//. S./cto ^W** % % PRINCETON, N. J. S7^//.. BL 200 .F75 1900 Fraser, Alexander Campbell, 1819-1914. Philosophy of theism PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM THE GIFFORD LECTURES DELIVERED BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH IN 1894-96 ALEXANDER CAMPBELL ERASER, LL.D. HON. D.C.L. OXFORD EMERITUS PROFESSOR OP LOGIC AND METAPHYSICS IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH SECOND EDITION, AMENDED N E W YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 153-157 FIFTH AVENUE 1900 PEEFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION Foe this edition the ' Philosophy of Theism ' has been recast, and to a great extent rewritten. It has also been condensed,' in the preface and throughout the lectures, partly by being- purged of redundancies which are perhaps pardonable in oral communication of ideas, but are less suited for thought- ful readers; and it now appears in one volume instead of two. The book has been further modified by occasional in- troduction of new matter, intended to present its central principle in fuller light. The whole has been arranged in Three Parts, preceded by two preliminary lectures in°which an expanded Natural Theology is defined, and articulated in its three logically indemonstrable data. A Eetrospect of the central course of thought follows the last Part. It is hoped that these changes may make the book less unworthy of the indulgent reception and sympathetic criticism with which the first edition has been signally favoured abroad, in America and in Australia, not less than in this country. In its new form it may also be more adapted to assist reflection on the fundamental questions of human life, in those educational institutions into which it has been received. The five lectures in the First Part deal with three forms of speculation, each of which would reduce the universe of VI PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION. reality to One Substance or Power ; and the lectures repre- sent total Scepticism as the reductio ad absurdum, alike of Universal Materialism, Panegoism, and Pantheism, when those Monist speculations are pressed intrepidly into their issues. This Part is chiefly critical and negative. In the Second or Constructive Part, the theistic con- ception of the three data is unfolded, not as a direct con- sequence of deductive or inductive proof, but as founded on our spontaneous moral faith in Omnipotent Goodness at the heart of the Whole, taken as an inevitable (conscious or unconscious) presupposition in all human experience — the reconciling principle in our intercourse, scientific or moral, with the Power that is universally at work. God is pre- supposed, and in a measure revealed, in the presuppositions of universal order and of universal adaptation; and is further revealed in the often dormant, but indispensable, moral and spiritual implicates of human experience, which need to be awakened into conscious and practical life by external events and institutions. The reality of human experience is found to involve the reality of omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent moral Providence, to which the emotion and will that go to constitute our final Faith respond, so making conscious or unconscious Eeligion the chief factor in the history of mankind. This Part in a degree unfolds the metaphysical rationale of theistic faith. The Third Part comprehends five lectures, concerned with the Great Enigma of Evil, presented at least on our planet, which seems to contradict the fundamental moral faith, and, by disturbing the religious or optimist conception of existence, leads to pessimist scepticism. The impossibility of an unomniscient intelligence demonstrating the supposed contradiction, and thus transforming our universe into an untrustworthy universe, with which one can have no inter- course, is the attitude primarily assumed towards this Enigma. But further considerations are proposed, by PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION. Vll which the difficulty seems to be mitigated even to human apprehension, pointing to modes of escape from the dismal alternative of a scepticism which would involve Science and Goodness in a common ruin. In particular, there is the fact that the universe, or at least this planet, seems to be adapted to the progressive improvement of persons who have made themselves bad, suggesting that a slow personal struggle towards the Ideal, rather than original and con- stant perfection of persons, may be implied in finite per- sonal agency. There is also the possibility of spiritual advance through what may appear to be interference by Omnipotent Goodness with the divine natural order, for the restoration to goodness of persons who have made themselves bad, but which may really be normal operation of the Universal Power, according to incompletely compre- hended Order. And, lastly, there is the room afforded for final adjustment, and for the satisfaction of Omnipotent Love, that is opened through the mystery of man's physical disappearance by death in the divinely constituted universe, and the consequent ultimate venture of theistic faith or ex- pectation. These are examples of mitigations of the Great Enigma that is presented on this planet, — an enigma which, if demonstrably inconsistent with Infinite Goodness or Love, would paralyse science, and moral development of the Ideal Man in the individual. The philosophy initiated in these lectures may perhaps be called either Humanised Idealism or Spiritualised Natur- alism. It seems to be the reasonable attitude towards his own life and the universe for a person like man, who is con- fined by his small share of experience to a knowledge which — real as far as it goes — is intermediate between Unconscious Nescience and Divine Omniscience. It is for philosophers or theologians, in the gradual progress of philosophy or theology, to show how far, and under what articulate con- ceptions, even in man's intermediate position, his indispens- Vlll PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION. able final credenda may become for him intelligenda. And, as with Plato and Aristotle, Origen and Aquinas, Berkeley and emphatically Hegel, philosophy is found, by different routes, to culminate in theology, or religion in its intel- lectual expression. If the universe, as realised in human experience, is religious in its final conception, philosophy and theology at last unite intellectually. " Natural Theology," thus philosophically expanded, must be distinguished from the natural theology which has often borne the name. About sixty years ago, with the latter in view, Lord Macaulay wrote thus : " As respects natural religion, it is not easy to say that a philosopher at the pre- sent day is more favourably situated than Thales or Simon- ides. He has before him just the same evidences of design in the structure of the universe that the early Greeks had. The discoveries of modern astronomers and anatomists have added nothing to the force of that argument which a reflecting man finds in every beast, bird, insect, fish, leaf, flower, or shell. All the great enigmas which perplex the natural theologian are the same in all ages. The ingen- uity of a people emerging from barbarism is sufficient to propound these enigmas. The genius of Locke or Clarke is quite unable to solve them. The Book of Job shows that, long before letters and arts were known to Ionia, these vexing questions were debated with no common skill and eloquence under the tents of the Idumean Imirs ; nor has human reason in the course of three thousand years dis- covered any satisfactory solution of the riddles which per- plexed Eliphaz and Zophar. Natural theology is not a progressive science. . . . But neither is revealed religion of the nature of a progressive science. All divine truth is, according to the doctrine of the Protestant Churches, re- corded in certain books; nor can all the discoveries of all the philosophers in the world add a single verse to any of these books. It is plain, therefore, that in divinity there PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION. IX cannot be a progress analogous to that which is constantly taking place in pharmacy, geology, and navigation. A Christian of the fifth century with a Bible in his hand is neither better nor worse situated than a Christian of the nineteenth century with a Bible — candour and natural acute- ness being supposed equal. It matters not at all that the compass, printing, gunpowder, steam, gas, vaccination, and a thousand other discoveries and inventions, which were unknown in the fifth century, are familiar in the nineteenth. None of these discoveries and inventions has the smallest bearing on the question, whether man is justified by faith alone, or whether the invocation of saints is an orthodox practice. It seems that we have no security for the future against the prevalence of any theological error that has ever prevailed in times past." The reader will consider how far the philosophy or theo- logy to which this book is an introduction is consistent with this discouraging view, or with the unconciliatory dualism which separates "natural" from "revealed" re- ligion, according to the assumption of Lord Macaulay. He will judge whether the elimination (on account of man's intermediate position) of enigmas which have perplexed past ages, and which still perplex, may not open the way to a sane progressive exercise of human reason, rooted in theistic faith with all that theistic faith implies, in dis- posing of the final questions which man requires to deal with somehow. Religion on its intellectual side is surely more advanced now than it was among the early Hebrews or in Homer. Fresh reflection by successive generations of thinkers upon the inevitable credenda, in order to convert them more fully or philosophically into intclligenda, com- bined with advancing interpretation of the divine revela- tions given in external nature, and in the inspired spirit latent in man, seems to afford ample scope for progress in that theology which, in the deepest meaning of nature, is X PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION. the most natural of all. The eternal gospel of Omnipotent Goodness, latent in humanity from the beginning, is un- folded in the divine human nature of the Ideal Man, and is gradually unfolding in human life and history. And if faith in Omnipotent Goodness, with all that this involves, is the root and spring of human experience and science, no changes in that experience, no discoveries in science, no historical criticism, no future events in history, neither things present nor things to come, can ever show the unreasonableness of this final faith, or deprive the human race of divine consolation and healing power. Gorton, Hawthornden, Mid-Lothian, February 1899. PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. Two subjects above all others have a universal interest. One of them always concerns all beings, but especially all persons, in all worlds. The other is of human concern only. The former relates to the moral meaning of the Universe, in which each person has to play his part, and its final moral trustworthiness. It has to do with the character of the Universal power, in continuous intercourse with which each person lives, in and through his ethical personality and his environment, without his own leave too, by the bare fact of existing under moral conditions. The other subject is the alternative of evanescence or per- manence after Death, as applicable to human persons. Do they all finally lose their conscious personality in physical death ; or do they continue in self-conscious life, notwith- standing the dissolution of the body — it may be with added intellectual and spiritual power, as a consequence of relief from its limiting conditions — after the body has served the end of permanently individualising the human spirit ? Is our environment essentially physical and non-moral, or is it ultimately divine ? Is his visible body the measure of the continuance of each man's self-conscious personal- ity ? These two correlated questions underlie human life. Neither of them, I think, can be got rid of on the ground Xll PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION. that it is interesting only speculatively, or that it is prac- tically indeterminable. Natural Theology, in the philosophical meaning of the term, is face to face with both these questions. For the word " natural," in the ancient and large meaning of Nature, is applied not only to the world of material things and their metamorphoses, but also to the world of persons or moral agents, and sometimes even to the sum of real existence, temporal and timeless, finite and divine. To follow " nature " is accordingly to follow reason — including moral reason. The philosopher has to consider whether men are doing this when they are proceeding upon the religious conception of the universe as its final conception ; whether they are re- quired by reason to accept a wholly physical or non-moral conception as the highest attainable ; or whether they need to withdraw from every endeavour to interpret themselves and their surroundings, and must subside in speechless, motionless, agnostic despair. It is in a large meaning of Nature that I take the term Natural Theology to com- prehend rational treatment of the universally interesting problem found at the root of human life. Deliberate study of it belongs to liberal education, especially in the condition in which we find modern thought. It should be the outcome of this remarkable Scottish Foundation by Lord Gifford, which admits of so many beneficial adaptations. In the following lectures the critical reader cannot fail to find conclusions sustained by reasonings that are not fully unfolded, and important questions either passed over or subjected to superficial treatment. It is hoped, however, that the order of thought which I have tried to follow may lead persons disposed to reflect on a path where more abundant fruit may be gathered by their own hands. I venture to ask that the work may be looked at in its PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION. Xlll reasoned unity, and not as a series of isolated discussions ; unbiassed, I hope, in its intention, by any interest that is at variance with what is true. The short time for prepara- tion that could be given by the academical authorities who honoured me by this appointment has not permitted me to explore as I could have wished the vast and ever-increasing relative literature. To escape the confusion of mind apt to be produced, in these circumstances, by much reading, I have confined myself to a sincere exposition of thoughts gradu- ally reached in a life devoted to kindred pursuits. Some of them have already found expression, in a less explicit form, chiefly in notes and dissertations included in my editions of the works of Berkeley and of Locke and biographies of those philosophers, as well as in lectures to students in the university of Edinburgh. The religious conception of the universe is adopted in these lectures as its true conception, on the ground that, unless the Power universally at work is Omnipotent Good- ness, there can be no valid intercourse of Man with Nature, which instead has to be avoided, as the action and revela- tion of a suspected Power : the perfect reliability of the Universal Power is presupposed in the reliability of ex- perience. The history of man is a record of collision between sceptical distrust of his nature and environment, on the one side, and moral faith and hope in an environ- ment that is trusted in as ultimately Divine, on the other. It presents a competition between final Doubt and final Faith for the deepest place. In the earlier lectures the voice of the Sceptic is prominent. Afterwards Faith makes itself heard, as that which must at last underlie the utmost pos- sible doubt, because the indispensable condition of any scien- tific or moral intercourse with the ever-changing universe of external nature and man. But sceptical criticism is still valuable for unfolding the rationale of final faith in the per- fect goodness of the Power that is universally at work. xiv PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION. That the method I have adopted may be called anthropo- morphic or anthropocentric is not, I think, a reasonable objection to it, if all man's intercourse with reality must be under human conditions, and is possible so far only as the universe is adaptable by man ; — not in humanly inaccessible Omniscience. The ultimate relations of men, in the fulness of their spiritual being, to the realities amongst which they were, without their own will, introduced at birth under in- evitable intellectual and moral postulates — not Omniscience as at the divine centre — this surely is the only philosophy or theology that man is able to entertain, or that is needed to satisfy his necessities. This is the realities in their relation to man, when man is recognised as more than a sentient automaton, yet as less than omniscient. The diffi- culties found in ultimate moral faith and hope arise largely from oversight of what humanly limited knowledge must be in the end. That a mixture of the abstract Spinozism which ignores change, and philosophises sub specie eternitatis, with the em- pirical agnosticism of David Hume, which reduces all realities to inexplicable successive appearances, is in this century working in the main current of thought in Europe and America, in sympathy with analogous ideas in India and the East, is a consideration which was present to my mind. Spinoza and Hume were seldom forgotten. Nor was their service to truth overlooked, in the way of deepening and vivifying the timid conventionalism which ecclesiastical theology sometimes exemplifies. It is difficult to discuss the questions of man and the universe in their final relations without making a large and unacceptable demand upon the reflective power of the reader — at any rate, a greater demand than is made by a Society novel. Yet I am well aware that this book falls far short of what might be reached in this respect by a more powerful philosophical imagination and a more lucid PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION. XV and penetrating intelligence, directed by artistic literary faculty. The defect has been largely supplied since. Eng- lish literature has been enriched by a treatise on ' The Foundations of Belief ' by Mr Balfour, in which the reader finds the basis of theology investigated in a manner that rivals Berkeley or Hume in luminous expression of subtle thought. Without venturing to offer observations upon an argument conducted with a somewhat different design, I may express the satisfaction with which I have found a sanction in Mr Balfour's reasonings for the equal final insolubility of physical science and theology ; and for their common founda- tion in what might perhaps be called the "authority" of the collective moral reason of mankind, as distinguished from direct logical proof. Two other eminent men of affairs have also added lately to the debt which religious thought owes to illustrious statesmen, since Bacon and Leibniz set the example. The world may be grateful to Mr Gladstone for the critical expositions in which he has powerfully recommended and reintroduced the chief English work of the eighteenth cen- tury in the philosophy of religion, thus associating his name with that of Bishop Butler. And the Duke of Argyll, with characteristic argumentative strength and eloquence, has explained the teleological conception of the universe on scientific grounds in his 'Philosophy of Belief.' That in the closing years of the nineteenth century three of the most eminent leaders in public affairs should have thus placed themselves on the side of final Faith in the struggle with final Doubt, is no insignificant sign of the time in this country and in the world. University of Edinburgh, September 1896. CONTENTS. PRELIMINARY. LECT. I. THE UNIVERSAL PROBLEM II. THREE PRIMARY DATA '. EGO, MATTER, AND GOD PAGE 3 24 FIRST PART. UNTHEISTIC SPECULATION AND FINAL SCEPTICISM. I. UNIVERSAL MATERIALISM . . . . .43 II. PANEGOISM ....... 62 III. PANTHEISM ....... 76 IV. PANTHEISTIC UNITY AND NECESSITY : SPINOZA . . 89 V. FINAL SCEPTICISM : DAVID HUME .... 104 SECOND PART. FINAL REASON IN THEISTIC FAITH. I. GOD LATENT IN NATURE II. IDEAL MAN AN IMAGE OF GOD III. WHAT IS GOD ? 123 139 154 XV111 CONTENTS. IV. PERFECT GOODNESS PERSONIFIED V. OMNIPOTENT GOODNESS VI. OMNIPRESENT DIVINE ADAPTATION . VII. PHILOSOPHICAL OR THEOLOGICAL OMNISCIENCE VIII. FINAL FAITH ..... 166 185 200 216 232 THIRD PART. THE GREAT ENIGMA OF THEISTIC FAITH. I. EVIL ON THIS PLANET ..... 247 II. THEISTIC OPTIMISM ...... 262 III. HUMAN PROGRESS ...... 277 IV. MIRACULOUS INTERFERENCE. WHAT IS A MIRACLE ? . 291 V. THE FINAL VENTURE OF THEISTIC FAITH . . . 306 A RETROSPECT 325 INDEX . 333 PRELIMINARY PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. LECTUEE I. THE UNIVERSAL PROBLEM. My first words must give expression to the emotion Personal, which I feel on finding myself once more admitted to speak officially within the walls of this ancient uni- versity, with which, as student, graduate, and professor, I have been connected for sixty years. For it is sixty years in this November since I first cast eyes of wonder on the academic walls which now carry so many memo- ries in my mind, and which to-day are associated with an extraordinary responsibility. In the evening of life, in reluctant response to the unexpected invitation of the patrons of the Gifford Trust, I find myself, in the presence of my countrymen, called to say honestly the best that may be in me concerning the supreme problem of human life, our response to which at last determines the answers to all questions which can engage the mind of man. No words that I can find are sufficient to represent my sense of the honour thus conferred, or the responsibility thus imposed, upon one who believed that he had bid a final farewell to appearances in public of this sort, in order to wind up his account with this mysterious life of sense. It is an appalling problem which confronts me, and in- 4 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. The final deed confronts us all, for all must practically dispose of it human j n oue wa y or ano ther ; and I am now required to handle and th? it intellectually. One may not be ready to say with Pliny, attitude of t } iat a ^ re ligi ns are the offspring of human weakness and n es. fear; and that what God is, if indeed God be anything distinct from the world in which we find ourselves, it is beyond man's understanding to know. Yet even the boldest thinker, when confronted by the ultimate prob- lem of existence, may desire to imitate the philosophic caution of Simonides, when he was asked, What God was ? — in first demanding a day to think about the answer, then two clays more, and after that continuously doubling the required time, when the time already granted had come to an end ; but without ever finding that he was able to produce the required answer; — rather becoming more apt to suspect that the answer carried him beyond the range of human intelligence. Often in these last months I have wished that I could indulge in this pru- dent procrastination, taking not more months only but more years to ponder this infinite problem. But after the threescore years and ten, this is a forbidden alter- native, if I am to speak in this place at all. I see at hand " The shadow cloak'd from head to foot, Who keeps the keys of all the creeds." Forms in Man's ultimate question about his life in the universe is at the heart of Theism. Philosophy asks what this which the problem of * the uni- illimitable aggregate of ever-changing things and persons verse may reai iy means, if indeed it means anything. What is the pressed. deepest and truest interpretation that can be put by me upon the world in which I found myself participating when I became percipient, and with which I have been in contact or collision ever since I began to live ? Ought a benign meaning or a malign meaning to be put upon it ? This is, surely, the most human question that can be raised: no man can avoid giving some sort of response to it in the motives of his life, if not in philosophic thought. In what sort of universe — divine, or diabolic, or indifferent— and for what purpose, if any, am I existing THE UNIVERSAL PROBLEM. 5 consciously ? What is the deepest and truest meaning of this ever-changing universe in which I am now struggling ? What the origin and the outcome of its endless flux ? Is the Universal Power perfectly reasonable and morally trustworthy ? or is the whole morally chaotic and mis- leading, with only transitory semblance of even physical order ? or must I remain for ever ignorant, and therefore unable to adopt either of those alternatives ? It is this problem of the ultimate meaning and purpose The hu- of human life in the universe, or whether indeed there is } uan p™ 1 '" any purpose in it, that I find at the heart or the subject universe that has been intrusted to me, for free but always rever- disturbs ential discussion. It is a many-sided subject, which each thought. lecturer is invited to discuss at his own point of view, with the advantage to truth of its being thus looked at on many sides — one, too, that is more than usually dis- turbing feeling and faith, in this outspeaking era of Euro- pean and American civilisation. When I was asked to engage in this work, I turned to Lord Gif- Lorcl Gifford's Deed of Bequest, in the hope that it might Auctions contain articulate directions with regard to the object- for dealing matter to be investigated, the method of investigation, Wlth it and the chief end of the proposed inquiry. I found, under each of these three heads, particular instructions, but more or less ambiguous. As regards the proposed matter of inquiry, it seems to It is infin- concern an Object that is absolutely unique. It cannot ^ d B s e m a ^ be made visible or tangible ; nor is it even finite, as absolutely objects studied in natural science are, and as the word j^^tna?" object seems to imply. This unique Object, if object it we have may be called, is thus spoken of in the Deed of Foun- to inquire dation : — " God, the Infinite, the All, the First and Only Cause, the One and the Sole Substance, the Sole Being, the Sole Reality, and the Sole Existence " ; — more particu- larly, " the nature and attributes of God," and " the rela- tions which men and the whole universe bear to God." " Science " of this is called " Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term." Next I find something about the method of conducting PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. The Infin- ite Being is to be inquired about in a scien- tific spirit. With a view to man's high est well- being and upward progress. this unique investigation. Strict scientific method is en- joined, according to the analogy of the natural sciences, unrestrained except by evidence, with consequent obliga- tion to follow facts, in pursuit of whatever is found on the whole to be reasonable. As thus : " I wish the lec- turers to treat their subject as a strictly natural science, the greatest of all possible sciences, in one sense the only science— that of Infinite Being ; without reference to, or reliance upon, any supposed special, exceptional, or so- called miraculous revelation. I wish it to be considered as astronomy or chemistry is. . . . The lecturers shall be under no restraint whatever in their treatment of their theme. For example, they may freely discuss (and it may be well to do so) all questions about man's con- ceptions of God or the Infinite ; their origin, nature, and truth; whether man can have any such conceptions; whether God is under any or what limitations; and so on_as I am persuaded that nothing but good can result from free discussion. . . . The lecturers appointed shall accordingly be subjected to no test of any kind, and shall not be required to take an oath, or to make any promise of any kind ; they may be of any denomination whatever, or of no denomination at all (and many earnest and high- minded men prefer to belong to no ecclesiastical denom- ination) ; they may be of any religion or way of thinking, or, as it is sometimes said, they may be of no religion ; or they may be called sceptics, agnostics, or free-thinkers, ... it being desirable that the subject be promoted and illustrated by different minds." Finally, the code of directions suggests that a broad social purpose of utility is to be kept in view throughout the inquiry. This is indeed the chief end of those lec- tureships on "Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term." It is intellectual enlargement for a human and practical purpose. One finds what follows :— -" I having been for many years deeply and firmly convinced that the true knowledge of God— that is, of the Being, Nature, and Attributes of the Infinite, of the All, of the First and only Cause, the one only Substance and Being ; and the true and felt Knowledge (not mere nominal THE UNIVERSAL PROBLEM. 7 Knowledge) of the relations of Man and of the Universe to Him — being, I say, convinced that this knowledge, when felt and acted on, is the means of man's highest wellbeing, and the security of his upward progress, — I have therefore resolved to institute and found, in con- nection if possible with the Scottish universities, lecture- ships for the promotion of the study of the said subjects, and for the teaching and diffusion of sound views regard- ing them, among the whole population of Scotland." This implies that a man's final faith or final doubt shows what the man is, and makes him what he is. It is with this deeply human purpose in view, and in Let us the scientific spirit which seeks for truth, truth only, * a ?f fact , s and truth all, that we now address ourselves to the ulti- honestly. mate question about the Universal Power, the answer to which constitutes " Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term." We are in quest of the wisest and truest answer, available for a being such as man is, to this su- preme question — What is the character of the Universal Power with which all experience brings me into inter- course ? Am I obliged in reason, by the facts and con- ditions of the case, to put finally a religious interpretation upon the universe ; or do the facts forbid me to recognise any conception higher than the physical, called par ex- cellence the "scientific"? Either way I must follow as facts and reason oblige me. " Things are what they are," as Bishop Butler says, " and the consequences of them will be what they will be ; why, then, should we desire to be deceived ? " Let us face the facts, seeking only to know what they are, and, as far as we can, what they mean. I will give the remainder of this lecture to some further consideration of the object - matter, method, and utility of Philosophical Theism, or " Natural Theology in the widest meaning of the term." I. Look first at that in man which suggests the final Recogni- human problem. The marvel of his own existence, and n ° n of . tne ... r . . i • i , n t i ■ in ultimate of the universe in which he finds himself, appears a marvel marvel only to man among known sentient beings ; and it of the 8 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. universe is is this with full consciousness only to the few who reflect. fa§c3iy r " " With the exception of man," as Schopenhauer says, " no human. being wonders at its own existence and surroundings." By the brute destitute of self - consciousness, the world and its own life are felt, uninquiringly felt, as a matter of course. But with man his own life and what it means becomes a thought at which even the most degraded may be moved to marvel. Men show themselves dimly conscious of this in the rudest forms of religion. A sense of the ever- abiding presence of the enigma of existence — shown in the form of wonder as to what we are, what our surround- ings involve, why we are what we are, why so surrounded, and what we are destined to become at last — is the chief motive to philosophy. It is the awe involved in the vague sense of man's absolute dependence upon the Universal Power, amidst the Immensities and Eternities, and the sense of moral responsibility for the way we con- duct our lives, that gives rise to religion. A merely The omnipresence of Infinite Beality gives their distinc- soiution of ^ ve cnara cter alike to philosophy and to religion. It is the univer- by their concern with Infinite Beality that both are dis- lemTm- 3 " tinguished from finite physical science. We are accus- possibie. tomed in sciences of the material world to a feeling of satisfaction when we are able to refer unexpected events to visible causes, on which they are believed naturally to depend, according to the established natural order, and by which they are provisionally explained. But it is some- thing deeper than desire for this provisional satisfaction that moves philosophical curiosity. For the complete or final meaning of the infinite universe of reality cannot be discovered by referring it to a natural cause, in the way material phenomena are referred to natural causes. Science of its Universal Power must be therefore abso- lutely unique science. The universe cannot be treated as if it were only a finite term in a natural succession. It is not like a visible event in one of the physical sciences, which, when a place has been found for it in the order of outward nature, ceases to perplex. In asking about the Character of the Power that accounts for the temporal procession, we are not trying to find a physical cause. THE UNIVERSAL PROBLEM. 9 Philosophic wonder and religions reverence are states of mind which rise above physical science. To try to reach out beyond the natural evolution of the visible uni- verse, and yet to treat the whole as only a finite effect in ordinary causal succession, seems to imply an experience of universes; but this surely involves a contradiction. For the universe of reality must be all - comprehensive ; yet it seems as if I must get outside of it, and out of myself too as a part of it, in order to see its final meaning and purpose. It is only an infinitesimally small part of" what happens in time that can be presented in each man's experience, or even in the experience of man- kind. Omniscience is the only form of science for the final reality, one is ready to say. This invincible difficulty in dealing with the final prob- gavid^ lem, as a problem in physical science, perplexed David 8u ^ e e st s ed Hume, the most intrepid theological and philosophical difficulty thinker that Scotland has produced. For it seems to me ^™ that the dimension of the problem of " Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term " was realised by this Edin- burgh citizen of last century as fully as by any preceding modern thinker, unless perhaps Spinoza. This is how David Hume makes Philo speak, as an interlocutor in " Dialogues on Natural Religion " : " If we see a house," Philo argues, "we conclude with the greatest certainty that it had an architect or builder ; because this is pre- cisely the species of finite effect which we have experi- enced to proceed from that species of cause." Let me interpolate the remark that even in this conclusion Philo takes for granted, without scientific proof, that man does know enough about the universe in its ultimate principle to be certain that he is actually living in a universe in which like sorts of natural effects must proceed from like sorts of natural causes— that the procession of events must be always orderly, and therefore intelligible— that the universe, in short, must be physically trustworthy. Waiving this, however, Philo thus proceeds,—" Surely you will not affirm that the universe bears such a resemblance to a house that we can with the same certainty infer a cause for it, or that the analogy is here entire and perfect. 10 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. Can you think, Cleanthes, that your usual phlegm and philosophy have been preserved in so wide a step as you have taken, when you have compared the universe to houses, ships, furniture, machines ; and from their simi- larity in some circumstances inferred a similarity in their causes ? Thought, design, intelligence, such as we discover in men and other animals, is no more than one of the innumerable springs and principles in the universe, which as well as a hundred others, such as heat and cold, attrac- tion and repulsion, fall under daily observation. It is a natural cause by which some particular parts of nature, we find, produce alterations on other parts. But can a conclusion with any propriety be transferred from [finite] parts to the [infinite] whole ? Does not the great [infinite] disproportion bar all comparison or inference ? . . . But, allowing that we are to take the operations of one part of nature upon another part, for the foundation of our judgment concerning the origin of the whole (which never can be admitted), yet why select so minute, so weak, so bounded a cause or principle as the reason and design of animals living upon this planet is found to be ? What peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we call thought that we must thus make it the model of the whole universe ? So far from admitting that the operations of a part can afford us any just con- clusion concerning the [infinite] whole, I will not allow any one part to form a rule for another part, if the latter be very remote from the former. . . . And if thought, as we may well suppose, be confined merely to this narrow corner, and has even here so limited a sphere of action, with what propriety can we assign it for the original cause of all things ? The narrow views of a peasant, who makes his domestic economy the rule for the government of kingdoms, is in comparison a pardonable sophism. But were we ever so much assured that a thought or reason, resembling the human, were to be found throughout the whole universe, and were its activity elsewhere vastly greater than it appears on this globe ; yet I cannot see why the operations of a world now constituted, arranged, adjusted, can, with any propriety, be extended to a world THE UNIVERSAL PROBLEM. 11 which was in its embryo state, and only advancing towards that constitution and arrangement. Nature, we find, from our limited experience, possesses an infinite number of springs and principles which incessantly discover them- selves on every change in her position and situation. And what new and unknown principles would actuate her in so new and unknown a situation as that of the formation of a Universe, we cannot, without the utmost temerity, pretend to determine." So far David Hume. Notwithstanding this obstacle to our comprehension of The pres- the Character of the Universal Power, there are facts in ^ e a ° f d experience that intensify the longing for some idea of of death in what life in this evolving world in which we find our- JJ^nSft? selves practically means for us, and what it is finally to human in- issue in. What probably quickens this desire, and \^ e ^^ rouses men out of the sensuous indifference produced by problem. the mere custom of living, is, in the first place, the suffer- ing and sin that seem to be chaotically mixed up with life on this planet ; and, in the next place, the vanity that appears to be stamped upon each person's share in the whole transaction, through the fact that he is confronted by his approaching death. Evil and death are chief diffi- culties, moreover, in the way of a solution. If this em- bodied life of ours — in which, without being able to avoid it, we become individually, for a time at least, part of the universe — if this life were endless, and unmixed with sin and pain, the interest man could take in the ultimate problem would be speculative. The great enigma of Evil would not then disturb the divine harmony. Neither should we be confronted by the mystery of our own prospective disappearance from the scene — " To die — to sleep ; — To sleep ! perchance to dream : ay, there's the rub ; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause." Philosophy has been described as meditation upon death. It is an expansion of what the gentle and re- ligious English essayist represented according to popular 12 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. Themys- conception in the "Vision of Mirza." But faith in their endless in- own immortality seems incredible to those who are accus- dividuai tomed to take the postulates of modern materialism llfe - alone for regulating their final interpretation of man. The world in which we are is found to be in constant change : all that is individual seems naturally transitory. Is it not contrary to the analogies of experience to sup- pose that T who lately began to live shall never cease to live — that I shall never be refunded into the uncon- scious existence from which I was evolved when I was born?^ Must not all that is generable be perishable? If I am immortal must not I have existed before my birth ? And if my existence then noways concerns me now, as little need my existence after my death concern me now. Unconsciousness before the natural birth of our bodies suggests unconsciousness when the organisation naturally dissolves. What arguments can justify expectation of a sort of existence which can no way resemble what any living member of the human race has experienced ? "When it is asked," says the sceptic, "whether Agamemnon, Thersites, Hannibal, Varro, and every stupid clown that ever existed, in Italy, Scythia, Bactria, or Guinea, is now alive, — can any man think that a scrutiny of nature will furnish arguments strong enough to answer so strange a question in the affirmative ? " Moreover, how can endless personal existence be reconciled with a sense of personal identity; or with the faintest memory, in an infinite future, of the immortal person's immeasurable past ? It is difficult for a grown man to identify himself with the new-born babe which he once was ; — how is this difficulty increased when the person has become millions of years old ? What practical identity can there be between myself now and myself a hundred millions of years hence ? And, above all, what means a conscious life that is endless or infinite, thus transcending years and time ? Is not an infinite succession of conscious states, or of events of any sort, impossible ? At any rate, what scientific verification of a conclusion so stupendous is possible? Even the crucial instance of a man who has died and been restored to life telling his experience of what followed his death fails : THE UNIVERSAL PROBLEM. 13 for he could not have had experience of endlessness. It is questions of this sort that the mystery of death is apt to suggest to those who assume that the physically scientific interpretation of the world must be its deepest interpretation. Man's position in relation to the final question which Plato's al- gives rise to philosophy, and which evokes religious faith JjjPg^jJ and hope, suggests Plato's parable of the Cave. Which illustrates things are an allegory, for in them the philosophic Greek {""i- 61 ?"^ figures the contrast between the realities beyond, and the constant succession of changes within this transitory em- bodied life. So that, with respect to what really exists, men in this mortal state are not unlike those who are getting educated in a Cave ; looking on the shadows of things, with their eyes turned away from the light which reveals the reality outside. Man's interest in a settlement of his final problem is God and perhaps connected by Schopenhauer too exclusively with ^3-^ a vague desire for " some kind " of existence after physi- of man. cal death. " We find," he says, " that the interest which philosophies and religions inspire has always its strongest hold in the dogma of some kind of existence after death ; and although the most recent systems seem to make the existence of God the main point, and defend this most zealously, yet in reality that is because they have con- nected their faith in a future life with God's existence, and regard the one as inseparable from the other. Only on account of this supposed future life is the existence of God important to man. For if one could sustain belief in one's own unending existence in some other way than by faith in God's existence, then zeal for the existence of God would cool ; and if conversely the absolute im- possibility of a future life for man were proved, theo- logical zeal would give place to complete theological indifference. Also, if we could prove that our continued existence after death was absolutely inconsistent with the existence of God, men would soon sacrifice God to their own immortality, and become zealous for atheism, in order to retain their hope of a future life." But does not all this proceed upon a wrong idea of 14 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. A universe what should be sought for, when we test the reasonable- without negs £ f a jtli and hope in the Universal Power ? Does it not involve a misconception or what ought to be meant by the word God ? For a universe emptied of God is really a universe without meaning, law, or order ; without reason, either omnipresent in it, or somehow supreme over it, and that is therefore even physically uninterpretable ; without trustworthy active moral reason at the root of its therefore ultimately chaotic evolutions. It is a universe which may possibly be charged with purposeless future misery to men, and to all other sentient beings — misery infinitely transcending that which the most wretched have experienced in the past. It is a universe in which we must live without reasonable hope ; and on the sup- position that each person's life in it must be endless, it may become to all an endless hell, from which there is no escape into unconsciousness. Without perfect moral order and goodness personified at its centre, man would be in a worse condition than that of the sceptic whose thoughts are paraphrased by Pascal. " Who has sent me into this scene in which I now find myself, I know not," he proclaims in despair; — "what the true final meaning of my surroundings may be, I know not ; what I really am myself, I know not. I am in a bewildering and terrifying ignorance of all things : I know not how to interpret any of the experience through which I pass. Encompassed by the fathomless and frightful abysses of Immensity and Eternity, I find myself chained to this one little corner of their boundless extent ; without under- standing why I am here rather than there, existing now rather than then ; with unknowable Power all around, which may at any moment cause me to disappear like a shadow. The sum of my knowledge, after the utmost experience that I can have of the infinite universe in which I am living, is, that I must soon die : my highest wisdom seems to consist in nothing better than a fruit- less meditation upon the mystery of my own death." Faith in the omnipresent supremacy of active moral Eeason — faith in God — is the one unconditional human hope. THE UNIVERSAL PROBLEM. 15 It is told of Bishop Butler that one day in conversa- An insane tion with his friend Dean Tucker he put the question, universe - Whether nations as well as individual men might not be liable to fits of insanity ? " I thought little at the time of that odd conceit of the Bishop," the Dean remarks ; " but I own I could not avoid thinking of it afterwards, and applying it to many cases of nations and their rulers." Butler's " odd conceit " may suggest a question not unlike his, with regard, not to nations only, but to the ever- changing Universe in which we are living and partici- pating. May not the supposed cosmos, to a dim per- ception of which we all awake, be the manifestation of irrational, or even of infinitely cruel, Power ? We have no guarantee against the virtual insanity of the Universe, when we lose moral reason in the Universal Power. Under such conditions, can we even justify the vulgar faith, which, in daily life and in the previsions and verifications of science, takes for granted, without proof, that man is living in an intelligible physical system, the events in which are fit to be reasoned about and con- verted into physical science? For it may then be that he is living in what may turn out at last a physical Chaos instead of a physical Cosmos ? Order in the past is no security then for order in the future. May not the postulate of order in nature — natural law in things — be a mistake for what at last is purposeless unreason at the heart of the whole ? Much philosophical and religious thought in the past Absolute is the issue of endeavours to find the best answers to ^f 1 ^' 11 questions like these. Keflecting men have been moved aim. to inquiry because they wanted to find reasonable security that the supposed Cosmos was not finally Chaos — so that the world and human faculties might be trusted in. This is the dominant note of absolute Idealism, winch in its own way seeks to shoiv that experience is coherent in the organic unity of reason, so that no rightly exercised human being can be put to permanent confusion by irrationality in the Universal Power. Is moral faith in the Universal Power the highest phil- Questions osophy, and, if so, what does this faith involve ? Is it our which 16 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. "Natural most reasonable attitude, demanded by and sufficient for Theology human nature in its true ideal? Is the immeasurable St mean-" reality, in which I find myself living and moving and ingofthe having my being, rooted in Active Moral Eeason, and therefore absolutely worthy of trust ; or is it hollow and hopeless, because at last without meaning, or even mean- ing ill ? According to the answers to those questions, our surroundings and our future are viewed with an ineradi- cable hope, or with literally unutterable, because total, doubt and despair. It is those questions that " Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term " has to answer. got to con- sider. Our Me- thod of procedure. What is II. Think next about the Method of procedure we are expected to follow when we are trying to find the answers. Lord GifTord's Deed of Foundation recommends one way meant by f dealing with the final problem of existence, while it ly natural" particularly warns us against another, as inconsistent with method of genuine inquiry and honest thought. The final problem of our Universe is to be disposed of, we are told, accord- ing to the " strictly natural " method of " science"; accord- ing to methods as " natural " as those adopted in the sciences of astronomy and chemistry, which are mentioned as examples. This is one instruction. The other is that we are to pursue the inquiry " without reference to, or reliance upon, any supposed special, exceptional, or so- called miraculous revelation." Ambigu- Each of these conditions, so stated, seems to involve lt y- ambiguity. Natural In the first place, it seems, as I have already said, that theohjgyis ^ g wno lly unique science of the Universe cannot be a urai"in science of natural causes, in the same way as astronomy the way an( j chemistry are sciences of natural causes. For these physical two, and others like them, are sciences of portions of sciences external nature ; their facts receive the required explana- tion in inductively ascertained laws, in which the inferred cause is presentable in sense, and fit to be experimented on. But Infinite Being — the Final Principle of the uni- verse — that in virtue of which the universe is a universe, and which keeps it a universe — this cannot be treated as only a portion of nature. For that would be to divest it THE UNIVERSAL PROBLEM. 17 at the outset of its unique character — to reduce " Infinite Being " to the level of the finite phenomena in which the astronomer and the chemist see illustrations of natural law. Indeed this uniqueness is expressly presupposed in those words of the Foundation Deed, which speak of " Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term," as being properly " the only science " — " the one universal science" — thus contrasting it with special sciences of portions of nature, like astronomy and chemistry. The- ology, as Aristotle saw, is truly that in which all phil- osophy culminates : for theology alone regards existence in its totality — if indeed the term totality may be applied to what is infinite. Theology is infinite in its scope : astronomy and chemistry concentrate themselves upon selected portions of what is finite. Therefore, when theology is (perhaps misleadingly) The narrow called " natural," and when Gifford lecturers are enjoined aud ™ d * to treat this subject as " a strictly natural science," I am oT"na? S obliged to infer that the important adjective " natural " f ure " and „ does not mean that Infinite Being, the object of study " natural and inquiry, is to be included in nature — unless the ambiguous word " nature " is used in an all-comprehensive meaning, and not as a synonym for things and persons evolved in time. It is the visible phenomena within this system that natural sciences, such as astronomy and chemistry, are employed in seeking for and inter- preting. In the narrower meaning of " nature " the " Infinite Being " of natural theology is s^crnatural ; and " natural " theology is concerned with what is super- natural or metaphysical. The implied analogy between the theology that is " natural," and sciences like astronomy and chemistry, must, therefore, mean something different from their being all concerned at last with natural causes. I conclude, accordingly, that the intended meaning Dogmatic of " natural," in Lord Gilford's deed, is found more fully assumption in the next injunction: — "I wish the lecturers to treat fallibility their subject . . . without reference to, or reliance upon, of Church any supposed special, exceptional, or so-called miraculous disallowed. revelation." That means, I suppose, that, just as u as- tronomy and chemistry" — the two named examples of B 18 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. "natural" science — must be formed by methodical ob- servation of events in nature, and freely formed inferences founded thereon— so, the theology which is "natural" must be determined by facts, and by principles of reason known to be true in their own light — not dogmatically assumed, on the infallible authority of a Church, or of books assumed to express infallibly the divine purpose. We know that there is no such dogmatically imposed authority for an infallible astronomy, or an infallible chemistry, which would supersede rational investigation. In like manner, blind reliance on supposed infallibility, biblical or traditional, in matters of religious thought, must be put aside by the Gifford lecturer ; so that all the three sciences — the two physical ones now named, and the unique science of the Universal Power — must alike make their final appeal to reason in experience ; not to tradi- tional authority per se, which can never be the final court of appeal for a reasonable being, on any question, natural or supernatural. What is meant seems to be, that reasonableness must finally direct us, in this as in everything else, if we are reasonable beings. But liter- So I do not interpret the terms of this Foundation as ary records un phil sophically putting an arbitrary restraint upon hispira- 1116 reason, by withdrawing from our regard part of what is tions"form re ported in the history of the world, — including those re^rded signal examples of religious experience, in Palestine and experience elsewhere, which claim to be the issue of what is called " supernatural interposition." The Church and the Bible present spiritual experiences about God, which somehow certain men have actually expressed in words or in ritual, and which (so far) are facts in the history of man. Whether natural or supernatural, in any of the several meanings of those ambiguous terms, this recorded ex- perience is a portion of history. It is still the office of reason to judge under what conditions it is reasonable to accept recorded human experience as revelation of God, and also to interpret the words in which the experi- ence is recorded. Whatever God has revealed is cer- tainly true; we are obliged in reason to accept it, for in doing so we are accepting reason itself. But that of man THE UNIVERSAL PROBLEM. 19 this or that which claims to be divine is divine can- not be assumed blindly: reason must judge whether it is reasonable so to accept it. Reason indeed can never permit us to reject a greater evidence in order to em- brace what is less evident, nor allow us to entertain probability in opposition to absolute certainty. No evi- dence that any church or book is divine can be more clear and certain than are the universal and necessary principles of reason ; and therefore nothing that is de- monstrably inconsistent with what is reasonable has a right in reason to be received in faith. But whatever is divine revelation can claim assent in the name of final reason, which is itself the inspiration of Gocl. One finds much need for Socratic questioning when the what is terms "natural" and "supernatural" are opposed to one ™ eantb y another. What conception of "nature" is taken when natural"? theology is called "natural," and as such admitted to academical treatment, as philosophically queen among the sciences ? Can there be a difference in kind between what happens naturally, and anything that is supposed to make its appearance supernaturally — in an ultimately reasonable universe ? Must not all that can enter into the history of the planet and its inhabitants be regarded by the theist as natural — in the wide meaning of " nature " ? and must not all possible events, whether called natural or supernatural, be consistent with the divine intellectual order ? Nay, is not supernaturalness, in another view, the characteristic of man, so far as man is a moral agent, and to that extent independent of physical nature ? Is not " miracle " — when the term is applied to a physical event — e.g., the resurrection of a dead man — a relative term, dependent on the limitations of human experience and human intellectual grasp ; so that, in proportion as man's intelligence and experience are widened, events called supernatural or miraculous would be seen by the eye of reason to take their places in the perfect order of God ; — but at a point of view perhaps transcending the share of scientific knowledge in which a human intelli- gence can participate ? In the view of perfect Intelligence can any event — say the resurrection of a dead man — be 20 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. miraculous, and not rather in natural conformity with omnipresent reason and purpose ? Looked at from the centre of things, is it not true that either nothing should be called supernatural, or all should be called supernatural ? A dim idea of this sort was perhaps in Bishop Butler's mind when he suggested that there can be no absurdity in supposing beings in the universe whose capacities and knowledge may be so extensive as that the whole Chris- tian dispensation, commonly called supernatural or mir- aculous, may to them appear natural ; as natural as the visible course of things appears to us. If all that happens, or can happen, in "nature" is the immediate issue and expression of omnipresent active reason, the distinction between natural and supernatural seems in the end to disappear ; but not therefore the distinction between what is merely physical or sensuous and what is spiritual ; nor is the rational possibility shut out of events by man for ever incalculable, is Faith a Locke, according to Hume, was the first Christian who species of ventured openly to assert that faith was nothing but a species of reason, and that religion intellectually con- sidered was a branch of philosophy. Omnipresent ra- tional order, not irrational and capricious interference with rational order, must be presupposed at the founda- tion of all " revelations " of the character of the Univer- sal Power, whether the revelations are called natural or supernatural. This is not inconsistent with the principle on which Goethe objected to Hegel, for transforming the Christian religion into philosophy, namely, that philosophy has really nothing to do with it; inasmuch as Christianity is sustained, not by philosophy, but by being found in experience to have a might of its own, by which dejected, suffering humanity is re- elevated from time to time. For in this, which after all is an argu- mentative appeal to experience, the spiritual efficiency of Christianity, proved by the consequences of its en- trance into the world, is taken by reason as a justifica- tion of Christian faith. III. Further, Lord Gifford's Deed gives a moral motive THE UNIVERSAL PROBLEM. 21 for his encouragement of " Natural Theology " in its wide niustra- meaning. It was because he saw in true knowledge of JkTdepen- God the means of man's highest welfare, and security for dence of his upward progress; and also that this knowledge_ could J^Xct be thus valuable only when it was reasonable conviction, upon our " really felt and acted on," not merely speculation ab- J^jj^" stracted from human life and social regard. And I think f life. it may be granted that the ultimate conception of life, in its relations to Omnipresent Power, which a man (con- sciously or unconsciously) acts under, is that which chiefly makes him what he is. Take some obvious illustrations. If a man fully accepts a final conception of the universe, which makes him only the passive subject of blindly necessitated natural evolution, morality and immorality become meaningless words, and Fatalism, as the logical, is also the practical issue. Again, our conduct and our judgments of human action must differ widely as the wholly material or the spiritual, the pessimist or the optimist, conception of existence, governs our lives. Also, unless we presuppose omnipresent Goodness in the uni- versal evolution, we cannot justify any interpretation put upon events by science : it is all physical chaos, under a temporary semblance of cosmos ; deceptive chaos, with a present pretence of order. It must surely be with a sense of weighty practical Theuniver- issues that we address ourselves to the consideration of i^ p ™ a y the supreme problem which in faint outline I have now be treated put before you. In the treatment of it, either of two J^Jy'ra objects may be prominent. It may be treated histori- metaphysi- cally, as an investigation of the religions of the world in call y- their natural evolution, in a historical science and psycho- logical analysis of Keligion ; or it may be treated meta- physically, as an examination of the ultimate foundations of the religious conception of the universe, in a Phil- osophy of Theism. In Scotland both these courses were followed by David Hume. The one is exemplified in his ' Natural History of Keligion, 5 a pioneer of that Science of Keligion which is characteristic of the nine- teenth century ; the other is the subject of Hume's ' Dia- 22 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. Is the theological conception of the uni- verse an anachron- ism and absurd ? The meta- physical points of view prom- inent in this Course. logues concerning Natural Eeligion,' in which we are brought face to face with the metaphysical questions which underlie religion and all human experience. Lecturers on the Gifford Foundation, in this and the other Scottish Universities, have hitherto, I think, in- clined to the historical treatment of Eeligion. Deeply interesting as that is, it leaves in the background the supreme human question, especially in a sceptical age — the truth or validity of Eeligion in any of its develop- ments. Can it be philosophically justified ? Is it a per- manent attitude of human nature, consistent with reason, if not the culmination of reason in man ? Can truth in such matters, or if not in any matter, be either naturally or supernaturally reached by man ? Is the religious con- ception of the universe a protracted illusion, characteristic of certain lower stages of human development, but an anachronism in a civilisation like that of modern Europe and America, which demands verified prevision under a physical or mechanical conception of the universe, as the only legitimate criterion of reality ? I propose to take the second of these two points of view, and so to deal metaphysically with the final human prob- lem. This involves inquiry into foundations of the differ- ent final interpretations of existence — all religious, if religion means vague recognition by man of Power in the universe that is superior to his own — not all properly theistic. Philosophy of Theism, not Natural History of Eeligion, is our subject — yet with the history taken in occasionally, in illustration of the philosophy. The moral interest of the history lies in the validity and worth of the faith. Eeligion presupposes that human experience demands a deeper interpretation than that offered in the conceptions of natural science. Theistic faith claims for man an obligation in reason to recognise the universe as supremely or finally a moral and spiritual unity. Ee- ligious phenomena are insufficiently treated, when regarded only as transitory physical growth or evolution, the scien- tific ordering of which is taken for our whole intellectual concern with them. One still wants to be satisfied regard- ing their practical and their eternal validity. One wants THE UNIVERSAL PROBLEM. 23 to find whether he is obedient to the inevitable limita- tions of human knowledge, when he ventures to put a religious meaning upon experience, and treats this as its most real meaning. Is filial faith in Omnipotent Good- ness a reasonable state of the human mind, and even an indispensable moral postulate of human experience ? In what follows I will try to supply some incitement Aids to and direction to reflection upon our final attitude towards Jjf^JXal the universe, frankly facing difficulties that are apt to attitude to- occur to thoughtful persons, always seeking to keep reality ^^ e honestly in view, and satisfied to make the best of glimpses of reality that may be within our reach in this embodied life. 24 LECTUEE II. THREE PRIMARY DATA: EGO, MATTER, AND GOD. Ultimate threefold articula- tion of the universe of existence. The three primary data are differently conceived The ultimate problem of existence, in the vague form in which it was presented in last lecture, may seem to evade intellectual grasp. It must be further ar- ticulated before it can be taken hold of for orderl) r meditation and investigation. An advance towards this is made when we recognise that the infinite reality of which we are part, into which we are all born, and the meaning and purpose of which philosophy and religion are especially concerned with, presents three primary data. Each of these .men seem to be obliged in some degree to recognise, but with innumerable differences in their individual conceptions. The three data make their appearance, in the very words of Lord Gifford's Deed which define the province of "Natural Theology, in the widest meaning of the term." Eor the words represent it as comprehending " knowledge of God's nature and attri- butes ; " knowledge of " the relations of men to God ; " and "knowledge of the relations which the whole universe bears to God." Here we have "men" — exemplified by each man for himself, in his own private consciousness ; then the material world outside each conscious ego ; and, for the final synthesis, " God " — Infinite or Universal Power. But although these three data are commonly postulated as distinguishable existences, it is not to be supposed that " existence " — " substance " — " reality," and suchlike terms, are applied to each of the three in the same THREE PRIMARY DATA. ZO meaning, by all men in all stages of their intellectual by different and spiritual development. All men do not think alike minds - when they employ the personal pronoun " I," — a pronoun so often uttered, yet withal so mysterious. Not less do they differ in their conceptions when they speak of the material world, as we find when they try to define the words " matter " and " external." Most of all does dif- ference appear when they try to conceive " God." Each of the three ideas assumes different phases when it is traced throughout the history of man ; and the variations are connected with the sort of experience that persons who employ the words pass through, and their power of interpreting it. Moreover, one of the three primary data is apt to be conceived as more entitled to have existence and substance and power affirmed of it than the other two. In the view of one, the Ego is so borne in upon him as to usurp the supreme place : the existence of things outside in space and the existence of God are taken as illusory, because reached only through acts of each private consciousness — there being no other con- sciousness than his own which a man can use. To another man, Matter, or what can be measured and moved, forms his final idea of reality, compared with which the Ego and God look shadowy. And in the mind of the " God- intoxicated" Spinoza, or of the religious mystic, Infinite Being seems to exhaust reality, and to absorb the other two data. The mutual relations of the individual Ego, Matter, Conse- ancl Gocl, form the principal part of Natural^ Theology, JJJ^jJ regarded as the Philosophy of Theism. Anterior to and the three independent of philosophy, a tacit faith in the ego, in beingover- external things, and in God, seems to pervade human s ised.. experience ; mixing, often unconsciously, with the lives of all ; never perfectly defined, but in its fundamental ideas more or less operative ; often intellectually con- fused, yet never without a threefold influence in human life. We may even say that unbalanced recognition of one of the three over the other two, in thought, feeling, and action, is the chief source of intellectual error and moral disorder ; add that life is good and 26 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. happy in proportion to the due acknowledgment of all the three. Confused conceptions of the three are an inexhaustible source of two extremes — superstition and scepticism. The three Take Locke's account of the foundation of certainty as dataa7 to the E S ' Matter, and God. It is given expressly in articulated three chapters of the fourth book of his ' Essay ' : but, by Locke. i nc | eec | ) the whole ' Essay ' converges and rests in the end upon what Locke calls " man's threefold knowledge of existence." I choose Locke among philosophers for this purpose, because he gives expression more than most of them to the uncriticised convictions of the common mind ; and before natural science and theological ideas were modified, either by the conception of universal physical evolution, or by the philosophical criticism of Kant and the dialectic of Hegel. I want to present Locke's homely articulation of the ultimate problem of the universe, as a preparation for the consideration of more pretentious philosophical speculations, which try to resolve the three primary data into one. He puts the case in the ninth chapter of the fourth book of the ' Essay,' and by implication in the twenty-third chapter of the second book. • How the In Locke's view, the most obvious of the three final tioTof mS certainties is Ego — the assurance one has of his own exist- own exist- ence. This arises when he recognises himself to be some- ence arises. j 10W more than a succession of conscious states — as the invisible personal centre to which alone a portion of the conscious experience that is in process in the universe must be referred, as being his own private and con- tinuous conscious life. "As for our own existence," he says, " we perceive it so plainly and so certainly that it neither needs nor is capable of any proof. For noth- ing can be more evident to me than my own existence. I think, I reason, I feel pleasure and pain: can any of these states be more evident to me than my own existence ? If I doubt of all other things, that very doubt makes me perceive my own existence. Experience THREE PRIMARY DATA. 27 then convinces us that we have an intuitive knowledge of our own existence, an internal, infallible perception that we are." (Bk. iv. ch. ix.) In this postulate Locke is giving expression to the un- The datum criticised conviction of the human mind. Enigmas that °* n a ^t e underlie the datum are left to the speculating philosopher person- to disinter. They emerge when we proceed to rake Locke's ™J* y ' or foundation. For further reflection is provoked to ask, — What is meant by one's existence as a separate person, — that something more than a series of isolated conscious states, which is supposed to be signified by the pronoun " I " ? This is the riddle of personality. The personal pronoun, in so far as it means this " something more," means something that cannot be perceived by the senses or pictured. Must it therefore be discharged from lan- guage, as empty sound ? This is the way the personal pronoun has been sometimes treated. David Hume, for example, dismissed all terms as jargon to which no imag- ination could be attached; and on this principle he virtu- ally dispensed with the personal pronoun " I." For, after trying the experiment, he said he could never light upon anything perceptible or imaginable, corresponding to " I " — only isolated and transitory conscious states ; so he con- cluded that if any one pretended to think that the Ego was something more than the single perception or feeling of the moment, it was "impossible to reason with him." If any one perceives something simple and continued which he calls "himself," I am certain, he asserts, that there is no such perception of continuous existence in me. But this negative certainty of Hume is confronted by the difficulty, that if the personal pronoun signifies nothing more than isolated momentary perceptions, there must be as many persons or egos as there are momentary perceptions ; each momentary perception, in what is com- monly called one's " mind," constituting a separate person, whose personal life lasts only as long as the momentary consciousness lasts. It is further confronted by the fact that the mysterious ego inevitably reappears by implica- tion in the words and actions even of the sceptical philo- sopher, who is thus obliged in fact to acknowledge as PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. real more than can be presented in sense or pictured in sensuous imagination. Enigmas There are other enigmas involved in our own existence involved tnat ij e more on the surface than the one now suggested. in tne ides, oo of our own The origin, gradual evolution, and final destiny of the individual invisible and continuous Ego ; the relations of the Ego of which we are conscious to its visible organism ; the need and nature of its connection with Matter, — are among the questions suggested by the meaning of the personal pronoun which modern thought presses upon us. Locke is satisfied with giving emphatic expression to his spontaneous conviction of his own existence. Si ?i07i rogas, intelligo. The belief He deals more analytically with perception of things thatmov- p resen t to the senses — the second of the three primary and in- ' data. Contact and collision with outward things is found dividual to De the occasion, if not the origin, of our awaking into exisTout- an irresistible conviction of our personality. For that side me. conviction involves a perception of something outside each ego, to which the personal states are found related. Every act of sensuous perception " gives us," Locke says, " an equal view of both parts of Nature — the corporeal and the spiritual. Whilst I know, by seeing and hearing, that there is some corporeal being without me, — the object of that sensation, I do more certainly know also that there is some spiritual being luithin me that sees and hears that object." So he finds that the human ego becomes simultaneously possessed of this "irresistible assurance" of the outside existence of things visible and tangible ; things which cannot be appropriated by the ego as states of itself, in the way that its own past and present feelings and thoughts are appropriated. But it is important to remark that it is a portion of " outward existence " very limited in extent and duration, which is supposed by Locke to be perceived, without need or possibility of proof — over and above the spontaneity of the sensuous perception itself, and the certainty which this spontaneity is taken to in- volve. The object spontaneously perceived is limited, be- cause the world of " outward things " is in constant change. And the fluctuating objects are felt to be certainly real THREE PRIMARY DATA. 29 only (so Locke assumes) during the moment in which each outward thing, " by actually operating upon our senses," in a manner forces us to perceive it then and there existing. Accordingly, when an outward object is withdrawn to a distance from one's organs of sense, or separated by an interval of time, Locke assumes that one has no absolute certainty of its still continued existence. Its absent existence, at least in the form it had when it was pres- ent, can only be inferred, and with a probability varied according to circumstances. When one is looking at the sun, he must have perfect assurance that the sun is then really existing: this is the spontaneous certainty of im- mediate perception. But when at night he is only expect- ing its reappearance in the morning, this expectation is nothing more than probable conviction of the continued existence of the absent sun : the solar system, Locke would say, might conceivably be dissolved before morn- ing; and there is no unconditional guarantee that this may not actually happen. Innumerable enigmas underlie Locke's infallibly cer- Enigmas tain sensuous perception of outward things — enigmas involvedin scarcely apprehended by him, especially in the forms in of things 1 * which they now appear in scientific and religious thought, existing T l i tt ± 1 1 ^ i i « ■ outwardly. lake an example. He tells us that we have an "irre- sistible assurance " of the present corporeal reality of all things that are "actually operating" upon "our senses" — especially upon the senses of sight and touch — as long as they persist in " actually operating " upon those senses. Here a question of far-reaching significance arises, which Locke touches only incidentally. In what meaning of the ambiguous words " power," " operation," and " cause," may any things of sense be said to operate either on one an- other or on me ? Have I reason for supposing that an atom or a mass of atoms can be rightly called an agent ; although in common and also in scientific language bodies are so spoken of — nay, are even supposed by materialists to be the only agents in the changes constantly going on in the universe ? Locke at any rate hesitates to include " active power " in the complex idea we are justified in forming of material substance ; although he falls into the 30 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. popular mode of expression ; for he occasionally speaks of bodies " operating." " But," he suggests, with characteristic caution, in the part of the ' Essay ' where the " powers of substances " are expressly treated of, that " material sub- stances are not so entirely active powers or agents as our hasty thoughts are apt to represent them." Indeed, " whether matter be not wholly destitute of active power may be worth consideration." But, if that be so, the solid movable things by which we are surrounded can be only the natural occasions, not the origin, of our perceptions of them. He begins to see that we must look elsewhere than to things visible and tangible for the power that directs the changes which the natural sciences are gradually learning to explain. It is only established order of procedure in external nature, not causation proper, that those sciences are concerned with. Natural science is only articulate application of our faith that in nature the future will so resemble the past that we, through the past, may, with practical safety, to some extent forecast the future. But our interpretations are often mistaken, when tested by the issue ; and even in those cases in which they are verified by experiment, it is only probable verification, not unconditional certainty, that one is landed in. The concrete past can never make the concrete future known, in the way abstract premisses make known an abstract conclusion in a mathematical demonstration. We do not know all the powers which determine changes, or the possible action of the Universal Power. Accordingly, we cannot be said to know uncon- ditionally even that the sun will rise to-morrow. An "accident," as in our ignorance we might call it, may occur to the solar system in the interval, so that there may be no " to-morrow " in the ordinary meaning. All physical " science " of outward things is sustained at last in undemonstrable faith. Duality of Nevertheless — with mysteries like these wrapped up in Matt?r° aud tne two c ^ta — tn ^ s cuia lity °f conscious person and un- conscious .thing are tacitly assumed, but by most persons in a si non rogas, intdligo state of mind. So one may say that he has natural assurance of his own existence, as a THREE PRIMARY DATA. 31 separate self-conscious ego ; and also natural assurance of the existence of things outside as long as they are present to his senses. He finds when he acts that he cannot rid himself of either of these, as working convictions, and he finds that each is the correlative of the other. Still this dual universe in which I find myself is re- Finite cognised as incomplete, when one thinks of it as consisting ^f 1 ^ only of the ego and the outside world — the occasion to presup- the ego of innumerable pains and pleasures. Locke ex- gjjj^^ presses the common feeling of this incompleteness, dim infinite. in many, when he finds himself unable to think of his own existence without also recognising the existence of " Something Eternal or Infinite " — more and other than the ego — more and other than the outer world of things. He finds himself as certain of the reality of this Eternal Something — as certain too that this Eternal Something must be Eternal Mind — as he is certain of any conclusion in mathematics. He finds himself even surer that an Eternal Mind exists than he is that anything else " out- side of himself " exists ; and he believes that every other human being who makes the trial must find that this is so. " It is as certain in reason," he says, " that there is a God as it is certain that the opposite angles made by the intersection of two straight lines are equal, or as that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles." Yet while the existence of the Universal Power, the supreme factor of experience, becomes conscious certainty in all who reflect, the certainty, Locke grants, needs re- flection to awaken it. Without due reflection a man may remain as ignorant of Divine Eeality as a stranger to geometry may remain ignorant of the demonstrations, and even the axioms, of Euclid, although they lie latent in the minds of all. In like manner, many persons never recognise necessity in experience for the existence of Divine Mind. But it must be remembered that the other two data — our own existence, and that of outside things — are also only obscurely recognised, although all acknowledge them, in feeling and action. Now how does conviction of the existence of Eternal Lock Mind first enter a human mind ? God cannot, of course, e s account of 32 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. how we come to iufer Eternal Mind. Can the Eternal Power be regarded as self- conscious Mind ? be presented to our senses ; nor, indeed, can any other ego than my own be present to me, in the way the invisible ego is. Here is Locke's answer : — " I cannot want a clear proof that God exists, as long as I carry myself about with me. For each man knows that he individually exists ; " and he also knows " that he has not existed always. It is therefore inevitable to him, as a rational being, to conclude that Something must have existed from eternity, . . . this being of all absurdities the greatest in the eye of reason — to imagine that pure Nothing, the perfect negation and absence of all beings, should ever produce any real existence. I cannot myself be this Eternal Something, seeing that my own existence, as I know, had a beginning ; and whatever had a beginning must have been produced by something else ; and it must have got all that belongs to its existence from that other being. Further, I find that I am a thinking being : there- fore this Something, the original source of my existence, must be a thinking being too ; — it being as impossible that what is wholly void of knowledge, and operating blindly and without any perception, should produce a knowing being, such as I am, as it is impossible that a triangle should make itself three angles bigger than two right ones." This argument, afterwards elaborated by Samuel Clarke, is in substance as old as Aristotle. Nevertheless, Eternal " Mind," when recognised by Locke as the translation of the Eternal Something, is this with an important qualification. Am I permitted by reason to think of the Eternal Something as "Mind," such as I find conscious in myself ? Is the Eternal Mind conscious mind, or is the term " consciousness " applic- able to the Eternal Power ? Are we obliged to suppose in what is called God an individual conscious life, in which subject and object are distinguished as in human consciousness ? May we think of Eternal Mind as a sep- arate conscious life, continually passing through conscious changes ? and if so, what is the ground in reason for so thinking? How do we know that the Eternal Power is an operative conscious life, and so eternally ? As to this Locke shows characteristic caution. The Eternal THREE PRIMARY DATA. 33 Something, he suggests, may be thought about as Eternal Mind, because it is practically related to me, in my ex- perience of my surroundings, in the way one person is related to another person. But he adds, " though for this reason I call it mind, I must not " — because I thus apply this name to the Eternal Something, in common with my- self — " I must not equal what I call mind in myself to the Eternal and Incomprehensible Being, which, for want of right and distinct conceptions, is also called Mind, or the Eternal Mind." This suggests the mystery of " mind " as supposed in the Universal Power. The words I have quoted — "the Being which, for want Enigmas of right and distinct conceptions, I call the Eternal Mind " JF"?;?^™ i r •-I-I--I-I1 the third — show a sense or the mystery involved in all human belief. ideas of God. They touch the question which is at the root of the theological embarrassment of the present day — What does the word "God" mean? And as to Locke's " mathematically certain " proof of the existence of " Eternal Mind," it may well be considered inade- quate. To conclude that there must be Mind Eternal or Infinite, because I am now conscious, and only lately began to be conscious, is surely an example of circular reasoning, in which the stupendous conclusion is presup- posed in order to be proved. " My own existence " means the existence of a finite being ; and unless infinity is pre- supposed in the premisses the conclusion fails. Infinite Being cannot be concluded from one finite being: God is not logically involved in me. When I take data of experience — in this case my own short-lived existence — as the sole datum, this finite event only cannot yield Infinite Being in the conclusion. Finite data yield only finite conclusions, not, without limit or condition, the in- finite God. And a finite god only sends the craving for a cause in quest of something deeper. A finite god leaves unsatisfied the religious sense of absolute security, and the demand for an unconditioned basis for science and human life. If the word God must mean, the Being whose existence necessarily forecloses ulterior inquiry as to the cause of Divine existence, the word in that case cannot be applied to any being whose existence is inferred from c 34 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. finite facts only ; and which, as finite, raises anew, in- stead of finally foreclosing, the previous question, as to the cause of its existence. The supposed gods of polytheism are finite ; — therefore dependent, and unfit to satisfy the need for absolute support, or to meet man's sense of in- completeness in all that is finite. The essence of the meaning of the word God is necessarily wanting in them. When " God " is taken to be a conclusion from the world, instead of a presupposition involved in all reasonable interpretation of the world, the term is then used in an untheistic meaning ; and, so far as this applies to polytheistic religions, they are in this respect untheistic. We must not take the operation of one finite being upon another finite being as analogy for forming an infinite conclusion. God is not to be thought of as one among innumerable individuals, material and spiritual, which make up the universe, but as One in whom all have their individual being — One incomprehensible under genus or species — absolutely unique — incapable of being classed. Morality, physical science, and reli- gion. The three primary data of reality are severally the occasions of morality, science, and religion. My own existence, implied in the recognition of my continuous personality, and in the power which I refer to myself, when I acknowledge personal responsibility, calls forth ideals of duty to man and God, and affords material for moral judgments. External nature, at least as presented in our sensuous experience, is non-moral: yet without the medium supplied by external things as signs, I seem to have no means of discovering the existence of other persons ; still less of receiving from them, or communi- cating to them ideas : so that, but for a material world, there would be no room for that exercise and develop- ment of intelligence which interpretation of visible nature requires, and on which individual and social progress de- pend : the material world, non-moral in itself, is a medium of social intercourse, and also a medium through which persons are individualised and morally educated. Then, too, without faith and hope in the Universal Power, THREE PRIMARY DATA. 35 on which the universe of change is presumed to depend, and on which we repose, as our basis for thought and ac- tion, both morality and natural science must be paralysed. In this divine faith religion is rooted ; so that secular mo- rality and natural science become at last religious. Trust in natural law is faith in God in wrm. Superstition and scepticism are extremes into which Examples men are led, by not preserving the balance between the of m . iscon " three primary data of reality. While no one of the three regarding can be wholly explained away, consistently with sane the three human life, any of them may be so exaggerated as to data.^ distort the final conception of life and the universe. Take examples. At certain stages in man's religious and intellectual development, there is a disposition to see God only in what is uncommon, unexpected, ab- normal ; and to refer to what are called " natural agents," events that are customary. According to this assumption, whatever is found to evolve or grow — evolution is another name for growth — gradually and regularly, is referred wholly to a supposed " power " in " nature," which power means only the constant natural method through which the issue is reached : God is recognised only when some- thing happens which seems not to appear gradually or undei natural law. So the realm of natural operation, and the realm in which God is supposed to operate come to be regarded as each excluding the other ; with the re- sult in an unconscious polytheism, which makes one god of " nature " and another god of " supernature." It follows that all scientific discoveries of natural causes or natural processes are supposed to exclude God more and more as the constant agent in the universe. God is seen acting only in what science cannot naturally bridge over; and these vacant intervals of course become fewer and fewer with the advance of science. The need for a religious interpretation of what happens in the universe seems to diminish with each step onward in natural interpretation : the idea of the universe as in itself throughout finally interpre table only physically, and therefore foreclosing an ulterior theological conception, in the end takes the place of the religious idea of the whole. The advance of science 36 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. becomes the paralysis of religious thought, because^ the system of nature leaves no room for that arbitrary viola- tion of rational order in which superstition and confused theological thinking find the sign of the providential pres- ence of God. When superstition is not permitted by science to retain an irregular and capricious universe of this sort, its deity and its religion disappear. The modern appreciation of natural causes, after dissolving the per- sonifications of polytheism, is now destroying their relics in inadequately conceived theism. The con- This conception of God, as mechanical and local and that God external, appears at the bottom of theological appeals maybe° C against the presumption of the atheist, who dares to found else- conc i u( j e that God does not exist, merely because neither though not our eyes nor our telescopes reveal His presence— within on this t h e comparatively narrow and always finite space to which planet. ^^ senses, even when artificially assisted, and our im- agination give positive access. If not found here, a God may possibly be found there; if not the cause of this which comes within our experience, a God may possibly be the cause of something elsewhere that man cannot see. If man does not know every agent in the wide expanse of the universe, the agent that he is ignorant of may be God. If he cannot assign the causes of all that he perceives to exist, the unperceived cause of that unknown remainder may be God. If he does not know how everything has been done in past ages, some of those doings may have been the doings of Gocl. In short, unless I preclude the possible existence of another god by being omniscient or a °"od myself, I cannot know for certain that the God whose existence I deny may not exist somewhere. Now a god that can be locally and potentially present, here, but not there, in this event, but not in that event; or that might be detected by a telescope in some remote part of space, if a powerful enough telescope could be invented ; or detected only in extraordinary events, — spoken of too as " a God " — is surely not the Unique Divine Eeality, " in which we all live and move and have our being " ; presupposed tacitly in all perception and self- conscious- ness, or else everywhere and for ever out of relation to- THREE PRIMARY DATA. 37 human life. God, as Bacon says, does not need to work physical miracles in order to refute atheists. If the whole natural course of things does not presuppose God, as the condition of its being even physically interpretable, no extraordinary local manifestations in nature can in them- selves supply the proof. With the presupposition granted of Divine Eeason latent in the heart of existence, some events in the history of the universe may doubtless be more fitted than others to evoke into fuller intelligence the corresponding moral trust and adoration that are latent in man ; but without the tacit postulate of God in all per- ception and consciousness, this fuller or richer intelligence of Deity, otherwise evolved by enlarged experience, finds no adequate foundation. Again. Is it not also an inadequate and inconsequent Or might theism that is left to depend finally upon historical proof f a ™ d been that the cosmical economy of our little planet, or even of long ago, the solar system, had no natural beginning ; because under J^w! the conception of natural beginning there could be no reason, it is assumed, for the supposition of " a God " ? If the economy of the present solar system must first be proved by historic records to have been formed unnaturally — according to the common expression, by a sudden crea- tive act — before faith in God can be justified, the basis seems too narrow and too precarious to support the con- clusion. It is not enough to argue for Eternal Mind, as some have done, on the ground that it can be proved by the book of Genesis that the visible world originated in God, but that there is no historical proof that the God in whom it originated Himself had a beginning. If we thus make history settle questions which lie beyond its sphere, what is the difference in this respect between the solar system and the causally dependent " God " its historical origin is supposed to prove? They are both treated in these arguments as caused causes. " A mental world, or universe of ideas," as Hume suggests, " requires a cause, as much as does a material world or universe of objects. In an abstract view, they are entirely alike ; and no difficulty attends the one supposition which is not common to both of them." Is it not only after the ultimate divineness of 38 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. Panmate rialism, all natural processes has been presupposed that any ex- perience is found to enlarge and illustrate our conception of God ? So much in illustration of perplexities in which thought becomes involved under crude conceptions of the three and Pan- ' fundamental data and their mutual relations. The dihi- theism. culty of reconciling these three existences with one another, along with the desire for undifferentiated unity awakened in speculating intelligence, leads to Monist theories which profess to resolve all that exists into One of the three. The theories differ according as this or that datum obtains exaggerated, and in the end exclusive, re- cognition. Thus the material world, which fills the horizon of sense, is taken for the single reality, in a final conception which makes the universe at last only a universe of molecules in motion. This is Panmaterial- ism, which fancies that it finds in Matter what common conviction refers to the Ego or to God. On the other hand, those in whom the introspective habit is strong are apt to interpret All as ultimately modified Ego, in a theory of Panegoism or Solipsism. Lastly, dissatisfac- tion with a universe of only finite beings, combined either with reasoned or with mystical aspiration after Infinite Eeality, disposes the courageous thinker, or the pious mystic, to seek for the One, neither in outward things with the Panmaterialist, nor in the Ego with the Panegoist, but in God. Is any of these spec- ulations a rest- ing-place for man, as a moral and spiritual being ? I will now endeavour to occupy each of these three Monist points of view in succession ; to try whether any of them affords the ultimate conception needed by man in his spiritual integrity. Are men under intel- lectual obligation to accept any of them, as the final in- terpretation of all that exists, and if so, which of them is thus obligatory ? If supreme regard for reasonableness obliges us to dismiss them all, what alternatives are open ? Must we abandon the universal problem, as one which does not admit even of a working human solution; our the negative final relation to it being uiowledge, that the THREE PRIMARY DATA. 39 whole is a riddle, an enigma, an inexplicable mystery ; — so that at last no judgment formed about anything can be regarded as more certain than its contradictory ? Is total scepticism the issue of the final rejection, as unreal, of any one of the three data, and of attempts to explain man's life in the universe in terms of one only of the three ? These are questions which we have now to meet. I will begin by asking you to look at existence as the materialist may be supposed to look at it, and inquire whether Universal Materialism is a coherent conception, and the only human solution of the Whole. FIRST PART UNTHEISTIC SPECULATION AND FINAL SCEPTICISM LECTURE I. UNIVERSAL MATERIALISM. In the infancy of philosophical speculation, as in the Early Hel- " lenic at- tempts to early years of each man's life, it is the world of solid k and extended things — what can be seen and moved — finally in- that is apt to be regarded as the one only reality, and ter p retthe x o «/ «/ > universe. as what alone is entitled to be called a Cause. So it was that in the age before Socrates, among the early Hellenic inquirers, the mystery in which we find our- selves enveloped when we look before and after seemed to be relieved, as soon as some element in matter could be detected, out of which it might plausibly be conjectured that all originally issued. They were satisfied when they thought that they could answer the final question about man and the universe, by resolving the Whole into some sort of visible substance — water, air, or fire — as primary material. The totality of existence was finally identified with matter ; but without analysis of what matter ultim- ately means, or even a distinct conception of outward- ness in relation to self-conscious mind. The objects of sense were tacitly credited with powers which seemed to subordinate the other two of the three primary data. It was among things that appeal to the senses that Thales, Anaximander, and other contemporaries sought satisfaction, when their crude experience gave rise to their philosophic wonder. This pre-Socratic materialism, latent in the universal flux of Heraclitus, developed in the atomism of Democritus, was idealised, and may be seen at its best, in the magnificent poem of Lucretius. 44 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. Material- ism in the nineteenth century. Our own nineteenth century finds millions trying to get satisfaction in the same way; still turning for ex- planation to what sense presents, when they are con- fronted by the mystery of their own life in the universe ; or when their desire for intellectual unity rebels against three final existences, and strives to reduce all plurality to One. Modern materialism, recognising the innumer- able useful secrets which the material world holds within it, and which modern science is disclosing to the in- crease of our knowledge and comfort — in gratitude for what Matter is apparently doing for us all — is ready to fall down and worship its benefactor, and to lose Man and God in the immensity of outward things and their eternal evolution. For science of outward things, after three centuries of successful experimental inter- course with the world that is presented to the senses, has much to say for itself. It is able to say that it has gradually succeeded, with universal consent, in inter- preting many things that surround us in space, solid and extended ; one kind of thing that we see being said to explain another kind of thing that can also be seen ; and it is ready to contrast the consent in physical inter- pretation with the perplexities which metaphysical inter- pretation of the universe is said to involve. So trust is put at last only on what is outward and that can be verified by physical experiment. What can be so made good, one is ready to say, is bound to carry it over theo- logical dreams, which are all that we possess when we pretend to something superior to sense. I seem to be the sport of illusion whenever I forsake this safe sphere, the naturalist inquirer insists : what I see I can also touch ; what I touch I can make experiments upon ; I can repeat the experiments in new circumstances, and then compare at my leisure the issues of various calcul- ated experiments. In this way I find that I can fore- see physical issues, and anticipate the natural behaviour of things. For these and other reasons I am certain that in the data of the senses I have got hold of existence on its only real side. I find that I can use tangible and visible experience as the one undoubted test for inter- UNIVERSAL MATERIALISM. 45 preting whatever happens that is interpretable. While I keep on this path I can walk with a firm intellectual step, and can stake my life on the certainty of my inferences. Such is the voice of modern science of external nature in evolution, when translated into Universal Materialism. It leads back to what, in naive and confused fashion, was the assumption of Hellenic cosmologists in the infancy of philosophical questioning. It is supposed to demonstrate the insignificance of man in nature, and therefore the base- lessness and unintelligibility of " the theistic hypothesis," when it pretends to be the last word about the Whole. For dogmatic atheism, or at least theological agnosticism, is the inevitable philosophy of those who confine experi- ence to external sense, disallowing any other experience, or any principle of harmony deeper than customary suc- cession of sense appearances. It was not always thus in the long interval which The an- separates Thales and Democritus from the nineteenth tnr op°- 0£TiLT*lC century. A teleological conception of existence that conception might even be called anthropocentric, or man - centred, oftheuni- instead of the earlier or the later materialism, pervades Hebrew in a striking fashion ancient Hebrew literature, as we am \ H . el - have it in Genesis and other books; intensified into a a ture. spiritual anthropomorphism in the Jewish psalmists and prophets, with their deep intuition of the moral relation of man to their vividly conceived personal God. Unique as were the Jews in this respect, a teleological, if not an anthropocentric, conception of the universe is not exclu- sively Hebraic, even in the ancient world. Among the Greeks there was a faint recognition by Anaxagoras of active Eeason as the supreme cosmic principle, superior to blind necessities of molecular motion, and apt to suggest a religious conception of the relations of the Whole. By an emphatic acknowledgment of Man rather than out- ward things as the primary object of human interest — the moral agent, not the starry heavens — Socrates re- called his followers from exaggerated regard for out- ward things ; he also directed reflection to ends latent in reason, and connected with man as the chief end. In 46 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. Above all in Christ- ianity. Anthropo- centric concep- tions in Medieval - Greece Socratic reaction was inspired by the genius of Plato, and more articulately through the systematic in- telligence of Aristotle ; while among the Eomans the natural theology of Cicero, based on a theological idea of the world, sometimes finds vent in language that might be called anthropomorphic. But it was the profound spirituality of Christianity, occasionally exaggerated among Christians, that reduced material things to insignificance, as compared with per- sons, in the elaborate theology or philosophy of the ages of faith. The conception of the supremeness of man in the cosmos found a scientific auxiliary in the accepted Ptolemaic astronomy, with its geocentric conception of the material universe, in which all falls into subordinate re- lation to a man-inhabited Earth. The destiny of man thus came to be regarded as even the final and eternal purpose of the universe ; and it was assumed, in har- mony with this, that the Universal Power must be a living Spirit, analogous to the spirit found incarnate in man. A narrow anthropocentric conception of the Supreme Principle of the universe culminated in the middle age of European thought. Monastic separation from the visible world ; absolute separation between what was ab- stracted as secular, and what was abstracted as spiritual, or between state and church ; opposition between nature on the one side, and supernatural power on the other, were among its symptoms. It produced indifference to physical order and to science of nature; warfare with those who would rule their lives by the physical idea of law ; an endeavour to live only in consciousness of supernatural environment; man at the centre of space, seeing the infinite eternal economy all directed to his own spiritual government — man's welfare supposed to be marred by acknowledgment of spirituality in secular life. Eeligion, under this ascetic form of religious thought, took the place in medievalism that is now claimed for sciences of outward nature. The atomism of Lucretius was exchanged for the subtle Christian theology of Aquinas, the curious conceits of the ' Divina Com- UNIVERSAL MATERIALISM. 47 media,' afterwards in the mythology of Milton, and the human analogies of Puritan divines. Man's imagined local supremacy under the Ptolemaic Local insig- astronomy encouraged this theological conception of human oJ^^ 06 life. A scientific revolution in men's ideas of their place in the material universe, which seemed to reduce man to his discovered local insignificance, and invited us to think of ourselves as the transitory issue of a natural process, appeared inconsistent with the supremacy of the religious idea, and an invitation to the atomistic and mechanical one to resume its old final place. The postulate that God is at the root of the Whole seemed somehow bound up with a now exploded uniqueness in the local position of man's earthly home in the material world. So modern free search among the natural causes per- Bacon and ceptible by the senses has been changing the old an thro- ti!e U teieo° U pocentric ideas — under the scientific assumption that logical con- causation is only regular sequence, open to experimental ^wni-^ detection, and more or less subject to human control, verse. This assumption accustomed the mind to physical utili- ties, and a narrow teleological conception seemed barren by contrast. The change finds voice in what Bacon and Spinoza say about the fruitfulness of natural causes, as compared with the inutility of final causes. It is as the visible means according to which human purposes may be carried out by men, as ministers of nature, that Bacon sets a high value on material or caused causes, and on the science which discloses them : in a final cause he found nothing which man could employ as his instrument, or of which he could be the interpreter. Final causes look unpractical : the inscrutable will and purpose of a distant God becomes an asylum for indolent neolect of the useful natural causes which surround us ; or a shelter for superstition, withdrawing men from ex- perimental inquiry into the texture of the web of nature in which we are involved. So Spinoza argues against anthropomorphism. In this he exceeds Bacon, who com- plains only of the abuse of final causes, when they make us neglect the causes that appeal to our senses, and 48 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. that can be adapted to human purposes in this em- bodied life ; but allowing for their value in other aspects. Not so Spinoza, who insists that reason teaches men the futility of the very idea of a final cause in which man is the end ; and argues that until men are satisfied that law in nature is not intended for their satisfaction, they are not likely to be convinced that reality must be measured by disinterested scientific evidence. Nothing, he says, should be concluded true or false, because it is or is not in harmony with human interests ; and it is a profound mistake to call things or events good or bad, because they happen to be agreeable or repugnant to a being so insignificant as man. On the other hand, Bacon, while he presses the need for engaging in the long-neglected search for the causes that may be found by experiment within the visible succession of nature — seeing that we may usefully employ such causes when we discover them — argues also that experimental search among physical phenomena may even confirm and exalt our recognition of divine purpose. For inductive inquiry into natural causes, which are the required conditions of all changes that go on around us, so far from dissolving faith in a dominant providence, only shows that full human satis- faction is not attained without discernment of divine providence animating the natural evolution. The centuries since Bacon and Spinoza have witnessed an increasing reaction against all forms of theological anthropomorphism, in the interest of a secularly fruitful centric search for operations of natural causes, visible and tang- conception. ibl ^ un( j er i aws w hich interpret our bodily surroundings, and our bodies besides— laws which may be applied by men as means for making this a more comfortable plan- etary abode. Thus the vast material world, as containing the only visible agents of desirable changes, has come to fill the popular imagination : that small portion of matter which is appropriated by each person as specially his body is reduced to relative insignificance. The merely physical interpretation of external nature, with its tacitly supposed, but undemonstratecl, faith in constant physical order, is next assumed to be the only legitimate sort of science, Modern reaction against the anthropo UNIVERSAL MATERIALISM. 49 and to open the only way in which reason can permit us to walk. Appeals to other constituents of the faith out of which reason in man spontaneously rises, and into which, in a more developed condition, it is found at last to return, are disparaged, as appeals only to feeling, imagination, or dogmatic authority, not to reason ; which must, it seems, be always something physically natural. Shall we, then, surrender ourselves to the influence of this intellectual atmosphere, and adopt the materialistic conception of the universe of existence, as ultimately only molecules in motion ? Much appears to recommend the conception to the obedient disciple of fact and reason when he comes with those presuppositions ; and then he presses the conclusion, that the only available solution of the problem of his life is to be found at a point of view at which the invisible Ego and the invisible God disappear, as superfluous postulates, added by unscientific imagination to the one solid fact — a universe of molecules in motion. A change in the astronomical conceptions of men led the The reac- way in this modern revolution. Copernican astronomy JSJedby gradually dissolved the old Ptolemaic idea that man's astronomi- abode was the centre of the material world — the starry ™\ c ^ ov " hosts dependent on human interests — all made for the specula- service of man. Copernicus consigns man to a position tlon - that has become relatively more and more insignificant, locally considered, with each advance in stellar science. Even under the old assumption about the starry heavens, the Hebrew poet was lost in wonder that the Supreme Purpose should have regard to a being so insignificant as man : " When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which Thou hast ordained ; what is man, that Thou art mindful of him ? and the son of man, that Thou visitest him ? " But with what deepened emphasis may this question of the unscientific Hebrew be put by the modern astronomer ? In the mind of the Jew, the " lights " in the vault of heaven which cheered this solid earth seemed, through a wonderful providence, to have been made because man was made. D 50 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. The starry heavens and man's relative insignifi- cance in Space. The insig- nificance According to his innocent conception, God had said, " Let there be lights in the firmament of heaven to give light upon the earth." But how can so grand a spectacle as modern astronomy puts before us be supposed by any reasoning being to have for its final cause the convenience of short-lived animals who somehow find their home on this small planet — transitory in their successive genera- tions, in the Homeric imagination, as the leaves which yearly appear and disappear on the trees of the forest ? The progress of modern astronomy has been a running commentary on the local insignificance of men, when men are thought of only as individual organisms in the illimitable material system found in possession of the immensity of space. What is the human body, invisible from another planet, in comparison with the infinite material world ? The Earth itself, instead of being con- ceived as the solid centre of all that exists in space, is now recognised as only one in a system of planets, more or less like itself, some immensely larger, all revolving round a central sun, on which they and all their contents depend. Then this solar system itself is only one among innumerable other solar systems, like itself, all it seems revolving collectively round some undiscovered centre. And even this enlarged material system may be only a subordinate part of an inconceivably greater economy ; which again in its turn may be an appendage to a greater still ; and so onwards and onwards in an unending series of enlargements, — for why should any boundary be set to the material contents of infinite space ? What, indeed, is this human animal — so much made of in the anthropo- centric conception — when placed beside the innumerable animals which may occupy the innumerable worlds that are moving through Immensity? What is man that he should be regarded at all in a Divine Purpose ? Above all, what is man that he should be the one supreme object in that Purpose, as in the Christian conception of redemp- tion, according to the medieval interpretation of it, which so long limited the teleological view. But if scientific investigation of the contents of space reduces the petty organisms of the race of man, from UNIVERSAL MATERIALISM. 51 supremacy in the Divine purpose, to inconceivable in- of men re- significance in the material system, this abatement of s ar . ded as human pretension is even more difficult to resist when JjSmT" one turns to what modern science has to tell about the evolved course of events in time. Above all, this is so if we m Time ' accept ^ the conception of the causal process, according to which a constant evolution of the material universe proceeds in what, for aught man can know, may be an uiibeginning and unending metamorphosis of its molec- ular constituents. If modern astronomy, inaugurated by Copernicus and Newton, has revealed the insignificance of man's planet among the illimitable starry hosts, and the infinite insignificance of each ephemeral human or- ganism, when all is interpreted in terms of space, what shall be said of the revelations of modern geology, and, much more, of modern biology? They seem to 'show that all the living bodies on this planet, as well as the planet itself, are transitory issues, in continuous natural processes of integration and disintegration, without beginning and without end. Some of the present laws according to which their changes occur have been discovered ; and those persons who claim to be discoverers have thus put some passing pleasures within reach of those by whom the discoveries may be applied, or have enabled them to escape some passing pains ; but no ultimate account of all this can be given. Nor can we tell whether the physical order — presumed without proof to be permanent within the narrow sphere of men's discoveries of natural causes — is really the ex- pression of Eternal Eeason, or only an accident during a brief interval, within which chaos, in human experience, assumes the semblance of a permanent cosmos. In the light of geological and biological discovery and The alter- speculation, one seems to see animal life gradually evolv- ™tisma of ing, in its relative place in the continuous natural succes- ^w£in° n sion, in a process according to which lower forms of living tegration in matter on this planet are slowly followed by higher and SET* more complex. Each generation in this continuous nat- ural evolution, infinitesimally different from that which preceded it, transmits the infinitesimal difference to its 52 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. successors; and thus, out of what may have been the common mass of protoplasm at an early stage, animal life becomes gradually differentiated into ever-multiply- ing species — the human organism the most notable among the organisms hitherto evolved in the history of this planet. The human organisms, moreover, at the present stage of the unbeginning and endless procession of changes which the material world presents, are found to be in advance of their remote natural ancestors in their intelligence; — with perhaps a prospect, according to the analogies of nature, of continuing to advance with the process of the suns. But human organisms, with their unique characteristic of self-conscious life, are only some of the constructions, naturally presented, in the un- beginning and unending evolution or metamorphosis of matter. They seem to rise into life spontaneously, when the conditioning material causes occur of which organisms of this sort, with their self-consciousness, are the natural sequence. But those physical causes, as well as their consequences, are themselves passive subjects of the natural rules of universal change. Eeasoning by anal- ogy, under commonly received maxims, all-embracing materialism may accordingly anticipate, in the future history of this planet, the final extinction of human organisms, in analogy with preceding extinctions of inferior races ; with all their works, their scientific discoveries, and indeed all signs of their past existence, in the general disintegration of the solar system. Later still, the whole material universe may be refunded into the original fire - mist out of which it was once evolved ; or it may all be condensed into one stupendous mass of molecules — ready to resume another prolonged course of natural integration, or natural creation, — with an issue, it may be, of new stellar and planetary sys- tems ; or perhaps of other constructions of matter, unpre- dictable, because due to physical conditions now un- known, and even by us inconceivable. In the new material universe of that immeasurably remote future, what room is there in retrospective thought for the petty human organisms of an immeasurably remote past UNIVERSAL MATERIALISM. 53 — with their ephemeral records of social institutions and social struggles, scientific discoveries, achievements of mechanical art, humanly admired creations of imagina- tion, religions and philosophies — all dissolved and buried in the dissolution of the vast molecular economy in which, even while they existed, they were as nothing, — for ever forgotten, in the new heavens and new earth, into which a universe, essentially of molecules, has then been trans- formed, in another of its purposeless metamorphoses? These are only materialistic dreams ; but they are dreams in analogy with the universally materialistic conception of existence, which I am asking you to try to realise in imagination. Two conditions, which both play an important part in Indestruc- sciences concerned with Matter, are presupposed, but not j^ t *J } ° f unconditionally demonstrated. The one is the indestruct- and con- ibility of the material molecules; and the other, the conser- Energy. vation of what is ambiguously called energy, which matter is supposed to involve. The indestructibility of Matter and the conservation of Energy are, as you know, hypo- theses which dominate modern inferences about the past and future history of the molecules which, on the material- istic conception of man and the universe, form the ele- mentary totality. Accordingly, as long as the material universe exists — and it is presumed to be indestructible — it must consist of the same quantity of matter, — the same number of molecules ; — this through all the metamor- phoses which these have undergone, or may yet undergo — in the form of stellar systems, and of living matter, in the various degrees of life, sentient, intelligent, self-con- scious, which less or more elaborately organised matter is found to manifest; as well as in future issues which human imagination cannot picture. The assumption of the indestructibility of matter forbids an inconceivable transformation of nothing suddenly into something, as in the old idea of sudden creation ; and obliges us always to suppose and seek for physical causes — presentable to sense, although not necessarily perceptible by human senses — when we try to account, through its exact material equiv- alent, for each new metamorphosis. The history of the 54 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. universe is therefore a history of the natural transforma- tions of what already exists molecularly : the addition of absolutely new molecules, or the absolute extinction of old ones, are unscientific conceptions. Each new appearance in nature implies an equivalent withdrawal of some other appearance, and the whole succession is an endless meta- morphosis. Light reappears in equivalent heat : electricity in equivalent magnetism : molecular changes in the living organism, in their equivalent states of conscious life : the births and deaths of men and other living organisms have their resulting compensation: the births and deaths of planets and suns have deaths and births in something else corresponding to them, is Causa- If all that has been, and that can be, must thus be tionwhoiiy thought of at last in terms of material molecules, the final so that 1 } ' problem should be solved in the discovery and exhaus- S-hf? tive a PP lication of tne ultimate law or laws according to priori] he which the innumerable molecular metamorphoses pro- the effect of cee( j. The search for cause is confined to a search for anyt mg. p erce p t j_^ e conditions which constantly precede, or con- stantly accompany, each perceptible change. Causal sequences are nothing more than the sequences which seem to be constant among material phenomena. As constant, they become a sort of language, in which natural causes are significant of their so-called effects, and the effects of their so-called causes. To explain the universe finally would be to read all its endless changes under their physical laws. An analysis of ex- perience, in quest of connections that are constant, be- comes the only means for determining whether this is the cause of that ; not any a priori idea of the sufficiency, or insufficiency, of this agent to be the cause of this or that sort of change. Abstractly — that is to say, without finding that this is always in nature actually followed by that — man has no right to assume that only this sort of cause can explain that sort of effect ; that unorganised atoms can, or that they cannot, account for the self- conscious life that is found on this remote little planet. Enough if experience presents life rising out of certain organic conditions ; and then conscious life appearing in. UNIVERSAL MATERIALISM. 5o the more elaborate living organisms: one is bound hon- estly to accept the facts. One is then told to see in the so related molecules and their motions, the true and only explanation of the psychical phenomena which appear in signal organisms, especially in the human, and which are vulgarly referred to what is called " mind," — the abstract word mind a convenient refuge for human ignorance. At this point of view any material thing appears a priori equally fit, or equally unfit, with any other to be the cause, or constant antecedent, of any sort of change. Causality is only the sort of sequence that is imagined to be constant ; and as any event may be imagined to follow any other — apart from experience — anything may be the supposed cause of anything that happens. The falling of a pebble may extinguish the sun, for aught we know a 'priori ; or the will of a man may disturb the planets in their orbits. When I see one billiard-ball moving in a straight line to- wards another, even if motion in the second ball should by accident be suggested to me as the result of their contact, might I not conceive hundreds of other sorts of events as well following from that particular cause. Might not both the balls remain at absolute rest ? Might not the first ball return in a straight line, or leap away from the second in any linear direction ? All these suppositions are conceiv- able. Why then should we give the preference to one of them, which a priori is not more consistent or conceivable than the rest ? No a priori reasonings will ever be able to show us an unconditional necessity in reason for this preference. Under this sensuous and empirical causality as the Thepossi- only human conception of power; with survival of the ^ e a ^f physically fittest as its highest biological illustration ; verse of with assumed indestructibility of matter and conservation P°^J^ of energy for working hypotheses ; and the speculative i u the in- postulate of an unbeginning and unending succession of tt ^ * uc " causal integrations and disintegrations of a universe of molecules in perpetual motion — with all this postulated, abundant opportunity seems to be given, in endless time, for infinite variety in the relations of the molecules to one another, and for all sorts of resulting molecular combina- 56 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. Self-con- scious lives the sup- posed ef- fects of special molecular organisa- tions which naturally occur in the infinite history of molecules in motion. tions. These when they emerge, as far as man can see before trial, may each be a cause of any sort of effect. So, under this ultimate conception of the universe, what forbids that in the course of time one of the innumerable issues of molecular collocation might be — that actually presented by the universe of individual things and persons in which we find ourselves living, in the economy of which the human organism forms a part, and into which each man has been naturally introduced. The universe of molecules, at this stage of its temporal evolution, includes those molecular organisms which, while they last, are found in experience to be the physical causes of different degrees of life ; in the more refined elaborations, the natural causes of sentient life ; and in due time, even of life that is self-conscious. Under this materialistic conception, the universe seems to be completely emptied of those alleged striking ex- amples of divine adaptation of natural means to human ends, in which, under another final conception, this visible world of ours once seemed to abound ; which impressed ordinary minds, when presented by Cicero or Paley ; or, earlier still, by the Hebrew poet, to whom the heavens " declared the glory of God, and the firmament " showed " His handywork." Under the Hebrew conception of things, " day unto day " was uttering this higher " speech," and night unto night this higher "knowledge." As the Jew looks at it, " there is no speech nor language " where this Divine Voice is not heard : " their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world." Under the molecular final idea of existence, on the contrary, the heavens and the earth, with all their living and intelligent population, declare the powers of in- numerable material molecules, in the infinity of their possible relations in the eternal succession. Out of any natural cause, any sort of issue — insentient mass or living organism, sentient or self-conscious life, for all we can predict a priori — is able to attain to its actual but ephemeral existence as naturally as any other. That the motion of one billiard-ball should be the natural sequence of contact with another billiard-ball in motion, UNIVERSAL MATERIALISM. 57 is neither less nor more wonderful in itself, than that an elaborate special organisation of molecules, itself the natural issue of the infinite possibilities of the universal motion, should, while the organism lasts, be the prior term in a sequence in which the consequent term should be a transitory self-conscious life. The self-conscious being may seem to himself to be continuous in his experience of memory ; and he lasts a little longer than the visible motion in the impelled billiard-ball. Causal sequence could in no case have been predicted without experience of its constancy : in each case it is equally credible and certain after this experience. According to the rules which the molecules are found exemplify- ing in their motions, the particular sort of colloca- tion of molecules of which billiard-balls are made is the issue of comparatively few and simple natural ex- periments ; the competitive process of survival of the fittest, for example in the case of the curious human organism, must have involved innumerable rejections, with all the involved waste of product, before man, with his intelligence, and his self -regarding and benevolent dispositions, gradually developed. With this mechanical difference of atomic elaboration only, the two sorts of natural sequence are analogous — if causality means only customary sequence. In neither is there any evidence of external contrivance, as in the work we attribute to the design of a human artist ; and, moreover, so-called effects of human contrivance are themselves only ex- amples of natural laws, which issued in the natural evolution of the organism of the contriver, with its correlative conscious life. The watchmaker, when his organism is issuing watches, is really only an insignifi- cant part of the natural process of world-making and universal metamorphosis that is constantly going on. Natural sequence — not Purpose, benevolent or male- volent — is the final solvent of the problem of the uni- verse. Deeper than this the human line cannot go, in the attempt to sound the infinite abyss, when one has to explain the universe under the postulates of Universal Materialism. The intrepid scientific inquirer, with his 58 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. The mate- rial organ- ism is the Man, in Universal Material- ism. Man thus viewed is only a pal- try part of physical natnre. universe conceived as ultimately molecules in motion, who recognises nothing in metaphysical implicates of experience that transcends this hypothesis, accepts it un- appalled, in the intrepid spirit of science. He is ready to say that " things are what they are, and are not other things" — but this with his eye turned exclusively to phenomena of matter in their relations of natural sequence. Man and his material organism are absolutely identified in this final interpretation of the universe, in which man consequently becomes one of its most insignificant items : his spiritual existence is measured by the size and con- tinuance of his body, which is himself. The conscious lives of men, especially those who have been evolved in this advanced era of the universal history, are the most remarkable manifestations of psychical phenomena that come within man's experience ; but even this sort is invariably embodied : our only example of self-conscious life is the human organism, in its little more than momen- tary existence. With a human organism, naturally given, the spiritual life of man mysteriously springs forth, " like the appearance of the genius when Aladdin rubbed his lamp in the Eastern story," or like any other natural fact which appears in its due season. It is thus that man is reduced from the fancied height of a moral agent, who, so far as such, must be indepen- dent of physical law, to the extent of his moral responsi- bility : he is identified with those aggregates of atoms in the natural evolution, which differ from the lifeless things of inorganic nature only in the fact of their organic con- nection with pleasurable or painful feeling, and their other automatic conscious states, manifested in the course of molecular changes of which the organism and its sur- roundings are the subjects — invisible states as wholly automatic, or dependent on molecular motions, as the visible changes in the organisms themselves, "Man, physical, intellectual, moral," we are told, " is as much a part of nature, as purely a product of the cosmic process, as the humblest weed." Therefore, men at their best present only this ephemeral consciousness, which emerges UNIVERSAL MATERIALISM. 59 from the always indifferent, and often cruel, natural mechanism, within which — without their own leave — they find themselves inextricably involved. Inconsolatory to the individual as this discovery of what he is, and the world in which he is, may be, it is inexhaustible in resources of physical explanation. It explains, as a physical consequence of relations among molecules which occur in the course of their history, man's illusion that he can ever be morally free from natural law, and re- sponsible for what he does. For the illusion is found in invariable sequence to certain organic states, which are themselves the issue of innumerable molecular motions and collocations that have occurred in the history of the material universe. The sufferings through which sentient beings on this planet pass, and the sins with which men are charged, are in this way seen in their infinite insig- nificance, as only phenomena in the succession of natural changes among the atoms which for ever occupy the im- mensity of space : they are not more significant ultimately than the pains or pleasures of insects too minute to be seen by the microscope in the summer sunshine now seem to us. Good and evil, right and wrong, merit and demerit, self-satisfaction and remorse, are scientifically discovered to be words which have acquired their misleading mean- ing at an inferior era in this world's history ; through man's natural ignorance at the time, that he is only an item in the unbeginning and unending succession of molecular changes, which Universal Materialism assumes to be finally co-extensive with reality. Yet, at another point of view — if anything might be Deification the cause of anything, because it may conceivably be its of matter, predecessor — might one not attribute to the molecules into which the universe is resolved all the attributes of man, and even those that are attributed to God? And if Deity may be thus latent in the molecular universe, is it more than a question of names — as between this omnipotent and omniscient Matter, on the one hand, and the God of pantheism, or even of theism, on the other. Where is the universal materialist to stop in what he 60 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. The trans- itory il- lusion of Morality. The trans- itory illu- sion called Reason. attributes to Matter, if he may attribute to it the rational acts and moral experience of a human body ? One asks in reply, what the materialist who argues thus means by Matter ? It must mean more than molecular motion. But the molecularly constituted " deity " of Universal Materialism has, it seems, caused, at one stage in the de- velopment of man, what are discovered to be illusions under later evolved conceptions to which the laws of nature are now automatically conducting scientific men conceptions, too, which may in their turn be all as naturally dissolved, later on in the progressive evolution. Amongst those illusory natural products may hereafter come to be included the moral ideas which presuppose the importance of the race of man, as compared, say, with a race of animalcules, and the ethical presuppositions from which men infer the need for individual sacrifice on be- half of the race, for the sake of a longer survival of the whole. Conscience begins to appear as an artificial device for the prolongation of the race : it was naturally generated at that inferior stage in the history of the molecules at which human organisms were naturally induced to claim a unique dignity and importance. But scientific disinter- estedness — itself a physical sequence, on occasion of certain molecular motions— comes afterwards to see that the man and the reptile are alike insignificant, being both the transitory outcome of universal physical law. To call an agent in a distinctive sense "moral" or "spiritual," is to apply a misleading predicate; for the "agency" can be only the physical law under which a certain condition of the human brain is constantly accompanied by the delusion that love and will and conscience are somehow superior to brain, or to the molecules on which all ultimately depends. For it is a natural law that, at a certain stage in its evolution, the organism which consti- tutes man becomes what we call ethical, and subject to the delusion that man is free to struggle against evil. But more than dissolution of morality would follow from premisses which yield a wholly molecular solution of the problem of self-conscious life in a molecular uni- verse ; _if indeed any conclusion about anything could be UNIVERSAL MATERIALISM. 61 consistently drawn in such a universe. For reason itself — reason to which science is wont to appeal as the supreme tribunal — is transformed into one of the innumerable transitory issues of purposeless organic conditions. In- telligence, with science as its product, and conscience, with morality as its product, come to be conceived as only transitory natural outcomes of molecular conditions. The thinking and observing processes themselves — those processes through which the materialist finds that con- scious mind, in all its states, is virtually molecules in motion — are only a part of the molecular process. Human intelligence and human conscience are only modes of the ephemeral phenomena to which the molecular universe, in its eternal tlux of molecules and a^o-resrates of molecules, CO o ' is supposed to be giving birth, at different stages in the course of its evolution. Its verified inferences, as well as its unproved hypotheses, are all alike transitory illusions ; — if we are not allowed to presuppose in the primary data more than molecules that seem under certain conditions to transform themselves into self-conscious life. And thus Monism, at least in the form of Universal Material- ism, itself disappears, along with conscious intelligence, in the abyss of Universal Nescience. Can we accept, as a solution of the universe, and of man Are science as a part of it, this, which asks us habitually to think of ^if e ^tli the whole as finally purposeless molecular aggregation and issues of motion, wherein intelligence and conscience are transi- lno j t ; cu i ar tory issues, but which, in the final darkness of Universal Materialism, can, while they last, put in no claim to deter- mine the interpretation of the whole ? Can what is commonly meant by Matter consistently claim this final universality and supremacy ? We shall consider what invisible consciousness has to say for itself, when thus confronted, in this remote corner, by a universe of only molecules and molecular sequences. 62 LECTURE II. PANEGOISM. The exag- Human organisms and their self-conscious life appear, at geration of tne ^ { n ^ f v i ew f atomism or moleculism, to be only versai Ma- part, and a very insignificant part, of the transitory terialist. natural issue of the universe of molecules in motion. They emerge for a time in a remote and petty corner of immensity, under those particular physical conditions which are found to give rise to a conscious organism. Mind — matter transformed into consciousness, according to materialism — is one among innumerable other trans- formations which molecules temporarily undergo ; not in itself more significant than any other of the many sorts of quantitative difference, in size, shape, or arrangement, of molecules and molecular masses, on which conscious life, as well as all the other qualities of things, are, on this conception of existence, assumed to depend. Simi- larly as fire differs from water, and water from gold, on account of supposed differences in the size, shape, motion, and consistency of their respective constituent molecules, — differences which might be described with precision if one could construct microscopes powerful enough to re- veal them, — so, on the same condition, those special characteristics of molecular organisation which give rise to consciousness, when they happen to become actual, might in like manner be observed in detail. This is the universe of the materialist, as it rises in imagina- tion, when the datum of a material world is taken by philosophy as the one final datum. PANEGOISM. 6 3 But has the percipient and self-conscious life by which What of man is characterised, with its scientific and moral out- the eg0 • come, which has started up in this remote planetary corner of the material world, nothing more than this to say for itself? The invisible self-conscious Ego does not so soon force The exag- itself upon attention as the boundless and endless world f^fix-st ° f of outward things presented to the senses does. At least postulate. the Ego does not obtrude itself upon the unreflecting as f c t cur + h exclusively entitled to be called real. Its assumed real- that of the ity seems instead to resolve into transitory modes of the second « solid and extended organisms presented to the senses, lieflection upon conscious life follows in the wake of spontaneous consciousness ; for thought must have appro- priate experience, in the form of spiritual states already passed through, before it begins to express spiritual life in terms of science, or to see the immense philosophical significance of living Mind. "The baby new to earth and sky. What time his tender palm is prest Against the circle of the breast, Has never thought that this is ' I.' But as he grows, he gathers much, And learns the use of ' 1 5 and ' me, And finds I am not what I see, And other than the things I touch ; So rounds he to a separate mind, From whence clear memory may begin." Or again — " Dark is the world to thee : thyself art the reason why ; For is He not all, but thou, that has power to feel ' I am I ? ' " Accordingly outward things are apt to be exaggerated The out- into the one final form of existence sooner than the in- fo^Jf 1118 " dividual and invisible ego. In the early stages of man's into the history he is more ready to suppose that consciousness can linv:ui1 - be refunded into the universe of outward things, than that the universe of outward things can be refunded into his 64 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. own self-conscious perceptions. We are all in our childish years more or less materialists. And we find the material- ist point of view the favourite one in the childhood of the race of man. In early Hellenic speculation Socrates awoke the sense of individuality and personality. But it was with the rise of Christianity that the idea of the individual person unfolded into moral distinctness. The Christian Fathers found something in a self-conscious person that was inadequately expressed in the Hellenic and Eoman thought of the pre-Christian world. " Great is the revelation given in memory," one finds Augustine exclaiming in his 'Confessions,' — "great is memory, in all its depth and manifold intensity; the strange reality revealed in it is my mind ; and my mind is myself. Fear and amazement overcome me when I think of this. Yet men go abroad to gaze upon mountains and waves, broad rivers, wide oceans, and the courses of the stars, and over- look themselves, the crowning wonder." In the thousand years after Augustine one finds many utterances in har- mony with this. And the supreme significance of the Ego survived the modern reaction against scholastic thought. In the new conceptions of the universe and the ultimate meaning of life which struggled into existence in the mind of Descartes, the watchword was — Cogito ergo sum : Ego sum cogitans. Ego was the one essential fact.^ Not atoms but ego was taken as the primary element in the universe. His own invisible self is what is nearest to each person, and his world is the world which depends upon his consciousness. This was the starting-point or birth of the new philosophic spirit, which so strenuously asserted itself in the seventeenth century. The more this invisible fact is pondered, the more one seems to see the dependence of the universe on it. So the Ego— conscious and percipient — comes by degrees to absorb outward things, converting an otherwise illusory outwardness into real inwardness. Like Actseon, changed into the stag, and then torn to pieces by his hounds on Mount Cithaeron, the once too obtrusive world of molecules is at last swal- lowed up in the world of one's own conscious life or per- sonality. PANEGOISM. 65 When one takes his own living consciousness, recog- Conscioi nised as the universe of his experience, for the philosophi- y%l he f cal point of view — instead of quantities of molecules in reality. space, and molecular changes in time — the final con- ception of the universe undergoes a radical transforma- tion ; and the new conception of reality seems deeper and truer than the old one. Conscious life in me — conscious life wherever it arises — no longer looks like an ephemeral and insignificant accident, that somehow, through a con- course of molecules, has happened to make its appearance on this planet in this era of its history. I seem now un- able to suppose that percipient conscious life in me, and in other possible egos, might all cease for ever, and yet that, after its extinction, the aggregates of molecules in their molecular masses, with all their properties, might continue to exist as they did before its extinction. Percipient life seems now to be able to say for itself, that it is the one paramount necessity — the one indispensable condition — of reality, and of the changes and sequences that oc- cur in what is really. The introduction of active and per- cipient consciousness into existence looks like the intro- duction of light into a dark room, that is in consequence distinguished by the beauty and variety which it presents. In the darkness the forms and colours that emerge were virtually unreal. The brilliant spectacle becomes real only when the lamp is carried into the dark chamber. If light had never existed, or if it were now to be suddenly and for ever annihilated throughout the universe, the vis- ible glories of earth and sky, as well as of the darkened room, would all cease to be real : and if light had never existed, they would never have existed, as we now see them ; for they were realised through the command, " Let there be light." So with the material world all realised through the percipient ego, which thus seems to show itself the unit of the universe. " Let there be a percipient ego," and all becomes the reality that we perceive. The reflec- tive thinker tries in vain to realise the material world — the universe of molecules and their a£o-reo;ates — after all conscious life has been withdrawn from the universe. 66 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. The fate of an unper- ceived material world. Consider what would become of the world that is re- vealed in vision and touch — the world which is the object of daily interest to every human being — which is the means, when scientifically interpreted, of* advancing man's comfort, and on which society and civilisation depend ; — what would become of this solid and expanded world — of all the physical and natural sciences too, and even of materialism itself as the living philosophy of a conscious "being — if the Ego were withdrawn, and conscious reason were for ever extinct. Intellec- tual suicide. For one thing, all intelligible experience of outward things, including the philosophy which teaches that exist- ence is all molecular, itself depends on what is inward. All science is dependent on conscious life, which, as felt, is not a visible molecule or mass of molecules. The perceptions and coherent inferences, of which living know- ledge of external things consists, are indispensable even for "the construction of the universal materialism in which man looks so insignificant. But for conscious life in this little corner of the universe, or elsewhere, the whole world of outward things would be for ever unrealised. If the persons who are percipient of the things that move in space, and who by reasoning combined with observation discover natural laws, are found, in the progress of their own discoveries, to be themselves, in the last resort, only transitory issues of unintelligent and unintelligible Matter, this materialistic philosophy of theirs must, like all that depends upon faculties so produced, be unworthy of trust. Human science is discredited in the degradation of the human beings in whom it is converted into an accident of the universal flux. For sciences and philosophy are then only accidents in the history of human organisms, which, in this era of molecular evolution, happen to have been formed on this little planet. The supposed discovery that the whole is ultimately only continuous mechanical motion of atoms, without moral guarantee in a divine natural order, discredits every pretended discovery. Un- less there is that in the universe which is more than evolution of matter into organisms — when "matter" PANEGOISM. 67 means only phenomena as presented in sense — there can be no valid science, no valid materialist philosophy. The testimony given by a human adventurer to the fact that he has been cast up inexplicably, in a succession of the molecular changes which are the only ultimate reality, and who thinks that he sees scientifically that all con- scious life must sooner or later disappear, is testimony which, under such conditions, can neither be vindicated nor refuted. The issue is a literally unutterable scepticism about everything. The key which pretended to open the secret of reality has been taken away in the very act of using it. Universal Materialism is intellectual suicide. Larger and deeper human experience seems to involve A con- a continual protest against this. The supposition that Bcio ™ eg0 intelligence is essentially molecular is found to be in- than a adequate, if not self-contradictory, philosophy. Modern u » iverse science of outward things, of which man is justly proud, scions as among the most signal of his conquests, becomes only tnin gs. one among innumerable other sorts of accidental and temporary modification of atomic movement ; culminating in the discovery of the irrelevancy and insignificance of the conscious reason that is the apparent instrument of the discoveries. Eealisation, in the form of living thought, of the mechanical law of gravitation, or of the still more comprehensive biological law of natural evolution — in- cluding evolution of those scientific discoveries themselves — surely implies, in the final constitution of the universe, something deeper than an originally unconscious and acci- dental concurrence of atoms. We are reminded of the sentiment of Pascal. Physically, man is a petty transitory organism. When we measure its size and duration, and compare this with the Immensities and the Eternities, man is insignificant indeed. A vapour, or a drop of water, is found enough to compass his destruction. Yet even if the illimitable material world were to employ for the destruction of men all the molecular forces that are supposed to belong to its atoms, there is still that in man which is more noble than the matter by which the human organisms would be destroyed, greater, too, than the dis- solved organism. For the man would be conscious of his 68 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. What do we meau when we affirm the real exist- ence of matter or molecules ? fate ; while the material universe would be unconscious of its victory. The true office and standing of man in the universe is to be read, not in the quantity of space that his body is seen to fill; nor in the period of time during which the physical evolution of which his body is the ephemeral issue has been going on — but in the invisible life, actively percipient and self-conscious, which emerges. Invisible egos are therefore superior to aggregates of molecules, however vast in size. The Ego is greater than the whole material world, when it is abstracted from all percipient life: it is greater than all the objects that can be pre- sented to the senses ; because the ego is conscious and active, while things presented to sense are known only as powerless and unconscious masses. The Panegoist, in short, raises a question which Univer- sal Materialism overlooks. He asks what the word matter ultimately means, when the word is rightly used. What is meant by the real existence of a molecule, or an aggre- gate of molecules, or by the reality of things in motion ? What is meant by the outwardness of a thing, or the external existence of a thing? By questions like these we bring into light the deity of materialism. We begin to see that there is more than we had supposed in per- ception of things. There is here a chasm, which the history of philosophical inquiry suggests the difficulty of bridging,— a chasm between living perceptions, which suc- ceed one another in the absolute privacy of one's own conscious life, and, on the other hand, solid and extended things, molecules and masses of molecules — crudely sup- posed to exist as one now sees them and touches them, whether or not there exists in the universe any percipient who is seeing or touching. The things called " outward," and supposed to be independent of all percipient life, in the absence of all percipients lose their qualities ; for these are no longer realised by the living factor of reality. They disappear as empty abstractions, when all percipient life is withdrawn ; so that one is led to ask whether an aggregate of molecules, or even a single molecule, could continue to exist in the way it now appears to our senses to do, after the extinction of all life in the universe, PANEGOISM. 69 Again. When one speaks of external things, he must The human include among them the minute organism which he calls ^Sd the his own body — that which, for the materialist, is the self-con- whole man. It is an object the local insignificance of J^JJSC which, among the other contents of space and duration, part of the signifies to a materialistic imagination the insignificance ^J^jJ of man, as an item in the universe. For one's own body se nse. is a part of the material world. Even though it is called " living matter," it is still, like all other space-occupying things, external to the private self of consciousness. When it is seen in this light, the thought occurs that no sufficient reason can be produced to show that conscious life must be embodied life, although ours is embodied. Is that fact a reason which forbids the supposition that I may pass through all the different sorts of sentient or mental experience of which I have been conscious since I was born, without being embodied ? Why may I not have the mental experience called seeing, or that other sort called touching, without my present visual and tactual organs, or even without an organism of gross molecular matter? Our senses, too, might conceivably have been other than they are — more numerous, and thus present- ing outward things clothed in qualities now absolutely unimaginable by man; or less numerous, in which case much that normally constituted men can now perceive and imagine would be unimaginable. Of this last we have examples in human beings who are born blind, and to whom words expressive of visual ideas to us who see are meaningless. For aught we know, there may be per- cipient beings in some other corner of the universe who are each destitute of all our external senses, and endowed with five or five hundred other sorts of senses, each different in kind from any of ours. If so, what means " matter " in their perception and conception of it ? It can have none of the qualities which we refer to the things we call outward ; and it must have five, or five hundred, sorts of properties, all of which a human being would be as unable to imagine as the born-blind man is to imagine scarlet — a quality which Locke's blind friend pictured as something like the sound of a trumpet. 70 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. The pro- But we must return from conjectures to facts. It nSterdis- ^ as been customary to distinguish the properties of bodies tinguished as of two sorts — those, which are essential to body, as primary deprived of which it would not be named matter ; and tative, and those, on the other hand, which might disappear with- secondary ou ^ its ceasing to be called matter. The first sort are orimpu e ' primary properties of matter; the others are called secondary properties. In their primary or essential at- tributes, bodies — whether large or small — are space- occupying : they are movable solids : they can be for- mulated mechanically, in terms of mathematical quan- tity. The secondary properties, again, are those which invest bodies with their chief human interest. They are those in virtue of which they are of practical importance to man — their hardness or softness, their heat or cold, their colours, sounds, odours, and tastes — all which, as distinguished from the former sort, are especially called qualities; — for the others are quantities rather than qualities. In fact, on the molecular final conception of existence, the original atoms were supposed to be quanti- ties only, without qualitative differences ; and the in- numerable differences which we observe in the secondary qualities commonly imputed to external things were re- ferred to quantitative differences too minute to be seen, — differences in the shape, size, position, and motions of their constituent molecules. Democritus, the representa- tive of early materialism, argues that all the qualitative differences in external things are caused by — i.e., are physically dependent on — their quantitative molecular differences. Water, for instance, presents qualities differ- ent from iron, because its constituent molecules are round and smooth, and do not fit into one another; those of iron, on the contrary, are jagged, uneven, and densely aggregated. This conjecture of Democritus reappears in Descartes and Locke ; with the cautious qualification in the case of Locke — that if the qualities imputed to out- ward things are not differenced by their dependence, on quantitative relations of their constituent molecules, they must at last depend upon something more mysterious. Now, looking in the first place only at the secondary PANEG01NM. VI properties of the material world, it is obvious that they Obvious depend upon sentient and percipient life. We cannot o|^g dence even imagine taste or smell existing externally, in the secondary absence of all sentient intelligence, except by reading ^pon^Lr- them in terms of the non-resembling molecules and molec- cipient. ular motions of which they are supposed to be the cor- relatives. The atoms of which fire is composed have themselves no sensation of heat, like that which I have when I approach fire. But if the mental sensation is abstracted, what remains that is at all imaginable, to con- stitute the meaning of the word heat, except motion among aggregates of molecules ? Heat is necessarily read in terms of motion, when it is imagined as something ex- ternal. When I cease to read it in terms of felt sensation of heat, I must read it, if I read it at all, in terms of molec- ular motion. An orange becomes virtually colourless in the dark, and must lose odour and taste, when sensuous perception ceases : the residuary issue is a mass of col- ourless, inodorous, tasteless molecules. Analysis of the properties of bodies in this way obliges us to strip the material world of all its secondary and interesting qual- ities ; — except so far as they can be translated, in terms of the atomic motions of which they are the correlatives. And physical science has not discovered all the varieties of molecular motion which, on the hypothesis of molecular correlation, correspond, under natural law, to the innumer- able varieties of secondary qualities. But the subordination of the world to the percipient Depen- ego, it may be argued at the point of view of Panegoism, ^^ se does not stop here. The process is not arrested when it of solid has stripped molecules and their aggregates of all that JJJJgjjJj^ gives them human interest. It may be further argued qualities, that the aggregates of molecules, and the molecules them- onper- selves, become empty inconceivable abstractions, after they m i lu i. have been stripped of their interesting qualities, and are left to exist in an unresistant, colourless, silent, inodorous, and tasteless condition, neither cold nor hot. For the chief primary property of things — occupancy of space — is itself dependent upon sensations or feelings — with which it is blended so inextricably that we cannot imagine a 72 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. Molecules thus be- come emp- ty abstrac- tions, and things re- solve into feelings. colourless mass of extended matter. An extended thing without any secondary qualities cannot be imagined as an outward or material thing at all. Strip things of all the qualities which really depend upon a percipient, and after that no perceptible qualities remain. But this subtraction of all their properties is practically the sub- traction of matter ; therefore matter cannot have real existence independently of all percipient life. At the most, only an unqualified and unqualified something re- mains, of which nothing can be either affirmed or denied, — an empty negation, not worth taking into account as a primary datum. If all the properties of material things are in this way proved to be dependent upon living perception, the common but confused supposition that some of them exist externally — meaning by that independently of all percipi- ent life, may be argued by the extreme Panegoist to be contrary to reason. Matter is realised, or brought into actual existence, by the sentient ego, through whose felt experience it becomes what we find it to be. The uni- verse, the Panegoist argues, cannot be finally a universe of independent molecules: it is finally the independent ego ; — with molecules, aggregates of molecules, and their qualities, all sustained in the conscious experience of the ego. Accordingly, one who looks upon the universe at the panegoistic point of view sees in the whole material world — stars, their planets, this planet with all its visible and tangible contents, including our own bodies — only inward experiences, proceeding in an established order which enables us to foresee other inward experi- ences still future, — all which orderly universe within the mind would necessarily become extinct with the extinc- tion of the percipient life of the ego, on which the whole is practically suspended. Our final conception of the world, and of what reality means, is even more deeply transformed in this intrepid Panegoism, than was the old-fashioned an- thropocentric conception by the modern discoveries of the astronomer. Instead of an external flux of variously qualified things, in orderly motion in space, the universe becomes a flux of orderly ideas and feelings, in the history PANEGOISM. 73 of my conscious ego. In this transformation scene my conscious life is the final supposition — not the starry heaven, with its molecular occupants, in the immensity of an independent space. Nothing now appears in the universe of existence but conscious mind; and the only mind of which I am conscious is my own. At this panegoistical point of view, a transformation Thecon- in the materialist ideas of causality and power is like- ^^ wise going on. For the Ego is found on reflection to outward be a power, more deeply and truly than molecules, or J^gf also aggregates of molecules, are perceived to be powers. In formed in recognising one's self as a moral agent, one finds that he Panegoism. is obliged to acknowledge more in moral agency than sense reveals in the "agency" of molecules and their masses. In outward nature, per se, all that is presented is phe- nomena, followed by, or changed into, other phenomena, — a continuous procession of caused causes — an endless orderly procession of passive metamorphoses — each term in the procession the passive subject of a rule ; but with- out innate activity being found in any of the units of the series, in the way self-originated power is found by con- science in my agency. For conscience obliges me to recog- nise myself as the final agent in all changes which evoke the feeling and conviction of remorse. The moral and immoral acts of the Ego thus differ in kind from caused causes in external nature. None of them are known to be agents that originate their own acts, as I am found by conscience to be, when I am judged to be the creator of an act for which I blame myself. Under this deeper conception of power, outward things are agents only meta- phorically : they are empty of real efficiency. So power proper comes to be regarded as that in which change originates ; not that which is only a constant antecedent under a natural rule, which a priori one has no reason to suppose might not have been different. The physically scientific conception of causality, as continuous sequence of appearances, is seen to be thin and shallow. Instead of matter and its forces explaining everything, they really explain nothing : all the conditions of change under gravi- 74 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. Matter only a system of interpret tation, and the still wider law of evolution, themselves need to be explained ; and the only light we have for ex- planation comes from morally responsible agency. Exter- nal things are agents only metaphorically : the ego alone is originative. In this way, instead of being an aggregate of material agents, to each of which certain issues may be finally re- ferred, the world that is unfolded to our five senses pre- abie sense sen ts only aggregates of passive sense appearances, called sensible things. These are related to one another, not as an agent is connected with effects which originate abso- lutely in himself, but as constant antecedents of events yet future, which they passively signify to us in a prac- tical way, because they are in constant connection with them. What are called causes in the material world are only premonitors, which warrant men in expecting the changes they are believed to signify. They are the ap- pointed forerunners of events, for which they prepare those who are able to interpret them. The world pre- sented to sense is conceived as a cosmos, only because it is conceived to be this system of interpretable sense signs : it is interpretable because certain sorts of its presented appearances are found in constant sequence with certain other sorts : faith in this constancy makes men infer that when an instance of the one sort appears, an instance of the other sort may be expected. The material world becomes transformed, under this conception, into a system of passive sense signs ; and we find that we are able to interpret usefully phenomena which signify coming plea- sure, and others which signify coming pain. The Pan- egoist uni- verse. At the point of view of Panegoism, the universe is born and dies with the person who experiences it ; and the only person of whose existence I am conscious is myself. Matter and God are absorbed and lost in Me. The solitary Ego, as the only datum, reduces human experience to absurdity, if not to contradiction. Unlike Universal Materialism and Pantheism, Panegoism is a form of Monism which can hardly lay claim to a historical exist- ence, although some highly speculative minds seem to have PANEGOISM. To boldly accepted it, as the logical issue of their analysis of the three primary data. But its exaggerations at least help to illustrate the subordinate office of Matter in the universe of existence, and its true relation to Spirit in human experience, in which the visible world appears as the servant of the invisible mind, having this for its chief end. It is chiefly as an aid to reflection upon the absurdity of dominant Materialism that I have enlarged upon Panegoism. I turn now to the third primary datum, in order to Another ponder- its adequacy to the demands of reason and experi- alternatlve - ence, when it is taken to supersede the other two. May the final intellectual and moral satisfaction desired by the philosopher be found, when God is assumed as the only reality, and when we think of Matter and the Ego as only illusory modes of God ? This third phase of philosophical Monism will be next considered. 76 LECTUEE III. PANTHEISM. Retrospect. Let me recall the train of thought thus far. At the outset I put before you my conception of the divine or universal problem with which one is concerned, when engaged with " Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term." It is the supreme problem of human life in the world in which man awakes into consciousness. That what is experienced exists, is what most of us take for granted : this primary faith is illustrated whenever things and persons are presented to us in space and time. But a guarantee is needed for the final moral and intellectual trustworthiness of experience, in the ever-changing uni- verse in which I find myself. I have entered it as a stranger and involuntarily, and when I look around I ask — What sort of universe is this ? May I look at it with trust and hope, as an orderly system ? or must I resign myself to final distrust and despair? What am I, who have become self-conscious and percipient; and for what purpose am I in this conscious life ? In what, or in whom, am I at this moment living and moving and having my being ? These are questions in which the final problem of existence is raised ; they are questions with which philosophy and religion are con- cerned in common. Philosophy culminates in answers to them : religion presupposes a practical answer. Keligion does not, indeed, involve a complete solution of infinite problems by the intellect. For religion is a moral re- lation of thought, emotion, and will to a finally divine PANTHEISM. 77 environment ; and this remains good although the divine reality is incompletely comprehensible in a human under- standing. A religious life of adoration and moral trust is not only consistent with, but involves recognition of, ultimate mystery — mystery to which reasoning, in ab- straction from the moral and emotional elements in human nature, is inadequate. Does not the highest philosophy take the form of religious confidence that man need not be put to intellectual or moral confusion in the end ? So much regarding the problem of Natural or Phil- Articula- osophical Theology. Our next step was to articulate it ^jfjjf 1 more definitely. There are three final existences — namely, three prim- my inner conscious Self ; the outer world of Matter, which ar y data - immediately environs me ; and God, or the universal Power. These are our three primary data. Under vari- ous conceptions of what each means, they are all tacitly assumed by mankind. For the history of man is really a record of the gradual, often interrupted, evolution of three central ideas — one's own personality — one's material environment — and Divine or Universal Power. Our con- ception of each is modified by the manner in which it is regarded in relation to the other two. For the last ques- tions regarding each cannot be raised without involving- answers to root questions about the others. In the early stages of man's development, self, or the personal factor, is only obscurely recognised. The idea of law or order in the sense environment is also dim in primitive ages, as at first in the life of every man. And the idea of God originally appeared in crude forms of fetichism and poly- theism, afterwards of interference with natural order. After these preliminaries we entered the First Part of Their re- the course, to contemplate philosophical endeavours to ^ p C Sso-° reduce the three primary data to One. With his craving phicaJ for unity, the theorist is dissatisfied when a mysterious JUJjJjj^. plurality instead of an imaginable unity is offered as istic, egois- final reality. The instinct of the speculative thinker ^ i ° t r ic pan " accordingly makes him try to reduce the three primary existences. So it comes about that some are disposed to a material unity, and take Matter as the last word about 78 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. tioued. what exists. The introspective thinker, again, exaggerates the conscious Ego, as the materialists exaggerate the visible and tangible world: he sees his surroundings dependent on the Ego; and his last word about what he is living and moving and having his being in is, that he is living and moving and having his being in himself. But neither molecules in their aggregates and organisms, nor the Ego in its successive conscious states, provides the desired unity to those who think deeply. A final reality, either in things of sense or in myself, is inconsistent with the omnipresence and omnipotence — Infinity, in a word — which must belong to the final Power. The Ego and the things by which I am surrounded accordingly lose their own reality: they are conceived as unreal modifications of One Infinite Eeality. Pantheistic Here are three ultimate conceptions of existence— that unity and mir ] er which All is resolved into a materialistic unity; aimifun- that under which All is resolved into my individual spiritual unity ; and that under which All is resolved into the Divine unity. But while each of these exagger- ations of one datum, to the exclusion of the other two, has its advocates, perhaps none of the three has ever been advocated with thoroughgoing consistency. We have already contemplated Universal Materialism and Panegoism, both of them untheistic when logical. Now we are to look at Pantheism, in which the idea of God is exclusive. Pantheism alone among the three gives the conception of absolute unity. We found modern Materialism, under the influence of sensuous imagination, ready to accept physical science as the solution of the universal problem. The physical organism is supposed to explain reason and will as manifested in self-consciousness; and natural history of the organism is substituted for introspective criticism of rational and volitional activity. The details of organic evolution, in the natural sequence of biological causation, are without doubt full of interest; but they are all irrelevant when we want to hear the final voice of reason itself. It is impossible to identify rational consciousness with what moves in space. The natural Matter as the ultimate unity. PANTHEISM. 7 9 science of the visible organism is irrelevant to theism : natural procedure is not atheistic ; nor is rational con- sciousness resolved into molecular motion, merely because it may be the natural outcome of physical conditions. I proceeded next to ask what egoistic immaterialism has The Ego to say for itself. For some of the consequences of think- g^^ ing the universe of things and persons under an ultimately unity. materialistic unity appear in a striking way, when we re- verse our point of view, and look at the universe wholly in the light of our own inward conscious life. We find that space-occupying things depend on conscious percep- tion in unexpected ways, and it is to rational conscious- ness that materialism itself necessarily appeals at last in all its own reasonings. It was chiefly to illustrate this inevitable dependence of the outward upon the inward, that I tried to make the Ego the final unity in the uni- versal system, resolving outward things and God into my subjective experience. It is true that Panegoism is hardly ever an accepted philosophical system, at least with a full concession of its logical consequences. It has been attrib- uted to Descartes, as an implicate of his method. Fichte, at a certain stage in his philosophical education, has sometimes been considered its representative. Hypo- thetically stated, it suggests a reductio ad absurdum of Universal Materialism. It reduces the only reality of the materialist to empty negation, when the light ancl life of percipient consciousness is withdrawn from existence. But Panegoism, too, is self-destructive : it shuts the ego in suicidal isolation ; because postulates of reason, which con- nect individual consciousness with what is outward and with the infinite, are, on its narrow basis, dissolved in the one datum of solitary individuality. But there is another alternative to a universe of Matter God as and also to the Ego universe. There is the recognition of JJ^-jljf 7 Infinite Being as the only possible reality. Mind and matter, in us and around us, under this conception have only illusory reality — not more or other than as transi- tory phases of One Absolute Eeality, of which the finite universe, in all its degrees, from minerals up to men, 80 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. is the necessitated illusion. The universe conceived pantheistically is the eternal involuntary evolution of Infinite Being: the being that we call "our own" is only a modification of the One Being. Atoms in their visible organisations, and the ego in its conscious states, are modes of Infinite Being, the only Substance and Power. This is pantheistic Monism, or the necessitated unity of the All. The innumerable atoms of materialism present an empirical and generic unity, rather than the necessary and infinite One. In Infinite Being alone we find unity that is logically inconsistent with real plurality; necessity that is inconsistent with real contingency; eternity that supersedes duration. Are finite Infinite Being, or the One Substance, seems, therefore, things and t0 h ave a c l a im in reason to exclusiveness which neither Kance, of the two other data can produce. God is more truly in the way substance and power, even under ordinary conceptions of iteitaBg'is what substance and power mean, than finite things and Substance? p erS ons can be. Descartes defined "substance" as that which so exists that it needs nothing else to account for or sustain its existence : what are called " created " sub- stances — bodies and egos to wit— are beings that need God for their beginning and continuance; they are, therefore, substances only in a secondary sense— what- ever that may amount to : substance proper is that which exists in itself — self - existent reality. Spinoza, more logical than Descartes, concluded from this that substance must be One, so that whatever is finite and plural can onlv be illusory. Pantheism Pantheism, in one or other of its many protean forms, in its pro- j s a way f thinking about the universe that has proved pervade? 8 its influence over millions of human minds. Looked at in the intel- one ijaht it seems to be Atheism ; in another, sentimental entuonai 1 or mystical Theism ; in a third, Calvinism. It has history of o-overned the religious and philosophical" thought of India mankind. |> or ageg Except in Palestine, with its intense Hebrew consciousness of a personal God, it has been characteristic of Asiatic thought. It is the religious philosophy of a moiety of the human race. In the West we find a pan- theistic idea at work in different degrees of distinctness— PANTHEISM. 81 in the pre-Socratic schools of Greece, as in Parmenicles ; after Socrates, among the Stoics ; then among the Neo- Platonists of Alexandria, with Plotinus in ecstatic eleva- tion — a signal representative ; again, in a striking form in Scotus Erigena, who startles us with intrepid speculation in the darkness of the ninth century, the least philosophi- cal period in European history ; yet again, with Bruno as its herald, after the renascence : and in the seventeenth century the speculative thought of Europe culminated in Spinoza's logically articulated pantheistic unity and necessity. The pantheistic conception was uncongenial to the spirit and methods of the eighteenth century, but it is at the root of much present religious and scientific speculation in Europe and America. It emerges in the superconscious intuition of Schelling : it has affinities with the absolute self-consciousness of the Hegelian : it is implied in the Absolute Will and the Unconscious Absolute of Schopenhauer and Hartmann, in Germany ; and in England it has affinity with the Unknowable Power behind phenomena of Herbert Spencer. This philosophical form of thought is older and more The word widely spread than the name now appropriated to it ; for Pantlieism - the term is of modern date. The ' Pantheisticon' of John Toland, early in last century, probably brought the word into vogue in this country, although the pantheistic idea was an exotic among us until the present century. For those now called pantheists were of old called atheists, because they seemed to identify their One Substance with the universe of Immensity, or to treat it as tertium quid — impersonal — neither matter nor mind. On the other hand, when the universe is seen strongly in dependence on Spirit, the pantheistic language used admits of monothe- istic interpretation. We find Berkeley saying in ' Siris ' that " whether God be abstracted from the sensible world, and considered as distinct from and presiding over the created system ; or whether the whole universe, including mind together with the mundane body, is conceived to be God, and the creatures to be partial manifestations of the divine essence, — there is no atheism in either case, what- ever misconception there may be ; — so long as Mind or F 82 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. Intellect is understood to preside over, govern, and con- duct the whole frame of things." This is not necessarily inconsistent with the existence of morally responsible persons. With this proviso it is not pantheism, either cosmic or acosmic. Deism. Pantheism is an ambiguous term. It is apt to be applied to theists who emphasise what distinguishes them from deists. Deism, theism, and pantheism should be dis- tinguished. Under the gross deistical conception, what is called God is imaged as existing in a place apart — determined at a certain time to create the things and persons that have appeared — these all after creation being- left by this remote Deity to supposed forces in nature — God at a distance — usually doing nothing— occasionally interfering with the natural order, by miracle or prov- idence — a wholly transcendent and alien God — an in- dividual among individuals, instead of the One Absolute Being. Pantheism The pantheistic conception is at the opposite extreme as opposed to t | ie deistical : Gocl is the ever-evolving infinite Being : individuals, or Deity modified by innate necessity, could present no other appearances than those they present in nature : finite things and persons are related to God as its waves are related to the ocean, whose surface they occasionally disturb — the waves not of a finite but of infinite ocean. But as waves are always water, even so ever-changing things and persons are always God. In Nature see nor shell nor kernel, But the All in All and the Eternal. to Deism. mediate. Theism Intermediate between the deistical conception of ^ an as inter- i