> A STUDY OF RELIGION MARTINEAU VOL. I. HENRY FROWDE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE AMEN CORNER, E.G. STUDY OF RELIGION SOURCES AND CONTENTS BY JAMES MARTINEAU, D.D., LL.D. LATE PRINCIPAL OF MANCHESTER NEW COLLEGE, LONDON Tldrtpov ovv S^i if vx*) s ytvos ^yKpares ovpavov Kal -yfjs Kal irdffrjs TTJS irepto'Sou ytyovtvcu p6in/nov Kai apery? ir\rjpfs, ^ rb fj.r)$frepa. KfKrrjfj.fvov ; PLAT. Legg. x. 897 B VOL. I AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 1888 \_All rights reserved"] T' ct T'-v r - r -. T rr SANTA BAJRBAUA IN MEMORY OF AN UNBROKEN FRIENDSHIP THROUGH THIRTY YEARS* COMPANIONSHIP IN DUTY AND IN STUDY WITH JOHN JAMES TAYLER AND OF THE QUICKENING INFLUENCE OF HIS RIPE SCHOLARSHIP AND TENDER PIETY THESE VOLUMES PREPARED AT HIS DESIRE AND ANIMATED BY HIS FELLOWSHIP OF SPIRIT ARE AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED TO THE PUPILS WHOM WE SOUGHT TO HELP ON THEIR WAY TO WISE AND FAITHFUL LIFE VOL. I. PREFACE. I CANNOT better introduce my readers to the main purport of these volumes, than by relating a conversa- tional criticism, by an eminent English Positivist, on a no less eminent American representative of the Spen- cerian system of thought. Friendly relations had grown up between them, when Professor Fiske, of Harvard, was in this country ; relations, none the less cordial from the tacit assumption, supposed to be warranted by his ' Cosmic Philosophy,' of their common rejection of religious beliefs. On the appearance, in 1884, of his interesting Address to the Concord School of Philosophy, entitled ' The Destiny of Man in the light of his Origin,' a report of its argu- ment, contained in a private letter, was read to his English friend ; who listened attentively enough till it came out that the Professor found, in the psychical evolution of Man, an intimation of individual immortality ; but then broke in with the exclamation, 'What? John Fiske say that ? Well ; it only proves, what I have always main- tained, that you cannot make the slightest concession to metaphysics, without ending in a theology ! ' a position, in which the speaker has no doubt been confirmed by the author's second Concord Address, in 1885, on ' the Idea of God.' A more fortunate criticism there could hardly be : for, if it answers the speaker's end, it certainly secures the au- thor's too ; being but the naive confession, ' If once you viii PREFACE. allow yourself to think about the origin and the end of things, you will have to believe in a God and immortality.' The conditions of the Agnostic case could not be more compen- diously stated : to make it good, you must be careful not to look beyond phenomena, as empirical facts : you must abjure the enquiry into causes, and the attempt to trace invisible issues : never lift the veil that bounds experience, and you will need nothing and know nothing of a trans- cendental world. On the very threshold, therefore, of the ' Study of Reli- gion ' we are met by the question, whether this Comtean delimitation of knowledge is correct. This was my reason for entering on the survey of human relations at the prac- tical end, and seeking the bases of conduct before pene- trating to the roots of thought ; allowing ' Ethical Theory ' to rest, as long as possible, on experienced psychological facts ; and holding back their apparent religious signifi- cance for more effectual testing, when their interior con- tents had been laid bare. And this led me to say, in dismissing the former volumes from my hand, that the Moral Postulates on which their exposition proceeded could be tried only ' in the court of Metaphysics,' and must stand over for a separate hearing. The cause thus reserved is called on for trial in the F'rst Book of the present ' Study.' But for the promise which I have quoted, I would gladly have spared my readers its intricate and technical pleadings ; for I am aware of the tediousness of these metaphysical tribunals ; especially when the whole process wins at last, through all its dizzying cir- cuits, only the very position which common sense had assumed at first. For this is all, I take it, that metaphy- sics can pretend to accomplish by their scrutiny of the PREFACE. ix ultimate factors of human knowledge. They discover for us that, for all phenomena of experience, we are obliged to supply in thought a transcendental object, as their ground l . Think it, we must ; but only as the base of that relation : believe it, we must ; for, if we evict it, the phe- nomena cling to it and go too : but prove it, we cannot ; since it is impossible for thought, however nimble, to leap beyond its own laws, and see, from a foreign station, whether they tell lies. The business of the metaphysician is to assemble, to discriminate, to interpret, these trans- cendental constants of thought, and shew how they deal with its phenomenal material, and organize the relations which form the contents of human knowledge. When for every variable he has named its permanent, his task would be complete, were it not for perverse attempts, on the part of speculative simplifyers, to escape the persistent relativity of nature, by cutting asunder the sides of every duality, in order to make over the monopoly of the universe, either to the phenomenal alone, or to the real alone : telling us, in the former case, how cleverly the phenomena can simulate the aspect of the real ; and, in the latter, how the real can dissemble, by masquerading before the human fancy. According to the first, ' the All ' is resolved into ' the Many' ; according to the second, fused into ' the One.' And so it comes to pass that, while Comte sets up the goal of knowledge at the Law r s of Change, Schelling plants it at ' the Absolute.' This artificial breach between the inseparable terms of 1 Wir iiberhaupt einen transcendentalen Gegenstand den Erschei- nungen zum Grunde legen miissen, ob wir zwar von ihm was er an sich selbst sey, nichts wissen. Kant, Krit. der reinen Vernunft. Rosenkranz, ii. 422. x PREFACE. a relation is fruitful in illusions ; leaving the contents and sciences of experience without their uniting tissue of living thought ; and, at the opposite extreme, inflating the Reason to the stretch of a monotonous infinitude, virtually emptied already by preaching the nothingness of all it holds. The distinction between the two factors of knowledge was, for the metaphysician who pointed it out, also their harmony. By an abuse of his method, it has been harassed into an alienation : and he is needed again, to undo the miscon- struction and effect a reconciliation. This he will attempt by a simple regress to the point of first divergency. He will not affect to go a step with either party on his separate way. He will not flatter the one, by offering new proofs of his ' Absolute ' ; or appease the other, by outbid- ding him in his valuation of the law of Evolution ; and then, having planted their imaginations at opposite foci, try to talk them into a common centre. His task calls for neither invention nor diplomacy. He has only to explain, that antithesis in thought does not involve separation, still less, antagonism in being ; that, as all knowledge is of relations, and all relations are dualities, a theory which unifies by sinking a co-ordinate term can land us in nothing but ignorance. By this kind of critical metaphysics alone, interpreting the text of the law of Reason, have I endeavoured to save such constants of human thought as are essential to religious belief, and have suffered of late from sceptical disparagement. Two of these have sufficed for the end in view, the intuition of Causality, as the ground of Natural phenomena, and that of Right, as the ground of Moral ; the one planting the Intellect, and the other the Conscience, face to face with the Eternal Source of wisdom and righteousness. If it be true that such PREFACE. xi ' Metaphysics are sure to end in a Theology,' it is not that they piece together new artifices of masonry for its sup- port, but only that they watch the lines of hostile approach to its foundation, and countermine them, ere any harm is done. At least, to such defensive work alone, of simply clearing and guarding the rock-base of natural faith, are these volumes devoted. For much of the Agnosticism of the age, the Gnosticism of theologians is undeniably responsible. They have in- considerately overstrained the language of religion till its meaning breaks : and the coherent thinker easily picks up its ruins to show that they can contain nothing. Whoever calls God by names of highest abstraction, such as 'the Absolute,' ' the Great / Ami f r tne very purpose of placing Him beyond comparison, as pure Thesis, without Antithesis or Synthesis, exposes himself at once to the proof that such a Being can never come into human ap- prehension at all ; and will be reproached for his ignorance of ' the relativity of knowledge,' which denies all access to ' things in themselves.' The critic's rebuke is well-de- served ; and if he intends by it no more than that God, so far forth as unrelated, is unknown, he should have thanks for his correction. But if he means to suggest, that what is only relatively known is, on that account, unknown, he simply repeats the error of the theologian and raises it to a higher power, by insisting, not only that an absolute object may be cognizable, but that, in order to be cognizable, it must be absolute. He is working against the whole force of his own doctrine of relativity, until he learns that both terms of a relation are known together, instead of each plunging the other into the dark. As well might he maintain that the interdependence of double stars pre- xii PREFACE. eludes each from finding the presence and the path of the other. Nay, his implication is even suicidal : for, if an object is shut out from knowledge by standing as one term of a relation, the ' Substance ' or ' Cause,' of which we are thus said to be quite ignorant, is in no worse plight than the correlative ' phenomenon ' or ' effect,' with which we are invited to cultivate exclusive acquaintance : and an Eleatic agnosticism of change is a valid reply to a Pro- tagorean agnosticism of entity. When the sophists of opposite type, having converted one another, become logical enough to believe in neither term, the time perhaps will have come for the healthy human mind to trust again its natural faith in both. Of the two sources of Religion unfolded in these volumes, each has encountered antipathy and rejection from one of the representative minds of the present century. Comte was for expunging the language and the idea of Causality ; Bentham, for ridding us of the phraseology and accepted meaning of Moral Obligation. Had the two aversions coexisted, a total desiccation of religion would, I suppose, have naturally ensued. But, by a happy exemption, each of the two men retained the element discarded by the other, and, under its influence, was upheld in some of the pieties of character which usually need a less scanty faith. Comte, though without any adequate base for his ideal of Right, was strongly possessed by moral sentiment and aspiration, freely resorted to the vocabulary of Duty and all its dependent conceptions, and was so susceptible to the higher qualities of character as to make his reverence for the possibilities of Humanity serve him as a Religion. Bentham, though finding only hedonist utility in Ethics, developing them simply from human self-love, and always PREFACE. xiii irritated by the suggestion of any authority beyond, yet had no quarrel with the logic of Causation, and was carried by it from the Order to the Divine Ordainer of the world. The humanism of the one, and the Deism of the other, are but weak residual forms of natural reverence. Already, the experience of their imperfection has largely provoked a rejection of both, and reduced the Religion of life to a blank. Ere this experiment has proceeded far on its perilous way, perhaps the two dissevered sources may repent of their disunion, and a reharmonized human nature find itself once more in a universe and a communion that are Divine. I have not been deterred from vindicating the Teleo- logical interpretation of nature, by the opprobrious treatment or, at best, condescending excuse, which seems to be deemed 'the right thing' for the 'Argument from Design.' ' Advanced thought ' also, like dress and manners, is not without its fashions and its fops ; and many a scientific sciolist who would bear himself ' comme il faut ' towards such questionable deceivers as ' Final Causes,' now thinks it necessary to have his fling at ' Paley and the Bridgewater Treatises.' He has it on the best authority that Darwin has exposed their imposture ; and he must show that he is not going to fall into their trap. It is probable that, of those who speak in this tone, nine out of ten have never read the books with which they deal so flippantly ; and it is certain that the tenth is incompetent to grasp the essentials of an argument, while letting its separable accidents fall away. No doubt, the doctrine, pre- valent in Paley's time, of impassable limits of species, the immature condition of chemical and biological science, detaining the mind in too great dependence on mechanical xiv PREFACE. conceptions, the darkness in which the geological record of the earth was still wrapped, the narrow limits of Time within which both natural and human history were assumed to be compressed, presented to his imagination a world variously different from ours ; incomparably smaller ; divided into autonomous, though confederated, provinces, needing, through the detachment of their products, a much greater multitude of Divine projects and volitions, amount- ing in effect to so many separate creations. But that these crude conceptions have any advantage over their successors, as claimants of design, that any expression of Mind which was present to Paley is lost to us, it is impossible to affirm. The great difference lies in the substitution of development for paroxysm of initiation. And this ' Evolution,' whatever its extent, is not a Cause, or even a Force, but a Method, which might be the path, either of a voluntary cause or of a blind force, and has nothing to say to the controversy between them. If there weje design before, so is there now : if not, then has none been added. But, on the other hand, if marks of Thought were truly found before, they have now become marks of larger and sublimer thought ; all that was detached having passed into coherence, so that one intellectual organism embraces the whole, from the animalcule in a dewdrop to the birth and death of worlds. I see no reason to doubt that Paley would have welcomed the new theory of organic life upon the globe, as a magnificent expansion of his idea. He did not, I presume, regard the Creator as having, virtually, taken out an independent Patent for every so-called species, to be jealously guarded from all encroachment. And if only the inter-relation could have been shown to him between type and type of being, as we are taught to see it now, he would PREFACE. xv not have been slow to feel the grander meaning of the vaster family encompassed by one providing thought. Professor Fiske has devoted a very attractive monograph, under the title ' The Idea of God,' to an exposition of the order of nature according to the doctrine of Evolution, in its religious bearings. He insists, with evident truth, that ' the whole scheme is Teleological, and each single act in it has a teleological meaning l ' ; a description, which abso- lutely identifies it, upon its Theistic side, with Paley's theorem, viz. that the constitution of nature, wherever we can read its story, betrays the evident direction of events upon a consummating end. Yet the Author, far from feeling that he is only annotating and illustrating Paley, turns upon him with the surprising remark, ' Herein lies the reason why the theory so quickly destroyed that of Paley ! ' In the same slighting tone he repeatedly refers to Paley's method as 'proved inadequate,' as 'anthropo- morphic,' as unwarrantably attributing ' purpose ' to God ; so that the reader seems to hear the voice of a believer in mere blind causation. I own my inability to reconcile ' teleology ' with the denial of ' purpose.' If it be not the theory which explains the prior acts of a series as deter- mined by the preconception of a posterior, I know not what it means. Nor is any light thrown upon what is to take the place of the expelled ' design ' by the evasive language now substituted for Paley's manly speech. We must on no account read ' purpose ' in the make of things and the story of the world : but ' a well-marked dramatic tendency' is discernible throughout. We are not to imagine a really contemplated end in view : but we cannot 1 The Idea of God as affected by Modern Knowledge. London, Macmillan, 1885, p. 161. xvi PREFACE. fail to notice ' a clearly marked progress of events towards a mighty goal} 'a working together of all things, through boundless ages of toil and trouble, towards one glorious consummation^! We may not predicate rational and intending thought, of the supreme ' Cosmic Power ' : but we may affirm 'the essential reasonableness of the universe,' and mark ' the meaning there is in the orderly sequence of events 2 .' And, in virtue of these things, we may admit, in the infinite and eternal ' animating principle,' ' a quasi- psychicar nature 3 . Beyond this we cannot go. These are enigmatical phrases, till some explicit inter- pretation is given of the distinction which they pretend to draw. We need to be told, whether there can be a ' well-marked dramatic tendency,' conducting to a regular ' denouement* without any plan or design ; what sort of ' mighty goal ' it is, which is not kept in view and at which no one aims, what ' glorious consummation ' which crowns no system preconceived ; what ' meaning ' can lie in an order of things which is the expression of no thought ; what ' reasonableness ' can belong to the constitution of a universe wrought out by no rational insight and foresight ; and, finally, whether, in the ' psychical principle ' the Universal fyvyji exceeds its proper limits and borrows any vovs, or whether, being only ' quasi-psychical,' it even falls a little short of its own definition, and remains on the confines of the animal standard. To the first of these questions alone do I find some semblance of an answer in the following sentence : ' While the dramatic tendency cannot be regarded as indicative of purpose, in the limited anthropomorphic sense, it is still, as I said before, the 1 The Idea of God affected by Modern Knowledge, p. 159. 2 Ibid. pp. 138, 139. 8 Ibid. p. 151. PREFACE. xvii objective aspect of that which, when regarded on its sub- jective side, we call purpose V So far then as it misses the predicate 'purpose! it is because it has no 'subjective side'; which means, I suppose, has no place in a conscious mind, as the condition of its ' objective existence.' I cannot but wonder that a thinker so strong and a writer so clear and picturesque, as Professor Fiske, should find any satisfactory shelter for his religious faith and feeling under this frail tissue of teleological language. It is an attempt, in the supposed interests of conciliation and justice, to say and unsay the same propositions, without becoming conscious of inconsistency. But between contra- dictories it is vain to seek for intermediaries ; and the false promises of vague phraseology are sure to betray them- selves in the disappointments of experience. Reason has been brought, by its long evolution, to a very resolute constitution, finally attached to its abode on terra firma : and it is too late to treat it as an amphibious creature, willing to try existence, now on the land and now in the water. The escape from conscious self-contradiction is managed by an illusory application of what are called ' symbolic conceptions.' These are familiar enough to us in the case of large or collective objects of perception, which our thoughts cannot at a glance embrace as a whole, but to which we can refer, and be referred, by a word naming them, either by some characteristic properties, or by some individual sample: the word stands for the rest, without having them in its definition. Here, that which it symbolises is really and distinctly in our thought, because it is something which has been put there by experience and 1 Ibid. Preface, p. xxiv. xviii PREFACE. has only to be revived. But when it is said that, in pre- dicating of God attributes of which we have cognizance in ourselves, the terms denoting them are to be stripped of their ' anthropomorphic sense ' and take on ' a symbolical,' because the human attribute belongs to a finite, the Divine to an infinite nature, the case is totally different. For, what we lay aside is all the meaning that we know, and behind the symbol retained there stands nothing but blank darkness. Representing what cannot possibly have place in human thought, the word is empty of meaning altogether. That out of such propositions of pure nescience any one can find even the phantom of a Religion emerge, is a singular proof how irresistible are the needs of human faith and affection, and how modest becomes the silence of Reason in their presence. The volumes with which I here part variously conflict, I am well aware, with the prevailing opinions and tendencies of the time. The approbation which, on this account, they must forego, will at all events be replaced by the more whole- some benefit of correction and disarming of their errors. Possibly, there may yet be a minority, among persons accustomed to reflect on the questions here discussed, who may find in them the satisfaction of fellowship, if not some clearing and confirmation of conviction ; and be encouraged, through mere force of sympathy, to cherish and vindicate the deep and simple pieties on which the sanctity of life depends. THE POLCHAR, ROTHIEMURCHUS, Oct. 24, 1887. CONTENTS OF VOL I. INTRODUCTION. PAGE I. What is Religion ? i II. Why Ethics before Religion ?....... 16 BOOK I. THE LIMITS OF HUMAN INTELLIGENCE CONSIDERED. Introduction. Unsettled Boundaries 35 CHAP. I. Form and Conditions of Knowledge ... 39 i. Varieties of Consciousness distinguished . ,. . . 40 2. Analytic and Synthetic Judgments 44 3. Kant's Account of Mathematical Judgments ... 48 4. What makes Synthetic Judgments true ? . . . . 54 5. Extension of Critical Principles to Super-sensible Objects . 57 CHAP. II. Appreciation of Kant's Doctrine . . . 61 i. As a Psychology of Belief . . . . . 61 2. As an Instrument of Verification ..... 7 CHAP. III. Absolute and Empirical Idealism . . . 82 i. From Kant to Schopenhauer 82 2. Helmholtz and J. S. Mill . ... . . . 96 CHAP. IV. Belativity of Knowledge ,. 113 i. Homo Mensura ; . . 113 2. ' All we know is Phenomena ' 124 3. 'The Unknowable' 131 BOOK II. THEISM. CHAP. I. God as Cause 139 i. Meaning of the Causal Relation 139 A. As judged by the Observer of Nature . . . 139 a. Thing as Cause 140 b. Phenomenon as Cause 145 c. Force as Cause 155 B. As conditioned by Activity in the Ego . . . 177 a. In Mediated Perception 179 b. In Immediate Perception 192 xx CONTENTS. PAGE 2. ' The World as a Heap of Powers ' 214 3. Will and Modes of Force 230 4. Will and Kinds of Being 250 5. Explicit and Implicit W T ill 257 6. Place of Teleology 270 7. Objections to Teleology considered 321 8. Implicit Attributes of God as Cause 398 A STUDY OF RELIGION; ITS SOURCES AND CONTENTS. INTRODUCTION. I. WHAT is RELIGION ? THE word ' Religion ' is here used in the sense which it invariably bore half a century ago ; and a reader whose conceptions are cast in the moulds of that time will know what to expect from an enquiry into its ' Sources and Contents.' Understanding by ' Religion ' belief in an Ever-living God, that is, of a Divine Mind and Will ruling the Universe and holding Moral relations with mankind, he will hope, on the one hand, to be led to the innermost seat of this belief in the constitution of human nature ; and, on the other, to see developed from it the dependent varieties of thought implicit in so fruitful a germ, and the cognate truths inseparable from it by collateral relations. Along just these paths of reflective insight, viz. first, to the secret birth-points of conscious religion, and then, to the survey of its interior volume and applied lights, it is the purpose of this ' Study ' to conduct him, so far as mere critical scrutiny can avail in a matter not wholly intel- lectual. In the soul of Religion, the apprehension of truth and the enthusiasm of devotion inseparably blend : and in proportion as either is deserted by the other, the conditions of right judgment fail. The state of mind in which they coexist may present itself under either of two forms, sharply distinguished in the language of our older writers. If it be reached by reflection on the order of the physical VOL. I. B 2 INTRODUCTION. and moral world, it is called l Natural Religion'; if it arises without conscious elaboration of thought, and is assigned to immediate communication from the Divine Spirit to the human, it is called ' Supernatural Religion.' The central faith in the Supreme Mind is usually at- tended by several satellite beliefs (e.g. in a life beyond death), which are all allowed shelter under the term Religion. When regarded apart from these, the primary conviction is known as Theism ; the rejection or absence of which has, accordingly, appropriated the negative word Atheism. This nomenclature, recommended by its simplicity and precision, has such complete possession of our standard literature, that no serious change in it can be made without deplorable confusion. Yet various causes have of late created a marked disaffection towards it. However ade- quate it may have been to mark off from each other the modes of thought hitherto prevailing, new states of mind have now arisen of which, we are assured, it gives no accurate account ; on which, indeed, its classification can- not be forced without rudeness and offence. The vocabu- lary of theology which was invented for the exigencies of Christendom, and which provided each of its components and opponents with a fitting name, proves too narrow for our wider knowledge of foreign faiths : as may be plainly seen when, in Buddhism, we come across a religion without a god. Not that we need go to the far East in quest of so strange a phenomenon ; we have only to open a recent volume of a popular monthly review, and we are present at a memorable single combat between Mr. Herbert Spencer and Mr. Frederick Harrison for the prize of the best re- ligion that dispenses with anything Divine. The changes, at first insensible, which have at last affected the meaning of important words in their very essence, and are now de- manding formal recognition, need to be distinctly stated and estimated at the outset of our enquiries. INTRODUCTION. 3 Religion, in the old sense above explained, was at once a. mode of thought and a mode of Jg^ljng ; rinr ^*s it, matter to their indissoluble union which of thq two you put into the prior place ; whether you trust first the instinct of intuitive reverence, and see the reality of God emerge as its postulate: or wb^frh***-, *qv<"g fntqllffrfiial ly judged that He is tfrere, yon surrender yourself to the awe and love of that infinite presence. These intense affections, rich in elements of wonder, admiration, reverence, culmin- ate in worship ; and, breaking thus into visible expression, reveal to others the invisible faith to which they insepar- ably belong. It is only our artificial analysis that separates the two, and insists on calling the intellectual side of the fact a theology, the affectional a religion. Thence we lose sight of the fact that they are not two things, any more than the convex and the concave surface of a curve, but only two aspects of the same thing ; and are tempted to think of each as possibly existing without the other, and so to look around us for a religion that may sit apart from all theology. If every awakening of wonder, admiration, or reverence, is to be called Religion, we need not go far to find it ; for in the gaining of knowledge we have the first, in the perception of beauty the second, in the presence of higher character the third. So far as the last is concerned, it may be freely admitted that the sentiment of reverence is really homogeneous, whether it be directed upon simply human excellence far abo\re our own, or upon the highest of all in the absolutely Perfect. It was not without a true feeling that the Latins covered by the single word pietas the venerating affection whence springs the right attitude towards superiors human and divine. Moral attributes, being the same for the whole hierarchy of minds, are of necessity contemplated with feelings not dissimilar, on what- ever part of the scale they are seen ; and it is precisely in the experience and history of the Conscience that (as shown B a 4 INTRODUCTION. in a former exposition of ethical theory *) we find the germ and secret implication of a transcendent piety. Of this affinity between the earthly and heavenly forms of inward homage advantage is now taken to persuade us that the essence of Religion is complete in the first alone ; that its theologic crown is a superfluous addition, and that it suffers no fatal loss, though the universe should contain no spiritual being higher than man. There is enough, it is said, in the nobler samples of humanity, in the vindicators of right, in the saviours of nations, the purifiers of private life, the martyrs of truth, to kindle the fervours of aspiration, and bring us to their feet as devotees : and is not this religion ? Nay, a still wider scope is given to the conception, by taking away the moral limits which fix it upon character alone. Beauty also sets the heart aglow with its fascination, and inspires a passionate pursuit, though presented by objects ethically neutral. And the scientific interpretation of the world, the deciphering of order in its dispositions and events, the contemplation of its environing immensity and eternity, attract and subdue the intellectual observer with an indescribable sense of sublime humility. When all these experiences are thrown into one lot, by cancelling their differences, and are set forth as the contents of Religion, it becomes, and is defined, ' Habitual and permanent admiration 2 ,' and retains its august pretensions, on whatever object it may fasten, whether dead or alive. Every form of enthusiasm, be it of Science, of Art, of Morals, thus suffices to constitute a religion 3 , though it should look upon the universe as a mere aggregate of coexisting and successive phenomena 4 , with nothing beyond, within, behind, or before them but still other phenomena ad infinitum. Nor are we to con- 1 Types of Ethical Theory, vol. II. 8 Natural Religion, 1882 ; ch. iv. p. 74. * Ibid. i. p. 3. * Ibid. iii. p. 45. INTRODUCTION 5 sider it any infringement of religion to deny the presence and agency, among these phenomena, of any ordering Mind, and to suppose that self-conscious intelligence and will have first emerged in the development of the human race. Such denial is perfectly consistent with the recogni- tion of Law, i.e. determinate order among phenomena ; and so long as any shred of law remains recognised, religion is saved 1 , though there be no legislator but blind necessity. This watering down of the meaning of the word Religion, so as to dilute it to the quality of the thinnest enthusiasm, would be less confusing, if it openly washed away with it and discharged all the theological terms which it empties of significance. But the reader, to his great surprise, is told that this reduced religion is still Theism ; that it is wrong to regard as an atheist one who sees in nature no trace of ordering mind ; and that such a one, in his bare recognition of law or regularity anywhere, still has his God. For, to the man of Science, for whom the cosmos is all in all, the word l God is merely a synonym for nature 2 '; the laws of nature are ' laws of God' ; and in the field of nature he stands as if ' in the presence of an infinite and eternal being,' nay, a ' divine being ' ; so that he is as truly a theist as one who bends down in prayer. There might be some excuse for this paradoxical statement, if its author were dealing with the Poet's personification of nature as an infinite organism, looking with deepest expression into the human soul ; for this conception does really, for the moment, both unify and animate the world, and brighten up its face as with a flash of inner meaning from beneath its form ; and, while this vision lasts, there is a transient immanence of mind with which the seer may commune. But, the assertion is expressly made of that lowest view of nature which, like Comte's, rids the observer of all ideas of causality or power, and resolves the All into phenomena, 1 Natural Religion, ch. ii. pp. 27, 43. 2 Ibid. iii. p. 45. 6 INTRODUCTION. related only in time and place, in resemblance and differ- ence, and simply grouped into sets under these heads. The deification of such bundles of facts (and ' laws ' are nothing else), the transference of the name God to the sum of them, the recognition of their study as Theism, involve a degradation of language and a confusion of thought, which are truly surprising in the distinguished author of ' Natural Religion.' The subversion of established meanings for familiar terms is already begun in the very title of his book : by ' Natural Religion ' has hitherto been understood ' what may be known of the invisible God through the things which he has made, even his everlasting power and divinity^-' ; but here it means, instead of the teachings of nature about God, the substitution of nattire for God, the actual dispens- ing from thought of everything but nature, and the attempt to concentrate upon it the affections previously reserved for him: in other words, nature-worship in place of divine worship. If it be true that the title of a book carries in it a virtual promise, it cannot fitly consist of a phrase employed in an unheard-of sense. Had the author fully realised what the absolute merging of God in the phenomenal order of the world amounts to, I hardly think he would have made a present of the dialect of theology to the investigator of physical laws. He would then have felt that it was impossible to invent a combina- tion of terms more definitely and unconditionally negativing the possibility of God, than the statement that there is nothing to be known but coexistences and successions of phenomena ; for it were too poor a mockery to hand over the divine name to any assemblage of massed and echeloned phenomena as such. Nature, it is probable, presented itself to the author's imagination not in this bare positivist aspect, of laws without source, of order without idea, of multiplicity without unity of thought, but as the medium 1 Rom. i. 20. INTRODUCTION. 7 in which alone their Source, their Idea, their all-embracing Subject could be sought and approached ; and accordingly he speaks of nature as the ' complete and only manifesta- tion of God ' ; thus, with apparent unconsciousness, contra- dicting his own statement that nature is identical with God ; for the acts and changes which contribute to the mani- festation are not the manifesting subject, but its subservient instrument of expression. If this is so, it is simply the immanence of God in nature, his living energy in its powers, his habits in its steadfast laws, which the author has in view, and on which he dwells as the sole and suffi- cient school of divine knowledge ; in contradistinction from what he repudiates under the name of ' supernaturalism,' i. e. miraculous events supposed to be interpolated, as means of Revelation, in the midst of the regularity of the world. His attention is wholly occupied with the alterna- tive of miracles or laws, as exponents of the ultimate and eternal secret of the universe ; and he never doubts that, on the rejection of the first, he is left alone with the second : that there is no other home where anything sacred can be found ; and that since this is nothing else than the realm of nature, beyond nature, or ' supernatural/ nothing can be. It is a fallacious inference. If we were simply classifying phenomena, certainly the author's bifurcate division would hold good : they must come about either conformably, or inconformably, with some given rule : they would be either natural, or extra-natural : the affirmation of the one would be the negation of the other. But the question whether ' Nature ' (in the sense of all that happens] is indeed the totality of existence, is a question not between one mode of happening and another, but between all happenings and the never-happening whence they come, between the time event and its eternal ground, between the phenomenal sum, from end to end, and the non-phenomenal presence without which they cannot emerge into thought at all. Change 8 INTRODUCTION. has no meaning, and no possibility, but in relation to the permanent, which is its prior condition ; and pile up as you may your ' coexistent and successive ' mutabilities, that patient eternal abides behind, and receives an everlasting witness from them, whether heeded or unguessed. Here it is, in this intellectual presupposition of any emerging world, this prior condition of the natural, that we meet a persistent ' supernatural,' in the idea of which the very essence of the religious problem lies, and without reference to which the order of nature can tell us of nothing but itself; for God is not there. Nature therefore can never swallow up the supernatural, any more than time can swallow up eternity : they subsist and are intelligible only together ; and nothing can be more mistaken than to treat them as mutually exclusive. It is no hindrance to theology, if the laws of phenomena pursue their undeviating way : it is no hindrance to science, if the laws of nature are laws of God ; the matter of both studies is furnished by the same relation ; only taken up at the opposite ends, so as to render explicit in each case the term which is implicit in the other. But though there is no ' antagonism ' between them, antithesis there certainly is ; and nothing can be more misleading than to say that ' God is merely a synonym for nature.' The attributes of nature are birth, growth, and death ; God can never begin nor cease to be : nature is an aggregate of effects ; God is the universal cause : nature is an assemblage of objects ; God is the infinite Subject of which they are the expression : nature is the organism of intelligibles ; God is the eternal intellect itself. Cut these pairs asunder ; take away the unchangeable, the causality, the manifesting Subject, the originating Thought ; and what is then left is indeed ' Nature,' but, thus bereft and alone, is the negation and not the ' synonym ' of God. And so, I am constrained to deny the antagonism which our author affirms ; and to affirm the antithesis which he denies. INTRODUCTION. 9 A further instance of the confusion arising from the pro- posed remoulding of well-defined terms will render our appreciation of it still clearer. As, in order to be a theist, the only condition is that you should, somewhere or other, find a bit of regularity in the succession of events, you would apparently earn the name by listening for thunder after lightning, or throwing paper into the fire to be burned. With the qualifications reduced so low, it would seem hardly possible to escape from the category ; and the search for an atheist becomes, one would think, more hopeless, with even the best of lanterns, than the search of Diogenes for an honest man. Perhaps then this is just the conclusion to which our author intends to lead, viz. that the species being extinct, the name is superseded and may be erased from the language. But no : consistent as this would be, and accordant with the limp tendencies of our age, it is not the course which commends itself to our author. He determines to keep the atheist among survivals still ; but in order to do so, supplies him with a new definition, or set of characteristics by which he may be known. Setting aside the disbelief of order as 'a mere speculative crotchet ' on which it is needless to dwell, he finds ' the real atheism ' not in any opinion, but in a certain form of temper and character. It is ' another name,' he says, 'for feebleness* induced by three causes, viz. (i) by wilfulness, or exaggera- tion of the human efficiency against the resistance of the world ; leading to vain and passionate self-precipitation upon Titanic enterprises barred by fate and ending in destruction : (2) by excessive caution, that, for want of acquaintance with nature's larger laws, ventures no step beyond the range of partial or proximate experience, and is paralysed by the hidden power of the universe : (3) by the cynical mood incident to a crumbling faith and a decaying Church, passing through the stages of anxious doubt, of compromised sincerity, of conventional conformity, 10 INTRODUCTION. of mutual distrust among associates, till all secure anchor- age is lost, and the life drifts at the mercy of the currents and the winds 1 . These several states of mind are finely described and illustrated ; and if by ' feebleness ' be meant any kind of failure, all may be accepted as examples of it ; though it is evident that in the first case, of the presumptuous impoiens, the failure is due to baffled energy, while in that of the over-circumspect, it is due to defective energy, to which alone the word ' feeble ' properly applies. But what, except in the third case, have they to do with Atheism ? Is every rash man who dares what is beyond his strength, and is struck down by superior force, an atheist ? and also every timid man, who underrates his possibilities, and keeps within the safe enclosure of petty things ? Is this the classification which we must make of the Polish nation, adduced by the author as his instance of the first ; and of the Mahommedans, who are his representatives of the second ? Is it that the author, identifying God with Nature, looks upon every distrust or misplaced trust of the laws of nature as tantamount to blindness towards God ? Then, till the whole of nature on which action and character are based is read through and through, all would be atheists together ; for, short of this, the condition is not reached of that accurate prediction, which excludes temerity and timidity alike. Atheism, no doubt, is ' feeble ' ; and the heroisms which illuminate the course of history and regenerate the life of nations are, for the most part, the products and embodiment of Faith ; and this is doubtless the antithesis which was present to our author's mind. But it is one thing to say that atheism is feeble ; it is another, that feebleness is atheism ; and the attempt to disparage and spoil the word as the name of a theological denial, yet save it as the designation of a certain type of 1 Natural Religion, ch. ii. pp. 27-35. INTRODUCTION. II moral character and disposition, forfeits what we want for the sake of what we can well spare. On the whole, then, I cannot reconcile myself to the proposed rhetorical extension of the word Religion, with all the altered meanings which it involves for the connected group of terms. The motives which recommend the sug- gested change deserve, no doubt, acknowledgment and sympathy. On the one hand, it is a pathetic thing to see how hard it is for the human soul to let its religion go ; to watch how those who, from loss of the infinite Father, find themselves in an orphaned universe, would fain attempt compensation by worshipping either each other, or even, while its sacred look yet lingers, the mere scene where he was, and persuade themselves that it is still the same piety, though they stand alone and no one reads their heart or hears their orisons. On the other hand, it is a generous impulse which leads large-minded men, themselves perhaps emerging from terrible crises of thought, to be tender towards like sufferers, and make the least rather than the most of the still doubtful issue. The hatred of denuncia- tion and anathema, the desire to diffuse a calm clear air and a sweet light through the halls of controversy, so that the scientist from his observatory and the artist from his studio may enter them without sense of repulsive change, the fear of letting an utter alienation grow up between the intellectual and the spiritual elements of modern civilisa- tion, are laudable and reasonable pleas for a quiet docility and modest respect in settling the relations between know- ledge and religion. The broader the common ground which you can define, the better ; provided you do not lay down upon your map a territory which no traveller can discover and no foot has ever trod. That however is an irremovable condition, which no catholicity of temper can charm from its place. The disputes between science and faith can no more be closed by inventing 'religions of I a 1NTROD UCTION. culture,' than the boundary quarrels of nations by setting up neutral provinces in the air. Heartily as I would welcome the enthusiasms for know- ledge and for art, as well as for Right, into the circle of religious affinities, and recognise in their noblest repre- sentatives an inspiration akin to that of genuine piety ; emphatically therefore as I deny that there is any un- congeniality between the modern culture and the ancient sanctities, I yet must hold that, in the order of dependence, these minor forms of devoutness hang upon the major ; and that if we are to give them a home in the widened category of Religion, it must be as children of the house and not as wielding its supreme authority. Their functions are sacred, because concerned with a universe already con- secrate by a Divine presence, gleaming through all its order and loveliness : suppose its inner meaning gone, let its truth be only useful and its beauty only pleasant, and would any lofty genius be taken captive by them, and bow before them? Rightly enough are the man of science and the true artist called ministering priests of nature : but this they could not be, unless nature were a temple filled with God. If there be no sanctuary and no Shekinah there, there is no inner meaning for them to interpret ; and the account of it is complete in the measure of its proportions and the inventory of its contents. If you place me face to face, not with an infinite living spirit, but only with what is called ' the Great Necessity* what ' enthusiasm ' do you expect the vision to excite ? Can there be a more paralysing spectacle? and shall I fling myself with passionate devotion into the arms of that ghastly physical giant ? It is impossible : homage to an automaton-universe is no better than mummy-worship would be to one who has known what it is to love and trust, and embrace the living friend. In short, a human soul so placed would itself be higher than aught it knows INTRODUCTION. 13 within the immensity, and could worship nothing there without idolatry. Even if it turns its gaze within instead of without, and, conscious of its littleness, forms the pre- conception of more knowledge, of purer beauty, of larger and deeper goodness, still, though it looks up to these, it is but as possibilities for itself, and not as the eternal realities of the universe, the law of its laws, the light of its loveliness, the pledge of its ends ; and, amid all the sickly talk about ' ideals ' which has become the common- place of our age, it is well to remember that, so long as they are dreams of future possibility, and not faiths in present realities, so long as they are a mere self-painting of the yearning spirit, and not its personal surrender to immediate communion with an Infinite Perfection, they have no more solidity or steadiness than floating air- bubbles, gay in the sunshine, and broken by the passing wind. You do not so much as touch the threshold of religion, so long as you are detained by the phantoms of your thought : the very gate of entrance to it, the moment of its new birth, is the discovery that your gleaming ideal is the everlasting Real, no transient brush of a fancied angel wing, but the abiding presence and persuasion of the Soul of souls : short of this there is no object given you, and you have not even reached the specified point of ' admiration' Within the limits of pure sincerity, no one can worship either a nature beneath him or an idea within him : however big may be the one, though it comprise all forces and all stars, if that be all, it will be venerable to no spirit that can comprehend it ; and how- ever fine may be the other, if it be but a dreamer's image, a phenomenon of perishable consciousness, it can never be more than the personality that has it, so as to make him its suppliant. The definition of religion as 'habitual and permanent admiration ' can hardly be intended for any rigorous appli- 14 INTRODUCTION. cation. Like the frequent identification in devotional literature of all goodness with Love, it forgets to take account of the object on which the feeling is directed, and on the worth of which the whole character and place of the feeling depend. To love amiss is no evidence of goodness ; and it is possible so to admire as to contradict the very essence of religion. Is there any more ' habitual and permanent admiration' than that of the handsome fop the Beau Brummel or Count d'Orsay of his day for his own person, as he stands before the mirror ; and he is only a more visible example of many varieties of self-complacency and self-homage equally sincere ; and surely no temper of mind is more utterly closed against the tender reverence and abnegating service which religion inspires. It would therefore be necessary, if this definition were not relinquished, to stipulate that the object of admiration should be something other than ourselves. That condition is no doubt fulfilled by the Positivists' calendar, which gathers into one view the nobles and martyrs of history, and leaves no day of the year without its tribute of celebration ; and I shall not challenge the right of this commemorative discipline to call itself a ' religion of humanity.' It does rest essentially upon reverent affection, not, on the whole, unwisely and un- worthily directed ; and if it were possible for human souls to illuminate and uphold each other, without any central orb to give them their reflected light and determine their dependent paths, this ritual might be something more than a melancholy mimicry of a higher conception. But place it beside the Catholic constellation of the saints ; and though its component stars are often of greater magnitude, you see at once that, as a whole, it is a minor worship made grotesque by being thrust into the place of the Supreme. Its attitude is retrospective, gazing into the Night of ages gone : the other has its face to the east, and INTRODUCTION. 15 anticipates the dawn : it is a requiem for the dead ; the other is a communion with the ever-living, an anthem in tune with a choir invisible : it anxiously seeks and puts together the doubtful traits and broken features of figures irrecoverably lost ; the other only waits a little while for the venerated teacher or the dear saint to be the com- panion that shall die no more. The secret dependence of all satellite forms of piety upon the grander, and at last upon the solar attraction, cannot be slighted without the fatal collapse of every problem we attempt Guard your canonisations as you may, take only the fairest specimens of character where it seems to blossom into all the virtues, cull and combine them with blameless skill, yet they are memorials of what was and is not, and make but a funeral wreath borrowed from one grave to be cast upon another. The author of 'Natural Religion' earnestly desires to heal the breach between what is called the 'culture' of our time and the inherited faith with which it seems so little congenial It is a noble aim, worked out with im- pressive persuasion and illustrated by episodes of the finest criticism. With his main purpose, and with the greater part of his subsidiary estimates of history and literature, I go with enthusiastic assent. But against the essential principle of his method, viz. that the anti-theological notions being accepted as facts and left as they are, lodgings shall be found for them within the vocabulary of religion, so that each leading term shall mean what it has hitherto repudiated and be at a loss for its own antithesis, I cannot but seriously protest A God that is merely nature, a Theism without God, a Religion forfeited only by the 'nil admirari,' can never reconcile the secular and the devout, the Pagan and the Christian mind. You vainly propose an dpr\viK.ov by corruption of a word The moment the device is put to the test, the antipathic elements which you have brought together spring asunder with more 1 6 INTRODUCTION. aversion than ever. Can you expect, for instance, that one to whom the whole essence of religion consists in conscious personal relations with a Divine Spirit, and who cannot live apart from that ever-present Friend, should consent to reduce this experience to a secondary position, and feel still a religious fellowship with his neighbour who deems it all a dream ? The most you can demand is that each should respect the conscientious belief of the other, and refrain from expressed or implied reproach. But the alienation of sympathy is inevitable ; and, resting upon real differences, is beyond the reach of verbal fusion. For these reasons, I retain the old meanings of the chief theologic terms, and decline to loosen their precision ; and by Religion I understand the belief and worship of Supreme Mind and Will, directing the universe and holding moral relations with human life. This I state as its essence ; but whatever this essence may either necessarily carry as a consequence, or, with the collateral aid of other evidence, may justify us in accepting as true, will also find its place under the category of religion. II. WHY ETHICS BEFORE RELIGION. The enquiries on which we are now entering have been preceded l by a treatment of ethical theory, the results of which will here be assumed as known. This order of exposition undoubtedly implies that I do not regard moral rules as depending upon prior religious belief ; and that I do regard the consciousness of duty as an originating con- dition of religion. In adopting this order, however, I do not mean to set up one exclusive source for the faiths and worships of mankind ; or to contradict any enquirer who may trace their genesis to the ' idea of the infinite, 1 or the 1 sense of absolute dependence,' or the startling impressions 1 In Types of Ethical Theory, two vols. 1885. INT ROD UCTION. 1 7 of external nature, or the memory of ancestors, or the images of dreams. In the absence of any experience which can test such hypotheses, they must remain specula- tions neither verified nor disproved ; and the chief objec- tion to them is, that the advocate of each is apt to claim the whole phenomenon as his own, and to suppose that his favourite source must be the only one. This is an un- warrantable assumption. Nothing forbids us to recognise in our nature more causes than one of the beliefs and affections embodied in worship ; and the strongly con- trasted types of creed, mythology and ritual, which have coexisted in the world, are more simply accounted for by distinct initiation than by divergent development. As I do not wish to ' speak evil of dignities/ I will not disparage the resources of the so-called ' science of religions ' for ulti- mately determining this question. But meanwhile we have some psychological knowledge of the springs and varieties of religious conception in ourselves ; and there seems no reason why we should neglect to consult these indications of experience as to the lines of tendency that pass from our own nature to feel after the Divine. If we live in union or affinity with God at all, it must be in several relations, not in one alone ; for our being is complex, and must touch his at every point We suffer, we think, we will ; what we feel is the pressure of his laws ; what we know is the order of his reality ; what we choose is from his possibilities : and how can there fail to be a path to him from the sensitive, the intellectual, and the moral passages of our history? If however the first of these were there alone, we should indeed be his creatures, but know it not : the dependent relation would be complete, yet in the dark to us, as to any animal that shares it with us. Not till the second function comes upon the scene, and we are set up as self- distinguishing subjects, does the first function step into VOL. I. C 1 8 I NT ROD UCTION. the light, and show us what we feel ; and with this self- conscious reading of our own experience comes the dis- covery of its order and the conception of its cause. If the experience which we contemplate is only that which we passively receive, either from without or from the instinc- tive forces within, we shall be aware of ourselves simply as parts of nature, just as the sheep upon the hills would do, if they could see themselves in the mirror of reflection. Of such a nature the Reason would find an adequate cause in a simply thinking Necessity, turning out idea into being at each step of consecutive inference ; and behind or with- in the phenomena nothing would be recognised as opera- tive but a conscious immensity of Science, the archetype of the system registered in visible characters throughout space, and now construed back into thought by man. Such a conception would certainly fall under the category of Religion ; but would barely save its essence, presented in the leanest condition, without any resource for investing it with fresh plenitude or grace. The defect can be removed only by quitting these side-chapels of our inner temple and resorting to the high altar of our Moral experience. There, a new type of relation bursts upon us. It is only as Objects in the known world that we are parts of nature : only as disposed of by it that it can claim us : but, as Subjects that know it, as Agents that withstand and conquer it, deter- mining its course this way rather than that, we are not of it, but above it, not in the chain of its effects, but tran- scending their position as a Cause ; for it is absurd to say that one of the phenomena known can be the knower of them all, that one of the necessitated links can have free choice of what shall follow from itself. In the moral con- sciousness therefore there enters a kind of dependence on the universal Cause unfelt before ; a dependence not for what we have to suffer, or are driven to do, but for what lines of self-determination it is open to us to take ; our INTRODUCTION. 19 datum is not a factor already settled for us, but an alterna- tive left to be settled by ourselves : the conditions are given : the solution is to be found. We are thus partners in the transaction ; not in servitude, as tools or creatures wielded by another hand, but taken into counsel, with the adoption of sons. Such investiture with selective power introduces at once relations of trust, of living affection, of possible sympathy, of possible alienation : the Divine pro- poser of the choice makes no secret of his own preference ; but in order that, on becoming ours as well, it may consti- tute a true spiritual tie uniting us with him, he refrains from imposing it as inevitable, and would have us make it our own by unconstrained assent. It is out of the vast enrichment which these conceptions add to the inner con- tents of life in its contact with Divine things that Religion gains its deepest problems and its intensest power : that both God and man emerge into thought as something more than nature : that the Science which knows the actual ceases to be supreme, and becomes ancillary to the insight which anticipates the possible : that Righteousness ascends to the throne in heaven, and Duty is owned as sacred upon earth. Hence it is that Ethics must be treated before Religion : not that they are an absolute condition of its beginning : not that they always involve it as their end ; but that they implicitly contain the resources whence Religion, in the higher form which alone we can practi- cally care to test, derives its availing characteristics, its difficulties, and its glories. The points of interconnection between Ethics and Re- ligion are perhaps most clearly seen when we try to realize what each would be when set up for itself apart from the other. Theism may undoubtedly announce itself as a purely ontological doctrine, justified by the impossibility of a universe of phenomena, without some substantive being whence they proceed ; and though philosophers C 2 20 INTRODUCTION. have sometimes been content to identify that substantive being with matter, the cosmical order has usually led to the recognition of an intellectual power as the disposer and sustainer of the universal frame. Whether regarded as standing to the world in the relation of substance to attribute, or in that of Designer to his product, such a being needs nothing to fulfil these conditions but thought and power. He either lays down laws of coexistence and suc- cession, or evolves them from his own essence, and sets in order the catena of means for their unswerving execution. If, among the creatures ruled by these laws, we were on the field, with all our present capacities except the con- sciousness of moral distinction in our impulses ; if then we discovered that this neutrality of ours was not shared by our Maker, and that, in order to encourage in us one set of affections rather than another, he had attached pleasures to the former and pains to the latter ; this knowledge would undoubtedly make it our wisdom to conform to his purpose, just as it is wiser -to take a profit rather than incur a loss : but should we be conscious of any guilt in doing otherwise ? should we have gone against anything but our own interests and a superior power? Clearly not. We should have no answer to one who pointed out our impru- dence ; but, if he charged us with sin, we could only reply 'We know not what you mean.' Where the grotmd of a command is present only to the legislator's mind and has no place in the natures on which the law is imposed, the requirement remains arbitrary, and the obedience external ; that obedience expresses no character, beyond mere pru- dence ; nor can a government of living beings conducted on this method alone ever much transcend in its results the movements of a flock of sheep driven by the shepherd's dogs. Religion then, as the bare belief in Divine omnipo- tence administering universal law, cannot institute a Duty or provide us with a possibility of Morals : the ' sanctions ' INT ROD UCTION. 2 1 of happiness and misery, though magnified to infinity and prolonged to eternity, are in themselves unavailing to dis- tinguish the angels of heaven from those of hell, except as the wise from the foolish virgins. Without an internal enactment in the soul, to which the external mandate brings its appeal, the consciousness of Right is impossible, 'and the human world is susceptible of government only as a menagerie. Take the converse case, and observe the difference. If we start from our own psychological experience alone, without assumption or speculation respecting the universe around, we meet there, at a very early stage, with ethical elements, involving the idea and furnishing the rule of duty. Childhood itself, small as are its concerns, is full of its moral enthusiasms and indignations, quick with its shame and compunction, bright with its self-approval ; and with all its heedlessness betrays every day the inner work- ing and the eager growth of Conscience. This order of feeling, personal and sympathetic, does not wait for the lessons of the religious instructor and the conception of the universe as under Divine administration : on the contrary, it is the condition on which such teaching depends for its efficacy ; and is present, where no theological sequel is ever appended to it. The profound sense of the authority and even sacredness of the moral law is often conspicuous among men whose thoughts apparently never turn to superhuman things, but who are penetrated by a secret worship of honour, truth, and right. Were this noble state of mind brought out of its impulsive state and made to unfold its implicit contents, it would indeed (as I have endeavoured elsewhere to show) reveal a source higher than human nature for the august authority of righteous- ness. But it is undeniable that that authority may be felt, where it is not seen, felt as if it were the mandate of a Perfect Will, while yet there is no overt recognition of such 22 INTRODUCTION. Will : i. e. conscience may act as human, before it is dis- covered to be divine. To the agent himself its whole his- tory may seem to lie in his own personality and his visible social relations ; and it shall nevertheless serve as his oracle, though it be hid from him who it is that utters it. The moral consciousness, while thus pausing short of its complete development, fulfils the conditions of responsible life, and makes character real and the virtues possible. Ethics therefore have practical existence and. operation prior to any explicit religious belief: the law of right is inwoven with the very tissue of our nature, and throbs in the movements of our experience ; and cannot be escaped by anyone till he can fly from himself. Did we even imagine that we came out of nothing, and went back into nothing, and had ties only with one another, still, so long as we are what we are, our life must take form from its own germ, and grow and ramify into moral common- wealths. Do not these statements, however, threaten religion with a very startling humiliation ? If it is incapable of creating morals, and if morals are secure of themselves and can dispense with it, what function remains for it? What affinity associates the two agencies? And in what di- rection does the passage lie, along which influence may flow from the one to the other ? i. The simply ethical conscience, with its intuition of what ought to be beyond anything that is, has contact with a mystery to which it conforms without consciously quitting the ground of commonplace. To be blind to any solemn significance in this experience is to carry an arrested humanity. If this ought is a fact, it is a very curious one : it is not, like other facts, in Time ; it is no pheno- menon, past or present : it has never been seen or other- wise perceived : it is predicable of no actual existence : it is no objective property : nor is there any nameable INTRODUCTION. 23 category of empirical reality under which it can be brought It can be affirmed of nothing that comes as a link in the chain of necessary sequence ; but only of a possibility, where more than one is present. It refers therefore only to the future and uncreated, that is still determinable py some free will. It is not the agent's fore- sight of what will be ; nor is it anything of his own making, which he can unmake or alter. Nor is it information, passing from the knowing to the ignorant ; it is command- ment, speaking in the imperative, and instantly owned as a perfect word, coming whence sovereign tones have a right to flow. Hence there is no sincere power to challenge that peremptory voice : the whole personality secretly kneels before it. Here then is revealed not simply the thought of one mind, but the relation between two ; both, the seat of the same conscious moral order ; the one, its infinite Archetype, the other, the finite image, made susceptible of appeal and of response. Till the peculiarity of the moral consciousness is thus followed out to its natural issue in religion, it environs us with a haunting realm of possibilities, with ' ideals ' of righteousness, which indefinitely grow, and oppress us with a quasi-infinitude, wholly unsecured as any- thing more than a subjective vision that may be baulked of all reality. There is a stage in the history of the conscience, when it reaches its fulness of feeling without yet being new-born into faith ; and it can no longer be content with the plainness of the near duty and the little zone of light at hand, through pressure of an infinite but dark horizon of the unattained closing in upon it from beyond. Stunted natures may stop short of this stage, and be complacent with their good habits : else, the mystery, once felt, must not rest idly upon the heart ; for, while it merely broods with its dead weight, it becomes either a helpless sense of sin or a hopeless reverie of aspiration : how can the lonely human will lift ' this mountain ' and 24 INTRODUCTION. 'cast it into the sea'? But, as soon as the other side of the relation is apprehended, the loneliness ceases : ' Lo ! God is here, and I knew it not ' ; the vision of Perfection is no dream ; and the tremulous purpose has an infinite ally. The self-strain is exchanged for self-surrender ; and the hovering cloud of possibilities which covered the soul with gloom bursts into heavenly light. We may compare the change, under some variation in the analogy, with that which Kant 1 describes as subsisting between the aspect which life would have for us if our nature came to an end with the data of Sense and Understanding, and that which it actually presents to us, as modified by the additional faculty of Reason. Limited to the narrower endowment, we should be wholly engaged in the apprehension and ordering of phenomena and their laws, and should be content with these, and from the absence of any ideas beyond, should treat them as our world. That world, however, by decree of nature itself, is only an island, though it is for us the sole seat of experience, where we measure the definite things that exist or happen, so as to build up Sciences ; yet Reason no sooner visits us, than we find it lying in the midst of a vast ocean, whose waves for ever break upon the shore, and on whose expanse loom mysterious objects that may be habitable lands, or mere cloud-banks, or melting ice. It is the boundless girdle of the possible that thus embraces all our actual : the murmuring and unresting deep of what may be and ought to be ; and from the moment of its opening upon our view we long to navigate it and bring home reports of what lies within or beyond it ; nor do repeated failures avail to quench the inextinguishable hope. Though Kant deemed the exploration impossible to the Speculative Reason, what he had dismissed as its illusions he received back 1 Krit. der reinen Vernunft. Rosenkranz und Schubert, ii. 196. INTRODUCTION. 25 as realities on the authority of the Practical Reason ; so that I do him no violence if, neglecting his obsolete division of faculties, I treat his transcendent world as not inac- cessible to rational belief; and then we may apply his illustration strictly to the development of the conscience. It is no doubt possible, so long as it is shut up within the routine of life, for it to remain quite unaware of any relations beyond this circle, and work within it as a complete and rounded whole ; but, when the moral eye loses the films of habit and attains to spiritual vision, the life of present duty reveals itself as an insular element of a more comprehensive sphere, and assures us of boundless affinities and a communion unseen. Ethics therefore, on their outer margin, bring us face to face with the momentous question, whether their supreme intimations are verifiable, and their relations eternal. 2. If this question is decided in the negative, not only is the passage into religion cut off as illusory, but the retreat back within the shelter of simple authoritative Morals is rendered impossible. The life of conscience may be one either of childlike trust, or of divine insight ; but to quit the first, and fail of the second, is to become an exile and a wanderer. Ask for no credentials, and you will have clear guidance : scrutinise its imperial claims, and persuade yourself that they are ultra vires, and you will listen to them only where they are within the limits of your wish. A sovereign title must either be perfect, or good for nothing ; and against a detected pretender there can be no high treason. If, on close inspection, you find in your moral consciousness nothing to excuse the por- tentous tones in which it speaks ; if you attribute their impressiveness to the survival of a misplaced trust or an early superstition, you will resent it as a cheat, and set to work to rationalize and reduce your code. There is but one result possible. If, among the acts of the will, there is 26 INTRODUCTION. for you no better and worse per se, if right wins no alle- giance from you on its own account, and you will insist on discovering some other quality that makes it right, you have bespoken your place in the school of Epicurus ; for sentient good and moral good make up together all that is eligible in human life ; and when once you treat the second as dependent, it becomes of necessity a satellite of the first. Hence it is that Ethics must either perfect themselves in religion, or disintegrate themselves into Hedonism ; and that there is an inevitable gravitation in all anti-theological thinkers to the ' greatest happiness ' doctrine. The attempts to construct intermediate theories have only shown, by their instability, the irresistible logical tendency to the single line of cleavage, which puts religious thought on the one side, and the eudaemonist on the other. Should then Kant's great ocean either prove to be an in- hospitable waste, or, defying our courage and skill to cross, refuse to tell us what sunnier lands and ampler skies may spread beyond, it will only remain for us to return inland, out of hearing of its waves, and raise what fruits we can from our island's scanty soil, asking no more from our span of space and time than to minimise its ill. 3. If, on the other hand, the question is decided in the affirmative, and the infinite seas are ours no less than the rocky nest which they embrace ; if the voices heard in the soul come to it on winds that cross the deep, and do indeed tell of an everlasting sympathy with the faithful and disinterested will ; if our action alone is tied to this spot, but our love is at home either here or there, the whole spirit and character of Duty becomes transformed. It was not indeed a hard necessity before, yielded-to simply because we mtist ; for instead of being reluctant it was self- accepted, adopted with assent, because we ought ; but still there was a weight to lift ; we had to remove out of the way another wish ; and in the felt imperative which de- INTRODUCTION. 27 manded this there was a mystery which made its power seem to issue from the dark. It was a sacred cloud, without form or living feature, which approached us and uttered a bidding as it passed ; and we obeyed, with reverence for we knew not what. Now, this impersonal pressure breaks its secret, and avows itself as the persuasive warning of One who would have us 'holy as He is holy'; and not only is this new vision equivalent to the apparition of the universe unveiled, but the response which conforms to it springs forth with the free enthusiasm of personal affection, unburdened by any weight. If the moral consciousness be, in very truth, a communion between the Divine and the human mind, it remains inchoate and one-sided only so long as God's part in it is unseen ; the moment the mists are gone, it completes itself in the conscious answer of the worshipper ; and the relation, which was always in existence, is now reciprocal in thought. Prior to this crowning recognition, the life of the faithful soul is the life of Law, shrinking from the forbidden ill, and compell- ing itself to the ordered good, not indeed from servile fears, not perhaps without a certain zeal for some favourite con- viction or abstract cause, but aided only by the limited dynamics of rigid conscientiousness and truth to itself. But with the opening of the heavens, a great redemption comes, and by presenting an infinite object of personal affection, converts the life of Duty into the life of Love, and reinforces the individual will by the ' Spirit that beareth witness with our spirit, that we are children of God.' The point of contact between Ethics and Religion is thus analogous to that between the bondage of the Law and the freedom of the Gospel. 4. When through this point of contact the transition has been effected to the spiritual life, the moral world has gained an immense expansion. The rule of right, the symmetries of character, the requirements of perfection, are 28 INTRODUCTION. no provincialisms of this planet : they are known among the stars : they reign beyond Orion and the Southern Cross : they are wherever the universal Spirit is ; and no subject mind, though it fly on one track for ever, can escape beyond their bounds. Just as the arrival of light from deeps that extinguish parallax bears witness to the same ether there that vibrates here, and its spectrum reports that one chemistry spans the interval, so does the law of righteousness spring from its earthly base and embrace the empire of the heavens, the moment it becomes a communion between the heart of man and the life of God. Not only does it thus pass, as already pointed out, from our ' ideal ' to the veritable real, but the reality it wins is stupendous in its scale, planted in the seats and following in the paths of all self-conscious spirits, coex- tensive with the Divine free agency. By such identifi- cation with the all-originating mind, it no less declares itself eternal than omnipresent : inherent in his essence, and therefore objectively put forth and instituted by his Will, for the assimilation of dependent and growing spirits to his own. The emergence of the dutiful relations into these dimensions is surely no slight change : it makes a difference whether the conscience is listened to as the wayside notice of a village oracle, or as a living voice from the sacrarium of the universe. And only when the true hierarchy of the affections has set into this sublimer form, will the character cease to be fluid, and show the stead- fastness of the martyr, with a stature more than human and a sweetness like that of Christ. Is there any en- thusiasm of goodness that can be excessive or unnatural in those who realise what it is to be, in very truth, ' children of God ' ? If, as a native of Tarsus, the Apostle could not help saying with a glow of pride that he was ' a citizen of no mean city/ how is it possible, without a flush of higher joy, for anyone to know himself a denizen of the INTRODUCTION. 39 city and commonwealth of God ? a community whose service is simple righteousness, and whose patriotism inex- tinguishable love of perfection. 5- One further result springs up at the point where Ethics become transcendent and constitute the relation between man and God. The world is thenceforward conceived as under moral administration, and natural law is expected to bear trace of a moral idea. In a being recognised as the central impersonation of righteousness it is impossible to suppose it subordinate to anything else : from their very nature all moral ends must yield to the ascendency of the moral conditions. Hence the religion of conscience goes to the great order of nature with the pre- conception that all its dispositions will be compatible with justice and beneficence, treating no sentient creature with cruelty, and all responsible agents according to their deserts. Under this preconception, attention would par- ticularly fix on the allotment of pleasure and pain ; for chiefly through them is it possible to give proportionate expression to the approval or disapproval of a judicial mind. What then is the general impression left by this new outlook upon the world ? Without entering as yet into the interior of its problems, it is well to notice at least whereabouts they lie. A certain portion of the good and evil of life answers well, in its distribution, to the moral anticipation, and falls where it is deserved. Besides the anguish of remorse, which is directly incident to guilt, the miseries of unhappy temper and ill-will, of alienation from others, of failure and despondency, of perplexity and ennui, are all referable to ethical disorder in the mind : nor is there any human instinct or affection which can either yield its own place or arrogate another's, without inducing the pangs and weak- ness of distortion. Of the physical disturbances of our well-being, an incalculable proportion is incurred by self- 30 INTRODUCTION. indulgence and the waste of energy which it entails and perhaps transmits ; and even of unsuspected disasters the causal ignorance is often wilful, though the intentions be clear. Through the whole range of these self-incurred penal- ties, the inner moral sense and the outer divine sense are in accord, and the thought secreted in the constitution of things seems but the echo or the original of our own. And great is the gain when some large lot of pain, that would else torture our sympathies by its aspect of indifference or cruelty, comes to be thus touched with new and ideal meanings which lift it at once into a higher plane, as an instrument of the sublimest end. If only this end, the realizing of absolute justice and the beatification of perfect character, can be similarly shown to swallow up all the remaining sufferings of the known world, the moral idea, in becoming transcendent, will have proved adequate to all demands, and the pessimist, having received his answer, may be requested to retire. It is by no means possible, however, to transfer the entire residue of painful experiences from the class of purely sensitive to that of ethical phenomena. Not all diseases, not all incapacities, are self-induced, or even visited upon ancestral sins. Convulsions of the earth's crust, the sweep of the tornado over sea and land, the baffling sur- prises of drought and frost and flood, and many another startling event, which may be regularities in nature, are yet unearned catastrophes for man ; and all the attempts to bring them, under the name of 'judgments,' into the moral category, are too futile to need reply. The boundary line between the responsible and irresponsible classes of experience may no doubt be plausibly shifted a little this way or that ; but that a large territory will anyhow remain where the Law of Right does not appoint the executive, is beyond dispute. What account may reasonably be given of its facts will be in due time considered : at present I INTRODUCTION, 31 would only point out that here we find the religious function of the moral consciousness at the end of its re- sources ; it has no competency beyond. This limit against which it strikes in no way impairs its validity in its previous application ; it leaves its authority untouched within its own proper bounds ; it simply marks its inadequacy to deal with an appendix of ulterior problems. As the sufferings from involuntary causes cannot be retributory, some other account of them must be sought : either they have no ends in view, and refuse to be brought into teleology at all ; or else they are directed upon some unmoral end, and are seen in their true place only as incidents in a physical or intellectual order, upon which a moral order is superinduced, or with which it is concurrent. At the same time the religion of conscience, which en- counters the check of this limit, is not without means of softening, if not neutralizing, its effects. If the moral relations revealed in our consciousness are the ectypal miniatures of eternal realities in God, it is impossible not to raise the question of their duration in us ; for there is something incongruous in supposing that a communion on our part with an eternal being, in respect of eternal verities central to his essence, should have just begun to know itself for what it is, and then be extinguished. Hence the immortality which the conscience assigns to moral re- lations it could not avoid expecting for itself; so as to throw open the gates of death and indefinitely prolong the story of human existence. That vaster world once coming into view, there is no telling what boundless reserve of rectifying possibilities it contains for completing the in- cipient but unfinished justice of the present life, and for compensating the sacrifices demanded by unmoral though indispensable laws. It is easy to visit with derision this way of postponing to an unknown future the solution of known difficulties in the present, and to insist that the 33 INTRODUCTION. lame justice of what we see is a poor reason for expecting a perfect justice in the unseen. But certain it is that, in the mixed experiences of this life, those which plainly affirm a moral rule impress us more deeply than those which are silent of it and will not tell their tale : so that of the one the report is believed, of the other the enigma remains ; and the part of which we are assured by its living witness in ourselves becomes the sample and foretaste of whatever sequel the further evolution of our nature may bring. The real light-sphere of conscience is not quenched by a limiting zone of darkness which it cannot penetrate ; and when its glow kindles faith in a state whence limits disappear, it must needs be the light that moves forward till there is no darkness at all. In every age ethically noble, the grief is keenest at every failure of right, and yet the despair of right will be the least possible ; and the secret stores of the eternal world will be held in resefve to redress the unequal incidence of natural ills, and harmonize the issues of life with the holiness of God. At this final point of contact then between Ethics and Religion there arises a certain check to their concurrence ; the former cannot, by becoming transcendent, so pass into the other as to permeate it throughout. Yet, precisely on this account, it opens up the conception and belief in a life beyond the present, which else would hardly have ac- quired the same distinctness and tenacity. Here we touch, I believe, the link of final connexion between Theism and the belief in a hereafter. Apart from the question of the moral government of God, and the painful lacunae in it which the conscience at present feels, the doctrine of a future life would become a mere episode of anthropology, and would have to be tested by the methods of natural history and physiology. Judged in this way (as it now often is), it would hardly present data worthy of serious attention ; nor would it, even if rendered credible, belong INTRODUCTION. 33 more specifically to religion than the fact of birth into this life. The evidence and the interest of this faith alike depend not only upon a pre-existing Theism, but upon the moral relation between man and God, and the need of somehow adjusting this to the order of the natural world. VOL. I. BOOK I. THE LIMITS OF HUMAN INTELLIGENCE CONSIDERED. INTRODUCTION. UNSETTLED BOUNDARIES. IF we have named the true links of connection between Ethics and Religion, we may see at once within what limits Morality may be transformed by ascending into Piety. It is not altered in its form, or the adjustment of its contents ; but simply carries over its old organism into its new life : for the springs of action stand on the same steps as before in the hierarchy of authority. Nor is there any revolution in its detailed application ; for its canon of consequences stands as it did, and if new fields are opened to it, they retain the same proportions. The difference lies (i) In the vast enlargement of dimensions throughout the whole scale, rendering what was empirical, transcendent ; turning the subjective miniature into an objective infinitude, as the picture on the retina's sensitive spot becomes in perception the vault of heaven, and each prick of light overhangs us as a star ; and so, intensifying the sublimity, while preserving the gradations, of our feeling. Our immediate lot may be small as the vicissitudes of a baby- house ; but its laws are not trivial, if they reduce in photograph the legislation of the universal empire ; (2) In the conversion of some springs of action, viz. the Sentiments (wonder, admiration, reverence) from impersonal impulses into personal affections ; and their consequent assumption of a far more definite and deeper power, D a 36 UNSETTLED BOUNDARIES. [Book I. manifesting. itself in distinct acts of religious expression, such as prayer, and all the usages of church life ; (3) In the appearance, therefore, upon the face of the world, of a large class of new moral facts for estimate, viz. all ecclesias- tical phenomena, and every expenditure of human zeal and interest for objects directly religious. These form a clear addition to the activities and products of the Will, and alter the whole contour of every historical and actual society. If we did not make the advance beyond the moral law, we should be disqualified for taking them into account. If, making the advance into* religion, we found it an illusion, we should condemn them as a grievous waste of life in delirious dreams. If we pronounced the religious surmises justified, we should trace in this field, amid many pathetic aberrations, some of the sublimest expres- sions of conscience, and nearest approaches to the perfection of our nature. But, however clear the points of approximation between morals and religion, and however great our interest in accomplishing the transition, it were vain to map out their lines of relation, if we can only stand upon the brink and look at the passage, without the foot to leap it, or the wing to fly, or the machinery to bridge the abyss. And this, it is well known, is a favourite modern allegation, sanctioned by many leaders of scientific opinion in England and on the Continent. From the very approaches to our enquiry we are driven by a notice that there is no way through. It is not denied that there may be habitable land, divine and fair, beyond. Perhaps there is ; perhaps there is not : but at all events we can never know, for its only possible objects are out of all relation to our faculties, and intrinsically incognisable by us. It is fitting indeed to stand with a certain reverence in face of that hiding-place of possibility ; but to say nothing, since nothing can be ascertained, a rule which recalls the maxim of Sextus the Pythagorean, Book I.] UNSETTLED BOUNDARIES. 37 TOP Oebv TI//.O, ei8oi>s KCU 8ta r