O/' 10/4 -M] RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED LONDON BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK BOSTON CHICAGO DALLAS SAN FRANCISCO THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD. TORONTO OF CALVOBHIft LOS ANGELBS RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY BY R. G. COLLINGWOOD FELLOW AND LECTURER OF PEMBROKE COLLEGE, OXFORD MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 1916 COPYRIGHT PREFACE IT was my intention to write this book as an essay in philosophy, addressed in the first instance to philosophers. But the force of circumstances has to some extent modi- fied that plan. To make of it an academic treatise, armed at all points against the criticism of the professed specialist, would require time far beyond the few years I have spent upon it. The claims of a " temporary " occupation, very different from that in which I began to write, leave no opportunity for the rewriting and careful revision which such a work demands, and I had set it aside to await a period of greater leisure. But the last year has seen a considerable output of books treating of religion from a philosophic or intellectual rather than either a dogmatic or a devotional point of view ; and I believe that this activity corresponds to a widespread reawakening of interest in that aspect of religion among persons not specially trained in techni- cal philosophy or theology. In the hope of making some small contribution to this movement, I venture to publish this book as it stands. No one can be more conscious than myself of its shortcomings ; that they are not far greater is largely vi RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY due to the patience with which certain friends, especi- ally E. F. Carritt, F. A. Cockin, and S. G. Scott have read and criticised in detail successive versions of the manuscript. It must not be supposed, however, that they are in agreement with all my views. 69 CHURCH STREET, KENSINGTON, W. July 30, 1916. CONTENTS P INTRODUCTION . . . . . ' x PART I THE GENERAL NATURE OF RELIGION CHAPTER I RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY ..... 1. The intellectual element in all Religion (creed). Anti- intellectual theories of Religion : (a) Religion as Ritual. (6) Religion as Conduct. (c) Religion as Feeling. 2. Identity of creed with Theology. 3. Identity of creed with Philosophy : (a) Negation of a special Philosophy of Religion. (b) Identity of Religion and Philosophy. (c) The supposed irreligious elements in Science. CHAPTER II RELIGION AND MORALITY . . . - . i. The existence of a practical content in all Religion. Contra- dictory views : (a) An historical argument. (b) An anthropological argument. (c) Religious determinism. (d) Antinomianism. (e) Quietism. vii viii RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY 2. The mutual dependence of thought and action : (a) Action always presupposes thought. (b) Thought always presupposes will. 3. The identity of thought and action : (a) Religious expression of this identity in the term "love." (b) Criticisms of the ordinary distinction. (c) The identity does not destroy real differences between different kinds of life. CHAPTER III RELIGION AND HISTORY . . . . -37 i. One-sided historical views of Religion (historical positivism): (a) Psychology and Comparative Religion. (b) History of Dogma or of the Church. z. Anti-historical views : (a) Anti-historical scepticism. (b) Dualism of History and Philosophy. 3. The mutual dependence of Philosophy and History : (a) History depends upon Philosophy. (b) Philosophy depends upon History. 4. The identity of Philosophy and History. 5. Application to Religion : doctrine cannot be severed from its historical setting. PART II RELIGION AND METAPHYSICS CHAPTER I ON PROVING THE EXISTENCE OF GOD . co i. Theology must prove the existence of God : (a) Attempt to evade this difficulty by the analogy of physics. () Physics proves the existence not of matter in the abstract, but of this or that kind of matter ; this proof, in fact, is physics itself. (f) In the same way theology has to prove not the exist- ence of any and every God, but of some particular God. CONTENTS 2. The traditional Theistic Proofs : (a) They are not the illicit product of thought in bondage to authority, but serious philosophical arguments. (b) Their method is reasonable and inevitable. 3. Scheme of the remaining Chapters of Part II. CHAPTER II MATTER ....... 72 1. The dualism of Matter and Mind : (a) Not satisfactory as a working hypothesis. (b) Interaction between the two is impossible. (c) They cannot be distinguished. 2. Materialism : (a) Materialism derives no support whatever from physics. (b) The paradox of causation : i. Nothing is a cause or an effect except a total state of the universe, ii. The explanation given by causal methods is either a tautology or an infinite regress, iii. Nothing is ever explained at all unless it is first assumed that the universe, though material, can cause its own states, i.e. is not subject to the law of causation. 3. Materialism and Idealism (or Immaterialism) : (a) The scientist's objection to Idealism : uniformity. (b) The plain man's objection : objectivity. (c) Idealism and the higher Materialism. CHAPTER III PERSONALITY . . . . . .96 1. The identity of persons with each other : (a) In communication. (b) In co-operation. 2. Identity and difference : (a) This identity rests on, does not destroy, the freedom of the various wills concerned. (b) Nor does it destroy the infinite differences of truths and aims. 3. Abstract and concrete identity : (a) The necessary identity of parts in a whole, distinct as abstract identity from the concrete (contingent) iden- tity above described. RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY () Importance of this distinction in philosophy or religion. An "Absolute," or a God, must be concrete. (c) A perfectly good and wise God is conceivable, but it seems necessary to conceive him as finite, i.e. qua God non-existent. This is the Problem of Evil. CHAPTER IV EVIL ....... 1. Statement of the problem : (a) The problem not peculiar to religion ; it is a philo- sophical problem, and therefore not insoluble. (b) Subordinate questions : i. Pain. ii. How does evil arise ? iii. What is evil ? Failure to answer this question ; how far fatal to the inquiry. 2. Some inadequate views of evil : (a] As non-existent. (6) As a finite point of view : i. Morality relative to the social system, ii. " Goodness " not the only value, iii. Sceptical theory of knowledge. (c) As means to good. (d) As merely negative. (e) As a superseded phase of evolution. 3. The main problem : (a) The elimination of error by truth. (A) The elimination of evil by good. PART III FROM METAPHYSICS TO THEOLOGY CHAPTER I THE SELF-EXPRESSION OF GOD IN MAN . . .147 i. The Person of the Christ in relation to God : (a) The two senses of identity : (i.) the abstract identity of every man with God ; (ii.) the concrete identity of thought and will in the Christ. CONTENTS xi PAGE (/>) Objection, that the infinite cannot be completely mani- fested in the finite. Criticism. (c) Objection, that such a person would be like God only, not divine. Criticism. (d} Objection, that to appear as human, God must undergo "self -limitation." Criticism. Omnipotence and omniscience ; their nature. The Christ in relation to Man : (a) The complete reality of his manhood, i.e. his personal human individuality. (b) His complete unification with his disciples. (c) His union with fellow-workers not nominally disciples. The Christ as unique, universal and all-inclusive : (a) Objection from pantheism, that there are infinite sides to God's nature. Criticism. (b) Objection from logic, that every particular equally dis- plays the universal. Criticism. (c) The historical uniqueness of Christ. (d) As the absolute experience he summarises all reality and all history. The problem of immortality. CHAPTER II GOD'S REDEMPTION OF MAN .... 169 1 . The contradictory duties of Punishment and Forgiveness : (a) Forgiveness cannot be dismissed as an illusion. (b) Neither can punishment : i. Breakdown of revenge theory, ii. Breakdown of deterrent theory. (c) The contradiction is absolute. 2. The solution of the contradiction : (a) Further analysis of punishment. (b) Identity of punishment and forgiveness. (<:) Empirical distinction between them. 3. The conception of redemption : (a) Objectively as grace of God. (b) Subjectively as effort of man. (f) Identity of the two sides. 4. The principle of vicarious penitence : (a) Its reality in the mind of God. (b) Its mediation through man. xii RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY CHAPTER III PACK MIRACLE . ... 194 1. The common definition, God's interference with Nature. General objections to such a dualism, philosophical and theological : (a) The common definition denies God by implication. (b) It also denies Nature. 2. Two possible methods of escape from the dualism : (a) Nature the sole reality. Miracle now defined as emer- gence of a higher law. This conception inconsistent with the idea of Nature and law. (b) God the sole reality. Miracle now defined as one special type of divine activity : i. e.g. abnormal as opposed to normal. Criticism of the ideas of normality and of a normative code of conduct. Rules of conduct either empty or not true ; valueless in proportion to agent's perfection. ii. Immediate as opposed to mediate. This is neither a tenable distinction nor a relevant one. 3. The conception of miracle as a separate category abandoned : (a) This agrees with the religious view of life and is necessi- tated by the fact of human freedom. (b) It does not conflict with the uniformity of Nature as rightly understood : for i. Mind shows the same uniformity as nature, and uniformity does not prove determinism, ii. Uniformity is relative to the point of view ; where superficial knowledge sees identity and mono- tony only, deeper knowledge sees differentiation and freedom. INDEX ... .215 INTRODUCTION THIS book is the result of an attempt to treat the Christian creed not as dogma but as a critical solution of a philosophical problem. Christianity, in other words, is approached as a philosophy, and its various doctrines are regarded as varying aspects of a single idea which, according to the language in which it is expressed, may be called a metaphysic, an ethic, or a theology. This attempt has been made so often already that no apology is needed for making it again. Every modern philosophy has found in Christianity, consciously or unconsciously, the touchstone by which to test its power of explanation. And conversely, Christian theology has always required the help of current philosophy in stating and expounding its doctrines. It is only when philosophy is at a standstill that the rewriting of theology can, for a time, cease. But before embarking on the main argument it seemed desirable to ask whether such an argument is really necessary : whether it is right to treat Christianity as a philosophy at all, or whether such a treatment, so far from being the right one, really misses the centre and heart of the matter. Is religion really a philosophy? May it not be that the philosophy which we find associated with Christianity (and the same applies to Buddhism or Mohammedanism) is not Christianity itself but an alien growth, the projection into religion of the philosophy of those who have tried to understand it ? xiv RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY According to this view, religion is itself no function of the intellect, and has nothing to do with philosophy. It is a matter of temperament, of imagination, of emotion, of conduct, of anything but thought. If this view is right, religion will still be a fit and necessary object of philosophic study ; but that study will be placed on quite a different footing. For if Christianity is a philosophy, every Christian must be, within the limits of his power, a philosopher : by trying to understand he advances in religion, and by intellectual sloth his religion loses force and freshness. Above all, if Christianity is a philosophy, it makes a vital difference whether it is true ; whether it is a philosophy which will stand criticism and can face other philosophies on the field of controversy. On the other hand, if religion is a matter of tempera- ment, then there are no Christian truths to state or to criticise : what the religious man must cultivate is not intellectual clearness, but simply his idiosyncrasy of temperament ; and what he must avoid is not looseness of thought and carelessness of the truth, but anything which may dispel the charmed atmosphere of his devotions. If Christianity is a dream, the philosopher may indeed study it, but he must tread lightly and forbear to publish the results of his inquiry, lest he destroy the very thing he is studying. And for the plain religious man to philosophise on his own religion is suicide. How can the subtleties of temperament and atmosphere survive the white light of philosophical criticism ? It is clearly of the utmost importance to answer this question. If religion already partakes of the nature of philosophy, then to philosophise upon it is to advance in it, even if, as often happens, philosophy brings doubt in its train. He knows little of his own religion who fears losing his soul in order to find it. But if religion is not concerned with truth, then to learn the truth about religion, to philosophise upon it, is no part of a INTRODUCTION xv religious man's duties. It is a purely professional task, the work of the theologian or the philosopher. These issues have been raised in the First Part of this book, and it may be well to anticipate in outline the conclusions there advanced. In the first place, religion is undoubtedly an affair of the intellect, a philosophical activity. Its very centre and foundation is creed, and every creed is a view of the universe, a theory of man and the world, a theory of God. If we examine primitive religions, we shall find, as we should expect, that their views of the universe are primitive ; but none the less they are views of the universe. They may be rudimentary philosophies, but they are philosophies. Secondly, religion is not, as philosophy is generally supposed to be, an activity of the "mere" intellect. It involves not only belief but conduct, and conduct governed by ideals or moral conduct. Religion is a system of morality just as much as a system of philo- sophical doctrines. Here, again, systems vary : the savage expresses a savage morality in his religion, but it is a morality ; the civilised man's religion, as he becomes more civilised, purges itself of savage elements and expresses ideals which are not yet revealed to the savage. Thirdly, the creed of religion finds utterance not only in philosophy but in history. The beliefs of a Christian concern not only the eternal nature of God and man, but certain definite events in the past and the future. Are these a true part of religion at all ? could not a man deny all the historical clauses in the Creed and still be in the deepest sense a perfect Christian ? or be a true Moslem while denying that Mohammed ever lived ? The answer given in Chapter III. is that no such distinction can be drawn. Philosophy and history, the eternal and the temporal, are not irrelevant to one another. It may be that certain historical beliefs have in the past been, or are now, considered essential to orthodoxy when in fact they are not, and are even xvi RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY untrue ; but we cannot jump from this fact to the general statement that history is irrelevant to religion, any more than we can jump from the fact that certain metaphysical errors may have been taught as orthodox, to the statement that metaphysics and religion have nothing in common. A fourth question that ought to be raised concerns the relation between religion and art. The metaphorical or poetical form which is so universal a characteristic of religious literature seems at first sight worlds removed from theology's prose or the " grey in grey " of philosophy. Is the distinction between religion and theology really that between poetry and prose, meta- phorical and literal expression ? And if so, which is the higher form and the most adequately expressive of the truth ? To deal with these questions we must enter at length into the nature of poetry and prose, literal and meta- phorical expression, and the general philosophy of language. And having raised the problem, I must ask the reader's pardon for failing to deal with it. The existence of the problem must be noticed ; but its complexity and difficulty are so great that it was found impossible to treat it within the limits of a single chapter. I have accordingly omitted any detailed treatment of these questions, and can only add that I hope to make good the deficiency in a future volume. Philosophy, morality, art and history do not exhaust all the sides of human life, because no list of faculties or activities can ever, in the nature of the case, be exhaustive. They are taken as typical ; and if each is found to be necessary to religion, it is perhaps not very rash to conclude that whatever others exist are equally essential. Thus religion is not the activity of one faculty alone, but a combined activity of all elements in the mind. Is it, then, a true unity ? Must we not say, " Philosophy I know, and history I know, but religion seems to be merely a confused name for a combination of INTRODUCTION xvii activities, each of which is really distinct and separate"? Does not religion dissolve into its component elements and disappear ? No ; because the elements will not dissolve. They contain in themselves the power of natural attraction which forbids us ever to effect the separation. Or rather, each by its own internal necessity generates all the others, and cannot exist as a concrete thing till that necessity has run its course. And religion is a concrete thing, a life, an activity, not a mere faculty ; and there- fore it must consist of all at once. So far from religion decomposing into its elements, every individual element expands into a concrete fulness in which it becomes religion. " Then is there no other life than religion ? " So it would appear. Just as every man has some work- ing theory of the world which is his philosophy, some system of ideals which rule his conduct, so every one has to some degree that unified life of all the faculties which is a religion. He may be unconscious of it, just as every man is unconscious of having a philosophy before he understands what the word means, and takes the trouble to discover it ; and it may be a good or a bad religion, just as a man's system of conduct may be a good or bad morality. But the thing, in some form, is necessarily and always there ; and even the psychological accompaniments of religion though they must never be mistaken for religion itself the feeling of awe and devotion, of trust in powers greater than oneself, of loyalty to an invisible world, are by no means confined to persons gifted with the " religious temperament." " But at least," it will be replied, " that is not the way we use the word ; and you can't alter the usage of words to suit your own convenience." I am afraid we cannot escape the difficulty by any method so simple as recourse to the dictionary. The question is not what words we use, but what we mean by them. We apply the term religion to certain types of consciousness, and xviii RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY not to others, because we see in the one type certain characteristics which in the others we suppose to be absent. Further investigation shows that the character- istic marks of religion, the marks in virtue of which we applied the term, are really present in the others also, though in a form which at first evaded recognition. To refuse to extend the term on the ground that you have never done so before is as if one should say, " I mean by a swan a bird that is white ; to describe this black bird as a swan is merely abusing language." We must make up our minds what we really do mean by religion ; and if we choose to define it super- ficially, by the colour of its feathers instead of by its comparative anatomy, we must renounce the attempt to philosophise about it, or to preach it, or to put our whole trust in it ; because none of these things can decently apply to superficialities. But if we really try to discover what is the inward heart and essence of the thing we call religion, we must not be alarmed if we find that our practised vision sees it in places where, till now, we had not expected to find it. PART I THE GENERAL NATURE OF RELIGION CHAPTER I RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY To determine the relation in which religion stands to the other activities of the mind, philosophy, conduct, and so on, might seem impossible without previously defining both religion itself and the other activities or forms of consciousness. But we cannot frame a defini- tion until we have investigated these relations ; and to offer it dogmatically at the outset would be to beg the very question we wish to solve. This is a difficulty common to all philosophical, and indeed in the last resort to all other investigations. No science is really in a position to define its subject-matter until it has brought its discoveries to a close. Consequently we offer no definition of religion at the beginning, but hope to arrive at one in the course of our inquiry. In fact, these introductory chapters are intended to lead to a general conception of religion ; abstract indeed, because its content will only be examined in the latter part of this book, but sufficient for the purpose of preliminary definition. We start here with only one presupposition : namely, that the form of con- sciousness called religion really does exist. What it is, and of what it is the consciousness, are questions we shall try to answer in the course of our inquiry. i. The first relation to be examined is that between religion and the intellect, that activity of the mind by which we think and know. The question before us is whether religion involves this activity or not ; whether 3 4 GENERAL NATURE OF RELIGION n . i or not the intellect has a part in the religious life. At present we do not ask whether it constitutes the whole of religion, and whether religion contains also non- intellectual elements. We only wish to determine whether it has an intellectual element ; and if so, what is the general nature of this element. This question naturally leads us to investigate certain views of religion which place its essence in something other than thought, and exclude that faculty from the definition of the religious consciousness. It has, for instance, been held that religion consists in the per- formance of ritual acts, and that all else is secondary and irrelevant ; or that it is neither more nor less than a system of practice or morals ; or again that it is a function of a mental faculty neither intellectual nor moral, known as feeling. We shall examine these views as mere types, in the abstract, not criticising any particular exposition of them, but rather treating them on general grounds as alternative possible theories. (#) The view that religion consists in ritual alone does not result from a study of the more highly developed religions. In these ritual may be very im- portant and have a prominent place ; but no one, probably, would maintain that they ever make ritual their sole content to the exclusion of creed. The theory springs rather from an examination of the religions of the lower culture : the evidence for it is " anthropological " in the common sense of that word. Anthropologists sometimes lay down the principle that the beliefs of primitive peoples are less worth studying than their practices. All ceremonial, whether of primi- tive or advanced religion, is definite and instructive ; but to question a savage as to his creed is at best a waste of time, since his powers alike of self-analysis and of self-expression are rudimentary, and at worst, for the same reasons, positively misleading. How valuable this principle is every one must recognise who has compared its practical results with those of the old- CH. i RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY 5 fashioned catechising method. But in order to explain its value, anthropologists have sometimes been led to assert that religion primarily consists in ritual alone, and that dogma or creed is at first non-existent, and only arises later through the invention of " astiological myth." The important thing, we are told, is that a savage does such and such actions at such and such times ; the story he tells, when pressed by an inquiring neophyte or a privileged stranger to explain why he does them, is a subsequent accretion and no part of the real religious impulse. Now this explanatory story or aetiological myth is supposed to be the germ which develops into creed ; and therefore it follows that creed, with all its theological and philosophical developments, is not an integral part of any religion at all. Such a position, however plausible it may seem at first sight, involves a host of difficulties. To begin with, it is at least unsafe to assume that religion in us is essentially the same as religion in the savage. No proof of this is forthcoming. It may well be the case that the emphasis we lay on creed has quite transformed religion, so that it is to us a different thing, incapable of explanation by analogy with that of the savage. Thus anthropologists tell us that the purpose of cloth- ing, in the most primitive culture, is to attract the eye, evil or otherwise, of the spectator ; not to keep out the weather. Am I therefore to resist the inclination to wear a greatcoat when I go to the post on a wet night, on the ground that it is a mere freak of vanity, and useless because no one will see me ? Even if the account of savage religion is true, it does not follow that it is a true account of the religion of other cultures. It is useless to appeal to the principle, if principle it is, that to understand a thing we must know its history and origin ; for if religion has really undergone a radical change, that principle is a mere cloak for giving irrelevant information : the history offered is the history of something else. 6 GENERAL NATURE OF RELIGION PT . i Secondly, such an account of savage religion itself seems to be incomplete. It fails to give any reason why the savage practises his ritual, for ex hypothesi the astiological myth only gives a fictitious reason. No doubt it is possible to say that there is no reason at all, that he has no motive, no special feelings, impelling him to these ceremonies. And it may be true that the accounts given by savages of their motive in ritual are unsatisfactory and inconsistent. But ritual is not mere motiveless play. If it is ritual at all, some definite im- portance is attached to it ; it is felt to have a value and to be obligatory or necessary. What is the nature of this importance which the savage attaches to his ritual? It cannot be a mere "feeling of importance" in the abstract ; such a feeling is not a possibility. However difficult it may be to explain why we feel something to be important, there must be an expressible reason for our feeling ; for instance, the belief that this ritual averts evil consequences of actions done, or en- sures benefits of some kind. It is not necessary that the conception be very sharply defined ; but some such conception necessarily underlies every ritual action, and indeed every other action that is not regarded as an end in itself. Ritual is not in this sense an end in itself; it is not performed as a pleasure but as a necessity ; often as practised by savages a most painful and ex- pensive necessity. If we could get at the savage's real mind, he would surely reply, when we asked him why he performed certain ceremonies, that otherwise crops would fail, rain would not fall, the spirits which surrround his path and his bed would turn against him. These fears constitute, or rather imply and express, the savage's creed. They, and not aetiological myth, are the germ which develops into creed as we know it. They differ from aetiological myth precisely in this, that whereas they are the real motive of ritual, the latter expresses not the real motive but a fanciful motive, invented when the self-analysis RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY 7 of the primitive mind has failed to discover the real one. That it should try to discover its motive is in- evitable ; that it should fail to do so is not surprising. Nothing is more difficult than to give a reasonable answer to the question why we behave as we do. And the anthropologist is right in refusing to take such myths as really accounting for ritual ; he is only wrong if his dissatisfaction with fanciful accounts makes him doubt the possibility of a true and adequate account. The point, then, which is independent of any view as to the relation of magic and religion, because it applies to both alike, is that ceremonial is based on creed. It is not the foundation of creed ; it depends upon it. The word creed is here used in a quite rudimentary sense, as indicating any theory of the nature of the power which governs the universe. You perform a ritual act because you believe that it pleases that power and induces it to make rain, or compels it to make rain, or simply makes rain come automatically ; whatever particular form your creed takes, it is always creed and nothing but creed that impels you to ritual. The principle of the centrality of ritual and the secondary nature of belief seems thus to be a result of insufficient analysis ; and though we have examined it only in its relation to savage religion, it is equally true of all religion that ritual is explicable by, and founded in, positive creed ; and that apart from creed ritual would always be meaningless and unmotived. () The second an ti- intellectual view of religion asserts that it is exclusively a matter of conduct, and that doctrine, so far as it does not immediately bear upon conduct, is no true part of religion at all. Now we may grant at once that religion has much to do with conduct ; we may even say that no part of it is irrelevant to conduct ; and yet we may be right in refusing to expel the intellectual element from it. For truth and conduct are not absolutely unrelated. Every piece of conduct depends on the realisation of some truth, since 8 GENERAL NATURE OF RELIGION PT. i we could not act efficiently, or indeed at all, without some knowledge of the situation with which we are dealing. The problem " How am I to act ? " is only soluble in the light of knowledge. And conversely there is no piece of knowledge which has not some practical corollary ; either it supplies us with the solu- tion of a practical problem, or it suggests a new problem for future solution. There is no such thing as conduct divorced from knowledge or knowledge divorced from conduct. The view we are considering seems to depend upon a form of scepticism. It admits (and we should agree) that one action is better than another and that there is a duty to promote good actions ; and it asserts that the best religion is that which promotes the best life. But it goes on to maintain that the doctrines of religion have no other value except their moral value ; that to describe one religion as true and another as false is meaningless. This implies that the intellectual problems of religion are insoluble and that no one answer to them is truer than any other ; whereas the practical difficulties of the moral life are real and can be overcome or alleviated by religious means. Or if it is not main- tained that the problems are insoluble, it is denied that religions solve them ; it is perhaps supposed that they are soluble by means of another kind of thinking ; by science or philosophy. Empirical difficulties against this purely moral view of religion arise from the fact that atheists and persons who differ from their neighbours in religion do not necessarily differ in morality. If a man living in a Christian society rejects Christianity, on this theory the only possible meaning of his action is that he rejects the Christian morality, for Christianity is denned as being precisely the Christian morality. But in practice this does not necessarily follow ; his morality may remain what it was before. The theory can only deal with such a case in two ways. Either it must say CH. i RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY 9 that he rejects Christianity in name only, while un- willing to uproot it out of his heart ; or else it must maintain that he rejects not the real Christianity (the morality) but Christianity falsely so called, the in- tellectual system which is arbitrarily annexed to it. Both these are unsatisfactory ; the first, because it makes a virtuous atheist into a mere hypocrite, and the second because the " arbitrary " connexion of an in- tellectual system with a moral one is precisely the fact that requires explanation. If the intellectual system (though false) is really necessary as a psychological basis for morals, 1 how can the former be rejected and the latter kept ? If not, why should the two ever be united at all ? The moral- istic theory of religion comes to grief over the fact that there is such a thing as creed. On the theory, there ought not to be ; but, nevertheless, it is there. Why is it there ? Because we cannot evade the answer it is believed to be true. Creed may be, among other things, a means to morality ; but it cannot be a means to anything unless it is first held as true. For a belief that no one believes can have no influence on any one's conduct. A morality assisted by creed is a morality founded upon the intellect ; for to judge something as true is the characteristic function of the intellect. Further, if the action induced by a belief is to be really good as well as really due to the belief, then the belief must be true. We may stimulate our moral consciousness by fictions, as that this day is our last on earth ; but the resulting action, so far as it is good, is due not to the belief but to the reawakened moral con- sciousness. Any action really due to the belief, such as taking farewell of our families and making arrange- 1 " It is necessary to most people, but not to every one " is a useless answer, not only because it implies that different people's minds may be constructed on absolutely and radically divergent lines an assumption which any.one is at liberty to make if he likes, and if he will take the trouble to see where it leads him but because it begs the question. Necessary for some people but not for others, as regular exercise, or a nap after lunch, or a thousand a year, means, as we are using terms, not necessary. io GENERAL NATURE OF RELIGION n . i ments for the funeral next day, would be merely silly. So, if our creeds are not truths but only means to good action, those actions which are good are not really due to them, and those which are due to them are a waste of labour. That is to say, they are a hindrance, rather than a help, to right conduct. This form of scepticism, like most other forms of the same thing, is in fact less a philosophy than a pro- paganda. It is not a theory of what religion is ; it is a proposal to reconstitute it on the principle of leaving out the creed and only keeping the commandments. There might, perhaps, be such a thing as non-religious moral teaching. We will not at present deny that. But it would not be religion. And we are not asking what improvements might be made in religion, or what better thing might be substituted for it ; we only want to discover what it is. This humbler inquiry may possibly be of value even to those who, without asking what it is, have decided to abolish or reform it. (f) The recognition of religion as having an intel- lectual content throws it open to intellectual criticism ; and in order to withdraw it from such criticism it has sometimes been placed in that faculty of the mind whose function is feeling. The term feeling seems to be distinctively applied by psychologists to pleasure, pain and emotions in general. But emotion is not a totally separate function of the mind, independent of thinking and willing ; it includes both these at once. If I feel pleasure, that is will in that it involves an appetition towards the pleasant thing ; and it is also knowledge of the pleasant thing and of my own state. There is no emotion which does not entail the activity of the other so-called faculties of the mind. Religion is doubtless an emotion, or rather involves emotions ; but it is not emotion in the abstract apart from other activities. It involves, for instance, the love of God. But the love of God implies RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY 1 1 knowing God on the one hand and doing his will on the other. Moreover the term itself is ambiguous. The word feeling as we use it in ordinary speech generally denotes not a particular kind of activity, but any state of mind of a somewhat vague, indefinite or indistinct character. Thus we have a feeling of the truth of something when we hardly say yet that we are convinced of its truth ; a feeling of the right treatment of a recalcitrant picture or sonnet, when we are not quite convinced of the right treatment ; a feeling that we ought to do something when we are not really sure. In this sense religion is decidedly not a matter of feeling. Some people's religion is doubtless very nebulous ; but religion as a whole is not distinguished from other things by its vagueness and indefiniteness. Religion is sometimes said to be a "low " degree of thought in the sense that it contains half-truths only, which are in time super- seded by the complete truths of philosophy or science ; but in the meantime it errs (if the description is true) not by being vague but by being much more definite than it has any right to be. To define religion as mere feeling in this sense would amount to complaining that it is not sufficiently dogmatic. In another commonly-used sense of the word, feeling implies absolute and positive conviction coupled with inability to offer proof or explanation of the conviction. In that case, to " feel " the truth of a statement would merely mean the same as to know it ; and this use of the word therefore already asserts the intellectual content of religion. The problem of the relation of this conviction to proof is noticed below (Part II. Ch. I.). 2. These types of theory all seem to fail through the same fault ; namely, their common denial of the necessity of creed in religion. They describe character- istics which religion does undoubtedly often or always possess ; but they try to explain it as consisting chiefly or only of these characteristics, and to avoid admitting 12 GENERAL NATURE OF RELIGION FT. i its basis in positive creed. Without examining further theories of the same kind, therefore, we may venture to assert that religion cannot exist without a definite belief as to the nature of God. This contention would probably be borne out by any careful investigation of actual religions ; every religion claims to present as true and intellectually sound a doctrine which may be described as a theory of God. This statement of belief as to the nature of God, which of course includes beliefs as to the relations of God and the world, God and man, and so forth, is the intellectual content of religion ; and it is not a thing outside or different from the religion itself. It may be only one aspect or element of religion ; but at least it is an element, and an indispensable element. I call it intellectual, even if it has not been reached by " scientific " processes, because the intellect is the name of that activity by which we think, know, hold con- victions or draw inferences ; and a non-intellectual conviction would be a contradiction in terms. 1 Now the Doctrine of God is of course theology ; it is in fact the translation of that word. Accordingly, a creed is a theology, and there is no distinction whatever between Theology and Religion, so far as the intel- lectual aspect of religion is concerned. My theology is the beliefs I hold about God, that is to say, my creed, the intellectual element of my religion. This identification is often controverted. In the first place, a distinction is sometimes made between religion and theology with a view to reconciling the claims of criticism with those of ecclesiastical authority. Criticism (it is supposed) merely affects theology ; orthodoxy is a matter of religion and is untouched by critical arguments. Such a distinction enables us to make two promises : first, to believe whatever the 1 The word intellect is sometimes used to distinguish one type of cognition from other types called reason, intuition and so on. Such distinctions are, in my belief, based on mistaken psychology ; and accordingly I use the various words indiscrimin- ately to cover the whole of the facts of knowing. CH.I RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY 13 church believes ; and secondly, to accept whatever criticism proves. But the two spheres cannot be separated in this way. There is an abstract possibility that criticism should prove the Gospel a forgery and that philosophy should demonstrate God to be an illusion ; and the second promise involves readiness to accept these results as promptly as any others. But this implication already denies any weight to the authority of the church ; for no church would allow its members to accept such conclusions. The proposed modus vivendi is as valueless in practice as it is indefensible in theory. Some writers, again, distinguish theology, as the thought which takes religion as its starting-point and builds a superstructure upon it, from the religion upon which it builds. But this is no distinction at all ; for if religion supplies the premisses from which theology infers other new truths, the two are only related as premisses and conclusion in one syllogism, and one and the same syllogism cannot be split up into two distinct kinds of thought. Rather, this argument would prove the identity of the two ; for there is no difference between putting together the premisses and drawing the conclusion. It is only in the abstractions of formal logic that they are separated. The distinction therefore would be an entirely abstract one; we could never point to two different concrete things and say " this is religion and that theology." The same objection would apply to the opposite distinction, according to which theology, instead of using religion as its starting-point, takes its pronounce- ments as conclusions, and endeavours to provide proofs for them. This does seem to be a way in which the word theology is sometimes used ; thus the conviction of the existence of God might be described as religion, and the proofs of his existence as theology. But in that case theology would include the whole intellectual side of religion in itself, and religion would be merely i 4 GENERAL NATURE OF RELIGION PT . i the name for an incomplete and mutilated fragment of theology the conclusion without the evidence which when its deficiencies were made good would coincide with theology. A somewhat similar distinction is that between religion as the personal experience of the individual and theology as the systematic statement of religious experi- ence as a whole. If religion means " that fragment of theology, of whose truth I have had personal experience," the distinction between the two can never be made at all. Theology is the whole ; religion my particular part of it. For me within my knowledge the two are in every way identical. Whatever theology I know is to me religion ; and the rest I do not know. There is certainly a kind of thought which takes religious dogmas and tries to discover their logical result ; and one which tries to prove their truth ; and one which arranges and expresses them all in a systematic way. And if we like to call any or all of these theology, we have no doubt a right to do so. But we must remember, if we use the term, that theology so described is not different from religion. A religious truth does not cease to be religious truth and turn into theological truth because it is proved, or arranged in a system, or reflected upon. In general, then, it does not seem that we can distinguish religion as creed from theology at all. Each of the above distinctions, as we have said, does correspond to a real difference in the way in which we use the words ; and they may be summed up by saying that in ordinary language religion means some- thing less deliberate, less consciously logical, than theology. Religious experience gives us a number of truths arranged anyhow, just as they come to the surface ; all is knowledge, all the fruit of intellectual activity, since intellect means nothing but the attain- ment of knowledge ; but it is knowledge unsystematised. Theology then, according to this view, arranges and RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY " 15 classifies the truths already given in religion ; it creates nothing new, but rather, so to speak, tidies up the workshop where religion has finished work for the day. But even this simile overstates the difference ; for in the apparent chaos of the unsystematised experience, system is in fact already present. The work of co-ordination which we have ascribed to theology is already characteristic of religion itself ; it supplies us not with a number of disconnected con- ceptions of the nature of God, but with a conception. 3. (a] If religion as creed is identical with theology, it remains to consider the further conception of the philosophy of religion. The philosophy of any subject means careful reflexion upon that subject ; thus we have the philosophy of art, of conduct, of science and so on. To do a thing, and to understand what one is doing and how one does it, seem to be different things ; and this distinction, it is thought, can be applied to intellectual as well as practical processes. To commit a crime is action ; to reflect upon one's crime is ethics. Similarly, to conduct an argument is science, to reflect upon it is logic ; to be conscious of God is religion, to analyse that consciousness is the philosophy of religion. Such is the common doctrine ; but it does not seem to provide us with a basis for distinguishing the philosophy of religion from other philosophies. Consciousness of truths is common to religion and all other kinds of thought ; the only distinction between religious and other knowledge would be that they were concerned with different objects. But the theory of knowledge or logic does not consider differences of the object, but only pro- cesses of the subject ; and therefore there is no dis- tinction between the philosophy of religion (as theory of religious knowledge) and the theory of knowledge in general. If there is a general philosophy of know- ing, it includes religious knowledge as well as all other kinds ; no separate philosophy is required. 1 6 GENERAL NATURE OF RELIGION Similarly, if religion involves certain types of conduct, the whole theory of conduct in general is treated by ethics. That side of the philosophy of religion merges in ethics precisely as the intellectual side merges in the general theory of knowledge or logic. There can only be a distinct philosophy of religion if religion is a quite separate function of the mind involving neither knowledge, volition, or any other specifiable activity. But unless this hypothesis can be maintained (and we know already that it cannot), we must give up the idea of a special departmental philosophy, the philosophy of religion, and hand over the study of religion to philosophy in general. (If) If the philosophy of religion is indistinguish- able from philosophy as a whole, what is the relation of philosophy as a whole to religion or theology? Philosophy is the theory of existence ; not of existence in the abstract, but of existence in the concrete ; the theory of all that exists ; the theory of the universe. This is frequently denied ; it is said that philosophy has problems of its own, and science has problems of its own ; that they progress by attending each to its own business and using its methods where they are suitable, and that when philosophy tries to answer the questions proper to science the result is chaos. The example of natural science under the domination of Aristotelian philosophy in the later middle ages is quoted as a warning to philosophy to confine its activities within its own province. Such a view seems to depend on a misconception as to the nature of philosophy. Sciences live by the discovery and em- ployment of methods which facilitate their particular operations and are inapplicable to other kinds of research. Differentiation of problems and methods is the very essence of the natural sciences. It is important to realise that philosophy has in this sense no methods of its own at all ; that it is through and through homogeneous, straightforward thinking where RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY 17 formulae and labour-saving devices are not used. This absence of definite and ready-made method is at once the strength and the weakness of philosophy ; its weakness, because it makes philosophy much more difficult than any of the sciences ; its strength, because failure through defects in the apparatus is avoided, and there is no limitation to one particular subject such as is necessarily entailed by a fixed method. Philosophy is the free activity of critical thought, and is applicable to any problem which thought can raise. The chaos of which the scientist complains is partly his own feeling of helplessness when confronted by philosophical questions to which his methods supply no answer, and partly real blunders like those of mediaeval science, whose cause he imagines to be the invasion of science by Aristotelian philosophy ; whereas they are really due not to the overbearingness of Aristotelian philosophy but to the defects of Aristotelian science. Now if philosophy is the theory of the universe, what is religion ? We have said that it was the theory l of God, and of God's relations to the world and man. But the latter is surely nothing more nor less than a view of the universe. Indeed religion is quite as comprehensive as philosophy. For the religious consciousness in its true and complete form nothing is irrelevant, nothing is without its own unique and individual value. Religion and philosophy alike are views of the whole universe. But are they therefore (it may be asked) identical ? May they not be views, but conflicting views? or views from different points of view ? Not the latter, because it is the aim of each alike to transcend par- ticular points of view, to overcome the limitations of individual interest. And to ask whether religion and 1 It is possibly worth while to guard against a verbal . pitfall. " Philosophy is theory, but religion is not ; it is Fact." This common and wrong use of the word seems to imply that a theory ceases to be a theory when it is true, or when it is a matter of vital interest or strong conviction. It was Mephistopheles who said, " Grau, theurer Freund, ist alle Theorie, und grim des Lebens goldner Baum." 1 8 GENERAL NATURE OF RELIGION PT. i philosophy may not disagree is to assume a general agreement among religions, which certainly does not exist, and the same among philosophies, which exists if possible even less. No doubt this or that philosophy would conflict with this or that religion. The religion of Homer is inconsistent with the philosophy of Auguste Comte ; but Comte's own religion and his philosophy are fully consistent with one another ; they are indeed identical. If religion and philosophy are views of the same thing the ultimate nature of the universe then the true religion and the true philosophy must coincide, though they may differ in the vocabulary which they use to express the same facts. But, it may be insisted, we have at least by this enforced agreement condemned unheard all philosophies but those which believe in a God ; for we have defined religion as the theory of God, and many philosophies deny or doubt or never mention God. This difficulty may perhaps be cleared up by recollecting that we have not assumed the " existence of God " hitherto in any definite and concrete sense ; we have not, for instance, assumed a personal God. The God of whom we have been speaking was a purely abstract one, a mere name for the philosophical Absolute, the solution of the cosmological problem. Thus we said that savage ritual (religious or magical) implies a creed ; but it may not imply anything we should call a theistic creed. The savage may believe that his ritual operates directly on the rain without any intervention on the part of a single supreme will. This is his ** theory of God " ; his " God " is not a person but a principle. The Buddhist believes in no personal God at all, but he has a definite scheme of the universe and doctrine of salvation ; he believes in certain eternal principles ; that is his " theory of God." Atheism itself, if it is a positive theory and not mere scepticism, is in this abstract sense a " theory of God " ; the only thing that is not a theory of God is scepticism, that is to say, the CH.I RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY 19 refusal to deal with the problem at all. God, so far as our conception has travelled, is merely at present a name for the unifying principle of the world, however that principle is regarded. Every philosophy has a God in this sense, just in so far as it is a philosophy and not a mere collocation of disconnected doctrines ; in which case it has a number of different Gods whose relations it has not yet determined. And this is the only sense in which some religions (such as Buddhism) have a God. In the sense, then, in which all religions require a God, one is equally required by all philosophy. (c) Since religion, on its intellectual side, is a theory of the world as a whole, it is the same thing as philosophy ; the ultimate questions of philosophy are those of religion too. But can we say the same of science ? Is not science, at least as interpreted by many of its exponents, anti-religious in its materialism and its frequent atheism ; and even if these characteristics were not present, does it not differ necessarily from both religion and philosophy in being a view of the universe not as a whole but in minute particular details only ? To the first question it must be replied that, para- doxical though it may seem, materialism and atheism are not necessarily irreligious. Philosophy, as well as science, may be both materialist and atheist ; indeed there may be, as we have said, religions which show the same features. We may even be so bold as to assert that atheism and materialism are necessarily religions of a kind ; for not only do they spring from the impulse to solve the intellectual problem of the universe, but they owe their form to an essentially religious dissatisfaction with existing solutions. Thus an atheist may well be an atheist because he has a conception of God which he cannot reconcile with the creeds of other people ; because he feels that the ground of the universe is too mysterious, too august to be described in terms of human personality and encumbered with mythological impertinences. The 20 GENERAL NATURE OF RELIGION PT . i materialist, again, may find in matter a real object of worship, a thing more worthy of admiration than the God of popular religion. The materialist Lucretius adores not the careless gods of the interstellar space, but the " alma Venus," the immanent principle of nature itself. And can we deny that such materialism or atheism is more truly religious, does more honour to the true God, than many theistic superstitions ? The materialism and atheism of modern science if indeed these qualities are rightly ascribed to it, which is very doubtful may or may not be preferable, considered as a view of the universe, to that offered by traditional Christianity. But whichever is right, each alike is a religion, and it is only because of this fact that they can ever come into conflict. In reply to the second question, the suggestion that science, as the knowledge of detail, is irrelevant to philosophy the knowledge of the whole, and therefore not itself religious in character, it must be remembered that we cannot have a whole which is not a whole of parts, nor parts which are not parts of a whole. Philosophy, as well as science, is concerned with detail ; it does not exist in the rarefied atmosphere of a world aloof from facts. Nor does science take its facts in absolute isolation one from another and from a general scheme of the world ; it is essential to science that the facts should be related to one another and should find each its place in the scientist's view of the whole. And any religion must take account of detail ; for it is only in the details that the nature of the whole is manifested. It is no doubt possible to forget the whole in laying stress on isolated parts, as it is possible to forget details in the general view of a whole. But each of these is a false abstraction ; we cannot identify the former with science and the latter with religion or philosophy. The ideal, alike for philosophy and science, is to see the part in its place in the whole, and the whole perfectly exemplified in the part. CHAPTER II RELIGION AND MORALITY WE have arrived at the conclusion that all religion has an intellectual element ; that this element is a creed or theology and at the same time a cosmology or philo- sophical theory of the world ; and that therefore religion is so far identical with philosophy. But we have still to determine what other elements it contains, and how these elements are related to one another. Religion, we are told again and again, is more than mere intellect, more than mere thought, more than philosophy. It may indeed find room within itself for an intellectual element, but that is not the whole of religion ; there are other elements of equal value. Indeed, intellect is only one single aspect of life ; and if philosophers sometimes treat it as if nothing else existed, that is only because philosophers are human enough to magnify their office. Granting freely that religion has its intellectual side, it has also a practical side which is no less important. If this language is justified, religion is not merely a theory of the world ; it is also a system of conduct. Just as any definite religion prescribes to its adherents certain definite convictions, so it inculcates certain definite modes of action. We have to ask whether this is true ; and if we find that religion does really contain these two distinct elements, we shall be com- pelled to determine so far as possible the nature of their connexion. 22 GENERAL NATURE OF RELIGION . i i. Parallel to the anti-intellectual theories examined in the preceding chapter are certain anti-moral theories of religion. These are directed to proving that religion does not dictate definite actions at all, or that if it does, this is not because these actions are moral but for some other reason. (a) As a matter of common experience, it is often said, religion sometimes inculcates actions which are flagrantly at variance with the principles of a sound morality. Can we look back on all the crimes done in the name of religion, the human sacrifices, the per- secutions, the horrors of religious warfare, the corrupt connivance at wickedness, the torture inflicted on simple minds by the fear of hell tantum relligto potuit suadere malorum and still maintain that religion stands for morality ? Undoubtedly we can. The argument is a rhetorical jump from half-understood instances to an unfounded generalisation. We might equally well quote the absurdities of ancient and the errors of modern scientists as proof that science does not aim at tr'uth. If a great scientist makes a mistake, the importance of that mistake, its widespread effect, is due to the very fact that the man who makes it is a high intellectual authority ; it is the exception which proves the rule that you can generally believe what he says. Religious persecution may be a crime, but it happens only because the persecutor believes it to be a duty. The crimes of the Church are a testimony to the fact that religion does dictate duties, and is believed to do so, for the most part, in a worthy manner. Nor can we draw a distinction between the two cases on the ground that religious crimes are sometimes already condemned by their contemporaries and are therefore doubly unjustifiable, whereas the mistakes of a great scientist represent a point in the progress of thought as yet unattained by any one, and are therefore pardonable. This would be to reduce the argument to a mutual recrimination between Church and State, RELIGION AND MORALITY 23 each trying to fasten upon the other the odium of being the worse sinner. Into such a discussion we can hardly be expected to enter. Our distinction is between right and wrong, truth and falsehood ; and if science teaches error or religion inculcates crime, extenuating circumstances are beside the mark. If the argument were successful, it would prove not that religion was irrelevant to conduct (for the cases quoted prove the reverse ; they are cases of religion definitely dictating conduct), but that it devoted its energies to the positive pursuit of immoral ends. And this would be to admit our main contention, that religion has a practical side ; while maintaining that this practical side was the apotheosis not of good but of evil. But this fantastic notion would be advanced by no serious student of the facts, and we need not trouble to refute it. We are not concerned to prove that every particular mouthpiece of every particular religion is morally infallible ; just as we do not assume it to be intellectually infallible. We tried to show in the last chapter that it was an essential note of religion to lay down certain statements, and to say, " Believe these " ; and that could only mean, " Believe these, for they are true." Truth is the governing conception, even if the dogmas propounded fail of reaching it. Similarly, religion always lays down certain courses of action and says, " Do these," that is to say, " Do these, because they are right." Not merely " because they are God's will," for God is a righteous God ; nor merely " for fear he should punish you," for his punishments are just. Historically, religions may have been guilty of infinite crimes ; but this condemnation is a proof, not a disproof, that their fundamental aim is moral. They represent a continual attempt to conform to the good will of God, and the fact that they err in determining or in obeying that will does not alter the fact that the standard by which they test actions is a moral standard. But is the will of God always conceived as good ? May 24 GENERAL NATURE OF RELIGION n . i it not be conceived as simply arbitrary ? One phase of this question is considered in the next section. () A second argument, of a type somewhat akin to the last, is drawn from anthropology. It appears that in primitive societies the morality of the tribe develops on lines independent of its religion. It is therefore supposed that morality and religion are two quite different things, which only in course of time come to be united in what is called the " moralisation of religion." This argument takes it for granted and indeed it can hardly be questioned that the higher religions are moralised ; that they conceive God's will as necessarily good. As in the last chapter, we may dismiss this argument by showing that it is irrelevant. For us religion is already moralised, and we must accept it as it is and not pretend that religion as known to us is still the same thing that (on the theory) it is to the savage. But as in the case of the anti-intellectual argument from anthropology we were not content with dis- missing it as irrelevant, but found it necessary to inquire more carefully into its own statements, so here it is desirable not simply to dismiss but to examine the argument. The word " moralisation " is the real difficulty. If a thing has at the outset nothing to do with morality, no jugglery or alchemy will bring it into relation with the moral consciousness. You cannot arbitrarily impose a category on a thing which is unfitted to receive it. And to suggest that " social evolution" can confer a moral value on a type of activity which has as yet no moral bearings whatever, is calling in a deus ex machina to perform feats which involve a contradiction in terms. The moralisation of religion the bringing of it into conformity with our moral standards is certainly a real thing. But it is not a single event, once for all accomplished, in which religion leaves behind its old indifference to morality and learns to take cognisance RELIGION AND MORALITY 25 of moral values. It is a continual process in which old standards are left behind and better ones adopted. If we look at the conduct of a class or nation or culture very different from our own, we are apt to imagine for a moment that it has no morality at all. But what we mistake for an absence of morality is really the presence of a different morality. Primitive religion does not inculcate civilised morality ; why should it ? It inculcates primitive morality ; and as the one grows the other grows too. (c) We now pass to a group of theories which arise not from the external, historical or psychological, investigation of the religious consciousness, but within that consciousness itself. These are determinist, antinomian, and quietist respectively. Religious determinism results from a conviction of the omnipotence and universality of God, so inter- preted that no power of initiation whatever is left to the human will. All that is done is done by God ; God's plans are not conditional upon man's co-operation or overthrown by his rebellion, because God knew these things before, and indeed was himself the cause of them. This creed lays upon its adherent no commands in the ordinary sense of the word, for it does not hold him free to execute them. On the other hand, it does issue commands in the only sense in which it allows itself to do so ; it teaches that one type of conduct is pleasing to God and another un pleasing, so that, if a man were free to choose, it would not hesitate to point out the kind of behaviour that ought to be chosen. And indeed those who hold views of this kind often surpass all others in the rigorism and puritanism of their actual lives. This theory therefore does not really banish conduct from religion. (d) Antinomianism springs from the same con- ception, as to the relation between God's will and man's, which underlies determinism. It causes, there- 26 GENERAL NATURE OF RELIGION n . , fore, no fresh difficulty. But it is perhaps desirable to point out the element of truth which it contains. If morality is conceived as what St. Paul calls a " law of works," an external and apparently unreasonable code of imperatives, then such a morality is certainly, as the antinomian believes, superseded and done away by religion. The external, compulsive law has been replaced by an inner spring of life. If a man is perfectly religious it is true that it does not matter what he does ; not in the sense that he may commit crimes with impunity, but in the sense that he will not commit them, even if you forget to tell him not to. Thus religion appears as a release from the servitude of morality. But this view depends on a false description of morality. The man to whose mind a moral law is a mere external command, grudgingly obeyed under compulsion, falls short not merely of religion but of morality. He is not really moral at all. He is in a state of heteronomy ; it is not his own will, freely acting, that produces the result but the imposition upon his will of alien force. The very nature of the moral law is this, that it is not imposed upon us from without. We do not merely obey it ; we make it. The member of the " kingdom of ends," the truly moral society, is not a mere subject ; he is a sovereign. Thus the moral law has already that character of spontaneity, that absence of compulsion, which is typical of religion. The transition from heteronomy to autonomy which for St. Paul is marked by the passage from Judaism to Christianity from the law of works to the law of faith is not a transition from morality to religion, but a transition into morality from some infra-moral state. What, then, is this infra-moral state ? We might be tempted to describe it as the stage of positive law, of civil law. But this would be equally unsatisfactory. Just as the really moral consciousness makes its own CH. ii RELIGION AND MORALITY 27 laws, and does not merely obey them blindly, so the really social will finds in the law of its society its own self-expression, and is sovereign as well as subject in the state in which it lives. This is an ideal, doubtless, to which few societies attain ; but it is the ideal, none the less, of civil life as such. And, therefore, we cannot distinguish civil from moral law as characterised by heteronomy and autonomy respectively. The difference is not between two types of law but between differences of attitude to one and the same law. The law may be divine, moral, or civil ; in each case there are two ways of obeying it, either from within, when the law becomes the free self-expression of the acting will, or from without, the law appearing as a tyrannical force blindly and grudgingly obeyed. This is the distinction which the antinomian has in mind. Antinomianism in the commonest sense, however, makes the mistake of supposing that the transition to autonomy cancels the duties which heteronomy enforced. Even this is in one sense true, for any " law of works " contains numbers of superfluous commands, presenting as duties actions which the autonomous will rightly sees to be valueless. But in so far as the external law enjoins real duties, the internal law comes not to destroy but to fulfil. Thus whatever in morality is really moral is taken up into religion ; and the state of mind which marks it as religious, the free and joyful acceptance of it, is not peculiar to religion as distinct from morality. It is essential to morality as such. (e) It remains to examine the view known as quietism. This view may be analysed as a development from certain types of expression very common in all religion ; for instance, that religion is not self-assertion but self-surrender ; that in the religious life we wait upon God and accept his good will instead of imposing ours upon him ; that the individual is lost in union with God, and is no longer an independent will. Such language is often called mysticism, and the word may 28 GENERAL NATURE OF RELIGION PT.I be usefully employed in this sense. It is, however, well to remember that the experience to which this language refers is an experience not peculiar to certain people called mystics, but common to every religious mind. Subject to this caution, we may use the word mystical as a description of that aspect of the religious life which consists in the fusion of the individual with God. This question is one which we shall treat at length in a later chapter ; and we shall there see reason to believe that this mystical language, so far from being a fanciful or confused description of the facts, gives a perfectly accurate account of that relation to God which is the essence of personal religion. At present we are concerned not with mysticism but with its offshoot, or rather perversion, quietism. Mysticism asserts the union of my will with the will of God, the total and complete fusion of the two into one. Quietism asserts that my will is negated, that it has simply disappeared and the will of God has taken its place. I am utterly lost in the infinity of God. The two things are really quite distinct ; the former asserts a union of two wills in one person, the latter asserts that the person has only one will, and that not his own but God's. Theologians will recall the relation of the Monothelite heresy 1 to the orthodox Christology of the Church; and indeed we may suggest that quietism was only a revival in another context of the essential doctrine of Monothelitism, whereas mysticism exactly expresses the orthodox view as to the relation of the divine and human wills. Quietism thus denies that conduct is a part of religion, because it believes that in religion the individual will disappears ; religion is a state of complete passivity. This doctrine is due to the assumption (which we shall criticise later) that two wills cannot be fused into one, 1 Consisting in the assertion that Christ had not (as laid down at Chalcedon) two wills, one human and one divine, but one only, the divine, and no human will at all. This was heretical as destroying the humanity of Christ. The subject is treated below in Part III. Ch. I. CH. ii RELIGION AND MORALITY 29 and therefore, feeling bound to preserve the unity of the individual, the quietist denies the human and keeps the divine. Pending our inquiry into the underlying principle, it is enough to point out certain objections, (i.) The act of self-abnegation is definitely an act of will, and is represented as a duty, and a religious duty ; therefore the practical content of religion is not in point of fact denied, (ii.) This act is not done once for all ; it is a continual attitude of the self to God, an attitude capable of being discontinued by an act of will, and therefore itself maintained by an act of will, (iii.) The union with God thus attained does not deprive the individual of all activity. Rather it directs and makes more fruitful and potent this activity. It affords a solution of all his practical difficulties, and gives him the strength to carry out the solution ; but it does not remove them from his consciousness and place him in a simply inactive sphere of life. In a word, the self-dedication of the will to God is not the end of the individual life, but the beginning of a new and indeed of a more active life. The union with God is a real union, not the annihilation of the self. 2. We have perhaps sufficiently shown that religion never exists apart from conduct. Just as all religion involves thought, as every religion teaches doctrine and a true religion teaches true doctrine, so all religion in- volves conduct ; and whereas a good religion teaches good conduct, a bad religion teaches bad. And further, just as we found that all knowledge was already in essence religious, so we must now say that all morality is already religious ; for, as we have seen, morality properly understood already shows in itself the freedom, the autonomy and devotion, of religion. It seems, there- fore, that religion is not a simple but a complex thing, containing two (or, for all we yet know, more) different elements. It is necessary that we should do something towards determining the relation of these elements to one another. If they are really separate ingredients of 30 GENERAL NATURE OF RELIGION PT . i a compound, then religion is merely the name for a life which contains both thought and action side by side ; it is no third thing over and above these, but simply the one plus the other. Such a conclusion really negates the conception of religion altogether ; for the different independent elements of which it is composed are capable of complete analysis and description each by itself, and there is no whole (religion) but only parts (thought, action). As a means of approach to this difficulty, it would be well to ask whether it is necessary that the two elements should always coexist ; or whether they are alternative modes of operation which can only exist one at a time, so that to speak of a kind of consciousness which unites the two, as we maintain that religion does, is meaningless. (a ) In any case of action, it is easy to see that some thought must be present. When we discussed the ritualistic theory of religion we found that unless ritual was simply meaningless and unmotived play it must be based on some definite creed. We may extend this principle further. Unless action is based on some knowledge it cannot take place at all. The most that can happen is some automatism of which the person, whose action we call it, is unconscious. An action is necessarily based on a large number of judgments, of which some must be true or the action could not be carried out ; while others may be true or false but must at least be believed. If, for instance, a man wants to drown himself, he must know " here lies the water : good : here stands the man : good " : otherwise he is not able to do it ; and also he must believe rightly or wrongly that he will improve his circumstances and get rid of his present miseries by putting an end to his life ; otherwise he will not desire to do it. Thus every act depends for its conception and execution upon thought. It is not merely that first we think and then we act ; the thinking goes on all through the act. And RELIGION AND MORALITY 31 therefore, in general, the conception of any activity as practical alone, and containing no elements of knowing or thinking, is indefensible. Our actions depend on our knowledge. (b) The converse is equally true. If we can only do what we know how to do, we only know what we wish to know. Knowing is an activity just as walking is, and, like walking, requires to be set in motion by the operation of the will. To think requires effort ; it can be described as harder or easier ; it is the outcome of a choice which deliberately determines to think and selects a subject of thought. There can be no activity of thought apart from activity of the will. If this is so, it is no longer possible to uphold the familiar distinction between a life of thought and a life of action. The man of action, the statesman or the soldier, would never be able to act at all but for his intellectual grip on the problems of his profession. The best man of action is not simply the man of iron will, dear to the popular imagination, but the man who has the clearest insight into the necessities and peculiarities of the given situation. Indeed the notion of a strong will in itself, apart from strength of intellect, and still more the worship of an abstract "will to power" or " blind will," are mere absurdities. A will to power must know what kinds of power there are to have, and which kind it wants ; and a blind will that did not know what it was doing or what there was to be done would never do anything at all. The student or man of con- templation, on the other hand, does not simply know without willing. He wills to know ; and his knowledge is the result of positive hard labour. No moment of thought is conceivable which is not also a volition, and no moment of will is possible which is not also an act of knowledge. Thus if there is such a thing as the religious life, it must be one which, like any other, involves both think- ing and acting ; and the religious life, so conceived, is 32 GENERAL NATURE OF RELIGION PT . i not, any more than a philosopher's life or a states- man's, the mere sum of two different lives. For of the two ingredients neither can ever exist by itself. It must exist in union with the other or not at all. Any real life must contain both elements, each playing as important a part as the other. 3. But although the duality, of which religion now seems to consist, cannot be broken up, in the concrete, into two separable elements, it is still a duality. Thought and action remain simply side by side and absolutely distinct, though each is necessary to the other. Religion, it appears, is simply a compound of philosophy and morality, though philosophy always in- volves morality and morality can never exist without philosophy ; and therefore all life, as such, shows the composite character which is the mark of religion. It is not simply religion, but all the life of the mind, that is now subject to the dualism ; and therefore there is the greater need of understanding it. What is this dualism between thought and action ? We have seen that the two things mutually depend upon one another, but we have not inquired very minutely into the nature of this dependence. (a) In the theory of the religious life offered by religion itself, there is no dualism at all between know- ing and acting. The two things are united, for instance by the author of the fourth Gospel, in such a way that they are absolutely indistinguishable. The term used to express their unity is " love," an activity which in its perfect manifestation is represented as the perfection of the religious life. The whole of the great final discourse in John is an exposition of this conception ; nothing can be clearer than the way in which the spirit of love is identified on the one hand with that of truth, and on the other with that of morality or obedience. And the two elements are not connected merely ex- ternally ; knowledge is the way of obedience and obedience the approach to truth. The connexion RELIGION AND MORALITY 33 between the two is the most intimate conceivable ; just as the perfect life involves the denial of all distinction between man and man, so it involves the denial of all distinction between man's two faculties of thought and will. () Such denials of our ordinary distinction, even if they cannot in themselves be taken as conclusive, serve at least to arouse doubts as to its sufficiency. And if we ask how thought and action are actually distinguished, the answer is not very satisfying. They are not the operations of two different parts of the mind ; that is admitted on all hands. The whole self wills, and the whole self thinks. Then are they alternative activities, like sleeping and waking ? No ; we have already seen that they are necessarily and always simultaneous. The only thing we can say seems to be that thinking is not willing and willing is not thinking. And this is simply to assert the existence of a distinction without explaining wherein the distinction consists. We cannot say that in willing we do not think, or that in thinking we do not will, for both these, as we have seen, we certainly do. If I will to think, there are not two elements in this act but one. When I will to walk, I do not separately experience an internal resolve on the one hand, and a movement of my legs on the other ; the act of will is the voluntary moving of the legs. To say " I will to walk " is the same thing as saying " I walk of my own initiative," that is, " I walk." And so " I will to think " means not two things but one thing : " I think." We never simply will in the abstract ; we always will to do something ; what we turn into a separate organ and call " the will " is only the fact of free activity, the voluntary doing of this thing or that. Walking is thus not something distinguishable from willing, a result, so to speak, of the operation of " the will " ; it is nothing more nor less than the willing itself, the particular form which, on this occasion, free activity D 34 GENERAL NATURE OF RELIGION PT . i takes. Thus walking is a kind of willing, not some- thing else ; and equally, thought is a kind of willing. But is there any other kind of willing ? Walking is only one kind ; is thinking only one kind ? No ; for if it were, there would be kinds of willing in which thought was not present. This, we have already admitted, there cannot be; and therefore, just as all thinking is willing, so all willing is thinking. Or, to put it in other words, there is neither consciousness nor activity considered as a separate reality, but always the activity of consciousness and the consciousness of activity. Nor can we say that in this second case there is a dualism between the activity of a mind and its own consciousness of that activity ; for an activity is already by its very nature conscious of itself, and if it were not, it would be not an activity but a mechanism. We conclude, therefore, not that one and the same thing, mind, has two manifestations, consciousness and volition, and that these two always exist side by side, but that all consciousness is volitional, and that all volition is conscious. The distinction between the two statements is not merely verbal. The former way of putting it suggests that there is such a thing as a mind, regarded as a thing in itself; and that this thing has two ways of behaving, which go on at once, as a machine might have both a circular and a reciprocating motion. This idea of the mind as a thing distinguish- able from its own activities does not seem to be really tenable ; the mind is what it does ; it is not a thing that thinks, but a consciousness ; not a thing that wills, but an activity. (c) This somewhat tedious discussion was necessary in order to vindicate the real unity of the religious life against the view that it is a falsely conceived juxta- position of heterogeneous functions with no unity and no interconnexion. There is, we have argued, only one kind of activity ; namely, that which is at the same time thought and will, knowledge and action ; and if RELIGION AND MORALITY 35 religion is the name of this activity, then all true life is religion. We cannot distinguish three kinds of life, the thinking life, the active life, and the religious life that unites the two. So far as anybody thinks, he wills to think, and is so far already in possession of the complete or religious life ; and the same is true of any one who wills. It may be desirable to remark at this point that to say there is only one possible complete life, and that the religious, does not in the least abolish the differences between different people's abilities and ideals, or set up one out of a number of lives as the one to which all ought to conform. In a sense, it is to do the very opposite of this ; for we have pointed out that what- ever life is really livable, whatever is a life at all, is already for that very reason religious in its degree ; and that no one type of life has any right to claim for itself the title of religious at the expense of any other. In one sense we do certainly make a restriction in the variety of ideals ; not in the number of possible lives, but in the ways in which such lives may be classified. While fully agreeing that there is a difference between the work of a statesman and that of a philosopher, for instance, we should not admit that this difference is of such a kind that the former can be correctly described as a man of action and the latter as a man of thought. And in the same way, we should not wish to deny the difference between a priest and a layman ; but we should deny that the life of the one was religious and the life of the other secular. As every life includes, and indeed is, both thought and action, so every life is essentially religious ; and the secular life, if that means a life negatively defined by the mere absence of religion, does not exist at all. If, however, the " secular " life is defined positively as consisting of interests from which priests are excluded, or of interests lying altogether outside the sphere of religion, we shall reply that no legitimate interest is 36 GENERAL NATURE OF RELIGION PT . i foreign to all religious life ; and that the question what is and what is not lawful for a priest, though a perfectly legitimate question, cannot be decided by an appeal to the conception of religion. Every man has his own duties, and every class of men has duties proper to itself as a class ; but just as the " man of action " is not freed from the obligation to truth, nor the " man of contemplation " from the obligation to morality, so the layman is as much bound as the priest by the ideals of the religion which in some form or other he cannot help professing. CHAPTER III RELIGION AND HISTORY WE have till now, in our treatment of the intellectual side of religion, confined our attention to the philosophic or theological content ; but if we are right in suppos- ing the religious life to be all-inclusive, it must also include the activity of historical thought. Religion, as Coleridge says, must contain " facts " as well as " ideas." The historical aspect of religion is not likely to suffer neglect at the present time. The application to religious problems of historical research has been the most conspicuous and brilliant feature in the theology of the last half-century. Even thirty years ago, so little was generally known of the origins and antecedents of Christianity that when the Apocalypse of Enoch was first produced in English in 1883, its editor could gloat with an almost comic delight over the publication of " the Semitic romance from which Jesus of Nazareth borrowed his conceptions of the triumphant return of the Son of Man." To-day no writer, however ignorant of recent research, could compose such a sentence. Every one knows that Christianity was deeply rooted in Judaism, and the relations of the two can be discussed without shocking the orthodox or causing malicious glee to the critics. This great historical movement in theology has taken two chief forms. They cannot indeed be sharply separated, but they may be broadly distinguished for the sake of convenience. One is Comparative Religion, 37 38 GENERAL NATURE OF RELIGION PT. i with its anthropological and psychological branches ; the other is Historical Theology, concentrating upon the antecedents, origin, history, and development of Christian doctrine. Each of these has made enormous and most valuable contributions to theology ; indeed whatever progress has been made in the last fifty years has been due almost entirely to their help. i. The danger at the present time is not so much that the religious importance of history may be for- gotten as that it may be overrated. The great successes of historical theology and of comparative religion sometimes lead theologians to expect more from these methods than they ever really supply. There is a tendency to regard historical methods as the only respectable approach to religious truth ; to suppose that the vexed questions of theology are soluble by historical means or not at all ; in fact to imagine that theology has tried the method of speculation and found it wanting, and that it has now at length found the right method, a method which properly used will yield all the truth that can ever be known. This theory I shall describe as historical positivism, by analogy with Comte's view that human thought was in his time emerging from a " metaphysical " stage and entering on a " positive " ; casting aside barren a priori speculation and waking up at last to the reality and all-sufficiency of a posteriori science ; passing out of the region of ideas into the region of facts. Comte's forecast, it may be observed in passing, was just. Thought did from his time assume for a while a notably less metaphysical and more positive character. It had been well frightened by its own philosophical daring in the previous period. It had jumped in and found itself out of its depth ; and Comte was the mouthpiece by which it recorded its vow never to try to swim again. Who has not made a similar vow ? and who, after making it, has ever kept it ? As in the case of Comtian positivism, so this CH. in RELIGION AND HISTORY 39 historical positivism in theology seems to imply a definitely anti-philosophical scepticism ; it is a merely negative attitude. It is characteristic of two religious types which at first sight seem to have little in common. On the one hand, it is expressed by that extreme anti- speculative orthodoxy which takes its stand on the bald historical fact "so the Church believes and has believed"; on the other, it is found in the extreme anti-dogmatic view of many Liberal Protestants, to whom "metaphysic" is anathema. These positions we shall not criticise in detail. We have already laid down in a former chapter the necessity to religion of a speculative creed, and there is no need to repeat the arguments there used. Instead of proving the impossibility of a totally un- philosophical theology, we shall consider two instances of unphilosophical representations of religion and try to show where and why they break down. These instances are abstract or one-sided forms of the two sciences mentioned above ; namely, (a) comparative religion, and () historical theology. (a) Comparative religion is the classification and comparison of different religions or of different forms of the same religion. Its aim is to determine the precise beliefs of such and such a people or sect. It is therefore on the one hand anthropological, as involving the comparison of different human types, and on the other psychological, as determining the religious beliefs of this or that individual considered as a member of a certain class, sect, or nation. Comparative religion or religious anthropology is therefore not really to be distinguished from the Psychology of Religion. If we ask what constitutes psychology and dis- tinguishes it from other sciences, we cannot answer merely that psychology is the study of the mind or soul. The philosophical sciences, logic, ethics, and so forth, attempt to study the mind ; and they are not psychological. Nor can we say (as some psychologists say) that this is the reason of their unsatisfactory 4 o GENERAL NATURE OF RELIGION PT . i character ; for these sciences exist on their own basis, and it is no criticism of one science to point out that it is not a different one. Again, we cannot define psychology as the study of conduct ; because that title is already claimed by ethics. From these philosophical sciences psychology is distinguished not by its subject but by its method. The method peculiar to psychology may perhaps be described as follows. The psychology of knowing differs from logic or the philosophical theory of know- ledge in that it treats a judgment the act of knowing something as an event in the mind, a historical fact. It does not go on to determine the relation of this mental event to the " something " known, the reality beyond the act 1 which the mind, in that act, apprehends. Such a further investigation would be metaphysical in character and is therefore avoided by psychology. Now this formula can be universalised, and thus gives us the definition of psychological method. Take the mental activity as a self-contained fact ; refuse, so far as that is possible, to treat of its metaphysical aspect, its relations with real things other than itself; and you have psychology. Thus in scientific thought as studied by logic we have a judgment in which the mind knows reality : psychology, treating the judgment as a mere event, omits its reference to reality, that is to say, does not raise the question whether it is true. 2 In religion, we have people holding definite beliefs as to the nature of God. Psychology studies and classifies those beliefs without asking how far they correspond with the real nature of God. In conduct generally we have certain actions, individual or social, designed to attain the ends of morality, utility, or the like ; psychology will study 1 The description of judgment as a mental event or act which refers to a reality beyond the act is borrowed from Mr. F. H. Bradley's Logic. I use Mr. Bradley's language not because I entirely accept such a description of the judgment, but because I believe it to express the view on which psychology is based ; and therefore psychology cannot be defined without reference to it. 2 The same omission or abstraction is made by Formal Logic, which I take to be a psychological rather than a philosophical science. CH. in RELIGION AND HISTORY 41 these actions without asking whether they are right or wrong, but taking them merely as things done. In general, the characteristic of psychology is the refusal to raise ultimate questions. And since that is so, it is plainly not in a position to offer answers to them : or rather, in so far as it does offer answers these rest on an uncritical and quite accidental attitude towards the problems. For instance, the psychology of religion, consisting as it does in the collection of beliefs about God without determining their truth, evidently does not aim at discovering what God is and which opinions give the best account of his nature. The psychology of religion, therefore, unlike the philosophy of religion, is not itself a religion ; that is, it has no answer of its own to the question " What is God ? " It has, in fact, deliberately renounced the investigation of that question and substituted the other question, " What do different people say about him ? " Of course a religious psychologist may be willing to offer an answer of his own to the first question. But in so far as he does that he is abandoning the psychology of religion and falling back on religion itself; changing his attitude towards religion from an external to an internal one. When I describe the attitude of psychology as " external " my meaning is this. There is an air of great concreteness and reality about psychology which makes it very attractive. But this concreteness is really a delusion and on closer inspection vanishes. When a man makes a statement about the nature of God (or anything else) he is interested, not in the fact that he is making that statement, but in the belief, or hope, or fancy that it is true. If then the psychologist merely makes a note of the statement and declines to join in the question whether it is true, he is cutting himself off from any kind of real sympathy or participa- tion in the very thing he is studying this man's mental life and experiences. To take an example, a certain mystic says, " God is a circle whose centre is everywhere 42 GENERAL NATURE OF RELIGION PT . i and whose circumference is nowhere." The psycho- logist, instead of answering, "Of course," or, "Really?" or, "I don't quite see what you mean," replies, "That is an example of what I call the Religious Paradox." 1 The mind, regarded in this external way, really ceases to be a mind at all. To study a man's conscious- ness without studying the thing of which he is conscious is not knowledge of anything, but barren and trifling abstraction. It cannot answer ultimate questions, because it has renounced the attempt ; it cannot enter into the life it studies, because it refuses to look with it eye to eye ; and it is left with the cold unreality of thought which is the thought of nothing, action with no purpose, and fact with no meaning. These objections against the ideal of religious psy- chology or of the science of comparative religion only hold good so long as, from such collections of opinions, the philosophical impulse towards the determination of their truth is completely excluded. And the fact that this impulse is never really absent is what gives re- ligious value to such studies. Indeed, this impulse alone gives them scientific value ; for some degree of critical or sympathetic understanding is necessary before the bare facts can be correctly reported. It is notorious that the unintelligent observer cannot even observe. It is only owing to surreptitious or unconscious aberrations from its ideal of " objectivity " that psychology ever accomplishes anything at all. () The ideal of a history of the Church as a substitute for philosophical theology is plainly open to the same general objections. It profits nothing to catalogue the heresies of early Christianity and get them off by heart, unless one enters with some degree of sympathy into the problems which men wished to solve, and tries to comprehend the motives which led them to offer their various answers. But this sympathy and understanding are purely religious, theological, 1 This instance is not imaginary. CH. in RELIGION AND HISTORY 43 philosophical ; to understand a heresy one must appreciate the difficulty which led to it ; and that difficulty, however expressed, is always a philosophical difficulty. The merely external history of dogma killeth ; it is the internal history the entering into the development of thought that maketh alive. The same applies, again, to the origins of Christianity. The " historical Jesus " can never solve the problem of Christianity, because there never was a "historical" Jesus pure and simple; the real Jesus held definite beliefs about God and himself and the world ; his interest was not historical but theological. By considering him as a mere fact in history, instead of also an idea in theology, we may be simplifying our task, but we are cutting ourselves off from any true understanding and sharing of his consciousness. Historical theology is always tempted to lose itself in the merely external task of showing what formulas he took over from current religion, and what he added to them, and what additions and alterations were superadded by the early Church ; whereas all this is but the outward aspect of the reality, and the true task of historical theology is to find out not only what was said, but what was meant ; what current Judaism, to begin with, meant by its formulae, and how far its meaning was a satisfactory theology. Then we should be in a position to understand from within the new doctrines of Jesus, and really to place ourselves at the fountain-head of the faith. To speak of studying the mind of Jesus from within may seem presumptuous ; but no other method is of the slightest value. 2. Historical positivism thus fails to give any answer to theological questions. It can tell us that the Church has anathematised certain doctrines. But what those doctrines mean, or why any one ever held them, or what the Church meant to assert by con- demning them, or even why it follows that we ought to condemn them too, pure history can never tell us. 44 GENERAL NATURE OF RELIGION PT. i For the solution of these problems we are thrown back on speculative thought. Hence, through condemnation of the over-emphasis laid on historical truth, emerges a contrary theory : namely, that history is useless as a basis for theology. This anti-historical view may take two forms : (a) that history is itself too uncertain to bear such an important superstructure as theology ; (b) that the two things are truths of different orders, so that one cannot have any bearing on the other. (a) However well attested a historical fact may be, it is never more than merely attested. It is always possible that it may be wrong ; we have no means of checking it ; it is always conceivable that evidence might turn up sufficient to discredit the best established historical belief. And still worse the evidence might never turn up, and we should simply go on believing what was totally untrue. Seeing, then, how desperately uncertain history must always be, can we, dare we, use it as the foundation for all our creeds ? This argument introduces a new form of scepticism, which we may describe as anti-historical scepticism. It is in essence a statement of the unknowability of past fact simply as such, on the abstract ground that failure of memory, breach of the tradition, is always possible. This is entirely parallel to the anti- philosophical scepticism which declares that no inference is sound because of the unavoidable abstract possi- bility of a logical fallacy. Each is a fantastic and hypercritical position, and neither is really tenable. If inference as such is to be distrusted, the evidence that leads us to distrust it is discredited with the rest. If attested fact as such is liable to be misreported, the facts on which we base this generalisation are as doubt- ful as any others. Indeed the theory puts a stop to every kind of activity ; for if the human memory as such is the seat of the supposed fallacy, we cannot count upon any continuity whatever in our mental RELIGION AND HISTORY 45 life ; it may always be the case that my memory of five minutes ago is completely misleading. If I may not base a theory on facts reported in books of history, am I more entitled to trust those recollected by myself? Plainly there is no difference of kind here. But if the sceptic falls back on a question of degree and says that some facts are better attested than others, then of course one agrees with him and admits that one is always bound to ask whether these facts are well enough attested to serve as basis for this theory ; whether the facts are two thousand years or two minutes distant in time makes no real difference. () The other argument against the use of history in theology asserts that there are two categories of fact, historical and philosophical ; and that since they are totally distinct, theological propositions, which are essentially philosophical in character, cannot be proved or disproved or in the least affected by historical arguments ; just as discussions about the authorship of a poem do not in the least affect its beauty. This argument is plainly right if it merely means that you cannot as if by magic extract a philosophical conclusion from non-philosophical premisses. If you understand history as something entirely excluding philosophical elements, then any philosophical con- clusion which you " prove " by its means will be dishonestly gained. But in this sense the statement is no more than the tautology that you cannot extract from an argument more than its premisses contain ; it does not help us to recognise a purely historical or philosophical argument when we meet one, or even convince us that such things exist. It may, secondly, be interpreted to mean that when we cite instances in support of philosophical views the philosophical conclusion depends not on the historical fact but on the " construction," as it is called, which we put upon the fact. We look at the fact in the light of an idea ; and the philosophical theory which we describe 46 GENERAL NATURE OF RELIGION n . i as proved by the fact is due not to the fact but to the idea we have read into it. Here again there is a certain truth. When A finds his pet theory of human selfish- ness borne 'out by C's action, and B uses the same action as an .illustration of his own theory of human altruism, it seems natural to say that each starts from the same fact but with different preconceived ideas : and that the fact is really equally irrelevant to both the theories which it is used to prove. But this account of the matter is quite inaccurate. A's " idea " is that C's act was a selfish act ; B's " idea " was that it was altru- istic. But of these ideas neither was a mere "idea" ; one was a historical fact and the other a historical error. Thus the distinction between the fact and the construc- tion put upon it is false ; what we call the construction is only our attempt to determine further details about the fact. And since the question whether C was acting selfishly or not is a question of historical fact, the doctrine that people act in general selfishly or altruistic- ally is based entirely on historical fact, or on something erroneously imagined to be historical fact. The attempt to dissociate philosophy and history breaks down because, in point of fact, we never do so dissociate them. One simply cannot make general statements without any thought of their instances. 3. Positivism and scepticism both break down under examination. We cannot, it appears, do without either philosophical or historical thought. We seem therefore to have here a distinction within the region of the intellect parallel to that of intellect and will in the mind as a whole ; and consequently we must investigate the relation between philosophy and history with a view to determining as accurately as possible the nature of the distinction. (0) In the first place, it appears that history cannot exist without philosophy. There is no such thing as an entirely non-philosophical history. History cannot proceed without philosophical presuppositions of a highly CH. in RELIGION AND HISTORY 47 complex character. It deals with evidence, and there- fore makes epistemological assumptions as to the value of evidence ; it describes the actions of historical char- acters in terms whose meaning is fixed by ethical thought ; it has continually to determine what events are possible and what are not possible, and this can only be done in virtue of some general metaphysical conclusions. It is not, of course, implied that no historian is qualified for his work without a systematic education in academic philosophy. Still less is it to be supposed that a philosopher dabbling in history is better able than the historians to lay down the law as to the value of such and such a historical argument. It must be remembered that by philosophy we mean, here as else- where, thought concerned with metaphysical problems : not acquaintance with technical literature and the vocabulary of the specialist. () It is equally certain that philosophy is impossible without history ; for any theory must be a theory of facts, and if there were no facts there would be no occasion for theory. But in asserting the necessity of history to philosophy we must guard against certain misunderstandings. In the first place, the above statement may be inter- preted to mean that philosophy develops or evolves along fixed lines, has a definite history of its own in the sense of a movement in which each phase emerges necessarily from the preceding phase, and therefore philosophy (i.e. the state of philosophical thought now) depends absolutely upon history (i.e. its own previous history). As against such a view it must be pointed out that philosophy is a human activity, not a mechanical process ; and is therefore free and not in any sense necessitated either by its own past or anything else. Doubtless every philosopher owes much to his pre- decessors ; thought is a corporate activity, like every 48 GENERAL NATURE OF RELIGION PT. i other. But the dependence of Hegel upon Kant, say, is of quite a different kind from the dependence in- dicated by the above theory. Hegel's work is based upon Kant, in the sense that many of Kant's truths are Hegel's truths too ; but Kant also makes errors which Hegel corrects. The error is not the basis of the truth but the opposite of it. It may, and indeed in a sense must, lead to it ; because an error cannot be refuted till it has been stated. But the statement of the error is not the cause of its refutation. The word " cause " is simply inapplicable ; for we are dealing with the free activity of the mind, not with a mechanical process. And therefore this theory uses the word dependence in a misleading sense. Secondly, philosophy may be said to depend on history in the sense that history, the gradual and cumulative experience of facts, is necessary before we can frame philosophical theories on a broad enough basis. The wider a man's experience, the more likely his generalisations are to be true. The same applies to the human race in general ; we have been accumulating facts little by little for centuries now, and consequently we are a great deal better equipped for philosophising than were, for instance, the Greeks. This theory expresses a point of view which is always widely held ; it is an attitude towards the world whose technical name is empiricism, and of which the dominant note is the abstract insistence on mere number or size. It reckons wisdom by the quantity of different things a man knows, and certainty by the number of different times a statement comes true ; it holds that a man broadens his views by travelling, and stunts them by living at home ; it measures everything in two dimensions, and forgets the existence of a third. As a matter of fact one is almost ashamed of having to utter such truisms he who accumulates information alone is very likely to accumulate not merely sorrow but indigestion of the mind ; if he cannot understand CH. in RELIGION AND HISTORY 49 himself, he is not necessarily the wiser for trying to understand others ; if he cannot learn truth at home, he will certainly not learn it abroad. It is true that more facts of some kinds are known to the learned world now than in the time of Socrates ; but it does not follow that we are all wiser than Socrates. The notion of establishing theories on a broad basis is, in short, an error ; itself based upon a broad, but ex- tremely superficial, theory of logic. What matters in the foundations of a theory is not their breadth but their depth ; the thorough understanding of a single fact, not the feverish accumulation of a thousand. History must be regarded not as a mechanical process, nor yet as a gradual accumulation of truths, but simply as objectivity ; as the real fact of which we are conscious. History is that which actually exists; fact, as something independent of my own or your knowledge of it. In this sense there would be no philosophy without it ; for no form of consciousness can exist without an object. We are not expelling from history the notion of move- ment ; for if we are asked, what is the nature of this reality of which we are conscious ? we shall reply that it is itself activity, growth, development ; but not development in any automatic or mechanical sense. 4. We are now able to , suggest more fully the relation of history to philosophy. Neither can exist without the other ; each presupposes the other. That is to say, they are interdependent and simultaneous activities, like thought and will. The question is whether, like thought and will, they are fully identical. Each is knowledge ; and if they are different, they must be the knowledge of different objects. How can we distinguish these objects ? History, it is sometimes said, is knowledge of the particular, philosophy know- ledge of the universal. But the particular is no mere particular ; it is a particular of this or that universal ; and the universal never can exist at all except in the form of this or that particular. " The universal " and 5 o GENERAL NATURE OF RELIGION FT . i " the particular " considered as separate concrete things are fictions ; and to equate the distinction of philosophy and history with such a fictitious distinction is to admit at once that it is untenable. Nor can we distinguish them as the knowledge of the necessary and of the contingent respectively. This distinction is due to the fact that a theory explains some things but leaves others unexplained ; and this remnant, relatively to the theory, appears as " the contingent." Contingent, therefore, is only a synonym for unexplained ; it cannot mean inexplicable, for if there is a sense in which anything is explicable, we cannot assume that anything is in this sense not explicable. In the last resort necessary probably means no more than real: when we say that a thing is necessarily so, we mean that we understand it to be really so. And therefore whatever is real is neces- sarily real. In point of fact, it is possible that the distinction between necessity and contingence is only a restatement of that between the universal and the particular. It would, again, be a repetition of the same idea if we tried to distinguish things that happen in time (history) from things that are true independently of time (philosophy). For there is one sense in which every truth is temporal ; as for instance the nature of God is historically revealed, and the fact that twice two is four is grasped by adding, on a definite occasion, two and two ; and there is another sense in which every fact is independent of time ; as it is still true and always will be true that the battle of Hastings was fought in 1066. The difference between a temporal event and a timeless truth is a difference not between two different classes of thing, but between two aspects of the same thing. This attempt to distinguish philo- sophy and history suggests a dualism between two complete worlds ; the one unchanging, self- identical, and known by philosophy, the other subject to change CH. in RELIGION AND HISTORY 51 and development, and known by history. But a world of mere self-identity would be as inconceivable as a world of mere change ; each quality is the reverse side of the other. To separate the two is to destroy each alike. History, like philosophy, is the knowledge of the one real world ; it is historical, that is, subject to the limitation of time, because only that is known and done which has been known and done ; the future, not being mechanically determined, does not yet exist, and therefore is no part of the knowable universe. It is philosophical, that is, all-embracing, universal, for the same reason ; because historical fact is the only thing that exists and includes the whole universe. History a parte objecti the reality which historical research seeks to know is nothing else than the totality of existence ; and this is also the object of philosophy. History a parte subjecti the activity of the historian is investigation of all that has happened and is happening ; and this is philosophy too. For it is incorrect to say that philosophy is theory based upon fact ; theory is not something else derived, distilled, from facts but simply the observation that the facts are what they are. And similarly the philosophical presuppositions of history are not something different from the history itself: they are philosophical truths which the historian finds historically exemplified. History and philosophy are therefore the same thing. It is true, no doubt, that each in turn may be interpreted abstractly ; abstract history being the mere verbal description of events without any attempt at under- standing them, philosophy the dry criticism of formal rules of thinking without any attempt at grasping their application. Abstract history in this sense is a failure not because it is unphilosophical, but because it is un- historical ; it is not really history at all. And similarly abstract philosophy becomes meaningless, because in eliminating the historical element it has unawares 5 2 GENERAL NATURE OF RELIGION n .i eliminated the philosophical element too. Each alike must also be the other or it cannot be itself ; each in being itself is also the other. 5. The value of historical theology, then, consists in the fact that it is already philosophical. It does not merely supply philosophical theology with materials ; it is itself already grappling with the philosophical problems. Religion cannot afford to ignore its historical content, nor can it treat this content as something in- essential to the establishment of its speculative doctrines. History must bear the weight of speculative super- structure to the best of its ability ; but in return it may derive help from philosophical light thrown there- by on its own difficulties. In this way the distinction between philosophical and historical theology disappears ; there is seen to be only one theology, which is both these at once. It may be presented with comparative emphasis on constructive doctrine, as in the later chapters of this book ; but if so, it does not omit or ignore history. It is woven of strands each of which is historical in character, and the whole presents itself as a historical fact. Similarly, theology may be written from a historical point of view, with the emphasis on temporal development ; but it is only theology so long as it is clear that the thing that is developing is really doctrine all the time. An illustration may serve to indicate the necessity to theology of its historical aspect. In view of the criticisms often brought against the records of the life of Jesus, many are inclined to take up a sceptical attitude and to declare that our tradition is hopelessly incorrect. But, they go on to ask, what then? We learn many valuable lessons from the Good Samaritan, though we do not believe him to have existed. We learn, too, from Homer, even if Homer never wrote what we ascribe to him. We have the tradition in black and white ; it bears its credentials on its face ; all else is a side-issue. Is there anything we learn from CH. HI RELIGION AND HISTORY 53 the Christ-history that we could not equally learn from the Christ-myth ? The simple religious mind would, I believe, emphati- cally reject such a suggestion. And this would be perfectly right. It is easy to say that the " Christ- myth " embodies facts about God's nature which, once known, are known whether they are learnt from one source or from another. That is by no means the whole truth. The life of Christ gives us, conspicuously, two other things. It gives us an example of how a human life may satisfy the highest possible standards ; and it puts us in contact with the personality of the man who lived that life. The whole value of an example is lost unless it is historical. If an athlete tries to equal the feats of Herakles, or an engineer spends his life trying to recover the secret of the man who invented a perpetual- motion machine, they are merely deluding themselves with false hopes if Herakles and the supposed inventor never lived. The Good Samaritan's action is the kind of thing that any good man might do ; it is typical of a kind of conduct which we see around us and know to be both admirable and possible. But if the life of Jesus is a myth, it is more preposterous to ask a man to imitate it than to ask him to imitate Herakles. Any valid command must guarantee the possibility of carrying it out ; and the historical life of Jesus is the guarantee that man can be perfect if he will. Further, in that perfection, or the struggle towards it, the religious man somehow feels that he is in personal touch with a risen Christ. We do not at present demand an explanation of this feeling, or ask whether there is a real intercourse ; it is enough that the feeling exists and is an integral part of the Christian consciousness. The presence of Christ is as real to the believer as the love of God. But it can hardly be real if Christ is a myth. It must be observed that we are not arguing to the 54 GENERAL NATURE OF RELIGION FT. i reality of Christ's presence now, or his historicity in the past, on the strength of this feeling. Such an argument would be extremely hazardous. We are merely concerned to show that Christianity would not be absolutely unchanged by the demonstration that these things were mythical. The belief that Christ really lived, whether it is true or false, colours the whole consciousness of the believer. The same holds good even of purely " intellectual " doctrine. If a doctrine is simple and easy, containing nothing very new or paradoxical, a fiction is enough to drive it home. But if it is difficult to grasp and conflicts with our preconceived notions, our first impulse is to challenge the reality of the fact which serves as an instance. A scientist propounds some new and revolutionary doctrine ; at once we ask whether the experiments on which it is based were fairly carried out as he describes them. If not, we dismiss the doctrine. No doubt to an absolutely perfect mind a fiction would be as illuminating as a fact, because ex hypothesi such a mind would have no special difficulty in grasping any truth, however subtle, and would stand in no need of, so to speak, forcible conviction. A person who was the equal or superior of Jesus Christ in spiritual insight could give up his historicity and not lose by it. But such a description only applies to God. And in God, we can no longer distinguish between the historical and the imaginary. If, speaking in a Platonic myth, we describe the course of history as a story told to himself by God, it makes no difference whether we say the story is imaginary or true. But for us objective fact, history, is necessary. We all have something of the spirit of Thomas, and must know a thing has happened before we can believe its teaching. Is this, perhaps, one reason for the difference between the parables that Jesus spoke and the parable he acted ? He knew the limitations of his audience ; CH.III RELIGION AND HISTORY 55 he saw what they could understand and what they could not. Some things about God he could tell them in words, and they would believe his words ; but one last thing how could he tell that ? and if he could find words to tell it, who would not mock him for a visionary or shrink from him as a blasphemer ? There was only one way ; to act the parable he could not speak. We are accustomed to think of the death of Jesus as the sacrifice for our sins. Was it not also, perhaps, a sacrifice for our stupidity ? PART II RELIGION AND METAPHYSICS 57 CHAPTER I ON PROVING THE EXISTENCE OF GOD i. IT might be maintained that the first duty of a philosophical theology, indeed of any theology, is to prove the existence of the God whose nature it professes to expound. The difficulty of this preliminary task is so great that theology tries in general to escape it ; pointing out that every science starts from some data, some fact taken for granted. The physicist is not called upon to prove the existence of matter, nor the historian to prove the existence of his documentary authorities. Granted that matter exists, the physicist will tell you what it is like ; and theology must claim to exercise the same freedom in the choice of a starting- point. (a) This defence is in part justified, and in part, I think, mistaken. It may be true that no empirical science would submit its foundations to such rigorous criticism as is here applied to theology. And if theology is to be a merely empirical science, it has a correspond- ing right to make uncriticised assumptions. But the sting of the criticism lies in the fact that theology claims to be more than this. It presents itself as a philosophy, a view of the universe as a whole, the ultimate ground of reality ; and philosophy can take nothing for granted. A historian may say, " I give you here a sketch of the character of Julius Caesar. It is based on all the available evidence ; but though I have weighed the documents as well as I could, and allowed for the 59 60 RELIGION AND METAPHYSICS partisanship of one writer and the prejudice of another, I still feel that the evidence is very slight and scanty, and that no high degree of certainty is possible. We have to remember in dealing with remote history that no proof of a statement can ever be offered which will stand against the objections of a determined scepticism." If a theologian prefaced his account of the nature of God by a statement in terms analogous to these, he would doubtless win the approval of many for his toleration and breadth of mind ; but all sincerely religious people would, I am convinced, feel that his detached and judicial attitude was not merely an outrage on their feelings but exhibited a certain intellectual obtuseness and incapacity to appreciate the point at issue. We should have the same feeling if a philosopher said, "Such, in my opinion, is the nature of morality. We must not, however, forget that some people deny the existence of morality altogether, and it is quite possible that they are right." To such language we should reply that a philosopher has no right to construct the nature of morality out of his inner consciousness, and end in the pious hope that the reality may corre- spond with his " ideal construction." His business as a philosopher is to discover what actually are the ideals which govern conduct, and not to speak until he has something to tell us about them. In the same way, the theologian's business is to understand, at least in some degree, the nature of God ; if he cannot claim to do this, he has no claim on our attention. A hypothetical science, one which says, " These are the characteristics of matter, or number, or space, granted that such things really exist " may be incomplete, but it is at any rate something ; a hypothetical philosophy or theology is not merely mutilated but destroyed. If we say to a scientist, " First prove to me that matter exists, and then I will hear what you have to say about it," he will answer, " That is metaphysics, and I have nothing to do with it." But theology is already CH.I ON PROVING EXISTENCE OF GOD 61 metaphysical through and through ; so it would appear that when we say to a theologian " I must have proof that God exists before I can be expected to listen to your description of him," the theologian is bound to supply the proof, and his science must stand still until he has done it. But this is at least not what theologians actually do ; and though it may be replied that none the less they ought to do it, is the demand quite fair either to them or to the scientists ? (b) The scorn with which the scientist utters the word "metaphysics" shows that he does not think the worse of physics for refusing to embark upon the argu- ments so entitled. And yet surely the physicist cannot suppose that it makes no difference to physics whether matter exists or not. Nor is it strictly true to say, as is often said, that he assumes matter to exist ; that is to say, begs the metaphysical question in his own favour. His real position is quite different from this. " How can I prove the existence of a thing " (he might say) " whose nature is totally undefined ? Did Newton first prove to a mystified world the existence of fluxions, and only afterwards deign to explain what he meant by the word ? If you will listen to me and hear what I have got to say about matter, you can then go on to criticise it, that is, to ask whether the thing which I call matter really exists. But this metaphysics, arguing about the reality or unreality of a thing you have never tried to describe, seems to me a waste of time." (c) The theologian, I think, ought to put in the same plea. A proof of the existence of God is all very well, but there are " Gods many," if by God you understand whatever this or that man happens to mean by the word. Would a proof of the existence of God prove that Apollo and Hathor and Krishna and Mumbo Jumbo all existed ? and if so, what becomes of any religion, if every other is exactly as true ? Plainly, if the God of one religion exists, the God of a contradictory religion cannot exist ; and the proof of one is the disproof of 62 RELIGION AND METAPHYSICS PT . n the other. Let us first determine what we mean by God, and then and only then we can profitably ask whether he exists. This second demand is more reasonable than the first ; but it still has one grave defect. The determina- tion of what I believe (about God or about anything else) is not a different thing from the question whether that belief is true. To believe a thing is to regard it as true ; and to attach a meaning to a word, to believe that this and no other is the right meaning, is to assert that the thing which you so name exists, and exists in this form and no other. Nor can we escape this con- clusion by quoting the time-honoured instance of the dragon, in which, it is supposed, we attach a meaning to a word without believing that the thing so named really exists ; for dragons do exist in Fairyland, and it is only in Fairyland that the word has any meaning. To attach a meaning to a word, then, is to claim that this meaning is the right one : that is, that the thing whose name it is really exists, and that this is its actual nature. To distinguish between the question, " What do I mean by God ? " and the question, " Does God exist, and if so what is he like ? " is impossible, for the two questions are one and the same. It is, of course, possible to distinguish the meaning I attach to the word, or my conception of God, from another person's meaning or conception ; and it may be possible, comparing these two, to discover which is the better and to adopt it. But in any case, the statement of what we mean by God (or anything else) is not the mere expression of a " subjective idea " or of the "mean- ing of a word" as distinct from the "nature of a thing." It is already critical, so far as we have the power of making it so ; it presupposes that we have reasons for believing that idea, that meaning, to be the right one. Thus the proof of the existence of God is not something else without which theology is incomplete ; it is theology itself. The reasoned statement of the CH. i ON PROVING EXISTENCE OF GOD 63 attributes of God is at the same time the proof that the God who has those attributes is the God who exists. Similarly, physics does not require to be supplemented by a metaphysical proof that matter exists ; it already supplies that proof in the form of an answer to the question, " What conception of matter is the right conception ? " It may be objected to this way of putting it that the existence of matter in the one case and God in the other really has been dogmatically assumed : and that thus we are falling into the very error which we set out to avoid. This is not the case. The assumption that some form of matter exists is only an assumption if a meaning is already attached to the word matter ; and since to supply the meaning is the function of physics, the word cannot mean anything at the outset. Actually, of course, this vacuum of meaning never exists, because the science is never at its absolute starting-point ; each new scientist begins with the meaning conferred on the word by his predecessors. But does he therefore assume that matter exists in a form precisely corresponding to that meaning ? If so, it would indeed be a monstrous assumption. But he does not. If he did, he would not be a scientist. His whole function as a scientist is to ask whether the matter conceived by his predecessors exists at all. He may discover that their conception was radically false, in which case there is no limit to the degree of change which the meaning of the word " matter " will undergo in his hands. The answer to the question what we mean by the word God, then, is identical with that to the question whether God exists. " What do we mean by the word God? " resolves itself into the question, " What is the right meaning to attach to the word ? " and that again is indistinguishable from the question, " What sort of God exists ? " To suppose that this doctrine rules out atheism is merely to misunderstand it ; for it might quite well be that the word God, like the word dragon, 64 RELIGION AND METAPHYSICS PT . n means something which exists only in the realm of the imagination. It follows that we shall not begin by proving the existence of God, nor indeed offer any formal proof at all. But this is not because the existence of God cannot, in the nature of things, be proved. It is often maintained that ultimate truths are incapable of proof, and that the existence of God is such an ultimate truth. But I venture to suggest that the impossibility of proof attaches not to ultimate truths as such, but only to the truths of " metaphysics " in the depreciatory sense of the word ; to truths, that is, which have no definite meaning. We cannot prove that Reality exists, not because the question is too " ultimate " (that is, because too much depends on it), but because it is too empty. Tell us what you mean by Reality, and we can offer an alternative meaning and try to discover which is the right one. No one can prove that God exists, if no definite significance is attached to the words ; not because as is doubtless the case the reality of God transcends human knowledge, but because the idea of God which we claim to have is as yet entirely inde- terminate. In the same way, we cannot prove or disprove the existence of matter until we know what sort of matter is meant ; but something can certainly be done to prove the existence or non-existence of the matter of Democritus or Gassendi or Clerk Maxwell. I do not wish to imply that hesitation and diffidence are mistaken attitudes in which to approach these questions. There is a false mystery, which consists in the asking of unreasonable and unanswerable questions ; but there is also a true mystery, which is to be found everywhere and supremely in that which is the centre and sum of all existence. In approaching these hardest of all problems, only the most short-sighted will expect to find their full solution, and only the least discriminating will think at the end that he has found it. Herein lies the real ground for humility ; not that CH. i ON PROVING EXISTENCE OF GOD 65 our faculties exhaust themselves in a vain struggle to compass the unknowable, but that however well we do we have never done all we might or all we could ; and are, after all, unprofitable servants of the supreme wisdom. 2. The common charge of inconclusiveness brought against the traditional proofs of God's existence is thus to a certain extent justified ; for these proofs are, in their usual forms, isolated arguments, detached from any positive theology and attempting to demonstrate the existence of a God whose nature is very vaguely conceived. This fact is sometimes expressed by saying that they are purely negative. It would be better to say that they are highly abstract, and that a full state- ment of any one of them would amount to the con- struction of a complete theological metaphysic. No argument can be purely negative, for it is impossible to deny one principle except by asserting another, however little that other is explicitly developed. (a) But there is another charge often brought against these proofs, which relates less to their positive value than to the temper in which they are conceived. It is supposed that they are the fruit not of free specula- tion but of an illicit union between dogmatism and philosophy, authority and criticism. They are believed to be typical of a benighted period when ecclesiastical tradition fixed not only the limits but the very con- clusions of metaphysical thought ; when reason was so debased as to submit to accepting its results blindly at the hands of an unquestioned dogmatism, and to demean itself to the task, apologetic in the worst sense, of bolstering up by sophistical ingenuity these un- criticised beliefs. This view of the traditional proofs, though popular at the present time, is neither historical nor fully reason- able. The Middle Ages were undoubtedly a period when the authority of the Church counted for much ; but these proofs are so far from being typically mediaeval 66 RELIGION AND METAPHYSICS . n that they run, in one form or another, through the whole of philosophy. If the history of speculation begins with Socrates, Socrates was the first person known to us who definitely formulated the Argument from Design ; and Socrates was no blind supporter of dogma. The Ontological proof, first I believe clearly stated by the sceptical philosopher Sextus Empiricus in refutation of the reckless dogmatism of contemporary atheists, enters modern philosophy indeed with Anselm in the Middle Ages, but was not accepted by the orthodox scholastic tradition, and the recognition of its importance was left to Descartes in the full tide of the Renaissance. Since then it has never lost its place as one of the central problems of the theory of knowledge. The third traditional proof, from the contingency or im- perfection of the world to some cause outside the world, is mediaeval only because it was already Aristo- telian, and Aristotle, whatever his shortcomings, cannot any more than Socrates be represented as an example of the priest-ridden intellect. The objection seems to consist in the notion that a proof of some belief which is itself held on other grounds is illegitimate and insincere. Let us so the notion runs employ our reason in the discovery of new truths, not in the invention of proofs for truths, if truths they be, which we learnt from another source and shall continue to believe even if the proof breaks down. By the latter course we learn nothing new, even if it is successful ; we only delude ourselves into mistaking the source from which our beliefs are derived. But this objection will not stand examination. In the first place, it would apply with equal force to the discovery of a proof in the case of, let us say, a mathe- matical theorem ; where we often see the thing to be true but cannot offer any proof of it. Here the discovery of a proof is subsequent to the existence of the belief, and the belief does not disappear if we fail CH. i ON PROVING EXISTENCE OF GOD 67 to discover any proof at all. Why then is it desirable to prove the theorem ? First, perhaps, in order to make sure that our original conviction was not a mere error. If we never tested our first impressions by such means, the mistakes of which we make quite enough already would be indefinitely multiplied. Secondly, in order that by means of the proof we may impart our conviction to persons less gifted than ourselves with the faculty of mathematical intuition. And thirdly, because in dis- covering the proof we really do attain new knowledge. Even if we do no more than make explicit the steps by which our mind leapt to its first conclusion, knowledge of our mental processes is gained ; and, moreover, no proof can be constructed without discover- ing new facts about the relation of this theorem to other things which we already knew. And the dis- covery that one truth necessitates another is a discovery worth making. "The parallel," it may be said, "is unfair. The discovery of a proof is in this case valuable precisely because it is homogeneous with the original intuition. Each was an example of mathematical thinking, and therefore each bears on and is relevant to the other. But the belief in the existence of God is not the fruit of the same kind of thought as the formal proof of his existence. The one is passively taken on authority, the other critically constructed by the reason." Authority does enter largely into the formation of all our beliefs, not excluding those of religion. But it is not peculiar to religion. Even in mathematics, a surveyor, an astronomer, a navigator uses countless formulae which he has never proved and never dreams of testing. In science, the learner takes a vast pro- portion of his beliefs on the authority of his teacher or the writer of his handbook. It would be strange if in religion alone there were no place for authority. (b) And it is doubtless true that there is a distinction 68 RELIGION AND METAPHYSICS PT . n between believing a thing because one is told it by an expert, and believing it because one has been into the evidence for oneself. It is precisely the distinction between the man in the street and the original investi- gator, philosopher, physicist, mathematician, or whatever he may be. But the objection which we are consider- ing puts a peculiar interpretation on this distinction. Because a man has once been a learner, it maintains, he cannot become an independent investigator unless he first forgets what he has learnt. If he attempts to philo- sophise about God, he must first cease to believe in his existence. But is this reasonable ? Must we cele- brate the beginning of our research into a subject by denying all we have been taught about it? "Not perhaps by denying, but certainly by questioning." Yes, no doubt : by asking whether we do believe : and, if we find we still do, by asking why we believe. Philosophy may start as well from one place as from another : and the fact that a man does actually believe in the existence of God, or of his fellow-man, or of an external material world, is no barrier to his becoming a philosopher. The modern "broad-minded" critic would have him dissimulate these convictions, if he cannot get rid of them ; and maintains that to come on the field with opinions ready made is to be hopelessly prejudiced. But the alternative, to come on the field with no opinions at all, is unfortunately impossible. It does not matter where you start, but you must start somewhere ; and to begin by making a clean sweep of all your beliefs is only to deprive yourself of all material on which to work. Or rather, since the feat can never be really accomplished, it is to put yourself at the mercy of those surreptitious beliefs and assumptions which your broom has left lurking in the darker corners. We are dealing not with abstract ideals, but with the ways and means of ordinary life and everyday thinking. No actual man can ever claim that his mind is, thanks to his sedulous avoidance of prejudice, a CH. i ON PROVING EXISTENCE OF GOD 69 perfect and absolute blank as regards the matter he proposes to investigate. There is only one course open to any critic : to discover what he actually does think, and then to find out, if he can, whether his first idea was just or not ; that is, to prove it or to disprove it. Systematic scepticism is the essence of all philosophy and all science ; but scepticism, if it means pretending not to entertain convictions which in fact one finds inevitable, soon passes over into systematic falsehood. Bearing in mind, then, that the preliminary state- ment of belief must be already, to some extent, critical, we can see that the method of argument to which ex- ception was taken is not only inevitable in practice, but theoretically sound. The kind of thinking which accepts truths on authority is not " passive," not funda- mentally distinct from that which criticises every step in detail. The authority is not accepted without some reason, and the fact that it is accepted does not in- capacitate us from analysing the reasons for acceptance and from discovering further reasons. 3. This may serve to explain the scheme of the re- maining chapters of this book. We shall not formally lay down the Christian, or any other, theory of God and then attempt to prove it either in itself or against alter- natives. This would be both wearisome and artificial ; for the exposition cannot be separated from the criticism. Neither shall we attempt a metaphysical construction, free from all presuppositions, which should demonstrate a -priori the truth of the Christian theology ; for this would entail the same arbitrary separation of the two things, even if it were not setting ourselves an initial task far beyond our power. I intend rather to state as simply as possible certain beliefs concerning God and the world which are at least central to the Christian theology, and then to examine certain alternatives to these, or objections alleged against them, which are familiar to modern readers. In this way it may be possible to develop in 7 o RELIGION AND METAPHYSICS the following three chapters a general view of the nature of God ; and in the remaining part I shall apply the results so obtained to some problems which, I imagine, would be commonly described as belonging less to metaphysics than to theology. The distinction between these two spheres, however, must not be insisted upon. The problem of the Incarnation is simply that of the true nature of man and his relation to the absolute spirit ; the Atonement presents in theo- logical terms the purely ethical question of the relation between the good will and the bad ; and the problem of Miracle is not in the last resort to be distinguished from that of the freedom of the will. The points I wish to examine in this part are as follows. Christian theology regards God as spirit, exercising creative power, however conceived, over the world of matter. This material world is supposed truly to exist, that is, to be no mere illusion : but yet to be not self-existent but to depend for its existence and nature on will. This view brings it into conflict with materialism, which regards matter as self-existent and indeed as the only true reality. This antithesis will form the subject of the next chapter. Secondly, God is conceived as a person ; but a person not exclusively related to other persons. His spirit his mind may enter into, may become an element of, indeed the very self of, a given human mind. And this is attained without loss of freedom or individuality on the part of that human mind. This paradox is in conflict with the popular view of person- ality as always exclusive and independent, which makes every person absolutely self-contained and autonomous : and the distinction between the Christian and this latter or individualistic theory of personality will be discussed in Chapter III. Thirdly, God is perfectly good and yet, as omnipo- tent, he is the ruler or creator of a universe in which good and bad exist side by side. Christianity can give CH.I ON PROVING EXISTENCE OF GOD 71 up neither of these doctrines ; it is equally hostile to a theism which restricts God's power, that is, makes him only one of a number of limited or finite beings, for the sake of preserving his goodness, and to a pantheism which denies his goodness in the interest of his infini- tude. This dilemma must be faced to the best of our ability in Chapter IV. These three inquiries do not exhaust even the lead- ing points and difficulties in the Christian conception of God ; but they are enough to take us into the most perilous regions of metaphysics, where the angelic doctors fear to tread. The problem of matter has hardly yet been settled by the advance of philosophy : that of personality is the subject of continual con- troversy : and that of evil is often given up as in- soluble. We cannot expect to achieve at best more than a partial solution of the infinite questions which these problems raise : and that not only because philo- sophy still has far to go, but because it is the nature of truth to present itself under infinite aspects and to offer an endless variety of problems where at first only one is seen. CHAPTER II MATTER POPULAR metaphysic distinguishes two categories of reality, mind and matter. Mind is a reality whose qualities are thought, will, and so forth ; it is not extended over space or divisible into parts. Matter, on the other hand, occupies space, and is homogeneously subdivisible into smaller parts ; it has no consciousness of itself as mind has, nor can it originate any train of events of its own free will. Mind is active, and acts according to its volitions ; matter is passive, and the changes in its condition, all of which are forms of motion, must be brought about either by the influence of other portions of matter, or by that of mind. Matter is thus subject to the law of causation, the law that whatever happens has a cause, external to itself, which determines it to happen in this way and in no other. This law of causation does not apply to mind, whose changes of state are initiated freely from within, in the form of acts of will. These acts of will may influence matter, but they cannot alter or in any way affect the operation of the laws which govern the movements of matter. The importance of this distinction from our point of view is that most religions, and notably Christianity, teach a metaphysic different from this. They hold that whatever happens in the world is brought about not by automatic causation but by the free activity of one or more spirits ; and conse- 72 CH.II MATTER 73 quently they place mind not side by side with matter as a co-ordinate reality but above it. On the other hand, materialism reverses this order, ascribes every- thing to the operation of matter, or causation, and denies to spirit any arbitrament in the course of the world's history. We have thus three hypotheses before us. Either the world is entirely material, or it is entirely spiritual, or it is a compound of the two. When it is said that the world is " entirely " material or spiritual it is not meant that the phenomena commonly described as mind or matter are simply illusory ; it is of course allowed that they exist, but they are explained in such a way as to reduce them to the position of instances of the opposite principle. Thus materialism will admit the existence of thought, but will try to explain it as a kind of mechanism ; the opposite theory (which for the sake of convenience I shall call idealism) l will admit the existence of mechanism, but will try to describe it in such a way that its operation is seen to be a form of spiritual activity. i. Of these three alternatives we shall begin by examining the most popular ; that is to say, the dualism which regards the world as composed of two different and clearly-distinguishable things, mind and matter. This theory, or some theory of the kind, may be described as the plain man's metaphysic. And as such, it has all the strength and all the weakness of an uncritical view. It is not led by a desire for unity, illegitimately satisfied, to neglect or deny one class of fact because it seems irreconcilable with another. The temper which gives every fact its full weight is necessary to any one who pretends to scientific thought ; but it is one-sided and dangerous to the 1 This sense of the word must be carefully distinguished from Idealism as a theory of knowledge. The former, concerned with the antithesis between mind and matter, has no connexion whatever with the latter, which concerns the quite different antithesis of subject and object, and is opposed not to Materialism but to Realism. 74 RELIGION AND METAPHYSICS PT . n truth unless balanced by its apparent opposite, the determination to draw the right conclusions from premisses even if these conclusions seem to contradict the facts. Faith in facts the belief that every fact, if correctly observed, has its own unique value is not really antithetical, but rather identical, with the faith in reason which believes that any rightly-drawn in- ference is as true, as much knowledge of reality, as the observed fact from which it started. It is a common mistake to imagine that the philosopher who says, " This fact is incompatible with my theory, and there- fore my theory is probably wfong," is superior in intellectual honesty to him who says, "This fact is incompatible with my theory, and therefore 1 must ask whether it is a fact." The only true intellectual honesty would lie in putting both these points of view at once. This may seem a truism ; but there is a real danger of treating " facts " with so much respect that we fail to inquire into their credentials, and into the fine distinction between observed fact and inferred or imagined implication. The plain man's dualism, then, seems to be an example of one half of this attitude without the other. It shows a genuine desire to do justice to all the facts, but fails to supply them with that interrelation apart from which it is hardly yet a theory at all. In other words, the plain man's dualism is always conscious of an unsolved problem, the problem of the relation of mind and matter ; and this problem is not a mere by-product of the theory, not a detail whose final settlement is of comparatively small importance ; it is the theory itself. Until some solution of the problem has been suggested, the dualistic theory has never been formulated. For that theory cannot be the mere statement that there are two things, mind and matter ; to be a theory, it must offer some account of the way in which they are related ; and that is just what it seldom if ever does. MATTER 75 (a) But a theory which has not solved all its difficulties even one which has not solved the most elementary and conspicuous of them may still be practically useful, and may indeed contain a certain amount of philosophical truth. It remains to be seen, therefore, whether dualism has these advantages. In the first place, it may be represented as a working hypothesis, if no more ; a method of classifying the sciences and of distinguishing two broad types sciences of matter and sciences of mind. Such a distinction is a 'matter of convenience, whether it does or does not represent a metaphysical truth ; and we must ask whether from this point of view the dis- tinction is of value. Considered as a working hypothesis, it is almost painfully evident that the distinction between matter and mind does not work. The division of sciences into those of mind and those of matter does not give satisfaction to the practical scientist ; it baulks and hinders, rather than helps, his actual work. A few examples will perhaps make this clear. If we take the case of biology, we find a remarkable instance of an entire province of knowledge claimed on the one hand by mechanists in the name of the material sciences, and on the other by vitalists old and new in the interest of the sciences of mind. The former point out that the essence of all vital functions is contained in the facts studied by bio-physics and bio-chemistry, and they further maintain that there is no ultimate distinc- tion between bio-physics or bio-chemistry and physics or chemistry in general ; material substances are not absolved from the operation of their normal laws because for the time being they happen to be parts of an organism. The vitalists, on the other hand, assert that no kind of machine whose operation was limited by the nexus of cause and effect could possibly behave as a living body behaves. We are not concerned to ask which side is in the right ; the point is merely that 76 RELIGION AND METAPHYSICS FT. n to the question "Is an organism mind or matter?" biologists have no unanimous answer ready. And this is enough to show that the methods actually used in biology, the existence and progress of the science, do not absolutely depend on an answer being given. That is to say, the practical scientist so * far from finding dualism a help to his work finds that it creates new difficulties, and therefore he simply ignores it. A still more curious case is that of empirical psycho- logy, where the functions of the mind itself are treated by methods which have been developed in connexion with the sciences of matter. Mind, according to these methods, is treated exactly as if it were matter ; and psychologists claim that by these methods they have solved or can solve problems with which the philosophy of mind has for ages grappled in vain. We need not ask whether these claims are justified ; whether psychology is, as some believe, a new and brilliantly successful method of determining the true nature of mind, or whether as others maintain it is only an old fallacy in a new guise. It is enough for our present purpose to point out that it exists ; that the distinction proposed by dualism as a working hypothesis is not actually accepted as helpful by the scientific men for whose benefit it is propounded. Nor is it possible for dualism to step in and prevent these things, by compelling each method to keep to its own side of the line and prosecute trespassers. The difficulty is that the distinction between mind and matter, which seems so clear to the plain man, vanishes precisely according to his increase of knowledge about either. Until he has studied physics, physiology, psycho- logy, he thinks he knows the difference ; but as soon as he comes to grips with the thing, he is compelled to alter his opinion. The plain man in fact bases his dualism on a claim to knowledge far more sweeping than that made by any scientist, and indeed the know- ledge which the plain man claims seems actually to CH. ii MATTER 77 contradict the scientist's most careful and mature judgment. () Nor can we entirely pass over the difficulty of the relations between mind and matter, even though we have been warned in advance that the theory does not undertake to solve this problem. For it does, as commonly held, make certain statements about their relations. It holds that mind can know matter, that it can move matter by an act of will, and that it is some- how connected with a piece of matter known as the body of that particular mind ; also that matter by its motions can produce certain effects in mind, for instance, pleasure and pain, derangement and death. These are merely examples ; it matters little what examples we choose. But is it really so easy to conceive how two things, defined in the way in which we have defined matter and mind, can act on each other? Matter can only operate in one way, namely, by moving ; and all motion in matter is caused either by impact or by attraction or repulsion ; influences exerted in either case by another piece of matter. 1 If therefore mind influences matter, that is to say, moves it, it can only do so by impinging on it or attracting it. But we do not associate these powers with mind as ordinarily conceived. They can (we should say) only belong to a thing which is spacial, possesses mass, and is capable of motion. Therefore mind cannot affect matter in any way in which matter can be affected, unless mind has properties characteristic of matter itself. That is to say, only matter can affect matter : mind can only affect matter if mind is itself material. Can matter then influence mind? clearly not ; for its influence consists in causing motion, and this it can 1 Attempts have been made to reduce the cause of all motion to impact ; but these have, I believe, never been entirely successful, and are quite foreign to modern physics. Nor are they of much value as a simplification ; for if the origin of motion by gravitation and by the attraction and repulsion of electric charges is hard to understand, its communication by impact is, properly considered, no less so ; though we have no space here to develop in detail the obscurities involved in the conception. 78 RELIGION AND METAPHYSICS only do in something capable of motion, something spacial ; that is, in matter. The two halves of the universe go each its own way, each alike uninfluenced by the other. Mind cannot, by an act of will, move a piece of matter as I imagine that I am moving my pen ; and no change in the position of a material body can disturb, still less annihilate, the activity of a mind. The difficulty is not merely that the dualistic theory omits to explain how these things happen, or that it offers an unsatisfactory account of them ; it definitely implies that they cannot happen at all. (;. " Moralisation " of religion, true and false, 24 Moralistic view of religion, 7-10 Morality, Pt. I. Ch. II. pass. autonomy of, 26 relative to society, 133 Moses, 167 Motion, its causes, 77 and n. Music, 11:, 126, 2<*7 Mystery, 159 true and false, 64 Mystic, 191 Mysticism, 27, 41 Myth, aetiological, 5-7 Mythology, 19 Napoleon, 212 Natural law, 199 ieqq. Nature, as object of worship, 20, 214 and miracle, 195 seqq. Necessary and contingent, 50 New Testament, 149 Newton, 61, 200 Non-contradiction of truth, 118 of good, 1 1 8 Normality, 202 seqq. Omnipotence, 120 what it is, 155 misconceived, 184 Omniscience, 117, 139 what it is, 156 Ontological proof, 66 Opera, 113 Optimism, 121, 131 Pagan gods, 20 Pantheism, 149, 162 " Paradox," the religious, 42 Part. See Whole Paul, S., 26, 209 Penalty = judgment, 179 Penitence. See Repentance Persecution, 22 Personality, 19, Pt. II. Ch. III. pass., 183-184 Pessimism, 121, 131 Peter, S., 209 Philosophical problems, in what sense insoluble, 124 Philosophy and religion, xiii itqq. of religion, non-existence of, 15-16 = theology = religion, 16-19 its distinction from science, 16-17 presupposes history, in true and false senses, 47 cannot admit hypothesis, 60 Philosophy and scientists, 17, 90 Physical suffering, its relation to punish- ment, 178 Physics, 59 uqq. Plato, 131 Pluralism, 96, 196 Polonius, 113 Positivism, 38 seqq., 109 Practical side of religion, Pt. I. Ch. II. Prichard, Mr. H. A., 101 . Proofs of God's existence, their abstract nature, 65 their supposed dishonest character, 65 not typically mediaeval, 66 Psychology, its nature, 39 method of, 40 limitations 0^41-42 its relation to the problem of mind and matter, 76 Punishment, 169 a crime ? 172 as deterrent, 172 an absolute duty, 175 its essence, 176 seqq. in what sense a duty, 177 does not consist of physical pain, 178 = forgiveness, 179 empirically distinct from forgiveness, 1 80 self-, 187 Puritanism, 25 Qualities = relations, 1 1 2 Quietism, 27-29 Real Presence, 210 Realism, 101 . "new," 101 . Reason = intellect, 1 2 n. Regress, infinite, 86 Relations, their alleged "externality," in = qualities, 112 Religion, and philosophy, xiii conduct and, xv history and, xv art and, xvi universality of, xvii usage of word, xvii of savages, 4-7, 18, 24 moralistic view of, 7-10 non-existence of philosophy of, 15-16 = theology = philosophy, 16-19 Religious wars, 22 life, its elements, 32 " paradox," 42 Renaissance, 66, 83 Repentance, 141, 144, 178 INDEX 219 Repentance, its relation to forgiveness 186 divine, 187 its nature, 188 seqq. of God, 189 of Christ, 192 Responsibility, 190-191 Revenge, 172 Rigorism, 25 Ritual, view that it is the true content of religion, 4-7 depends on creed, 7 Robinson Crusoe, ill Rules, of conduct, 203 seqq. in art, 207-208 Samaritan, Good, 52 Savages, religion of, 4-7, 18, 24 Scents, difficulty of defining, 188 Scepticism, 8, 18, 99 true and false, 69 Science and religion, 19 Scientists and philosophy, 17, 90 Scott, Mr. S. G., vi Secular, falsely opposed to religious, 35 Self-condemnation, 178-189 Self-consciousness, 101 Self-dependence, 184 Self-expression of the good will = punish- ment, 177, = forgiveness, 179 Self-identity, 97 seqq., 152 Selfishness, 46 Self-limitation of God, 154 Self-preservation, 172 Self-surrender, 27-29 Series, infinite, 87 Sextus Empiricus, 66 Shakspere, 113, 212 Society, 172-173 morality relative to, 133 Socrates, 49, 66 Son of Man, 37 Sonata, 207 Spinoza, 104, 131 Spirit, Holy, 183 God as, 70 Subjective idealism, 120 " Super-moral Absolute," 123 Teleology, 83 Temperament, xiv Temptation of Jesus, 154 Testament, New, 149 Theism, transcendent, 125, 149 Theology, xiii attempts to distinguish it from creed- element in religion, 12-15 = creed, 12 Theology = philosophy = religion, 16-19 historical, 38, 42 stqq. philosophical character of historical 52 not an empirical science, 59 Theory of knowledge, 1 5 and fact, false antithesis, 17 . anti-moral, of religion, 22-29 atomic, ancient, 8 1 Things and thought, 101 Thinking, ambiguity of the term, 93 Thompson, Francis, 214 Thought, conduct in relation to, 7-8, 30 and action, popular distinction, 33 breakdown of the distinction, 34 and things, 101 Timelessness as characteristic of all truth, 50 Totality, two senses of, 137 must be good, 139, 144 Transcendence, 119, 198 Treatment of criminals, 171 seqq. Triangle, 163-164 Triumph, 188 Truth, ultimate, 64 involving differences in unity, 106 involving non-contradiction, 118 Ultimate truths not incapable as such of proof, 64. Uniformity, 92, 211-214 Union with God, 27 Uniqueness, 92, 102 of Christ, 163-166 Unity, of minds, 101, 104-105 and truth, 106 and identity, 1 08 Universal and particular, 49, 163 Universality of religion, xvii Universe, in what sense a totality, 140 Unknowable, the future as, 156 Vendetta, 172 Vitalists, 75 Wars, religious, 22 Watson, Prof. J., 101 . Whole and part, 2O, 88, 104, 108 itqq., 152 "Will, blind," 31, 123 Will falsely distinguished from faculties, 103 "Will not to will," 154 "Will to power," 31 Words, meaning of, 62 Works, law of, 26 Worship, Nature as an object of, 20, 214 Printed by R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, Edinburgh. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY Los Angeles This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. ID-URL JUN1-198S E C E I V D MAIN LOAN DESK MAY 2 2 1965 . ., 7 18 4 REC;P. .w. ^ OCT 281968 , RECTf 28 1971 Form L9-Series 444 A ooo 030 eVo