I ;- THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES LECTURES AND ESSAYS NATURAL THEOLOGY AND ETHICS HENRY FROWDE, M.A. PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD LONDON, EDINBURGH, AND NEW YORK Lectures and Essays on Natural Theology and Ethics BY WILLIAM WALLACE LATE FELLOW OF MERTON COLLEGE AND WHYTE'S PROFESSOR OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD EDITED, WITH A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION BY EDWARD CAIRO MASTER OF BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD WITH A PORTRAIT AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 1898 PRINTED AT THE CLARENDON PRESS BY HORACE HART, M.A. PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY PRINTED IN ENGLAND. & Wl CONTENTS PACK BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION vii-xl I. GIFFORD LECTURES ON NATURAL THEOLOGY AND THE RELATION OF RELIGION TO MORALITY. INTRODUCTORY NOTE 3 i. THE SCOPE OF NATURAL THEOLOGY .... 4 ii. THE GREEK ORIGINS OF THEOLOGY .... 24 in. THE NATURAL THEOLOGY OF CHRIST .... 42 iv. RELIGION AND MORALITYTHE DEFINITION OF RE- LIGION 52 v. THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT IN RELIGION ... 60 vi. MR. BALFOUR'S ' FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF ' . . 73 vn. NATURALISM AND RATIONALISM THE SCIENTIFIC AND THE PHILOSOPHICAL POINT OF VIEW THE MAIN CONDITIONS OF THE EVOLUTION OF REASON . 93 vin. SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL CONDITIONS OF ETHICS . 113 ix. MAN'S RELATION TO NATURE MATERIALISTIC AND IDEALISTIC VIEWS OF IT 130 x. MORALITY AS CIVILIZATION THE MATERIAL BASIS OF THE MORAL LIFE 147 1326983 vi CONTENTS PACK xi. ON SOME RELATIONS OP MOKALS, SCIENCE, AND RE- LIGION 168 xn. THE ESSENTIAL NATURE OF RELIGION AND ITS RELA- TION TO MORALITY THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY 191 II. ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY. i. OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 213 ii. PERSON AND PERSONALITY 265 in. RESPONSIBILITY 301 iv. DUTY 314 v. HEDONISM 343 vi. UTILITARIANISM 374 vn. THE ETHICS OF SOCIALISM 399 viii. THE RELATIONS OF FICHTE AND HEGEL TO SOCIALISM 427 ix. THE LEGAL, SOCIAL, AND RELIGIOUS SANCTIONS OF MORALITY 448 III. CRITICAL ESSAYS. I. LOTZE 481 ii. NIETZSCHE'S CRITICISM OF MORALITY . . . .511 in. NIETZSCHE'S 'THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA ' . . . 530 iv. STUDIES IN THE HEGELIAN DIALECTIC, BY JOHN M. E. MCTAGGART 542 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION I HAVE undertaken to write a short account of the life and work of the late Professor Wallace as an introduction to this volume of selections from his manuscripts. The existence of a College Tutor and University Professor is so quiet and uneventful, and Wallace confined himself so closely to his academic duties, that an elaborate biography of him would be out of place. At the same time, his influence over his pupils was so great, and his work both as a writer and lecturer was so unique in kind, that it has seemed desirable to put on record the main events of his life, and to attempt, so far as is possible, to estimate the main features of his character and the general purport of his philo- sophical teaching. William Wallace was born on May n, 1843, at Cupar, the county town of Fifeshire. His father, James Wallace, began life as a mason, and got on so well as to become a successful master- builder. He and his wife, Jean Kellock, were a quiet, industrious pair, who mixed little with their viii BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION neighbours, and devoted themselves mainly to the bringing up of their family, of whom there were five, four sons and one daughter. William was the eldest of the family, and the third son was Edwin Wallace, afterwards Fellow of Worcester College and author of an edition of Aristotle's De Anima, a man of fine intelligence and generous character, who died of consumption at a comparatively early age. The parents were simple and truthful people, the mother especially being a woman of considerable energy and originality, and their example had no little influence in developing in their son that quiet independence and uncompromising devotion to ideal aims, which were leading notes of his character. His ability and steadfastness of purpose showed themselves very early. Both at the Madras Academy, Cupar, and subsequently at the University of St. Andrews, he easily took the first place in all the studies to which he gave his mind. His main interest at first was in Classics, in which he had the advantage of the teaching of Professor Sellar and Professor (afterwards Principal) Shairp, but in the last years of his course he came under the influence of Professor Ferrier, to whose lectures he traced his first intel- lectual awakening and his initiation in philosophical study. He did not take to golf as an amusement like most St. Andrews students, nor indeed did he ever care much for athletics in any form ; but he early developed a taste for natural beauty, which he indulged in long country walks. At St. Andrews he was specially impressed by his first view of the BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION ix sea, and used to spend much time in watching the waves breaking on the rocks or rolling up the long slope of the sands. For such a studious youth in Scotland, the Church seemed the natural profession ; and his parents sent him to the University with that object. But after spending four years in the Arts course at St. Andrews, and especially after his philosophical studies had awakened him to independent thinking, Wallace came to feel himself not specially fitted for that profession, and somewhat doubtful whether he could comply with its requirements. On this subject an interesting anecdote is told by a member of his family. It had been arranged, in conformity with the wish of his mother, that he should go to the Divinity Hall in Edinburgh after having completed his curriculum at St. Andrews. But at last, when the day came that he should start, he said to her, ' Do you really wish me to go? If you say the word, I will go.' His mother, seeing that his heart was not in it, turned away in silence ; she was much disappointed, but was too wise to press him further- in such a matter. Having thus changed his plans, he was recom- mended by his professors in 1864 to try for an Exhibition in Balliol College, which he succeeded in getting. At Oxford he showed the same easy mastery of the work he had to do, taking a First Class in Moderations 1866, and a First in Literae Humaniores in the following year, gaining also the Gaisford Prize for Greek Prose, and, not long after, x BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION a Craven Scholarship. I remember making his acquaintance when he first came into residence in Oxford, and the impression of youthful staidness and self-command which he made upon me. In Balliol, owing to his retiring disposition, his com- parative maturity of mind, and his disinclination to athletics, he was not well known to many of the undergraduates, and a certain bluntness of manner, partly the result of shyness, gained him the nick- name of ' The Dorian.' But he was greatly respected and admired, and his genuine kindness of heart and rectitude of purpose made itself felt by all who came into near relation with him. Jowett and Green both had a high estimate of his character and powers, and he was strongly influenced by both in his mental development. From Green he received a further stimulus towards the study of philosophy, and especially of the philosophy of Germany ; and long afterwards he spoke of what he owed ' to that example of high-souled devotion to truth, and of earnest and intrepid thinking on the deep things of eternity.' On the other hand, the intellectual influence of Jowett was more in the direction of Classical scholarship and of literary style, and of general balance of mind. In the preface to the last edition of Wallace's Prolegomena to the Hegelian Logic, which was written under the influence of Jowett's recent death, he says a few words about his ' old Oxford Tutor and friend,' touched no doubt with the idealization of memory and regret, but characterizing the nature of Jowett's influence as BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xi truly as anything that has been written of him. ' The late Master of Balliol,' he says, ' was more than a mere scholar, a mere philosopher. He seemed so idealist, yet so practical ; so realist, and yet so full of large ideals ; so delicately kind, and yet so severely reasonable. You felt that he saw life more steadily, and saw it more whole than others ; as one reality in which religion and philo- sophy, art and business, the sciences and theology, were severally but elements and aspects. To the amateurs of novelty, to the slaves of specialization, to the devotees of any narrow way, such largeness might, with the impatience natural to limited minds, have seemed indifference. So must appear those who on higher planes hear all parts of the harmony of humanity, and with the justice of a wise love, maintain an intellectual Sophrosyne. On his pupils, this secret power of an other-world serenity laid an irresistible spell, and bore in upon them the conviction that beyond scholarship and logic there was the fuller truth of life, and the all-embracing duty of doing their best to fulfil the amplest require- ments of their place.' In 1867, just after taking his Degree, Wallace became a Fellow of Merton College, and was shortly after appointed to a Tutorship, the duties of which he continued to discharge till his death, in addi- tion to those of Whyte's Professorship of Moral Philosophy, to which he was elected 1882, as the successor of T. H. Green. In 1872 he had married Miss Janet Barclay, daughter of the Sheriff Clerk of xii BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION Fife, who, with a daughter and two sons, survives him. The main after-events of his life were connected with the publication of his books. In 1874 he published his translation of the Logic of Hegel (from the Encyclopaedie), with Prolegomena, in which he dealt with the main preliminary difficulties of the study of Hegel. His Epicurean Philosophy appeared in 1880 (in the S.P.C.K. Series of Ancient Phi- losophies). It contains a delicately appreciative account of a philosophy to which we should hardly have expected Wallace to feel any special attraction. It traces the origin of the school, and dwells with much sympathy upon the beautiful harmony and ideal simplicity of the society of friends which Epicurus created. In this work Wallace first showed that desire to realize in all their details the circumstances of the life of the thinkers in whom he was interested, which was a marked characteristic of his writing. It was not that he exaggerated the importance of such secondary elements in biography ; he even apologizes for paying so much regard to them ; but he took very great pleasure in collecting even the least important facts about the philosophers or poets whom he was studying, and in visiting the scenes associated with their lives. Generally he directed his summer tours to such places, and in different years sought to familiarize himself with the environ- ment of Hegel, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and finally, of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Thus, while writing his book on Kant, published in 1882, for BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xiii Blackwood's Philosophical Series, he paid a visit to Konigsberg. The result is shown in the very inter- esting and humorous biography in which he pictures to us in a very lifelike way the surroundings of the great critical philosopher and his faithful servant Lampe. The part of the book relating to the philosophy of Kant is an excellent resume, but suffers from the fact that he had to cut it down so much in order to reduce it to the required size. His next book, the Life of Schopenhauer, pub- lished in 1890, was written in a similar way. It is perhaps the best of his smaller books, and con- tains a very vivid account of that curmudgeon of genius if we may be allowed the expression in which the defects of his character and philosophy are indicated, but at the same time full credit is given to him for that deeper idealistic impulse that runs through his works, and the wonderful gleams of poetic or philosophic insight which he exhibits from time to time. In this volume Wallace displays a very rare biographical gift. I do not know any biography which makes us to see more clearly that the character and thought of its subject are different aspects of the same thing. We are made to realize how Schopenhauer's violent recoil against materialism and empiricism, and the impatient and intolerant idealism which was his mental characteristic, almost inevitably resulted in his negative Pantheistic theory of the world ; and how, at the same time, he was enabled by a logical tour de force to give to that negative view something of the value of xiv BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION a positive, and to maintain that the ultimate unity has a sporadic manifestation in art and life, which it is the open secret of genius to detect. Thus we are enabled to understand the strange alternations of depth and shallowness, of penetrative insight and savage prejudice, of egoistic passion and self- abnegation, which showed themselves in his life and found expression in his philosophy a philo- sophy whose influence upon some readers has been so great, partly because it was such an immediate reflex of the character of the author. Take one passage : ' One may say,' says Wallace, ' that there are two Schopenhauers in the field. Even the meanest of God's creatures, says the poet, " Boasts two soul sides, one to face the world with, One to show a woman when he loves her." Schopenhauer's beloved was no mortal maiden, but an angel vision or was it a reality ? of truth. There is the Schopenhauer of the outward biography, an irritable, petulant, paradoxical creature, plagued by a most unconquerable vanity ; whose acts accuse him of being selfish, harsh-mannered, and sordid, with a history full of trivial incidents and vulgar quarrels ; self-engrossed, dead to the sweet ties of domesticity, and deaf to the call of public and national interests ; sinking as the years passed by into a solitary cave, whence, like the giant in Bunyan's Allegory, he raged impotently at the heterodox wayfarer. Unfortunately in some of his books, especially in the later, this unpleasant self BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xv is rampant. But these same books, at their best, give the picture of another soul, which, freed from the bond of temporal quarrels and the world's litigiousness, draws closer to the great heart of life, and tries to see clearly what man's existence and hopes and destiny really are ; which recognizes the peaceful creations of art as the most adequate representations the sense-world can give of the true inward being of all things ; and which holds the best life to be that of one who has pierced through the illusions dividing one conscious individuality from another, into that heart of divine rest where we are each members one of another, essentially united in the great ocean of Being, in which and by which we alone live V The chapter that follows this gives not so much an analysis of Schopenhauer's work, as rather a sympathetic rendering of its inner spirit ; and the whole biography is a great illustration of the principle that the most powerful criticism of an author lies in a thorough appreciation of the best that is in him. In 1892 Wallace brought out the second edition of his translation of Hegel's Logic, carefully revised, and enriched with many notes ; and in the following year he republished his Prolegomena, so much modified and enlarged as really to constitute a new work. Finally, in 1894, he published a translation of the last part of Hegel's Encyclopaedic, The Philo- sophy of Mind, with five Essays, in which he reviews the subjects of the volume, dealing especially with 1 Life of Schopenhauer, ch. iv. xvi BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION the question of the method of psychology, and its relation to ethics and theology. In 1892 he was appointed Gifford Lecturer in the University of Glasgow, and in the two following years delivered two courses of lectures there on the history of Natural Theology, and on the relation of Morality and Religion. What of these lectures has been preserved is printed in this volume. Wallace had contemplated a complete rewriting of these courses, and also the preparation of a volume on the ethical ideas in the poets of the nineteenth century. But the execution of these and other projects was postponed till he should be released from the lectures of the Merton Tutorship. In 1 898 he would have earned a pension for thirty years' service in that College, and have had much more leisure for literary work. But in February, 1897, in riding down a hill about eight miles from Oxford, he appears to have lost control over his bicycle, and was dashed against the parapet of a bridge at the bottom. He survived until the following morning, but never recovered consciousness. Wallace's life was purely the life of a teacher ; he never took any prominent part even in University politics, though he frequently served on the Board of Faculties and other committees for University administration, and, both in these and in the meet- ings of his College, his words had great influence. He formed his opinions with much independence, and his forceful, and often pointed and luminous expression of them, was such as to lend them full BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xvii weight and effect. He had not a little practical insight, and much of what one might call mental detachment and impartiality, and even those who could not agree with him often felt that his words cast a fresh light upon the subject. ' He was a quick- tempered man,' writes a member of his College, who had good opportunities of judging, 'but never bore malice, was always inclined to think matters over, and, if necessary, to express a change of opinion. He had the strong and vigorous sense which enabled him to strike at the root of practical questions.' And the Warden of Merton speaks of ' the incisive brevity, weight, and pertinency of his remarks at College meetings,' and says that, in discussions on discipline or examinations, his ' desire to be just was evident, and he was not afraid to stand alone in his judgement.' While, however, Wallace did not decline such University business as fell to his share, his main interest lay in his work as a College Tutor, as Lecturer on Philosophy, and as a writer on philosophical sub- jects. As a College Tutor, he gained the respect of many generations of Merton men ; and after he became a University Professor his influence was greatly extended. He was not indeed naturally fitted to be a teacher of Passmen, and in later years he did not take any share in that work. But as a teacher of philosophy to men reading for the Honour School of Literae Humaniores, he has had few rivals in the history of the University. ' Of this, indeed/ as Principal Fairbairn has said, ' only b xviii BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION those who passed through his hands are qualified to speak, and the most qualified have spoken in terms of unstinted praise. It might be hard to some, though to -none so hard as to himself, to break through his habitual and constitutional reserve ; but he was so true a man, so good a scholar, so high and pure a thinker, and so conscientious a teacher, that association with him could not but be to the capable an education in itself.' To exercise his full educative power, he required to be known, and he could hardly be well known except to those who had some depth of character and real interest in philosophy ; but upon those whom he influenced at all, he had an almost transforming power. His sincerity and simplicity of manner, his absorbing interest in the real purport of philosophy, and disregard of what was merely formal and technical, his dislike of sham and pretence, and his sympathy and power of entering into the diffi- culties of a student, even his intolerance of idleness, and the severity of the demands he made upon his pupils, awakened in them an admiration and enthu- siasm seldom felt for any teacher. I have before me many letters from former pupils, who are well qualified to estimate the value of the instructions they received, in which he is spoken of in language that might seem extravagant, if it were not so obviously sincere. One old pupil writes : ' I should think that no one who was taught by him could fall into carelessness or insincerity of thought without feeling rebuked. It was teaching that could not pass away, because it gave one new powers and BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xix a higher life.' Another says : ' When I was in Oxford, I was simply saturated with his sayings, and was always quoting him and writing about him to my friends. I remember writing that he was a Carlyle, but a Carlyle with eyes fixed on thought rather than on practice.' Another says : ' All his pupils must feel that he was their intellectual father a sternish father at times. He provoked us to thought, and his words stuck in one's memory like burrs. I was warmly attached to him, and felt this more strongly every time I saw him.' A Fellow of Merton, who was quite recently a pupil under Wallace's tuition, writes : ' It is extremely difficult for so young a man as myself to attempt adequately to appreciate the greatness of our late Professor ; but an intercourse of two years, and the intimacy into which that intercourse brought me, inspired in me and here I am speaking for all his pupils, not for myself alone an admiration, I might say a reverence, which was never felt toward any other teacher. From the first we could not but feel the utter earnestness of the man, the intense seriousness with which he approached the great subjects of which he was trying to give us some faint con- ception. His method was severely Socratic ; for the first year of work with him he struck us sometimes as stern and hard, as demanding too much ; but we soon came to see that if he asked much from us in the way of devotedness, enthusiasm, labour, and self-denial, he asked much more from himself. To have known him as I did for two years in almost b 2 xx BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION daily contact, was a high and generous inspiration. He had more of the prophet about him than any man I have known, and he was regarded by those of his pupils who could at all appreciate him, with a whole-hearted devotion such as few others ever inspired. His memory is the most precious posses- sion of my University life.' Wallace's lectures were in many ways unlike the usual University type ; they had an individual flavour which it is not easy to characterize. They were not systematic expositions of the subject, as already formed and settled in the speaker's mind, but rather like attempts to realize its significance afresh, by approaching it now from one point of view and now from another. He seldom read from a manuscript, and when he did so, the constraint of reading seemed to deprive him of the freedom neces- sary to effective speaking. His custom was rather before lecturing to fill his mind with his subject, making many notes, and often writing out even many pages of extracts from the authors criticized. Generally, however, especially in later years, he made no attempt to write out even a sketch of what he had to say, but trusted for the expression to the impulse of the moment and of the audience. Speaking thus ex tempore, he never seemed to have any difficulty in finding words for his ideas, and his sentences flowed on without hesitation ; though he was some- what dependent for his effectiveness upon the mood and temper of the moment, and, we may add, upon the state of his health. But by this method he BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xxi seemed to gain unusual power of putting himself en rapport with his audience, and of communicating to them, by a kind of infection, his own vivid percep- tion of his subject, as it rose before his mind in the moment of delivery. His hearers seemed to be receiving thought in the making, and not as the cut- and-dried product of the study. The play of his mind upon the questions discussed, the strange touches of humour with which his discourse was lighted up, the subtle beauty and conclusiveness of expression which he often attained, and, through it all, the gravity and earnestness of his manner, pro- duced an impression which was unique of its kind. He did not aim at giving to those whom he addressed the kind of things which might be useful in the Schools, but rather at showing them how to think and feel. His thought seemed never the working of an abstract intellect, but rather an attempt to deepen life by making it self-conscious and communicating it to others. ' He is never other than stimulating and suggestive, and, in a sense, he was always preaching,' said an appreciative listener ; and it is not impos- sible that the fact that he had looked forward to the Church as his profession, as well as the strongly ethical cast of his own mind, tended to give a practical turn to his teaching. He might indeed be fairly said to be a preacher of ideal truth, and his lectures seemed to be to him an opportunity in which he could free himself from the circum praecordia frigus, which made it so difficult for a man constitutionally reserved, and further trained xxii BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION to reticence by academic habits, to utter himself freely on the highest subjects. * To those who live in London/ writes Professor Muirhead, ' his figure has not been unfamiliar for some years past, when he has come to lecture at Toynbee Hall, or the London Ethical Society the tall and somewhat gaunt outline, the earnest and thought-worn expression, the perfect mastery of material and language, which enabled him to speak for generally over an hour, without note or reference, yet without a slip ; the graphic and humorous illustrations must have stamped themselves on the memory of many. His habit was to choose for his subject some individual thinker (Rousseau, Epicurus, Nietzsche, Wordsworth, were the titles of some of his lectures) ; or if he chose some more abstract topic, such as " Duty," he was careful to attach what he said to some concrete instance ; the lecture last referred to taking the unexpected turn of a vivid characterization of Frederick the Great as a type of devotion to duties of one's station. Ideas were to him living forces, and unless he could show them in actual operation in concrete instances, he had little hope of making their scope and meaning clear V In the published works of Wallace, what first strikes the reader is their literary quality, which is unusual in philosophical writing. His style, with more continuity of thought, has much of the subtlety and refinement which characterize the writings of Jo wet t. One cannot read many pages without 1 Fortnightly Review, May, 1897. BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xxiii coming upon one of those ' Olympian sentences/ as one of his pupils called them, those irea Trre/aoerra, winged at once with thought and imagination, which seem once for all to fix and define for us some aspect of things. And on a closer view, one finds that this power of speech is not a mere literary gift, but due to the fact that he thinks (Platonically) not with his intellect only, but with his whole soul, using his imagination and his sympathies to aid him in identi- fying himself with the object, and explaining it from within outwards. It is due also to what, for want of a better word, we must call the intuitive character of his mind, which led him rather to see the whole in every part, and therefore to attempt to realize it as something with independent life, than to trace out its connexions and relations with the other parts. For, though his main work was devoted to the ex- position of Hegel, the great modern systematizer of Idealism, and though he had, as we shall see, a subtle appreciation of the dialectical method of Hegel's thought, it cannot be said that his own tendency was to system, or to the close tracing of the filiation of thought upon thought. His effort was rather to realize by subtle criticism and sympa- thetic insight the different aspects of the matter with which he was dealing ; and then to gather up the general result in some luminous imaginative expression. His way was to ruminate upon a sub- ject till ' the fire burned,' and clearness of vision led to vivid and characteristic utterance. Or we might say that reflexion was to him rather a means to an xxiv BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION end, a way of securing more perfect vision, and that he hardly cared to analyze or methodize it for itself. He once spoke to me of the ' wretchedly episodic character of his mind/ which seemed to be a strange complaint from one who was always looking at his subject, whatever it might be, in the light of the unity of the whole. But w T hat he meant is, I think, illustrated by many places in his writings, in which he seems to suggest point after point, to view the subject in aspect after aspect, and then to call upon the reader to make the synthesis for himself, with the aid of some striking metaphor, or else, as Pro- fessor Muirhead indicates, of a sketch of the life and character of some individual, in whom the idea he is discussing was embodied. It is in harmony with this that he quite as often seeks to illustrate his thoughts from the poets as from the philosophers. He was a constant and unwearied reader of all the great ancient and modern classics, and he often made a special study of any new appearance in literature. And both in literature and philosophy what he sought was not thought or system for itself, but rather as the concentrated expression of life, the quintessence of human experience. The Hegelian philosophy had its strong hold upon his mind mainly because he seemed to find in Hegel one w T ho united idealism with a more than positivist insistence upon the emptiness of abstract ideas, and whose thinking was a continual effort after the comprehension of the actual in its concreteness and complexity. It is an indication of the same longing to get BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xxv close to reality that so much of Wallace's interest was by preference drawn to writers whose ten- dencies were just the reverse of his own. He seemed to feel that philosophy was only to be trusted if it could verify itself in the most unfavour- able of instances. He was fearful lest his idealism should become empty, if he did not continually bring it into contact with the crudest empiricism ; that his optimism might get shallow if he did not con- tinually drag it up de profundis from the deepest divisions and contradictions of thought and life. I have already spoken of the great pains he took to realize to himself, not only the intellectual atmo- sphere in which the philosophers and poets about whom he wrote were living, but also all the details of their outward life. Wallace's criticism is almost always appreciative, and we might say, at times appreciative to a fault. He was, indeed, not without some of the logical pugnacity attributed to his countrymen, and which made a friend of mine say that when a Scotsman agrees with you on ninety-nine points, and differs on one, he always chooses that one point to speak about. He could occasionally fulminate with much vigour against views and tendencies of which he disapproved. But on the whole he disliked and avoided the atmosphere of controversy, and generally when he thought an author worthy of study, he took infinite pains to enter into his point of view, and even to suggest reasons to justify what seemed paradoxical and extravagant. This may be noticed xxvi BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION in his treatment of not only Kant and Hegel, but of Epicurus, Hobbes, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and others. Certainly the fault, if it is a fault, is more than compensated by the subtle insight which is the natural reward of this kind of criticism, and which enables him to see the affirmation that is working behind the negations of the authors he is examining, and to find out all the grains of gold which are hidden in their dross. Wallace's most important work, of course, lay in his exposition of the Hegelian system. In the Prolegomena to Hegel's Logic, even in its first form, he did much to remove the preliminary difficulties that embarrass the student ; and in the enlarged edition, he discussed very fully all the main aspects of the Hegelian philosophy, giving also a sketch of the whole movement of the Logic, and showing its relation to the other parts of the system. The main defect of the Prolegomena is one which I have already indicated, viz. that while the topic of each chapter is treated in a very suggestive and pene- trative way, the links of connexion between the different chapters are not always fully indicated ; and in consequence the whole has the aspect of being a series of essays, rather than of a connected treatise. This, however, is more in appearance than reality, and to any one who carefully studies the volume as a whole, it will become evident that there are few real difficulties in the subject, which have not been thoroughly dealt with. The points upon which Wallace dwells most fully are, first of all, BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xxvii Hegel's view of the relation of the point of view of philosophy to that of the ordinary consciousness on the one hand, and that of the sciences on the other. In connexion with this, he takes up and discusses very fully the various misunderstandings of what is meant by Idealism, such as the supposi- tion that it is the reduction of the objective world to an appearance in the consciousness of the subject, or that it involves the reference of the phenomenal world to a transcendental world of ideas. Such misconceptions he tries to meet by an historical survey of the transition through Kant and Fichte to Schelling and Hegel ; and again by showing that the fundamental truth upon which Idealism exists, is the relativity of all distinctions. In particular, he seeks to prove that it does not set the object and the subject against each other, or deny the reality of the former any more than of the other, but that it insists primarily on that ultimate unity of all things which Plato adumbrated in the Idea of Good. ' The central or cardinal point of view of Idealism x is/ he declares, ' its refusal to be kept standing at a fixed disruption between subject and object, between spirit and nature. Its idea is the identity or unity (not without the difference) of both. In its purely logical or epistemological aspect, one can easily see that, as Schopenhauer was so fond of repeating, there is no object without a subject, and no subject without an object. The difficulty arises 1 Proleg., p. 193. xxviii BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION in remembering these excellent truisms when one of the correlatives is out of sight, and the other seems to be independent, and to come before us with a title to recognition apparently all its own. . . . The basis of all consciousness and mental activity is an original division, a "judgement" or dijudication of self from self. But once the dijudication made for such ends, it is a mistake to forget its initiation, and lose sight entirely of the fact that the observing mind is also the active, and that the object-self is not merely in relation to the subject-self, but in a higher unity is identifiable therewith. . . . What Hegel, after Schelling, teaches, on the other side, is that the process of sense impression and the manipu- lations to which it is subjected by intellect pre- suppose, for their existence and their objective truth, a Reason which is the unity of subject and object, an original identity uniting knowledge to being.' If, therefore, we attempt to separate spirit from nature, we end in depriving of all meaning the element which we try to treat as an independent substance. As Schelling puts it l : ' Opposing and separating the world of intelligence from the world of nature, men have learned to see nature outside God, and God outside nature, and withdrawing nature from the holy necessity, have subordinated it to the unholy which they name mechanical, while by the same act they have made the ideal world the scene of a lawless liberty. At the same time 1 Proleg., p. 165 ; Schelling, iv. 306. BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xxix as they defined nature as a merely passive entity, they supposed they had gained the right of defining God, whom they elevated above nature, as pure activity, utter " actuosity," as if one of these concepts did not stand and fall with the other.' On the other hand, we must not conceive the unity so asserted as a transcendent Being, in which the difference of things is simply lost, but simply as the unity of experience fully thought out. ' This transcendental, absolutist, a priori philosophy, which stands so strange and menacing on the threshold of the nineteenth century, is after all only, as Kant sometimes called it, an essay to comprehend and see the true nearness and dimensions of the much-quoted experience. All knowledge exists in (not on) the unity of experience. All the several experiences rest in the totality of one experience, ultimate, all embracing, absolute, unconditioned, universal and yet indivi- dual, necessary and yet free, eternal, yet filling all the works of time ideal, and yet the mother of all reality, unextended, and yet spread through the space of the universe. Call it, if you like, the experience of the race, but remember that that apparently more realistic and scientific process connotes neither more nor less (if rightly understood) than normal, ideal, universal, infinite, absolute experience. This is the Unconditioned, which is the basis and the builder of all conditions ; the Absolute, which is the home and parent of all relations. Experience is no doubt yours and mine, but it is much more than yours and mine. He who builds xxx BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION on his experience, builds on and in the Absolute, in the system, a system which is not merely his. In his every utterance he claims to speak as the mouthpiece of the Absolute, the Unconditioned ; his words expect and require assent, belief, acceptance ; they are candidates (not necessarily or always success- ful) for the rank of universal and necessary truth ; they are dogmatic assertions, and, even in their humblest tones, none the less infected with the fervour of certainty. For, indeed, otherwise it would be a shame and an insult to let them cross the lips V Again, if this be so, we can understand that the task of philosophy is not merely to sum up the results of the sciences, or to show the harmony of their first principles, but it is to transform our ordinary view of the world as a collection of independent things, or even of things acting and reacting on each other, by thoroughly working out the idea of their unity. In opposition at once to the mystic view that would lose all things in God, and the empirical view that would rest in their apparent independence as phenomena conditioned by time and space, a true philosophy must be guided by the idea of system a system which does justice to all the divisions of reality, yet attempts to show the organic or super- organic unity of the whole. Philosophy cannot stop short of this ; and if it be said that such system is unattainable, the answer is, that the thing is done by us all, and has to be done ' 2 . ' If not as men 1 Proleg., p. 169. 2 Philosophy of Mind, Essay i, p. 18. BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xxxi of science, yet as men, as human beings, we have to put things together, and form some total estimate of the drift of development, of the unity of nature. To get a notion, not merely of the general methods and principles of the sciences, but of their results and teachings, and to get this, not as a mere lot of fragments but with a systematic unity, is indis- pensable in some degree for all rational life. The life not founded on science is not the life of man. But he will not find what he wants in the text- books of the specialist, who is obliged to treat his subject, as Plato says, "under the pressure of necessity," and who dare not look on it in its quality, " to draw the soul towards truth, and to form the philosophic intellect so as to uplift what we now mainly keep down" (Plato, Rep. 527). If the philosopher in this province does his work badly, he may plead the novelty of his task, to which he comes as a pioneer, or even as an architect. He finds little that he can directly utilize. The materials have been gathered and prepared for very special aims ; and the great aim of science that human life may be made a higher, an ampler and happier thing has hardly been kept in view at all, except in its more materialistic aspects. To the philosopher the supreme interest of the physical sciences is that man also belongs to the physical universe, or that Mind and Matter are (to use Mr. Spencer's language) " at once antithetic and inseparable." He wants to find the place of Man, but of Man as Mind in Nature.' xxxii BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION This view leads to a new conception of logical method, in which the old difficulty of Plato, whether inference proceeds from the known to the known, or from the known to the unknown, receives its solution. We cannot base knowledge on principles which we know independently of the results based on them, or on so-called 'facts' which remain to the end what they were for us at the beginning. For any such principle or fact, as thus isolated, must be imperfectly conceived, and can be rightly con- ceived only when we discern in it the relations and connexions which at first we overlook ; nor can we stop short in the process of regress and recon- struction, of corrective interpretation and reinter- pretation, till we find the whole in, or behind, our first starting-point. 'Begin where you like, the reason of things, if you allow it to w r ork, carries you round till you see identity where you saw only difference, or effects where you only looked for causes. You begin, as the inductive logician, with the belief that the process is from the known to the unknown. You start with your basis of fact, as you called it. The nemesis of things forces you to admit that your facts are partly fictions, which waited for the unknown to give them a truer and fuller reality. You talk at first of induction, as if it were a single and simple process, which out of facts builds up generalities and uniformities. You learn as you go on that the only induction which operates, except in cases which have been artificially simplified by supposing half the task done before you apply your BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xxxiii experimental methods, is an induction of which the major part is deductive, and where your conclusion will be recurrently made your premiss. Your in- duction only works on the basis of an hypothesis, and must be itself linked in the " concatenation of truths," a concatenation which is itself a criticism and a correction V From this it follows that the mechanical method of construing the whole as the aggregate of the parts, and also, what may be called the chemical method, in which the unity of the parts appears as a new partial existence with qualities that have no apparent essential connexion with those of the elements out of which they come, must be regarded as abstract methods, which, though they work well within a certain region, yet rest on a limited and hypothetical construction of things. And they must both ultimately yield to the 'method of development which is the method that is applicable to the full concrete reality, not like the others to parts abstracted from and insulated in reality 2 / a method which ' has to blend induction with reduc- tion, and to start from both ends in the series of causation at once,' and which goes upon the supposi- tion that the determinations of each part can be truly known only when we regard it as resting upon and returning to the unity of the whole. This method ' recognizes in the object it examines a certain independence or originality, yet also the pressure of an immanent law, which does not wait 1 Proleg.,p. 188. 2 Id., p. 214. C xxxiv BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION for the outsider to put it together, but constructs itself as it were after a plan of its own V It sees in it the ' same subjective principle, both analytic and synthetic, as we own in thought.' The object is for it, ' neither a mere thing to be explained and construed ab extra, nor a mystery of sudden trans- formation to be passively accepted ; but a growth to be sympathetically watched and understood understood, because it follows the same order as the movement of our own thought in the process of knowledge. Similia similibus cognoscuntur.' As an actual specimen of this method of treating an object, and working towards the comprehension of it by following its own dialectic, we may refer to the eighteenth chapter of the Prolegomena, where Wallace attempts to deal with the idea of Per- sonality, and to show how the different views of it may be regarded as steps in self-explication ; or to the remarks in the next chapter on Genesis in mental life. The concluding chapters of the Pro- legomena give an account of Hegel's application of this method to Logic itself, showing especially in what sense the whole system is developed out of the idea of Being with which it began, and in which sense the beginning really presupposes the system. In the Essays prefixed to Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, Wallace's last published work, there is an attempt in the same spirit to discuss the value of the different methods in their application to 1 Proleg., p. 221. BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xxxv psychology, and to maintain the ultimate superiority of the method of development. The following passage may be sufficient to indicate the general point of view. ' The vulgar apprehension of these things seems to assume that we have by nature or are born with a general faculty or set of faculties, which we subsequently fill up and embody by the aid of experience. We possess they seem to imply so many "forms" or "categories" latent in our minds ready to hold and combine the new materials supplied from without. According to this view, we have all a will and an intelligence ; the difference is only that some put more into them, and some put less. But such a separation of the general form from its contents is a piece of pure mythology. It is perhaps true and safe to say that the human being is of such a character that will and intelligence are in the ordinary course inevitably produced. But the forms which grow up are the more and more definite and systematic organization of a graded experience, of series of ideas, working themselves up again and again in representative and re-representative degree, till they constitute a mental or inner world of their own. The will is thus the title appropriate to the final stage of a process, by which sensation and impulse have polished and perfected themselves, by union and opposition, by differentiation and accompanying redintegration, till they assume characters quite unsurmised in their earliest aspects, and yet only the consolidation or self-realization of implications. c 2 xxxvi BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION Thus the mental faculties are essentially acquired powers, acquired not from without, but by action which generates the faculties it seems to imply. The process of mind is a process which creates individual centres, raises them to completer inde- pendence ; which produces an inner life more and more self-centred, and also more and more equal to the universe which it has embodied. And will and intelligence are an important stage of that process.' In what follows, Wallace gives a very suggestive commentary on the way in which Hegel follows out this idea, not only in psychology, but also in ethics and the philosophy of religion. As may be partly seen from the account just given, Wallace was at once one of the most faithful of the followers of Hegel, and at the same time the most free from any clinging to mere verbal fidelity. He does not deal much in Hegelian formulae, even when he is explaining Hegel ; rather he is very impatient of such literalness, and never rests in the Hegelian thought till he has reproduced it in a new form, or in many new forms. His allegiance means that he seemed to himself to find in Hegel just what he wanted for the development of his own tendencies of mind. On the other hand, just for that reason, I think his expositions of Hegelianism extremely faithful, and little influenced by any preconceptions. They seem to me to be explanations from within outwards, and less embarrassed by subordinate technicalities than almost any other treatment of the subject I have met with. If there is a bias BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xxxvii in them at all, it is, as I have already indicated, that he emphasizes more the aspect of Hegel in which he agreed with Schelling, and therefore lays more stress upon the presence of the whole in each part, than upon the negative dialectical movement from one stage to another. But this is rather a question of comparative emphasis than of any essential difference of view. In his general attitude to philosophy, Wallace combined a strong, almost unswerving confidence in the general idealistic point of view, with an extreme distrust of his own power of stating it adequately. This arose partly from a consciousness of the complexity of things which made him con- tinually ready to look at them in new aspects, and to reconsider views of them which he had neglected, or to which he felt he had not done sufficient justice. It arose also partly from his high literary ideal, which made him keenly alive to any defect of exactness or refinement of expression. As I have said, he took endless pains in gaining an intimate knowledge of any subject or author whom he was studying, even down to the most external and insigni- ficant details of biography ; and when preparing any work for publication he wrote and rewrote what he had to say, till he was even in danger of losing the spontaneity of his original draft. I hardly think I have known any one who was so much oppressed with the vision of perfection, or rather with the combined and almost irreconcilable ideals of literary and philosophical excellence. This is partly the xxxviii BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION reason why he did not produce more, though it was also due to the fact that his circumstances, and the various claims upon him, rendered it necessary for him to combine the work of a Tutorship with that of his Chair, and also to undertake other work which left him comparatively little time for writing. It is harder to speak of Wallace's personal cha- racter, and of what he was to those who knew him intimately. The somewhat abrupt speech and manner, which might repel strangers, and made the process of becoming intimate with him slow and difficult, did not conceal from those who came nearer to him the deep sincerity and reality of the man, and the tenderness and strength of his affections. And those who knew his private life know what sacrifices of any kind he was capable of making for those in whom he was interested. He was one who hid his good deeds almost as if they were crimes. Generally his innate reserve made it difficult for him to show what he was, out of his own household, and a comparatively narrow circle of friends. During the work of the Term, he often seemed rather oppressed than satisfied with what he could do. But he had correspondingly keen enjoyment in the times when the pressure was relaxed, especially in the numerous tours which he made with his family to places interesting from literary or philosophical associations. He was a 'lover of the meadows, and the woods, and mountains,' who had the deepest enjoyment in natural beauty, and who would go miles to see the first spring flowers and bring BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xxxix them back to his family. He loved the simple and the natural, and he was intensely averse to any kind of show or display. But one could not be long in his company without feeling the in- fluence of his strong rectitude of nature, and of his latent and never directly expressed enthusiasm for that ideal view of life which he regarded as the truth. In regard to the contents of the following volume, only a few words need be said. Wallace was not in the habit of writing out his lectures, and hence some of his best work in later years exists only in the form of notes, which are too disconnected and unfinished for publication. But there remains a considerable amount of w r riting, mainly on ethical or theological subjects, from which I have selected the parts that seemed most likely to interest the public. With the exception of two reviews, none of the papers included had been prepared for publication by the author, and consequently some of them are lacking in completeness and consecutiveness of treatment, and others want that finish of literary expression which his writings generally show. At the same time, I think there is some gain on the other side, especially for those who desire to search into the actual working of a philosopher's mind. There is in them often a certain spontaneity and freshness, a directness and force, which more than compensate for any defect of form. The Giflford Lectures, in spite of their frag- mentary condition, contain a fairly adequate expres- sion of his view of the relation of philosophy to xl BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION theology, and of religion to morality. And some of the papers, especially the Essays on Moral Philosophy, have a tentative and heuristic character, as of a mind testing different ways of thought and seeking an outlet in one direction after another, which will be specially attractive to those who like to see thought, not ready made, but in the process of development. On the whole, they do not seem to me to fall below the usual high standard of the author's philosophical writings, and they show more completely than any of them his mind upon the highest questions of Religion and Morality. I have to offer my best thanks to Mr. Bernard Bosanquet, to Professor Jones of the University of Glasgow, and to Mr. J. A. Smith of Balliol College, for assistance in selecting, from Wallace's manu- scripts the papers that were most suitable for publication. EDWARD CAIBD. BALLIOL COLLEGE, Oct. 10, 1898. LECTURES ON RELATION OF RELIGION TO MORALITY [BEING THE GIFFORD LECTURES DELIVERED IN THE UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW IN 1894 AND 1895] INTRODUCTORY NOTE TO THE GIFFORD LECTURES PROFESSOR WALLACE delivered two courses of Gifford Lectures in the University of Glasgow. In the first course, delivered in 1894, he discussed the subject of Natural Theology historically, giving a sketch of the views of Greek philosophers, and showing their influence on the development of Christian doctrine. The first three of the following lectures belong to this course ; the other lectures of this course exist only in the form of news- paper reports, which are too imperfect and fragmentary to be reprinted. The first two, dealing with the scope of Natural Theology and the Greek Origins of Theology, do not correspond with the newspaper reports, and seem to have been written after the course was delivered, when Mr. Wallace was thinking of preparing his lectures for publication. The third, on the Natural Theology of Christ, was actually delivered. The second course, delivered in 1895, dealt with the subject of the relations of Morality and Religion. Of this course, nine lectures have been preserved. The first five lectures were occupied with a review of the various B 2 4 INTRODUCTORY NOTE iniluences, ethical, literary, and scientific, which are affect- ing the religious thought of the present time, and changing the old dogmatic conceptions with which religion was formerly associated. Of this part of the course only two lectures are preserved (the fourth and fifth of the lectures following). The MS. breaks off abruptly at the end of the second of these two lectures, at the point where Mr. Wallace entered upon an examination of the influence of modern scientific conceptions upon the religious idea. The rest of the lectures of this course, from the sixth to the twelfth lecture, are preserved. They begin with an account and criticism of Mr. Balfour's Foundations of Belief, and then proceed to discuss the - general subject of the relations of morality and religion. These lectures, though they have not been in any way revised or corrected since they were first written, seem to me to contain some of the most original and suggestive pages w r hich Professor Wallace has produced. ' LECTURES NATURAL RELIGION AND THE RELATION OF RELIGION TO MORALITY THE SCOPE OF NATURAL THEOLOGY AT the present time, Natural Theology is apt to seem a belated stranger, if not even an impertinent intruder, in the circle of the sciences. The very term, the combination of noun and adjective, suggests an ill-assorted pair, or perhaps a contradiction in the conception. Theology, firmly estab- lished on its rock of Scripture, looks down almost con- temptuously on the feeble efforts of unassisted reason to feel after God, if haply it may find Him. An impassable gulf is declared to separate the range of nature, which is the field of science, from the higher sphere of religion and of divine things. In the latter, it is urged, mere human reason is incompetent, or, where it is not altogether incompetent, it is altogether subordinate. For theology the necessary stimulus and starting-point must come from above, and has in fact come in the shape of a supernatural revelation. The mere natural man by merely natural means can know nothing of God, and, if he is to know anything of Him, must be directly or indirectly enlightened about God by God Himself. 6 GIFFORD LECTURES [i Questions like these may be said no doubt to go to the root of the matter. But it will perhaps also be admitted that, before proceeding to these extremities, there are problems of some importance connected with the scope of the terms employed. To mark the problems which are under examina- tion, the contrasts of natural and supernatural have to be dealt with. The history of theological conceptions has to be traced. And, in the first place, we must try to rise out of and beyond the conception of Natural Theology which is most familiar to the English mind, the conception which was adopted by Paley and the Bridgewater treatises of the present century. Natural Theology is thus restricted to the study of the evidences of design in nature, to an examination of the mutual adaptations in the physical universe which seemed to indicate as their origin an intelligence ordering all things for a purpose, that purpose being on the whole understood to be the welfare of man. So many and so striking are, from this point of view, the appearances of wise arrange- ment, moulding everything into materials for the use of humanity, that it is impossible to suppose them to be the result of chance, to be the undesigned consilience of indepen- dent agents. This kind of Natural Theology, though with Paley (1802) and Chalmers it lasts on into the nineteenth century, is really a survival of a mode of thought more appropriate to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By Francis Bacon (1605) Natural Theology, with an alternative title of Divine Philosophy, is described as that 'knowledge or rudiment of knowledge concerning God which may be obtained by con- templation of His creatures.' ' It suffices,' he adds, ' to confute atheism, but not to inform religion/ Even at that date the subject was a popular one : on this topic, remarks the author of the Advancement of Learning, 'I am so far from noting any deficiency as I rather note an excess.' Bacon, in fact, seems i] . THE SCOPE OF NATURAL THEOLOGY 7 thoroughly aware of the limited scope and negative character of the remarks and observations included under the title of Natural Theology, as indeed might have been expected from one who has complained elsewhere of the unhappy results of mixing up theology with science. The authority of Sir Isaac Newton contributed, in England at least, to subordinate science to certain presuppositions from theology. In the Scholion Generale which concludes the third book of his Principia (1687) Newton almost steps out of his way to affirm, as against Cartesianism, his acceptance of the creationist theory. Hypotheses like that of Descartes may profess to explain the stability and symmetry of the planetary world by a purely naturalistic or mechanical evolution of an aggregate of material particles according to the laws of movement. Newton, on the contrary, distinctly states his conviction that ' All these regular movements do not have their source in mechanical causes ' ; and in the (posthumously published) letters to Bentley plainly says, ' the diurnal rota- tions of the planets could not be derived from gravity, but required a divine arm to impress them.' This argument is indeed of little value : for it only means that the man of science is unable to construct a scheme of evolution without lacunae from the assumed primordial state of matter down to the ordered system of the present epoch. Yet if we translate the figuratively materialistic language of Newton into more abstract terms, we may say that, however far back we retrace the origin of the present scheme of things, we cannot really escape the hypothesis of a system which even in its molecules was instinct with the presence of law and order. The whole tenor of Natural Theology betrays its connexion with an age of practical and utilitarian science, which, how- ever, had not cast off its religious faiths, and was solicitous to keep the two sides of its life in some sort of correlation. Works like that of John Ray, The Wisdom of Go/I manifested in the Works of Creation (1691) popularized, and we may even 8 GIFFORD LECTURES [i say vulgarized, the idea of making 'the book o nature a commentary on the book of revelation/ The example apparently ' caught on' and satisfied a need of the times. The Boyle lectures, instituted for what is sometimes called the proof of fundamental Christian doctrine against all out- siders, of other religion or of none, offered a vehicle for such reflections. The new natural knowledge, which had hitherto struggled onward on its own resources, winning favour by its intrinsic attractions, received a status of respectability in the social hierarchy. Even as the older Church had given an ex post facto consecration to movements and organizations that had first started beyond its pale, so Protestantism allied to itself the rising spirit of research, and sought to make the sciences pay tribute to the religious and theological interests of the age and country. Among the early Boyle lectures were those of W. Derham, in 1711-12, published under the title of Physico-theology. This is the name which in the more careful use of words is specially appropriated to the branch of Natural Theology now under discussion, the argument from the contrivance and adaptation supposed to be detected in nature to the existence of a designer and contriver of more than human wisdom and power. In 1714 Derham followed with an Astro-theology, specially illustrating the way in which the heavens declare the glory of God. /These essays found imitators in England, and still more in Germany, to which at that epoch England stood more in the position of an ensample than she can be at present said to do. It may be that by such observations the pious Christian mind was enabled to strike up a relation between religion and the other aspects of life and reality. Derham's two works were translated into German by the notable scholar and compiler John Albei*t Fabricius in 1728 and 1730, who also contributed to the literature of the subject by a Hydro-theology in 1730, and the outlines of a Pyro-theology in 1732. The philosopher Christian Wolff dealt with the whole subject in his Theologia i] THE SCOPE OF NATURAL THEOLOGY 9 Natitralis (1736), of which the first volume treated especially of the a posteriori evidences, whilst the second gave the a priori or metaphysical argument. One writer (F. C. Lesser) added three special departments for pious reflection : viz. on stones, insects and shell-fish, endeavouring (in the words of one of his own titles) to show how, under the authority of Scripture and reason, 'by attentive study of otherwise neglected natural facts one may rise to a lively perception and admiration of the omnipotence, wisdom, goodness, and justice of the great God/ Other writers in the half-century preceding Kant's first Kritik dealt with the religious lessons which may be derived from the phenomena of snow, plants, birds, thunder, locusts, fishes, bees, earthquakes. These treatises, long since consigned to oblivion, were not without their particular occasions and appropriateness : e. g. they preserve the memory of the great snowfalls of 1726 and 1729, the plague of locusts in central Europe between 1747 and 1749, and the earthquake at Lisbon in 1 755. Of this mode of bridging over the interval between science and religion Paley's Natural Theology in 1802 is a belated survival, a character still more attachable to the Bridgewater treatises published more than thirty years later. But as it reappeared, it had lost in naturalness what it professed to gain in logical plausibility ; for with the larger apparatus of scientific method the line of evidence grows artificial, and rather reflects the acumen of the demonstrator than the skill apparent in the works of nature. Meanwhile the conceptions of matter and of nature had been passing beyond the phases at which the argument for final causes took them. The relationship of a creator to the creatures as that of an architect or manager to his works was no longer deemed adequate, nor did it seem the highest praise which could fall to him that he had made the best of somewhat recalcitrant materials. The great mechanician is only a mode, and an insufficient mode, of conceiving God's supremacy; and even io GIFFORD LECTURES [i if it be specially suitable to the genius of a utilitarian age, it cannot rank as more than an analogy under which we form a partial conception of the divine mode of action. The problems of the cosmos presuppose for their solution a greater power of adapting matter than human agency as yet pos- sesses : so that, if God works after our methods, He must exhibit our powers in a transcendent degree : such is all that the argument carries. Religion had little to gain by these demonstrations : at least any religion which had real vitality and was not a form of words parasitically seeking to gain support from alien growths. There is, indeed, a natural piety which sees God in everything, and translates every word of nature into a whisper of God. When the devoted Jesuits, who in the early part of the seventeenth century carried the Gospel to ' New France/ write back to their French superiors, ' To live in New France is in sooth to live in the bosom of God and to breathe only the air of His divine guidance ' ; when they say, ' How good it feels in the sacred horrors of these forests, and how much of heaven's light is found in the dense dark- ness of this barbarian land/ we recognize the presence of that faith which removes mountains, where the vision of dominant conviction transfigures wilds and Indians into a rift through which shine the glory and love of the Eternal. It is the same when we find Jonathan Edwards describing his feelings, when sometime between his seventeenth and twentieth years his mind had first been visited with some insight into the deeper realities of life, and he had retired to what he calls a solitary place in his father's pasture. ' As I was walking there and looking upon the sky and clouds, there came into my mind so sweet a sense of the glorious majesty and grace of God that I know not how to express. . . . The appearance of everything was altered : there seemed to be a calm sweet cast or appearance of divine glory in almost everything. God's excellency, His wisdom, His purity and love seemed to i] THE SCOPE OF NATURAL THEOLOGY n appear in everything : in the sun, moon, and stars : in the clouds and blue sky : in the grass, flowers, and trees : in the water and all nature : which used greatly to fix my mind.' Even the more terrible phenomena of nature participated in this new spirit. ' Scarcely anything among all the works of nature was so sweet to me as thunder and lightning. . . I felt God, so to speak, at the first appearance of a thunderstorm/ Even in such immature sentimentalism we can see that it is only the sun-possessed eye that can behold the sun itself. It is the pure in heart that see God : and Pectusfacit theolognm. The dominant principle, idea, love, passion determines the interpretation of facts. So while Charles Kingsley finds it a nobler thought to hold that c Deity created primal forms capable of self -development into all forms needful pro fen/pore and pro loco' than to follow the old view of a creation once and for ever established in its species, Mill is more inclined to see in the evolutionist hypothesis the supplanting of the old creator by what Darwin called 'my deity, natural selection.' To minds susceptible mainly to practical and material considerations this form of Natural Theology, the physico- theological argument from design, has seemed a sounder basis than the ontological method which appeared to juggle with ideas. In Mill's judgement it satisfied the requirements of inductive inference so far at least as to suggest a considerable probability in favour of an intelligent and powerful being as the guide of the cosmic movements, but to be less cogent now that it had been, if, as the Darwinian hypothesis suggested, the same facts could also be explained as the cumulative effect of accidental variations, and of the mutual actions and reactions of all existences. Yet on a closer inspection perhaps it may be said that the real effect of design argu- ments is only seen when they are pushed back to their ultimate presupposition in the radical unity and interdependence of all things that are. Things are not external to each other and 12 GIFFORD LECTURES [i independent : they are not merely brought into affinity and correlation by an outside impulse and guidance; but are essentially and primordially in organic interconnexion, sym- pathetic, interconscious, in a many-sided reciprocal attraction. Its weakness is the tendency to regard humanity as the centre or pivot on which the whole effort of creation con- verges : whereas the human interest is only a relative and partial centre, not to be elevated into absolute authority to the exclusion and depreciation of others. Besides this use of the term Natural Theology, restricting it to the physico-theological argument from design, there is a wider use of it to mean what is also called rational or philosophical theology. Here we come in touch with what has been called Natural or Rational Religion, and with the naturalistic and rationalistic movements which mark the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is not unfrequently said, and with some surface plausibility, that Lord Herbert of Cherbury (J)e Verilate, 1624) gave in modern times the impulse to this free-thinking movement. The thinkers of the Renaissance and Reformation had been occasionally touched by the larger spirit of religious faith. Thus Erasmus in his Encheiridion could say ( Christum vero esse puta non vocem inanem, sed nihil aliud quam charitatem, sim- plicitatem, patientiam, puritatem, breviter quidquid ille docuit/ To him it seemed that inspiration was not limited to the Jews : the ethical scriptures of Cicero, Seneca, and above all Plato, formed a catena of truths not unworthy to be linked along with the theism of the Old and New Testament. It is this 'natural religion' which is an inspiring principle to writers so different as Sir Thomas More, Rabelais, and Mon- taigne. It finds voice in the syncretism of Mutianus Rufus : ( Quum Jovem nomino, Christum intelligo et verum Deum/ Sebastian Frank (1495-1543) identifies the lumen naturale with the ' word ' or invisible Christ : he sees in the historical fact of Adam and Christ only a symbol of the eternal relation i] THE SCOPE OF NATURAL THEOLOGY 13 of man and God: 'Omnis homo/ he says, 'unus homo: vita una et eadem omnibus/ The older Realism revives, and sets the eternal Spirit against the changing- history of the letter. But the oldest example of the phase of Natural Theology belonging to this pre- Reformation period is the Theologia Natwalis of Raymond de Sabunde, published in 1438. It is probably best known by Montaigne's Apology. Montaigne knew little more of the author than that he was said to be a Spaniard, and he is described on the title-page as doctor in arts and medicine, and professor in theology. Montaigne, who tells us he made a translation of the work (published apparently in 1569), speaks mysteriously of the original as ( basty d'un espaignol, baragouine en terminaisons latines/ which seems an exaggeration of the character of the text as we have it. The obnoxious matter is contained in the pro- logue, which has been onfitted in all subsequent editions, as condemned before 1500 by the Index 1 . The prologue in a few pages states the scope of the book. There are two books given by God to man. That originally given was the book of nature, or of the Universitas creaturarum. But by reason of his blindness man was unable to read it; and another had therefore to be given, the book of Holy Scripture. Unfortunately the key which Scripture affords is itself a dubious and puzzling gift. Its obscurity requires in the interpreter a special training, that of the scholar and priest : its authenticity needs to be corroborated by research and argument. Philology, grammar, logic, and rhetoric are indispensable, if we are to make a proper use of the super- natural key to the meaning of the world and life. The case with the book of nature is very different. It is a connatural part of the regular order of life, and can be studied by the unassisted intelligence sine magistro. There 1 The full title of the book is Theologia naturalis, sive liber creaturarum, specialiter de homine et de natura ejus in quantum homo, et de his quae sunt ei nccessaria ad cngn(,scendum seipsum et omne dcbitum ad quod homo tenetur et obliga- tur tarn deo quam proximo. 14 GIFFORD LECTURES [i is no possibility of misunderstanding it, and no risk from forgeries. It is an infallible science which any one can acquire 'in a month and without labour, and it requires no effort of memory/ This is the ' light of all the sciences/ without which they are but vanities. It contains that rule of nature by which a man learns all his duty. And now in the end of the world it is necessary to every Christian that he may be established in the Catholic faith. It argues, in- fallibly, ' from those things which are most certain to every man by experience, or from the nature of all the creatures and of man himself, from those things which man most surely knows of himself by experience, and especially by inward experience ; and therefore it is a knowledge which does not require any witness but man himself.' But before dealing with man it considers the various orders of created things. For 'the universe of things and beings is set as it were a natural ladder having firm and immovable steps by which a man may ascend into himself/ To grasp these stages in their unity is to learn the meaning of the book of the universe, in which the several creatures and their groups form the letters and syllables. Man learns to see his own purpose, his own dignity and duty, by seeing himself as the convergent unity of lower orders of being, the culmination of a process from mere existence to life, from life to sentiency, and from sentiency to intelligence and will in a free person- ality. But man himself points upwards to an absolute unity and realization of all being, a being who is the principle of love, the root of all good, and of an all-inspiring delight. The interest of such a book is to be sought in its historical surroundings and antecedents. Towards the past it gives an echo of that liberal and mystical theology which stretches across the Middle Ages, with here and there a half -heretical thinker taking up the philosophical standpoint of the Alexandrines and of the Gnostics and Neoplatonists. It belongs to a movement which, so to speak, goes on behind i] THE SCOPE OF NATURAL THEOLOGY 15 the Lutheran reformation, drawing its impetus from a more literary, scientific, and rationalist current of ideas ; its basis is not the reference from a corrupt tradition to an incorrupt book of authoritative doctrine, but from all written texts whatever to the everlasting- and unfailing gospel, of nature and reason. It rises, however it may or may not admit this to itself, above the ecclesiastical traditionalism which had been the best-preserved part of the Church's inheritance from Augustine, above the dependence on literal revelation, and while adopting the basis of inner experience, it thinks more of the systematized experience of natural life than of the bare inwardness of mystical theology. If mediaeval theology was determined to understand what it believed, this postulate implied in the last resort the conviction of the reasonableness of the faith, i.e. of its correspondence with the entire system of reality as it had been otherwise ascer- tained. This conviction is at the bottom of de Sabunde's book. It is partly distorted by a certain boastfulness, marking the intoxication of a discoverer who has learned that a truth hitherto accepted on authority is intrinsically credible, and concordant with fact. But, along with this, there goes a tendency to see in religion an ally of ethics, and to find its essence rather in the scope it assigns to our duty than in the knowledge it gives of God as an abstractly independent being. Perhaps the earliest occurrence of the title Natural Theology in Western thought belongs, however, to the system of Stoicism. St. Augustine (De Civ. Dei, vi. 5-12) states, on the authority of Varro, who probably but epitomizes the reflection of Stoic teachers, that there are three species of theology, the poetic or mythological, the civil or political, and the physical or natural. The first is the scheme of divine acts and beings which is suitable to the theatre, the world of literature and art, and its hierophants are the poets. The second is the mode under which a political community acknowledges its 16 GIFFORD LECTURES [\ dependence upon higher powers, and is under the charge of sacerdotal officials. But the third is the way in which the thinker and the man of science sees the great power of things. His eye is not restricted to the narrow scope of the city, nor is it content with the reflection of reality in myth and legend of demi-gods and gods. He looks at the whole of things, at the great system of nature, above the range of art and of popular religion ; he finds the truest approach to divinity in a philosophy that seeks the deeper reality, the universal truth, which underlies the visions of poets and the conventional or historical distinctions which national peculiarities have in- troduced into divinity. To Varro, and to the philosophers for whom he speaks, the two other species of theology were at bottom erroneous, and were only suitable for such as by nature and temperament, or by circumstances and authority, were incapable of attaining the true vision of the essence of things. Yet at the same time it is apparent that he can speak of philosophy as a theology only in so far as he allows the two other interpretations, the political and the artistic, to give colour and form to the somewhat vague and unsubstantial phases of the world-order. It is this confusion between philosophy and practical needs which marks the Stoical system, and which is the inevitable consequent of its pro- fessing to give the world a guide through life and its duties. The old antagonism between the philosopher and theologian is smoothed down into that between an esoteric and an exoteric doctrine, or between the inner truth and the accom- modation of it to vulgar necessities, and popular incapacity for the higher teaching. We may thus learn that, under all its phases in history, natural theology is the attempt at a synthesis of two factors in human life, which at their first appearance and always present to each other a certain incompatibility, or it may be hostility. It is the application of science to religion, the interpretation of faith and worship by the intellectual i] THE SCOPE OF NATURAL THEOLOGY 17 principle, and in accordance with the results of ascertained- knowledge. It may err by being premature and hasty : it may err by an inadequate perception of the fact to .be explained. The science which is dominant at a particular age may be one-sided and imperfect as judged by a later and more enlarged standpoint ; and the result of its verdict on religious facts cannot in such a case be unprejudiced. It may turn itself too exclusively to one aspect of reality, too much to the world of physical fact and too little to the realm of psychical life ; and it may on that account fail to give a due place to certain aspects of religious phenomena which are alien to its prepossessions. But in some degree the rationalization of belief, the naturalization of religion, is an inevitable problem. There are differences in the extent to which reason carries this determination, but it is only a question of degree. Even the primaeval f theologian/ whom the philosopher seeks to dispossess, is a philosopher too in his infinitesimal degree. He may be dubbed irrational, but that only means that his reasoning stops short at an earlier stage than we think proper. His development in the line of intelligence has suffered arrest. Yet nothing is more certain than that a widespread jealousy meets the attempt to rationalize the faith. Not merely natural theology, but theology altogether has seemed to be an intruder on the religious field. The creation of dogma is an injury to the spirit of faith : under pretence of strengthening the living organism, it turns it into a lifeless petrifaction. Nor is this merely a shrinking from intellectual effort, which springs partly from an ignoble preference for the animal luxury of dull feeling and stolid enjoyment, partly from the effects of reaction against the illusions and dis- appointments that have befallen others. The same tendency is fostered by the preference for action, the sense that theological speculation is an unnecessary, and perhaps a shameful luxury, when so much of the world is lying in sin c i8 GIFFORD LECTURES [i and misery. There is also the delicacy of feeling which shrinks from theological dogma as a kind of profanation, or as at best but ' sound and smoke clouding over the glow of heaven.' The deeper moments of religious experience, where the soul is alone with God, shrink from the cold clear light of analysis and reflection. The heart claims for its object of devotion a unique and incomparable quality, which would be destroyed when such object was classified and reduced to the level of its kindred. Yet when we come to think of it, we can see that this protest of life against being reduced to mere logic is exaggerated. What it really implies is a feeling that reason is not omnipotent, a feeling that all our knowledge rests on. and arises by contrast with, an unknown ; that consciousness must be in perpetual antithesis, but also in perpetual correla- tion with an unconscious. We may, no doubt, amuse ourselves with the fancy of absolute beginnings and absolute ends. But in sober fact it has to be admitted that all our knowledge rests upon ignorance, that it always has a presupposition, which it as continually displaces. We may speak of an ap-^r] avvTidOeTos, but we shall be misled if we take this for one single truth out of which others can be deduced by proper analysis, and upon which others can be built. The true method of science is neither a mere analysis (as the one phrase suggests), nor a mere synthesis (as is implied by the second). Analysis and synthesis are continually alternating and complementary : in other words, analysis is only valuable as a step to synthesis, and synthesis involves a preliminary distinction of elements. If it be said that it is the object of philosophy to construe religion, that does not mean, as sometimes seems to be supposed, that it has to construct it. To construe a thing is to set it in its relation to other things, to give it its place in a system, to deprive it of its mere individuality, and to understand its place and value. As has been said, some such appreciation i] THE SCOPE OF NATURAL THEOLOGY 19 or estimate is always made : but it may be made stealthily, blindly, and without due sense of proportions. The whole claim made by philosophy is that such evaluation of the factors of life shall be made consciously and with due care, and not at haphazard. It may be maintained, indeed, that, as a matter of fact, the most prominent and widespread forms of religion have grown up in a soil thoroughly saturated by philosophic influences. This is certainly true of Christianity and Buddhism. But, apart from this, we must distinguish between philosophy as a life, and philosophy as logic. In reference to life, philosophy is only instrumental and sub- ordinate. It is the extension and deepening of intelligence; the translation, it may be said, of the is into the is known ; the organization of the fragments of life so at first they appear into the complete structure which they really pre- suppose. Philosophy in this case means the development of intelligence into a united view of all the factors of reality and life in their mutual relationships ; the correlation of all departments of human activity with each other, in the light of their being but severally parts and members in working out the ideal of humanity. Philosophy is thus the surveillance of the whole over the members, or rather the spirit of the whole, awakening in each of these members, and making them aware of their mutual dependence. It is the idea of perfection realizing itself in each imperfect medium, seeking to reduce the divergent factors of civilization to accord in the idea of life, full and perfect. To perform such a task a certain aloofness is required. But that is what always happens in any department. To philosophize is to stand apart from the bustle of life : yet the philosopher is after all a man, and his philosophy is only a part of his life, for him perhaps the most important, yet in the great system of human collective life reduced to a factor and a share. When philosophy arises, it comes because of felt contradic- tions. It is stimulated by the presence of difficulties and C 2 20 GIFFORD LECTURES [i incongruities, not to say inconsistencies, in the religious scheme. It is all very well to say with Vincent of Lerinum (Common. II. 3) that ' quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus, credi- tum est, hoc est vere proprieque catholicum/ But to discover what possesses the marks of ' universitas, antiquitas, consensio ' is a task that soon appears to be hopeless, unless we call in the aid of reasoning and reflection. A mere statistical enumeration and summation is in such a problem impracticable. The marks, literally taken, are inapplicable : the universal and eternal is not found in the range of sense-phenomena. To find it, we must gradually educe from the facts some idea in which they find their unity, and which again in its turn serves as a standard of criticism. Not that such an idea is found once and for all. It is itself but an ideal capable of indefinite approximation, the organized product of a vast number of less adequate steps towards it. It is not therefore in a wilful aggression on a peaceful field that we are to seek the origin of rationalizing in religion. Such effort at rationalizing in religion is only the reaction from the effects of hesitancy and dispute. The variety of contemporary belief, the changes in the successive phases of faith and doctrine, are sufficient to account for the attempt to give a reasonable character to a faith. But this is not the whole of the problem. There are other departments of human life, and these in course of time develop with unequal speed and to disproportionate extents. Contradictions thus emerge between church and state, between art and religion, and between science and theology, in the restricted senses in which these terms are ordinarily used. It is partly in consequence of such divergences that Natural Theology has found itself in competition with theology in its narrower sphere. It is, and should be, the business of philosophy to release the human problem from this departmental division so far at least as each of these elements of life tends to isolate itself in one-sided supremacy. The antitheses between art l] THE SCOPE OF NATURAL THEOLOGY 21 and morality and religion, not to mention many others, have their relative justification ; but they do harm when treated as independent forces. For a large and philosophic view, morality is a part and step in the great process of man's self-development, a part which, if on one side it is in un- broken continuity with the fulfilment of the elements of psychical life to a free and full personality or true self, is on the other hand building a framework of social relationships, without which religion would hardly deserve that august name, and would certainly not rank as the great humanizing energy it is supposed to be. Such a philosophical view, again, will free religion from the taint of an evil ' other- worldliness/ which often befalls it, and give it its right place in the scenes of daily life and the sympathies of common intercourse. Keleased from its isolation and specious sacro-sanctity, religion will appear as the crown and consecration of an actuality which often in its details seems trivial and frivolous. Art, again, as it releases the tension of desire, and reveals the repose and self-completeness of existence, will keep religion from falling away from the temporal scene, and protest against the absoluteness of scientific analysis. And science, in the narrower sense, will recognize its limitations, and above all the hypothetical character of its constructions, which are after all approximations to the infinitely complex structure of the real, made practicable only through the self-restraint of an abstraction. Such a Natural Theology grows up inevitably as man emerges from the cave of tradition and custom^ and realizes that in him, as an intelligent and rational being, there is something superior to the mere individuality which sets him as only one among the many things of the world, and that he is (in the phrase of Protagoras), in some sense, the measure of all things. Nay, more, it may be asserted that man has never been wholly without this faculty of raising himself so as in some measure to survey and control his environment, 22 GIFFORD LECTURES [i instead of being wholly immersed in it, and forming a mere part to be moulded and altered by agencies outside and above him, of which he has no control. The degrees in which this power has been exercised may range within an immense space ; but the germ of such detachment, of such individuali- zation, which lifts the individual above a mere passive par- ticipation in the whole to which he belongs, seems to be indispensable to characterize humanity. The note of naturalness in theology, therefore, lies in its superiority to restrictions due to special historic conditions. The antithesis of natural is not to revealed : but to one type of revealed, exalted as the alone revealed, to the exclusion of all others. When it uses the term natural, it does not, except in the restricted sense of physico-theology, mean to exclude from its survey the field of history and of human life. It rejects, indeed, the notion of special revelation, if that be understood to imply the communication of full-made truths by a miraculous importation of them into the human faculties. But, on the other hand, it does not, by calling itself natural or rational, imply that it turns its back upon history and experience. It may be that at certain epochs, in a fit of disgust at vulgar credulity and in hatred of superstition, it imagined that unassisted reason could of itself construct a creed. But in so far as it did so, it was labouring under an illusion. There is no absolutely unassisted reason. Reason, on the contrary, only lives by a perpetual antithesis to sense : it only emerges from the soil of reality and life, from the fact of experience : it is experience made more and more har- monious, complete and self-explanatory. Its only conflict with revelation arises because revelation is said to introduce into the sphere of human knowledge and experience a fact absolutel} 7 " unique and incommensurable. Unique and incom- mensurable, in a way, every reality is : but not in the sense that it forms no part in the compass of reality, giving to and taking from its environment. Natural theology, the theology i] THE SCOPE OF NATURAL THEOLOGY 23 of reason, claims the prerogative of man to examine all things, and is but an attempt in a special range of questions to carry out that purpose fully, without bar or check from any specially privileged province. Christian theology is a different thing. That is no inquiry into truth, no free scientific pursuit, no mere theory. It is the redaction into a system of the non-historic and essential constitution of the Church : the reflex of its life-spirit, its needs and relationships, in a shape determined no doubt by individual instrumentality, but by instruments pervaded by a common faith, a historical experience, a sense of eternal community, eternal with an eternity such as no nation can boast, because the church, each and every visible church, believes itself, through and above its earthly manifestation, to be a city divinely founded and maintained. II THE GREEK OEIGINS OF THEOLOGY NATURAL Theology as already described in last lecture has been almost identified with what in the present century would be usually called the philosophy of religion. Either term may be taken to denote a reflective study of the facts or phenomena of religion, when that study is methodically or systematically pursued. Such reflection can hardly be turned upon religion, .until religious facts or phenomena have grown into the rank of obviously objective material for observation. There must be a tolerably well-defined group of performances, rites, cere- monials, sacrifices, prayers, &c., upon which the vision can be turned. Till that epoch has offered such material, religious life, in feeling and act, may have been intense and vigorous, and may have undergone various transformations ; but so long as these phenomena have not been set in special relief, and brought into a certain anomalous position in life, they will be passed over with the indifference which awaits all that is familiar and awakes no sense of curiosity. It needs the stimulus of a trouble and a want to prompt laggard curiosity. Religion must have come to be in some measure detached from the observed : it must no longer form an organic part of his life and being. With the process of social differentiation the several aspects of life come to be more or less strangers to many of those who share in the social unity. Religion will thus have become the special care of a certain order, and present more and more a mystery to those outside the sacred 25 circle. Diversity of interests, and even of religious interests, is a condition for the study of religious phenomena. Here as elsewhere, it is when the first fervour of life and zeal is past that .reflection begins. Theology, therefore, as an attempt to note and correlate the phenomena of the religious life, will have a certain antipathy to the first age of devotion. Religion at such an epoch has become, instead of a common all-embracing influence penetrating life, one interest among many; a memory and a hope, rather than a present faith. And such interest may come either from those professionally interested in it, or from the outsider and the critic. To the former the main work of theology is the codification of faith in a creed. To the latter it may either be a subject of disinterested study, or an interest which he would fain rescue from the hands of the mere specialist, and base upon a wider foundation than the mere authority of a text. In the latter case we have what is called natural theology. The natural theologian aims at widening the basis of faith by an appeal to a wider range of corroborative fact, but he seldom studies religious phenomena in a spirit of philosophic impartiality. He has a special view of what constitutes the essentials of religion as opposed to its accidents : a view which in the main represents the average standpoint of his time and not a result of critical inquiry. The natural theologian of this type has a practical interest : he is anxious to purify religion from what he regards as the extravagances of superstition and to rest it upon a surer evidence than that of a supposed super- natural authority. To such an one the nucleus of true religion lies in its ethical context, or rather in its supposed guarantee of three ethical needs : a God, to make the world of nature co-operative to the success of duty; Freedom, to raise man above the necessitation of purely physical influences; and Immortality, to make man's capacities a match for duty's infinite requirements. ' What Christ did/ said Leibniz in the preface to the Theodicee, 'was to translate natural religion -26 GIFFORD LECTURES [n into a law, and to give it the authority of a public dogma.' Natural religion so understood is the warranty by metaphysical fact to the absolute claim of duty. Morality is possible, because nature is not omnipotent over man by its impulses, nor victorious over him by the dissolution of his body, and because God who holds the keys of nature is the warder of morality. The emancipation of man from the tyranny of nature is the essence of morals, and the purpose of religion is to furnish a creed in which that liberation is guaranteed by a metaphysical or supernatural theory of life and the world. The philosophy of religion cannot have the directly practical aims of this so-called natural theology : its stand- point is purely that of the critical observer who seeks to understand. But the term theology has a further dis- advantage as applied to denote the science of religion. In a strict etymological use, the term may seem either defective or redundant. It is defective, because it sets in peculiar relief and isolates from its context one important term of the religious life. It separates the object or outward projection of religious faith from the faith and life to which it stands in essential relation. It leaves God, so to speak, bare and abstract, withdrawn from the witness of the spirit, and left cold and dead on the analytical board. So left, the object of theology loses its life and significance, and the theological demonstrator is therefore obliged to begin his work of exposition by a task not known in the same way to the other branches of science : he has to establish the reality of his object, which has become only a name, and to prove, as it is called, the existence of God. Yet, on the other hand, the name theology may seem redundant as a title for the phenomena of religion. It is possible that the object of religious life, the objective focus of faith, may scarcely rise to the definiteness, individuality, and stability which would fairly entitle it to the name of n] THE GREEK ORIGINS OF THEOLOGY 27 God. Life may be controlled by the unseen, and what is sometimes called the supernatural : faith and hope may turn from the world to something- hardly unified and permanent enough to be called a divinity. And so, without clear idea of God, there may be that presence of the other world in this, that dependence on something supernal or infernal, which seems the central power of religion. It is evident, therefore, that if theology is to be regarded as equivalent to the theory of religion in general, it must not be confined to one precise shape in which objectivity and quasi- sensible form is given to the powers and influences on which human life is assumed to depend. Theology, as we know it, is a product of Greek civilization. It is a trite confession to admit the debt we owe to Greece. But perhaps it may be thought that it is not in the religious sphere that that influence most obviously prevails. And no doubt it is true that the germinal principle of the religious life established amongst us comes from the Hebrews, and especially from a movement arising in the later Judaism. Yet, for all that, it was through Greek words and Greek literature that the oracles of the new faith, the letters of its first evangelists, were proclaimed and written ; it was through the systems of ethics, and the schemes of virtues and vices, worked out by Greek moralists, that it had to define its relations to social life : and it was through the attempts of Greek thinkers to determine the conditions of truth, and the value of the various factors in reality, that the Christian community had to justify its conception of life, and correlate its view of the first and last things with the conventions of civilization. Even before Christianity emerged upon the scene, Greek influences had come to pervade Western Asia. Not, of course, that the peasantry of Palestine, or the com- monalty of Syria were familiar with Hellenic ideas, and instructed in Greek philosophy. That, if ever possible, could only have been accomplished in many ages. But, at the 28 GIFFORD LECTURES [n centres of light and leading through the East, it was Greek thought and Greek culture that gave the tone to literature and religion. Even in the stronghold of Judaism the influence of Hellenism was felt at every corner, and it determined, by its opposition, the movements that rose up to repel it. Greek was the vehicle of intercommunication between races of alien manners and speech. And thus even on the religious field ' captured Greece took captive her barbarian conqueror.' Even when St. Paul carried Christianity to Corinth and the West, he carried it as one who had been born at Tarsus and had gained some familiarity with that Greek culture; which influenced even the teachers of the Law, as it had influenced the later writers of the Apocrypha literature. Greece, in fact, furnished the mould for the science of religion, just as she supplied the grammatical categories in which the study of language has been carried on. Practical needs led ingenious instructors of Greek to formulate a scheme for describing and defining the facts of language : to create a system of rules for guiding the speaker and writer in acquiring the phrase held to be alone correct in the multi- plicity of practice. Thus grew up a grammar, meant originally for Greek, which came to serve a like purpose for other tongues. So long as the new languages were of a kindred structure with Greek, all might go well : but when in course of time the forms and rubrics so obtained had to be applied to languages of quite other structure, like the Semitic, or the languages of Africa and the New World, the old scheme was found to fail. Gradually this incongruity led to the perception of the need for a new method of the study of languages : a method which should not force the more primitive stages into forms and moulds suitable only for an advanced stage of linguistic development. The analysis of language had to be carried further and with a wider reference in order to fulfil its purpose. It had to find a new alphabet and syntax of more comprehensive scope. n] THE GREEK ORIGINS OF THEOLOGY 29 So in some measure it has been with the philosophy of religion. It is futile no doubt to ask how that philosophy would have fared if speculation on religious phenomena had by some freak of fate begun elsewhere and not in Greece. And if it be an ignoble indolence which proclaims that what- ever is is right, it is a still more mischievous conceit which grumbles that whatever is is wrong. Yet it may not be with- out its uses to reflect that theology would hardly have taken the shape it has done had it grown up under other influences. There is an unparalleled clearness and visual objectivity about the Greek gods ; an individual independence, and a systematic unity in their differences, which sets them in a unique position in the world's pantheon. They need only be compared with the strange impersonality of Chinese religion, whether we regard the supreme imperial heaven or the ill-defined but pervasive multitude of lesser spirits ; with the mystic haze through which the Vedic gods emerge under the magic efficacy of ritual and sacrifice; or with the abstract imps of momentary act and quality, which were so often all that stood for deities at Rome to let us see how different is the atmosphere in which the Greek gods live and move. In other races the religious process had stopped short at an emotional or devotional stage. But with the Greeks the divine power stands out in individualized shapes with clear- ness of outline and definite personality, probably unparalleled in religious development. The conditions of cultus or worship, the prayer, sacrifice and ritual, fall into the background, and allow the object of worship and of sacrifice to emerge in brilliant and conspicuous form, standing out independent of the religious process in which they had their birth. Theology thus becomes a mythology, or, a history and a description of certain divine persons, a collection of legends and sacred tales about gods, who, separated from the religious interest and motive in which they had their source, move about and act with interests of their own, denizens, almost, of the real 3 o GIFFORD LECTURES [u world. The first fleoAo'yot are narrators who tell the history of beings, no doubt related to man, but somehow raised to an independent and collateral existence. At least the religion of Greece upon its higher levels dealt mostly in this region. It is a strange feature of Greek life that a poem so secular as the work of Homer should be said to give us the theology of the Greeks. We must always remember that the poet and this is true even of Vedic hymns gives a picture from a special point of view and from a special level of culture. The works of Greek literature and art reveal Greek life to us, in the first instance, as it appeared on the heights to those emancipated from the baser influences of ignorance and superstition. It is true there are traces everywhere of the lower strata, the basis of common life. They come out in isolated moments, and show the abyss which always rolled under the sunlit tablelands of art. The criticisms of Epicurus and Lucretius on the religion of the masses, though possibly affected by fanaticism, may serve to counterbalance the more aesthetically refined but perhaps irreligiously trivial ideas of popular art. And thus, though the Greek philosophers are not out of touch with the vulgar needs of religion, they chiefly deal with it as it appears on the literary level. The Aeio-tSat/xoyta which comes to the front in Nicias and Xenophon, the foul rites which flourish in the obscurity of antique custom or of modern licence, the freaks of witchcraft and magic, are only seen at faint instants. Greek religion, like everything Greek, was, until comparatively modern times when closer research and the influence of wider anthropological study had taught a different lesson, regarded under an idealized and poetical halo, which separated it from grosser reality. When philosophy came upon the scene, it found the phenomena of religion arranged under two heads. On one hand, they had been to some extent regulated, licensed, and reduced to a fixed type for the community. They had n] THE GREEK ORIGINS OF THEOLOGY 31 adapted themselves to the ruling influence of the social organization, stamped with an appointed ritual and an order of worship and service. In Greece, as well as in Rome, religion was an integral part of the social system, indis- tinguishable in practice from other performances needful to the stability of the political edifice. Religion, in this point of view, had hardly separated itself from the general political problem : the gods were part of the state, of the system of custom and law. But there was also a poetical theology, in which the gods had come to form a group of realities, with a history of their own, independent and col- lateral. Towards this mythology philosophy, following even the more reflective poetry, began at an early period to take up a critical attitude. Xenophanes had boldly accused men of having formed the conceptions of these gods too much in their own image, and of having attributed to the heavenly ones all that was disgraceful among men. Philosophy thus ignored the origin of these tales in the conditions of more primitive life, and treated them simply as regards their effects on the morals of the contemporary community. From that point of view Plato laid down two canons or ' types ' to control the eccentricities of popular mythology : the first, that evil- doing must never be attributed to a divine agent ; the second, that a divine being should be represented as always true and unchangeable in his revelations of himself to man. In Plato there is no discussion of the problem of religion as a whole, in its psychological premisses and its metaphysical presuppositions. There is indeed no one term in Greek which can cover the whole field. Piety (ewe/3 aa) is at one time counted as one of the more important characteristics of the good man : but in the scheme of the Republic e. g. it finds no distinct recognition. The service of religious observance is relegated to the special care of priestly rules, and forms no part of general humanity. But of the political value of religion Plato is deeply convinced, especially, as it seems, 32 GIFFORD LECTURES [n in his later years. The gods of the commonwealth are for him the sign and bond of its social unity, of its vigour as a living and tKriving organism. The essence of their being and nature, therefore, lies not so much in what they abstractly are, as in their significance for the ethical life. So far as Plato can be said to define God at all, it is as the form of Good, something higher than being and than knowledge, something neither to be treated as a mere objective nor as a mere subjective, but as transcending that opposition. If, therefore, we ask, as polemics has often asked, whether Plato inclines to pantheism, or to a personal God, it is impossible to give a simple answer. Unquestionably he is not all things, either as aggregate or unity; for he is distinctly declared to be above the contrasts of good and evil in this world. Here, in this world, there must be always evil : always, that is, truth can only be reality as presupposing error, and goodness cannot free itself from the presence and opposition of vice. For man there is left the effort to become like unto God, in whom is no evil at all. There thus seems to be two extreme or absolute poles, one all goodness, another all evil, between which actual existence is a struggle : and these poles seem to be real. To the modern relativist this supposition of Plato seems a mistake. He recognizes the opposition of good and evil, but he does not believe that that means the struggle of two self-subsistent forces, which come into external collision. He believes no more in an absolute good and absolute evil, than in an absolute cold and hot. Only that can be good, in the real sense of that word, which is not wholly good : i. e. which has in it further possibilities of goodness. A thing is evil which has fallen short of its goodness, yet is not bereft of its goodness altogether. But if we say that God is good, it must be in another sense of the word. Thus the ( form of good ' is a directing principle which draws mankind ever higher and higher on the path toward perfection. It is, we may almost say, the ii J THE GREEK ORIGINS OF THEOLOGY 33 form which Godhead presents to us, the shape in which His presence and power appear; and yet it would be rash to identify it with Him. The essence of religion, it may be added, is in what it is for us. The gods or God are made no better by worship which men offer them. But man by such service wins his reward in an ennobled character. He attaches his existence to the eternal tendency upward and onward. Beyond all struggle, his attainment. Only if we call this perfection of attainment goodness, we do not mean that it is good merely, free from all taint of evil. At the moment when evil ceases to trouble, then the word good loses its old meaning. So much agnosticism at least seems necessary to retain. Existence involves antithesis. On another point Plato touches upon religion, and that is the relation of God as maker and creator of the world. Here too he tends to remove the creation from the direct contact with the creator. The thesis in which he is interested is the rationality of existence, i. e. its unity of meaning and purpose. Here again the essential point is not the act of God as creator, but the wisdom of order in nature which permits man to work towards ends. There is intelligence in things, an intelligence which however can only show itself operative on a black gulf of unintelligence. Only, here too, we must not follow Plato or his modern analogues, if he puts a blind matter here, and a wise arranger there supervening. We must not break up the two parts of the antithesis from their inseparable solidarity. Matter is only for an intelligence which manipulates : and an intelligence is a mere word unless in relation to a matter which it penetrates. Or, as intellect presupposes sense, and sense implies intellect, so mind implies matter, and matter is only so by antithesis to mind. In Aristotle we can distinguish two levels of theology. There is, first of all, the general assumption of teleology in a united universe. There is nothing in vain, nothing random. D 34 GIFFORD LECTURES |_n There are no inexplicable episodes in the world due to violent and chance interposition. God does not interfere from with- out. But, on the other hand, there is nothing- chaotic. The world is all an ordered and co-operant unity. God is in a way to be identified with nature : a self-centred, self-moving system of things. There is an art in things : but it is unlike human art, because it is immanent in the things themselves, and not directing from without. God is not banished from His universe. In all nature there is a source of growth and movement, which in the last resort can only be explained by an attraction a strong love by which Aristotle in metaphorical language represents all things as drawn towards the prime aim of desire and principle of thought. In the very heart of all existence there is a craving for perfect existence, for the fulness of being. Man, like other things, has his place in this order, and a high place : but the higher the seat, the harder the duty, the closer the obligation. The son in the family is less left to the licence of his own devices than the bondman. Thus in the Aristotelian realm of nature there lives and moves a principle which is quasi-intelligent and quasi- volitional. It acts, if not with a purpose, yet never in vain. All things natural have in them something divine. Nature is alive, in eager and incessant motion, struggling onwards towards greater perfection, wrestling with an obstacle which is always present to it. Even without explicit consciousness it is straining uniformly and regularly after the best. The world of nature has thus an indwelling divinity, but a divinity concordant and unanimous with being, and not anarchic, unexpected, or irregular. This view is in sharply- conceived opposition to the atoms of Democritus. Meno agitat molem. Movement is not mere locomotion, but is the path of self-realization, of the increase of being. But at other times when Aristotle is engaged with the transition from metaphysics to physics there is a tendency n] THE GREEK ORIGINS OF THEOLOGY 35 to a kind of materialism. On the outskirts of the material or visible universe is the home of the divine. Far away at the limit of the world of time and place and movement, there is a world of unmoved unvarying 1 being-, source of eternal energy, where there is no void, but fulness of reality : another world which, not by the force of mechanical impact but by the strength of love-yearning, draws to its fruition of perfect life all that in the sensible world is but in the promise and potency of being. Materialistically understood, at some far-distant verge of things the supreme reality, God, comes into quasi-sensible contact with the great circle of the cosmos, and causes to be initiated in it a movement which thence descends through sphere after sphere, till it reaches even this sublunary world and vivifies the things of earth. In the heavens divinity is near : in the stellar and planetary spheres it is powerfully present, but on earth it is marred by disturbing influences. How much in this conception, which has been familiarized by Dante, should be assigned to the twilight of imagination, and how much is to be translated into rational terms, is a point on which there might be long discussion. Discount the metaphor : and to define God as extramundane may mean that He is the key to the multi- plicity of existence, the enveloping unity which gives cohe- rence and meaning to all its parts. Regard the figurative language as the essence of the matter : and it means that, far away beyond the range of experience, there is another range of existence of finer texture : an order of superior beings, yet somehow things of like kind after all. The source of these difficulties and contradictions in the theology of Aristotle is, partly at least, to be sought in his failure to get at the root of religion, and in his accepting up to a certain point, and admitting to a certain authority, the results of the process of religion, the theogonic process. He is anxious apparently to show that popular theology and the worship of celestial bodies has a philosophic value. To do D 2 36 GIFFORD LECTURES [n that, he takes them as objects given, and for which an appropriate interpretation has to be sought. But he is premature in the identification of deity with the unity and rationality of existence. The epistemologist, who examines the history of our ordinary physical knowledge, shows how the things we seem to see as many independent objects, each out in a world of their own, unaffected by our being so or otherwise, are really dependent for their separate existences on a system of relations without which they would not be what they are. It is not otherwise with the gods. The aspects of deity are the result of a historical development : they are for men, not indeed nothing in themselves, but only symbolic of something more : they live in a covenant between God and man. And the conception of God is more akin to ethical problems than to the inquiries of physics. To under- stand the gods or God, we must get to see the place and scope of religion as a whole. Now it may be said that such an inquiry hardly falls within the scope of ancient philosophy. The idea of v who is not also ap^o^evos, i. e. who is not in his own person at once sovereign and subject, at once lawgiver and law-bound, king and commoner. This then is the true or ideal democracy, the organization of the total power of a group of human beings, in which none is merely a mean or instrument of service, but each also enjoys the end of his own and others' action ; in which there is fraternity, but not necessarily equality or even vulgar liberty; or where the equality lies in common duty of service, and the liberty in the removal of all mere passivity. On its negative side, then, democracy is the power and force of the whole body, as against the decided dominance of one or of several classes in the body politic. As so negative, it has an appearance of no direction, of anarchy. But the positive side must not be ignored. And that, in one word, is autonomy, self-direction, self-organization. It is not the negation of direction or government, but its completion and universalization. To realize that positive side is the work of education : and, it is in the recognition of that problem that the promoters of an ethical movement have their place and function in the present as in the past. They are the witness of a feeling that something is amiss; that the order of the world is passing through a change, and that a new effort is needed to set it right, to prevent stagnation 64 GIFFORD LECTURES [v and corruption. It is not quite so clear that they have dis- covered the root of the evil, or that they are on the likely way to a solution of the question. More than this. If we are guided by the analogy of the old world, we may well doubt whether the issue is at all simple and near. Even where only material interests are concerned, it is often long ere the great masses can be got to discern the nature of the needs they labour under. It requires the guidance of genius to show the place of the evil. It is not for everyone to say where the shoe pinches. The sense of the masses is a vague feeling of malaise, a vague disgust, spite, indignation, against something wrong ; but to discern what the wrong precisely is or in what it exactly consists, that is just what the masses are unable to compass, and what their leaders, good or false, try or pretend to make possible for them. So it is alike in material and spiritual evil. The remedy comes only by diagnosis, by the ascer- tainment of the definite nature, the characteristic feature, of the ailment. So in the ancient Greek world, it was not a simple matter to say what was the evil eating at the root of life. It was easy of course to note symptoms : for a little natural inter- pretation in a predisposed mind can turn any fact into a symptom, and a spontaneous imagination may easily add to their number. But the diagnosis of the disease of Greece which Plato offered, and the ideal of the good and happy life which he faintly indicated, were too alien to the ordinary mind of his countrymen to find immediate response. Yet the Greek philosophers by direct and indirect energies laboured a soil of which other people reaped the fruits. It is by no means fanciful to say that the organization of the mediaeval Church was the realization of Plato's ideal, though a realiza- tion of it which was deeply pervaded by a spirit of alien tone. The early Christian writers themselves in their saner moods spoke of Greek philosophy as the preparation of v] THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT IN RELIGION 65 Gospel, though sometimes in their blind zeal they styled it devilish. To us looking at the facts in the light of history, it is hardly possible to say otherwise than that though it was well done, it was far from being thoroughly well done, or so done that it can be considered satisfactorily done for ever. But we need cherish no illusions as to what we can learn from the past. The cry is again and again raised. Back to it may only be to Kant : it may be to Greece, it may be to mediaeval Christendom, it may be to primitive Christianity, or, as with Rousseau, it may be back to Nature. But in what sense back ? What has been done, even the gods themselves (says the adage) cannot make undone. All that historical reversions can do is to suggest that in the onward move- ment something precious had been left behind, which it were well to recover before going further. But the Nature, the Greece, the Christianity we go back to is not in the past ; it is, seen through the arch of experience, the gleam of that untrodden world to which we move. To seek them in the past is to seek the living among the dead. The gates of one Paradise are closed, the Paradise of infancy, of simple hours, of naive faith. The gates of Paradise are eternally open. The ethical movement, as it has been called, is the result of various influences, and is an attempt to satisfy various needs. It grows out of felt wants, and gropes about to find a remedy. It is no solution, but a step towards a solution. Its most obvious source perhaps is found in what some people would rashly call the decline and fall of religious belief. But what is thus called by the comprehensive title of religious belief is only one part of the existing religious spirit and institution, and perhaps not its most central or religious part. What has fallen or is falling is not that central spirit of religion which we found described as conscientiousness, de- votion, reverence, loyalty, fidelity, enthusiasm, and heroism. F 66 GIFFORD LECTURES [v What has fallen is not that trust in the world order, that faithfulness unto death, that joy in well-doing-, that cheer- fulness of good conscience, which made obedience no burden, and service a delight. These things, it may be said, are now seldom seen : but so, it may be answered, was it always. It may be added perhaps that they are oftener to be seen for those who have the eye to detect them than our cheap cynicism admits. What has changed lies in another part of the religious system. W T hat has fallen, or rather what has become un- certain and suspect, is the historical and metaphysical dogmas, the cosmic theory, which have been knit up with religion. In the history of the Christian Church in a way which I endeavoured in my last year's course of lectures to trace there grew up slowly and naturally a creed, a body or group of articles, partly historical, partly philosophical, in which an effort was made to express the fundamental Christian conception of what man was, is, and would be; what God is, how the world is related to God and to man; in other words, to furnish a scheme of beliefs about life and death, duty and reward, which should answer all demands that legitimate curiosity on man's part could make. By those who formulated this body of doctrine, these articles of faith, it was believed that their labours and decisions only codified and defined what originally, in some exceptionally favoured epoch of history and in some peculiarly holy land, had been given forth with an authority more than human, and from a source veritably divine. In some way though precisely how it happened, an unanalytical age barely presumed to inquire God had communicated directly with men and given them a message, in which the true purpose of existence was revealed, and the means indicated by which the full fruition of existence for man might be realized. That message was, as it were, a bequest consigned to a trust, left in charge of a community who, walking by the light of the revelation, v] THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT IN RELIGION 67 maintained it intact in their treasury-archives as a funda- mental document, a title deed to the inheritance. That document is of course the sacred Scripture. But while maintaining the deed intact and seeing to the training of a select body, the so-called clergy, which should be able to read and interpret it, the main function which the Church claimed as her abiding work was to celebrate, i. e. to repeat and realize, in symbolic ceremony, the perpetual meaning of the said message. A system of rites, a series of sacramental observances, carried out in all departments of life the purport of the fundamental conception of life and duty. The aim of the Church was to make each individual feel and perceive for himself that here and now the meaning of the everlasting Gospel was enacted and realized. A symbolic ceremony was by active participation of the celebrant the sign of an inward process. Day by day, year by year, in appointed cycle, the Church re-enacted the deed once done, the life once lived and the death once died, not in vain repetition or impious travesty of the accomplished fact, but in order to enforce by sensible image the eternal and universal virtue of the truth, of the law of life, the way to life which is true life, or, as the phrase is, life eternal. If it be said that this is but opus operatum operari, it might be replied : Even so, always, what God may be said to do once for all, man, the child of time, can only equal by eternal repetition. But with the Reformation, which was also and most obviously a Revolt, a new view of the Church's duty emerged. It was supposed, not without reason, that the Church under- took to do by her own authority what had been done once and for all in a remote past. Not content to occupy till He came who should restore all things, the Church, it was said, had usurped the absent ruler's place, and claimed to rule by right of her own, as if her dominion were irresponsible and not merely vicarious. She was accordingly thrust aside as illegitimately intervening between the soul and its God. F 2 68 GIFFORD LECTURES [v The whole ritual was pronounced to be a work of idolatry. And it was reasserted that not the ceremonial was the essential, but the inward spiritual change which the cere- monial typified. And if, indeed, the Church had so stepped in between, if she had assumed a mediatorial function between man and God, so far the change made was to be justified. If, on the other hand, the Church had only acted in its organic capacity as a whole, to guide and help the faint efforts of its weaker members, the change was less excusable. If the Church had meant to teach that not the temporary event but its real significance was the essence of true religion, if her symbolism was merely the means of making the dogma approach the apprehension of ignorant minds, then who shall say the Church was wholly wrong ? Such in barest outline is the quarrel between Catholicism and Protestantism. It is time perhaps to realize that, like all violent changes, the Reformation only helped progress by accentuating the fundamental issues involved in religious life, as a life in the world. It did not answer the questions it raised, and it imported a new bitterness into all attempts to answer them. At any rate, what happened was that the documentary evidence of Scripture came to be looked upon as all important. The historical record took the place of the Church. The title deed became more important than the estate. Nominally at least, the individual was encouraged to regard the document as a private promissory note, which he could use by the light of his own soul, or by a light privately vouchsafed, without regard to the community. It was not long indeed before the right of private interpretation was claimed. Protestantism gradually and perhaps inevitably came to assert that the whole truth, the whole message of God to man, was contained in the ' Testament/ There each, even the cottager at her own door, could read clear her title to a mansion in the skies. But the fact, which remained unchanged by any formal declaration of indepen- v] THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT IN RELIGION 69 dence, was that the interpretation,, which fifteen centuries had helped to consolidate, remained in its main features dominant over those who renounced allegiance to the Pope at Rome. The quarrel had in the first instance touched only on the machinery. Like all quarrels, indeed, it induced a spirit of suspicion which surmised evil everywhere. But, in the deeper regions of belief, the old scheme still remained in essentials unaltered as the theory of true life. And, practically, in all the gamut of Protestantism down to Congregationalism, and if there be ranges beyond it, the individual never came merely and simply in contact with the revelation. He might see with ' old lights ' or with ' new lights,' but always he saw the truth revealed in Scripture through some common light, a light burning in a community, however narrow might be the limits he assigned it. When he sought toleration, it was often because he wanted to tyrannize in a body after his own mind. With an excusable inconsistency Protestantism accepted in the main, though with slight reservation and corrections, the doctrinal system which the efforts of theologians in council had wrought out of the data of the original documents. Now in the course of last year's lectures I attempted to show that it is a delusion to suppose that these doctrinal systems are merely the pure colourless statement in logical form of God-given truth. In all cases they are a synthesis, a compound product, due to a reflection on the data of Christianity, which was guided in the main by ideas derived from Greek philosophy. They are a mixture of good metal and other less worthy elements. And when I thus express it, I do not mean that the dividing line between these elements lies at the boards of the Bible. The line of dis- tinction is harder to draw than that. The tares lie mixed with the wheat even within the sacred precincts ; and the separation of false from true is not to be made by simply returning to a given tradition of the past, but in working 7 o CIFFORD LECTURES [v and waiting for what is called the ' end of the world/ the revelation of the sons of God. These theological structures were the result of attempts to rationalize the faith and the articles of belief it embraces, and out of them to form a system of doctrine. But such a system could not be final ; the doctrine must grow, i. e. it must be altered and enlarged. Since the Reformation dogmatic theology in the older sense could make no advances. And why? It was then asserted that the real theology lay in the limited words and scope of the Scriptures, and that the creative process of religion had been restricted to the space of a few years. Hence the na'ive process by which the early Church built up theology, seeking to give to religion and science, to faith and art, a unity of scheme and idea, was henceforth condemned as unscriptural and illegitimate. All that could be done was to set the same old material in a slightly different light : but to add to it was impossible. You see the results in the endless series of German Dogmatics. A narrower view of the position was to reject all theology or interpretation and cling to the Scriptures alone. Hold to them, and you will be safe. But this standpoint is untenable, (i) The private inter- pretation of the individual no less than that of the Church involves the application of ideas of human and social origin. Private theology is liable to all the additional recklessness of in- dividual judgement. For individual judgement is what ? The judgement of one biassed by an opinion due to surroundings, to instruction, habit, and all the various mixture of ignorance and knowledge. Always it is the product of class influences ; its roots lie outside its apparent source, it is the work of many causes, necessitated on all hands; and yet it comes forward with the claim of freedom and independence. Wlr freie Geister, says Nietzsche. But who gave us Ceist and Freiheitt (2) The title-deeds themselves are subjected to criticism. This applies to Catholic as well as Protestant v] THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT IN RELIGION 71 theology, so far as it is founded upon Scripture. Yet Catholicism has still the living and actual faith and practice of an abiding body to fall back upon. It has never com- pletely pinned its faith to history and a limited tradition. It has built on the universal tradition of all ages, i. e. really on the essential humanity or rationality of its doctrines. What was the crowning merit of Catholicism ? The very thing which many a modern, accustomed to identify it with the Inquisition and the Society of Jesus, or perhaps with a caricature even of these, would probably deny to it. That is, that in a rough and imperfect way the Church regarded itself as a central and guiding principle of life, to which indeed all other things were but ancillary ; but, just for that reason, conceived it as a duty to give to each of them a place and a function within itself. Hence science, art, social life, political union, grew up as integral parts of its structure. The unity, perhaps, was somewhat roughly compacted : and it only held out against criticism so long as progress was slow or imperceptible. But still, as Dante shows us, the synthesis of life was there. Already, however, in the Cinquecento the Renaissance indicates that disease has set in for the organism ; that disease which consists in the too unequal growth of the several members. And soon the Reformation comes to make a deep rent in the one body of spiritual life. It breaks up the unity of art, science, morality, and religion. And it does so, though with characteristic variations in either case, both for o * the Reformed Church and for the Church of the Council of Trent. But, on the other hand, science in the mean time has been setting itself up side by side with religion, taking religion in the narrow sense. That is, a view of the world's meaning and drift has been slowly growing up, parallel with and partly antagonistic to the strictly religious view. The latter has no doubt the advantage of being a more closely wrought, complete coat of mail. But it is antiquated. The 72 GIFFORD LECTURES new view is growing, fragmentary, progressive, and therefore incomplete. It is forming from different sources, by slow processes of natural growth, here a little and there a little, though it still remains the property of a few and are by them known only in parts. It is chaotic, assertive, and self-con- tradictory a . 1 At this point the manuscript abruptly stops. In the three following lectures Professor Wallace examined the influence of modern science and literature in changing our ideas of religion. The manuscript begins again in the sixth lecture with an examination of Mr. Balfour's Foundations of Belief, and is continuous to the end of the course. VI MR. BALFOUR'S ' FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF ' THE title of Mr. Balfour's book promises to lay bare the 1 Foundations of Belief/ and ' to delineate, and if possible to recommend' a particular way of looking at the world- problems ' a way which may be briefly styled the theological, perhaps even the Christian. The theme of the book is less purely theoretic, and more polemical than its title suggests. It is in the main an examination and an indictment of a modern creed, to which the critic has given the name of Naturalism, and which is, by definition, the negation of all theology. The book falls into four parts. In the first part there is an exposition of some ' consequences/ which in Mr. Balfour's judgement follow from the naturalistic creed, certain changes, which its uncompromising acceptance would involve, in our estimate of the principles we call ethical, aesthetical, and logical or intellectual : in other words, this part seeks to show that the naturalistic standpoint, if thoroughly adopted, would in the long run dry up and cause to wither away every belief in the paramountcy of righteousness and beauty and reason 1 . Naturalism, it is therefore concluded, is practically insuffi- cient. The second part, under the title of Some Reasons for 1 The book, perhaps by an oversight, describes this part as ' Some Consequences of Belief ' ; it really treats of ' Presumable Consequences of the Naturalistic Creed.' 74 GIFFORD LECTURES [vi Relief, carries us to a point of outlook from which we can, at a proper distance, survey the philosophers, the men of sound common sense, and the professional theologians, at their work of providing a rationale for a, or their, or the creed. First of all and that from respect to their ' formidable following ' come the Naturalistic Empiricists. By that name is meant those who, in the first place, attempt to provide a theory which may show on what the certainty and stability of the sciences rest, a task in which they have failed ( c such/ remarks Mr. Balfour, ' is after all the common lot of philosophies ') ; and who, in the second place, disguising or ignoring their failure, have, under cover of the successes of the sciences which they profess to explain, contrived to foist upon the blatant part of the world a theory of life and of all reality, which is no necessary concomitant or part of genuine science, and which at once fails to satisfy the conscience, and violates the coherence of reason. In a second rank, as befits their scanty numbers, and their foreign origin (for their utterances, made English out of German, are such no ' ordinary Englishman will consent to assimilate '), come the Idealists. ' Very remote, indeed, from ordinary modes of expression/ the doctrines of these ( Idealists/ or, as they are often doubly dubbed in the text, ( Transcendental Idealists/ are for the general reader's sake veiled in a chapter in smaller type, which he is recom- mended to omit. For the present it need only be said that under this head are weighed and found wanting certain views, more or less attachable to Kant and T. H. Green; the net result of the criticism being that these views have their natural outcome in Solipsism, the theory that ' in the infinite variety of the universe there is room for but one knowing subject, and that for each one of us severally this subject is "him- self/^ Such a conclusion, so obviously inconsistent with science, morality, and common sense, seems indeed to justify the place given to ' transcendental idealism ' on Mr. Balfour's index expnrgatorius. Behind these Metaphysicians who are vi] MR. BALFOUR'S' FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF' 75 poets of the abstract and supersensible, but to be sure, poets with a difference (for it cannot often be said that the product of their labours is a ' thing of beauty '}, come as third line of array, the troop of Rationalists. These, otherwise known as champions of common sense or enlightenment, are not, as such, philosophers: they, indeed, ignore, if they do not despise, metaphysics. They judge as men of the world, and test every belief by one touchstone : they ask, of every article of any creed, does it 'square with the view of the universe based exclusively upon the prevalent mode of interpreting sense-perception ' ? Rationalism, in short, is the method which, in an age where the physical sciences have a pre- ponderating eclat, inevitably leads to Naturalism. It is ' Naturalism in embryo/ And its right to the name Rationalism is based on its carrying out at least that principal function of reason, which is to smooth away con- tradiction, to remove inconsistencies. Lastly, as a fourth group, with its own attitude to the problem of belief, comes the band labelled ' Rationalist Orthodoxy/ Here muster the Natural Theologians, who make theology c a mere annex or appendix to science, a mere footnote to history ' ; or who, in other words, profess, by an extension of physical methods and the evidence of historical fact, to read God's word in the rocks, in the struggles of animated life, and in the course of civilization. The doom of Natural Theology is written : it has appealed to natural science, but it is not by the method of science that it can ( break out of the naturalistic prison-house/ The third part propounds ' Some Causes of Belief/ It supposes us to take the position of an observer from another planet ( who, in a spirit of detached curiosity/ surveys beliefs from the outside, so as to find out the place they occupy in the natural history of the earth and its inhabitants. The task of this observer is, it may be suggested, by no means easy, not to say impossible: but let that pass. With a penetrative power such as archangel cannot match, he sees 76 GIFFORD LECTURES [vi where it exists (in certain vital forms) the correspondence of neural change and psychic event : he sees the beliefs of external things with their order in time and place forming in the indi- vidual mind. But he soon discovers that other influences than those of the physiological structure of the individual man are at work in forming the individual's creed. Man's beliefs are not all on one level : they rise in a kind of hierarchy. And to explain such of them as are connected with the higher scientific, social and spiritual life of the race, there is needed something more than physiological structure : an appropriate environment is required. In that environment one group of causes influ- encing these higher beliefs is specially selected for notice. This group is named briefly Authority. To fix its place and function, according to Mr. Balfour's estimate of it, we need only note that it is styled the c rival and opponent ' of reason. It ' stands for that group of non-rational causes, moral, social, and educational, which produces its results by psychic processes other than reasoning/ To Authority we owe the order and stability of the moral world : by it the efforts of reason to rationalize are l coerced to a fore-ordained issue ' : throughout the whole course of history its part in producing belief is immense, inevitable, and, on the whole, beneficent: it is through it that are generated ' psychological climates/ i. e. general and irresistible habits of belief of which reason is but the dupe or the captive. Even ' rationalism ' itself rules those whom it rules, not by its reasonableness, but as a mood and a fashion of the set, the age, or the place. Political ( loyalty ' is one of the most valuable products of authority. The believer, it is true, will often attempt by reason to justify his faith ; and in the causes which, as a matter of fact, have generated it, he will profess to discover reasons which legitimate it. But in so doing, he is the victim of an illusion which he would be the first to condemn in others. ' It is from Authority that Reason itself draws its most im- portant premises/ 'It is Authority rather than Reason to vi] MR. BALFOUR'S < FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF 1 77 which in the main we owe not religion only, but ethics and polities'; and not these only, but the essential elements of the premises of science, and the foundations and the super- structure of social life. And, on the other side, we are reminded, that ' reasoning is a force most apt to divide and disintegrate/ The fourth part offers ' Suggestions towards a Provisional Philosophy/ i. e. towards the ' unification of all belief into an ordered whole, compacted into one coherent structure under the stress of reason/ Of these various and heterogeneous beliefs, certain, viz. those about the world of phenomena, the so-called material world, possess a peculiar prominence ; for they seem inevitable and universal to a degree to which no others can lay claim. But from the view of reflective reason this pre-eminence is ' irrelevant/ The omnipresence of the material world in our habitual moods is the product of an irrational coercion ; it is forced upon us by the elementary necessities of life, bred from infancy into our very flesh and bone. The universality and necessity of oiir beliefs in the reality of the material world cannot, therefore, confer on these beliefs superiority of rank or dignity. The needs which a scheme of belief must reasonably satisfy are not merely those which we ' share with our brute progenitors/ It is on this gradation of beliefs that the whole question hinges. The postulate underlying all beliefs about ( phenomena/ as well as about things other than what are ordinarily called phe- nomena, is a ' harmony between our inner selves and the universe of which we form a part ' ; a correspondence not partial, but complete, between our essential selves and the eternal reality of things. It is the assumption that the human consciousness in its fundamental character, its essential requirements, strikes a note which is answered in complex harmony by the deepest heart in the ordered frame of the universe. At this point Mr. Balfour interpolates some remarks on the 78 G1FFORD LECTURES [vi relation between beliefs and formulas especially in theology. There, as he puts it, ' the explanation and the thing explained are mutually dependent/ The abandonment of a theory which formulates a religious experience often carries with it, to popular apprehension, the negation of the fact on which it is based. It is as if gravitation would cease to act, should the gravitation theory be shaken. But there is another point which gives a special character to the theological formula. That formula is not merely a statement of theoretical agree- ment : it is the index and the support of the unity of an associated organization. Hence an alteration in the creed tends to draw with it a revolution in the corporate life. And even while the formula remains to outward appearance the same, its inner meaning is almost certainly undergoing a continuous and hardly perceptible change. The words of it no longer are answered in those who repeat it by the thoughts which they once awakened. And in any case the thoughts themselves are, at the best, but inadequate repre- sentations and expressions of the one all-embracing reality, be that reality in the last resort what it may. ' What kind of a universe/ cries Mr. Balfour, ' would that be which we could understand ?' It may be exaggeration to say that the very absurdity and impossibility of a dogma are the best witness to its truth ; but at any rate an excess of simplicity in a theory is always a good ground for preliminary suspicion. These distinctions the distinction between the two functions of formulas as expositions of doctrine and as a basis for common action, and again the distinction between the formal precision of formulas as modes of expression, and the material reality of the belief they shadow forth may serve to moderate our demands upon formulas and our criticism on their imperfec- tions. They suggest how difficult it is to determine that element in doctrine or dogma or belief which may be truly styled immutable, which amid all variations of formula and vi] MR. BALFOUR'S 'FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF 1 79 explanation may be regarded as the ark of truth, the veritas vere catholica enshrined and hidden in formulas. What these 'immutable doctrines' are, Mr. Balfour does not take upon himself to say. But that there are such propositions, charged no doubt in course of time and progress of knowledge with richer and richer content, 'propositions about the real world capable of ministering unchanged for indefinite periods to the uses of Mankind/ inalienable Krr;/xara es act, is what he is concerned to asseverate. The fourth chapter of this part is of the nature of an arffvmentttm ad kominem. It is addressed to those who, while ready enough to admit or insist upon the radical inadequacy of all theological formulae, are under the fixed impression that scientific statements bring us face to face with supreme reality and touch the very foundation of things. By a few pertinent questions, e. g. as to what is a ' thing/ and by some deeper probing of Mr. Spencer's admissions as to 'ultimate scientific ideas/ Mr. Balfour urges the inference that, if we cannot clearly make out even what is a 'thing/ it is not wonderful that we should come short in our knowledge of God ; and that, if the basis of physical uniformity is admitted to be a puzzle, some obscurity is not a wholly intolerable offence in theories about the basis of moral law. Science cannot solve all riddles. It cannot, as represented by its theoretical exponents, even justify its own premises. But it has its place. It is not, indeed, as Naturalism sup- poses, the possessor and standard of all truth and reality, but it is a province and an important one, co-operating with others in the revelation of the one reality. These provinces, physical science, ethics, aesthetics and theology, are (each in its measure and kind) ' the expression of a reality beyond our reach, the half-seen vision of transcendent truth'; and the problem of philosophy is (with all its powers, be they what they may) 'to harmonize the detached hints and isolated fragments in which alone Reality comes into relation to us/ 8o GIFFORD LECTURES [vi We have, however, not done with ' Naturalism/ It has to sustain another and a closer assault. The early chapters showed how utterly insufficient was its explanation of morality and beauty to justify the place these hitherto have held in the scheme of life. But, at the present stage, the point is, that ' Naturalism ' is inconsistent with the very implication or presupposition of knowledge itself. If Naturalism is to be our ultimate creed, science or knowledge is a mere accident in the course of evolution, a chance product in the development of matter, with no claim, or at least no right, to be judged as true or false. No doubt, if the ordinary assumptions of Evolutionism are correct, ' knowledge/ since it actually exists, (only how can it be entitled to the implications of the term knowledge?) must have been advantageous to its possessors, a useful weapon in the war of world-evolution. But the rank of a critic of life or a theorist of ultimate truth it must sur- render : for these, by its naturalistic genesis, it possesses no competence. Only on one hypothesis can we emerge from these abysses. And that hypothesis is that, above and embracing us and the world, there is Being, Reality, through whom if is intelligible and we are intelligent. And if it be said that we cannot form any conception of how this one reality, this transcendently true, stands to us and the world how it, so to say, interferes in things the retort is easy. No more can we tell how soul acts on matter or matter on soul. Every self is in its turn a creator in the world, endowed with a creative faculty which, from the purely naturalistic point of view, is inexplicable. Nor merely from the naturalistic point of view. Mr. Balfour equally on his own part acquiesces in f the existence of an unsolved difficulty/ The problem how man can be an agent, in tautological phrase, a free agent, is a real difficulty in psychology : but it is certainly not less intractable there than it is in theology. Science then cannot maintain its claim to be true, to be vi] MR. BALFOUR'S ' FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF' 81 knowledge of reality, without postulating the idea of some- thing not less real, which is the harmony of mind and the world ; or, if we may borrow the language of another philosophy, the identity (or unity) of subject and object. It does not of course follow that this quasi-scientific Deity is the God of religion. Yet compatible or connected the idea in both departments must be, if the problem of philo- sophy is to be solved, if science and religion are to be co- ordinated. The incompatibility between the two departments is sup- posed to show itself most acutely in regard to the question of Miracles. These are understood to be at variance with the scientific principle of the Uniformity of Nature. Here Mr. Balfour, retracing the ground of his former book, urges that the uniformity of Nature is a fine-sounding but some- what nebulous phrase, and that laws are not more than abstractions formed for scientific purposes. He urges, what is more obvious, that the modern definition of a miracle, if definition that may be called which practically negatives the existence of the definiendum, is entirely foreign to the epoch of organic religious life, and implies a division between the natural and something else, perhaps spiritual, which is no less strange to the religious consciousness. Nor is it possible to lay down canons generally acceptable as to what con- stitutes a wonder : for these can only be based on a prior determination of the whole meaning and scope of things, and that ex liypothesi is not in existence. If again a miracle be said to imply the ( special action of God/ a special providence, or, in general, a ' preferential exercise of divine power,' it may be noted that such ' pre- ferential action ' seems an almost invariable presupposition of religion, and not a mode confined to special times or places. If so, at what point can we draw the limit to the range of its operation ? And, on the other side, with what right dare we represent the universal God as entering into more intimate G 82 GIFFORD LECTURES [vi relation with one part of creation than another ? We seem shut up in an antinomy between God as alike near to all, and as specially close to each. Nor is this a matter for religion alone. Ethics also seems to lose grip, if God is regarded as indifferent, or, still worse, as malevolent. An immoral or an indifferent God must in the long run render ethics impossible. It would seem then that, if we assume that God is, ethics and religion require us to believe or postulate that he enters into special relations with individuals and nations ; and evolution, as sometimes interpreted, suggests that the frame of things is an ' economy/ a work carrying out step by step a purpose, a striving towards something yet to be. In short, whereas, according to a naturalistic creed, scientific, ethical, and aesthetic beliefs are simply the products of phenomenal causes or sources, non-rational, non-ethical, non- aesthetic ; the truth rather is that we can only restore the balance between cause and effect, can only get a real reason for the alleged result, by postulating behind these non-rational and non-moral forces a rational and moral God. Nor is the beautiful in a position different from that of truth and morals. Beauty may be no ' objective ' fact, as the phrase has it : still, here too, we may and must believe that ' in the thrill of some deep emotion we have for an instant caught a far-off reflection of divine beauty/ Religion too ceases, on the same postulate, to be a mere psychological phenomenon of the naturalistically conceived individual. ' Mankind have almost always claimed for their beliefs about God that they were due to God ' : or, the cause of religion must be something adequate to the given effect. And, if that be so, the distinction between the sphere of the natural and the sphere of the supernatural must be broken down. The effort, by which the human soul rises and grows in wisdom, goodness, and truth, is unintelligible without a counter-process, the process by which God continually communicates himself to man. ' Unassisted reason is a fiction/ vi] MR. BALFOUR'S 'FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF' 83 All progress is the product of two factors, a divine influence and a human effort. In other words, ' Inspiration ' (if the divine co-operation with humanity is to be so called) ' is limited to no age, to no country, to no people/ ' Let us not/ says Mr. Balfour, ' give colour to the opinion that God's assistance to mankind has been narrowed down to the sources, however unique, from which we immediately and consciously draw our own spiritual nourishment/ Can we then judge between the conflicting for conflicting in many, though not all or perhaps even most, ways they are can we judge between the conflicting claims of various religions to authority over the lives and consciences of men ? Or, putting the practical and immediate question which comes first to the occidental, by what criteria shall we determine the claim of Christianity to take precedence of a general Theism, which speaks of God only as the one supreme Reality or Transcendent Truth? The criterion, says Mr. Balfour, is found in the degree in which a religion ' ministers to our ethical needs.' What are these ethical needs ? ' They are the aspirations and ideals which inspire conduct; they include, above all, harmony between the interests of the individual and those of the community/ And that harmony, urges Mr. Balfour, can be perfectly secured only by the complete correspondence between virtue and felicity in a future life. Above all, the fundamental ethical need is to keep entire the dignity of human nature, of man's essential self, as against the mere immensity of the material universe. In these latter times ' we search out God with eyes grown old in studying Nature, with minds fatigued by centuries of metaphysics, and imaginations glutted with material infinities/ Whether this be so, whether the causes of the practical atheism of the world are not to be rather sought in its petty cares and the deceit- fulness of riches, we need not discuss. At any rate, even if speculation by itself may discover that moral excellence is for ever incommensurable with material bigness (Mr. Balfour says G a 84 GIFFORD LECTURES [vi ' grandeur/ but the word is out of place ; ' grandeur ' is always moral), ordinary mankind can only get an ' imaginative grasp' of this truth by a history and a doctrine such as that of the ' Incarnation.' Physical science, again, as she more and more reveals the immensity of the physical universe, makes us realize more and more the dependence of mind on physical organization and environment. And if speculative philosophy here too shows the account given by materialism to be at bottom inconsistent and meaningless, it needs a visible demon- stration, an intuition of the faith-inspired imagination, such as the same doctrine of Christianity presents, to transform that speculative glimpse for the mass of mankind into a life- controlling and life-exalting dynamic. And, last but perhaps not least, if the problem of suffering calls for all the power of philosophy to explain its function in the great whole, Christianity, in its picture of a suffering God, ( ministers to one of our deepest ethical needs/ And, now, passing from the analysis of Mr. Balfour's contribution to philosophy, let us try to ascertain its value. Is it new, and is it true ? And first, let us welcome his discovery of the function of philosophy. That function is to put together ' under the stress of reason/ ' into one coherent structure/ the contributions which art and morality, science and religion, severally bring to the expression of the One Reality. It is to systematize and harmonize the various provinces and different aspects under which the Being of Being is known, felt, perceived, and surmised by us. In the long run, a double, divided truth, a truth in theology which is indifferent to a truth in science, is intolerable to humanity. The monistic, if that means the unificatory, instinct is irresis- tible. To some, no doubt, the transcendent truth, the supreme reality, the infinite Personality, may have a more pleasing sound than has that pedantic term, the Absolute. If so, let them remember that the obnoxious term means neither more nor less than the others, so long as the others are kept at the vi] MR. BALFOUR'S < FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF 3 85 height of their meaning, and not used as a vehicle under which casual associations may be insinuated. Philosophy offers the great Eirenikon : a method of peace and reconciliation. If it is to be monistic, its monism must be one which leaves abundant iioom for difference, for dualism, for further even than dual opposition. Unity requires at least two, probably more, members of truth. It cannot sacrifice religion to science, or science to religion : nor, in its completeness, can it neglect even the rights of art. It is true that many will probably join Mr. Balfour in his view that it is forced and arbitrary to treat the ' artistic fancies of an insignificant fraction of the human race during a very brief period of its history' as important elements in building up humanity and the spiritual world. They may, like him, think ' most schemes of metaphysical aesthetics very absurd,' and hold that there is ' no natural punishment attached to bad taste/ Yet something may be said on the other hand for those who hold that the beliefs of the cultivated races as regards the place of art in life are only the more developed manifestations of a faith, efficient and living, as early as any traces of human life can be found : that the aesthetic theories of metaphysicians are after all only the systematized efforts to trace out and analyse that charm, which lights up the dull levels of life, and of which most of us, if human, have at times felt the power; and that bad taste carries with it inevitably a lowering of tone, a confusion of judgement, a perversion of aim, than which there can be no punishment more exemplary. But, whatever may be our estimate of the function of art in life and art, remember, is all that gives life its grace, its dignity, its form, and not a thing to be locked up and sometimes looked at in museums and galleries it is at any rate true that, to the English public, the con- trasting views of life are those derived from religion, which in some dim way includes moral doctrine, and from physical science. That there are other sciences which deal with the 86 GIFFORD LECTURES [vi inner life, i. e. the completer reality ; that political effort and ideal is the obverse and test of morality; and that national righteousness is that without which individual righteousness is a puny and diseased thing these are points which a few realize, and which many painfully surmise. For the most, however, the antithesis is set, simply and solely, between religion (or theology) and science. And because it is so set, without due regard to the environment or context, it is set falsely and foolishly. There have indeed been times when the conduct of the so-called theologian, in adjusting religion to scientific advances, has reminded one of Miss Matilda Jenkyns and her friend in protecting the colour of the new drawing-room carpet. The sun in its course blazed through and down on a strip of the Brussels, and the ladies spread newspapers to shelter it from the withering ray. But as the sun gradually moved on and on, the newspapers had to be again and again taken up and placed on a fresh patch of light. It is certainly not so that Mr. Balfour understands the reconciliation. Each has its place. Science, such is his plea, ' can only do what it claims to do,' i. e. ' reveal reality in its special way, if it presupposes a theory of existence, very like that which in its ultimate premises constitutes the base of theology. But reconciliation thus acquired, through identity in fundamental principle, is far from interfering with a wholesome growth of either separately. As someone has said of its relations to theology, ' non adjutrix nisi libera, non libera nisi adjutrix philosophia/ ' In its labour/ says M. Sabatier, ' the human race builds an eternal cathedral of which the two main columns (colonnes mattresses) are science and the holy life (la vie sainte). They spring slowly from the soil, and rise parallel in the air. Amongst the workmen who labour at this divine work, some are dis- couraged and fear the two columns may never meet and form the vaulted arch they dream of. Others, impatient, inflect the severe rectitude of the lines of the construction, but the vi] MR. BALFOUR'S l FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF' 87 false and apocryphal work they thus make, is self -ruined and self -demolished, because it violates the rigour of the mysterious plan of the invisible architect. The religious worker is humble : he guards himself against the impatience which makes us faithless, and the discouragement which makes us cowardly. He lives by faith, not by sight : he raises the two pillars of his inner life in obedience to the prescribed rules, knowing that his duty is not to make them arbitrarily con- verge and join before the time, but to build them stone by stone, higher, straighter, more solid. Science is only positively served by those who with all strictness apply the laws of scientific research. Similarly, we advance in the moral life by an undeviating obedience to the ideal law of conscience 1 .' Mr. Balfour therefore has risen to that idea of philosophy to which Schelling and Hegel, following out the sugges- tions of Kant, have given its characteristic modern form, but which has really been the underlying aim of all the higher modern, as it was in a great measure, of ancient speculation. We can hardly indeed apply to Mr. Balfour what the aged German poet, Fr. Riickert, has dared to forebode (1864) 'Was Kant hat angebahnet, Was Schelling vorgeahnet, Was Hegel ausgeschliffen Zu glanzenden Begriffen, Bis es ward ausgepfift'en, Es wird aus der Veraltung Gewinnen Neugestaltung In hOherer Entfaltung.' That prophecy still awaits its fulfilment, when it shall come : yet before it comes, it is necessary that the doctrine shall sink as a simple rudimentary form into the common stock of culture. As such, its appearance in a work like Mr. Balfour's is a welcome symptom, that the general standpoint of 1 A. Sabatier : Esquisse d'une philosophic de la religion. 88 GIFFORD LECTURES [vi philosophy is finding its way to the heart of the nation, despite the uncouth tongue in which its oracles are written. But, before this very general idea can be the principle or the foundation of beliefs, it must explicate itself into something less indefinite and scanty. It is not enough to say that four, or it may be more, provinces must combine, that their several glimpses of reality must be reconciled. A good deal remains to be done before the terms of union are to be defined. Are the provinces or faculties co-ordinate? Are they mutually corrective and complementary ? What are their several tasks ? To answer these questions is to indicate the founda- tion of belief: and in common phraseology it is to write a philosophy. A provisional philosophy will not answer the purpose. Provisional, of course, every philosophy is, in a sense : each exists only until there come a better to super- sede it. But it must not build, on that account, a mere shell, perfunctorily : it must do its work with all its heart, and soul, and strength, as if it built its house for eternity. Of all this positive work, to which contributions have been made by many, here and elsewhere, after Kant had mainly concerned himself with the critical and negative task, Mr. Balfour does next to none. He simply does for the English public what Kant had already done, but, according to him, had not by his interpreters and commentators suc- ceeded in teaching to the average insular mind. Whether there are not more who have ceased to bow the knee to the Baalim of Naturalism than Mr. Balfour suspects, is a question we need not discuss. Yet to have impressed upon the public that philosophy is the way to a complete theology not, we need hardly say, to religion is a service which the religious bigot, if such there be, may rate less than lightly, but which most other people can only welcome. Our thanks would have been less mixed, if Mr. Balfour had not, to generalize his own confession, 'found it easier to satisfy himself of the insufficiency . . . than of the absolute sufficiency, or any of vi] MR. BALFOUR'S 'FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF' 89 the schemes by which it has been sought to complete or modify Naturalism/ That is the weakness of a man who possesses considerable faculty of dialectic and enjoys the zest of debate, and whose instinct is to look for weak points, pulling a complex theory to pieces by piece-meal attack. It is no doubt the accredited method of parliamentary warfare, but even there its results are hardly so pleasing or useful as to lead us to desire its extension to the more serious problem of philosophy. When Mr. Balfour again urges that ethics, aesthetic and science, are only retainable in their truth, beauty and righteousness, on the hypothesis that behind the phenomenal process of sensation and movement there is an encompassing ' reality/ if that is to be the word for the presence and power of the Idea, we can only say that we are glad to see that the fundamental dogma of Platonism still serves to the rest-and- shelter-seeking soul as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. Plato too had to fight with the champions of what Mr. Balfour has called ( Naturalism.' To them the whole fabric of moral, aesthetic, and spiritual ideas was a matter of physical history : thought was a fact of brain-movement, and beauty a growth of associations, generated out of what was utterly without aesthetic quality. The naturalistic theory of life was as complete, if not as detailed, in Athens in 400 B. c. as it is to-day. And against that theory Plato lays down his axiom that ' it is by the beautiful that things beautiful become beautiful/ and that knowledge would not have been at all, had not things and perceiver been at one in the ' transcendent truth/ eTre/ceiya TOV OVTOS, which is, in our modern phrase, at once real and ideal, and so above either alone. In other words, you cannot completely explain the higher form by the lower elements ; a true synthetic unity is not a mere product or sum of its elements : it is unique ; and they are, at best, its condition, or in an older phraseology, its material, but not its final or formal, cause. To use words 90 GIFFORD LECTURES [vi like sum or product', is simply to ignore a principle of organiza- tion, a law of crystallization, which rules and manipulates its constituents. You trace, scientifically, the gradual evolution of form from form : but, behind the facts and results, is the agent and the life, the idea in its efficiency, the substance of Spinoza, the Absolute of Mr. Bradley, the Reality of Mr. Balfour, infinite, ever-new, ever-creative ; never a mere putter together of the old, but with the old materials, by a cosmic and divine phantasy, creating the new. Its syntheses are more than syntheses : they are at each stage a new birth : a fresh revelation of the infinite spirit of life, the life of life, the cause of causes. Yes, here too, we miss a deeper view. The religious mind, as well as the scientific and the aesthetic and the moral mind, each are jealous of their own : the reality behind science stands awful and grim in presence of the ideal of art, the God of religion : and this introduction to theology does little to bring them together. When Mr. Balfour points out that, behind all the variety of formula, and all the imperfection of dogma, there are ' immutable doctrines,' nourished on which men have lived and died in hope, faith, and love, the philosophy which I have learned from is agreed. But it would hardly be satisfied with the mere confession of an unknown God. That is a hopeless search for God and reality, which is seeking him in an ever receding reality behind and beyond phenomena. Phenomena too are of God, nay, in their place and function, they are the visible and sensible body of God. Sensible matter too is part of the immutable doctrines. It is not, as Mr. Balfour seemed to say, a mere ( irrelevancy that the material body, the material world, stands with a pre-eminent reality/ Far from it. The whole spiritual, the aesthetic, moral, religious life, needs the body ; and with a bodiless, a disembodied spirit, it ceases to have meaning, reality, and power. You have heard what Mr. Balfour has to say of the power of Christian dogma of Incarnation to fulfil our moral vi] MR. BALFOUR'S 'FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF 1 91 needs. To my mind the central value of the doctrine of the Incarnation is to teach that all men, as they live and are, are sons of God ; sons, some of them prodigal, and some conceitedly goody : but all, if they would but know it, and knowing, realize it, sons of God ; with the Godhead in spirit within them, suffering, enjoying with them, their bodies temples of the holy one who inhabiteth Eternity. The eternal reality is in it all : God is in it all : not, as Mr. Balfour seems to think, alone by himself, enjoying an unchanging beauty of which we can only catch glimpses, but with us and in us, suffering in us and with us, the captain of our salva- tion, the firstfruits of many brothers. We, if I, a mere disciple, may speak for the great masters of those who know, take the Incarnation as no mere temporary fact, but as the eternal truth of human life and history. We can rise to the poet's words : ' Lady, I fain would tell how evermore thy soul I know not from thy body, nor thee from myself, neither our love from God.' Not less is Philosophy in general agreed, that the true test of the truth of a religion is its capacity to satisfy our ethical or moral needs. It would, perhaps, hardly be content with a mere phrase, which is left open for interpretation by each private sentiment. Still less, perhaps, would it, like Mr. Kidd and Mr. Balfour, regard the consilience of individual and social interest as the only nameable moral need, or treat a future life, a vague word, as clenching the need. It would probably take a different view about the place of punishment, and it would certainly note that moral conceptions of the future life were the fruit of moral life. But it would in the main agree to accept Mr. Balfour's thesis. Only I think it would put it in a less restricted phrase. It would hold that we are primarily and essential beings who have to act, to be agents. We are, as it were, endowed with a problem, enriched with a task the task to live. It is only by slow degrees that we gather all that it means, that we see what 92 GIFFORD LECTURES we really and truly will. All experience, all science, all association, all suffering and joy, show it more and more fully. But always it stands behind and before, above and within, a light to our feet. Plato called it the idea of good; the Gospel of St. John calls it ' the light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world/ VII NATURALISM AND RATIONALISM. THE SCIENTIFIC AND THE PHILOSOPHICAL POINT OF VIEW. THE MAIN CONDITION OF THE EVOLUTION OF REASON Ax interesting range of questions is opened out by what is said in Mr. Balfour's Foundations of Belief as to the nature and function of theological formulas, as to the respective place of Reason and Authority in forming beliefs, and indeed as to the general scope of the two cognate habits of mind or attitudes of thought which have been styled Naturalism and Rationalism. Perhaps there are few things more noteworthy, and yet few things more neglected, in the study of the history of human thought, than the tendency to accentuate the points of partial difference and to ignore, as if taken for granted, the deep and broad bases of fundamental agreement. Each great philosopher an Aristotle, say, succeeding a Plato builds in his turn upon the uncontested and accepted body of doctrine and belief which is common to him with his predecessors. For that very reason he says little about it. What he lays stress upon and, to the careless reader, seems alone to think essential, are certain favourite ideas of his own, certain peculiarities of definition and detail, which are his peculiar work, and which pass into history as the essentials of Aristotelianism. So things seem from the outside. To 94 GIFFORD LECTURES [viz a profounder study Aristotle is himself a Platonist, sharing the deepest convictions of Plato, but, like a true and perfect man who is never a mere imitator, carrying the germ out into the fulness and integrity of an individual system, without which discipleship is a sham and a snare. It is not so merely in philosophy. It is a general law that what counts at first sight is difference. When we measure our income and our resources, it is not wholly what we are and have that gives the habitual tone to our mind. What we see as ourselves in our mental vision, what we think others will estimate us at, is the differential amount between our estate, our endowments, and theirs. The nearer the fundamental equation of what we are and have with what others are and have, the more keenly do we set store by our petty prerogative, in that imagination of compared dignity which haunts us like a demon. It is not always his poverty that makes the poor man's hardship : it is as often the sense that he is poorer than others : poorer, above all, than others he would otherwise have matched. We may apply these principles to the judgements which we have heard passed on Naturalism and Rationalism. An '-ism' is by its inmost being always in opposition. It marks a protest against a feature which is believed to be erroneous and injurious. As it thus emerges, it is no complete theory of the subject with which it is chiefly concerned. On the contrary it subsists only because it has tacitly taken over into itself, and accepted without question, the great bulk of the general creed or system against which it raised a partial objection. Utilitarianism e. g. protesting against what it considered an irrational, ascetic, or sentimental vice in the dominant formulation of ethical doctrine, still, in the first instance, accepted the general lines of moral order and pro- gress. Socialism, again, as it first appeared, was no com- prehensive theory of the ideals and methods of collective life, but chiefly a criticism of the chief evils of a disintegrating vn] NATURALISM AND RATIONALISM 95 individualism and a suggestion of remedies. But it is easy to see that things cannot so remain. In the first place, a struggle inevitably arises between the old and the new. From some points of view the new is obviously at disadvantage. It is the theory of a partial point of view, and as it steps beyond its original limits, it is almost sure to fall into inconsistencies, and make mistakes in extending its principles. On the other hand, it is generally backed by an enthusiasm and eagerness, which is only inten- sified by anything that suggests the superiority of strength that lies at the command of its opponent, the established authority. It is inclined to credit itself with all or most of the truth, and leave only force to its opponent. The older and larger body of doctrine, again, is apt to attach too much importance to formal and logical inconsistencies, and to forget that there may be much in the new formularies which those who hold them read, so to speak, between the lines, but do not think it needful to express. But in the struggle it is almost certain that each party will exaggerate its differences. Forgetting altogether the many points where it might well admit ( he that is not against us is on our- side/ each con- centrates its view on those apparently cardinal issues, in which it can raise its battle-cry, ' he that is not with us is against us.' Now the Rationalism, which we heard described as an embryo Naturalism, is under that historic title mainly a product of the eighteenth century. In its origin it was the continuation of that protest against the men and works of darkness, which Ulrich von Hutten waged by the side of Luther, the war against superstition, idolatry, obscurantism. But as a great authority reminds us, it is hard to pluck up the tares without destroying some good wheat. You cannot, i. e. the race of man cannot, draw a hard and fast line where the true worship of God gives place to superstitious idol- worship. It is not merely that good and evil grow so closely 96 GIFFORD LECTURES [vn side by side : that were a minor difficulty : but in most of human life it is hard to say where good does not grow out of evil, and evil out of good. It is only the sword of God, which pierces to the dividing asunder the bone and the marrow, that can discern the secrets of life. A too ardent assault upon superstition may itself become a superstition, and a baleful one, for its champions. But for that fault it was not the Rationalist who was mainly or solely responsible. The least concession was refused to his claim for more light. He was commanded to bow reverently to the ever-revealing Church, or to the revealed Scripture. In the presence of these oracles reason must be dumb. There is a vulgar proverb to the effect that, if you ask for a silk gown, you may get a sleeve. As the Rationalist was given little, he natui-ally came to demand more. When it came to the time of Voltaire, the cry Ecratez I'Infame, which originally only meant a demand to clear the temple of thieves and money changers, came to be the ominous threat of a clean sweep of all that Christianity held and holds most precious. Nor that alone. There were heard mutter- ings : Ni Dieu ni maUre : down with all absolute irrational authority, be it in realms secular or in realms sacred. And all this, just because the cry for light was gagged, because the stream of reason was stopped by a great dam piled ever higher, until the stream, gathering into itself the myriad impulses of human nature, high and low, became a wild flood that for a while swept all institutions into ruin. So it is with Naturalism. It in its origin was the protest, not against the supernatural in itself, but against a super- natural conceived as arbitrary, incoherent and chaotic : it was the protest against the idle profanity which thinks it has explained an event, when it has said, with pious gesture, that it is the work of God, as if aught were not the work of God. Naturalism is not the antithesis of theology, as Mr. Balfour has assumed, though a vindictive theology has VH] NATURALISM AND RATIONALISM 97 often pushed it into such an attitude : nor is it the assumption that the beggarly elements of sense-perception are enough to frame for us the picture of the world, though a foolish Spiritualism has often driven it into the arms of Materialism. Naturalism and Rationalism must not be judged solely by what they are at the worst, in the hands of sciolists and polemics ; they must be judged altogether, in their worst and their best, in the principles which at first gave them direction not less than in the course which through the intermixture of effects they have occasionally taken. It is an easy-going Rationalism, unworthy of the name, which thinks its only function is to knock off corners, and smooth inequalities. f What/ cries Mr. Balfour, ' would be a world which we should understand : ' or, as I suppose, which we had thoroughly understood ? A world, clearly, without interest ; the den of listlessness and dumb despair : or rather the ice- age of humanity, when to be and not to be would for once be absolutely alike. But, on the other hand, what were a world which we did not understand, had not in any measure under- stood ? A world full of fears rather than hopes : a perpetual uncertainty, a grisly mystery, which made darkness cover the earth, and gross darkness its peoples. The world which reason claims is one where she may go for ever on and never die : a world where nothing can be called utterly unknowable, though much may remain for ever unknown : a world where, as humanity accumulates more and more its intellectual and spiritual capital, we shall move about more and more freely, i. e. more and more wisely, as becomes those who are called to inherit the kingdom. The world which the genuine Naturalist desires is not different. It is a world of law : but in the ideal sense law in Nature is even as law in the social sphere. To the beginner in sociological study, laws are an aggregate of commands of a general character, set by somebody who can command to others, who will by some means and to some extent be constrained to obey. To the idealist you will find H 98 GIFFORD LECTURES [vn him in antiquity amongst the great Stoics of the middle period (as may be read in Cicero) to the idealist, law is one system, one economy carried out in different grades, all mutually interdependent, whereby the right working of each member of the community may be attained, whereby each may not only do his duty as past ordinances have appointed, but may find an outlook and a stimulus to conceive and execute ever fresh, ever higher codes of duty. So it is also with the world of scientific law. The older scientists looked upon laws as so many ascertained uniformities of sequences, regularities in the succession of cause and effect, which, as they grew more numerous, admitted of codification, and some degree of system. The net result of them was a hint to man in his practical endeavours, that certain things can be done, certain others cannot be done. The reign of law was thus a disguised reign of force : it seemed to consist of a network of checks spread over the whole structure of the universe, as so many barriers within which God, it might perhaps be said, had tied his own hands, as well as limited the possibilities of man. On the other hand, the idealist view which has always lurked at the heart of religious faith, though often strangely marred by foreign concretions looked at the future rather than the past, at what was to be, rather than what was. Put religiously, it subordinated the creational (taking that term in its narrower sense) idea of God to the providential. It looked at Nature as, not merely what was and is, but also as what will be. It regarded the universe (as Goethe has pictured it in that series of aphorisms which he drew up under the stimulus of Frau von Stein's charm) as at once Natura naturans and Natura Naturata, as an organic community, an ideal, or as St. Paul might call it, a spiritual body, working by myriad ways to an end which only gradually reveals itself, and using methods or modes of operation, which in parts we can discern, and when discerned we call laws. The reign of law has here become, if not the vn] NATURALISM AND RATIONALISM 99 reign of grace, at least the kingdom of the spirit. All its special laws are but fragments, from time to time abstracted and isolated, which enter into the one unity of organization. Nor dare we set limits to the possibilities of that organization. If we exclude the old conception of miracle, we exclude equally the conception of inflexible rules to which God must bow. And if we could rise to the height of beatific vision, which is difficult, not to say impossible, we might, turning round Browning's words, say, ' All 's law, but all's love/ This is a long way from Mr. Balfour's Naturalism. But it has an equal right, nay, a far better right, to the name. It is the Naturalism that full-grown science seems more and more brought to adumbrate. Mr. Balfour, ' for reasons with which it is not necessary/ he says, ' to trouble the reader/ has selected the name Naturalism for what might equally have been styled Agnosticism, Positivism, or Empiricism. When reasons are concealed, it is improper perhaps to surmise them. And yet it hardly seems going beyond a legitimate inference to suggest that the name was chosen as a way to deal a more crushing blow. To assault Naturalism and Rationalism is to strike Nature and Reason : it is to support Supernaturalism., and the Materialism of authority. It looks a little like seeking to wound an opponent by an insult to his beloved. But, as old Socrates pulls himself up, and admits that when he saw his love Philosophy lightly dealt with, he spoke some- what vehemently ; so here we may admit that after all Mr. Balfour does not mean it : it is only an incident in the polemical debate. To the superficial glance, the history of philosophy seems to be a mere succession of opinions, contradicting or con- troverting opinions that have gone before, and to be in turn contradicted by opinions yet to come. On a deeper view this contradiction is a phenomenon like the supersession of the flower by the fruit. For the plant's life under all apparent incoherence is one process, continuous, incessant, in which H 2 ioo GIFFORD LECTURES [vn one plant soul creates for itself a body which is ever chang- ing 1 , yet which in some sense ever remains identical with itself. So, reasoning 1 by analogy, the annals of philosophic failure need not unduly depress us. It is, says Mr. Balfour, the common lot of philosophies to fail. Even so to the rash judgement is every human life and the greater its scope and task, the more decidedly a failure. It comes with promise of peace and good will, and when it is over, it seems to have left a sword that pierces ever deeper and deeper into the heart of humanity. It bourgeons out with the fairest flowers of art and letters ; and yet, as the times roll on, these flowers seem to corrupt, till the air is too heavy and poisonous for men to breathe it and live. It founds a great and glorious empire in which social energies should find all room for their ameliorating play, conquering and to conquer; and the political grandeur is there only as it were to intensify and accelerate the ravages of the cancerous growths under the sleek and prosperous surface. It spreads the light of science ; and the chief use of the new weapons science prepares is to rend asunder the fabric of social well-being. And yet it would be rashness, on the strength of these appearances, to pronounce a verdict on human life, on the efforts of science, art, religion, and law, which would echo the merely pessimistic cry as if failure were all. ' Thou fool/ says the strong-hearted apostle, ' that which thou thy- self sowest is not quickened except it die, and that which thou sowest, thou sowest not the body which shall be, but a bare grain ; and God giveth it a body even as it pleased Him, and to each seed a body of its own/ Take this phenomenon of life by death and death to life, as it shows in our own inner and individual life. The resolution which (we often can hardly tell how) emerges into the light of rational volition, must, before it issues in outward act, plunge, first, into the warring mass of other impulses, which, awhile silent, as if they had yielded up the ground, only its existence vn] NATURALISM AND RATIONALISM 101 stimulated into activity ; and then, as it reappears, altered and complicated from the struggle, it must again plunge into the seething mass of outside efforts, the surge and swell of the adjacent world, to re-issue with the body which the providence of nature and history has been pleased, we co- operating, to give it. To us, the spectators of our own selves and of outward event, this drama, this Divina Commedia of human life, presents itself so. We have hardly formed our resolve, when we regret it : the voices of our other selves, of that manifold pack of half-formed personalities within us, none of which we dare honestly disown, are raised in protest against the usurping monarchy of our overt resolve. The democracy, or shall we call it the ochlocracy, of passion and appetite has to be heard and reckoned with ; and a struggle arises, of which the issue is a modification and enlargement, for better or for worse, of the original purpose. It is the same with the outward act. It never is exactly vckat we meant it, and as we meant it. We are disappointed and discouraged by the event : and often it seems as if, the higher and purer our aim had been, the greater had been the discomfiture in our achievement. What do these things teach us? First, perhaps, that we must not judge what manner of men we are by the thoughts and resolves that come to the surface in our hours of clearest vision : that we are not the simple and straightforward units we fancy ourselves to be, but rather an undulating and varying unity of impulses and powers, growing slowly by effort and discipline into the unity of the perfect man. And secondly, that we, however original, personal, individual, or monadic we may be, are still units circling in, penetrated by, and fulfilled with, a larger social life, a common, it may be, national spirit, which is at once outside us and within us, at once containing us and contained by us, on which we depend, and through which we gain such independence as can ever be ours. It is a mistake, therefore, and a fateful one, to isolate the 102 GIFFORD LECTURES [vn phenomena of life from their context. Falsus in uno, says a vulgar &da,ge,falsus in omnibus. One error entails another, one lie involves a second, to try to cover it. So undoubtedly it in part is : and so it would for ever be, if life and humanity were what some people call logical, if pedantic consistency were the rule. But the world is not in that sense of the term logical or reasonable : though in a larger sense, and with a more generous scope, it may still be called logical and reasonable. To be reasonable is ; in the full sense of the term, to be human : it is to cling to and follow after unity, but not always to ensure mere consistency. The function of reason is to seek totality, to be comprehensive. It is more than abstract intelligence ; it is the faculty of ideals, the faculty that dreams of and tries, of course never quite successfully, and let us add, never without some success, to give com- pleteness, system, rounded perfection to our lives. It soars beyond science, because it springs from an impulse larger than that which brings science to birth. It has been said to be the purpose of science to find a theory of nature. That is a scope which can only be claimed by science, if we give to science a very wide meaning. Science, as such, in its actual performance, has a humbler scope, a more practical and more practicable aim. And this aim is, within certain ranges approximately and roughly marked off, under certain conventions, and with certain hypotheses which work, i. e. admit of experimental treatment and confirma- tion to constitute a system of coherent relations, of un variable sequences and unconditional causality. For science, properly speaking, there is no Nature: Nature is to science a poetic, artistic, or metaphysical word. A science deals with a group of phenomena, roughly demarcated by common sense, and seeks to organize it into a system of coherent relations; which, it may be added in case some one may dream that you can have relations by themselves include things related. Such, at least, is the scope of all the positive sciences. vii J NATURALISM AND RATIONALISM 103 The scope of ideal science or philosophy is quite other. In common talk, indeed, it is often implied that the science of the ideal is only a generalization or an extension of the positive sciences into a region where they grow large, but at the same time vague and fantastic. But in truth, philosophy is no mere sum or generalization of the positive sciences. It is a view, or attempt at a view of Nature, i. e. the whole sum of facts, lived, experienced, and believed in their unity : it is the fulfilment of the task which, according to Bacon, is appointed to man, to be the minister et interpret Naturae. That is more than the special sciences do or profess to do : it is the work of a science, which is ideal no less than positive; a science which includes art, religion, and morality as its handmaids, but handmaids who are maids of honour and not mere helps in the kitchen of humanity. Thus reason is the principle of unity : but of a unity which works through, and in, diversity. The dispute between reason and authority as to priority and posteriority is one which may be paralleled with another more notorious con- troversy. Did the hen come first or the egg ? To answer it, let us ask how reason arose, and what it works : let us ask what authority means, and not content ourselves with vague nominal oppositions. Just because reason is so often opposed to authority, they must have something in common, were it only some common subject to dispute. And, indeed, a quarrel unites as surely, and the cynic may say, more closely and permanently, than a friendship. Indifference, presumably, is not union. A certain propinquity of interests, a community of purpose, is needed for a vigorous opposition. Nay, may we not further say, that in many a case we quarrel more fiercely with others, just because they say out aloud something which we would fain keep silent in ourselves; and that the rage against the enemy outside is only the evidence of an inward struggle in our own breast, which we have failed to quench ? 104 GIFFORD LECTURES [vir Now what is the fundamental feature of all reason, of all ideal forms ? Surely this, that they rise from us, seem to be our offspring, nay, perhaps, our product, and yet, without any warning, turn round and lord it over us. Take con- science : it is, says Butler, a principle of reflection, it is our act of judgement : and yet it claims (and we cannot help in a sneaking way admitting the claim) to be the voice of God. Take fashion : it is a whim to which we seem to give currency by our own act, and yet it plays the inflexible despot. We calmly speak as if we made the laws, and talk of ourselves as law-givers and law-makers ; and yet the law rules in its own right. We love, and it seems the expression of our freest personality; and lo, we have forged a chain which, whether agreeable or not, binds us for perhaps a life. We act purposely; and it seemed free for us to do or to abstain : yet the deed is an irrevocable master ; the gods themselves, says the Greek proverb, cannot undo what is done. Even the light word, to which we unthinkingly give voice, may one day chastise us with scorpions. How can these things be? Are we really so little lords of ourselves as they seem to show ? Can we only assert our freedom in order to throw ourselves into a more effective bondage ? Whence came this reason ? Reason, we have lately heard from Mr. Kidd, is individualistic in the uttermost, the weapon of disintegration. When we say, ' Come, let us reason together,' it appears that we mean (not, as the men of old time thought, ' Let us try to agree, and remove the stumbling-blocks that cause jars between us ; ' but, in the modern language), ( Let us dispute and divide/ Now it is simply impossible to allow any one thus to play the fool with language. No doubt, if the thing had been done long enough ago, the rose might still smell as sweet had it had another name. But as things are, names have been pre- occupied, and to play false with them is neither more nor less than stealing. And stealing a good name, as Falstaff vn] NATURALISM AND RATIONALISM 105 tells us, is a more serious crime than stealing the trash that is in our purse. It is a kind of treason to humanity : Nomina numina. Is reason then a private property of the individual ? Is conscience, is soul, is love ? In one thing- Mr. Balfour is quite right : the higher spiritual life with its beliefs is not explicable from the physiological or biological individual. In that biological framework and function, as every one is perhaps aware, we are of close kindred with the animal world, and, comparatively speaking, of very close kindred with certain members of it. We know that every human being, as an embryo in his mother's womb, runs in a few months through, we may almost say, the whole scale of animal life. An ancient Greek sage, of supposed mystic tendencies and oracular utterance, told in some verses the story of his life, as he passed, still one soul, throvigh various animal forms, in sea, in air, and on land ; and people thought him moon- struck. It is now received as the soberest scientific truth that each of ns and in the lapse of no long time, as measured by the horologe of our daylight world has run through a career more romantic and strange than old Empedocles oif Agrigentum probably ever dreamed of. We j are and the less we forget it the better, the higher we may learn to become we are, in the substantial framework and function of our being, animals, comrades of the dog, the hare, the ape, and the tiger. They seem sometimes far apart from us, brutes at the worst, poor relations at the best. Now that I do not say, wisely or unwisely we have concluded that we are made but a little lower than the Elohim, and no longer see angels as an aristocracy of creation above us, but fancy ourselves as its foremost rank, we are apt to forget that the difference between us and the nearest mammals sinks to at least apparent insignificance in comparison with the gulf between them and the awotla, an apparently amorphous, structureless mass, or rather molecule. io5 GIFFORD LECTURES [vn The evolution of reason, of authority, of morals, of art and religion, that, is the problem. I spoke the other day of the birth of a soul. I may come later to speak of the birth of conscience. What is it that we can expect to find in this mode of enquiry, in this path of evolution ? There was a time when the word for the new birth was creation. But the word was a little too abstruse for many who employed it, and it led to strange fancies of a superhuman man moulding creatures out of nothing. With all this confusion of vulgar imagination, the philosophical conception of creation had nothing to do. Something of the same confusion has infected the modern term Evolution. Evolution has been taken to mean a process of continuous change by which, if you only give it time enough, an A will some day turn into a B, an oak become a beech. So once on a time the chemists but at that time they were called alchemists had the fancy that, by some method of manipulation yet to be discovered, iron or one of the baser metals would be trans- muted into gold. The alchemist saw transmutations of a kind going on everywhere in nature, and with a judgement perverted by the lust of wealth, he came to look upon all the mineral kingdom as a range of steps which, if we could only get the secret of transmutation, would bring us nearer and nearer to its final head and supreme development, the royal Gold. A similar frenzy seized some biologists at hearing the idea of transformation of living beings. The whole kingdom of animals presented itself to their minds as one continuous development from some primary organism which, allowing sufficient variation in circumstances and sufficient length of time, might become, to put it briefly, anything in the possible range of animality. Now that this is possible or impossible, I am not concerned to say. The very word impossible, indeed, is not one in favour with sensible men, and is one that science will rarely use. Perhaps, like Napoleon, the vn] NATURALISM AND RATIONALISM 107 sciences may call it ' a blockhead of a word/ Science, i. e. human knowledge of facts and laws of fact, can ascertain to a certain extent that something has or has not been done. But to pronounce that it cannot be done, is what it will only do with the qualification: f so far as we at present know/ This holds in the region of biology as it holds elsewhere. Transformation of animal form and function within certain limits has long been a fact of common experience. It is hard or, as things stand, impracticable, to lay down definitely where these limits lie : they are often very elastic ; how elastic, we dare not forecast : but all experience tends in the direction that there are limits, and even impassable limits. It is easy, but it is frivolous, to say that we can place no limits to the power of adaptation which we actually observe. Such a style of argument is after the fashion of the man who, finding his horse did not perish under a gradual reduction of his corn, proceeded with a so-called logical mind it is the logic of the fixed idea, and common amongst the insane to maintain him on no corn at all. We cannot place the limits, perhaps, but the limits may be there. All observed varia- tion in present nature, or in the historical process which palaeontology partly reveals, takes place within limits : and if the limits in the data afforded for long past ages by palaeontology seem wider than those exemplified in the present day, perhaps we may be permitted to suggest that the evidence of the geological strata is a matter which has not yet received its final interpretation, and should not be put too much in the first brunt of battle. Evolution, in short, is at present a working hypothesis. If any one asks what that means, it need only be said that, by the assumption that all living things may be conceived as forming links in a con- tinuous chain of life, instead of being taken, as the casual observer might suppose them, to be merely diverse and apparently unconnected, we get a point of view for biological io8 GIFFORD LECTURES [vn study which both suggests wise and far-reaching questions, and makes it more easy to find answers. More than this the Darwinian theory need never become : but this is quite sufficient for scientific work ; though perhaps not enough to gratify an ignorant and aimless curiosity, which would get behind the beginnings of things, and, so to speak, see them as they were before they were made. The fact, then, which biology would seem to start from, is the probability that man was once, when no one knows, a creature in all appearance and in all structure very like an ape, a creature closely allied to certain species of our existing quadrumana, but yet somehow sui generis : a unique ape, an ape which really was not an ape as we know apes, but which had in him the promise and potency of humanity; just as the human embryo of to-day, though in its earliest stages it reminds the observer of certain animals, has in it, whether the anatomist can detect it or not, a je ne sais quoi which determines it to be man, and nothing but man. The starting- point is, you observe, not entirely a fact : but it may fairly be called, from the biological standpoint, a plausible and workable hypothesis. There was then a time within the present century, when each of us, man or woman, so far as all the experimental tests could tell us, was the very nega- tion of all we as adults claim to be : a time when for us speech and thought, reason and morality, all the distinctive peculiarities of human shape and structure, were not. As in the old story of the creation of the terrestrial globe, so there was a time when we were ' without form and void ' : an amorphous, inorganized mass. And yet shape and organiza- tion were there, though our organs and even our instruments failed to detect them. It is in that sense and with these limitations that I speak of the evolution of reason or of morality. I can attach no meaning to the statement that reason or morality was made out of something utterly other than itself. Non-reason does vn] NATURALISM AND RATIONALISM 109 never beget reason, nor does non-moral beget moral. We may possibly lay down the conditions, the circumstances, the occa- sions, which facilitated the event, its sine qua. non. But the secret of the first birth, the secret of life's emergence at conception, the mystery of origins, is well kept. Still, now as of old, each birth is a creation. We have learned thanks to Darwin, and, as I am more especially bound to add, to others before Darwin that creation is a process law-governed, a work of reasonable not arbitrary deity; that the whole organic kingdom is a systematic unity, the unveiling in time and place of one grand plan. We can guess with much probability the scheme of architecture, but we have not forced the hand of the architect, and stolen the secret of his work. We are, to him, in a position not unlike that of the grammarian and the critics to a great original genius in poetry or painting; we can catch, or deem we catch, some of his tricks or his mode of composition. But Raphael and Dante are always on another plane than their imitators, and He that sits in heaven may perhaps smile at those who so boldly identify the way they construe his plan with that plan itself ; or who fail even to surmise and this is the important thing that He is an architect who draws no plan and directs no workers, but is himself the life that inspires the worker and the source that supplies the work. It is the evolution of the human mind we study, with reason as its governing function, with morality, art, and religion as its characteristic products. And that means, when, and under what conditions, can mind be seen emerging? In what atmosphere did it draw its breath, from what parentage did it spring? The psychologist who analyzes mental phenomena assumes mind as a given fact ; or rather for him the soul is a geographical term, used to denote the range within which certain phenomena which he describes are to be found, and sometimes equated with the sum or aggregate of their phenomena. The comparative psychologist will show no GIFFORD LECTURES [vn us by a process of guess-work and more or less plausible analogical interpretation of stories of animal life, of move- ments executed by animals how in the animal world with varying degrees there are indications of the presence of several of the faculties found in man. And these comparisons are very interesting, if always a little liable to the defect of alternative interpretation. But we must go a little further than either of these, and ask : When or under what conditions do we first observe the human, the rational soul ? The answer briefly is and the same answer will apply to morality, art, and religion that reason is a social product : it appears and lives in human association. Just as cohesion, or electricity, or any other material property only exhibits itself in a correlation of elements, which are at once antithetic and interdependent : so the human soul is a phenomenon which appears and lives in the sociality of human beings. There is doubtless a sentiency which is part of animal nature in general : but even it, we may note, only exists in a great community of physical life. The specially human soul is a social fact, the resultant and index of a social effort. Society, the reciprocity of man with man, is the atmosphere in which it breathes, the soil in which it grows. Man, the individual physiological being, exhibits in association with his fellows the products we call rational, moral, aesthetic, and religious. And it is only man, not all animals, that does so : a statement which need not be pressed to exclude all approaches to reason in the so- called lower animals. Hence we conclude that in him there is a something which in the appropriate environment will so develop. The soul is his potentially, let us say : and yet it would never be actual any more than hydrogen and oxygen, of their separate initiative, form water, without some con- straining agent unless another soul were to be made at the same stroke. To some it may sound a paradox to say that reason is not of the individual, as such, but only of the socialized or vi i] NATURALISM AND RATIONALISM in civilized individual. It is not so long- ago that indignation was lavished on the anthropologist, who dared to hint that primaeval man in his birth-time had been speechless. And yet the obnoxious fact reveals itself afresh in every human infant. The doctrine that reason is the concomitant of sociality is a common one to philosophy. Hear Hobbes : 1 Reason ' (which he defines in his rough way as conceiving a sum-total from the addition of parcels, as in short ' reckon- ing') 'is not, like sense and memory, born with us, nor gotten by experience only ' (by experience Hobbes means ' the tear and wear of life '), ' as prudence is, but attained by industry/ Hear Fichte : ' Man would not be rational or human, were he purely isolated and unsocial/ Let us not, however, misunderstand, Juxtaposition, associa- tion, in and by itself, could yield nothing. But where there is a something which however we do not know in itself, and can only discern in its effects this association leads to a new development : it is the meeting of energies which causes birth. The human being, to put it in materialistic figures, is charged with force, energy, faculty: but energy requires solicitation from without, to bring it into exercise and actuality. The human individual, as such, is to all appearance simply an animal : primus inter pares, perhaps, yet still only amongst his peers. But under that appearance there are in him possibilities of unique energies. There are tendencies and potencies craving to meet each other, and to link hand in hand, heart in heart. All the various ranges of Nature live, if we speak the religious language, under some special dis- pensation of God : in scientific phrase, they have each their own law of development. The specific law of human existence is sociality. It is that which makes us human beings. The absolutely solitary, said Aristotle, is either a brute beast or a god. This is a truth of which all exceptions prove the rule. St. Simeon Stylites is as much dependent on a social environ- ment for such life as he leads, as the most sociable and business- ii2 GIFFORD LECTURES like citizen of Antioch. Even the Cyclops of the Odyssey, who is said to live reckless of all neighbours, finds that they will not stand his midnight howls. But if sociality be the root, the medium, the atmosphere of all that is distinctly human, there is one peculiarity about it which cannot be passed by. To the rest of the natural world their peculiar law, the guiding principle of their being, seems (I will not at present go beyond f seems ') to be given to be their own inalienable property ; a natural endowment, a fixed law, which they have without effort, and which they cannot or will not transgress. Man, doubtless, like the rest of Nature, has his so-called inherent properties, his instincts and qualities. But all that he can call specially his own is an effort, an acquisition. As I put it before, he inherits a task, he is endowed with a problem : his riches are all to be earned. This sociality is not a quality but a tendency, craving for fulfilment, tasking the energies. Man has been defined in many ways. Let us for the present say that he is par excellence the being who works, labours: that he is so in tendency, in progress. Man the worker 'that which he hath done but earnest of the thing which he shall do/ 'Tis true that barbarian man, and still more savage man, is idle : and that their survivals in modern days whether at one end or other of the social scale still carry out the old animal ideal. But with these exceptions which only prove the rule for savage man can only idle while his women and other slaves toil, and later barbarians nourish their idleness largely by some sort of force and fraud the rule for man is not to merely accept the given, but to mould and fashion it for himself. In him nothing merely is : it is to be : it has taken on it a new law, the law of becoming, as the law which governs him and the things he deals with. With his emergence on the scene, the world has, as it were, got a new relative centre : all things have become, or rather are more and more becoming, anthropocentric. VIII SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL CONDITIONS OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF ETHICS THE point at which we had arrived in the last lecture was a consideration of that sum or group of conditions under which the characteristic features of humanity make their appearance. In a broad general way we gave it the name of sociality : meaning thereby to indicate the fact that reason and morality, art and industry, science and philosophy and religion, only present themselves in associated bodies of human beings. It is perhaps in one way trivial, yet is it in another way important to add, that association is not here treated as a cause or a reason. If we say that morality or religion or language is a social product, we must not deceive ourselves. Mere association can do of itself nothing. Association is, so to say, the outward visible sign of an invisible inward grace : and the first thing to realize clearly is, that you cannot have the one without the other. The mere fact of there being two or three or more people together would not make anything grow or become, which had not its root in some way in the single individuals. So, too, the con- clusion of a syllogism dare not, in one way of looking at the matter, add anything new to the premises : whatever goes beyond the premises is of evil, and erroneous. And yet, this material identity does not prevent the conclusion being a real addition to our sum of knowledge. You put, as the phrase is, two and two together : and the result well, it is not quite I H4 GIF FORD LECTURES [vm two and two, but two and two put together. No doubt, if you insist on overlooking the ' put together/ or treating it as it' it were nothing what anybody can do, and so a neglige- able quantity you may say we are exactly where we were. Yet, when we are ourselves, and not playing the verbal quibbler, we know that to put two and two together is to create something new, something irreducible to, and incom- parable with its factors or elements. All the data of Hamlet were already somewhere, before Shakespeare touched them ; and jet, except as implicit in the predeterminate laws of life natural and social, or if you prefer it, in the determinate will of God, Shakespeare's Hamlet, the Hamlet of the modern world, was not. Or, again, the musical notes are, in a way, all there ; and yet each musical genius that comes upon the scene is a creator of new constellations of harmony. So here, the mother, already enriched with reason and love, bending over her infant,- does not by her glance, her smile, her touch, give it a soul, a spirit, a reason : and yet in that glance, that smile, that touch, soul, spirit, reason, are as surely born as the physiological life of the same child is born, and so far as we know is only born, in the congress of male and female. As in that case the elements of the living being, the constituents which build up structure, are older, far older than the tv^o parents, who to popular appre- hension are the authors of the being of their progeny ; so in the spiritual world, the child and its mother severally bring to their union of soul a store of powers and faculties prepared by, it may be, centuries of intiefited tradition. Yet it is in the main true, that it is the mother's and father's look and touch, charged with the fruits of life, of life both theirs and that of myriad others which have gone to make up theirs, which kindles into flame the dull materials of humanity, and begins that second birth, that spiritual parentship which, at least not less than the first, should be the peculiar glory of human father and motherhood. And, to prevent mis- vin] SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT OF ETHICS 115 conception, the gift of soul and spirit, if gift it be, is not on one side only. If the parent, in a way, makes the child, it is not less true that the child makes the parent. He kindles new lights, and pierces out new depths, in the parent soul ; builds his world anew, with other features and fabric than of old : brings him nearer heaven or nearer hell ; but at any rate, if the parent ever really sees his child eye to eye and approaches him touch to touch and unfortunately we dare not assume that this always happens, so many parents and children have never seen each other's soul-face he is not as he was before. We are here concerned with facts, and with the funda- mental condition of our human reality. With facts. It might have been that each of us should have been sent into the world, a fixed and complete quantity of energy charged with a certain role; a germ, containing a certain bundle of possibilities, and capable of developing all that was pre- figured without help or hindrance from other things. It might have been that each of us should have existed as an independent individual, burdened indeed internally with a certain drag or limitation or inertia of resistance, so that the infinity, implicit in each of us, never became at any moment wholly actual, wholly equal to the absolute and perfect Being, but yet not hampered by anything without ; and thus the outward happening, though it was to all appear- ance perpetually about to interfere with what we did, would yet never really come into contact with us, but would be kept off, as by some plate-glass surface, or by some imper- meable yet transparent adamant encircling our sphere of being. So, it appears, thought the great Leibnitz. Each real being he called it a Unit or Monad he thought to be, as it were, a god, a potential never quite perfect god, but filled with an instinct towards greater and ever greater com- pleteness : a being, always fragmentary, in that there were numberless other beings outside it, utterly independent of i a ii6 G1FFORD LECTURES [vm it, yet all somehow, more or Jess faintly, within its ken, ideally present to it; it and all the rest again having the full, real, true God above and over all as a sovereign, the real bond which was represented in this ideal harmony. It is, you say, an inconsistent conception. But the inconsistency is partly, I may suggest, in the fact that it is the phraseology of a compromise. Its voice is the voice of eighteenth- century Deism, which was the final deposit of a Century of Lutheran orthodoxy : but its hands are the hands of something very much liker Spinozism than his contemporaries fancied. At any rate, without committing ourselves to any denial that in a higher interpretation the idealism of Leibnitz may hold its ground, for the present we must insist on the reality of the fact of inter-action. The individual, so far as phenomenal facts go, is what he is, through and in his surroundings. But to call them surroundings or environment is to mislead. The surroundings of the individual are, how- ever paradoxical the phrase may sound, not merely around, but in him. They are part and parcel of him : he is part and parcel of them. The old idealists, such as the later Stoics, were fond of insisting that things are what we make them, or take them to be. Everything, say Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, is imoXri^is ; imagination, fashion, opinion, rules the world. But if this is true, there is necessity for reaffirming a corresponding and counter- truth : ( Things are what they make us become.' Neither side, taken by itself, has a monopoly of productiveness or creativeness. Things are not, as an idealist like Fichte might be supposed to say, mere stuff for us to cut and carve for our own sakes, and as we please. They are and this is what Fichte, who was not a mere idealist, did say the stuff by our manipulation of which we become better or worse. In other words, they subdue us to them, just as much as we subdue them to us. And if that be so, it would seem to follow that what we call vm] SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT OF ETHICS 117 our acting upon them, is, in equal degree, their acting upon us. Action and re-action are always equal : because, as a philosopher might say, they are the same thing, seen from two ends. External things are the tests of our reality. The so-called Berkeleian idealist was supposed to hold that, in the case of sensible things, their esse was their percipi : to say that they existed, was only another phrase for saying that we perceived them. And some scoffers jeered at the lunatic philosopher who reduced all reality to a spectral phantasma- goria in his, i. e. the philosopher's, mind ; or, as the cruder critic said, in his brain. But these species of philosophical propositions are only fully understood, when they are seen to be reversible. It is equally true that the percipient gets his being from the perceived. Not to know them, it is said of some great ones, argues yourself unknown. Do not be too rash, therefore I may perhaps say to the very young meta- physician, do not be in a hurry to throw overboard the sensible world. It is true that a metaphysician of fame has declared that you cannot hope to be a genuine philosopher, if you have not had at some time a serious doubt as to the so-called reality of the material world. There is something in this, I admit : but it reminds me of the encouragement given to a beginner at the game, when he is told that he will never turn out a crack golfer, unless he first breaks a club or two : or of the general warrant sometimes thrown out to the young that, if later years are to bring forth a crop of good and valiant deeds, it is necessary to begin with sowing some wild oats. In these cases I suspect there is a little of the confusion which in the logic books is said to take post hoc as if it were propter hoc. In other words : it may be a grand and generous soul will, just because of his nobler mettle, commit faults and break hearts, ere he, so to speak, gain the full mastery of his machine, and learns to elicit the high music that is in him ; and a player of the grand style may n8 GIFFORD LECTURES [vm break an instrument or two, before he learns that even golf- sticks are to be handled delicately and with respect, as becomes what are no mere rigid things but organs of the spirit. But it would be a perilous thing for the clown to draw encouragement from the necessary mishaps of genius, and suppose that he can only trundle his wheelbarrow with its load, if he imitates the prancings and caprioles of some high-bred steed. So it is with the way to philosophy. Every one must take his own path, his own royal road. There is no regulation pattern, no scheme of philosophical salvation, which each must undeviatingly follow. It is not necessary, in order to be a philosopher, to doubt the reality of the external world ; but it is necessary to abandon two beliefs before, philosophically, you can be saved. The first is that the external world is the reality, and that our mind, our ego, is a mere echo, a reflection, or epiphenomenon of it. The second is that we are the reality we, the scheme of ideas and that the external world is a mere dream, the passing phenomenon of our minds. The former error is Materialism, and some people call it Realism : the latter is Spiritualism, and some people call it Idealism. Salvation, philosophic or otherwise, can come only to one who has disowned both errors, and who has learnt that the truth lies in the utter qualification of one half-truth by the other. The way to philosophy can only pass through a point where we see that neither subject or object alone primarily is : where we learn that things are, because we by reason understand how things are what they are, and, not less, because the sense passively receives the impress of their action. Inner and outer must utterly coincide to give reality. These epistemological considerations are not alien to our present problem. For they tend to show that the bond of reality, as Leibnitz hinted, is in something which compre- hends us and things : that reality is not in things of any grade whatever, but that things are in reality : or that reality vm] SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT OF ETHICS 119 resides in the manifold system of relations, the complex, which binds them together. None of the ring's which form the chain of reality is itself strong enough to hang the others thereon ; yet, on the other hand, each of the rings is charged by implication with the whole. Each ?>, has being in itself, but when we look carefully, it is in itself only through the being of others. Each, as you view it from the standpoint of the other, is only a phenomenon : and yet each must be real, or it could not even be a phenomenon. Everywhere subjective initiative is inseparable from passivity, as of an object, to something else. This reciprocal interdependence of aspects holds good, as perhaps few can care to deny, in the relationship between man and things. And to us, looking at the problem from our present standpoint, here might seem to be the commencement. We go forward to meet the world, to learn from it, to struggle with it ; if possible (and it is not fully possible) to overcome it. But it is we who go forward : we, the collective, the race of man. Even when an individual David goes forth to meet Goliath, he is a champion of an associated host, the bearer of an ancestral and national interest, the worshipper of his country's god, the wielder of the weapon which centuries of customary skill have fashioned, strong in the sympathies of his compatriots, and strengthened by burning hatred against the uncircumcised Philistine. The individual in the search for science is no less sustained, fortified, inspired, by a long past, by many ages of struggling humanity. The scholar, even the most rudimentary, does what he does only in the strength of what his forefathers and their comrades have done and suffered. By all means let him be proud of his intelligence, his wit, his genius, his science, his freedom of mind. But let him remember that if he is free born, some one has had to pay for him the price of his emancipation. When Renan at twenty-five years old entered on his brilliant course of philological and historical achievement, he started 120 GIFFORD LECTURES [vin from a great capital of tradition, which he entered upon partly by labour but largely by inheritance. He received, in the dispensation of Nature, all that acquired power of patient work, of sympathetic insight, of natural piety and human tenderness, which his Breton peasant forefathers had laboured for ; he entered upon all the august memories, the organized strength, the systematized logic and learning, the grand theistic conception of the Catholic Church: he gathered the fruits of a scientific struggle, prolonged through centuries of experimental research, of theoretical construction, and of attempts to find a law in human life and human history. Wirfreie Geister, we emancipated intelligences, is the favourite cry of a modern German thinker, as he thinks of himself and a band of advanced thinkers. It is a cry that calls for humility at least as much as pride. One has read of armies in retreat before some terrible destroyer, brought face to face suddenly with a deep and precipitous ravine, and compelled by the mere pressure of horror from behind to march on and on, till the gap was filled with prostrate human forms, and the survivors reached the other bank safely by the involuntary self-sacrifice of their front ranks. Something like this is always happening in the annals of each life. That each of us can individually seek to develop our individual minds, prosecute our separate studies, reach intellectual, artistic, or social eminence, is possible only because we are raised on the joined hands of many unknown to fame, who have formed by stern resolve and hard clench a solid roof over that abyss of mere animality into which we should otherwise fall. Science, art, and religion, all that makes life glorious, all that con- stitutes the special glory of individuals, grows out of the root of sociality. They rest and grow, says Hegel, in the State. But what, according to Hegel, is the State ? Not something, assuredly, which lives in London, and has its holy of holies in the offices of the Treasury : not something which lives for the time being in the Cabinet, and in the upper and influential vm] SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT OF ETHICS 121 circle of the bureaucracy. The State, as Hegel conceives it, is the completed organization, the self-contained social form, in which human life can develop its ideal activities : it is an organization in which the family forms the perennial, and so to speak the natural basis, the ever fresh, ever creative spring of moral, intelligent, and artistic life : in which the inter- dependence of industrial effort, commerce, social and com- mercial demand and supply, constitutes the ever-widening stream : while the more purely political organization itself blends all these divergent interests and natural ties into one single and comprehensive nationality or people, wherein the members can both play their own part well, and contribute their quota in orderly way to the total work of humanity. Before the individual could deal successfully, reasonably, well with the natural world around him, he had to deal with his own kind, and, combined in action with them, to gain the weapons and the machinery for carrying out his ends. Before he could cultivate science and art, he had to live, and to live he must live in a community. It is no doubt a temptation to separate one part of this from another, to suppose that outward activity created inward faculty, or that inward faculty gradually evolved outward instruments. But the whole point we here have to insist upon is, not the separateness of these two, but their necessary interdependence. Man was not an intelligent creature, who gradually devised newer and abler tools ; nor was he an unintelligent creature, who became intelligent by the reflex action of the machinery he had devised. The old question at issue between Anaxagoras and Aristotle, c Is man the cleverest animal because he has hands ? or has he hands because he is the cleverest of animals ?' can never be answered as it stands. The tu r o developments go on pari passu , parallel to each other, each always cause and always effect of the other. As Spinoza puts it, there is no body without a soul, no soul except it be the idea, the life and consciousness, of a body. The aptitudes of action belonging 122 GIFFORD LECTURES [vin to the body are exactly equivalent to the intelligence and rationality of its soul. Soul is not something given a body to direct ; body not something handed over to a soul's direc- tion. The union of reasonable soul and animal body is a deeper thing than either spiritualism or materialism. Reality has, according to Spinoza, a double aspect : seen this way, it is soul ; seen that way, it is body : this way, you attribute to it modes of thought ; that way, you attribute to it modes of extension. It is true, you may say, that this is to exceed the facts ; for you only see in yourselves, and infer in those like you, that there are two aspects. But, answers Spinoza, you cannot have this doubleness of being even in these cases, you cannot carry your reasoning a step, unless you admit that, beyond and behind these two aspects in you, there is an identity, i.e. a self -reaffirming coincidence of these two aspects. That intelligence and reason, conscience and language, emerge only through social, collective, or combined action is the point. Sociality is not mere juxtaposition, mere aggrega- tion ; if it be ever describable as a quality or property of the human animal, it is only so in the sense that in man there is, in a degree and way unknown to the other animals, an impulse which drives him to combined action. There are, of course, what are called animal societies, of which certain species of bees or ants form the typical instances ; though there are others perhaps which in some respects come closer to their human analogues. Between the almost stereotyped caste scheme of the former, and the looser and more flexible gregariousness of the latter, man steers a sort of mean. It is not that we can say he is, in any line of distinction, absolutely and utterly unique. To establish such an impass- able gulf of division between himself and the whole animal world, has no doubt been a dominant interest in human curiosity on these matters. But it is hardly describable as a noble, still less as a disinterested curiosity. It savours of vin] SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT OF ETHICS 123 meanness to think our titles to grandeur will be securer, if we can exclude the claims of the animal creation. Nobler, I think, is the attitude of St. Francis, when he speaks of his 'brothers' throughout creation, and, with the Hebrew psalmist, calls all things from sun and moon to young men and maidens, old men and children, to praise the name of the Lord. One thing I know, that neither science nor philosophy are interested in the question of excluding dogs from heaven, on the ground, apparently, that the spaces of paradise would become incon- veniently crowded. Perhaps the day may come when the gospel can be preached for what some people complacently call the ' beasts that perish/ So long as the device is ' Let right prevail/ we may be confident no legitimate right will come short. But we are concerned with man : and with man sociality is an effort. The physiological individual, the pure animal, if we have a right to such an abstraction, tends to slip away into isolation. At the best, he eats and drinks side by side with his fellows ; but, unless provender is plentiful and space is wide, he tends to quarrel with his neighbours, with those who wander beside him. Even the attraction of sex is a fickle and feeble bond. I do not know whether Professor Drummond is right in saying that through the animal world ' the apathy and estrangement between husband and wife is radical and universal/ Too general utterances in these matters are undesirable, and the cynic may point out, with too much apparent justice, that this apathy and estrangement are not confined to what is ordinarily called the animal world. But at any rate it seems tolerably true that, in most cases, the connexion not merely between animal husband and wife, but generally between animals, is fairly described as indifference tempered by occasional caresses and quarrels : while, in the cases where a closer and more lasting union prevails, as in the social animals, it has a stereotyped and mechanical character, as if the several creatures were automata moved by 124 GIFFORD LECTURES [vm some necessitation behind them. The human association is co-operation, society in work, or action. At first perhaps it is an association of labourers cemented by their common subserviency to some end; afterwards the association of labourers who interest and attract each other, not merely through their final end but also in themselves; not merely for the temporary or lasting pleasure their deeds confer, but also for their own sakes, as independent centres of action, who can be for us all that they may be, only when they are never mere instruments but always also sources of original activity. This is, in a nutshell, the evolution of ethics. It begins when co-operative action first appears upon the scene, and it marks the fact (first) that the single self has made a step forward, has broken the mechanism of nature, and assumed a direction, set forth an end ; and (second) that it did so in a strength not entirely its own, through a will not completely self-centred ; that it depended on help, on co-operation, and thus submitted itself to a bond. At first, indeed, it lays the stress, so far as it can, exclusively on one side. It treats the con- tribution of others as a mere subserviency to its own initiative. It is selfish, and makes its own utility the centre of all judgement. It forms relations of inequality, of which the type is that of master and slave. The human being is, at this stage, only one among the instruments of production and conquest, distinguished from the rest only by his flexibility, his plasticity to the master's hand. Even this, however, is an advance on a more primitive condition. For the merit of the relation is that it has introduced order and stability, which is the first and indispensable condition of all progress. The worse preliminary stage was an age of chaotic, inconsistent, erratic conjunctions, when each to other was as a comet coming occasionally and at barely predictable intervals over the other's path. Such would be the ideal state of savagery, a state, it need hardly be said, which has left no traces and vm] SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT OF ETHICS 125 which, indeed, in its utterness, is inconceivable. For by savage we mean simply a degree of civilization far removed from our own, in which all the more characteristic products of advanced civilization are conspicuous by their absence. The evolution of ethics, i. e. the process whereby these faint traces of ethicality have been actualized more and more, is the process in which the two elements in all ethics have acquired increased light, and by which their solidarity has become more and more real. These elements or factors, to repeat, are the principle of direction of will-movement on the one hand, and that of co-operation and co-ordination on the other. The essence of all ethics is shut up in the word ( Autonomy ' ; but shut up, perhaps, so as hardly to be per- ceptible. Its first part is the idea of originality of action, of initiation, of movement to end : its second part is the idea of law, solidarity, community. Emphasize the first, and ethics seems to be purely idealist, a chase for unattainable perfections, for self-satisfaction, it may be, even, for pleasure. But, as our most thoughtful novelist says : ' The cry of the young for pleasure is actually I have studied their language a cry for burdens/ It may be that a theoretical hedonist may say of Lais, ' I have and hold her, not she me ' : yet if Lais does not hold him, it can only be because some petty care, some mean tie, binds him with a more constraining force, and makes him lose even the best of Lais. At any rate, it is true that the cry for pleasures is the cry for life, for struggle, for tasks : and, inevitably, as life rolls on, it turns round into another and an opposite ethics, the ethics of realism, and of passivity. Thus ethics becomes compliance with a code, obedience to a rule, the thraldom of law and custom ; it becomes the negative sense of duty, and then, as the same novelist adds, ' the old ones cry for having too many burdens on their shoulders/ In this second stage ethics leaves half its meaning behind : it grows negative, and ascetic, the bondage of Sinai, a schoolmaster to be listened 126 GIFFORD LECTURES [vm to, a school to be submitted to. The very word 'school' is a standing commemoration of this change. In its Greek original,