LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE I ^I'K.Ayi^ P%.^^ 4,^, THE NATURE OF PERSONALITY ^ MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited LONDON . BOMBAY . CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK . BOSTON . CHICAGO ATLANTA . SAN FRANCISCO THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. TORONTO THE NATURE OF PERSONALITY A COURSE OF LECTURES WILLIAM TEMPLE i" HEAOMASTER OF REPTON ; LATE FELLOW OF QUEENS COLLEGE, OXFORD CHAPLAIN TO THE AKCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURV MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 191 I 3J>231 r4s Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, bread street hill, e.g., and bungay, suffolk. TO THE REV. W. SANDAY, D.D. OLD REPTONIAN LADY MARGARET PROFESSOR OF DIVINITY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD THESE LECTURES ARE GRATEFULLY AND AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED AUTHOR'S NOTE This course of lectures was delivered in Oxford in the Lent Term of 1910 ; many of those who attended it expressed the desire to be able to refer to the lectures in print ; a similar desire was expressed by Dr. Sanday, who was kind enough to read them and to make some valuable criticisms on the original form of the last lecture ; this is the only lecture which has been materially altered since delivery, and the alterations in it are only amplifications designed to make the original sequence of ideas less obscure. This is not a contribution to the philosophy of the subject ; nothing more ambitious is intended than an effort to stimulate and, in a small degree, to guide the thought of people, whose study of philosophy is not far advanced, viii AUTHOR'S NOTE concerning some of the most serious and difficult of all problems. While omitting to enumerate my debts, I must record my obligations to Karl von Hase's Evangelisch-'protestantische Dogmatik, which has been my guide through so much of the maze of patristic and scholastic literature as I have threaded. The introductory lecture was not part of the course ; it was delivered in the Univer- sities of Sydney and Melbourne in August, 1910, under the auspices of The Australasian Student Christian Union, by whose permission it is now reprinted. W. T. Repton, January, 1911. CONTENTS INTRODUCTORY LECTURE aiATERIALISM AND AGNOSTICISM xi LECTURE I THING, BRUTE, AND PERSON 1 LECTURE II RIGHTS AND DUTIES : DETERMINISM AND INDIVIDUALITY 11 LECTURE III THE WILL AND ITS FREEDOM 22 LECTURE IV ORIGINAL SIN AND MORAL DUTY 37 LECTURE V DUTY AND SOCIETY 50 LECTURE VI PERSONALITY AND THE TIME-PROCESS : THE SOCIAL PURPOSE 65 LECTURE VII PERSONALITY AND THE UNIVERSE 80 LECTURE VIII THE TRIUNE PERSONALITY OF GOD 97 INTEODUCTORY LECTURE MATERIALISM AND AGNOSTICISM Materialism and Agnosticism are as old almost as human thought itself; but the form which they take at any time is determined by the form commonly given to religious teach- ing in the preceding epoch. They always appear, not as independent, constructive philosophies, but as protests against deficien- cies in the statement given at any time to the spiritual interpretation of experience. So it has been through the whole history of thought. And so it is true that the responsi- bility for agnosticism, when it is serious and reverent, rests less with the agnostic than with the exponents of religion ; these may not be in any way to blame ; they may have done the best that could be done with the intellectual apparatus furnished by the xii INTRODUCTORY LECTURE thought of their age ; but the statement was defective, and those who discover this are bound to reject it. The fault of the agnostic seems to be, not his protest against this or that formulation, but his exclusion from his scientific view of all those facts of experience with which the inadequate formula attempts to deal. And we must also remember that it is through the need of answering wrong doctrine that true doctrine is discovered ; agnosticism now, as heresy in the early Church, is the chief spur pricking men on to the discovery of theological truth. There is nothing particularly modern about materialism. The Greek philosophers before Socrates were, many of them, highly material- istic. Leucippus and Democritus constructed a view of life which Epicurus adopted and Lucretius preserved to all posterity in the one supremely great Latin poem, which is astonishingly modern in its main conceptions, as any reader of Lucretius may see. This theory held that all the facts of our experi- ence, and even our experience itself, have their origin in various combinations of minute particles of matter, which differ only in size INTRODUCTORY LECTURE xiii and shape. Lucretius, having " explained " all the main types of experience by this hypothesis, delivers himself, in a quite con- temporary fashion, of seventeen refutations of the doctrine of immortality. But materialism as we know it is due to a protest, generated by scientific advance, and directed against the statement of the spiritual interpretation of life which was usual in the eighteenth century. At that time men commonly supposed that God had made the world at a certain moment of time — some even professed to know at what time ! — and had then left it, for the most part, to follow its own course, interfering now and then by way of miracle. All otherwise inexplicable events were explained by the hypothesis of God's intervention ; but the fatal admission was tacitly made that the world has a course of its own to follow, apart from the Will of God, who only operates here and there, now and then. But with the growth of science it was found that one after another of these supposed interventions was a case of the great uniformities which science perpetually discovers. This naturally distressed religious xiv INTRODUCTORY LECTURE people, who felt that the admitted sphere of the Divine activity was being curtailed ; though, as a matter of fact, we were being brought back by science to the belief, which we ought never to have relinquished, in one supreme principle of the universe " through which all things were made, and apart from which there hath not one thing happened " — the belief that God acts, not here and there or now and then, but everywhere and always. This, however, could not be understood at first, and to most people's minds it seemed that to extend the sphere of the operation of natural law was to cut down that of God. And as the whole subject-matter of the science in question was material, the natural result of its amazing success was dogmatic materialism — the doctrine that only matter exists, and that it always behaves according to Laws of Nature. But what is matter ? The old materialists thought they knew, but we know they did not. They thought it consisted of atoms and void, the atoms being tiny particles quite irreducible to anything more elementary. But recent analysis has broken up the atom INTRODUCTORY LECTURE xv itself, which is now regarded as a whole system, consisting of revolving centres of electrical force — a kind of minute solar system, with the sun left out, where each planet is not a piece of solid stuiF, but a centre of force. Solidity then becomes an equipoise of forces. (I deliberately avoid technical terms, which, though more exact, are only fully intelligible to specialists — not to amazed outsiders like myself.) This very surprising result may be the final account of the thing ; but it is clear that no gain in lucidity or definition is to be looked for from materialism while the term " matter " changes its meaning in this be- wildering way. And what is a Law of Nature ? It is not an explanation of anything. It is a mere statement of fact. The old people used to say that rivers flowed because of a river-god in them, or, at least, believed in river-gods because rivers flow. We say rivers flow in obedience to the Law of Gravitation. But no one knows what Gravitation is ; its Law is the statement of the way in which material bodies do, as a matter of fact, behave ; why they so behave no one knows. And even if xvi INTRODUCTORY LECTURE we find in the electrical theory of matter the ground of this behaviour, it will only be through a still wider generalisation — a more comprehensive statement of fact. It will still be no final explanation. Mr. G. K. Chesterton tells us that he was once surprised on first seeing an elephant, and asked why it had a trunk. He received the answer. *' That is because all elephants have trunks," which was still more surprising. But the real problem is one of categories, or leading principles of thought. Materialism of the old-fashioned sort is the assertion that everything can be stated and accounted for in terms of mass and motion. But love and hate and all that makes up a specifically human life is altogther unamenable to such treatment. In the sensation expressed by the words, " I feel hot," the element repre- sented by the word "hot" may be material- istically stated, but not that represented by " feel," still less that represented by " I." It was the perception of this fact that led to the transition from dogmatic materialism to agnosticism ; but there was a half-way house. Tyndall asserted that nothing can bridge the INTRODUCTORY LECTURE xvii gulf that lies between the most elementary sensation and the molecular vibrations — of nerve and brain tissue — which accompany and condition it. Hence arose the theory asso- ciated with the name of Huxley, which bears the deplorable title of Epiphenomenalism. An epiphenomenon is a by-product, having its origin in some material process, but not affecting that process ; the moving shadow cast by a man as he walks in the sunshine, or the white cloud escaping from a locomotive, are simple illustrations. Huxley held that consciousness is such a by-product ; the material processes of the nervous system produce it, but it has no power of affecting the movements of the body ; consciousness takes note of events, but causes none. Huxley was a very great man, and one wishes to speak of him with respect and even reverence ; but this theory does not seem to me quite sensible. My college chapel is at 8 o'clock in the morning ; and if my mind did nothing but watch and see when my body would get out of bed, I should very seldom " keep a chapel." From a host of small incidents, as well as from all the great crises b xviii INTRODUCTORY LECTURE of life, it is clear that elements in experience not materialistically explicable — meanings, values, aspirations, and the like — affect our movements constantly. And so we are led on to Agnosticism, which admits the existence of a spiritual world, but says we cannot know anything about it. This is a very curious position. How can I know that something is unknowable unless I first of all know what it is ? When I say, "It is unknowable," does the word "It" mean something or nothing ? If the former, it is not unknowable ; if the latter, my sentence has no meaning, and is a mere set of noises. When Herbert Spencer solemnly hands over the realm of the Unknowable for religion to disport itself therein, the situation is simply funny ; we remember Mr. Bradley's footnote, which points out that Mr. Spencer pro- poses "to take something for God, simply and solely because we cannot tell what the devil it can be." ^ And, of course, if Agnosticism only means that we cannot know all about the Supreme Power, it is merely repeating what all the religions of the world have said. But ^ Appearance and Reality, p. 128. INTRODUCTORY LECTURE xix it means more than this ; it means that we cannot know anything about the Supreme Power at all. What I have said makes it clear that I do not base religious belief on miracles ; but before proceeding I should like to insert a short digression on this subject. I am not passionately interested in the miraculous as such. My interest in the miracles reported to have been worked by Christ is not due to their abnormal nature, but to the light they throw on His character. My interest in His Resurrection is not primarily in a miracle, but in a fact to which weight must be given in our theory of the Universe and our estimate of the Supreme Power. But I would point out that the argument from miracles is not contrary to the doctrine of the uniformity of nature, but rests on it. That doctrine says : If A, then B ; if A occurred, and B did not follow, uniformity would be broken. The argument from miracle says : Here is D, when B was expected ; the previous fact must have been C, not A. An ordinary man says to a leper : Be thou clean ; and nothing happens. XX INTRODUCTORY LECTURE Another Man says it, and the leper is cleansed; this Man, then (says the argument), is different from other men. That is an argument from, not against, uniformity. Of course, a miracle is not a " breach of a Law of Nature ; " still less " the emergence of a higher law " (an expression wholly out of place in this connection) ; it is an instance of another law. What powers over the material are involved in spiritual transcendence is a matter for specific investigation ; but no alleged miracle can be dismissed by vague generalities about laws of nature. The fact that most of us could not write Hamlet does not prove that Shakespeare did not, or that it was never written at all. But let us now look at the problem in a little more detail, not speaking of Science in general, but of the effect of the several sciences on our view of the world. Our fore- fathers believed that the world was made in a week, precisely in order that men might dwell upon it ; the heavens were spread as a canopy over men's heads, and the sun and moon were designed to give light upon the earth. But astronomy came and showed us INTRODUCTORY LECTURE xxi that this earth of ours, the scene of all our endeavours, is a twirling speck, revolving with quite startling futility about one of the minor stars, always coming back to the same place and always setting out on the ridiculous round again ; and it is growing cold, and where, then, will be our aspirations and struggles and the cities we have built ? Surely everyone who has looked at the sky on a starry night must have wondered if he is not the merest accident. The fcelino: is old enough, but astronomy has intensified it : — " 1 will consider Thy heavens, even the works of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained ; what is man that Thou are mindful of him, or the son of man that Thou visitest him ? " And, as if this were not enough. Geology followed and revealed incredible vistas in the past history of the earth ; and Biology reduced humanity to a single phase in an endlessly changing life-process.^ Astronomy made our world a tiny atom in infinite space ; ' It is to be remembered, howev'er, tliat many modern biologists insist emphatically that the mechanical categories are not applicable to biological phenomena. xxii INTRODUCTORY LECTURE Geology made our whole history a moment in infinite time ; Biology made our boasted faculties an incident in a process whose beginnina; and end are alike unknown. And so we are left, helpless in a vast machine-like universe, whose indifference to us can only be symbolised by — The august, inhospitable, inhuman night Glittering magnificently unperturbed. At first it seemed impossible that this vast system, with its rigid uniformities, should be the expression of a Divine Purpose. But this was partly because we so easily form a wrong conception of Will and of Purpose ; we think of them often as manifested in caprice. But the man of strong AVill or Purpose is not the man who may do anything at any moment ; rather, he is the man who is absolutely reliable, because in all circumstances he pursues one end. As a matter of fact, the purpose of a strong man is the most reliable thing in nature. In the material sciences we only reach absolute certainty so far as we leave concrete experience and take refuge in INTRODUCTORY LECTURE xxiii the abstractions of matliematics ; we know that a causes h ; but we do not know that the fact before us is a until h follows it; if /3 appears instead we say, " It was not a, but a (alpha), which looks just like a, but is the start of the Greek, and not the English, alphabet." We can only reach universality of statement by making our statement a definition. This is the method of mathe- matics ; there every term means what it is defined to mean, and nothing else ; and thus certainty is attainable. The angles at the base of an isosceles triangle are undoubtedly equal ; but how are we to be sure that any material object before us is really an isosceles triangle ? Indeed, we may be pretty sure that it is not ; for a triangle is " bounded by three straight lines," and it is highly doubtful whether there are in material nature, that is, in the field of our sensations, any straight lines. There is a shortest distance between two points ; and thought can grasp it ; but there is no straight edge. A celebrated Cam- bridge scientist was so much impressed by this that, in the midst of lecturing, he lapsed into xxiv INTRODUCTORY LECTURE rhyme and metre, uttering this stanza, which you will seek in vain in In Memoriam — And so no force, however great, Can stretch a cord, however fine, Into a horizontal line, Which shall be absolutely straight. If we can keep our imagination quiet and let pure thinking guide us, we shall see that the constancy of Nature is no argument against our belief in the Divine Purpose. And that belief is a scientific necessity. All other categories or principles of thought fail absolutely to give any final answer to our problems. The principle of causation drives us back from stage to stage, with no prospect of ever reaching a First Cause. Only Purpose, so far as our experience goes, can give a final answer satisfying the intellect, to the question, "Whyr'i But even if this be so, it is urged that man at least is no free spirit ; another science has made a study of him, and has gone far towards locating all his faculties and feelings in certain parts of his body and brain. Physiology presents the most serious difiiculty 1 Gf. the first of my lectures on The Faith and Modern Thought. (Macmillan.) INTRODUCTORY LECTURE xxv of all. It has been very successful in tracing the physical conditions of psychical states, and, so far, explaining them. Certainly, many of the problems arising here have not yet been solved by those who uphold the religious views of life ; I will mention only one — the problem of lunacy. And, personally, I expect that, if I had devoted all my studies to physiology, I should now be a materialist. Materialism is a general philosophy, and as such seems to me quite untenable ; but if my attention had been so concentrated on the study of physiology that I had had no time to attend to philosophical considerations, materialism would have seemed almost irresistible. There is, however, one purely physiological argument against the materialistic account of man, which I will mention, because great authorities, including Lotze, have laid great stress upon it. It appears that there is in the brain no one centre of consciousness to which all sensations are communicated ; I, who see, am the same I, who hear ; yet there is no physiological basis of this " I " to whom all the sensations belong ; the Ego or Self is therefore non -material. xxvi INTRODUCTORY LECTURE Leaving that argument for others to pronounce upon its value, let us pass on to one more fundamental. Materialism has considerable success in dealing with a great part of what we know ; it fails completely to account for our knowing it. But the fact of our knowledge is as real as any of the objects which we know, and must be accounted for by any general theory. And when we attend to this fact of knowledge, we find, in the first place, that it is something altogether unique ; consciousness, as Tyndall admitted, IS not a mere play of atoms ; it is that which is aware of the play of atoms. But we find, also, that the material facts which science investigates are not merely physical occur- rences, but have meaning and value. When I speak to another man I make certain atmospheric vibrations which beat upon the drum of his ear ; if I make one set — an insult in a language he does not know — he is un- moved ; if I say, " What a fool you do look ! " I shall provoke the most violent emotional response. Is the whole diff"erence due to the difference in the material qualities of the vibrations ? And if anyone says it is due to INTRODUCTORY LECTURE xxvii some form of association, let him reflect that it has been abundantly shown that mere events, whether physical or psychical, cannot be thus associated, except in virtue of their meaning.^ When we proceed to " value," the difliculties of materialism are still greater. How can the difference between good and bad be expressed in terms of mass and motion ? Or, if physiological materialism has other terms than these, the difficulty still remains ; for, even though it be true, as seems improbable, that our estimate of this as good and of that as bad is ultimately due to the utility of this and the harmfulness of that to the bodily organism and its survival, still the distinction itself between good and bad remains unaccounted for. A world which has value is not a purely material world. For we must remember that the real question is not " What are things made of?" but " How do things behave ? " We never know what anything is apart from its ' " Meaning " is here used in its purely logical sense. Association is of (or at least by means of) Univei'sals. Cf. Bradley, Principles of Logic, Bk. II, Pt. II, Ch. I. xxviii INTRODUCTORY LECTURE activities; we know nothing about substances; we only know actions and reactions. If we are to speak in terms of substance at all, we had better speak of one substance only, and examine its various modes of action ; but it is at least misleading to call this one substance by the name of matter, for that implies that it can only act and react in the ways studied by the physical sciences. The continuity of all existence, which is postulated by science, is in no way inimical to a belief in real distinctions. If we believe that man is a spiritual being — that is, acts and reacts in other ways than those dealt with by physics, chemistry and physiology — we are not therefore called upon to draw a a line of demarcation at which the spiritual begins. A cabbage is a vegetable ; a horse is an animal ; but which is a rotifer ? A boy of ten is a boy ; a man of fifty is a man ; but an undergraduate is a hybrid. Only in legal fiction do we pass at a moment of time from infancy to manhood ; but though the transition from one to the other is gradual, the meaning of the terms is perfectly distinct. As we look at the continuous course of INTRODUCTORY LECTURE xxix Evolution, we ought not to say : " After all, it all comes from a nebula with no life or meaning, so it, too, is without life or meaning." Rather we should say : " See what has come from that dead nebula ; how full of potentiality it really was." We cannot interpret the higher and more complex in terms of the lower and simpler ; rather we must interpret the lower in terms of the higher, seeing in it the potentiality of the latter. Origin is not to be confused with either essence or validity. If people tell us that our religion is the survival of natural magic, we reply : " And so is the science that told you so ; but that does not affect the validity either of the science or the religion." The true meaning of evolution is surely this — the world moves on to ever greater manifestations of its capacity ; what remains in the future we do not know ; but the greatest thing the world has yet produced is the spiritual being which we call Man ; and while we know that Personality, as Man possesses it, must be inadequate to express the nature of the Supreme Principle, yet it is the most adequate term we have. We are XXX INTRODUCTORY LECTURE agnostic in this — that we confess our inability to know the Supreme Being perfectly ; but still we know quite certainly that He is more adequately conceived as a Person than as a mere sum total of blind Laws of Nature. " But still," it is objected, " even if there are spiritual activities, they only realise themselves through the material." This, however, is no difficulty to the Christian ; it is the doctrine of the Incarnation. Christians have been taught from the beginning that the Divine Spirit operates through Nature and through Man ; that it only operates perfectly through the One Man who is its perfect embodiment ; that, even after His manifesta- tion of it, it operates now through the Church, which (ideally) is His Body, the organ of His Spirit, as His fleshly body was in the days of His earthly ministry. Christianity alone of religions does justice to the physical. Other spiritual interpreta- tions of life treat it as illusory, or, at best, as negligible. But Christ commences His ministry preaching and healing, and the first rumour of Him that goes abroad describes Him as the healer of men's bodies. And the INTRODUCTORY LECTURE xxxl central doctrine of His Church's creed is the Incarnation : " The Word M'^as made flesh." There is another and profounder kind of Agnosticism than that with which I have been dealing, and its origin is the fact of Evil. We cannot discuss it now, but I would just remark that here, again, Christianity, alone of religious or other interpretations of life, gives us a clue to the mystery. To refute Materialism is not, as a matter of logic, to establish Theism. But in practice it comes near it, just because Materialism and Agnosticism always arise as a protest against the current statement of religious doctrine. If the protest collapses, religion revives. To all who think the world must at times appear overwhelming in the perplexity it causes ; and some will always feel bound to say that they see no track through the maze. Such agnosticism — reverent and tentative, not blatant and aggressive — is the cost some men must pay if mankind is to find truth at last. We who are Christians remember that the Godhead never shone forth in Christ so effulgently as in the moment when He felt Him- self forsaken of God ; and we shall not think xxxii INTRODUCTORY LECTURE ill of those who, in the search for truth, fill up what remains of the sufferings of Christ. But, still we believe — though often with doubt and trembling — that the secret of the universe is made known to us in Christ. As we use our belief the problems seem to dissolve ; the path of duty becomes clearer, and the darkness which surrounds our minds is no lons^er a thick blackness, but a mist through which we grope our way. For in Christ we see the perfect union of physical and spiritual, and in His death we see God bearing the evil of the world. But if so ? " The very God ! think, Abib, dost thou think ? So, the All-great were the All-loving too ; So through the thunder comes a human voice, Saying, ' O heart I made, a heart beats here ; Face my hands fashioned, see it in Myself ; Thou hast no power, nor mayst conceive of Mine, But love I gave thee, with Myself to love. And thou must love Me, Avho have died for thee.' " THE NATURE OF PERSONALITY LECTURE I THING, BRUTE, AND PERSON There are few terms which play so large a part in either popular or technical philo- sophy as "Personality," and the various terms allied to it — " spiritual," " conscious," and so forth. And yet there are few whose meaning is so indistinct. This is natural enough, for these terms are the most concrete and full of meaning that we possess, and consequently it is hard, perhaps impossible, to set out their meaning adequately. But it is of the highest importance to make what progress we can in fixing their meaning, for to the vagueness and confusion that attends them is due in laro-e o measure the attractiveness of materialism for many of the clearest minds. Huxley, 2 THE NATURE lect. in an often- quoted passage, commits himself to the position that "It is in itself of little moment whether we express the phenomena of matter in terms of spirit or the phenomena of spirit in terms of matter — each statement has a certain relative truth. But with a view to the progress of science, the materialistic terminology is in every way to be preferred. For it connects thought with the other phenomena of the universe .... whereas the alternative, or spiritualistic, terminology is utterly barren and leads to nothing but obscurity and confusion of ideas. Thus there can be little doubt that the further science advances, the more extensively and con- sistently will all the phenomena of Nature be represented by materialistic formulae and symbols."^ Now we may reasonably object to the state- ment that the use of spiritual or materialistic terms is a matter of indifference — at least so long as words are to have their usual meaning ; and if we have such an objection, it seems regrettable that the question should be settled ' Collected Essays, Vol. I, p. 164 ; cf. Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism, Vol. I, p. 19, Vol. II, pp. 57 ff. 1 OF PERSONALITY 3 one way or the other merely on the ground that the materialistic terms are clear and the spiritualistic are not. It is of course quite arguable that materialism is right ; that is another question. But supposing it to matter whether it is right or not, we cannot be content to let the question be settled on the grounds given by Huxley. The term most opposite to " Person " is " Thing." Let us begin with this distinction and try to see what marks off one term from the other. In the first place, a Thing has no claims upon us ; our treatment of Things, if it does not affect other persons, has no value except to ourselves. The man who hits a golf ball does not consider the significance of his action from the point of view of the ball ; he assumes that no such point of view exists. And if he is wrong in this, it is not because things have a point of view of their own, but because the golf ball is more than a mere thing. When we call an object a "Thing," we mean that other objects are without value or significance of any kind for it. A Thing has no feelings or thoughts ; for it there is no good or evil. B 2 4 THE NATURE lect. An animal, if our ordinary conception of animals is correct, has feelings, but either no thought or only the most rudimentary form of it. Still, it is not natural to call an animal a thing, and the reason is, apparently, simply that events matter to an animal ; it experi- ences pleasure and pain ; so far at least, good and evil exist in the experience of the animal. Consequently our attitude to an animal and our treatment of it are not the same as our attitude to a thing ; there are two points of view to be considered, and we know it. We seem then to get beyond mere thing- hood when an object not only exists but finds a value in the existence of itself or other things. But we have not yet reached person- ality : we have got above the thing, which is only an object, to what is also a subject, though a subject only of feelings. We must now^ distinguish between Brute and Person. I know nothing of the real psychical nature of brutes, and probably it is not possible to fix the meaning of the term in such a way as to make it strictly aj)plicable to all brutes, just as it is conceivable that no pure " Thing" really exists. Any attempt to define terms I OF PERSONALITY 5 precisely involves some falsification, but that is no harm if we know what we are doing. We may find that Personality is nowhere fully realised except in the Godhead — as Lotze main- tained : but that will not in the least degree invalidate our definition. No points or lines or surfaces, in Euclid's sense, can exist : but Euclidean geometry is true in its own sphere, and material objects exemplify its propositions just so far as they are merely spatial. The Brute then, I suggest, is a subject of feelings only. As an object it has continuous existence ; as an object of my experience a cat is the same to-day as it was yesterday. But as a subject it exists only in the present. It learns, not by remembering, but by re- acting according to determinations externally imposed and forgotten. If it chases birds, I beat it ; I thereby afi'ect its permanent nature, and next time it sees a bird it does not chase it — not because it is conscious that to do so will earn a beating but because it does not want to chase. The chasing and its punish- ment have merged in a total efi'ect ; the whole fact of bird-killing is, de facto, unpleasant. The cat is in future not attracted by it. It 6 THE NATURE lect. does not remember : it simply does not wish to chase. I use indicative verbs for the sake of clear- ness : let me hasten to add that I neither know nor care whether what I say is true of a cat : but I suggest that the word " brute " means an animal of which this would be true, and that it is therefore true of a cat so far as it is a brute. No doubt in most cases this latter question is the important one. Generalisa- tions, if taken as a direct guide to conduct, are the source of all manner of evil. As William Blake forcibly put it, " To generalise is to be an idiot." And yet we must first generalise, and in doing so we must have regard to two considerations : first our classificatory terms must be distinct ; secondly, we should draw the dividing line at the points which most facilitate scientific procedure. To repeat the illustration of the Introductory Lecture, the terms Boy and Man have per- fectly distinct meanings : but there is no point of transition from one to the other. The Law treats us as becoming fully re- sponsible on our twenty-first birthday, and that is as good a moment to choose as any 1 OF PERSONALITY 7 other. But no sudden change takes place in our moral nature. The fact that any point is rather arbitrary does not prove that any one point will do as well as any other. Our classifications cannot be exhaustive, and their one merit is to be clear. Some animals may be in fact more person than brute, according to the definition we reach : but the important thing is to know what we mean when we call an animal or a man a brute ; when we know this we can settle with some reason on what occasions to use that term. So I suoro;est that we should take the term Brute, as applied to animals, to mean that the animal is a subject, and not only an object, but that its subjectivity is limited to feeling : its conscious life is only in the present, whereas the Thing has no conscious life at all. But Personality is still more than this. We should never call a living creature Personal unless he were conscious of continued exist- ence, and attributed value not only to the present but to the past and to the future, The past and the future do not stand on the same footing in this respect, and we shall have later on to consider them separately ; 8 THE NATURE lect. but all the moral terms which go along with Personality depend not only upon continued existence but upon consciousness of continued existence. If a man is convicted of a crime which he has utterly forgotten (as may happen if some accident causing concussion had occurred soon after) he may still be punished ; but if he were wholly incapable of under- standing what was meant by saying that he did it, punishment in the moral sense would be out of the question. To hold a man morally responsible for his past actions (and this is certainly involved in Personality) is to presuppose that he can understand what is meant by saying he did them. A Person then must be conscious of continued identity, and must take interest in the past and future as well as in the present. It is this, I take it, which makes a Person a possible subject of rights, which is no doubt the legal and primary sense of Personality. The Brute has no effective claim upon us, though it has a point of view and can feel pain we inflict : but it lives [qua conscious- ness) in its sensations. To torture a brute is cruel but not criminal, and only indirectly I OF PERSONALITY 9 immoral ; I mean it is the act of an immoral person but not an immoral act. The brute is not a possible member of a society, because (as we shall see) a society is always a number of persons united by a common purpose ; and the brute has no purpose. We cannot hold the brute responsible to-day for what it did yesterday ; we can only say — it may do the same again if the suggestion is given. And it may be noticed that towards the higher animals we feel a rudimentary obliga- tion. A dog's fidelity comes sometimes very near a real purpose, and in so far the dog is felt to have a right to kind treatment. But most of us do not feel that a sheep has a right to any treatment at all, though to treat it badly might be wrong on the part of the man who does it. For it is not the same thing to say, " It is right for the shepherd to treat sheep well," and to say, "The sheep have a right to kind treatment from the shepherd." At least in ordinary speech the latter would imply a consciousness, actual or possible, of this right in the sheep. And the presence or absence of this consciousness does very much affect our attitude — and rightly so. The pain lo NATURE OF PERSONALITY lect. i of mere cruelty is great, no doubt ; but in the case of a person there is the added pain of disappointed expectation. If an angry man beats his cat and his child for no reason except that he is angry, they both feel the physical pain, but the child feels also the pain of outrage : a dog perhaps would feel it too, but would soon forget it, and seems again half-brute, half-person. LECTURE II RIGHTS AND DUTIES : DETERMINISM AND INDIVIDUALITY So far we have got these results : a thing has no consciousness ; a brute is conscious only of and in the present ; a person's conscious- ness surveys past, present, and future. And this led us to the conception of a person as the subject of Rights — the primary meaning of the word. Only that can have rights which is conscious of the right (or at least cajDable of becoming conscious of the right) ; and this involves both memory and expectation, though no doubt expectation is the more important in this regard as memory is in regard of liability to punishment. But it is also essential to our notion of a Person that he should be the subject of Duties — and indeed it is only as he is a 12 THE NATURE lect. possible subject of Duties that lie is altogether a subject of Rights. I can only have rights against those who can appreciate those rights : I have no rights against a tiger or a savage ; and only those can appreciate rights who are such as to have rights themselves. Therefore I can only have rights against those who have rights against me. A's rights are B's duties, and vice versa. Let us see then what is meant by being the subject of Duties. Duty can only by fulfilled in conduct ; and conduct is only possible as the reaction of the individual to circumstance : a man cannot act in relation to nothing at all. And the general class of action that is possible or desirable is determined by circumstances. To this extent all conduct is externally conditioned ; but how much further any reaction is externally dictated depends on the nature of the agent. Complete Determinism would say that it is externally determined, quite absolutely, in every case. But this is impossible ; it is in- deed impossible in any case. Determinism, the theory that everything is constituted by its relations to other things — that it consists in fact of these relations — is II OF PERSONALITY 13 seen to be fallacious so soon as its application is universally extended. It tells us that in a system ABC, A is only A in virtue of its relations to B and C ; B and C determine it as A. And that seems easy ; but why is B, B ? It must be determined as B by A and C. And similarly C by A and B. If then each term is nothing till its external relations constitute it, we are confronted with the astonishing spec- tacle of nothing at all developing internal differentiation by the interaction of its non- existent parts. We may echo the question which Coleridge asks about the self-differ- entiation of Schelling's Absolute — Unde haec nihili in nihila tarn portentosa trans- nihilatio ? Nor does this matter become any better by being put into the time series, though some of the difficulties may be veiled in this manner ; for an individual to be wholly deter- mined by its past, or by its present environ- ment, or by both is utterly impossible. For as its present environment is only other individuals, so is its past environment — and what determined them ? To regard this process as strictly infinite is really to give up 14 THE NATURE lect. the game ; it is only a way of saying that you never do reach a positive which may commence turning nothing into something. To posit infinite Time, the only escape for the pure Determinist, seems in this connexion to be the assertion of an infinite undifferenti- ated substance ; but an undifferentiated sub- stance is for this purpose the same as nothing at all. It is logically the same, for bare being (sein), which is not something, is indistin- guishable from not being {iiicht sein) ; and it is the same in effect, for there is no means of getting the differentiation started. If we allow differentiation as a fact (and no one denies it), we are giving up pure external Determinism. We are now in the position of saying that in the system A B C, A is determined as A by B and C ; but it must have been something in its own right first, and that too of such a kind as to make the determination as A possible to it — a. Thus if we abolish, or suppose abolished, B and C, A will not disappear but will become a. To take the familiar illustra- tion, a hand severed from the body is no longer a hand in the full sense of the word ; II OF PERSONALITY , 15 it has lost most of the functions of a hand ; but it is not just nothing at all. We are led then to the position that the system A B C is the synthesis of a and ^ and 7. That is to say, A is not isolable, because the attempt to isolate it reduces it at once to a, and so with B and C. Of course the actual distinction between a and A must be determined specially in each case ; but the distinction is real, and this is the fact represented by the scientific method of reducing all individuals to their relations. An individual is what it is in virtue of its relations ; that is true ; but we are not justified in concluding that apart from its relations it is nothing at all.^ Thus we find that every individual fact in the universe is something altogether in its own right. It is not wholly to be accounted for by any generalisation or any accumulation of generalisations. But the extent and im- portance of its recalcitrance to generalised treatment may vary indefinitely. In the ' I am, of course, aware that I am here in conflict with very high logical authorities. I hope to justify my position at length on a future occasion. i6 THE NATURE lect. case of the mere thing, individuality may be almost, if not quite, ignored. It moves as it is forced externally to move. The difference between two billiard balls for instance is negligible, at least for the purpose of the game. Matter, whose chief property is inertia, is the general name of such utterly dead objects. It is no doubt important to remember what Ward insists upon, that mere Matter is a mathematical notion ; it represents something that can be measured and nothing else. So perhaps if we say that a Thing is always altogether externally determined, we must add that this conception only gives us an ideal limit, and not an accurate account of any actual fact. At the purely mechanical stage, whether it is real or not, individuality counts for nothing, and the motion of a body — the only activity open to it — can be calculated from a knowledge of its mass and the force acting on it. As the object in question becomes more complex, its reactions cease to be determinable by such purely general and external considerations. If you put two different plants in water, they will pro- duce wholly different flowers ; here it is still II OF PERSONALITY 17 difference of species rather than of individ- uality that counts. When we reach the higher animals, such as the dog, individuality begins to be not only theoretically actual, but practically important. And in the case of man, or at any rate civilised man, individuality is quite as important as uni- versal and generic qualities. As an ideal limit at this end we should have the con- ception of a wholly self-determined being — not in any w-ay determined by external influence. But it would be contrary to all usage, and scientifically inconvenient, to keep the term Personality for this limit, as it would exclude all mankind. On the whole, usage and good classification both suggest that the term begins to be applicable where individuality (and not mere generic difi'er- entiation) is as important a factor in conduct as all external and generic qualities. That gives its sphere of application so far a very hazy outline ; but that is a gain rather than otherwise, for our aim is not to reach a definition from which deductions may be drawn ; this is indeed impossible from the nature of the case, as the individuality we c 1 8 THE NATURE lect. have been considering will always invalidate the deduction. Rather our aim is to under- stand the phase of existence which we dis- tinguish as Personal. We have thus suggested two series. To the Thing all interest is impossible ; to the Brute the Present has an interest ; to the Person Past, Present, and Future have interest. The Thing is moved wholly from without ; the living but not personal object determines its own reactions in some degree ; the Person determines his reactions as much as anything else does. This second series gives us the initial and formal Freedom which is a property of Personality. In one sense it may be said that our arofument ao-ainst Determinism attributes such Freedom to every thing that can be called an individual (however brief or however long our analysis may have been ; for we always reach our individuals by analysis, and "individuals" are the terms reached by any analysis). And it is no doubt true that, speaking with strict accuracy, we may say that Freedom — underived essence — is a factor in every individual object ; but it 11 OF PERSONALITY 19 is a negligible factor in the case of mechanical objects, and by no means so in the case of human beings. The extent of the part played by a man's underived contribution to the scheme of things cannot be calculated in any given case. That there is such a contribution is certain, and that it is effective is certain. And it is the basis of moral as distinct from legal responsibility. For legal responsibility all we need is continued identity ; the judge, speaking for society, may say to the criminal, " Whether or not circumstances made you a criminal, I don't know ; but you are a criminal ; and we propose now to treat you in such a way as may make you less disposed to criminal acts in future, and may give pause to others who feel impelled to such acts." But for moral responsibility, and therefore for the justification of moral indignation, it is necessary to be able to say " You are a criminal, and it is yourself that made you one. Circumstances provided the opportu- nity, the temptation : that you gave way is due to yourself alone." It is probably impossible to affix this full degree of moral c 2 20 THE NATURE lect. responsibility on any individual for any action ; but it is certainly possible to affix some measure of it. Every individual has in him some underived element which assists in the determination of his conduct ; Mf it were different, he and his conduct would be differ- ent. To whatever degree this element affects his conduct, he is morally responsible. The problem of ultimate or theological responsi- bility is a further one, which we must leave alone at present. But we may remark before leaving this part of the subject that this Freedom is not necessarily a treasure ; as Moberly observes, St. Paul calls it " the body of this death." ^ Freedom as the real treasure and crown of Personality we shall discover later on. But taking this formal Freedom in con- junction with the interest in the past and future as well as in the present, we reach the two most prominent elements in our con- ception of Persons — character and purpose; or rather, we reach the conditions which ' Sc. the a, which alone can become A, but only becomes A when the proper external influences are operative. ^ Atonement and Personality, p. 221 ; see pp. 216-223. II OF PERSONALITY 21 make character and purpose possible. For character, as we said, implies not only a continued psychical entity, but at least the capacity to recognise such continuance. My past psychic life is far more than I can re- member and far more than has ever come into my full consciousness; but the fact that parts of that life can be recalled by me now as parts of my life is of immense importance. For it is this which makes the difference between mere organic growth, like that of a tree, and the spiritual growth of struggle, repentance, and aspiration. We do not merely pass from stage to stage ; but we com- pare our present state with our actual past and our ideal future, and our conduct is largely shaped by the results of this com- parison. LECTURE III THE WILL AND ITS FREEDOM We have now stated, I think, the chief elements, except the principle of society, which differentiate Personal from Sub- Personal existence, whether animal or mechanical. The Person is aware of and takes interest in Past, Present, and Future ; is self-determined in approximately as great a degree as externally determined ; and is consequently a centre of continuous conscious and deliberate activity : this is what we mean by attributing to Persons character and purpose ; but these terms demand further investigation. We have so far altogether ignored the question what type of initiative actually exists in living creatures, which is not found in mechanical things. It is, at least in the LECT. Ill NATURE OF PERSONALITY 23 rudimentary stage, mainly appetition. The instance we took of the two plants put in the same water and using it for the production of different flowers does not bring this out. But it is enough to mention the elementary desires of hunger and thirst. This appeti- tion is direct : it is not a desire for pleasure, but for objects. And even apart from the elementary physical desires, our appetition is a wholly individual aff'air. AVhat we like depends on what we are, and it is something which does not admit of argument. No doubt it is true that taste and appreciation may be developed, and of that we shall have to say more wdien we come to the dis- tinctively moral aspects of the problem ; but what concerns us now is that any given desire, at the moment when we have it, is just a fact. If I desire what is really bad, I do desire it, however true it may be that on a fuller appreciation of the object the desire will cease. Our initiative, roughly speaking, comes from our desires. For in all our conduct there is an appetitive element. No doubt there are reactions in which our Personality is not concerned at all — such as 24 THE NATURE lect. blinking in bright light and so on. But all the acts, which make up conduct, are reactions not only of a conscious but an appetitive self. If, when I am hit, I hit back at once, I may call the act an instinctive reaction if I like ; but none the less it is the reaction of a psychic being who not only knows he has been hit, but attaches certain values to the event. The desires from which we act may be undetected by ourselves — as we discover when some other person or some event in our own lives suddenly reveals our secret motives. A person may be repelled or attracted by this or that, and act on the impulse many times, and never really understand its nature. But Purpose is always conscious, and there- fore these desires, which are set each simply and directly upon its own object, and may lie on the fringe of consciousness or outside of it altogether, do not of themselves constitute Purpose. Yet they are the material of which Purpose is made wp, and with Intellect and Imagination they are the whole of that material. In other words. Will as a separate entity seems to me a fiction. But let us consider the nature of volition rather further ; Ill OF PERSONALITY 25 for it is in volition that character is expressed, and volition in its full development is Purpose. The invention of Will as a separate entity is due, I believe, to the failure, not of intellect, but of imagination to apprehend activity apart from something which acts ; imagination is, of its very nature, always materialistic, and has imposed upon thought an unreal demand for substances which may support attributes and activities. This trouble will no doubt be diminished if the scientific attempt to reduce matter to a phase of energy is successful, be- cause then, in the material world itself, the materialist demand for stuff, substance, and so on, will be discredited. This demand in psychology led to the creation of " faculties " not as Bvvdfiei'i l)ut as constitutive parts of a substantial soul ; and as Purpose is certainly different from any one of our chaotic impulses and ideas, a Will was invented to be the organ of Purpose. It was then asked how this will is determined, and whether it is free. The absurdity of the latter question is sufficiently exposed in Locke's celebrated chapter on " Power," where he points out that it is sens- 26 THE NATURE lect. ible to ask " Is man free ? " or " Has man a will ? " for these mean the same ; but to ask " Is the will free ? " is nonsense, for it only means " Has the power to choose got power to choose ? " Locke thus reminds us, perhaps not with full intention, that the fact before us is choice ; it is actual concrete cases of choice that we are concerned with. Kant's noumenal Will, which is perfectly free and never does anything, is an evasion. For the explanation of choice, I believe we cannot improve on Aristotle's account oiirpoalpeais as vovs opeKTtKos or ope^cs SiavorjTiKi] — the union of the Intel- lectual and Appetitive functions ; and for the statement of the ideal in this regard we can- not improve on Plato's eva yeveaduL e/c TToWoov ■ — out of many to become one. The facts are sometimes represented as follows, though not, of course, by any philo- sopher : we have many impulses and the Will selects one as its motive, usually after deliber- ation. But if the Will acts altogether on its own account in choosing motives, character and moral responsibility are destroyed, and the fact of habit — especially the continuous struggle against bad habit — becomes unintelligible. If Ill OF PERSONALITY 27 on the other hand the Will is the desire that is dominant when deliberation has done its work, there is no special faculty of volition required ; choice is then rationalised desire. The only point we need add to this is that the function of reason or deliberation is not limited, as Aristotle suggests, to the discovery of means to a fixed end ; it may also collect and compare the various ends suggested by appetite and aspiration, and pronounce which are compatible and which incompatible with others. But an act of choice is not yet an act of Purpose. When a man says that he did something " on Purpose," he means that he deliberately took some step after considering the consequences, and that he expected not to repent of it — generally he even means that he has not repented. This is a development of mere choice. An act of choice may occur without such full assent. We " choose " no end of things every day on impulse ; but because there is some reflection involved and because there always might be more, it is real choice and not mere reaction, such as our blinking in bright light. And sometimes 2 8 THE NATURE lect. these choices cut right across our real purpose. How can that be ? How can aKpaala occur ? — not the tame syllogistic aKpaaia of Aristotle's Ethics but the type of helpless impotence described by St. Paul in chapter VH. of the Epistle to the Romans. Let us consider our practice in early education. As soon as the child's physical life is fairly well established we begin to say that for half an hour or an hour every day the child shall attend to some one thing. For at first the child is a mass of chaotic interests and impulses whose notice is attracted and fixed altogether by external occurrences ; ])ut we insist that for a jicriod every day he shall not allow himself to be distracted by anything. That period is called lessons. It scarcely matters what subject is taus-ht : the vital matter is that the child should learn " attention " in general. Gradually that period is extended, and the whole system of regulations, called " discipline," is developed, till " lessons " and "discipline" together cover nearly the whole of life : then the external pressure is relaxed again, and the individual is set free in Ill OF PERSONALITY 29 the sense that he is now left to the guidance of the habits which discipline has created in him ; and the educator may say — " I have created a will in you ; at first you were a mere mass of impulses ; I have co-ordinated and systematised those impulses so that now you have a real will and purpose of your own ; I have forced you into freedom ; now go and exercise that freedom." There is a great dispute perpetually reappearing in philosophy and theology as to the moral value of our natural impulses. The strict form of the doctrine of Original Sin makes them out to be evil : many moderns are fond of saying they are good, and only become evil by abuse. Surely the plain fact is that they are neither good nor evil, but are the material out of which either virtue or vice is to be made. It is true, as the moderns referred to insistently urge, that all of them theoretically have a place in the economy of the ideal human life. It is also true, as the valuable part of the doctrine of Original Sin insists, that they can only be made into elements of such an ideal human life by much effort ; for if left undisciplined, 30 THE NATURE lect. tliey will not make up a single moral life at all, but the man will remain a chaos of impulses ; and he cannot himself conduct this discipline, for he is just the chaos of impulses. Society educates and disciplines him. By enforcing concentration of attention, by restraining the excessive activity of any one impulse, and so on, it co-ordinates him and makes him for practical purposes one agent instead of many, or in other words makes him truly free. Of course, when once this j^rocess is fairly begun, the child co-operates with it ; and from the reaction of certain forms of conduct on his own self-respect he is led to take an ever greater share in the moulding of his own character. This is the true freedom of man, when his whole nature controls all its own con- stituent parts. Its root is the merely formal freedom which we spoke of earlier, when we were noticing how each individual brings into the world some original element, which, by interaction with circumstance, becomes that individual's character. On account of this element in us, a man must always feel with regard to any action — " Something that m OF PERSONALITY 31 was mine and mine alone went to the doing of that act. It was not wholly forced upon me from without." But such freedom, while carrying with it some measure of respon- sibility, is no particularly excellent possession ; for the man may feel that just because the source of some evil action is himself, there is no escape. " wretched man that I am, who can deliver me out of the body of this death ? " Go where he will, into whatever environment, the impulse to that action goes with him. True freedom is not only or chiefly a freedom. from external control, but freedom from internal compulsion ; it is found — not when a man says " I did it, and no one else," but when a man says " I did it, and I am glad I did it, and if opportunity arises T will do it again." Only such a man is really free or really directing his own life. The man who has no purpose in life, or having one yet perpetually acts in direct opposition to it, is in bondage to a part of himself. Plato com- pared him to a state governed by a tyrant, where one member of the community imposes his will by force on the whole community, that will not being for the common good. So 31 THE NATURE lect. in tlie case of the man we are considering, a single element in the soul forces upon the whole man an action not good for the man as a whole. Hence it is at once apparent that discipline or external restraint, far from necessarily diminishing freedom, may be the means of increasing it ; this of course applies to wise legislation, and is one of the tests of wise legislation. We thus reach another ideal limit for the scale whose lowest term is the mere Thing and whose summit is Personality — the ideal namely of a spiritual life which is self-deter- mined, not only in the sense of being deter- mined by nothing external, but in the sense that the whole Being controls all the several functions. Just as in ideal Democracy all the citizens together constitute the sovereign power which each individually obeys, so in perfect Personality all the impulses, under the guidance of Reason, constitute a Soul or Self which all obey. The truly free man, or the man of strong will, is not the man who may do anything at any moment, but the man who has some great purpose which he follows despite all impulses and all obstacles. II OF PERSONALITY ^3 But two problems still call loudly for treat- ment — the relation of our impulses to an imperfectly established personality or purpose, and the relation of this personality to moral requirements and to Society. In our experience this ideal of perfect self- determination does not exist. Not only do we depend very largely on our environment — a point to which we must recur — but we have not complete control of ourselves. We have no purpose in life wide enough to in- clude the satisfaction of all our impulses and strong enough to check each from undue indulgence. And consequently our purpose, so far as it is active at all, is very often chiefly apparent in restrictions upon appetite. Will, so far, seems to appear in the inhibition of this or that impulse or instinct. But beyond this we must notice two different sets of fact — the two main elements of the moral problem. The first is aKpaala. This is re- latively simple. As our character is in pro- cess of formation — and that means throughout our lives — the co-ordination of the various inherited instincts and impulses remains in- complete ; and any one of them may rush us D 34 THE NATURE lect. into an action directly contrary to our general purpose in life, an action that we regret the moment it is done and even sometimes while we are doing it. We have no need for Aristotle's elaborate scheme of parallel syllo- gisms. The ape and tiger in us easily account for these lapses. In extreme cases it seems as though the action were scarcely ours at all ; "it is no more I that do it, but the sin which dwelleth in me " ; and in such cases the man may be reduced to a moral despair. The evil that he would not, that he does ; and as far as he can see he will go on doing it for ever, whenever the opportunity arises. A familiar instance is the habitual drunkard. It is easy and tempting to regard this as an opposition between will and desire ; and that is harmless if by will we mean a man's deliberate purpose as it exists when he is cool-blooded and reviews his life as a whole. But if the will is the co-ordination of all the impulses under the direction of reason then it would be more true to say that in d/cpaaia the will is incom- pletely formed and is divided against itself. The appetitive nature is set on two incom- patible things simultaneously. II OF PERSONALITY 35 But sometimes the matter is even worse than this, and a single passion fills so large a place that all other impulses have to give way, and reason is used — not to correlate the ends suggested by the various appetites — but to fi]id means to the satisfaction of the one passion. Usually no doubt this is due to lack of imagination. One pleasure is well known and is attainable. The harm that follows is known in general terms but is not visualised ; and the good that is lost is also known only in abstract terms. Nothing can change such a man except the appearance before him of the violated ideal in full em- bodiment, so that its attractive power may be felt. The strong man armed keepcth his house until the stronger come. If even the embodiment of the ideal awakes no response, there is no hope : the man is guilty of an eternal sin. All of this helps us to fix the meaning we are to give to Freedom ; for it appears that Freedom (so far as it is a good thing) is the same as self-control. The Freedom which is merely the fact that we and no others determine our actions is neither good nor D 2 36 NATURE OF PERSONALITY lect. hi l)ad : it becomes either good or bad according a8 our impulses are disciplined or otherwise. The true Freedom, by which a man feels that he is really living his own life, is something to be won, and moreover something that the individual alone cannot win. Only through the operation on us of some external pow^er can we become free in this full sense. This will become clearer as we proceed. LECTURE IV ORIGINAL SIN AND MORAL DUTY We are now in a position to appreciate the great truth contained in the doctrine of Original Sin. As this Doctrine is sometimes O formulated, it attributes all the struggle which is necessary before we reach true Freedom to the Fall of Adam ; and asserts that we are guilty because that fall has cor- rupted our nature. This is nonsense. If it proves anything, it proves that Adam is guilty of all our sins, not that we are guilty of his. A corrupted nature is not in itself guilt ; it is an evil, and needs changing, but it is not guilt. But all this very obvious criticism is unimportant. The important point is this : by nature we are perhaps not wicked, but also by nature we are not morally good. Moral goodness is something 37 38 THE NATURE lect. to be won. All the elements of our animal nature have to be built up into a whole life that is more than animal. What the old Theologians put down to Adam we attribute in part to our evolutionary descent from non- human ancestors, and in part to " social heredity " — the evil influence of the actual society into which we are born, its tradition of self-seekino' and moral indifference. We have to resist the pressure both of inherited impulses and of social demoralisation which itself is rooted in a long history. There may never have been a Fall ; but we are fallen at least in the sense that if we stay where we are, we are in a very bad way, and also that of ourselves we can do nothing but stay where we are. The Pelagian heresy — the only heresy which is intrinsically damnable — was just this. AVe can be good if we will ; God rewards us if we are good and punishes us if we are not ; — a consideration which con- stitutes an additional impulse to goodness ; but everything depends upon us ; we are free to be good or not as we choose ; all we have to do is to choose. And St. Augustine IV OF pf:rsonality 39 answers in effect — " all we have to do is to choose ; but that is just what we cannot do." St. Augustine's position is stated with a most desirable lucidity in his Confessions.^ Con- sider the prayer which he found himself uttering — " Give me chastity, but not yet." He wanted to be rid of a habit ; he also wanted to indulge it a little longer ; and it was the same he that wanted both. It is no use saying to such a man, " You have only to choose, and the habit is broken." The seat of the problem is in the will itself. We could be good if we would, but we won't ; and we can't begin to will it, unless we will so to begin ; that is, unless we already will it. I am told to repent if I would be forgiven. But how can I repent ? I only do what is wrong because I like it ; and I can't stop liking it or like something else better because I am told to do so, nor even because it is proved that it would be better for me. The trouble, as Augustine perceived, is that there is no single will, no one purpose, in me at all. In this state of conflicting desires, the mind is in the curious position of being able to move 1 Bk. VIII, §§ 20, 21. 40 THE NATURE lect. the body but unable to move itself. As Augustine puts it — " Tbe mind commands the hand to be moved, and is so readily obeyed that the command is scarcely dis- tinguished from the execution ; yet the mind is mind and the hand is body. The mind commands the mind to will, that is, its own self, yet it does not obey. Why is it ? ... . Non ex toto vult ; non ergo ex toto imperat .... Non utique plena imperat, idee non est quod imperat. Nam si plena esset, nee imperaret ut esset, quia jam esset." ^ The truth of this position seems to me quite indisputable. Our fundamental volitional attitude is the thing about us over which Ave have least control. Our wills move our bodies, l)ut the will cannot move itself My will is just myself as a practical agent — an individuality largely consisting of inherited tendencies and shaped by circumstance of one sort and another. Being what I am, I like this and dislike that ; and the only way to change my likes and dislikes is to change me. No doul)t I may like some things only so long as I do not understand them ; if their full 1 Bk. YIII, §§ 20, 21, IV OF PERSONALITY 41 nature is explained I may feel tliem to be disgusting ratlier than attractive. But that is because, for emotional purposes, the object itself is altered : I am not liking what I previously liked ; l)ut I have learnt that what I liked does not exist. No doubt this dis- covery alters my conduct, but it leaves unaffected the fact that I cannot, at any given moment, alter my likes and dislikes. It is necessary to insert the words "at any given moment," for it is possible for me, by deliberately bringing myself under certain influences when the desire for improvement is uppermost, to mould my whole character and tune my tastes in a new key, so that what was once congenial is now disgusting. But at the moment of action my choice is deter- mined by my character at that moment. And wrong conduct does not always rest on a misunderstanding. So long as our characters are imperfectly formed, there may be ten- dencies known to be bad, which are yet active whenever circumstances give them opportunity. Their satisfaction is so im- portant to us that we quite deliberately indulge them, though we know it is to 42 THE NATURE lect. our total injury : we know it is morally wrong, and we know it is self-destructive, yet rather than pluck out our right eye, rather even than close it, we fling our whole body into Hell. It is no use trying to find reasons for doing this : reason is all on the other side, as we know quite well when we act. We do not even think the present good greater than the more remote. We do not think at all. AYe just say " Here goes ! " Such an experience proves that for practical purposes the man is not a unity at all. Plato was quite right when, in the Rejmhlic, he put all his emphasis on the initial multiplicity of the soul, for his whole concern was with the soul as agent in conduct. And he was quite right too, as I believe, to represent the pro- blem of politics and the problem of the moral life as being essentially identical. But the matter is not as would at first appear. At first it seems that in society we are given a multiplicity — all the individual citizens — and have to create a unity, while in the individual we find a unity and have to develop it into its varied activities. There is a certain obvious truth in this, but the other point is more IV OF PERSONALITY 43 important. The individual is no doubt a unity. Even Plato's democratic man is only one man ; but he is all manner of different agents, vary- ing according to the tendency or impulse which was last stimulated. But the real problem is, given the multiplicity of impulses, to con- struct a unity of them : to form a constitution in the soul — 'ha yevia-dat ex ttoXXcup. The statesman, on the other hand, does not find a number of isolated men whom he has to bind together into a state : such a prol)lem may arise through a confusion of races, as in South Africa to-day, but it is comparatively acci- dental ; the further back we go in history the more potent is the domination of the clan ; the political problem is — given the political unity, to find room within it for individual variety. But we cannot follow Plato's enticing lead into the borderland of ethics and politics. What we have to notice now is that Freedom (when it means more than the formal ground of Responsibility) is the control of all our actions by our whole being : to be free is to have a Purpose, in following wdiicli we satisfy every function of our nature, and which we 44 THE NATURE lect. pursue undeviatingly. In some cases, perhaps in all, it is necessary for us to crush this or that desire ruthlessly, because, if indulged at all, it waxes tyrannous. But the ideal stands and the man who is free in this sense is the embodiment of Will — he is the strong-willed man. There is a popular notion, miscalled the doctrine of Free Will — philosophically foolish and theologically heretical — which suggests that the Will is essentially a Jack in the Box that crops up here or there when least expected. But the man of strong will, as was said before, is not the man who may do any- thing, but precisely the man who can be depended on : in fact strength of will reveals itself in certain splendid incapacities, as when it is said of a man accused of taking bribes — "He could not do it." People with no will at all like to attribute the varie- gations of their conduct to their freedom ; one day a man chooses to be quite respectable ; another day he chooses to be dissolute. But such choice is at best a mere rhythmic recur- rence of various impulses, or the mechanical response to various environments, or both. The man of strong will is the man wlio is the IV OF PERSONALITY 45 same from day to day and in all circumstances, not turned from his purpose by outward allurements or inward passions. True freedom manifests itself in constancy and stability of character. But may not this be shown in a life of licentious indulgence? Is not the deliberately and consistently wdcked man just as free and self-controlled as the most perfect saint ? No, he is not ; and for two reasons. It is not his whole nature that expresses itself in his acts of indulgence : he has no real self by which to guide his actions. His Personality as a whole is never active : now this part and now that is active, but never the whole ; or if we imagine the impossible case of a man whose spiritual nature is so impoverished by perpetual indulgence that only one desire is active at all, we must say that he is not free at all ; in his actions there is no real choice ; there are no ''' living alternatives " ; he does not review the various impulses and the suggestions they ofl'er from the point of view of a life's purpose and select accordingly ; he acts automatically ; the stimulus is given and he responds. 46 THE NATURE lect. But at least, it may be urged, if he is not self-determined in the same sense as the man of strong character, at least he is just as happy. No, he is not. Even if he were as contented, we could still deny that he was happy ; for his contentment consists in a single satisfaction, not in the varied activity of a many-sided nature. And incidentally it is almost if not quite always the case that this life of indulgence ceases to provide even the satisfaction it gives at first. The dose must be perpetually made stronger. We may refer to Plato's celebrated remark in the Goi'gias, that the absolute monarch is never a free man ; he never satisfies his real want, because he can at any moment do what takes his fancy — ouSev iroielp ov ^ovXovrac, ws eVoy eiirelv, iroietv fievTOL b ri av avrols Bo^i] /SeXTiarov ehat.^ Restraint is necessary to true freedom ; and at first if not permanently that restraint must be external. With regard to the relation between happi- ness and moral character I may quote a passage from Dr. MacDougal's Social Psychology : — ' Oorgias, 466 e. IV OF PERSONALITY 47 " Pleasure is a qualification of consciousness of momentary duration or, at most, of a fleeting character, and it arises from some mental process that involves but a mere frag- ment of one's whole being. Joy arises from the harmonious operation of an organised system or sentiment that constitutes a consider- able feature or part of one's whole being ; it has therefore, potentially at least, a greater persistence and continuity and a deej^er resonance : it is, as it were, more massive than pleasure : it is more intimately and essentially a part of oneself, so that one cannot stand aside and contemplate it in philosophic or depreciatory detachment, as one may contem- plate one's pleasures. Happiness arises from the homogeneous operation of all the senti- ments of a well-organised and unified person- ality, one in which the principal sentiments support one another in a succession of actions all of which tend towards the same or closelv allied and harmonious ends. Hence the richer, the more highly developed, the more com- pletely unified and integrated is the personality, the more capable is it of sustained happiness in spite of inter-current pains of all sorts. In 48 THE NATURE lect. the child, or in the adult of imperfectly de- veloped and unified personality, the pleasure or pain of the moment is apt to fill or dominate the whole of consciousness as a simple wave of feeling, whereas in the perfected personality it appears as a mere ripple on the surface of a strong tide that sets steadily in one direc- tion. " If this account of happiness is correct, it follows that to add to the sum of happiness is not merely to add to the sum of pleasures, but is rather to contribute to the development of higher forms of personality, personalities capable, not merely of pleasure, as the animals are, but of happiness. If this conclusion is sound, it is of no small importance to the social sciences ; it goes far to reconcile the doctrine of such moralists as T. H. Green with that of the more enlightened utilitarians, for the one party insists that the proper end of moral effort is the development of personalities, the other that it is the increase of happiness, and these we now see to be identical ends."i That gives us one reason why the consist- ^ Op. cit., pp. 156, 157 IV OF PERSONALITY 49 ently indulgent man is not truly free : the other reason is that we are born members of a society. Many of our impulses are such that their indulgence is bad for society ; in other words, we are not born good citizens. But we are born members of society, with a strong social instinct, a desire for the approval of our fellows, and so on. If the purely selfish man is to be even contented, he must either stifle this desire, as is perhaps impossible, or else endure its permanent non-satisfaction. If this social instinct in its manifold forms is to be satisfied, the man must become a good citizen, a good member of society. In other words, he must acquire morality. Perhaps it may be necessary to justify this identification of moral with social conduct, of morality with good citizenship. LECTURE V DUTY AND SOCIETY If we look at the terms peculiar to the moral sphere — " Duty," " Obligation," " Ought" — we find that they always express a relation between an individual agent or group of agents and other similar beings. If some catastrophe swept all conscious beings out of existence with the exception of a single man, would he still be under any sort of obliga- tion ? Not to other men, for ex hypothesi there are none ; nor to God, for He too, as a conscious being, is excluded by the hypothesis. Can he be under obligation to himself? The phrases " Duty to self" — " You owe it to yourself " — certainly occur. But in what circumstances ? Either when a man has earned some reward, which he is forgoing — and then we do not regard it as his duty to LECT. V NATURE OF PERSONALITY 51 take it, but only as a right the waiving of which may be morally admirable rather than evil ; or else such a phrase occurs when a man is contemplating a course of action in some one's interest by which he will diminish his own usefulness, such as giving up a holiday when it is much needed ; and here we do regard it as his duty to take the holiday and maintain his usefulness— a duty not to him- self but to Society. Duty is a term never applied strictly to the isolated individual. Kant, as we all know, tried to evolve a Categorical Imperative out of the autonomous will of the individual; but when it appeared it took the form — " Act at all times from a maxim fit for universal law," where the word "universal" introduces the reference to Society in unmistakable form. Indeed Kant's funda- mental argument to prove that only the Good Will is absolutely good rests on a surrep- titious reference to the admitted interests of Society ; and so it must always be. The isolated individual may ])c wise or foolish ; he cannot be moral or immoral. An atheistic debauchee upon a desert island is not liable to moral censure. > E 2 52 THE NATURE lect. It is then our membership in society that makes us capable of morality ; and it is con- sciousness of that membership that endows us with a moral sense. This is the condition of the possiljility of obligation — of any sense of " ought " — and of the particular form of Good which is distinguished as Moral Good or Right. And if this is so, it becomes a matter of quite primary importance for the purpose of ethics that we should find out what we mean by Society and by the individual's membership in it. Let us then consider the general nature of Society, and let us begin with the obvious and uncontroversial facts about it. Plainly a Society is a collection of persons united by some non-physical bond ; this bond may be economic as in a Joint Stock Company ; or it may be scientific, as in the British Association ; or political, as in the Ijiberal or Conservative party ; or social, in the narrower sense, as with a group of friends. Or of course any given Society may be held together by several such bonds at once. But wdien we look at these more closely it appears that every one of them is a determination of the V OF PERSONALITY 53 human will. The real hond of union in a Company or a Trade Union is not any economic fact or facts, but the purpose of the members that certain economic conditions shall continue to exist or cease to exist or begin to exist. In each case the members are united by a common purpose, which may be fairly simple, as in the case of a scientific society, or highly complex, as in the case of a nation. The essential basis of a society is community of purpose. How far is this description true of a Nation 1 and, inasmuch as ethical rules are now held to apply universally, how far is it true of Mankind or of the world of conscious beino;s as a whole ? Let us take the case of the Nation first. It may seem impossible here to specify the purpose ; but that is not fatal, because the purpose must in any case be so immensely complex that no term or phrase could be adequate. It is more serious that one cannot easily specify any constituent element of this purpose. But its negative side is plain enough ; it is a long while now since English- men, for instance, first felt a distinction 54 THE NATURE lect. between themselves and foreigners, dis- covering a common purpose at least as against the latter. In early stages war is the great consolidator of nations ; and it is so because it brings into clear consciousness the unity of purpose in a nation's citizens by placing it in practical contrast with a hostile purpose. The unity is still only germinal, but it is enough to be one term in a dis- tinction, the subject of a negative judgment. In all cases the existence of ideas in our minds is liable to become apparent through their figuring as the subjects of negative judgments. Long before we are able to form positive judgments we are able to exclude various suggestions. Negation as the form of distinction is no doubt equally fundamental with assertion ; but the negative judgment as conscious act of thought always represents partial ignorance ; we only say " That is not the way to London " when some one suggests by word or act that it is (in which case the ignorance is in his mind) — or because we ourselves know that there is a road to London but not which road it is, and there- fore wish to exclude as many opportunities of V OF PERSONALITY 55 error as we can, so as to narrow the field of inquiry. Thus early morality consists of negatives : it is not known what the ideal life is, but it is known that it cannot include murder or theft. Just so we may not know what our national purpose positively is, but we know enough about it to sing with real conviction that " Britons never shall be slaves." This, however, can only be because the term " Briton " is felt to be incompatible with the term " slave " ; whatever ideal it represents is one contrary to slavery. But in order to resist, it must have some character of its own. What is this character ? It is the product of a mass of tradition and sentiment which permeates all individual citizens. We were born into a people reading the Bible, Shake- speare, Milton, Bunyan, and so on ; into a people who had finally broken with the feudalism once common to all European nations by the precise expedient of beheading a King in a moment of Puritan fervour, etc., etc. We brought some new element our- selves into being when we were born, but even this was moulded by a history embodied 56 THE NATURE lect. in institutions and prejudices and principles; and even those wlio are keenest in criticism of British methods are Britons themselves as soon as they have to choose between their own country and another ; and often their criticism is a kind of patriotism, perhaps even the best kind. The national purpose in civilised countries is still only germinal : it has no clear conscious aim or accepted methods ; but it is there. It does not as yet directly influence more than a tithe of our lives ; for the rest, our activities go chaotically on their own way, just as the impulses and instincts do in a child, before any conscious purpose is formed by which some are checked, and others guided, and method is gradually introduced into life. For alike in the individual and in the society freedom and self-goverjiment can mean only one thing — the control of the parts by the whole which they constitute. If a man is to be free, he must have self- direction as against compulsion l)y other people ; but also his self-direction must be direction by his whole self, and not by passing desires which impel him to act V OF PERSONALITY 57 aofainst his real interest. And if a nation is to be free, it must have self-Q:overnment in the sense that it is bound by no laws except those it makes for itself; but also its self-govern- ment must be government by its whole self in the light of its whole interest and not the mere supremecy either of the wealthiest class or of the most numerous class or of the passing fancies of the mob. It may well be thought that this line of reflection would lead to a direct personification of the State. And indeed the conjunction of this language with the previous suggestion of a common Purpose as the uniting V)ond of society may seem to lead up to such a theory as that entertained by Cardinal Newman, who played with the idea that a spirit or demon presides over every nation, on the ground that only so could one account for the difl'er- ence between people's individual and collective action. What is the seat of this Common Purpose ? Where does it exist ? Or what is meant by the cognate expression that Society is a self- conscious unit ? It may be that each of the cells composing our bodies has a con- 58 THE NATURE lect. scious will of its own, and then perhaps our Wills stand to these as the Social Will stands to ours. But this is a most pre- carious hypothesis and does not seem to be what is intended, for on this analogy the Social Will niioht have no reference at all to O our individual wills ; and it is always taken to he some systematic unity of our individual wills which does justice to every one. There is no evidence whatever for the view that there is a social consciousness anywhere in society other than the consciousness of the individuals that they are members of the social body. Society is the network of persons related to each other by co-operation for a common end, the members related being conscious of their relations to each other and willing the maintenance of those relations. The common purpose therefore appears as a purpose set upon a single object, but formed by many individuals. If by will we mean a direction for action, then there is one social will ; if we mean the seat of actual volition, then there are as many social wills as there are citizens. Perhaps it will be in closest conformity with the ordinary use of language V OF PERSONALTY 59 if we adopt the formula — One Purpose, Many Wills. Of course it does not follow that society is any less real than the citizens or that they are primary while it is secondary. All we have said is that, in the living fact which we call society, the citizens are the seat of consciousness. And yet this purpose is not consciously present in any of the members, and it only exists in them at all so far as they constitute the society. I am always very unwilling to use the idea of the subconscious as an ex- planation of human affairs ; it is so obviously a receptacle for all inconvenient prol)lems. But here I see no help for it. And no doubt a large part of our character even as individuals is subconscious. The effort to see ourselves as others see us is very largely an effort to bring into consciousness motives and impulses which determine our actions but of which we are quite ignorant ; and though we may object to regard such undetected parts of our nature as elements in our Purpose, that only means that in our indi- vidual lives Purpose — or at least our own Purpose — does not altogether control us. 6o THE NATURE lect. We thus find that morality consists in the subordination of our own Purpose and sub- conscious aims to the Purpose of the society of which we are members — in the last resort of the human race — though that Purpose is not known to us or any one else on earth. This incidentally involves an inability on our part to determine with absolute certainty what is right or wrong in any circumstances. But it also involves some- thing of far greater practical importance, namely that we must always take the moral convictions, which have grown up out of the experience of the race, as our guide. Here and there we may find that these have sur- vived from an age to which they were adapted into one to which they are not adapted ; and then we must no doubt denounce them. But the only ground on which we can do this is the principle underlying those convictions themselves. We are bound to defy conven- tional moral judgments when we see that they are wrong ; but we are bound to obey them so long as we only fail to see that they are right ; and our standard must be the principle of those judgments to themselves. V OF PERSONALITY 6i We may take conventional morality, discover its principles, and then criticise its several iudgments in the light of its own principles. So Wilberforce appealed to the admitted prin- ciples of Christianity in his attack on the slave- trade. Conventional Christendom said this was nonsense : Christianity had always toler- ated slavery ; besides, it was an attack on property ; and in the House of Lords all the Bishops voted against the abolition of the slave-trade. Li such a case it is easy, at any rate after the event, to see that the innovators were right ; but the innovation was only a new application of the admitted principle of general morality. The important point, however, to notice here is that personality as we meet with it is amongst other things a principle of fellowship in a common purpose, and that it requires the individual's acceptance of this common pur- pose though he cannot tell what it is. Here as often before we find that Personality as we know it is a principle whose complete realisa- tion would l)e something we do not know at all. Morality or Duty is one mark of Personality, and for this to be perfectly 62 THE NATURE lect. realised the individual must know what is the good of the human race, and devote himself to it. But no individual knows what the good of the human race is. We are linked to one another by a common purpose that we none of us possess, and are in our fellowship loyal to an ideal which we cannot formulate or understand. It is this which makes it so hard for many people to grasp the essentially social nature of human Personality ; the society of which the individual is a member (a limb or organ) is not capable either of observation or definition by human faculties. But it is clear that a human being cut off from society is not fully human ; that our ideals and temptations alike come largely from society ; and that our significance and value are almost wholly derived from our relation to society. Let us at this point bring together the vari- ous sides of Personality, on which, as far as we have gone, we have found human Personality to be manifestly defective. First we noticed the distinction of a Person from either a Brute or a Thing, in that the person not only has interests, but has interest in past and future ; V OF PERSONALITY 63 but cleurly this interest is, as a fact, limited on both sides by ignorance and narrowness of sympathy. At some quite arbitrary point, determined by our individual limitations, this interest fades away or breaks off. We have suggested to us as an ideal limit in the process from thing to Person, a Being Who should care for the whole of history. Secondly, we found that, whereas a Thing is determined externally — or almost altogether so — a Per- son's individuality is as important a factor in determining his character and conduct as are the external forces. This points to an ideal case of a spiritual being wholly determined by himself. Thirdly, we found that a man is partly master of his own actions in the sense that to a certain extent his character as a whole controls all his particular impulses and desires ; and the ideal is suggested of a Being wholly self-controlled and self-directing in this sense also. And lastly we have found that Personality as it exists in men requires sub-' ordination of the individual to a Purpose he cannot know ; so that we reach the conception of a spirit knowing and willing the good of the whole world. In each of these four cases we 64 NATURE OF PERSONALITY lect. v find that only God can fulfil the whole re- quirement. Our process from things upwards finds its end in God or nowhere. Our per- sonality at any rate is an imperfect thing. If God exists, His Personality will be the true one, at least in those functions of Personality which we have so far considered. LECTURE VI PERSONALITY AND THE TIME-PROCESS : THE SOCIAL PURPOSE We must now return to a point we men- tioned previously, the relation of Personality to the Time-process. We have found that a Person is distinguished by this fact among others, that the past and future alike have interest for him ; we said, however, that the two were not interesting in equal degree, and that point must now be discussed. The thesis I have to defend is that the Future is more interesting — or, as we often say, " matters more" — than the Past, and that the more fully Personality is developed the more true this becomes. We have found that the chief element in full Personality is Purpose. But clearly the Past has very little relevance to Purpose : it 6s F 66 THE NATURE lect. provides the basis on which our purposes must be formed and from which they must work ; it provides guidance as to the success and failure of various methods of work ; but our Purpose is not and cannot be directed towards the Past, except in a very special and indirect sense which we must attend to in a moment. No doubt the Past has a very great interest and importance : it is, for instance, a good thing to belong to a nation with a great history behind it. And yet the greater part of that value depends on the inspiration for the Future which it affords. If that be subtracted, some value no doubt remains — a strong sentiment of national pride and so on. But if this leads to nothing, most of us would agree that it is not worth a vast amount. So too with the Church : it is a great thing to inherit a long tradition of faith and practice, but the chief value of this is again its inspiration for our Purpose. All the good elements in the Past derive most of their value for us from their relation to the Future. But the case seems different, at first sight anyhow, with evil. Whether in the corporate or the individual life, what is VI OF PERSONALITY 67 bad seems to need wiping out in some way, if that may be : it is not only something not to be repeated, a warning (as the good in the past is chiefly valuable as a stimulus), but it challenges attention as something need- ing abolition. But here again we shall find that the Future contains the key to our difficulty. The Past is plainly in one sense unalter- able : it has happened and to all eternity it will have happened. But the value of the Past is not irrevocably fixed ; it remains to be determined by the Future. Let me illustrate this point from that part of our experience which is deliberately occasioned with a view to certain effects, namely Art. The Artist isolates some relatively independent fact and concentrates our attention upon it ; and when he presents a temporal succession, as the dramatist and the musician do, he fixes our attention in this way upon a period of time which we can grasp in a single experience ; and consequently we find out more about the nature of time from considering such cases than in any other way. Now consider two plays, each in three acts, one proceeding F 2 68 THE NATURE lect. from a cheerful opening, through a neutral phase, to a gloomy close ; the other proceeding from a gloomy opening, though a neutral phase, to a cheerful close. It is by no means the case that in each play the first and last acts cancel each other, making a neutral efi'ect on the whole : on the contrary, the former play is peculiarly depressing — more so than a play which is gloomy throughout ; and the latter peculiarly exhilarating — more so than a play which is cheerful throughout. Yet this second play would have been depress- ing if it had stopped at the end of the first act. The emotional value therefore of that first act is quite difi'erent in isolation from its value when the two later acts are added : at its own close it has quite a definite value, but at the end of the play it has another value. The value then of any event in time is not fixed until the series of which it is a member is over — perhaps, therefore, not to all eternity. But now we may pass on to a cognate point. The genius of the Greeks seems to have led to a rule that in Comedy — that is where only superficial matters are in VI OF PERSONALITY 69 question, or where serious matters are super- ficially treated — the dramatist is to make his own plot ; but in Tragedy the plot was always something well known. And indeed it is necessary to our appreciation of Antigone's great action that we should know, as we watch, not only what consequences she anticipated, but what consequences would actually ensue. In any great drama our appreciation is increased by knowledge of the story, because we sec each incident in the light, not only of the Past, but of Past and Future together. This gives us some valuable hints as to the nature of Personality in its relation to the time-process. Those events in the Past which seem to require obliteration cannot indeed be made unreal, but their character can be changed. They may become the occasions of some spiritual state of great value which could not have been reached without them. Till the power is known that can so transform them, they remain mere blots : and the man, in whose experience they are, feels the weight of an irremovable burden. 70 THE NATURE lect. But if there is known to him some trans- forming power, his despair vanishes. It is clear that we are here on the borders of the doctrine of the Atonement ; and we cannot embark on such a topic as a digression. I would only remark here, that our chief trouble about wrong acts in the past is not so much the sense " I did it," as the sense " I am the kind of man to do that, and I may do it again " ; not " I did it yesterday," but " I cannot see what is to prevent my doing it again to-morrow." So far as this is so, it is clear that the Past derives its significance from the Future, and the fears or expectations it occasions. And we have seen that so far as the evil of the Past is a burden or a stain, it is at least possible that the Future may alter that entirely. If all this is true, it follows that the more fully Purposive we are — that is, the more complete our Personality — so mucli the more will the Future preponderate over the Past in our interest. And this fact, with the grounds of it, must be steadily kept in mind by any who wish to construct a spiritual theory of the Universe or a doctrine of VI OF PERSONALITY 71 Atonement. The explanation of reality, as Mr. Haldane has said, is to be sought in a system of Ends rather than of Causes.^ And now I would take up another point that has already been mentioned and develop it further. Purpose is the highest and most distinctive mark of Personality ; and Purpose involves morality, for we found that our social instincts would not allow real freedom or self-direction except in and through morality. But let us, in the outline manner which we are adopting throughout, consider this fact of morality more closely. What is the fact which has moral value ? Now I cannot understand attributing value to any fact except in so far as it is an object of consciousness. The only good or evil I know is the good and evil of persons — or at least of sentient beings. And I can see no value in any action or course of conduct except its value for the agent or for others. Further, I know of no way of proving a jyr'iori that any thing is good or evil : we must go to our own moral judgments. The term " good " is irreducible : the fact it expresses cannot be 1 The Pathivay to Reality, Vol. I, pp. 298, 299. 72 THE NATURE lect. expressed in the terms of any particular science. And we must notice that "utility" is not goodness ; the value of what is useful does not lie in itself but in the result to which it conduces. About intrinsic value there can be no argument : one approves or not and there's an end. And if an individual differs from the world at large, or from an expert, he can only be called upon to look more closely. As Mr. F. H. Bradley has argued — " Our sense of value, and in the end, for every man his own sense of value, is ultimate and final. And since there is no court of appeal, it is idle even to inquire if this sense is fallible." ^ This seems to lead to chaos and indivi- dualism of an intolerable kind. But our social nature saves us. It may be impossible and undesirable for every individual to form the same value-judgments ; but there are those which belong to him as the particular member of society that he is ; we are not left to mere caprice because we are not isolated individuals. Each man is a unique and irre- placeable member of the system with his own » Mind, N.S. 66, p. 230. VI OF PERSONALITY 73 bit of the value of things to realise ; and in developing his moral faculties, his devotion to the public good, he will reach the right value- judgments. But if conduct derives its value from its relation to the assent and those affected, what is morality ? and where is moral value ? For an act to be morally good, it must have both good results and a g-ood motive. When we are trying to determine what Duty requires of us, we consider the results of the various courses of action open to us ; we do not consider that we have merely to follow some universal rule and leave the results to take care of them- sel\^es. No command or prohibition can be universal in morals except by begging the question. " Thou shalt do no murder " is universal, because murder is unjustifiable killing ; but we recognise justifiable homicide, and certainly " Thou shalt not kill " is not a binding command upon a soldier in battle. Our action is always both a particular act in particular circumstances, and a case of a general class of act. But our action, morally speaking, is not the motion of our bodies, in striking a man or speaking words ; it is the 74 THE NATURE lect. whole train of circumstance that we initiate. We review the whole of all the courses open to us and choose whatever we judge to be the best. But w^hen a man has done what we think a right thing, we do not grant our moral approval if we know that he did it from a low motive. We find full moral value only when the right thing is done because it is the right thing. There may be failure here in two respects — either in the motive or in the result ; and if the motive is right and the result only turns out wrong through unpre- dictable circumstances, we still allow full moral worth to the action. If, however/^the bad result could have been foreseen, we blame the man for causing it, however well-inten- tioned he may have been. We find moral worth, then, in a person who wills the good and really looks for the right means to realise it. Moral worth is found in the will regarded in relation to society. But to will the good of other people is to love them. " Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself" is thus the supreme principle of morality. Morality does not consist in this or that sort of conduct ; all virtuous action can be rooted in pride ; VI OF PERSONALITY 75 morality consists in a certain spiritual con- dition, wliicli necessarily issues in virtuous action ; it is a determination of the will. And this is judged by the moral sense, or by our value-sense, to be the chief good of man. But we still have not settled what is the good of society, or of other men, at which we are to aim. Our highest orood is to love them and seek their good. What is their good ? Kant held that we should aim at our own Perfection and everyone else's Happiness ; and this maxim is adopted by so sane a practical moralist as R. L. Stevenson. There is safety in it, for it will save us from cen- soriousness and priggishness. And yet, if Love is the best thing for us, it must also be for them. The aim of our love will then be to bring them to an equal love ; the good will is, in this sense, the will that wills itself ; it wills its own universalisation. When Plato's Socrates was asked to justify morality, he did not talk about its benefits ; he described it ; he drew a picture of a just man in a just state, and said "Now you see it, you must like it." About Goodness itself he was a pure Intuitionist. But about all particular 76 THE NATURE lect. actions he was a relentless utilitarian. That act is right which conduces to SiKatoavvrj. This seems to me to be the truth of the matter. Love is the supreme goal of Person- ality ; at that we aim for ourselves, and having acquired it we seek to pass it on to others. If we want to find the right thing to do, we must ask what will do most to increase the volume of love. Love alone has absolute moral value. But here we reach the strangest of all the limitations and defects in human Personality. Only in Love can we realise ourselves ; but in the first place Love is self-forgetfulness ; and in the second place it is the one thing that we cannot acquire. It is self-forgetfulness ; and therefore as Ions; as we aim at it as some- thing Sfood for ourselves we can never reach it. It is the one thing we cannot acquire ; for how can the self annihilate its own self- will ? Love can only be produced in us by the love or need of another calling out our love. We love people, if at all, because we and they are we and they. Still the ideal of our life is universal love. " So far as we can conceive such a state, it would be one in VI OF PERSONALITY 77 which there would be no ' individuals ' at all, in the sense in which individuality means mutual exclusion : there would be a universal being in and for another : ' consciousness ' o would be the consciousness of ' another ' which was also 'oneself — a common con- sciousness." ^ Personality as we know it can only reach individual self-satisfaction through complete individual selflessness : or, to put it otherwise, it is misleading to speak of self-realisation through self-sacrifice. Self-sacrifice is self- realisation. Our method in this investigation is neither altogether inductive nor altogether deductive — though rather the former than the latter. We have been gathering together the dis- tinguishing marks of Personality as we know it in our own experience. We have not tried to fix any rigid formula of it, from which particular deductions are to be made ; but we are attempting to collect into a single conception the different attributes and func- tions whose presence enables us to distinguish their possessor as a Person, allowing this ^ Nettleship, Philosophical Eemains, p. 42. 78 THE NATURE lect. conception to transcend altogether any empirical instances of Personality. And we have found that the term Personality stands for a certain phase — the highest in our experience — in a continuous process whose simplest term is the mere Thing. It is im- possible to set strict limits to this sphere. In practice we regard all animals which are biologically human as Personal, and deny the title to all others. This use has practical convenience in its favour ; and in so far as the use of material objects as tools is common to all men, and civilisation as distinct from the unity of the pack is thus made possible, it seems fair to claim that all men are at least potentially personal in the full sense. This way of treating the matter always sounds horribly cold-blooded ; but we do in fact deny by our conduct many of the ele- ments in Personality to children, lunatics, and criminals. And at the end of the scale most remote from the Thing we have the conception of a spritual Being to whom all time has a value, and to whom therefore, in some sense, all time is present, but for whom the future is VI OF PERSONALITY 79 always the governing element in time ; a Being determined by Himself alone and in His action always guided by His whole Purpose, never by any single impulse or caprice ; a Being moreover whose Purpose is absolutely self-less — a Being who realises Himself in spending Himself for others. But this Being is the God of Christian Theology. If, then, there is such a Being, He is the true norm and type of Personality. LECTURE VII PEESONALITY AND THE UNIVERSE The God of Religion then is not only Personal, but Personal in a fuller sense than any other being. As St. Paul says that "of Him all Fatherhood in heaven and earth is named," ^ so we may say that of Him all Personality in heaven and earth is named. It is our Person- ality rather than His, which is defective and metaphorical. If we insist on taking our Personality as the norm, we may call Him supra- Personal ; but this generally leads to thinking of Him as infra-Personal, for our minds habitually treat the antithesis of Person and Thing as exhaustive — though the animals then seem to appear on both sides of the antithesis. If we are to take Person as the J Eph. Ill, 15. So LECT.vii NATURE OF PERSONALITY 8i extreme antithesis of Thing, then only God can be completely Personal ; for only of God is it possible that He should be wholly self- determined. Other Beings might conceivably be utterly loving and care for the whole history of the world. But only the Creator can be utterly and absolutely free ; for only to His Will is there no external circumstance. AVith men it is necessary that, even in order to express their own nature and purpose, they should conform to conditions. Even in creative art, the freest of the activities poss- ible to man, it is necessary for the artist to submit to the limitations of his material. Words have their meaning before the poet uses them, and he can only transform that meaning in a limited degree. Marble cannot move about. Musical instruments have each a limited compass ; and if, as Beethoven is liable to do, you make your sopranos scream their voices to rags in the first two numbers, they will not sing as well for the rest of the work. Only God has no external conditions. His Power is limited only by His own Nature. Some things, we may say, He cannot do — but only because, being what He is, He can- G 82 THE NATURE lect. not want to do them : this is not incapacity or limitation of Power. He and He alone is absolutely free. But does Philosophy allow us such a crown and climax to our series which develops from Thing to Person ? If God exists, He is fully Personal ; but docs He exist ? And may it not be the case that Personality on reaching its utmost development contradicts itself and passes into a non- Personal Absolute ? The arguments by which we are led to the belief in some supreme Being or absolute Principle are very various. But I would point out that in order to be satisfactory they must have perpetual reference to the actual world of ordinary experience. In the greatest of the sciences we must employ the same method as elsewhere, not merely passing from particulars to universals, nor from universals to particulars, but perpetually moving between the one principle of the whole and the parts of that whole which it unites. Our business is to pass from the multiplicity of the world, not only to some sort of unity, but to a unity that really explains this world. That the Universe is in some sense one VII OF PERSONALITY 83 is the presupposition of all philosophical inquiry. Perhaps the universe is unin- telligible, and then philosophy is a chimerical endeavour ; but as far as we philosophise, that is so far as we try to understand the world, we are bound to assume that it is a single system, governed by a single princij)lc. We may set out on the search for this single principle in a variety of different ways ; but we must always rememl)er that we are looking, not merely for some intelligible principle, but for a principle which is at once intelligible in itself, and through which the world of everyday experience is explained. Many of the philosophic attempts to conceive the Absolute seem to me to fail through being based on an altogether false conception of Knowledge and its relation to Reality. That is too large a topic to embark on by way of a digression ; but I would say this. As long as we try to conceive the unity of the world in terms of Knowledge we are bound to arrive at insuperable barriers at two points : finite Personality will become inexplicable and error will become impossible. If the unity of the world is a unity of G 2 84 THE NATURE lect. Knowledge, we are driven to the belief in one all-knower ; the unity is found in the single Subject-Object relation of the Absolute experience ; and the apparent multiplicity of knowing subjects becomes an offence ; the Absolute may know that I have knowledge, but he cannot know my know- ledge, unless I am a mere channel of the Absolute consciousness ; and this contradicts my sense of individuality ; and, if it con- demns that sense as illusion, it provides no ground on which the illusion can arise. Why should the Absolute realise His Knowledge through channels or vehicles of consciousness which fancy that it is they, in their individu- ality, which have the Knowledge ? This illusion at least is not part of the Absolute Omniscience. And on this basis Error is impossible. Mr. Joachim admits, in the fourth chapter of his essay on The Nature of Truth, that error cannot be worked into his system. It is of no use, as he points out, to call error partial Knowledge ; for the essence of the experience called error is that the man thinks he is right; if his defect is that his knowledge is VII OF PERSONALITY 85 partial, his belief is that it is complete. And into that experience the Absolute can never enter ; he can never suppose that partial knowledge is complete knowledge. We are involved in the paradox that the Absolute, just because He is omniscient, cannot know one of the facts in the world ; and we remember how Aristotle's God, just because He was omniscient, had no notion that this world of ours exists. But let us make the hypothesis that the one principle which governs the universe is the Purpose of a Person such as we have described. At once there is room for the multiplicity of finite personalities ; indeed they are needed ; for if this Purpose is to be a Purpose of Love, the Love will need objects. We shall not be driven to regard our own minds as mere phases of the Divine Mind ; and yet that Mind and Will are the origin of their existence. The familiar analogy of Fatherhood is the best : a son owes his existence to his father ; but he is not his father. Our need of this Divine Will logically is that it may give unity to the world ; and it can do this without itself being 86 THE NATURE lect. the world ; we do not need to abolish differences in order to find the unity, for it is a characteristic of Will that while remaining itself it can bring into being many other things. No doubt our wills give no analogy for volition which is absolutely creative : we always produce from a given material : the artist cannot make a poem except in an extant language, nor the sculptor a statue except in given marble ; but this does not affect the essential nature of volition. It is urged, however, that even if we pass over that point, still an Infinite Personality is impossible. Personality as we know it derives its meaning from what is other than itself In knowledge the self is known by its distinction from the not-self; in the volitional region, the value of an act of will depends on its relation to other persons. The former argument does not seem to me conclusive. Our knowledge of ourselves is historically reached by distinction from the not-self ; but direct self-knowledge is not in itself an utter impossibility ; in fact, after the first stages of our development, we actually possess it. The other argument is no doubt fatal to any VII OF PERSONALITY 87 attempt to present the Universe itself as a moral person. But it is not fatal by any means to the belief in an Almighty Spirit by Whose AVill the world was made and is maintained ; for this Spirit clearly stands in relation with and distinction from that world. His relation to us is not the same as our relation to one another, just as my relation to my brother is not the same as the relation of both of us to our father. And if it is said that, at least before the Creation, God existed alone and in no relations at all, then I say that " before the Creation " is a phrase to which I can attach no meaning, for I cannot see why the world should ever have begun at all. God is its Creator, not because He made it at a moment of time, but because from all eternity to all eternity it depends upon the Will of God. To conceive of the ultimate World-Principle as a Purpose has this further advantage, that this Principle may then be regarded as self- explanatory. It is clear that such a Principle cannot be explained by anything outside itself; it can never be reached by Deduction, for this would make it dependent on some- 88 THE NATURE lect. thing else which, by definition, it cannot be. Nor can it ever be finally established by Induction, for this would involve proving that no other principle was possible. But only if we take the ultimate Principle as a Purpose can we make it self-explanatory ; for no other principle in our experience is self- explanatory, but this is. To understand a Purpose does not mean to explain the history of its origin ; it means to imagine oneself forming a similar Purpose. And when we have found a Purpose, which we understand in the sense that we sympathise with it, we consider that we have explained the actions to which it led and in which it expressed itself. To answer the question "Why?" in terms of physical causation is to start upon an endless regress ; but to answer it in terms of Purpose is really to answer it finally, if the Purpose is one with which we sym- pathise.^ And here above all things it is important that we should be careful that we understand 1 Cf. the author's lectures on Tim Faith and Modern Thought, Lecture I, where this argument is more fully developed. VII OF PERSONALITY 89 our terms rightly. For we may easily approve in cold blood, when the fact is not vividly before us, what we disapprove the moment it is clearly before us ; when we are used to some evil thing, our critical faculty is very often dormant ; St. Telemachus put an end to gladiatorial shows by suddenly revealing their real moral worth to people who had been looking at them for years. What is more important for our purpose, how- ever, is this, that we may very easily dis- approve in cold blood what we know to be admirable and excellent when our faculties are all alive. The fundamental vice of eighteenth-century rationalism was not its appeal to Reason, which is right enough, but its tacit assumption that the canon of reason- ableness is what seems sensible to the man in the arm-chair. But the man who really knows what victory is like is the man who has just won one. The man who knows what sacrifice is like is the man who habitually makes sacrifices. No doubt it is an abuse of language to call sacrifice pleasant ; but quite equally there is no doubt that the only people, whose experience qualifies them to 90 THE NATURE lect. pronounce, regard it as good and not evil, even as the highest good they know. We are proceeding on the hypothesis that God is the climax of Personality ; and we found that Personality reaches its fullest development in Love, in self-less devotion to the good of others. We are then to make the hypothesis that it is the essential nature of God to spend Himself in Love of His world. Let me quote again from Nettleship's wonderful frag;ment on the Atonement : " The doctrine (or a doctrine) of the New Testament goes so far as to say that God himself gave (and is eternally giving) up what is dearest to him in order to save the life of the world. (Death is self-surrender : all loss is a kind of death ; ' the only begotten Son ' is the summing up of what is dearest, most ones ovm). I.e. God can only be at one with his work, can only make it to be truly his work, by eternally dying — sacrificing what is dearest to him. " God does not thereby cease to he; he does not annihilate himself; he lives eternally in the very process of sacrificing his dearest work. VII OF PERSONALITY 91 "Hence God is said to be ' love ' ; for ' love ' is the consciousness of survival in the act of self-surrender : the consciousness of dying for another and thereby of being one with that other. " How if this were the truth of the doctrine of the ' survival of the fittest ' ? " That doctrine has at present been inter- preted in two opposite ways — neither of them satisfying. " To some it means the ghastly fact that ' force ' governs the world ; that all the feelings which we naturally prize most are really of no avail against this sort of JuQ-o-ernaut's car of ' evolution.' "To some, on the contrary, evolution is increasing adaptation to environment, and they look forward to a state of complete adapta- tion — a state in which there would be no sacrifice, no struggle. " Neither interpretation satisfies the double conviction, (l) that love is the strongest thing in the world — the most living thing ; (2) that love means self-sacrifice, is strong only in weakness, lives only by dying. " The ' whole creation groans and travails in 92 THE NATURE lect. pain ' ; wherever we look, in the organic and inorganic worlds alike, we see change and decay and apparently infinite waste. " On the other hand, we can see (though very fragmentarily) that the waste is not waste. Suppose for a moment that alJ human beings felt permanently and universally to each other as they now do occasionally to those whom they love best. It would follow that all the pain in the would be swallowed up in the joy of doing good. Then go further, and suppose every particle of energy in the world animated by the equivalent spirit to ' love ' in the particular form of energy which we call human consciousness. " So far as we can conceive such a state, it would be one in which there would l^e no individuals at all, in the sense in which indi- viduality means mutual exclusion : there would be a universal being in and for another : where being took the form of consciousness, it would be the consciousness of 'another' which was also 'oneself — a common consciousness. "Such would be the 'atonement' of the world — God eternally living in his own death, VII OF PERSONALITY 93 eternally losing, and eternally returning to, himself." ^ This is at least the basis for a coherent view of things. God because of His Love makes other spirits " to love and be loved by for ever " ; precisely for the perfecting of that Love, He permits evil in His world, that love may be developed through sacrifice, which is at once the essential activity of love, and the means by which it wins its own return.^ Gradually by the Revelation of His Love He wins love from us in return ; and it becomes perpetually more true that Love is the one principle of the existing world, as it is of the world's origin. And if we really believe that Love is the best thing of which Spirit, as we know it, is capable, then we have here a Purpose with which we can sympathise, and therefore a clue to the explanation of the world, the groundwork of a true and final metaphysic. And many would regard this as enough. But we have only shown that there is a * Nettleship, op. cit. pp. 40-42. It will of course be plain that Nettleship's thought is cast in a more pantheistic mould than I should desire. 2 Cf . The Faith and Modern Thought, pp. 134-172. 94 THE NATURE lect. known principle which is capable of explain- ing the world. We have not thereby proved that the world is actually governed by it. In order to do that we must either show that no other principle is possible as the explana- tion, or else that some fact in the empirical world imperatively demands the application of this principle. The first method is clearly impossible, for we could never prove that no other principle exists capable of explaining the world ; one can never prove a negative even where evidence is obtainable ; and here there is no evidence. And even if we had shown that this principle alone can do what is required, it could still be said that this prmciple is as a matter of fact inapplicable, that there is no evidence in the world that it is ordered by Almighty Love. And this after all is the only real religious difficulty, the only one that anybody really feels. Some would say that if Reason leads to a conclusion we must follow it, come what may. It is argued for instance that Reason drives us to the belief in an Omniscient and Almighty Spirit ; that such a Being could not deliber- ately will what is evil, for He could not make VII OF PERSONALITY 95 mistakes ; therefore He must will what is good, or at least the best possible ; therefore, the world is good or at least the best possible. But a man may reply : " If Reason leads to that, so much the worse for Reason : I cannot deny my own experience, though I may doubt the validity of my reflections upon it ; and my experience is evil. If the choice is between Christian Theism and utter scepticism, loyalty to truth forces me to the latter. It may mean that I have no right to apply such knowledge as 2 + 2 = 4 to the world ; I may have to deny the right of Reason altogether. But that is better than the monstrous self- deception of saying that the world we live in is the creation of Almighty Love." Now I do hold most emphatically that the choice for us lies between Christian Theism and ultimate scepticism. And a 'priori I prefer the former ; but I could not press it on anyone upon whom the evil of the world had borne heavily, unless I believed that there is in the world a fact which imperatively demands Christian Theism as its explanation. No one wants to be an ultimate sceptic; if there is such a fact, anyone will prefer to 96 NATURE OF PERSONALITY lect. vii follow its direction and find intellectual rest in Christian Theism. And there is such a fact. The fact of Christ and the Church demands this explanation.^ Our world- principle must be capable of producing that Life and Death with what has flowed from it. We are bound to take it as our guide, our clue to the world-problem. This is not the time to argue the matter in more detail ; but emphatically 1 claim the philosophy of the Licarnation as the only tenable metaphysic. 1 Cf. The Faith and Modern Thought, pp. 56-64. LECTUEE VIII THE TRIUNE PERSONALITY OF GOD We have now to try, ecKora fxvOov aTroBexo- fievoc, to amplify our conception of the Divine Personality. And first I must dissociate my- self from any attempt to conceive the Divine Being "In Himself," if by that is meant "apart from His relation to the world " ; and that for two reasons. In the first place it is only from His relation to the world that we know any- thing about Him, for even the most direct imaginable revelation is itself a relation to the world. And secondly, as He is actually in relation to the world, I do not know why we should suppose we come closer to His true Nature when we leave that relation out of account. God as He is in Himself is God in relation to the w^orld ; God out of that relation is precisely God as He is not, either in Him- self or otherwise. We are not therefore called 97 H 98 THE NATURE lect. upon to handle riddles such as, How can God be Love if there is no object for His love ? For there is the whole Universe for such object. And we are not called upon to speculate on the mode of His existence before the Creation if we do not think that the Universe had a beginning in time. But there remain certain serious problems in the conception of ideal Personality to which we have been led by the argument ; it is the conception of a "Spiritual Being "to whom all time has present value, and to whom there- fore, in a sense, all time is present, but for whom the Future is always the governing element in time ; a Being determined by Him- self alone and in His action always guided by His Whole Purpose, never by any single impulse or caprice ; a Being who is absolutely self-less and realises Himself in spending Him- self for others. It is the combination of the last point with the first which raises the first difiiculty ; but before handling it let us remind ourselves again that the second point, the complete Self-determination of this Being, absolutely fixes His Unity. Philosophy and orthodoxy are at one in requiring first and foremost the Unity of God. VIII OF PERSONALITY 99 But how can this One God at once know and care for the whole history of things, and also genuinely spend Himself in Love. Must not either the sacrifice or the infinity be a sham ? 1 This is in general terms the problem which first led theologians to attempt to formulate the Trinitarian doctrine ; though for them of course it was raised by the central case of Christ's Passion. Gnostics said the Divine in Christ did not suffer ; Patripassians said the Godhead in its fulness sufl^ered. The Church was concerned to maintain the real Infinity of God and the real sacrifice of God in Christ ; and it laboured in various ways to make this intelligible in the language of the time, ovaia and viroaraai';, Substantia and Persona, are not particularly hopeful terms, though it is doubtful if we have any better now. Here then is our first problem. If God is to hold the world together in His Purpose, its whole history must proceed from Him and be known to Him. But if He is to be the explanation and unifying principle not only 1 This only applies to the Infinity of Knowledge ; with re- gard to Power, the Sacrifice, far from being incompatible with Omnipotence, is essential to it. Cf. The Faith and Modern Thought, pp. 149, 150. H 2 loo THE NATURE lect. of some world but of the world we know, with men and women in it, He must be per- fectly loving and must reveal His Love in real sacrifice that He may win the hearts and possess the wdlls of those men and women, so drawing them into the unity of His Purpose. Only so moreover can He fulfil the ideal of Personality. That is to say his Nature must be capable of two types of experience, which for natures such as ours would be incompatible — real knowledge of the eternal victory of Good and real sacrifice and suffering in the achievement of it. We may have a faint analogue of such a combination in our own experience ; a man may suffer for a great cause, which he is convinced will be victorious; but that conviction seems to me a very different thing from the certainty of present knowledge. No doubt the old theologians were mainly influenced by a Stoical objection to the admission of suffering into the experi- ence of God the Father, the 77^7^ OeoTTjTo^; ; and some spoke of the Son as a wholly distinct centre of consciousness, in whom the suffering was realised, thus leaving the Father free from all suffering whatsoever. But this VIII OF PERSONALITY loi comes very near the assertion of two Gods ; and later the doctrine of the Trinity was carefully stated so as to exclude this. There is only one God ; and the sacrifice of Love is made by the one God. But the one God is also the source of all existence, and therefore the author of the drama in which the sacrifice occurs. There is naturally more difficulty for us in appropriating the language of ancient writers on this subject than on any other. For the doctrine of the Trinity was formulated as a means of expressing various beliefs, all of which were held to be true, concerning the Nature of the ultimate ground of Reality, and we shall expect that here if anywhere a change in philosophic outlook, or even in vocabulary, must make a difference too great to be ignored. Even when the words were familiar, they were felt to be useless for expressing the thought ; and now they are not familiar — except one, the word Person, which is worse than unfamiliar, for it is familiar in another sense. Let us at once say definitely that the sense which we have built up for the word Personality is not the sense which it has in 102 THE NATURE lect. the formula " Three Persons in one God " — una Substantia, tres Personae. The difficulty that arises from our language, as well as from the transcendence of the subject, is forcibly enough expressed in the well-known passage in St. Augustine's De Trinitate, V. 9 : " Cum Pater non sit Filius, et Filius non sit Pater, et Spiritus Sanctus ille, qui donum Dei vocatur, nee Pater sit nee Filius ; tres utique sunt. Tamen cum quaeritur : quid tres ? magna prorsus inopia humanum laborat eloquium : dictum est tamen ties personae non ut illud diceretur sed ne taceretur." Augustine is also most emphatic that the three Persons are in no sense parts of a Godhead which is their sum- total ; the Deity in his conception is certainly not a society. " Tantus est solus Pater, vel solus Filius, vel solus Spiritus Sanctus, quantus est simul Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus." (Op. cit. VI. 8.) Each of the Persons singly is equal to all the Persons together. Clearly then the three Persons are not three indi- viduals. So Peter the Lombard quotes with approval from Augustine, cont7'a Maxi- minum, Lib. 3 : " Times ne Pater sit pars VIII OF PERSONALITY 103 unius Dei qui constat ex tribus. Noli hoc timere ; nulla enim fit partium in Deitatis unitate divisio ; unus est Deus Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus, id est ipsa Trinitas est unus Deus " : or again, " Nee hujus Trinitatis tertia pars est minus, nee majus aliquid duo quam unus est ibi, nee majus aliquid sunt omnes quam singuli." (L. I. D. XIX.) Moreover when we come to the conception of the Third Person it is clear that He is not, when regarded singly, a Person in our sense of the word. Here is one of Tertullian's statements of the relation of the Second and Third Persons — " Et Spiritus substantia est Sermonis, et Sermo operatio Spiritus." (Adv. Prax. 26.) And Augustine says that the Holy Spirit is the Love of the Father for the Son and of the Son for the Father. (De Trin. VL 5. Cf. Peter the Lombard, Lib. L Dist. X. and XVn. In the latter it is shown that our love for God and our neighbour is the Holy Spirit.) What then according to these writers is the distinction between the Persons, if it is not parallel to that between two indi- I04 THE NATURE lect. vidual minds ? It consists precisely in those qualities denoted by the name in each case. St. Thomas Aquinas is here quite explicit (Pt. 1, Q. XXIX. Art. 4) : " Aliud est quaerere de significatione nominis persona in communi, et aliud de significatione personae divinae. Persona in communi significat substantiam individuam rationalis naturae : individuum autem est quod est in se indistinctum. Distinctio autem in divinis non fit nisi per relationes originis. Relatio autem in divinis non est sicut accidens inhaerens subjecto sed est ipsa divina essentia. Unde est subsistens, sicut essentia divina subsistit. Persona igitur divina significat relationem ut subsistentem." The two points — the absolute Unity of the Godhead and the distinction of the Persons as resting precisely in their relation to each other within that Unity — are thus brought together by St. John of Damascus. (De. Fid. Orth. 1. 10.) ^^a Tov Trarepa e%et 6 vi6<; koI to TTvevfia irdvra a e^ei, rovTecm. Bia to tov iraTepa €^€t,v avTa, ifKrjv Trj<; d'y€vvr}a-La<; Koi ttj^ vac'; Oeov eVrt: and again St. Gregory Nazianzen exclaims — el fMrj ^eo? to TTvevfia to djiov, decodijrco 7rp(0T0v,Kal OVTO) OeovTco fxe tov 6ix6tl[jlov. (Or. 34.) We thus stand in three separate relations to God ; and these are such that a single con- sciousness of the human type could not be the term of more than one. But we are not so compelled to speak of three centres of consciousness in the Deity ; rather we should speak of a triplex consciousness, for we have seen that the distinction of the Persons is found precisely in their relations to each other, which are inferred from their relations to us. As St. Augustine was fond of point- ing out, we have some analogues of this triplicity in ourselves. Thus he says : " Haec tria, memoria, intelligentia, voluntas, quoniam non sunt tres vitae sed una vita, nee tres mentes sed una mens : consequenter utique nee tres substantiae sunt, sed una substantia. . . . Jam adscendendum est ad illam altissimam essentiam, cuius impar imago est humana mens, sed tamen imago. . . ." (De Trin. X. 11.) Or again (IX. 2.) : " Cumaliquid VIII OF PERSONALITY 113 amo, tria sunt : ego, et quod amo, et ipse amor. . . . (12.) Est quaedam imago Trini- tatis ipsa mens et notitia eius, quod est proles eius ac de se ipsa verl)um, et amor tertius, et haec tria unum atque una sub- stantia." Or again {De civ. Dei, XL 26) : "Nam et sumus et nos esse novimus et nostrum esse et nosse diligimus." Perhaps a better illustration would he the complicated experi- ence of a man watching a play with whose plot he is familiar ; he experiences the emotions of the characters and also knows what they cannot know, the issue of their actions. But if it is suitable to use such analogies as these, it is difficult also to use that of a society. Thus I must dismiss altosrether the aro-u- ment which urges that in the Godhead, conceived apart from the Creation, there must be Personal distinctions, because otherwise God could not be Love. This argument maintains that God is Love, and Love requires an object ; therefore there must be at least a second Person to be the object of the Love and to return it. At first sight, no doubt, this argument seems to have high 114 THE NATURE lect. authority. Some of the passages ah'cady (potcd support it, and Peter the Lombard categorically states : " Omnes catholici con- cedunt quod Spiritus Sanctus sit charitas Patris et Filii." (L. 1. D. 17. L.) But, as Dr. Rashdall reminds us, ' ' to understand the scholastic doctrine of the Trinity, it is necessary to remember that the Love of the Father for the Son is really the Love of God for the objects of His own thought, i.e., for His creatures. ' Verbum igitur in mente conceptum est repraesentativum omnis ejus quod actu intelligitur. Unde in nobis sunt diversa verba secundum quae intelligimus. Sed quia Deus uno actu et se et omnia intelligit, unicum Verbum ejus est ex- pressivum non solum Patris, sed etiam creaturarum.' (Summa Theol. Pt. 1, Q. XXX. Art. 3.) When, therefore, some modern Divines talk about an intercourse or society subsisting between the Father and the Son, meaning by the Son a conscious being, distinct alike from God, and the world, and the ' assumptus homo,' Jesus Christ, they are using language which an orthodox scholastic theologian would probably have pronounced VIII OF PERSONALITY 115 to be sheer Tritheism." (Rashdall, Doctrine and Development, pp. 21, 22 : see the whole discussion, pp. 21-32. Cf. the same writer's Philosophy and Religion, pp. 181-185.) I am not concerned to deny the existence of three centres of consciousness in the Godhead ; there is nothing impossible in the notion ; the necessary Unity is that of the Purpose which controls the world and holds it together ; this may operate in three Wills, which are by it united in a single society ; and such a view is perfectly harmonious with the essentially social nature of Personality as known to us. But I see no ground for this speculation, and it is important to avoid all groundless affirmations. We cannot with safety go further in this direction than to say that in the Unity of the Godhead there must be a wealth of Being adequate to support the three essential and essentially distinct rela- tions in which we know that we stand to God. This is not Sabellianism, for that regarded the three Persons as three Characters, in any one of which God might be regarded ; but we insist that He must always be regarded in all three at once. ii6 THE NATURE lect. And tlie Wisdom of God is shown in tlie Revelation to be the Method of Love which wins its own return through Sacrifice. In one man, Jesus of Nazareth, the whole of this Wisdom of God is seen. It is no part of God that is Incarnate ; for the Wisdom of God is not a part of God, but is God Himself in one of His Eternal Functions. But of course the human consciousness of Jesus, in which this Wisdom is seen, is not itself the Godhead ; to assert that would be to make Him wholly unintelligible, and to embrace both the Monophysite and the Monothelite heresies in their most obnoxious forms. ^ But though I must dismiss the argument to a Duality of Persons, which rests on an attempt to conceive God apart from the world, that is, to conceive Him as He does not actually exist, I have far more respect for the ' I do not think the notion of the "subconscious" will help us much in understanding the relation of the Divine to the Human in Christ. And we are all agreed that we cannot to-day regard the Divine and the Human as existing in Him side by side ; the humanity is divine and the divinity is human ; the former is the Synoptist dt)ctrine, the latter is S. John's. T would suggest as worthy of consideration this formula : the form of His consciousness is human, the content is Divine. viii OF PERSONALITY 117 great Hegelian argument, except that it speaks too exclusively in terms of thought and knowledge, and consequently becomes Pantheistic. If anyone wishes to follow this in detail I am afraid he must read Hegel's Philosophy of Religion, or at least the third part of it ; but a brief outline statement of it is to be found in Mr. Haldane's Pathivay to Reality, Vol. II., pp. 155-170. What, then, shall we say on the whole subject ? The aim of scientific knowledge is to reach fixed principles, according to which the actual world pursues its path of change. These principles are timeless, like proposi- tions in Geometry ; that is, Time does not have to be considered at all in relation to them. But the real facts, concerning which they are true, are temporal facts and are in process of change. The aim of biologists, for instance, is to find some one principle which shall hold good of all the various facts of evolution. That principle will be un- changing; but the facts it is to explain are precisely the changes in the world. And when we take the Universe as a whole, we find that here, too, change rules ; and we ii8 THE NATURE lect want some fixed principle of that process of change. We do not want to exhibit the Universe itself as timeless, and to treat Time as an illusion ; the philosophies which attempt this never succeed in showing how or why the illusion of Time arises ; what we want is an unchanging principle of the actual changes in the world, a scientific formula of the Life of the Universe. And we have it in the doctrine of the Trinity. Thus we have God as Infinite Subject positing His own Object or Other — Creation ; but this Other is yet Himself — Incarnation and Redemption ; so that the Unity of the Subject and Object is complete — Atonement and Sanctification. (Of. Hegel, PhilosojyJiy of Religion, Part. III., paragraph 1, and B and C, "The Metaphysical notion or Conception of the Idea of God," and the " Division of the Subject" (E.T. Vol. IL, pp. 327, 328, 348— end, and Vol. III., pp. 1-6) ; and Joachim, The Nature of Truth, chap. IV., and Mind, N.S. 53, pp. 7 and 8.) But because all this takes place in the spiritual world it must be stated in terms Purpose and Love. The One God is Love, and requires objects for His love ; He makes VIII OF PERSONALITY 119 the world and the spirits in it ; lie undergoes the Sacrifice of Love and appears Himself in the form of one finite spirit in order that His Love and its sacrifice may be known to the created spirits ; by this Sacrifice and its Revelation He wins back the Love of His creatures and so achieves the Purpose for which He made them. All of this takes time ; in ftict it takes eternity. But the formula of the process never changes, and that formula is the Doctrine of the Trinity. This Doctrine in its fully developed form is not part of religion in the ordinary and narrower sense of the term. But the three- fold experience of God on which it rests is a quite vital part of complete religion ; and the Church must refuse to permit the denial of the Trinitarian Doctrine for fear lest that denial should endanger the fulness of religious experience. But ordinary people need not be perplexed by disquisitions on Substantial Relations and the rest, unless the perplexity arises of itself in their own minds. But if we set out to think the problem through to the end, we must, as I believe, reach this conception. As the Philosophy of the I20 NATURE OF PERSONALITY viii Incarnation is the only tenable metapliysic, so tlie Doctrine of the Trinity is the only adequate formula of universal history. Thus we find that this term Personality which we have been considering finds its complete expression in the Supreme Power of the Universe, which is to be conceived ; not as an impersonal system of laws nor as a non- personal experience, but as a Being of such wealth and vitality that if we speak by the analogy of human consciousness we must regard Ilim as a Threefold Personality. R. CLAY AND SONS, LTD., PREAD STI:EET HILL E.C. ANP BUNGAY, SUFFOLK UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY AA 001 123 679 i I i DATE DUE GAYLOKD