The
subject of Saintliness left us face to face with the question, Is the sense of
divine presence a sense of anything objectively true? We turned first to mysticism
for an answer, and found that although mysticism is entirely willing to corroborate
religion, it is too private (and also too various) in its utterances to be able
to claim a universal authority. But philosophy publishes results which claim to
be universally valid if they are valid at all, so we now turn with our question
to philosophy. Can philosophy stamp a warrant of veracity upon the religious man's
sense of the divine? I imagine that many of you at this point begin to indulge
in guesses at the goal to which I am tending. I have undermined the authority
of mysticism, you say, and the next thing I shall probably do is to seek to discredit
that of philosophy. Religion, you expect to hear me conclude, is nothing but an
affair of faith, based either on vague sentiment, or on that vivid sense of the
reality of things unseen of which in my second lecture and in the lecture on Mysticism
I gave so many examples. It is essentially private and individualistic; it always
exceeds our powers of formulation; and although attempts to pour its contents
into a philosophic mould will probably always go on, men being what they are,
yet these attempts are always secondary processes which in no way add to the authority,
or warrant the veracity, of the sentiments from which they derive their own stimulus
and borrow whatever glow of conviction they may themselves possess. In short,
you suspect that I am planning to defend feeling at the expense of reason, to
rehabilitate the primitive and unreflective, and to dissuade you from the hope
of any Theology worthy of the name.
To a certain extent I have to admit that
you guess rightly. I do believe that feeling is the deeper source of religion,
and that philosophic and theological formulas are secondary products, like translations
of a text into another tongue. But all such statements are misleading from their
brevity, and it will take the whole hour for me to explain to you exactly what
I mean.
When I call theological formulas secondary products, I mean that in
a world in which no religious feeling had ever existed, I doubt whether any philosophic
theology could ever have been framed. I doubt if dispassionate intellectual contemplation
of the universe, apart from inner unhappiness and need of deliverance on the one
hand and mystical emotion on the other, would ever have resulted in religious
philosophies such as we now possess. Men would have begun with animistic explanations
of natural fact, and criticised these away into scientific ones, as they actually
have done. In the science they would have left a certain amount of 'psychical
research,' even as they now will probably have to re-admit a certain amount. But
high-flying speculations like those of either dogmatic or idealistic theology,
these they would have had no motive to venture on, feeling no need of commerce
with such deities. These speculations must, it seems to me, be classed as over-beliefs,
buildings-out performed by the intellect into directions of which feeling originally
supplied the hint.
But even if religious philosophy had to have its first
hint supplied by feeling, may it not have dealt in a superior way with the matter
which feeling suggested? Feeling is private and dumb, and unable to give an account
of itself. It allows that its results are mysteries and enigmas, declines to justify
them rationally, and on occasion is willing that they should even pass for paradoxical
and absurd. Philosophy takes just the opposite attitude. Her aspiration is to
reclaim from mystery and paradox whatever territory she touches. To find an escape
from obscure and wayward personal persuasion to truth objectively valid for all
thinking men has ever been the intellect's most cherished ideal. To redeem religion
from unwholesome privacy, and to give public status and universal right of way
to its deliverances, has been reason's task.
I believe that philosophy will
always have opportunity to labor at this task. * We are thinking beings, and we
cannot exclude the intellect from participating in any of our functions. Even
in soliloquizing with ourselves, we construe our feelings intellectually. Both
our personal ideals and our religious and mystical experiences must be interpreted
congruously with the kind of scenery which our thinking mind inhabits. The philosophic
climate of our time inevitably forces its own clothing on us. Moreover, we must
exchange our feelings with one another, and in doing so we have to speak, and
to use general and abstract verbal formulas. Conceptions and constructions are
thus a necessary part of our religion; and as moderator amid the clash of hypotheses,
and mediator among the criticisms of one man's constructions by another, philosophy
will always have much to do. It would be strange if I disputed this, when these
very lectures which I am giving are (as you will see more clearly from now onwards)
a laborious attempt to extract from the privacies of religious experience some
general facts which can be defined in formulas upon which everybody may agree.
* Compare Professor W. WALLACE'S Gifford Lectures, in Lectures and Essays,
Oxford, 1898, pp. 17 ff.
Religious experience, in other words, spontaneously
and inevitably engenders myths, superstitions, dogmas, creeds, and metaphysical
theologies, and criticisms of one set of these by the adherents of another. Of
late, impartial classifications and comparisons have become possible, alongside
of the denunciations and anathemas by which the commerce between creeds used exclusively
to be carried on. We have the beginnings of a 'Science of Religions,' so-called;
and if these lectures could ever be accounted a crumb-like contribution to such
a science, I should be made very happy.
But all these intellectual operations,
whether they be constructive or comparative and critical, presuppose immediate
experiences as their subject-matter. They are interpretative and inductive operations,
operations after the fact, consequent upon religious feeling, not coordinate with
it, not independent of what it ascertains.
The intellectualism
in religion which I wish to discredit pretends to be something altogether different
from this. It assumes to construct religious objects out of the resources of logical
reason alone, or of logical reason drawing rigorous inference from non-subjective
facts. It calls its conclusions dogmatic theology, or philosophy of the absolute,
as the case may be; it does not call them science of religions. It reaches them
in an a priori way, and warrants their veracity.
Warranted systems have ever
been the idols of aspiring souls. All-inclusive, yet simple; noble, clean, luminous,
stable, rigorous, true;- what more ideal refuge could there be than such a system
would offer to spirits vexed by the muddiness and accidentality of the world of
sensible things? Accordingly, we find inculcated in the theological schools of
to-day, almost as much as in those of the fore-time, a disdain for merely possible
or probable truth, and of results that only private assurance can grasp. Scholastics
and idealists both express this disdain. Principal John Caird, for example, writes
as follows in his Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion:
"Religion must
indeed be a thing of the heart; but in order to elevate it from the region of
subjective caprice and waywardness, and to distinguish between that which is true
and false in religion, we must appeal to an objective standard. That which enters
the heart must first be discerned by the intelligence to be true. It must be seen
as having in its own nature a right to dominate feeling, and as constituting the
principle by which feeling must be judged. * In estimating the religious character
of individuals, nations, or races, the first question is, not how they feel, but
what they think and believe- not whether their religion is one which manifests
itself in emotions, more or less vehement and enthusiastic, but what are the conceptions
of God and divine things by which these emotions are called forth. Feeling is
necessary in religion, but it is by the content or intelligent basis of a religion,
and not by feeling, that its character and worth are to be determined." *(2)
* Op. cit., p. 174, abridged.
*(2) Ibid., p. 186, abridged.
Cardinal Newman,
in his work, The Idea of a University, gives more emphatic expression still to
this disdain for sentiment. * Theology, he says, is a science in the strictest
sense of the word. I will tell you, he says, what it is not- not 'physical evidences'
for God, not 'natural religion,' for these are but vague subjective interpretations:
* Discourse II. SS 7.
"If," he continues, "the Supreme Being is powerful
or skillful, just so far as the telescope shows power, or the microscope shows
skill, if his moral law is to be ascertained simply by the physical processes
of the animal frame, or his will gathered from the immediate issues of human affairs,
if his Essence is just as high and deep and broad as the universe and no more;
if this be the fact, then will I confess that there is no specific science about
God, that theology is but a name, and a protest in its behalf an hypocrisy. Then,
pious as it is to think of Him, while the pageant of experiment or abstract reasoning
passes by, still such piety is nothing more than a poetry of thought, or an ornament
of language, a certain view taken of Nature which one man has and another has
not, which gifted minds strike out, which others see to be admirable and ingenious,
and which all would be the better for adopting. It is but the theology of Nature,
just as we talk of the philosophy or the romance of history, or the poetry of
childhood, or the picturesque or the sentimental or the humorous, or any other
abstract quality which the genius or the caprice of the individual, or the fashion
of the day, or the consent of the world, recognizes in any set of objects which
are subjected to its contemplation. I do not see much difference between avowing
that there is no God, and implying that nothing definite can be known for certain
about Him."
What I mean by Theology, continues Newman, is none of these things:
"I simply mean the Science of God, or the truths we know about God, put into a
system, just as we have a science of the stars and call it astronomy, or of the
crust of the earth and call it geology."
In both these extracts we have the
issue clearly set before us: Feeling valid only for the individual is pitted against
reason valid universally. The test is a perfectly plain one of fact. Theology
based on pure reason must in point of fact convince men universally. If it did
not, wherein would its superiority consist? If it only formed sects and schools,
even as sentiment and mysticism form them, how would it fulfill its programme
of freeing us from personal caprice and waywardness? This perfectly definite practical
test of the pretensions of philosophy to found religion on universal reason simplifies
my procedure to-day. I need not discredit philosophy by laborious criticism of
its arguments. It will suffice if I show that as a matter of history it fails
to prove its pretension to be 'objectively' convincing. In fact, philosophy does
so fail. It does not banish differences; it founds schools and sects just as feeling
does. I believe, in fact, that the logical reason of man operates in this field
of divinity exactly as it has always operated in love, or in patriotism, or in
politics, or in any other of the wider affairs of life, in which our passions
or our mystical intuitions fix our beliefs beforehand. It finds arguments for
our conviction, for indeed it has to find them. It amplifies and defines our faith,
and dignifies it and lends it words and plausibility. It hardly ever engenders
it; it cannot now secure it. *
* As regards the secondary character of intellectual
constructions, and the primacy of feeling and instinct in founding religious beliefs,
see the striking work of H. FIELDING, The Hearts of Men, London, 1902, which came
into my hands after my text was written. "Creeds," says the author, "are the grammar
of religion, they are to religion what grammar is to speech. Words are the expression
of our wants; grammar is the theory formed afterwards. Speech never proceeded
from grammar, but the reverse. As speech progresses and changes from unknown causes,
grammar must follow" (p. 313). The whole book, which keeps unusually close to
concrete facts, is little more than an amplification of this text.
Lend
me your attention while I run through some of the points of the older systematic
theology. You find them in both Protestant and Catholic manuals, best of all in
the innumerable text-books published since Pope Leo's Encyclical recommending
the study of Saint Thomas. I glance first at the arguments by which dogmatic theology
establishes God's existence, after that at those by which it establishes his nature.
*
* For convenience' sake, I follow the order of A. STOCKL'S Lehrbuch der
Philosophie, 5te Auflage, Mainz, 1881, Band ii. B. BOEDDER'S Natural Theology,
London, 1891, is a handy English Catholic Manual; but an almost identical doctrine
is given by such Protestant theologians as C. HODGE: Systematic Theology, New
York, 1873, or A.H. STRONG: Systematic Theology, 5th edition, New York, 1896.
The arguments for God's existence have stood for hundreds of years with the
waves of unbelieving criticism breaking against them, never totally discrediting
them in the ears of the faithful, but on the whole slowly and surely washing out
the mortar from between their joints. If you have a God already whom you believe
in, these arguments confirm you. If you are atheistic, they fail to set you right.
The proofs are various. The 'cosmological' one, so-called, reasons from the contingence
of the world to a First Cause which must contain whatever perfections the world
itself contains. The 'argument from design' reasons, from the fact that Nature's
laws are mathematical, and her parts benevolently adapted to each other, that
this cause is both intellectual and benevolent. The 'moral argument' is that the
moral law presupposes a lawgiver. The 'argument ex consensu gentium' is that the
belief in God is so widespread as to be grounded in the rational nature of man,
and should therefore carry authority with it.
As I just said, I will not discuss
these arguments technically. The bare fact that all idealists since Kant have
felt entitled either to scout or to neglect them shows that they are not solid
enough to serve as religion's all-sufficient foundation. Absolutely impersonal
reasons would be in duty bound to show more general convincingness. Causation
is indeed too obscure a principle to bear the weight of the whole structure of
theology. As for the argument from design, see how Darwinian ideas have revolutionized
it. Conceived as we now conceive them, as so many fortunate escapes from almost
limitless processes of destruction, the benevolent adaptations which we find in
Nature suggest a deity very different from the one who figured in the earlier
versions of the argument. * The fact is that these arguments do but follow the
combined suggestions of the facts and of our feeling. They prove nothing rigorously.
They only corroborate our pre-existent partialities.
* It must not be forgotten
that any form of disorder in the world might, by the design argument, suggest
a God for just that kind of disorder. The truth is that any state of things whatever
that can be named is logically susceptible of teleological interpretation. The
ruins of the earthquake at Lisbon, for example: the whole of past history had
to be planned exactly as it was to bring about in the fullness of time just that
particular arrangement of debris of masonry, furniture, and once living bodies.
No other train of causes would have been sufficient. And so of any other arrangement,
bad or good, which might as a matter of fact be found resulting anywhere from
previous conditions. To avoid such pessimistic consequences and save its beneficent
designer, the design argument accordingly invokes two other principles, restrictive
in their operation. The first is physical: Nature's forces tend of their own accord
only to disorder and destruction, to heaps of ruins, not to architecture. This
principle, though plausible at first sight, seems, in the light of recent biology,
to be more and more improbable. The second principle is one of anthropomorphic
interpretation. No arrangement that for us is 'disorderly' can possibly have been
an object of design at all. This principle is of course a mere assumption in the
interests of anthropomorphic Theism.
When one views the world with no definite
theological bias one way or the other, one sees that order and disorder, as we
now recognize them, are purely human inventions. We are interested in certain
types of arrangement, useful, aesthetic, or moral,- so interested that whenever
we find them realized, the fact emphatically rivets our attention. The result
is that we work over the contents of the world selectively. It is overflowing
with disorderly arrangements from our point of view, but order is the only thing
we care for and look at, and by choosing, one can always find some sort of orderly
arrangement in the midst of any chaos. If I should throw down a thousand beans
at random upon a table, I could doubtless, by eliminating a sufficient number
of them, leave the rest in almost any geometrical pattern you might propose to
me, and you might then say that that pattern was the thing prefigured beforehand,
and that the other beans were mere irrelevance and packing material. Our dealings
with Nature are just lines in innumerable directions. We count and name whatever
lies upon the special lines we trace, whilst the other things and the untraced
lines are neither named nor counted. There are in reality infinitely more things
'unadapted' to each other in this world than there are things 'adapted'; infinitely
more things with irregular relations than with regular relations between them.
But we look for the regular kind of thing exclusively, and ingeniously discover
and preserve it in our memory. It accumulates with other regular kinds, until
the collection of them fills our encyclopedias. Yet all the while between and
around them lies an infinite anonymous chaos of objects that no one ever thought
of together, of relations that never yet attracted our attention.
The facts
of order from which the physico-theological argument starts are thus easily susceptible
of interpretation as arbitrary human products. So long as this is the case, although
of course no argument against God follows, it follows that the argument for him
will fail to constitute a knock-down proof of his existence. It will be convincing
only to those who on other grounds believe in him already.
If philosophy can
do so little to establish God's existence, how stands it with her efforts to define
his attributes? It is worth while to look at the attempts of systematic theology
in this direction.
Since God is First Cause, this science of sciences says,
he differs from all his creatures in possessing existence a se. From this 'a-se-ity'
on God's part, theology deduces by mere logic most of his other perfections. For
instance, he must be both necessary and absolute, cannot not be, and cannot in
any way be determined by anything else. This makes Him absolutely unlimited from
without, and unlimited also from within; for limitation is non-being; and God
is being itself. This unlimitedness makes God infinitely perfect. Moreover, God
is One, and Only, for the infinitely perfect can admit no peer. He is Spiritual,
for were He composed of physical parts, some other power would have to combine
them into the total, and his aseity would thus be contradicted. He is therefore
both simple and non-physical in nature. He is simple metaphysically also, that
is to say, his nature and his existence cannot be distinct, as they are in finite
substances which share their formal natures with one another, and are individual
only in their material aspect. Since God is one and only, his essentia and his
esse must be given at one stroke. This excludes from his being all those distinctions,
so familiar in the world of finite things, between potentiality and actuality,
substance and accidents, being and activity, existence and attributes. We can
talk, it is true, of God's powers, acts, and attributes, but these discriminations
are only 'virtual,' and made from the human point of view. In God all these points
of view fall into an absolute identity of being.
This absence of all potentiality
in God obliges Him to be immutable. He is actuality, through and through. Were
there anything potential about Him, He would either lose or gain by its actualization,
and either loss or gain would contradict his perfection. He cannot, therefore,
change. Furthermore, He is immense, boundless; for could He be outlined in space,
He would be composite, and this would contradict his indivisibility. He is therefore
omnipresent, indivisibly there, at every point of space. He is similarly wholly
present at every point of time,- in other words eternal. For if He began in time,
He would need a prior cause, and that would contradict his aseity. If He ended,
it would contradict his necessity. If He went through any succession, it would
contradict his immutability.
He has intelligence and will and every other
creature-perfection, for we have them, and effectus nequit superare causam. In
Him, however, they are absolutely and eternally in act, and their object, since
God can be bounded by naught that is external, can primarily be nothing else than
God himself. He knows himself, then, in one eternal indivisible act, and wills
himself with an infinite self-pleasure. * Since He must of logical necessity thus
love and will himself, He cannot be called 'free' ad intra, with the freedom of
contrarieties that characterizes finite creatures. Ad extra, however, or with
respect to his creation, God is free. He cannot need to create, being perfect
in being and in happiness already. He wills to create, then, by an absolute freedom.
* For the scholastics the facultas appetendi embraces feeling, desire, and
will.
Being thus a substance endowed with intellect and will and freedom,
God is a person; and a living person also, for He is both object and subject of
his own activity, and to be this distinguishes the living from the lifeless. He
is thus absolutely self-sufficient: his self-knowledge and self-love are both
of them infinite and adequate, and need no extraneous conditions to perfect them.
He is omniscient, for in knowing himself as Cause He knows all creature things
and events by implication. His knowledge is previsive, for He is present to all
time. Even our free acts are known beforehand to Him, for otherwise his wisdom
would admit of successive moments of enrichment, and this would contradict his
immutability. He is omnipotent for everything that does not involve logical contradiction.
He can make being- in other words his power includes creation. If what He creates
were made of his own substance, it would have to be infinite in essence, as that
substance is; but it is finite: so it must be non-divine in substance. If it were
made of a substance, an eternally existing matter, for example, which God found
there to his hand, and to which He simply gave its form, that would contradict
God's definition as First Cause, and make Him a mere mover of something caused
already. The things he creates, then, He creates ex nihilo, and gives them absolute
being as so many finite substances additional to himself. The forms which he imprints
upon them have their prototypes in his ideas. But as in God there is no such thing
as multiplicity, and as these ideas for us are manifold, we must distinguish the
ideas as they are in God and the way in which our minds externally imitate them.
We must attribute them to Him only in a terminative sense, as differing aspects,
from the finite point of view, of his unique essence.
God of course is holy,
good, and just. He can do no evil, for He is positive being's fullness, and evil
is negation. It is true that He has created physical evil in places, but only
as a means of wider good, for bonum totius praeeminet bonum partis. Moral evil
He cannot will, either as end or means, for that would contradict his holiness.
By creating free beings He permits it only, neither his justice nor his goodness
obliging Him to prevent the recipients of freedom from misusing the gift.
As regards God's purpose in creating, primarily it can only have been to exercise
his absolute freedom by the manifestation to others of his glory. From this it
follows that the others must be rational beings, capable in the first place of
knowledge, love, and honor, and in the second place of happiness, for the knowledge
and love of God is the mainspring of felicity. In so far forth one may say that
God's secondary purpose in creating is love.
I will not weary
you by pursuing these metaphysical determinations farther, into the mysteries
of God's Trinity, for example. What I have given will serve as a specimen of the
orthodox philosophical theology of both Catholics and Protestants. Newman, filled
with enthusiasm at God's list of perfections, continues the passage which I began
to quote to you by a couple of pages of a rhetoric so magnificent that I can hardly
refrain from adding them, in spite of the inroad they would make upon our time.
* He first enumerates God's attributes sonorously, then celebrates his ownership
of everything in earth and Heaven, and the dependence of all that happens upon
his permissive will. He gives us scholastic philosophy 'touched with emotion,'
and every philosophy should be touched with emotion to be rightly understood.
Emotionally, then, dogmatic theology is worth something to minds of the type of
Newman's. It will aid us to estimate what it is worth intellectually, if at this
point I make a short digression.
* Op. cit., Discourse III. SS 7.
What
God hath joined together, let no man put asunder. The Continental schools of philosophy
have too often overlooked the fact that man's thinking is organically connected
with his conduct. It seems to me to be the chief glory of English and Scottish
thinkers to have kept the organic connection in view. The guiding principle of
British philosophy has in fact been that every difference must make a difference,
every theoretical difference somewhere issue in a practical difference, and that
the best method of discussing points of theory is to begin by ascertaining what
practical difference would result from one alternative or the other being true.
What is the particular truth in question known as? In what facts does it result?
What is its cash-value in terms of particular experience? This is the characteristic
English way of taking up a question. In this way, you remember, Locke takes up
the question of personal identity. What you mean by it is just your chain of particular
memories, says he. That is the only concretely verifiable part of its significance.
All further ideas about it, such as the oneness or manyness of the spiritual substance
on which it is based, are therefore void of intelligible meaning; and propositions
touching such ideas may be indifferently affirmed or denied. So Berkeley with
his 'matter.' The cash-value of matter is our physical sensations. That is what
it is known as, all that we concretely verify of its conception. That, therefore,
is the whole meaning of the term 'matter'- any other pretended meaning is mere
wind of words. Hume does the same thing with causation. It is known as habitual
antecedence, and as tendency on our part to look for something definite to come.
Apart from this practical meaning it has no significance whatever, and books about
it may be committed to the flames, says Hume. Dugald Stewart and Thomas Brown,
James Mill, John Mill, and Professor Bain, have followed more or less consistently
the same method; and Shadworth Hodgson has used the principle with full explicitness.
When all is said and done, it was English and Scotch writers, and not Kant, who
introduced 'the critical method' into philosophy, the one method fitted to make
philosophy a study worthy of serious men. For what seriousness can possibly remain
in debating philosophic propositions that will never make an appreciable difference
to us in action? And what could it matter, if all propositions were practically
indifferent, which of them we should agree to call true or which false?
An
American philosopher of eminent originality, Mr. Charles Sanders Peirce, has
rendered thought a service by disentangling from the particulars of its application
the principle by which these men were instinctively guided, and by singling it
out as fundamental and giving to it a Greek name. He calls it the principle of
pragmatism, and he defends it somewhat as follows:- *
* In an article, How
to make our Ideas Clear, in the Popular Science Monthly for January, 1878, vol.
xii. p. 286.
Thought in movement has for its only conceivable motive the
attainment of belief, or thought at rest. Only when our thought about a subject
has found its rest in belief can our action on the subject firmly and safely begin.
Beliefs, in short, are rules for action; and the whole function of thinking is
but one step in the production of active habits. If there were any part of a thought
that made no difference in the thought's practical consequences, then that part
would be no proper element of the thought's significance. To develop a thought's
meaning we need therefore only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce;
that conduct is for us its sole significance; and the tangible fact at the root
of all our thought-distinctions is that there is no one of them so fine as to
consist in anything but a possible difference of practice. To attain perfect clearness
in our thoughts of an object, we need then only consider what sensations, immediate
or remote, we are conceivably to expect from it, and what conduct we must prepare
in case the object should be true. Our conception of these practical consequences
is for us the whole of our conception of the object, so far as that conception
has positive significance at all.
This is the principle of Peirce, the principle
of pragmatism. Such a principle will help us on this occasion to decide, among
the various attributes set down in the scholastic inventory of God's perfections,
whether some be not far less significant than others.
If, namely,
we apply the principle of pragmatism to God's metaphysical attributes, strictly
so called, as distinguished from his moral attributes, I think that, even were
we forced by a coercive logic to believe them, we still should have to confess
them to be destitute of an intelligible significance. Take God's aseity, for example;
or his necessariness; his immateriality; his 'simplicity' or superiority to the
kind of inner variety and succession which we find in finite beings, his indivisibility,
and lack of the inner distinctions of being and activity, substance and accident,
potentiality and actuality, and the rest; his repudiation of inclusion in a genus;
his actualized infinity; his 'personality,' apart from the moral qualities which
it may comport; his relations to evil being permissive and not positive; his self-sufficiency,
self-love, and absolute felicity in himself:- candidly speaking, how do such qualities
as these make any definite connection with our life? And if they severally call
for no distinctive adaptations of our conduct, what vital difference can it possibly
make to a man's religion whether they be true or false?
For my own part, although
I dislike to say aught that may grate upon tender associations, I must frankly
confess that even though these attributes were faultlessly deduced, I cannot conceive
of its being of the smallest consequence to us religiously that any one of them
should be true. Pray, what specific act can I perform in order to adapt myself
the better to God's simplicity? Or how does it assist me to plan my behavior,
to know that His happiness is anyhow absolutely complete? In the middle of the
century just past, Mayne Reid was the great writer of books of out-of-door adventure.
He was forever extolling the hunters and field-observers of living animals' habits,
and keeping up a fire of invective against the 'closet-naturalists,' as he called
them, the collectors and classifiers, and handlers of skeletons and skins. When
I was a boy, I used to think that a closet-naturalist must be the vilest type
of wretch under the sun. But surely the systematic theologians are the closet-naturalists
of the deity, even in Captain Mayne Reid's sense. What is their deduction of metaphysical
attributes but a shuffling and matching of pedantic dictionary-adjectives, aloof
from morals, aloof from human needs, something that might be worked out from the
mere word 'God' by one of those logical machines of wood and brass which recent
ingenuity has contrived as well as by a man of flesh and blood. They have the
trail of the serpent over them. One feels that in the theologians' hands, they
are only a set of titles obtained by a mechanical manipulation of synonyms; verbality
has stepped into the place of vision, professionalism into that of life. Instead
of bread we have a stone; instead of a fish, a serpent. Did such a conglomeration
of abstract terms give really the gist of our knowledge of the deity, schools
of theology might indeed continue to flourish, but religion, vital religion, would
have taken its flight from this world. What keeps religion going is something
else than abstract definitions and systems of concatenated adjectives, and something
different from faculties of theology and their professors. All these things are
after-effects, secondary accretions upon those phenomena of vital conversation
with the unseen divine, of which I have shown you so many instances, renewing
themselves in saecula saeculorum in the lives of humble private men.
So much
for the metaphysical attributes of God! From the point of view of practical religion,
the metaphysical monster which they offer to our worship is an absolutely worthless
invention of the scholarly mind.
What shall we now say of the attributes called
moral? Pragmatically, they stand on an entirely different footing. They positively
determine fear and hope and expectation, and are foundations for the saintly life.
It needs but a glance at them to show how great is their significance.
God's
holiness, for example: being holy, God can will nothing but the good. Being omnipotent,
he can secure its triumph. Being omniscient, he can see us in the dark. Being
just, he can punish us for what he sees. Being loving, he can pardon too. Being
unalterable, we can count on him securely. These qualities enter into connection
with our life, it is highly important that we should be informed concerning them.
That God's purpose in creation should be the manifestation of his glory is also
an attribute which has definite relations to our practical life. Among other things
it has given a definite character to worship in all Christian countries. If dogmatic
theology really does prove beyond dispute that a God with characters like these
exists, she may well claim to give a solid basis to religious sentiment. But verily,
how stands it with her arguments?
It stands with them as
ill as with the arguments for his existence. Not only do post-Kantian idealists
reject them root and branch, but it is a plain historic fact that they never have
converted any one who has found in the moral complexion of the world, as he experienced
it, reasons for doubting that a good God can have framed it. To prove God's goodness
by the scholastic argument that there is no non-being in his essence would sound
to such a witness simply silly.
No! the book of Job went over this whole matter
once for all and definitively. Ratiocination is a relatively superficial and unreal
path to the deity: "I will lay mine hand upon my mouth; I have heard of Thee by
the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth Thee." An intellect perplexed and
baffled, yet a trustful sense of presence- such is the situation of the man who
is sincere with himself and with the facts, but who remains religious still. *
* Pragmatically, the most important attribute of God is his punitive justice.
But who, in the present state of theological opinion on that point, will dare
maintain that hell fire or its equivalent in some shape is rendered certain by
pure logic? Theology herself has largely based this doctrine upon revelation;
and, in discussing it, has tended more and more to substitute conventional ideas
of criminal law for a priori principles of reason. But the very notion that this
glorious universe, with planets and winds, and laughing sky and ocean, should
have been conceived and had its beams and rafters laid in technicalities of criminality,
is incredible to our modern imagination. It weakens a religion to hear it argued
upon such a basis.
We must therefore, I think, bid a definitive good-by to
dogmatic theology. In all sincerity our faith must do without that warrant. Modern
idealism, I repeat, has said good-by to this theology forever. Can modern idealism
give faith a better warrant, or must she still rely on her poor self for witness?
The basis of modern idealism is Kant's doctrine of the Transcendental
Ego of Apperception. By this formidable term Kant merely meant the fact that the
consciousness 'I think them' must (potentially or actually) accompany all our
objects. Former skeptics had said as much, but the 'I' in question had remained
for them identified with the personal individual. Kant abstracted and depersonalized
it, and made it the most universal of all his categories, although for Kant himself
the Transcendental Ego had no theological implications.
It was reserved for
his successors to convert Kant's notion of Bewusstsein uberhaupt, or abstract
consciousness, into an infinite concrete self-consciousness which is the soul
of the world, and in which our sundry personal self-consciousnesses have their
being. It would lead me into technicalities to show you even briefly how this
transformation was in point of fact effected. Suffice it to say that in the Hegelian
school, which to-day so deeply influences both British and American thinking,
two principles have borne the brunt of the operation.
The first of these principles
is that the old logic of identity never gives us more than a post-mortem dissection
of disjecta membra, and that the fullness of life can be construed to thought
only by recognizing that every object which our thought may propose to itself
involves the notion of some other object which seems at first to negate the first
one.
The second principle is that to be conscious of a negation is already
virtually to be beyond it. The mere asking of a question or expression of a dissatisfaction
proves that the answer or the satisfaction is already imminent; the finite, realized
as such, is already the infinite in posse.
Applying these principles, we seem
to get a propulsive force into our logic which the ordinary logic of a bare, stark
self-identity in each thing never attains to. The objects of our thought now act
within our thought, act as objects act when given in experience. They change and
develop. They introduce something other than themselves along with them; and this
other, at first only ideal or potential, presently proves itself also to be actual.
It supersedes the thing at first supposed, and both verifies and corrects it,
in developing the fullness of its meaning.
The program is
excellent; the universe is a place where things are followed by other things that
both correct and fulfill them; and a logic which gave us something like this movement
of fact would express truth far better than the traditional school-logic, which
never gets of its own accord from anything to anything else, and registers only
predictions and subsumptions, or static resemblances and differences. Nothing
could be more unlike the methods of dogmatic theology than those of this new logic.
Let me quote in illustration some passages from the Scottish transcendentalist
whom I have already named.
"How are we to conceive," Principal Caird writes,
"of the reality in which all intelligence rests?" He replies: "Two things may
without difficulty be proved, viz., that this reality is an absolute Spirit, and
conversely that it is only in communion with this absolute Spirit or Intelligence
that the finite Spirit can realize itself. It is absolute; for the faintest movement
of human intelligence would be arrested, if it did not presuppose the absolute
reality of intelligence, of thought itself. Doubt or denial themselves presuppose
and indirectly affirm it. When I pronounce anything to be true, I pronounce it,
indeed, to be relative to thought, but not to be relative to my thought, or to
the thought of any other individual mind. From the existence of all individual
minds as such I can abstract; I can think them away. But that which I cannot think
away is thought or self-consciousness itself, in its independence and absoluteness,
or, in other words, an Absolute Thought or Self-Consciousness."
Here, you
see, Principal Caird makes the transition which Kant did not make: he converts
the omnipresence of consciousness in general as a condition of 'truth' being anywhere
possible, into an omnipresent universal consciousness, which he identifies with
God in his concreteness. He next proceeds to use the principle that to acknowledge
your limits is in essence to be beyond them; and makes the transition to the religious
experience of individuals in the following words:
"If [Man] were only a creature
of transient sensations and impulses, of an ever coming and going succession of
intuitions, fancies, feelings, then nothing could ever have for him the character
of objective truth or reality. But it is the prerogative of man's spiritual nature
that he can yield himself up to a thought and will that are infinitely larger
than his own. As a thinking, self-conscious being, indeed, he may be said, by
his very nature, to live in the atmosphere of the Universal Life. As a thinking
being, it is possible for me to suppress and quell in my consciousness every movement
of self-assertion, every notion and opinion that is merely mine, every desire
that belongs to me as this particular Self, and to become the pure medium of a
thought that is universal- in one word, to live no more my own life, but let my
consciousness be possessed and suffused by the Infinite and Eternal life of spirit.
And yet it is just in this renunciation of self that I truly gain myself, or realize
the highest possibilities of my own nature. For whilst in one sense we give up
self to live the universal and absolute life of reason, yet that to which we thus
surrender ourselves is in reality our truer self. The life of absolute reason
is not a life that is foreign to us."
Nevertheless, Principal Caird goes on
to say, so far as we are able outwardly to realize this doctrine, the balm it
offers remains incomplete. Whatever we may be in posse, the very best of us in
actu falls very short of being absolutely divine. Social morality, love, and self-sacrifice
even, merge our Self only in some other finite self or selves. They do not quite
identify it with the Infinite. Man's ideal destiny, infinite in abstract logic,
might thus seem in practice forever unrealizable.
"Is there, then," our author
continues, "no solution of the contradiction between the ideal and the actual?
We answer, There is such a solution, but in order to reach it we are carried beyond
the sphere of morality into that of religion. It may be said to be the essential
characteristic of religion as contrasted with morality, that it changes aspiration
into fruition, anticipation into realization; that instead of leaving man in the
interminable pursuit of a vanishing ideal, it makes him the actual partaker of
a divine or infinite life. Whether we view religion from the human side or the
divine- as the surrender of the soul to God, or as the life of God in the soul-
in either aspect it is of its very essence that the Infinite has ceased to be
a far-off vision, and has become a present reality. The very first pulsation of
the spiritual life, when we rightly apprehend its significance, is the indication
that the division between the Spirit and its object has vanished, that the ideal
has become real, that the finite has reached its goal and become suffused with
the presence and life of the Infinite.
"Oneness of mind and will with the
divine mind and will is not the future hope and aim of religion, but its very
beginning and birth in the soul. To enter on the religious life is to terminate
the struggle. In that act which constitutes the beginning of the religious life-
call it faith, or trust, or self-surrender, or by whatever name you will- there
is involved the identification of the finite with a life which is eternally realized.
It is true indeed that the religious life is progressive; but understood in the
light of the foregoing idea, religious progress is not progress towards, but within
the sphere of the Infinite. It is not the vain attempt by endless finite additions
or increments to become possessed of infinite wealth, but it is the endeavor,
by the constant exercise of spiritual activity, to appropriate that infinite inheritance
of which we are already in possession. The whole future of the religious life
is given in its beginning, but it is given implicitly. The position of the man
who has entered on the religious life is that evil, error, imperfection, do not
really belong to him: they are excrescences which have no organic relation to
his true nature: they are already virtually, as they will be actually, suppressed
and annulled, and in the very process of being annulled they become the means
of spiritual progress. Though he is not exempt from temptation and conflict, [yet]
in that inner sphere in which his true life lies, the struggle is over, the victory
already achieved. It is not a finite but an infinite life which the spirit lives.
Every pulse-beat of its [existence] is the expression and realization of the life
of God." *
* John Caird: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, London
and New York, 1880, pp. 243-250, and 291-299, much abridged.
You will readily
admit that no description of the phenomena of the religious consciousness could
be better than these words of your lamented preacher and philosopher. They reproduce
the very rapture of those crises of conversion of which we have been hearing;
they utter what the mystic felt but was unable to communicate; and the saint,
in hearing them, recognizes his own experience. It is indeed gratifying to find
the content of religion reported so unanimously. But when all is said and done,
has Principal Caird- and I only use him as an example of that whole mode of thinking-
transcended the sphere of feeling and of the direct experience of the individual,
and laid the foundations of religion in impartial reason? Has he made religion
universal by coercive reasoning, transformed it from a private faith into a public
certainty? Has he rescued its affirmations from obscurity and mystery?
I
believe that he has done nothing of the kind, but that he has simply reaffirmed
the individual's experiences in a more generalized vocabulary. And again, I can
be excused from proving technically that the transcendentalist reasonings fail
to make religion universal, for I can point to the plain fact that a majority
of scholars, even religiously disposed ones, stubbornly refuse to treat them as
convincing. The whole of Germany, one may say, has positively rejected the Hegelian
argumentation. As for Scotland, I need only mention Professor Fraser's and Professor
Pringle-Pattison's memorable criticisms, with which so many of you are familiar.
* Once more, I ask, if transcendental idealism were as objectively and absolutely
rational as it pretends to be, could it possibly fail so egregiously to be persuasive?
* A.C. FRASER: Philosophy of Theism, second edition, Edinburgh and London,
1899, especially part ii. chaps. vii. and viii.; A. SETH [PRINGLE-PATTISON]: Hegelianism
and Personality, Ibid., 1890, passim.
The most persuasive arguments in favor
of a concrete individual Soul of the world, with which I am acquainted, are those
of my colleague, Josiah Royce, in his Religious Aspect of Philosophy, Boston,
1885; in his Conception of God, New York and London, 1897; and lately in his Aberdeen
Gifford Lectures, The World and the Individual, 2 vols., New York and London,
1901-02. I doubtless seem to some of my readers to evade the philosophic duty
which my thesis in this lecture imposes on me, by not even attempting to meet
Professor Royce's arguments articulately. I admit the momentary evasion. In the
present lectures, which are cast throughout in a popular mould, there seemed no
room for subtle metaphysical discussion, and for tactical purposes it was sufficient,
the contention of philosophy being what it is (namely, that religion can be transformed
into a universally convincing science), to point to the fact that no religious
philosophy has actually convinced the mass of thinkers. Meanwhile let me say that
I hope that the present volume may be followed by another, if I am spared to write
it, in which not only Professor Royce's arguments, but others for monistic absolutism
shall be considered with all the technical fullness which their great importance
calls for. At present I resign myself to lying passive under the reproach of superficiality.
What religion reports, you must remember, always purports to be a fact of
experience: the divine is actually present, religion says, and between it and
ourselves relations of give and take are actual. If definite perceptions of fact
like this cannot stand upon their own feet, surely abstract reasoning cannot give
them the support they are in need of. Conceptual processes can class facts, define
them, interpret them; but they do not produce them, nor can they reproduce their
individuality. There is always a plus, a thisness, which feeling alone can answer
for. Philosophy in this sphere is thus a secondary function, unable to warrant
faith's veracity, and so I revert to the thesis which I announced at the beginning
of this lecture.
In all sad sincerity I think we must conclude that the attempt
to demonstrate by purely intellectual processes the truth of the deliverances
of direct religious experience is absolutely hopeless.
It would
be unfair to philosophy, however, to leave her under this negative sentence.
Let me close, then, by briefly enumerating what she can do for religion. If she
will abandon metaphysics and deduction for criticism and induction, and frankly
transform herself from theology into science of religions, she can make herself
enormously useful.
The spontaneous intellect of man always defines the divine
which it feels in ways that harmonize with its temporary intellectual prepossessions.
Philosophy can by comparison eliminate the local and the accidental from these
definitions. Both from dogma and from worship she can remove historic incrustations.
By confronting the spontaneous religious constructions with the results of natural
science, philosophy can also eliminate doctrines that are now known to be scientifically
absurd or incongruous.
Sifting out in this way unworthy formulations, she
can leave a residuum of conceptions that at least are possible. With these she
can deal as hypotheses, testing them in all the manners, whether negative or positive,
by which hypotheses are ever tested. She can reduce their number, as some are
found more open to objection. She can perhaps become the champion of one which
she picks out as being the most closely verified or verifiable. She can refine
upon the definition of this hypothesis, distinguishing between what is innocent
over-belief and symbolism in the expression of it, and what is to be literally
taken. As a result, she can offer mediation between different believers, and help
to bring about consensus of opinion. She can do this the more successfully, the
better she discriminates the common and essential from the individual and local
elements of the religious beliefs which she compares.
I do not see why a critical
Science of Religions of this sort might not eventually command as general a public
adhesion as is commanded by a physical science. Even the personally non-religious
might accept its conclusions on trust, much as blind persons now accept the facts
of optics- it might appear as foolish to refuse them. Yet as the science of optics
has to be fed in the first instance, and continually verified later, by facts
experienced by seeing persons; so the science of religions would depend for its
original material on facts of personal experience, and would have to square itself
with personal experience through all its critical reconstructions. It could never
get away from concrete life, or work in a conceptual vacuum. It would forever
have to confess, as every science confesses, that the subtlety of nature flies
beyond it, and that its formulas are but approximations. Philosophy lives in words,
but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.
There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles
and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late. No one knows
this as well as the philosopher. He must fire his volley of new vocables out of
his conceptual shotgun, for his profession condemns him to this industry, but
he secretly knows the hollowness and irrelevancy. His formulas are like stereoscopic
or kinetoscopic photographs seen outside the instrument; they lack the depth,
the motion, the vitality. In the religious sphere, in particular, belief that
formulas are true can never wholly take the place of personal experience.
In my next lecture I will try to complete my rough description of religious experience;
and in the lecture after that, which is the last one, I will try my own hand at
formulating conceptually the truth to which it is a witness.
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