THE GIFFORD LECTURES FOR 
 
 19O3-19O4 
 
 THE PATH WAY TO REALITY 
 
 R.B.HALDANE
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 AT LOS ANGELES 
 
 GIFT OF 
 
 MRS .MATTER H.MERRILL
 
 THE PATHWAY TO REALITY
 
 THE PATHWAY 
 TO REALITY 
 
 STAGE THE SECOND 
 
 BEING THE GIFFORD LECTURES 
 DELIVERED IN THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF ST ANDREWS IN THE SESSION 
 
 1903-1904 
 
 BY THE RIGHT HONOURABLE 
 
 RICHARD BUKDON HALDANE 
 
 M.P., LL.D., K.C. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY 
 
 1904
 
 Printea in Great Britain.
 
 BD 
 H 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 THE lectures which this volume contains were 
 delivered consecutively, the first six in October 
 1903, and the last four in the following January. 
 As in the case of the earlier series, published last 
 year, they were, for the most part, not written. It 
 had been suggested to me from the first that the 
 plan of talking instead of reading, with the aid of a 
 note just sufficient to fix the general sequence, was 
 likely to prove less burdensome to the audience 
 than an endeavour to rivet their attention to written 
 and therefore rigid discourses on topics which were 
 largely technical. The proposal suited my own cir- 
 cumstances, and, at least in the case of a layman, 
 seemed admissible. The scheme of the lectures I 
 had for some time past been thinking out, in the in- 
 tervals of different avocations. But binding engage- 
 ments, public and private, did not facilitate writing. 
 Indeed, the delivery of the lectures contained in 
 this volume had to take place in the intervals of 
 utterances of other kinds. Possibly there has, as 
 a consequence, been carried into what follows 
 something of an atmosphere which is not strictly 
 academic. At all events, by the terms of my 
 
 Til
 
 viii PEEFACE 
 
 engagement to the Gifford Trustees, I was bound 
 to publish the lectures as I gave them, and on 
 reading over the transcript I felt that it contained 
 things which I wanted to say, and which I was 
 not likely to have another opportunity of saying- 
 What is here printed is simply a carefully corrected 
 copy of what a most competent shorthand writer 
 took down day by day. To the lady who under- 
 took this duty I must here express my gratitude 
 for the skill with which she spared me much of what 
 is often a wearisome burden of correction. Here and 
 there I wrote out passages, and these I used where 
 I could. But in the main I relied on the capacity of 
 the reporter, even where the points were technical 
 and obscure. The only exception to this was in the 
 last part of the first lecture, and in the whole of 
 that which comes seventh in order. These were 
 written during a holiday in Germany. 
 
 Such a method of producing a metaphysical 
 book has defects. Stern critics may say that 
 no man has the right to publish anything of this 
 kind put together in such a fashion. I admit the 
 weight of the criticism, and I throw myself on the 
 mercy of the critics. I also plead that the Gifford 
 Trustees insisted, somewhat against my will, on my 
 accepting their Lectureship, and then bound me to 
 publish what I should say. I am not by profession 
 a philosopher, and as I had no reputation to lose, 
 I agreed to do what they wished. They allowed 
 me time and time, as has been observed by persons 
 of great authority, is infinitely long. Then there
 
 PREFACE ix 
 
 were some things to be considered on the other side. 
 I had spent in these investigations a good deal of 
 my life, and it seemed to be permissible for me, 
 finding myself in such a situation, to try to say 
 how the world seemed to one whose occupa- 
 tions necessitated his living in it. Again, my 
 plan, the only possible one for a busy person, 
 was not wholly without its advantages. In the 
 first place, he who is going to speak ex tempore 
 has to make a determined effort not to allow the 
 trees to prevent him from seeing the wood as a 
 whole. I think I may say that I have not spared 
 myself in the effort to do this. The writer who 
 shuts himself up with his lamp in his study is 
 sometimes in peril of getting lost in his details. 
 He is tempted to think as he expresses himself, 
 instead of thinking before he expresses himself. 
 He does not easily, such is the force of habit, 
 reflect as he walks through the market place. 
 And yet the market place has its own kind of 
 stimulus for those who have to be constantly 
 striving to pull themselves together, a stimulus 
 which is not to be felt to the same extent either 
 in the pulpit or the chair. Moreover, upon the 
 whole, experience shows that the spoken word is 
 better for teaching purposes than the written manu- 
 script. It leaves the lecturer free to follow into 
 their perplexities the minds of those who are his 
 hearers. Finally, the circumstance that he has 
 but talked, leaves the talker with a sense of liberty 
 remaining to him. It was, I think, Eenan who
 
 somewhere declared that to write a book was to 
 limit oneself. If, however, the author has but 
 expressed his thought in language which owed its 
 form to the audience and the hour, the sense of 
 self-limitation is less oppressive. 
 
 In my earlier volume the chief topic was the 
 complete relativity of our knowledge, in everyday 
 life and in physical science. The nature of reality 
 was subjected to a scrutiny which ended in the 
 recognition of a boundary line to such knowledge. 
 Beyond that boundary line it appeared to be im- 
 possible to pass in the absence of an interpretation 
 of mind, and of its relation to the Universe, more 
 definite and more extensive than that which is 
 current in everyday usage. In this volume I have 
 done what I could to find the interpretation needed, 
 and, with its aid, to cross the line. I have tried to 
 find the answer to the question what we are really 
 striving to express when we speak of God and of 
 Freedom and of Immortality. It has seemed to 
 me that, in the two thousand years which have 
 passed since Aristotle taught on these topics, 
 progress in our knowledge has been made, but 
 progress in the main on certain lines which he 
 laid down. 
 
 The first volume of this book had a reception 
 more generous than one who is to be reckoned 
 with laymen was entitled to look for. Only of 
 two criticisms which were made on it, do I wish 
 to say anything. One was that the book was a 
 mere reproduction in modern form of what had
 
 PREFACE xi 
 
 before been taught by Aristotle and by Hegel. 
 On this I will merely observe that the criticism 
 cannot carry the critic far. I believe it to be 
 true, and have already said so. But my assertion 
 depends for its validity on the accuracy of my 
 interpretation of the doctrine of these great men. 
 Now of what is a very difficult doctrine the in- 
 terpreters have been many, and as various as they 
 were many. They have not seldom reproached 
 each other with liberties taken with their gospel. 
 Accordingly I will endeavour to disarm hostility by 
 frankly confessing here that in both volumes I have 
 freely used the method of what theologians call exe- 
 gesis. Some, for whose judgment and authority I 
 have the deepest respect, have shaken their heads, 
 and have told me that, whether or not I have inter- 
 preted Aristotle aright, I have not truly followed the 
 teaching of Hegel. I have laid, as they think, too 
 little stress on the abstract element in knowledge 
 and on the dialectical character of knowledge as a 
 system of universals. I can only answer that what 
 I have done has been done after deliberation, and 
 that in the present volume I have sought to justify 
 it. I have thought for long that metaphysical 
 investigation has had its credit seriously impaired, 
 not only in Germany but in this country, by a too 
 narrow view taken of the nature of mind. This 
 word has been used by certain writers as meaning 
 either the process of relational or discursive thought, 
 in its essence of the character of what is universal, 
 or else something no one seems quite to know
 
 xii PREFACE 
 
 what considered somehow to exist apart from time, 
 and to be that of which thought is the activity. 
 The next step has been to put the process (or the 
 activity, as the case may be) in contrast with feel- 
 ing. Thereupon has come the splitting of the 
 philosophers into camps, in some of which it is 
 sought to reduce feeling to thought, and in others 
 to reduce thought to feeling. In short, people 
 have fallen into the way of insisting on construing 
 the concrete riches of the world of the actual, as if 
 they must be reduced either to universals of reflec- 
 tion or to particulars of sense. To me the dilemma 
 appears to rest on too narrow a view of the nature 
 of mind. With mind, if there be any truth in the 
 doctrine of these lectures, we must begin. It is the 
 actual, what lies nearest to hand, and it is also the 
 ultimate, beyond which we cannot get, and which 
 can only be described in terms of itself. Universal 
 and particular seem to me, following Aristotle, 
 to be but abstractions, made in the process in which 
 it is actual by the subject which has before and 
 within it its experience and itself. That subject, 
 with its experience and its self-consciousness, is the 
 actual concrete fact in which all knowledge has its 
 starting point. Such a starting point is concerned 
 with what is singular and individual, and it is within 
 what is thus in its actuality singular and individual 
 that the universal and particular, which can emerge 
 only as abstractions, have reality. The grounds 
 for this opinion, which appears to me to have been 
 that of Aristotle and Hegel, and to have been
 
 PREFACE xiii 
 
 dropped out of sight by some of their interpreters, 
 I partly set forth in the earlier lectures. In this 
 series I have returned to the attack from another 
 side. I am unable to assent to a narrow use of 
 the word which would confine thought to a par- 
 ticular mode of thinking that is itself the mere 
 outcome of abstraction. Yet this identification 
 seems to me to be frequently made by writers 
 whose aim it is to interpret from the standpoint 
 of idealism. That Hegel himself (of Aristotle it 
 is hardly necessary to speak) would have repudi- 
 ated this form of idealism, appears from his express 
 declarations.* The warnings have been disregarded, 
 and the result has been something of a breach and 
 much of confusion in the camp of the idealists. A 
 striking incident has been the departure of Mr 
 F. H. Bradley from the headquarters of orthodox 
 idealism, and his adoption of a separate position, 
 He has intimated his decision that thought, rela- 
 tional and discursive as, in the sense in which the 
 late Mr Green and others have used the word, he 
 finds it to be, has no capacity to reach final truth 
 or to penetrate beyond appearance. Yet is Mr 
 Bradley's view of thought sufficiently wide ? One 
 asks how, if thought be merely what he takes it to 
 be, he gets as far as he does. Is not his scepticism 
 self-destructive ! And is his Absolute any better 
 than " the night in which all cows look black " ; 
 an unknowable substance of which we may say, 
 
 * See Werke, Band vi., p. 5, and also the final part of his 
 Religions -Philosophic, passim.
 
 xv 
 
 "De non apparentibus et de non existentibus, eadem 
 est ratio f " Mr Green himself seems to have had 
 misgivings about this use of the word thought. In 
 one passage he even protests against it, blaming 
 Hegel, as I think, not quite justly.* For myself 
 I prefer to believe, what the facts seem to me to 
 demonstrate, that the scope of the activity which is 
 of the essence of mind, is wider than the limits of 
 relational or discursive thinking. It follows that 
 abstract reason has no monopoly of the means 
 of access to reality, although I hold it to be the 
 only competent guardian of the pathway. It seems 
 to me that relational thought and feeling are alike 
 aspects which arise by distinctions which are really 
 abstract, within the ultimate reality which we call 
 Self-consciousness or Mind or Spirit, and which is 
 in its nature singular and all-embracing. In this 
 volume I have accordingly pressed the point that if 
 by the word thought we wish to indicate the 
 activity in which mind consists, we must interpret 
 it as extending to every form of that activity, and 
 not in the contracted sense in which it is some- 
 times used. 
 
 For these and other reasons which are set out 
 in the lectures that follow, I have assigned to Art 
 and to Religion parts as important as that of 
 Philosophy in the search after truth. That, like 
 Philosophy, Art and Religion can aim at reaching 
 nothing short of the reality that is ultimate, I 
 cannot doubt. The difference is one of method and 
 
 * See Works of T. H. Green, vol. iii., p. 142. .
 
 PREFACE xv 
 
 of symbol It is no function of Art or of Religion 
 to bring us to scientific results. It is just because 
 the scientific aspect of the truth is the aim of 
 Philosophy that its language is abstract and that 
 its methods have the defect of their quality. Its 
 results can never be for our minds wholly sufficing. 
 At our plane of intelligence the tendency to frame 
 abstractions, and so to separate what are but 
 aspects in a single reality, the Beautiful, the Good, 
 and the True, is too powerful. Yet the content of 
 our minds will not the less on this account always 
 be more than abstract thought. And this leads 
 me to add a final observation to this preface. 
 
 If any one should say that the name of Goethe 
 occurs too frequently in the pages of what purports 
 to be a metaphysical book, my answer will be, that 
 my way of looking at things made it impossible 
 not to turn frequently, in the course of an investi- 
 gation such as this, to the greatest critic of life that 
 has spoken in modern times. Should I, in the 
 course of these lectures, have succeeded in helping 
 any one to realise more fully the depth of meaning 
 in the precept of that great genius : 
 
 " . . . Im Ganzen, Guten, Schonen 
 Resolut zu leben," 
 
 I shall feel that I have been well repaid for the 
 little that I have been capable of doing. 
 
 CLOANDKN, AUCHTERARDER, 
 1904.
 
 ERKATA 
 
 On p. xiii., line 27, far "self-destructive! " read "self-destructive? " 
 
 On pp. 19 and 21, for " Glancon " read "Glaucon." 
 
 On p. 59, in footnote, for " Glaubens-lehre" read " Glaubenslehre." 
 
 On p. 126, in third line of third stanza, for "zients' " read "ziemt's.' 
 
 On p. 145, line 28, for "Boland " read "Bolland." 
 
 On p. 158, line 20, for "nnity " read "unity." 
 
 On p. 240, in fifth line of first stanza, for "last 'gem" read "last 'gem. 
 
 On p. 240, in last line of first stanza, for " Geniiss " read " Genuss." 
 
 On p. 273, in Index, for " Boland " read " Bolland."
 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 BOOK ILL 
 
 ABSOLUTE MIND 
 LECTURE I. Pages 3 to 38 
 
 RETROSPECT 
 
 Throughout these Lectures what has been meant by the 
 word " God " is nothing short of the Highest and most Real. 
 The images and metaphors of everyday theology are inadequate 
 in an inquiry of the character prescribed by Lord Gifford. 
 Ultimate Reality was, as the result of the first series of lectures, 
 found to be Mind, and within Mind the whole of experience, 
 possible as well as actual, was found to fall. In the course of 
 the first part of the inquiry three things became apparent : 
 
 (1) Peril of going off the track through the use of metaphors ; 
 
 (2) the necessity for careful criticism of the limits and validity 
 of categories ; (3) the absurdity and self-contradiction of the 
 notion that abstract thought could either be a product of 
 things, or itself create them. Neither Aristotle nor Hegel 
 sought to deduce nature from logical forms, though it is a 
 common superstition to believe that they did. They held that 
 self-consciousness was the ultimate fact behind which it was 
 logically impossible to go ; that it was no net-work of abstract 
 universals, but concrete and living subject, not substance ; that 
 within it arose and were contained, as the outcome of its own 
 distinctions, the entire universe of thought and things. For 
 them this ultimate reality was individual, unique, and singular, 
 as an ultimate fact must be. Outside of it nothing could, with 
 any intelligible meaning, be said to exist, and within it the two 
 
 XTU fr
 
 xviii CONTENTS 
 
 aspects or moments of its nature as Intelligence, the universals 
 of thought and the particulars of feeling, were separable in 
 logical analysis but not in fact. Among the further topics 
 which must engage our attention are the question in what sense 
 mind so conceived can be described as a Person, and what is 
 the relation to such mind of the finite forms in which self- 
 consciousness appears e.g., in man. 
 
 LECTURE II. - Pages 39 to 70 
 
 Further examination of what is implied in self-conscious 
 mind. Metaphors more than usually out of place here. To 
 call mind a "thing" is utterly wrong. To call it "subject" is 
 better, but is still misleading, for the distinction from the 
 object, though essential for self-consciousness, is made by and 
 falls within it. Again, to look upon mind as resoluble into 
 feeling, out of which what is higher has become evolved by 
 differentiation, is for the purpose of a metaphysical inquiry 
 quite insufficient, for such evolution presupposes time, and time 
 has itself to be accounted for. Nor, as we have already seen, 
 can it be described as a system of universals, for, as Aristotle 
 showed, such a system is nothing apart from the particulars in 
 which it realises itself. It must be described in terms of itself, 
 as a final and unique fact, the nature of which is to be disclosed 
 only by the study of its own movement. The meaning of 
 " finiteness " in relation to the self. Comparison with Berke- 
 leianism. With the rejection of the conception of mind as 
 substance, solipsism becomes meaningless, for it is apparent 
 that to try to think of a finite self as the ultimate form of 
 reality is to try to think what is st If -contradictory. The forms 
 of finitude are the outcome of the limited ends and purposes by 
 which our intelligence is in everyday life dominated. Meaning 
 of Understanding as distinguished from Reason. Illustration 
 from space and time. The categories of thought are the forms 
 of Reason, and they constitute a system in which each link 
 logically implies every other link. The whole system is 
 implicit in and presupposed by the earliest link. From the 
 days of Plato onwards the method of the greatest thinkers has 
 more or less explicitly been to try to comprehend and set out 
 the nature and interrelation (if categories. Meaning and 
 nature of Dialectic. The Hegelian " Notion " and " Idea."
 
 CONTENTS xix 
 
 The nature of mind is to posit itself in distinction, and to 
 comprehend and pass beyond the distinctions. What is called 
 Pantheism is a misunderstanding of the nature of God. 
 
 LECTURE III. - Pages 71 to 94 
 
 The result of the inquiry so far has been to insist, with 
 Bradley and Royce, as against Green, that stress must not be 
 laid exclusively on intelligible relations. But Bradley holds 
 thought to be at once capable of raising the problem of reality 
 and incapable of adequately solving it. His reason is that to 
 him thought appears to be relational or finite. It is difficult to 
 see how his scepticism can escape from the reproach of in- 
 consistency. For if thought is adequate to the comprehension 
 of its own limits, it must be able to go beyond these limits. 
 Royce's work is valuable because of his insistence on the 
 concrete and ethical character of the activity of intelligence. 
 But it is open to the criticism that it is only in the systematic 
 exposition of its own forms that intelligence can at all adequately 
 set forth its nature as the ultimate reality. Notwithstanding 
 the freshness of Royce's method, it therefore appears to be 
 unsatisfying. One is driven back to the Hegelian system, not 
 because one believes that it contains the final word, but because 
 of its unflinching thoroughness. The value of Hegel's attempt 
 at a dialectical explanation of the relationship of the distinctions 
 which self-consciousness makes is that it leaves no gaps. He 
 declared that all that is actual is rational, and all that is 
 rational is actual, and, again, that the spiritual alone is the 
 real, but he certainly did not mean that nature could be dis- 
 played in terms of intelligible relations. He insisted, on the 
 contrary, that the appearances which make up the realm of 
 nature have the characteristic of contingency and foreignness 
 to reason, and he explains that this is so because the system of 
 these appearances is a system of abstract separations, made by 
 intelligence dominated by purposes which do not lead to full 
 comprehension, and which operate under finite forms of thought. 
 So far from being rational, nature is rather for him unreal, 
 excepting as comprehended at a higher level than that of 
 thinking under finite forms of self-consciousness, a comprehen- 
 sion which would change its appearance. Such a line of 
 criticism leads back to the conception of God as the mind of
 
 xx CONTENTS 
 
 which ours is a manifestation on a lower plane. The Hegelian 
 Logic is no ordinary logic, but the system of categories in 
 which the notion, the characteristic movement of thought, 
 displays itself. This system, as exhibited in the Logic, is but 
 one aspect of Ultimate Reality, of the Absolute Mind, and it is 
 reached by abstraction. The philosophy of nature deals with 
 another aspect which is abstract in another way, and is the 
 outcome of intelligence operating after the fashion of the 
 understanding, which separates and isolates, as in the forms of 
 sense perception, in space and time. The standpoint of such 
 particularism is the outcome of abstraction, and, like that of 
 the Logic, finds its correction and completion in the self- 
 consciousness of concrete spirit, which is described in the 
 Philosophy of Mind. 
 
 LECTURE IV. - ... Pages 95 to 116 
 
 It is the elusiveness of the subject-matter that makes 
 philosophy difficult. Hard thinking is the only instrument 
 with which we can break through the misleading images and 
 metaphors of daily use, misleading because they furnish views 
 which, while sufficient for the purpose in hand, and in that 
 sense representative of truth, are inadequate for those who 
 want light on the nature of Ultimate Reality. Art and religion 
 demonstrate the fact of this inadequacy, and, after all, the diffi- 
 culty appears in the same fashion in other studies for example, 
 those of the higher mathematics. Having found that the 
 apparently hidden nature of Reality is self-conscious mind 
 which contains within itself all the appearances which go to 
 make up the world as it seems, we have now to ascertain how and 
 why it is that the distinctions exist to which these appearances at 
 their various grades are due. That self-consciousness is the 
 final form of mind cannot be doubted, for the very doubt really 
 implies the principle as its basis. To speak of absolute mind 
 as unconscious is to use words without meaning. In some sense, 
 accordingly, God is a Person, and we have to inquire in what 
 sense ! The fact of self-consciousness implies a distinction of 
 subject from object, of self from not self. The nature of mind 
 is to make distinctions and to exist in and through them. It is 
 no inert simultaneum, but, as Aristotle long ago pointed out, is 
 active reason, life and more than life, intelligence which com-
 
 CONTENTS xxi 
 
 prebends, and in its comprehension is present in every form of 
 the content of its self-consciousness. The end which deter- 
 mines its activity is the end of making itself explicit to itself, 
 and this end seems to be implicit even in the lowest forms of 
 mind. In its lower forms, as mere understanding, mind lays 
 stress on the reality of its distinctions and the self-subsistence 
 and isolation of what is distinguished. In its higher forms, as 
 reason, mind interprets and comprehends what is distinguished 
 and the acts of distinction as having meaning only as links or 
 moments in a series. Examination of the nature of time. Time 
 is continuous just as much as it is discrete, and, when taken as 
 a final form of reality, proves to be self-contradictory in its 
 conception, and unreal in appearance. The meaning of the 
 expression " comprehension sub specie ceternitatis." The world 
 as it must appear in the mind of God. The degrees of reality 
 in appearance. 
 
 LECTURE V. - Pages 117 to 142 
 
 In this lecture we must not pass by the next problem that 
 confronts the inquirer, that of the nature of finite mind. The 
 ground of finiteness lies in distinctions made within the Absolute 
 Mind, whereby it appears as object to and other than itself. 
 But these distinctions and what results from them presuppose, 
 as their logical foundation, the notion of a mind that is absolute. 
 It is a misconception of the teaching of Hegel to imagine that 
 he identified the Absolute Mind with mind as it appears in 
 History. For there the forms in which mind displays itself are 
 never more than finite, i.e., relative to what has gone before or 
 is to come after. What we are dealing with is not the relations 
 of substances derived from substance, but stages or planes in 
 the comprehension of its own appearances by all-embracing 
 mind. Indeed there may well be higher planes of comprehen- 
 sion than that which characterises the mind of man or the 
 world-spirit, and such planes may yet be finite. Man is at once 
 in separation from and in union with God, because the founda- 
 tion of his existence is Intelligence, the essential characteristic 
 of which is Dialectic, difference in unity and unity in difference. 
 Thus man has a double nature, out of which arises for him, 
 on the one hand, the consciousness of separation from God, or 
 evil; and, on the other hand, the consciousness of potential 
 union with God, or religion. Though finite spirit, man is nope
 
 xxii CONTENTS 
 
 the less spirit, consequently he is essentially free, and therefore 
 responsible. The relational character of the finite, insistence on 
 which is the mark of the understanding, and the quality of 
 dialectic, because of which spirit, even though it be finite, has 
 to distinguish itself from what is other than it, and yet to find 
 itself in that other, is the explanation of man's relation to 
 nature. It is also the reason why he appears to himself as 
 emerging out of nature, and as one among many others. The 
 doctrine of degrees of reality in appearance is important in this 
 connection. It is because man, though spirit, is finite spirit, 
 and because what is typical of his knowledge of his every-day 
 world is the separation and isolation which the understanding 
 seeks to make, that for his plane of comprehension the universe 
 with himself in it appears as it does. As Hegel points out, 
 nature cannot be taken as appearing to God in the abstract 
 externalities of space and time, and indeed stands to Him in no 
 direct relation, for the plane of appearance which is distinctive 
 of it pertains merely to the finite mind of man. Nature is in 
 the mind of God only in as much as the mind of man is compre- 
 hended as a degree in the absolute mind of God. Bosanquet's 
 analysis of the relation pf the " universal self " to the actual 
 individual consciousness. 
 
 LECTURE VI. Pages 143 to 170 
 
 The problem of the nature of God. Retrospect. In His 
 nature there can be conceived no difference between Thought 
 and Thinker, for we have passed beyond the category of sub- 
 stance. With Him to create must mean to think, and to think 
 to create. Thus intelligence and volition fall together. Because 
 self-consciousness turns out to be the highest of all categories, 
 and to be the basis of all intelligence and therefore the pre- 
 supposition of our reasoning about the nature of ultimate reality, 
 God must be self-conscious. He must have ends which are 
 realised in the mere fact of their being proposed. The 
 character of His activity cannot be represented in images 
 drawn from the world of appearance in space and time. Yet 
 because His nature is to posit and realise Himself in forms 
 which are the forms of otherness, in difference, and yet be self- 
 identical, that nature cannot resemble the Spinozistic simultaneum 
 of Pantheism, which lands us in a lifeless identity without 
 difference. Here it is more than usually necessary to study
 
 CONTENTS xxiii 
 
 critically the categories we employ, and to guard against the 
 anthropomorphism which is natural and comparatively harmless 
 in other spheres of inquiry. Inasmuch as mind conceived as 
 Absolute must be self-conscious, it must have an object through 
 distinction of itself from which it is so. As it is all-embracing 
 that object can be no other than itself, distinguished by itself 
 from itself. It must be for itself, and comprehend itself in the 
 utmost fulness compare the VOTJOHS voTycrecos of Aristotle, and 
 his doctrine of the Active Reason. Because what appears for 
 the mind of God as its other is just itself, that other is self- 
 conscious, and because its essential characteristic is to be for 
 God, to stand in relation to and depend on Him, it is finite, 
 and the forms of its knowledge are throughout marked by 
 finiteness. While potentially those of reason, they are actually 
 those of understanding. Thus in the mind of man, which, like 
 the mind of God, seeks to distinguish itself from its other or 
 not-self, as the very condition of self-consciousness, there arises 
 a world of appearances in relations of isolation. Space and 
 time are fundamental among such forms, but nature presents 
 many others less strikingly characterised by apparent irration- 
 ality and contingency, and these forms of knowledge ultimately 
 turn out to be comprehended and to have their truth in self- 
 knowledge, in which mind, having found nature to be only 
 /or itself, and thus its not-self to be really itself, is at a higher 
 plane of comprehension than that in which nature is given. 
 The forms of finite mind and the differences which are thus 
 created have their value, meaning, and justification as stages 
 in the dialectical movement in which Absolute Mind is con- 
 scious of, and so realises and enriches, itself. Without them 
 God were not perfect. In Him they are comprehended and 
 transformed. Only by the free choice of finite Spirit in select- 
 ing its ends have they assumed the aspect of hard-and-fast 
 separation from God, and in the spirit that knows itself as one 
 with Him and His ends this aspect is comprehended and put 
 past. For the scope of the Divine Intelligence is not contracted 
 by finite ends as is ours. Yet even in man such ends and 
 purposes are not the only ones, nor are his comprehension and 
 nature wholly limited by them. In Art and in Religion he 
 passes beyond his finiteness. This is what is meant to be 
 illustrated by such phrases as " Dying to Live." The medium 
 of Religion is, like that of Art, not abstract thought. Religion 
 is a practical matter ; it belongs to the will and it expresses
 
 xxiv CONTENTS 
 
 itself emotionally, as a " new heart." It is the consciousness of a 
 direct relation to God, but in forms that belong to the region 
 of feeling, and are consequently describable only symbolically. 
 Under its own forms it grasps the presence of God as here and 
 now in the object world ; it is the sense that He is immediately 
 manifested, and this feeling is expressed in the symbols and 
 pictorial manifestations of the creeds. The metaphysical theory 
 is that Absolute Mind is conscious of itself in Another which is 
 just itself, and that these, its two aspects, are only distinguish- 
 able by abstraction in the entirety of self-conscious Spirit of 
 which they are the moments. This Christianity expresses in 
 the well-known symbolical form of a Father who sends His 
 Only Begotten Son into otherness, the world, to return to Him 
 with the otherness overcome and the redemption of the world 
 accomplished. Thus the doctrine of the Trinity, which is by 
 no means peculiar to Christianity, embodies a profound truth. 
 It is an analysis in symbolical form of the three aspects or 
 moments in the self-consciousness of God, in Hegelian termin- 
 ology, Logic, Finite Intelligence (including Nature and Finite 
 Spirit), and Absolute Spirit ; the realisation of the Universal 
 and the Particular in the Individual. We are neither to con- 
 found Persons nor divide Substances. The Athanasian Creed, 
 which owed its origin to the influence of Neo-Platonic meta- 
 physics in the Church of Alexandria, has been too little 
 appreciated. The analysis also throws light on the origin of 
 evil, the responsibility for which rests with the finite spirit 
 which is free to prefer the good. Because man can transcend 
 his separation from God he is responsible. In order to be 
 finite man he must be separated, and his duty is to overcome 
 his separation. The choice of a higher plane implies the 
 surrender of the self, with its particularism. Thus evil arises 
 and is a necessary moment in the Universe. But it is in finite 
 spirit that it arises, and, like nature generally, it stands in no 
 direct relation with God. Because man is thus separate from 
 God, and must surrender his finite nature in order to gain 
 union with Him, he worships. The love of God is just the con- 
 sciousness of the potential unity of the finite and the absolute self. 
 
 This completes the examination in outline of the theoretical 
 aspect of the nature of Ultimate Reality. The succeeding 
 lectures will deal with concrete questions which arise out of 
 the relation of man to God,
 
 CONTENTS xxv 
 
 BOOK IV. 
 
 FINITE MIND 
 
 LECTURE I. - Pages 173 to 200 
 
 As we have seen, the mind as human is finite ; knows itself 
 as known, and as known yet knows. It comprehends itself in 
 time-distinctions, the characteristic of which is relativity. But 
 even in presentation knowledge is aware of its own limits, and 
 in comprehending transcends them. The recognition of beauty, 
 however, is not abstract knowledge. It is in the immediacy of 
 feeling that we are conscious of beauty, although it is only for 
 the mind that is capable of thought. The object of Art must 
 be expressive. The beautiful in Art is higher in its kind than 
 the beautiful in Nature. Schopenhauer's view of music. The 
 true meaning of poetry. Goethe on the study of Art. Art 
 never really expounds abstract conceptions, yet the world as it 
 is for Art is what it is in virtue of Reason, which shines, as it 
 were, through a sensuous garment. The difference between 
 the artist and the man of science. Kant's Critique of 
 Judgment. Schiller and Carlyle. Beauty is the middle 
 term between sense and thought. 
 
 LECTURE II. - Pages 201 to 225 
 
 In Art mind stands revealed to itself in sensuous form, but 
 as freed from the trammels of finitude. In Religion we have 
 a similar deliverance. Religion is a phase of the will, and 
 belongs to the region of practice. As in the case of Art its 
 certainty is immediate, and assumes the form of feeling. In 
 Philosophy also the mind transcends the limits of the finite in 
 comprehending them. But its medium is not concrete, as in 
 the case of the other two. Its procedure is like that of the 
 sciences, for it concentrates on that aspect of mind in which 
 mind appears as an abstract system, and thus Philosophy gets
 
 xxvi CONTENTS 
 
 beyond the limits of what is immediate. One of its problems 
 is the deeper meaning of the contrast between life and death. 
 The aspects in which the self presents itself as body and soul 
 belong to time, and are in their nature transitory. Explanation 
 of this. For these aspects death is a necessary and natural 
 part of their history. Illustrations of how death is natural in 
 the case of animals and human beings. But this is only a part 
 of the meaning of death. It has been said to be superseded in 
 a higher stage of the reality of self-consciousness ; considera- 
 tion of this opinion. The antithesis between life and death is 
 the work of understanding, and is not a final view. The real 
 significance of what is called eternal life. Is it for us more 
 than an abstraction ? Consideration of this question. 
 
 LECTURE III. Pages 226 to 253 
 
 It is clear that as subject the mind is directly conscious of 
 possessing an infinite and non-sensuous character, and is con- 
 tinuously yielding up the particularity of its forms. This 
 infinite quality cannot be exhaustively given in any temporal 
 present, and hence, as expressive of the limit of that temporal 
 present, the mind determines itself as realised in a future. In 
 this attempt to present as a temporal picture the infinite quality 
 of the mind, an antinomy arises, which, like other antinomies, 
 can only be solved by a deeper and more thinking considera- 
 tion. Reason why the difficulty does not arise in Art or 
 Religion. The pictures of Art are symbolical. The faith 
 which characterises the self-surrender of the will in Religion 
 is a sense of reality above and beyond what is seen. In its 
 doctrines of the eternal nature of the self and of degrees in 
 reality Metaphysics teaches the same truth in scientific form. 
 The true relation of spirit to spirit, and the meaning of Love 
 in its highest and most general sense. The understanding can 
 never solve the problem of another life, for it is hampered by 
 a dilemma based on the finality of the idea of duration. A 
 direct presentation of the unreality of death can never be 
 accomplished in our picture world, and yet the recognition of 
 that unreality is necessitated. For a higher degree of know- 
 ledge, though short of absolute knowledge, such recognition 
 may present no difficulty. For ordinary knowledge it appears 
 only in the symbolical representations of Art and Religion.
 
 CONTENTS xxvii 
 
 LECTURE IV. Pages 254 to 272 
 
 Characteristics of the doctrine of the mind of man as set 
 out in the preceding lectures. The teaching of what is called 
 " Spiritualism " has no bearing on it. Place of Spiritualism, 
 as expounded by Mr Myers and others, in anthropology. 
 
 Survey of the ground covered in the twenty Gifford Lectures 
 now delivered, and of the results reached. CONCLUSION.
 
 BOOK III 
 
 ABSOLUTE MIND
 
 LECTURE I 
 
 I HAVE to resume these lectures at the point at 
 which I laid down the thread in January last. My 
 task, as prescribed by Lord Gifford, is to inquire 
 into the nature of God. For that task he also 
 prescribed the spirit in which its execution was to 
 be carried out. It was to be executed impartially, 
 and in a scientific fashion, without fear and without 
 favour. I have endeavoured in the course of the 
 lectures which I have already delivered to look to 
 the truth and the truth only as my goal, and I shall 
 seek in the course which I have now to commence 
 to observe the same principle. 
 
 In the last series I began by pointing out that to 
 inquire into the nature of God must be to inquire 
 into the nature of Reality, and I examined at some 
 length the meaning of such words as Reality and 
 Truth. These lectures, which have since been 
 published, were of necessity critical rather than 
 constructive. I had to prepare to build, and for 
 that purpose it was necessary that I should clear 
 the ground before I could endeavour to place upon 
 it a structure. I have now to try to carry out the 
 constructive portion of my undertaking ; but before
 
 4 ABSOLUTE MIND [Lscr. i. 
 
 I enter upon it I wish to remind you of the sub- 
 stance of what has already been done. 
 
 We were confronted in the beginning of our in- 
 quiry into the nature and meaning of Reality with 
 this fact, a fact which looked formidable, that the 
 world as it seems around us presents an aspect 
 which is apparently alien to mind and impenetrable 
 by thought. We had to consider what I called the 
 hard-and-fastness of that world as it is presented 
 to us, and to endeavour to trace to its source the 
 reason of that characteristic. You will recall that 
 I traced that characteristic back to its source in the 
 limited ends and purposes which govern us men 
 and women in thinking our experience. I pointed 
 out to you that this hard-and-fastness, this impene- 
 trability of the object world, owed its significance 
 to a certain " setting " in which our knowledge was 
 placed by the dominating influence upon that 
 knowledge of ends and purposes of a limited 
 character, necessary for our social lives, but which 
 yet were not of a nature sufficiently far-reaching to 
 guide us in the search after ultimate truth. 
 Analysis showed that these ends and purposes were 
 neither final nor exhaustive, and in this conclusion 
 we found ourselves in the company of a number of 
 people who had approached the subject from differ- 
 ent points of view, but who had converged on 
 something like the same result ! Men so different 
 as Berkeley, Mill, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and the 
 later Germans, had all pointed out that it is the 
 way in which we think things that gives rise to
 
 RETROSPECT 5 
 
 much of what we take to be the objective universe 
 in which we live. 
 
 Put shortly, it may be said that it is ends and 
 not causes which fashion that universe, and thus 
 we get to the conclusion that knowledge is, in a 
 deeper sense than that in which the expression is 
 commonly used, relative. The relativity of all our 
 knowledge is a relativity which depends, not upon 
 the fact that there is something hidden behind, for 
 there is no warrant for the belief in any hidden 
 thing-in-itself, but upon this, that the ends and 
 purposes which dominate and control our thinking 
 are not final or ultimate ends and purposes. 
 
 Now the inquiry which I have summarised, and 
 which occupied the last ten lectures, led us to take 
 warning against certain perils which beset the 
 searcher after truth. One of these perils arises 
 from the habit into which we readily fall of using, 
 in such an investigation as we are engaged in, 
 metaphors and similes which are appropriate for 
 everyday purposes, but which are wholly out of 
 place in regions which are not akin to the regions 
 from which they are drawn. Thus men and women 
 have been led to torture themselves and to cause 
 themselves endless perplexity by trying to conceive 
 the mind as a thing. If it be a thing, how natural 
 to look upon it as operated upon by mechanical 
 causes, and as incapable of freedom, in any sense in 
 which meaning can be given to the word ! Yet we 
 found that the notion of the mind being a thing, 
 was a notion which rested upon metaphors which
 
 6 ABSOLUTE MIND [LECT. i. 
 
 were wholly inapplicable when we were treating of 
 the nature of the mind. 
 
 Let me take a second danger which the last 
 course of lectures was designed to illustrate. We 
 are, as I have just said, prone to bring to bear upon 
 the subject matter into which we are inquiring 
 conceptions or categories which are wholly out of 
 place, and that is a danger which besets not only 
 philosophers but people whose work is, in the 
 special sense of the word, scientific. For example, 
 as we saw in the last series, in physiology the in- 
 sistence upon a mechanical way of looking at 
 things has affected the researches which from time 
 to time have been undertaken, in such a fashion as 
 to lead, not only to confusion of thought, but to a 
 good deal of deflection of experiment into channels 
 which are not the natural channels. 
 
 And this carries with it further consequences 
 which arise from the misuse of categories. We are 
 very apt, when we get a view of experience and fix 
 it as a particular aspect, to take that view, that 
 aspect, as exhaustive of the whole. But such a 
 conclusion speedily carries Nemesis in its train, 
 because we find, as I showed you in detail in 
 the last four lectures of the former course, that we 
 fall into endless contradictions when we do anything 
 of the sort. Therefore a criticism of categories is 
 essential in philosophy. We must know what is 
 the relation to one another of the conceptions of 
 which we make use, and what is the limit of their 
 validity.
 
 PEEILS OF THE EOAD 7 
 
 Then there is a third peril to which I had to 
 allude in some detail before, and which is of quite 
 a different character, although in its source it is 
 akin to the two others. Philosophy has got into 
 disrepute by the carelessness of philosophers in the 
 use of language. It is not possible to be always 
 accurate in language, especially when you are 
 carrying into a region of research which is quite 
 different from other regions of research, words and 
 phrases which are taken from the usages of every- 
 day life. But still it was not necessary for thinkers 
 and even very great thinkers have been to 
 blame here to have led the world to suppose that 
 philosophy tries to do what it ought never to try to 
 do. For example, it has been common to suppose 
 that idealism meant that somehow the professor of 
 idealism would show how thought made a thing, 
 instead of simply showing what the meaning of 
 being a thing is, and in what its reality consists. 
 Even the great Kant has not been wholly free 
 from this reproach. But I pointed out to you 
 that thought cannot properly be said to make 
 things. 
 
 The word "make" is a metaphor, drawn from 
 the regions of space and time, and is wholly inade- 
 quate to express the relation of thought to its 
 object. None of the great thinkers have really 
 preached the heresy in question, particularly not 
 those whose names are, in the popular imagination, 
 most associated with the doctrine. Aristotle and 
 Hegel are really wholly free from the imputation,
 
 8 ABSOLUTE MIND 
 
 nor does their language, when properly scanned, 
 lend countenance to the notion that they taught 
 the heresy. 
 
 Well, so much for the negative part of the 
 earlier set of lectures. The conclusion at which 
 I asked you to arrive with me was this, that God's 
 nature could not be of a quality less than the 
 quality of Ultimate Reality, and that the meta- 
 phors and images of ordinary theology are wholly 
 inadequate as a description of God's nature. Now 
 it is useless to do what a considerable, and, I fancy, 
 for the moment, a growing school of theologians 
 are seeking to accomplish. They are trying to 
 bring us back to an everyday view of the nature of 
 God, away from the regions in which metaphysics 
 has taught us to search. Those who imagine that 
 they are rendering a service to the permanent 
 character of theology by going back to feeling, by 
 limiting what ought to be accurate description to 
 the ordinary metaphors of everyday life, are really 
 rendering no service. They are sowing no seed. 
 They can expect no fruit. They are ploughing the 
 sands. If the nature of God is to be investigated, 
 it must be investigated in the light of a searching 
 criticism of the categories implied, otherwise we 
 shall encounter the danger expressed in the now 
 trite saying of Goethe, "Man never knows how 
 anthropomorphic he is." 
 
 While the analysis of the last set of lectures 
 began with the view of things which we traced to 
 the domination of those various limited purposes of
 
 FINITE ENDS IN KNOWLEDGE 9 
 
 which I have spoken as the source of a considerable 
 amount of error, I pointed out that the ends and 
 purposes which dominate have their origin in the 
 necessities of everyday life ; that they come from 
 this, that we men and women, in our intercourse 
 with one another, must speak on the basis of a 
 common foundation. That common foundation 
 comes to be largely expressed in phrases which 
 owe their origin to the social ends which we have 
 in view, ends which by degrees pass in our minds 
 into the appearance of being the only ends with 
 which we are concerned. I pointed out that this 
 was so in the sciences, just as much as in everyday 
 life, only that in the sciences what is done is done 
 consciously. In the sciences what we do is to take 
 an aspect of things, a particular aspect ; to con- 
 centrate on it to the exclusion of other aspects, 
 and, by the clearness of thought which we thus 
 obtain, to get, by means of reasoning, beyond what 
 is immediately present to the senses. In geometry, 
 for example, we abstract from everything excepting 
 the relations of space, and we construct figures with 
 a clearness and a concentration of mind which 
 enables us to get far beyond what the senses could 
 tell us. But these figures are ideal. The concrete 
 riches of the universe have, for the purposes of the 
 inquiry of the geometer, been put out of account 
 rightly put out of account for they are not relevant 
 to that inquiry, but yet put out of account in a 
 fashion which makes the investigations of geometry 
 a guide to only a partial aspect of the truth. Now,
 
 10 ABSOLUTE MIND [LECT. i. 
 
 what is true of the abstract conceptions of geometry 
 is true in a varying degree of every other science. 
 We traced the process, in our account of the special 
 sciences, down to the abstractions of psychology 
 in the method of what is called Presentationism. 
 It is the procedure of science to exclude those 
 aspects which are not germane to the ends which 
 the man of science has in view, in order to con- 
 centrate with greater clearness and greater insight 
 on the particular aspect which does concern him. 
 In that fashion the man of science reminds one of 
 the procedure of everyday life, where the ends and 
 purposes which guide us in thinking our experience 
 are ends and purposes which often shut us out from 
 what may prove to be a deeper insight into its 
 character. 
 
 As the result we found that all that is or can be 
 conceived has meaning only as expressing distinc- 
 tions which fall within the mind itself. Even space 
 and time are distinctions, have meaning and exist- 
 ence only as distinctions, which fall within self- 
 consciousness. These distinctions are distinctions 
 which are before or for the mind, and in them 
 phenomena get their setting and their significance. 
 The Ultimate Reality we therefore found to be 
 mind and nothing else, to be subject rather than 
 substance, although even the expression "subject" 
 is one which we cannot use without a certain 
 amount of explanation. For the word "subject" 
 suggests what is called subjective idealism, suggests 
 the return to the notion of the mind as a thing
 
 MY CONSCIOUSNESS 11 
 
 constructing or building up its experience a view 
 which got some countenance in Kant's division of 
 the mind into faculties, a division which suggested 
 that the mind could be put, as it were, upon the 
 table, and dissected into component elements. 
 
 Now, there is no making of things by thought 
 in that sense. The " window " theory of the mind 
 represents one extreme of untruth, the theory, 
 namely, that things have an independent existence, 
 and that somehow knowledge is a streaming from 
 them into the interior of the mind as into a vacant 
 chamber. On the other hand, it is equally untrue, 
 as I showed you, to try to exhibit experience as a 
 piecing or putting together by the mind of what is 
 to be thought of as a magic lantern picture which 
 the mind projects, and which, compared with what 
 projects it, is unreal. My self-consciousness is not 
 a thing that makes its object, for object and subject 
 equally fall within it. My self-consciousness is 
 feeling just as much as thought, and thought just 
 as much as feeling, and the separation of the two 
 arises from a distinction which falls within it. Self- 
 consciousness is in form reflection, within which the 
 whole meaning of existence falls, and within which 
 all existence emerges. Later on in these lectures we 
 shall have to consider what is the meaning of the 
 word " my " in this connection, and to ask whether 
 it is not true that there too we have a distinction 
 which falls within self-consciousness. But feeling 
 and thought this is the point of my observation 
 are not two elements which exist separately, the one
 
 12 ABSOLUTE MIND [LBCT. i. 
 
 from the other. They are rather related as the 
 particular and the universal which have no inde- 
 pendent existences, but are merely moments of con- 
 crete reality in the individual, actual, and concrete 
 singular of direct experience, within which they are 
 only separable by abstraction. Behind conscious- 
 ness I can neither go nor find meaning in trying to 
 go. That consciousness is before itself as my con- 
 sciousness is a fact which, as we shall find later on, 
 makes no difference. 
 
 If one has to characterise reality one must 
 characterise it as, in the sense I have indicated, 
 individual. The real is always something singular, 
 unique, having nothing else like it. It is always 
 a "this." So is self-consciousness itself. And it 
 is equally true that self-consciousness, when I 
 reflect that time is itself but a relation or dis- 
 tinction falling within self-consciousness, may be 
 characterised as having for the form of its exist- 
 ence an eternal "now." There is a great phrase 
 of Hegel : " Dem Begriffe nach einmal ist allemal," 
 "In the notion once is always," and that is a 
 saying on the significance of which I shall have to 
 dwell a good deal in the course of these lectures. 
 My point is just now that, as all existence falls 
 within self-consciousness, and as all existence 
 emerges within self-consciousness, a thesis which 
 I developed at length in the earlier course of 
 lectures, so self-consciousness is not in the nature 
 of a set of abstract universals, nor yet in the nature 
 of any particular of feeling, but is itself just an indi-
 
 THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM 13 
 
 vidual "this," the centre to which all else falls, 
 unique and singular in its character, and eternal in 
 the sense of being that for which time is. All know- 
 ledge is accordingly nothing else in its real nature 
 than the making explicit what is implicit. It is 
 true that when we think in time distinctions, as 
 the ends which fashion our intelligence force us 
 men and women to think, sense seems to come 
 first, and completed knowledge last. But when 
 you scrutinise reflectively and more deeply the 
 nature of what you there have, you find that in the 
 earlier and simpler stages of knowledge, even in 
 the particulars of sense, there is implicit the whole 
 of what comes into clear consciousness later on in 
 time, but is in reality implied from the first. That 
 is the necessary consequence of the nature of self- 
 consciousness. 
 
 The Ultimate Reality is Mind, and the nature 
 of God cannot be less than that of the Ultimate 
 Reality. God must be Mind. Is He personal ? 
 What is His relation to the finite forms in which 
 self-consciousness appears, for example, in man ? 
 These are questions which I shall have to consider 
 with you in what follows. 
 
 Well, I have sketched the idea of the ten 
 lectures on which I am now entering, and I have 
 summarised what has already been accomplished. 
 I fear that many of you have found the pathway to 
 reality, so far as we have yet trodden it, hard and 
 stony. It is beset with many difficulties, and in 
 the region upon which we are now entering, as we
 
 14 ABSOLUTE MIND [LECT. i. 
 
 cross the borderland, we shall find the pathway 
 that lies before us not less hard and not less stony. 
 We have to ascend precipitous places ; we have to 
 go along the very brink of abysses of thought ; but 
 yet, if we have faith in the great teachers, the half- 
 dozen great teachers who, in the two thousand years 
 which embrace what is greatest in the history of the 
 human mind, have trodden the road before us, we 
 shall find that they have cut steps in the rock which 
 are of an enduring character, footholds which will 
 enable us to get from point to point. As the out- 
 come of their work, they have left us certain great 
 results which form their common contribution, 
 results which they have expressed in varying 
 language, and which are our inheritance and our 
 strength and our guide in our toil. 
 
 I have so far brought you to a point at which it 
 is evident that what we have to do is to build upon 
 the ground which we have cleared, to get some 
 definite notion of the nature of Mind. For if God 
 be the Ultimate Reality, and if the Ultimate 
 Reality be Mind, the problem with which we have 
 to deal is obviously, What is the nature of Mind ? 
 Now the great difficulty in lecturing upon a topic 
 of this kind is not a difficulty which applies only to 
 the lecturer. There is a difficulty which rests with 
 the audience. There are many of the points in an 
 inquiry of this kind which have not emerged in the 
 minds of some of you, and yet, until these points 
 emerge, until you become conscious that there are 
 problems that have to be solved, and realise the
 
 NECESSITY FOE WONDER 15 
 
 nature of these problems, it is hard for you to make 
 progress. That is why we read a book so much 
 better when it deals with some topic on which we 
 have reflected and about which we have much con- 
 cerned ourselves, until the book has, so to speak, 
 come to our rescue. And so it is in the most pre- 
 eminent degree with the study of metaphysics. It 
 seems barren, it seems in the air, unless you have 
 realised the intensity of the difficulty with which 
 the metaphysician sets himself to grapple, and this 
 has always been so in the history of philosophical 
 teaching. That is what the Greeks meant when 
 they used to talk two thousand years ago of wonder 
 as a necessity for the beginner in philosophy. He 
 must have learned to ponder over the difficulties 
 which beset him, and, before he has learned that, 
 he must have become conscious of these difficulties. 
 And it is not merely wonder as to abstract theory, 
 but it is moral wonder which is essential in the 
 undertaking. There is a saying of Erdmann which 
 I will quote, making the preliminary observation 
 that it is not until we have passed a certain point 
 in the evolution of the spiritual as well as the 
 moral nature of man, that such an inquiry as is the 
 subject of the Gifford Lectures attains the fascina- 
 tion that is characteristic of it. " The task," writes 
 Erdmann at the beginning of his History of Philo- 
 sophy, " of apprehending its own nature in thought 
 can only tempt the human mind, and, indeed, it is 
 then only equal to it, when it is conscious of its 
 intrinsic dignity." We may add that it was only
 
 16 ABSOLUTE MIND [LCT. i. 
 
 after Christianity had raised humanity to the full 
 consciousness of the infinite worth and importance 
 of the individual that these inquiries attained their 
 deepest meaning, and that the old commandment 
 " Know thyself" got its full significance. 
 
 Well, we have to try to find light upon a 
 problem that is of supreme importance to all of us, 
 and our conclusions about which must profoundly 
 influence our conduct. I cannot undertake always 
 to succeed in using the language which is most 
 apt, or to be always clear and lucid. That will be 
 partly my fault, but it will be in a yet greater 
 measure the fault of the topic with which I have to 
 deal. 
 
 It is, indeed, a reproach often directed against 
 those who speak about philosophy that their 
 language is obscure. The complaint is almost in- 
 variably directed at some supposed shortcoming of 
 the speaker. Those who make it rarely pause to 
 ask whether it be not possible that the nature of 
 the subject is the real reason of the obscurity. 
 Philosophy has to deal with the meaning and nature 
 of Ultimate Reality, and what is ultimate is rarely 
 easy to get at. You and I can readily see through 
 the water of a babbling brook when we cannot see 
 to the bottom of the lake into which the waters 
 flow. If the waters of philosophic reflection had 
 resembled those of the brook we should have long 
 ago known what underlay them. Lord Gifford 
 would not have founded a Trust; libraries would 
 not have been filled with volumes of controversy.
 
 SOURCES OF OBSCURITY 17 
 
 The obscurity lies really in the topic of dis- 
 course. Feeble as may be the capacity of the 
 lecturer, it is not his feebleness that is the chief 
 head of offending. There have been those who 
 have attempted, with the aid of great gifts of 
 exposition, to set forth solutions of the problems of 
 metaphysics in language that was apparently clear 
 as noonday. But one after another t .eir attempts 
 have failed. The language was clear, because it 
 was the language of everyday life where the prob- 
 lems in question had simply been ignored. The 
 pictorial images of this language were admirably 
 adapted for the display of that which they resembled. 
 But the region of philosophy is not a region of 
 pictorial images. Rather, as I showed you in the 
 lectures of the last series, is it a region where such 
 similes and metaphors have sadly misled those who 
 have set out on the search after truth in its deeper 
 meaning. It is just because it has to get rid of the 
 misleading associations of language which belongs 
 to a plane of reflection other than that at which it 
 has to place itself, that philosophy requires its own 
 special and technical terminology. Therein it 
 resembles mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, 
 and, indeed, every science which has to try to get 
 beyond appearances to their significations. Why 
 these other sciences should escape the reproach in 
 question, and philosophy have to encounter it, is 
 not apparent. Yet the reproach against philosophy 
 is common even from the lips of educated people. 
 " It is," observes Hegel in the Introduction to the 
 
 B
 
 18 ABSOLUTE MIND [LECT. i. 
 
 Encyclopaedia, "the generally accepted view that 
 to make a shoe requires study and experience, 
 notwithstanding that every man has a model in the 
 shape of his own foot, and has in his hands the 
 natural instruments for the work which he has to 
 do. It is only in the case of philosophy that learn- 
 ing and study and hard work are taken to be 
 unnecessary. This comfortable opinion has, in 
 recent times, been strengthened by doctrines about 
 immediate or intuitive knowledge." Had Hegel 
 lived to-day he would have added to these strength- 
 ening causes the easy avenues to truth, which our 
 popular writers on science and on theology seem 
 never to tire of describing. 
 
 But in point of fact there are no royal roads to 
 this kind of learning any more than to other kinds. 
 If philosophy is to be studied to any purpose, and 
 especially to the purpose of enabling the student to 
 work out his own intellectual salvation, it must be 
 studied in systematic form. The pathway is hard 
 and stony. Lectures like the present may help 
 you over the slough of preliminary despond and 
 through the wicket gate. They may lead you to a 
 place from which you may have some view of new 
 regions. But more than this they cannot do. 
 When you reach these regions you must pursue 
 your own way, and nothing short of hard toil will 
 bring you any distance into these unfamiliar places. 
 When you get to them the only guides that can 
 help you are the great thinkers, those who have 
 been great, not merely in the history of speculative
 
 NO EOYAL EOAD 19 
 
 philosophy, but in the history of science, of litera- 
 ture, of art, of religion, of all that has raised the 
 intellectual level of mankind. There is no short 
 cut. There is no epigram in which it is practicable 
 to shut up what can be set forth only in a system. 
 The language, too, must be language which has 
 expressions for metaphysical conceptions. That is 
 why French is a poor medium for this kind of 
 science, and English not very much better. There 
 is a story which is sometimes told of Cousin and 
 Hegel, but, I think, it is properly told of Madame de 
 Stael and Fichte. The brilliant lady is said to have 
 called on Fichte in Berlin, and asked that he 
 should sum up for her his system succinctly and in 
 French. " Ces choses ne se laissent pas dire succincte- 
 ment, surtout en franpais," is said to have been 
 Fichte's response. 
 
 But our generation is not the only one that has 
 suffered from a widespread desire to take short 
 cuts in philosophy. The Greeks had to protest 
 against the same illusion. In the Seventh Book of 
 the Republic, Glancon says to Socrates, " Say then 
 what is the nature and what are the divisions of 
 dialectic, and what are the paths which lead 
 thither ; for these paths will also lead to our final 
 rest." 
 
 "Dear Glancon," I said, "you will not be able 
 to follow me here, though I would do my best, and 
 you should behold, not an image only, but the 
 absolute truth, according to my notion. Although 
 I am not confident that I could tell you the exact
 
 20 ABSOLUTE MIND [IT. ,. 
 
 truth, I am certain that you would behold some- 
 thing like the truth." 
 
 "Doubtless," he replied. 
 
 "But I must add that the power of dialectic 
 alone can reveal this, and only to one who is a 
 disciple of the previous sciences." 
 
 " Of that assertion you may be as certain as of 
 the last." 
 
 " And certainly no one will argue that there is 
 any other method or way of comprehending all true 
 existence ; for the arts in general are concerned 
 with the wants or opinions of men, or are cultivated 
 for the sake of production and construction ; and, 
 as to the mathematical arts which, as we were 
 saying, have some apprehension of true being 
 geometry and the like they only dream about 
 being, but never can they behold the waking reality 
 so long as they leave the hypotheses which they 
 use unexamined, and are unable to give an account 
 of them. For when a man knows not his own first 
 principle, and when the conclusion and intermediate 
 steps are constructed out of he knows not what, 
 how can he imagine that such a conventional state- 
 ment will ever become science ? " 
 
 "Impossible," he said. 
 
 "Then dialectic, and dialectic alone, goes 
 directly to the first principle, and so the only 
 science which does away with hypotheses in order 
 to make certain of them ; the eye of the soul, which 
 is literally buried in an outlandish slough, is by 
 her taught to look upwards ; and she uses as hand-
 
 SOCRATES AND DIALECTIC 21 
 
 maids, in the work of conversion, the sciences we 
 have been discussing. Custom terms them sciences, 
 but they ought to have some other name, implying 
 greater clearness than opinion, and less clearness 
 than science." . . . 
 
 "Dialectic, then, as you will agree, is the 
 coping-stone of the sciences, and is placed over 
 them ; no other science can be placed higher the 
 nature of knowledge can no further go." 
 
 Glancon then asks who ought to study dialectic, 
 which in this context means just philosophy, and 
 what qualifications he should have. Socrates 
 replies, " Such gifts as keenness and ready powers 
 of acquisition ; for the mind more often faints from 
 the severity of study, than from the severity of 
 gymnastics." "Further, he of whom we are in 
 search should have a good memory, and be an 
 unwearied solid man who is a lover of labour in 
 any line, or he will never be able to undergo the 
 double toil and trouble of body and mind. The 
 mistake at present is, that those who study 
 philosophy have no vocation, and this, as I was 
 saying before, is the reason why she has fallen into 
 disrepute ; her true sons should study her, and not 
 bastards. Her votary should not have a lame or one- 
 legged industry I mean that he should not be half 
 industrious and half idle ; as, for example, when a 
 man is a lover of gymnastic and hunting and all 
 other bodily exercises, but a hater, rather than a 
 lover, of the labour of learning, or hearing, or 
 inquiring."
 
 22 ABSOLUTE MIND [LECT. i. 
 
 It seems, then, as though it had been recognised 
 since Plato's time, that philosophy must remain the 
 most difficult of sciences, and as though the fact 
 were one which it were useless to try to disguise 
 by using language which lacks in precision and 
 meaning, in proportion as it gains in popularity. 
 Such language is no help but rather a hindrance. 
 It is not really lucid. It is better to keep boldly 
 and without apology to the well-worn terminology, 
 clumsy as much of it is. As Seneca says : " Mira 
 in quibusdam rebus verborum proprietas est, et 
 consuetude sermonis antiqui qusedam efficacissimis 
 notis signat." Bearing this in mind let us once 
 more, before recommencing our journey, take stock 
 of our equipment for it. 
 
 I will begin by summing up, in fresh language, 
 the conclusion of the first set of lectures. From 
 the point at which they concluded I have to try 
 to carry you yet a stage further, a stage which we 
 must travel if we are to get a clear grasp of the 
 theory, not merely of knowledge, but of practice. 
 And this we cannot get unless we keep before our 
 minds the result of the analysis of Ultimate Keality. 
 That analysis brings us to the conception of Mind, 
 present to itself in changing aspects, but, under 
 whatever aspect, as the sole reality within which 
 distinctions fall and change takes place, as singular, 
 as individual, as unique, as all-embracing. 
 
 Knowledge is a supreme and ultimate fact. It 
 is not to be explained as a phenomenon brought 
 about by physical and physiological causes. The
 
 NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE 23 
 
 facts of physics and physiology arise through dis- 
 tinctions drawn in knowledge. We ascend from 
 matter to mind only to discover that it was in mind 
 that matter first of all attained to meaning and 
 existence. 
 
 The real world within and without me is indi- 
 vidual, is always the unique, singular "this," and 
 the individual, in which thought rests, is reality. 
 Thought never passes beyond the singular, all- 
 containing fact of reality, however it may transform 
 it. Even when I pronounce one fact in experience 
 to be different from that other, what I have done 
 is to make a distinction within the subject of my 
 judgment. The individual immediacy has been so 
 far transformed by reflection that within it has been 
 established a numerical distinction, and the true 
 individual, the subject to which my next judgment 
 will attach a predicate, of which it will proclaim 
 a fresh " what," is the whole of that reality inside 
 which a separation of a really abstract character 
 has been established as a qualification of the 
 original aspect of reality. If my experience is of 
 myself as contrasted with what is not self, in like 
 manner it is within the unique, all-inclusive, self- 
 sustaining totality of the presentation by the mind 
 of itself to itself that the contrast is established. 
 A new aspect has emerged, that is all. Because 
 the individual of experience is mind, and its nature 
 is to be activity, it is never still, and the only 
 fashion in which the varying aspects are fixed and 
 held still is, as philosophers from the time of
 
 24 ABSOLUTE MIND [L*cr. i. 
 
 Heraclitus to that of Mill have pointed out, 
 through the abstractions of reflection. So only is 
 the system evolved in which we must think our 
 experience so only does our Universe rise before 
 us. It Is not in so-called causes, but in the ends 
 or purposes which the mind has before it in so 
 reflecting, and in nothing short of these, that the 
 reason is to be sought of the fixity of the appear- 
 ance of the world as it seems, and of us as part of 
 it. We are what we are in virtue of ends set before 
 it by the Mind in which we live and move and 
 have our being. Therein lies the reason why reality 
 presents itself as set in just these and no other 
 aspects. With the ends the aspects vary. As 
 each end is real for mind, so does each aspect 
 equally belong to reality. If ends co-exist, so must 
 aspects co-exist. Every aspect of the world as it 
 seems is real, if and so far as the end which is 
 realised in it is real. The degrees of reality depend 
 on the relation of the ends. If an end is super- 
 seded by a deeper purpose, the aspect to which 
 the former gave being sinks to the level of mere 
 appearance. 
 
 I know how hard all this is to grasp, and those 
 of you who find it unintelligible I must refer back 
 to the first six of the old lectures, where you have 
 it worked out up to the point to which I now 
 come. This point is that just as when we want 
 to find out the nature of a particular science and 
 the meaning of what it teaches, we must inquire 
 into its method and categories, so it is in the
 
 BEAUTY 25 
 
 case of practice also. If we would know what 
 the artist really says and does, or the good man, 
 or the godly man, we must find out what his 
 method is, and what are his dominating con- 
 ceptions, and the ends which move him to act 
 under them. Beauty, goodness, godliness, are 
 all aspects in the world as it seems, aspects 
 under which mind presents itself, aspects forming 
 varying phases in which its individuality discloses 
 itself to itself in what we call experience. The 
 beautiful, for example, is an aspect in which experi- 
 ence comes to us, an aspect which we fix and 
 preserve in universals of reflection. Can we then 
 hope to be able to resolve it into such universals ? 
 Certainly not ! Beauty is an aspect in which reality, 
 always in form individual, discloses itself, and this 
 unique individuality cannot be resolved into the 
 universals which exist only in it and are separated 
 out merely in abstraction. Beauty is one of the 
 forms in which Mind recognises itself, and it 
 belongs to the region of fact. Before reflection 
 had played its part in isolating and fixing it, beauty 
 was without meaning. A pig or a dog seems to 
 know nothing of beauty. As Hegel has pointed 
 out, it is only in so far as we think that we are 
 capable of art, or morality, or religion. The extent 
 to which each of us is capable of appreciating beauty 
 depends on our capacity for conceptions and for 
 the ends which lead us to choose them. The height 
 to which mankind in general can rise in grasping 
 the true, the beautiful, the good, depends on what
 
 26 ABSOLUTE MIND [LECT. i. 
 
 are the ends and capacity for conceptions of man- 
 kind. That is why the Universe appears as it does 
 to us human beings, and not otherwise. The 
 limited character of the ends which, in practice as 
 in theory, our nature leads us to choose, divides 
 us not only from God but from the world as it is 
 for God. If we would get as near as we can to 
 Him we must seek the highest forms of which 
 human experience is capable. For these will point 
 us beyond themselves, not to other human forms, 
 for of these there will be none beyond, but to reality 
 that lies beyond and gives them deeper meaning as 
 stages towards such reality. We may be satisfied if 
 we find that, in the light of a deeper understanding, 
 what has troubled us, what has separated us from 
 God, has been nothing that separated us wholly 
 from Him, nothing with a self-subsisting and inde- 
 pendent nature, but a set of distinctions which fall 
 within our own selves, which have their hard-and- 
 fast appearance because of our mental and spiritual 
 limits, and which, whether they assume the aspect 
 of our weakness or that of the grave that closes 
 on us, are but appearance relatively to the reality 
 which comprehension of the deeper meaning dis- 
 closes. In the Ultimate Reality such appearances 
 can be but transient, and it is only the finiteness of 
 our powers of reflection that has made us fix them 
 into a system from which we see no escape. This 
 system is the system of what we call the actual. 
 What is actual is experience. Experience is neither 
 the universal nor the particular, but the combination
 
 THOUGHT AND FEELING 27 
 
 of the two in the individual presentation. Presenta- 
 tion gives us the actual. Now in presentation, and 
 therefore in the actual, the transforming work of 
 reflection, without which the individual presentation 
 cannot be fixed for thought, operates in varying 
 degrees. At times, as when we see colour or feel 
 pleasure, the particular element of sensation pre- 
 dominates. At other times, as when we recognise 
 as facts confronting us the institutions of the family 
 or the state, the element of sense recedes, and 
 what gives its meaning to reality is the domi- 
 nating conception. Objectivity is here very plainly 
 what we are forced to think. It is the feeling 
 which is highly qualified through reflection that 
 binds the parent to the child, and the citizen to the 
 state. A family and a state may be objects in 
 experience, actual individuals in direct presentation, 
 but it is only for a thinking being that they are so. 
 For a low type of intelligence and among low types 
 of intelligence they are meaningless and do not 
 exist. A cow may conceivably have some sort of 
 self-consciousness, but watch the expression of its 
 face and you will readily satisfy yourself that it has 
 no religion, no sense of citizenship. The higher the 
 capacity for thought, the wider the limits of what is 
 actual, and the more apparently is it rational. 
 
 There appears to be also a varying limit at the 
 other boundary, in the region of feeling. The 
 capacity of our senses, the field of consciousness, 
 may be much enlarged by sufficient suggestion to 
 the subliminal self. Many of the phenomena of
 
 28 ABSOLUTE MIND [Lcr. i. 
 
 hypnotism illustrate this. Such experiences as 
 those of telepathy and thought-reading seem to 
 depend on the relaxation of the normal inhibitions 
 which restrain the capacity of the self for sensation. 
 Yet the records of these phenomena and the little 
 they assist us towards knowledge of the higher 
 kinds, strikingly suggest that what we are over- 
 stepping is only the lower limit of feeling, within 
 which the normal inhibitions of the self confine it, 
 and not the upper limit of capacity to think. It is 
 the shortcoming of mysticism that it takes feeling 
 as such, with its barrenness of intellectual effort, to 
 be sufficient as a form of reality. The strength of 
 mysticism is its directly present particular of feel- 
 ing. But this yields at best but the emotion which 
 is no guide to truth, which has no basis in reflec- 
 tion or justification in reason. Mysticism has the 
 defects of its qualities. Its power lies in its 
 simplicity, the readiness to hand of its material. 
 But valuable as is the sense of reality which that 
 material brings, it is wanting in the depth and 
 solidity which only a systematic form can give. 
 And a systematic form can be the outcome of 
 reason alone. The great fact of family life has 
 its foundation in passion, passion transfigured, but 
 yet in its origin sexual and sensual. It develops 
 on a basis that is largely one of feeling and of 
 instinct. But its deeper meaning, the form which 
 pervades and moulds it, is one which depends upon 
 a dominating end and conception, the organisation 
 of the family in which parents and children alike
 
 KELATIVITY 29 
 
 realise their lives in a social whole that is itself 
 individual, as real as the individuals which are the 
 members, as real as the cells for which the body 
 forms the organic whole. To the eye which 
 possesses sight, as well as to the eye of faith, the 
 family is just as real a phenomenon as is the human 
 body. Both are directly presented. When I say 
 that I have met the Fairchild family, I mean some- 
 thing that I have seen, and not a mere succession 
 or group of particular people. In the same way, 
 when I say I have seen a living body, I mean more 
 than a mere aggregate of cells. It is only relatively 
 that the one is less directly presented than the 
 other. The senses of a gnat might see in a human 
 body only an aggregate of cells appearing to work 
 in mechanical harmony of purpose. The coarse 
 senses of the inhabitants of Brobdignag, directed 
 upon Lilliput, might find the family more difficult to 
 break up into its constituent members than a gnat 
 may find the human body. Here, as in an infinity 
 of other instances, the distinctions which occur in 
 the field of perception, and which separate what 
 appears as immediately given from what appears 
 otherwise, depend on our particular measure of 
 space and time. There is no hard-and-fast line of 
 demarcation between what is directly and what is 
 indirectly given. Nevertheless, there is for each of 
 us a practical working line. Taking two pheno- 
 mena, both of which lie on one side of it, the human 
 family and the human body, while both are pre- 
 sented directly, they are presented with differing
 
 30 ABSOLUTE MIND [L*CT. i. 
 
 degrees of distinctness. The former owes most to 
 reflection, the latter most to sense, for beings at the 
 same plane of intelligence. 
 
 There comes, indeed, not a definite point, for 
 that never comes, but a region where we get from 
 feeling the merest with which we start, to abstract 
 universals of reflection which are never themselves 
 presented as individual wholes, or as single or unique 
 facts of experience. Such, as we saw before, are 
 atoms and energy at the one end of the scale, and the 
 Universe as a totality at the other end. Such are 
 the past and the future by contrast with which the 
 present is made definite in reflection. We become 
 conscious even of our limits as individuals, and we 
 thereby transcend them, by contrasting our presenta- 
 tion of ourselves as objects for ourselves with what 
 we can construct in thought, but cannot directly 
 experience. That which is so constructed is con- 
 structed abstractly, in universals only. Never does 
 it present for us the universal combining with the 
 particular to form the fact that is individual, unless, 
 indeed, our inhibitions have been in some fashion 
 and measure removed, and the region within which 
 our faculty of presentation is confined has been ex- 
 tended. Why we are limited as we are we cannot 
 tell further than this, that it is in virtue of our 
 occupying just this definite plane in the self-com- 
 prehension of the absolute mind which is the founda- 
 tion and final form of our reality. The ends which 
 are in course of realising themselves, and in the 
 self-realisation of which the plane of our intelligence
 
 RELATIVITY 31 
 
 is a stage, are ends which our finite methods always 
 hold out as lying beyond us, as to be reached by 
 inference only, and when we do reach them thus 
 inferentially we can describe what we reach only 
 in either the abstract universals of speculative 
 philosophy, or halting metaphors drawn from a 
 lower sphere. We are what we are, and it is only 
 at a level of intelligence that is incrusted with 
 limitations arising from the finiteness of the pur- 
 poses of our everyday life as men and women, that 
 we reason at all. And yet reason takes us beyond 
 ourselves, and in the highest phases of human self- 
 consciousness tells us of much that lies beyond. 
 Could we directly view the Universe sub specie 
 ceternitatis we should see beyond these limits. 
 But if we could so view we should have become as 
 God is. 
 
 Such is the conception, to which philosophy 
 seems to have brought man, of the inmost nature 
 of the content of his self-consciousness, of the world 
 as it seems. That world lies between two limits, 
 neither of which is, for man, reality. At the one 
 extreme is what comes earliest in the time-history 
 of our intelligence feeling, feeling that cannot be 
 defined, that is but material for the activity of in- 
 telligence to further fashion into the individual of 
 sense. At the other extreme is what seems to be 
 a sphere of mere reflection, the creatures of which 
 exist only for abstract thought. Between these 
 two limits lies the individual world of reality, never 
 still and ever self- transforming, just because its
 
 32 ABSOLUTE MIND [!**. i. 
 
 reality is mind the essence of which is spontaneous 
 and self- originating activity. The aspects under 
 which this world discloses itself vary in character 
 according as they approach to the one limit or the 
 other. But just because they are not self- subsist- 
 ing things, numerically distinct, like marbles in a 
 heap, but are aspects under which the real presents 
 itself, they fall actually or potentially within the 
 complex standpoint of human experience. Every 
 phase of the world as it seems is real, though 
 relatively to each other these phases are graded 
 and possess degrees of reality. In the next five 
 lectures we shall try to see something of their 
 nature in such detail as space permits. To set out 
 that nature fully would require a book no less 
 great than the entire book of Life. But the out- 
 lines must disclose themselves, if the task of these 
 lectures is to be accomplished. It is for Philosophy 
 to pursue her narrow path to the summit, and there 
 to join hands with Art, and Morality, and Religion. 
 The accomplishment of this is for her the test of 
 success. It is only when he finds that the world 
 as it seems to the artist, to the good man, to the 
 godly man, seems real to him also, that the philo- 
 sopher has done his work. 
 
 In the first and second books of these lectures 
 I showed you how the various ends after which 
 knowledge in its different forms is striving, trans- 
 form the real world. I carried the account down 
 to the process of selective attention in the conscious 
 human being. Now, just as in our consciousness
 
 ENDS IN THE SPHERE OF PRACTICE 33 
 
 the appearance of our world is determined by our 
 ends, so are we determined in our characters and 
 actions as individuals by the ends which we seek 
 to realise. The artist, the good man, the religious 
 man, are what they are in virtue of the purposes 
 which are constantly being embodied in their 
 practice. On the distinction between these pur- 
 poses depends the distinction between the worlds 
 of these men. Just as when we know, what we 
 know is fashioned by the conceptions under which 
 we have organised our knowledge, so, when we 
 act, what we do takes its character and significance 
 from the ends which we have striven to realise in 
 our actions. 
 
 Mind which is free in its choice acts under con- 
 ceptions which it freely chooses, just as it reflects 
 under such conceptions. " By their works ye shall 
 know them." It is in works that Faith attains to 
 life. It is in action that the spirit realises itself. 
 In such action man may be an intelligent being as 
 completely as in his thinking. Just in so far as 
 his action is the embodiment of thought does it 
 disclose itself as the individual in which reality is 
 attained in the union of what is universal, so long 
 as it remains in the region of mere purpose, with 
 what is particular in the concrete execution of that 
 purpose. Conduct which is moral embodies both 
 end and means. It is not the having an idea that 
 is wrong, it is the giving effect to it, even if such 
 giving effect assumes only the form of allowing the 
 
 mind to dwell on it 
 
 c
 
 34 ABSOLUTE MIND [LCT. lm 
 
 It is of the nature of man as a thinking being 
 to realise himself in a twofold fashion. The first of 
 these fashions is theoretical. He seeks to organise 
 the world of experience, as we saw in the first series 
 of lectures, under conceptions in such a fashion as 
 in the end to abolish its foreignness. He endeavours 
 to find its reality in the law, which lies behind and 
 gives meaning to phenomena, by dragging to light 
 the universal which gives the individual its meaning 
 and existence, and enables the mind to find itself 
 even in the apparent externality of nature. The 
 second fashion is that in which he alters his 
 surroundings by what he does, and so stamps on 
 them the impression of his personality. He may 
 do this by making his surroundings, including his 
 fellow-men, subordinate to his purpose of accumu- 
 lating riches. He does it when he turns the 
 material that is to his hand into clothes for himself, 
 or makes others clothe him. Or he may do it, as 
 the artist does, by making marble, or colour, or 
 musical sound, or language the medium in which 
 his self bodies itself forth. In all such cases the 
 essential feature which gives its character to reality 
 is the embodiment of purpose, the realisation of 
 mind in the transformation of its material, its 
 object world, into forms which are its own. In 
 practice as in theory the task of mind is to 
 find itself. In practice as in theory the com- 
 pleteness with which this is done depends on the 
 capacity for thinking. It is, therefore, in their 
 purposes, or the ends which they seek to realise,
 
 THE ARTIST 35 
 
 that the distinctions between the various forms of 
 practical activity must be sought. And these 
 purposes or ends must be investigated, and their 
 relations to each other established, by reference to 
 the conceptions which govern them. In the world 
 of action, no less than in the world of science, a 
 criticism of categories is essential for clear know- 
 ledge. 
 
 We have an illustration of this truth in Art. 
 The artist is essentially practical. What he wills 
 and what he accomplishes is just a transformation 
 of experience. His mastery over the sensuous 
 forms, whether of sound, or of outline and colour, 
 or of bronze and marble, or of language, enables 
 him to set individual reality before us in new 
 aspects. In these aspects we have the work of his 
 will. He gives us an experience which he has 
 himself fashioned, and its importance is that in it 
 he enables us to have before us the individual as it 
 is presented at the plane of his own mind. A scene 
 in nature has in it an infinity of detail which is far 
 beyond the reach of the brush, even of a Turner. 
 But the artist does not copy nature. He presents 
 nature as he has comprehended and set it in his 
 own mind, and thereby he lifts us for the moment 
 to his own level, a level at which the greatness of 
 his mind becomes apparent to us. 
 
 Again, in a moral action we are conscious, as 
 before us, of a plane of purpose which goes beyond 
 that of the brute purpose, it may be, which goes 
 beyond that of the brute just in so far as it inspires
 
 36 ABSOLUTE MIND [LECT. i. 
 
 man to act on the footing of being more than a 
 mere isolated and self-regarding individual, and as 
 finding reality in a social whole of which he is a 
 member. 
 
 So again in religion attention is concentrated 
 on the relation of man to God, and the religious 
 man is he whose will is constantly striving to give 
 effect to purposes which are fashioned by this 
 relationship. It is the old problem that confronts 
 us, the problem of how the various aspects of life as 
 it seems stand to one another. Just as in the 
 earlier lectures I had, after defining the nature of 
 Ultimate Reality, to set forth its phases as they 
 appeared in the various sciences, so, later on, I 
 shall have to try to touch upon its phases as they 
 appear in the region of practice. But, as was 
 pointed out in the tenth of the earlier lectures, the 
 distinction between theory and practice is only a 
 relative one, and its importance becomes less the 
 deeper we penetrate into the meaning and nature 
 of reality. For certain practical purposes we 
 contrast thinking and willing, knowing and being. 
 But the contrast exists for practical purposes only. 
 That is to say, in thought as in action, the essence 
 of what we do is to alter the individual fact of 
 experience from which we start by giving it a new 
 form, by introducing through the judgment, of 
 which, in practice as well as theory, it is always the 
 subject, a new qualification within its limits. 
 
 The task of philosophy, in this stage of the 
 search after truth, is to express in language which
 
 THE TASK OF PHILOSOPHY 37 
 
 is as nearly as possible scientific what is implicitly 
 present to the mind that reflects, but has been 
 obscured by the incrustations that arise from 
 habitual immersion in the language and metaphors 
 of a lower plane. Even at that lower plane the 
 man of the world finds himself confronted by : 
 
 "Those obstinate questionings 
 Of sense and outward things, 
 Fallings from us, vanishings, 
 Blank misgivings of a Creature, 
 Moving about in worlds not realised, 
 High instincts before which our mortal nature 
 Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised. 
 But for those first affections, 
 Those shadowy recollections, 
 Which, be they what they may, 
 Are yet the fountain light of all our day, 
 Are yet a master light of all our seeing, 
 Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make 
 Our noisy years seem moments in the being 
 Of that eternal Silence ; truths that wake, 
 To perish never ; 
 
 Which neither listlessness, nor rude endeavour, 
 Nor man nor boy, nor all that is at enmity with joy, 
 Can utterly abolish or destroy." 
 
 Deep down in the hearts and brains of even 
 those who seem to be most of all of the earth earthy, 
 lie the impulses that make them men and women in 
 a higher sense than any they express in words. 
 In the surroundings that have slowly but surely 
 grown up about us, in the manifestations of our 
 corporate life as a nation, in the institutions with- 
 out which no race of human beings counts itself 
 civilised, we have the intimations of the existence 
 that is more than one of rivalry in the assertion of 
 
 73
 
 38 ABSOLUTE MIND [LK*. i. 
 
 the individual will to live. The picture galleries, 
 the schools, the hospitals, the Courts of Justice, 
 the Parliament Houses, these and the like bear 
 witness to the larger meaning of the life that is 
 ours, and the deeper meaning that gives form to its 
 experience. It is the Mind which is the foundation 
 of that experience, and the various forms which 
 that experience assumes under control by categories 
 of thought which we have not yet examined, that 
 must be the subject of the next five lectures.
 
 LECTURE II 
 
 TO-DAY I have to start from the position that the 
 Ultimate Reality is mind, and I have to ask you 
 to go with me in an investigation of what the 
 nature of mind is. Now this is perhaps the very 
 hardest part of our task, and this lecture may prove 
 the most difficult to follow. But it is a part of the 
 undertaking which must be faced, and through 
 which I must carry you as well as I can. Let us 
 try to get together our materials, and let us begin 
 by doing, what is always a useful thing when you 
 want to find the meaning of a word, by trying to 
 see what mind is not. Now mind is not this is 
 perfectly clear if the reasoning up to this stage be 
 right a thing. It is not a thing that is somewhere 
 in the brain and is worked by the nerves or works 
 the nerves. It is nothing with a locality, because 
 it is that to which everything, not excepting the 
 forms of space and time, presents itself. If we 
 were to assume that mind was a thing having a 
 locality in space and a place in time we should be 
 driven to one of two conclusions. We should 
 either end in materialism, or, at the other extreme, 
 we should fall into what is even more difficult to
 
 40 ABSOLUTE MIND OCT. n. 
 
 get out of than materialism, that which is called 
 solipsism, the doctrine that existence is merely the 
 being a set of the impressions or ideas of a par- 
 ticular individual object called the self. Bishop 
 Berkeley, as Hume afterwards showed, got very 
 near to this position. For him the mind was some- 
 thing which was acted upon by God, a mechanical 
 God really, who operated upon it ab extra, and 
 produced the impressions which made up the 
 Universe of which the self was conscious. Well, 
 it is clear that mind cannot be a thing with a locality 
 in space and time. 
 
 Again an equally imperfect account of it is to 
 describe it as a subject with an object of a foreign 
 nature confronting it. By an object of a foreign 
 nature I mean an object which does not fall 
 within the mind itself. If you take that point of 
 view, you will find it wholly impossible to explain 
 how mind and its object ever get together, or how 
 the object can have any meaning excepting in 
 virtue of distinctions which obviously are the work 
 of the mind itself. The characteristic of the mind 
 is to be self-conscious, is to be active, is to be more 
 like a life than like an inert substance. Its nature 
 is self-conscious activity, and it is within that 
 activity that all that is and all that can be falls. 
 
 Now, another misapprehension which we have 
 to avoid is the exclusive identification of mind with 
 any particular phase of mind, for instance, feeling. 
 It is only by abstraction that feeling is put on one 
 side and thought is put on the other. Mind is just
 
 THE NATUKE OF MIND 41 
 
 as much feeling as it is thought, and it is just as 
 much thought as it is feeling, because thought and 
 feeling, as here distinguished, are merely two of the 
 aspects in which the living self-conscious individual 
 mind manifests itself as activity. It is in reflection 
 only and for purposes that are special that we 
 break up the activity in which mind consists, 
 activity that is final and ultimate, into the con- 
 trasted aspects of the discursive thought which 
 relates terms, and the supposed immediacy of 
 particular feeling. Idealism has been brought at 
 times into disrepute by want of attention to the 
 fact that the distinction is an artificial one. 
 
 Now we come to another point. All the 
 phenomena which are before the mind appear 
 before it as successive and so in time, and many of 
 them appear also as in space. But it is plain that 
 these phenomena present that aspect only for the 
 mind. In our everyday conversation we ignore the 
 relation of the mind as subject to its object. We 
 speak of the object world as if it were something 
 self-subsisting, and that is how we come to talk of 
 time and space as if they were self- subsisting and 
 finite forms of reality. It is quite right that we 
 should do that for everyday practical purposes. 
 You and I live in this world, and we have to deal with 
 each other as human beings, as citizens of a state, 
 as members of a family, as lecturer and audience. 
 In these relations we have to contemplate ourselves 
 from a standpoint where it is necessary to make 
 clear the distinction between our personalities, and
 
 42 ABSOLUTE MIND OCT. n. 
 
 so it is that for social purposes we come to make 
 distinctions which lead us to treat ourselves as if we 
 were so many different minds and so many different 
 living things. That is a standpoint which represents 
 truth, measured by the purposes which we have in 
 view, but it is not a standpoint from which the final 
 word can be said about the nature of reality. The 
 phenomena of the mind are phenomena which are 
 there for the mind, and the general relations in 
 which they appear, space and time, are just rela- 
 tions of what comes before the mind, and are 
 therefore themselves distinctions which the mind 
 itself makes, and which exist only in so far as the 
 mind presents things to itself. 
 
 Now, to some extent we see that this is so when 
 we look at even very familiar illustrations. What 
 is called the " tempo " of different kinds of mind, 
 the measure of time, is different. We can conceive 
 beings for whom a thousand years is as one day, 
 and beings for whom one day is as a thousand years. 
 Take an animal with very fine senses ; for example, 
 a gnat in all probability possesses such senses. To 
 a gnat an explosion may seem to occupy a definite 
 time, whereas to a creature with a less finely 
 organised sense of hearing the explosion may seem 
 to occupy but an instant. There are some in- 
 genious calculations by Von Baer on the effect of 
 differences in the amount of duration felt, and in 
 the fineness of the events that may fill it. If we 
 were able, within the length of a second, to note 
 ten thousand events distinctly instead of ten as
 
 BELATIVITY OF KNOWLEDGE 43 
 
 now; if our life were then destined to hold the 
 same number of impressions, it might be one thou- 
 sand times as short. We should live less than a 
 month, and personally know nothing of the change 
 of seasons. If born in winter, we should believe 
 in summer as we now believe in the heats of our 
 carboniferous era. The motions of organic beings 
 would be so slow to our senses as to be inferred, 
 not seen. The sun would stand still in the sky, 
 the moon be almost free from change, and so on. 
 And now reverse the hypothesis, and suppose a 
 being to get only 1000th part of the sensations 
 that we get in a given time, and consequently 
 to live 1000th times as long. Winters and 
 summers will be to him like quarters of an hour. 
 Mushrooms and the swifter growing plants will shoot 
 into being so rapidly as to appear instantaneous 
 creations ; annual shrubs will rise and fall from the 
 earth like restlessly boiling water springs ; the 
 motions of animals will be as invisible as are to us 
 the movements of bullets and cannon balls ; the 
 sun will scour through the sky like *a meteor, 
 leaving a fiery trail behind him.* 
 
 Now I come to another point. If time be a 
 relation in which things are presented for the mind, 
 if it be, as it were, just the form of such presenta- 
 tion, then thought must take account of another 
 relation in which the contents of the mind stand to 
 one another. It is conceivable, for instance, that 
 what is first in time may, in a deeper view of 
 
 * See James' Principles of Psychology, vol. i., p. 639.
 
 44 ABSOLUTE MIND OCT. n. 
 
 reality, become logically last, and conversely that 
 what is logically last may become, in the deeper 
 sense, first in time. Take the notion of the mind 
 in comprehending phenomena as successive. One 
 phenomenon comes after another, and we trace the 
 connection, and if we are psychologists we trace 
 the succession of forms back to their origin as 
 suggestions of the senses and as constructions of 
 the intelligence. But it is plain that, although in 
 this way we get last of all to the mind, the mind 
 must have been presupposed as the very condition 
 without which that succession of phenomena, which 
 are there as its object, could not have taken place. 
 Our very psychological analysis leads us to see that 
 the mind must be presupposed before there can be 
 any possibility of such succession ; and, therefore, in 
 the deeper meaning of things, in the fuller view 
 of truth, the mind must come logically first, although 
 it is reached last as a presentation in the psycho- 
 logical analysis which only takes account of the 
 history in time. In that way there comes to be a 
 fuller view, of things, and a view of things in which 
 we see mind as the ultimate truth, and the ultimate 
 truth in the sense that things presuppose mind 
 instead of mind presupposing things. If the activity 
 of thought be the condition without which it is 
 impossible to attach any meaning to the notion of the 
 object world of phenomena, presented as arranged 
 in space and as successive in time, then mind must 
 be logically first, whatever the nature of the time 
 series, and the final view of things must be the
 
 ILLUSTRATION FBOM CARLYLE 45 
 
 view in which they owe the very meaning of their 
 reality to the mind. 
 
 In the course of these lectures I have tried from 
 time to time to illustrate to you metaphysical truths 
 from the insight and often it is very great of the 
 poets and the artists, and I have quoted to you 
 various illustrations of how the poets in particular 
 have seen, as it were by an intuition of genius, into 
 the very metaphysical conclusions which we have 
 been straining after with so much difficulty. This 
 is true of the topic with which I am now engaged. 
 I am going to quote to you, not a poet in the tech- 
 nical sense, but one who was a poet in a very real 
 sense, I mean Carlyle. In Sartor Resartus, in his 
 chapter on " Clothes," Carlyle makes Teufelsdrockh 
 say : " With men of a speculative turn there come 
 seasons, meditative, sweet, yet awful hours, when 
 in wonder and fear you ask yourself that unanswer- 
 able question : Who am I ; the thing that can say 
 ' 1 ' (Das Wesen das sick Ich nennt) ? The world 
 with its loud trafficking retires into the distance ; 
 and through the paper-hangings and stone walls, 
 and thick plied tissues of Commerce and Polity, 
 and all the living and lifeless integuments (of 
 Society and a Body) wherewith your existence sits 
 surrounded the sight reaches forth into the void 
 Deep, and you are alone with the Universe, and 
 commune with it, as one mysterious Presence with 
 another." 
 
 " Who am I ; what is this Me ! A Voice, a 
 Motion, an Appearance ; some embodied visualised
 
 46 ABSOLUTE MIND [LKCT. n. 
 
 Idea in the Eternal Mind ? Cogito ergo sum. . . . 
 Has not a deeper meditation taught certain, of 
 every climate and age, that the Where and the 
 When, so mysteriously inseparable from all our 
 thoughts, are but superficial terrestrial adhesions 
 to thought ; that the Seer may discern them where 
 they mount up out of the celestial Everywhere and 
 Forever ; have not all nations conceived their God 
 as Omnipresent and Eternal ; as existing in a 
 universal Here and everlasting Now? I think, 
 well, thou too wilt find that Space is but a mode 
 of an human sense, so likewise Time ; there is no 
 Space and no Time ; we are we know not what ; 
 like sparkles floating in the aether of Deity. 
 
 " So that this so solid-seeming World, after all, 
 were but an air image, our Me the only reality; 
 and nature, with its thousand-fold production and 
 destruction, but the reflex of our own inward Force, 
 the ' phantasy of our Dream ' ; or what the Earth 
 Spirit in Faust names it, the living visible Garment 
 of God: 
 
 ( In Beings floods, in Actions storm 
 I walk and work, above, beneath, 
 Work and weave in endless motion ! 
 
 Birth and Death 
 
 An infinite Ocean ; 
 
 A seizing and giving 
 
 The fire of the Living ; 
 
 'Tis thus at the roaring Loom of Time I ply, 
 And weave for God the Garment thou see'st Him by.' 
 
 Of twenty millions that have read and spouted 
 this thunder-speech of the Erdgeist, are there yet
 
 DEEPER MEANING OF EVOLUTION 47 
 
 twenty units of us that have learned the meaning 
 thereof ! " 
 
 Well, if Mind be that into which all these dis- 
 tinctions, including the distinctions which go to the 
 making of presentation in space and time, fall, there 
 is a deeper view of evolution than any with which 
 people are ordinarily familiar. If the process of 
 succession in time be but a process that falls within 
 the sphere of presentation by the mind to the mind, 
 and if the last in time be nevertheless the first in 
 logic, then if we would comprehend the true mean- 
 ing of evolution we must seek it in the ends which 
 the mind realises in its processes. We must seek 
 it in the stages of comprehension, or rather of self- 
 comprehension, of the mind. It is only another 
 way of stating all this to say that it is just as set 
 in the universals of reflection, as Aristotle long ago 
 showed, that the particulars of feeling have exist- 
 ence. I quoted to you in the first lecture last year 
 Mill's analysis of existence into the permanent 
 possibilities of sensation, an analysis which he 
 extended to the mind just as he had applied it to 
 the external world. It is these permanent possi- 
 bilities, the universals in which the particulars are 
 set, and in union with which, they alone come to 
 reality, that give its true meaning to existence. 
 Not that the universals and the particulars can be 
 separated Aristotle long ago showed that they 
 have no existence independent of one another but 
 they are moments, factors in the ultimate reality, 
 and it is only in reflection that we come to dis-
 
 48 ABSOLUTE MIND [LECT. n. 
 
 tinguish them. Yet in reflection we do distinguish 
 them ; we do distinguish feeling, for instance, from 
 thought. The psychologist Mtinsterberg, in a book 
 which I quoted to you last year, shows that the 
 method, or one of the methods of his science, is 
 what he calls Presentationism, the seizing upon 
 feeling and by a sort of abstraction converting it 
 into a self-subsisting phenomenon divorced from the 
 movement of reflection which gives it its meaning. 
 Just as you may hypostatise feeling by abstraction, 
 so you may hypostatise thought by abstraction. 
 Hegel points out that it is the doing this which 
 has caused one of the chief difficulties which people 
 experience in trying to understand the method of 
 philosophy. They will imagine, following the 
 tendency to make hard and abstract distinctions 
 which is so prevalent in everyday life, that thought 
 is something which can be taken apart from its 
 content, that thought and feeling, for instance, can 
 be separated as two different existences, whereas 
 the truth is that it is only in reflection that the 
 distinction emerges. The objective system in which 
 we perceive reality is neither the one nor the other, 
 but the reality in which both attain their meaning, 
 and it is not possible to separate the one from the 
 other except in abstract reflection. 
 
 Now, another conclusion to which one comes in 
 this connection is that mind as the ultimate factor, 
 the ultimate reality within which all these distinc- 
 tions fall because it has itself made them, can only 
 be described in terms of itself. That is one of the
 
 THE ACTIVITY OF MIND 49 
 
 difficulties we have in trying to give an account of 
 mind. We are dealing with what is the ultimately 
 real and cannot be expressed in terms of any- 
 thing lying beyond itself, and therefore it is that we 
 must go back and simply set our own mind to 
 observe itself and record its observations in a fashion 
 which is free from the hypostatised abstractions and 
 metaphors which pass current in everyday life. 
 The mind is obviously that which makes its own 
 distinctions, and it is its essential character to make 
 these distinctions. It must make its own distinc- 
 tions, and make them, not as a mere movement of 
 universals, but as a concrete living reality, whose 
 very nature is to be active, and whose characteristic 
 it is to be always setting, as it were, its own forms, 
 its own activities, and so giving them an air of 
 having an existence fixed in independence of each 
 other; while, at the same time, it comprehends 
 them in a larger whole in which they are seen to 
 be there only as factors or moments. I shall get 
 to that point presently, and I wish merely to make 
 it at the present stage. 
 
 Now let us see how this fact has been recog- 
 nised, not only by the metaphysicians, but again by 
 the poets. I have quoted to you Carlyle, as show- 
 ing how a person of great imaginative insight had 
 come to the conclusion, not as matter of specula- 
 tion but as matter of direct insight, that the 
 ultimate reality of existence was to be sought in 
 mind, and therefore had not that hard-and-fast 
 
 character which is so baffling to the persons who 
 
 D
 
 50 ABSOLUTE MIND OCT. ,,. 
 
 want to penetrate beneath the hard crust of this 
 world of appearances. But you have got the same 
 truth set forth by those who are in the stricter 
 sense the poets. I quoted to you once before 
 Wordsworth's Sonnet on the River Duddon. I will 
 quote it again, because it shows how Wordsworth, 
 who had a fine metaphysical insight, saw that what 
 was real and distinctive in his vision of the stream, 
 was not the particular particles of water which 
 floated by the actual water was always changing 
 but the form in which the stream was compre- 
 hended as a whole : 
 
 " Foi', backward, Duddon, as I cast my eyes, 
 I see what was, and is, and will abide. 
 Still glides the stream, and shall for ever glide ; 
 The Form remains, the Function never dies." 
 
 It is only for the mind that is capable of con- 
 templating the stream as a whole that it can 
 present that form and function. But there is a 
 poet who has had a finer insight even than Words- 
 worth into the deeper nature of phenomena, that 
 nature which discloses them as constantly changing 
 and as presenting their continuity only in the 
 wholes into which thought binds them. Goethe 
 in his poem, "Eins und Alles," says : 
 
 "Nur scheinbar stehts' momente still, 
 Das Ewig'regt sich fort in alien ; 
 Denn Alles muss in nichts zerfallen, 
 Wenn es im Sein beharren will." 
 
 " Only in seeming stands the moment still, 
 In all the Eternal is in motion, 
 For all that is must change to nothing, 
 If to existence it would hold and be."
 
 CONCEPTION OF THE SELF 51 
 
 Well, the poets and the philosophers have 
 come to the same conclusion about this matter. 
 There is no more difficulty in rising to the con- 
 ception of the real nature of things as .falling within 
 the mind, and as possessing its characteristics, than 
 there is in topics which we have to examine every 
 day. For instance, I have already discussed the 
 difference between life and mechanism. You can- 
 not express the nature of a living body in mechanical 
 terms. You must speak of it in words which 
 recognise a whole that controls its parts, not as 
 from without, but as what determines the behaviour 
 of the parts from within, and makes the cells of 
 which the organism is composed more like soldiers 
 in an army with a common purpose, than like the 
 wheels and cranks of a machine which are external 
 to one another and only held together by outside 
 compulsion. In the organism you are lifted into a 
 new set of conceptions which were wholly foreign 
 when you were dealing with mere mechanism, and so, 
 when in mind you are lifted to the conception of 
 that which presents itself to itself, to what has 
 meaning only in terms of distinctions which it 
 makes for itself, you are not really dealing with 
 anything more extraordinary than you were deal- 
 ing with when you made the transition from the 
 machine to the living organism. 
 
 We found in the last set of lectures that the old 
 chase after the meaning of the self proved a hope- 
 less one, so far as the method of psychology was 
 concerned. We found that in the pursuit of the
 
 52 ABSOLUTE MIND [LECT. n. 
 
 self we baled out part after part of the content 
 until we could find nothing that we could say really 
 belonged to the self. Where we emerged nearest 
 to it, where we seemed to get something which ex- 
 pressed the self although it was not the self or even 
 what was popularly called the self, was in the soul. 
 But, when we came to examine the nature of the 
 soul, we found that the soul was nothing but what 
 we had before regarded as the body, though in a 
 different aspect. That did not cause us apprehen- 
 sion of being landed in materialism, because we had 
 got away from the notion of these two things as 
 substances, of the one depending upon the other 
 for its existence in some mechanical fashion. We 
 found in the soul, first an aspect of that which in 
 a different aspect was called the body, and then we 
 discovered that it implied body just as much as 
 body implied soul. These two presentations rather 
 seemed to be two elements or factors which 
 were required in order that in comprehending them 
 we might get to the notion of a self of which they 
 were the expression, and which was their truth. 
 The self, in so far as we can get near it psychologi- 
 cally, that is to say, by looking into our own bosoms, 
 seems to imply a soul and a body, and yet these 
 two, the one of which hampers the other for the 
 body is never adequate to the soul get into a sort 
 of contradiction and prove difficult to harmonise. 
 The body is more than a mere living organism. 
 There is something more that is characteristic of it 
 as a body than there is in a mere external living
 
 BODY AND SOUL 53 
 
 thing. It is a living organism that feels, that behaves 
 intelligently, and when we say that it feels and 
 behaves intelligently we mean that it is the mani- 
 festation of a self. The soul is just that aspect of the 
 body in which it feels and behaves intelligently. The 
 body and the soul are of course in time, the body 
 at least in space also, and that means that they are 
 presentations made by the mind. But the mind does 
 more than merely present them to itself. In so far 
 as it recognises them as sentient and as intelligent it 
 recognises them as its own, as aspects of the indivi- 
 dual of reality within which emerge all the distinc- 
 tions which are made within self-consciousness. 
 
 Now this conception arises really as the result 
 of the deeper kind of evolution of which I spoke 
 before, the logical chain in which the first in time 
 is the last in thought. The order in time is here 
 the inverse of the order in Logic. It may well be, 
 and analysis shows that it is so, that the distinc- 
 tion of soul from body and the distinction of the 
 self from the not-self are distinctions which exist 
 only for the mind, and because they are for the 
 mind are made by the mind. As self-conscious- 
 ness is discovered to be the larger whole in which 
 these are moments, we get a view of things in 
 which we see that the relation of our own soul and 
 body is a relation which perplexes and puzzles us 
 merely because we have grasped it in abstractions 
 and distinctions which we have made hard, because 
 for practical purposes it was necessary that we 
 should make them hard.
 
 54 ABSOLUTE MIND [LKT. n. 
 
 Now this point is worth spending a moment 
 or two in elaborating. The soul seems to be that 
 aspect of our experience as persons in which we 
 do not yet fully contemplate the content of the 
 mind from the standpoint of self-consciousness, 
 and in which we have abstracted from the freedom 
 and power of detachment which are the character- 
 istics of self-consciousness. It seems to be dis- 
 tinctive of full self-consciousness that it should be 
 recognised as able to extrude and exclude any parti- 
 cular part of its content. That is why it was that we 
 found that we could never get psychologically at the 
 notion of the self. In the soul we have the body 
 on its ideal side, separable from the body only in 
 abstract reflection. The body as such is its vehicle, 
 and it may be said to be in a sense a function of 
 the body. They are factors, each of them, or 
 moments, which go to the making of the conscious 
 self, since they are only for that self. The more they 
 are made the expression of that self-consciousness 
 the more they disclose themselves as inadequate, 
 as lacking in that quality of being above and beyond 
 change which belongs only to the self as subject, as 
 no more than presentations destined to be superseded 
 in a larger comprehension by the consciousness for 
 which space and time, and body and soul as in 
 space and time, are. Death is inherent in them 
 just because their nature is to be transient, to 
 belong to a world of phenomena where birth and 
 growth and decay and dying, are not only the 
 natural but the necessary features of an existence
 
 THEIE RELATION TO THE SELF 55 
 
 that more and more exemplifies the contradiction 
 that discloses itself, wherever mere life as object 
 in a space and time world is taken to be the ulti- 
 mate aspect of reality. The real existence out of 
 time begins not beyond the grave but on this side 
 of it The self, conscious of itself as the subject for 
 which the world exists, solves the contradiction, 
 the want of harmony between the soul and its 
 imperfect vehicle, body, in that it is aware that 
 both exist merely as relational and as forms within 
 its own object world. 
 
 Now this process of soul and body, existing in 
 change and always working out, as it were, the con- 
 tradiction between them, is exemplified in the course 
 of life. A child starts with a sense of something that 
 is foreign to it, that resists it. As reflection dawns 
 in its soul, it begins more and more to exercise self- 
 control and to act rationally. More and more it 
 makes its body conform to and express the purposes 
 of its mind. As it grows up it becomes aware of 
 itself as a rational being in rational society and 
 with rational surroundings. But although the 
 course of life is just, as it were, the equation of the 
 child's body to its soul, and of both to the surround- 
 ings, you find that, as the result of the habit into 
 which the struggle and the victory over obstacles 
 crystallise, a certain deadening inevitably ensues. 
 And the course of life is just that the activity of 
 the child more and more assumes the form of habit, 
 until in middle age and still more in old age, soul 
 and body tend to become inert. The sense of
 
 56 ABSOLUTE MIND OCT. n. 
 
 foreignness which was the spring of exertion is 
 gone, with the consequence that there is less vitality, 
 less activity, than there was in the period of the 
 early struggle. Thus we pass through middle age 
 and old age to our natural end as objects in a world 
 of change. 
 
 In a fine passage in his Philosophy of Mind 
 Hegel shows how the process is exemplified in the 
 life of man, and how that life works out under the 
 governance of an end. " He begins with childhood, 
 the mind wrapped up in itself. His next step is the 
 fully developed antithesis, the strain and struggle 
 of a universality which is still subjective (as seen 
 in ideals, fancies, hopes, ambitions) against his 
 immediate individuality. And that individuality 
 marks both the world which, as it exists, fails to 
 meet his ideal requirements, and the position of 
 the individual himself, who is still short of inde- 
 pendence and not fully equipped for the part he 
 has to play (that is to say, Youth}. Thirdly, we see 
 Man in his true relation to his environment, recog- 
 nising the objective necessity and reasonableness of 
 the world as he finds it a world no longer incom- 
 plete, but able in the work which it collectively 
 achieves to afford the individual a place and a 
 security for his performance. By his share in this 
 collective work he is first, is somebody, gaining an 
 effective existence and an objective value (that is 
 to say, Manhood). Last of all comes the finishing 
 touch to his unity with objectivity ; a unity which, 
 while on its realist side it passes into the inertia
 
 CHARACTER OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 57 
 
 of deadening habit, on its idealist side gains free- 
 dom from the limited interests and entanglements 
 of the outward present (that is to say, Old Age)" 
 
 You will find in connection with this matter a 
 great deal of literature which belongs to the pro- 
 vince of anthropology, and I will not follow it out 
 further at this stage, but the point is illustrative 
 of the main topic of this particular lecture. 
 
 Well, as the outcome of that way of looking at 
 things, one is driven to the conclusion that self- 
 consciousness is the larger whole in which body and 
 soul are what I have called moments. In other 
 words, it is in the union of these two aspects in the 
 reality which they attain in the mind which is more 
 than mere soul, because mind is that for which soul 
 and body are, that you get to reality. And the ques- 
 tion which arises is whether, if it is of the nature of 
 self-consciousness that it should be something more 
 than mere soul, just as it is something more than 
 mere body, if it is the truth of the two, these 
 moments are or are not so preserved in it that 
 self-consciousness itself bears the impress of the 
 particular human personality which the body and 
 soul expressed ? Now, in the relationship of two 
 notions such as being and not-being you find that 
 the one implies the other ; and further, that, as we 
 shall see presently, the whole out of which they are 
 
 * Hegel's Philosophy of Mind; Wallace's Translation, p. 17. 
 See also Erdmann, Leib und Seele ; and Bosanquet, Psychology 
 of the Moral Self; the Natur-Pkilosophie of Hegel contains in 
 its final section a discussion of this point.
 
 58 ABSOLUTE MIND [LECT. n. 
 
 broken up, and in which they attain reality, is 
 becoming. Becoming, which assumes the form of 
 qualified being or there-being, is a notion which has 
 not wholly destroyed and got rid of these two earlier 
 moments, but preserves them as factors or moments 
 in itself and shows the traces of them. Well, upon 
 that there turned at one time a tremendous contro- 
 versy. Do not the two moments of our individu- 
 ality, what make us just this particular person in 
 the world, do not the particular body and soul, that 
 seem to be essential moments in the self just as 
 being and not-being are preserved in becoming, 
 show themselves as implied and as kept alive in 
 that larger whole of the conscious self which is 
 their truth ? Now this controversy is a very im- 
 portant one. A modern writer, Professor Royce, 
 puts it that no meaning which has once been in the 
 mind of God can ever be lost. He says that it is 
 only when you are dealing with the sphere of space 
 and time that you can talk of loss, of perishing, of 
 passing away, and that when you are talking of 
 what is out of time, of mind as the eternal, even 
 the moments which are implied in its self-expres- 
 sion, and which give particularity to its meaning, are 
 moments which must be said to be, not preserved 
 by, for that is no better than to speak of them as 
 having a beginning in time, but essential elements in 
 the mind which is presupposed as the very condition 
 of the beginning and is independent of the end. 
 
 As Royce puts it, " Can any meaning which has 
 once been in the eternal mind be otherwise than
 
 CONTROVERSY ABOUT ITS CHARACTER 59 
 
 eternal ? " Can any mode of self-consciousness 
 which enters into the truth and reality of the self 
 be otherwise than of the nature of the eternal ? 
 Now, all I wish to say at the moment on this is 
 that it recalls a long-forgotten battlefield. After the 
 death of Hegel there was a tremendous controversy 
 between the Hegelians of the Right, the theological 
 Hegelians, and the Hegelians of the Left, over this 
 very point. Those of you who are curious about it 
 and it has, as we shall see better later on, a 
 bearing upon the question of immortality will 
 find an account of it in the last part of Strauss's 
 Dogmatik* As far as I can judge, Hegel himself 
 regarded the controversy as really irrelevant and 
 founded on failure to grasp the subject in its full 
 bearing. He seems to have looked upon the 
 problem as based upon dilemmas arising out of a 
 too narrow standpoint. For him the whole contro- 
 versy apparently had its origin in mistaken meta- 
 phors drawn from the sphere where there are 
 beginnings and ends, the sphere of time. 
 
 Well, we come back to consider further what 
 we mean by the self. Another characteristic of the 
 self to which I must now pass is this, that it is 
 undoubtedly presented for us men and women as 
 finite. By finite I mean limited by or confronted 
 with something else. When in thinking we fix an 
 object in thought and try to preserve a clear view 
 of the distinction which has been made, we effect 
 
 * Published under the title, Die Christliche Glanbens-lehre, in 
 1841 ; see vol. ii., pp. 727-739,
 
 60 ABSOLUTE MIND [LKT. H. 
 
 an abstraction, that is to say, we regard our object 
 as if it were something self-subsisting and dis- 
 tinguished from what is not itself. The finite is 
 that which is confronted by another which is 
 conceived as having existence only relatively to yet 
 another, and it is this mode of thinking, really 
 abstract in character, which gives us the notion of 
 the finite self, the notion namely, that we can talk 
 of self as we do for practical purposes, and regard 
 it as something which has a fixed and immovable 
 nature, and which is different and distinct from the 
 not-self. 
 
 But you will notice that it is always my not-self 
 that I distinguish myself from. It is a not-self 
 which is determined in its conception by the marks 
 by which I characterise it for the social purposes of 
 everyday life. We, of course, must make these 
 distinctions, but they are really abstract and they 
 are the outcome of reflection which might theoreti- 
 cally have been of a nature quite different. And it 
 is the self looked upon in this finite fashion, that is 
 to say, as confronted with another, that gives rise 
 to the notion of the self as a substance, and so to 
 the Berkeleian notion of a thinking thing. Now 
 this notion of the mind as a substance brings us 
 into solipsism. There is no escape from it if the 
 mind is really a thing in space and time. But, to 
 make these abstract distinctions, as we undoubtedly 
 must do, is only one side of the activity of thought. 
 What it divides it also puts together. If it recog- 
 nises a limit and fixes a limit, it also transcends
 
 CHARACTER OF THOUGHT 61 
 
 that limit. If you watch the movement of thought 
 it is always fixing something in reference to some- 
 thing else, and yet, in recognising it as distinguished 
 from something else, it implies that there is a 
 higher standpoint from which the two may be 
 contemplated. It posits, as it were, in distinction, 
 and then the distinction which it has made it recog- 
 nises as having its truth in a deeper meaning, and 
 the distinction comes in that way to be put past or 
 sublated. 
 
 Now thought can combine these two functions, 
 because its nature, the very essence of its nature, 
 is to be active. The mind, which is neither abstract 
 thought nor bare feeling, but which is just concrete 
 living mind, is never still. It is always producing 
 by the contrasts it establishes some aspect of what 
 is actual within itself, and it has its very existence 
 in making these distinctions, overcoming them, and 
 presenting the whole in a further series of aspects. 
 The illustration which I gave you before of the 
 inseparability, save in abstraction, of being and not- 
 being, is a good one on this point. A great many 
 people, like the late Mr G. H. Lewes, fell foul of 
 Hegel for saying that being and not-being were the 
 same thing, and, of course, they are, for practical 
 purposes, different things. But when you are in- 
 vestigating the nature of the movement of thought 
 in the distinctions which it makes, it is pretty 
 evident that the conception of the thing only has 
 meaning in contradistinction to the alternative that 
 the thing is not. When you take the process of
 
 62 ABSOLUTE MIND [LECT. n. 
 
 growth, of change, of what is called becoming, it is 
 plain that you have just these two notions in com- 
 bination. In every definite kind or form of being 
 you have got these two conceptions of being and 
 not-being implied. All distinctive quality involves 
 them. The reality of the mind is its activity, and 
 the activity is an activity which posits or sets these 
 distinctions and then overcomes them. 
 
 Now that brings me to what I must say a word 
 about, the distinction between what have been called 
 reason and understanding. Reason is the way of 
 looking at things which comprehends, while under- 
 standing merely apprehends. They are not two 
 different faculties. It is only darkening counsel to 
 speak of them as though they were. They are two 
 different modes of thinking about things, deter- 
 mined in their differences by the purposes which 
 we have in view. If I want to make a hard-and- 
 fast distinction it is, of course, natural that I should 
 express myself in a way that makes the distinction 
 very definite, hypostatises it, if I may use the 
 expression. But if, upon the other hand, what I 
 want to do is really to see how this distinction looks 
 from the point of view of the mind which made it, 
 and which, just because it made it, is capable of 
 expressing it, then I look from the standpoint of 
 the comprehension which seeks to resolve the 
 differences. Reason is, therefore, a way of looking 
 at things which is larger than the mere under- 
 standing which made and set fast the differentiation. 
 Reason and understanding are not thoughts of two
 
 REASON AND UNDERSTANDING 63 
 
 different natures, two faculties. They are thought 
 pursuing different ends. We make our own experi- 
 ence present different appearances according as our 
 ends differ. That is a very familiar observation. 
 Long ago Montaigne put it in one of his Essays, 
 that on Democritus and Heraclitus, in very simple 
 language. " Wherefore," he says, " let us no longer 
 excuse ourselves by laying the blame on the quality 
 of external things. It belongs to us to give our- 
 selves an account of them. Our good and our evil 
 had no dependency except from ourselves. To 
 ourselves let us make our offerings and our vows, 
 and not to fortune. She hath no power over 
 our character. On the contrary, character draws 
 fortune in its train, and moulds her to its own 
 form." In other words, what to the man whose 
 spirit is cast in a narrow mould seems final and 
 irresoluble in ill-fortune, may seem to the man of 
 larger comprehension a very different thing. It 
 depends on our end and purpose, it depends on 
 whether we are at the standpoint of comprehension 
 or merely of apprehension in difference, how the 
 things present themselves. 
 
 Well, the essence of understanding is to separate. 
 If I look at marbles in a row my purpose is to 
 count them, to enumerate them, and therefore I am 
 seeking to apprehend them, each in its difference 
 from the other. If I am trying to comprehend I 
 do not dwell upon the distinctions, but I search for 
 the larger whole, the unity in which the differences 
 are comprehended. Now for apprehension, for
 
 64 ABSOLUTE MIND [LECT. n. 
 
 understanding, the leading mode of operation is 
 distinction in space and in time. Between space and 
 time there is a considerable difference. In space 
 things are regarded as just as completely independent 
 of one another as they can possibly be. The very 
 essence of space is mutual exclusion of parts. You 
 have got the very hardest of distinctions there. But 
 in time the now only has meaning as distinguished 
 from a past and from a future. These never co- 
 exist. The essence of them is that the one should 
 be actual and real in contrast with the other two, 
 the past and the future, which are not actual. 
 Therefore in time you have got a stage on towards 
 comprehension, towards the comprehension of the 
 past, the present, and the future as in a unity in 
 which they are not independent but related, and 
 which is more than any one of them. Just so in 
 a piece of music you have the notes, no doubt 
 capable of being taken in their separation, but also 
 getting their meaning, and each one getting its 
 meaning, from the musical whole which is the form 
 in which full comprehension appears. 
 
 Now the truth about space and time is that 
 they are modes in which the mind presents phe- 
 nomena, space the hardest and most abstract form 
 of distinction, time the form in which that dis- 
 tinction is less hard and abstract, but is still one 
 in which separations are made. But it is plain, 
 if the view of thought which I have been present- 
 ing to you is right, that thought not only must have, 
 but actually has, other and higher forms, from the
 
 SPACE AND TIME 65 
 
 standpoint of which presentation in space and time 
 is deficient and inadequate to the truth. Such a 
 view of space as one among a multitude of other 
 relations in reality contrasts a good deal with that 
 with which those of you who have read Kant are 
 familiar. Kant looked upon space and time as 
 two forms which had an existence independent of 
 the matter of sensation, the raw material of sensa- 
 tion, which was fitted into them by reflection. The 
 raw material, and the space and time, and the 
 thought which operated in the arranging raw 
 material in space and time, he at least spoke 
 of as if they were separable elements. But if the 
 true view be, not that the mind thinks things as 
 though arranging them ab extra in the forms of 
 space and time, but that the forms of space and 
 time are merely stages or aspects in the mode of 
 self-comprehension by the mind within which the 
 whole of reality falls, then it is plain that it is not 
 quite accurate to talk of space and time as specially 
 forms. They are not separable from the other modes 
 in which the mind arranges its contents. Their 
 position is just like that of other modes of presenta- 
 tion in the mind. In the mind, understood as 
 mind, taken from the standpoint of comprehension, 
 we cannot fail to be struck with this, that it is pre- 
 sent in everything it does, and yet that everything 
 it does, the whole of its activity, only has meaning as 
 part of the entirety of the mind. Whole and parts 
 are not separate, as they are even in the organism, 
 where the realisation of the whole in the parts is 
 

 
 66 ABSOLUTE MIND [LCT. u. 
 
 never quite complete ; but in the mind its activity 
 in any particular mode is an activity which implies 
 the entire mind. Look, for instance, at the thinking 
 of things as cause and effect. You cannot separate 
 these two. If you apply the match to the gun- 
 powder it seems as if there were two separate 
 things, one cause and the other effect, but it is not 
 so when you come to scrutinise closely. What you 
 have done in applying the match is to release the 
 potential energy which is stored up in the gun- 
 powder, and if it is said that the match is the true 
 cause of the explosion, the answer is that the 
 dryness of the powder and a host of other indis- 
 pensable conditions might, with equal truth and 
 untruth, be selected for the distinction of being 
 pronounced the cause. 
 
 Cause and effect, as I showed you in detail in 
 the earlier lectures, are conceptions which are 
 separable only in abstraction. The cause in point 
 of fact passes into the effect, and the effect is just 
 the cause in another form ; that is to say, the mind 
 makes a distinction which turns out to be a 
 vanishing one as the purpose changes. The con- 
 ceptions in which the mind works are always in 
 a sense vanishing. They are never really separate 
 from one another in a hard-and-fast fashion. 
 The nature of the mind is to be active, to posit 
 its distinctions and then to resolve them, and 
 the result is that every one of its conceptions 
 involves every other. If I say that a thing 
 is, I mean that it is in contrast to the possi-
 
 THE DIALECTICAL NATURE OF MIND 67 
 
 bility that it is not. If I say that a thing is 
 growing or becoming, I imply that not-being has 
 become superseded in a higher stage of its being. 
 The essence of the mind is a form of activity in 
 which each conception implies the other, and in 
 which the conceptions or categories under which 
 the mind arranges and gives meaning to its experi- 
 ences, the universals in which the particulars are 
 grasped in the individual, are a logical chain in 
 which the first presupposes the last and the last 
 is its presupposition and its truth. Therefore a 
 great task of theoretical philosophy, when dealing 
 with the meaning of these conceptions of the mind, 
 must be to set them out in a system. 
 
 Now the relation to each other of these concep- 
 tions, when they are set out in such a system, is, 
 as I have pointed out to you, not the relation of 
 dead inert separation, but the relation of concep- 
 tions each of which implies the other, and, as we 
 are dealing with thought and the distinctions made 
 by thought, each of which in that sense passes into 
 the other. We find that thought never stands still. 
 It is always active, even its fixing of distinctions is 
 activity. Its characteristic has, therefore, been said 
 to be dialectical. Dialectic is just the movement 
 which thought exhibits in the passing from one 
 position to another. Plato's Parmenides is the 
 Dialogue in which he sets out the nature of thought, 
 and pronounces it to be dialectical in the sense I 
 have indicated, but just because he is dealing there 
 with perhaps the most difficult part of philosophy,
 
 68 ABSOLUTE MIND [LECT. n. 
 
 the Parmenides is the Dialogue which it is 
 hardest to summarise or give a short account of. 
 Hegel does the same work much more closely in 
 his Logic. He is not trying in his Logic to set 
 out a picture of the world ; he is not trying to show 
 the world as rising out of thought, as people have 
 wrongly supposed. He is isolating the abstract side 
 of the actual. He is taking the modes in which 
 thought operates in comprehending, and he is 
 showing their relation the one to the other. He 
 is really starting from the individual of reality and 
 by abstraction exhibiting it upon its universal side. 
 He does not mean that in his Logic you have got 
 a series of logical forms, a sort of " ballet of blood- 
 less categories" as Mr Bradley has named them, 
 which exist by themselves and which give us, as 
 self - subsistent, what, to use a phrase of his, is 
 God as He was before the creation of the world. 
 What he means is to take one aspect of reality, of 
 the concrete individual entirety of reality, to separate 
 it out by abstraction, and to exhibit mind in the 
 aspect in which, just because it is the aspect of pure 
 thought that he is here dealing with, the activity of 
 the dialectic is most apparent. Hegel's categories 
 are not, like Plato's, to be conceived as in some sense 
 apart from our experiences. They are just what 
 gives meaning to our experience, and it is only in 
 reflection that they can be separated out from the 
 concrete reality of experience. The linking of 
 one to the other by the inherent dialectic of which 
 they are the manifestation, Hegel calls the Notion,
 
 HEGEL 69 
 
 and the entire system the Idea. This is the purest 
 type of an abstract treatment of the movement of 
 thought, and it forms the subject of the Hegelian 
 Logic. 
 
 Hegel has been blamed by many people because 
 they say he has not shown how he got from Logic 
 to Nature. But the categories of his Logic do not 
 form one thing, with Nature as another thing in- 
 dependent of it. Hegel was not trying to show a 
 process of creation. He was exhibiting two partial 
 and therefore abstract views of a deeper and fuller 
 reality ; he was setting out on its abstract side the 
 ultimate reality which for him was mind in its con- 
 crete actuality. The element that pertains to Nature, 
 the element that corresponds to the particular in 
 its relation to the universal, is got at in another 
 abstract way of looking at the real. To this he 
 accords a separate treatment in his systematic 
 account of the place of nature in mind, in the same 
 way as he had separated out the antithetical 
 abstract side in the Logic. Neither is actual inde- 
 pendently of the other, and, therefore, to talk of a 
 transition in time from one to the other, is simply 
 to show that you have not understood the elemen- 
 tary meaning of the Hegelian system. 
 
 The nature of thought is, as I have several 
 times said, to make distinctions and to reconcile 
 them in a higher meaning. If we dwell on the 
 distinctions abstractly, we get the finite. If we 
 dwell upon the self in its distinction from other 
 selves in this world, as we must do for our own
 
 70 ABSOLUTE MIND [L-cr. n. 
 
 social purposes, we get the notion of the finite self. 
 But the true notion of infinity is not an infinity 
 which is numerically different from the finite self, 
 but it is the self conceived as higher than the dis- 
 tinctions which go to the making of its finiteness, 
 distinctions which therefore really fall within it. 
 That view of infinity, the view of the self as that 
 within which all distinctions emerge that view 
 leads us to the conception of mind as the ulti- 
 mately real, and of the finite self as one only of the 
 stages at which mind comprehends its own content. 
 It leads us to a view of mind in which we are 
 beyond the category of substance, and are there- 
 fore delivered from the perils of solipsism. It 
 brings us to living, concrete, self-conscious mind. 
 The more exact relation of this to finite mind is 
 what I shall have to deal with in the next lecture.
 
 LECTURE III 
 
 To those of you who listened to my last lecture it 
 will be apparent that I am not satisfied with a view 
 of reality which would reduce it to intelligible 
 relations. For it must seek its ultimate character 
 in a form fuller than the finite form of relational or 
 discursive reflection. It is only in the abstraction 
 of such reflection that these intelligible relations, as 
 they have been called, get isolated from the moment 
 of the particular, the particular in combination with 
 which they form the concrete living singular, which 
 appears as the content of mind or as the self- 
 comprehension of mind, according to the fashion 
 in which we are approaching it. The activity 
 of mind which is disclosed in the actual is 
 one and indivisible. If we would arrive at the 
 nature and character of mind we must therefore 
 start with this activity as being not only the final 
 truth about the mind, but as being that which 
 in reality is the first, the prius. The contrary 
 view is a view which is associated in the history 
 of philosophy with the great name of Kant, 
 because more and more people are coming to see 
 
 that what Kant really did was to set the actual 
 n
 
 72 ABSOLUTE MIND [L*CT. m. 
 
 upon the rack, so to speak, and tear it to pieces. 
 If the view of things which I have been putting 
 before you is the true one, all mind can do is, 
 starting with what is in reality itself, to make 
 explicit what is implicit. Now according to Kant 
 knowledge was a process which could be dissected 
 and broken up. He took the unity of ultimate 
 reality and he sought to resolve it into constituent 
 elements. He seems to have put the wrong ques- 
 tion. It should not have been the question, " What 
 is the process of perception in which reality is put 
 together," but rather "What is the meaning of 
 reality ? " 
 
 Well, the result has been a very considerable 
 reaction from the standpoint of ordinary Idealism 
 within our time, and I think that it is not too much 
 to say that this reaction has been due to the repel- 
 lent influence of Kant on some who are not Kantians. 
 In this country one of the most strenuous of those 
 who have advocated what is a view inconsistent 
 with that of Kant is Mr F. H. Bradley, a very 
 great thinker. In Mr Bradley's view mind is 
 the final form of reality, but he is unable to come 
 to the conclusion that its nature can be compre- 
 hended by thought thought being for him, as he 
 holds, relational only, that is, its function being to 
 establish relations between terms that are not in 
 themselves reducible to mere thought. He holds 
 that it is impossible that thought should tell us the 
 final truth about reality. He apparently believes 
 that it is conceivable that there should be other
 
 DISCURSIVE THOUGHT 73 
 
 elements in the activity of mind besides thought 
 for example, feeling. Now if I am right in what I 
 have been saying to you, feeling is nothing apart 
 from thinking, just as thinking is nothing apart 
 from feeling. In each you certainly have the 
 dialectical character of the activity of mind bodying 
 itself forth. The dialectical nisus is apparent 
 whichever aspect you take, and that is owing to 
 the fact that this dialectical nisus or activity is of 
 the very essence, the very inmost nature of mind 
 itself. It is possible that the scepticism of Mr 
 Bradley is the outcome of the splendidly thorough 
 piece of work he has done in subjecting the notion 
 of thought, as it is treated in ordinary logic, to a 
 complete revisal and overhaul. But it seems as if 
 the scepticism for scepticism it is in which he 
 apparently ends is hardly more consistent with 
 itself than was the scepticism of the Greeks and of 
 Hume. For after all what question, even about 
 the limits of the capacity of thought, can be raised 
 excepting upon the basis of thought itself? It 
 would seem as though Mr Bradley's view of thought 
 was too narrow, as though his conception of it was 
 that limited conception which Hegel, in a passage 
 which I referred to yesterday, points out. Hegel 
 says that much of our difficulty arises from taking 
 thought to mean merely the "reflective thinking 
 which has to deal with thoughts as thoughts, and 
 brings them into consciousness." * A few sentences 
 further on in the same book, Hegel sums up the 
 
 * Hegel's Logic ; Wallace's Translation, p. 5.
 
 74 ABSOLUTE MIND [!. ' 
 
 substance of the matter by declaring that the contents 
 of our consciousness "remain one and the same, 
 whether they are felt, seen, represented or willed, 
 and whether they are merely felt, or felt with an 
 admixture of thoughts, or merely and simply 
 thought." Feeling, perception, thought itself, are 
 for him merely the forms into which the mind 
 throws itself in making itself its own content or 
 object. 
 
 Mr Bradley's Absolute is, therefore, that of 
 which he can give no direct account. The ultimate 
 reality it must be. But it is got at in a fashion 
 which seems to imply a gap in the capacity of 
 reason, and consequently it comes to us rather 
 suddenly. To use two metaphors which Hegel 
 applied to the Absolute of Schelling, Mr Bradley's 
 Absolute seems as though it were " shot out of a 
 pistol," or, in the language of the other metaphor, 
 " like the night in which all cows look black." We 
 know very little about it save that all disappears 
 in it. But we owe a great debt to Mr Bradley. 
 He has done the work of the great metaphysicians 
 over again in a fashion which is unparalleled in 
 recent times for its thoroughness and acuteness, 
 and he stands at the very head of the philosophical 
 world. He has been fortunate in finding a colleague 
 in the leadership of that peculiar movement away 
 from Kant with which his name is associated, a 
 colleague who is, perhaps, less of a sceptic than 
 himself, and whose work has been, what his own 
 really is, not only critical but constructive.
 
 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS 76 
 
 When I see your new Professor of Moral Phi- 
 losophy * sitting before me in the audience which 
 I now am addressing, I confess I feel a little like 
 an evangelical preacher who stands in front of a 
 congregation containing an archbishop. I can 
 only say that a study of his books has made me 
 feel nearer to what I think is his standpoint than 
 to that of any other living thinker, and I commend 
 those of you who have listened to these elementary 
 lectures on Idealism to a study of his great books 
 on Logic, on ^Esthetics, and on the State. 
 
 Well, there is another modern thinker who is the 
 very antithesis of Bradley, I mean Professor Royce 
 of Harvard. Now, Royce does not commit himself 
 upon the point of his exact historical position. He 
 may be, for aught that appears and I rather think 
 he is a disciple of the school which in its broad sig- 
 nificance I have endeavoured to put before you as 
 founded by Aristotle and carried to its full develop- 
 ment by Hegel. In Royce the dominant note is 
 ethical. The will and its purposes bulk largely. 
 The real with Royce is that in which purpose rests 
 satisfied, with a sense of no further incompleteness 
 left. The criterion of reality in his view may 
 therefore, in a sense, be said to be ethical. But 
 with him, of course, the will and the intelligence, 
 and this is necessitated by his standpoint, are not 
 separated as they are separated, for example, by 
 Schopenhauer. With Royce the Absolute is con- 
 ceived as an individual living Self, expressing itself 
 
 * Professor Bosanquet.
 
 76 ABSOLUTE MIND [LECT. m. 
 
 in particular forms, particular meanings, living 
 forms of its intelligence, which are the foundations 
 of finite personalities that have the basis of their 
 Eeality in the Absolute Mind. There are some 
 things in Professor Royce's work which seem to 
 me to be of great value. There is his investigation 
 of the nature of time in relation to the will, and, 
 as the outcome of this, his investigation of the 
 nature of the general forms of time-series. 
 
 Now, the notion of a series is one which has 
 always given rise to a considerable amount of dis- 
 cussion. You have the series in music, in the 
 sonata, for example, in which you have a succession 
 of musical sounds which is a great deal more than 
 a succession of isolated units unconnected with one 
 another. The meaning of each arises from its 
 relation to the whole of the conception, and the 
 musical whole is present in every part of the sonata. 
 
 Take, again, a more purely mathematical series. 
 Suppose I start with unity and add to it a half, and 
 then a fourth, and then an eighth, and then a six- 
 teenth, and so on. I am making an addition, I am 
 extending in a series which has no end ; that is 
 to say, I can go on for ever doing this without 
 coming to a termination at any particular point. 
 But at the same time, taking a fuller view of the 
 relation of the members of the series, I find that 
 they embody a law which points to a limit. Further 
 than that limit they cannot go, and the limit is, of 
 course, in this case the number two. And that is 
 because each member of the series is something else
 
 THE TRUE NATURE OF SERIES 77 
 
 than a mere isolated unit. It is something that 
 embodies in itself the law of the series. By the 
 study of this conception of series Royce has been 
 brought to certain views, which must have atten- 
 tion, of the nature of infinity. He appears to have 
 been greatly influenced in his work by a German 
 mathematician, Dedekind, who in 1887 published 
 an Essay which came into my hands several years 
 ago, before I had seen Royce's book, and I noticed 
 its metaphysical character at the time. Dedekind 
 investigated the nature of series as Royce has 
 investigated it, and referred it back to the peculiar 
 character of the mind which is to be wholly present 
 in its expressions or manifestations. In the mind 
 there is no externality of the whole to the parts or 
 of the parts to the whole. The activity of the 
 mind is constantly comprehending its whole self 
 in its expressions. 
 
 Dedekind got hold of that in his little book, 
 " Was sind and was sollen die Zahlen" and treated 
 it in a way that almost anybody who has reflected 
 on these things at all can understand, because there 
 is really much more of what is metaphysical in it 
 than there is of mathematical technicality. Now 
 Dedekind seems to have suggested to Royce what 
 the latter insists upon as the true nature of series, 
 and what he has since developed. It is very 
 interesting to contrast the perfervidum ingenium 
 with which Royce goes into the matter, with the 
 sceptical way in which one could picture to oneself 
 Bradley approaching it. Of course Royce has not
 
 78 ABSOLUTE MIND [LKT. m. 
 
 escaped a good deal of criticism on his view, but 
 still it is a very remarkable investigation which he 
 puts forward in the Supplementary Essay appended 
 to the first volume of his Gifford Lectures, The 
 World and the Individual. He insists that the 
 mathematical inquiry of which I have spoken 
 shows that there are series of such a kind that the 
 whole series, though infinite, though endless in 
 the sense that it can be extended without limit, can 
 yet be viewed as given in its entirety in its defini- 
 tion, and consequently as implicit in each member of 
 the series. 
 
 You will see what that means from the illustra- 
 tions I have given you. Take the second one first, 
 the mathematical series. In the relationship of 
 each member of this series to the others you have 
 got the law of the whole that enables you to sum 
 it up, and to show that the number two is the 
 limit to which it approximates. In the case of the 
 sonata you have, in like manner, the musical whole 
 manifesting itself in the relation of the parts, and 
 in that way, Royce argues, you have got the series 
 in a form in which it can be viewed as given in its 
 entirety in its definition, and implicitly given in its 
 entirety in every member of the series. Such a 
 series he calls self-representative. Next he applies, 
 just as Dedekind did before him, this conception to 
 the self. He finds that the number series is a 
 purely abstract image of the relational system that 
 must characterise an ideally completed self; that is 
 to say, a self that does not merely pass from ex-
 
 THE TRUE NATURE OF SERIES 79 
 
 pression to expression, but comprehends the rela- 
 tion to each other of these expressions. The system 
 of thought, so far from consisting in the bare con- 
 junctions which are characteristic of appearance, 
 is self-representative in that it is present as a 
 whole in every thought in the series. 
 
 Let us take an illustration. " To-day is 
 Thursday." That is one of my thoughts. Yes, 
 and this last reflection, the reflection that to-day is 
 Thursday, is also one of my thoughts. So is 
 this further reflection that I made the reflection 
 that to-day is Thursday, and so on. The infinity 
 of this system consists, not in the fact that 
 you can go on indefinitely extending it, but in 
 the characteristic that every one of its members 
 implies a corresponding reflective thought which 
 in its turn is to belong to the system. The true or 
 positive infinity of the system lies in its capability 
 of being adequately represented in the one to one 
 correspondence with its constituent parts. Thus, 
 Royce holds, in opposition to Bradley, that thought 
 can comprehend the infinite, because thought 
 is of the character of a self-representative series, 
 capable of comprehending the totality of the series in 
 each member. He says that thought is not merely 
 relational, but that at each stage it comprehends 
 the series as a whole, and that there you have got 
 an illustration of the capacity of thought to com- 
 prehend the infinite. That is his point of depar- 
 ture from Bradley. 
 
 From this standpoint the series is for Royce
 
 80 ABSOLUTE MIND OCT. m. 
 
 a totum simul. The entire determined series of 
 thoughts, in the instance above given, would be a 
 self, completely reflective regarding the fact that all 
 of these thoughts were its thoughts, and containing 
 their entire genetic principle. The reason of the 
 fission, which is typical of the act of judgment, the 
 establishing of a relation between the subject and 
 the predicate, between the thought and the mind 
 which is productive of the thought, is therefore not, 
 as Mr Bradley thinks, due to the impotence 
 of thought, but to the self-representative character 
 of its relational system. The Absolute must be 
 such a system, and yet it must have the form of a 
 self fully present in each act of thought. 
 
 Now I cannot linger over the further develop- 
 ment of this, but I should like to go on to its 
 application. What is real, according to Royce, is 
 individual, unique, singular, the resting-ground of 
 satisfied meaning or intellectual purpose. Of 
 course, he concludes from that that there can only 
 be a single absolute reality. Finite forms, where 
 they assume the forms of personalities or of objects, 
 arise only by distinction within this unique entirety, 
 distinctions which arise from the finite purposes 
 which the absolute mind contains within its activity. 
 He puts the matter in this form : Time is for him 
 the form of the will. But, consistently with his 
 view of the nature of intelligence as a self-repre- 
 sentative system, time presents two aspects. We 
 are aware that each element of the succession 
 excludes the others from its own place in time.
 
 TIME 81 
 
 We are also aware that the series of successive 
 states of experience is presented as an entirety, as 
 a whole. The other, the complement that the 
 finite being seeks, is not merely something beyond 
 the present, is not merely a future experience from 
 which it is distinct. It is inclusive of the very pro- 
 cess of the striving itself. For the goal of every 
 finite life, he says, is simply the totality of which 
 this life is a fragment. When I seek my own goal 
 I am looking for the whole of myself. In so far as 
 my aim is the absolute completion of my selfhood, 
 my goal is identical with the whole life of God. In 
 all our strivings the attainment of the goal means 
 more than any future moment taken by itself could 
 ever furnish. For the self in its entirety is the 
 whole of a self-representative system, and not the 
 mere last moment or stage, if such there could be, 
 of the process. And this can only be so because 
 in God we possess our individuality. It is as 
 a meaning in the Absolute Mind that we have 
 existence. Our very dependence is the condition 
 of our freedom and of our unique significance. The 
 lesson of philosophy is the unity of the finite and 
 the infinite, of temporal dependence and of eternal 
 significance, of the world and all its individuals, of 
 the one and the many, of God and of man. Not in 
 spite of our finite bondage, but because of what it 
 means and implies, we are full of the presence 
 and of the freedom of God. Personality, Royce 
 goes on to declare, is an essentially ethical category. 
 A person is a conscious being whose life, temporally 
 
 F
 
 82 ABSOLUTE MIND OCT. m. 
 
 viewed, seeks its completion through deeds ; while 
 this same life, eternally viewed, consciously attains 
 its perfection by means of the present knowledge 
 of the whole of its temporal strivings. 
 
 You will observe that E-oyce's view of such a 
 conception does not abolish time any more than 
 the conception of the self abolishes the distinction 
 between body and mere substance, or any more than 
 in becoming you have the abolition of being and of 
 not-being. These conceptions are taken up as 
 moments, to use the technical term, into the larger 
 whole, which in its comprehension of them and in its 
 self-comprehension preserves them in itself, but pre- 
 serves them as put past, as having another signifi- 
 cance in which they are no longer the final form of 
 reality but only a logical stage towards it. There- 
 fore, with Koyce, the conception of the will, striv- 
 ing in time and yet conscious of the entirety of the 
 system in which it strives, is not a conception in 
 which time is abolished, in which God is reduced 
 to a mere "now," the vanishing point into which 
 everything collapses, but time is preserved in it 
 as the form in which the will in one aspect strives, 
 while that aspect is seen not to be final, but when 
 more fully comprehended to be but a moment put 
 past in the larger view of the process. God's 
 life is the infinite whole that includes the endless 
 temporal process, and consciously surveys it as one 
 life, God's own life. God is thus, for Royce, a person 
 and self-conscious, because the self of which He is 
 conscious is a self whose eternal perfection is
 
 JOWETT ON HEGEL 83 
 
 attained through the totality of these ethically 
 significant temporal strivings, these processes of 
 evolution, these linked activities of finite selves. 
 
 Now you will observe that the way in which 
 Koyce puts the matter is a way which is not remote, 
 by any means, from the view of reality which I have 
 been putting before you in the course of these 
 lectures, and the reason is that Royce, and for that 
 matter, Bradley, have the origin of their views in 
 the doctrine which Aristotle long ago, and Hegel 
 more recently, worked out of the true relation 
 of the particular and the universal. One comes 
 back to Hegel because, after all that has been 
 said against the Hegelian doctrine, in his writ- 
 ings you have a systematic form and an unflinching 
 thoroughness which are not to be found elsewhere. 
 His system is presented with a fulness of detail 
 and a largeness of scale which are unrivalled. 
 There is a passage in Jowett's Introduction to 
 Plato's Dialogue the Sophist, in which he gives an 
 estimate of Hegel which, speaking for myself, I 
 should unhesitatingly adopt. "Hegel," he says, 
 "if not the greatest philosopher, is certainly the 
 greatest critic of philosophy who ever lived. No 
 one else has equally mastered the opinions of his 
 predecessors, or traced the connection of them in 
 the same manner. No one has equally raised the 
 human mind above the moralities of the common 
 logic, and the unmeaningness of mere abstractions, 
 and above imaginary possibilities, which, as he 
 truly says, have no place in philosophy. No one
 
 84 ABSOLUTE MIND [LECT. m. 
 
 has won so much for the kingdom of ideas. . . . 
 He shows that only by the study of metaphysics 
 can we get rid of metaphysics, and that those who 
 are in theory most opposed to them are in fact 
 most entirely and hopelessly enslaved by them." 
 
 Well, we must not in this world of ours stand 
 still, if we would avoid degenerating into sterility, 
 we must always be doing the work over again. As 
 Goethe says in the second part of Faust : 
 
 " Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben 
 Der taglich sie erobern muss." 
 
 " Tis only when we daily strive to conquer them anew, 
 That we gain life and freedom for ourselves." 
 
 And so it is in the study of philosophy. You cannot 
 stand still by the side of any one personality, how- 
 ever great. You must try, however humbly, however 
 inadequately, to do the work over again for yourself, 
 and thus, notwithstanding the debt which the world 
 owes to Hegel, we have each of us in this generation 
 to try, if we would comprehend the true meaning 
 of his teaching, to think it all out for ourselves, in 
 the light that he has given us, but still for ourselves. 
 Otherwise we shall not really make any progress. 
 The first series of these lectures has incurred a 
 two-fold criticism. Some people said it was too 
 Hegelian. Others, for whose opinion I have a 
 great respect, said it was an altogether unorthodox 
 interpretation of Hegel. Well, there is nearly as 
 much strife and disputing about the interpretation 
 of Hegel as there is about the interpretation of the
 
 HEGEL 85 
 
 Scripture. Yet the fact of the strife over the 
 interpretation of the Scripture does not make the 
 Scripture any the less excellent, nor does the strife 
 over the interpretation of Hegel make Hegel any 
 the less a good teacher. Therefore I am content to 
 say what he himself said to the orthodox of his 
 time, "I am a Lutheran and wish to remain so." I 
 am content to say that I am a Hegelian and wish 
 to be called so. There are reservations implicit in 
 both declarations. 
 
 Now I go back to my text. Like Bradley and 
 Royce, I feel that it is impossible to be content 
 with a definition of the Real in terms of the mere in- 
 telligible relations which, in reflection, are separated 
 from feeling as being something different and apart 
 from it. We start, I repeat, from within the con- 
 crete, living actuality of mind, outside of which we 
 cannot get, even in thought, and of which the plane 
 of the human intelligence is only, after all, an inter- 
 mediate plane or stage. Human thought, dominated 
 as it is, to an extent of which we are largely un- 
 conscious, by human ends and purposes, compre- 
 hends at a level which is not the fullest or the 
 highest. Our minds are before consciousness in 
 pictorial distinctions, in which we figure to ourselves 
 these minds as belonging to bodies which go about 
 separately in this world. That view is not the final 
 view, but it is none the less a necessary view, and 
 as such is true and representative of the degree of 
 reality to which it belongs. The social purposes 
 and ends which have to be fulfilled in the presenta-
 
 86 ABSOLUTE MIND [LECT. m . 
 
 tion of the world in the aspect of a society in which 
 personality is related to personality in which men 
 and women are not isolated but are dependent on 
 each other in the family and in the State give rise 
 to pictorial conceptions which do not come upon us 
 by accident, but are the outcome of phases in the 
 deeper self-comprehension of the Absolute Mind. 
 How that comes about and its meaning I shall 
 try to explain to you in later lectures. At present 
 it is enough to say that its effect upon us is to 
 dominate our thinking, to throw it into the distinc- 
 tions which give rise to finiteness, and to make the 
 self-comprehension of the human being pursuing 
 his ordinary avocations only an imperfect stage in 
 self-comprehension. Finiteness arises from the 
 fashion in which we conceive the mind in ourselves ; 
 that is to say, the fashion in which the mind con- 
 ceives itself in us. 
 
 Like Berkeley, we have to put a new question. 
 We have to ask what is the meaning of Reality ? 
 And our answer must be that it means being con- 
 tained in and comprehended by mind, and has, as 
 an essential element in it, being for mind, or before 
 mind. Antithesis and distinction, such as reflection 
 is always giving rise to, are essential for clear 
 knowledge. Hence it is that the understanding, 
 the business of which is to produce clear and 
 definite knowledge without reference to the question 
 whether it embraces the whole of the aspects of 
 Reality or not hence it is, I say, that the under- 
 standing makes these distinctions in their sharp
 
 THE PROCESS OF THOUGHT 87 
 
 forms by means of its abstractions. But, in truth, 
 even the conceptions which the understanding 
 makes use of are, as we shall see presently, in their 
 nature dialectical ; that is to say, their opposites 
 are inherent in them. They refer beyond them- 
 selves ; they refer to their opposites and to their 
 union with these opposites. 
 
 Mind as the Ultimately Real, as what is truly 
 actual, is, by reflection and by the abstraction which 
 reflection brings in its train, separated into the 
 aspect of mere thought, upon the one hand, and 
 the boundless hard - and - fast contingency which 
 baffles thought, upon the other. The distinction 
 is a distinction which emerges within mind, and it 
 gives rise in the study of mind to two aspects which 
 have to be considered in their separateness, but 
 which, having been considered in their separateness, 
 have to be recognised as arising only by the dis- 
 tinction which reflection makes within mind, a 
 distinction which, after all, is a vanishing one when 
 more fully grasped. On its abstract side self- 
 consciousness discloses itself as the movement of 
 thought in forms, in conceptions, in what are called 
 categories, which are related to one another dia- 
 lectically ; that is to say, each of which not only 
 implies the next of them, but implies the whole 
 series and finds its completion and truth only in 
 the entire series. You get in that way what Hegel 
 called "Logic," the metaphysical view of thought 
 distinguished abstractly as pure thought, put in 
 contrast to what is not so distinguished. Its
 
 88 ABSOLUTE MIND PT. ni. 
 
 antithesis, that with which it is put in contrast, 
 is a counter abstraction, Nature, which again is 
 simply an aspect within the concrete totality of 
 Mind. This is the truth of the two, and therefore 
 their prius. And again I say to you, what I said 
 yesterday, that to me there seems no more vain 
 or foolish controversy than the controversy as to 
 how Hegel made the transition from nature to 
 mind. He was not talking of transitions in time, 
 nor was he talking of making or constructing. He 
 was simply displaying his system as a whole, and 
 the only way to do that was to show how it is of 
 the nature of thought to make abstractions, correct 
 them by dwelling on their contraries, and compre- 
 hend the two sides as merely distinctions within the 
 larger and final conception of mind or spirit which 
 embraces both as moments within itself. 
 
 If one analyses one's own self-consciousness 
 one finds that in the apprehension of the self, in 
 the endeavour to fix it, one distinguishes it from 
 a not-self which is other than the self. It is my not- 
 self that is distinguished from my self. But in so 
 concentrating on myself I have made it an object 
 which ceases to present the aspect of the mind which 
 apprehends. If I endeavour to fix thought again as 
 something which I can isolate and consider in con- 
 trast to what is not thought, I have made it an 
 object, as it were, external to my self, and so 
 I get into the endlessness of Royce's series. But 
 the true view is the recognition of the dialectic 
 of thought as the inherent movement which is of
 
 APPREHENSIONCOMPREHENSION 89 
 
 the very nature and essence of mind. And 
 when you have studied that movement by simply 
 observing it as it does its own work, you discover 
 that you have the very characteristic of mind in 
 the activity which in apprehension produces these 
 distinctions, and simultaneously reconciles them 
 by comprehending them as belonging to a higher 
 unity. In that way the method and the sub- 
 ject-matter to which the method is applied fall 
 together in a fashion that obtains in no other 
 department of human knowledge, because in every 
 other department of human knowledge the mind 
 is in reflection distinct and regarded as essentially 
 distinguished from the object which it is contem- 
 plating. And so when we get to the most thorough- 
 going investigation of all, the metaphysical 
 investigation of the nature of Ultimate Reality, a 
 unity the highest of all emerges in our comprehen- 
 sion, and in that way we escape from what would 
 otherwise be an infinite or unending progress. The 
 true infinite is discovered just in the recognition 
 of the nature of the movement. So soon as you 
 have realised the nature of mind you find that you 
 do not reach infinity by merely heaping item on item, 
 but only by getting the law of the series which each 
 member of the series must obey, and so disclosing 
 the difference between the members and the series 
 as a difference which has been called into being, 
 but has none the less to be put past. 
 
 The reason why mind makes these distinctions 
 is a reason which I shall deal with in a subsequent
 
 90 ABSOLUTE MIND [LECT. m. 
 
 lecture, and I shall show you that it is of the very 
 essence of mind that it should do so. But I wish 
 simply to point out here that this train of analysis 
 leads us straight to what must be the conception 
 of God in which it terminates, God as the finally 
 self-comprehended Reality of Mind the Last that 
 is really First, Mind at its highest plane of self- 
 comprehension. Our own human plane of reflection 
 is the outcome of the reflection of the Absolute 
 Mind in those finite forms which are the steps or 
 stages or moments in its activity. -The logical 
 process can only be set forth in a system, and it 
 would take me far beyond the limits of these lectures 
 were I to try to give you an account of the attempt 
 whether it be more or not we need not discuss 
 here which Hegel has made to set out in system- 
 atic form the movement of mind in its self- 
 comprehension. 
 
 I have pointed out to you that the endeavour 
 to make these things appear as simply movements 
 of abstract thought, to set out the movement of 
 such thought in its abstract forms, however useful, 
 however valuable and it is both useful and valu- 
 able is capable of throwing light on one side 
 only of reality, and that when you come to the 
 other side, the counter abstraction of nature, the 
 other aspect of mind which is equally embraced in 
 its fuller self-comprehension, you find a different 
 aspect of the activity of thought. You find reflec- 
 tion there operating by making sharp distinctions. 
 The unifying influence of thought is not looked
 
 THE PERCEPTION OF NATURE 91 
 
 for there, because the purposes and the ends which 
 the mind has before it in the contemplation of 
 nature are purposes and ends which are foreign 
 to that unification and do not require it. The 
 purpose which we have before us when we are 
 face to face with nature, I mean the habitual and 
 thus unconscious purpose which dominates our 
 way of conceiving it, is to contemplate it without 
 reference to the subject. We abstract from the 
 fact that nature is there only for the mind which 
 perceives it, or as object for the subject. We shut 
 out that aspect of the truth as completely as we 
 can, and the result is that we get nature, character- 
 ised as it is by sharp and clear distinctions, in 
 forms in which separation and isolation are the 
 order of things. For instance, the apprehension of 
 nature as in space is a mode which displays things 
 as at the utmost possible stage of isolation from 
 one another. In time, as I showed you before, 
 you get a little nearer to establishing some sort 
 of unity among them, because, while the present 
 excludes both the past and the future, it yet has 
 meaning only in relation to the past and the future. 
 Therefore in time you have got nearer to the unity 
 which comes only from comprehension as distin- 
 guished from mere apprehension, from reason as 
 distinguished from mere understanding. A yet 
 more developed application of reflection under the 
 domination of the same kind of end gives you the 
 aspect of nature as mechanism. The finiteness of 
 such conceptions as the understanding here makes
 
 92 ABSOLUTE MIND [I-**, m. 
 
 use of is exhibited in the cause, which shows its 
 inherent contradiction by passing over into the 
 effect, and becoming indistinguishable from the 
 effect when you think it out. In the law which 
 the man of science finds when, putting aside the 
 mere crude appearances of phenomena, he fixes 
 upon what is essential, what underlies, is a principle 
 in which he passes beyond mere particulars of sense, 
 and abstracts in a manner which, though finite, brings 
 him to conceptions in which the foreignness of things, 
 the separation of things in space and time, is, in a 
 large measure, overcome. In the higher aspects of 
 nature this is strikingly so. For example, as I 
 showed you earlier, you set before the mind in the 
 perception of the living organism the conception of a 
 whole which shows itself through the metabolism of 
 the parts, and dominates the parts, more as soldiers 
 in an army are dominated by their common purpose, 
 than as marbles are held together in a heap. 
 
 It is only the understanding in its abstraction 
 that shuts out the fuller comprehension which 
 would come to us if we had before our minds that 
 nature is there only for mind which perceives it. 
 Of course, I do not mean that our minds make 
 nature. We are in one aspect parts of nature. I 
 explained that very fully in the last set of lectures, 
 and how it came about that we arrived at our con- 
 ception of our minds as particular things which 
 contemplate nature as through windows. But 
 the fact remains that nature is there only as the 
 object of mind, and only for mind ; and if you com-
 
 THE TWO ASPECTS OF QUANTITY 93 
 
 prebend that relationship fully you will have got 
 rid of the apparently absolute character of the hard- 
 and-fast relations of nature and its boundless 
 particularity. Even in nature as the man of science 
 regards it you see the manifestation of dialectic. 
 Take the quantities of the mathematician. Take 
 quantity as you have it in the measurements of 
 space and time. Take the old puzzle of Achilles 
 and the tortoise. Just as quantity always has two 
 sides, a discrete and a continuous, the discrete the 
 side which is dealt with in arithmetic, and the con- 
 tinuous that other side which is the subject of the 
 calculus ; so in the puzzle of Achilles and the tor- 
 toise these two sides appear. You remember how 
 Achilles sets out to overtake the tortoise, but the 
 tortoise has gone a little way by the time Achilles 
 gets up to the point from which it started. By the 
 time Achilles arrives at the next point the tortoise 
 has gone a little farther, and so on, and Achilles, 
 in this view, never overtakes it. But just as we 
 can sum up the series by showing the law of its 
 growth, the relation of its parts, so we can show 
 that there is an ascertainable point at which 
 Achilles must overtake the tortoise. The fallacy 
 is the passing from the view of space in which it 
 is discrete to the view of space in which it is con- 
 tinuous without being aware of the transition, and 
 the mixing up of two abstract aspects passing 
 under the same name. But the fact that you have 
 the discrete and the continuous side apparently 
 co-existing, shows that the movement of thought
 
 94 ABSOLUTE MIND [LECT. m. 
 
 is inherent even in the particularity of nature, and 
 that fully comprehended nature discloses the 
 dialectic which is characteristic of every aspect of 
 reality. 
 
 Thought never stands still, except in the 
 abstractions of reflection, and it is characteristic of 
 philosophy that it has been occupied greatly with 
 pointing out the antinomies or contradictions 
 which we find at every turn even in our most 
 everyday view of things. Nature is never fully 
 known until it is comprehended in its relation to 
 self-consciousness. When it is so comprehended, 
 and is grasped as arising by distinctions which fall 
 within self-consciousness, its foreignness is over- 
 come, put past. That is how we come back again, 
 by whatever road we travel, to mind as the ultimate 
 form of reality. 
 
 I have now got some way in my analysis, and 
 I shall go on in a subsequent lecture to develop 
 the meaning of the finite quality which characterises 
 our human minds.
 
 LECTUEE IV 
 
 MY task in the earlier series of these Gifford Lec- 
 tures was to set out the proof of the thesis that 
 the nature of ultimate reality is mind. In the first 
 three lectures of the present series, and particularly 
 in the second and third, I have endeavoured to 
 put before you some account of the characteristics 
 of mind and of its content. In this fourth lecture 
 I have to endeavour to show you how mind comes 
 to present itself as finite, and the consequences of 
 this. 
 
 When Spinoza in the second part of his Ethics 
 has completed his demonstration that the human 
 mind is part of the infinite intellect of God, he 
 pauses and says, rather pathetically, " At this point 
 many of my hearers will, no doubt, stick fast and 
 will think of many things which will cause delay, 
 and therefore I beg of them to advance slowly, step 
 by step, with me, and not to pronounce judgment 
 until they shall have read everything which I have 
 to say." Something of Spinoza's depression is 
 upon me. If the pathway is difficult it is not, 
 however, my fault any more than it is yours. It 
 is the nature of the subject that makes it so. My
 
 96 ABSOLUTE MIND [L*CT. w. 
 
 task is to set before you, as intelligibly as I can, 
 a great conception, the work of a succession of 
 great men, a conception which we have inherited 
 from past ages, and which in their own fashion 
 these great men have dealt with in its different 
 aspects. But for those who would profit by the 
 work that has been done by the intellectual giants 
 who have attacked the problem of the nature of 
 reality in the past, it is essential that they should 
 have some clear realisation of the difficulties which 
 were present to the minds of these men. 
 
 Above all things, a sense that there is a problem 
 is necessary, and that sense is not one which is 
 very easily awakened. I have pointed out to you 
 that the great hindrance to the grasp of what one 
 may call the conception of reality which has been 
 the common conception of these great thinkers 
 because, as I think I have already shown you, it 
 has varied more in language and in form than in 
 substance in the hands of those who have fashioned 
 it is the irrelevant and unmeaning metaphors 
 which we carry with us as a burden on our backs. 
 This, I say, is the chief hindrance to getting hold 
 of what the great thinkers have put before us. 
 This was apparent, I think, yesterday, when we 
 had to try to scale the precipitous cliffs which have 
 to be surmounted if we are to attain to a view of 
 the nature of mind. We felt then the extraordinary 
 difficulty of shaking ourselves clear from similes 
 and analogies, drawn from regions of inquiry which 
 were wholly foreign to the regions in which we
 
 THE FOBMS OF FINITUDE 97 
 
 were painfully toiling, and that burden it is which 
 presses upon those who have to climb with difficulty 
 from point to point of these almost inaccessible 
 rocks, with the constant sense of being dragged 
 back. Nevertheless our duty is to clear ourselves 
 by careful criticism as far as we can from the effect 
 of that burden. The footholds are there firm 
 enough, if we would only look for them as they 
 have been cut by the great thinkers of the past. 
 After all, if people make it a reproach against phi- 
 losophy that it is difficult, there is an answer. 
 Philosophy is not necessary ; it is not even a help 
 to everyone. Only to those is it a necessity whose 
 minds have been disturbed by thought. The gulf 
 which thought makes thought alone can bridge 
 over, and for those who have once become con- 
 scious of the problem and of the difficulty of its 
 solution, there is no other way but the hard toil of 
 the thinking consideration of things. 
 
 Well, to-day I shall have to deal with the 
 problem of the forms of finitude in mind. Now 
 the relation in which man stands to the mind with- 
 in which his reality falls in ultimate analysis, must 
 remain an inscrutable mystery if we cannot free 
 ourselves from the domination of the category of 
 substance, an unnecessary and unnatural category 
 when we are investigating the nature of mind. Of 
 course if we start from this, that what is must be 
 a thing, a thing which, if we thought out our con- 
 clusions about it, could have no meaning except as 
 
 existing in space and in time if that be the ulti- 
 
 G
 
 98 ABSOLUTE MIND OCT. w. 
 
 mate conception by which thought is hemmed in, 
 then it is impossible to represent God in any other 
 light than as a substance, or to find any intelligible 
 relation between Him and the finite mind. 
 
 But God is a Spirit, and those who seek Him 
 must seek Him in spirit and in truth. It is not the 
 methods of mechanism, the methods which are 
 applicable to the externalities of space and time, 
 that can help here or that are in place. My self- 
 consciousness is an ultimate fact, and yet in its 
 finiteness, as characterised in the concept of my 
 particularity, it appears as my self-consciousness. 
 Now one pauses here to observe that at this point 
 there is a problem to be solved. What we mean by 
 the element of particularity, what we mean by self- 
 consciousness as my self- consciousness, as distin- 
 guished from somebody else's self-consciousness, is 
 a matter which is not thought out in the usages 
 which guide us when we employ this conception 
 in everyday life. A necessary conception it is, and 
 one which represents the truth from our everyday 
 practical standpoint. It is not only useful, but 
 without it we could not get on, and, indeed, it is 
 the consequence of our view and experience of the 
 social whole of which we form a part. We stand 
 in relation to other selves, and yet there is some- 
 thing to be thought out. Taken simply so, it is 
 plain that self-consciousness has not fully compre- 
 hended its own character, and one has to see 
 what is the nature of the distinction which it has 
 made within itself, and which gives rise to its
 
 THE ALL-EMBRACING CHARACTER 99 
 
 finite quality or appearance. There can be no 
 doubt of the conclusion to which the train of 
 reasoning which we have been pursuing leads. 
 There can be nothing outside self-consciousness. 
 The universe, when we reflect on it and do not 
 leave it in abstraction, is a universe that is there 
 for us as object for a subject, and its meaning and 
 development must be a meaning and development 
 within the field of the object- world of conscious- 
 ness. 
 
 As Hegel somewhere puts it : " The universe 
 as it is in and for itself"- observe the phrase "is 
 the totality of existence ; outside it there is 
 nothing." That is to say, you cannot escape from 
 the closed circle of the mind and its content. 
 There is no meaning in even raising a question of 
 anything outside. It is on the basis of the mind 
 itself that any such question would be raised. Yet 
 to take a short-cut and to assert that because I am 
 self-conscious, and because all the distinctions 
 which go to the making up of the universe fall 
 within my self-consciousness, therefore, I am the 
 absolute God to assert this is not only startling, 
 but one feels instinctively that it is an assertion 
 which no one has a right to make. It is absurd to 
 say such a thing of a mere particular man, a link 
 in a chain with a beginning that stretches back 
 endlessly into the past and will stretch forward 
 endlessly into the future. Such an assertion seems 
 to mean one of two things. Either the universe is 
 a mere appearance, the projection of a mind which
 
 100 ABSOLUTE MIND [Lw*. w. 
 
 is taken as being something here and now in space 
 and time, and that possesses knowledge as a quality. 
 In this case the universe can be nothing more than 
 the projection of a mind that is a finite thing. In 
 sucli a light the universe has no more reality than 
 have the pictures which a magic-lantern throws 
 upon a sheet. Such a conclusion, of course, is 
 revolting to common sense, and must fail to bear 
 scrutiny. Or, on the other hand, the assertion 
 may be taken to mean that in truth the ultimate 
 form of reality is a correlation of substances, and 
 that the mind and its object and God Himself, so 
 far as they are taken to be anything else, are mere 
 appearances, mere misinterpretations of a reality 
 which consists in the mechanical connection of sub- 
 stances. Such a conclusion is equally incapable of 
 being stated self-consistently. Both of these views 
 are, moreover, pronounced by the heart, whatever the 
 intelligence may say, to be blasphemous ; for they 
 are the denial of the truth of that spiritual signifi- 
 cance which throughout history has been the pro- 
 foundest moving force in the souls of men. The 
 conviction of this truth it is that has done more 
 than anything else to arouse men to the effort to 
 solve the problem which reason has raised, and 
 that has awakened the human mind to the 
 necessity for a careful criticism of its categories. 
 
 Well, one comes back to scan again, in the 
 light of these difficulties, the final fact of one's own 
 self-consciousness as manifestation within which 
 both the universe without and the universe within
 
 MIND AS SUBJECT 101 
 
 disclose themselves. What is the meaning of its 
 finiteness ? We have seen that such finiteness 
 cannot consist in this, that the mind can really 
 be a thing here in space and now in time. Let us 
 see whether we can get on any better by trying to 
 image it under another form ; let us try to reflect 
 upon it, to think about it as mind, as subject if you 
 please, in that large and full significance of the 
 word that it gets when we purify it as far as we 
 can from similes drawn from the region of the 
 external world. If you do your best in this 
 direction, you will find that you are inevitably led 
 back in your investigation to the self as the 
 final and ultimate reality, but not possessing its 
 final and ultimate form in the finite self, as it 
 appears when, after the fashion of John Locke, we 
 dive into our own bosoms. In that finite self you 
 find at every turn the evidences of incompleteness 
 of comprehension, and the suggestion that arises, 
 as you pursue your path, is that if the phenomenon 
 of the finite self were more completely thought out, 
 the difficulties which you meet with would prove to 
 be difficulties due mainly to the inadequacy of your 
 own procedure. 
 
 " The truth," says Hegel in a daring sentence, 
 " is that there is only one reason, one mind, and 
 that the mind as finite has not a real existence." 
 Of course, he does not mean to say that the universe 
 collapses under reflection into a mere point, into an 
 inert simultaneum, or to deny to it the movement 
 that characterises mind as mind. What he means
 
 102 ABSOLUTE MIND [LKT. iv. 
 
 is just what I have been putting before you, that 
 the true view of mind is the view which goes 
 beyond that limited aspect in which it appears as one 
 among many, or even as my own particular mind. 
 The relationship of being one among many, the 
 relationship of being mine as distinguished from 
 yours, belong to that aspect in which mind presents 
 itself to itself as a phenomenon falling within its own 
 object- world, as a phenomenon which arises because 
 mind has made abstraction from the fact that it is 
 itself setting up the very distinctions which it is 
 contemplating. 
 
 Now in our daily practice we find some con- 
 firmation of the extent to which these difficulties 
 vanish when we confront them from a higher stand- 
 point. It is when we rise above the contempla- 
 tion of minds as related to each other as things, 
 that we get rid of the difficulty of explaining to 
 ourselves why we prefer at our best the well-being 
 of our neighbours to our own. But even in daily 
 practice the same difficulty occurs. Man is often 
 tempted to feel that though as a free personality he 
 has the power of choosing the right, and is respon- 
 sible if he does not choose it, yet that temptation is 
 too much for him, and it is unnatural that his 
 choice should be otherwise than the choice of what 
 is lower. This is a frame of mind of which we 
 have only too familiar experience. But, on the 
 other hand, the saint, the man who lives at the 
 highest level, finds, just because he lives at the 
 highest level, and his conception is one which
 
 THE MEANING OF SAINTLINESS 103 
 
 raises him above the particularism of these 
 temptations, that they are no serious temptations 
 to him. The greatest saint may lapse; when he 
 lapses it is not because he has ceased to be free, 
 but because for the moment he has done what any 
 human being may do, he has lowered his stand- 
 point. At his highest standpoint the man who is 
 really holy is free from temptation, because tempta- 
 tion presents no attraction to him, looking at it as 
 he does. 
 
 Well, just in the same fashion if you have once 
 actually got the speculative point of view, these 
 difficulties which seem so great, because they 
 afflict you as his temptations afflict the saint who 
 cannot always live at the same high level, yet 
 will come to seem less, because they are vanish- 
 ing difficulties from the point of view at which 
 you have learned that you can contemplate them. 
 In practice as in theory there are stages or 
 degrees in reality, and when we once have reached 
 to a higher stage in our view of reality and are 
 sticking to it, whether it be practical life or whether 
 it be speculative contemplation that we are concerned 
 with, troubles that we thought insuperable at a lower 
 stage cease to be troubles at all, because they cease 
 to exist. We see how they arose, we see how they 
 presented themselves, but we also see how that 
 presentation can be superseded in a larger view. 
 
 I have had to dig down to the foundations, in 
 order to get at the nature of reality, through the 
 covering soil to which the current abstractions and
 
 104 ABSOLUTE MIND OCT. rv . 
 
 metaphors and similes have imparted an adaman- 
 tine hardness. Other aids than philosophy may 
 assist the faith that underneath there lies a founda- 
 tion which can be reached. You can all be helped 
 by Art and by Religion. Your Goethe, your Carlyle, 
 your Wordsworth, your Browning, yes, and your 
 New Testament, all these give the sense of the 
 things that are unseen, a sense that may be strong 
 enough to carry you over these difficulties. There 
 you will find aids of another kind to faith, the faith 
 of the doctrine that it is not in some remote other 
 world that the truth is to be looked for, but just in 
 this world, seen and comprehended at a higher 
 level. And it is not even necessary to turn to the 
 poets and to literature for this sort of aid. Some 
 of the finest natures, perhaps the very finest natures, 
 do not need that. 
 
 " If thou appear untouched by solemn thought, 
 Thy nature is not therefore less divine," 
 
 writes Wordsworth, and so it has been at all times. 
 And yet the vindication of the truth, if the truth 
 must be vindicated, can only be given by Reason. 
 Art and Religion can do much. They can bring 
 before us vivid images, can lead us into moods 
 which humanity with a thousand voices proclaims 
 to represent the truth and the impress of reality. 
 But it is only the iron logic of philosophy that can 
 break through the hard incrustations beneath which 
 lies buried the full truth, the completed scheme. 
 When completely thought out, reality dis-
 
 MIND ESSENTIALLY SELF-CONSCIOUS 105 
 
 closes its hidden nature, in the light we have now 
 got, as self-conscious mind completely self-com- 
 prehensive, whose characteristic it is to be active, 
 and being active, to be actual. I have now 
 to show you that it is of the very quality of such 
 mind to throw itself into finite forms, and so to make 
 the distinctions and create the aspects which in 
 everyday life are familiar to us, but the unstable 
 and merely relative character of which appears 
 when we take things from the standpoint of what 
 has been called reason as distinguished from under- 
 standing. That mind is self-conscious as well as 
 conscious is, when we think the matter out, a mere 
 tautology. If you analyse the simplest form of 
 consciousness, for instance the sense of feeling, 
 there is implicit in it a reference to self, because it 
 is " I " who feel. It is only by an abstraction, by 
 the cutting- off of reflection, that you ignore the fact 
 for the moment that it is " I " who feel. The full 
 truth is that a feeling is always referable to a self. 
 It is legitimate to speak in another sense only 
 if we know what we are doing. For instance 
 the psychologists tell us about the threshold of 
 consciousness, and they point out, and point out 
 with justice, about the aspect in which it discloses 
 itself under their methods, that there is such a 
 thing as a subconscious self, and that there are 
 antecedents to sensation which do not cross the 
 threshold of consciousness. That is quite true 
 if you are looking at the soul from the standpoint 
 of what I described to you, in the earlier lectures,
 
 106 ABSOLUTE MIND [LKT. iv. 
 
 as presentationism, where the whole content of 
 consciousness is set out as though it were a series 
 of discrete events in time. But that standpoint, 
 useful and legitimate as it is for its own purposes, 
 and constantly as we employ it not merely in 
 psychology but in daily life, is only a very limited 
 one. In it abstraction is made, and is necessarily 
 made, from the higher unity of the self, for which 
 the history in time, which presentationism gives, 
 exists. 
 
 To be conscious is to be conscious of my self 
 as comprehending. There is no such thing conceiv- 
 able as mere consciousness that is not also self- 
 conscious when it is thought out. I call it " thing " 
 because such a consciousness, if we could attach 
 any meaning to it at all, would be a thing, would 
 belong to the region of what was external, and not 
 properly to the self as self. Even if we desire to 
 be sceptical we can only raise our scepticism as 
 the reflection of an " I " that comprehends. 
 
 Self-consciousness is the logical prius of every 
 effort of thought and of every phase of feeling, even 
 the lowest. The task of thought is to make 
 explicit what is implicit, and it only fails to do so 
 when it takes things in abstraction. Grasp them 
 in the fulness of their comprehension, and you find 
 that self-consciousness is the presupposition of 
 every conceivable form of experience. Well, that 
 carries with it an important consequence. If God 
 be mind, if His nature is to be mind, He must be 
 in some sense self-conscious, One has here to
 
 THE SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS OF GOD 107 
 
 guard oneself, because the idea of self-consciousness 
 is infected by many metaphors drawn from the 
 everyday world. What I mean is that the nature 
 of mind is to be actual in its distinctions, and to 
 comprehend these distinctions and itself as their 
 source. This characteristic of consciousness is of 
 the essence of mind, and therefore is of the essence 
 of God. We come to that conclusion as soon as we 
 find that the function of thought is to do something 
 more than merely establish relations between things 
 that are given to it. As soon as you become aware 
 that there can be no distinction excepting upon the 
 basis of thought, and that beyond thought there is 
 nothing, because it is only on the basis of thought 
 that we can even speak of anything beyond thought, 
 you are forced to the further conclusion that mind 
 must in every phase be self-conscious. 
 
 In self-consciousness we apprehend the self. 
 It is of the essence of self-consciousness that it 
 should distinguish the self from what it puts before 
 it in distinction from the self. That is to say, at 
 the ordinary level at which we men and women 
 reflect, we think of the object- world from which 
 the self is distinguished as one object and the self 
 as another object. In other words, when we 
 apprehend the self, when we present it to ourselves 
 as distinguished from its object- world, we appre- 
 hend it as understanding does, in separation from 
 something else which is correlative to it, and in 
 this way we give it the character of finitude. That 
 is how the finite arises. It is the work and the
 
 108 ABSOLUTE MIND [L*CT. nr. 
 
 apprehension of thought which takes even the self 
 and fixes it, so to speak, in contradistinction from 
 the self, abstracting from the unity of comprehen- 
 sion in which the two are held. Just as I appre- 
 hend my object- world as "there and then," so I 
 apprehend myself as "here and now," the centre, 
 as it were, of the universe. 
 
 Well, there again you have in still further 
 development the notions of the finite. They spring 
 up upon you the moment you begin to think at this 
 plane, the plane at which you are encouraged to 
 think by the social purposes which you have to 
 fulfil as members of society. These are all modes 
 of what we may call the relation of otherness, 
 which is the quality of the finite. If I fix myself, 
 for example, in reflection, as one among many, I 
 get the notion of a plurality of selves isolated in 
 time and for that matter in space, and so I am 
 brought very far into the region of the finite. And 
 the occasion of my making these distinctions is my 
 purpose of leading a social life, of living among my 
 fellow men and women, of profiting by my experi- 
 ence, by my memories, by my relationship to my 
 family, by what I have done, by what I may be, 
 by that chain of connections which binds me up in 
 a whole with those about me. The purpose of 
 realising myself in that world makes me insist on 
 these distinctions, and as these distinctions are 
 distinctions all of which belong to the region of the 
 finite, the characteristic of finitude penetrates deeply 
 into my notion of myself. Of course this kind of
 
 MAKES EXPLICIT WHAT IS IMPLICIT 109 
 
 apprehension, however necessary, is a narrow and 
 limited one, because it ignores the larger view of 
 mind as the subject within which all these distinc- 
 tions take place. 
 
 Mind not only has for its task to make explicit 
 what is implicit, but it must do so, because as I 
 showed you before, the character of its activity, 
 the activity which posits itself, so to speak, in 
 conceptions, is dialectical. That is to say, each 
 conception is posited in such a fashion that it is 
 made at once to involve a correlative, a correlative 
 linked to something beyond, and the whole is found 
 to form a chain in which the imperfect is taken up 
 by the movement of thought into what is more 
 perfect and more complete. Thought is always 
 active, and therefore it never can and never does 
 rest content in any single finite aspect. The con- 
 sequence is that the world in which we live, the 
 world as it seems, has an infinity of aspects. It 
 has the aspect of beauty and of morality, it has 
 the aspect which is dealt with in mathematics, the 
 aspect which is dealt with in political economy. 
 All these aspects of the world as it seems are 
 equally real, and what we have to do is to 
 determine their relations to one another, and to 
 be careful that we do not confuse the standpoints 
 at which these different aspects arise, and misapply 
 the conceptions which have led to their separation. 
 They are the outcome of the finite purposes which 
 guide our reflection on our own experiences, and 
 they are the necessary outcome of these purposes.
 
 110 ABSOLUTE MIND [L ECT . iv. 
 
 Well, the nature of thought is not to rest 
 satisfied with any one of these aspects or with 
 any one of the conceptions under which they arise. 
 From the very beginning the ultimate nature of 
 thought, the ultimate goal which it has to realise, 
 can be nothing short of its complete comprehen- 
 sion of itself, and the reason is of course that 
 only in the fully comprehended system of the 
 mind within which all these distinctions have 
 been made, can their relation to one another, 
 and to the end which they presuppose, be ade- 
 quately shown. That is where, what I told you 
 of in an earlier lecture, the new and deeper view 
 of evolution comes in. It is not only in time that 
 you have evolution ; you have evolution in thought, 
 in the stages of comprehension, and evolution in 
 which what comes last in time is first in thought, 
 because all the stages that precede it in time are 
 really only fragments of it isolated by the abstrac- 
 tions of reflection. The completed totality is the 
 truth of the whole movement of the process. But 
 to say that is not to say that the nature of 
 mind is to deny the reality of all those lower 
 stages and to make them naught. The passing 
 through these lower stages is part of the very 
 activity of mind. Its essence is to posit itself, so 
 to speak, in abstract distinction, and then, in its 
 fuller comprehension, to overcome that distinction, 
 to show it as one which has been made only by 
 the abstraction of the understanding, an abstraction 
 made for the purposes of self-realisation in the
 
 TIME FURTHER CONSIDERED 111 
 
 form of clear and distinct knowledge. In geometry 
 we deal with figures in which we have abstracted 
 altogether from colour, from beauty, from weight, 
 from everything else except consideration of the 
 purest kind in space, and thereby we get clear and 
 distinct knowledge, because the mind can con- 
 centrate in this kind of consideration. Such 
 illustrations show that it is the work of the mind 
 to make abstract distinctions in understanding in 
 order to enrich knowledge, and afterwards to take 
 up the distinctions so made in the larger unities 
 which thought reaches as it comprehends still 
 more fully. 
 
 Now I want in this connection to follow out 
 the illustration which we have of this in the case 
 of time. Time is a relationship or form which 
 belongs to the object- world, the world in which 
 we image either things as outside us, or the stream 
 of our mental states as within us. Time, as Hegel 
 says in the Natur-Philosophie, is the presenta- 
 tion of becoming, of what is there just inasmuch as 
 it ceases to be there. Now see what is implied 
 in that. The event which is in time is there just 
 inasmuch as it ceases to be there. The reason is 
 that the now is always ceasing to be the now. 
 The now is nothing that you can lay hold of ; before 
 you can do so it has passed into the then, and 
 the next instant becomes the instant which you 
 characterise as the now. That instant is made 
 what it is by its relation to a future which will be 
 but is not yet. Therefore you have in time this
 
 112 ABSOLUTE MIND [LBCT. w . 
 
 combination of being and not-being which gives 
 to succession the character of the presentation, 
 or rather the attempt at a presentation, of what 
 becomes, of transition. You cannot have any fixed 
 image of time. Time has always got this con- 
 tradiction within itself, that it is in the relations 
 of the elements in it, the past, present, and future, 
 that time consists. It is in the deepest sense a 
 relation of finitude. 
 
 Hegel points this out in a passage in which he 
 says that it is not because things appear in time 
 that they are finite ; it is because they are finite 
 that they appear in time.* In other words, time 
 is just the abstract form of the characteristic 
 which finite things have of being in a state of flux. 
 As Heraclitus pointed out, all things are in a 
 state of flux, and so it is with the finite world. 
 There is no distinction which remains permanent. 
 What appears is always altering, for the in- 
 dividuality of reality is always disclosing a new 
 and fresh aspect. It is in comprehension by 
 thought that you get the stability, the unity, the 
 element that is permanent, because it is out of 
 time in the sense that time is in reality for it. 
 
 Well, as inherent in its nature, time has got a 
 curious contradiction within itself, a contradiction 
 which exhibits itself in the fact that time has 
 always two moments, the moment of the discrete 
 and the moment of the continuous. You fix time, 
 the moment, as now, but in so fixing it you find 
 
 * Hegel, Natur-Pkilosophie, p. 54.
 
 TIME AND THE SELF 113 
 
 that what you are really fixing on is something 
 with a continuous flow which causes it to be gone 
 as soon as you think you have grasped it, and so it 
 is that in all investigations of time you have got 
 these two sides confronting you. In arithmetic, 
 which is founded in large measure upon time, you 
 have an illustration of this. I discussed with you 
 yesterday, the series, the self-representative series. 
 Let it be the mathematical series which we took as 
 an illustration, l+J++&, and so on, extending 
 without end, but yet having a limit in the number 
 2. In that series you have got this curious result, 
 that the series is endless, that you can always go on 
 adding to it a diminishing fraction, and yet, on the 
 other hand, that it has got an end because even if 
 you were to project it into infinity it never could 
 exceed the limit of 2. Now there you have 
 the characteristic which time discloses, that the 
 moments in it are not really exclusive one of the 
 other. When the series is self-representative, as 
 such a series is, and as the series of my thoughts is, 
 you have the characteristic of each member of the 
 series in this that it represents the whole. In this 
 characteristic lies the contradiction which is only 
 explicable if you understand that the form of time 
 is really a form in which the self comprehends 
 itself, and grasps what it comprehends as the self 
 for which time is, and which in that sense is out of 
 time. The self belongs to eternity in the true sense 
 of the word, but yet posits itself in distinctions 
 which are superseded in its comprehension of them.
 
 114 ABSOLUTE MIND [L*CT. iv. 
 
 It is the nature of mind that it is free from the 
 dilemmas that affect the object- world, and that it 
 neither stands still nor is mere change. Its nature 
 is to be permanence in change and change in 
 permanence. The whole mind is present in every 
 act of the mind, and every act of the mind implies 
 the whole mind. It is not a process on which you 
 can get any light from metaphors and similes drawn 
 from the object- world, because it is what lies at the 
 foundation of the object- world itself. You can, 
 perhaps, get at it best if you keep in mind the 
 contradictions which appear in even such familiar 
 features of the object- world as the time sequence. 
 But just because there is the phase of presentation 
 on the part of the mind of itself to itself, the element 
 of exclusion by which one phase is distinguished 
 from another is a real phase. Yet it is not all. It 
 is a phase whose nature is to be forthwith put past, 
 and taken up into a higher comprehension. 
 
 Now, the effect of that is to give us some light 
 upon what the nature of time must be when con- 
 templated from the standpoint of Absolute Mind. 
 It cannot as so contemplated be non-existent. 
 Kather it must be there as taken up, preserved in a 
 more complete comprehension. The endless aspect 
 of the series is in contradiction with the fact of its 
 limit, and therefore a higher standpoint, for the 
 purposes of which the lower standpoint is inade- 
 quate, is necessary for the solution of the contradic- 
 tion and the comprehension of the whole. And 
 when you set to yourself the problem of how the
 
 THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD 115 
 
 universe in time must seem to God, the answer is 
 that as God is Mind and as it is of the nature of 
 Mind to realise itself in these distinctions which go 
 to make up among other things the time series, God 
 must in His self-consciousness include these dis- 
 tinctions, and yet preserve them, not as a mere time 
 series, but in a higher conception in which they are 
 comprehended in the entirety in which the series 
 is summed up, and summed up in a fashion 
 of which even that expression gives no proper 
 analogue. Now, this is a consideration which 
 throws some light on the problem of immortality, a 
 problem on which I shall have to touch in later 
 lectures, because it shows that existence in time is 
 not the whole of existence as fully comprehended. 
 For the mind of God the world must appear as no 
 mere simultaneum, no mere negation of change, but 
 as the time series summed up and comprehended 
 in the fullest grasp of thought. It is only from 
 such standpoints as those of geometry and mechan- 
 ism, in which we set the distinctions in their 
 characteristic abstraction, that the spectres which 
 trouble us appear as more than spectres. 
 
 These abstract conceptions have their place. 
 The movement of thought which makes them 
 renders possible the riches of the self-comprehen- 
 sion of mind. But it is mind that we are dealing 
 with, and mind is not inert. It posits itself in 
 difference and gathers itself up at a higher level 
 than that from which it started. Its very nature is 
 to be present to itself in finite forms. That it must
 
 116 ABSOLUTE MIND [LKT. iv. 
 
 do in order to fulfil the nature of its being, to 
 realise its own end. There you have the why of 
 the process of finitude. 
 
 It is into the forms of finitude that the Absolute 
 Mind goes forth in the process of its self-realisation. 
 How plain it is that if we would contemplate the 
 nature of God, we must, as in worship, contemplate 
 in spirit and in truth.
 
 LECTURE V 
 
 IN the last lecture I showed you how the forms of 
 finitude originate in the mind. Their origin we 
 found to be finite ends, and the result was an 
 illustration of the truth that the attempt to com- 
 prehend the universe ought to be a search after 
 ends and not after causes; a very important dis- 
 tinction. 
 
 We got some way towards a view of the 
 Absolute Mind as not only self-conscious, but as 
 requiring and so conserving the finite forms which 
 it sets up and transcends in the act of setting up. 
 Following this out, we begin in the present lecture 
 to get something like an idea of what must be the 
 relation of man to God. I may now attempt, on 
 the basis of what I have already said, a definition 
 of God which may serve us provisionally as a start- 
 ing point for the rest of the lecture. 
 
 God means Absolute Mind conscious of itself 
 as completely realising the highest ends. He is 
 the completed consciousness which comprehends 
 itself in its completeness as the prius and source of 
 the whole of the movement that forms its content. 
 Do not forget what I pointed out to you in examin- 
 
 117
 
 118 ABSOLUTE MIND [LECT. v. 
 
 ing the nature of the self-representative series in a 
 former lecture. Both moments in the time series, 
 the moment of exclusion, and the moment of the 
 implicit presence of the whole in each member of 
 the series, are if transmuted yet implicit in the 
 character of Absolute Mind. That is to say, in 
 endeavouring to contemplete the Mind of God it is 
 plain that we are not to think of time as having 
 ceased to have meaning, but are to look upon it and 
 its two aspects as merely superseded in the higher 
 standpoint from which He must contemplate Him- 
 self. No pictorial image of such a mind can be 
 adequate, for all pictures are based on relationship 
 in time and space, and they are never complete. 
 They always suggest what lies beyond in time 
 and space, and therefore it is not to pictorial 
 representation that we can turn, unless we are 
 prepared to bear in mind that the picture, however 
 admirable, can only be a symbol of what is to be 
 adequately expressed in nothing short of the highest 
 categories of thought. 
 
 Now let us, furnished with this definition of 
 God, turn to the nature of man. It is plain that 
 man is finite mind and that as finite his mind is 
 realising itself at a level of comprehension that 
 is not the highest level. Man's ends are finite 
 ends. Thus his categories, the conceptions which 
 his ends call into use, are finite categories, and his 
 world and himself also are presented as in separa- 
 tion from mind, as in hetereity, the form of what 
 people have called " otherness." By reason of the
 
 NATTTKE OF FINITE MIND US 
 
 domination of these finite ends, and the conse- 
 quently self-limited action of reflection in the form 
 of understanding, the content, cut off in this way in 
 abstraction, gets a semblance of permanence, of 
 being fixed. We thus become apt to take truth 
 to consist merely in that which we all think, 
 instead of having a foundation to be sought in an 
 answer to the deeper question, Why and How we 
 all think it so. 
 
 Philosophy ought to be able to show the 
 relationship to each other of the ends that are 
 finite, how they arise, what is their order, what is 
 their position in the scheme in which the activity of 
 mind manifests itself. If this is shown in an 
 abstract form we get what is called "Logic" in 
 Hegelian terminology ; that is to say, the abstract 
 forms which belong to the content of the Idea, the 
 subject-matter of the first part of the Hegelian 
 Encyclopaedia. This conception goes deeper down 
 than would be possible in any picture of mere 
 creation, because creation, after all, is a word which 
 carries with it the association of an image in time, 
 of something brought into being, it may be out of 
 nothing, but at all events ab extra ; whereas we are 
 here dealing with activities of thought dominated 
 by these ends which are and must be the prius of 
 any such picture. 
 
 The Hegelian doctrine, no doubt, identifies 
 human self-consciousness with the consciousness of 
 God, but it does not conversely identify the con- 
 sciousness of God with human self-consciousness.
 
 120 ABSOLUTE MIND [LKT. v. 
 
 The greater contains the less and is not contained 
 in it here any more than elsewhere. Because it is 
 mind that we are dealing with, no real difficulty 
 arises, as we shall presently see, over such problems 
 as that of evil. One of the great objections which 
 has been urged against all systems of absolute 
 idealism, all systems that would identify the mind 
 of man with the mind of God, is this. It is said, if 
 they be true you must attribute evil to God as 
 something falling within His nature. Well, if we 
 were dealing with what is to be conceived as a 
 substance that would be so, but we are dealing 
 with what is of the nature of mind, and I shall be 
 able to show you presently that the difficulty is not 
 a difficulty which arises, if we will only be in earnest 
 with the notion that what we have got before us is 
 not substance but subject. 
 
 Equally it is true that the forms of history 
 belong to the finite. That is another reproach 
 which has been urged against the standpoint of the 
 German idealists, that they identify God with Spirit 
 as it discloses itself in history. But the forms of 
 history are finite, just as the forms of human mind 
 are finite. It is even conceivable that there may be 
 finite forms higher than any that disclose themselves 
 in humanity or in history, and which, just because 
 they are finite forms, must turn out to be inade- 
 quate to the conception of God. The lesson one 
 learns, the deeper one digs down into this ground, 
 is the complete relativity of human knowledge, in a 
 more thorough-going sense of the expression than
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS 121 
 
 that which has been current. The way of looking 
 at things of our everyday standpoint leads us to 
 anthropomorphism in a fashion which is still 
 more menacing to the desire to reach the truth 
 than is ordinarily conceived. We have to be 
 in earnest with the view that God is mind, and 
 nothing short of mind, if we are to make any 
 progress. 
 
 Now, I shall digress for a few moments from 
 this very abstract and difficult line of thought to 
 some parallel teaching. It is always interesting if 
 one finds that what one has been searching for and 
 thinks one has arrived at has something corre- 
 sponding to it in the conclusions that have been 
 reached by other men at other times. First of all 
 I will take you back over two thousand years, and 
 I will tell you what Aristotle said, as the result of 
 his consideration of this very problem. I am going 
 to quote to you a passage from the Xllth Book of 
 the Metaphysics, 7th chapter, and the rendering 
 which I shall offer you is a rendering of a passage 
 so obscure that I should have but little confidence 
 in my translation, but for some extremely com- 
 petent assistance which has been given to me. 
 Not only have I had the advantage of comparing 
 the versions given by Bonitz and by Schwegler, 
 but Principal Donaldson and Professor Burnet 
 have been so good as to make suggestions as to the 
 rendering. 
 
 "The intelligence," says Aristotle, "which is 
 complete in its own nature is the intelligence
 
 122 ABSOLUTE MIND [Lrr. v. 
 
 which has for its object that which is good in its 
 own nature, and the absolute intelligence has for 
 its object what is absolutely good. But the mind 
 thinks itself when it comprehends what is in- 
 telligible ; when it comprehends, and so, as it 
 were, is in contact with what is intelligible, it 
 becomes intelligible to itself. So that the mind 
 and what is the mind's object are one and the 
 same. For the capacity to grasp the intelligible 
 that is the substance of reality is mind, and mind 
 realises itself or becomes actual in doing so. For 
 what of divine the mind seems to possess consists 
 in its actuality as distinguished from its mere 
 potentiality, and what is most agreeable and best 
 is the realised act of contemplation. If what is 
 divine is eternally as blessed as we at times are, 
 this is worthy of admiration ; if it is blessed in a 
 higher degree, yet more worthy. That, however, 
 is the real characteristic of the divine. It has 
 life in it, for the activity of mind is life, and mind 
 is activity. Pure and absolute activity is its most 
 perfect and its eternal life. Thus it is that we 
 come to say of God that Pie is an eternal and 
 most perfect living being. Life is His, unbroken 
 eternal existence, for that is of the essential nature 
 of the divine." You will appreciate at once how 
 closely that approaches to the Hegelian view 
 which I have been putting before you in these 
 lectures. It is remarkable, looking over the 
 sea of time that separates us from Aristotle, 
 how clear a vision we get of a great intellect
 
 ARISTOTLE AND GOETHE 123 
 
 working out the very same problems that we have 
 to-day, and working them out to similiar conclu- 
 sions. 
 
 Now I pass from Aristotle to another great 
 mind of a very different order. Perhaps the 
 profoundest critic of life that ever existed was 
 Goethe ; certainly his was one of the most com- 
 prehensive intellects that the world has seen. 
 Now Goethe was not nominally a metaphysi- 
 cian ; indeed he might rather be said to have 
 laughed at all philosophy. Many of you will 
 recall the passage in Faust in which Mephisto- 
 pheles interviews the student and says to 
 him : 
 
 " Grau, theurer Freund, ist alle Theorie, 
 Und griin des Lebens goldner Baum." 
 
 Well, but although Goethe was not a professed 
 metaphysician, and may be said, indeed, to have 
 professed not to be a metaphysician, he was far 
 more of one than people generally think. That 
 great mind missed nothing. It had the power of 
 taking in the most different aspects of things, and 
 setting them together in great conceptions. There 
 is a metaphor which Mr Gladstone once used 
 of a great Parliamentary orator of his younger 
 days. He said of him that "his oratory took in 
 as vapour what it gave back in torrent." You 
 may say of Goethe that he absorbed in their most 
 abstract form the theories of science and philosophy 
 and poured them back in the concrete riches of 
 his poetry. For Goethe this question of the
 
 124 ABSOLUTE MIND OCT. v. 
 
 nature of God was one which was profoundly 
 interesting. If you wish to see how closely he 
 had given his mind to it you have only to turn up 
 the Correspondence, which is published in two 
 volumes, between him and Schiller, and to read 
 some of the letters in the beginning of the second 
 volume. There is one in particular which was 
 written from Weimar to Schiller, who was then at 
 Jena, on the 6th of January 1798, from which it 
 is plain that Goethe had been studying very closely 
 the teaching of Schelling. It is also plain from 
 the letters written about that period that Schiller 
 had been urging on him the study of Kant, and 
 that Goethe had applied himself to Kant and 
 also to some of the writings of Fichte. Goethe 
 also, as we know from the Eckermann Conver- 
 sations, saw a great deal of Hegel. To what 
 extent he was influenced by the younger men 
 we are not told, but in his writings there are 
 things which very plainly point to the influence 
 on him of Spinoza and also of the great school of 
 German idealists. There is one well-known poem 
 of which I will give you a rendering which has 
 been furnished to me, a poem which very strik- 
 ingly illustrates the artist's grasp of the very 
 conception which I have been pressing on you 
 throughout these lectures, that God is to be 
 sought not in some distant world, there and 
 then, but here and now, in what is present to 
 us, but comprehended in larger and fuller con- 
 ceptions than any that ordinarily pass current.
 
 GOETHE'S DESCRIPTION OF GOD 125 
 
 I will quote first the English rendering, and 
 then I will read the poem to you in the 
 German. 
 
 "In His name who hath Himself created, 
 And through eternity createth still ; 
 In His name who summoned into being 
 Faith, Love, Strength, Activity, and Will ; 
 In name of Him whom each man calls upon, 
 But Whom in essence no man ever knows : 
 
 As far as ear, as far as eye can reach, 
 All that we know is in His image shown, 
 That image and that likeness which suffice 
 The spirit's highest inspiration. 
 It speeds thee on, impels thee forward still, 
 And where thou wanderest all is fair for thee, 
 No longer shalt thou mark or reckon time, 
 But measureless shall every footstep be. 
 
 What were a God who ruled as from without, 
 Who let the world about His finger spin ? 
 Should He not be in Nature self-revealed, 
 And move and guide us rather from within ? 
 That all things which in Him exist and live, 
 May fail in naught of what His power can give. 
 
 Also there is a Universe within, 
 
 And thence the goodly custom which arose, 
 
 That every man should hail as very God, 
 
 The highest and the holiest thing he knows, 
 
 Shall yield both Heaven and Earth unto His sway, 
 
 Should fear Him, yea, and love Him where he may." 
 
 Some of you who know your Goethe will 
 recognise at once the first poem in the collection 
 which he published under the title of " Gott und 
 Welt" I will now give it in German, because
 
 126 ABSOLUTE MIND LECT. v. 
 
 you have it there in a way which even the best 
 English version cannot reproduce. 
 
 " Im Namen dessen, der Sich selbst erschuf 
 Vor Ewigkeit in schaffendem Beruf ; 
 In seinera Namen, der den Glauben schafft, 
 Vertrauen, Liebe, Thatigkeit und Kraft ; 
 In jenes Namen, der so oft genannt, 
 Dem Wesen nach blieb immer unbekannt : 
 
 So weit das Ohr, so weit das Auge reicht, 
 
 Du findest nur Bekanntes, das Ihm gleicht, 
 
 Und deines Geistes hochster Feuerflug, 
 
 Hat schon am Gleichniss, hat am Bild genug ; 
 
 Es zieht dich an, es reizt dich heiter fort, 
 
 Und wo du wandelst, schmiickt sich Weg und Ort ; 
 
 Du zahlst nicht mehr, berechnest keine Zeit, 
 
 Und jeder Schritt is Unermesslichkeit. 
 
 Was war' ein Gott der nur von Aussen stiesse, 
 Im Kreis das All am Finger laufen liesse, 
 Ihm zients' die Welt im Innern zu bewegen, 
 Natur in Sich, Sich in Natur zu hegen, 
 So dass, was in Ihm lebt und webt und ist, 
 Nie seine Kraft, nie Seinen Geist vermisst. 
 
 Im Innern ist ein Universum auch ; 
 Daher der Volker loblicher Gebrauch, 
 Das Jeglicher das Beste, was er kennt, 
 Er Gott, ja seinen Gott benennt, 
 Ihm Himmel und Erden uebergiebt, 
 Ihn furchtet, und wo moglich liebt." 
 
 Well, I will quote to you finally yet another 
 great man, and again of a very different type. 
 Luther, in his Commentary on the Book of Daniel, 
 has given us his definition of God, or perhaps it 
 would be more accurate to say his test of what is a
 
 LUTHER'S DEFINITION OF GOD 127 
 
 real conception of God. "A God," he says, "is 
 simply that whereon the human heart rests with 
 trust, faith, hope, and love. If the resting is right, 
 then the God is right ; if the resting is wrong, then 
 the God, too, is illusory." * 
 
 Now all these definitions by men of such 
 different minds as Aristotle, Goethe, and Luther, 
 are interesting in this, that they fix upon us the 
 imperative necessity of beginning with the here 
 and now if we would get to the nature of God. We 
 must look within ourselves. We must take mind 
 as it is and see what abstractions, what contrac- 
 tions, our plane of comprehension has brought 
 about, and if we find that by criticism we can free 
 ourselves from these abstractions, then the way lies 
 open to getting a plainer conception of what it is 
 that we are in search of. And so it comes about 
 that not only the metaphysicians but the poets 
 have been able to throw a light upon what, after 
 all, is the most profoundly absorbing problem 
 which can occupy humanity. 
 
 I now go back to the point at which I had 
 arrived. I have shown you what is the relation of 
 man to God, that it is the relation of mind compre- 
 hending itself at a lower level to mind comprehend- 
 
 * " Verum cum in Scriptura etiam idola aliquando Dii vocen- 
 tur, cumque Deus nihil aliud sit quam id, cui cor humanum se 
 credit, in quod spem omnem reponit, in quo fiduciam fixani 
 habet, quod am at. Si fiducia pia ac bona est turn et Deus verus 
 est. Si fiducia ilia erronea ac falsa est, turn et Deus nihil est." 
 Luther, Commentarius in Danielem Prophetam (Frankfort 1556), 
 p. 200 recto.
 
 128 ABSOLUTE MIND OCT. v. 
 
 ing itself at the highest level. Now if that be true 
 man must be at once in union with and in separa- 
 tion from God. If man's mind be just the infinite 
 mind comprehended at a lower plane, then it is 
 evident that you must have all the indications of 
 unity in combination with difference. And this 
 is because of the very character and nature of 
 thought, as I have already set it out before you 
 in the earlier lectures of this series. The nature of 
 the mind is to be activity, and not only activity, but 
 dialectical activity ; that is to say, activity which is 
 always seeking to realise itself in a higher truth, in 
 which it takes up aspects which it had before fixed 
 upon and set. One finds evidence of this in the 
 recognition made in all ages of the necessarily pro- 
 gressive nature of the human mind. You see it, for 
 example, in the doctrine of the Fall, and of the 
 Atonement. In the pictorial representation which 
 is given of man's early condition you have the 
 state of childlike innocence, from which there was 
 first a parting and then the return back to a state of 
 childlike innocence, but not until after much that 
 was disastrous had been passed through. But 
 there is a difference between the state of mind of 
 Adam before the Fall, and the state of mind to 
 which man is represented as brought back in the 
 scheme of salvation. In the mind of Adam you 
 have childlike innocence, no doubt, but it is the 
 innocence that comes of ignorance. In the course 
 of man's redemption you have a mind brought back 
 to God after having travelled along devious ways,
 
 THE SIN AGAINST THE HOLY GHOST 129 
 
 but ways which lead on to a higher level, until 
 in the end the new dispensation is seen to be a 
 higher dispensation than the old. And the reason 
 of this is just that the mind of man has been in all 
 ages recognised as having this double nature, the 
 tendency to alienate itself from God, and the 
 tendency, not less strongly marked, to bring itself 
 back again. 
 
 Man is conscious of separation from God in 
 that he is conscious of evil. But that is only one 
 side of man's nature. He is finite spirit, and in 
 his finiteness lies the possibility of the alienation. 
 But he is free finite spirit, for freedom is of the 
 very essence of spirit in whatever form you find 
 it. Man can choose evil or he can choose the 
 return to God. He is therefore responsible. He 
 only does choose evil when he abstracts from his 
 real relation to God, and so ignores and shuts out 
 his higher nature. 
 
 Now much speculation has been concentrated 
 in theological commentary upon the meaning of 
 what is called the sin against the Holy Ghost. 
 It is pretty plain that the idea underlying that sin 
 is simply the idea of the man who shuts himself 
 out from his higher nature, concentrates upon the 
 moment of alienation and excludes the moment of 
 return. It is a sin which is unforgivable in the 
 sense that there can be no talk of forgiveness 
 for the mind which does not seek forgiveness, which 
 does not seek by surrender of its finite ends to free 
 itself from the alienation. That has always seemed
 
 130 ABSOLUTE MIND OCT. v. 
 
 to me to be the idea which underlay the thoughts 
 of those who laid stress upon the peculiar and 
 baffling nature of this sin. 
 
 But now look at the other side of the picture. 
 Man is conscious of separation from God ; that is 
 to say, he is conscious of evil. But he is also in 
 potential union with God. He is conscious of the 
 capacity to lift himself towards God ; that is to say, 
 he has religion. When he renounces the will to 
 live, his private will, the will which seeks his own 
 finite ends, he has made the first step towards his 
 reconciliation with God ; that is to say, towards 
 the transcending of the separation which has 
 divided him from God, because, as we have seen, it 
 is these very finite ends, which by hypothesis he is 
 now renouncing, that have so coloured his view 
 of things, so dominated his self-comprehension, as 
 to throw his mind into the form of evil, of aliena- 
 tion. The consciousness of the possibility of 
 identity with God is the consciousness of the higher 
 side of his nature. Man dies to his private self in 
 order to live, when he renounces his private will. 
 His ends now become God's ends. Keligion is 
 an affair of the will, of a choice of ends, of an 
 identification of the will with the divine will. It is 
 therefore not theoretical but practical; it belongs 
 to the sphere of the will. 
 
 The consciousness of this potential identity, of 
 the significance of the renunciation which is 
 necessary if we are to transcend the endless chase 
 which is the characteristic of every process in
 
 RELIGION 131 
 
 time, including the effort, however strenuous, at 
 self-realisation in a social life in the world, is just 
 religion. But, as in the case of the self -represen- 
 tative series which we discussed before, the life in 
 this world, the life in hetereity, is an essential 
 moment in the process without which the higher 
 could not come to be. We have to die that we 
 may live, and we equally have to live that we 
 may die. The old dispensation is essential for the 
 accomplishment of the new dispensation. 
 
 One understands better, in the light of these 
 considerations, why it was that the chase of 
 psychology after the self, which I traced out for 
 you in the old course of lectures, proved so vain. 
 The self of man in ultimate analysis discloses itself 
 as free finite spirit. It cannot be got at as spirit, 
 as subject, by the abstract and presentational 
 method of psychology. This was found to con- 
 sist in the fixing upon an aspect of the mind 
 which was artificially set by itself and preserved 
 in rigid self-identity. The method of presenta- 
 tionism, as explained and criticised by Professor 
 Miinsterberg in the book which I quoted to you so 
 much in the last lectures, consists in the taking 
 of the mind as though it were but an object, 
 fixing it in thought as if it were but a series of 
 feelings succeeding one another in time, and 
 regarding the conception so obtained as an ade- 
 quate conception of the mind. So it is for the 
 purposes of psychology ; you must treat it so if you 
 are to get that possibility of measurement which
 
 132 ABSOLUTE MIND OCT. v. 
 
 first becomes open to you by connecting the series 
 so obtained with the physical events to which the 
 modern physiological psychologist attaches so much 
 importance. But that is not a final notion of 
 the mind, and it is not a notion which can ever 
 lead you to any adequate grasp of the self. The 
 self we can get at, but only after we have found 
 that the process of psychological analysis is of no 
 use for our purpose. If you take the two moments 
 in the presentation of the individual, body and soul, 
 and seek for the conception in which alone they 
 cease to be self-contradictory abstractions, you find 
 it in the conception of the finite self as free finite 
 spirit. Because the comprehension of the free 
 spirit is here finite, its self-comprehension does not 
 wholly overcome the externality in which it appears 
 before itself, if I may use an expression that I have 
 used before. Because his plane of comprehension 
 is imperfect nature appears to man as a series of 
 facts in mutual exclusion. It discloses a want of 
 rationality and a certain contingency, inasmuch as 
 he cannot bring these mutually exclusive events 
 into any relationship which will rid them of the 
 foreign aspect which they present to thought. 
 
 But it is only for finite mind, the mind which 
 operates under finite categories and by understand- 
 ing, as distinguished from the comprehension of 
 reason, that nature appears thus hard-and-fast. 
 Hegel points out in a passage in his Philosophy of 
 Religion that " Nature enters into a relation with 
 man only, and not on its own account into a relation
 
 NATURE EXISTS FOE FINITE MIND 133 
 
 with God, for nature is not knowledge ; God is 
 Spirit, but nature knows nothing of Spirit." * 
 
 Now, that is a very remarkable piece of 
 criticism. What Hegel says is that, for the know- 
 ledge of God, nature does not appear as it does 
 to us, and that it is real only at the plane of self- 
 comprehension of the finite mind. In a higher 
 kind of knowledge nature would not appear as 
 it does to us, would not exist in the fixity and 
 contingency which characterises it for our finite 
 plane of reflection. The form, he says, in which 
 you find nature arises only in and through the 
 finite mind. It is only for the spirit that is limited 
 by the categories of finiteness that the vision of 
 nature as external, irrational, and irresoluble by 
 intelligence, exists, just as in the same way it is 
 only for the finite spirit that evil exists. The man 
 who could always remain at a high plane would 
 not be tempted. It is only when he lets himself 
 down to the lower level that he is apt to make the 
 choice of what is evil. And so it comes that it is 
 only for finite spirit and because of the freedom of 
 finite spirit that evil exists. Evil has no direct 
 relation to God any more than nature has. Both 
 appear only in the relations of finiteness and for the 
 spirit that is finite. 
 
 There is another very important passage of 
 Hegel which occurs just a few sentences above the 
 one which I have quoted to you from the Religions- 
 
 * Hegel, Philosophy of Religion, English Translation, vol. iii., 
 p. 42.
 
 134 ABSOLUTE MIND OCT. v. 
 
 Philosophie, and I will read it, because it may now 
 throw light for you on what we have been dis- 
 cussing : 
 
 " Another question," says Hegel, " or what is 
 partly the same question with a broader meaning, 
 is raised when it is said that the world or matter, 
 inasmuch as it is regarded as having existed from 
 all eternity, is uncreated and exists immediately for 
 itself. The separation made by the understanding 
 between form and matter lies at the basis of this 
 statement ; while the real truth is that matter and 
 the world, regarded according to their fundamental 
 characteristics, are this Other, the negative which 
 is itself simply a moment or element of posited 
 being. This is the opposite of something independ- 
 ent, and the meaning of its existence is simply 
 that it. annuls itself, and is a moment in the 
 process. The natural world is relative, it is 
 appearance; i.e., it is this not only for us but 
 implicitly, and it belongs to its quality or character 
 to pass over and return into the ultimate Idea. 
 
 "... The Idea is manifested, but its content is 
 just the manifestation, and consists in its distin- 
 guishing itself as an Other, and then taking back this 
 Other into itself, so that the expression taking back 
 applies equally to what is done outside and inside. 
 In nature these stages break up into a system of 
 Kingdoms of Nature of which that of living things 
 is the highest. Life, however, the highest form in 
 which the Idea exhibits itself in nature, is simply 
 something which sacrifices itself and whose essence
 
 HEGEL ON FINITENESS 135 
 
 is to become Spirit, and this act of sacrifice is the 
 negativity of the Idea as against its existence in 
 this form. Spirit is just this act of advance into 
 reality by means of nature ; i.e., Spirit finds its 
 antithesis or opposite in Nature, and it is by the 
 annulling of this opposition that it exists for itself 
 and is Spirit. The finite world is the side of the 
 difference which is put in contrast with the side 
 which remains in its unity, and thus it breaks up 
 into the natural world and the world of finite 
 Spirit."* There you have in Hegel's own language 
 the substance of what it has taken three lectures to 
 set out before you. 
 
 Now I have discussed how it is that we come 
 to appear to ourselves as though our mind had a 
 local position in space and time and were a pro- 
 duct of natural evolution, because that is the 
 meaning of what we have been considering, the 
 appearance of nature as something which limits the 
 mind, as the other, to which the mind stands in 
 relation. The understanding fixes exclusively upon 
 the moment of antithesis in the logical process. 
 It fixes upon the limitation of the mind which 
 is characteristic of the finite standpoint, discovers 
 the other of the mind in nature, and then pro- 
 ceeds to set in contrast to mind the nature which 
 confronts it. One aspect becomes dependent 
 upon the other and cannot be separated from it. 
 The finite mind is conscious of itself as belonging 
 
 * Hegel, Philosophy of Religion, English Translation, vol. iii., 
 p. 40.
 
 136 ABSOLUTE MIND [LKT. v . 
 
 to the object world, and so as related to nature, 
 and not only to nature in the sense of mere exter- 
 nality in space and time, but to other finite minds 
 which it conceives as having, not only a connection 
 with nature, but a local position in it, as having 
 position in space and as being, like itself, the pro- 
 duct of evolution in time. 
 
 The finite mode of looking at things never 
 completely transcends the appearance of externality 
 that is characteristic of its finiteness ; indeed, if it 
 did, our knowledge would be not the knowledge 
 of finite men but as God's knowledge. Yet its 
 concepts, its concepts even of itself, are altering, 
 developing concepts. In the finite mind you have 
 as its characteristic the dialectical movement, the 
 process of self- comprehension and, in that sense, of 
 self- evolution, just as markedly as you have it in 
 the absolute mind, but with the stages less perfectly 
 separated out. If you take the finite mind as it 
 manifests itself to itself in externality, the conscious- 
 ness of a child, let us say, and trace it psychologi- 
 cally, you find that this is so. As I showed you in 
 the first set of lectures, the true view of the way in 
 which a child's mind grows is not to look on it 
 as a process of piecing together ideas which exist 
 in independent completeness and are as it were 
 brought in and put together like a tesselated 
 pavement in the child's mind. The true view is 
 that there is a development from what is inde- 
 finite to what is definite, the differentiation of 
 what begins as a psychological continuum into
 
 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MIND 137 
 
 more definite form. All this has been worked 
 out by Professor Ward in his great article on 
 "Psychology" in the Encyclopcedia Britannica ; 
 and I do not go back to the matter because I 
 discussed it pretty fully in last year's lectures. The 
 point of it is that the child's mind differentiates 
 itself through the course of its experience out of 
 what is indefinite. 
 
 Now if that be true we have in it just the 
 imperfect picture in time of what takes place in 
 thought. In thought you have what comes first, 
 implying, as what gives meaning to it and gives 
 it reality, the larger conception which it may 
 reach only at the end of a process in time, but 
 which was implicit from the very beginning. In 
 nature we see stages in the evolution of logical 
 conception. We have such stages in number, the 
 externality of which is transcended in the categories 
 of mechanism, categories which import and imply 
 something more than rigid externality. Yet these 
 are themselves transcended in life, where you have 
 got rid of the indifference to each other of the parts 
 in mechanism, and have reached the whole which 
 realises itself in and controls the parts and yet is 
 nothing outside or distinct from them. In like 
 manner you have the spectacle of what is a pro- 
 gressively fuller self-comprehension on the part 
 even of the finite mind. We can see how that 
 arises not only in our individual selves but in our 
 social consciousness. Take my relation to other 
 people in the world in which I live. My conscious-
 
 138 ABSOLUTE MIND CL ECT . v. 
 
 ness of myself and the meaning which I attach to 
 my own personality are a consciousness and a mean- 
 ing which grow as grows the definiteness of my 
 conception of the other persons. The one reacts 
 upon the other. The comprehension of the identity 
 of the self with that other who is recognised as 
 equally a self, bound together with me in a common 
 social whole, is one of the instruments by which I 
 work out my own self-comprehension. The notion 
 of such a whole is larger than the notion of the 
 particular self from which I start, because it is freer 
 from the exclusiveness of externality. If I think of 
 myself merely as MOY ^confronted by a mechanical 
 world, I think of two objects which I separate from 
 each other as substances. When I think of M or 
 N as in a social world with duties and obligations 
 and common ties with other inhabitants of that 
 world, then I have got to a larger and higher con- 
 ception, and one at which I am above the exter- 
 nality of nature. 
 
 In his book on Philosophical Theory of the 
 State, Professor Bosanquet has worked this out 
 very fully. He shows how the reflection of the 
 action of our own selves in the action of other 
 men and women does much to stimulate and to 
 develop our own consciousness of self. He draws 
 the inference that every social group, the family, 
 the city, the state, is the exhibition in space and 
 time of the totality of the corresponding mental 
 systems of individual minds. The social group or 
 whole, he points out, must be a whole gathering
 
 into itself psychical dispositions and activities, 
 answering to one another in indeterminate ways. 
 The social whole is therefore of the nature of a 
 continuous or self-identical mind pervading a 
 system of differences and realised in them. It 
 differs from a machine, and even from a living 
 organism, in that the whole is present in every 
 part, not merely for the observer, but, through 
 the nature of consciousness, in some degree, at 
 least, for the part itself. It is not the less real 
 because it is in a plurality of natural individuals 
 that it is realised. And, like all the conceptions 
 of reason, it contains the potentiality of its own 
 supersession in a yet deeper and fuller conception. 
 Purpose, the seeking to fulfil definite ends, has 
 brought it about. Deeper purposes and larger ends 
 point us to a continuation that goes beyond it. 
 
 Now that is the analysis of a philosopher. Let 
 me contrast it with the same conclusion reached by 
 one who was not a professed philosopher and 
 whom I have quoted before, Carlyle. I shall just 
 take a few sentences from Sartor Resartus, 
 because they very strikingly illustrate the way in 
 which Carlyle had come to much the same view 
 of the nature of the relation of man to the social 
 whole as has Professor Bosanquet, and as have those 
 who have maintained the thesis which is the subject 
 of these lectures. 
 
 "Of man's Activity and Attainment," says 
 Carlyle in the 8th chapter of the Second Book of 
 Sartor Resartus, "the chief results are aeriform,
 
 140 ABSOLUTE MIND OCT. v . 
 
 mystic, and preserved in Tradition only : such are 
 his Forms of Government, with the Authority they 
 rest on ; his Customs, or Fashions both of Cloth- 
 habits and of Soul-habits ; much more his collective 
 stock of Handicrafts, the whole Faculty he has 
 acquired of manipulating Nature : all these things, 
 as indispensable and priceless as they are, cannot 
 in any way be fixed under lock and key, but must 
 flit, spirit-like, on impalpable vehicles, from Father 
 to Son ; if you, demand sight of them, they are 
 nowhere to be met with. Visible Ploughmen and 
 Hammermen there have been, even from Cain and 
 Tubal-Cain downwards : but where does your 
 accumulated Agricultural, Metallurgic, and other 
 Manufacturing Skill lie warehoused. It transmits 
 itself on the atmospheric air, on the Sun's rays (by 
 Hearing and Vision) ; it is a thing aeriform, im- 
 palpable, of quite spiritual sort. In like manner 
 ask me not, Where are the Laws; where is the 
 Government ? In vain wilt thou go to Schonbrunn, 
 to Downing Street, to the Palais Bourbon : thou 
 findest nothing there but brick or stone houses, 
 and some bundles of papers, tied with tape. 
 Where then is that same cunningly devised al- 
 mighty Government of theirs to be laid hands on ? 
 Everywhere yet nowhere : seen only in its works, 
 this too is a thing aeriform, invisible ; or if you will, 
 mystic and miraculous. So spiritual (geistig) is 
 our whole daily Life : all that we do springs out of 
 Mystery, Spirit, Invisible Force ; only like a little 
 Cloud-image, or Armida's Palace, air-built, does
 
 FURTHER ILLUSTRATIONS 141 
 
 the Actual body itself forth from the great mystic 
 Deep."* 
 
 Well, there you come very near to language 
 which might be the language of any metaphysician, 
 and yet it is the language of one who was observ- 
 ing in the concrete, and expressing merely the 
 reflections which a historian, who was at the same 
 time a poet, would make upon what passed before 
 him. 
 
 I will conclude this lecture by quoting to you, 
 in his own words, something else that Professor 
 Bosanquet has said, because it is something that 
 points us to what lies beyond even the ends and 
 purposes which are embodied in the social whole. 
 
 " We have taken," he says, " Society and the 
 State throughout to have their value in the human 
 capacities which they are the means of realising, in 
 which realisation their social aspect is an inevitable 
 condition (for human nature is not complete in soli- 
 tude), but is not, by itself, in its form of multitudes, 
 the end. There is, therefore, no breach of continuity 
 when the immediate participation of numbers, the 
 direct moulding of life by the claims and relations 
 of selves, falls away, and the human mind, consoli- 
 dated and sustained by society, goes further on its 
 path in removing contradictions and shaping its 
 world and itself into unity. Art, philosophy, and 
 religion, though in a sense the very life-blood of 
 society, are not and could not be directly fashioned 
 to meet the needs and uses of the multitude, and 
 
 * Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, Book II., Ch. 8.
 
 142 ABSOLUTE MIND [LOT. v. 
 
 their aim is not in that sense 'social.' They 
 should rather be regarded as a continuation, within 
 and founded on the Commonwealth, of the work 
 which the Commonwealth begins in realising 
 human nature ; as fuller utterances of the same 
 universal self which the ' general will ' reveals in 
 more precarious forms ; and as in the same sense 
 implicit in the consciousness of all, being an in- 
 heritance which is theirs so far as they can take 
 possession of it." * 
 
 * Bosanquet, Philosophical Theory of the State, pp. 332, 333.
 
 LECTURE VI 
 
 I WILL begin this lecture by answering a question 
 which has been put to me by one of my audience. 
 I am asked to explain how I understand self-con- 
 sciousness to exist apart from actual physical brain- 
 cells, changes within which are to be held re- 
 sponsible for all mind activity. Well, I dealt with 
 that question at some length in the first six lectures 
 of the last series, and the point of the answer 
 which I then gave was this. All competent thinkers 
 agree that you cannot stop with the mere picture 
 of thought as a function of the brain. The brain 
 and the whole of the external world as it appears 
 in space and time are only there, in the deepest 
 sense at all events, in the mind or for the mind 
 that perceives them. That was what Berkeley and 
 Mill taught, and what men like Mr Herbert Spencer 
 teach, and the true controversy that arises is as to 
 what brings about the appearance of objectivity or 
 reality which this picture presents. I took Mill as 
 my text in the lectures to which I allude, and I 
 showed you how Mill brings you to the conclusion 
 that it is in the fact that we must so think these 
 things that we find what we mean by their reality. 
 
 148
 
 144 ABSOLUTE MIND [L.CT. vi. 
 
 I pointed out to you that this analysis was one 
 which did not go deep enough, but that it at all 
 events dispelled the notion that thought could be 
 regarded merely as a function or product of the 
 brain. It is quite true that in a certain way we do 
 regard and must regard our minds as in time and 
 as conditioned by a body which exists in space and 
 time, but that view of the relationship belongs only 
 to the picture which we have, as it were, painted 
 for ourselves, and it is the hard-and-fastness of that 
 picture which these lectures were directed to explain. 
 I took an illustration, which perhaps is not a bad 
 one upon this point, the illustration of the stereo- 
 scope. You look through the stereoscope at a flat 
 piece of paper, and the lines which have been 
 arranged on it stand out as if they were in three 
 dimensions, instead of merely in two as we know 
 they are. Now, everybody who looks through the 
 stereoscope has the same conviction, that the lines 
 are standing out in three dimensions. That is 
 because everybody who looks through the stereo- 
 scope under the influence of suggestion thinks 
 things in the same way, but abstracts from the cir- 
 cumstances in which his knowledge arises. He 
 ignores the relation which would account for that 
 abnormal presentation, and that is how he falls 
 into the mistake of taking it to represent reality. 
 In other words, he has not fully comprehended 
 what is the object of his contemplation. Well, in 
 the same way we form a picture of the mind as 
 dependent on and contained by a body, a picture
 
 SOUL AND BODY 145 
 
 the origin of which we do not fully comprehend. 
 It is quite right that we should form such a picture ; 
 it is the picture which we have to form in order to 
 fulfil the purposes which are ours in our everyday 
 intercourse with our fellow human beings. But the 
 picture of the world that is ours and our fellow 
 human beings' is a picture which has grown in its 
 definiteness in a fashion akin to the picture which we 
 get through the stereoscope. Therefore my answer 
 to my questioner is that while this view is not only 
 a legitimate one for everyday life, but the view which 
 we adopt in psychological investigation, it is a view 
 which is abstract, and that its abstractness arises 
 from this, that the mind in making it has not fully 
 comprehended it own operation. I should like to 
 be able to follow out this topic, but were I to do 
 so it would land me in anthropology and psychology, 
 and it would take six lectures at least to trace out 
 the whole of the reasons why the mind comes to 
 present itself to itself in the form of something con- 
 ditioned by a body. I have touched on it in some 
 of the lectures in this series, but those of you who 
 wish to follow the subject further, and who read 
 German, cannot do better than turn to a book a 
 short book of about 130 pages which was written 
 by Erdmann on the subject, under the title Leib und 
 Seele, and which has been re-edited by a Dutch 
 professor, Professor Boland. It is plain from Pro- 
 fessor Boland's Introduction to that book that 
 whether Hegelianism is alive in Germany or not 
 
 it is very much alive in Holland, and the book, to 
 
 K
 
 146 ABSOLUTE MIND [LECT. . 
 
 which he has contributed some valuable notes, is 
 the most modern exposition I know of the Hegelian 
 position on this point. 
 
 Now I come back to my topic. In the last 
 lecture which I delivered I pointed out to you that 
 great thinkers of the most various types had been 
 in accord with the conclusions to which I was 
 leading you. I showed you that Aristotle and 
 Goethe, approaching the subject in entirely different 
 fashions, had arrived at what was in substance a 
 common result. Now, to some of you it may seem 
 depressing that after two thousand years of work 
 we should be going back to Aristotle, and discover- 
 ing that he had found out these things long ago. 
 But there is another side to that reflection. It is 
 comforting to think that the truth is nothing so 
 buried away that the human intelligence has not 
 been able to get at it. It is a satisfaction that the 
 great thinkers, in their diverse investigations into 
 the meaning of reality, have arrived at substantially 
 the same result as to its ultimate nature. That 
 gives you the sense that the ground is more solid 
 than people sometimes make out. There is another 
 consideration which must be borne in mind by those 
 who think that there ought to be the same sort of 
 progress in philosophy that there is in science. In 
 science the results which are reached by one 
 generation are often superseded by the further 
 results obtained by a subsequent generation. Much 
 of what even Newton taught us is no longer suffi- 
 cient, for mathematics and physics have now got
 
 ART 147 
 
 further than Newton had got. But that arises from 
 the character of what science has to deal with. 
 Science investigates I am taking science in its 
 narrower sense the relations of things in space 
 and time, and because it is carrying out the investi- 
 gation of relations in space and time it is dealing 
 with a field in which an endless progress is inevit- 
 able. There is no limit to space, there is no limit 
 to time, considered as stretched out before us, and 
 therefore there is no end to the possibilities of an 
 inquiry conducted progressively into the content of 
 that world which is stretched out in space and in 
 time. You are always adding to your knowledge, 
 and your method cannot sum up the series. 
 
 But there is another department of the mind 
 where what you meet with is quite different in 
 character. In art you deal with the concrete 
 immediacy that confronts you. You do not try to 
 break things up into abstract relations ; you try to 
 grasp what is highest in the world as it seems, and 
 to present it at the highest level that the human 
 mind is capable of. That is done, not by analysis, 
 but by the insight of genius, when you have art in 
 its highest form, and the result is that it is done 
 once for all. We do not expect that the progress of 
 another two thousand years will enable the human 
 intelligence to produce anything greater of its kind 
 than a Dante, or a Shakespeare, or a Milton has 
 given to us. They have shown us what the aperpu 
 of the human mind at its highest can amount to. 
 We do not ask that what they have done should
 
 148 ABSOLUTE MIND [L^cx. vr. 
 
 be superseded, because we see that it is individual 
 and cannot recur. 
 
 Well, philosophy stands midway between science 
 and art. It too, like art, is not concerned with the 
 endless progress of space and time relations. But, 
 unlike art, its business is to comprehend in the 
 forms of abstract thought, and consequently it 
 occupies an intermediate position, a position in 
 which it has, as it were, to deal with a series, but 
 to deal with it upon the side of its summing up. 
 And in that way philosophy, while it discloses 
 progress, can disclose it only in the form of an 
 increasingly complete grasp of the conception of 
 reality which its great founders have fashioned out. 
 
 The history of philosophy is indeed no vain 
 succession of system succeeded by system and 
 thrown aside as if it had not been. We witness in 
 this history the progressive deepening of the grasp 
 which the human mind has got upon the nature of 
 reality ; we see the evolution of a conception in 
 which past systems are not left behind as they 
 would be on a journey through the world, but in 
 which what is true in these past systems is taken up 
 and preserved in those that succeed them. 
 
 Well, that is a reflection which may give some 
 comfort to those who despair of philosophy. Phi- 
 losophy is really the study of the self-comprehen- 
 sion of the mind, and its subject is neither the 
 endless progress which you have in science, nor the 
 immediacy and individuality of the sense pictures 
 with which art deals.
 
 HEGEL ON THE WORK OF MIND 149 
 
 Now I want to sum up, because I think it may 
 make a little more clear to you what I have been 
 doing, the result of the standpoint which I have 
 been seeking to suggest to you, in other words than 
 my own, and I am going to take a passage- or 
 rather two passages from Hegel and to give you 
 in his own words what his view of the work of 
 philosophy is. " The world," he says, " into whose 
 depths thought penetrates is a supra-sensuous world, 
 which is thus, to begin with, erected as a beyond 
 over against immediate consciousness and present 
 sensation ; the power which thus rescues itself from 
 the here that consists in the actuality and finiteness 
 of sense, is the freedom of thought in knowledge. 
 But the mind is able to heal this schism which its 
 advance creates ; it generates," and here he is 
 speaking of a particular phase of it, " out of itself 
 the works of fine art as the first middle term of 
 reconciliation between pure thought and what is 
 external, sensuous, and transitory, between nature, 
 with its finite actuality, and the infinite freedom of 
 the reason that comprehends." 
 
 Then he goes on in a passage later in the same 
 book to say this : t 
 
 "The modern moralistic view starts from the 
 fixed antithesis of the will in its spiritual universality 
 to its sensuous natural particularity, and consists, 
 not in the completed reconciliation of these con- 
 trasted sides, but in their conflict with one another, 
 
 * Hegel, Introduction to Philosophy of Fine Art, Bosanquet's 
 Translation, p. 13. t Ibid., p. 101.
 
 150 ABSOLUTE MIND [LECT. vi. 
 
 which involves the requirement that the impulses 
 which conflict with duty ought to yield to it. This 
 antithesis does not merely display itself for our 
 consciousness in the limited region of moral action ; 
 but also emerges as a fundamental distinction and 
 antagonism between that which is essentially and in 
 its own right, and that which is external reality and 
 existence. Formulated in the abstract, it is the 
 contrast of the universal and particular when the 
 former is explicitly fixed over against the latter, 
 just as the latter is over against the former ; more 
 concretely, it appears in nature as the opposition of 
 the abstract law against the abundance of individual 
 phenomena, each having its own character ; in the 
 mind as the sensuous and spiritual in man, as the 
 battle of the spirit against the flesh, of duty for 
 duty's sake, the cold command, with the individual 
 interest, the sensuous inclinations and impulses, the 
 individual disposition as such ; as the hard conflict 
 of inward freedom and of natural conception 
 empty in itself compared with full concrete 
 vitality ; or of theory and subjective thought con- 
 trasted with objective existence and experience. 
 
 "These are antitheses which have not been 
 invented either by the subtlety of reflection or by 
 the pedantry of philosophy, but which have from 
 all time and in manifold forms preoccupied and 
 disquieted the human consciousness, although it 
 was modern culture that elaborated them most 
 distinctly, and forced them up to the point of most 
 unbending contradiction. Intellectual culture and
 
 HEGEL CONTINUED 151 
 
 the modern play of understanding create in man 
 this contrast, which makes him an amphibious 
 animal, inasmuch as it sets him to live in two 
 contradictory worlds at once ; so that even con- 
 sciousness wanders back and forwards in this 
 contradiction, and, shuttle-cocked from side to side, 
 is unable to satisfy itself as itself on one side or 
 the other. For, on the one side, we see man a 
 prisoner in common reality and earthly temporality, 
 oppressed by want and poverty, hard driven by 
 nature, entangled in matter, in sensuous aims and 
 their enjoyments ; on the other side, he exalts 
 himself to eternal ideas, to a realm of thought and 
 freedom, imposes on himself as a will universal 
 laws and attributions, strips his world of its living 
 and nourishing reality, and dissolves it into abstrac- 
 tions, inasmuch as the mind is put upon vindicating 
 its rights and its dignity simply by denying the 
 rights of nature and maltreating it, thereby retaliat- 
 ing the oppression and violence which itself has 
 experienced from nature. Such a discrepancy in 
 life and consciousness involves for modern culture 
 and its understanding the demand that the con- 
 tradiction should be resolved. Yet the under- 
 standing cannot release itself from the fixity of 
 these antitheses. The solution, therefore, remains 
 for consciousness a mere ought, and the present 
 and reality only stir themselves in the unrest of a 
 perpetual to and fro, which seeks a reconciliation 
 without finding it. Thus the question arises, 
 whether such a many-sided and fundamental
 
 152 ABSOLUTE MIND [LECT. vi. 
 
 opposition, which never gets beyond a mere ought 
 and a postulated solution, can be the genuine and 
 complete truth, and, in general, the supreme 
 purpose. If the culture of the world has fallen 
 into such a contradiction, it becomes the task of 
 philosophy to undo or cancel it, i.e., to show that 
 neither the one alternative in its abstraction nor 
 the other in similar one-sidedness possesses truth, 
 but that they are essentially self-dissolving; that 
 truth only lies in the conciliation and mediation of 
 the two, and that this mediation is no mere postu- 
 late, bat is in its nature and in reality accomplished, 
 and always self -accomplishing. This intention 
 agrees directly with the natural faith and will, 
 which always has present to the mind's eye pre- 
 cisely this resolved antithesis, and in action makes 
 it its purpose and achieves it. All that philosophy 
 does is to furnish a reflective insight into the 
 essence of the antithesis in so far as it shows that 
 what constitutes truth is merely the resolution of 
 the antithesis, and that not in the sense that the 
 conflict and its aspects in any way are not, but in 
 the sense that they are, in reconciliation." 
 
 Well, there you have the substance and essence 
 of what I have been saying put in another form. 
 It is a summing up of the method which thought 
 must resort to if it is to get rid of the gaps and the 
 antithesis which itself has created. The nature of 
 thought and reality cannot be got at psychologically 
 
 * Hegel, Introduction to Philosophy of Fine Art, Bosanquet's 
 Translation, p. 101.
 
 THE NARROW VIEW OF THOUGHT 153 
 
 by the presentationism which isolates thought from 
 feeling and gives it a relational and what is some- 
 times called a discursive appearance. Great 
 difficulty has been caused in the understanding of 
 idealism by the notion that things exist, on the one 
 hand, out there in their hard-and-fastness in- 
 dependently of the mind for which they are what 
 they are, and on the other hand, that thought is 
 something that we can isolate and distinguish from 
 the other faculties and contents of the mind as if it 
 had a position by itself. In grammar we break up 
 the language which embodies thought into different 
 parts, the subject, the predicate, and the copula, as 
 though the copula were something which had 
 existence apart from the other two which it unites. 
 It is grammar and the old division of logic, based 
 upon a scheme which Aristotle who founded it 
 probably used for a special purpose and not as a 
 guide to what he was teaching his pupils of the 
 nature of reality, that have led to much of the 
 difficulty that we often experience to-day. Just as 
 in psychology we fall into presentationism to use 
 Miinsterberg's phrase which I have so often used 
 before in these lectures the setting of feeling as 
 not, what it is in reality, a part of the continuous flow 
 of the content of the mind, but as something which 
 can be isolated and treated as though it had an in- 
 dependent existence apart from the other contents 
 of the mind, so in ordinary logic and psychology 
 we are very apt to do the same with thought. 
 We do it for some purposes, and it is right that
 
 154 ABSOLUTE MIND [LECT. vi. 
 
 we should do it for some purposes, just as in psy- 
 chology it is necessary to resort to the method of 
 presentationism, but when you come to talk of the 
 nature of reality and when you are inquiring into 
 the meaning of things by the methods which we 
 
 / 
 
 are using here, the conception of thought in which 
 it is presented as an element existing apart from 
 feeling is not only a narrow one, but a false and 
 extremely misleading one. 
 
 Of course, thoughts do not make things. It is 
 ridiculous to suppose that thought, in that narrow 
 sense, can give you the meaning and nature of reality 
 as consisting in what is reducible to such thought. 
 The ignoring of the fact that thought has a wider 
 meaning in which it embraces the entire activity of 
 the mind, has led to a vast amount of confusion and 
 fallacious reasoning. 
 
 Yet it is by asking what to be means, and by 
 purifying our notion of the work of the mind, which 
 bodies itself forth in reality, from the abstract 
 fashions of regarding it which are useful for every- 
 day purposes, that we make progress. The plane 
 of our degree of reality in the self-development 
 of absolute self-comprehension is what we have to 
 clear our minds about. Our self-comprehension, the 
 self-comprehension of finite mind, is only partial, 
 just because mind in that form has imposed on itself 
 the categories of what is partial, the conceptions of 
 finitude. But we cannot entertain the notion that 
 such limitations are final in the mind that fully com- 
 prehends itself as that within which all reality falls.
 
 THE WIDER VIEW OF THOUGHT 155 
 
 For the absolute mind and in the absolute mind to 
 think must be to create. It is obvious that in saying 
 this I am taking the word " thought " in the wider 
 sense. To think is to create ; in other words, for 
 this is the other side of that reflection, intelligence 
 and will must fall together. If we were at the plane 
 of absolute self-comprehension, relieved from those 
 categories of finitude which are always imposing 
 upon us the necessity of conceiving everything as 
 having reference to another beyond it, something 
 foreign to itself, we should comprehend the world 
 as God comprehends it. 
 
 Now, this idea of complete self- comprehen- 
 sion is no new idea. You find it in the poets. I 
 go for illustration to another poet, a speculative 
 poet, yet one who was less speculative than Goethe. 
 Most of you here know Tennyson's little poem, a 
 very short one, on the flower in the crannied wall : 
 
 " Flower in the crannied wall, 
 
 I pluck you out of the crannies ; 
 
 Hold you here, root and all, in my hand, 
 Little flower but if I could understand 
 What you are, root and all, and all in all, 
 I should know what God and Man is." 
 
 Well, God as self-consciousness, the basis and 
 presupposition of even our capacity to reflect about 
 Him, must have an object from which He distin- 
 guishes Himself. I showed you in a previous 
 lecture that even a sceptical question could only be 
 raised upon the basis that it was an "I" that reflects, 
 that to be self-conscious was the very characteristic
 
 156 ABSOLUTE MIND OCT. VI . 
 
 of mind, that the very nature of mind consisted in 
 being self-conscious. But in self-consciousness 
 we distinguish the self from something else. This is 
 of the essence of the conception of self, and that char- 
 acteristic must in some sort be the characteristic 
 of Absolute Mind, as it is of mind at the plane 
 of finite comprehension. If the Absolute Mind 
 must have, as is implied in the fact of self -conscious- 
 ness, an object, it is plain that that object can only 
 be itself. For the Absolute Mind nothing can have 
 any meaning, outside itself. Its object must fall 
 within itself, can only be within itself. It must find 
 the necessary distinction from itself in an Other that 
 is just itself. The mind of God must have in its 
 Other itself, and must recognise in that Other just 
 Himself in the form of otherness. 
 
 Now that is not a modern conception. That is 
 a conception which was embodied by Aristotle in 
 his famous definition of God, the infinite intelli- 
 gence, as the vorjans votj<reu>?, " the knowledge of itself 
 by knowledge." Absolute Mind can only think 
 itself, and can only find the necessary distinction 
 from itself in the Other which is just itself. That 
 Other is for it, and the only finitude that comes in 
 is not, and cannot be, finitude as belonging to the 
 Absolute Mind as such, but to the Absolute Mind 
 as Other to itself. It must recognise in its object 
 itself, and itself as having assumed as object the 
 form of finitude which for the Absolute Mind is thus 
 an aspect in its own self-comprehension. Just 
 because the other, the object of which the Absolute
 
 THE ABSOLUTE IN OTHERNESS 157 
 
 Mind is conscious, is mind itself, the other must 
 appear as a mind which knows, but knows having 
 assumed the form of finitude. The Absolute Mind, 
 of course, does not as such comprehend under the 
 form of finitude, but its object, which is just itself 
 as subject known as such in knowledge, appears as 
 mind which has imposed upon itself the form of 
 dependence on another to which it stands in con- 
 trast, and therefore knows under finite cate- 
 gories. 
 
 Now, if that is so the Absolute Mind has before 
 it in the mind which is its object a mind for which 
 nature and evil, which cannot be for it directly, can 
 arise because of the nature of finitude, and these 
 therefore touch the Absolute Mind only indirectly, 
 in an aspect only of its self-comprehension. That is 
 how the Absolute Mind realises itself in the process 
 into which it is necessary that it should go in order 
 to the enrichment of its self-consciousness. Without 
 an object there could be no self-consciousness ; with- 
 out these distinctions there could be no content for 
 the Absolute Mind ; and yet in making these dis- 
 tinctions it must comprehend them as falling within 
 itself, and as created by itself. 
 
 That is how God's nature is eternal activity, how 
 He, so to speak, goes out into series and yet remains 
 as the sum of the series an eternal now which is 
 not distinguished from but is the inclusion in itself, 
 in a superseded and transmuted form, of the moments 
 of past and future. In an ordinary time series we dis- 
 tinguish past, present, and future as three moments
 
 158 ABSOLUTE MIND [LECT. vt. 
 
 which are related to one another, and are not wholly 
 mutually exclusive like parts in space, yet we never 
 transcend wholly the foreignness which time pre- 
 sents, the externality to each other of the members 
 of its series for thought. But in such a series as I 
 have been describing to you the whole of the series 
 is summed up in an eternal now which does not 
 make time unmeaning, but must transmute and 
 supersede the notion of the past and the future as 
 facts which limit or make finite the now, the eternal 
 now of perfect comprehension. 
 
 Well, the purpose of the Absolute Mind, the 
 end which it seeks to realise, must be self-compre- 
 hension in its utmost fulness. Self-consciousness 
 must go into otherness in order to enrich itself, and 
 it must return into itself, so to speak, in order to 
 be the self-consciousness of the Absolute Mind. 
 That is to say, just as we found that the nature of 
 thought was a triple movement, that mind posited 
 itself in difference and then comprehended its unity 
 with that difference in that the difference turned 
 out to fall within itself and to form one whole with 
 itself, so we have the same movement of thought, 
 the same dialectic of the notion, when we come to 
 the characteristic of Absolute Mind. Just because 
 we are dealing with mind of which the nature is to 
 be activity and dialectical activity, you must have 
 these three moments in the Absolute Mind : the 
 first, the aspect from which you proceed, that of 
 mind which we may speak of as mind in itself in so 
 far as we abstract in reflection from the movement ;
 
 DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY 159 
 
 then the mind setting itself in antithesis to itself as 
 the condition of self-consciousness ; and then the 
 self-consciousness, the complete self-comprehension, 
 as the totality which embraces the two. And it is 
 obvious that we are not here describing a process 
 in time ; we are describing a whole in which the 
 first two appear only as aspects, and in which the 
 richest conception is the conception of the totality 
 of the other two moments. 
 
 You get in this way three phases : Absolute 
 Mind in itself; Absolute Mind in its hetereity or 
 otherness, under the distinction which it has set up 
 of itself from itself; and Absolute Mind in syn- 
 thesis, a synthesis which is the real prius of the other 
 two. If this is the true nature of mind, its dialectical 
 character must show itself not merely in the abstract 
 language in which metaphysics describes it, the 
 difficult language which I have been using, but 
 also in much more concrete forms. You have it in 
 art. You have it in such poems of Goethe and 
 Wordsworth as I quoted to you, where you witness 
 recognition of dialectic as the real characteristic 
 of the world when that world is closely enough 
 scrutinised. And you have it also in religion. 
 Now, religion is the side of things in which the 
 relation of man to God is realised, not in abstract 
 terms, but in feeling and in acts of will. The nature 
 of God, the nature of Absolute Mind, is to exhibit 
 the triple movement of dialectic, and so the nature 
 of God, as conceived and presented in religion, must 
 be a triplicity, a Trinity. The doctrine of the
 
 160 ABSOLUTE MIND [LECT. vi. 
 
 Trinity is by no means a specially Christian doctrine. 
 You find it in other religions. You find it in Greek 
 thought ; you find the traces of its foundation in 
 the Dialogues of Plato. It penetrated deeply into 
 the way of looking at things of the Neoplatonic 
 School of Alexandria, and through the Neopla- 
 tonists it came to influence the early theologians in 
 a very marked fashion. It is not merely in phi- 
 losophers like Philo and Plotinus that you find the 
 beginnings of this doctrine. You find just as 
 definitely the same sort of doctrine appearing in 
 teachers like Justin Martyr and Athanasius, who 
 were much under the influence of Plato and at the 
 same time prominent Christians. 
 
 The creeds have always spoken in pictorial 
 language. That is essential, because religion is 
 something which deals not with abstractions, with 
 what is mediated by thought, but with the immediate, 
 with feeling, with direct consciousness. The creeds 
 speak in pictorial language, and because truths 
 which can be represented only in metaphysical 
 language and abstractly are thus put into pictorial 
 conceptions, there is constantly strife arising 
 over the pictures which the mind frames of 
 the ultimate aspects of reality. As it is stated 
 in the creeds the doctrine of the Trinity is 
 essentially a doctrine which can be adequately 
 expressed only in metaphysical language. It 
 belongs to reason as distinguished from under- 
 standing. I mean, of course, by reason the atti- 
 tude of mind which comprehends, as distinguished
 
 UNNECESSARY DIFFICULTIES 161 
 
 from the mental attitude which merely apprehends. 
 And just because a doctrine which belongs to 
 reason has been seized on by understanding, much 
 strife and much obscurity has arisen. 
 
 Hegel makes the observation that " those who 
 oppose the doctrine of the Trinity are men who are 
 guided merely by their senses and understanding." 
 But he goes on to point out that the advocates of 
 the doctrine have used images and metaphors which 
 are responsible for the confusion. The apparent 
 incomprehensibility arises simply from this, that 
 people will try to express in images which belong 
 to the region of space and time what belongs to a 
 higher level than that of mere space and time rela- 
 tions. There can be no incomprehensibility in the 
 doctrine of the Trinity if our view of the nature 
 of thought be true, the view, namely, that the 
 difficulties with which thought has to cope are 
 difficulties of its own creation, which it must there- 
 fore be adequate to deal with. 
 
 Well, let us see whether we can compare our 
 metaphysical result, the result which we have 
 reached in these lectures, as to the nature of mind, 
 with the theological expression of the doctrine to 
 which I have just made reference. 
 
 The Gospel of John begins with this sentence : 
 " In the beginning was the Word, and the Word 
 was with God, and the Word was God." Now, 
 the Greek which is translated " word " is " Logos," 
 and it is evident that the expression " word " is a 
 very imperfect translation of what is conveyed by
 
 162 ABSOLUTE MIND [L*CT. vi. 
 
 " Logos." Logos is an expression which you find 
 early in Greek philosophy, and it was a familiar 
 expression in the School of Alexandria. It may 
 well be that this sentence is an interpretive sentence 
 which was inserted into the Gospel of John by 
 somebody of a more metaphysical mind than its 
 original writer. One might possibly paraphrase the 
 first verse of John's Gospel, rendering it in meta- 
 physical language, thus : " In the beginning was 
 the concrete actuality of Spirit, and this concrete 
 actuality of Spirit stood in relation to God, and 
 one aspect of God was the Spirit which was so 
 related." That, of course, is a paraphrase, but it is 
 a paraphrase which comes very near to what seems 
 to be the metaphysical meaning. 
 
 You have in the New Testament the recognition 
 of the three moments on which metaphysics lays 
 such stress. You have, first of all, that which in 
 philosophy would be the aspect which belongs to 
 what Hegel calls "Logic" I mean the aspect 
 which represents Mind taken in itself and apart 
 from its consciousness of itself in another. Mind 
 in itself may be said to represent what in 
 theological language is described as the Father. 
 In the element of the Son you have mind gone 
 into otherness, hetereity, finite mind, the nature 
 of which is conditioned by the externality which, 
 as we saw, is only for and through the finite mind 
 God, in other words, imposing on Himself the 
 limits of man's finitude, and so only, in this 
 fashion alone, coming into direct relation with
 
 THE THREE ASPECTS 163 
 
 nature, with evil, and with death. Then there is 
 the third moment in the movement, the return of 
 the Absolute Mind into itself in the fulness of its 
 self-consciousness, the Holy Spirit, the aspect in 
 the Trinity which is in reality the logical prius of 
 the two other aspects, aspects which are separable 
 only in abstraction. 
 
 Now, if you take into account that these three 
 aspects of one reality, although they are three, are 
 yet one, and, although they are one, are yet so in 
 the unity of an Absolute Mind which distinguishes 
 itself and expresses itself under these three aspects, 
 the difficulty of the doctrine of the Trinity turns 
 out, as Hegel has said, to be due to the tendency 
 of man to look at things always in the light of his 
 abstractions of the understanding, instead of from 
 the standpoint of reason which comprehends and 
 so transcends its own distinctions. 
 
 Turning back to John's Gospel I may observe 
 in passing that the view of the nature of Ultimate 
 Reality which I have been suggesting, throws light 
 on a point on which there was a great controversy 
 in the early Church. If it be the case that the 
 true conception of the nature of absolute mind is 
 that it implies the contemplation of itself as in other- 
 ness, as having taken upon itself the guise of finite- 
 ness, and as at the same time being reunited with 
 itself in the completeness of self-conscious spirit, 
 then the third, the complete actuality in which the 
 others are separable only by abstraction, is a 
 third which implies the union of the other two.
 
 164 ABSOLUTE MIND [LECT. vr. 
 
 The actuality of self-conscious mind has, as its 
 moments, not merely the first aspect in the anti- 
 thesis, absolute mind, taken by itself, nor the second 
 taken by itself, but the two in combination. Now 
 what was in the thoughts of the early theologians 
 of the School of Alexandria is not easy to de- 
 termine. But they had inherited the Platonic 
 view of the dialectical nature of reason, and it is 
 evident that they ascribe such a nature to God as 
 they conceived Him. It seems, therefore, that those 
 who succeeded them were right in invoking their 
 authority in support of the doctrine that the 
 Holy Spirit must be taken as proceeding from 
 the Son as well as from the Father. If so, the 
 weight of authority in a great controversy of the 
 Christian Church is with those who argued in the 
 sense in which the Western Church ultimately re- 
 solved it. 
 
 The Logos, as I have said, was a familiar word 
 to students of Greek philosophy. The Platonic 
 doctrine of the dialectical relation of the one and 
 the many had profoundly influenced the School of 
 Alexandria. Now, the translation of this first 
 sentence in John's Gospel is very difficult. It is 
 discussed in a very learned and scholarly work 
 which I regret to think is out of print, but which I 
 have had the advantage of consulting in the pre- 
 paration of these lectures. I refer to Principal 
 Donaldson's Critical History of Christian Literature 
 and Doctrine from the Death of the Apostles to the 
 Nicene Council. Principal Donaldson points out
 
 THE SCHOOL OF ALEXANDRIA 165 
 
 that the words in the verse in John are not just 
 what some of the interpreters have taken them to 
 be. The words are in Greek, KOI Oeoo- tjv 6 Xoyo?, not 
 KOI 6 Oeoo- f\v 6 XoyoV To translate Oeoa- as " God " 
 seems therefore to go too far ; to render it as 
 " divine " seems too little. That is why I have sug- 
 gested the true translation as being that the Logos 
 was an aspect of the divine, a rendering which 
 would accord with the current tradition of the 
 Alexandrian School. It seems as though what 
 was meant was to indicate, not numerical identity, 
 but a different aspect of one reality. Especially 
 suggestive, as showing the frame of mind from 
 which that expression may have originated, is 
 Principal Donaldson's account of the teaching of 
 Justin .Martyr, who lived in the second century. 
 Justin Martyr was a close student of Plato. He 
 explains that he wishes to call himself a Christian 
 " not because the teachings of Plato are different 
 from those of Christ, but because they are not in 
 all points like." He believed that his teacher, 
 Plato, had learned much from Moses, and that in 
 Plato there were even anticipations of the doctrine 
 of the Cross. Now, the influence of the Platonic 
 doctrine of the one and the many, which was very 
 prominent in men like Justin Martyr, certainly did 
 not diminish as the Church grew. Athanasius was 
 Bishop of Alexandria, and his name is associated 
 with a great creed. Two things are certain, the 
 one that Athanasius had been brought largely in 
 contact with Neoplatonism ; the other, that Athan-
 
 166 ABSOLUTE MIND [LKT. vi. 
 
 asius had nothing whatever to do with the Athan- 
 asian Creed. That document was composed very 
 much later. It probably did not emerge in its 
 completeness until the seventh century, and Athan- 
 asius, who lived in the fourth century, obviously 
 could have had no direct connection with it. But 
 the name of Athanasius was a name of great 
 renown, and it may well be that those who con- 
 structed the Athanasian Creed thought that his 
 was a suitable name, having regard to the nature 
 of his teaching, to give authority to a doctrine 
 which seemed to accord with what tradition associ- 
 ated with him. 
 
 On the question of the nature of the Athanasian 
 Creed and its position in Church history, I do not, 
 of course, feel competent to speak, but Harnack, 
 whose History of Dogma is the source of most of 
 such information as I have upon the subject, in the 
 fourth volume of the English translation discusses 
 the origin of this Creed, and defines it as "the 
 transformation of the doctrine of the Trinity as an 
 article of Faith to be inwardly appropriated, into 
 an ecclesiastical legal statute on the observance of 
 which salvation depends." He states that the 
 Athanasian Creed was apparently a Gallican Rule of 
 Faith explanatory of the Creed of Nicsea, and that, 
 probably as early as the fifth century, it began with 
 the famous phrase "Quicunque vult salvus esse." 
 By degrees it grew into its position as a Confession 
 in the eighth or ninth century. Now the Athanasian 
 Creed is the Creed which settled once and for all
 
 THE ATHANASIAK CKEEt) 167 
 
 the controversy over the " filioque " clause. Those 
 of you who have read Church history know that 
 the " filioque " clause was the clause which affirmed 
 that the Procession of the Holy Ghost was from 
 the Son as well as from the Father, and that over 
 this question the Western Church and the Eastern 
 Church were divided. The Athanasian Creed, 
 which declares that "The Holy Ghost is of the 
 Father and of the Son ; neither made, nor created, 
 nor begotton, but proceeding," pronounced for the 
 Western view, and of course became the Creed of 
 the Western Church. It asserts that " Unity in 
 Trinity and Trinity in Unity" is what is to be 
 worshipped, and it thus lays down a doctrine, 
 obviously of Platonic origin so far as its language 
 goes, which accords with the metaphysical view 
 which I have been setting before you. The Athan- 
 asian Creed has been much abused, but at least it 
 has the merit of showing a speculative insight much 
 more profound than that of the other creeds. The 
 history of the " filioque " clause controversy illus- 
 trates how much more of resemblance than of 
 difference we find between old thoughts and new, 
 when we take the trouble to try to understand the 
 context and the circumstances in which the old 
 thoughts were expressed. As Hegel, in his Proofs 
 of the Existence of God, says: "The consideration" 
 (of the relation of the mind of man to Absolute 
 Mind), "is a matter at once of the deepest and 
 most elevated kind, and just because of this it is 
 the most difficult of tasks. You cannot carry it on
 
 168 ABSOLUTE MIND [LECT. vi. 
 
 by means of finite categories ; that is, the modes of 
 thought which we employ in ordinary life and in 
 dealing with contingent things, as well as those 
 we are accustomed to in the sciences, don't suffice 
 for it. The latter have their foundation, their logic, 
 in connections which belong to what is finite ; such 
 as cause and effect; their laws, their descriptive 
 terms, their modes of arguing, are purely relations 
 belonging to what is conditioned, and which lose 
 their significance at the heights where the Infinite 
 is. They must indeed be employed, but at the 
 same time they have always to be referred back 
 to their proper sphere and have their meaning 
 rectified." * 
 
 " The fact," he goes on, " of the fellowship of 
 God and Man with each other involves a fellowship 
 of Spirit with Spirit. It involves the most im- 
 portant questions. It is a fellowship, and this very 
 circumstance involves the difficulty of at once 
 maintaining the fact of difference, and of defining 
 it in such a way as to preserve the fact of fellow- 
 ship. That Man knows God implies, in accordance 
 with the essential idea of communion or fellowship, 
 that there is a community of knowledge ; that is to 
 say, Man knows God only in so far as God Himself 
 knows Himself in Man. This knowledge is God's 
 self-consciousness, but it is at the same time a 
 knowledge of God on the part of Man, and the 
 knowledge of God by Man is a knowledge of Man 
 
 * Hegel, Proofs of the Existence of God, English Translation, 
 p. 303.
 
 HEGEL 160 
 
 by God. The Spirit of Man, whereby he knows 
 God, is simply the Spirit of God Himself." 
 
 Hegel's Philosophy of Religion, from the last part 
 of which I have quoted these words for the Proofs 
 of the Existence of God are an Appendix to his 
 Philosophy of Religion is one of the most important 
 parts of his system. It fills up several gaps in his 
 teaching. And in the Philosophy of Religion you 
 have, in addition, the exhibition of a rich and 
 reverent mind letting itself go freely into the task 
 of trying to bring order and clearness into the 
 comprehension of the most difficult of all problems. 
 
 Well, religion is related to philosophy, to 
 abstract knowledge, in a way which marks it out 
 as, on the one hand, necessitating that abstract 
 knowledge for orderliness in its own doctrines, and, 
 upon the other hand, as containing in itself some- 
 thing which no abstract doctrine can supply. The 
 forms of religion vary. Their expressions of the 
 truth differ in different ages and with different 
 minds. But in the highest forms of religion there 
 is a common content or substance. Faith always 
 means the sense that the true reality of the world 
 lies in the unseen ; not in that which is merely 
 hidden from sight, in the ordinary sense, but in 
 aspects which require the use of higher categories 
 than those of everyday social life for their grasp. 
 
 The central doctrine of the Atonement illus- 
 trates this, for it implies the potential identity of 
 man and God in a single subject of knowledge. 
 
 * Hegel, Ibid.
 
 170 ABSOLUTE MIND [LECT. vt. 
 
 Excepting on this footing, it is hardly intelligible. 
 What it signifies is the return into identity from 
 difference, the conception which, throughout the 
 history of thought, has underlain the profoundest 
 forms of speculation. In the religious conscious- 
 ness this return appears as an exercise of the will 
 as a dying to live and that others may live. Thus 
 the deliverances of the religious consciousness, in 
 its broad interpretation, converge, as do those of 
 the aesthetic consciousness, towards the same result 
 as the teaching of philosophy gives. 
 
 I have completed with that observation the first 
 six lectures of this course. What I have done in 
 them is to try to build up an affirmative conception 
 of what philosophy means by the expression 
 "God." The result of my attempt has been to 
 define God as mind that comprehends itself com- 
 pletely. Within such mind all reality of whatever 
 character or degree must fall. It is a deduction 
 from the definition that mind as it is in Man is this 
 same self-comprehension, but at a plane or stage 
 which is imperfect. I have shown you, further, 
 that it is the nature and level of the purpose to be 
 realised that determines the nature and level of the 
 comprehension, and that thus it is in ends and not 
 in causes that the explanation of the Universe is to 
 be sought. 
 
 In this set of six lectures I have thus endeavoured 
 to deal with the nature of what is Divine. My 
 remaining four lectures will be directed to the 
 nature of what is Human.
 
 BOOK IV 
 FINITE MIND
 
 LECTURE I 
 
 THE discussion of the nature of mind which 
 occupied the last six lectures brought us to the 
 conclusion that complete self-comprehension is the 
 characteristic of mind, in the sense in which it is 
 the equivalent of final and ultimate Reality. Such 
 complete self-comprehension is, as I showed you, 
 only possible in a consciousness where the cate- 
 gories, which are the forms of what, for want of 
 a better expression, I will call its life and movement, 
 are present in the entirety of their system and full 
 relationship to each other. If mind concentrates 
 under certain of these categories to the exclusion 
 of others, and of their real relationship to these 
 others and to the whole, imperfect self-comprehen 
 sion is the characteristic of consciousness. Yet 
 the very nature of reflection is to concentrate, in 
 this partial and abstract fashion, as the logical pre- 
 liminary to more complete self-realisation. Thus 
 the finite is a necessary moment in the true infinite, 
 but a moment only. So it is that mind as it is in 
 man is mind that knows itself as known, and as 
 known yet knows, a form into which Absolute 
 Mind throws itself, in the attainment of the full 
 
 173
 
 174 FINITE MIND [LECT. r. 
 
 fruition of the riches of its self-comprehension. 
 Such is the necessary outcome of the dialectical 
 nature of thought. Like the men of science, whose 
 procedure we discussed in Book II. of the first 
 series of these lectures, we men and women have 
 to limit ourselves that we may fulfil the ends for 
 which we exist, and these ends themselves exist 
 because they form part of the scheme of the Divine 
 Mind. 
 
 Thus the self-comprehension of the human 
 mind has the defect of its quality. Only in so far 
 as its quality is what it is can that mind be human. 
 In so far as it is human it is defective, and must 
 remain so, in self-comprehension. That self-com- 
 prehension has to take place under time distinctions, 
 in a process which is unending, because its essence 
 is to recognise what is as qualified by what is 
 not, inasmuch as, being not yet presented, the latter 
 lies beyond. There is for us nowhere an aspect of 
 reality which is not in contrast with another aspect, 
 actual or possible. Did we not conceive our lives 
 under such distinctions we should be untrue to the 
 very basis of our existence, such as it is. 
 
 Even thought, which we are always seeking to 
 abstract and present as other than its object, and 
 to contrast with feeling, is thus characterised for 
 us by finitude. It is natural that we should apply 
 to it a method of investigation which gives us, 
 indeed, clear knowledge of a kind, but clear 
 knowledge purchased at the cost of our being 
 obliged to treat thought abstractly, as if relational
 
 NATURE OF THOUGHT 175 
 
 and discursive. But the relational and discursive 
 aspect turns out quickly to be but an aspect in 
 which thought can present itself to itself. The 
 fashion of such presentation implies a violent 
 abstraction. That thought can itself correct this 
 abstraction is apparent from the very fact that it is 
 aware of the shortcoming and does correct it. 
 The more closely self-consciousness is investigated, 
 the more apparent it is that the distinction between 
 subject and object is made by and falls within it. 
 
 Now you and I may expect, as we proceed to 
 look in the next four lectures into the nature of 
 finite mind, that we shall find this tendency to self- 
 correction on the part of reflection everywhere 
 apparent. Complete comprehension of self in its 
 object there can never be, for the reason that 1 have 
 so much dwelt on. But there can hardly be a limit 
 assigned to the progress towards it. We shall 
 expect, if we scan closely enough, to see in an 
 ordinary view of the world about us lower aspects 
 being displaced by higher ones, in a process that 
 is unending in the sense that no limit can be 
 assigned to it. We may not be able to sum up the 
 series, but our study of the nature of consciousness 
 may assure us that it can be, and is, summed up for 
 a mind that is at a higher plane than ours. Just 
 as the aspect of life was found by us to be freer 
 from the abstractions of finitude than that of 
 mechanism, just as consciousness in like manner 
 proved to be, even for presentationism, an aspect 
 of reality fuller and truer than that of life, so we
 
 176 FINITE MIND [LECT. i. 
 
 should expect to find aspects of the world as it 
 seems in which that world expresses a nature that 
 is greater than the nature of finite self-hood, with 
 the distinctness in which it crystallises what appears 
 in it. Now such aspects we seem to discover lying 
 ready to hand in what is characterised by beauty, 
 and indeed in the entire world as it is for the artist, 
 and especially in the forms in which he recreates 
 it. Let us try to find out what these aspects mean 
 for him. 
 
 The most obvious characteristic of external 
 nature is the mutual exclusiveness of its appear- 
 ances, and the stubbornness with which they resist 
 the attempt of reflection to attribute to them a per- 
 vading rational significance. But in the recognition 
 of beauty in nature we have before us a relationship 
 which transcends this hard-and-fastness of exter- 
 nality, and, which is there, not for the pig or the 
 sheep, but only for the being that reflects. Yet as 
 reflection does not make things, and as, on the other 
 hand, things have no meaning or existence except 
 in reflection, beauty must belong to those forms of 
 reality which fall within the individuality which the 
 universal and particular combine to form. It must 
 be an aspect within the individual as object, as real 
 as any other aspect of the world as it seems. If so, 
 its character must be that of the individual in other 
 words, neither that of a universal of reflection, nor 
 that of a mere fleeting particular of feeling. It must 
 be complete in itself, and an end in itself. 
 
 Let us try to find out what are the character-
 
 THE BEAUTIFUL 177 
 
 istics of the beautiful. In the first place, the senses 
 through which we perceive beauty are the senses 
 which are in the highest degree the handmaids of 
 intelligence. We do not get any definite idea of 
 beauty through the senses of taste or smell or touch 
 taken by themselves. It is through sight and hear- 
 ing that we perceive beautiful objects, and through 
 these senses almost exclusively. This fact seems 
 to indicate that it is only for a reflecting mind that 
 what is beautiful exists. For a dog or a horse it is 
 there, at the most, only in a very slight degree. On 
 the other hand, it is clear that beauty is no abstrac- 
 tion, and cannot be resolved into concepts, however 
 much its perception may vary with the capacity to 
 form concepts. An object that is beautiful, whether 
 for sight or for sound, is beautiful in so far as it is 
 expressive. It must embody much more than a 
 mere mechanical relationship, however perfect, 
 much more than mere attainment even of a pur- 
 pose. What then is it that such an object must 
 express ? If we go beyond the mere beauty of 
 Nature, and turn to Art, we seem to get the answer 
 to this question. The mind of the artist has the 
 characteristic quality of mind : it is essentially free. 
 It can mould and sever or combine its materials as 
 it pleases. It can, therefore, in its various forms of 
 activity, construct sensuous images which are in the 
 highest degree expressive, expressive of the highest 
 meaning which the mind is capable of grasping. 
 
 " The beauty of Art is the beauty that is born 
 born again, that is of the mind, and by as much 
 
 M
 
 178 FINITE MIND [LECT. i. 
 
 as the mind and its products are higher than Nature 
 and its appearances, by so much the beauty of Art 
 is higher than the beauty of Nature." * 
 
 A sunset in Nature is infinitely richer in material 
 and in brilliancy than a sunset painted by Turner. 
 But the reason why a picture by Turner is in an 
 extraordinary degree valuable is twofold. In the 
 first place, in the picture we see nature as Turner 
 saw it in other words, we get an expression and 
 a quality of expression which we cannot get other- 
 wise. In the second place, although the expression 
 is embodied in only a few poor patches of paint on 
 a canvas, it is embodied in permanence, and not in 
 the fleeting fashion in which nature generally 
 embodies an expression. The true artist is there- 
 fore no copyist. His material, that which his 
 technical skill enables him to mould, is, nothing 
 abstract, but the individual in sensuous form. Yet 
 in the sensuous material which he so moulds, mind 
 is apparent. He is " nearer to mind and its 
 thinking activity than is mere external unintelligent 
 nature ; in works of art mind has to do but with 
 its own." f The immediacy of nature is in its 
 character boundlessly contingent and transitory, 
 and the tendency of reflection is to erect over 
 against it an abstract realm of universals which, 
 rational and permanent as is their nature, are yet 
 inadequate to the concrete riches of this chaotic 
 
 * Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of Fine Art, Bosanquet's 
 Translation, p. 3. 
 
 t Hegel, Ibid., p. 22.
 
 ART 179 
 
 and fleeting spectacle. " But the mind is able to 
 heal this schism which its advance creates, it 
 generates out of itself the works of fine art as the 
 first middle term of reconciliation between pure 
 thought and what is external, sensuous, and transi- 
 tory ; between nature with its finite actuality, and 
 the infinite freedom of the reason that compre- 
 hends."* . . . "Art liberates the real import of 
 appearances from the semblance and deception of 
 this bad and fleeting world, and imparts to 
 phenomenal semblances a higher reality born of 
 mind." f The work of art is what it is for sensuous 
 apprehension. But it is no mere sensuous object. 
 It addresses itself to the mind which is meant to 
 be affected by it, and to find satisfaction in it. It 
 is not for its use but for its truth that we turn to an 
 object of art. But the truth to which we turn is 
 not truth in a scientific or abstract form, but the 
 truth which consists in the recognition of expres- 
 sion in an individual and sensuous form. 
 
 Many passages might be quoted from great art 
 critics which bring out the point that I have been 
 so constantly trying to insist on, the point that the 
 individual is no mere symbol of abstract knowledge, 
 no mere means to an end, but an end in itself, a 
 true individual in which the mind rests satisfied as 
 with something complete, self-sustaining and unique, 
 something which leaves no sense of purpose unsatis- 
 
 * Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy oj Fine Art, Bosanquet's 
 Translation, p. 13. 
 f Ibid., p. 15.
 
 180 FINITE MIND [LECT. i. 
 
 fied. In our appreciation of his work the artist 
 raises us to his own plane of comprehension. This 
 is most plainly so in music, and the reason is easy 
 to find. In music we are in feeling lifted away 
 from the hard externality of nature which confronts 
 us in even the most perfect definition of external 
 form which painting or sculpture can give us. The 
 centre of reality is no longer the not-self with which 
 the self is confronted as with something foreign in 
 which it has to seek a meaning, but feeling which 
 belongs essentially to the region of the self. The 
 externality of time and space is, as it were, 
 abolished while we listen and realise ourselves 
 anew in the sound that has transformed our world. 
 Schopenhauer states this in another way when he 
 points out that in music, as in all art, we are carried 
 away from the desire to assert our individuality in 
 the world of time and space, away from the plane 
 at which we will, and at which we suffer pain 
 because we suffer hindrance from the Other which 
 confronts us. He speaks of the sense of unutter- 
 able depth in music " by virtue of which it floats 
 through our consciousness as the vision of a paradise 
 firmly believed in, yet ever distant from us, and by 
 which it is so fully understood and yet so in- 
 explicable." " This," he says, " rests on the fact that 
 it restores to us all the emotions of our inmost 
 nature, but entirely without reality, and removed 
 from their pain." * In music we may say that we 
 
 * World as Will and Idea; English Translation, vol. I., p. 
 341.
 
 MUSIC 181 
 
 are lifted to a plane which is above that of every- 
 day life, in so far as the hard-and-fastness of our 
 everyday standpoint melts away. A new stand- 
 point emerges in which feeling predominates, which 
 is characterised by very little abstract conception, 
 but in which we none the less recognise that mind 
 has lifted itself above the plane of the differences 
 which really fall within it and are not final. The 
 incrustations and inhibitions which hold down the 
 "subliminal self" are in part, at least, removed, 
 and there arises a new order of certainty. But just 
 as I showed you in the earlier lectures that the 
 revelations of the subliminal self were no safe guide 
 by themselves, and must be made the servants of 
 reason and not its masters, so the emotions which 
 music awakens do not all stand on the same footing. 
 Between the strains of a valse and a sonata of 
 Beethoven there is a great difference, which cannot 
 be referred to any difference in strength of feeling. 
 It can only depend on the extent to which mind is 
 bodied forth in the latter as distinguished from the 
 former. We may derive satisfaction from the 
 sonata even though badly executed. But perfection 
 in execution cannot make the valse appeal to us in 
 the same way. Technique is of high value and 
 importance. Without it the greatest artist could 
 not express his mind. But it is rather a means to 
 an end than an end in itself. It is only mind that 
 can satisfy mind, whether in music, or painting, or 
 sculpture, or poetry. Mind seeks to find itself 
 here, just as it does in other aspects of the world
 
 182 FINITE MIND OCT. ,. 
 
 as it seems. This is why the " own composition " 
 at a concert is often so wearying to those who do 
 not belong to the class of listeners who go there in 
 search of technique only. 
 
 What I have been trying to set before you is 
 still more apparent in poetry. The greatest quality 
 of poetry is, as has often been said, that of "size." 
 In other words, a really great poem must express a 
 really great mind. In poetry, as in music, it is not 
 an abstract conception that we look for. It is an 
 individual reality complete in itself and depending 
 on no meaning outside itself. The universal and 
 particular moments in this individuality are not 
 broken up by reflection, as is the case in science or 
 even in everyday experience. Reflection is, of 
 course, operative ; otherwise in poetry we should be 
 without permanence of expression, the contrast to 
 the fleeting particulars that the actual perception 
 of nature rescues only for the instant. But the 
 permanent moment in poetry does not take the 
 form of an abstraction, existing out of time and 
 space. It may be a sensuous image, provided that 
 what gives its characteristic and significance to the 
 image is its embodiment of mind, its presentation 
 of what is only for mind, and is therefore mind 
 itself presented in this form. This is why art is 
 the form of the individual which gives us the 
 middle term between nature as essentially external, 
 and thought as essentially above time and space. 
 We cannot reduce beauty to principles of thought, 
 or to relations of space and time, Beauty and the
 
 POETBY 183 
 
 object world of art constitute a realm by them- 
 selves, a realm complete in itself, an aspect of the 
 world as it seems which is real, as every other 
 aspect is real, because it is an aspect in which 
 mind presents itself to itself, is for itself, a phase 
 which cannot be explained away or melted down, 
 because it is one among the ultimate forms of 
 reality. 
 
 That poetry exists only in the reflective con- 
 sciousness is clear when we consider what a poem 
 is. On paper it is but a series of marks made 
 with printer's ink, and it has no other significance 
 either to the dog that chews the paper, or to the 
 foreigner who knows not the language. To a 
 person devoid of sense of poetic form it is but a 
 series of somewhat obscure and ill-framed sentences. 
 But to him who finds in it poetry it is very different. 
 For such an one the poem is an individual fact of 
 experience, but differs from other individual facts 
 of experience in, among other qualities, its per- 
 manence. However often the book is shut, when 
 it is opened the same thing is perceived. The ink 
 may have faded, the paper may be torn, but the 
 expression never changes. This is even more 
 apparent in the case of music. The sounds in each 
 performance are different, and, as unique individuals 
 of experience, are there for the first time. The 
 execution may vary greatly. But the impression 
 made is the same, because what is expressed is not 
 of the transient character of events of space and 
 time, but belongs to a higher plane of mind, yet a
 
 184 FINITE MIND OCT. i. 
 
 plane which has no existence except as embodied 
 in the sensuous form which the art of the musician 
 has created. All forms of art have this character- 
 istic as their essence that the moment of uni- 
 versality in them lifts their creations above the 
 transitory and fleeting nature of the instant in 
 which they are apprehended, and detaches them 
 from the relationship of place in the Universe. 
 The object whose nature is so transformed may be 
 a very simple one. A Dutch landscape painter 
 has placed before us, say, a peasant's cottage and 
 some animals. Any one who cares is attracted 
 and moved by the picture. Why? However 
 minute and careful the work, it is but patches of 
 paint on a canvas, and the material is far inferior 
 to that of the original, nature. Yet it moves us as 
 nature cannot. The reason is that the artist has 
 detached and fashioned the scene in such a way as 
 to lift us above the merely sensuous. A sense of 
 aloofness from the contingency of our surroundings 
 comes to us, and of aloofness from the particularism 
 of ourselves. The moment ceases to interest us, to 
 be important. The peasants, the cottage, the 
 cattle, have long since passed away, nay, they 
 never were ! But they express and engross us in 
 that stillness and peace of nature which they do 
 not symbolise as a word symbolises a concept, but 
 embody as a universal in individual form. They 
 lift us towards a view of the world from the plat- 
 form of those who are spectators of all time and 
 all existence, Jn this fashion, Art mediates
 
 AET FOE ART'S SAKE 185 
 
 between thought and sense, and so fulfils a special 
 function which can be fulfilled by no other form of 
 spiritual activity. 
 
 What has been said may serve to cast some 
 light on the famous saying, "Art for Art's sake." 
 For it follows, in the first place, that in the concrete 
 fact of Art we can never separate form from matter. 
 We can never value a poem merely for its cadence, 
 or only for its meaning. It is an end in itself, and 
 is to be valued for its own sake and not for that of 
 some end or standard beyond. In the second place, 
 Art can never be explained in terms of anything 
 else, for that would mean that as a form of reality 
 it was derivative only, and not self-subsisting. We 
 may, indeed, show its place among the planes or 
 stages from which Mind comprehends what is in 
 ultimate analysis Mind. But, just because it is 
 equally real with every other plane or stage, every 
 attempt at a definition of it is tautologous. To 
 define a poem as "the succession of experiences 
 sounds, images, thoughts, emotions through which 
 I pass when I am reading as poetically as I can "- 
 is, not to define, but to point to a " this " beyond 
 which I cannot get. The poem, like the picture 
 and the sonata, is no copy of nature ; its appeal is 
 to the imagination which is contemplative, and not 
 to that which is merely reproductive. In the whole 
 which the poet creates neither form nor matter can 
 be abstracted or altered. The parody, which can 
 make the hero of the poem into a ridiculous figure, 
 depends on this fact, Where form is less obviously
 
 186 FINITE MIND [LKT. i. 
 
 essential than it is in verse, as, for instance, in the 
 novel, parody becomes easy, as in Thackeray's 
 parodies of Scott and other novelists of the 
 romantic school. There, by an alteration of form, 
 the significance of the whole is transformed from 
 what is serious into what is ludicrous. This is 
 more difficult with verse, where form predominates, 
 but it has often been done. On the other hand, the 
 form may be reproduced apart from the matter in 
 the parody, and then the result is uninteresting for 
 want of content, and is merely a tour deforce. 
 
 It can hardly be too much insisted on that, in 
 the work of art, form and content are really 
 inseparable. What would Hamlet or Paradise Lost 
 be without the presence of both ? The combination 
 is what gives these poems their " size." And this 
 combination is no addition of elements that are 
 independent of one another. The gift of the artist 
 is not to be a thinker, or to set before his mind an 
 abstract conception, and then to see how he can 
 embody it by virtue of his technical skill. His gift 
 is rather that of creative imagination, in the forma- 
 tions of which his qualities are indissolubly fused, 
 just as the qualities of form and content are indis- 
 solubly fused in his work. It is so that we get in 
 the creation of the artist something that appeals to 
 us far more vividly than the reasoning of the 
 philosopher. I remember reading in the news- 
 papers that someone had written to Cardinal 
 Newman to ask him to state precisely what he had 
 in his mind when he wrote " Lead, Kindly Light ! "
 
 POETRY 187 
 
 The Cardinal was said to have replied that he did 
 not know. Of course, he did not know ! The 
 verses were the work of an artist, not of a theo- 
 logian, and that is what was not realised by an 
 excellent clergyman who tried, without consulting 
 their author, to improve them by adding a verse 
 setting forth their theological significance. 
 
 The present Professor of Poetry in Oxford 
 University has put this so admirably, in the course 
 of an inaugural address which he delivered not long 
 ago, that I will quote his words : " Pure poetry is 
 not the decoration of a preconceived and clearly 
 defined matter ; it springs from the creative impulse 
 of a vague imaginative mass pressing for develop- 
 ment and definition. If the poet always knew 
 exactly what he meant to say, why should he write 
 the poem ? The poem would, in fact, already be 
 written. For only its completion can reveal, even 
 to him, exactly what he wanted. When he began, 
 and while he was at work, he did not possess its 
 meaning ; it possessed him. It was not a fully 
 formed soul asking for a body : it was an inchoate 
 soul in the inchoate body of perhaps two or three 
 vague ideas and a few scattered phrases. The 
 growing of this body, its full stature and perfect 
 shape, was the same thing as the gradual self-defini- 
 tion of the meaning. And this is the reason why 
 such poems strike us as creations, not manufactures, 
 and have the magical effect which mere decoration 
 cannot produce. This is also the reason why, 
 if we insist on asking for the meaning of such
 
 188 FINITE MIND [LECT. i. 
 
 a poem, we can only be answered, ' It means 
 itself.'"* 
 
 In his Conversations with Goethe, Eckermann 
 describes how Goethe instructed him in what to 
 look for in the works of art that were shown to 
 him : " We then opened the portfolios, and pro- 
 ceeded to the examination of the drawings and 
 engravings. . . . Goethe in such matters takes 
 great pains on my account, and I see that it is his 
 intention to give me a higher degree of penetration 
 in the observation of works of art. He shows me 
 only what is perfect in its kind, and endeavours to 
 make me apprehend the intention and merit of the 
 artist, that I may learn to pursue the thought of 
 the best and feel like the best. ' This,' said he, ' is 
 the way to cultivate what we call taste. Taste is 
 only to be educated by contemplation, not of the 
 tolerably good, but of the truly excellent. I 
 therefore show you only the best works, and when 
 you are grounded in these you will have a standard 
 for the rest which you will know how to value 
 without overrating them. And I will show you the 
 best in each class, that you may perceive that no 
 class is to be despised, but that each gives delight 
 when a man of genius attains his highest point. 
 For instance, this piece by a French artist is galant 
 to a degree which you see nowhere else, and is 
 therefore a model in its way.' 
 
 " Goethe handed me the engraving, and I looked 
 
 * Poetry for Poetry's Sake An Inaugural Address delivered 
 on 5th June 1901 p. 28. By Professor A. C. Bradley.
 
 GOETHE 189 
 
 at it with delight. There was a beautiful room in 
 a summer residence, with windows looking into a 
 garden, where one might see the most graceful 
 figures. A handsome lady, aged about thirty, was 
 sitting with a music book from which she seemed 
 to have just sung. Sitting by her, a little further 
 back, was a young girl of about fifteen. At the 
 open window behind stood another young lady 
 holding a lute, upon which she seemed still to be 
 sounding. At this moment a young gentleman 
 was entering, to whom the eyes of the ladies were 
 directed. He seemed to have interrupted the 
 music, and his slight bow gave the notion that he 
 was making an apology which the ladies were 
 gratified to hear. 'That, I think,' said Goethe, 'as 
 galant as any piece of Calderon's, and you have 
 now seen the very best thing of the kind. But what 
 say you to this?' With these words he handed 
 me some etchings by Koos, the famous painter of 
 animals ; they were all of sheep, in every posture 
 and situation. The simplicity of their counte- 
 nances, the ugliness and shabbiness of the fleece, all 
 was represented with the utmost fidelity, as if it 
 were nature itself. 'I always feel uneasy,' said 
 Goethe, ' when I look at these beasts. Their state, 
 so limited, dull, gaping, and dreaming, excites in me 
 such sympathy that I fear I shall become a sheep, 
 and almost think the artist must have been one. 
 At all events it is wonderful how Koos has been 
 able to think and feel himself into the very soul of 
 these creatures, so as to make the internal character
 
 190 FINITE MIND [LECT. i. 
 
 peer with such force through the outward covering. 
 Here you see what a great talent can do when it 
 keeps steady to subjects which are congenial with 
 its nature.' 'Has not then,' said I, 'this artist 
 painted also dogs, cats, and beasts of prey with 
 similar truth ; nay, with this great gift of assuming 
 a mental state foreign to himself, has he not been 
 able to delineate human character with equal 
 fidelity?' 'No,' said Goethe, 'all that lay out of 
 his sphere ; but the gentle grass-eating animals, 
 sheep, goats, cows, and the like, he was never 
 weary of repeating ; this was the peculiar province 
 of his talent which he did not quit during the 
 whole course of his life. And in this he did well. 
 A sympathy with these animals was born with 
 him, a knowledge of their psychological condition 
 was given to him, and thus he had so fine an eye 
 for their bodily structure. Other creatures were, 
 perhaps, not so transparent to him, and therefore 
 he felt neither calling nor impulse to paint them." 
 In a passage a little further on Goethe points 
 out the difference between science and art. In 
 science the treatment is nothing and the discovery 
 everything. In art the idea is common property. 
 It is the power of embodying it in a concrete work 
 that makes the artist, it is this power for which we 
 look in him. In his Laocoon Lessing expresses the 
 same thought : " The aim of science is truth ; the 
 aim of the arts, on the contrary, is to give artistic 
 pleasure. The artist need not copy or even be 
 true to nature. He may achieve his aim in repre-
 
 THE AIM OF AKT 191 
 
 senting the commonest objects." For that aim is 
 not mere nature any more than mere thought. It 
 is rather, to use a phrase of Schopenhauer's, the 
 Idea, and therefore the Ideal, with which he con- 
 cerns himself, and to which he moulds matter and 
 form alike. 
 
 The work of art is not to instruct, not to ex- 
 pound abstract conceptions. It has always to 
 bring its content before the mind's eye, not in its 
 generality as such, but with this generality made 
 individual and sensuously particularised. When 
 Byron says : 
 
 " I live not in myself, but I become 
 Portion of that around me, and to me 
 High mountains are a feeling," 
 
 he is expressing the standpoint of poetical emotion 
 from which idealism is embodied in feeling about 
 nature. The conception which qualifies such feeling 
 could never be expressed abstractly with the same 
 vividness, perhaps it could never be expressed at all so 
 to seem real. But the poet makes us feel its truth. 
 It is the function of genius to lift us, in the medium 
 of what is particular and immediate, to a higher 
 plane, and so to set the world in a new light. 
 The spectator is, as it were, lifted up, so that he 
 feels himself above and beyond the hard-and-fast 
 distinctions which are, at a lower plane, assumed 
 as reality. But the ideal with which he is brought 
 face to face is not in contrast with a reality that is 
 hard-and-fast. It is just that reality raised to a 
 higher plane. The world as it is for art is what it
 
 192 FINITE MINI) [Lr. ,. 
 
 is in virtue of thought, which, as it were, shines 
 through a sensuous garment. But the garment 
 that shines is just as much a part of the world of 
 reality as was the garment before it shone. In the 
 world of art we are still in the real world, in the 
 same way as the man of science who has passed 
 from the phenomenon to its law is still in the real 
 world. He looks at the water before him. He 
 thinks of the law of its chemical constitution out of 
 oxygen and hydrogen atoms ; yet it is still water 
 for him, though its meaning and the nature of its 
 reality have become enlarged for him. The par- 
 ticular concerns him less, the universal more. So 
 with the artist : he sets reality in a new light for 
 us, a light which removes us farther from particu- 
 larism : 
 
 " Art may tell a truth 
 
 Obliquely, do the thing shall breed the thought, 
 Nor wrong the thought, missing the mediate words. 
 So you may paint your picture, twice show truth, 
 Beyond mere imagery on the wall, 
 So, note for note, bring music from your mind, 
 Deeper than ever the andante dived, 
 So write a book shall mean, beyond the facts, 
 Suffice the eye and save the soul beside." * 
 
 It is time to turn again to the significance of 
 Art from the speculative side. We have approached 
 sufficiently near to the nature of the beautiful to 
 get some inkling of this significance. The topic 
 of the meaning of Art and the divisions into which 
 ^Esthetics fall is one so vast, and so surrounded 
 with materials which generation after generation 
 
 * Browning, at the end of the Ring and the Book.
 
 ART AND REALITY 193 
 
 has piled up, that nothing short of a treatise is 
 sufficient to contain an account of it. Those of 
 you who wish to pursue this topic further must 
 turn to such books in this department as those of 
 Hegel and Bosanquet. But with even the glimpse 
 we have got of the nature of the beautiful it is 
 possible to get some understanding of the place of 
 Art as a stage towards reality. 
 
 Let us imagine that we can present to ourselves 
 a view of the world as exhibiting no relations 
 which go beyond those of externality to each other 
 of events in time and space. Let us suppose, if we 
 can, that the mind passively receives a series of 
 impressions which assume in consciousness the 
 form of a stream of isolated feelings. Let us try 
 to imagine, further, that the mind which is passively 
 conscious of these feelings reasons about them 
 in a fashion which neither imparts to them nor 
 takes from them any portion of the system in 
 which they are real. The conceptions which the 
 mind forms, and its purposes in forming these con- 
 ceptions, will be abstract and separate from the 
 concrete feelings about which the reasoning takes 
 place. Now in the real universe we find no 
 analogue of such a process. We saw that the 
 mind and its object cannot be separated. We 
 found that even in our everyday experience that 
 experience was continuously moulded through the 
 ends and purposes which determined the percipient 
 in organising knowledge. But I told you in the 
 end of the third lecture I delivered here last year, 
 
 N
 
 194 FINITE MIND [LKT. i. 
 
 how Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, had 
 failed to realise this, and how he had tried to treat 
 experience as something that could be peeled into 
 layers like an onion, as something that consisted of 
 elements, contributed by sense and understanding 
 respectively, which were in some fashion self- 
 subsisting and independent of each other, and 
 which could therefore be considered as separable 
 in fact. The result was that for Kant the real 
 world was limited by what could be expressed 
 through the conceptions of substance, cause, and 
 reciprocity. On the other side of the gulf which 
 reason had discovered lay a partly subjective world 
 in which the Ideas of our practical reason, of the 
 moral world, lay. To this unreal world must for 
 him be relegated such ideals as those of God, 
 Freedom, and Immortality, abstract conceptions 
 which the constitution of reason compelled us to 
 believe to be realisable somehow, but never here 
 or now. It became obvious to Kant that this 
 huge gap between the faculties of the mind as well 
 as between their objects must in some sort be 
 shown as bridged over, if we were to be capable at 
 all of understanding how it was the world seemed, 
 as it did seem to us, to present all these aspects, 
 and not only the first kind. He had divided the 
 mind into three faculties, that of Conception, that 
 of Judgment, and that of Reason. The first gave 
 us reality, but reality as but mechanical. The last 
 gave us the ideal, but the ideal as separated from 
 the real world by a gulf. If, then, the apparent
 
 KANT'S CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT 195 
 
 continuity of our actual attitude towards life was 
 to be accounted for, there must be a faculty which 
 produced the semblance of ideality in the region of 
 direct perception, and the semblance of direct per- 
 ception in the region of the ideal. This faculty 
 was that of judgment, and its work was examined 
 and its limits denned by Kant in his Critique of 
 Judgment. 
 
 It is a tradition in the philosophical world that 
 the Critique of Pure Reason influenced the develop- 
 ment of speculative thought less than did the 
 Critique of Judgment. The truth which underlies 
 the tradition is that in the latter book Kant came 
 very near the position which was common to 
 Aristotle and the German thinkers of the early 
 part of the nineteenth century. Here he set out 
 a view of the individual in which the universal of 
 reason and the particular of sensation were no 
 longer divorced, as was, at least to a considerable 
 extent, the case in the other parts of his system. 
 It is true that the union is allowed to possess reality 
 only of a subjective kind, as a regulative principle in 
 judgment about experience, which experience thus 
 comes to seem as though it contained individuals 
 of beauty and organisation in which the ideal can- 
 not be regarded as abstract merely, or otherwise 
 than hi indissoluble combination with sense. Still, 
 so far as he allowed to such individuals any reality 
 at all, they formed a true feature of the world as 
 comprehended by us, a world from which we could 
 not get away. For him the beautiful was a fact,
 
 196 FINITE MIND [LKT. . 
 
 and it was quite different from the merely pleasant, 
 which was what it was because it satisfied a 
 purpose of a particular mind, and was therefore 
 merely subjective. It was also different from the 
 good, because this was what it was in virtue of 
 being means to an end. For Kant beauty and 
 life were the points at which two regions met, 
 where reason was represented in the world of 
 sense, and sense was represented in the world of 
 reason. Only in abstraction could the beautiful 
 and the living be broken up into their moments. 
 For in them there was no division between means 
 and end. 
 
 But Kant, as I have told you, while he declared 
 that this was so, stopped short at admitting that 
 it was so otherwise than sub modo, for a particular 
 faculty only. He never got away from the arti- 
 ficial antithesis, which pervades his system, of sub- 
 jective thought and objective things, of abstract 
 universality and sensuous particularity. Of the 
 Critique of Judgment, Hegel says : " This criticism 
 forms the starting-point for the true conception of 
 artistic beauty. Yet this conception had to over- 
 come the Kantian defects before it could assert 
 itself as the higher grasp of the true unity of 
 necessity and freedom, of the particular and the 
 universal, of the sensuous and the rational. And 
 so it must be admitted that the artistic sense of a 
 profound and, at the same time, philosophic mind, 
 was beforehand with philosophy as such in demand- 
 ing and commanding the principle of totality and
 
 HEGEL AND SCHILLER 197 
 
 reconciliation, as against that abstract endlessness 
 of reflective thought, that duty for duty's sake, 
 that intelligence devoid of plastic shape, which 
 apprehend nature and reality, sensation and feeling, 
 as a mere limit, and as an absolutely hostile element. 
 For Schiller must be credited with the great merit 
 of having broken through the Kantian subjectivity, 
 and having dared the attempt to transcend these 
 limits by intellectually grasping the principles of 
 unity and reconciliation as the truth, and realising 
 them in art. Schiller, in his aesthetic discussions, 
 did not simply adhere to art and its interest with- 
 out concerning himself about its relation to philo- 
 sophy proper, but compared his interest in artistic 
 beauty with the principles of philosophy ; and it 
 was only by starting from the latter, and by their 
 help, that he penetrated the profounder nature of 
 the beautiful. Thus we feel it to be a feature in 
 one period of his works that he has busied himself 
 with thought more, perhaps, than was conducive 
 to their unsophisticated beauty as works of art. 
 The intentional character of abstract reflection and 
 even the interest of the philosophical ideas are 
 noticeable in many of his poems. This has been 
 made a ground of censure against him, especially 
 by way of blaming and depreciating him in com- 
 parison with Goethe's straightforwardness and 
 objectivity. But in this respect Schiller, as poet, 
 did but pay the debt of his time ; and the 
 reason lay in a perplexity which turned out 
 only to the honour of that sublime soul and pro-
 
 198 FINITE MIND OCT. i. 
 
 found character and to the profit of science and 
 cognition." * 
 
 Schiller, though penetrated by the theoretical 
 teaching of the Critique of Judgment, was not 
 dominated by it, and he was able, as Hegel points 
 out, to carry matters a stage further on. Jena, in 
 the early years of that century, was a fruitful place. 
 There Schiller and Goethe not only met each other 
 but met Schelling and Hegel. The skeleton of the 
 theory of art became clothed with living flesh and 
 blood. Hegel himself there learned the lesson 
 which taught him to seek to gather together in his 
 hand the strands of which he had such ample 
 opportunity to lay hold. For him the region of 
 the beautiful, the region too of the other forms that 
 belong to art, was the region in which Mind, the 
 Idea, exists, not as philosophy conceives and sets 
 it forth in abstract terms, but "as developed into 
 concrete form fit for reality, and as having entered 
 into unity with this reality. For the idea as such, 
 although it is the essentially and actually true, is 
 yet the truth in its generality which has not yet 
 taken objective shape ; but the Idea as the beautiful 
 in art is at once the Idea when specially determined 
 as in its essence individual reality, and also an in- 
 dividual shape of reality essentially destined to 
 embody and reveal the Idea. This amounts to 
 enunciating the requirement that the Idea, and its 
 plastic mould as concrete reality, are to be made 
 completely adequate to one another. When reduced 
 
 * Philosophy of Fine Art, Bosanquet's Translation, p. 116.
 
 CA&LYLE 
 
 to such a form the Idea, as a reality moulded in 
 conformity with the conception of the Idea, is the 
 Ideal."* 
 
 Carlyle in his own way puts it in words which 
 I may quote to you : 
 
 "Another matter it is, however, when your 
 Symbol has intrinsic meaning, and is of itself fit 
 that men should unite round it. Let but the God- 
 like manifest itself to Sense ; let but Eternity look, 
 more or less visibly, through the Time-Figure 
 (Zeit-bild) \ Then is it fit that men unite there ; 
 and worship together before such Symbol ; and so 
 from day to day, and from age to age, superadd to 
 it a new divineness. 
 
 " Of this latter sort are all true Works of Art ; 
 in them (if thou dost know a Work of Art from a 
 Daub of Artifice) wilt thou discern Eternity looking 
 through Time ; the Godlike rendered visible. . . . 
 
 "... Highest of all Symbols are those 
 wherein the Artist or Poet has risen into Prophet, 
 and all men can recognise a present God, and 
 worship the same ; I mean religious Symbols. 
 Various enough have been such religious Symbols, 
 what we call Religious ; as men stood in this stage 
 of Culture or the other, and could worse or better 
 body forth the Godlike : some Symbols with a 
 transient intrinsic worth ; many with only an 
 extrinsic. If thou ask to what height man has 
 carried it in this manner, look on our divinest 
 Symbol ; on Jesus of Nazareth, and His Life, and 
 * Ibid., P . 141.
 
 200 FINITE MIND [LECT. i. 
 
 His Biography, and what followed therefrom. 
 Higher has the human thought not yet reached : 
 this is Christianity and Christendom ; a Symbol of 
 quite perennial, infinite character; whose signifi- 
 cance will ever demand to be anew inquired into, 
 and anew made manifest." * 
 
 Thus in the picture gallery of Art we have 
 Reason which is intuitive, the complete fusion of 
 the universal and the particular, the individual in 
 a form in which thought and feeling have in this, as 
 elsewhere, fallen together, the true relation between 
 Logic and Nature. The here and the now are 
 transcended. The fleeting impression is rescued 
 from the flux of time and the relativity of place. 
 It receives immortality from the spirit which it 
 embodies, a spirit which, in its turn, only in this 
 embodiment gains its unique and incomparable 
 character as concrete fact. The words of an 
 Aristotle or of a Newton may cease to be for us 
 lasting and final words. The words of a Homer 
 or a Shakespeare are imperishable. For as men 
 and women we cannot transcend the plane at which 
 they represent the most that is possible in immediate 
 presentation. 
 
 * Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, Chapter on Symbols.
 
 LECTUKE II 
 
 I SPENT my time yesterday in examining the human 
 mind in phases in which it touches the infinite. In 
 the earlier lectures of this second course, I began 
 by approaching mind from the side on which it 
 presents an aspect that is absolute. In this latter 
 part of the course, I am starting from the aspect in 
 which mind is finite, and working up to the level 
 at which it attains to the infinite. Yesterday I 
 took that phase of the human mind in which its 
 perception is immediate, and in which what it per- 
 ceives yet represents knowledge that is absolute. 
 I took the immediate as it appears in Art, and I 
 showed you that in Art the mind transcends its 
 own finite forms. In Art it is quite true that that 
 with which we are in contact is in its nature 
 something that has a locality in space and a 
 position in time. It may be but the vanishing 
 patches of paint upon a canvas. But what the 
 mind really has before it in Art is, not the patches 
 of paint upon the canvas, but itself, directly 
 revealed in the highest form. Art is no matter of 
 inference ; Art is not something to which we come 
 mediately. It is that which is directly presented, 
 
 201
 
 202 FINITE MIND OCT. it. 
 
 but presented, as it were, in a sensuous form 
 through which it shines. Absolute mind as dis- 
 closed in Art is not something which is behind the 
 sensuous form, but is in the sensuous form, and 
 gives its meaning and character to that form. 
 Therefore, although the patches of paint are but 
 patches of paint, and although the canvas is but 
 canvas, what is represented by the hand of genius 
 is something, as I showed you, which is above 
 time and space in the sense that time and space 
 are indifferent to it. The meaning for us of 
 what is in the landscape of the Dutch painter 
 remains, although the figures have no reality, and 
 although the scene belongs to a period of time 
 which is past, or even never was. The significance 
 is one which transcends the particularism of the 
 observer and the observed, and in it you have the 
 directly revealed manifestation of that side of mind 
 in which it is no longer finite but has transcended 
 the limits of its own finitude. In other words, you 
 have, in what is represented in the picture, mind 
 comprehending itself in its fulness. 
 
 Now that is one phase of mind in which it 
 discloses itself in immediacy, and there is another 
 phase of mind in which, even for us men and 
 women, the higher aspect is disclosed in a different 
 form of immediacy. Religion is something just 
 as real as is Art. In Religion you have an aspect 
 of the human mind in which it is in contrast with 
 the human mind as you have it in ethical relations. 
 In Ethics you are always confronted with this, that
 
 MORALITY AND RELIGION 203 
 
 beyond the deed that is done lies another deed 
 which has yet to be accomplished. In the duty 
 which you have to another person to treat him as 
 a person, as you yourself would be treated, you 
 are still in the relationship of the one and the 
 many. That other person is, like yourself in that 
 relation, finite, and beyond him and you, beyond 
 even the society of which you both form members, 
 there are levels which you have not reached, and 
 which, if you did reach them, would still leave you 
 confronted with something beyond, separating you 
 from infinitude. In Ethics, in other words, you 
 are capable only of endless progress, in which the 
 self never reaches its own goal or its own self- 
 comprehension. But in Religion, the essence of 
 which is the surrender by the self of its finite ends 
 and the acceptance of the ends of God in place of 
 these finite ends, you have the transcendence of 
 that relation of finitude in which the self is always 
 confronted with another beyond. In Religion the 
 self finds its true life in the life of God, and in that 
 way the contradiction which manifests itself at 
 every turn of its finite action is overcome. 
 
 In Religion you have got reality, but reality 
 manifested, like reality in Art, only in immediacy. 
 You have it in the sense of the surrender by 
 the will of its finite purposes. In Religion, as 
 in Art, you are dealing with what is immediate. 
 It is in feeling, not in abstract conception, that 
 Religion dwells, and it is in that act of will 
 which assumes the form of the surrender of the
 
 204 FINITE MIND [LECT. u. 
 
 purposes that are not final that the essence of 
 Religion consists. Therefore in Religion, as in 
 Art, what you are dealing with is not abstract 
 conception. I do not wish you to understand me 
 as conveying to you that one ought to, or indeed 
 that one can, separate Art and Religion and 
 Thought from one another as though they were 
 the manifestations of three different faculties of the 
 mind. On the contrary, what I have been insist- 
 ing on throughout the whole of these lectures is 
 that we must start from the mind itself as final 
 reality, and that Art in the form of feeling, and 
 Religion in the form of the consciousness of an act 
 of will completed, and Thought as the other form 
 in which the activity of the mind manifests itself, 
 are three forms, but three forms which are only 
 separated and isolated from one another by the 
 act of the very self-consciousness to which they 
 belong, and within which they are merely phases 
 of one activity. Nevertheless, when we are deal- 
 ing with that aspect with which Religion is con- 
 cerned, we are dwelling upon that which concerns 
 the will, as distinguished from that which belongs 
 to the sphere of the beautiful or to the sphere of 
 contemplation. 
 
 When we take a man of devout character who 
 is also a thinker, when we take, for example, the 
 personality of such a man as Spinoza, "the God 
 intoxicated," we recognise in him a holy man, not 
 on account of his thought, but on account of his 
 attitude of will, the attitude of will which manifested
 
 THE RELIGIOUS MAN 205 
 
 itself throughout his work, the resignation of the 
 will to live, and the acceptance of absolute purpose. 
 Nevertheless we are always aware that in the con- 
 templation of such a character we cannot separate 
 off the will from the intellect, but that the one 
 profoundly influences the other. The purpose of 
 the religious man is to die to self, as it has been 
 said, in order to live in God ; that is to say, in 
 the exercise of the freedom that belongs to him 
 even as finite spirit, to cease to will finite ends and 
 purposes. The medium in which his religious con- 
 sciousness embodies itself is thus acts of will and 
 phases of feeling. Scientific knowledge belongs to 
 another sphere, and the ends which scientific 
 knowledge seeks to realise are apart from the ends 
 which are sought after in Religion. Between 
 Science and Religion, so understood, there is no 
 conflict, simply because the two do not aim at the 
 same thing, and accordingly we must bear in mind 
 that the deliverances of the religious conscious- 
 ness, in so far as they travel outside their sphere 
 of immediacy, must always be symbolical, and can 
 never in themselves and of themselves be guides to 
 scientific conceptions. 
 
 By the reflective phase of that initial activity 
 of mind, which only in abstraction is separated 
 into the different forms which I have mentioned, 
 I mean the power which the human mind has to 
 become in contemplation conscious of its own 
 limits, and in this consciousness to transcend them. 
 Now that consciousness is not immediate, as is
 
 206 FINITE MIND [LMT. H. 
 
 the case with Art and with Religion. It is only 
 in reflection that the human mind can transcend 
 the limits of its finitude, and that reflection takes 
 place in the form of inference. Not only does it 
 take place in the form of inference, but the infer- 
 ence is the inference of finite mind conscious of 
 itself as finite. Nevertheless reflection does often 
 assist the finite individual to bear with and even 
 rise above the limitations of his finitude. I have 
 never wholly agreed with Shakespeare that a philo- 
 sopher could be no better than anybody else at 
 bearing toothache 
 
 " There was never yet philosopher 
 That could endure the toothache patiently, 
 However they have writ the style of gods, 
 And made a push at chance and sufferance." 
 
 He ought to be better able to bear it, if he is not. 
 But the philosopher, even in his philosophising, 
 certainly does reflect on the footing of being a finite 
 person, and his medium never can be more in itself 
 than the universals of reflection which reflection 
 detaches from their setting in reality, in just the 
 same fashion as does reflection in geometry detach 
 the universal from what is in its nature individual. 
 The method of philosophy is therefore abstract, and 
 although thought, which is the instrument of philo- 
 sophy, can lift the human mind to the contemplation 
 of itself as more than finite, it does not give that 
 direct, rich, concrete sense of immediate contact 
 which you have in the case of Art and in the case of
 
 207 
 
 Religion. Thus it comes about that while Philosophy 
 can aid Art and Religion, and is, as I have said be- 
 fore, the only proper guardian of the truth in these 
 matters, it cannot, like these, give immediate presen- 
 tation. What it does, is to show us that in all of what 
 is said to be immediately present to the mind there 
 is implicit, as the very condition of its possibility, 
 knowledge of a higher kind, which in ultimate 
 analysis becomes disclosed as creative knowledge in 
 absolute mind. As I have already shown to you, 
 it is the finiteness of our human ends which makes 
 us abstract from the presence of this deepest aspect 
 of reality. We do not get rid of our finite ends in 
 our philosophising, but Art and Religion show us, 
 even in our human lives, those deeper aspects of 
 reality, which are in their nature ultimate, as form- 
 ing the very basis of our finite existence, and they 
 show us that directly. It is only in the distinctions 
 made by finite spirit, in its freedom to follow the 
 limited purposes which are of its essence as human, 
 that the object world of finite mind becomes im- 
 mediate, and its really mediate and derivative char- 
 acter is left out of sight simply because it is veiled 
 by the abstractions of understanding. In other 
 words, in so far as we are finite, and are therefore 
 dominated by ends and purposes which are not the 
 ends and purposes of absolute mind, we drop out 
 of sight what it is that has made the world as it 
 seems to us wear the aspect which it does. It is 
 thus that there is hidden from us the reality which 
 is disclosed in the highest forms of Art and of
 
 208 FINITE MIND [LECT. n. 
 
 Religion, and which is disclosed in the abstract 
 reasoning of Philosophy. And this reality we are 
 apt, when we give ourselves up to the domination 
 of the purposes which make us human beings, to 
 leave out of account and at times almost passion- 
 ately to protest against as unreal. 
 
 There are striking illustrations of this in litera- 
 ture, of the most varied kinds. One there is, re- 
 markable in its combination of simplicity with 
 subtlety, in a well-known poem, Fitzgerald's " Omar 
 Khayyam." Omar Khayyam, the Persian poet, is 
 not, like the men of a still more remote Eastern 
 land, overwhelmed by the consciousness of the in- 
 finite. He is aware that there is an ideal to pursue, 
 but, strong in the sense of the direct presence of 
 finite purpose, he holds it futile to make the effort 
 to pursue an ideal 
 
 " For f /* ' and ' Is-not ' though with Rule and Line 
 And Up-and-doivn without I could define, 
 I yet in all I only cared to know, 
 Was never deep in anything but wine."* 
 
 He speaks, however, as no common cynic in that 
 somewhat sceptical utterance. He is dissatisfied 
 with the endless progress of the world of finite ends, 
 with the Beyond reached only to disclose yet an- 
 other Beyond. But he will lay hold of what seems 
 to be here and now, and try to put from him the 
 consciousness of its unreality, regardless of whether 
 or not he is consistent with himself in the effort 
 
 * Fitzgerald's "Omar Khayyam" (1st ed.).
 
 THE PROBLEM OF DEATH 209 
 
 he is making. In a verse just before, he has ex- 
 claimed : 
 
 " How long, how long, in infinite Pursuit 
 Of This and That endeavour and dispute ? 
 Better be merry with the fruitful grape 
 Than sadden after none, or bitter, Fruit." * 
 
 The same thought is expressed by Browning, in 
 language less cynical, but putting the same point : 
 
 " Better ends may be in prospect, 
 Deeper blisses (if you choose it), 
 But this life's end and this love-bliss 
 Have been lost here." 
 
 None the less the history of humanity, and 
 above all, the history of what has been recognised 
 by humanity as highest and most real, proves be- 
 yond question that in a different attitude multitudes 
 in all ages have found the apparent dilemma to 
 be no dilemma. It is the business of philosophy 
 to tell us how and why this has been so. 
 
 The problem which confronts philosophy is why 
 even the best in the world of the finite should be 
 transitory, should have an end as it has had a be- 
 ginning, and the topic on which this most directly 
 arises is the topic of death. ' I have already in 
 part considered the nature of death in the earlier 
 lectures. I pointed out to you that the finite and 
 particular self is what it is to itself by contrast with 
 nature. It recognises itself as confronted by nature, 
 as limited by nature, and therein lies its finiteness. 
 I examined the question of why that was so, and 
 
 * Ibid. 
 

 
 210 FINITE MIND [LECT. n. 
 
 how it comes that self-consciousness can look 
 upon itself as arising in time out of the world by 
 which it finds itself confronted, and I also pointed 
 out to you that in the knowledge which embraces 
 that world in experience we have different stages 
 or degrees of reality in that experience. We start, 
 for example, with what is most alien and impene- 
 trable to mind, the relation of things as external 
 to one another in space, and again with what is 
 nearly, though not quite, as alien and impenetrable, 
 the relation of things as succeeding one another in 
 time. In that succession you have an endlessness 
 which is mindless and wearisome. But you get 
 to other conceptions in nature which transcend 
 what can be expressed in terms of space and 
 time relations, and there you find you have risen 
 above mere endless succession as well as above 
 mere externality of parts in space. In life, in the 
 organism, you are conscious of the presence of the 
 whole as controlling the parts, and yet as having in 
 space and time no existence separate from the parts. 
 The whole is here in the parts, and the parts are 
 what they are only in so far as they belong to the 
 whole. In other words, the externality of space 
 and time is in large measure, though not altogether, 
 transcended, and you have passed in some degree 
 from the endless exclusiveness of things as outside 
 each other in these two relations. 
 
 But there is a further stage at which the mind 
 arrives, and that is where it takes in that the object 
 world is what it is only for the mind which per-
 
 THE SOUL 211 
 
 ceives it. In other words, you there see that the 
 very externalities of space and time, the relation- 
 ships of being outside each other and of being suc- 
 cessive to each other, are relations which fall within 
 the mind itself, and are what they are only for mind 
 that perceives. These distinctions turn out to fall 
 within self-consciousness, and so you find yourself 
 getting a step further towards recognising mind as 
 what is ultimately real through the various stages 
 which become manifest in nature. Above and 
 beyond the notion of life in the physical organism 
 there confronts you the fact of the organism as 
 sentient, as even intelligent, as displaying those 
 characteristics which can only be displayed by a 
 body which gets its significance from a soul, and 
 displays its higher aspects in the form of a soul. 
 And so it comes that in the human being, the being 
 that presents the aspect of soul as well as that of 
 body, you have got away from mere endless succes- 
 sion in time ; you have got above even the notion 
 of the whole which is in the parts and controls 
 them, notwithstanding that the organism in one 
 aspect belongs to externality, and you have got 
 nearer to the notion of mind as that which 
 embraces reality within itself. But just as you 
 have got away from mere succession and endless- 
 ness, just as that aspect is seen to be not the only 
 aspect but one which dominates only in knowledge 
 of a limited kind, so you get to a further but still 
 imperfect presentation of the self ; this you have in 
 the picture which you frame to yourself of the
 
 212 FINITE MIND [LECT. rt . 
 
 individual which has soul and body. Here you are 
 still conscious of defects in your presentation. In 
 body and soul you have the manifestation of mind, 
 but it is mind still thought of as for the self 
 which perceives, and as under the domination of 
 relations of space and time which have only been 
 partially transcended. Taken in their abstract 
 presentation, soul and body are in time, and as in 
 time, although they have transcended the mere 
 endlessness of succession, they transcend it only 
 in so far as they have a limit or an end. I pointed 
 out to you how in the mathematical series the 
 notion of the limit, that is of a notional end to 
 the apparently endless succession, was really the 
 key to the conception of a whole which gives the 
 series its truth and its existence. Well, so it is in 
 the nature of the organism. There is here some- 
 thing that corresponds to the limit, which raises 
 the process above mere unending succession, and 
 that is the course of development of the organism 
 in which it attains the fulness of its reality. In so 
 far as that follows a course of growth and then 
 decay, in so far as there is a development to be 
 accomplished which is the key to the very meaning 
 of the organism, there is implied a beginning and 
 there is equally implied an end. Life is impossible 
 except on the basis of development, and develop- 
 ment must be of what is born, comes into existence, 
 grows, and finally declines to a natural end ; because 
 the complete conception of life is only attained 
 when we recognise that the individual is a member
 
 LIFE AND DEATH 213 
 
 of the species, and that it is the law and life of the 
 species which give law and life to the individual. 
 The species cannot continue, cannot maintain its 
 vitality, unless the individuals which have become 
 old and useless to it pass away, and consequently 
 you see how in nature the individual being passes 
 away for the benefit of the species. That is part of 
 the great conception of evolution, and that is how 
 the life of the world, taken as a whole, goes on. 
 Thus it is that the notion of death is not merely 
 implied in the meaning of the life of the individual, 
 but is a notion which is so completely correlative 
 to those of birth and of life that without it these 
 two would not be intelligible. 
 
 Now let us, in the light of this truth that death 
 is an event which is required for the completion of 
 the life of the individual taken as a mere living 
 organism, and is necessary for the life of the 
 species, let us, I say, in the light of this reflection, 
 examine the contrast between life and death. 
 Death is a natural event, and in it you have, in 
 point of fact, the reconciliation of the conflict of 
 interest between the particular organism and the 
 species. If the particular organism were as endur- 
 ing as the type the type would suffer, and it is for 
 the benefit of the species that the particular 
 organism, having done its work, should die and 
 pass away. When you turn from the mere biologi- 
 cal point of view at which that is true to the point 
 of view of psychology, where you have the soul as 
 individual, as sentient, as reflective, as capable of
 
 214 FINITE MIND [Lser. n. 
 
 volition, you have other phenomena not alto- 
 gether dissimilar from those upon which I have 
 been touching. In the soul you have in childhood, 
 as I pointed out once before, the characteristic 
 of great detachment on the part of the mind. 
 Its bodily surroundings, the world that confronts 
 it, are something strange and foreign which it 
 has to dominate and mould to its purposes, and 
 in childhood you have the greatest sense of the 
 freedom of soul life. Habits have not yet been 
 formed. As you go on in life, and more and more 
 make your body the servant of your will, and more 
 completely dominate your surroundings, the real 
 power of the soul increases, and by degrees, as old 
 age approaches, the soul succeeds in so moulding 
 its surroundings and its body to itself that it 
 establishes courses of conduct and habits which lead 
 to still greater facility in the realisation of its own 
 activity. But that activity is gradually deadening 
 into habit, and the deadening into habit which is 
 characteristic of old age points to an end to that 
 kind of external life of the soul, just as essentially 
 involved in the completion of the existence of the 
 soul as death is in that of the physical organism. 
 Well, whether we take it from the point of view 
 of animal life or of physical life, the death of the 
 particular living creature appears as natural and 
 necessary, and is the more seen to be so the larger 
 and more complete the outlook and comprehension 
 of the process which takes place. It is only when 
 we fall into the abstractions of the understanding,
 
 NATURE AND DEATH 215 
 
 which take what is presented in their own distinc- 
 tions as final, and as representing complete truth 
 and complete reality, that we rebel against this 
 view. If we are dealing simply with the side of 
 things in which they belong to nature, we do not 
 rebel against the notion of death or take it as 
 unnatural. I shall show you presently that the 
 rebellion arises out of this, that people uncon- 
 sciously assume that the higher aspects of the life 
 of the spirit must be taken as subordinated to the 
 law of the physical. But in the meantime I am 
 dealing only with what I may call the physical side 
 of the soul itself, the side which belongs to nature ; 
 and the point is that, if you keep to simple animal 
 life, you do not find any contradiction in the notion 
 of death, or the rebellion against it which you find 
 at a higher stage, where you are really contem- 
 plating something higher than animal life. 
 
 Dealing first with mere animal life, I am going 
 to quote to you the description, given by an 
 American writer who is a keen observer of animal 
 life, of the death of animals. This is what he 
 says, after a great deal of study of the facts : * 
 
 " How do the animals die ! quietly, peacefully, 
 nine-tenths of them. . . . The vast majority steal 
 away into the solitudes they love, and lay them 
 down unseen where the leaves shall presently cover 
 them from the sight of friends and enemies alike. 
 
 We rarely discover them at such times, for the 
 
 * The School of the Woods, William J. Long. Chapter on 
 " How the Animals die ! " p. 352.
 
 216 FINITE MIND [L*CT. . 
 
 instinct of the animal is to go away as far as 
 possible into the deepest coverts. We see only 
 the exceptional cases, the quail in the hawk's grip, 
 the squirrel limp and quiet under the paw of the 
 cat or weasel ; but the unnumbered multitudes that 
 choose their own place and close their eyes for the 
 last time, as peacefully as ever they lay down to 
 sleep, are hidden from our sight. 
 
 "There is a curious animal trait which may 
 account for this, and also explain why we have 
 such curious, foolish, conceptions of animal death 
 as a tragic and violent thing. All animals and 
 birds have a strong distrust and antipathy for any 
 queerness or irregularity among their own kind. 
 Except in rare cases, no animals or birds will 
 tolerate any cripple or deformed or sickly member 
 among them. They set upon him fiercely, and 
 drive him away. So when an animal, grown old 
 and feeble, feels the queerness of some new thing 
 stealing upon him, he slips away, in obedience to a 
 law of protection that he has noted all his life, and, 
 knowing no such thing as death, thinks he is but 
 escaping discomfort when he lies down in hiding 
 for the last time." . . . "In short,* unless the 
 animals are to live always, and become a nuisance 
 or a danger by their increase, Nature is kind, even 
 in her sterner moods, in taking care that death 
 comes to all her creatures without pain or terror. 
 And what is true of the animals was true of man, 
 
 * The School of the Woods, William J. Long. Chapter oq 
 " HOW the Animals die ! " p. 360,
 
 HOW THE ANIMALS DIE 217 
 
 till he sought out many inventions to make sickness 
 intolerable and death an enemy. . . . The vast 
 majority of animals go away quietly when their 
 time comes ; and their death is not recorded, 
 because man has eyes only for exceptions. He 
 denies a miracle, but overlooks the sunsets. Some- 
 thing calls the creature away from his daily round ; 
 age or natural disease touches him gently in a way 
 he has not felt before. He steals away, obeying 
 the old warning instinct of his kind, and picks out 
 a spot where they shall not find him till he is well 
 again. The brook sings on its way to the sea ; the 
 waters lap and tinkle on the pebbles as the breeze 
 rocks them ; the wind is crooning in the pines 
 the old sweet lullaby that he heard when his ears 
 first opened to the harmony of the world. The 
 shadows lengthen ; the twilight deepens ; his eyes 
 grow drowsy ; he falls asleep. And his last con- 
 scious thought, since he knows no death, is that 
 he will waken in the morning when the light calls 
 him." 
 
 Goethe died with the words " More light " upon 
 his lips, expressive, apparently, of just such con- 
 sciousness of a simple natural life and of something 
 that was coming simply and naturally. 
 
 Well, I have described how death appears 
 natural when taken from the point of view of mere 
 life, as distinguished from that of self-consciousness, 
 and I will now take, as an illustration of a yet 
 higher attitude in which death is contemplated as 
 natural, the diary of a man of science who passed
 
 218 FINITE MIND [Lacr. n. 
 
 from the world only some three years ago, Professor 
 Pettenkofer of Munich. He was one of the 
 greatest living authorities of the time on Public 
 Health, and, among other things, it had always 
 been in his mind that the question of how the 
 infection of cholera was conveyed was one which 
 could be answered only by experiment, experi- 
 ment which might prove fatal, but which must be 
 performed before the truth could be known. His 
 view was that the mere presence of the cholera 
 germ in drinking-water was not sufficient to account 
 for infection, unless there were other conditions 
 also present. Accordingly, finding himself in 
 infirm health, he made up his mind to test his 
 theory by experimenting upon himself. He had 
 resolved that he would swallow a cultivation of 
 the cholera bacillus in water, and this is the 
 description, afterwards found in his diary, of 
 what happened : 
 
 " On the 7th of October 1892, in the presence of 
 witnesses, I took the cholera drink, which tasted 
 like the purest water. Some of my friends were 
 concerned for me, and asked that if I were now 
 determined that the experiment should be made, 
 they might be allowed to sacrifice themselves in 
 place of their old teacher ; but I wished to act in 
 accordance with the old maxim, Fiat experimentum 
 in corpore mil ! I have the right to consider myself 
 a corpus vile. I am seventy-four years old, I have 
 suffered for years from glycosuria, have not a single 
 tooth left, do not even use my artificial teeth in
 
 THE STRONG MAN AND DEATH 219 
 
 eating, but only when I have to speak long and 
 clearly ; and I feel also other burdens of old age. 
 Even if I were mistaken, and the experiment 
 endangered my life, I should look death calmly 
 in the face, for it would be no thoughtless and 
 cowardly suicide. I should die in the service of 
 science, as a soldier on the field of battle. Health 
 and life, as I have often said, are very high earthly 
 gifts, but not the highest for man. The man who 
 wills to stand higher than an animal must be ready 
 to sacrifice even life and health for a higher ideal 
 good." 
 
 Well, he made the experiment successfully, and, 
 by surviving it without serious damage, proved that 
 so far he was right. The story remains simply 
 illustrative of this, that, with a sufficiently firm 
 conception that death is a perfectly natural occur- 
 rence when a certain condition of the organism has 
 been reached in natural course, a man of strong 
 mind can subordinate the conception of death so 
 completely as to have no fear of it of any sort or 
 kind. This is possible in so far as we look at it as 
 an event in nature, as the example of Professor 
 Pettenkofer shows. But we do not take nature 
 to be the ultimate form of reality, or merely submit 
 ourselves to death as a final end to be attained. 
 
 Bacon says of death, that 
 
 " Revenge triumphs over it ; Love slights it ; 
 Honour aspireth to it ; Grief flieth to it ; " 
 
 and we have the same feeling expressed in other
 
 220 FINITE MIND [LECT. H. 
 
 and better known words : " Oh death, where is 
 thy sting ? Oh grave, where is thy victory ? " 
 
 The acceptance of death seems to be there 
 regarded as a step towards the attainment of some- 
 thing higher, not represented as something to come 
 later in time, but as that which is in itself higher, 
 and in comparison with which the reality of death 
 disappears. This acceptance of death seems now 
 to mean an attitude in which death itself becomes 
 unimportant and unreal. Observe the contrast. 
 Mere endless succession of time, with its blank- 
 ness, is at the one extreme ; at the other extreme 
 is the life which is, in the only true sense, called 
 eternal as being above time, the life which, when 
 reached, is the highest form of reality. Between 
 these there is a gap which has to be bridged 
 over, a gap bridged over only in the expression of 
 itself by mind, an expression which may assume 
 the form of acceptance of physical change, or of 
 the fulfilment of physical law, even if it assumes 
 the form of the death of the organism. And yet 
 this is only tolerable upon the footing that death 
 itself and the intermediate stages to which it 
 belongs are themselves unreal, compared with this 
 highest form of reality. 
 
 Now let us pause and inquire a little what we 
 mean by this. We do not mean merely to prefer 
 to life as it is now a life which is subsequent in 
 time. The notion of mere endless succession in 
 time is a notion which altogether belongs to the 
 finite. What is in the mind is rather the refusal
 
 THE DILEMMA 221 
 
 to regard the present life in time as more than 
 relatively real. The mind looks for the truth 
 about those things as to be got, not so much by 
 setting up something beyond, as by breaking down 
 the reality of what is here and now, so as to trans- 
 form what is appearance here and now into the 
 presentation of another and a higher aspect. Taken 
 abstractly, we put life and death in sharp anti- 
 thesis ; but, as I have shown you, if we examine 
 the matter from the point of view of the mere 
 natural life of the organism, the antithesis seems 
 not to be real, any more than in other cases where 
 one has traced the origin of an antinomy to the 
 action of the understanding in putting things in 
 sharp abstraction. The formula of the understand- 
 ing is that something is either this or something else, 
 and yet we are constantly finding in reflection that 
 the " either, or" and the dilemma based on it, are 
 not exhaustive, and that there is a higher concep- 
 tion through which the sharp antithesis disappears. 
 
 The contrast, after all, between life and death 
 is a contrast which is made within self-conscious- 
 ness. Self-consciousness is not itself an event in 
 time. It is that within which the world of events 
 in time falls. This does not mean that the contrast 
 between life and death does not exist. It does 
 exist, but it presents its appearance of finality only 
 for a comprehension which is not complete, and 
 which therefore corresponds only to a degree in 
 reality. 
 
 Now that is no point of view which is peculiar
 
 222 FINITE MIND [LKT. n. 
 
 to philosophy. With the instinct of a man of 
 genius, Goethe rejected the old Roman maxim, 
 Memento mori, "Remember that thou art dying," 
 for the larger maxim, Memento vivere, " Remember 
 that thou art living." The meaning of Goethe's 
 Gedenke zu Leben, I take to be this : " Think of 
 life as something more than a mere present with a 
 past behind it and a future in front of it. Think of 
 thy present as a present which, fully understood, 
 taken at its highest significance, pertains to the 
 eternal, to the infinite self that makes within itself 
 the distinctions out of which has arisen the con- 
 trast between past and present and future. Think 
 of the instant, think of the moment in which 
 thou livest, think of the deed which thou doest, 
 think of the merest daily act, all as having eternal 
 and infinite significance. Think of spirit as that 
 which gives reality to what is, was, and shall be, as 
 that within which what is, was, and shall be, falls." 
 In other words, in his "instant made eternity," 
 Goethe lays down the great truth, that, if you would 
 find the highest aspects of reality you must seek 
 them, not in some world beyond, but in the world 
 as it is here and now, only fully comprehended 
 and taken in its complete relation to mind. This 
 does not mean that death has no place, still less 
 that eternal life signifies endless duration and con- 
 tinuance in infinitum of the present life of the 
 physical organism. Such a view would be repug- 
 nant, not only to the conception which Goethe puts 
 before us, but to the best thought of the ages.
 
 THE FALSE INFINITE 223 
 
 Jesus, when rebuking the Sadducees, tells them, 
 as is recorded in the 22nd chapter of Matthew's 
 Gospel, that they err, not knowing the power of 
 God for in the true resurrection they neither 
 marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the 
 angels of God in heaven. God, he says, is not the 
 God of the dead, but of the living. Again, in John 
 17th, he defines eternal life: "This is life eternal, 
 that they might know thee the only true God, and 
 Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent." 
 
 The religious man, as Professor Edward Caird 
 has pointed out in his Gifford Lectures,* believes in 
 a future life for himself and mankind, because he 
 believes in God, and does not believe in God 
 because he believes in a future life or another 
 world. In a remarkable passage t in his Lectures 
 he goes on to say : 
 
 " The belief in immortality may easily become 
 an unhealthy occupation with a future salvation, 
 which prevents us from seeking for salvation for 
 mankind here, unless it be that natural spring of 
 confidence in its own supreme reality, that unbelief 
 in death, which seems to be the necessary character- 
 istic or concomitant of true spiritual life. If it be 
 a consequence of the intellectual conditions under 
 which we live in the present day, that the empirical 
 evidences of a future life that seemed most sure 
 and certain to our fathers have for some of us lost 
 
 * Prof. Edward Caird, The Evolution of Religion, vol. ii. 
 p. 242 (3rd ed.). 
 t Ibid., p. 243.
 
 224 FINITE MIND [Lwr. n. 
 
 their controlling power, this, in a religious point 
 of view, may not be altogether a loss. It is possible 
 even that the spiritual may gain all that the super- 
 natural has lost " ; an observation which, I think, 
 is as remarkable as it is true. 
 
 How certain it is, that the repugnance which 
 is awakened in our minds by such books as 
 Letters from Heaven and The Gates Ajar is due to 
 this cause the feeling that the picture of a con- 
 tinuance in time of a life in all material respects 
 resembling our own, and only quantitatively different 
 from it, affords us no satisfaction. Those of you 
 who recall Swift's biting description of the " Struld- 
 brugs," of the people whose lives continue without 
 cessation, and the consequent misery which he 
 depicts in Gulliver's Travels, will remember what 
 depths of unhappiness the contemplation of such a 
 state of things can disclose. The picture of a 
 physical life which does not obey the ordinary 
 course of nature, the law which bids life to have a 
 beginning, and bids it equally naturally to have an 
 end, that is not any key to what we desire when 
 we pray for eternal life. Eternal life gains nothing, 
 but loses much, when it is represented as the per- 
 sistence of a physical organism. It is only the 
 abstract character of understanding which has led 
 people so to symbolise it. 
 
 Well, in this lecture I have endeavoured to 
 prepare the way for the more complete considera- 
 tion to-morrow of what I think we are now in a 
 position to enter upon the true signification of
 
 ETERNAL LIFE 225 
 
 eternal life and the meaning of its reality. I shall 
 endeavour in what follows to investigate the real 
 nature of that life and its lesson. I am aware that 
 the problem is one which man never will leave 
 where it lies. The longing for "the touch of a 
 vanished hand, and the sound of a voice that is 
 still," will always forbid us to be satisfied with any 
 doctrine that cannot redeem itself from the reproach 
 of bidding us be content with an abstraction. We 
 cannot accept stones in place of bread. We have 
 therefore to see whether a conception of eternal 
 life be possible which will free it from the 
 reproach of offering stones in place of bread.
 
 LECTURE III 
 
 I DEVOTED my time yesterday to the consideration 
 of death looked at as an event in time, and I 
 endeavoured to show you that the conception of an 
 organism, preserving its life and pursuing its course 
 of development from birth to death through the 
 metabolism of its material, was less abstract and 
 therefore higher than the conception of a mere 
 endless succession in time. The presentation of 
 such an organism, implying as it does transcend- 
 ence of complete mutual exclusion of parts, belongs 
 to a higher stage in nature, and the knowledge of 
 it would seem to be a further step towards the 
 self-comprehension of mind as what alone proves 
 in ultimate analysis to be the real. In fact the 
 pathway to reality would seem to be a pathway 
 through stages of knowledge, each one higher 
 than that which preceded it, to that complete self- 
 comprehension by mind of itself which exhibits 
 mind as containing all reality within itself. One f 
 of these stages of knowledge is the recognition of 
 life as an intermediate stage in the comprehension 
 of itself by mind. Yet in life we are still in the 
 sphere of nature. And a life that did not in death 
 
 226
 
 THE MEANING OF ETEKNAL LIFE 227 
 
 naturally fulfil its purpose as an individual member 
 of the species, but on the contrary continued end- 
 lessly, would be unnatural and miserable ; as, 
 indeed, Swift showed in the illustration I quoted 
 to you yesterday of the " Struldbrugs," and as 
 we all instinctively feel when we read pictorial 
 accounts of another world. 
 
 Eternal life must then mean something quite 
 different from this, and to-day I propose to take up 
 the problem of that meaning. My purpose is to 
 begin by considering the question with which I 
 closed the last lecture the question why we are 
 dissatisfied with the mere assurance that the forms 
 of time have no application to self-consciousness, 
 as a substitute for what people call the living 
 personal sense of continuance beyond the grave. 
 Now I want, in considering this, to see first what 
 light metaphysics can cast upon the problem. 
 There are two extremes, two forms in which we 
 can think reality, each of which is abstract, and 
 each of which is divided from the other by a con- 
 siderable gulf. To begin with, the notion of mere 
 endless succession is a barren notion, and one 
 which is incomplete. If I take a particular, say 
 unity, and count it again and again and again, I 
 feel, not only that my task is in point of fact 
 without an end, but that there is no reason in the 
 nature of what I am doing why it should come 
 to an end. The future is uninteresting and in- 
 different to me because it does not lift me in any 
 sense beyond the present. That is one extreme.
 
 228 FINITE MIND OCT. m. 
 
 The other extreme is such a logical conception 
 as the abstract one of mind, as that within which 
 all space and time and all distinctions within them 
 fall. If that is set up merely in the form in which 
 abstract thinking gives it to us, we feel that it also 
 is shadowy and that it is not adequate to reality. 
 
 Well, these are two extreme views ; they are in 
 their different fashions abstract, and in order to see 
 what they mean one has got to consider whether 
 they do not represent mere planes of knowledge, 
 bearing in mind that, as we saw before, knowledge, < 
 even absolute knowledge, only attains reality by : 
 collecting itself, as it were, out of the differences in 
 which it has expressed itself. You have got, on the 
 one side, abstract succession; you have got, upon 
 the other side, the fixed notion of a self which is 
 timeless because time falls within it. But the 
 concrete riches of human life are between these 
 two. They are like the individual in which just 
 such abstractions attain reality for our finite know- 
 ledge. No life is sufficiently pictured under the con- 
 ception of one antithesis or under that of the other. 
 Real life contains within itself the elements of the 
 two, and one comes to see that the difficulty and 
 the antithesis have been caused by taking extreme 
 views in a highly abstract form as representative 
 and sufficiently descriptive of the facts with which 
 we have to deal. Life has the side of succession 
 in time in it ; life also has its meaning as falling 
 within self-consciousness, and getting its significance I 
 only through self-consciousness.
 
 THE FORMS OF KNOWLEDGE 229 
 
 Between these two different kinds of knowledge 
 there are, intermediate, other forms of knowledge ; 
 for example, our experience of the organism in 
 which life determines parts that are always 
 changing, and yet is not anything separate from 
 these parts. The conception of the whole, which 
 you have there, carries you beyond the mere 
 externality to each other of the units which you 
 find in a mere endless succession in time. Again, 
 the course of life from birth to death, the develop- 
 ment which that life pursues, the purpose which it 
 realises, not only on its own account but for the 
 sake of the species, and which ends with its death 
 just as naturally as it commenced with its birth 
 these disclose that you are dealing with life and 
 with knowledge at a higher plane, and therefore 
 with reality in a higher degree, than what you find 
 when you are dealing with the mere succession of 
 events in time. 
 
 Now, bearing that in mind, let us see what 
 light we get on the problem which confronts us 
 when we cannot reconcile our individuality as part 
 of nature with the sense which we have that in one 
 aspect our lives rise above mere succession in time. 
 Life, on one side of it, is succession in time. Life, 
 on another side of it, finds its reality in the self- 
 consciousness for which succession in time is. 
 Therefore if we take the life of the individual 
 and deal with it abstractly as a mere event in time, 
 deal with it by the method which the geometer 
 adopts when he abstracts from everything except
 
 230 FINITE MIND [LECT. in. 
 
 space relations in order to get clear knowledge, we 
 reach a conception which is not adequate to what 
 we are trying to express by it. If life is necessarily 
 something more than the mere indifferent succession 
 of unit to unit, it cannot be expressed merely as an 
 event. Life, with its reference, its intrinsic refer- 
 ence, to self-consciousness as its highest meaning, 
 imports more than any mere fact in that object 
 world which is for self-consciousness, and, conse- 
 quently, when we endeavour to get the clear 
 knowledge which is essential for the purposes of 
 our everyday social intercourse by speaking of a 
 person as if that person could be labelled as a mere 
 fact determined by space and time relations, we 
 get a contradiction which presses itself upon us. 
 We quite see how we come to regard the person in 
 that light, but we also feel that that light is quite 
 inadequate, and therefore unconsciously we pro- 
 ceed to determine the life, which we have thus 
 abstractly conceived, as finding its completion, the 
 higher truth which we have the sense, and rightly, 
 that it must have, in something that lies beyond. 
 Now that something our imagination, which pre- 
 sents pictures that succeed each other in time, 
 causes us to present to ourselves as another period 
 into which life enters in time after its termination 
 as an event here. But, when we come to look at 
 that pictorial future, it turns out to be just as in- 
 adequate as was the first pictorial presentation of 
 the present from which it started. 
 
 What we mean is simply this, that in conceiving
 
 THE PICTORIAL BEYOND 231 
 
 life simply in the light of an event in time, we have 
 conceived it too abstractly, and therefore inade- 
 quately. Our picture has not been a true picture. 
 Our knowledge has been imperfect, and we have 
 endeavoured to correct that imperfection by setting 
 up a Beyond which is again imperfect and inade- 
 quate for just the same reason ; and therefore, while 
 we are forced to conceive of a future life, that 
 conception of a future life as a mere succession in 
 time to the present is itself imperfect, for just the 
 very same reason that the first was imperfect. In 
 that way an antinomy arises. 
 
 Now what an antinomy is most of you know. 
 Take a famous one. The world has either got a 
 first cause or it has not got a first cause. It must 
 have a first cause, because as you go back and back 
 you must come to something which is the cause of 
 all that is. On the other hand, it cannot have a 
 first cause, because as you go back you find that 
 each cause in its turn appears to be just an effect, 
 and there is no end to the series of causes present- 
 ing themselves as in their turn merely effects. 
 Well that is an antinomy which arises because we 
 have made use of categories which are not adequate 
 to their subject matter the universe conceived as a 
 totality ; and so the difficulty about the future life, 
 the dilemma that the individual must either perish 
 with the events of time, in which case his nature is 
 not accounted for, or that he must have a future 
 life, in which case that future life is impossible to 
 reconcile with what we know about this one, is a
 
 232 FINITE MIND [Lwr. m. 
 
 dilemma which arises out of a similar inadequacy 
 of the conceptions applied. The more you look at 
 it and the more you examine it, the more you see 
 that the pictorial conception of immortality is one 
 which is forced on us because we are bound to 
 determine the life of the self as meaning more than 
 a mere external event, and it is equally clear that 
 the more you try to picture to yourself that future 
 life, the more you get into hopeless contradictions. 
 That point is, I think, one which is just as capable 
 of being worked out in philosophy as are the anti- 
 nomies about which there has been so much 
 discussion antinomies of which this difficulty is 
 no more than a specimen. 
 
 What I have suggested to you has not been 
 very much touched on in philosophy, but it has 
 been put by Hegel in a passage in which he dis- 
 cusses a kindred topic, in the latter part of his 
 Philosophy of Religion* He points out that the 
 subject is certain of its own infinite, non-sensuous 
 substantiality; that the form of its self-conscious- 
 ness consists in an endless yielding up of its 
 particularity, and finds its infinite value only in 
 what he calls the Love which consists in infinite 
 sorrow and arises out of it. "This," he says, 
 "is a quality and a life which is beyond time 
 and what is transitory, and since it is also in 
 antithesis to its finite and conditioned mode of 
 existence in the present, its necessity of eternal 
 self-realisation determines itself as future. The 
 
 * Hegel, Werke, xii. p. 313.
 
 THE ANTINOMY 233 
 
 infinite demand to see God, that is, for the mind to 
 become conscious of His truth in this temporal 
 present, is not yet satisfied for percipient con- 
 sciousness." 
 
 Well, that is putting the very point in another 
 form. It is because life is more than a mere fact 
 of externality, that we are forced by the action of 
 reflection to determine it as having a future beyond 
 the grave ; and yet that determination, because it 
 takes what is really an abstract view, is inadequate, 
 and lands us in contradictions and difficulties. We 
 have got to work ourselves out of that antinomy, 
 and we can only do this by finding a higher con- 
 ception which gives us what we want without the 
 contradiction arising. So long as people think of 
 life at its highest as a spectacle in time and, as in 
 this aspect, a final fact of reality, so long will they 
 be driven to long for its continuance beyond the 
 grave in just that form, and to think that they are 
 shut up to the alternatives of its either ending 
 here or continuing beyond the grave. They take, 
 do these people, two mutually exclusive views, 
 and alternate necessarily from one to the other. 
 And yet, so often as they try to picture this 
 continuance, just so often will they be driven 
 to fall into self-contradiction and inexplicable 
 difficulties. The antinomy is a real one, and it 
 must be solved by a deeper and more thinking 
 consideration. 
 
 We have already in the course of these lectures 
 had to discuss several antinomies. A remarkable
 
 234 FINITE MIND [LECT. m. 
 
 one was that which we had to deal with in the case 
 of life and mechanism. It is obvious that you 
 cannot give an adequate account of life in terms of 
 mechanical conceptions. I will not labour that 
 again, because I have dealt fully with it before ; 
 but out of the tendency to express everything in 
 mechanical terms, there arose a theory which was 
 called Vitalism. Vitalism of the old order declared 
 that the only way to account for the fact of organic 
 life was to suppose that there was some kind of 
 vital force, different from ordinary physical forces, 
 which conserved the organism and gave it its life. 
 Well, that of course was just introducing a new 
 mechanical conception to redress the difficulties of 
 the old physical conception, and Vitalism the old 
 Vitalism fell, because of its mechanical view, into 
 just as great contradictions as did the theory which 
 it was meant to improve. 
 
 Now the ordinary notion of a continuance of 
 this life after death is subject to just as great 
 difficulties as was the old Vitalism, but that does 
 not drive us into saying that the soul and the self are 
 to be conceived as something which comes to an 
 end with the grave, any more than it would be 
 right to infer from the failure of the old Vitalism 
 that the mechanical interpretation of life was the 
 true one. The truth in this case is that the 
 difficulty which you have to face arises from the 
 basis upon which you have started, and it was 
 because it was an altogether inadequate concep- 
 tion of the soul to take it as a mere thing in time,
 
 AET AND DEATH 235 
 
 that you were driven to set up a correction of 
 that conception by supposing a continuance in time 
 beyond the grave as the only way of getting out of 
 the dilemma in which you found yourselves. 
 
 In other branches of knowledge, interpreted in 
 the large sense in which I have used the word 
 in these lectures, the problem solves itself with- 
 out difficulty. In Art, for example in the pictures 
 which Art gives us of the lives of great men, 
 we are not troubled with the notion of their 
 deaths. Not only do we see in them minds that 
 have risen above the fear of death, but we see that 
 in their deaths the completion of life often lies. 
 In, for example, the death of Caesar, or of Nelson, 
 Art can draw for us pictures which symbolise what 
 we feel to be the highest modes of completion that 
 we could have desired for these lives as it interprets 
 them for us. We would not have them end other- 
 wise nay, it could not have been otherwise without 
 destruction to the greatness of the story. " Selig 
 der den Er im Sieges Glanze findet" is an expres- 
 sion which you find occurring over and over again 
 in different forms in the history of literature. So 
 it is in yet a deeper sense with the life of Jesus. 
 It was not the continuance of that which was, in- 
 definitely, it was its culmination in a scene in 
 which past and present and future were gathered 
 into one that was the truth of that life. Not in 
 the mere temporal succession of the events of these 
 great lives, but in action in which duration in time 
 became of merely secondary importance, existed for
 
 236 FINITE MIND OCT. m. 
 
 them and for us the culminating instant which be- 
 came eternity. 
 
 Well, in the lives of such men we find the 
 expressions of their personalities, of their self- 
 consciousness, in forms that are for sense. Art has 
 the power of presenting in sensuous form what is 
 more than sensuous. In it mind finds itself again. 
 The world that appeared for them, as it appears in 
 identical forms for us who contemplate their careers, 
 was a world which included, in what was necessary 
 to its history, their own deaths. But, together 
 with all its events, its beginning and its end, for 
 them as for us that world arose and ended within 
 self-consciousness and was in that self-conscious- 
 ness transcended. 
 
 Art expresses these things for us symbolically, 
 and when it tells us the story of the lives of great 
 men it leaves us with no sense of difficulty in grasp- 
 ing the story. For Religion, which embodies ana- 
 logous truths in its consciousness of free-will acts 
 of self-surrender, these are felt to be the truths that 
 are absolute. Faith, the sense of the reality of 
 what is above and beyond that which is seen, 
 makes them its substance. In Religion we are 
 conscious of difficulties smoothed away for us, not 
 by scientifically constructed pictures, but by the 
 sense we have of truth attained in self-surrender, 
 in the adoption of purposes which are greater than 
 our own finite purposes ; and in the consciousness \ 
 of that we get what is called faith, the sense of the 
 things that are more than seen. Problems and
 
 THE SYMBOLS OF RELIGION 237 
 
 difficulties disappear, and men and women are sus- 
 tained by a sense which lifts them up. That sense 
 accompanies acts of will and arises out of acts of 
 will. But Religion, Religion as it takes form in 
 the Church, as it takes form in the intercourse of 
 the human beings whom it binds together, Re- 
 ligion is assisted by the pictorial forms into which 
 in the human mind it naturally passes. These 
 pictorial forms do not give scientific truth, but they 
 are, as it were, the symbols in which religious feel- 
 ing expresses itself. We have the sense of Absolute 
 Existence, of God, as of Someone from whom we are 
 separated and whom we can therefore worship as 
 lower beings worship the highest; but we also 
 know and have the sense of our union with that 
 highest form of mind in a single subject of know- 
 ledge, the knowledge in which the universe is sus- 
 tained, and it is that relationship which enables us 
 at once, in the exercise of our freedom as free though 
 finite spirit, to be apart from God and to assume to 
 Him the attitude of those who may pictorially re- 
 gard themselves as separated from, and at the same 
 time as returning to Him. Of these things, Religion, 
 as I have said, can give no scientific pictures, but it 
 can give us an assurance arising out of that sense 
 of certainty which accompanies the act of the 
 surrender of its particular existence by the will. 
 Metaphysics has for its business to put those 
 things into scientific form, and it does so in 
 its teaching about degrees of reality, and the 
 eternity of self-consciousness as essentially above
 
 238 FINITE MIND OCT. m. 
 
 time. It is when we lapse from the meta- 
 physical standpoint, and try to express what is as 
 though we could completely describe its nature in 
 space and time relations, that we get into diffi- 
 culties. Space and time relations are necessary ; 
 they represent reality when we regard things under 
 certain conceptions adopted for limited purposes ; 
 but if we wish to get at the truth about such a 
 matter as eternal life, we have to resort to concep- 
 tions of a higher kind, and only when we resort to 
 conceptions of a higher kind are we delivered from 
 the dilemma that this life either ends with the 
 grave or continues beyond the grave. The grave 
 and this temporal present, taken as events, turn out, 
 from a higher standpoint, to be appearance merely, 
 and not to be representative of reality. The 
 antinomy has arisen in a form that seems at first 
 sight insoluble simply because of the limited basis 
 we have adopted, and what we have to do is by 
 analysis to break down what appears as hard-and- 
 fast, and not to set up and insist upon a counter 
 abstraction. 
 
 Let us try to follow this out in a concrete 
 illustration. A child dies. Its parents are over- 
 whelmed with grief. As time goes on, their grief 
 remains. The touch of a vanished hand is missed, 
 and the tender grace of a day that is gone never 
 returns to them. Now, try to follow what it is 
 that is in their minds. They do not really desire a 
 reunion on the footing that they, changed it may 
 be, by the lapse of twenty years' time, changed in
 
 RELATION OF SPIRIT TO SPIRIT 239 
 
 circumstances, in character, in age, should meet 
 again the child stereotyped, as it were, at the 
 moment of death; nor do they desire that they 
 should meet again a being developed in another 
 world in surroundings far away from all the 
 associations of this one, a being whom they would 
 encounter as almost a stranger. What binds them 
 to the child is something deeper. It is a relation, 
 not of external event to external event, but of spirit 
 to spirit. The physical organism of the child was 
 but the symbol which expressed the higher mean- 
 ing of its personality to them, just as in the 
 patches of paint upon a canvas, which at one 
 standpoint are mere patches of paint, we are able 
 at another standpoint to discern as symbolised 
 the higher meaning, the higher expression. The 
 love of the parents for the child is not a relation of 
 physical organism to physical organism. It is, as I 
 have said, a relation of spirit to spirit, and it is 
 only spiritually that it can be interpreted. The 
 parents do not desire to have restored in another 
 life, unaltered and without development, the being 
 that was taken from them. Apart from growth, 
 apart therefore from change, without a course of 
 life which must have its termination just as it had 
 its beginning, temporal existence in this or any 
 other world which resembled it would be intoler- 
 able. It is only in a deeper and more adequate 
 conception that we can find that relation of spirit 
 to spirit which is really desired in our aspirations 
 to immortality.
 
 240 FINITE MIND OCT. m. 
 
 Now, that view of the nature of the individual 
 is not a view which has been confined to philosophy. 
 There are two little companion poems of Goethe, 
 one called "Eins and Alles" and the other 
 " Vermachtniss," in which this thought was ex- 
 pressed by him in words which are worth while 
 quoting here : 
 
 "Im Grenzenlosen sich zu finden, 
 Wird gern der einzelne verschwinden, 
 
 Da lost zich aller Ueberdruss ; 
 Statt heissem wimschen, wildem wollen, 
 Statt last 'gem Fordern, strengem Sollen, 
 
 Sich aufzugeben 1st Geniiss." 
 
 " In what is infinite to find himself again 
 Will who is finite gladly pass away ; 
 There to be free from what oppresses, 
 There free from burning wishes, wild desire, 
 There free from grinding pressure, keen ambition, 
 In self-surrender blessedness to find." 
 
 And then, again, in the other poem we have the 
 companion verse : 
 
 " Kein Wesen kann zu nichts zerfallen, 
 Das Ewige regt sich fort in alien, 
 
 Am Sein erhalte dich begliickt ! 
 Das Sein ist ewig ; denn Gesetze 
 Bewahren die lebend 'gen Schatze, 
 
 Aus welchen sich das All Geschmiickt." 
 
 " No being can to nothing pass away, 
 In everything 'tis clear the eternal moves. 
 In Being steady, then, thyself in joy, 
 Being eternal is, for laws conserve 
 
 The living Treasure 
 From out of which stands clothed in life the Whole." 
 
 There you have a poetical presentation of the
 
 THE MEANING OF LOVE 241 
 
 spiritual aspect of the individual, an aspect 
 which rises beyond the mere organism and the 
 mere notion of life as giving its significance to 
 individuality. 
 
 Now in human affection it is clear that what 
 is loved is no abstraction fixed by the understand- 
 ing in universals that are unchanging. It is the 
 concrete embodiment of the spirit which though 
 finite is free, and which is but symbolised in the 
 bodily forms in which it expresses itself, and in the 
 changes in which the working out of its own 
 destiny is imaged. The love of the parent, of the 
 husband, is just like that of the patriot, of the artist, 
 of the saint, is like that of God Himself. It is a 
 relation, not of what is external to what is external, 
 but of spirit to spirit. "When," writes Hegel,* 
 " we say God is love, we are expressing a very great 
 and true thought ; but it would be unreasonable 
 merely to take this in such a simple way as a simple 
 characterisation of God, without analysing the 
 meaning of love. For love implies a distinguishing 
 between two ; and yet these two are, as a matter of 
 fact, not distinguished from one another. Love, 
 this sense of being outside of myself, is the feeling 
 and consciousness of this identity. My self-con- 
 sciousness is not in myself but in Another; but 
 this Other in whom alone I find satisfaction and 
 am at peace with myself, and I exist only in so far 
 as I am at peace with myself, for if I had not this 
 inner peace I would be the contradiction which 
 
 * Hegel, Philosophy of Religion, Eng. Tr., vol. iii. p. 10.
 
 242 FINITE MIND [LECT. ,. 
 
 breaks itself up into parts this Other, just because 
 it is outside of me, has its consciousness only in 
 me. Thus the two are represented simply by this 
 consciousness of their being outside themselves and 
 of their identity, and this perception, this feeling, 
 this knowledge of the unity, is love." 
 
 Love, in other words, is the bond, the highest 
 bond, which you find between mind and mind. In 
 whatever form it takes, whether it originates in 
 some natural relation, whether it originates in sense, 
 whether it originates in the relation of citizen to his 
 country, whether it originates in the relation of man 
 to God, the highest of all these forms, it gets its 
 meaning from a higher and deeper conception than 
 anything that can be expressed in mere external 
 relations. Love is the highest relation of spirit to 
 spirit. With that conception you are still in the 
 sphere of the one and the many, but you have got 
 to the highest point, the point at which in the rela- 
 tion of one to another there is the consciousness of 
 identity in the deepest sense. 
 
 Now if that be so, the real foundation of the 
 love of the parents for the child that is gone, being 
 a relationship of spirit to spirit, must be assigned 
 to an aspect of existence in which the present is 
 something more than a mere relationship to a past 
 and to a future, each of them as transitory and 
 unsatisfactory as itself, and in which the real nature 
 of spirit may be sought in a region where the 
 mutual exclusion that characterises events in 
 time does not obtain. It is clear that at one
 
 IDENTITY L IN DIFFERENCE 243 
 
 extreme we can describe to ourselves in abstract 
 language, in abstract conceptions, a self within 
 which time and space fall, because it is the sub- 
 ject for which all knowledge is. And if reality 
 have degrees, and if therefore the knowledge in 
 which reality consists have degrees, then it becomes 
 apparent that a deeper and fuller view of things 
 than the view which fixes life as an event midway 
 between a past and a future is the view which would 
 interpret life as in truth transcending the succession 
 of these three different moments in the time rela- 
 tion. And so it comes that it is not on our own 
 account, nor for their qualities, but because in their 
 personalities our own lives really centre, that we 
 love those around us. It is in form the conscious- 
 ness of identity in difference, a relation which tran- 
 scends that of mere externality, and belongs to a 
 higher degree of reality and to a different stand- 
 point. And if this be so, we seem to be near to 
 the key to our problem. It is no longer of any use 
 to put the dilemma that we must either again see 
 or not again see those from whom death separates 
 us. The antinomy of the abstract understanding 
 raises the dilemma, but it is not an exhaustive 
 dilemma. It is not, even at this present moment 
 of life together, a question of mere seeing. If death 
 is transcended, if it ceases to be more than appear- 
 ance when you get to the completed comprehension 
 of the conscious self, it is transcended and is unreal 
 in the love which is the manifestation of the inmost 
 nature of the conscious self, that inmost nature
 
 244 FINITE MIND [LKT. m. 
 
 which the physical organism, in its nature trans- 
 itory, only symbolises. Neither the self nor that 
 in which it recognises identity with itself fall 
 within the sphere of transitory and self-abolishing 
 appearance. If one goes, the other goes. If one is 
 not so affected, the other is not so affected. Could 
 we think out life, or even a particular event in it, 
 completely, there were no room for the abstract 
 antithesis of death. We are more than mere facts 
 in time, and time cannot bar us off from one another 
 if we are all of us more than mere facts in time. It 
 is not by setting up a beyond, but by breaking down 
 the false and hard-and-fast semblance of reality in 
 the present, that we solve the problem that con- 
 fronts us. Just as we found God, not in some 
 remote region, but in the world as it is here and 
 now, so in the here and now, in this present more 
 completely comprehended, and more completely 
 brought into that relation to mind which is the 
 key to all reality, do we find the true immortality, 
 the immortality of the soul, not regarded as a sub- 
 stance, but looked at as subject related, in the con- 
 sciousness of identity called love, to subject and not 
 to substance. 
 
 Doubtless there are many aspects in which 
 death, to use the language of the East, is the 
 Separator of persons and the Terminator of delights. 
 These aspects are aspects which confront us very 
 closely at our everyday social level. When we 
 read an account in the newspaper of a railway 
 accident, these are the aspects which are engaging
 
 HIGHER POINTS OF VIEW 245 
 
 oui' minds. For the executor and the undertaker, 
 there are no others that occupy their attention. 
 But these are not really the aspects which occupy 
 us when we find ourselves longing for the touch 
 of a vanished hand and the sound of a voice 
 that is still. It is the relation of spirit to spirit 
 which then engages us. If we will but look at 
 it from the point of view of spirit, if we will but 
 remember where the pathway towards reality leads 
 us to, we shall find that the dilemma that confronts 
 us in our everyday conceptions is a dilemma which 
 no longer presents itself as exhaustive. 
 
 In life, as I have pointed out often, there are in 
 each moment implicit diverse standpoints at which 
 reality is possessed of diverse meanings and degrees. 
 There is no experience but implies more standpoints 
 than one ; perhaps every experience contains an 
 infinity of standpoints and conceptions. And it is 
 with the higher standpoints that the questions of 
 immortality and of love and grief are truly con- 
 cerned, and not with the abstractions which are the 
 outcome of the lower standpoints. It is the Veil 
 of Maya which the understanding is ever weaving 
 for us that conceals the truth. For us, whose 
 picture world arises under the finite forms of our 
 finite knowledge, a direct presentation of the un- 
 reality of death can never be accomplished. Yet 
 as symbols of more than they can express for 
 abstract knowledge such pictures are of use to us. 
 The dying man may have before his mind the 
 pictorial spectacle of himself as passing away in a
 
 246 FINITE MIND [L*CT. m. 
 
 world which he and others image as continuing after 
 him. It does not disturb him, for in some form or 
 another he has a deeper sense. He may be filled with 
 a simple faith that assures him that his Redeemer 
 liveth or a faith may be his that in yet a different 
 form tells him that it is within his own self that 
 the world and himself as in it are passing, and 
 that in his grasp of the fact he is above it, and 
 is at one with the eternal. What is the insight that 
 sustains him in these deep waters ? Wherein does 
 he comprehend and see what those do not who look 
 at him and mourn? In this, perhaps. For him 
 as for them the world is there, with its present, its 
 past, and its future. The present is determined 
 only through the future and the past, but equally 
 the past and the future exist only as distinctions 
 made within the present. For this present has a 
 supreme reality that enables it to be grasped, by 
 the mind that has sufficient insight, as that which 
 possesses, beyond the appearance with which it is 
 invested by the finite forms of reflection necessi- 
 tated by the ends of workaday life, a higher degree 
 of reality that belongs to the Eternal. At this 
 level his present embraces within itself no less 
 than the entire universe, and the separations 
 that other purposes have hypostatised into what 
 seems final and unyielding sink into mere appear- 
 ance. The present contains within itself, for him 
 who by faith or by knowledge is lifted above and 
 away from purposes which pertain but to the pass- 
 ing moment, the entirety of what was, is, and will
 
 FAITH 247 
 
 be. His insight, the outcome it may be of the 
 faith that in religion comes with the voluntary 
 surrender of the self to God, or the outcome of a 
 knowledge that may be rarer, but not the less 
 brings peace, has disclosed to him supreme reality. 
 Dimly, perhaps, yet certainly, he knows that he 
 himself, those about him, the world which one 
 and all have been used to take as foreign to 
 themselves, as the Other that confronts them, are 
 included and exist only in a self-consciousness that 
 now emerges into the light as containing within 
 itself every event that exists for it, even the spec- 
 tacle of the passing of a life that, not the less 
 because it is his own, in one aspect belongs to 
 Nature. He sees all things in God, and this is 
 not the less his faith because he may not know 
 what it signifies in abstract knowledge, nor be able 
 to express it. Not the less on this account does 
 the true reality of his universe sum itself up in a 
 Now that comprehends all change within itself, and 
 is so beyond the reach of the all-severing wave of 
 time. For those who stand by his bedside, if they 
 have not the insight which he has, and their very 
 health and strength immerse them in interests 
 which make this hard of attainment, he is but part 
 of that Nature the destiny of whose creatures it is 
 to come to maturity and to pass away. Not for 
 the mere Understanding that fixes in difference, in 
 obedience to finite necessities, but only for the 
 Reason that completely comprehends, can the full 
 meaning of the scene be made manifest, and
 
 248 FINITE MIND OCT. m. 
 
 appearance give place to reality. By Reason the 
 limits of the finite may be transcended in know- 
 ledge, as for the dying saint they are in practice, 
 and men may be certain that, could they compre- 
 hend as God comprehends, they should see the 
 Eternal made manifest through the fleeting shadows 
 of time. For there is but one Single Subject within 
 which all knowledge and all reality fall. With and 
 in that Single Subject philosophy and faith alike 
 assure us that we are one. And so when his 
 simple creed, pictorial it may be, but symbolical of 
 the deeper meaning of reality, bids the humblest 
 soul in his greatest and last extremity be assured 
 that his Redeemer liveth, it may be that there has 
 come to him an insight in form only different from 
 that of the profoundest thinker. 
 
 Such a conclusion is not the mere outcome of 
 mysticism. It is the outcome of the reasoned 
 system which Aristotle founded and Hegel 
 developed, and the method of which it has been 
 my endeavour to set before you in these lectures 
 as the only one that can cast the light of know- 
 ledge on the nature of ultimate reality. 
 
 The question therefore is a practical one, 
 whether after all we must not frankly recognise 
 that these aspirations, the "intimations of im- 
 mortality," as Wordsworth has called them, from 
 which we cannot escape, are in truth representa- 
 tive of degrees of knowledge in which the mind, 
 though still at the standpoint of the finite, is 
 raised above the ordinary dilemmas of everyday
 
 DEGREES IN KNOWLEDGE 249 
 
 knowledge. It may well be that between the 
 extremes of mere duration on the one hand and 
 being above time on the other, we can analyti- 
 cally construct the conception of a life which 
 understanding cannot present as existence in mere 
 temporal sequence, but which, while it preserves in 
 love the differentia of otherness and individuality, 
 is yet not necessitated to present itself to itself, 
 even in immediacy, as a passing phenomenon. It 
 may be right to recognise that such phases of con- 
 sciousness belong just as much to what is reality 
 as do phases in other kinds of knowledge. In 
 such phases I can conceive that consciousness may 
 be still finite, and yet as much above and beyond 
 my consciousness as mine is beyond that of my 
 dog, for whom the appearance of this world, as I 
 pointed out to you in the lectures of last year, 
 must be very different from what it is for me. Just 
 as there are degrees in reality, so there seem to be 
 degrees in the ends and standpoints of knowledge- 
 degrees above those of our ordinary knowledge and 
 yet short of the knowledge that is absolute. At 
 such standpoints the categories of the one and 
 the many may still apply, and separation in time 
 and space yet appear unreal. In other words, it 
 seems as though it were conceivable that mind 
 should have, even in finite contemplation, a direct 
 experience, more perfect than any that is ours, of a 
 relation of itself to the world in which the passing 
 of that world would not seem to imply the passing 
 of the mind which in one aspect appears in it, In
 
 250 FINITE MIND [LECT. ,. 
 
 even our human experience it is plain that the 
 mind can triumph over death ; and that should 
 not surprise us, who realise that in social relations 
 which are characterised by finitude, by a sense of 
 something always beyond, even when the moral 
 law is being obeyed, we are ever conscious that 
 we are more than physical organisms, more than 
 finite, that we are what we are only upon a basis 
 that is absolute. 
 
 I will sum up what I have been trying to 
 express of the teaching of philosophy about the 
 future life. That life is represented as future only 
 on the footing of taking the present as having no 
 meaning save in reference to what is beyond in 
 time a limit, as it were, not more on the side of 
 the future than on that of the past. But the 
 present, so taken, is no adequate picture of reality. 
 Along with the past and the future to which it 
 refers us beyond itself, it belongs to the world of 
 appearance only, seems as it does only in virtue of 
 abstraction by the understanding. At a plane of 
 fuller comprehension that present turns out to fall 
 within a consciousness of self which is eternal, 
 because only within it can time and the other 
 distinctions which mind constructs arise. So com- 
 prehended the now is an eternal now, within which 
 past and future arise as constructions of the mind. 
 It is only on the basis of eternity and within it, that 
 change has any meaning. Goethe's maxim, Gedenke 
 zu leben, bids us think of life as greater than any- 
 thing in it. Here we have the same truth, but in
 
 THE DIRECT EXPERIENCE 251 
 
 a different form. Life now stands for us as intel- 
 ligible only when contemplated from the stand- 
 point of the eternal. Here and now is God, 
 here and now is freedom, here and now is immor- 
 tality. It is the old difference between appearance 
 and reality, between the world as it seems at 
 different planes of knowledge. The teaching of 
 philosophy may to our minds, which even in 
 the best thinking are dominated by the finite 
 ends that make our thinking abstract, and ever 
 leave us conscious of contrast with Another 
 beyond, appear attenuated and shadowy. Yet none 
 the less has appearance been penetrated and over- 
 come by the wonderful might of thought which 
 can rest satisfied only in the ultimately real. Thus 
 it is that we turn quite naturally to Art and to 
 Religion for the direct sense of the presence of what 
 is truly closer to us than breathing and nearer than 
 hands and feet. In Art, in its widest and highest 
 significance, and most of all in Religion, with its 
 deliverance from the sense of unending progress 
 that characterises even the noblest of moral lives, 
 does the spirit find freedom. The theoretical basis 
 of this freedom I have tried to set before you in this 
 lecture, and I should like to quote to you before I 
 sit down, the analysis given by Hegel (who as usual 
 deals with these things more powerfully than other 
 men), of the peace which such a standpoint as that 
 of religion can give a peace based not on the 
 mere negation of the will to live, as Schopenhauer 
 conceived it, but on the reality which is attained in
 
 252 FINITE MIND OCT. ,. 
 
 the acceptance of ends which are God's ends, in 
 the place of ends which are finite. 
 
 "All the various peoples," says Hegel,* "feel 
 that it is in the religious consciousness they possess 
 truth, and they have always regarded religion as 
 constituting their true dignity and the Sabbath of 
 their life. Whatever awakens in us doubt and fear, 
 all sorrow, all care, all the limited interests of finite 
 life, we leave behind us on the shores of time ; and, 
 as, from the highest peak of a mountain, far away 
 from all definite view of what is earthly, we look 
 down calmly upon all the limitations of the 
 landscape and of the world, so, with the spiritual 
 eyes, man, lifted out of the hard realities of this 
 actual world, contemplates it as something having 
 only the semblance of existence, which, seen from 
 this pure region bathed in the beams of the 
 spiritual sun, merely reflects back its shades of 
 colour, its varied tints and lights, softened away 
 into eternal rest. In this region of spirit flow the 
 streams of forgetfulness from which Psyche drinks, 
 and in which she drowns all sorrow, while the dark 
 things of this life are softened away into a dream- 
 like vision, and become transfigured until they are 
 a mere framework for the brightness of the Eternal. 
 This image of the Absolute may have a more or less 
 present vitality and certainty for the religious and 
 devout mind, and be a present source of pleasure ; 
 or it may be represented as something longed and 
 hoped for, far off, and in the future. Still it always 
 
 * Hegel, Philosophy of Religion, Eng. Tr., vol. i. p. 3.
 
 HARD-AND-FASTNESS 253 
 
 remains a certainty, and its rays stream as some- 
 thing divine into this present temporal life, giving 
 the consciousness of the active presence of truth, 
 even amidst the anxieties which torment the soul 
 here in the region of time. Faith recognises it as 
 the truth, as the substance of actual existing things ; 
 and what thus forms the essence of religious con- 
 templation is the vital force in the present world, 
 makes itself actively felt in the life of the individual, 
 and governs his entire conduct. Such is the 
 general perception, sensation, consciousness, or, 
 however we may designate it, of religion." 
 
 I have now shown you that it is only for mind 
 as finite that the hard-and-fastness of nature and 
 its forms arise. For mind at a higher level it is 
 put past. As mind we exist, in the deeper mean- 
 ing of our reality, at that higher level. For the 
 plain man the deliverance from the fear of death, 
 which he finds directly given to him in the 
 emotions which Art and Religion awaken, is a 
 true deliverance. It is the task of philosophy to 
 demonstrate by reasoning the foundation of this 
 deliverance in the nature of mind. Herein lie the 
 reconciliation and the identity of knowledge and 
 faith, and the substance of things unseen.
 
 LECTURE IV 
 
 THIS morning I approach the conclusion of these 
 lectures. You will have observed that in the 
 twenty discourses, of which this is the last, I have 
 sought to draw near together Philosophy and Art 
 and Religion. The reason is that in actual life, 
 life as it is for us whose forms of knowledge are 
 characterised by finitude, Art and Religion are the 
 highest forms in the object world which, from our 
 finite standpoint, we presuppose as confronting us 
 within and without. That world we conceive, in 
 our daily ways of looking at things, to be finally 
 and immediately presented, and not to owe its con- 
 struction to reflective mind. This conception I 
 have shown you to require careful consideration. 
 It has within it no permanence ; it is, like all that 
 depends on individual presentation, a vanishing 
 one. It is in the conceptions of thought, not- j 
 withstanding that for us they will always be , 
 abstract, that permanence is after all to be sought. 
 For the intellect of God the conceptions of philo- 
 sophy can be no abstractions ; for us, they always 
 will be such. 
 
 The work of philosophy must therefore embrace 
 
 254
 
 ART AND RELIGION 255 
 
 the critical examination of the symbols of Art and 
 of Religion, the highest forms of what for finite 
 intelligence is concrete and directly given, with a 
 view to determining what in them is representative 
 of ultimate reality. This is the task which I set 
 myself in these Gifford Lectures. You will 
 observe that I have guarded myself. I have been 
 careful to point out that the images of the artist 
 and of the saint are not to be looked upon as ; 
 expressions of scientific truth. Nevertheless they 
 are not on that account contradictory of scientific 
 truth. The field of scientific truth has turned out 
 to be a limited one. Dilemmas only arise when Art 
 and Religion assert that their language is expressive 
 of truth and reality as they appear at a standpoint 
 which is not the standpoint of Art and of Religion. 
 Of the standpoint of even what is called Naturalism 
 I am the last to wish to question the value and 
 importance. It is as a man of the world that I 
 have come here to speak to you, to speak with a 
 full sense of the value of concrete things. But 
 because, when we stand still, we wish to feel solid 
 ground under our feet, it does not follow that 
 we should despise wings. Art and Religion fall 
 into trouble when they speak the language of 
 Understanding, but what they teach can be ex- 
 pressed in that of Reason. Into such language I 
 have tried in these lectures to translate their 
 teaching. We have found, as the result of our 
 journey of discovery, that the pathway to reality 
 leads us to look at the nature of what is ultimate
 
 256 FINITE MIND [LECT. iv. 
 
 as mind completely comprehending itself, and that 
 finite mind is this same mind in imperfect forms of 
 self-comprehension, self-determinations on the part 
 of the Absolute Mind that are but phases of the 
 activity in which it creates and gathers up the full 
 riches of its concrete self-comprehension. It is only 
 relatively to an insight which is not fully attained 
 in finite self-consciousness, but which is yet pre- 
 supposed as its foundation, that space and time are 
 abstract and insufficient forms. They have their 
 meaning as distinctions made in the course of its 
 self-realisation by the consciousness within which 
 all reality falls, and whose vocation it is at once to 
 distinguish in comprehension and to comprehend 
 in distinction. It is to the doctrine of degrees in 
 reality and in the knowledge in which the nature 
 of reality lies, that we have to look for the key to 
 the way out of the perplexity. 
 
 Yet how little trouble do people take to find 
 this key. There is a passage in Hegel, the last of 
 the many which I shall have quoted to you in the 
 course of these lectures, to which I should like to 
 call your attention at this point : 
 
 " If we recollect," he says in his Philosophy of 
 Mind* "how intricate is the knowledge of the 
 divine mind for those who are not content with the 
 homely pictures of faith but proceed to thought- 
 at first only rationalising reflection, but afterwards, 
 as in duty bound, to speculative comprehension, it 
 may almost create surprise that so many, and 
 
 * Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, Eng. Tr., p. 176.
 
 THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD 257 
 
 especially theologians whose vocation it is to deal 
 with these ideas, have tried to get off their task by 
 gladly accepting anything offered them for this 
 behoof. And nothing serves better to shirk it than 
 to adopt the conclusion that man knows nothing of 
 God. To know God as spirit to apprehend this 
 accurately and distinctly in thoughts requires 
 careful and thorough speculation. It includes, in 
 its forefront, the propositions that God is God only 
 in so far as He knows Himself ; His self-knowledge 
 is, further, His self-consciousness in man, and man's 
 knowledge of God, which proceeds to man's self- 
 knowledge in God. . . . When the immediacy and 
 sensuousness of shape and knowledge is superseded, 
 God is, in point of content, the essential and actual 
 spirit of nature and spirit, while in point of form 
 He is, first of all, presented to consciousness as a 
 mental representation. This quasi-pictorial repre- 
 sentation gives to the elements of His content, on 
 the one hand, a separate being, making them pre- 
 suppositions towards each other, and phenomena 
 which succeed each other; their relationship it 
 makes a series of events according to finite reflec- 
 tive categories. But, on the other hand, such a 
 form of finite representationalism is also overcome 
 and superseded in the faith which realises one 
 spirit, and in the devotion of worship." 
 
 With this extract I pass from the topic of the 
 speculative conception of God. Before I sit down, 
 I wish to say a few words about a subject to which 
 
 I have made but little allusion in the course of 
 
 R
 
 258 FINITE MIND [LECT. iv. 
 
 these lectures I mean that of which we hear so 
 much to-day under various appellations, one of 
 which is Spiritualism. It would be the sheerest 
 bigotry to pass by or ignore the work of the distin- 
 guished men of science who are engaged in investi- 
 gating its phenomena. Names like those of 
 Lodge, Crookes, Sidgwick, Gurney, Myers, are 
 names that must appeal to us all by the weight 
 of their authority. And yet it does not follow, 
 because we listen with respect to what these men 
 have to tell us, and because we recognise the 
 remarkable work they have done in investigating 
 and sifting certain phenomena, that we must accept 
 their interpretation of their facts. For that inter- 
 pretation appears to go far beyond what is strictly 
 science. If these lectures have truth in them, 
 mind is not a substance. The great difference is 
 not between the things that we know, but between 
 the modes in which we know them. By many 
 adherents of spiritualism, on the contrary, it 
 appears to be assumed that our experience may 
 be interpreted as though the pathway to reality 
 could lead to a region where minds will be dis- 
 covered to be substances upon which other sub- 
 stances make impressions. Now this may for 
 some purposes be a useful way of looking at 
 our experience, but, as I showed you long ago 
 in another connection, it is a way of looking at 
 things which can at best be but provisional. Such 
 a mode of inquiry as the Society for Psychical 
 Research pursues may indeed enlarge the narrow
 
 SPIRITUALISM 259 
 
 limits of a too narrow view of matter and of energy. 
 It may also and here I think it may be that there 
 is very great value in the investigations of those 
 who are looking into the phenomena of spiritualism 
 give us a fuller and more complete conception of 
 the physical organism. Such work as has been 
 done by the men whom I have alluded to, such 
 work, too, as that which was done in their book, 
 The Unseen Universe, by Professor Tait and Pro- 
 fessor Balfour Stewart is work which is full of 
 interest, in so far as it tends to warn us that we 
 are apt to come to the investigations of physics and 
 physiology with presuppositions which are too 
 narrow a mode of approach to what has to be looked 
 at. It may be that the teaching of spiritualism will 
 decisively show that we have hitherto excluded 
 from our comprehension a large field of pheno- 
 mena of nature which require close attention. 
 But no such investigation can be any guide to the 
 character of the ultimately real, as metaphysics 
 defines it, and as I have sought to show you that 
 it must be defined, in these lectures. Spiritualism 
 and all cognate methods seem to tumble into the 
 category of substance in just the same fashion as 
 did the old pre-Kantian philosophy. Their stand- 
 point seems to be dogmatic in the very sense in 
 which Kant used the expression. 
 
 Now in order that I may not misrepresent a 
 way of looking at things which I feel I may have 
 failed fully to grasp, I wish to give it to you in 
 the words of one who is recognised as having been
 
 260 FINITE MIND [LKCT. iv. 
 
 among its most distinguished exponents. There is 
 no more complete or thorough work in this field 
 than that recorded in the book by the late Mr 
 Myers which bears the title, Human Person- 
 ality and its Survival of Bodily Death ; and I will 
 quote to you from the First Volume his summing 
 up of the standpoint which he has reached as the 
 result of his inquiry : 
 
 "To me at least," he says,*' " it seems that no 
 real explanation of hypnotic vitalisation can, in 
 fact, be given except upon the general theory sup- 
 ported in this work the theory that a world of 
 spiritual life exists, an environment profounder than 
 those environments of matter and ether which in a 
 sense we know. Let us look at this hypothesis a 
 little more closely. When we say that an organism 
 exists in a certain environment, we mean that its 
 energy, as one part thereof, forms an element in a 
 certain system of cosmic forces, which represents 
 some special modification of the ultimate energy. 
 The life of the organism consists in its power of 
 interchanging energy with its environment, of ap- 
 propriating by its own action some fragment of that 
 pre-existent and limitless Power. We human 
 beings exist in the first place in a world of matter, 
 whence we draw the obvious sustenance of our 
 bodily functions. 
 
 " We exist also in a world of ether ; that is to 
 say, we are constructed to respond to a system of 
 
 * F. W. H. Myers' Human Personality and its Survival of 
 Bodily Death (1903), vol. i., p. 215.
 
 ME MYERS' BOOK 261 
 
 laws, ultimately continuous, no doubt, with the 
 laws of matter, but affording a new, a generalised, 
 a profounder conception of the Cosmos. So widely 
 different, indeed, is this new aspect of things from 
 the old, that it is common to speak of the ether as 
 a newly known environment. On this environment 
 our organic existence depends as absolutely as on 
 the material environment, although less obviously. 
 In ways which we cannot fathom, the ether is at 
 the foundation of our physical being. Perceiving 
 heat, light, electricity, we do but recognise in certain 
 conspicuous ways as in perceiving the 'X rays' 
 we recognise in a way less conspicuous the per- 
 vading influence of ethereal vibrations which in 
 range and variety far transcend our capacity of 
 response. 
 
 "Within, beyond, the world of ether, as a still 
 profounder, still more generalised aspect of the 
 Cosmos, must lie, as I believe, the world of 
 spiritual life. That the world of spiritual life does 
 not depend on the existence of the material world, 
 I hold as now proved by actual evidence. That it 
 is in some way continuous with the world of ether, 
 I can well suppose. But for our minds there must 
 needs be 'a critical point' in any such imagined 
 continuity ; so that the world where life and thought 
 are carried on apart from matter, must certainly 
 rank again as a new, a metethereal environment. In 
 giving it this name I expressly imply only that from 
 our human point of view it lies after or beyond the 
 ether, as metaphysic lies after or beyond physics.
 
 262 FINITE MIND [LECT. w. 
 
 I only say that what does not originate in matter 
 or in ether originates there ; but I well believe that 
 beyond the ether there must be not one stage only, 
 but countless stages in the infinity of things. 
 
 " . . . In my view, then, each man is essentially 
 a spirit, controlling an organism which is itself a 
 complex of lower and smaller lives. The spirit's 
 control is not uniform throughout the organism, 
 nor in all phases of organic life. In waking life it 
 controls mainly the centres of supraliminal thought 
 and feeling, exercising little control over deeper 
 centres, which have been educated into a routine 
 sufficient for common needs. But in subliminal 
 states trance and the like the supraliminal pro- 
 cesses are inhibited, and the lower organic centres 
 are retained more directly under the spirit's con- 
 trol. As you get into the profounder part of man's 
 being, you get nearer to the source of his human 
 vitality. You get thus into a region of essentially 
 greater responsiveness to spiritual appeal than is 
 offered by the superficial stratum which has been 
 shaped and hardened by external needs into a de- 
 finite adaptation to the earthly environment. Even 
 thus the caterpillar's outside integument is fashioned 
 stiffly to suit larval requirement, while deeper in 
 the animal, unseen processes of rapid change are 
 going on, in obedience to an impulse not derived 
 from larval life." 
 
 For Mr Myers, then, the soul, and for that 
 matter the self, would appear to be a physical and 
 external fact, something extended in space and de-
 
 ITS DOGMATIC PRESUPPOSITION 263 
 
 veloping in time. The categories of mechanism 
 are the categories which he uses as adequately de- 
 scriptive of its existence. After all, this leads us 
 to something very like a higher form of materialism, 
 because, take it as you will and twist it as you 
 please, whenever you attempt to describe mental 
 life in terms of the categories of cause and of effect 
 and of substance, to materialism, in some shape or 
 form, you come back. Such a standpoint gives the 
 go-by to the criticism of modern philosophy. I do 
 not presume to examine the scientific methods of 
 this new school, or to ask whether their standards 
 of testimony are wholly complete or sufficient. 
 Certainly the material which they have got together 
 is, much of it, very striking ; while again, there is 
 more of it which, according to the criteria of the 
 physicist, or, for that matter, according to the 
 standards which are applied in courts of justice, 
 would require a great deal of consideration before 
 we could accept it. Nevertheless their field of in- 
 vestigation is a novel one and their task a very 
 difficult one, and far be it from any of us to be 
 otherwise than grateful for investigations to which 
 the splendid public spirit has been devoted which 
 is shown in the work of Mr Myers and some of 
 those who have collaborated with him. Still, I 
 could wish that the adherents of this school had 
 shown more consciousness that many of the con- 
 ceptions which they use freely had been subjected 
 to scrutiny by modern philosophy, and shown to 
 be very full of what is misleading. Even to go
 
 264 FINITE MIND [LECT. iv. 
 
 no further than the philosophy of Kant, no one 
 ought to undertake an investigation into the field 
 covered by Mr Myers' book without first making 
 himself cognisant of the criticism to which Kant 
 subjected the dogmatic use of the categories which 
 Mr Myers so freely employs. In the difficult 
 regions where such inquiry moves, a careful criticism 
 of categories is absolutely essential. 
 
 But one does not need to go to metaphysics to 
 find this out. The acute mind of the Professor of 
 Psychology in this University of St Andrews, 
 Professor Stout, has been directed recently to an 
 examination of a phrase which Mr Myers and 
 his colleagues have employed, the "subliminal 
 self." Had they confined themselves to using 
 that term as simply a convenient one for embrac- 
 ing certain classes of mental phenomena, Pro- 
 fessor Stout would have offered no objection ; 
 but what they have done is to go further, and to 
 give to the subliminal self an existence co-ordinate 
 with that of the ordinary self of consciousness, and 
 upon this point Professor Stout parts company with 
 them. He subjects their conception to a close 
 scrutiny, and comes to the conclusion that ordinary 
 psychological method has at all events the capacity 
 of accounting for all the phenomena with which 
 they deal, without bringing in such notions as that 
 of a subliminal self in the sense in which the 
 phrase is used by the adherents of the school of 
 spiritualism. 
 
 Now, Professor Stout examines the whole
 
 ME BRADLEY ON THE SELF 265 
 
 matter in a critical but kindly spirit. A more 
 hostile attack is made by Mr F. H. Bradley, in his 
 book, Appearance and Reality, and while, as I have 
 already told you, I am unable to go the whole 
 length of Mr Bradley's scepticism in various 
 matters with which I have had to deal in the 
 course of these lectures, Mr Bradley's scepticism 
 is so thoroughly reasoned, and consequently so 
 valuable, that no one can deal with these matters 
 who has not considered its foundation. And in no 
 region is this more apparent than in his investiga- 
 tion of the phenomena of psychology. Mr Bradley 
 is not only a great metaphysician, but also a great 
 psychologist, and among other things he subjects 
 the conception of the self, which Mr Myers deals 
 with so freely, to a scrutiny which no one ought to 
 ignore who is considering these matters. In his 
 book, Appearance and Reality, he deals with the 
 conception of the self, especially in the two chapters 
 on the "Meanings of Self," and the "Reality of 
 the Self." His general conclusion is the necessary 
 outcome of his view of the merely relational char- 
 acter of thought, its necessary infection with the 
 abstractions and isolations of the understanding. 
 For reasons already given I cannot wholly accept 
 his view, but his criticisms are none the less valid 
 against all psychological attempts, based on pre- 
 sentational methods, to detect the self as anything 
 approaching to a physical fact or substance. For 
 him the self, as ordinarily spoken of, turns out 
 to be appearance merely, no doubt the highest
 
 266 FINITE MIND [LECT. iv. 
 
 form of experience we have, but for all that 
 not a true form. It certainly cannot be described 
 as a merely discrete or discontinuous succession 
 of isolated experiences. For even introspection 
 carries us further than this, and shows that as 
 long as there remains in the self, sought to be dis- 
 tinguished from the rest of the universe, a certain 
 basis of content ideally the same, so long may the 
 self recall anything once associated with that basis. 
 And this identity of content, working on the 
 principle of redintegration, and so bringing up the 
 past as the history of one self, is what the facts 
 give us. It shows, says Mr Bradley, that self-same- 
 ness exists as an apparent fact, and that hence some- 
 how an identical self exists ; but how, according to 
 him, we cannot tell. We cannot, he thinks, define 
 what we mean by personal identity. Psychology 
 shows us the importance of memory in the practical 
 view of everyday life ; but it shows us this besides, 
 that a self is not thought to be the same, merely 
 because of apparent continuity of memory, but only 
 so when that memory is regarded as not being 
 deceptive. Memory, he points out, depends upon 
 reproduction from a basis that is present, a basis 
 that may be said to consist in self-feeling. Hence, 
 so far as this basis remains the same through life, 
 we may recall anything once associated with it. 
 As this basis changes, so does its connection with 
 past events appear different. The basis may even 
 be so altered that the very condition required for 
 reproduction of our past life is gone, and if the
 
 MR BEADLEY ON THE SELF 267 
 
 basis alters back and forwards, our past life may 
 appear to us so differently that we seem to be 
 different selves alternately, selves which have 
 never really existed in the past, such as the 
 selves conceived under the influence of hypnotic 
 suggestion. 
 
 Observe how this psychologist shows that it is 
 not only altogether unnecessary, but that it is a 
 misconception, to resort to the notion of an out- 
 side self, a different thing, taking possession, so 
 to speak, of the physical organism of the hypno- 
 tised subject and directing it. What he points out 
 is that the identity on which we rest our view of 
 our continuity rests upon the basis of memory, and 
 if this basis be shifted whether by suggestion, or 
 by illness, or by whatever other means the result 
 is that we may enter upon a totally different view 
 of our past and therefore of our present, and that 
 we may appear to ourselves to be even different 
 personalities. Thus, he concludes, mere memory 
 is not the basis of a true personal identity. Some 
 sort of continuity of existence is required, but what 
 sort we cannot say. And in a remarkable illustra- 
 tion he observes : " He who is risen from the dead 
 may really be the same, though we can say nothing 
 intelligible of his ambiguous eclipse or his phase of 
 half existence. But a man wholly like the first, 
 but created fresh after the same lapse of time, we 
 might feel was too much to be one, if not quite 
 enough to make two." * 
 
 * F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, 2nd ed., p. 85.
 
 268 FINITE MIND [LECT. w. 
 
 That is a kind of criticism which you really 
 cannot ignore in the investigation of these pheno- 
 mena ; and until modern spiritualists equip them- 
 selves better with a knowledge of what has been 
 done in the sphere of psychology, they cannot 
 expect their investigations to receive the attention 
 and the consideration which they would otherwise 
 receive. 
 
 I agree with the attitude of Professor Stout in 
 his recent article on Mr Myers' book in the Hibbert 
 Journal* in which he says that we have to listen 
 attentively and gratefully to what is told us by the 
 distinguished men who are inquiring into the 
 phenomena of telepathy and hypnotism and the 
 so-called subliminal self. They may be able to 
 establish facts which will require the closest in- 
 vestigation, and their investigation may lead to an 
 enlargement of the field of observation greater even 
 than that which the progress of modern chemistry 
 is rapidly effecting. But on the problem of the 
 nature of ultimate reality, or on the problems of 
 free-will and immortality, and of the relation of the 
 divine mind to the human, it does not appear to 
 me that their methods are capable of throwing 
 light. If they succeed in showing, as it is at least 
 possible that they may do, that our conception of 
 the physical organism has been too narrow, this 
 may have important consequences for physics and 
 biology, and even for anthropology. But its interests 
 can hardly extend beyond the region of these 
 
 * Professor Stout, Hibbert Journal for October 1903.
 
 END OF THE PATHWAY 269 
 
 sciences into these other regions where the cate- 
 gories of externality are not applicable. 
 
 I pass therefore by the gate where they stand 
 and beckon us to follow them down a different 
 path from that which we have been treading in the 
 course of these lectures. Their road leads to no 
 region in which we could have found light on the 
 deeper problem with which we are concerned. 
 Accordingly I now bring you to what, so far as 
 these lectures are concerned, is the close of our 
 journey. From the place where we have come to 
 stand we see lying beyond us new regions, the 
 gate to which is now open to us. We have 
 learned that not then and there in some other and 
 different world, but here and now in just this one 
 truly interpreted, is to be sought Keality. Such 
 knowledge is but abstract. Not to philosophy 
 alone can we look for deliverance. Philosophy, \ 
 more than any other kind of science, more than 
 even the science of the mathematician, enables us to 
 survey the world from above the level of our finite- 
 ness. But it is not the abstractions of the scientist, 
 nor even the system of universals in which philo- 
 sophy herself moves, that can set for us the concrete 
 riches that we find without as within ourselves. 
 The poets and the artists, the men of goodliness 
 and the men of godliness, they, too, have learned 
 to see existence sub specie ceternitatis, and they, too, 
 must be our teachers if the spirit is fully to com- 
 prehend itself. The metaphors which they use 
 may be inadequate, but their speech is to the heart,
 
 270 FINITE MIND [LECT. iv. 
 
 and from the heart the head can never wholly be 
 separated. They touch our emotions, and make, as 
 no mere reasoning can, 
 
 " Our noisy years seem moments in the being 
 Of the eternal silence ; truths that wake 
 To perish never." 
 
 But still in the end it is to the history of philo- 
 sophy that we must turn, if we would gain an abiding 
 insight into the nature of Reality. To Reason the 
 problem is due, and Reason alone, as I told you at 
 the very beginning of these Gifford Lectures, can 
 heal the wounds which Reason has made. Mind 
 there may be, at a higher level than ours, and yet 
 finite, that can find itself in the world as it seems, 
 with less labour and more immediate certainty 
 than can mind as it is in us men and women. 
 Only by difficult analysis can the spirit penetrate 
 beneath the hard crust of appearance and there 
 discover itself as the reality that is final. Yet, in 
 the struggle to raise ourselves to the level of specu- 
 lative thinking, we have this comfort, nothing once 
 gained can ever be wholly lost. Insight into its 
 own nature by the mind that is conscious of its 
 own potential greatness, brings with it deliverance, 
 and freedom of the spirit. Man learns the lesson 
 that the true home of his soul is eternity. " In the 
 notion once is always." 
 
 " All that is, at all, 
 
 Lasts ever, past recall ; 
 Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure, 
 
 What entered unto thee, 
 
 That was, is, and shall be ; 
 Time's wheel runs back or stops ; Potter and Clay endure."
 
 CONCLUSION 271 
 
 I have now completed my task, how imperfectly 
 I well know. Under the sun there is nothing new. 
 The real searcher after truth seeks not to unearth 
 some isolated particle, nor is he eager for the joy of 
 labelling it, when found, with the name of his own 
 small personality. He seeks rather to make his 
 own what the great minds have brought to light 
 of the true nature of Reality in Art, in Religion, in 
 Philosophy. For to comprehend is to pass beyond. 
 He tries to add to the common stock what he has 
 got, even if it seems to him but a fragment broken 
 from the infinity of God's Truth. At least, he can 
 fulfil that most sacred of all duties, to strive to be 
 helpful. 
 
 Yet in the end each must do the work for him- 
 self and in his own fashion. Only in solitude can 
 the hardest part of the pathway to reality be 
 trodden : 
 
 " Space is but narrow east and west 
 There is not room for two abreast." 
 
 No one of us is like any other, either in his needs 
 or in the mode in which these needs must be 
 satisfied. Every man bears the impress of his 
 finitude, with its infinite variety of form. Hardly 
 less is that impress borne by even the greatest and 
 highest expression in which the truth is told to us. 
 Yet if that truth be hard to reach nay, even if the 
 most genuinely strenuous effort to reach it must 
 ever remain incomplete, and the work have to be 
 done over again by each one for himself, we have 
 no justification for despair, or for sitting in idleness
 
 272 FINITE MIND [LECT. iv. 
 
 with folded hands. For in the search for truth, as 
 in all the other phases of our activity, we only gain 
 and keep our life and freedom by daily conquering 
 them anew. 
 
 There is a passage in Spinoza, with which I will 
 conclude these lectures. He ends the final Book 
 of his Ethics with these words : 
 
 " I have finished everything I wished to explain 
 concerning the power of the mind over the affects, 
 and concerning its liberty. From what has been 
 said, we see what is the strength of the wise man, 
 and how much he surpasses the ignorant who is 
 driven forward by lust alone. For the ignorant 
 man is not only agitated by external causes in many 
 ways, and never enjoys true peace of soul, but lives, 
 also ignorant as it were, both of God and of things, 
 and as soon as he ceases to suffer ceases also to be. 
 On the other hand, the wise man, in so far as he is 
 considered as such, is scarcely ever moved in his 
 mind, but being conscious, by a certain external 
 necessity, of himself, of God, and of things, never 
 ceases to be, and always enjoys true peace of soul. 
 If the way which, as I have shown, leads hither, be 
 very difficult, it can nevertheless be found. It must 
 indeed be difficult, since it is so seldom discovered ; 
 for if salvation lay ready to hand, and could be dis- 
 covered without great labour, how could it be 
 possible that it should be neglected almost by every- 
 body ! Sed omnia prceclara tarn difficilia quam 
 rara sunt ; but all noble things are as difficult as 
 they are rare."
 
 INDEX 
 
 Appearance and Reality, Mr Brad- 
 
 ley's, 267. 
 Apprehension and Comprehension, 
 
 62, 63, 88. 
 Aristotle, 4, 7, 47, 121, 146, 153, 
 
 156. 
 Art, 32, 35, 147, 192, 193, 199, 201, 
 
 203, 207, 235, 251. 255. 
 Athanasian Creed, 166, 167. 
 Athanasius, 165. 
 Atonement, the, 128, 169. 
 
 BACON, 219. 
 
 Beauty, 25, 176, 177. 
 
 Beethoven, 181. 
 
 Being and Not-being, 57, 61. 
 
 Berkeley, 4, 40, 86, 143. 
 
 Body, the, 52, 54, 55, 144, 217. 
 
 Boland, 145. 
 
 Bonitz, 121. 
 
 Bosanquet, 57, 75, 138, 141. 
 
 Bradley, Professor A. C., 187, 188. 
 
 Bradley, F. H., xiii., 72, 74, 79, 80, 
 
 265. 
 
 Browning, 104, 192, 209. 
 Burnet, Professor, 121. 
 Byron, 191. 
 
 CAIRO, Professor Edward, The 
 
 Evolution of Religion, 223. 
 Carlyle, 45, 49, 139, 199. 
 Category, 6. 
 Cause and Effect, 66. 
 27i 
 
 Childhood, 55, 56, 136. 
 
 Christianity, 16. 
 
 Commentary on the Book of Daniel, 
 
 Luther's, 127. 
 Comprehension, 62, 89. 
 Conduct, 33. 
 Conversations of Goethe, Eckermaun's, 
 
 188, 189. 190. 
 Cousin, 19. 
 Critique of Judgment, Kant's, 195, 
 
 198. 
 Critique of Pure Reason, Kant's, 1 94, 
 
 195. 
 
 DEATH. 20 , 213, 219, 245. 
 Dedekind, 77. 
 Dialectic, 21, 67. 
 Dogmatik, Strausa's, 59. 
 Donaldson, Principal, 121, 164. 
 Dutch landscape, 184. 
 
 ECKERMANN, 188. 
 
 Encyclopaedic, Hegel's, 18. 
 Ends, 4, 5, 24. 
 Erdmann, 15, 57, 145. 
 Eternal Lite, 225, 227. 
 Ethics, Spinoza's, M5. 
 Evil, origin of, 129. 
 Evolution, 110. 
 Experience, 4. 
 
 FAITH, 33, 169. 
 Fall, the, 128.
 
 274 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Faust, Goethe's, 46, 84, 123. 
 
 Feeling, 48. 
 
 Fichte, 19. 
 
 Finitude, 69, 97, 108, 116, 117, 118, 
 
 171. 
 Fitzgerald, Omar Khayyam, 208, 
 
 209. 
 
 GEOMETRY, 9. 
 
 Gifford, Lord, 3. 
 
 Gladstone, 123. 
 
 God, 8, 13, 26, 36, 58, 81, 98, 115, 
 120, 155, 157, 170, 237 ; defini- 
 tion of His nature, 117 ; as mind, 
 13, 81 ; His relation to man, 130, 
 237 ; His relation to nature and 
 evil, 132, 133 ; His relation to 
 reality, 3. 
 
 Goethe, xv., 8, 50, 84, 123, 125, 126, 
 127, 188, 197, 217. 
 
 Goethe's Faust, 46, 84 ; Goethe's 
 Oott und Welt, 123, 124 ; Goethe's 
 Eins und Alles, 50, 240 ; Goethe's 
 Vermachtniss, 240. 
 
 Green, T. H., xiv. 
 
 Gurney, Edmund, 258. 
 
 HARNACK, History of Dogma, 166. 
 Hegel, xiii., 7, 12, 17, 25, 48, 56, 57, 
 
 59, 61, 69, 73, 83, 88, 99, 101, 112, 
 
 133, 149, 163, 167, 169, 178, 196, 
 
 198, 251. 252, 256. 
 Heraclitus, 24, 112. 
 History, 120. 
 
 Holy Ghost, sin against the, 129. 
 Human Personality and its Survival 
 
 of Bodily Death, 260. 
 Hume, 40, 73. 
 
 Intimations of Immortality, Words- 
 worth's, 37. 
 
 JOHN, Gospel of, 161, 164, 
 Jowett, 83. 
 Judgment, 23. 
 Justin Martyr, 165, 
 
 KANT, 4, 65, 71, 194 ; his Critique 
 of Judgment, 195 ; his Critique of 
 Pure Reason, 194, 195. 
 
 Knowledge, 22, 42. 
 
 LAWS OP NATURE, 34. 
 
 Leib und Seele, Erdmann's, 57, 145. 
 
 Lessing, 190. 
 
 Locke, 101. 
 
 Lodge, Sir Oliver, 258. 
 
 Logic, 153. 
 
 Logos, 161, 162, 164. 
 
 Long, The School of the Woods, 215, 
 
 216. 
 Luther, 126, 127. 
 
 MANHOOD, 56. 
 
 Materialism, 39. 
 
 Maya, the Veil of, 245. 
 
 Metaphors, 5, 17. 
 
 Mill, 4, 143. 
 
 Mind, 13, 14, 38, 39, 44, 48, 49, 52, 
 
 70, 81, 87, 135, 156, 159. 
 Montaigne, 63. 
 Morality, 32, 35. 
 Miinsterberg, 48, 131, 153. 
 Music, 64, 180, 181. 
 Myers, F. H., 258, 260. 
 
 NATURE, 69, 91, 92, 93, 94, 132. 
 Natur-Philos'yphie, Hegel's, 57, 112. 
 Neoplatonism, 160, 164, 165. 
 Newman, Cardinal, hia "Lead 
 Kindly Light," 186. 
 
 OLD AGE, 57. 
 
 PARODY, 185, 186. 
 
 Personality, 81. 
 
 Philo, 160". 
 
 Philosophy, 32. 
 
 Philosophical Theory of the State, 
 
 Bosanquet's, 141. 
 Philosophy of Fine Art, Hegel's, 149, 
 
 152, 178, 179, 198. 
 Philosophy of Mind, Hegel's, 67, 256,
 
 INDEX 
 
 275 
 
 Philosophy of Religion, Hegel's, 133, Sophist, Jowett's Introduction to the, 
 
 135, 169, 252. 
 
 83. 
 
 Plato, 4; his Republic, 19; his Soul, 52, 53, 54, 55, 217. 
 
 Parmenides, 67. 
 Plotinus, 160. 
 Poetry, 183, 185, 187. 
 
 Space, 46, 64, 65. 
 Spencer, Herbert, 143. 
 Spinoza, 95, 204, 272. 
 
 Poetry for Poetry's Sake, A. C. Brad- Spiritualism, 258, 259. 
 
 Stael, Madame de, 19. 
 Stout, Professor, 264. 
 Strauss, 59. 
 
 ley's, 188. 
 
 Presentationism, 10, 48, 131. 
 Principles of Psychology, James', 43. 
 Proofs of the Existence of God, Hegel's, Substance, 60. 
 
 167, 169. 
 Psychology, 10. 
 Psychology of the Moral Self, Bosan- 
 
 quet's, 57. 
 
 TAIT, Professor, Unseen Universe, 
 
 259. 
 
 Tennyson, 155. 
 Thing, 5, 7, 11, 39. 
 Thought, 33, 48, 62, 69, 87; its 
 relation to Beauty, 25 ; its relation 
 to Things, 7. 
 Time, 41, 43, 44, 46, 64, 65, 80, 111, 
 
 112. 
 Trinity, Doctrine of the, 160, 163, 
 
 167. 
 Sartor Resartus, Carlyle's, 45, 139, Turner, 35, 178. 
 
 199. 
 
 Schiller, 124, 197. VITALISM, 234. 
 
 Schopenhauer, 75. Von Baer, 43. 
 
 Schwegler, 121. 
 Self, 52, 69, 75, 81, 131, 132, 265, WARD, Professor, 137. 
 
 REALITY, 10, 23, 39, 71. 
 
 Kelativity, 5, 42, 43. 
 
 Religion, 32, 36, 130, 202, 203, 207, 
 
 237. 
 
 Ring and the Book, Browning's, 192. 
 Royce, 58, 75, 79, 80. 
 
 267. 
 Self- comprehension, 47, 174. 
 
 Was sind und was sollen die Zahlen, 
 Dedekind's, 77. 
 
 Self-consciousness, 10, 11, 53, 87, Wordsworth, 50, 104, 248 ;" Intima- 
 
 106. 
 
 tions of Immortality," 37, 248. 
 
 Series, 76, 77, 78, 79, 88, 113, 157 ; World, 4. 
 
 self- representative, 78, 80, 113. 
 Shakespeare, 206. 
 Svmultaneum, idea of a, 115. 
 Socrates, 19. 
 Solipsism, 60. 
 
 World and Individual, Royce's, 78. 
 World as Will and Idea, Schopen- 
 hauer's, 180. 
 
 YOUTH, 56.
 
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