with itself, or itself into
+harmony with the surroundings; or must be made so uncomfortable as to
+be unable to remember itself as subjected to any such difficulties, and
+therefore to die through inability to recognise [sic] its own identity
+further.
+
+Under these circumstances, organism must act in one or other of these
+two ways: it must either change slowly and continuously with the
+surroundings, paying cash for everything, meeting the smallest change
+with a corresponding modification so far as is found convenient; or it
+must put off change as long as possible, and then make larger and more
+sweeping changes.
+
+Both these courses are the same in principle, the difference being only
+one of scale, and the one being a miniature of the other, as a ripple
+is an Atlantic wave in little; both have their advantages and
+disadvantages, so that most organisms will take the one course for one
+set of things and the other for another. They will deal promptly
+with things which they can get at easily, and which lie more upon the
+surface; those, however, which are more troublesome to reach, and lie
+deeper, will be handled upon more cataclysmic principles, being allowed
+longer periods of repose followed by short periods of greater activity.
+
+Animals breathe and circulate their blood by a little action many times
+a minute; but they feed, some of them, only two or three times a day,
+and breed for the most part not more than once a year, their breeding
+season being much their busiest time. It is on the first principle that
+the modification of animal forms has proceeded mainly; but it may be
+questioned whether what is called a sport is not the organic expression
+of discontent which has been long felt, but which has not been attended
+to, nor been met step by step by as much small remedial modification as
+was found practicable: so that when a change does come it comes by way
+of revolution. Or, again (only that it comes to much the same thing),
+a sport may be compared to one of those happy thoughts which sometimes
+come to us unbidden after we have been thinking for a long time what to
+do, or how to arrange our ideas, and have yet been unable to arrive at
+any conclusion.
+
+So with politics, the smaller the matter the prompter, as a general
+rule, the settlement; on the other hand, the more sweeping the change
+that is felt to be necessary, the longer it will be deferred.
+
+The advantages of dealing with the larger questions by more cataclysmic
+methods are obvious. For, in the first place, all composite things must
+have a system, or arrangement of parts, so that some parts shall depend
+upon and be grouped round others, as in the articulation of a skeleton
+and the arrangement of muscles, nerves, tendons, etc., which are
+attached to it. To meddle with the skeleton is like taking up the
+street, or the flooring of one's house; it so upsets our arrangements
+that we put it off till whatever else is found wanted, or whatever else
+seems likely to be wanted for a long time hence, can be done at the same
+time. Another advantage is in the rest which is given to the attention
+during the long hollows, so to speak, of the waves between the periods
+of resettlement. Passion and prejudice have time to calm down, and when
+attention is next directed to the same question, it is a refreshed and
+invigorated attention-an attention, moreover, which may be given
+with the help of new lights derived from other quarters that were not
+luminous when the question was last considered. Thirdly, it is more
+easy and safer to make such alterations as experience has proved to be
+necessary than to forecast what is going to be wanted. Reformers are
+like paymasters, of whom there are only two bad kinds, those who pay too
+soon, and those who do not pay at all.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II. COMMON GROUND
+
+I HAVE now, perhaps, sufficiently proved my sympathy with the reluctance
+felt by many to tolerate discussion upon such a subject as the existence
+and nature of God. I trust that I may have made the reader feel that he
+need fear no sarcasm or levity in my treatment of the subject which I
+have chosen. I will, therefore, proceed to sketch out a plan of what I
+hope to establish, and this in no doubtful or unnatural sense, but by
+attaching the same meanings to words as those which we usually attach to
+them, and with the same certainty, precision, and clearness as anything
+else is established which is commonly called known.
+
+As to what God is, beyond the fact that he is the Spirit and the
+Life which creates, governs, and upholds all living things, I can say
+nothing. I cannot pretend that I can show more than others have done
+in what Spirit and the Life consists, which governs living things and
+animates them. I cannot show the connection between consciousness and
+the will, and the organ, much less can I tear away the veil from the
+face of God, so as to show wherein will and consciousness consist.
+No philosopher, whether Christian or Rationalist, has attempted this
+without discomfiture; but I can, I hope, do two things: Firstly, I can
+demonstrate, perhaps more clearly than modern science is prepared to
+admit, that there does exist a single Being or Animator of all living
+things--a single Spirit, whom we cannot think of under any meaner name
+than God; and, secondly, I can show something more of the persona or
+bodily expression, mask, and mouthpiece of this vast Living Spirit than
+I know of as having been familiarly expressed elsewhere, or as being
+accessible to myself or others, though doubtless many works exist in
+which what I am going to say has been already said.
+
+Aware that much of this is widely accepted under the name of Pantheism,
+I venture to think it differs from Pantheism with all the difference
+that exists between a coherent, intelligible conception and an
+incoherent unintelligible one. I shall therefore proceed to examine
+the doctrine called Pantheism, and to show how incomprehensible and
+valueless it is.
+
+I will then indicate the Living and Personal God about whose existence
+and about many of whose attributes there is no room for question; I will
+show that man has been so far made in the likeness of this Person or
+God, that He possesses all its essential characteristics, and that it is
+this God who has called man and all other living forms, whether animals
+or plants, into existence, so that our bodies are the temples of His
+spirit; that it is this which sustains them in their life and growth,
+who is one with them, living, moving, and having His being in them; in
+whom, also, they live and move, they in Him and He in them; He being
+not a Trinity in Unity only, but an Infinity in Unity, and a Unity in an
+Infinity; eternal in time past, for so much time at least that our minds
+can come no nearer to eternity than this; eternal for the future as long
+as the universe shall exist; ever changing, yet the same yesterday, and
+to-day, and for ever. And I will show this with so little ambiguity that
+it shall be perceived not as a phantom or hallucination following upon
+a painful straining of the mind and a vain endeavour [sic] to give
+coherency to incoherent and inconsistent ideas, but with the same ease,
+comfort, and palpable flesh-and-blood clearness with which we see those
+near to us; whom, though we see them at the best as through a glass
+darkly, we still see face to face, even as we are ourselves seen.
+
+I will also show in what way this Being exercises a moral government
+over the world, and rewards and punishes us according to His own laws.
+
+Having done this I shall proceed to compare this conception of God with
+those that are currently accepted, and will endeavour [sic] to show that
+the ideas now current are in truth efforts to grasp the one on which
+I shall here insist. Finally, I shall persuade the reader that the
+differences between the so-called atheist and the so-called theist are
+differences rather about words than things, inasmuch as not even the
+most prosaic of modern scientists will be inclined to deny the existence
+of this God, while few theists will feel that this, the natural
+conception of God, is a less worthy one than that to which they have
+been accustomed.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III. PANTHEISM.
+
+THE Rev. J. H. Blunt, in his "Dictionary of Sects, Heresies, etc.,"
+defines Pantheists as "those who hold that God is everything, and
+everything is God."
+
+If it is granted that the value of words lies in the definiteness and
+coherency of the ideas that present themselves to us when the words
+are heard or spoken-then such a sentence as "God is everything and
+everything is God" is worthless.
+
+For we have so long associated the word "God" with the idea of a Living
+Person, who can see, hear, will, feel pleasure, displeasure, etc., that
+we cannot think of God, and also of something which we have not been
+accustomed to think of as a Living Person, at one and the same time, so
+as to connect the two ideas and fuse them into a coherent thought. While
+we are thinking of the one, our minds involuntarily exclude the other,
+and vice versa; so that it is as impossible for us to think of anything
+as God, or as forming part of God, which we cannot also think of as a
+Person, or as a part of a Person, as it is to produce a hybrid between
+two widely distinct animals. If I am not mistaken, the barrenness of
+inconsistent ideas, and the sterility of widely distant species or
+genera of plants and animals, are one in principle-sterility of hybrids
+being due to barrenness of ideas, and barrenness of ideas arising from
+inability to fuse unfamiliar thoughts into a coherent conception. I have
+insisted on this at some length in "Life and Habit," but can do so no
+further here. (Note: Butler returned to this subject in "Luck, or
+cunning?" which was originally published in 1887.}
+
+In like manner we have so long associated the word "Person" with the
+idea of a substantial visible body, limited in extent, and animated
+by an invisible something which we call Spirit, that we can think of
+nothing as a person which does not also bring these ideas before us. Any
+attempt to make us imagine God as a Person who does not fulfil [sic] the
+conditions which our ideas attach to the word "person," is ipso facto
+atheistic, as rendering the word God without meaning, and therefore
+without reality, and therefore non-existent to us. Our ideas are like
+our organism, they will stand a vast amount of modification if it is
+effected slowly and without shock, but the life departs out of them,
+leaving the form of an idea without the power thereof, if they are
+jarred too rudely.
+
+Any being, then, whom we can imagine as God, must have all the
+qualities, capabilities, and also all the limitations which are implied
+when the word "person" is used.
+
+But, again, we cannot conceive of "everything" as a person. "Everything"
+must comprehend all that is to be found on earth, or outside of it,
+and we know of no such persons as this. When we say "persons" we intend
+living people with flesh and blood; sometimes we extend our conceptions
+to animals and plants, but we have not hitherto done so as generally as
+I hope we shall some day come to do. Below animals and plants we have
+never in any seriousness gone. All that we have been able to regard as
+personal has had what we can call a living body, even though that
+body is vegetable only; and this body has been tangible, and has been
+comprised within certain definite limits, or within limits which have at
+any rate struck the eye as definite. And every part within these limits
+has been animated by an unseen something which we call soul or spirit. A
+person must be a persona--that is to say, the living mask and mouthpiece
+of an energy saturating it, and speaking through it. It must be animate
+in all its parts.
+
+But "everything" is not animate. Animals and plants alone produce in us
+those ideas which can make reasonable people call them "persons" with
+consistency of intention. We can conceive of each animal and of each
+plant as a person; we can conceive again of a compound person like the
+coral polypes [sic], or like a tree which is composed of a congeries of
+subordinate persons, inasmuch as each bud is a separate and individual
+plant. We can go farther than this, and, as I shall hope to show,
+we ought to do so; that is to say, we shall find it easier and more
+agreeable with our other ideas to go farther than not; for we should
+see all animal and vegetable life as united by a subtle and till lately
+invisible ramification, so that all living things are one tree-like
+growth, forming a single person. But we cannot conceive of oceans,
+continents, and air as forming parts of a person at all; much less
+can we think of them as forming one person with the living forms that
+inhabit them.
+
+To ask this of us is like asking us to see the bowl and the water in
+which three gold-fish are swimming as part of the gold-fish. We cannot
+do it any more than we can do something physically impossible. We can
+see the gold-fish as forming one family, and therefore as in a way
+united to the personality of the parents from which they sprang, and
+therefore as members one of another, and therefore as forming a single
+growth of gold-fish, as boughs and buds unite to form a tree; but we
+cannot by any effort of the imagination introduce the bowl and the water
+into the personality, for we have never been accustomed to think of such
+things as living and personal. Those, therefore, who tell us that "God
+is everything, and everything is God," require us to see "everything"
+as a person, which we cannot; or God as not a person, which again we
+cannot.
+
+Continuing the article of Mr. Blunt from which I have already quoted, I
+read:--
+
+"Linus, in a passage which has been preserved by Stobaeus, exactly
+expresses the notion afterwards adopted by Spinoza: 'One sole energy
+governs all things; all things are unity, and each portion is All; for
+of one integer all things were born; in the end of time all things shall
+again become unity; the unity of multiplicity.' Orpheus, his disciple,
+taught no other doctrine."
+
+According to Pythagoras, "an adept in the Orphic philosophy," "the soul
+of the world is the Divine energy which interpenetrates every portion
+of the mass, and the soul of man is an efflux of that energy. The world,
+too, is an exact impress of the Eternal Idea, which is the mind of God."
+John Scotus Erigena taught that "all is God and God is all." William
+of Champeaux, again, two hundred years later, maintained that "all
+individuality is one in substance, and varies only in its non-essential
+accidents and transient properties." Amalric of Bena and David of Dinant
+followed the theory out "into a thoroughgoing Pantheism." Amalric held
+that "All is God and God is all. The Creator and the creature are one
+Being. Ideas are at once creative and created, subjective and objective.
+God is the end of all, and all return to Him. As every variety of
+humanity forms one manhood, so the world contains individual forms
+of one eternal essence." David of Dinant only varied upon this by
+"imagining a corporeal unity. Although body, soul, and eternal substance
+are three, these three are one and the same being."
+
+Giordano Bruno maintained the world of sense to be "a vast animal having
+the Deity for its living soul." The inanimate part of the world is
+thus excluded from participation in the Deity, and a conception that
+our minds can embrace is offered us instead of one which they cannot
+entertain, except as in a dream, incoherently. But without such a view
+of evolution as was prevalent at the beginning of this century, it was
+impossible to see "the world of sense" intelligently, as forming "a vast
+animal." Unless, therefore, Giordano Bruno held the opinions of Buffon,
+Dr. Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck, with more definiteness than I am
+yet aware of his having done, his contention must be considered as a
+splendid prophecy, but as little more than a prophecy. He continues,
+"Birth is expansion from the one centre of Life; life is its
+continuance, and death is the necessary return of the ray to the centre
+of light." This begins finely, but ends mystically. I have not, however,
+compared the English translation with the original, and must reserve a
+fuller examination of Giordano Bruno's teaching for another opportunity.
+
+Spinoza disbelieved in the world rather than in God. He was an Acosmist,
+to use Jacobi's expression, rather than an Atheist. According to him,
+"the Deity and the Universe are but one substance, at the same time
+both spirit and matter, thought and extension, which are the only known
+attributes of the Deity."
+
+My readers will, I think, agree with me that there is very little of the
+above which conveys ideas with the fluency and comfort which accompany
+good words. Words are like servants: it is not enough that we should
+have them-we must have the most able and willing that we can find, and
+at the smallest wages that will content them. Having got them we must
+make the best and not the worst of them. Surely, in the greater part of
+what has been quoted above, the words are barren letters only: they do
+not quicken within us and enable us to conceive a thought, such as we
+can in our turn impress upon dead matter, and mould [sic] that matter
+into another shape than its own, through the thought which has become
+alive within us. No offspring of ideas has followed upon them, or, if
+any at all, yet in such unwonted shape, and with such want of alacrity,
+that we loathe them as malformations and miscarriages of our minds.
+Granted that if we examine them closely we shall at length find them
+to embody a little germ of truth-that is to say, of coherency with our
+other ideas; but there is too little truth in proportion to the trouble
+necessary to get at it. We can get more truth, that is to say, more
+coherency-for truth and coherency are one-for less trouble in other
+ways.
+
+But it may be urged that the beginnings of all tasks are difficult and
+unremunerative, and that later developments of Pantheism may be more
+intelligible than the earlier ones. Unfortunately, this is not the
+case. On continuing Mr. Blunt's article, I find the later Pantheists a
+hundredfold more perplexing than the earlier ones. With Kant, Schelling,
+Fichte, and Hegel, we feel that we are with men who have been decoyed
+into a hopeless quagmire; we understand nothing of their language-we
+doubt whether they understand themselves, and feel that we can do
+nothing with them but look at them and pass them by.
+
+In my next chapter I propose to show the end which the early Pantheists
+were striving after, and the reason and naturalness of their error.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV. PANTHEISM.
+
+The earlier Pantheists were misled by the endeavour [sic] to lay hold of
+two distinct ideas, the one of which was a reality that has since been
+grasped and is of inestimable value, the other a phantom which has
+misled all who have followed it. The reality is the unity of Life, the
+oneness of the guiding and animating spirit which quickens animals and
+plants, so that they are all the outcome and expression of a common
+mind, and are in truth one animal; the phantom is the endeavour [sic] to
+find the origin of things, to reach the fountain-head of all energy,
+and thus to lay the foundations on which a philosophy may be constructed
+which none can accuse of being baseless, or of arguing in a circle.
+
+In following as through a thick wood after the phantom our forefathers
+from time to time caught glimpses of the reality, which seemed so
+wonderful as it eluded them, and flitted back again into the thickets,
+that they declared it must be the phantom they were in search of, which
+was thus evidenced as actually existing. Whereon, instead of mastering
+such of the facts they met with as could be captured easily-which facts
+would have betrayed the hiding-places of others, and these again of
+others, and so ad infinitum-they overlooked what was within their reach,
+and followed hotly through brier and brake after an imaginary greater
+prize.
+
+Great thoughts are not to be caught in this way. They must present
+themselves for capture of their own free will, or be taken after a
+little coyness only. They are like wealth and power, which, if a man
+is not born to them, are the more likely to take him, the more he has
+restrained himself from an attempt to snatch them. They hanker after
+those only who have tamed their nearer thoughts. Nevertheless, it is
+impossible not to feel that the early Pantheists were true prophets and
+seers, though the things were unknown to them without which a complete
+view was unattainable. What does Linus mean, we ask ourselves, when he
+says:--"One sole energy governs all things"? How can one sole energy
+govern, we will say, the reader and the chair on which he sits? What
+is meant by an energy governing a chair? If by an effort we have made
+ourselves believe we understand something which can be better expressed
+by these words than by any others, no sooner do we turn our backs than
+the ideas so painfully collected fly apart again. No matter how often we
+go in search of them, and force them into juxtaposition, they prove to
+have none of that innate coherent power with which ideas combine that we
+can hold as true and profitable.
+
+Yet if Linus had confined his statement to living things, and had said
+that one sole energy governed all plants and animals, he would have come
+near both to being intelligible and true. For if, as we now believe,
+all animals and plants are descended from a single cell, they must be
+considered as cousins to one another, and as forming a single tree-like
+animal, every individual plant or animal of which is as truly one and
+the same person with the primordial cell as the oak a thousand years old
+is one and the same plant with the acorn out of which it has grown.
+This is easily understood, but will, I trust, be made to appear simpler
+presently.
+
+When Linus says, "All things are unity, and each portion is All; for of
+one integer all things were born," it is impossible for plain people-who
+do not wish to use words unless they mean the same things by them as
+both they and others have been in the habit of meaning-to understand
+what is intended. How can each portion be all? How can one Londoner
+be all London? I know that this, too, can in a way be shown, but the
+resulting idea is too far to fetch, and when fetched does not fit in
+well enough with our other ideas to give it practical and commercial
+value. How, again, can all things be said to be born of one integer,
+unless the statement is confined to living things, which can alone be
+born at all, and unless a theory of evolution is intended, such as Linus
+would hardly have accepted?
+
+Yet limit the "all things" to "all living things," grant the theory of
+evolution, and explain "each portion is All" to mean that all life is
+akin, and possesses the same essential fundamental characteristics,
+and it is surprising how nearly Linus approaches both to truth and
+intelligibility.
+
+It may be said that the animate and the inanimate have the same
+fundamental substance, so that a chair might rot and be absorbed by
+grass, which grass might be eaten by a cow, which cow might be eaten by
+a man; and by similar processes the man might become a chair; but these
+facts are not presented to the mind by saying that "one energy governs
+all things"-a chair, we will say, and a man; we could only say that one
+energy governed a man and a chair, if the chair were a reasonable living
+person, who was actively and consciously engaged in helping the man to
+attain a certain end, unless, that is to say, we are to depart from
+all usual interpretation of words, in which case we invalidate the
+advantages of language and all the sanctions of morality.
+
+"All things shall again become unity" is intelligible as meaning that
+all things probably have come from a single elementary substance,
+say hydrogen or what not, and that they will return to it; but the
+explanation of unity as being the "unity of multiplicity" puzzles; if
+there is any meaning it is too recondite to be of service to us.
+
+What, again, is meant by saying that "the soul of the world is the
+Divine energy which interpenetrates every portion of the mass"? The soul
+of the world is an expression which, to myself, and, I should imagine,
+to most people, is without propriety. We cannot think of the world
+except as earth, air, and water, in this or that state, on and in which
+there grow plants and animals. What is meant by saying that earth has a
+soul, and lives? Does it move from place to place erratically? Does it
+feed? Does it reproduce itself? Does it make such noises, or commit such
+vagaries as shall make us say that it feels? Can it achieve its ends,
+and fail of achieving them through mistake? If it cannot, how has it a
+soul more than a dead man has a soul, out of whom we say that the soul
+has departed, and whose body we conceive of as returning to dead earth,
+inasmuch as it is now soulless? Is there any unnatural violence which
+can be done to our thoughts by which we can bring the ideas of a soul
+and of water, or of a stone into combination, and keep them there for
+long together? The ancients, indeed, said they believed their rivers to
+be gods, and carved likenesses of them under the forms of men; but even
+supposing this to have been their real mind, can it by any conceivable
+means become our own? Granted that a stone is kept from falling to dust
+by an energy which compels its particles to cohere, which energy can be
+taken out of it and converted into some other form of energy; granted
+(which may or may not be true) also, that the life of a living body is
+only the energy which keeps the particles which compose it in a certain
+disposition; and granted that the energy of the stone may be convertible
+into the energy of a living form, and that thus, after a long journey
+a tired idea may lag after the sound of such words as "the soul of the
+world." Granted all the above, nevertheless to speak of the world as
+having a soul is not sufficiently in harmony with our common notions,
+nor does it go sufficiently with the grain of our thoughts to render the
+expression a meaning one, or one that can be now used with any propriety
+or fitness, except by those who do not know their own meaninglessness.
+Vigorous minds will harbour [sic] vigorous thoughts only, or such as bid
+fair to become so; and vigorous thoughts are always simple, definite,
+and in harmony with everyday ideas.
+
+We can imagine a soul as living in the lowest slime that moves, feeds,
+reproduces itself, remembers, and dies. The amoeba wants things, knows
+it wants them, alters itself so as to try and alter them, thus preparing
+for an intended modification of outside matter by a preliminary
+modification of itself. It thrives if the modification from within is
+followed by the desired modification in the external object; it knows
+that it is well, and breeds more freely in consequence. If it cannot
+get hold of outside matter, or cannot proselytise [sic] that matter and
+persuade it to see things through its own (the amoeba's) spectacles-if
+it cannot convert that matter, if the matter persists in disagreeing
+with it-its spirits droop, its soul is disquieted within it, it becomes
+listless like a withering flower-it languishes and dies. We cannot
+imagine a thing to live at all and yet be soulless except in sleep for
+a short time, and even so not quite soulless. The idea of a soul, or of
+that unknown something for which the word "soul" is our hieroglyphic,
+and the idea of living organism, unite so spontaneously, and stick
+together so inseparably, that no matter how often we sunder them they
+will elude our vigilance and come together, like true lovers, in spite
+of us. Let us not attempt to divorce ideas that have so long been wedded
+together.
+
+I submit, then, that Pantheism, even as explained by those who had
+entered on the outskirts only of its great morass, nevertheless holds
+out so little hope of leading to any comfortable conclusion that it will
+be more reasonable to occupy our minds with other matter than to follow
+Pantheism further. The Pantheists speak of a person without meaning a
+person; they speak of a "him" and a "he" without having in their
+minds the idea of a living person with all its inevitable limitations.
+Pantheism is, therefore, as is said by Mr. Blunt in another article,
+"practically nothing else than Atheism; it has no belief in a personal
+deity overruling the affairs of the world, as Divine Providence, and is,
+therefore, Atheistic," and again, "Theism believes in a spirit
+superior to matter, and so does Pantheism; but the spirit of Theism is
+self-conscious, and therefore personal and of individual existence-a
+nature per se, and upholding all things by an active control; while
+Pantheism believes in spirit that is of a higher nature than brute
+matter, but is a mere unconscious principle of life, impersonal,
+irrational as the brute matter that it quickens."
+
+If this verdict concerning Pantheism is true--and from all I can gather
+it is as nearly true as anything can be said to be which is predicated
+of an incoherent idea--the Pantheistic God is an attempt to lay hold of a
+truth which has nevertheless eluded its pursuers.
+
+In my next chapter I will consider the commonly received, orthodox
+conception of God, and compare it with the Pantheistic. I will show that
+it, too, is Atheistic, inasmuch as, in spite of its professing to give
+us a conception of God, it raises no ideas in our minds of a person or
+Living Being--and a God who is not this is non-existent.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V. ORTHODOX THEISM
+
+We have seen that Pantheism fails to satisfy, inasmuch as it requires us
+to mean something different by the word "God" from what we have been
+in the habit of meaning. I have already said-I fear, too often-that no
+conception of God can have any value or meaning for us which does not
+involve his existence as an independent Living Person of ineffable
+wisdom and power, vastness, and duration both in the past and for the
+future. If such a Being as this can be found existing and made evident,
+directly or indirectly, to human senses, there is a God. If otherwise,
+there is no God, or none, at any rate, so far as we can know, none with
+whom we need concern ourselves. No conscious personality, no God. An
+impersonal God is as much a contradiction in terms as an impersonal
+person.
+
+Unfortunately, when we question orthodox theology closely, we find that
+it supposes God to be a person who has no material body such as could
+come within the range of any human sense, and make an impression upon
+it. He is supposed to be of a spiritual nature only, except in so far
+as one part of his triune personality is, according to the Athanasian
+Creed, "perfect man, of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting."
+
+Here, then, we find ourselves in a dilemma. On the one hand, we are
+involved in the same difficulty as in the case of Pantheism, inasmuch
+as a person without flesh and blood, or something analogous, is not a
+person; we are required, therefore, to believe in a personal God, who
+has no true person; to believe, that is to say, in an impersonal person.
+
+This, as we have seen already, is Atheism under another name, being, as
+it is, destructive of all idea of God whatever; for these words do not
+convey an idea of something which human intelligence can understand
+up to a certain point, and which it can watch going out of sight into
+regions beyond our view, but in the same direction-as we may infer other
+stars in space beyond the farthest that we know of; they convey utterly
+self-destructive ideas, which can have no real meaning, and can only be
+thought to have a meaning by ignorant and uncultivated people. Otherwise
+such foundation as human reason rests upon-that is to say, the current
+opinion of those whom the world appraises as reasonable and agreeable,
+or capable of being agreed with for any time-is sapped; the whole thing
+tumbles down, and we may have square circles and round triangles, which
+may be declared to be no longer absurdities and contradictions in terms,
+but mysteries that go beyond our reason, without being contrary to it.
+Few will maintain this, and those few may be neglected; an impersonal
+person must therefore be admitted to be nonsense, and an immaterial God
+to be Atheism in another shape.
+
+On the other hand, if God is "of a reasonable soul and human flesh
+subsisting," and if he thus has the body without which he is-as far as
+we are concerned-non-existent, this body must yet be reasonably
+like other bodies, and must exist in some place and at some time.
+Furthermore, it must do sufficiently nearly what all other "human flesh"
+belonging to "perfect man" must do, or cease to be human flesh. Our
+ideas are like our organisms; they have some little elasticity and
+circumstance-suiting power, some little margin on which, as I have
+elsewhere said, side-notes may be written, and glosses on the original
+text; but this power is very limited. As offspring will only, as a
+general rule, vary very little from its immediate parents, and as it
+will fail either immediately or in the second generation if the parents
+differ too widely from one another, so we cannot get our idea of-we
+will say a horse-to conjure up to our minds the idea of any animal more
+unlike a horse than a pony is; nor can we get a well-defined idea of a
+combination between a horse and any animal more remote from it than an
+ass, zebra, or giraffe. We may, indeed, make a statue of a flying horse,
+but the idea is one which cannot be made plausible to any but ignorant
+people. So "human flesh" may vary a little from "human flesh" without
+undue violence being done to our reason and to the right use of
+language, but it cannot differ from it so much as not to eat, drink, nor
+waste and repair itself. "Human flesh," which is without these necessary
+adjuncts, is human flesh only to those who can believe in flying horses
+with feathered wings and bills like birds-that is to say, to vulgar and
+superstitious persons.
+
+Lastly, not only must the "perfect man," who is the second person of
+the Godhead according to the orthodox faith, and who subsists of "human
+flesh" as well as of a "reasonable soul," not only must this person
+exist, but he must exist in some place either on this earth or outside
+it. If he exists on earth, he must be in Europe, Asia, Africa, America,
+or on some island, and if he were met with he must be capable of being
+seen and handled in the same way as all other things that can be called
+perfect man are seen; otherwise he is a perfect man who is not only not
+a perfect man, but who does not in any considerable degree resemble one.
+It is not, however, pretended by anyone that God, the "perfect man," is
+to be looked for in any place upon the surface of the globe.
+
+If, on the other hand, the person of God exists in some sphere outside
+the earth, his human flesh again proves to be of an entirely different
+kind from all other human flesh, for we know that such flesh cannot
+exist except on earth; if in space unsupported, it must fall to the
+ground, or into some other planet, or into a sun, or go on revolving
+round the earth or some other heavenly body-or not be personal. None of
+those whose opinions will carry weight will assign a position either in
+some country on this earth, or yet again in space, to Jesus Christ, but
+this involves the rendering meaningless of all expressions which involve
+his personality.
+
+The Christian conception, therefore, of the Deity proves when examined
+with any desire to understand our own meaning (and what lawlessness so
+great as the attempt to impose words upon our understandings which have
+no lawful settlement within them?) to be no less a contradiction in
+terms than the Pantheistic conception. It is Atheistic, as offering us
+a God which is not a God, inasmuch as we can conceive of no such
+being, nor of anything in the least like it. It is, like Pantheism, an
+illusion, which can be believed only by those who repeat a formula which
+they have learnt by heart in a foreign language of which they understand
+nothing, and yet aver that they believe it. There are doubtless many who
+will say that this is possible, but the majority of my readers will hold
+that no proposition can be believed or disbelieved until its nature is
+understood.
+
+It may perhaps be said that there is another conception of God possible,
+and that we may see him as personal, without at the same time believing
+that he has any actual tangible existence. Thus we personify hope,
+truth, and justice, without intending to convey to anyone the impression
+that these qualities are women, with flesh and blood. Again, we do not
+think of Nature as an actual woman, though we call her one; why may we
+not conceive of God, then, as an expression whereby we personify, by a
+figure of speech only; the thing that is intended being no person, but
+our own highest ideal of power, wisdom, and duration.
+
+There would be no reason to complain of this if this manner of using the
+word "God" were well understood. Many words have two meanings, or even
+three, without any mischievous confusion of thought following. There
+can not only be no objection to the use of the word God as a manner of
+expressing the highest ideal of which our minds can conceive, but on the
+contrary no better expression can be found, and it is a pity the word is
+not thus more generally used.
+
+Few, however, would be content with any such limitation of God as that
+he should be an idea only, an expression for certain qualities of human
+thought and action. Whence, it may be fairly asked, did our deeply
+rooted belief in God as a Living Person originate? The idea of him as
+of an inconceivably vast, ancient, powerful, loving, and yet formidable
+Person is one which survives all changes of detail in men's opinion. I
+believe there are a few very savage tribes who are as absolutely without
+religious sense as the beasts of the field, but the vast majority for a
+long time past have been possessed with an idea that there is somewhere
+a Living God who is the Spirit and the Life of all that is, and who is a
+true Person with an individuality and self-consciousness of his own. It
+is only natural that we should be asked how such an idea has remained in
+the minds of so many--who differ upon almost every other part of their
+philosophy-for so long a time if it was without foundation, and a piece
+of dreamy mysticism only.
+
+True, it has generally been declared that this God is an infinite God,
+and an infinite God is a God without any bounds or limitations; and
+a God without bounds or limitations is an impersonal God; and an
+impersonal God is Atheism. But may not this be the incoherency of
+prophecy which precedes the successful mastering of an idea? May we not
+think of this illusory expression as having arisen from inability to
+see the whereabouts of a certain vast but tangible Person as to whose
+existence men were nevertheless clear? If they felt that it existed, and
+yet could not say where, nor wherein it was to be laid hands on, they
+would be very likely to get out of the difficulty by saying that it
+existed as an infinite Spirit, partly from a desire to magnify what they
+felt must be so vast and powerful, and partly because they had as
+yet only a vague conception of what they were aiming at, and must,
+therefore, best express it vaguely.
+
+We must not be surprised that when an idea is still inchoate its
+expression should be inconsistent and imperfect-ideas will almost always
+during the earlier history of a thought be put together experimentally
+so as to see whether or no they will cohere. Partly out of indolence,
+partly out of the desire of those who brought the ideas together to be
+declared right, and partly out of joy that the truth should be supposed
+found, incoherent ideas will be kept together longer than they should
+be; nevertheless they will in the end detach themselves and go, if
+others present themselves which fit into their place better. There is no
+consistency which has not once been inconsistent, nor coherency that has
+not been incoherent. The incoherency of our ideas concerning God is due
+to the fact that we have not yet truly found him, but it does not argue
+that he does not exist and cannot be found anywhere after more diligent
+search; on the contrary, the persistence of the main idea, in spite
+of the incoherency of its details, points strongly in the direction of
+believing that it rests upon a foundation in fact.
+
+But it must be remembered there can be no God who is not personal and
+material: and if personal, then, though inconceivably vast in comparison
+with man, still limited in space and time, and capable of making
+mistakes concerning his own interests, though as a general rule right in
+his estimates concerning them. Where, then, is this Being? He must be
+on earth, or what folly can be greater than speaking of him as a person?
+What are persons on any other earth to us, or we to them? He must have
+existed and be going to exist through all time, and he must have a
+tangible body. Where, then, is the body of this God? And what is the
+mystery of his Incarnation?
+
+It will be my business to show this in the following chapter.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI. THE TREE OF LIFE
+
+Atheism denies knowledge of a God of any kind. Pantheism and Theism
+alike profess to give us a God, but they alike fail to perform what they
+have promised. We can know nothing of the God they offer us, for not
+even do they themselves profess that any of our senses can be cognisant
+[sic] of him. They tell us that he is a personal God, but that he has no
+material person. This is disguised Atheism. What we want is a Personal
+God, the glory of whose Presence can be made in part evident to our
+senses, though what we can realise [sic] is less than nothing in
+comparison with what we must leave for ever unimagined.
+
+And truly such a God is not far from every one of us; for if we survey
+the broader and deeper currents of men's thoughts during the last three
+thousand years, we may observe two great and steady sets as having
+carried away with them the more eligible races of mankind. The one is
+a tendency from Polytheism to Monotheism; the other from Polytypism to
+Monotypism of the earliest forms of life-all animal and vegetable forms
+having at length come to be regarded as differentiations of a single
+substance-to wit, protoplasm.
+
+No man does well so to kick against the pricks as to set himself against
+tendencies of such depth, strength, and permanence as this. If he is
+to be in harmony with the dominant opinion of his own and of many past
+ages, he will see a single God-impregnate substance as having been the
+parent from which all living forms have sprung. One spirit, and one form
+capable of such modification as its directing spirit shall think fit;
+one soul and one body, one God and one Life.
+
+For the time has come when the two unities so painfully arrived at must
+be joined together as body and soul, and be seen not as two, but one.
+There is no living organism untenanted by the Spirit of God, nor any
+Spirit of God perceivable by man apart from organism embodying and
+expressing it. God and the Life of the World are like a mountain, which
+will present different aspects as we look at it from different sides,
+but which, when we have gone all round it, proves to be one only. God
+is the animal and vegetable world, and the animal and vegetable world is
+God.
+
+I have repeatedly said that we ought to see all animal and vegetable
+life as uniting to form a single personality. I should perhaps explain
+this more fully, for the idea of a compound person is one which at first
+is not very easy to grasp, inasmuch as we are not conscious of any but
+our more superficial aspects, and have therefore until lately failed
+to understand that we are ourselves compound persons. I may perhaps be
+allowed to quote from an earlier work.
+
+"Each cell in the human body is now admitted by physiologists to be a
+person with an intelligent soul, differing from our own more complex
+soul in degree and not in kind, and, like ourselves, being born, living,
+and dying. It would appear, then, as though 'we,' 'our souls,' or
+'selves,' or 'personalities,' or by whatever name we may prefer to
+be called, are but the consensus and full-flowing stream of countless
+sensations and impulses on the part of our tributary souls or 'selves,'
+who probably no more know that we exist, and that they exist as a part
+of us, than a microscopic insect knows the results of spectrum analysis,
+or than an agricultural labourer [sic] knows the working of the British
+Constitution; and of whom we know no more than we do of the habits
+and feelings of some class widely separated from our own."-("Life and
+Habit," p. 110.)
+
+After which it became natural to ask the following question:--"Is it
+possible to avoid imagining that we may be ourselves atoms, undesignedly
+combining to form some vaster being, though we are utterly incapable of
+perceiving this being as a single individual, or of realising [sic] the
+scheme and scope of our own combination? And this, too, not a spiritual
+being, which, without matter or what we think matter of some sort, is
+as complete nonsense to us as though men bade us love and lean upon an
+intelligent vacuum, but a being with what is virtually flesh and blood
+and bones, with organs, senses, dimensions in some way analogous to our
+own, into some other part of which being at the time of our great change
+we must infallibly re-enter, starting clean anew, with bygones bygones,
+and no more ache for ever from age or antecedents.
+
+"'An organic being,' writes Mr. Darwin, 'is a microcosm, a little
+universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms inconceivably
+minute and numerous as the stars in Heaven.' As these myriads of smaller
+organisms are parts and processes of us, so are we parts and processes
+of life at large."
+
+A tree is composed of a multitude of subordinate trees, each bud being
+a distinct individual. So coral polypes [sic] form a tree-like growth
+of animal life, with branches from which spring individual polypes
+[sic] that are connected by a common tissue and supported by a common
+skeleton. We have no difficulty in seeing a unity in multitude, and
+a multitude in unity here, because we can observe the wood and the
+gelatinous tissue connecting together all the individuals which compose
+either the tree or the mass of polypes [sic]. Yet the skeleton, whether
+of tree or of polype [sic], is inanimate; and the tissue, whether of
+bark or gelatine [sic], is only the matted roots of the individual buds;
+so that the outward and striking connection between the individuals
+is more delusive than real. The true connection is one which cannot be
+seen, and consists in the animation of each bud by a like spirit-in the
+community of soul, in "the voice of the Lord which maketh men to be
+of one mind in an house"-"to dwell together in unity"-to take what are
+practically identical views of things, and express themselves in concert
+under all circumstances. Provided this-the true unifier of organism-can
+be shown to exist, the absence of gross outward and visible but
+inanimate common skeleton is no bar to oneness of personality.
+
+Let us picture to our minds a tree of which all the woody fibre [sic]
+shall be invisible, the buds and leaves seeming to stand in mid-air
+unsupported and unconnected with one another, so that there is nothing
+but a certain tree-like collocation of foliage to suggest any common
+principle of growth uniting the leaves.
+
+Three or four leaves of different ages stand living together at the
+place in the air where the end of each bough should be; of these the
+youngest are still tender and in the bud, while the older ones are
+turning yellow and on the point of falling. Between these leaves a sort
+of twig-like growth can be detected if they are looked at in certain
+lights, but it is hard to see, except perhaps when a bud is on the point
+of coming out. Then there does appear to be a connection which might be
+called branch-like.
+
+The separate tufts are very different from one another, so that oak
+leaves, ash leaves, horse-chestnut leaves, etc., are each represented,
+but there is one species only at the end of each bough.
+
+Though the trunk and all the inner boughs and leaves have disappeared,
+yet there hang here and there fossil leaves, also in mid-air; they
+appear to have been petrified, without method or selection, by what we
+call the caprices of nature; they hang in the path which the boughs and
+twigs would have taken, and they seem to indicate that if the tree could
+have been seen a million years earlier, before it had grown near its
+present size, the leaves standing at the end of each bough would have
+been found very different from what they are now. Let us suppose that
+all the leaves at the end of all the invisible boughs, no matter how
+different they now are from one another, were found in earliest budhood
+to be absolutely indistinguishable, and afterwards to develop towards
+each differentiation through stages which were indicated by the fossil
+leaves. Lastly, let us suppose that though the boughs which seem wanted
+to connect all the living forms of leaves with the fossil leaves, and
+with countless forms of which all trace has disappeared, and also with
+a single root-have become invisible, yet that there is irrefragable
+evidence to show that they once actually existed, and indeed are
+existing at this moment, in a condition as real though as invisible
+to the eye as air or electricity. Should we, I ask, under these
+circumstances hesitate to call our imaginary plant or tree by a single
+name, and to think of it as one person, merely upon the score that the
+woody fibre [sic] was invisible? Should we not esteem the common soul,
+memories and principles of growth which are preserved between all the
+buds, no matter how widely they differ in detail, as a more living
+bond of union than a framework of wood would be, which, though it were
+visible to the eye, would still be inanimate?
+
+The mistletoe appears as closely connected with the tree on which it
+grows as any of the buds of the tree itself; it is fed upon the same sap
+as the other buds are, which sap-however much it may modify it at
+the last moment-it draws through the same fibres [sic] as do its
+foster-brothers-why then do we at once feel that the mistletoe is no
+part of the apple tree? Not from any want of manifest continuity, but
+from the spiritual difference-from the profoundly different views of
+life and things which are taken by the parasite and the tree on which it
+grows-the two are now different because they think differently-as
+long as they thought alike they were alike-that is to say they were
+protoplasm-they and we and all that lives meeting in this common
+substance.
+
+We ought therefore to regard our supposed tufts of leaves as a tree,
+that is to say, as a compound existence, each one of whose component
+items is compounded of others which are also in their turn compounded.
+But the tree above described is no imaginary parallel to the condition
+of life upon the globe; it is perhaps as accurate a description of the
+Tree of Life as can be put into so small a compass. The most sure proof
+of a man's identity is the power to remember that such and such things
+happened, which none but he can know; the most sure proof of his
+remembering is the power to react his part in the original drama,
+whatever it may have been; if a man can repeat a performance with
+consummate truth, and can stand any amount of cross-questioning about
+it, he is the performer of the original performance, whatever it was.
+The memories which all living forms prove by their actions that they
+possess-the memories of their common identity with a single person in
+whom they meet-this is incontestable proof of their being animated by
+a common soul. It is certain, therefore, that all living forms, whether
+animal or vegetable, are in reality one animal; we and the mosses being
+part of the same vast person in no figurative sense, but with as much
+bona fide literal truth as when we say that a man's finger-nails and his
+eyes are parts of the same man.
+
+It is in this Person that we may see the Body of God-and in the
+evolution of this Person, the mystery of His Incarnation.
+
+[In "Unconscious Memory," Chapter V, Butler wrote: "In the articles
+above alluded to ("God the Known and God the Unknown") I separated the
+organic from the inorganic, but when I came to rewrite them I found that
+this could not be done, and that I must reconstruct what I had written."
+This reconstruction never having been effected, it may be well to quote
+further from "Unconscious Memory" (concluding chapter): "At parting,
+therefore, I would recommend the reader to see every atom in the
+universe as living and able to feel and remember, but in a humble way.
+He must have life eternal as well as matter eternal; and the life and
+the matter must be joined together inseparably as body and soul to
+one another. Thus he will see God everywhere, not as those who repeat
+phrases conventionally, but as people who would have their words taken
+according to their most natural and legitimate meaning; and he will feel
+that the main difference between him and many of those who oppose him
+lies in the fact that whereas both he and they use the same language,
+his opponents only half mean what they say, while he means it
+entirely... We shall endeavour [sic] to see the so-called inorganic as
+living, in respect of the qualities it has in common with the organic,
+rather than the organic as non-living in respect of the qualities it has
+in common with the inorganic."]
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII. THE LIKENESS OF GOD
+
+In my last chapter I endeavoured [sic] to show that each living being,
+whether animal or plant, throughout the world is a component item of
+a single personality, in the same way as each individual citizen of a
+community is a member of one state, or as each cell of our own bodies
+is a separate person, or each bud of a tree a separate plant. We must
+therefore see the whole varied congeries of living things as a single
+very ancient Being, of inconceivable vastness, and animated by one
+Spirit.
+
+We call the octogenarian one person with the embryo of a few days old
+from which he has developed. An oak or yew tree may be two thousand
+years old, but we call it one plant with the seed from which it has
+grown. Millions of individual buds have come and gone, to the yearly
+wasting and repairing of its substance; but the tree still lives and
+thrives, and the dead leaves have life therein. So the Tree of Life
+still lives and thrives as a single person, no matter how many new
+features it has acquired during its development, nor, again, how many
+of its individual leaves fall yellow to the ground daily. The spirit or
+soul of this person is the Spirit of God, and its body-for we know of no
+soul or spirit without a body, nor of any living body without a spirit
+or soul, and if there is a God at all there must be a body of God-is
+the many-membered outgrowth of protoplasm, the ensemble of animal and
+vegetable life.
+
+To repeat. The Theologian of to-day tells us that there is a God, but is
+horrified at the idea of that God having a body. We say that we believe
+in God, but that our minds refuse to realise [sic] an intelligent Being
+who has no bodily person. "Where then," says the Theologian, "is the
+body of your God?" We have answered, "In the living forms upon the
+earth, which, though they look many, are, when we regard them by the
+light of their history and of true analogies, one person only." The
+spiritual connection between them is a more real bond of union than the
+visible discontinuity of material parts is ground for separating them in
+our thoughts.
+
+Let the reader look at a case of moths in the shop-window of a
+naturalist, and note the unspeakable delicacy, beauty, and yet
+serviceableness of their wings; or let him look at a case of
+humming-birds, and remember how infinitely small a part of Nature is
+the whole group of the animals he may be considering, and how infinitely
+small a part of that group is the case that he is looking at. Let him
+bear in mind that he is looking on the dead husks only of what was
+inconceivably more marvellous [sic] when the moths or humming-birds were
+alive. Let him think of the vastness of the earth, and of the activity
+by day and night through countless ages of such countless forms of
+animal and vegetable life as that no human mind can form the faintest
+approach to anything that can be called a conception of their multitude,
+and let him remember that all these forms have touched and touched and
+touched other living beings till they meet back on a common substance in
+which they are rooted, and from which they all branch forth so as to be
+one animal. Will he not in this real and tangible existence find a God
+who is as much more worthy of admiration than the God of the ordinary
+Theologian-as He is also more easy of comprehension?
+
+For the Theologian dreams of a God sitting above the clouds among the
+cherubim, who blow their loud uplifted angel trumpets before Him, and
+humour [sic] Him as though He were some despot in an Oriental tale; but
+we enthrone Him upon the wings of birds, on the petals of flowers, on
+the faces of our friends, and upon whatever we most delight in of all
+that lives upon the earth. We then can not only love Him, but we can
+do that without which love has neither power nor sweetness, but is a
+phantom only, an impersonal person, a vain stretching forth of arms
+towards something that can never fill them-we can express our love and
+have it expressed to us in return. And this not in the uprearing of
+stone temples-for the Lord dwelleth [sic] in temples made with other
+organs than hands-nor yet in the cleansing of our hearts, but in the
+caress bestowed upon horse and dog, and kisses upon the lips of those we
+love.
+
+Wide, however, as is the difference between the orthodox Theologian and
+ourselves, it is not more remarkable than the number of the points on
+which we can agree with him, and on which, moreover, we can make his
+meaning clearer to himself than it can have ever hitherto been. He, for
+example, says that man has been made in the image of God, but he cannot
+mean what he says, unless his God has a material body; we, on the other
+hand, do not indeed believe that the body of God-the incorporation of
+all life-is like the body of a man, more than we believe each one of our
+own cells or subordinate personalities to be like a man in miniature;
+but we nevertheless hold that each of our tributary selves is so far
+made after the likeness of the body corporate that it possesses all our
+main and essential characteristics-that is to say, that it can waste
+and repair itself; can feel, move, and remember. To this extent, also,
+we-who stand in mean proportional between our tributary personalities
+and God-are made in the likeness of God; for we, and God, and our
+subordinate cells alike possess the essential characteristics of life
+which have been above recited. It is more true, therefore, for us to say
+that we are made in the likeness of God than for the orthodox Theologian
+to do so.
+
+Nor, again, do we find difficulty in adopting such an expression as that
+"God has taken our nature upon Him." We hold this as firmly, and much
+more so, than Christians can do, but we say that this is no new thing
+for Him to do, for that He has taken flesh and dwelt among us from the
+day that He first assumed our shape, some millions of years ago, until
+now. God cannot become man more especially than He can become other
+living forms, any more than we can be our eyes more especially than any
+other of our organs. We may develop larger eyes, so that our eyes may
+come to occupy a still more important place in our economy than they
+do at present; and in a similar way the human race may become a more
+predominant part of God than it now is-but we cannot admit that one
+living form is more like God than another; we must hold all equally like
+Him, inasmuch as they "keep ever," as Buffon says, "the same fundamental
+unity, in spite of differences of detail-nutrition, development,
+reproduction" (and, I would add, "memory") "being the common traits of
+all organic bodies." The utmost we can admit is, that some embodiments
+of the Spirit of Life may be more important than others to the welfare
+of Life as a whole, in the same way as some of our organs are more
+important than others to ourselves.
+
+But the above resemblances between the language which we can adopt
+intelligently and that which Theologians use vaguely, seem to reduce the
+differences of opinion between the two contending parties to disputes
+about detail. For even those who believe their ideas to be the most
+definite, and who picture to themselves a God as anthropomorphic as He
+was represented by Raffaelle, are yet not prepared to stand by their
+ideas if they are hard pressed in the same way as we are by ours. Those
+who say that God became man and took flesh upon Him, and that He is
+now perfect God and perfect man of a reasonable soul and human flesh
+subsisting, will yet not mean that Christ has a heart, blood, a stomach,
+etc., like man's, which, if he has not, it is idle to speak of him as
+"perfect man." I am persuaded that they do not mean this, nor wish to
+mean it; but that they have been led into saying it by a series of steps
+which it is very easy to understand and sympathise [sic] with, if they
+are considered with any diligence.
+
+For our forefathers, though they might and did feel the existence of a
+Personal God in the world, yet could not demonstrate this existence, and
+made mistakes in their endeavour [sic] to persuade themselves that they
+understood thoroughly a truth which they had as yet perceived only from
+a long distance. Hence all the dogmatism and theology of many centuries.
+It was impossible for them to form a clear or definite conception
+concerning God until they had studied His works more deeply, so as to
+grasp the idea of many animals of different kinds and with no apparent
+connection between them, being yet truly parts of one and the same
+animal which comprised them in the same way as a tree comprises all its
+buds. They might speak of this by a figure of speech, but they could
+not see it as a fact. Before this could be intended literally, Evolution
+must be grasped, and not Evolution as taught in what is now commonly
+called Darwinism, but the old teleological Darwinism of eighty years
+ago. Nor is this again sufficient, for it must be supplemented by a
+perception of the oneness of personality between parents and offspring,
+the persistence of memory through all generations, the latency of this
+memory until rekindled by the recurrence of the associated ideas, and
+the unconsciousness with which repeated acts come to be performed.
+These are modern ideas which might be caught sight of now and again by
+prophets in time past, but which are even now mastered and held firmly
+only by the few.
+
+When once, however, these ideas have been accepted, the chief difference
+between the orthodox God and the God who can be seen of all men is, that
+the first is supposed to have existed from all time, while the second
+has only lived for more millions of years than our minds can reckon
+intelligently; the first is omnipresent in all space, while the second
+is only present in the living forms upon this earth-that is to say, is
+only more widely present than our minds can intelligently embrace. The
+first is omnipotent and all-wise; the second is only quasi-omnipotent
+and quasi all-wise. It is true, then, that we deprive God of that
+infinity which orthodox Theologians have ascribed to Him, but the
+bounds we leave Him are of such incalculable extent that nothing can be
+imagined more glorious or vaster; and in return for the limitations we
+have assigned to Him, we render it possible for men to believe in Him,
+and love Him, not with their lips only, but with their hearts and lives.
+
+Which, I may now venture to ask my readers, is the true God-the God of
+the Theologian, or He whom we may see around us, and in whose presence
+we stand each hour and moment of our lives?
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII. THE LIFE EVERLASTING
+
+Let us now consider the life which we can look forward to with certainty
+after death, and the moral government of the world here on earth.
+
+If we could hear the leaves complaining to one another that they must
+die, and commiserating the hardness of their lot in having ever been
+induced to bud forth, we should, I imagine, despise them for their
+peevishness more than we should pity them. We should tell them that
+though we could not see reason for thinking that they would ever hang
+again upon the same-or any at all similar-bough as the same individual
+leaves, after they had once faded and fallen off, yet that as they had
+been changing personalities without feeling it during the whole of their
+leafhood, so they would on death continue to do this selfsame thing
+by entering into new phases of life. True, death will deprive them of
+conscious memory concerning their now current life; but, though they die
+as leaves, they live in the tree whom they have helped to vivify, and
+whose growth and continued well-being is due solely to this life and
+death of its component personalities.
+
+We consider the cells which are born and die within us yearly to have
+been sufficiently honoured [sic] in having contributed their quotum to
+our life; why should we have such difficulty in seeing that a healthy
+enjoyment and employment of our life will give us a sufficient reward in
+that growth of God wherein we may live more truly and effectually after
+death than we have lived when we were conscious of existence? Is Handel
+dead when he influences and sets in motion more human beings in three
+months now than during the whole, probably, of the years in which he
+thought that he was alive? What is being alive if the power to draw men
+for many miles in order that they may put themselves en rapport with
+him is not being so? True, Handel no longer knows the power which he has
+over us, but this is a small matter; he no longer animates six feet of
+flesh and blood, but he lives in us as the dead leaf lives in the tree.
+He is with God, and God knows him though he knows himself no more.
+
+This should suffice, and I observe in practice does suffice, for all
+reasonable persons. It may be said that one day the tree itself must
+die, and the leaves no longer live therein; and so, also, that the very
+God or Life of the World will one day perish, as all that is born must
+surely in the end die. But they who fret upon such grounds as this must
+be in so much want of a grievance that it were a cruelty to rob them of
+one: if a man who is fond of music tortures himself on the ground that
+one day all possible combinations and permutations of sounds will have
+been exhausted so that there can be no more new tunes, the only thing
+we can do with him is to pity him and leave him; nor is there any better
+course than this to take with those idle people who worry themselves
+and others on the score that they will one day be unable to remember
+the small balance of their lives that they have not already forgotten
+as unimportant to them-that they will one day die to the balance of
+what they have not already died to. I never knew a well-bred or amiable
+person who complained seriously of the fact that he would have to die.
+Granted we must all sometimes find ourselves feeling sorry that we
+cannot remain for ever at our present age, and that we may die so much
+sooner than we like; but these regrets are passing with well-disposed
+people, and are a sine qua non for the existence of life at all. For if
+people could live for ever so as to suffer from no such regret, there
+would be no growth nor development in life; if, on the other hand,
+there were no unwillingness to die, people would commit suicide upon the
+smallest contradiction, and the race would end in a twelvemonth.
+
+We then offer immortality, but we do not offer resurrection from the
+dead; we say that those who die live in the Lord whether they be just
+or unjust, and that the present growth of God is the outcome of all past
+lives; but we believe that as they live in God-in the effect they have
+produced upon the universal life-when once their individual life is
+ended, so it is God who knows of their life thenceforward and not
+themselves; and we urge that this immortality, this entrance into
+the joy of the Lord, this being ever with God, is true, and can be
+apprehended by all men, and that the perception of it should and will
+tend to make them lead happier, healthier lives; whereas the commonly
+received opinion is true with a stage truth only, and has little
+permanent effect upon those who are best worth considering. Nevertheless
+the expressions in common use among the orthodox fit in so perfectly
+with facts, which we must all acknowledge, that it is impossible not
+to regard the expressions as founded upon a prophetic perception of the
+facts.
+
+Two things stand out with sufficient clearness. The first is the rarity
+of suicide even among those who rail at life most bitterly. The other
+is the little eagerness with which those who cry out most loudly for a
+resurrection desire to begin their new life. When comforting a husband
+upon the loss of his wife we do not tell him we hope he will soon join
+her; but we should certainly do this if we could even pretend we thought
+the husband would like it. I can never remember having felt or witnessed
+any pain, bodily or mental, which would have made me or anyone
+else receive a suggestion that we had better commit suicide without
+indignantly asking how our adviser would like to commit suicide himself.
+Yet there are so many and such easy ways of dying that indignation at
+being advised to commit suicide arises more from enjoyment of life than
+from fear of the mere physical pain of dying. Granted that there is much
+deplorable pain in the world from ill-health, loss of money, loss of
+reputation, misconduct of those nearest to us, or what not, and granted
+that in some cases these causes do drive men to actual self-destruction,
+yet suffering such as this happens to a comparatively small number, and
+occupies comparatively a small space in the lives of those to whom it
+does happen.
+
+What, however, have we to say to those cases in which suffering and
+injustice are inflicted upon defenceless [sic] people for years and
+years, so that the iron enters into their souls, and they have no
+avenger. Can we give any comfort to such sufferers? and, if not, is our
+religion any better than a mockery-a filling the rich with good things
+and sending the hungry empty away? Can we tell them, when they are
+oppressed with burdens, yet that their cry will come up to God and be
+heard? The question suggests its own answer, for assuredly our God knows
+our innermost secrets: there is not a word in our hearts but He knoweth
+it altogether; He knoweth our down-sitting and our uprising, He is
+about our path and about our bed, and spieth out all our ways; He has
+fashioned us behind and before, and "we cannot attain such knowledge,"
+for, like all knowledge when it has become perfect, "it is too excellent
+for us."
+
+"Whither then," says David, "shall I go from thy Spirit, or whither
+shall I go, then, from thy presence? If I climb up into heaven thou art
+there; if I go down into hell thou art there also. If I take the wings
+of the morning and remain in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there
+also shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me. If I say
+peradventure the darkness shall cover me, then shall my night be turned
+into day: the darkness and light to thee are both alike. For my reins
+are thine; thou hast covered me in my mother's womb. My bones are not
+hid from thee: though I be made secretly and fashioned beneath in the
+earth, thine eyes did see my substance yet being unperfect; and in thy
+book were all my members written, which day by day were fashioned when
+as yet there was none of them. Do I not hate them, O Lord, that hate
+thee? and am I not grieved with them that rise up against thee? Yea, I
+hate them right sore, as though they were mine enemies." (Psalm
+CXXXIX.) There is not a word of this which we cannot endorse with more
+significance, as well as with greater heartiness than those can who
+look upon God as He is commonly represented to them; whatever comfort,
+therefore, those in distress have been in the habit of receiving from
+these and kindred passages, we intensify rather than not. We cannot,
+alas! make pain cease to be pain, nor injustice easy to bear; but we
+can show that no pain is bootless, and that there is a tendency in all
+injustice to right itself; suffering is not inflicted wilfully, [sic] as
+it were by a magician who could have averted it; nor is it vain in its
+results, but unless we are cut off from God by having dwelt in some
+place where none of our kind can know of what has happened to us, it
+will move God's heart to redress our grievance, and will tend to the
+happiness of those who come after us, even if not to our own.
+
+The moral government of God over the world is exercised through us, who
+are his ministers and persons, and a government of this description
+is the only one which can be observed as practically influencing
+men's conduct. God helps those who help themselves, because in helping
+themselves they are helping Him. Again, Vox Populi vox Dei. The current
+feeling of our peers is what we instinctively turn to when we would know
+whether such and such a course of conduct is right or wrong; and so Paul
+clenches his list of things that the Philippians were to hold fast with
+the words, "whatsoever things are of good fame"-that is to say, he falls
+back upon an appeal to the educated conscience of his age. Certainly
+the wicked do sometimes appear to escape punishment, but it must be
+remembered there are punishments from within which do not meet the eye.
+If these fall on a man, he is sufficiently punished; if they do not fall
+on him, it is probable we have been over hasty in assuming that he is
+wicked.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX. GOD THE UNKNOWN
+
+The reader will already have felt that the panzoistic conception of
+God-the conception, that is to say, of God as comprising all living
+units in His own single person-does not help us to understand the origin
+of matter, nor yet that of the primordial cell which has grown and
+unfolded itself into the present life of the world. How was the world
+rendered fit for the habitation of the first germ of Life? How came it
+to have air and water, without which nothing that we know of as living
+can exist? Was the world fashioned and furnished with aqueous and
+atmospheric adjuncts with a view to the requirements of the infant
+monad, and to his due development? If so, we have evidence of design,
+and if so of a designer, and if so there must be Some far vaster Person
+who looms out behind our God, and who stands in the same relation to him
+as he to us. And behind this vaster and more unknown God there may be
+yet another, and another, and another.
+
+It is certain that Life did not make the world with a view to its own
+future requirements. For the world was at one time red hot, and there
+can have been no living being upon it. Nor is it conceivable that matter
+in which there was no life-inasmuch as it was infinitely hotter than the
+hottest infusion which any living germ can support-could gradually come
+to be alive without impregnation from a living parent. All living things
+that we know of have come from other living things with bodies and
+souls, whose existence can be satisfactorily established in spite of
+their being often too small for our detection. Since, then, the world
+was once without life, and since no analogy points in the direction of
+thinking that life can spring up spontaneously, we are driven to suppose
+that it was introduced into this world from some other source extraneous
+to it altogether, and if so we find ourselves irresistibly drawn to
+the inquiry whether the source of the life that is in the world-the
+impregnator of this earth-may not also have prepared the earth for the
+reception of his offspring, as a hen makes an egg-shell or a peach a
+stone for the protection of the germ within it? Not only are we drawn to
+the inquiry, but we are drawn also to the answer that the earth was so
+prepared designedly by a Person with body and soul who knew beforehand
+the kind of thing he required, and who took the necessary steps to bring
+it about.
+
+If this is so we are members indeed of the God of this world, but we
+are not his children; we are children of the Unknown and Vaster God who
+called him into existence; and this in a far more literal sense than we
+have been in the habit of realising [sic] to ourselves. For it may be
+doubted whether the monads are not as truly seminal in character as the
+procreative matter from which all animals spring.
+
+It must be remembered that if there is any truth in the view put forward
+in "Life and Habit," and in "Evolution Old and New" (and I have met
+with no serious attempt to upset the line of argument taken in either
+of these books), then no complex animal or plant can reach its full
+development without having already gone through the stages of that
+development on an infinite number of past occasions. An egg makes itself
+into a hen because it knows the way to do so, having already made
+itself into a hen millions and millions of times over; the ease and
+unconsciousness with which it grows being in themselves sufficient
+demonstration of this fact. At each stage in its growth the chicken is
+reminded, by a return of the associated ideas, of the next step that it
+should take, and it accordingly takes it.
+
+But if this is so, and if also the congeries of all the living forms
+in the world must be regarded as a single person, throughout their long
+growth from the primordial cell onwards to the present day, then, by
+parity of reasoning, the person thus compounded-that is to say, Life or
+God-should have already passed through a growth analogous to that which
+we find he has taken upon this earth on an infinite number of past
+occasions; and the development of each class of life, with its
+culmination in the vertebrate animals and in man, should be due to
+recollection by God of his having passed through the same stages, or
+nearly so, in worlds and universes, which we know of from personal
+recollection, as evidenced in the growth and structure of our bodies,
+but concerning which we have no other knowledge whatsoever.
+
+So small a space remains to me that I cannot pursue further the
+reflections which suggest themselves. A few concluding considerations
+are here alone possible.
+
+We know of three great concentric phases of life, and we are not without
+reason to suspect a fourth. If there are so many there are very likely
+more, but we do not know whether there are or not. The innermost sphere
+of life we know of is that of our own cells. These people live in a
+world of their own, knowing nothing of us, nor being known by ourselves
+until very recently. Yet they can be seen under a microscope; they can
+be taken out of us, and may then be watched going here and there in
+perturbation of mind, endeavouring [sic] to find something in their
+new environment that will suit them, and then dying on finding how
+hopelessly different it is from any to which they have been accustomed.
+They live in us, and make us up into the single person which we conceive
+ourselves to form; we are to them a world comprising an organic and an
+inorganic kingdom, of which they consider themselves to be the organic,
+and whatever is not very like themselves to be the inorganic. Whether
+they are composed of subordinate personalities or not we do not know,
+but we have no reason to think that they are, and if we touch ground, so
+to speak, with life in the units of which our own bodies are composed,
+it is likely that there is a limit also in an upward direction,
+though we have nothing whatever to guide us as to where it is, nor any
+certainty that there is a limit at all.
+
+We are ourselves the second concentric sphere of life, we being the
+constituent cells which unite to form the body of God. Of the third
+sphere we know a single member only-the God of this world; but we see
+also the stars in heaven, and know their multitude. Analogy points
+irresistibly in the direction of thinking that these other worlds are
+like our own, begodded and full of life; it also bids us believe that
+the God of their world is begotten of one more or less like himself,
+and that his growth has followed the same course as that of all other
+growths we know of.
+
+If so, he is one of the constituent units of an unknown and vaster
+personality who is composed of Gods, as our God is composed of all the
+living forms on earth, and as all those living forms are composed of
+cells. This is the Unknown God. Beyond this second God we cannot at
+present go, nor should we wish to do so, if we are wise. It is no
+reproach to a system that it does not profess to give an account of the
+origin of things; the reproach rather should lie against a system
+which professed to explain it, for we may be well assured that such a
+profession would, for the present at any rate, be an empty boast. It is
+enough if a system is true as far as it goes; if it throws new light
+on old problems, and opens up vistas which reveal a hope of further
+addition to our knowledge, and this I believe may be fairly claimed for
+the theory of life put forward in "Life and Habit" and "Evolution,
+Old and New," and for the corollary insisted upon in these pages; a
+corollary which follows logically and irresistibly if the position I
+have taken in the above-named books is admitted.
+
+Let us imagine that one of the cells of which we are composed could
+attain to a glimmering perception of the manner in which he unites
+with other cells, of whom he knows very little, so as to form a greater
+compound person of whom he has hitherto known nothing at all. Would he
+not do well to content himself with the mastering of this conception,
+at any rate for a considerable time? Would it be any just ground of
+complaint against him on the part of his brother cells, that he had
+failed to explain to them who made the man (or, as he would call it, the
+omnipotent deity) whose existence and relations to himself he had just
+caught sight of?
+
+But if he were to argue further on the same lines as those on which he
+had travelled hitherto, and were to arrive at the conclusion that there
+might be other men in the world. besides the one whom he had just
+learnt to apprehend, it would be still no refutation or just ground of
+complaint against him that he had failed to show the manner in which his
+supposed human race had come into existence.
+
+Here our cell would probably stop. He could hardly be expected to arrive
+at the existence of animals and plants differing from the human race,
+and uniting with that race to form a single Person or God, in the
+same way as he has himself united with other cells to form man. The
+existence, and much more the roundness of the earth itself, would be
+unknown to him, except by way of inference and deduction. The only
+universe which he could at all understand would be the body of the man
+of whom he was a component part.
+
+How would not such a cell be astounded if all that we know ourselves
+could be suddenly revealed to him, so that not only should the vastness
+of this earth burst upon his dazzled view, but that of the sun and of
+his planets also, and not only these, but the countless other suns which
+we may see by night around us. Yet it is probable that an actual being
+is hidden from us, which no less transcends the wildest dream of our
+theologians than the existence of the heavenly bodies transcends the
+perception of our own constituent cells.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's God the Known and God the Unknown, by Samuel Butler
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