f\ rt_j^_- 
 
 REESE LIBRARY 
 
 u-n H n, 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 
 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM 
 
 BEING 
 
 THE GLFFORD LECTURES 
 
 DELIVERED BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF EDINBURGH IN 1895-96 
 
 SECOND SERIES 
 
 BY 
 
 ALEXANDER CAMPBELL FKASER, LL.D. 
 
 I/ 
 
 HON. D.C.L. OXFORD 
 
 EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF LOGIC AND METAPHYSICS 
 IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH 
 
 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS 
 
 EDINBURGH AND LONDON 
 
 MDCCCXCVI 
 
 All Rights reserved 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 THEEE are two subjects which above all others have a 
 universal interest. One of them always concerns all 
 sentient beings, but especially all persons or moral agents 
 in all worlds. The other is more exclusively of human 
 concern. The former relates to the moral meaning of the 
 environment in which each person has to play his part 
 as a rational and responsible being, in other words, to 
 the final moral trustworthiness of the universe in which 
 he finds himself. It has to do with the character of the 
 Universal Power, the Soul of the universe, into continu- 
 ous intercourse with which each person is brought, in 
 and through his ethical personality and environment, 
 without his own leave too, by the bare fact of his 
 existing under moral conditions. The other subject is 
 the alternative of evanescence or permanence as char- 
 acteristic of human persons. Do they all finally lose 
 their self-conscious and percipient personality in physical 
 
vi PREFACE. 
 
 death, at least subside at death into a supposed timeless 
 state, unchanging and without duration an empty ab- 
 straction; or do they still continue in self-conscious and 
 percipient life, notwithstanding the dissolution of the 
 present physical embodiment, it may be with added spirit- 
 ual power and responsibility as a consequence of relief 
 from its limiting conditions ? 
 
 Is our environment essentially physical and non-moral, 
 or is it ultimately moral, spiritual, and divine ? Is the 
 maintenance of the bodily organism the condition and 
 measure of the continuance of each man's conscious and 
 percipient moral personality ? These two final questions 
 underlie human life. Neither of them can be got rid 
 of on the ground that it is interesting only speculatively, 
 or that it is even practically indeterminable and has no 
 relation to conduct and character. 
 
 Natural Theology, in the large philosophical meaning 
 of this term, is face to face with both these questions. 
 For the word " natural," in the ancient and extended 
 meaning of Nature, is applied not only to the world of 
 material things in their continuous metamorphoses, but 
 also to the world of persons or moral agents, and even 
 to the whole sum of existence, temporal and timeless, 
 finite and divine. To " follow nature " is accordingly to 
 follow reason including moral reason. The natural or 
 philosophical theologian has then to consider whether 
 men are doing this when they are proceeding upon the 
 theistic or theological conception of the universe as its 
 
PREFACE. vii 
 
 true final conception ; or whether they are not rather 
 required by reason to suppose that a wholly physical or 
 non - moral conception is the highest attainable ; nay, 
 whether they do not after all need to withdraw from 
 every endeavour to interpret themselves and their sur- 
 roundings, even physically and in common life, and sub- 
 side in speechless, motionless, agnostic despair. The 
 philosopher, in his theological capacity, has to examine 
 critically Seneca's thesis regarding Nature: Quid enim 
 aliud est Natura quam Detis et Divina Ratio toti mundo et 
 partibus ejus inserta. 
 
 It seems to be in this large meaning of Nature that the 
 term Natural Theology is used in the Gifford Foundation, 
 and therefore as directly comprehending a rational treat- 
 ment of the two universally interesting enigmas at the 
 foundation of human life, which have given rise to Philo- 
 sophy, and which cannot be overlooked in a complete 
 liberal education of human beings. Accordingly the two 
 volumes of which this is the second proceed upon this 
 philosophical conception of the task imposed upon the 
 theologian. 
 
 Express consideration by one lecturer of the human 
 rationale of the final problem of the universe or of man is, 
 however, perfectly consistent with the large place that 
 scientific interpretation of nature, in the narrower meaning 
 of the word nature, as well as scientific criticism of the 
 phenomena of religion in its ascending degrees of develop- 
 ment in the history of mankind, ought also to take in 
 the outcome of this remarkable Foundation, which admits 
 
viii PREFACE. 
 
 of so many beneficial adaptations to the present transi- 
 tion state of thought on the ultimate questions in the 
 civilised world. 
 
 That the design of these volumes is inadequately real- 
 ised in them must be apparent to the thoughtful reader, 
 who cannot fail to find postulates insufficiently criticised, 
 conclusions sustained by reasonings that are not fully un- 
 folded, and questions which may seem to deserve a promi- 
 nent place either passed over or subjected to superficial 
 treatment in an occasional reference. It is hoped, how- 
 ever, that the consecutive course of thought which I have 
 tried to pursue may lead some who are disposed to reflect 
 along a path where more abundant fruit may be gathered 
 by their own hands. I venture only to ask that these two 
 volumes of lectures may be looked at in their unity as a 
 reasoned inquiry, not as a series of isolated discussions, 
 still less as consciously associated with any interest 
 that is at variance with what is eternally true or with 
 the facts of the case. The short time for preparation that 
 could be given by the academical authorities who honoured 
 me by this appointment has not permitted me to explore 
 as I could have wished the vast and ever-increasing library 
 of books which represent the world's philosophical and 
 theological thought. To escape the confusion of mind apt 
 to be produced by further reading in these circumstances, 
 I have confined myself to an honest exposition of results 
 already reached in a life devoted to kindred pursuits, 
 some of which had already found expression, in a less 
 explicit form, chiefly in notes and dissertations included 
 
PREFACE. ix 
 
 in editions of the works of Berkeley and Locke, and in 
 the relative biographies. 
 
 The moral or theistic conception of the universe of 
 reality is accepted in these lectures as the true final con- 
 ception, on the ground that, unless the Power universally 
 and finally at work is morally perfect, as omnipotent 
 goodness or love, there can be no valid intercourse with 
 Xature, which instead has to be avoided as the revelation 
 of a suspected Power. Philosophical Theism or Theistic 
 Philosophy becomes accordingly the final Philosophy. As 
 with Aristotle, but in a more human sense, philosophy 
 and theology are at last one : philosophy becomes theology, 
 or religion on its intellectual side whether called natural 
 or supernatural. 
 
 The history of mankind is in a manner a history of 
 constant collision between men's sceptical distrust of 
 themselves and their environment, as being only physical 
 and finally uninterpretable, on the one side, and moral 
 faith and hope in an environment that is trusted in as 
 ultimately Divine, on the other side. It has been a com- 
 petition between final Doubt and final Faith for the 
 deepest place in human mind and character. In the first 
 series of these lectures the voice of the Sceptic was pro- 
 minent. In this second series Faith makes itself heard, 
 as that which must at last underlie the deepest possible 
 doubt, being the indispensable condition of any intercourse 
 with the ever-changing universe of external nature and 
 man. Tentative sceptical criticism, valuable for the in- 
 tellectual improvement of the common faith, must not at 
 
x PEE PAGE. 
 
 last subvert moral or religious trust and hope, which is 
 trust and hope in the perfect goodness of the Power 
 universally at work as the infinite Soul of the world. 
 
 That the method I have adopted is what might be 
 called anthropomorphic or anthropocentric is not, I think, 
 a reasonable objection to it, if all man's intercourse with 
 reality must be under human conditions, or is possible 
 so far only as the changing universe is adapted to and 
 adaptable by man ; not as it is at the divine centre itself 
 in a humanly inaccessible Omniscience. The ultimate 
 relations of men, in the fulness of their spiritual being, 
 to the final realities among which they were involuntarily 
 introduced at birth, under inevitable intellectual and 
 moral postulates, and not the Universal Power, taken 
 either in abstraction from, or in a complete comprehen- 
 sion of, the manifested universe this is surely the sphere 
 of the only philosophy and theology which man is able to 
 entertain, or which is required to satisfy his spiritual 
 necessities. This is Nature or the Universe in its full 
 relation to him, when he is recognised as more than a 
 sentient and intelligent automaton, and yet as less than 
 omnipotent goodness. The difficulties found in this fun- 
 damental moral faith and hope seem to arise largely from 
 ignorance of what a human knowledge of the universe 
 in the end must be, and oversight of the impossibility 
 that it can at last be other than a moral faith. 
 
 That a sort of combination of the abstract Spinozism 
 which ignores change and philosophises sub specie eternitatis, 
 with the empirical agnosticism attributed to David Hume, 
 
PREFACE. xi 
 
 which reduces the realities to inexplicable successive 
 changes in mere appearances, is in this century working in 
 the main current of thought in Europe and America, in 
 sympathy with analogous ideas in India and the East, is 
 a consideration which was present to my mind ; for Spinoza 
 and Hume were seldom forgotten. Xor was their service 
 to truth overlooked, in the way of deepening and vivi- 
 fying the timid conventionalism which professional theo- 
 logy so often exemplifies. Perhaps some thought about 
 this dynamical Spinozism, or dogmatic agnosticism, may 
 have been at the foundation of the Gifford Trust. 
 
 It is difficult to discuss at all adequately the 
 questions of man and the universe in their final 
 relations without making a large and unacceptable 
 demand upon the reflective power of the reader, at 
 any rate, without a greater demand than is made by a 
 Society novel. Yet I am well aware that these 
 volumes fall far short of what might well be reached in 
 this respect, by a more powerful philosophical imagination 
 and a more lucid and penetrating intelligence, directed 
 by artistic literary faculty. The defect is largely supplied 
 in more recent contributions. When these lectures were 
 in course of delivery, English literature was enriched by 
 a treatise on ' The Foundations of Belief ' by Mr Balfour, 
 the Chancellor of this University, in which the reader 
 finds the basis of theology investigated in a manner 
 that rivals Berkeley or Hume in luminous and beautiful 
 expression of subtle thought. Without venturing to offer 
 observations upon an argument conducted with a some- 
 
xii PREFACE. 
 
 what different design, I may express the satisfaction with 
 which I have found a sanction in his reasonings for the 
 equal final insolubility of modern science and theology, 
 and for their common foundation in what might perhaps 
 be called the " authority " of the collective moral reason 
 of mankind, as distinguished from discursive reason and 
 physical understanding if I may so interpret Mr Balfour. 
 Two other eminent men of affairs since have further 
 added to the debt which philosophy and religious thought 
 owe to illustrious statesmen since Bacon and Leibniz set 
 the example. The world may be grateful to Mr Glad- 
 stone for the critical expositions in which he has so 
 powerfully recommended and reintroduced the chief 
 work in the philosophy of religion of the eighteenth 
 century, thus associating his name with that of Bishop 
 Butler. And the Duke of Argyll, with characteristic 
 argumentative strength and eloquence, has defended the 
 teleological conception of the universe on scientific grounds 
 in his ' Philosophy of Belief.' That in these closing years 
 of the nineteenth century three of the most eminent lead- 
 ers in public affairs should have thus placed themselves 
 on the side of final Faith in the struggle with final Doubt, 
 is no insignificant sign of the times in this country and 
 in the world. 
 
 The first series of these lectures tends to show the 
 magnitude and singularity of the philosophical or theo- 
 logical problem which the second series endeavours to 
 dispose of in its final relations to man. 
 
PREFACE. xiii 
 
 As regards their form, it is hoped that the marginal 
 analyses in the two volumes may help the reader in 
 retaining the continuity of the argument and its relation 
 to the central idea. A synoptical outline of the whole 
 is appended (pp. 267-283) to the lastvlecture in this 
 volume, in which the first five lectures\are concerned 
 with the moral and intellectual rationale of Theism, and 
 the other five with the chief enigma of theisftic faith. 
 
 I have to thank Professor Andrew Seth for his kind- 
 ness in reading the proofs, and Mr Charles Douglas for 
 an excellent Index. 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH, 
 September 1896. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 LECT. PAGE 
 
 I. MORAL FOUNDATION OF THEISM ... 1 
 
 II. CAUSATION THEISTICALLY INTERPRETED . . 35 
 
 III. COSMICAL ADAPTATION AND DIVINE DESIGN : TELEO- 
 
 LOGICAL ...... 65 
 
 IV. DIVINE NECESSITY : ONTOLOGICAL ... 93 
 V. PHILOSOPHICAL FAITH . . . . .121 
 
 VI. EVIL : THE ENIGMA OF THEISM . . . 142 
 
 VII. OPTIMISM ...... 167 
 
 VIII. PROGRESS ...... 192 
 
 IX. MIRACLE : WHAT IS A MIRACLE ? 216 
 
 X. THE MYSTERY OF DEATH : DESTINY OF MEN . . 240 
 
 INDEX 285 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 LECTUEE I. 
 
 MORAL FOUNDATION OF THEISM. 
 
 I BEGIN to-day a second series of lectures on the Philosophy 
 Philosophy of Theism. Last year I offered an Intro- distin- 
 ductory Course, meant to awaken reflection to what from Ici- 
 is involved in Natural Theology, " in the widest sense 
 of the term." So conceived, it appeared to be con- 
 cerned with the ever -pressing human problem, con- 
 cerning the final trustworthiness and intelligibility of 
 the universe in which we are living ; the problem 
 which underlies all human life, but especially in its 
 religious experience. For, the meaning, reality, and 
 worth of religion in any of its degrees of develop- 
 ment, above all in Christianity, professedly its catholic 
 or absolute form merges, as an intellectual inquiry, 
 in this central question of philosophy, about the ethi- 
 cal value, and the intellectual relations of the indi- 
 
 A 
 
2 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 vidual self, the outward world, and God the three 
 existences of which the universe of reality is instinct- 
 ively supposed to consist. The demand for Natural 
 Theology, not in the narrow or exclusively physical, but 
 in the universal or philosophic sense of the term 
 "natural," is a demand virtually for the rationale of 
 instinctive trust in the final principle of the universe, 
 the Power we all have practically to do with, in 
 our daily experience through the five senses and 
 in our consciousness of individual personality. The 
 Natural Theology that is philosophical is not merely a 
 history of religion, or a comparative science of religions 
 as they appear in the historical evolution of the world 
 phenomena to be described and classified according 
 to their natural causes : it is the historical evolu- 
 tion translated into the deepest and truest thought 
 which man's power of interpreting the microcosm 
 or universe of his own incompletely intelligible ex- 
 perience permits. The terms of the Gifford lecture- 
 ship not only admit but expressly include, among the 
 subjects which the different lecturers are invited to 
 make choice of for discussion, that which I have 
 chosen namely, Theistic Philosophy, with its eter- 
 nal problems. This, as distinguished from historical 
 Science of Eeligions, is more than enough to fill two 
 courses such as ours. I pretend to offer only a series 
 of Theistic Studies, as aids to reflection for those who 
 are trying, as many now are, to realise intellectually, 
 whether or not we are living and moving and having 
 
MORAL FOUNDATION OF THEISM. 3 
 
 our being in an essentially divine universe that is 
 to say, in a universe that in its final principle is 
 morally trustworthy, and that is more or less inter- 
 pretable by man, in an exertion of theistic or religious 
 faith, as well as of physical faith. 
 
 The way in which this final question is disposed of, Either 
 
 . sceptical 
 
 when expressed in terms of philosophy, seems to separ- alienation 
 ate men as representatives of two opposite tendencies, wholly 
 There are those whose dominant disposition is to 
 
 think of the universe agnostically, so that even the 
 physical experience through which we are all daily 
 passing becomes at last " a riddle, an enigma," an every reason a b . le 
 way " insoluble mystery " : there are those, again, whose in tne uui - 
 
 J J versal 
 
 life is one of deepening moral trust, even sympathetic Power. 
 intercourse with the Power that is continuously re- 
 vealed in the temporal evolution of nature, and in 
 the spiritual or supernatural constitution of man. The 
 whole history of mankind may be read as the history 
 of a struggle between final distrust and final trust. 
 The one disposes to sceptical alienation from an un- 
 interpretable universe ; and life is then contemplated, 
 according to the individual temperament, with easy 
 indifference or with pessimist despair. The other 
 inclination of mind is towards reconciliation with the 
 universe in hopeful moral faith; even if it must be 
 faith combined with incomplete scientific understand- 
 ing of the Whole, and with inability to translate 
 itself fully into sensuous conception. Do not aspira- 
 tions in human nature, combined with the intellec- 
 
4 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 tual weakness of man, hinder both the tendency to 
 alienation, or the tendency to reconciliation from 
 being carried practically to the extreme of Universal 
 Nescience, on the one hand, or Omniscience, on the 
 other ? Men could not live even a life of sense if 
 they treated the universe as wholly uninterpretable ; 
 and the perfect comprehension, which would supersede 
 faith, involves either the deification of man or the 
 degradation of the infinite reality. 
 
 Philosophy The Philosophy of Theism is necessarily the centre 
 essays the of this perennial struggle between what, when fully 
 of the m 1 thought out, becomes the empty negation of total 
 Scepticism, and the final Faith that we are living 
 * n a un i vers e that in its deepest reality is morally 
 trustworthy, to which man may be reconciled without 
 necessarily contradicting reason, and although the Faith 
 may never be exchanged by man for perfect compre- 
 hension of the threefold totality ego, the outward 
 world, and God in a human philosophy emptied of 
 all mystery. 
 
 The pres- The idea of the infinite in quantity that is irresistibly 
 
 ence of 
 
 the infinite lorced upon us when we try to understand finally the 
 verse tends space through which our bodies move, the duration in 
 structiveor which our lives are spent, and the causation which 
 tiveTs S sue, C ~ determines ceaseless change, is what gives uniqueness 
 at l ast to our physical experience. Now, this idea of 
 the infinite or mysterious quantity of existence in 
 garded. space, duration, and causation, according to the way in 
 
MORAL FOUNDATION OF THEISM. 5 
 
 which it is handled, may nourish either sceptical nesci- 
 ence or religious faith. Looked at in one way, it alien- 
 ates man from the universe in which he finds himself : 
 it shakes trust in it, as in something that cannot be 
 intellectually grasped, on account of its infinite size, as 
 well as its physical unbeginningness and unendingness. 
 So that also in its changes, because already in its in- 
 exhaustible infinity, the changing universe seems to 
 evade intelligence when one asks for its character and 
 purpose. This final scientific incomprehensibility of 
 that to a dim perception of which we are first awak- 
 ened in sense, and call " real," produces perplexity and 
 paralysis a presumption that life is meaningless, and 
 the world uninterpretable and therefore unapproach- 
 able because we find that we must remain for ever 
 baffled by the mysteries involved in its immensity, eter- 
 nity, and endless causal regress. Yet the same negative 
 idea of the infinity, or mysterious incompletability, of 
 existence, under which all seems to lose itself at last in 
 causal mystery, becomes the very minister of moral and 
 theistic faith, when what is causal mystery for the scien- 
 tific understanding is handled in reverential humility, 
 and is found to open room for, and even justify, theistic 
 as well as physical faith in the Power that is at the 
 root of all. For the consequent conviction that man 
 cannot become omniscient is then apt to make the 
 subject of this conviction disposed to accept an under- 
 standing of things that is at last determined by practical 
 substitutes for omniscience that may be found in the 
 
6 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 moral and spiritual constitution of man. The universe 
 is seen to be too mysterious for us to interpret it even 
 in part and physically, unless we submit understanding 
 to the authority of human nature as a whole, which 
 includes man emotional, and man acting supernaturally 
 in volition, as well as man thinking scientifically, and 
 at last necessarily baffled in so thinking. The littleness 
 of self, and the mystery of physical evolution, is relieved 
 by the elevating sense of the infinite reality, even with 
 the element of venture which limited knowledge neces- 
 sarily involves. In this disposition of mind it seems 
 
 as if 
 
 " Our destiny, our being's heart and home, 
 Is with Infinitude, and only there ; 
 With hope it is, hope that can never die, 
 Effort and expectation and desire, 
 And something evermore to be." 
 
 The mysterious Boundlessness which envelops and 
 governs our whole temporal experience, so regarded, 
 opens the way to reconciliation with the Reality, instead 
 of alienating us ; for it gives room to reverential ascent 
 towards the living God, on the " altar-steps " that " slope 
 through the darkness " of infinity. 
 
 iiiustra- Thus its infinity, or physical incompletableness, makes 
 Destruc- * the final problem of the universe look foreign to the 
 Construe- scientific understanding, and, exclusively at its point 
 ^ vi ew > envelops us and our surroundings at last in 
 an i m P ene trable darkness, which dissolves faith. Yet, 
 otherwise regarded, this final margin of mystery be- 
 comes the light of life ; because the apology for the 
 
MORAL FOUNDATION OF THEISM. 7 
 
 faith instead of perfect science, without which life can- 
 not be lived. One finds the Infinite casting its dark 
 shadow in Lucretius and in David Hume, in Schopen- 
 hauer and Herbert Spencer: Philo, in Hume's' Dia- 
 logues concerning Natural Eeligion,' is indeed the special 
 spokesman of those who judge reality unapproachable 
 on account of it, and the whole discussion in the ' Dia- 
 logues ' is depressed by its shadow. Infinity turns its 
 divine side to Plato and Pascal, to Descartes and Bacon 
 and Locke, to Kant and Hegel and Lotze, and to the 
 great religious thinkers, especially of Christendom ; it 
 unconsciously inspires martyrs and saints of the Catholic 
 Church ; it is latent even in the physical faith of the 
 leaders of modern natural science, and in the common 
 experience of the senses in all human beings. 
 
 The crisis of the struggle between Doubt and Faith The cen- 
 turns at last upon whether the idea of the infinity or the first 
 necessary boundlessness of the universe of reality is lectures, 
 taken by its theistic or its atheistic handle. The im- 
 manence of mysterious infinity in human experience is 
 the occasion of the struggle. This thought was in my 
 mind throughout the Introductory Course. It is im- 
 plied in its two opening lectures ; it pervades the 
 negative exposition and criticism of universal material- 
 ism, panegoism, and pantheism, with their resolution 
 into universal nescience, in the five following ones ; 
 and it colours the constructive criticism to which the 
 three concluding lectures incline. In now pursuing the 
 construction, I will try in this and the four next lectures 
 
8 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 to show the ground on which the finally theistic inter- 
 pretation of the universe rests, and the harmony of 
 this interpretation with the highest human exercise of 
 reason. The five concluding lectures are meant to deal 
 with the obstacle to theistic or absolute trust and hope in 
 omnipotent goodness that is presented by the Evil which 
 man finds mixed with Good in his experience of life. 
 
 Modern thought confronts us with three responses 
 to the final question about the reality and meaning 
 of the universe. One of these is the atheistic or 
 sceptical, which confesses total inability to find mean- 
 ing or intelligible principle at the root of the temporal 
 evolution in which we find ourselves involved : human 
 experience seems an unintelligible flux or succession 
 of accidents. Opposite to this is the religious or 
 theistic conception, according to which the evolving 
 universe is the constant expression of ever - active 
 moral reason, so that we are living and moving and 
 having our being in a perfect moral providence; and 
 our final relation to the operative Power is a personal 
 relation, because involving moral responsibility. In- 
 termediate between the meaningless universe of the 
 sceptic, and the morally or personally constituted 
 universe of the theist, is the final conception of an 
 impersonal, non-moral, physically determined universe ; 
 in course of evolution by Unknowable Power, the sup- 
 posed centre of the unethical or necessitated natural 
 causation, which gives a sort of continuity to the per- 
 
MORAL FOUNDATION OF THEISM. 9 
 
 petual flux; a continuity supposed to imply that one 
 thing somehow comes into existence through another 
 thing, hut in which all are only things, not persons. 
 Proper personality, with its implicate of moral re- 
 sponsibility, is here excluded as that for which there 
 is no intellectual room : physical causality instead of 
 spiritual morality must be the last word of a universe 
 thus emptied of moral trustworthiness. This is am- 
 biguously called the pantheistic conception and inter- 
 pretation of human experience : those who adopt it 
 are commonly found fluctuating between the universal 
 nescience of the sceptic and the trust in moral order 
 of the theist, in proportion as its merely physical 
 " religion " declines into total distrust, or becomes in- 
 vigorated by practical acceptance of the ethical pos- 
 tulates that constitute theism. 
 
 The spirit of the time asks which of these three atti- which of 
 tudes reason justifies as the final interpretation of life. i s the most 
 Must we become alienated from what we experience, attitude to- 
 in a feeling of the meaninglessness of the whole, or 
 is reconciliation possible on reasonable terms ? If the 
 last, what is the best form of reconciliation that a 
 thoughtful and good man can reach, for co-operating 
 as it were with the Supreme Power in the infinite, or 
 finally mysterious, universe of reality that is assumed 
 to exist ; and how may this harmonious relation be 
 best expressed in terms of philosophy? Is it a wholly 
 physical relation of one thing to another thing that is 
 alone discoverable; or is it ultimately the moral and 
 
10 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 religious relation of one person to another person 
 myself in personal relation to absolute moral obliga- 
 tion divinely personified ? 
 
 The answer to this question turns much upon the 
 true answer to the question : Am I only a thing, or am 
 I also a person? Am I obliged, by a necessity of 
 moral reason, to believe that / originate all acts for 
 which I can reasonably be blamed or praised; or, on 
 the contrary, if I would not indulge in illusion, must 
 I think of what are called " my own " actions in a 
 wholly physical or non-moral way ; acknowledging that 
 they are not really mine, but vaguely actions of Su- 
 preme Unknowable Power : there being nothing in ine 
 that is supernatural, nothing for which, as its ultimate 
 cause, I alone am responsible ? Is the Power that 
 is supreme and final manifested only in and through 
 continuous natural phenomena events dependent on 
 other events, which other events are in like manner 
 dependent on their natural antecedents, all refunding 
 themselves at last into an unintelligible unbeginning- 
 ness ? May not the Supreme Power be more fully 
 revealed in and through free moral agents, called 
 persons ; so related to the Supreme Power that each 
 of them is able to Tyring into existence what ought not 
 to exist, what accordingly is not necessitated to exist, 
 but may be brought into existence, in opposition to 
 the Supreme Power, by an intending act of the indi- 
 vidual person who brings it into existence; who is 
 nevertheless, as the final cause of his own moral and 
 
MORAL FOUNDATION OF THEISM. 11 
 
 immoral acts, under absolute moral obligation to the 
 personal or moral Life of the Universe? 
 
 I must now ask emphatically whether the deepest Andthere- 
 
 . fore finally 
 
 and truest available interpretation or human expen- in a moral 
 
 ,., . relation to 
 
 ence is that in which all experienced reality is re- an infinite 
 garded merely as physical cause and potentiality, in ityj or ac _ 
 which self-conscious life itself is only a physical event l 
 
 in the continuous evolution of sense-presented nature ? 
 Is not a deeper and truer interpretation found rather 
 when all is finally interpreted in the light of moral 
 reason, or what is popularly called conscience, with its 
 sense of remorse and self-satisfaction for what is done 
 personally, and its absolute imperativeness? If this 
 last is the final meaning, we indeed find ourselves in 
 a universe that is physically unintelligible in the end, 
 in its mysterious regress into the unbeginning past, 
 and its not less mysterious progress into the unend- 
 ing future, but which notwithstanding this mystery 
 of its physical infinity or necessary incompletability 
 assumes moral trustworthiness and practical intel- 
 ligibility when it is regarded as the revelation of 
 absolute moral obligation conceived as personal; so 
 that its secret, concealed in the inevitable mystery of 
 physical causality, is practically revealed, as far as man 
 is concerned with it, in the voice of conscience with its 
 sense of eternally underlying, righteousness alone. Is 
 not this the conception of the Whole, which I do 
 not say by strict logical necessity of the understanding 
 I must take but which I ought to take ? To think of 
 
12 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 the universe into which I enter in all my concrete ex- 
 perience as inevitably involving in it, at the extreme 
 of man's intellectual resources for the inquiry, the idea 
 of Duty, and its correlative personal freedom, is to 
 realise that I am a spiritual person, and not merely a 
 physical thing. It is, correlatively, to think of the 
 universe as the revelation to me of moral Personality, 
 and not merely as an unbeginning and unending suc- 
 cession of physical changes. Is not this the inter- 
 pretation which developed conscience and developed 
 religious instinct may be said to put upon what 
 would otherwise be physical as well as moral chaos ? 
 This moral personification of the physically infinite 
 universe translates its scientifically insoluble problem 
 into one that is morally or practically soluble. Natural 
 science leaves us at last as it were in an infinite sphere, 
 the centre of which is everywhere and the circumfer- 
 ence nowhere. Conscience, with its implicates of per- 
 sonified moral obligation, and supernatural spirituality 
 in man and God, enables man to read the daily drama 
 of life in the evolution of inorganic and organic nature, 
 as finally moral intercourse of individual person or 
 moral being with Infinite Personality concealed yet 
 thus revealed ; and shows us ourselves to ourselves as 
 living in what is more than the infinite machine, 
 because also, under its higher ideal, the free order of 
 moral Providence. 
 
 Conscience, it has been said, not only teaches us 
 that God is, but what God is. It expresses the voice 
 
MORAL FOUNDATION OF THEISM. 13 
 
 not of surrounding incognisable Power but of surround- practically 
 ing morally trustworthy Power; a voice that accord- forman 
 ingly sustains faith even in a natural order that will 
 
 not finally put us to confusion, when we trust it in 
 the actions of common life, or in scientific verifica- 
 tions ; inasmuch as we then find ourselves participa- chau s e 
 ting in a providential system of active perfect moral 
 reason, instead of being always face to face with a 
 finally inexplicable physical necessity. In this recog- 
 nition of eternally living moral obligation, I can find 
 myself at home everywhere, because everywhere in a 
 morally principled universe, which gives to the most 
 distant place, and the remotest time, a significance, and 
 thus a homeliness, that transforms and reconciles the 
 otherwise alienating physical infinite. This life is the 
 light of men, that "lighteth every man that cometh 
 into the world." One may " take the wings of the 
 morning and fly to the uttermost part of the earth," 
 only to find there the same personified moral obligation 
 which is the supreme conception here, and so may 
 everywhere recognise and rest in God. For in this 
 sense " God dwelleth within all things." According to 
 a great Christian divine, God is above all things, be- 
 neath all things, above by power, beneath by sus- 
 tentation, within by subtlety, ruling above, contain- 
 ing below, encompassing without, penetrating within, 
 everywhere sustaining by ruling, ruling by sustain- 
 ing, penetrating by encompassing, encompassing by 
 penetrating, everywhere personified moral obligation 
 
14 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 of individual persons. This is the language of the 
 higher religions, or religion in its ethical development, 
 with its highest and absolute form in Christianity. 
 The modes of the first appearance of religion in the 
 individual or in the race, in the crude forms of fetichism 
 and polytheism, and the inferior conceptions of prim- 
 itive morality, are really irrelevant to the validity of 
 religious and moral ideas in their advanced state of de- 
 velopment. Their justification lies in what they are 
 now found to be: this is not discredited by the inco- 
 herence of their early manifestations, either in children 
 or in the childhood of the race. The faint forms under 
 which the now matured contents and implicates of 
 either physical or spiritual experience were first mani- 
 fested must not prejudice their rational authority as 
 speculative and practical principles, at their present 
 stage. The mathematical calculus is not treated as 
 illusion because infants and some tribes of savages, 
 as well as whole tribes of animals, have got no distinct 
 idea of number. The moral and scientific conceptions, 
 on which educated intelligence now relies, are presented 
 in living form in history in very various degrees : we 
 apply them in their articulate form, not in their em- 
 bryo state. And so we find God in the idea of Good, 
 enriched by experience, and Personality becomes the 
 supreme conception, because Moral Obligation is found 
 to be absolute. The ideal issue, not the fact that the 
 ideal has been gradually unfolded, is what is truly 
 significant for philosophy and religion. The human 
 
MORAL FOUNDATION OF THEISM. 15 
 
 organism may have come naturally out of protoplasm ; 
 but man is not merely protoplasm now, as we find him 
 personified in great physical discoverers, or in moral 
 and religious geniuses. 
 
 That the final interpretation of the universe is rea- Kantian 
 sonably taken under a moral or theistic conception, Theiam, 
 not a wholly physical one, virtually coincides with 
 Kantian philosophy ; although Kant has been claimed 
 as one of the two pioneers of modern agnosticism, on 
 the ground of the destructive criticism which he directs 
 against traditional theistic dialectic, as logical proof 
 of the existence of God. His analysis of pure reason 
 seems to end in showing that absurdity is involved 
 in every endeavour to read the riddle of the universe. 
 Whether its final mystery is approached cosmologically, 
 in the argument for a First Cause, teleologically, in the 
 argument from signs of design, or ontologically, from 
 the idea of absolute perfection, it refuses to yield up its 
 secret to human understanding. And if Kant had 
 ended with this, his authority might be produced in 
 support of the sceptical ideal of life in a universe of 
 which man can at last affirm nothing, in which further- 
 more he can do nothing that implies faith in its trust- 
 worthiness or in his own ; for one can find as little 
 moral support in the empty categories of pure reason as 
 in a wholly empirical view of things. But Kant surely 
 means more than this ; at least his philosophy in its 
 completeness is not necessarily inconsistent with its in- 
 
 
16 
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 complete first chapter. The physically scientific under- 
 standing is not the whole of reason, nor the limit of 
 man's practical participation in reason. If man were 
 only physically scientific, the secret of the world would 
 be so much out of his reach that he could not justify 
 the moral confidence that is implied even in its physical 
 interpretation. For existence, with its unique quasi- 
 quantitative infinite in space and duration, and its 
 causal mystery, becomes incapable of being handled at 
 all, when it is dealt with as a wholly physical problem. 
 The unbeginning and unending material rebels against 
 the categories of an intelligence measured empirically 
 by sensuous quantity : when finite intelligence is thus 
 required to do infinite work, it must either become 
 paralysed by the paradoxes that arise in its consequent 
 attempt to image the necessarily unimaginable to put 
 eternity within time, or immensity within place as the 
 exclusively physical speculator has to do. Man in the 
 fulness of his spirit man moral and religious, as well 
 as man the scientific thinker must be in exercise, 
 when he is confronted with his final question ; and a 
 spiritual and practical interpretation, in which the 
 physically scientific one merges in the end, is what has 
 to be looked for, in intelligence like the human, that is 
 intermediate between physical omniscience and physical 
 nescience. 
 
 Natural science, accordingly, is checked by reason, 
 when the naturalist proposes to take the final ques- 
 tion about human experience of reality exclusively 
 
MORAL FOUNDATION OF THEISM. 17 
 
 within his own province. The check is best admin- moral 
 istered, Kant's reasoning seems to imply, by showing 
 the contradictions in which we are landed if we insist 
 upon approaching the infinite reality, not with our 
 entire spiritual humanity, but only with the data 
 and presuppositions of pure reason measured by sense. 
 Faith only in this gives support indeed to the working 
 hypotheses on which scientific progress turns ; but 
 then even this cosmical faith is possibly misleading 
 in the end, unless man can virtually put moral trust 
 in the supreme principle of the universe, and regard 
 experience finally, not as an aimless procession of 
 customary sequences, which may in the end play him 
 false, but as manifested moral order or providence. 
 Even physical interpretation, in its faith in the 
 steadiness of the natural order, and the adaptation of 
 that order to human intelligence, proceeds practically, 
 if unconsciously, upon a moral and religious interpre- 
 tation of the Whole. Human nature forces us to 
 acknowledge in existence more than physical nature, 
 as the condition of its own spiritual health. I do 
 not say that Kant so expresses the matter; but the 
 full meaning of his philosophy, when moral reason 
 is found supplementing the inadequacy of scientific 
 understanding, is, I think, in analogy with this 
 position. 
 
 This finally moral or theistic meaning of the tern- For physi- 
 cal faith 
 poral drama or existence cannot be scientifically proved : in natural 
 
 physical order, which is assumed in all physical verifica- supposes* 
 
18 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 moral faith tions, is itself assumed without reason when moral and 
 universal religious faith in the universal Power is withdrawn : 
 without this deeper faith the temporal process may be 
 supposed at any time to subside into chaos, in the 
 innumerable contingencies of agencies out of the reach 
 of our physical experiments ; so that the root of all 
 merely physical experiment may itself turn out to be 
 a broken reed, as far as only sensuous intelligence 
 reveals it. Even the agnostic naturalist is virtually 
 expressing an unconfessed moral faith, when he pro- 
 ceeds upon the efficacy of what is called " scientific 
 verification " ; for he is taking for granted that 
 scientific intelligence will not be finally put to con- 
 fusion when it shows trust in the supreme prin- 
 ciple of the universe, in its inductive ways of dealing 
 with the procession of events. Their past custom of 
 sequence is not in itself reason, unless it is so reinforced 
 by moral faith as that the universe is practically 
 looked at as manifestation of ever active moral 
 reason, and therefore incapable of imposing upon us 
 diabolical illusion, when we daily trust in its physical 
 uniformities. 
 
 Amoral An idea of this sort may be found at the bottom 
 
 trust in the , . ,. . 
 
 changing ot that vindication or the veracity of human percep- 
 reaHty S uu- tions and intelligence which Descartes suggests in his 
 
 autobiographical account of his own philosophical re- 
 covery from a state of tentative doubt about every- 
 
 argumen- 
 
MORAL FOUNDATION OF THEISM. 19 
 
 even in what my mental faculties most certainly assure tative vin- 
 me of, they may not after all be deluding me ? My the trust- 
 
 relation to my surroundings may be finally deter- 
 mined, not according to perfect moral order, but manmmd - 
 according to diabolical caprice. How can I be sure 
 that I have a body, merely because I now see what I 
 call my body, or how can I be sure that other living 
 organisms exist outside my own ? How can I justify 
 the faith which I indulge in, that the customary course 
 of nature is so reliable that I may act in the expecta- 
 tion that, under what seem to be similar conditions in 
 future, I may expect similar issues to those which 
 were evolved under like conditions in the past? 
 What real assurance can a man have when he pro- 
 jects his thought into the past through memory; or 
 into the past, the distant, and the future in scientific 
 expectation? Why may not the physically scientific 
 understanding always deceive in the future although 
 it may never happen to have deceived in the past? 
 How do I know that waking perception is not as 
 illusory as a dream in sleep ? For all these may be 
 experiences in a universe in which the Supreme Power 
 is enacting a diabolical fraud. 
 
 But if, instead of this fundamental doubt, I deliber- Tiie trust- 
 ately presuppose the final supremacy of God, or active 
 moral reason, I am only giving reflective expression 
 to the faith that is at the root of all other faith, 
 deeper than which I cannot go. If God. or living P rese ted 
 
 to us in 
 
 goodness, is supreme, external nature and my faculties our senses 
 
20 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 and in con- cannot thus conspire to delude me. For this would 
 
 sciousness 
 
 is finally be to suppose that the changing universe and my 
 
 fit to be 
 
 believed in. nature are in contradiction to one another, so that 
 I should be obliged throughout all experience to 
 believe a lie. The only presupposition that forbids 
 the entrance of this total scepticism is the presup- 
 position that God, or active moral reason, is prac- 
 tically omnipresent or omnipotent. The trustworthi- 
 ness of my faculties, and so the physical interpret- 
 ability of the universe, presupposes the action of 
 morally perfect spiritual Power at the heart of the 
 Whole. 
 
 This is not This is not an argument, although Descartes tries 
 sion from to make it one, and it becomes circular. It is only the 
 pneno- " overt expression of a presupposition, without tacit as- 
 recognitkm sent to which, in some form, human knowledge and 
 must dissolve in total doubt or inorance. The 
 
 truth that one finds in the heart of this so-called 
 argument for the trustworthiness of the human mind 
 is, that the existence of God is presupposed in the 
 reliableness of experience. If I do not, at least tacitly, 
 indulge in this moral faith, I cannot even make a 
 beginning. Unless I believe that I am justified in in- 
 terpreting the manifestations of existence as manifest- 
 ations of what, in its ultimate principle, is personified 
 moral order and goodness, phenomena cannot be in- 
 terpreted, even physically, as in the natural sciences, 
 and in the common-sense perceptions and acts of daily 
 life. Agnosticism in religion and morality carries in 
 
MORAL FOUNDATION OF THEISM. 21 
 
 it universal agnosticism, including physically scientific 
 paralysis as well as religious paralysis. Cosmic faith 
 depends on moral faith in the universe of reality ; 
 and moral faith, in its religious form, is theistic or 
 practically personal faith. Otherwise even what men 
 cannot help believing and seeing to be true may be 
 false an illusory intellectual necessity. Unless we 
 take for granted that we are born into infinite moral 
 order or moral providence, the universe and our 
 interpretations of those of its manifestations that 
 enter into our temporal experience, may all in the 
 end put us to confusion ; and surrender us to idle 
 dreams, with the contingency of a future of unbroken 
 purposeless misery, or final discord between moral 
 conduct and happiness. I cannot indeed logically 
 argue all this, by an argumentative appeal to a spec- 
 ulatively demonstrated God, but I virtually assume 
 God in practically presupposing the absolute reign of 
 order. When I am sure that life cannot be a lie, this 
 means that I cannot help believing that God exists, 
 that obligation to goodness is supreme and eternal, 
 and that this supreme and eternal obligation may be 
 thought of as the perfect will of active moral Eeason. 
 I am tacitly assuming that the whole cannot be a devil's 
 drama, notwithstanding the lurid appearances which 
 the sentient beings on this planet often present. Faith 
 in the final harmony of moral principle and expediency, 
 or in moral trustworthiness at the root of experience, is 
 thus the ultimate practical postulate of human life. 
 
22 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 Mr Her- The commingling of inevitable ultimate ignorance 
 Spencer, with partial] knowledge the infinitely unknowable yet 
 spiritually experienced God- in man's final interpre- 
 tation of the world, suggests the ultimate conception 
 adopted by Mr Herbert Spencer, as the basis of a syn- 
 thetic philosophy. I name with the utmost respect 
 this distinguished living representative of philosoph- 
 ical or theological inquiry, to which he has devoted a 
 long life, with indomitable intellectual persistency, and 
 a noble honesty of purpose of which there are few 
 examples combined in him with a largeness of specu- 
 lative aim and architectonic tendency that, even at a 
 distance, still reminds one of Aristotle or Hegel, and 
 among Englishmen of Bacon, although one misses the 
 splendour of philosophical imagination, and the class- 
 ical culture of the author of the 'Advancement of 
 Learning.' Mr Spencer attracts the average intelli- 
 gence of the practical Anglo-Saxon mind, much as 
 Auguste Comte found response in a like popular con- 
 stituency in France, and then throughout the world. 
 Dissimilar in many ways, these philosophers are not 
 unlike in the fortune of their repute undue depre- 
 ciation at first in the academical coteries of Europe, 
 exaggerated credit then and since among the multi- 
 tude. As Comte has been called the philosopher of 
 the half-educated, so too it may be said of Mr Spencer 
 without disrespect; for the function is a high one. 
 They will both in time take their due place, intermedi- 
 ate between extremes of depreciation and deification. 
 
MORAL FOUNDATION OF THEISM. 23 
 
 The consummation of Mr Spencer's speculation is Seeming 
 that the dual universe of material and mental phen- Religious 
 omena is the temporal manifestation of eternally x 
 Unknowable Power. Accumulated arguments and 
 illustrations pave the way to his conclusion that the 
 Eeality underlying appearances is totally and for ever 
 inconceivable, from the very nature of human intelli- 
 gence. Common-sense, he tells us, asserts the exist- 
 ence of a Eeality; objective science proves that this 
 reality cannot be what we think it ; subjective science 
 shows why we cannot think it as it is, and yet 
 are compelled to think of it as existing ; and in this 
 final assertion of a Eeality utterly inscrutable in na- 
 ture, Eeligion finds an assertion essentially coinciding 
 with its own. We are somehow obliged to regard every 
 phenomenon presented in experience as the manifes- 
 tation of Power by which we are acted on ; Omnipres- 
 ence is indeed unthinkable, yet, as experience dis- 
 closes no bounds to the diffusion of phenomena, we are 
 unable to think limits to the presence of this Power ; 
 while the criticisms of science teach us that it is 
 Power incomprehensible. And this consciousness of 
 incomprehensible Power is the very consciousness that 
 constitutes Eeligion. Eeligion, he further suggests, has 
 vainly struggled to unite more or less science with its 
 inevitable nescience, while Science has tried to keep 
 hold of more or less of this nescience, as though it 
 were bound to convert it into Science. Permanent 
 peace between Eeligion and Science is possible only 
 
24 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 when Science becomes convinced that its explanations 
 are proximate and relative, and when Eeligion becomes 
 convinced that the mystery it contemplates is absolute 
 and therefore for ever inexplicable. Accordingly, Mr 
 Spencer would divorce Science and Eeligion in the 
 distribution of goods, assigning to Science all human 
 knowledge, such as it seems to be, and reserving 
 all human ignorance, such as it must be, to Eeligion. 
 Eeligion is thus the unintelligible Feeling in which 
 Knowledge that is only relative or seeming at last 
 inevitably merges. 
 
 Empty Consciousness of being always in the presence of 
 
 Unknow- wholly unknowable Power seems to be Mr Spencer's 
 asthe'finai' nna l attitude towards the infinite universe of reality 
 war<tethe" i n wn i cn we are having our being. Strictly interpreted, 
 universe* 1 ^ s ^ s an ex P ress i n f thorough-going agnosticism or 
 total nescience ; and this, as I have repeatedly suggested, 
 leaves no room for any man to express himself at all 
 about anything otherwise than in the form of question 
 if even thus, for purely sceptical interrogation neces- 
 sarily dies in the birth ; it can only be a still-born ques- 
 tion. But the Spencerian philosophy consists of more 
 than universal questioning. Its favourite assertion of 
 eternal Unknowableness is combined with many other 
 professedly reasoned assertions. The unknowable Power 
 is affirmed to be a " manifested " Power : we are told that 
 " the Power manifested in the universe is unknown and 
 unknowable." But how can Power that makes itself 
 "manifest" in the material and spiritual phenomena 
 
MORAL FOUNDATION OF THEISM. 25 
 
 that compose the temporal succession be wholly un- 
 known ? That looks like the self - contradictory 
 assertion, that the Power is at once manifested and 
 not - manifested that we know that it exists, but 
 without being able to predicate anything of it, not 
 even its existence, or at least its " existence " only when 
 the word is emptied of all meaning. That which 
 manifests itself must be known, as far as the mani- 
 festation or revelation goes. That the infinite reality 
 stretches without limit beyond the manifestations that 
 are presented in the physical, moral, and religious 
 experience of men including, of course, the necessary 
 postulates involved in this experience, need not trans- 
 form light that may be within the experience into 
 the darkness of necessary and eternal total ignorance. 
 Even if it could do this, so long as there is light 
 enough remaining to enable one to make the one nega- 
 tive assertion of eternal uuknowableness, he must have 
 enough of knowledge about the Power manifested in 
 the universe to justify this negation. But Mr Spencer 
 retains a good deal more than this wholly negative 
 knowledge. His Unknowable Power reveals itself in 
 a way that, on his own showing, admits of a whole 
 hierarchy of sciences being formed to represent the 
 philosophical meaning of its experienced manifesta- 
 tions : human sciences of the revelations which the 
 Unknowable Power makes of itself are presented by 
 Mr Spencer in elaborate co-ordination. The Unknow- 
 able Power is so much manifested that he thinks he 
 
26 
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 is able to generalise its evolutionary and involutionary 
 laws integrative and disintegrative expressed in the 
 history of its manifestations, and thus to describe one 
 noteworthy characteristic of its customary behaviour. 
 It seems to be a Power which, in its sensuous mani- 
 festations, is found revealing itself, slowly and grad- 
 ually, in evolutionary and involutionary order. At a 
 stage in this process, states of human consciousness are 
 found emerging, in persistent correlation with organic 
 movements ; so that the successions of external phe- 
 nomena are accompanied by corresponding simultaneous 
 psychical phenomena. The hierarchy of the natural 
 sciences in which those manifestations can be co-ordin- 
 ated is surely a standing proof that the Power thus 
 revealed in the universe is not in every way un- 
 known and unknowable. The verified contents of the 
 sciences of matter and mind are a considerable con- 
 tribution to our interpretation of the Power an in- 
 terpretation in which men put trust, and thus express 
 faith in its morally reliable behaviour of the Power, in 
 this part of their intercourse with it. 
 
 How far the revelations of the Supreme Power that 
 are within human reach in the physical, aesthetical, 
 moral, and religious experience that men have, with 
 its necessary rational implicates how far these carry 
 man, on his way towards omniscience or infinite know- 
 ledge, is of course a further question. Enough that the 
 latent Power is not wholly unmanifested or unrevealed. 
 It is doubtless only a physical God and a physical 
 
MORAL FOUNDATION OF THEISM. 27 
 
 religion that we have in the sequences of sense -pre- 
 sented evolution, interpreted in the natural theology 
 commonly called natural science, sustained as it is by 
 the attenuated moral or religious faith which tacitly 
 enters even into physical faith. For this gives only a 
 boundless and endless universe of things not including 
 persons at all, in the moral and spiritual meaning of 
 personality. It seems to have for its last word Mr 
 Spencer's own assertion, that the Power whose temporal 
 manifestations are thus scientifically generalised is " an 
 Existence which fills all space and time." I find this 
 unproved proposition in one of his latest and not least 
 interesting utterances, contained in a criticism of Mr 
 Balfour in the ' Fortnightly Review.' But to affirm 
 of the Power revealed in the universe of our experi- 
 ence, so much as is affirmed when we are told that 
 it "fills all space," and must therefore be extended, 
 looks like a really illegitimate incursion into the region 
 of the unknowable. 
 
 This philosophy seems to oscillate inconsistently be- Oscillation 
 tween that phase of Pantheism which interprets the finally* 11 
 
 universe as at last significant through its phenomena 
 
 of " Divine " Thing, or infinite non-moral Power, and 
 
 the absolute Nescience in which the Power is wholly fg SC ce ' 
 
 unmanifested and undetected by reason. Yet there is ^ e . en Pan : 
 
 tneism and 
 
 in it latent theistic faith, so far as the ever- changing Pyrrhon- 
 
 ism. 
 
 universe is treated as worthy of confidence, reliable, or 
 what may be taken for a true revelation of the 
 Supreme Power, at least in the evolution of physical 
 
28 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 phenomena; so far a trustworthy universe, not a 
 capricious and diabolical universe, that may at any 
 moment paralyse human activity and intelligence, per- 
 haps by transforming itself into chaos and still keeping 
 us in life. 
 
 infinite or Mr Spencer ends in the cosmic or physical faith, 
 moral Per- that men are things, causally connected under Infinite 
 Power, but without rising into the moral and religious 
 faith, that men are persons, having their being in ab- 
 solute moral correlation with what is finally conceived 
 as moral personality, or personified goodness, without 
 recognising man in his spiritual personality as the most 
 significant "manifestation" of the Power that is supreme. 
 Because man cannot finally comprehend Reality in its 
 necessarily infinite or incompletable physical order; 
 and because he finds himself, when he tries to do 
 this, involved in a tissue of unintelligible proposi- 
 tions, therefore nothing can be really known either 
 speculatively or practically, this seems to be the 
 outcome of Mr Spencer's argument. I find myself 
 in contact and collision with an evolving and then 
 dissolving universe, of which I am at the same time 
 a part an unbeginning and unending evolution, it 
 may be in which I cannot by all the methods of 
 wholly physical inquiry discover final meaning or 
 purpose: therefore I must dismiss as unwarranted 
 the theistic interpretation in which all is recognised 
 as the manifestation of morally trustworthy, or, as we 
 say, personal agency. For its theistic final interpreta- 
 
MORAL FOUNDATION OF THEISM. 29 
 
 tion seems to mean for Mr Spencer, that the Power at 
 the centre of the infinite universe must have a personal 
 life so like man's own as that it is the theatre of succes- 
 sive conscious states. And as a person, whether called 
 finite or infinite, can be conscious, he takes for granted, 
 of only one state at a time, divine Omniscience is dis- 
 missed as an absurdity. The Omniscience that has to 
 comprehend Boundlessness in space and time, either in 
 a single intuition, or in a succession of conscious acts, 
 cannot consist, it is virtually argued, with any idea we 
 can have of personal life and conscious knowledge 
 either in man or in God. 
 
 The inference, on grounds of this sort, that the is a Divine 
 universe does not admit of being at last morally or edina 
 religiously interpreted by man, or as being regarded, interpret- 7 
 for and by man, as practically manifested Spirit, re- 
 minds one of the quaint conceit of Du Bois Eaymond, 
 who refused to believe in God until he could find some- 
 where in space a huge brain, like the human, with 
 warm arterial blood and ganglia, proportioned to the 
 infinite greatness of the Mind that was dogmatically 
 supposed to need cerebral organisation. As if the final 
 Power in the universe could not be practically Spirit, 
 or moral Obligation and Goodness personified, unless em- 
 bodied in an organism like the human. It seems hardly 
 less reasonable to insist that if man's final relation to 
 the Whole is supposed to be a moral and personal rela- 
 tion, the Supreme Principle must be the subject of suc- 
 cessive conscious states of personal life, like those of men. 
 
30 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 Examples This finite, or for ever incomplete, knowledge of what 
 
 of a human . . . 
 
 knowledge at last infinitely passes finite knowledge moral and 
 which in it- practical knowledge of what is at last physically in- 
 
 cognisable by the knower is illustrated all round the 
 now e ge. nor ^ zon o f numan experience. Take examples : One 
 can demonstrate the geometrical relations of figures, 
 although the Immensity toward which all finite places, 
 shapes, and sizes inevitably carry thought is found to 
 transcend human understanding; yet human under- 
 standing does not, on this account, reject Euclid as a 
 bundle of unwarranted and illusory conclusions. Again, 
 I am obliged to think of events as before and after, and 
 I find that I can make reasonable use of a chronological 
 table, while I cannot fathom the mystery of the two 
 eternities into which I am necessarily carried, when I 
 reflect upon the temporal evolution of the changes in 
 which the supreme Power is revealed to me. So too 
 the manifestations of natural causality that are pre- 
 sented in sense are treated as interpretable in science, 
 and for practical human purposes ; yet they are all at 
 last involved in the impenetrable causal mystery of 
 unbeginning regress and endless progress. In these 
 instances I seem to say, Si non rogas, intelligo. I suffi- 
 ciently understand the manifested Power, if I am not 
 obliged, as the condition of understanding its manifes- 
 tations, to reduce to sensuous intelligence the mystery 
 into which these resolve themselves. Is it otherwise 
 with man's moral or religious faith in what the universe 
 finally is ? This too suggests questions which man can 
 
MORAL FOUNDATION OF THEISM. 31 
 
 as little answer, about a consciousness or supercon- 
 sciousness that is as remote from the human as 
 Immensity is remote from the spaces comprehended in 
 our finite figures, or as Eternity is remote from the 
 temporal successions that can be measured in our tables 
 of chronology. I am not obliged to be agnostic as re- 
 gards either the spacial manifestations of the universe, 
 or its temporal manifestations, because Immensity and 
 Eternity, physically regarded, present a multitude of 
 questions which man can never answer. May not the 
 continuous self-consciousness of persons, in their moral 
 and religious experience, with its necessary postulates, 
 reveal, what is even eternally true as it were in a 
 relative eternal truth while its problems only perplex 
 man with contradictions, when he tries to realise, under 
 the terms of his limited physical experience, a con- 
 sciousness or superconsciousness that, as infinite, must 
 be for him finally mysterious, and of which, in Mr 
 Spencer's words, "not even the highest mental attri- 
 butes conceivable by us" are adequate predicates. I 
 do not see why, " unless I wish to be deceived," I must 
 surrender as delusion either a physical or a fully 
 theistic faith in the Eeal, only because human know- 
 ledge cannot become an infinite intelligence of infinite 
 experience ; or because man's intelligo disappears when 
 he tries to transform it into the Omniscience from 
 which faith and mystery are wholly eliminated. 
 
 Yet so it seems to Mr Spencer. Those who, like him Are men 
 
 reduced to 
 
 turn away from a finally uninterpretable universe in despair in 
 
32 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 a morally despair, so think and act, he tells us pathetically, " not 
 pretabie because they wish to do this, but because they must " : 
 self-deception seems to him the alternative. " There is 
 no pleasure," he goes on to say, " in the consciousness 
 of being an infinitesimal bubble, on a globe which 
 is itself infinitesimal, compared with the totality of 
 things. Those on whom the unpitying rush of 
 changes inflicts sufferings, which are often without 
 remedy, find no consolation in the thought that 
 they are at the mercy of blind forces, which cause, 
 indifferently, now the destruction of a sun, and now the 
 death of an animalcule. Contemplation of a universe 
 which is without conceivable beginning or end, and 
 without intelligible purpose, yields no satisfaction. 
 The desire to know what it all means is no less strong 
 in the agnostic than in others, and raises sympathy 
 with them. Failing to find any interpretation himself, 
 he feels a regretful inability to accept the interpreta- 
 tion they offer." But these striking sentences of Mr 
 Spencer can hardly be said after all to describe an 
 uninterpretable universe : they express positive know- 
 ledge that the force at work is " blind," and that 
 human life is conducted on a globe that is " infinitely 
 small " compared with some (so far) known " totality " ; 
 and they imply that enough is knowable about the 
 manifested Power to justify some human assertions 
 about reliable realities, " which must not be aban- 
 doned for deceiving fancies." They express, in short, 
 a physical faith, while they discard as self-deception 
 
MORAL FOUNDATION OF THEISM. 33 
 
 the moral trust that is the implied guarantee of 
 physical trust both, it is true, logically unproved 
 and unprovable, but justified in practical reason by 
 the fact that human life without them is baseless, 
 and its ideal unapproachable, so that each faith is 
 a permanent practical need of Man in his final 
 relation to the Whole. 
 
 Theistic or moral faith in the ever -changing uni- Sensuous 
 verse, without doubt, is not equally developed in all Spiritual 
 men, nor so widely as physical faith in common experi- 
 ence and in the natural sciences. It may be asked, 
 How and why is this so ? Coleridge offers one answer 
 in his 'Aids to Reflection/ " It is not in our power," 
 he suggests, " to disclaim our nature as sentient beings," 
 but it is more or less "in our power to disclaim our 
 nature as moral beings." In recognising the finally 
 ethical and spiritual constitution of the universal real- 
 ity, " I assume a something, the proof of which no man 
 can give to another, yet every man may find for him- 
 self. If any man assert that he cannot find it, I am 
 bound to disbelieve him. I cannot do otherwise with- 
 out unsettling the very foundations of my own moral 
 nature. The reasoners on both sides commence by 
 taking something for granted. But the pure physicist 
 assumes what, according to himself, he neither is, nor 
 can be under an obligation of moral reason to assume. 
 If he uses the word obligation, he can mean only 
 physical necessity. To overthrow faith in aught higher 
 than physical necessity is the very purpose of his 
 
 c 
 
34 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 argument. He desires you only to take for granted 
 that all reality is included in physical nature, and he 
 may then safely defy you to ward off his conclusion 
 that nothing real is excluded." This thought of 
 Coleridge is exemplified in the individual men who 
 are types of man at his best and highest who rep- 
 resent constituents of humanity which, while normal, 
 are yet not universally developed felt and seen by 
 saint and prophet, in others unawakened or obscured. 
 They recall words long ago uttered in Palestine, which 
 present in one aspect the moral foundation of theism 
 " Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see 
 God." 
 
 Summary. The eternal divine gospel that God is love may be 
 taken as another expression for that perfect moral 
 trustworthiness of the final principle of existence, 
 which has been presented in this lecture as the essen- 
 tial principle of theistic faith, and the infallible foun- 
 dation of all human intercourse, through experience 
 and its rational implicates, with the Power that is 
 universally manifested quern nosse vivere. 
 
35 
 
 LECTURE II. 
 
 CAUSATION THEISTICALLY INTERPRETED. 
 
 RELIGIOUS life as it develops in the individual makes Does not 
 him personify, or recognise as moral spirit, the eternal 
 moral obligation on which human conduct ought to 
 turn. In this religious recognition of moral order one Go( * OT . 
 
 perfect 
 
 finds the germ of theistic faith. It is absolute trust in Goodness 
 
 . finally at 
 
 moral providence that seems to be, consciously or at the root of 
 least tacitly, at the bottom of that recognition of even persons ? 
 physical trustworthiness in the universe of reality, 
 which the daily actions of men, as well as their natural 
 sciences, finally presuppose and depend upon. Must 
 not even physical faith dissolve without an implied 
 moral and religious trust ? Unless men take for 
 granted that natural order is a dependable reality, 
 and neither a temporary accident, nor the capricious 
 contrivance of a diabolical Power at the heart of the 
 Whole, intent upon misleading sentient human intelli- 
 gence in the end, they can neither interpret nature. 
 
36 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 nor employ natural things in their service, in the spirit 
 of the Nomim Organum. When I try to think out an 
 ethically sceptical conception of the universe, I find 
 myself becoming scientifically and practically par- 
 alysed. Intellectual system in the universe disappears 
 in the dissolution of moral faith in it, with the con- 
 sequent dissolution of all faith, even that without 
 which a human understanding cannot be so applied to 
 presented phenomena as that they may be recognised 
 as things. Man is rescued from universal scepticism 
 through trust finally in the divine synthesis. The 
 individual ego and the outer world are unintelligible 
 unless God is tacitly presupposed, 
 is not But is this finally religious trust finally blind ? Is 
 
 religious . . . . _ 
 
 faith rea- it more than an irrational inclination ? Is it not 
 faith? rather so charged with reason, or moral obligation, 
 that one may even say that indulgence in it is the 
 only finally reasonable attitude of the human mind 
 in its relation to the infinite universe of reality ; and 
 that its decay would be the decay of what is highest 
 in the ideal human being, the decay of that in which 
 humanity culminates ? Can man be acting reasonably, 
 or doing justice to his highest self, when he tries to 
 extinguish this final and unconditional moral trust, 
 which seems to enter instinctively into his mental ex- 
 perience; or when he tries to get rid of the theistic 
 personification of the data of conscience, which makes 
 him regard morally responsible Will as the only abso- 
 lutely originative Cause of change that can be dis- 
 
CAUSATION THEISTICALLY INTERPRETED. 37 
 
 cerned, at the highest attainable human point for 
 insight into the final principle of the universe? 
 
 These questions lead us into a fuller investigation Theistic 
 of the reasonableness of moral and theistic trust, as faith, like 
 the final rational attitude, at the different points at f a ith, 1C pre- 
 which its constituent elements and supposed supports ino 
 have been looked at, in what are sometimes called 
 " proofs " of the existence of God. But the word proof 
 
 universe, 
 
 is used in a qualified meaning when it is so applied, and not 
 
 originally 
 
 Theistic faith, as the condition of all proof, is itself derived as 
 
 a conclu- 
 
 incapable of scientific proof. " Did you deduce your skm from 
 
 mere phe- 
 
 own being ? " asks Coleridge. " Even this is less ab- nomena. 
 surd than the conceit of deducing the Divine Being. 
 Never would you have had the notion had you not 
 had the idea rather had not the idea worked in 
 you like the memory of a name which we cannot 
 recollect, yet feel that we have ; which reveals its 
 existence in the mind only by a restless anticipation ; 
 and proves its a priori actuality by the almost ex- 
 plosive instantaneity with which it is welcomed and 
 recognised." Theistic or moral trust is an existing 
 fact in human consciousness that asks to have its 
 possible consistency with reason shown. It is a state 
 of which the human mind may try to rid itself only 
 if the intellectual difficulties involved in its action 
 as the final faith of man are found to be greater 
 than the difficulties involved in its suspension. Any- 
 way, in dealing with the rationale of religion we are 
 dealing with the rationale of something that is found 
 
38 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 already in man's mental experience, manifesting itself 
 in corresponding human feeling, human conduct, and 
 human thought. We do not need to bring into ex- 
 istence by reasoned proofs the already operative faiths 
 which sustain religious, moral, sesthetical, scientific life, 
 or common working life we cannot bring these into 
 existence, in the form of conclusions logically evolved 
 from premisses. They arise spontaneously in men's 
 minds as the common root of their growing mental 
 experience. Thus the daily physical experience of men, 
 and the verified inductions of the natural sciences, 
 show physical or cosmic faith in spontaneous exer- 
 cise ; and inquiry into the reasonableness of this in- 
 ferior degree of faith in the universe is open to the 
 philosophical analyst, who can interrogate reflectively 
 what he is actually living by. So is it with the 
 moral or religious faith on which the physical trust 
 itself in the end depends. It already operates, be- 
 fore it is reasoned out philosophically ; and that not 
 only in the attenuated form, of trust in external uni- 
 formities, but in the deeper form of moral obligation, 
 the implicate of personal remorse, and involved in the 
 religious idea of eternally personified moral obligation 
 or goodness. And, as in the former case, so here 
 likewise, it is open to the philosophic critic to reduce 
 to its elements the complex fact of religious reliance 
 on the final principle of the universe, as we have this 
 reliance exemplified in the ethical religions, above 
 all, in Christianity. This may still be done with a 
 
CAUSATION THEIBTIGALLY INTERPRETED. 39 
 
 view to determine whether a faith deeper than the 
 physical or non-moral is only an anachronism, ready 
 to die out in the fuller evolution of humanity ; or, 
 on the contrary, an eternal human need, which be- 
 comes stronger and more enlightened, in the form of 
 religious life, in proportion to the advance of men in 
 thoughtfulness and goodness. 
 
 What are misleadingly called " demonstrations " and Alleged 
 
 . cosmologi- 
 
 " logical arguments that God exists are really more or cai, teieo- 
 less successful analyses of the rational constituents of ontoiogical 
 a faith already in germ. In what is this faith faith in ? ortheism. 
 and is it justified in reason in being faith in this? 
 This is one form in which the analytical inquiry might 
 be expressed. Or otherwise What does the word 
 "God" mean, and on what ground is one moved to 
 believe that that meaning corresponds to the actual 
 reality ? These questions underlie the so-called theistic 
 " proofs," each of which takes its own point of view for 
 recognising the validity of the faith, or for testing its 
 reasonableness. Thus one way of seeing the reason- 
 ableness of the theistic postulate may be found in what 
 is virtually philosophical analysis of the principle of 
 causality that principle on which man rests whenever 
 he contemplates the ever-changing universe : this is at 
 the root of what is called the " cosmological proof " of 
 theism. Another way, or rather a popular modifica- 
 tion of the preceding way of showing the reasonable- 
 ness of theism, is observation of natural adaptations 
 of means to ends especially ends that relate them- 
 
40 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 selves to man "final causes" as they are somewhat 
 ambiguously called. Adaptations of this sort, whether 
 or not they pervade the evolving universe universally 
 and eternally, seemed at least to present themselves 
 more particularly in the history of organised matter, 
 animal and vegetable : the construction of the human 
 eye was a favourite instance. The universe was ac- 
 cordingly reported to abound in curious and useful 
 superhuman contrivances, many of them adapted to 
 promote life and happiness, and in the long-run to 
 improve man towards whose physical evolution and 
 education, in the larger light of recent science, the 
 whole planetary evolution seems to conspire, as if 
 the world were contrived for that end: the inference 
 drawn from all this is, that men are reasonably justi- 
 fied in the faith that the universe is manifested in- 
 telligence: here you have the familiar " teleological " 
 vindication of theistic faith. Then again there are 
 thinkers of more daring speculative power who essay 
 to translate moral and religious faith exhaustively 
 into necessary intellectual forms ; sublimating the 
 temporal evolution in nature and spirit in a timeless 
 dialectical evolution of universal Eeason, into which 
 all reality is supposed finally to resolve itself: this 
 is what may be called the " ontological " method of 
 vindicating or rationalising theology. 
 
 These time-honoured "proofs" are commonly sup- 
 Kant's cri- 
 ticism of posed to have encountered rough and damaging intel- 
 
 theistic 
 
 logic. lectual handling on the part of Immanual Kant. 
 
CAUSATION THEISTICALLY INTERPRETED. 41 
 
 Ever since he criticised them, they have been more 
 or less discredited in scientific opinion. The dis- 
 credit is probably not undeserved, if any one of these 
 arguments, or even all collectively, is so misconceived 
 as to be taken for the conscious source of man's moral 
 and religious faith in the constituting principle of the 
 universe. They are discredited when regarded as 
 conclusive arguments that are able to determine a 
 conclusion which, being infinite, is not in this way 
 determinable. For either abstract reasoning or physi- 
 cal induction becomes a tissue of paralogisms, when 
 it tries to bring the universe of reality, as a finite 
 quantity, under logical conditions that are adapted 
 only to what is finite, thus identifying scientific 
 understanding with the larger reason that concerns 
 itself with the final problem. Physical science and 
 its argumentative proofs cannot be treated in this 
 way as final philosophy. Yet theistic " proofs," so- 
 called, may each in its way uncover the speculative 
 and practical principles which underlie theistic faith, 
 and final faith thus finds that it has been tacitly 
 sustained. 
 
 Take first the Principle of Causality, and estimate is Theism 
 the strength of the cosmological proof. Consider voivedin 
 
 . , , . the Causal 
 
 whether the theistic interpretation or the universe conception 
 is not just the idea of causality in its final form, changing 
 and in its ultimate application. In assuming, as umveri 
 we must, the dependence of every change upon a 
 
42 
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 Causality 
 as the su- 
 preme in- 
 tellectual 
 postulate 
 concerning 
 the chang- 
 ing uni- 
 verse. 
 
 Without 
 causality 
 in the uni- 
 verse there 
 could be 
 no science 
 of its 
 events or 
 changes. 
 
 cause, are we not virtually assuming its dependence 
 at last on the only originating or uncaused cause that 
 can enter into our thought that is to say, its de- 
 pendence on intending Will, recognised by and as 
 active moral Eeason ? To answer this question we 
 must try to make clear to ourselves what causality 
 finally means and involves. 
 
 We can easily see that men recognise the universal 
 presence of causation in this ever-changing world : we 
 all unavoidably proceed in life on the supposition that 
 because we are living among changes, we must be 
 living among causes. The causal relation is of all 
 relations the most universal, in a universe of ever- 
 changing things and persons ; and for exclusively 
 natural science, natural causation seems to be final. 
 It becomes the supreme category, which comprehends 
 all change under itself. Latent intelligence in man 
 awakes, and gives the first signs of its activity in 
 craving vaguely for natural or perceptible " causes." 
 
 But what sets human intelligence agoing in search of 
 cause ; and what is meant by the word cause, when it 
 signifies that of which intelligence is then in quest? 
 In an immutable universe there would be no need for 
 the craving, and no room for the idea, nor room there- 
 fore for a conscious life such as man's ; for with us 
 consciousness necessarily involves change of mental 
 state and object. It is the actual metamorphosis, the 
 continuous change to which all experienced things and 
 all individual persons are subject, and in which things 
 
CAUSATION THEISTICALLT INTERPRETED. 43 
 
 and persons reveal themselves, that raises in man the 
 final question of intelligence, WTiy all this is so ? Mind 
 is awakened in this temporal procession, or causal evo- 
 lution, in which we are each participating, and which, 
 as far as we can see, is in process, if not in progressive 
 amendment, from everlasting to everlasting. This is 
 the universal fact, signified by Heraclitus of old in the 
 formula rravra pet All things flow. The changeable 
 describes the actual. Everything seems to be and yet 
 not to be : it is at once being and becoming. By an 
 irresistible intellectual necessity every event every 
 change carries the thought of man beyond the event 
 itself, into some preceding form of existence out of 
 which the event has emerged, as the evolved trans- 
 formation and equivalent of this its natural cause. For 
 we have been gradually taught to believe in an ex- 
 act equivalence or proportion between an event as an 
 effect, and that event in the preceding form of its 
 own natural cause; so that whatever appears in the 
 new form must have its due corresponding phenomenon 
 in another form i.e., that phenomenon which physical 
 science calls its cause. Natural science rests at last 
 on the faith that this is so; for if this were not so, 
 scientific proof, or verification by fact, would be im- 
 possible : the organised knowledge of change which is 
 called science which is itself an event or effect in its 
 way could not come into conscious existence in human 
 minds. Calculated comparisons of phenomena, with a 
 view to inductive generalisations, would lose their in- 
 
44 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 dispensable working postulate. If this causal connec- 
 tion between new forms of existence and their old 
 forms were not a real and dependable connection; if 
 there were no natural causality immanent in the uni- 
 verse, no physical order, there could then be no physical 
 science, and no experience available for the conduct 
 of life. The indispensable director amidst otherwise 
 chaotic changes would be wanting. 
 
 Theimme- For consider what inquisitive intelligence and the 
 vantage of practical needs of men have secured for themselves, when 
 knowledge the discovery has been made that some new phenomenon, 
 physica/or hitherto an orphan in the universe in the mind's eye, 
 ca*uJes! n J has fo un d its parentage in other phenomena already 
 dissolved, but of which the new phenomenon is proved 
 to be the exact correlative, or natural effect its pro- 
 portional equivalent in the natural metamorphosis ? 
 Increased knowledge of those causal relations between 
 new phenomena and their old equivalents is plainly 
 useful to mankind so far as human pains and plea- 
 sures are themselves effects, dependent on natural 
 causes, first in the outside world, and then in indi- 
 vidual organisms, by physical consequence ; and so far 
 as men are able to direct the current of natural changes 
 into congenial channels, for " man as the servant of 
 nature," as Bacon advises us, can do so much, and so 
 much only, as he has observed of the causal course 
 of nature. Human knowledge of causal changes and 
 human power meet in one. Where a presentable cause 
 is not perceived, the natural effect cannot be secured 
 
CAUSATION THEISTICALLY INTERPRETED. 45 
 
 by man : nature to be commanded must be obeyed : that 
 which in our thought is the cause is transformed in 
 active life into the rule. It is only by obedience to 
 the rules thus formed that man can live at all, in 
 a universe that is undergoing constant and continuous 
 metamorphoses, on which human thoughts, sensibilities, 
 and overt actions are themselves dependent. We are 
 all without our leave entangled while we live in this 
 universal web of natural causation. 
 
 Yet notwithstanding its obvious utility, the discovery Discovery 
 of the natural causes of perceived changes leaves the natural 
 causal craving of persistent intelligence as dissatisfied as events 
 
 it was before. For the predecessor out of which a 
 change has naturally emerged, and of which the change explained"- 
 is a metamorphosis, itself equally needs a causal prede- j^ 1 " 18 ^ t 
 cessor. The discovered natural cause, being only a ural i c ?J as 
 
 must itsell 
 
 finite phenomenon, must itself too be only an effect be caused. 
 to the eye of awakened intelligence. In seeking for a 
 perceptible finite cause the mind is seeking for satisfac- 
 tion in a necessarily unsatisfying universe of mutually 
 dependent phenomena. The cause sought for, if it is 
 to give absolute relief, must be other than the pro- 
 visional causes registered in natural science ; for each of 
 these, as much as its effects, requires something beyond 
 an imaginable finite into which it may be refunded. 
 The scientific discovery that oxygen and hydrogen is 
 the causal equivalent of water, or the discovery that 
 heat is a conditional metamorphosis and causal equiv- 
 alent of modes of motion, has brought the discoverer 
 
46 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 no nearer final satisfaction than he was before he 
 reached them notwithstanding the partial intellectual 
 relief, and the increased command of nature, which 
 growing knowledge of natural causes carries with it. 
 The old form of each new phenomenon as much needs 
 explanation as the new form itself did, and still when 
 we have reached what physical science accepts as its 
 cause, we have only enlarged our natural outlook by 
 a wider empirical generalisation. The need for the final 
 or absolutely originating cause, which can alone satisfy 
 persistent causal craving, remains in other respects as 
 urgent as before. The search for wholly natural causes 
 is like the search for the source of a river that has no 
 source. As in adding finite spaces to finite spaces, 
 however vast the resulting space becomes, we are 
 obliged to believe that we are no nearer Immensity or 
 Boundlessness than we were when we began to add ; or 
 just as millions of years form a duration that is really 
 no nearer than a single moment is to the unbeginning 
 and unending, called Eternity, so the endlessly regres- 
 sive search for natural causes, with the discovery of 
 more and more extensive physical laws, or customary 
 uniformities in the natural procedure, leaves us still in 
 want of the final or originative Cause of the natural 
 network as a whole. 
 
 The hu- Do we not find ourselves intellectually obliged to be- 
 
 soiubie 11 lieve that, because Something is now undergoing 
 
 anunbe- changes, Something must exist eternally either in 
 
 ilng the form of an unbeginning succession of causally equiv- 
 
CAUSATION THEIST1CALLY INTERPRETED. 47 
 
 alent changes, or in the not less mysterious way of series of 
 One unchanging uubeginniug Something ? " That causes. 
 Something has really existed from all eternity " I samuef 
 use the words of Samuel Clarke, who, along with Locke, 
 is a representative expositor of causality as the ration- 
 ale of theistic faith " is one of the certainest and most 
 evident truths in the world, acknowledged by all men, 
 and disputed by none. Yet as to the manner how this 
 can be, there is nothing more difficult for the mind of 
 man to conceive than this plain Self-evident truth. For 
 how anything can have existed eternally that is, how 
 an eternal duration can be now actually past is a 
 thing utterly as impossible for our narrow under- 
 standing to comprehend as anything that is not an 
 express contradiction. And yet to deny the truth of 
 the proposition, that an eternal duration is now actually 
 past, would be to assert something far more unintel- 
 ligible, even an express and real contradiction." Yet it 
 is the mystery of infinite regress that science of nature 
 has always to face ; and this, without the theistic pos- 
 tulate in the background, makes it impossible to treat 
 even external nature as trustworthy. For science ad- 
 vances in the discovery of natural causes in the moral 
 trust that natural changes are orderly, and in the per- 
 sistence of this order in continuous metamorphoses ; 
 but a wholly natural science proceeds only tacitly on 
 this assurance, without analysis of its implicates, and 
 not recognising the final guarantee for its own expecta- 
 tions. Why may not a natural cause some day issue in 
 
48 
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 Natural 
 causa- 
 tion, or 
 evolution- 
 ary meta- 
 morphosis 
 of pheno- 
 mena, 
 explains 
 nothing. 
 
 But is our 
 feeling of 
 dissatisfac- 
 tion with 
 this pro- 
 visional 
 causation 
 a reason for 
 
 phenomena different from those into which it has hitherto 
 been transformed ? Or at least what security does the 
 narrow experience that is open to man give against 
 the practically chaotic interference of hitherto inex- 
 perienced natural causes, to the utter confusion of the 
 expected succession ? Does the inevitable demand for 
 a cause on the part of human intelligence mean only 
 demand for a natural or dependent finite cause, not- 
 withstanding the ultimate unsatisfactoriness of such 
 " causes," in their being themselves as dependent on 
 what is physically unknown as their effects were ? If so, 
 physical science lands us at last in the infinitely mys- 
 terious alternatives of eternal Becoming, or eternal Being 
 eternal metamorphosis of imaginable phenomena, or 
 the eternal unchanging unimaginable Something. 
 
 In truth natural causes and the natural evolution of 
 phenomena in themselves explain nothing. Kesponse 
 to the causal craving is not really provided by them, 
 or only provisionally. They present an orderly pro- 
 cession of effects, not the agent in the whole dramatic 
 performance. So they leave in the background the 
 faith, necessarily postulated, that this performance on 
 the part of the universe is more than a treacherous 
 illusion. 
 
 But in adopting this postulate are we not relieving 
 in dogmatic fashion the discomfort occasioned by the 
 discovery that natural causes are not all that the per- 
 sistent causal craving needs ? Is not this to indulge 
 in a vague faith that since natural science cannot give 
 
CAUSATION THEISTICALLY INTERPRETED. 49 
 what we want, a really restful cause is somehow in- assuming 
 
 the reality 
 
 nate in the Whole seeing that without its imman- ofsuper- 
 
 natural 
 
 ence our discomfort must continue ? Is not this to Power, to 
 
 proceed upon the gratuitous hypothesis, that we cannot feeling? 
 be living in a universe that is and must be constantly 
 uncomfortable to us, or at least a constant source of 
 intellectual uneasiness ? Are men entitled to conclude 
 that because nature presents to natural science only 
 unbeginning and unending change, finally unexplained 
 and inexplicable, there must, for our relief, be forth- 
 coming an explanation of the Whole ? Does it follow 
 that because perceived things appear to the sensuous 
 understanding to be naturally dependent on, or as 
 we say caused by, one another, and so far not really 
 caused at all, there must therefore exist uncaused 
 morally perfect Will, for explanation of the Whole, 
 only because it must not be supposed that men should 
 be subject to the discomfort of baffled desire ? But if 
 something in my mind sets me in quest of causes, and 
 if the sensuous understanding in its scientific exercises 
 never reaches what I am in quest of, can I not refer to 
 something in my spiritual constitution that makes me 
 pause in the infinite scientific regress, and that puts me 
 under an obligation to believe that I am living and 
 moving and having my being under Power that is 
 independent of the natural regress and progress, and 
 on which all natural procedure is itself dependent, 
 the Cause which not only does not need, but which does 
 not admit of being itself caused ? If so, what is this 
 
 D 
 
50 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 something in reason and experience, which arrests the 
 otherwise vain search for final cause within the tem- 
 poral order of imaginable change, and directs us at last 
 to the philosophically satisfying Cause ? 
 Our feeling If all that could be found in this relation were only 
 the uncomfortable feeling of continued causal dissatis- 
 faction, it would be insufficient reasoning to conclude, 
 
 verse of as some seem to do that because dissatisfaction is 
 
 provisional 
 
 causes discomfort, the existence otherwise of the inevitable 
 
 only, is in 
 
 itself an discomfort is a sufficient reason for making the stifl 
 
 insufficient 
 
 reason for persistent causal craving a proof of the reality or super- 
 
 concluding , 
 
 super- natural Power. Of the seemingly unbegmnmg and un- 
 
 Power. ending evolution of changing phenomena called Nature, 
 only an insignificant portion can come within the per- 
 sonal experience of each man, and a relatively insignifi- 
 cant portion within the collective experience even of 
 the whole human race. To argue for more than this 
 narrow experience presents, on the ground of uneasy 
 feeling, looks like saying that there must be more than 
 natural causation that an empirical conception of the 
 world must be fundamentally misleading merely be- 
 cause the finally empirical supposition is uncomfortable 
 when we try to think it out. If this uneasy feeling is 
 the only ground in reason and experience for the hypo- 
 thesis of supernatural and uncaused Power being imma- 
 nent in the whole, we must be using empty words when 
 we speak of this Power. And if the whole experience 
 of man is and must be sensuous, or mechanically articu- 
 lated, what meaning can be introduced into the words 
 
CAUSATION THEISTICALLY INTERPRETED. 51 
 
 which pretend to signify the true and resting Cause 
 that does give satisfaction to the transcendental desire ? 
 
 I do not see how these obstacles to the satisfaction For this is 
 of the causal craving can be met, or how any final 
 interpretation can be put upon what is called natural 
 causation, if the data to which an exclusively physical 
 science confines itself exhaust man's resources. If this verse> 
 causality is the only causality, there is no room for final 
 faith in the universe, or in any finally satisfying cause : 
 we must at last face the infinite mystery of endless ac- 
 cidental change that sceptical aspect of the Infinite, 
 which dissolves all faith, in the idea of a capricious 
 temporal process an evolution without the supposi- 
 tion of a constant morally trustworthy Evolver 
 finally unintelligible motion. The supposed cosmo- 
 logical proof of the reality of the eternal Evolver or 
 Mover becomes only one form of a vague dissatisfac- 
 tion with the idea of the finite in quantity. 
 
 But while natural causation, exclusively regarded, while nat- 
 conceals God, man, as presenting more than natural ^[slonaf 
 causation, reveals God in signally revealing final exclusively 
 causality, or an uncaused cause that is alone and conceals*' 
 absolutely responsible for its effects. Yet I should f^f n 
 rather say that external nature conceals God, only if Go f> 
 
 J J and super- 
 
 God is not revealed through the moral and religious naturalises 
 
 natural 
 
 experience of man. After this revelation external nature causation, 
 itself becomes for man constantly symbolic of the divine : 
 each fresh discovery of a natural cause is then inter- 
 
52 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 pretable as only a further and fuller revelation of the 
 supernatural Power of which all natural "agency" is 
 the effect and expression. After God has been found 
 in the moral experience of man, which points irresist- 
 ibly to intending Will as the only known Cause that 
 is absolute, the discovery, that this is the natural or 
 provisional cause of that, is recognised as the only dis- 
 covery that this is the divinely constituted sign, or 
 constant antecedent, of that. The whole natural succes- 
 sion becomes the manifestation of infinite Spiritual or 
 Personal agency : the universe in its temporal process 
 is seen to be reasonably interpretable as finally the con- 
 stantly manifested moral activity of God, incarnate in 
 the Whole and in every part ; in a way to which some 
 may think they find a faint analogy, when they con- 
 template their own bodily organism, in its dependence 
 on their own governing and responsible will this micro- 
 cosm thus the symbol of the infinite Macrocosm. 
 For in our But what is that in man, you ask, which explains or 
 justifies this divine satisfaction of the causal demand, as 
 the highest reasonableness that is within man's reach, 
 
 find e fi]Ta e i wnen ne as k s f r tne cause f tne natural universe, 
 or absolute an( j see k s relief for a sense of absolute dependence that 
 
 Power. 
 
 finds nothing to be absolutely depended on in what is 
 finite and caused ? The existence of the vague feeling 
 of discomfort, as I have said, is not enough. But we 
 find in man more than dissatisfaction with merely 
 natural causes. We find an obligation of moral reason 
 to recognise that he is himself, as a spiritual person, 
 
CAUSATION THEISTICALLY INTERPRETED. 53 
 
 the absolute finally determining cause of all those 
 changes in himself and in external nature for which 
 he is morally responsible. This supernatural experi- 
 ence throws deeper meaning into Causation, derived 
 from morally responsible intending Will, the only 
 cause within human experience that is a finally satis- 
 fying cause; a cause which not only does not need, 
 but absolutely forbids us to go behind itself for the 
 explanation of whatever it alone is morally answerable 
 for. Herein man shows in his own personality what 
 a cause is that is really a cause, or what cannot be 
 in its turn an effect. This is found in his own 
 superuaturalness, or ability to originate acts, so far 
 as he can be rightly praised or blamed for them, 
 those acts on account of which he may enjoy self- 
 satisfaction, or have experience of remorse. 
 
 Eegarded as animal organisms, men form part of 
 the natural process, and they can neither be praised nor 
 blamed for being what they are organically, or by hered- 
 ity. Man does not, as a visible organism, create himself : 
 he is evolved according to natural law, a procedure in 
 that continuous process which we call " natural " : the 
 cause of the natural processes being orderly is the fact 
 that has ultimately to be explained. But although 
 thus organised naturally, he is found, under the nat- 
 ural evolution, to contain what is more than finite 
 nature ; at least if he is really justified in reason, 
 in taking personal credit, or acknowledging personal 
 blame, for determination to act, or to refrain from 
 
imiverse is 
 
 54 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 acting. Conscience, like a finger-post, points to the 
 spiritual, personal, morally responsible agents of vol- 
 untary acts as, in their moral relation to those acts, 
 examples, and the only examples, of causation proper, 
 or supernatural agency, that man, when at his best, 
 comes in sight of; and it assures us that when we 
 come in sight of this, we have data which so far 
 justify us in reading the universe in its continuous 
 evolutionary process, morally and religiously, as well 
 as physically and biologically. 
 
 in physical Of course nature may be read only physically, or 
 e in terms of the wholly natural process in terms ex- 
 clusively of natural causation. It is possible, by ab- 
 
 ciusiyere- s traction from what is spiritual in man, to withdraw, 
 
 garcl to the 
 
 provisional as ft were all moral colouring from the natural pro- 
 causes 
 which it cedure of events, and to treat the whole temporal 
 
 contains. 
 
 succession as non-moral. Indeed, natural science has 
 to make this abstraction of its attention, on the 
 principle of divided intellectual labour ; and because 
 reduction of phenomena under the moral or super- 
 natural conception would disturb that unbiassed search 
 for physical causes, or established signs of changes, 
 which is the chosen office of the naturalist. Natural 
 science has to determine what are constant physical 
 sequences in the universe, in terms of their natural 
 causality only, without regard to the possible moral 
 goodness or badness or their originating and respon- 
 sible cause. 
 
 Thus the molecular changes which succeed one 
 
CAUSATION THEISTICALLY INTERPRETED. 55 
 another in the brain, nerves, muscles, and external sinners 
 
 , , , and saints 
 
 organs of a murderer, when he is engaged in a alike, in 
 criminal act, and which in their successive meta- O f wholly 
 morphoses issue in that act ; and also the molecular science! 
 changes which occur in the brain, nerves, muscles, and 
 external organs of a saint, which issue in an overt act 
 of piety or philanthropy, are, for natural science, alike 
 non - moral phenomena : they may be contemplated 
 out of relation to conscience and to the supernatural 
 agency of the men. The series of sequences in the 
 visible organism of the murderer is scientifically as 
 admirable as those of which the visible organism of 
 the saint is the theatre. They are both interpreted 
 under the same conception of natural causality, and 
 the natural causes which the organism of the murderer 
 illustrates are neither more moral nor more immoral 
 in themselves than those which lead up to the most 
 signal overt act of what is now called "altruism," 
 or of religious devotion. The biology of the criminal 
 makes natural science as well as the biology of the 
 saint. Gravitation and natural evolution are neither 
 praiseworthy nor blameworthy in themselves. They 
 express methods that the universal Power follows in 
 the natural procession of events. 
 
 Now, just as the phenomena of natural growth and So too is 
 
 . . . the whole 
 
 the overt change manifested in the organisms ot crimi- universe 
 nals and saints, are in themselves indifferent to the whe^oniy 
 moral conceptions under which they may be brought, in F n ter- Ca 
 that deeper interpretation of the universe, into which pre 
 
56 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 the idea of moral obligation enters, with its implied 
 postulate of supernaturalness, or freedom from physical 
 necessity, so too the continuous physical evolution of 
 the whole universe of caused causes which, for all 
 we can tell, may be in an unbeginning and unending 
 process may in like manner be contemplated in ab- 
 straction from the final or supernatural Cause of the 
 whole, and therefore in abstraction from its moral 
 and religious meaning. In all natural sciences this 
 abstraction is made, leaving for their appropriated 
 share in the interpretation of the world, the duty of 
 filling in hitherto undiscovered terms in their register 
 of natural sequences, and the attainment of more and 
 more extensive physical generalisations. Each dis- 
 covery in science is the discovery of something per- 
 ceptible in the mechanism of visible nature that was 
 before concealed; with the often illustrated issue that 
 the discoverer and others are able to live more happily 
 within the naturally determined machine. To think of 
 the world, including its human organisms individually, 
 as an unbeginning and unending process of organisa- 
 tion and disorganisation the terms of which men are 
 bound, by regard for truth, and for their individual 
 comfort, to interpret according to the established 
 sequences of its natural causality,; this is to think 
 of things as the wholly physical inquirer does. But 
 unless proof is forthcoming that no higher conception 
 than this physical one is consistent with reason, or 
 can be applicable to the temporal process over and 
 
CAUSATION THEISTICALLY INTERPRETED. 57 
 
 above the physical conception ; unless the intellectual 
 difficulty of a moral or theistic interpretation of the 
 Whole can be shown to be greater than a merely 
 physical or atheistic interpretation involves ; unless the 
 homo mensura principle, upon which, in an attenuated 
 form, natural science itself rests, forbids the spiritual 
 interpretation, with its recognition of nature as essen- 
 tially and finally spiritual, unless proof of all this is 
 forthcoming, what can be alleged in reason against 
 the finally supernatural interpretation of the accumu- 
 lating facts and laws which form the glory of modern 
 science ? To invest the discovered natural sequences 
 with a moral and spiritual glory, by reading the whole, 
 and in all its parts, in relation to the whole man so 
 including what is highest in man and not merely in 
 relation to his sensuous intelligence, and by doing so to 
 merge physical or cosmic faith in the end in moral 
 or theistic faith, this is not to oppose science but 
 to invest it with a new crown. " In the entrance of 
 philosophy," says Bacon, " when the second [or caused] 
 causes, which are next unto the senses, do offer them- 
 selves to the mind of man, if it dwell and stay there, 
 it may induce some oblivion of the Highest Cause ; 
 but when a man passeth on further, and seeth the 
 dependence of causes and the works of Providence, 
 then, according to the allegory of the poets, he will 
 easily believe that the highest link of nature's chain 
 must needs be tied to the foot of Jupiter's chair." 
 The natural and the theistic interpretations of the 
 
58 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 ifaiinat- universe cannot conflict with one another, if each 
 
 ural or , . . , 
 
 provisional discovery of a natural cause is recognised as also a 
 finally Di- supernatural revelation, involving recognition of the 
 
 fi na l supernaturalness that continuously makes nature. 
 Those who are educated in this conception can no 
 
 x 
 
 ^vine l n g er see i n tne physical antecedent a usurper of the 
 Science, Divine Power, now superseded by natural law. What 
 
 but must 
 
 form a part ground in reason is there for the assumption that the 
 natural cause of an event rescues that event, as it were, 
 from divine agency ; and that if the customary physical 
 antecedents of all the changes that occur in nature 
 could be detected by experiment, there would then be 
 neither need nor room for God ? The truth seems to 
 be that the more successfully scientific inquiry is ap- 
 plied to the sequences presented in experience, the 
 more fully God is revealed ; and that if we could 
 realise the scientific ideal of a reasoned knowledge 
 of the natural cause of every sort of event, we 
 should then be in possession of the entire self- 
 revelation given in outward nature of the infinite 
 moral Person, of whom the natural world is the 
 symbol and adumbration. 
 
 Modern Experimental search for the physical order of the 
 
 of C naturai n different sorts of changes that are presented in human 
 insteadof ex P er i ence is claimed as a distinguishing character 
 capricious o f mo dern progress. In the early ages of the world, 
 
 agency, in * 
 
 the final and still amonsr imperfectly educated races and indi- 
 
 interpre- 
 
 tationof viduals, natural appearances, ordinary as well as ex- 
 
 the uni- 
 
 verse. traordmary, were referred to the capricious personal 
 
CAUSATION THEISTICALLY INTERPRETED. 59 
 
 action of otherwise unknown spirits, so that fear was 
 the foremost religious sentiment. All visible motions 
 were supposed to be animated motions. Fire, air, earth, 
 and water had each their separate spirits : thunder was 
 singled out as emphatically the voice of God. The 
 wayward agency of those incalculable forces then 
 obscured the now developed conception of universal 
 natural order. This supreme scientific conception now 
 reacts against caprice in nature. For natural law is 
 popularly supposed, not only to supersede the capri- 
 cious forces of fetichism and polytheism, but to be 
 inconsistent with the idea of the divine foundation of 
 things, and of continuous divine agency, as the power 
 really at work in all so-called natural agency. The 
 arbitrary assumption is further made that causation can 
 be only natural, and that a merely natural causation 
 is finally intelligible. Accordingly, in proportion as 
 natural causes are one by one discovered by science, God 
 is supposed to be superfluous : natural causation, under 
 the name of natural law, takes His place ; so that if 
 any room is left for God (which is doubtful), it must be 
 somewhere in the far past, when the orderly process 
 of this visible and tangible universe was supposed to 
 be set agoing. And if scientific inquiry should ever be 
 able to refer all events to their natural causes, it would, 
 on this hypothesis, have then rid the world altogether 
 of the theistic idea. Scientific and religious thought 
 are thus made to pull in opposite directions. Theism, 
 identified with the irregular action of a capricious 
 
60 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 spirit, looks like an anachronism, and divine action 
 appears unnatural. The theistic interpretation of the 
 universe looks like a retrograde movement, a relapse 
 into the childish and savage condition of thought to 
 which the idea of physical causes and universal order 
 is foreign. It is supposed to mean surrender of the 
 territory conquered by experiment and scientific reason, 
 when they have substituted natural causes for the 
 supernatural ones of superstition. Under those ideas 
 of what causality means, and of what theism means, 
 the religious interpretation of events seems only covert 
 polytheism, or of like intent as a working hypothesis. 
 Spinoza in the seventeenth century, David Hume and 
 the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, reinforced 
 now by a group of speculative naturalists, have warned 
 the world of its intellectual danger, as long as personal 
 agency assumed to be capricious and irregular is 
 permitted to take the place of the persistent orderly 
 agency of what is ambiguously called Nature, which, 
 under what is really a metaphor, is supposed to rule 
 the universe actively by its laws. 
 Moral or But are spiritual agency in the Universal Power, and 
 
 spiritual i_ i i , 
 
 agency and physical order in what is virtually constant creation, 
 
 order not as the effect are these necessarily inconsistent ? On 
 
 SS55? 7 tne contrary, each of the extremes the spiritual and 
 
 on?an! th the physical seems to present one side of a truth 
 
 other. common to both. The sense of dependence on persons 
 
 more powerful than ourselves agents in the meaning 
 
 of agency that our moral experience makes intelli- 
 
CAUSATION THEISTIGALLY INTERPRETED. 61 
 
 gible agents who exert rational will seems to be 
 recognition of the only satisfying sort of power of 
 which man is aware : it finds unphilosophic expression 
 in the cruder religions, and in the superstitions which 
 still confuse the religious thought of the unthinking. 
 On the other hand, may not the modern scientific faith 
 in natural causes be treated as the consequence of grow- 
 ing experience and apprehension of the fact, that the 
 Power manifested to man's senses is a Power that con- 
 tinuously produces a cosmos, not a chaos so that the 
 natural effects of the constant agency are universally 
 orderly, not chaotic ? But the modern scientific faith 
 may have to be purged of undue assumptions as well 
 as the superstitious faith. Progressive substitution of 
 natural order for capricious and meaningless interfer- 
 ence, need not supersede final agency that is moral or 
 personal, and which in a perfect personality must be 
 the source and sustaining centre of perfectly rational 
 order, however far that order may transcend man's 
 limited opportunities in experience for fully interpret- 
 ing it. It is when theistic superstition rises into the 
 theism that treats all that is presented in the natural 
 universe as finally one form of manifestation to man of 
 perfect moral Spirit, and which sees at last, in all the 
 physical conditions on which changes are made to 
 depend, God operating in the various ways commonly 
 called natural laws it is then that religious thought 
 and scientific thought approach, instead of moving in 
 opposite directions. Then God becomes more fully 
 
62 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 known, as in other ways, so also through a fuller 
 scientific apprehension of the divinely ordered and 
 maintained sequences, in their natural and therefore 
 rational or divine concatenation. Neither the irregu- 
 lar agency of capricious Spirit, nor natural science, 
 concerned only with the order and significance of the 
 visible effects, and not with moral active agency at all 
 neither of these exhausts man's final relation to the 
 universe ; for this depends upon the reconciliation of 
 these two conceptions under one that recognises the 
 voice of Conscience inviting us to comprehend the 
 whole natural evolution in its relation to moral order, 
 moral growth, moral providence. There are signs, if 
 I am not mistaken, that this idea of causality and 
 power may enter more into the leading thought of 
 the twentieth century than it has into the religious 
 or the scientific thought of the past. 
 
 Theism as This interpretation of all natural law and order as 
 
 theprovi- essentially divine is not to be confused with the causal 
 
 airegress, S inference of eternal Mind, that has been founded on 
 
 to C Locke g the ^ ac k ^ na ^ finite mind, especially each person's own 
 
 and others. m [ n ^ i s now f ou nd in existence. Human minds, it 
 
 is said, are insufficiently accounted for by physical 
 
 causes ; therefore there must be a hyperphysical 
 
 cause for them. Mind exists, for I am conscious : 
 
 my mind must have been caused, for I have not 
 
 existed always: the only sufficient cause of mind 
 
 must be Mind: therefore God exists. This is what 
 
CAUSATION THEISTICALLY INTERPRETED. 63 
 
 Locke calls a " demonstration " of Eternal Mind. " To 
 be certain that there is a God," he says, " I think we 
 need go no further than to ourselves, and that un- 
 doubting knowledge we have of our own existence as 
 conscious persons who had a beginning." There must 
 be a cause for this : every cause must be a sufficient 
 cause, or adequate to the effects produced, and as 
 mind only is adequate to cause mind, my existence 
 as a conscious person proves the existence of Eternal 
 Mind. 
 
 This reasoning makes the existence of Eternal Mind They fail to 
 a physical inference from the present existence of a the causal 
 finite person. But the final and the infinite is not 
 
 logically contained in the provisional: only a pro- thTmoral" 
 
 visional and finite mental cause can be found in pro- 
 visional and finite effects : inquiry as to the natural 
 cause of their natural cause is still open ; for the pro- bilit J r - 
 cedure is still under the pressure of a mechanical idea 
 of causality, with its unbeginning and endless regress. 
 Nothing is presented to arrest the ever-renewed question 
 of the cause of the natural cause ; unless Mind is found, 
 or rationally postulated, to contain what makes it 
 absolute or final ; leaving all so-called natural causes 
 destitute of any evidence that they are properly causes 
 at all, or more than signs of phenomena that are caused 
 by the supreme Power to accompany them constantly in 
 nature. " I ought, therefore I can" points to spiritual 
 or personal agency as the morally responsible, and 
 necessarily absolute cause of action. It is the only 
 
64 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 index we have that points to originative power, and 
 it reveals the ultimate meaning of Causality in the 
 form of intending Will. We have no index that iden- 
 tifies any merely natural phenomenon as the necessarily 
 exclusive and final source of what are called its natural 
 effects; and therefore we have no reason for calling 
 them its independent effects. The moral implicates of 
 the reason in which I share, rather than the empirical 
 fact of my existence as a thinking thing that appears 
 in the temporal procession, seems to be what makes 
 the universe, and my conscious life as part of it, that 
 revelation of eternally active moral Eeason which what 
 is highest in me requires that I should spiritualise or 
 personify. 
 
 Summary. The lesson of this lecture is that religious thought 
 and physically scientific thought about the world, in- 
 stead of destroying, really strengthen one another, in 
 the recognition of continuous active divine activ- 
 ity, or endless creation, under the form of natural 
 order. For the natural order of procedure may be 
 interpreted as one form of the universal revelation 
 of the perfectly reasonable Will. Thunder is no 
 longer the voice of an interfering God, on account 
 of its supposed physical inexplicability, or because 
 it is a startling phenomenon ; it is a revelation of 
 God just because it is recognised as an event that 
 makes its appearance under natural law, in the orderly 
 evolution : 
 
 " For if He thunder by law, the thunder is yet His Voice." 
 
65 
 
 LECTUEE III. 
 
 COSMICAL ADAPTATION AND DIVINE DESIGN: 
 TELEOLOGICAL. 
 
 MY last lecture involved the principle that man's moral Retrospec- 
 experience of a cause that must be absolute or un- 
 caused, because responsible for its effects, offers the 
 relief which the causal craving that is at the root of 
 all physically scientific inquiry ultimately needs. This 
 relief comes through moral experience in a practical 
 form, not in the unintelligible form of endless succes- 
 sion of natural causes. If a deliberate personal voli- 
 tion, for which one can be justly praised or blamed, 
 must be caused absolutely and finally by the person who 
 is morally responsible for it, then this unique example 
 of what causal satisfaction means may be taken as 
 practically a type of the mysterious Power constantly 
 at work at the heart of things, determining the physical 
 order, upon faith in which daily life, as well as our 
 scientific inductions, proceeds. It is as active moral 
 
 E 
 
66 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 Reason that man may regard the Power that is latent 
 
 in the natural sequences that are presented within his 
 
 experience. Nature may be treated by man as, for him, 
 
 virtually the revelation of this moral Power, even if 
 
 " rational will " or " moral reason " represents the Infi- 
 
 nite Being inadequately, as viewed at the divine centre. 
 
 Two rival There are at last two rival hypotheses regarding 
 
 postulates, the universe if one may call them hypotheses. There 
 
 * s ^ ne hypothesis of an unbeginning and unending 
 physical succession of changes, metaphorically spoken of 
 as a " chain " an infinite chain of non-moral natural 
 sequences : there is also the moral hypothesis, which, 
 without removing the infinite mystery of physical un- 
 beginningness and unendingness, sees in the actual 
 procedure of the manifested universe of things and 
 persons, interpreted in science, the constant personal 
 revelation of morally active Reason. It is true that 
 both these hypotheses leave us at last enveloped in 
 what is mysterious to the sensuous understanding : the 
 infinity or mystery into which each retires at last 
 makes an inevitable demand upon moral trust. In ac- 
 cepting either of them we must at last be acting in 
 faith, instead of seeing the universe with the perfect 
 intellectual vision of omniscience ; but it is with an 
 imperfect intellectual vision in which omniscience finds 
 its substitute in moral faith. 
 
 Compared. Yet if these two rival hypotheses seem to have this 
 common weakness, it appears on comparing them that 
 the final mystery of an infinite physical regress and 
 
OOSMICAL ADAPTATION AND DIVINE DESIGN. 67 
 
 progress of non - moral or wholly natural causes em- 
 braces no originative or satisfying cause at all, while 
 the other hypothesis supplies what meets the causal 
 craving, while it satisfies the spiritual constitution of 
 man. On this ground alone, it would appear to be an 
 obligation of reason finally to interpret the universe, 
 not atheistically or agnostically, as the purely physical 
 hypothesis does, but theistically, that is morally and 
 spiritually, according to the second. The first leaves 
 us in physical, because in moral, chaos : it professes 
 physical faith in a universe in the movements of which 
 it can have no moral trust. The second still presup- 
 poses physical trust, as proceeded upon in inductive 
 science, but without adopting the negative assumptions 
 of some speculative naturalists ; for it finds that physical 
 order and reliability postulate the moral order of per- 
 fect or divine providence. The atheist in disclaiming 
 as superfluous this perpetually creative moral Power 
 immanent in all natural phenomena, the guarantee of 
 the customary natural uniformity which he dogma- 
 tically assumes the absoluteness of is virtually saying 
 that the temporal evolution in physical nature has after 
 all no spiritual meaning, moral or immoral ; that all 
 events happen without trustworthy reason, so that their 
 future is incalculable ; we cannot tell in what succes- 
 sion, because we must not presuppose a rational order. 
 He is left without ground even for the faith that they 
 will continue to happen according to the forecasts of 
 physical science ; or that in the future all may not 
 
68 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 become uninterpretable chaos ; or that the changing 
 universe may not subside into changelessness. The 
 moral key to any practical interpretation of the uni- 
 verse, even physical, has been wantonly thrown away, 
 under the pressure of an hypothesis that is physically 
 not more comprehensible than the theistic ; while, on 
 account of its discord with moral reason, it leaves us 
 with a universe emptied of what makes it as a natural 
 evolution worthy of scientific trust. 
 
 The causal The theistic or moral interpretation of natural 
 
 and the tel- ,. 1*1 T -n T i 
 
 eological causation, which sees divine Power pervading physi- 
 
 S ca l sequences, may be distinguished from the teleo- 
 tinguished lgi ca l conception of the universe, in the popular argu- 
 ment for God from final causes or contrivances. This 
 conception arose of old out of certain obtrusive in- 
 stances of adaptation in nature to humanly useful 
 or beautiful ends, which the world presents. It now 
 includes apparent adaptation in the cosmical evolu- 
 tion as a ivhole, when viewed as a natural process 
 that has been continuously leading on towards the 
 evolution of Man, with his spiritual or supernatural 
 endowments. For the universe in which we find our- 
 selves does seem to be a universe which, as illustrated 
 by this planet of ours, has been slowly making for the 
 gradual development of persons, or moral agents, as its 
 ideal goal. 
 Observa- The fact that the temporal procession of phenomena 
 
 tion of . 
 
 natural is found to abound in notable contrivances, that have 
 
COSMIC AL ADAPTATION AND DIVINE DESIGN. 69 
 
 not been contrived by the intending will of man, or contriv- 
 ances, the 
 of any other supposable intelligent agents limited in popular 
 
 power like men, is probably the consideration that Divine De- 6 
 finds most favour with ordinary minds, when they S1 
 are moved to ask themselves, why they believe that 
 the world owes its existence to Divine purpose or pre- 
 destination, instead of being an incomprehensible ac- 
 cident. Nature is found full of adaptations, especially 
 in its living organisms ; and, inasmuch as visible 
 adaptation is to common -sense the sign of designing 
 mind, it may seem that if we are in the presence 
 of natural adaptations of means to ends, we must be 
 in the workshop of a divine mechanist. The strik- 
 ing adaptations presented in organisms need a cause: 
 physical (so-called) " causes " are not known by us to 
 be really causes; but even if they were, they are 
 insufficient causes of constructions so elaborate and 
 useful, or so beautiful, as many of those which emerge 
 in the course of the natural evolution of things, inor- 
 ganic and organic. In presence of this spectacle we 
 are invited, as by Socrates and Cicero and Paley, to 
 refer the constructions in nature to Divine Design. 
 The curious natural constitution of the eye, or of the 
 ear, we are told to observe, is so adapted to a useful 
 purpose that this organ cannot be thought of as a 
 purposeless accident of collocation in an irrational 
 iiux. Its curious correlation of means to ends was 
 not brought about, we very well know, by a human 
 "eye -maker," while it is too elaborate to have been 
 
70 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 brought about by a chance or unregulated concurrence 
 
 of atoms. We are obliged, by common-sense or some- 
 
 thing in our minds, Paley tells us, to refer organs and 
 
 organisms like this to a superhuman eye-maker or ear- 
 
 maker. Elaborate adaptation our mental constitution 
 
 forbids us ever to regard as uncalculated. 
 
 Expiana- The ready popular recognition of the eye and innumer- 
 
 wide ac- able other instances of superhuman adaptation as valid 
 
 - ground for theistic faith, may be partly explained by the 
 conception. wav an elaborate and useful machine brings design 
 home to the ordinary mind. In a world full of useful 
 adaptations, one seems more easily than in other ways 
 to find that God is working ; or at least that God must 
 have been once at work, even if, now and during an in- 
 definite past, the maintenance of organic construc- 
 tions that at first came ready-made from the Divine 
 artificer or creator has been intrusted to what are 
 called "natural" causes. If the adaptations are now 
 natural, they must have been at first supernatural, it 
 is argued. God must, at some pre- historic time or 
 other, have "interfered," as we say, to "create" the 
 organ which what is vaguely called " nature " now 
 propagates. God seems in this way to be speaking 
 to men out of the past, even if He has left only 
 "nature" speaking to them at this hour, speaking 
 to them as one man may be said to speak to another 
 man, through acts that are significant, because adapted 
 as means to convey meaning from mind to mind. 
 Just as a watch or other machine brings vividly 
 
 
COSMIGAL ADAPTATION AND DIVINE DESIGN. 71 
 
 before one the existence of its human maker, so the 
 special organ called the eye, or the whole human body 
 the adaptations which so ingeniously fit organs to 
 their environments, and fit the minds of men too to 
 the physical universe in which they awake into con- 
 sciousness all these and millions of like instances 
 of contrivance have been found to quicken at least 
 intellectual sympathy and affinity with the Power 
 that must have been at work before all this could 
 have become what it now is, and which it naturally 
 continues to be. One is ready, too, when his atten- 
 tion is emphatically called to abounding examples of 
 useful or beautiful adaptation, to feel as if God were 
 no merely abstract Being, realisable only through 
 metaphysical reasoning or speculation, as if He were 
 a living Person whose intelligent activity, at least in 
 the past, is as manifest as the past intelligent activity 
 of a human watchmaker is manifest to me in and 
 through my watch, or as the inventive power of any 
 sort of artist is revealed in and through the useful 
 machine, or the picture of beauty, of which his design 
 must have been the source. In contemplating means 
 and ends in nature, I seem to trace this invisible 
 Power, working consciously and of set purpose cal- 
 culating making use of materials that possess latent 
 capacities for being adapted, and made useful to men 
 or other animated beings. The rude chaotic materials 
 themselves, in virtue of inherent powers tacitly at- 
 tributed to them, are supposed to admit of adapta- 
 
72 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 tions, and so help to bring about the ends which we 
 now admire and benefit by in the ordinary course of 
 nature. Thus in the numberless examples of well- 
 calculated contrivance which the great machine the 
 physical universe presents, and also in the existence 
 of the great machine itself, an observer seems to find 
 at least the relics of the Great Mechanist or Contriver ; 
 with as much assurance, he is ready to say, that 
 He must be an intelligent Being as -he has of the in- 
 telligence of him to whom he spontaneously refers the 
 adaptations in his watch, or of the author or the printer 
 of a book, in which arbitrary verbal signs are adapted 
 to convey meaning from one human mind to another. 
 Natural If it be objected that I cannot see this Divine Con- 
 
 tioSs make triver of any of the adaptations which natural theology 
 visible in re fers to God, it may be replied that neither do I 
 waVas 16 ever rea lly see t ne human contrivers of any of the 
 the con- machines which I attribute to human plan or purpose 
 
 tnvances 
 
 ofaimman that is to say, if a human contriver means more than 
 
 artist make 
 
 the artist the visible and tangible bodily organism of a human 
 
 visible. 
 
 being; for this is needed to signify to me his in- 
 visible spiritual purposes, that must themselves be con- 
 fined to his own private consciousness. But all recog- 
 nise, in the case of man, that the visibly moved hum an 
 organism is charged with invisible intelligent purposes, 
 so that the man is not merely an unconscious auto- 
 maton. Still the conscious intention of the human artifi- 
 cer is as invisible to the witness of the machine he has 
 made as the Divine intending purpose in natural con- 
 
COSMIC AL ADAPTATION AND DIVINE DESIGN. 73 
 
 structions is beyond the senses of all human beings. 
 The conscious states of other living beings necessarily 
 transcend the consciousness of all, except the one 
 person whose conscious states they actually are. 
 
 Another circumstance, less obvious than the mere The reia- 
 fact of adaptation as such, probably contributes to make 
 
 the phenomena of natural adaptation touch the imagin- to Manas" 
 ation of the mass of mankind forcibly, in the way of an^^t. 
 awakening the idea of Divine design and a Divine ual bein &- 
 Designer. For natural adaptations all seem to con- 
 verge upon Man. Withdraw men and sentient animals 
 from the world, and what demand remains in it for 
 useful and beautiful adaptation ? The physical universe 
 seems to be contrived in ways which adapt its natural 
 sequences to animal life, but above all to the conscious 
 life of human spirits or moral persons. The enormous 
 amount of natural waste that goes on, the numerous 
 natural malformations, and above all the appalling 
 mixture of human and animal suffering discovered in 
 the cosmicai evolution, may indeed be set in objec- 
 tion. Of that afterwards. But these suspicious phe- 
 nomena do not strip the natural revelation, through 
 beneficial adaptations, of its necessary relation to beings 
 that are sentient, and above all to human beings. It 
 may be granted that this concentration of natural adap- 
 tations especially upon man is only what appears at 
 man's own limited point of view, and also that it need 
 not exclude innumerable ends higher than those which 
 make for man. But it is as obvious adaptations at 
 
74 
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 David 
 Hume's 
 acknow- 
 ledgment 
 of the re- 
 ligious sig- 
 nificance 
 of the 
 construc- 
 tions pre- 
 sented in 
 Nature. 
 
 least to man that the phenomena come before human 
 beings as charged with meaning and purpose. 
 
 Something more than can be fully detected by the 
 logical criticism of the understanding seems to touch 
 the imagination and the heart of man, in this contem- 
 plation of a universe full of adaptations to the lives of 
 its spiritual inhabitants. The impression of a divine 
 revelation which consists in superhuman constructions 
 and contrivances is acknowledged by the most sceptical 
 in certain moods. " The whole chorus of nature," 
 David Hume, in the person of Cleanthes, emphatically 
 acknowledges, " the whole chorus of nature raises a 
 hymn in praise of its Creator. You alone," Cleanthes 
 remonstrates with Philo, " or almost alone, disturb the 
 general harmony. You start abstruse doubts, cavils, 
 objections ; you ask me what is the cause of this 
 supposed intelligent designing Cause ? I answer that 
 I know not, I care not ; that concerns not me. I have 
 found a Deity, and here I choose to stop my inquiry 
 into causes. Let those go farther who are wiser and 
 more enterprising." In these words, nevertheless, 
 Hume puts a wholly arbitrary arrest upon the regres- 
 sive causal questioning in lack of the morally rational 
 arrest that we found presupposed in the necessary 
 postulate of moral experience. This ground for arrest 
 was outside the range of his vision and philosophy, 
 finally determined as that was by the mechanical and 
 empirical conception of "natural causes" that need 
 to be themselves caused by what is external to them- 
 
COSMIC AL ADAPTATION AND DIVINE DESIGN. 75 
 
 selves. Merely physical observation rather than moral 
 reason or spiritual insight is the basis of Hume's con- 
 clusion, in his ' Natural History of Eeligion,' that " the 
 whole frame of nature bespeaks an intelligent Author," 
 and that " no rational inquirer can, after serious reflec- 
 tion, suspend his belief for a moment with regard to 
 the primary principles of genuine theism and religion." 
 And this " genuine theism " of Hume can be only that 
 attenuated theism, which infers, from observed cosmical 
 adaptations, the past, if not the present, existence of 
 " an intelligent cause " of those adaptations while still 
 left in doubt about the omnipotence and perfect good- 
 ness of the physically inferred and after all only intel- 
 ligent supreme Cause. According to physical analogy, 
 he might say, intelligence other than human seems to 
 have been somehow and at some time at work in 
 Xature. But as to the good or bad character of this 
 intelligent being, or the extent of his power, his em- 
 pirical data leave him unable to determine anything: 
 perfect or truly divine reason and goodness in the 
 conclusion would be in excess of the only premisses 
 which his philosophy allowed him to use. And thus 
 his so-called " god " is only one intelligent and perhaps 
 deceiving cause added to the intelligent causes we are 
 accustomed to find in our natural experience of human 
 contrivers. He offers us a god that needs an ulterior 
 cause of his own individual existence. 
 
 The argument for divine design that is grounded on 
 
76 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 The argu- cosmical adaptations long favoured in popular natural 
 
 divine de- theology, roughly handled by Spinoza, criticised by 
 
 is based Kant, discredited by some speculative naturalists of the 
 
 observed present generation is in danger of losing the weight 
 
 tnat i g really due to it, as an auxiliary to the theistic 
 itself lain- "interpretation that we are led to put upon the universe 
 adequate, by our mora i O r religious experience with its neces- 
 sary postulates, and also by the craving which sends 
 us in quest of an originating Cause of change. Pre- 
 suppose perfect moral reason or goodness as eternally 
 personal, as what is always and everywhere active, and 
 this at the heart of existence ; then, under this indis- 
 pensable presupposition and motive, the innumerable 
 adaptations presented in sensuous experience corre- 
 spond with, confirm, and bring vividly home to the 
 ordinary mind, the conception of Divine intending 
 mind existing virtually at the root of all, notwith- 
 standing the mixture of seeming malconstruction, 
 misery, and sin in which the world abounds. But 
 to infer the existence of a Being of perfect power, 
 wisdom, and mercy, solely from specimens of other- 
 wise unexplained contrivance that occur empirically 
 in our observation of the external world, is to beg a 
 conclusion already presumed] not one that has been 
 logically gathered from observation of natural organ- 
 isms. The divine conclusion is infinitely in excess of 
 the empirical premisses : the largest collection of super- 
 human natural constructions can yield only a more or 
 less probable finite inference : the finite can never be 
 
COSMIC AL ADAPTATION AND DIVINE DESIGN. 77 
 
 logically transformed into the infinite, which cannot 
 be deduced from the finite as from a premiss. The 
 empirical data perhaps suggest an intelligent contriver 
 of the observed contrivances, analogous to the mind 
 supposed in the human contriver of a machine, but 
 wanting, so far as the observed facts can carry us, in 
 what is uniquely divine. 
 
 Other defects in the supposed deduction of perfect in its com- 
 moral design and the perfect divine Designer, from jt seemsrto 
 empirically presented instances of cosmical contriv- {* author 
 ance, begin to suggest themselves, when the empir- 
 ical facts are taken to justify the infinite conclusion, 
 instead of only helping to awaken the infinite presup- 
 position, or faith in God, as the primary necessity of overcom- 
 man's relation to the universe of reality. How, we 
 may be asked, can the analogy of a human artist and 
 his work of art apply to the Divine artist, whose 
 power is supposed to be boundless, and who must 
 therefore be the author of the very materials which, 
 in his inferior relation of Designer, he is alleged to 
 have adapted, with more or less difficulty, to his 
 ends ? Why should adaptation of resisting material 
 be part of the work of the omnipotence, on which the 
 material, with all its qualities and modes of behaviour, 
 must, on the divine hypothesis, absolutely depend ? 
 This looks like supposing God to be the cause of a 
 difficulty, only in order that He may afterwards show 
 His skill and strength in the removal of it. 
 
 Again. The introduction of the Divine Designer 
 
78 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 And to has been reclaimed against, as an " interference " with 
 the province which science must keep secure for 
 
 universal- natural evolution which, as natural, is dogmatically 
 ^rational presumed to be undesigned: natural uncalculating 
 order. evolution really deserves, we are told, all the glory of 
 the useful and beautiful contrivances in which the in- 
 organic world and its living organisms abound. Visible 
 sequences in their customary evolution, it is argued, are 
 all we have to do with, and it is worse than super- 
 fluous to invest them with the conception of purpose. 
 Even although some natural effects present adjust- 
 ments which, if their antecedent condition were a 
 human hand, we might refer to man's organism as their 
 physical cause, a wider experience of natural evolution 
 shows that, in the absence of this physical cause, other 
 physical causes seem spontaneously to transform them- 
 selves by degrees into those useful and beautiful me- 
 chanisms which, in their former ignorance, men referred 
 to the creative " interference " of God. Our own ex- 
 perience of what nature, without this supposed 
 capricious and incalculable divine interference, does 
 gradually transform itself into, demonstrates that 
 supernatural interposition is superfluous. Unaided 
 natural evolution is found, in fact, to issue in con- 
 trivances ; and the contrivances are inferred to be 
 customary issues of wholly natural antecedent con- 
 ditions, which need no conscious design or predestina- 
 tion outside themselves. To assume arbitrarily " the 
 intervention of a designing force " is to withdraw 
 
COSMIC 'A L ADAPTATION AND DIVINE DESIGN. 79 
 
 interest and attention from what alone is of practical 
 importance in a man's intercourse with what is 
 around him the visible causes that are presented 
 to the observing faculty ; for these, so far as men are 
 themselves causes, they are able in some degree to 
 adapt as means to their own ends. Visible causes 
 alone, accordingly, are the causes on which our organic 
 pleasures and pains immediately depend. Man has 
 nothing to do with a " Power " of which natural 
 science can say nothing, because it is outside all 
 physical or sensuous experience. 
 
 A recent criticism of Lord Salisbury's British As- Yet all 
 sociation address illustrates these remarks. It is by Causation 
 I )r Weisrnann, the eminent naturalist, in a late num- the^expres 
 ber of the ' Contemporary Eeview.' I find in it the Divine 
 following remarkable sentence : " The scientific man I)eslgn! 
 may not assume the existence of a designing force, 
 as Lord Salisbury suggests ; for by so doing he would 
 surrender the presupposition of his research the 
 comprehensibility of nature." Now, by the "compre- 
 hensibility of nature," I suppose Dr Weismann to 
 mean, the presupposition that changes in nature must 
 be in all cases the issue or metamorphosis of ascer- 
 tainable natural causes, whatever else they may be or 
 may imply; and that the particular sorts of natural 
 or dependent causes on which the different kinds of 
 physical facts and events depend, and not the un- 
 caused origin of the Whole, is all that physical science, 
 at any rate, has to do with. The physical comprehen- 
 
80 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 sibility of nature is, in short, the final postulate and 
 motive of science ; in obedience to which it persists in 
 inquiring only for the visible and tangible established 
 signs of changes. These, under the ambiguous name of 
 " causes," form its exclusive concern. But that the 
 " coinprehensibility of nature," so understood, should 
 bar out the conception of the natural world being also 
 a divine revelation of means adapted to calculable ends, 
 useful or beautiful, looks like saying that the world 
 must be finally incomprehensible, in order that it may 
 be naturally or scientifically comprehended. That a 
 perfectly reasonable "designing force" should "neces- 
 sarily contradict" or "interfere with" the scientific 
 presupposition of the fixed order of natural causes, is 
 itself a prejudice, the groundlessness of which I sug- 
 gested in last lecture. The scientific " comprehensi- 
 bility" or interpretability of nature, instead of being 
 inconsistent with the immanence of intendin'g moral 
 power and perfectly rational design, is really only 
 one way of expressing this final truth as a practical 
 fact. To show that a certain event is the new form of 
 some antecedent phenomenon is not, properly speak- 
 ing, to show its cause or origin : it only makes us ask 
 further, What invests the antecedent phenomenon with 
 its so-called power? Does not this question at last 
 throw us back upon intending will as the only origin- 
 ating power that man encounters, involved as he finds 
 it in his moral experience ? May not the sort of caus- 
 ation for which a finite personal agent is morally 
 
COSMIC 'AL ADAPTATION AND DIVINE DESIGN. 81 
 
 responsible be taken as typical of the supreme Power ; 
 and may not that Power be conceived to act either 
 with or without the visible causes, or physical signs, 
 which alone concern the physical inquirer? If all 
 natural causation may at last be reasonably this, then 
 discovery of a natural cause, which is thus only 
 the natural sign of a consequently expected event, 
 is no disproof of the event being really or finally 
 a physical revelation of divine intending Will. This 
 thought indeed seems to be dimly present to Dr Weis- 
 mann himself, when he adds in a concluding sentence, 
 that " there is nothing to prevent our conceiving (if 
 conception be the right word to use in such a context) 
 of a Creator as lying behind or within the forces of 
 Xature and being their ultimate cause." Yet here and 
 throughout his remarks, the ambiguous word "force," 
 in its unanalysed physical application, further obscures 
 his meaning ; which had been already confused by the 
 dogma that "divine design" is necessarily "interfer- 
 ence " with order in nature, or that it is, in his 
 own words, an " intervention to supplement the forces 
 of Nature just where they break down." It cannot 
 be " interference " or " superfluous intervention," if in- 
 tending Will is the only originative cause all natural 
 sequences and natural evolution being only its orderly, 
 and therefore interpretable, or physically comprehen- 
 sible, effects. Thus physical causes, not being them- 
 selves properly causes, are, per se, as uninterpretable 
 as spoken or printed words are, when emptied of mean- 
 
 F 
 
82 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 ing and purpose, and taken as isolated sensuous phe- 
 nomena of hearing or of sight. It all looks different 
 when we find that physical nature may itself be re- 
 garded supernaturally, without ceasing to be nature 
 for all the intellectual purposes of physical science, or 
 for the secular utilities derived from its physical inter- 
 pretation. 
 
 Adapta- Further. Adaptations may be slowly evolved accord- 
 - ing to natural laws, in a natural progress that may 
 often look to us like regress, and notwithstanding they 
 mav ^ e tne natura l revelation of God. If morally 
 intending spirit is the only creative power that man's 
 manifests- experience suggests to him ; and if the causal or origina- 
 continuous tj ve activity of this power is the reasonable implicate 
 
 divine 
 
 agency. O f faith in natural order, and also in the innumerable 
 adaptations that appear in nature it follows that 
 continuous growth or evolution, not off-hand production, 
 as of a watch or other mechanism by a human artist, 
 is the true analogy to the manifestation of God that is 
 actually presented in the persistent maintenance of 
 worlds. Providential evolution of the universe in- 
 cluding occasional crises of natural disintegration in 
 an essentially supernatural process from an incal- 
 culable past, with its outcome in an incalculable 
 future, this rather than sudden creations, or inter- 
 ferences with the divine continuity of events in the 
 providential evolution, becomes the theistic conception 
 of contrivance in nature, under the modern dynamical 
 conception of the physical universe. Creation is then 
 
COSMIC AL ADAPTATION AND DIVINE DESIGN. 83 
 
 Providence or divinely - determined natural progress. 
 Evolution or metamorphosis is at once natural and 
 divine, the visible growth as it were of the universal 
 divinely-directed organism, in which human organisms, 
 naturally yet supernatural ly, live and move and have 
 their being. A universe charged throughout with 
 natural adaptations may then be read as the expres- 
 sion of ever-active spiritual agency, otherwise recog- 
 nised as living and acting Reason, revealed throughout 
 the Whole. The more obvious examples form illus- 
 trations, for popular use, of pervading purpose in the 
 physical drama presented to the senses, and come home 
 to the ordinary mind in the way that characteristic 
 actions and habits of a man strikingly reveal his inner 
 life and purposes to onlookers. 
 
 An ideal of the physical universe, as not a finished is the uni- 
 product but a continuous natural process, in unending its se'em- 
 duration, in analogy so far with the continuous life of dfi adap- 
 a plant or an animal, is proposed by the sceptical construc- nd 
 Philo in Hume's ' Dialogues ' as a more reasonable final 
 conception of Nature than that which likens it to a 
 machine made by a human mechanist at a given time. aild .i f so > 
 
 can it also 
 
 But Philo makes the tacit assumption that if cosmical be the 
 
 revelation 
 
 adaptations are in fact successive outcomes of the of super- 
 natural 
 natural order, under the law of "natural selection" let purpose? 
 
 us suppose, they cannot need immanent intending mind 
 to direct them. The "course of nature" is credited 
 with the seemingly artificial collocations : they are 
 simply a part of the customary behaviour of Nature ; 
 
84 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 as if Nature's conduct must ultimately be other than 
 divine or morally trustworthy conduct. Take the fol- 
 lowing in one of the utterances of Philo : " There are 
 
 O 
 
 other parts of the universe besides the machines of 
 human invention, which bear a greater resemblance 
 than this to the fabric of the world, and which 
 therefore afford a better conjecture concerning the 
 universal origin of this system. These parts are ani- 
 mals and vegetables. The world plainly resembles an 
 animal or a vegetable more than it does a watch or 
 a knitting-loom. Its cause, therefore, it is more prob- 
 able, resembles the cause of the former than the latter. 
 The cause of the former is generation or vegetation. The 
 cause therefore of the world we may infer to be some- 
 thing similar or analogous to generation or vegetation. 
 ... In like manner as a tree sheds its seed into the 
 neighbouring fields, and produces other trees, so the 
 great vegetable, the world, naturally produces within 
 itself certain seeds, which, being scattered into the sur- 
 rounding chaos, vegetate into new worlds. Or if, for 
 the sake of variety (for I see no other advantage), 
 we should suppose the universe to be an animal : a 
 comet is, as it were, the egg of this animal. An exist- 
 ing tree bestows order and organisation on the tree 
 
 O *-* 
 
 which springs from it, without itself knowing the 
 order; an animal, in the same manner, on its off- 
 spring, without foreseeing what is done ; and instances 
 of this kind are even more frequent in the world than 
 those of order which arise from conscious reason and 
 
COSMICAL ADAPTATION AND DIVINE DESIGN. 85 
 
 contrivance. To say that all this order or adaptation 
 in animals and vegetables proceeds ultimately from 
 design is begging the question; nor can that great 
 point be ascertained otherwise than by proving a 
 priori both that order is from its nature inseparably 
 connected with thought, and that it can never of 
 itself, or from original unknown principles, belong to 
 matter." Now if merely natural sequence must be 
 taken, as Philo takes it, for our last word about the 
 events that fill up the history of the universe, I dare- 
 say the natural processes of vegetation and of the birth 
 of animals may give a better final conception of the 
 Whole than any others suggested by the natural pro- 
 cesses which come within man's experience. But if all 
 natural processes, per se, are only manifestations or 
 effects, in themselves uninterpretable ; if even the 
 scientific interpretation of such effects, as examples 
 of "laws," itself depends upon moral and spiritual 
 reason for the physical faith which makes it possible, 
 and enables us with moral confidence to put even a 
 physical interpretation upon changes ; if, moreover, 
 there is nothing in the theory of the physical in- 
 terpretability of phenomena that is inconsistent with, 
 or any way opposed to, a co-ordinate theistic interpre- 
 tation of them ; and if this deeper interpretation of 
 their natural modes of behaviour, adaptations, and con- 
 structions, tends to satisfy man's genuine spiritual needs 
 if all this be so, why should natural causation, when 
 its actual relations are ascertained by scientific inquiry, 
 
86 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 be regarded as necessarily empty of divine or moral 
 purpose ? Why must I infer that every fresh discovery 
 of what is called a natural cause is a discovery that 
 relieves its natural effects of connection with God, or 
 makes them undivine ? 
 
 The mys- In truth it is the overwhelming idea of the infinity 
 infinite in of the universe, when it arises under an empirical habit 
 
 of thought, that seems to oppress Philo, and others who, 
 like him, think only empirically, with what, if they yield 
 to it enough, must become a despairing sense of the 
 design 11 f uninterpretability of all that is presented in experience, 
 within our ^ uninterpretability even up to the extent to which 
 
 narrow 
 
 experience, physical interpreters profess to read its meanings into 
 natural science. Philo takes hold of the Infinite, as it 
 were, by its sceptical or agnostic handle, and so, instead 
 of its mystery quickening reverential faith, the idea of 
 infinity seems wholly to disintegrate human experience. 
 The incomprehensibility of a wholly physical experi- 
 ence, with its final negations of Boundlessness and 
 Eternity, into which the natural sequences refund 
 themselves, are allowed to paralyse moral reason, and 
 religious faith in the supremacy of perfect goodness, 
 which otherwise enable man to keep his head, and 
 wisely regulate his course, even in an experience which, 
 when only physically regarded, at last surpasses human 
 knowledge. With the loss of the absolute moral 
 postulate of practical reason, the mysteries of the in- 
 finite in quantity the infinite in space, in duration, 
 and in physical causality dissolve the divine analogy 
 
COSMIC 'AL ADAPTATION AND DIVINE DESIGN. 87 
 
 between cosraical adaptations in nature and those 
 adaptations which we are accustomed to refer to 
 human contrivers. And this disintegrative sense of 
 mystery, if the sceptic is consistent, must not cease 
 to operate when he contemplates what we call the 
 contrivances of men. The men who surround us, not- 
 withstanding the signs of design presented in their 
 visible organic history, may also, like the universe, be 
 only automatons : no man can enter into, or be con- 
 scious of, the invisible purpose which he nevertheless 
 attributes to the human artificer whose organs are 
 seen at work. The dark shadow of infinite mystery 
 not only destroys the analogy so far as to forbid the 
 theistic interpretation of the curiously adapted world ; 
 it not less forbids the spiritual interpretation of the 
 visible adaptations in a watch, which refers them to 
 the conscious design of a human watchmaker. More 
 than this, it forbids all scientific interpretations of 
 natural phenomena; because it implies that the uni- 
 verse, on account of its infinity, is too unique for us 
 to make any affirmations about any of its events. It 
 has, for man at least, lost its finally synthetic principle, 
 and become a succession of meaningless sensuous im- 
 pressions, and all this only because it has become in 
 thought infinite in extent and duration and physical 
 causation, and therefore to us incomprehensible. 
 
 Conscious design at work in another mind is in all Conscious 
 
 design at 
 
 cases invisible. I see the material constructions, and work in 
 
 another 
 
 1 see the movements in a human organism that natur- mind can 
 
88 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 be revealed ally lead to the statical products ; but I can neither 
 mind only perceive nor be conscious of the mental activity that 
 medium.* I suppose in their cause, and which, in the case of 
 living human organisms, is referred by me to a con- 
 scious life and agency that is human, and more or less 
 like my own. We are more at a loss how to represent 
 to ourselves the invisible life-processes that animate 
 other animals on this planet in their seeming adap- 
 tations of means to ends, and their works of art 
 bees in their mathematically regulated constructions, 
 ants in their organised commonwealth, or dogs in an 
 intelligent kindness that often seems to rival that of 
 man. Yet when I find in them too continuous signs of 
 policy, calculation, adaptation, resembling those which 
 give expression to these invisible states or acts of 
 conscious life in myself, something in me obliges me 
 to regard the phenomena as signs of another acting 
 intelligence, or at least of what is, for all practical 
 purposes, acting intelligence other than man's. In all 
 cases the assurance of continuous orderly adaptation 
 of means to ends, whether presented in human organ- 
 isms and their movements, in the organisms and out- 
 ward movements of animals, or in the universal evolu- 
 tion, obliges men to treat the manifestations as virtually 
 a revelation of purpose. When overt actions which 
 involve skill are performed through our organs, as 
 they often are, without our voluntary agency, or indi- 
 vidual intending will, we are obliged to refer them to 
 another intending intelligence. " We are not conscious," 
 
OF THF 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 COSMIC 'AL ADAPTATION AND DIVINE DESIGN. 89 
 
 it has been remarked, " of the systole and diastole of 
 the heart, or the motion of the diaphragm. It may not 
 nevertheless be thence inferred that unknowing nature 
 can act thus regularly, as well as ourselves. The true 
 inference here is that the self-thinking individual, or 
 human person, is not the real author of those nat- 
 ural motions, and the adaptations which they present. 
 And in fact no man blames himself if such organic 
 motions, over which he has no control, go wrong, or 
 values himself if they go right. The same may be 
 said of the fingers of a musician, which some assert 
 to be moved by habit only, which understands not. 
 But it is evident that what is done by rule and 
 calculation must proceed from something that under- 
 stands the rule ; therefore, if not from the mind of the 
 musician himself, from some other active intelligence; 
 the same perhaps which governs bees and spiders in 
 their constructions, and moves the limbs of those who 
 walk in their sleep." 
 
 The immanence of design in a curious natural con- Wemay 
 struction may be affirmed, although we may be unable 
 
 ,. . , ,, . i-c c tions with- 
 
 to pass even in imagination into the conscious lire of out being 
 the designer. Although the universe is to us practi- 
 
 cally the manifestation of sufficiently comprehensible ^e Power 
 examples of means adapted to human ends, it would *^ e wl ^g 
 be presumptuous to infer from this alone that the referred. 
 intelligence so manifested must itself reason and calcu- 
 late in successive conscious states or living acts, as in 
 the conscious experience of men. We cannot do this 
 
90 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 even in the case of those beings we call " inferior 
 animals," who are so great a mystery to us, but in- 
 finitely less in the case of the Universal Designer. 
 Yet so far as man is able to look into reality, he 
 sees in natural adaptations what he may with moral 
 confidence act upon, as signs of what he can think 
 of only as consciously calculating mind ; but this 
 without having a right to assert that he can ade- 
 quately realise what, for want of more expressive 
 language, he calls eternal or infinite "Mind." 
 
 Natural I have spoken of adaptations in nature as fit to be 
 distinguished from law or regularity in the sequences 
 ^ nature - Yet looked at more deeply, it may appear 
 
 pretingin- na no ^ on ]y ^0 f a ith in physical law, and faith in 
 telligence. 
 
 divine construction or adaptation, rise somehow out 
 of the practical constitution of man, relieving him of 
 the sceptical paralysis that would be otherwise in- 
 duced by the appalling sense of mysterious infinity; 
 the two faiths even appear to coincide at last. 
 For all natural uniformity law in nature may be 
 regarded as adaptation of the temporal process to 
 the moral and intellectual constitution of man. If 
 we could suppose ourselves living consciously in a 
 physical chaos, instead of living in what faith recog- 
 nises as a physical cosmos; and if in this supposed 
 conscious life we could be endowed with our present 
 moral and religious constitution with moral reason 
 in its highest human development, we should still, 
 
COSMIC 'A L ADAPTATION AND DIVINE DESIGN. 91 
 
 it would seem, be obliged to suppose that the chaos 
 around us must somehow, and at some time, have its 
 final outcome in a reasonable world ; but besides this 
 greatly increased strain upon our moral faith, we should 
 lose the educational and other practical advantages of 
 living now in a world so adapted to us that we gradu- 
 ally learn how to regulate our conduct, in reasonable 
 expectation of changes which the sustained order in 
 nature enables us to anticipate as probable. 
 
 The divine constitution of physical order, with its The final 
 natural evolution of organic adaptations, may seem a ^auer e and 
 roundabout method for accomplishing what infinite LL 1 pta- S1Ca 
 Power might be supposed to accomplish in man extra- Stum* 
 naturally or by sudden miracle. What is the purpose to man- 
 of an organism so curiously constructed as the eye, one 
 may ask, if men could have existed, able to experience 
 mentally the conscious state called "seeing things," 
 u-ithaut eyes; or what the need for the complex struc- 
 ture of our bodily organisms, if we could have the 
 mental life we pass through between birth and death 
 tcifhout bodies, or as unembodied conscious spirits ? If 
 those elaborate bodily constructions do not originate 
 the conscious life with which they are found connected, 
 what are they adapted for ? and must their organic 
 adaptations not be looked at as superfluous in what 
 is essentially a spiritual world ? This raises a question 
 about Matter, and about miraculous as distinguished 
 from natural revelation of God, the consideration of 
 which enters at a later stage in our course of argument. 
 
92 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 Summary. The lesson of the present lecture is, that design is a 
 conception in harmony with, and even involved in, 
 natural evolution, and that whether Nature is con- 
 templated as a whole, or in its particular organisms 
 and events. Designed order in the whole involves 
 design in each part, as much as universal gravitation 
 is illustrated even in the fall of an apple to the 
 earth. The universality of adaptation the applica- 
 tion of the idea of providence to all natural changes 
 seems as possible as the universality of the ideas 
 of gravitation or of evolution within the sphere of 
 their applications. Nothing is too great or too little 
 for natural law, and therefore for providential pur- 
 pose. Universal Providence is in this sense neces- 
 sarily special. The very idea of natural la.w is 
 teleological. 
 
93 
 
 LECTUEE IV. 
 
 DIVINE NECESSITY: ONTOLOGICAL. 
 
 I HAVE been trying to show that those are proceeding The Sci- 
 
 6D.CG Ot* 
 
 unreasonably, and therefore unphilosophically, who Religions 
 
 treat theistic faith, or the disposition to put finally an 
 ethical and religious interpretation upon the universe, 
 >as in every form only a subjective sentiment, char- analysis 
 acteristic of some men, or some races of men, or of 
 certain stages in the history of mankind a sentiment [ 
 which may take the form of what is called religious faith 
 thought, but which after all is only transitory fancy 
 that is likely to become an anachronism, if it is not 
 already this among the educated. The great historic 
 fact of the permanence, in many forms, of the dis- 
 position to put a morally obligatory or supernatural 
 background to human life, and especially to extraor- 
 dinary events that happen in the world, with the 
 immense influence the religious instinct has in the 
 history and development of mankind, suggests that 
 
94 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 theistic faith in the Power at work around us must be 
 reconcilable with reason, if it is not even reason itself, 
 in its deepest and truest human manifestation. The 
 modern Science of Eeligions has accumulated abundant 
 evidence that Eeligion is this potent factor in history ; 
 although the human disposition to interpret experi- 
 ence in the light of supernatural power darkens and 
 degrades the interpreter, when a faith that is essentially 
 ethical presents itself as non-moral, or immoral super- 
 stitions. But even in superstitions, one can trace the 
 ineradicable dissatisfaction with what is merely finite, 
 and some sense of dutiful conformity to eternal and 
 ennobling ideals. And in all this theism appears in 
 germ. 
 
 Theists The individual subjects of moral and religious ex- 
 
 may be in- 
 distinctly perience or course may not themselves see what their 
 
 sciousof own disposition to read the world religiously means 
 
 mental 1 *' when regarded philosophically ; they may fail to see in 
 
 oftheir lty our morally religious faith the most rational conception 
 
 faith! 10 tna t man can nna lly f rm of the changing universe. 
 
 Those even in whom the religious instinct is strong and 
 
 pure are not on that account intellectually awake to 
 
 its essential reconcilableness with reason, or with the 
 
 physically scientific interpretation of the world, which 
 
 so many now treat as if it exclusively were the final 
 
 reason that is the proper criterion of all reasonableness 
 
 and unreasonableness. 
 
 The ra- My last three lectures were meant to show that in 
 
 theistic yielding to the religious tendency, which, in its de- 
 
DIVINE NECESSITY. 95 
 
 veloped form, puts a theistic interpretation upon faith so far 
 
 , . . found in 
 
 everything in nature, we are not only not contradicting the cos- 
 
 physical science, but are really explaining and sustain- 
 
 ing the physically scientific interpretation of the world, thevalidtty 
 
 What is there in reason which forbids us to think of 
 
 the laws or customary sequences in physical nature as 
 
 finally the outcome and revelation of perfectly reason- 
 
 able Will in other words, as one at least of the modes 
 
 of the self-revelation of God? Natural laws are not 
 
 disparaged surely when they are not only believed 
 
 in on the faith of experiments, but also accepted at 
 
 last in moral and religious faith. Thus, instead of 
 
 banishing God from their sphere, they are, so far as 
 
 they go, an articulate revelation of the perfectly ra- 
 
 tional Will that man's natural environment should 
 
 be a concatenated and calculable physical order, and 
 
 not an incalculable procession of chaotic events or 
 
 chance changes. When Nature is looked at thus, each 
 
 advance in the discovery of its scientific meaning is 
 
 seen to be also an advance in the theological interpre- 
 
 tation of the universe. The customary procedure in 
 
 the natural evolution of phenomena becomes in our 
 
 thought God's natural, and therefore reasonable, mode 
 
 of acting ; referred to God because there is no trace in 
 
 human experience of any other absolute or final cause 
 
 than intending will, or moral agency, which divinely 
 
 raises what would be otherwise only a natural into a 
 
 supernatural reality. This consideration is what one 
 
 seems to find at the root of the so-called cosmological 
 
96 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 argument for God, or for sustenance of faith in the re- 
 ligious interpretation of all natural changes and their 
 laws. Vaguely and at first the idea of cause expresses 
 only the deep-rooted human sense of dissatisfaction 
 with chance changes, and the implied need for an 
 unconditioned cause, by which this causal dissatis- 
 faction only provisionally relieved by scientific dis- 
 coveries of natural causes may be finally and reason- 
 ably satisfied and put to rest. It seems to be true 
 philosophy that man should accept the only arresting 
 and final sort of cause that human experience offers 
 that found involved in his own moral responsibility, 
 under the necessary postulate of moral reason. And 
 this transforms the otherwise wholly physical and 
 spiritually unsatisfying universe, into what turns out 
 to be more than physical : when thus more deeply con- 
 ceived, and more seriously lived in, it is found to be 
 providential moral order. 
 
 Theimma- But this impotence of mere physical phenomena, 
 Design^ abstracted from the spiritual activity which they may 
 a who7e, as be believed to manifest, and of which they and their 
 fore in^u natural orderliness are the significant signs this, their 
 construe- seeming impotence, is not the only ground in reason 
 changes d wn i n sustains theistic faith in the power at work in 
 the universe. A sense of the powerlessness, per s*, 
 of outwardly manifested Nature indeed welcomes im- 
 manent intelligence and moral agency, and is ready to 
 say Mens agitat molem. Yet this is not all that the 
 outward changing world suggests. In last lecture I 
 
DIVINE NECESSITY. 97 
 
 turned to those more precise signs of the immanence 
 of Mind in nature which observation claims to detect, 
 in the form of means obviously related to useful or 
 beautiful ends, in which the organised matter of the 
 world naturally abounds. This illustration of calcu- 
 lating thoughtfulness in external Nature becomes more 
 impressive with each advance of natural science, and 
 especially since the comprehensive idea of organic 
 evolution has more and more formulated the physical 
 interpretations which pass current in this nineteenth 
 century. For what, at our human point of view, is 
 called divine Design is now recognisable, not only in 
 particular instances of natural adaptation, like those on 
 which Paley dwells, but universally in the very notion 
 of natural evolution and progressive orderly change 
 itself. The isolated examples, singled out by the old- 
 fashioned natural theologians, as proofs of the past 
 interference of a calculating and contriving God, are 
 now found to be provisionally explained as gradual 
 processes that can be expressed in terms of natural 
 law. In the imperfect causal vocabulary of exclusively 
 physical science, the human body, including of course 
 the human eye and man's other organs, may be all 
 naturally accounted for, we find, by "natural causes," 
 causes long and slowly in evolutionary operation. Thus 
 the whole history of the physical world may turn 
 out, in the progress of physical science, to be a history 
 of slowly forming special instances of natural construc- 
 tion increasingly useful or beautiful adaptations of 
 
 G 
 
98 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 means to human ends, but all arising as sequences in 
 the successive processes of what science calls natural 
 causation. The visible machine of Nature seems to be 
 giving rise to the outcoming constructions and adapta- 
 tions, and this according to discovered processes of 
 " natural selection," or other natural modes of behaviour. 
 But what if the ambiguous Power, called Nature, is only 
 metaphorically " doing " this or anything else ? TVhat 
 if its phenomena present to experimental inquiry no 
 proof of their own final and proper agency, "while man 
 has proof of final and proper agency that must be 
 supernatural, because it is moral or immoral. In that 
 view of things the great natural machine is really 
 charged with supernaturalness, so that all its natural 
 evolutions not only admit of, but require, a teleological 
 as well as a physical interpretation. Natural causes 
 explain, for sense and sensuous imagination, the bodily 
 organisation of man, as well as its special organs, such 
 as the eye or the ear. But then the merely physical 
 explanation is always only a provisional explanation. 
 It may in addition be thought of as the design of what, 
 at the human point of view, seems predestinating Mind, 
 so that continuously operative Eeason may, at the end, 
 be credited with all the adaptations that are gradually 
 elaborated in the natural time-process. On the sup- 
 position that scientific inquiry verifies a universal nat- 
 ural evolution, as I am now supposing, science is only 
 revealing a universe of natural adaptations that are in 
 process of slow continuous formation, the natural laws 
 
DIVINE NECESSITY. 99 
 
 or modes of procedure being the scientific expression 
 of how creation proceeds. The Power that keeps the 
 whole in motion is then thought of as Power that is 
 making more and more for useful and elaborate rela- 
 tions of means to ends, in the virtually living organism 
 commonly called outward Nature ; and in issues of 
 gradually increasing value, measured by the satisfaction 
 given to what is highest in man, who is himself the 
 highest of the progressive and providential outcomes 
 on this planet. The whole and each event in Nature, 
 as thus contemplated, becomes in our view charged 
 with Purpose, the revelation to us of latent Eeason, 
 to which the human spirit responds in intellectual and 
 moral sympathy. This is just to say that God is the 
 real cause in all the natural causes that are making 
 either for the integration or the disintegration of the 
 universal virtually living organism the presented 
 Universe which, in either natural way, integrative 
 or disintegrative, continuously reveals God. 
 
 It is only when the final mystery of the physical The intiu- 
 
 infinity of Nature is taken wantonly by what I called 
 its atheistic handle that OUT want of physical omni- paralyse 
 science is produced as sufficient reason for refusing to of 
 read all experience theistically. For the world would 
 
 be scientifically uninterpre table, if man were obliged to mt< ? our ex - 
 
 penence. 
 
 turn away from all attempts to explain even its natural 
 meaning or laws, until he had relieved himself of the 
 final physical mystery by rising into omniscience. I 
 cannot even move from where I stand, if I am bound, 
 
100 
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 Special 
 natural 
 adapta- 
 tions and 
 universal 
 natural 
 design. 
 
 before I do so, to have a perfect knowledge of the uni- 
 verse, and so make absolutely sure of my intellectual 
 ground. The hypothesis that the orderly evolution 
 of nature is a history of Purpose, may humanly sus- 
 tain itself, by observed facts of natural means in their 
 relations to ends, which, when I am affected by the 
 mystery of physical endlessness, are found so impres- 
 sive, and this even although my end of the line of 
 natural sequences appears to be its only end it being 
 regressively without any beginning, i.e., any other end 
 than the present moment. For I do seem to be here 
 confronted by the mystery of a line that has only one 
 end that at which I am percipient, when I make the 
 regressive movement of thought in quest of the be- 
 ginning of the natural procession of changes. 
 
 When particular constructions found in nature, like 
 the human eye in man, or the wings in a bird, are 
 appealed to as signs that intelligent agency must 
 have been at work in overcoming the resistance of 
 intractable natural material, by adroit combination and 
 collocation like a human artificer making a machine, 
 this way of conceiving the case presents two diffi- 
 culties. In the first place, it represents natural law, 
 and the qualities of " matter," as in conflict with the 
 Designer of the contrivances. This is so, no doubt, 
 when the artist is a man. And if the supposed divine 
 Designer is credited with the natural laws and qualities, 
 as imposed by Him upon matter in some prehistoric 
 period in the illimitable Past, this looks like His mak- 
 
DIVINE NECESSITY. 101 
 
 ing the difficulty at first, for the sake of the pleasure 
 of overcoming it afterwards. In the second place, to 
 ground faith in supernatural design on visible adap- 
 tations, found in particular instances of the employ- 
 ment of matter for purposes useful or pleasant to a 
 living being, is exposed, as I have said, to the risk of 
 having the supposed supernaturalness in those instances 
 discovered to be after all according to a natural pro- 
 cess; and with this the supernaturalness disappears, 
 if we must assume that when an event or a construc- 
 tion is proved to have happened naturally, it must 
 therefore cease to be due to supernatural Power. But 
 it is otherwise when reason at least something not 
 unreasonable in the constitution of man makes us re- 
 cognise, in all natural processes and issues, really 
 divine processes and issues; so that whenever useful 
 or beautiful adaptations of means to ends, in organic 
 structures or otherwise, are naturally evolved, this 
 evolution, however slow and gradual, must be inter- 
 preted by man as the constant action of immanent 
 Deity. External nature, as presented to the senses, is 
 then, throughout the whole course of its natural evo- 
 lution out of an original fire-mist, if you please, or 
 out of whatever else can be proved scientifically to 
 have been its early form external nature or physical 
 universe, I say, may then be for man one phase of 
 the Divine revelation practically for us a revelation 
 of supernatural and superhuman design whatever more 
 it may be, at a point of view higher than the human. 
 
102 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 Miracu- Whether this natural revelation, charged throughout 
 
 lously ac- 
 complished with what men may in effect treat as design or cal- 
 divine . 
 
 design. culation, and expressed in what might be called a 
 natural language whether this revelation has included 
 in its past history, among other revealed designs, those 
 also which are called " miracles " physical and other 
 miracles is a question which belongs to a later 
 stage in our course of thought. It demands the con- 
 sideration of what is meant by a physical miracle. 
 Is a miracle an event brought about according to the 
 natural procedure, through undiscovered, and perhaps 
 to men for ever inaccessible, natural causes, but de- 
 signed, by its iincornmonness and natural inaccessibil- 
 ity, perhaps to draw attention to prophetic inspirations, 
 and so to quicken otherwise dormant or languid moral 
 response ? Or is it an event, presented indeed in 
 nature, yet not conditioned by any physical cause, but 
 one in which the Eeason that is actively immanent in 
 nature dispenses, for a purpose, with all physical causes, 
 and reveals design only in the miraculous physical 
 effects, which thus appear in nature without any physi- 
 cal cause at all ? If the second of these is taken for 
 the true conception, a physical miracle would be an 
 event in nature in which the immediate action of the 
 all -pervading Mind was not in the lower meaning 
 natural, but action independent of physical conditions. 
 We should then have to distinguish the supernatural- 
 ness that is manifested according to perceptible pro- 
 cesses from extra-natural or miraculous manifestation 
 
DIVINE NECESSITY. 103 
 
 of super-naturalness. But this only by the way, in 
 the present connection. 
 
 In last two lectures I invited your attention to what Defects 
 
 , both in 
 
 is suggested by the finite and ever-changing pheno- the merely 
 mena presented in the physical universe, or temporal the merely 
 
 process, in support of theistic confidence in the per- 
 feet reasonableness and goodness of the Power that 
 is at the heart of the Whole. There is still inade- 
 quacy, however, in these considerations, taken by them- universe. 
 selves, even although they are important elements 
 and auxiliaries in a more comprehensive rationale of 
 theistic faith. At least when put into the form of 
 arguments, the infinite conclusion seems to be falla- 
 ciously begged, in the causal argument, whether taken 
 in cosmological or in teleological form. For one thing, 
 the final appeal in both may seem to be made to an 
 individual reason and consciousness only, while the 
 conclusion is assumed to apply to Universal Being ; 
 and this, it may be said, can be legitimately done 
 only by the Universal Reason or Consciousness some- 
 how entering into man, and elevating his individual 
 reason into Eeason that, as universal, can alone finally 
 interpret universal reality. How can the required 
 rationality at the heart of the universe of Being 
 emerge from, or be found in, my individual intelli- 
 gence an intelligence of which, moreover, no one ex- 
 cept myself can be actually conscious ? How can 
 each person's private intelligence so peculiarly his 
 
104 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 own as that no other individual can be conscious in 
 his living thoughts how can this isolated mind be 
 the foundation or centre of a knowledge of the Uni- 
 versal Mind and Meaning ? I and all other individual 
 egos might never have existed, and yet the universal 
 or final rationality of the universe of reality would 
 remain ; at least if what men call human " knowledge " 
 be real, and if the physical universe presented to our 
 senses be trustworthy and interpretable capable, as 
 metaphysical pedants might say, of being " objectively 
 justified " ? Adequate analysis of theistic faith, if 
 theistic faith is valid in reason, must find an element 
 that is wanting, or at least left in the background, 
 throughout the theistic interpretation of natural causa- 
 tion, and also in the teleological conception of natural 
 processes and natural organic constructions. 
 The onto- What has been called ontological " proof " of the eter- 
 ception COn nal and universal inseparability of thought and real 
 impHclt existence self-conscious Knowing and actual Being 
 is sometimes brought forward in this connection. 
 The idea of unconditional need for Eternal Mind, the 
 impossibility of reality in the absence of thought, the 
 contradiction implied in the universe existing without 
 God this idea has taken many forms of expression 
 in the course of theological and philosophical specula- 
 tion about the final principle of existence. May it 
 be accepted as at least implied in theism ? Is an 
 infinite or omniscient Knower the rationally necessary 
 implicate of all reality ? From Plato to Hegel, not 
 
DIVINE NECESSITY. 105 
 
 to speak of pre-Socratic European, and still earlier 
 Asiatic meditations, the absolute and final necessity for 
 Mind the omnipresence or omnipotence of active 
 Eeason is an idea that has in different forms per- 
 vaded theistic dialectic. Through this abstract ne- 
 cessity the individual thinker has essayed to secure 
 for himself a more commanding position than the 
 individual consciousness of one human mind seems to 
 supply. It is assumed that one's hold of the final 
 principle of the universe cannot reasonably be de- 
 pendent on one's own, lately born, isolated self: if I 
 have, or can ever attain to, intellectual possession of 
 reality, I must somehow become involved in a higher 
 Eeason than my individual reason ; spiritually I must 
 become more than an orphan spirit, or spiritual atom. 
 I must be somehow identified with the Universal 
 Eeason, and this in proportion as I become truly my- 
 self. So regarded, my true self seems, in proportion as 
 it unfolds, to be at bottom the Universal Self: what 
 is called " individual " reason finds ultimate justification 
 in the discovery for which this philosophy takes credit 
 the discovery that reason finally is not mine indi- 
 vidually, but mine, as it were, theistically, or in so far 
 as God lives in me. My self is then truly and in- 
 finitely realised in God ; and the individual, orphan, 
 isolated self is renounced, the more the individual man 
 becomes universal, and in so becoming, becomes divine. 
 The essential divinity of what is truly real is the ra- 
 tionally necessary conception with which Eeason is 
 
106 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 credited, when we have learned to rise from the ab- 
 stractions of special or separate physical sciences into 
 the central and absolute philosophy of Being, which 
 philosophy is theology under another name. For a 
 resolution of religious faith into philosophic science 
 may, with equal fitness, be called theology or philo- 
 sophy: it would be the theology that deserved the 
 proud title of supreme Science, or Science of sciences. 
 Various A position akin to this is, I think, virtually taken 
 
 ontoiogicai in the chief forms of ontological proof, final ontolo- 
 
 theism. , . , 
 
 gical synthesis, or constructive necessity of thought. 
 I have described it perhaps more according to the 
 manner in which it is presented in our own century 
 or generation, than in some of its earlier and cruder 
 forms. But one recognises it in the Idealism of Plato, 
 where things of sense dimly symbolise the rational 
 reality towards which the individual man may gradually 
 approximate, as he rises from contingent sense appear- 
 ances, and fluctuating opinions, and enters into the 
 underlying intellectual necessities of Divine Thought, in 
 which alone is true reality. That the Thought which 
 transcends the private consciousness, and which can 
 be entered into only through mystical ecstasy, contains 
 the secret of Being, or of the universe, was the supreme 
 lesson of Plotinus in later and more transcendental 
 Platonism. Eecognition of absolute or outological ne- 
 cessity for the real existence of Divine or Perfect 
 Being, as involved in the very idea of perfection, per- 
 vades the celebrated theistic dialectic of St Augustine, 
 
DIVINE NECESSITY. 107 
 
 St Anselm, and Descartes. Perfection in idea, it was 
 argued, must include actual existence ; for an idea 
 cannot be conceived as perfect unless conceived to be 
 in consequence existing, thus existing by an abstract 
 necessity of reason. The absolute reality of the Divine 
 Being, in other words, is involved in the idea of 
 infinity or perfection that is latent in all of us : thought 
 necessarily underlies existence : and so universal thought 
 must underlie universal reality : real existence needs 
 livin^ thought to constitute and sustain it. These 
 
 O O 
 
 are varied expressions of the idea which appears 
 at the bottom of ontological theism and theology. 
 Expressed in its cruder form, this looks like the 
 childish fallacy, that merely because I fancy that a 
 thing or a person exists, that thing must therefore 
 actually exist. But to say that the eternally real 
 existence implies eternal thought or reason is very 
 different from saying that men's contingent fancies 
 about finite things must be objective realities, or, as 
 in Kant's caricature by analogy of the ontological 
 argument that because I imagine that I have money 
 in my purse, it must be true that I have it. That 
 there is intellectual need for God involved in the 
 idea of space and immensity, also in duration and 
 eternity, is another form of ontological argument for 
 theism: it appears in Samuel Clarke's once famous 
 demonstration of abstract intellectual necessity for 
 the divine existence. And the other argument of St 
 Anselm and Descartes might be taken as an awk- 
 
108 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 wardly expressed anticipation of the esse is percipi, 
 or esse is percipere, of Berkeley ; itself anticipated 
 long before St Anselm or St Augustine, in the TO 
 avro voelv re teal elvai, attributed to Parmenides. 
 That the Universal Mind is, by abstract necessity, 
 the prius of all individual things and persons, and 
 presupposed in their existence, is the constant refrain 
 in Berkeley's ' Siris,' in which the inevitable demand 
 for Reason, as the finally uniting principle of exist- 
 ence, is reiterated at many different points of view. 
 " Comprehending God and the creatures in one gen- 
 eral notion, we may say," according to Berkeley, 
 "that all things together make one Universe, or TO 
 TTOV. But if we should say that all things make one 
 God, this," he thinks, " would indeed be an erroneous 
 notion of God, but would not amount to Atheism, so 
 long as Mind or Intellect was admitted to be the 
 governing part. It is nevertheless," he argues, " more 
 respectful, and consequently the truer notion of God, 
 to suppose Him neither made up of parts, nor to be 
 Himself a part of any Whole whatever." The intel- 
 lectual need for recognising that the universe must 
 be constituted in Universal Eeason is, one may say, 
 the chief lesson of ' Siris,' a book of aphorisms, and 
 a stage in the modern unfolding of the ontological 
 conception that God is the intellectually necessary 
 foundation of all that we call real, and the very es- 
 sence of reality. 
 
 The recognition by Leibniz of universal ideas, innate 
 
DIVINE NECESSITY. 109 
 
 at once in the universe and in every human mind, in a Theistic 
 pre-established harmony with the natural processes, Necessity 
 may likewise be taken as the germ of an ontological 'Leibniz 
 theism. Kant's philosophical revolution made him 
 the Copernicus of philosophy and theology, in ex- 
 pressly taking human thought as, for man, the final 
 explanation and regulative principle of the universe, 
 instead of supposing thought itself and its necessi- 
 ties explicable by things, as naturalism dogmatically 
 does. This opened the way to the all-comprehen- 
 sive philosophical theism and theology of the post- 
 Kantian era in which we are living. If human experi- 
 ence is an experience of what is real, it was argued 
 that it must be an intelligible experience, its intelligi- 
 bility being its justification. Our knowledge, even our 
 desire to know, implies that what is presented in ex- 
 perience must be intrinsically capable of being known. 
 Now the conviction that we are living in a knowable 
 universe, already more or less interpreted by man, 
 doubtless contains an essential germ of theistic faith, 
 which readily adapts itself to ontological theism. Ex- 
 ternal nature is instinctively treated by us in the 
 sort of way a book is treated by its readers. We 
 expect to find meaning in all our experience of things : 
 this expectant trust supposes that we can enter philo- 
 sophically into its essential or final Eeason. The 
 philosophically unfolded Eeason that is implied in 
 the intelligible existence of things, or in the inter- 
 pretability of what is experienced is not my individual 
 
110 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 or private reason ; nor can it be the merely private 
 thinking of any other individual person : it must be 
 the absolute and universal Thought, if experience is 
 real. The universe must be a tissue or network, as it 
 were, of intelligible relations, in virtue of which it is 
 capable of being reduced to science. Its intelligible re- 
 lations are the divine Thought or Eeason that is uni- 
 versally involved in it latent at first as far as each of 
 us individually is concerned, but which men may and 
 do bring into their actual perceptions more and more, 
 in proportion as their scientific interpretation of things 
 advances. This advance, so far as it goes, might be 
 called increasing individual participation in the Uni- 
 versal Thought ; so that, in proportion to his success 
 as an interpreter of portions of the universe, a man 
 may be said to be identifying himself more fully 
 with that Universal Eeason or Consciousness, which the 
 possibility of his having scientific and philosophic ex- 
 perience presupposes to be at the centre of the Whole. 
 I begin to "participate," it may be said, in objective 
 thought or reality, when, by expectant calculation, 
 founded on past experience of the manifestations of 
 what is real, I bring my individual thinking out of the 
 state of idle fancy, and into line with the outwardly 
 manifested or real thought; thus substituting reason- 
 able interpretation of nature for an individually capri- 
 cious " anticipation " of nature, as Bacon would call it. 
 And so I may be said to be " identifying " myself with 
 God, or with the divine thought immanent in experi- 
 
DIVINE NECESSITY. Ill 
 
 ence, which now expresses itself in and through my 
 thoughts about things, that are becoming more and 
 more divine-like, as my science advances. In like 
 manner we say that in reading a book intelligently and 
 sympathetically, the individual reader is entering into 
 it thinking the thoughts of its author; becoming one 
 with, or participating in, his spirit. The reader enters 
 into and thus far becomes one with the author ; the 
 author enters into and becomes one with the sympa- 
 thetic reader. 
 
 Again. Thought or reason, whether so manifested Abstract 
 in a human microcosm, or manifested in the macrocosm an<nfving 
 of the universe, must be referred, at least by man, i 
 to living conscious Mind. He is instinctively obliged 
 to personify it, as we say, and that whether it presents 
 itself in purely intellectual relations, or as obligatory 
 moral reason. The relations of science which an inter- 
 pretable universe involves, oblige us to suppose that 
 we are living in organised living intelligence, just as 
 moral obligation presupposes us living individually 
 in moral relation to the living moral Eeason that is 
 supreme. Universal thought to us means universal 
 conscious life. So that the indispensable initiative 
 of having scientific intercourse with contingent pheno- 
 mena, of which we have trial in our fragmentary human 
 experience, appears as the beginning of intellectual 
 intercourse with the Universal Consciousness ; or, if 
 another mode of expression be preferred, the be- 
 ginning of the revelation in us of the Universal 
 
112 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 Consciousness. It is an approach on our part, and a 
 self-revelation on God's part, which becomes more full 
 and articulate with all human progress in philosophy. 
 Hegelian Following this line of argument or speculation, we 
 ^ ll ^- ourselves becoming involved at last in something 
 like the dialectical procedure of Hegel. For his philo- 
 sophy of the universe is finally and throughout a 
 philosophical theism or theology the most comprehen- 
 sive and elaborate perhaps that modern thinking has 
 produced; and which, indirectly even more than by 
 direct assimilation, has been giving new forms to the 
 religious thought of this age. Its sympathetic yet 
 critical introduction to the British and Anglo-Saxon 
 world is largely due to an eminent countryman, a former 
 Gifford Lecturer, whom we are proud to have living 
 among us in Edinburgh. Dr Hutchison Stirling's 
 ' Secret of Hegel,' published some thirty years ago, 
 marks the beginning of a new era in our insular 
 philosophy, with corresponding activity and enlarge- 
 ment in religious thought. Its appearance was almost 
 contemporaneous with that of another epoch-making 
 book, representative of the opposite pole of philosophy, 
 yet not without affinity to the all-comprehensiveness of 
 Hegelian religious thought I mean the volume of 
 ' First Principles/ and the synthetic philosophy of 
 which it was the pioneer, which forms Mr Herbert 
 Spencer's contribution to the intellectual life of his 
 generation. For Mr Spencer's philosophy of the uni- 
 verse is as it were an inverted Hegelianism resting 
 
DIVINE NECESSITY. 113 
 
 on an empirical, not on a rationally ontological base, 
 and constructed by empirical generalisation, not by 
 the necessities of purely rational dialectic. Its apo- 
 theosis is in the universally and for ever Unknowable 
 Power, at the extreme opposite to the potential if not 
 actual Omniscience which Hegel seems to claim. 
 
 The Hegelian dialectic is virtually the Hegelian Thetheo- 
 theology. It becomes a Philosophy of Religion Philo- Dialectic 
 sophical Theism the boldest and most thorough-going 
 which issues in a system that may be called indif- 
 ferently Philosophy or Theology, seeing that in Hegel 
 these are virtually one. His interest in the problem 
 of existence seems to be religious and Christian as 
 much as intellectual. As with Aristotle, and still more 
 with St Thomas Aquinas, theology is with Hegel the 
 consummation of speculation, if not, as with Bacon, 
 " the Sabbath and port of all man's labours and 
 peregrinations." 
 
 Hegelian dialectic might be taken as an exhaustive Outline, 
 intellectual elaboration of what is put only in a tenta- 
 tive and practical way in the cosmological argument ; 
 which, as I suggested, is founded on the craving for 
 cause that finds rest only in the agency of Divine 
 Spirit, or, as one might say, in the Universal Conscious- 
 ness. The Hegelian progressive and ascending syn- 
 thesis is a process which is brought forward to show 
 articulately in reason the inadequacy of the lower and 
 more abstract categories of thought, the intellectual 
 need for ascending regressively from the extreme in- 
 
 H 
 
114 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 adequacy of Pure Being to the infinite fulness of the 
 concrete Divine Beality making manifest that the uni- 
 verse in its true concreteness necessarily presupposes 
 infinite wealth in its divine ground in the Thought or 
 Consciousness that is universal. This is not an old- 
 fashioned deduction things and persons deduced from 
 a principle unfolded in the way conclusions in mathe- 
 matics are drawn out of the axioms and definitions in 
 which they are tacitly involved ; nor an induction from 
 facts, in the way natural causes are generalised from 
 their physical effects. It is a reflex synthesis of 
 what is alleged to be found by reason, as necessarily 
 presupposed in the lower and more abstract categories 
 of thought, when they are purged of the inadequacy 
 and error that pertains to them if they are taken as 
 ultimate. Thus purely abstract Being must be less 
 adequate to express Universal or Divine Being than 
 the higher category of change or Becoming: this, in 
 turn, is less adequate than Being that is determin- 
 ate, and so on, till Infinite and Spiritual Being, or God 
 in His fulness, is reached, to be realised more and 
 more fully in the progressive conscious intelligence of 
 individual men, as it is always latent in Nature. This 
 regressively dialectical ascent promises, at each stage 
 of advance, a fuller conception of the Absolute Being 
 or God, till at last God is found by the philosopher 
 in the form of rationally articulated reality or uni- 
 versal consciousness, more or less shared in by all 
 finite things and persons. Each partial step on the 
 
DIVINE NECESSITY. 115 
 
 ascent, on account of its unsatisfying abstractness, 
 craves a richer or more concrete thought ; and without 
 this further development, the judgment is left sceptical 
 between affirmation and negation. The consequent in- 
 tellectual unrest is the movement which carries the 
 mind upward, until it finds complete satisfaction in 
 the universal rational consciousness. This is recogni- 
 tion that the universe of rationally articulated things 
 and persons is essentially Divine : the perfect rational 
 articulation is another name for God. Dialectical de- 
 velopment of the categories of thought, in their hier- 
 archical gradation, may be called the gradual unfolding 
 of philosophical or ontological theism. The individual 
 thinker, potentially identical with God, through the 
 unconscious immanence of the now articulated ration- 
 ality in himself as in all things and persons, becomes 
 consciously identified, in proportion as, through the 
 dialectical synthesis, he is made to see philosophically 
 how he is living and moving and having his being in 
 universal reason or universal consciousness. He becomes 
 aware of his own participation in Deity, by translating 
 into thought what was otherwise held in the imper- 
 fect intellectual form of feeling. Philosophy is, in 
 short, theistic and Christian faith in the universe, 
 translated in terms of thought : the translation makes 
 explicit the reason that is latent in the feeling, making 
 all visible as the infinite or divine universe. This 
 philosophy is offered to this generation as the intel- 
 lectual form of religion, assimilating in itself the 
 
116 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 Christian as the one catholic and absolute religion. It 
 claims to be religion so far as religion is intellectual, 
 but not necessarily to the exclusion of religion in the 
 more human and practical form of feeling, emotion, 
 and faith. And if theology is the intellectual inter- 
 pretation and co-ordination of man's final relations to 
 the divine universe of reality, Hegelian philosophy is 
 Hegelian theism or theology ; the two are really syn- 
 onymous. Hegelian dialectic becomes Christian theism 
 elaborated in the form of eternal and necessary thought 
 siib specie ccternitatis, as Spinoza would say. It ap- 
 pears at the opposite pole to every modification of 
 agnosticism, and yet the extremes are sometimes found 
 to approach. 
 
 Questions Is the philosopher justified in reason, when he 
 by the on- announces, as discovered intellectual necessity, the 
 ThefsoT perfect rational articulation of the universe in the 
 Hege1 ' universal consciousness called God, as what all things 
 and persons must really exist in ? Is all that is im- 
 plied in the actual existence of things and in the moral 
 agency of persons fully explained, or relieved of all 
 mystery, so that the burden which has put so much 
 strain in past ages upon faith is found to disappear, 
 when the Hegelian translation of theistic faith into 
 this form of theistic thought has been dialectically un- 
 folded ? Is faith found to be exchanged for sight, in the 
 perfect intellectual vision supplied by this dialectical 
 reconciliation of the universe of nature and spirit ? Is 
 
DIVINE NECESSITY. 117 
 
 this philosophic thought adequate for the accommoda- 
 tion of all the facts of experience for which it is bound 
 by its profession to provide room ; or must we all still 
 bear, in the form of life and living trust, a burden of 
 mysteries, which neither this nor any other intellectual 
 interpretation of the universe is able finally to elimin- 
 ate ? Does Hegelian thought penetrate deep enough to 
 take in all the genuine facts of man's physical and 
 moral experience all the facts, I mean, which can 
 vindicate their genuineness, and the need for recog- 
 nising them, by the sceptical disintegration of human 
 experience the impossibility of any scientific and 
 moral intercourse with reality that follows if they 
 are disallowed or ignored ? When the dialectical un- 
 folding of the universe of existence is said to show 
 that " all things and persons exist in God," does this 
 mean that nothing exists (or can exist) except God ? 
 Does it mean that so much actual existence in visible 
 and tangible things as is implied in their being media 
 of intercourse between persons is an illusion ; and 
 also that faith in the free or self-originative power of 
 persons, in their morally responsible acts, is misleading 
 fancy ? How do individual persons retain their morally 
 needed personal identity, if their personal activity evil 
 as well as good is really the activity of God con- 
 sciously to themselves God, up to the degree in which 
 each man learns through philosophy to recognise only 
 Deity in what he still calls " himself " ? As a fact, is 
 not each man able to originate voluntary acts, which 
 
118 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 are therefore called his own acts many of which ought 
 not to have been acted, and which, therefore, there was 
 no absolute necessity in reason for the human person 
 to create ? Or, on the contrary, are all acts that enter 
 into the temporal manifestations of the divine active 
 reason the malignant will of the murderer, equally 
 with the lofty ideals that are more or less realised in 
 a philanthropic and saintly life are these all alike acts 
 of God part of the divine life ? Do they all express 
 the Universal Consciousness in its incarnate activities ? 
 There are especially two mysteries of existence from 
 the burden of which I do not find the promised intel- 
 lectual relief 
 
 Does this (1) I cannot find in this dialectically evolved neces- 
 diaiectic Ca sity the explanation of the mystery involved in the 
 mora^mys- existence of individual personal agents who must them- 
 ttepersons selves be blamed for acts which ought not to exist 
 morai heU ac ^ s ^ or wn i c ^ there is no rational necessity that they 
 power? should come into existence, and which therefore cannot 
 be acts accordant with moral reason. Are not all im- 
 moral acts undivine acts ? How does the dialectical 
 necessity transform personal responsibility into a 
 final thought in which human consciousness is freed 
 from all mystery ? Does the offered philosophy more 
 than cover with a new vocabulary what is still a 
 mystery, hid in the final unknowableness as dis- 
 tinguished from a human or practical knowledge ? 
 Or of time- (2) Then there is the mystery of individual persons 
 es "' and outward things naturally existing in time the 
 
DIVINE NECESSITY. 119 
 
 mystery of change, with its relation to an imbeginning combined 
 
 . . with the 
 
 and an unending natural succession, or to the " time- historical 
 less" Universal Consciousness. While human under- individual 
 standing has to face this mystery of mysteries, how persons? 
 does the dialectical procedure transform faith in it into 
 concrete thought and intellectual vision, making the 
 faith become sight ? Can future change be conceived 
 as always real ? Is all that has been and all that is to 
 be the temporal process which faith assumes to be in 
 actual fulfilment only gradually is all this only 
 illusion ; so that whatever happens in time must, as 
 such, be unreal, and the words " before " and " after " 
 only an expression of error or of ignorance ? Can the 
 dialectical ontology resolve into one perfect timeless 
 conception our otherwise finally mysterious faith in the 
 historical reality of the procession of natural changes 
 and in the eternity of God ? 
 
 In this connection I find wisdom in the words of Lotze. 
 one who is perhaps the deepest and most considerate 
 thinker among the later Germans I mean Lotze. The 
 words suggest the inadequacy of all abstract categories 
 of Eeason to explain exhaustively mysteries of actual 
 fact and experience ; which nevertheless they may 
 enable us to co-ordinate, in subordination to the rea- 
 sonable faith on which our individual relation to the 
 supreme realities of the universe seems finally to re- 
 pose. "All universal propositions, upon which our 
 knowledge depends," says Lotze, " are judgments which 
 do not tell us that anything concrete is, or takes place ; 
 
120 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 they only declare what would exist, or would have to 
 take place, in case certain conditions actually occur: 
 they merely express certain general rules which we 
 must follow in the construction of the content of our 
 ideas. On the contrary, those propositions upon which 
 all the special interest of religion depends for ex- 
 ample, that God is, that He has created the World, 
 that the soul of man survives death these are all 
 declarative judgments, which assert particular definite 
 facts. The first -mentioned general propositions are 
 nothing but expressions of the forms of activity in 
 which reason, according to its own abstract nature, 
 must be exercised. On the other hand, the declara- 
 tive propositions of faith, which assert facts with 
 respect to the ordering of a world that is more than 
 abstract reason, cannot with equal legitimacy be re- 
 garded as the innate endowment of our intelligence, 
 but are in some sort the result of experience and 
 spiritual culture." 
 
 All this raises a significant question about the nature 
 and limiting conditions of human understanding as re- 
 gards our final conception of the universe, to which I 
 will ask your consideration in next lecture. 
 
121 
 
 LECTUEE V. 
 
 PHILOSOPHICAL FAITH. 
 
 THE final problem of the universe may be taken as the The final 
 signal object-lesson for illustrating the limit of man's theuniu 
 power to interpret experience, his intellectual relation 
 to reality, and the ultimate constitution of moral faith 
 in the universe. Can our final relation to the highest 
 
 realities be found in and through what we are as t hinkor 
 
 know. 
 
 thinking or intellectual beings only ? Does the rea- 
 sonableness of our philosophic interpretation of things 
 not depend on complex influences, other than those that 
 are determined by the scientific understanding measured 
 by data of sense ? Must not the moral, practical, and 
 reverential dispositions in man, as well as the logical 
 understanding and sense - experience, be recognised 
 when we try to read the deepest available thought 
 about the world including the spiritual world that 
 we are living and having our being in ? Is it there- 
 fore possible for man to eliminate all mystery from his 
 
122 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 final philosophical conception of himself, the world, 
 and God in an intellectual vision in which an im- 
 perfectly understood faith, that things are working 
 together with loving purpose towards a reasonable end, 
 is exchanged for an all - comprehending philosophical 
 intuition of the infinite reality in an unmysterious 
 rationally articulated system ? Is man potentially, if 
 not as yet with full consciousness, an omniscient being ? 
 Can his individual intelligence of the universe become 
 perfect without any eternally necessary remainder of 
 incompletable mystery left for faith to assimilate, in 
 what some might deprecate or disparage as a mystical 
 act ? What if this be in reason impossible, unless man 
 can become absolutely identified with God his incar- 
 nate consciousness one with the eternal consciousness ? 
 Moral faith or trust must then be each man's highest 
 form of living, in relation to what can be completely 
 intelligible only at the Divine centre of things, from 
 which man is eternally excluded, as entrance into it 
 would mean complete deification. If this be true, 
 theistic faith cannot be exchanged by man for theistic 
 thought that has been completely liberated, by philo- 
 sophical speculation, from that abridged or broken, 
 because imperfect, knowledge that at last takes the 
 form of feeling, faith, and action. 
 
 Aiterna- These questions are suggested by attempts to think 
 imut be 11 ^ exhaustively the human ego, the outer world in its 
 
 temporal process or evolution, and the Divine active 
 that pro- reason, all " organically united " in necessities of reason, 
 
PHILOSOPHICAL FAITH. 123 
 
 and emptied of resolved mysteries. This is offered as mises to 
 relief from the mental discomfort of imperfect know- final faith 
 ledge, implied in a final faith burdened with mysteries, thought 
 The moral faith out of which theism seems to emerge 
 cannot, of course, sustain what is demonstrably self- 
 contradictory what can be shown to be absolutely 
 irrational. But may the faith, in addition to con- 
 formity with this negative criterion, be also transformed, 
 in a human mind, into completely unmysterious insight 
 - unclouded mental vision, that is, so to speak, co- 
 extensive with universal reality ? If a philosopher 
 affirms this, and professes that he has accomplished 
 this transformation, let us make sure that no con- 
 victions which are indispensable to human experience 
 are thereby virtually converted into illusions ; rejected 
 only because they cannot be provided with accommo- 
 dation in the philosophic theory that is offered in 
 exchange for a final faith. For we are in that case 
 face to face with the alternative of either rejecting a 
 philosophy of the universe that is obliged to spoil 
 indispensable root - convictions in order to vindicate 
 its own claims, or of eliminating the convictions them- 
 selves, in order to save the philosophical theology that 
 must be pronounced inadequate if they are retained. 
 In order to rise wholly out of the incomplete know- 
 ledge of the universe, which needs trust, shall we adopt 
 a speculative system which contains the seeds of gen- 
 eral scepticism ? Should we not rather regard the 
 offered system as a failure, if it cannot consistently 
 
124 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 recognise in their integrity the root-convictions which 
 
 human life needs ? 
 
 Locke It was the speculative intrepidity, more immediately 
 
 raised the of Spinoza and others, in offering a purely intellectual 
 solution of the mysteries which confront religious and 
 
 moral faith, that at the end of the seventeenth cen- 
 
 ^ urv P ene d what is now perhaps the most significant 
 theological q ues tion of modern thought that between a final 
 
 knowledge. u 
 
 nescience, a final gnosticism, and a final combination of 
 nescience with gnosticism in which the last word is 
 moral faith in the perfect goodness or perfect reason- 
 ableness of the end, incompletely conceivable by man, 
 towards which all things are making ; towards which, 
 in virtue of necessary moral postulates of experience, 
 we are obliged to believe that they are making. John 
 Locke was in this matter the earliest spokesman of 
 modern religious thought, as regards the question of the 
 limits of a human understanding of the realities of 
 existence: he sought by argument to restrain rash 
 attempts philosophically to translate human feeling 
 and faith into full intellectual vision. Locke set to 
 work in order to try how far a human understanding 
 could go in what one might call the ontological direc- 
 tion, in dispensing with the authority of faith, as non- 
 rational, possibly fallacious, but anyway an insuffi- 
 ciently thought-out sort of knowledge. He was the 
 first deliberate modern representative of this investi- 
 gation. Yet one need not take his famous ' Essay,' in 
 which the inquiry is only initiated, as a sufficient 
 
PHILOSOPHICAL FAITH. 125 
 
 reply to the fundamental question about the power of 
 man as a thinker to think out the universe, or as to 
 the possibility of elaborating a philosophy or theology 
 which should make all that was mysterious about the 
 human ego, the temporal process of nature, and the 
 Eternal Consciousness or Universal Eeason, fully under- 
 stood. Locke only raised what has become the ques- 
 tion between a thorough-going agnosticism, a thorough- 
 going gnosticism, and the intermediate blending of the 
 two in a final faith. The question has come to its 
 crisis in the nineteenth century, which is confronted 
 by the philosophy that finds its apotheosis in the 
 Unknowable, at the one extreme, and the philosophy 
 which, at the other extreme, seems to claim the Infinite 
 Reality as within the comprehension of human thought. 
 
 The caution that is characteristic of Locke's state of The infinite 
 mind finds emphatic utterance in the familiar sentences Being." 
 in the Introduction to his 'Essay,' which tell of its 
 occasion and design : we there learn what gave rise to 
 his philosophical enterprise, which has become the 
 problem of modern thought in the last two centuries. 
 It was the perplexities in which human understand- 
 ing is involved when one engages intrepidly in religious 
 speculation, and tries to interpret the universe finally. 
 " This it was," Locke tells us, " which gave the first rise 
 to, this Essay concerning human understanding. For 
 I thought that the first step towards satisfying several 
 inquiries the mind of man was very apt to run into, 
 was to take a view of our own understanding, examine 
 
126 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 our own powers, and see to what things they were 
 adapted. Till that was done, I suspected we began at 
 the wrong end, and in vain sought for satisfaction in 
 a quiet and sure possession of the truths that most 
 concerned us, whilst we let loose our thought in the 
 vast ocean of Being; as if all that boundless extent 
 were the natural and undisputed possession of human 
 understanding, wherein there was nothing exempt 
 from its decisions or that escaped its comprehen- 
 sion. Thus men extending their inquiries beyond 
 their capacities, and letting their thoughts wander into 
 those depths where they can find no sure footing, it is 
 no wonder that they raise questions and multiply 
 disputes ; which, never coming to any clear resolution, 
 are proper only to increase their doubts, and to confirm 
 them at last in perfect Scepticism." Locke's tone in 
 this enterprise has been deprecated as an expression 
 of the languid speculative interest, and compromising 
 intellectual mediocrity, of the unspeculative English- 
 man. We are told that the true and only way to 
 determine the extreme resources of man's understand- 
 ing, is for men to make trial of what their intelli- 
 gence can do : let each man actually enter the water, 
 without first seeking to find, in this abstract way, 
 whether he is able to swim ; let him persist in trying, 
 in hope of reaching a fully satisfying or omniscient 
 intellectual vision of the infinite reality. Furthermore, 
 we may be told that for man to ask how much man 
 can know, is to presume already that man can know 
 
PHILOSOPHICAL FAITH. 127 
 
 enough to justify him in engaging in this supreme in- 
 tellectual enterprise that which Locke inaugurated, 
 which Kant a century later carried further, and which 
 underlies contemporary theological thought and con- 
 troversy. 
 
 But an inquiry into the foundations of what may Man may 
 turn out on reflection to be necessarily incomplete whether 
 human knowledge of God, the world, and the indi- O fthereai- 
 vidual self, in their organic unity, need not be en- 
 gaged in indeed was not by Locke in order to find 
 first whether man can be intelligent of anything, and reasona1;)le 
 then to find whether he can reduce all final questions Faith - 
 about the three supposed realities to answers in which 
 no remainder of intellectual incompleteness or mystery 
 
 need remain. To show that a human knowledge of the in m * is 
 
 possible. 
 
 universe must at last become incomplete or mysterious, 
 presupposes that something is knowable by man, al- 
 though divine omniscience may not be within his reach. 
 Now the inquirer who recognises that he already knows 
 something, or that he has some amount of intelligible 
 experience, may perhaps be able to find points at which 
 reason itself forbids further approach to intelligibility 
 or completeness, under human conditions of thought 
 and experience ; the point, for instance, at which under- 
 standing is arrested by the absence of all experience, 
 or else by the discovery that there are indispensable 
 needs and convictions of human nature which are 
 spoiled whenever they are taken as adequately rendered 
 in a human intellectual vision, instead of remaining in 
 
128 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 the living religious or moral faith, which would be thus 
 shown to be our only and sufficient philosophy. It may 
 be found that such faith cannot be held in its spiritual 
 integrity in the purely intellectual way, inasmuch as 
 the whole man, emotional and moral as well as in- 
 tellectual, may be required to sustain what human 
 understanding can only in part comprehend, or realise 
 in terms of sense and sensuous imagination. If it 
 should turn out on inquiry to be so, what is called 
 man's "participation" in the Universal Consciousness 
 or Universal Eeason would be finally an act of trust 
 in what his spiritual constitution authorises and re- 
 quires, but which his understanding of the changing 
 universe is too incomplete to unfold in a finally un- 
 mysterious philosophy. In this way submission to 
 what is reasonable would at last bear the character of 
 submission to reason as trusted authority, rather than 
 recognition of reason, on account of the fully perceived 
 meaning and rationality of the faith. It would be the 
 issue of the living action of the whole man at his lest, in 
 response to the universe of changing reality in which he 
 awoke in dim perception and self-consciousness at first. 
 This is what I mean when I speak of human attempts 
 to determine the final meaning of the universe, as 
 being necessarily, in their last and highest form, what 
 may more properly be called reasonable faith or trust 
 than absolutely complete science. The result must be 
 the outcome of what is characteristic in man in his 
 whole spiritual "personality, not the outcome of man 
 
PHILOSOPHICAL FAITH. 129 
 
 merely in his sensuous understanding, which is incap- 
 able of grasping and elaborating what is needed for the 
 whole divine or infinite problem. Man, as Goethe says, 
 is not born to solve the problem of the universe, but 
 to find out where the problem begins. The reason of 
 man and the reason of God are in this different. 
 
 May it not be said that the otherwise impassable in its final 
 gulf between the Divine Omniscience or Infinite Know- ma n's 
 ledge towards which no advance in our scientific O f the ge 
 knowledge is more an approach than an addition of u-aivirsK 
 finite spaces is an approach to Immensity, or an addi- takesthe 
 tion of finite times an approach to Eternity that 
 
 the gulf between this Omniscience and our neces- reasonable 
 
 faith or 
 
 sarily incomplete scientific understanding of the uni- trust. 
 verse is practically crossed sufficiently for human 
 purposes by our spiritual humanity in the fulness of 
 its rationally authoritative needs by the larger reason, 
 if one chooses so to call it by reason as authoritative, 
 as distinguished from the purely logical understand- 
 ing ? For this would be reason in the form of author- 
 ity, so far as it is a faith and hope that is imposed 
 by something in the mind which cannot be shown 
 to contradict logical intelligence, although the reality 
 cannot be adequately represented in the religious or 
 philosophical imagination. This may be sufficient for 
 man, while infinitely insufficient. When opposed to 
 what is properly knowledge, this final trust or faith 
 involves the incompleteness, or necessary mysterious- 
 ness of its object in imagination, and in any empirical 
 
 i 
 
130 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 evidence, while yet the faith cannot be charged with 
 being absurd or self - contradictory. It is not suffi- 
 ciently comprehensible for this charge to be brought 
 against it, and therefore it may be reasonably sus- 
 tained by what one might call spiritual motive as 
 distinguished from full intellectual insight. It may 
 even be said to be the crowning example of man's 
 inevitable dependence upon authority, that all human 
 thought about the meaning and active principle of 
 the universe, must end in an authoritative, because 
 partly blind or agnostic, exercise of reason, as con- 
 trasted with those acts in which a man comprehends, 
 or completely grasps, a defined but isolated object. 
 Reason in Faith, trust, authority, are accordingly words not unfit 
 becomes 8 to designate the final relation of the human spirit to the 
 
 universe of reality. Properly speaking we know only 
 cipie Prm " what is perfectly comprehended : we submit in faith to 
 the authority of our spiritual constitution, when it 
 moves us to assent to what can be only imperfectly 
 comprehended. In this way reason itself, it may be 
 said, at last rests upon authority : for its original, in 
 a finite intelligence, with limited experience, does not 
 consist of logical conclusions, but of what is spontane- 
 ously accepted by reason as reasonable, because im- 
 posed by human nature spiritually developed. It is 
 therefore of the nature of trust. Our final interpreta- 
 tion of the appearances which the changing universe 
 presents so unlike in many ways to what man might 
 have expected in an essentially divine universe is 
 
PHILOSOPHICAL FAITH. 131 
 
 therefore an interpretation that has to unfold itself in 
 the moral faith that relates to a fragmentary revela- 
 tion of perfect reason and perfect goodness or love. 
 Working convictions, the object-matter of which can- 
 not be fully translated into picturable thought for the 
 understanding, even by the philosopher, seems to be 
 the implied condition under which man exercises intelli- 
 gence, and which must therefore determine his finally 
 reasonable attitude towards the Whole. It is a crede 
 ut intdligas, but in which intelligo is partly contained 
 in the crede ; it is not the intellige ut credas in which 
 omniscience or perfect intelligence is the precondition 
 of the credo. This philosophical faith can be implicit 
 knowledge, but it is for man an unrepresentable know- 
 ledge, of the infinite reality : it is the human equivalent 
 for Omniscient Divine Eeason. So it may be said that 
 we have at last only faith in the " authority " of a 
 necessarily incomplete, or finally mysterious, knowledge, 
 because the concrete conclusions of human reason must 
 all be rested on trusted principles that are not in their 
 turn logically proved conclusions. In the end 
 
 " We have but faith. : we cannot know ; 
 For knowledge is of things we see ; 
 And yet we trust it comes from Thee, 
 A beam in darkness : let it grow. 
 
 Let knowledge grow from more to more, 
 But more of reverence in us dwell ; 
 That mind and soul, according well, 
 
 May make one music as before, 
 
 But vaster." 
 
132 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 And leaves It is in this way that the religious instinct in man 
 knowledge rises above the finite and transitory, and although in- 
 " passes capable of complete intellectual satisfaction, may yet 
 
 reach satisfaction which takes the form of spiritual 
 life, and of a philosophy that may be disparaged as 
 indolent and mystical, or dogmatic and uncritical, by 
 those who resent limitations in our power of con- 
 ception and understanding. This too, I take it, may 
 give meaning to Sir William Hamilton's paradox when 
 he speaks of the last and highest consecration of true 
 religion being "an altar to the unknown and unknowable 
 God." For this may signify that the final Principle, or 
 supreme Power, of the universe is unknowable by man, 
 in the sort of way we are said to know " things we see," 
 or natural laws of change in the temporal procession, 
 in the physically scientific meaning of knowledge. But 
 in a larger meaning this final faith or trust may itself 
 be called knowledge, as when St Paul says, " I know in 
 whom I have believed," or St John in his exclama- 
 tion, " We know that we know Him." The " knowledge " 
 that " God is love " is the deepest expression of theistic 
 faith in the principle of the universe. 
 
 obedience I seem to find a germ of this philosophy latent in 
 " tnose opening aphorisms of the ' Nbvum Organum,' 
 
 r- WQ i cn express the action of final faith in its physical 
 ^ orm : ^ n WOI> ds reported as spoken by Jesus to his 
 that is followers in Palestine, one seems to find recognition of 
 
 latent in 
 
 the uni- the final faith in its moral and spiritual form. When 
 
 verse of 
 
 reality. Bacon speaks of man as the interpreter of nature, only 
 
PHILOSOPHICAL FAITH. 133 
 
 so far as he is its obedient minister; and when he 
 makes the suggestion in the often - quoted words, 
 " Natura non nisi parendo vincitur," does he not strike 
 the key-note of reverential submission to an authorita- 
 tive voice, proceeding from the reality that is under- 
 going investigation, and which must not be gainsaid, 
 although it is only imperfectly comprehensible, accepted 
 at last in an act of obedience rather than of victorious 
 intelligence ? And is not a like idea at the root of the 
 memorable words, " If any man will do God's will, he 
 shall know," know by this practical criterion the 
 final difference between individual opinion and the 
 divine reality know this so far as this is intellectually 
 comprehensible by man ? Not through intellect alone, 
 or by man exercising himself as a thinking being ex- 
 clusively, but in and through the constant exercise of 
 all that is best or highest in him through the active 
 response of the entire man, while still in an incom- 
 pletely understood " knowledge " ; it is only thus that 
 it is open to man finally to dispose of his supreme pro- 
 blem, with its mysterious intellectual burden. The 
 final philosophy is practically found in a life of trustful 
 inquiry, right feeling, and righteous will or purpose, 
 not in complete vision ; and perhaps the chief profit of 
 struggling for the vision may be the moral lesson of 
 the consequent discovery the consciousness of the 
 scientific inaccessibility of the vision. 
 
 The rational reality in which all finite spirits may in Revelations 
 
 J of God in 
 
 a sense be said to participate, cannot be fully reached the actual 
 
134 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 universe, even in the most philosophic thought of a human 
 imperfectly spirit, if the time - consciousness of finite intelligence 
 StdSctu- an d the eternally complete divine thought must remain 
 Man! 37 unharmonised. And we must meet the mystery of 
 man's personal power to create acts that ought not to 
 be acted, which are inconsistent with the perfect reason, 
 and for which the human person, not the Power at the 
 heart of the universe, is responsible. These two along 
 with other mysteries are bars to the perfect vision. 
 The burden of the first is not removed by explaining 
 away history, and resolving the whole at last into the 
 Universal Consciousness, in which the illusion of time 
 is supposed to disappear; nor is the mystery of the 
 other relieved by disclaiming moral responsibility for 
 man and other finite spirits, and thinking of them all 
 as only temporary, non-moral, occasions for the mani- 
 festation of eternal Substance. The reality of time 
 and change disappears in the one explanation, so that 
 the words "before" and "after" are philosophically 
 irrelevant, and this means scepticism even as to all the 
 temporal evolutions of external nature, and in the his- 
 tory of man. Then if God can be self-revealed as the 
 real agent even in the immoral acts of man, how can 
 this be reconciled with the inevitable self-accusation of 
 which the immoral man himself is conscious, which 
 supposes that he himself must be the culprit, and 
 therefore the sole origin of the acts ? And how does 
 it consist with reprobation of the man by moral reason 
 in mankind, or with the constitution of society ? 
 
PHILOSOPHICAL FAITH. 135 
 
 It is difficult to see that modern thought of the Can we 
 Hegelian sort has done much towards translating these for the 
 
 two mysteries the universe in time, and morally re- 
 sponsible personality out of the darkness in which a e nd" moral 
 preceding philosophies have had to leave them, and in abstractly" 
 which it seems that they must remain unless man can 
 become God. Philosophy may show, notwithstanding, 
 that those dualisms continuous change and absolute 
 endlessness physical causality and moral freedom 
 from this sort of causality are not necessarily incon- 
 sistent with scientific reason. It may also show that 
 moral reason obliges us to live under their pressure, 
 although we cannot fully think the whole out into an 
 articulately consistent image, but must be content 
 with a fragment at the last. Moreover an eternal 
 consciousness that is supposed to reduce to illusion the 
 temporal procession of events in Nature, and to ex- 
 plain away the moral economy of finite spirits inde- 
 pendent enough to originate acts that ought not to be 
 acted, this abstract universal consciousness, or abstract 
 system of rational relations, while called " spirit," now 
 begins to resemble the Universal Substance of Spinoza, 
 of which nothing could be predicated, which takes a 
 semblance of meaning from the illusory things and 
 persons in which it is manifested in time. The in- 
 tellectual vision which was to give relief seems to 
 present a God that is in a gradual process of revela- 
 tion and self -development in what is after all an 
 unreal or illusory revelation ; at least if we are bound 
 
136 
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 The 
 
 * * orfi 
 
 unity " is 
 
 hended 
 umty< 
 
 And the 
 
 moral" va 
 
 verbally 
 relieved. 
 
 to think that God is dependent on the successive con- 
 scious acts of finite persons who are not really per- 
 sons for entering into consciousness at all. 
 
 On the other hand, is it more than the semblance of 
 a perfectly explained " organic unity " that the Hegelian 
 thought presents, if it is able to preserve the reality of 
 outward events, and of persons with their self-origin- 
 ated changes, and if it is to deliver the divine perfec- 
 tion from all responsibility for the immoral actions of 
 men ? It is true that men are not conceived by the 
 Hegelian to be mechanically parts of God, although they 
 find their true reality in Him ; but in that case " organic 
 unity " is only a term which covers over a relation still 
 left in the mystery of a necessarily incomplete human 
 thought or philosophy. It is still an organic unity 
 that passes human knowledge, although it is doubt- 
 less innocent of the gross idea which makes all things 
 and all persons only physical parts of One Bound- 
 less Substance, the physical effects of One Unknowable 
 Power called Nature. 
 
 That Hegel meant his final thought to be interpreted 
 consistently with the actuality of the world, and also 
 w i tn the moral personality of man, I do not deny ; nor 
 can one ^ T ^y interpret this philosophy or theology 
 pantheistically," in the obnoxious sense that involves 
 final moral, and therefore final scientific, scepticism. 
 Its fundamental unity is perhaps elastic enough to 
 admit of being interpreted so as to comprehend, but in 
 some mysterious way, the world of successive nature, 
 
PHILOSOPHICAL FAITH. 137 
 
 and the world of human spirits, without spoiling our 
 experience of the actuality of the world, or the morally 
 necessary conviction of the freedom of each man to 
 create actions referable exclusively to himself for their 
 responsible causation. But then this is no more than 
 an assertion of faith at last. Yet we were led to ex- 
 pect that through Hegelian dialectic this and every 
 other legitimate faith could be translated into philo- 
 sophic thought, with the burden of its mystery all 
 removed not merely with the mysteries articulated 
 in a fresh form of verbal expression. If there is here 
 more than amended verbal articulation of the old dif- 
 ficulties, one fails to find it, as long as, notwithstand- 
 ing Hegel, the burden still oppresses that resisted all 
 former attempts so to think out the universe of reality 
 as to eliminate, for example, the two mysteries which 
 I have taken as illustrations of man's intellectual in- 
 adequacy. Even the philosophic human knowledge of 
 what we are living and having our being in, and of how 
 we are so living, to us seems still to remain knowledge 
 of something that in the end passes knowledge, that is 
 known while it is still unknown; known, in a moral 
 and spiritual life which can be lived if we will; un- 
 known, because it cannot be fully thought out in the 
 infiniteness of its reality. So intellectual analysis of 
 human experience generally, and of religion in Christi- 
 anity, seems always to leave at the last a residuum of 
 trust, inevitable in what one might call authoritative 
 reason, instead of perfectly understood reason ; the 
 
138 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 authoritative reason in which reverential obedience to 
 what is trusted in as reasonable is more prominent than 
 intellectually victorious insight. Surely the authority 
 of final faith can be dispensed with only in the Omni- 
 science which leaves no room for mystery or incomplete 
 knowledge. 
 
 The Hegel- But after all it may be only the question of how the 
 
 ian intel- 
 
 lectual an- final attitude of man to what is of human interest in 
 
 Christian the universe of reality should be named, rather than a 
 
 difference with regard to what the actual attitude must 
 at ^ as ^ be, tnat separates those who suppose that they 
 deTtciahn~ are adopting, from those who suppose that they are 
 rejecting, the Hegelian interpretation of the relation of 
 man and the universe to God. Should the final attitude 
 be called knowledge thought reason; or should it be 
 called faith trust in authority? To call it "know- 
 ledge " seems to claim too much, as long as there must 
 be an inevitable remainder of mystery, which leaves the 
 so-called knowledge incomplete in quantity, and an 
 unimaginable unity, incomprehensible by the sensuous 
 intelligence. To call it " faith " may seem to mean 
 that it is empty of objective rationality ; for this is not 
 secured by even the most confidently felt conviction, 
 individual certitude being no sufficient ultimate test 
 of absolute truth. As for " authority," this is a word 
 that suggests deference to a person, instead of the im- 
 personal intellectual necessity that belongs to purely 
 rational proof. Yet if those who prefer to express, 
 
PHILOSOPHICAL FAITH. 139 
 
 under the names of " reason " and " knowledge," their 
 final relation to the highest reality, at the same time 
 disclaim for man the omniscience which otherwise seems 
 to be assumed in their words, then this philosophic 
 thought, at last obliged to submit to arrest, is really 
 the philosophic faith that at last trusts in what is 
 not fully open to man's understanding. The difficul- 
 ties in which the inevitable remainder of final ignor- 
 ance involve every human mind are not necessarily 
 suicidal, if they do not necessarily forbid man, on pain 
 of contradicting reason, from satisfying his moral and 
 spiritual needs. The suicidal or essentially sceptical 
 philosophy is then the one that claims to have thought 
 out in its infinity what man can think out only incom- 
 pletely. 
 
 An intellectual analysis of religion and Christianity Hegelian 
 
 . , . , speculation 
 
 that adopts this final attitude, would probably be re- humanised, 
 garded by some as not inconsistent with Hegelian 
 theism, and its exhaustive interpretation of the uni- 
 verse in terms of the divine reason. The "organic 
 unity " of Nature and Man in God is then interpreted 
 in a meaning that admits the moral freedom of agents 
 who are responsible for themselves when they act 
 immorally, and also the reality of change or temporal 
 succession. "What is called " participation " in, or 
 " identity " with, Universal Eeason, and " organic 
 unity" of the universe, are taken only as emphatic 
 expressions of the conviction that men are not isolated 
 psychological atoms, but members of a moral totality, 
 
140 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 in which the moral faith that is in us is sure to find 
 sympathetic response in the incompletely comprehen- 
 sible Divine Eeason that is perpetually active at the 
 centre of the Whole. So the further man penetrates 
 intellectually, the more fully this divine order discovers 
 itself : more and more of what corresponds to the final 
 faith is recognised in the principles that are determin- 
 ing the history of the world ; and it is seen that, while 
 men are " free " to resist God by doing evil, it is in their 
 harmony with the Divine Reason that the highest 
 freedom is to be found. So understood, the Hegelian 
 speculation becomes an elaborate dialectical recogni- 
 tion of man's final dissatisfaction with the limited 
 phenomena of sense in time, in perception of which 
 human life begins ; also of the obligation which the 
 reason that we call ours finds to unite the universe 
 of change in dependence on the Perfect Eeason that, 
 in broken form, is involved in our experience, but 
 under which we never fully comprehend the Whole. 
 It becomes a vindication of the universe, as incapable 
 of being conceived as mindless, purposeless evolution 
 of phenomena as really the expression of morally 
 related Spirit thus relieving the chill of abstract 
 physical science with the warmth of pervading Divine 
 life and love. In the thorough-going intellectual ana- 
 lysis of Christian Eeligion, man may in this way be 
 helped to recognise his own moral or personal reality, 
 by its mysterious affinity with the transcendent intel- 
 lectual system on which all depends. Still this philo- 
 
PHILOSOPHICAL FAITH. 141 
 
 sophy would be at last only an expression of faith, 
 founded upon needs inherent in the entire human 
 constitution, not on perfect intellectual comprehen- 
 sion on the part of the human thinker. It would at 
 most represent man's best way of carrying an intellec- 
 tual burden that is too heavy for the sensuous under- 
 standing. It would be his philosophical acknowledg- 
 ment of absolute dependence upon the constantly 
 active Eeason that he is nevertheless mysteriously 
 able to violate and resist, in his volitions and volun- 
 tary habits. This final faith or theistic reason is 
 weakened when it is made the object of logical proof. 
 Its justification is that the universe of reality dissolves 
 in sceptical and pessimist doubt when the moral faith 
 is withdrawn. The ultimate foundation of proof must 
 be incapable of proof, and intellectual reserve is the 
 correlative of a philosophic faith. 
 
 Philosophical Faith is the truly rational trust that PMiosophi- 
 nothing can happen in the temporal evolution which the reflex 
 can finally put to confusion the principles of moral Faith? 18 
 reason that are latent in Man, scientifically incom- 
 prehensible as the world's history of mingled good 
 and evil must be when measured only by finite ex- 
 perience in scientific intelligence. Philosophical Faith 
 is thus the reflex of theistic faith. 
 
142 
 
 LECTUEE VI. 
 
 EVIL: THE ENIGMA OF THEISM. 
 
 Eetro- MY first course of lectures was meant to quicken and 
 
 spect : the . 
 
 preceding deepen a perception or the absolute uniqueness of the 
 final problem, in its threefold articulation, with which 
 philosophy and theology are concerned ; also to suggest 
 the inadequacy and incoherence of all attempts to re- 
 solve its triplicity into an impersonal philosophical 
 unity, as well as the impossibility of treating the 
 universe as wholly uninterpretable in the nescience 
 to which those attempts conduct. Towards the end 
 of the course we seemed to approach the elements of 
 a settlement accommodated to the needs of man in 
 his true ideal. 
 
 In the present course I have hitherto been trying 
 to penetrate the ground in reason for theistic or 
 filial faith in the Power that is finally operative 
 in the universe, and is thus at the heart of all our 
 experience. The questions which I now meet are 
 
 The 
 
 present 
 Course. 
 
EVIL. 143 
 
 concerned, directly or indirectly, with the supreme 
 difficulty which theistic faith has to overcome, when 
 we find ourselves in a universe which, in this corner 
 of it at least, presents a strange and unexpected mix- 
 ture of what is bad with what is good. This is an 
 obstacle to moral faith, and the religious interpreta- 
 tion of the world, which must be honestly met. But 
 first let us recollect the chief issues thus far. 
 
 It was urged that human life, in its practical de- TheEthi- 
 
 . . calFoun- 
 
 pendence on experience, always presupposes ethical dation, or 
 trustworthiness in the Power that is continuously Faith in 
 revealing itself in all the experience of which man supreme 
 is conscious. We cannot proceed at all under the 
 possibility that the universe in which we are living v 
 and having our being may be morally untrustworthy, 
 or deceptive, and therefore even physically uninter- 
 pretable, so that reason or order, in the evolution of 
 its events, is not to be finally depended on. Such a 
 universe would be either intended by its supreme 
 Power to put us to intellectual and moral confusion, 
 or, if it be an unintended issue of what is finally 
 chaotic change, its events would be equally liable to 
 traverse reasonable expectations. Moral trust in a 
 perfectly reasonable universe of reality is the needed 
 condition of experience, and for understanding what 
 any fact or change really means. This fundamental 
 moral trust may be only tacit and unreflected on 
 by many men : its latent presence is not apt to be 
 recognised, for instance, in the trust we daily put in 
 
144 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 our perception of things around us, or in our memories 
 of the past, or in the assumption that the intellectual 
 necessities of which we are conscious may not after 
 all be illusions, even although we are intellectually 
 necessitated to think that they must be true. Yet in 
 all this an ethical faith in our mental experience is 
 virtually implied : there is a moral acknowledgment 
 that the distinct recollections of memory, and the 
 supposed physical order, and the perceived intellec- 
 tual necessities, cannot be transitory illusions in a 
 temporal procession of external changes and mental 
 states that is all hollow and deceptive, so that the 
 whole performance may be the manifestation not of 
 a trustworthy but of a malignant or of an indifferent 
 Power. For human activity is sustained by the 
 optimist faith, that the universe with which we are 
 in living intercourse must at last be treated as a 
 morally trustworthy reality a perfectly good and 
 omnipotent moral Power or Person being therein 
 manifested. 
 
 Conscience In this ethical root of life, and spiritual ground of 
 ality. the interpretability of experience, one finds the germ 
 of Theism. It is the absolutely uniting and harmon- 
 ising principle, in that threefold articulation of real 
 existence from which we set out. The universe of 
 reality is finally a moral unity incompletely compre- 
 hensible in human intelligence, but which moral reason 
 obliges man to suppose somehow consistent with moral 
 perfection in the Power or Person that is continually 
 
EVIL. 145 
 
 at work in the heart of it. Cosmic faith morally 
 involves this amount of theistic faith ; for even physi- 
 cal interpretation of a presumed cosmical order must 
 be interpretation of that in which morally trustworthy 
 Power or Personality at the centre is being physically 
 revealed. Really originating power is recognised by 
 man only in spiritual or morally responsible Will : there 
 is therefore no reason to suppose that physical causa- 
 tion is more than the sensible expression or language 
 of spiritual activity. It is an undue assumption that 
 any natural cause can be other than a dependent or 
 caused cause, at last an effect of personal or moral 
 power. The causality attributed to external things 
 may be philosophically conceived as the orderly ex- 
 pression of eternally active Eeason, the only true 
 agent in all natural changes. All so-called natural 
 agency may not unreasonably be regarded as really 
 divine agency ; the issue, not, indeed, of a capricious 
 will, but of the infinitely perfect and constantly oper- 
 ative Eeason, which may be trusted not to lead us into 
 illusion, if we do justice to ourselves as interpreters 
 of its revelations in nature and in man. 
 
 The cosmical system, moreover, may not unreason- The 
 ably be interpreted throughout as a universe of organic Snfverse is 
 adaptations, in which everything is fitted into every- 
 thing else, and in which there is a harmony of means 
 and ends, making the Whole adaptable by man, and thr 
 man's organism adapted to the Whole ; but in which 
 also there is correlative adaptation of every other purpose. 
 
146 
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 The in- 
 
 soluble 
 
 physical 
 intowHch 
 
 solvent-" 
 
 inconsis- 
 
 tent with 
 
 its finally 
 
 theistic 
 
 meaning, 
 
 sentient and intelligent being to the Whole, and of 
 the Whole to every other sentient and intelligent being 
 the adaptations, not all intelligible to us, yet legiti- 
 mately assumed by us to be latent in the universal 
 constitution of things. 
 
 That the finite and ever-changing universe, in which 
 
 . 
 
 our conscious lives become morally involved during the 
 interval between birth and death, is a temporal pro- 
 cession of natural causes, all in their turn natural 
 effects, in a natural regress which may even be im- 
 beginning, and that this may continue without end 
 j n j^ g successive metamorphoses all this does not 
 seem to militate against the intellectual possibility and 
 
 
 
 the moral need of finally interpreting the universe in 
 theistic faith and hope. The mystery of unbeginning- 
 ness and unendingness in which the temporal proces- 
 sion of natural events seems at last lost, need not involve 
 moral distrust of the manifestation which what is real 
 makes of itself now ; has made of itself since it emerged 
 out of the mysterious Past ; or which it has to make of 
 itself on its way into the mysterious Future. The 
 infinite that is to say the necessarily mysterious 
 duration of the natural manifestation does not make 
 the course of things and persons morally untrustworthy 
 or scientifically unintelligible as far as human nature 
 and experience provide for faith and incomplete science. 
 That the past and future of the natural procession dis- 
 appear in physical mystery, is only another way of 
 saying that human intelligence is necessarily inter- 
 
EVIL. 147 
 
 mediate between Sense and Omniscience. Our relation 
 to the infinite, as the thought of the infinite arises out 
 of quantity in extent or in duration, is in harmony 
 with the intermediate position which man occupies. 
 Duration is revealed to us in the form of a quantity 
 that seems to become at last not a quantity ; and this 
 contradictory duality, which follows us everywhere 
 when we try to reduce the infinite problem to the 
 conditions of the understanding that measures by the 
 experience of sense, faces us conspicuously when we 
 try in vain to read the final riddles of physical causality 
 and natural science. But the inevitable darkness in 
 which we then become involved need not communicate 
 itself to the moral reason, nor disturb absolute ethical 
 trust in the Power that in the end determines the 
 experienced reality. That I find myself living in an 
 infinite sphere, the centre of which seems to be every- 
 where and the circumference nowhere, or in an infinite 
 succession, cannot disturb the eternal necessities of 
 moral obligation, and need not disturb the faith that 
 man's highest relation in all this is to Power that is 
 morally reliable. Although " clouds and darkness " are 
 round about the revelation of this Power which the 
 universe makes, yet " righteousness and judgment " 
 must be " the establishment of its throne " ; and thus 
 the whole natural process must be making for the 
 righteousness in which the divine ideal of human life 
 is realised. 
 
 The finite in quantity and the infinite are mys- 
 
148 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 Duration, teriouslv blended in our idea of duration, which is at 
 
 ... in- 
 
 blended once infinite and finite, subject to finite measures, yet 
 
 andinfini- finally unlimited; either way incomprehensible under 
 
 analogous the conditions of human conscious life and personality. 
 
 relative The temporal process inevitably resolves at last into 
 
 yeTfinai n ' wna ^ transcends all temporal limits, so that its final 
 
 hensttniity i ssues are perceived only as what is beyond sensuous 
 
 of God. understanding. For interminable duration is absolutely 
 
 unimaginable : a million, or a million times a million, 
 
 of years, being finite, is a period that is in itself 
 
 imaginable, although a human imagination cannot dis- 
 
 tinctly picture so prolonged a process: but endless- 
 
 ness is necessarily unpicturable as a completed unity, 
 
 for a sensuous picture is inconsistent with the thought ; 
 
 while eternity, if supposed as a state that is incon- 
 
 sistent with duration, and in which change is therefore 
 
 impossible, is not less incomprehensible. Duration 
 
 expressed in change is at once cognisable and incog- 
 
 nisable, at least through intelligence measured by sense 
 
 thus signally illustrating what the universe of our 
 
 experience in all its aspects illustrates, when intel- 
 
 ligence measured by sense tries fully to realise the 
 
 Power or Personality that finally animates the whole. 
 
 God, like duration, is at once intellectually appre- 
 
 hended and yet the final mystery revealed in man, and 
 
 through man in all natural causation when it is in- 
 
 terpreted according to the analogy of what is highest 
 
 in man ; yet at last as unrevealable scientifically 
 
 as endlessness, for the timeless is, as such, unreveal- 
 
EVIL. 149 
 
 able through the changing temporal procedure in 
 nature. 
 
 The word " person " has been condemned as an unfit Persou- 
 term for designating the Power or Principle that per- a l y ' 
 vades and harmonises the cosmic organism, making its 
 evolutions the object of at least tacit ethical trust. 
 The conception of the final Power as personal is alleged 
 to involve a contradiction in terms. Infinite Being, it 
 is argued, as all-comprehensive, must be the negation 
 of personality : for personality involves the antithesis 
 of something that is not-self or impersonal, therefore 
 excluded from the person, and so makes personality 
 necessarily finite. Thus I am asked by a critic to 
 explain how an omnipresent Being can by possibility 
 be personal: ubiquity and personality seem to him 
 as irreconcilable as light and darkness. 
 
 Those who allege this objection to the finally ethical Person- 
 or theistic interpretation of existence seem to include applied 
 as necessary to their idea of personality what I should morally 
 exclude as irrelevant, even when the term is applied supreme 
 to human beings, still more to the supreme moral Power - 
 Power. Does not the faith on which life reposes the 
 faith that the universe is finally trustworthy, and that 
 I am morally free put one who experiences this faith 
 in a consciously ethical relation to the reality that is 
 operative in all his experience ? Now if the term 
 "person," as distinguished from "thing," is taken as 
 the one term which especially signalises moral relation 
 among beings, and which implies moral order, as dis- 
 
150 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 tinguished from merely mechanical or physical order ; 
 and if the universe of reality, in its final principle, 
 must be treated as an object of moral trust, when we 
 live in obedience to its conditions, does not this mean 
 that it is virtually personal, or revelation of a person 
 rather than a thing an infinite Person, not an in- 
 finite Thing ? If our deepest relation to it must be 
 ethical trust in perfect wisdom and goodness or love 
 at the heart of it trust in its harmonious adaptation 
 to all who are willing to be physically and morally 
 adapted to it this is just to say that our deepest or 
 final relation to reality is ethical rather than physical : 
 that personality instead of thingness is the highest form 
 under which man at any rate can conceive of God. 
 This is the moral personification, or finally theistic 
 conception, of the universe of experience. 
 The But this inevitable moral postulate does not oblige 
 
 or finally those who for the reason now suggested speak of 
 Person 1 S God as " Person " to affirm of God all that is now 
 found essential to a human person any more than the 
 use of the term duration, when we speak of a short 
 duration and eternal duration, obliges us to suppose 
 that eternity must be time. The " personality " of 
 God need not mean that the Being adumbrated in 
 Nature and Man is an embodied and separated self- 
 conscious life like the human, that God is organised 
 and extended coextensive with space, and in this 
 gross sense ubiquitous ; or that the divine intelligence 
 
EVIL. 151 
 
 is a conscious life that is subject like ours to succes- 
 sion, or to change of conscious state. Ubiquity and 
 eternity are for us terms which express, commingled, 
 comprehension and necessary incomprehensibility. The 
 Augustinian idea of the " Eternal Now," as expressive 
 of what our universe of temporal change is in Divine 
 intelligence, hardly helps to make intelligible to us the 
 sort of consciousness thus attributed to the Power with 
 whom we are in constant moral relation; for a fixed 
 untemporal universe of reality seems not to consist 
 with the reality of perceived change, or with the 
 difference between what happens now and what has 
 not yet happened. Its practical adoption by us seems 
 to dissolve all supposed past and prospective realities 
 into illusions of universal nescience. Personality in 
 man, moreover, implies memory ; but we are not bound 
 to suppose that the ethical postulate of life and ex- 
 perience implies the same in the moral Person with 
 whom all experience brings us into constant inter- 
 course. Again, a human intelligence of the world in- 
 volves reasoning on the part of human persons ; but it 
 does not follow that the Supreme Moral Being, signified 
 to us in the universe of nature and man, is actually 
 conscious of eliciting conclusions from premisses, or of 
 generalising under conditions of inductive calculation. 
 The " personality of God " is a formula which implies 
 that, in relation to us and at the human point of view, 
 the Power manifested in nature and in man must be 
 
152 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 regarded at last morally, not physically only as an 
 imperfectly conceived Person, not as an imperfectly 
 conceived Thing. 
 The phy- The conception of the three presupposed realities as 
 
 sical and . . 
 
 intellectual finally a spiritual unity or moral order, incompletely 
 
 orthe ry comprehensible physically or scientifically, that is as 
 
 notThe 6 ' manifested to man in the natural temporal process, 
 
 staciVto" * s a conception that is outside all merely natural 
 
 mora/OT scien ce. Yet moral faith in the world, which we find 
 
 interpre- so stran 8' e when we look round and reflect upon it, may 
 
 tation be sustained by the relief which this ethical inter- 
 
 OI It. 
 
 pretation of its final meaning affords to demands of 
 moral reason of which man is conscious, when he is 
 moved to interpret morally what is at last physically 
 incomprehensible. But the final mystery of unbe- 
 ginning and unending natural causation, in which the 
 temporal process is lost in both directions, and the 
 contradictions which emerge when the finite measure- 
 ment of the understanding alone is employed for the 
 infinite comprehension of physical Nature, these in- 
 tellectual difficulties are not after all the pressing 
 " burden and the mystery of this unintelligible world." 
 For a universe in which the finite and the infinite, the 
 natural and the supernatural, are so blended as in the 
 end to transcend the scientific imagination, is not 
 necessarily inconsistent with absolute filial trust on 
 the part of the human persons who are participating 
 in this mysterious existence. Their theistic interpre- 
 tation of the Whole seems, in spite of those purely 
 
EVIL. 153 
 
 intellectual difficulties, to be still ready to relieve 
 the agnostic embarrassment that is inevitable when a 
 physically scientific solution of the infinite problem is 
 demanded ; urgent too, since when theism is lost man 
 is left isolated in a wholly uninterpretable world, a 
 world that cannot be lived and acted in after total 
 paralysis of the final moral trust. Let it be granted 
 that man cannot explain how or why God exists, the 
 constant sustaining and intending Power throughout 
 the whole course of nature, or indeed why any thing 
 or person should exist at all. This human ignorance 
 is no insurmountable objection to the application of 
 the moral or divine postulate to the changing world 
 in which we actually find ourselves. 
 
 The formidable obstacle to ultimate moral trust in The mix- 
 the Power continuously working in the universe is Evil with 
 found, not at the mysterious extremities, or because 
 
 tliey evade scientific understanding omnia exeunt in 
 
 v Ob up 
 
 mysteria but in the suspected contents of this corner em s ma - 
 of the universe, in which so much is found that ought 
 not to exist at all. On this planet what is bad is 
 mixed up with what is good. Capricious infliction 
 of pain on beings susceptible of pain seems, at least 
 in this region, to be as much the customary pro- 
 cedure of the Supreme Power as the secure happi- 
 ness which the world, supposed to be a revelation of 
 ethically trustworthy and therefore loving Power, might 
 be expected to present universally. Ignorance and 
 
154 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 error, moreover, take the place of intellectual insight, 
 more or less in all human minds ; and reason, " the 
 candle of the Lord," in the light of which sentient 
 beings might escape many evils in their experience, 
 and might attain to more that is good, this candle 
 of the Lord burns so dimly in human minds that 
 even those who have the largest share of it complain 
 that it only shines enough to show the darkness. 
 But even pain and error may be evil only relatively, 
 and as incidents natural to gradually developing in- 
 telligence : at a higher point of view they may be 
 seen to be absolutely good. At least they are less 
 formidable obstacles to theistic trust than the occur- 
 rence of immoral acts, the entrance of which into 
 existence contradicts the eternal ideal of moral obli- 
 gation, and which must therefore be absolutely evil. 
 If what is known to contradict the righteousness 
 that is the basis of theistic faith and hope can never- 
 theless enter into existence in the volitional activity 
 of men, with a prevailing disposition also towards 
 moral evil among mankind what trust can be put 
 in the absolute perfection of the Power that is at 
 the root of all ? The universe seems absolutely un- 
 trustworthy, its phenomena therefore uninterpretable, 
 and human life hopeless. 
 
 HOW can Somehow persons on this planet are not as they 
 fection P be ought to be. Experience shows the world to be " in 
 ofth* a verv strange state," Butler somewhere says, and it 
 Universal n() j. a pp ear fa&t it was ever in a perfect state, or 
 
EVIL. 155 
 
 that mankind will ever become perfectly good. How Power, 
 
 . . when that 
 
 then can the supposed supreme Power be infinitely Power is 
 good, when the continuous evolution of things and m the 
 persons, in which the character of that Power is re- universe* 
 vealed to us, contains so much that is evil ? A per- 
 son's character is judged of by his actions: the actions 
 of the Person that is operative in the experienced 
 universe seem not to consist with perfection. 
 
 It is true that man's experience of the infinite uni- Our ex- 
 
 , , - ., , . ,3 perience 
 
 verse is confined to a very narrow corner of it chiefly i s confined 
 to this remote planet, and to a small part of what sentient 
 
 it contains as regards the sentient beings, and the 
 self-conscious persons who inhabit it ; and even of ^enfn this 
 them each man's knowledge is fragmentary and super- -^s 111 "*" 1 
 ficial. Yet apart from the relations of outward things a . ncl dura - 
 
 tion. 
 
 to the sentient and personal life of which the earth 
 is the scene, what good or evil can be attributed to 
 the " dead things " themselves ? The mixed good and 
 evil of the universe, as far as man's experience can 
 carry him, resolves into the good or evil that is found 
 in the sensitive, intellectual, and volitional state of 
 the living beings on this planet. What are they, we 
 may be asked, as examples of the Whole ? Our planet, 
 compared to the stellar system, is less than one grain 
 of sand compared to all the grains in the solar system ; 
 and its living occupants may be more insignificant in 
 relation to the Whole than the living occupants of a 
 single grain of sand in relation to all the living beings 
 supposed to inhabit the earth. Nor can man determine 
 
156 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 certainly whether the possession of living inhabitants 
 is a peculiarity of this planet alone in the stellar uni- 
 verse, or whether each sun with its attendant planets 
 is similarly occupied; whether some are empty and 
 others crowded with living beings ; whether personal 
 life is always confined to organisms located on stars, 
 or also extended to unembodied spirits able to range 
 through space, or even existing consciously out of con- 
 scious relation to place and time. Then there may be 
 sentient beings whose intelligence is brought by their 
 senses into relation with a material world that presents 
 none of the qualities which matter presents to us ; 
 inasmuch as they are endowed with none of our senses, 
 but instead with five, or fifty, or five hundred senses 
 wholly alien to those of man. That these and in- 
 numerable other possibilities are open may seem to 
 minimise indefinitely the importance of the mingled 
 good and evil of the great current of existence as it 
 flows through the experience of men on this planet, 
 so limited in its extent, and so brief in its duration 
 in each individual life, and even in the past history 
 of its whole human race. 
 
 doeVnot But a ^er all this limitation does not much affect 
 difficult* 6 ^ ie P resen t question. Ethical trust in the absolute 
 of Evil perfection of the Power at work in the universe is in- 
 
 being found * 
 
 anywhere, consistent with one evil in a remote corner, as well as 
 
 in a uni- 
 verse sup- with a universe of evil unmixed with good. Falsus in 
 
 posed to be . . ... 
 
 ethically uno, fcdsus in omnibus. Trust is lost in a man who 
 worthy. has once deceived us, although no man is omnipotent 
 
EVIL. 157 
 
 and omniscient. Much more must a single act that can 
 be pronounced absolutely evil seem to destroy ethical 
 trust and hope in the supposed perfect Power or Per- 
 son. To believe in the Divine perfection, as Cudworth 
 remarks, is to believe that all is as it ought to be ; and 
 this faith is apt to be upset if anything is found 
 existing which ought not to exist, however insignificant 
 the corner in which it is found, and however rare the 
 occurrence may be. One such issue must darken the 
 infinite purity. And for man the issues on this planet 
 are all in all. He interprets the universe by the speci- 
 men of it which enters into his own experience. 
 
 Now, the hardest difficulty which man has to meet The exist- 
 in putting a theistic or ethical interpretation upon the living te- 
 world is not the existence of natural causes unwar- strange 
 
 rantably assumed to supersede God, instead of to reveal 
 
 God. It is the bad state in which man finds men, 
 
 and other sentient beings too, on this small planet. f s 
 
 It may be true that we cannot so distinguish the a P ol gy for 
 
 agnostic 
 
 possible from the impossible as to assert with extreme pessimism. 
 pessimists that this is the worst world possible, nor 
 even that it is found so bad that it were better to pass 
 out of conscious life altogether (if that is a possibility) 
 than to persist in life under the given conditions. 
 Yet, at the least, the history of this planet forms a re- 
 velation of omnipotent goodness of a sort unlike what 
 an intelligent being predisposed to absolute ethical 
 trust in the universe of reality might expect. 
 
 Philo puts the case plainly in Hume's ' Dialogues ' : 
 
158 
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 This diffi- 
 culty as 
 put by 
 David 
 Hiime. 
 
 " It must, I think, be allowed that if a limited human 
 intelligence, utterly unacquainted with the actual uni- 
 verse, were assured before trial that it was the produc- 
 tion of a very good, wise, and powerful Being, he would 
 in his conjectures form beforehand a very different 
 notion of it from what we find it to be by experience ; 
 nor would he ever imagine, merely from those attributes 
 of its cause of which he was previously informed, that 
 the effect could be so full of vice and misery and dis- 
 order as it appears in this passing life. Supposing, 
 indeed, that this person were brought into the world 
 assured (on a priori grounds) that it was the work- 
 manship of such a sublime and benevolent Being, he 
 might perhaps be surprised at the disappointment, but 
 would never retract his former belief, if founded on 
 any solid argument ; since such a limited intelligence 
 must be sensible of his own blindness and ignorance, 
 and must therefore allow that there may be many solu- 
 tions of these phenomena [evil mixed with good] which 
 will for ever escape his comprehension. But supposing, 
 which is the real case with regard to man, that this 
 intelligent creature is not antecedently convinced of a 
 Supreme Intelligence, benevolent and powerful, but is 
 left to gather such a belief solely from the appearances 
 of things, this entirely alters the case, nor will he ever 
 find any reason for such a conclusion. He may be 
 fully convinced of the narrow limits of his own under- 
 standing ; but this will not, in these circumstances, help 
 him to infer the goodness of the omnipotent Power, 
 
EVIL. 159 
 
 since he must form his inference from the facts he 
 knows, not from what he is ignorant of. The more 
 you exaggerate his weakness and ignorance, the more 
 diffident you render him, and give him the greater 
 suspicion that such subjects are beyond his faculties. 
 You are obliged, therefore, to reason with him from the 
 known phenomena only, and to drop every arbitrary 
 supposition and anticipation." 
 
 This is distinctly put. One cannot infer a good it is an 
 
 . . ,, , , , insoluble 
 
 artist from a bad picture, especially if he has only difficulty 
 this one picture to go upon for his conclusion. And empirical y 
 if the true philosophy of the universe is, as with 
 Hume, purely empirical, it is not only impossible to 
 conclude that the world is the revelation in fact of 
 omnipotent goodness ; it is also impossible to inter- ? t ^ en h m sical 
 pret any of its phenomena for any purpose. Is there mterpreta- 
 any alternative to universal doubt, if we are at liberty all ethical 
 
 or theistic 
 
 to suspect the moral integrity of the Power that is trust is 
 manifested to us in nature and in man ? Not to speak drawn. 
 of physical science, can the commonest movement in 
 life be made if we may finally distrust the Power that 
 we are therein continually in intercourse with ? No 
 doubt the narrow limit of human experience does not 
 experimentally justify the faith that the universal 
 Power must be perfectly good: intellectual finitude 
 only admits that man does not know enough to war- 
 rant the conclusion that the suspicious phenomena are 
 necessarily inconsistent with perfection in the Power 
 that they reveal. And if moral perfection must be 
 
160 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 presupposed in the faith without which self and the 
 world are wholly uninterpretable, and life unfit to be 
 lived, this seems to be a reductio ad absurdum o; 
 the dogma that a purely empirical ultimate premiss is 
 adequate philosophically. A primary premiss that is 
 wholly empirical can never get under weigh, for it is 
 really not a premiss. Moral trust in the final prin- 
 ciple of the universe is needed to enable man to make 
 way at all. 
 Pain, error, Animal suffering, human pain ; error or misinterpre- 
 
 sin, and 
 
 death are tation of experience ; violation of moral order, against 
 
 the chief , . . 
 
 Evils pre- which conscience protests on the entrance into exist- 
 the human ence of acts inconsistent with eternal moral obliga- 
 of the'uni- ^on ; death, which cruelly separates persons united 
 in social fellowship, and brings the curtain down be- 
 fore the act is well begun, these, I suppose, are the 
 chief evils which, on this small and remote planet 
 seem at variance with its divine order, with our ideal 
 of love and justice, and with omnipotent moral in- 
 tegrity on faith in all which human life tacitly re- 
 poses. It is to these suspicious facts that we apply 
 the term "evil." For what crimes do animals endure 
 the torments which so many animals undergo in the 
 order of nature ? What good purpose is served by 
 the miseries of which surrounding things are the 
 natural causes, and which, if all natural causation is 
 really divine causation, must be caused by God ? On 
 this planet Nature often looks cruel and unrelenting. 
 or, at the least, wholly indifferent to the pains and 
 
EVIL. 161 
 
 pleasures of living beings. And the seeming cruelty 
 or indifference is perhaps presented on a greater scale 
 in other parts of the stellar universe than on this 
 planet. Do not stars suddenly disappear in collision, 
 it may be, with other stars involving, we may fancy, 
 the sudden death in agony of their living passengers, 
 or, in other cases, continuous suffering beforehand, 
 while the natural changes were gradually unfitting 
 their world for living occupants ? 
 
 But the greatest enigma presented in the experi- The exist- 
 ence of man is the existence in man himself of acts moral evil 
 of consciousness which ought not to exist, in other of theuni- 
 words, the existence of what philosophers call moral thTfinai 
 evil, and what theologians call sin. How can the 
 presence in the world of that which moral reason faith< 
 pronounces absolutely inconsistent with the moral 
 order on which faith in the universe finally reposes, 
 how can that be in harmony with, or not expressly 
 contradictory of, such faith ? Pain, error, and death 
 may be only relatively evil, as seen at the human 
 point of view. But sin is absolutely evil. Pain is 
 the correlative of pity and sympathy, and thus a 
 natural means for the education of spiritual life. 
 Moreover the assumption that the physical pleasure 
 of moral agents ought to be the supreme end of their 
 existence, far less of the existence of the universe 
 of Nature and Man, is one which reason would find 
 it difficult to sustain. The ideal in what Cudworth 
 calls the " intellectual system of the universe " is 
 
 L 
 
162 
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 surely something higher than physical pleasure, as 
 one may argue from facts of observation, and from 
 reflection on the constitution of man: and there is 
 nothing in the categories of intellect, or in the neces- 
 sary postulates of moral reason, that seems to require 
 this otherwise dogmatic assumption. 
 
 For Sin But the continued presence of what is unconditionally 
 
 Pain? be* * evil cannot be disposed of in this way. How to relieve 
 as only re- the mystery of moral evil, including irregular distribu- 
 tion of pleasure and pain, has been the philosophical 
 and theological perplexity from the beginning. It 
 finds expression in Hebrew poets like Job, and in 
 Greek dramatists like j33schylus. It has been the 
 source of innumerable speculative fancies which have 
 left their traces in popular opinion. Can it be recon- 
 ciled with a final moral trust in the Power that is 
 revealed in external and spiritual experience ? 
 
 Either 
 Maniche- 
 ism, or 
 else One 
 imperfect, 
 or One 
 wholly in- 
 different 
 Power, as 
 solutions. 
 
 That the universe, taking it as man finds it in and 
 around him, must be the issue of a constant struggle 
 between two rival eternal Powers, the one benevolent, 
 the other malevolent, is the ancient hypothesis of 
 Manicheisra, symbolised in the Zoroastrian antithesis 
 of Ormuzd and Ahriman, and it is not without sup- 
 porters in the modern world. Its implied subversion 
 of the ethical postulate on which human life reposes, 
 and without which experience becomes incoherent, 
 must discredit this hypothesis with those who are 
 not prepared to yield at last to universal nescience and 
 
EVIL. 163 
 
 pessimist despair. A like difficulty attends Monism, 
 which, superficially regarded, presents plausible alter- 
 natives either that the One Power, revealed in the 
 inorganic and organic world, is a Power of mixed 
 good and evil, corresponding to the mixed phenomena 
 of which the revelation contained in nature and man 
 is found to consist ; or else that the One Power is 
 blindly and absolutely indifferent to the happiness or 
 misery, the moral good or moral evil, of the dependent 
 living beings. Dualism, in the form of two eternal 
 Powers, good and evil, and Monism, or a single eternal 
 Power, partly good and partly evil, or else indifferent, 
 are both inconsistent with moral faith in the universe 
 that is to say, with religious recognition of God in 
 the articulation of the realities because inconsistent 
 with moral trust and hope in experience. 
 
 Again. The traditional teaching of ordinary Christian "Tempta- 
 theology attributes the evils which afflict men and other Devil" 
 animals on this planet to a " fall " of the human race vlsioifafex- 
 from its divine ideal into a mainly animal and sinful P lanatlon - 
 state, caused by the temptation of a wicked being 
 called the Devil, in whom Evil is personified. The 
 first man sinned, and in consequence all men are in- 
 clined to sin, and so suffer for their inherited opposi- 
 tion to the will of God. This may satisfy those who 
 do not care to press the question. But it only moves 
 the cause a step back, while it even aggravates the 
 original mystery. It throws no light upon the exist- 
 ing mixture of evil in the universe, even if the alleged 
 
164 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 facts on which it proceeds are admitted. The Devil 
 being presented as the occasion of moral evil in man, 
 and sin being then transmitted as the natural inherit- 
 ance of the human race the fact of its pre-existence 
 in the Devil still remains ; with the added difficulty of 
 naturally transmitted sin, which seems to make sin 
 physical evil, to transform moral persons into non- 
 moral things, and to destroy individual responsibility. 
 If the Devil is an eternal Power, co-ordinate with God, 
 we are landed in Manicheism. If he is a " fallen " 
 finite person, whence came moral evil into him ? The 
 difficulty is aggravated. What is unconditionally, and 
 therefore irrelatively, evil somehow arose, and is now 
 naturally transmitted in a universe which is still 
 supposed to be the revelation of omnipotent and 
 perfectly good Power. 
 Can moral The preceding hypotheses fail to sustain trust in 
 
 evil be a , 
 
 necessity of the Power universally at work in a universe which 
 contains what ought not to exist. There are other 
 theories in which the moral Evil is sought to be 
 
 Matter^ or explained away. For they imply that its appearance 
 unconditionally necessary in a world of finite or 
 
 plained individual beings. Finitude must include evil or im- 
 
 away as a 
 
 merenega- perfection, it is argued. Contrast or antithesis, we 
 
 tion ? 
 
 are told, is unavoidably involved in all individual 
 existence, which must be the product of opposed 
 forces, and character is naturally formed by the 
 struggle of evil with good. Good can exist only in 
 opposition to Evil ; analogously attraction involves 
 
EVIL. 165 
 
 repulsion, and positive involves negative electricity. 
 In infinite unindividual Being alone can perfection 
 be realised, without an otherwise necessary mixture 
 and antithesis of evil. But an unconditional neces- 
 sity for moral evil makes the evil no longer immoral. 
 No one can be blamed for its unconditionally neces- 
 sary existence, or feel remorse because it is thus found 
 in existence. Some of the old philosophers insisted 
 that Matter was the obstacle to a perfect universe 
 of unmixed good; the universe could not be formed, 
 it was assumed, without pre-existing Matter ; and the 
 intractable material was supposed to be incapable of 
 reduction to perfect order even by Omnipotence. But 
 if this be so, Evil is no longer what ought not to be : 
 it cannot but be. Again, that Evil is only a negation, 
 while no real existence can be only negative, is another 
 speculative fancy of theologians, and in philosophical 
 theodicies. Nothing that ought not to exist, it is 
 argued, can ever come into actual existence ; what 
 actually exists only errs by defect of reality. A cruel 
 or a dishonest purpose, however, is surely something 
 that actually enters into the mental experience of the 
 cruel or dishonest man ; nothing seems to be gained by 
 this verbal relief, except a change of name. 
 
 That " moral obligation " is only the creation of Moral 
 
 ,...,, .,, obligation 
 
 arbitrary divine will, so that arbitrary will becomes cannot be 
 the criterion of divine moral obligation, is the hypo- into 
 thesis of some theologians. It also explains away will/ 
 moral order, while it resolves goodness into omnipo- 
 
166 
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 Either 
 Pessimism 
 or Opti- 
 mism the 
 ultimate 
 alterna- 
 tives. 
 
 tence, virtually transforms persons into things, and 
 leads to final scepticism. 
 
 These theories, strictly understood, all seem to lead 
 towards the pessimist scepticism which is the anti- 
 thesis of faith and hope. Does, then, theistic or 
 philosophical faith and hope mean an optimist con- 
 ception of the universe ? and, if so, in what meaning 
 of Optimism ? This question will be considered in 
 next lecture. 
 
167 
 
 LECTUEE VII. 
 
 OPTIMISM. 
 
 MORAL evil is not an abstraction. It is an actual The exist- 
 
 dice of 
 
 fact, found in the lives of human persons who oc- what ought 
 cupy this planet. The appearance of Sextus Tarquin, s t, i n eJ 
 that monster of cruelty, is taken by Leibniz as an ex- 
 ample of the lurid facts which threaten to paralyse 
 theistic faith, casting doubt on the moral meaning of 
 the universe. Leibniz seeks to explain them in the 
 celebrated optimist theory unfolded in his ' Theodice'e.' 
 But Tarquin and Nero and Caligula are not singular, 
 among monsters who have appeared in human form, 
 and occupied thrones as well as all places from thrones 
 downwards, in the history of mankind to the present 
 hour the source of told and untold misery to myriads 
 of living beings. For moral evil is found in more 
 than a few persons. Experience of mankind shows a 
 mysterious tendency to decline from man's true ideal, 
 which possesses human beings from the very beginning 
 of their personal life ; which shows itself as a tendency 
 
168 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 that ought continually to be resisted, and against 
 which the policy of mankind ought to be a constant 
 struggle sustained in each individual person, in the 
 form of religious endeavour to live the divine life, and 
 thus recover the ideal man in his individual instance. 
 Indeed the moral interpretation of the universe is 
 strangely apt to meet with aversion instead of satis- 
 faction. Ingenuity is exhausted, not in searching for 
 God, and in recognising signs that we are living in 
 what, if we will, may become our divine life ; rather 
 in searching for arguments through which men may 
 escape from moral or theistic trust in the supreme 
 principle of the universe, and then conclude that sen- 
 tient life is not worth living; so that the supreme 
 end of man should be, to get out of life finally; if 
 indeed it be possible for a being who has once be- 
 come personal to become finally impersonal. How 
 and why there should be this tendency to negation, 
 instead of to the divine, this pessimist instead of 
 optimist disposition, especially in present-day specula- 
 tion, this disposition to prefer the merely physical faith 
 that taken alone is untrustworthy to a final faith in 
 spiritually perfect meaning of the universe, is difficult 
 to understand, as well as how far individual men are 
 morally responsible for it. It is a downward disposi- 
 tion which may seem inherited rather than originated 
 by each person, at least not so originated since each 
 person awoke into his present life ; unless one may 
 suppose a latent memory of a pre-existent life, which 
 
OPTIMISM. 169 
 
 may hereafter become patent in conscious memory. 
 On the whole, we are obliged to acknowledge that 
 much which ought not and need not exist is com- 
 monly existing in this corner of the universe ; what- 
 ever may be the case in the other parts of its infinite 
 extent, or at other periods than within that section 
 of unbeginning duration which is embraced in our 
 scanty record. 
 
 The actual existence of what ought not to exist, in a The appar- 
 
 . . , . , ent incon- 
 
 universe which is tacitly assumed, in the commonest sistencyof 
 physical acts and knowledge, to be so far a trustworthy w itn any 
 and hope-inspiring universe, is the perplexity of persons 
 who desire to retain moral faith in the outcome of ex- 
 perience as the divine basis of life. The broad fact of 
 prevailing injustice and cruelty among men, and the 
 " cruel " indifference of the course of things to the 
 happiness of living beings, seems not to consist with 
 the natural evolution being a manifestation of perfect 
 goodness. It inclines the sceptic to treat the whole as 
 a non-moral, and therefore really impersonal, proces- 
 sion of phenomena. It suggests pessimist surrender 
 of filial trust and hope that the Power to which what 
 is highest in man responds is continually at work in 
 us and around us, in order to assimilate us to Him- 
 self. A universe in which nothing can ever make its 
 appearance that ought not to appear, seems, in our 
 first thought, to be the only possible manifestation 
 of the infinitely perfect moral Being presupposed in 
 morally religious faith. Does not the rise into actual 
 
170 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 life of that which conscience obliges man to condemn 
 as absolutely evil necessarily involve, either limited, 
 and therefore imperfect, goodness, or else deficient 
 power either way the absolute or final untrustworthi- 
 ness of all that man trusts in, for the physical regu- 
 lation of his life, the formation of his knowledge, or 
 the improvement of his character ? Does not the ex- 
 istence of vice, and its long-continued toleration in 
 this part of the universe, mean, not infinite goodness, 
 but an imperfect regard for goodness, on the part of 
 the omnipotent Power ? The supposed divine guar- 
 antee of our inductive faith in experience, it is urged 
 in the name of reason, must be either a Power that is 
 not willing to hinder the entrance of what ought not 
 to exist, or not able to do so, or both willing and 
 able. The last of these three suppositions alone, it is 
 taken for granted, corresponds to the idea of omnipo- 
 tent goodness. But that the supposed Power at the 
 root of all is not both able and willing to bar the 
 entrance of what ought not to exist seems proved, 
 by the observed fact that much that is morally and 
 physically evil has existed, and continues to exist. 
 The flood of sin and suffering that is always flow- 
 ing in human and in all sentient life on this planet 
 seems to show either impotence or moral imperfec- 
 tion at the heart of an experienced reality such as 
 this ; so as to produce total paralysis of faith and 
 hope, when the narrow world of human experience 
 is taken as sufficient proof of moral indifference and 
 
OPTIMISM. 171 
 
 impotence combined, in the final interpretation put 
 upon the Whole. 
 
 The theistic conception of the universe is necessarily The theis- 
 
 . . tic is the 
 
 optimist, in as far as it implies that its constitutive optimist 
 principle or system is absolutely the best ; for this is tion of the 
 what we mean by its being divine. To believe in God u 
 is to believe that the supreme idea, expressed so far 
 in our experience of things and persons, is as it 
 ought to be ; so that whether or not individual persons 
 are all as good as they might be, the divine Idea 
 in the whole could not possibly be better. To sup- 
 pose that the temporal procedure of the Supreme 
 Power is the revelation of an Ideal that is radically 
 bad must mean that it is not the outcome of perfect 
 wisdom and goodness, but of a Power that is in- 
 different, or even hostile, to what ought to be. This 
 Power, whatever other name might be given to it, 
 could not appropriately be called God, when God 
 means personification of perfect goodness, or of what 
 unconditionally ought to be : God only thus becomes 
 the ground of the trust, that neither our physical 
 nor our moral experience in the divine universe can 
 in the end put the persons who have the experience 
 to confusion. To suppose that the Supreme Ideal 
 embodied in the universe could be better than it is, 
 means that evil more or less belongs to the divine 
 ideal, that the Supreme Power is untrustworthy, not 
 the personified moral obligation presupposed in our 
 primary faith. Theistic faith expires in the sup- 
 
172 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 position that God might prefer absolute evil to the 
 absolutely good. The Supreme Power might be fraud- 
 ulent, or it might be blind indifferent Power : in either 
 case all that is presented in experience my whole self- 
 conscious life may be finally illusory; the so-called 
 faculties of knowledge may be formed to mislead, or 
 their issues may be meaningless. The revelation that is 
 presented in the temporal procession of natural things, 
 and in the living existence of morally good and morally 
 evil persons, must therefore admit of being interpreted 
 under some form of optimism, if it is fit to be inter- 
 preted theistically ; and this whether or not the opti- 
 mist or divine conception can be fully thought out by 
 man's intelligence. For indeed it is not to be expected 
 that it can be so thought out in a human understanding 
 as to leave no remainder of mystery enveloping the uni- 
 verse. To think finite things and persons out infinitely 
 is to transcend a finite intelligence of them, or, in 
 other words, to empty the universe of all that is 
 mysterious. Only in Omniscience can the universe 
 be infinitely thought out. Yet the maintenance by 
 reason of moral trust in the root principle of all is 
 not necessarily inconsistent with this imperfection of 
 intellectual insight; unless the imperfect intelligence 
 does see enough to make it necessary to destroy final 
 moral trust and hope, and thus arrest human life by 
 a suicidal scepticism. 
 
 Can moral But is this arrest inevitable in reason , as the con- 
 evil enter 
 into an sequence of the broad fact that what ought not to exist 
 
OPTIMISM. 173 
 
 does exist somehow in the lives of conscious persons optimist 
 living on this earth, and that pain enters, with a 
 seemingly capricious disregard of desert, into innum- 
 erable sentient lives ? Can a divine or morally con- 
 stituted world admit what is morally, and therefore 
 absolutely, evil ? And even if the temporary rise of 
 evil may be somehow not necessarily inconsistent with 
 the infinite goodness of the Supreme Power, inasmuch 
 as virtue, let us suppose, may be educated by the conse- 
 quent struggle, which may issue, let us also suppose, in 
 the final extinction of evil, can the persistence, and 
 perhaps endless persistence, in the universe of what is 
 inconsistent with moral reason be reconciled with the 
 eternal ethical obligation presupposed in absolute good- 
 ness personified ? 
 
 In last lecture I suggested the insufficiency of vari- Hypothe- 
 ous attempts made to explain the fact of the presence eit 
 
 of evil in the universe. Some of them are theories 
 
 appears 
 
 formed at the expense of the perfection of the Supreme 
 
 Power or Powers; others by explaining away moral 
 evil, either interpreting it as the unconditional necessity 
 of finite and individual beings, or else as an unactual 
 negation, for which no power at all need be, or indeed 
 can be, presupposed ; not to speak of attempts to put 
 the difficulty of moral evil in man in the background, 
 as by referring it, in an aggravated form too, to the 
 agency of a superhuman spirit. Manichean dualism; 
 monistic indifference, if not malevolence ; ontological 
 
174 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 necessity for evil, in a universe of reality which con- 
 tains finite, and therefore necessarily imperfect, beings ; 
 necessity for evil in a universe formed out of intractable 
 Matter ; and the unreal negative nature of evil, these 
 are speculations which either destroy moral faith in 
 the Supreme Power, or else destroy the absolute and 
 eternal difference between what must be or is and 
 what ought to be. They leave us in a universe which 
 at last reveals persistent collision between two rival 
 Powers of good and evil ; or presents the action of 
 One Power that is either indifferent to good or that 
 intends evil ; or finally a universe that consists of non- 
 moral things only, to the exclusion both of good and 
 bad persons. 
 
 An unwar- The question why God permits moral evil, since its 
 sumption, existence must be opposed to perfect moral and provi- 
 dential order, seems to involve an unproved assumption. 
 It tacitly assumes that a necessitated absence of evil 
 must be in itself good, or alone good, so that only 
 impossibility of its ever making its appearance is 
 consistent with the moral ideal of the universe. 
 What ought not to exist, it is supposed, cannot any- 
 where, or in any degree, coexist with omnipotent good- 
 ness. But has this ominous dogma ever been shown 
 to be a necessity in reason ? Has it been proved 
 that the difficulty of subsuming the universe under 
 the conception of theistic optimism is as great as that 
 involved in the rival alternative, namely, atheistic, or 
 at least agnostic, pessimism with the arrest which 
 
OPTIMISM. 175 
 
 atheism logically puts upon all interpretations of ex- 
 perience, including even those on which animal life 
 itself depends, so that suicide is its natural issue ? 
 Cosmical trust in experience seems absolutely incon- 
 sistent with a radically untrustworthy universe. 
 
 But it may turn out after all that the root-question Must a 
 here is Whether it is morally necessary that the uni- constituted 
 
 verse in which the Supreme Power is revealed should 
 be a universe of non-moral things, to the exclusion of non-moral 
 individual persons, who, as moral beings, must be able ^"^it'not 
 to make themselves immoral ? Must not the perfect a , lso , in ; . 
 
 elude finite 
 
 ideal include the existence of persons with the con- r individ- 
 
 ual per- 
 
 sequently implied possibility of their making them- son . w ^o, 
 'selves bad, and keeping themselves bad which last, must have' 
 
 . absolute 
 
 it seems, means making themselves gradually worse ? power to 
 Now, a universe of things, in moral correlation with themselves 
 persons, or which exists for the sake of the inter- 
 communication of persons, and for their intellectual 
 and spiritual education, seems to be the sort of universe 
 we human beings find ourselves in, if we may judge by 
 the appearance it presents in this little corner. The 
 moral probation and education of man looks like its 
 chief end when regarded, I mean, at the highest human 
 point of view; for I am far from supposing that it 
 would seem only this, or not much more than this, at 
 a higher point of view, or that if man could become 
 divinely omniscient the whole difficulty might not dis- 
 appear, in the full light of perfect reason. But, as the 
 case is, man can interpret the universe only under 
 
176 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 human conditions. This interpretation gives him the 
 humanly related universe really all that he has to 
 interpret, or to do with and its final human meaning 
 may be eternally true under the human relations, and 
 enough for the purposes of his spiritual as well as his 
 physical life. 
 
 Can "per- May it not be then that the perfect ideal, or what 
 in'virtue of ought to exist according to the infinitely true and good 
 personal 1 " intellectual system of the universe," includes the possi- 
 sist^aiT biHty of the entrance into existence and the continu- 
 weii as to ance j n existence of that which ought not to exist, and 
 
 assimilate 
 
 the divine w hich does not exist by an absolute necessity, but only 
 
 life, exist 
 
 in a the- i n an d through the free will of finite personal agents ? 
 
 istically in- 
 
 terpretabie As moral beings, finite persons are free to originate 
 
 universe? . 
 
 voluntary acts that are bad or undivme, as well as 
 acts in harmony with the divine moral order acts, 
 that is to say, of which they are themselves the 
 creators, or absolutely originating causes if they must 
 be held morally responsible for the acts coming into 
 existence. Now must the universe in which infinitely 
 perfect Power is revealed be a universe which consists 
 exclusively of naturally necessitated, and therefore 
 impersonal, things ? May it not rightly contain super- 
 naturally acting persons, and even find its larger issues 
 in their education and moral trial ? Does not a neces- 
 sitated absence of sin and sorrow mean the necessary 
 non-existence of persons, and the existence of uncon- 
 scious things only, or at most of things that might be 
 called conscious automatons but not properly persons ? 
 
OPTIMISM. 177 
 
 And is this the highest ideal of the universe that man 
 even can form ? Is not a world that includes persons 
 better than a wholly non-moral world, from which per- 
 sons are excluded on account of the risk of the 
 entrance into existence of what ought not to exist, 
 through the personal power to act ill that is implied 
 in their morally responsible agency ? If so, may not 
 acts which ought not to exist enter into existence, through 
 the agency of persons, under a perfect or divine ideal 
 of the Whole ? Individual persons, or dependent beings 
 who can create voluntary acts that ought not to be 
 acted, cannot be excluded from existence, if God can 
 admit persons, and sustain persons in existence, con- 
 sistently with the ideal perfection of goodness. God 
 cannot make actual what involves express contradic- 
 tion, namely, an individual person who, because under 
 an absolute necessity of willing only what is good, is not 
 a person if individual personality involves morally 
 responsible freedom. If this impossibility seems to 
 limit omnipotent Power, and to make it finite, the 
 alternative supposition that the existence of a person, 
 or being who is morally responsible for acts that 
 enter into existence, is not possible in a divinely con- 
 stituted universe is not less a limitation of omnipot- 
 ence. It is a limitation, too, that is imposed only on 
 the ground of the residuum of mystery, or incomplete 
 conception, implied in the idea of individual person- 
 ality; whilst the obstacle to an agent existing who is 
 at once an individual person, and yet unable to act 
 
 M 
 
178 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 personally, lies not in its niysteriousness, but in its 
 being a contradiction in terms. 
 
 A contra- For is not express contradiction presented in the 
 ideal, at supposition of finite free agents existing without the 
 ciudingand possibility of all or any of them doing what ought 
 individual n t * ^ e done ? If so, the assertion that the infinite 
 cannotbe perfection of God necessitates the persistent sinless- 
 orVerfect 6 ness ^ responsible persons living in the divine or 
 ideal. perfect universe, would be to assert that irrationality, 
 not reason, is at the root of all. It is no abatement 
 of omnipotence to assert that an express contradic- 
 tion cannot be realised even by omnipotence. A con- 
 tradiction in terms is irrational, or indeed meaningless: 
 to say that, if God is perfect, individual persons, ex- 
 ercising responsible freedom, cannot produce volitions 
 which they ought not to have produced, and whicl 
 are opposed to eternal moral reason or divine will 
 is not to vindicate divine perfection, but to destroy 
 it. It is to say that if God, or infinitely perfect 
 Power, exists, then only things, not persons, can coexist 
 in the divinely constituted world. The perfection of 
 omnipotence is surely not seen in power to realise 
 contradictions. So we say that God cannot sin ; can- 
 not make a thing or a person at once to exist am 
 not to exist ; cannot make 2 and 2 equal to 5 
 cannot make a circle have all the properties of a 
 square while it remains a circle ; cannot make the 
 actual past never to have been actual. If we may put 
 faith in the perceptions of the reason in which we share, 
 
OPTIMISM. 179 
 
 these are not possible issues of omnipotence, for in- 
 ability to realise them does not really limit it ; the 
 assertion of their possibility has no meaning. 
 
 In those examples the contradiction or meaningless- There cau- 
 ness is glaring. There are other contradictions in individual 
 which the absurdity is not less, but in which it is less ]f notan 10 
 
 obvious. This of the inability of morally responsible 
 individuals to make themselves bad may be one of such, able tbe- 
 Is not an individual person who should be morally comebacl - 
 responsible, yet absolutely incapable of an immoral 
 volition, an impossible or contradictory idea. If he 
 is free to act, he must personally be able, as their 
 first or absolutely originating cause, to originate evil 
 acts. To refer his acts to the Divine Will, instead 
 of to the finite person, would transfer moral respon- 
 sibility for the acts from the individual to God, and 
 would also reduce the individual from a moral agent 
 to a conscious thing or automaton. 
 
 Further, the essence of man's moral responsibility The moral 
 
 ,..,.. . , , . , freedom of 
 
 lies in the origin, not in the physical consequences, of acts lies m 
 
 his personal or voluntary acts. The overt consequences rin, not in 
 
 in external nature of a good or evil act of human will 
 
 are determined under law of nature that is to say, by 
 
 the agency of the Divine Power that is operative in all 
 
 natural order; but the invisible voluntary determina- 
 
 tion itself so far as it is immoral so far as there is 
 
 an individual responsibility for its badness cannot be 
 
 thus physically determined by God, under the natural 
 
 or really divine method of procedure. For is it not 
 
180 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 in the personal centre to which the act of will has to 
 be referred, as its primary or responsible source, not in 
 what follows from the act in nature under natural law, 
 that the secret of moral evil lies ? Accordingly it is 
 the origin of the evil volition, not its consequences as a 
 natural antecedent of change in the surrounding world 
 after it has been originated, that must be kept in view. 
 Hence a person whose volitions could not, according 
 to the laws of nature, be followed by the changes, 
 beneficent or the contrary, which he intended, would 
 remain responsible for the deliberate intention, so far 
 as this state of mind was his own absolute creation; 
 but plainly not for any physically impossible conse- 
 quences, these being divinely determined according to 
 the mechanism of nature, and so withdrawn from the 
 man's personal power or will, and therefore from his 
 personal responsibility, his responsibility for badness 
 being measured by his own power to make bad. The 
 accountability of a person presupposes this super- 
 natural character in the acts or states for which, as 
 so far intrusted with individual supernatural power, 
 he is accountable : he cannot be the moral or immoral 
 agent in an act for which he is not responsible, on the 
 ground that it has not ultimately originated in himself, 
 but must be referred to its place in that constant course 
 of Nature, which is the effect, not of his imperfectly 
 reasonable will, but of the perfectly rational will of 
 God. Thus the real question about the existence of 
 evil acts of will, and who is responsible for them, turns 
 
OPTIMISM. 181 
 
 upon the previous question Whether the supposed 
 human agent of the evil action is the only power to 
 whom the act is finally referable ; or whether acts 
 supposed to be only his are in reality only natural links 
 in the succession of caused causes, all of them orderly 
 effects or manifestations of the supreme universally 
 operative Power ? Does " I ought " mean that / can, or 
 only that Nature i.e., God can ? It is no doubt im- 
 possible for fallible men to determine with infallible 
 certainty the exact line which separates overt acts for 
 which an individual person is responsible, and pheno- 
 mena which should be referred to the divine mechanism 
 of nature inherited by, or external to, his organism. 
 We cannot know in every case whether the overt action 
 is in this regard the man's own action, for which he 
 alone deserves blame ; or how far its occurrence is due 
 to its place in the mechanism of nature, for which he 
 is not responsible. But moral responsibility is con- 
 ditioned and measured by absolute power to do or not 
 to do that for which there is moral responsibility. A 
 person is morally responsible for his personal volition, 
 and for what changes he knows that his volition must 
 be followed by, according to the ordinary evolutional 
 metamorphosis or course of nature. 
 
 Personal origination of acts, in freedom from the Persons as 
 Power that operates in the natural uniformities, I natural 
 assume to be the fundamental postulate of personal visional 
 responsibility. So that a wholly physical and biologi- c< 
 cal science of man, which concerns itself only with the 
 
182 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 natural uniformities of which the human organism is 
 the theatre, ignores what is supernatural in man that 
 by which he is distinguished as a rational spirit, and 
 which makes him the faint image or symbol of the 
 infinitely perfect Power that constantly supports and 
 operates in the physical universe. The course of 
 natural causes is found in correlation with a super- 
 natural and more comprehensive order in man, with 
 which the exclusive biologist takes no concern. So far 
 as an individual person is properly a person so far, 
 that is, as there are events for which he alone is morally 
 responsible he is extricated from the mechanism of 
 natural causation this because he is included in that 
 higher economy to which the natural mechanism may 
 be in harmonious subordination, and for the sake of 
 which it appears to be directed in its progressive 
 evolution, at least as seen at our human point of view. 
 individual Another agency than the human may operate through 
 
 moral per- . 
 
 sonaiity our intellectual and emotional consciousness ; but the 
 that in- power to originate volitions for which he is responsible 
 persons must be the person's own who is responsible for them : 
 
 ne cann t be only their natural cause, nor can they 
 be only naturally caused, which is in the end to be 
 divinely caused : they must originate in the individual. 
 An agent cannot be a personally responsible agent 
 without this individual power. One may, with the 
 atheist, or under an ideal of universal natural neces- 
 sity like Spinoza's, suppose a wholly non-moral uni- 
 verse, in which all is mere nature, although it may by 
 
OPTIMISM. 183 
 
 a fiction be called divine ; and this ideal universe may 
 seem more worthy than the actual universe with its 
 sins and sorrows. But such a universe is freed from 
 the risk of wicked persons on moral trial only on con- 
 dition that it is empty of good persons on moral trial. 
 To relieve the world of all risk of anything existing 
 in it which ought not to exist, supposed persons on 
 moral trial must be reduced to non - moral things. 
 Morally accountable individual agents must be ex- 
 cluded from the universe. To argue that the ideal of 
 the universe cannot be perfect, and that its final 
 Principle or Supreme Power cannot be ever -active 
 and infinitely perfect moral Eeason, if moral evil, with 
 naturally consequent suffering, is found in any part of 
 it, implies, does it not, that God cannot be God if we 
 find in existence a world of personally responsible 
 agents on personal trial ? A circle that is destitute 
 of all the essential properties of a circle could as well 
 be supposed to exist as a finite person on moral trial 
 who is wanting in the one essential mark of a finite 
 person on moral trial. 
 
 The real question thus seems to be, not whether sin The real 
 and sorrow can enter under the perfect ideal, but whether 18 ' 
 
 the previous question Whether the existence of in- 
 dividual persons is consistent with the perfect or opti- 
 mist conception of existence ? Can dependent beings ^ 
 such as men rightly exist, who can put and keep them- tiraism ? 
 selves below their ideal ; and if some of them do so, why 
 do they not either rise into their true ideal, or else 
 
184 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 have their self-conscious personality at once withdrawn 
 from the universe, so that sin may at least not be a 
 permanent element in existence ? " Offences must needs 
 come " if persons exist ; but the " woe " is to the per- 
 sons by whom they come. Indeed, the existence of 
 finite or individual persons seems to involve the risk 
 of evil as long as they are found in the world. It does 
 not appear that omnipotence can exclude what ought 
 not to exist, as long as there are beings whose essential 
 characteristic is, that they are able to bring evil into 
 existence ; and who cannot want this power of resist- 
 ing the divine order, and of excluding themselves from 
 union with God in the divine life, without losing their 
 moral personality and being only things. 
 
 Is the human understanding able to demonstrate 
 
 verse which ,, , , 
 
 contains that a world empty or persons is a more divine world, 
 who,being or tne outcome of a higher ideal, than a world con- 
 must be siting exclusively of things unconscious things and 
 j t m ight be also conscious things or automatons, but 
 ^h ^ proper moral personality? Would it en- 
 necessariiy hance the perfection of the self-revelation of God in 
 
 an untrust- 
 worthy and Nature that nothing supernatural should, in the form 
 
 hopeless . 
 
 universe? of good and evil human agency, appear in the course 
 of nature; or that evil should be excluded, by also 
 making goodness in the form of morally tried personal 
 life impossible ? Is it only on such terms as these 
 that man can consent to regard the universe as the 
 revelation of finally trustworthy Power, and its ideal 
 as perfect ? Are we obliged to say, that the presence 
 
OPTIMISM. 185 
 
 of more or less moral evil, even under this condition, is 
 necessarily inconsistent with an optimist conception of 
 the Whole, and therefore with the proper divinity of 
 the Supreme Power. A divinely necessitated moral 
 goodness in individual persons, but one which de- 
 stroys responsibility, and therefore personality itself, 
 is in necessary contradiction with personality. A 
 finite " person " must have been intrusted with power 
 to resist the divine will that all persons in the uni- 
 verse should be always good, or should become good, 
 if they have made themselves bad. 
 
 " Evil," according to a special form of optimist con- The op- 
 ception that was elaborated by Leibniz, evil belongs Leibniz. 
 not to the actualities of the universe, which are all 
 determined by the divine Will, but to eternally neces- 
 sary abstract ideals, to each of which correspondingly 
 different actual universes must conform, these ideals 
 being independent of all Will, even the divine or 
 omnipotent Will like the abstract mathematical ne- 
 cessities which God cannot reverse, because they are 
 of the essence of reason. The ideals are eternally 
 necessary, and cannot without inconsistency be made 
 different. And if evil is thus necessarily involved in 
 the best possible ideal according to which God could 
 make a world, then either no world at all can make its 
 appearance, or it must be one in which wicked persons 
 and suffering animals may be found. The world as 
 we have it is still good, notwithstanding the seeming 
 
186 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 monsters that make their appearance in it. For their 
 so-called crimes are the necessary means of more than 
 equivalent good. Thus the tyrant Tarquin is figured 
 by Leibniz in a variety of positions other than those 
 in which he must be in this universe good and happy 
 in each of these but in each case in a universe that 
 is, in consequence of his goodness, necessarily inferior 
 to the actual universe, in which the Tarquin of history 
 spread disorder and misery around him. 
 "A good Had Jupiter, the goddess of Wisdom is made to 
 explain, had Jupiter made Sextus Tarquin happy 
 at Corinth, or a good and prosperous king in Thrace, 
 
 thanthat instead of a cruel and licentious tyrant at Eome, the 
 in which wor id j n which he was found could no longer be this 
 
 the wicked 
 
 Tarquin world, and must have been less good on the whole 
 
 appears. 
 
 than the one in which Sextus actually appeared. So 
 that Jupiter could not but choose this universe, even 
 with its tyrant Sextus ; because its ideal surpasses in 
 perfection the ideals of all other possible universes, 
 and forms the apex of the ideal pyramid. Otherwise, 
 Minerva goes on to say, Jupiter would have renounced 
 his wisdom, and preferred the worse. " You see, then," 
 she continues, " that my father has not made Sextus 
 wicked: he was so from all eternity in the best of 
 eternally necessary ideals. Jupiter has done nothing 
 but award him actual existence, which supreme wisdom 
 could not refuse to that ideal universe in which this 
 so-called criminal is necessarily contained ; Jupiter has 
 only made him actual, instead of ideal; under the 
 
OPTIMISM. 187 
 
 perfect ideal from which an " evil " Tarquin is not ex- 
 cluded, because his exclusion would make it an impos- 
 sible ideal. So the crimes of Sextus are even already 
 seen to be the source of great issues. They made 
 Borne free, and then Eome became a great ideal empire, 
 with illustrious examples of manliness; though even 
 these are as nothing to the final issues of that eternal 
 ideal in which the wicked Sextus and a glorious Eoman 
 Empire are found, as realised in admiring thought, 
 when, after a happy passage from this mortal state to 
 a better, the gods shall have made us able to conceive 
 the Whole. 
 
 An objection to the theistic meaning of the world Theargu- 
 which underlies this allegory of Leibniz might be sug- Leibniz, 
 gested. Is it not the case that a Power which sustains 
 a world that contains evil, when either the evil might 
 have been left out or the making of the world might 
 have been omitted, does not do what is good? God 
 makes a world in which there is evil, which either 
 could have been made without evil in it, or which 
 need not have been made at all. The inference seems 
 to be that the Power to which this mixed world is to 
 be referred has not done what ought to be done, and so 
 this world cannot be the revelation of omnipotent good- 
 ness. Leibniz replies that no doubt there is seeming 
 evil in the world in which man finds himself, and also 
 that it was possible to evolve a universe without this 
 evil in it, or else not to have a universe in actual exist- 
 ence at all, for its actual existence depends on the free 
 
188 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 will of God. But he rejects the assumption that a uni- 
 verse in which there is the evil we find may not be the 
 best ; since, for all man can tell, the best may be not 
 that in which there is no such evil; for it may turn 
 out that the evil is the natural and needed parent of 
 the good. An imperfection in the part may be needed 
 for the perfection of the Whole. A general will prefer 
 a great victory with a wound to loss of the battle with- 
 out the wound. Sin may introduce into the universe 
 something nobler than what could have been brought 
 into existence but for sin. In that case, Leibniz 
 argues, a world with sin in it would be better than a 
 world without sin. But Leibniz fails to show Tiow the 
 supposed perfect eternal ideals make the evils which 
 are found in the world inevitable, or how a world in 
 which nothing could come into existence that ought not 
 to exist might not be the perfect world. 
 The insuffi- This form of theistic optimism seems to make moral 
 
 ciency of 
 
 his opti- evil not something which there is an unconditional 
 obligation to condemn, but rather what may, for its 
 own sake, be admitted as good by the Supreme Power, 
 on account of its consequences. It also seems to imply 
 an inadequate conception of the power of persons, in 
 virtue of their individual moral responsibility for their 
 own acts, to bring into existence what ought not to 
 exist, and what is therefore not brought into existence 
 by a divine necessity. If moral personality is origina- 
 tive to the extent of the spiritual acts and states for 
 which a person is morally accountable, then as I have 
 
OPTIMISM. 189 
 
 been arguing the question resolves into the consistency 
 of the existence of persons, able themselves to make 
 themselves bad, with infinite perfection in the Su- 
 preme Power. May beings exist, under the perfect 
 intellectual system of the universe, who are able to resist 
 the divine will that all persons should be morally 
 good, and so realise the ideal of Tightness or duty. 
 
 That the glories of Eome should make the crimes of it seems to 
 Sextus only relatively crimes, but absolutely and finally " 
 
 good, by a necessity which omnipotence is unable to u e y s 0( 
 overcome, is surely an unsatisfying idea. It seems to 
 relieve the difficulty by explaining away moral evil, 
 or rather by transforming it, at a higher point of view, 
 into good ; so that the worst crimes are only relatively 
 evil, but really what ought to come into existence. 
 It seems to imply that Sextus could not help being bad, 
 because what we regard as a bad Sextus was really a 
 good Sextus, when he is looked at in all his relations, 
 or as a part of the universe. He is what he is by an 
 intellectual necessity of existence, not by a personal 
 act of his own that is absolutely independent of ideal 
 necessities, and that might, but for himself alone, have 
 been other than what it actually was. This is to make 
 Sextus unfortunate, not blameworthy. For moral evil 
 is the entrance into existence of what ought not to 
 exist, and for which there was no absolute necessity, 
 only a free individual volition. His sin is the singular 
 effect of the person in whose voluntary act it is created. 
 Is the existence of individual persons on moral trial, 
 
190 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 who therefore can make themselves bad, necessarily in- 
 consistent with omnipotence, or necessarily inconsistent 
 with perfect goodness ? Can the universe not be finally 
 divine, even if it contains individual beings who are able 
 to make and keep themselves undimne, notwithstanding 
 God's will and endeavour that they should be good ? 
 The intel- But, after all, this moral trial of individual persons 
 
 lectualpos- . . 
 
 sibmty without their own leave, their weakness and ignorance, 
 optimist and the associated miseries of men and other sentient 
 wWchYs 011 ' beings, presented on this earth, forms a strange and un- 
 " expected feature of the revelation of morally trust- 
 
 * 
 
 n a 
 
 finally wortn y Power presented in the universe. The per- 
 sistency and extent of the lurid phenomena within 
 ma iv< be e ' human experience are still insufficiently explained, by 
 notwith- the reference of acts of will that ou^ht not to be acted 
 
 standing its 
 
 remainder solely to the originative agency of individual persons. 
 
 of mystery, 
 
 sufficient Under this condition, one might have expected to find 
 
 reason for . . 
 
 moral and some persons resisting, others perfectly conforming 
 faith. U themselves to, the moral ideal of reason and assimi- 
 lating the divine life. The contrary fact, and the 
 morally downward tendency found in men, suggests 
 that there is a remainder of mystery in personality 
 which we are not able to remove ; perhaps that 
 the persons on this planet began to exist personally 
 before their birth into this life ; or perhaps that no 
 individual person is wholly individual. But incomplete 
 knowledge, as distinguished from absolute self-contra- 
 diction, always leaves room for the optimist conception 
 that is presupposed in a finally trustworthy and hope- 
 
OPTIMISM. 191 
 
 ful, or divine, world. Pessimist universal scepticism 
 which is literally suicidal for final extinction of con- 
 scious life would be the escape out of an experience 
 that may in the end deceive us all, even issuing in an 
 outcome of universal woe this pessimist scepticism 
 can be imposed, not by incomplete knowledge, with its 
 remainder of mystery, but only by a complete percep- 
 tion that the existing universe must be absolutely con- 
 tradictory to a final idea of perfect goodness. When 
 the necessary alternatives are theistic optimism and 
 atheistic pessimism, I fail to find in reason this neces- 
 sity for the suicidal alternative ; and I do find the 
 opposite alternative supported by what is highest in 
 the constitution of man, or by man at his best. This 
 is not demonstration, as in pure mathematics. But 
 is it not enough to satisfy him who sincerely seeks 
 to become what he ought to be ? 
 
192 
 
 LECTUEE VIII. 
 
 PROGRESS. 
 
 A univers- THE Teductio ad cibsurdum implied in a finally untrust- 
 
 Srllv SC6D~ 
 
 tical pessi- worthy universe, which makes inevitable the pessimist 
 logical and universally sceptical conception, is the philoso- 
 to thefstk; 6 phical vindication of the theistic or optimist inter- 
 optimism. pretat i on O f the world. The optimist alternative is 
 
 demonstrable, so far as universal nescience and despair 
 admits of refutation by the impossibility of interpreting 
 experience, or even sustaining life, without final moral 
 faith, consciously or unconsciously in operation. This 
 refutation should be sufficient, unless it can be demon- 
 strated that the mixture of evil intellectual, physical, 
 and moral with what is good, or conformable to moral 
 reason, is absolutely contradictory to the idea of morally 
 perfect Power being at the root of all. But this demon- 
 stration would be literally suicidal. If the evil found 
 in the universe is not somehow consistent with the 
 perfect goodness of its supreme Power, and so with 
 a deep or ultimate optimism, the universe of so-called 
 
PROGRESS. 
 
 reality must either be wholly meaningless, or else 
 charged with an evil meaning: trust and hope must 
 be withdrawn from it, in all the phases of our inter- 
 course with ourselves and our surroundings : a human 
 life, in the darkness of this discovery, would not be 
 worth living. The ideal for the individual man, if 
 man may then be supposed to have any ideal, would 
 be, to get out of personal and sentient life as soon as 
 he could on the supposition that it would be possible 
 ever to get out of it, after a person is once in it ; to 
 get out of it, either in the vulgar way of suicide, or in 
 the philosophical way of a sort of Nimana, by absorp- 
 tion in the universal meaninglessness. 
 
 When I speak of the opposite conception to all this Moral evil 
 
 , T cannot be 
 
 as an optimist conception, you must understand what I an impos- 
 
 , , -n , , -1-1 sibility, if 
 
 mean by optimism. For it is not an optimism which the world 
 means that the universe contains nothing that ought 
 not to exist in it ; it is an optimism which refers the 
 real evil that does appear while it ought not, and 
 need not to the will of individual persons who enter trial - 
 into nature and make themselves bad. The rise of evil 
 is thus contingent upon the universe being a universe 
 of persons, not of things only; and a universe, too, 
 which, at least at our human point of view, seems to 
 be gradually evolved, as a school for the education and 
 moral trial of responsible persons. This gives rise to 
 spiritual relations between persons, human and divine, 
 as well as physical relations among things; and it 
 obliges us to look at natural causes, and the divine 
 
 N 
 
194 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 system of natural causation, in a higher light than 
 physical science does. It implies especially that per- 
 sons, being persons, may make themselves bad, and thus 
 become a new and modifying element in the unbroken 
 physical uniformity in which God is otherwise revealed. 
 If the theistic, or morally perfect, ideal of the universe 
 includes individual persons, and moral relations be- 
 tween persons superior to things and their relations 
 presented in the sense symbolism of physical causes, 
 then the entrance of what ought not to exist is an in- 
 evitable contingency. Absolute exclusion of the possi- 
 bility of evil ever making its appearance, in the form 
 of immoral resistance to the divine will this resist- 
 ance leading to suppression of divine life in the resist- 
 ing persons would then involve a contradiction to tin 
 idea of moral personality, educational probation, anc 
 trial. Its forcible removal, too, by the Supreme Power 
 as long as persons continue to exist, able to resist the 
 divine will, would also seem to involve a contradictior 
 to the idea of individual personality. A world oJ 
 persons, such as we find, must, as personal, be capabh 
 of being made bad in the persons of whom it consists 
 The entrance into their lives of volitions which oughl 
 not to have been willed is not " permission " of whai 
 might have been prevented by the Supreme Powei 
 keeping all persons perfectly good : to keep persons 
 perfectly good, by an absolute or irresistible necessity 
 would be to transform a spiritual world of persons 
 into a wholly physical or non-moral world of things 
 
PROGRESS. 195 
 
 of which neither moral worth nor moral evil could be 
 affirmed. 
 
 Self-conscious persons, it may appear from this, are Nou-morai 
 more emphatically real, and more independent individ- must be 
 ually, than material things are, if tilings are in them- 
 selves impotent. But the actual existence, whether of 
 things or of individual persons, that is to say, the 
 existence of either of these two presupposed existences 
 in the original threefold articulation of realities, may 
 only mean that neither things nor persons are actually 
 states or phenomena of God, the third presupposed 
 reality. Visible material things must be somehow 
 other than only conscious states of persons. For 
 outward things must at least have outward reality 
 enough to be available media of intercommunication 
 between separate conscious persons : they afford an 
 interpretable system of signs, charged with the mean- 
 ings of which natural science is the objective inter- 
 pretation : they must be able to convey the meaning 
 of one mind, more or less adequately, into another 
 mind that otherwise could not get possession of it, at 
 least under human conditions of experience ; we prac- 
 tically find at least this amount and kind of objective 
 reality in visible things. And this sort of reality 
 seems not inconsistent with material things having 
 their potential existence in God, when they are not 
 actucdised in the sensations and intelligence of liv- 
 ing beings ; in whom, and for whose uses, they 
 present themselves in actual and orderly existence 
 
196 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 whatever other ends they may serve in the divine 
 
 system. 
 
 The only But although material things are, in an imperfectly 
 power, comprehended way, more and other than exclusively 
 the Divine private phenomena of individual consciousness, we 
 which have no reason for supposing that things, like persons, 
 l Na.ture,\s are authors of acts, which would imply that they can 
 attributed originate them so far like persons as it were outside 
 rJasonTo ^ ne ^ vme power. For we practically distinguish things 
 individual f r0 m our personal consciousness, and also from God, the 
 
 persons 
 
 to resist sustaining power in things and persons ; we likewise 
 
 their divine 
 
 ideal. distinguish ourselves from things, in virtue of our 
 being endowed by God with moral personality, which, 
 as far as our responsible activity extends, enables 
 each man to resist the divine will. And this auton- 
 omy of persons is not necessarily inconsistent with 
 the causal concatenation of physical nature, of which 
 indeed each person needs to avail himself in all overt 
 action, as distinguished from wholly private deter- 
 minations of his will. Individual persons seem to 
 be the only originative powers in existence that are 
 revealed to man, over and above the universal and 
 constantly operative power of God. "Why should this 
 resisting power of persons, in virtue of which they 
 may refuse to assimilate with the divine ideal, neces- 
 sarily contradict the finally optimist conception of the 
 universe ? This would seem to imply that a person 
 a creator of evil acts could not exist in a divinely 
 maintained and ordered world, and therefore that God 
 
PROGRESS. 197 
 
 could be revealed only in and through unconscious 
 things, or at most through conscious automatons, 
 neither good nor bad morally. 
 
 But one may still ask how a universe that contains But what 
 
 *f 11 " 
 
 within it this possibly disturbing element of individual dividual 
 personal agency can be kept by God in harmony with wereto 
 
 the perfect or divine ideal ? If a universe which in- 
 eludes resistance of persons to what ought to be 
 their individual power to make and keep themselves 
 in states of mind and will in which they ought not ideal? 
 to exist if a universe so constituted is of a sort that 
 it is within the power of God to manifest Himself in, is 
 it not a universe that may finally be converted into 
 moral chaos by the individual persons in it, even while 
 it might continue to be a physical cosmos so that pro- 
 gressive improvement in the persons who compose its 
 successive generations would be impossible ? More 
 than this, may not individual persons, with their im- 
 plied power of initiating evil, gradually make the 
 world of persons a world in which all individual 
 persons are wholly and finally bad ? May not the 
 existence in the universe of persons undergoing educa- 
 tive and moral trial lead thus to universal and un- 
 ending moral disorder ; so that theistic faith would 
 be virtually extinguished by that very supernatural- 
 ness or moral personality in man on which I have 
 argued that it partly rests ? The existence of persons 
 who, as persons under moral relations, must all be 
 free to become permanently bad; who cannot by any 
 
198 
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 Why is 
 there any 
 universe 
 of reality 
 or any 
 temporal 
 process ? 
 
 power, divine or other, be hindered from becoming bad 
 without being reduced to irresponsible things, seems tc 
 imply the possibility at last of a universe in whicl: 
 all persons have become irrecoverably bad. "\Vha1 
 then becomes of the theistic or optimist conception! 
 Theistic faith would then turn out to be a fallacious 
 guarantee for the moral cosmos which this faith seems 
 necessarily to presuppose in the final outcome. Sc 
 far as it consists of persons, the universe would ther 
 have become a universe of devils surely not a pos- 
 sible manifestation this of the perfect Power presup- 
 posed in our moral or filial theistic instinct, as the 
 needed support and reconciliation of human life. 
 
 It is here that the very existence of persons, whos< 
 personality enables them to make and keep themselves 
 bad, is the chief enigma, and the evidence of the limita 
 tion at least of our final conception of the universe 
 To resolve this enigma fully we should need to know 
 why the finally trusted universe of things and persons 
 now exists, has existed, and will continue to exist 
 if, indeed, even this way of putting the problem, ir 
 terms of changing existence in time, does not take ir 
 what may have to disappear at the central point o 
 view, as distinguished from our one-sided human con 
 ception. The reason for the actual existence of God 
 and of the universe of things and persons in whicl 
 He is revealing Himself, is the insoluble problem 
 and without solving it we cannot be sure that oui 
 knowledge is complete enough to show that even 
 
PEOGRESS. 199 
 
 moral world composed of persons who have made 
 themselves permanently wicked would be necessarily 
 inconsistent with the perfect ideal. We must first 
 get possession of that ideal. This is not needed for 
 human purposes ; if each man finds that he may 
 maintain the filial trust that all will be absolutely 
 well with those who withdraw personal resistance to 
 the perfectly good Will, and permit the divine ideal 
 of Man to be gradually realised in themselves. 
 
 An experience of persons that like man's is limited Experience 
 
 suggests 
 
 to the human beings found on this planet in ignor- that the 
 auce of innumerable other orders of persons that may persons on 
 exist elsewhere persons connected, it may be, in un- ma ybethe 
 known relations to men, all persons in the universe 
 being perhaps morally related to all others, as all 
 things are physically related in the physical system, 
 this infinitesimally limited human experience of per- 
 sons, combined with the final theistic faith in the 
 righteousness and love of the Universal Power, form 
 our available resources for determining what the 
 absolute meaning of the Whole may be ; or rather of 
 the Whole so far as man is personally related to it. 
 Now, when we contemplate the history of moral and 
 sentient beings on this little world of ours, do we find 
 that the persons who appear and then disappear, in 
 their successive generations, are becoming better or 
 becoming worse, according to our highest ideal of what 
 ousrht to be ? and do we find that their environment 
 
200 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 what is called their civilisation is in progress to- 
 wards what is better, or in regress towards what is 
 worse ? Does it suggest gradual approximation, in 
 individuals and in their social state, to what is ideally 
 good, or is the movement all in the opposite direc- 
 tion ? Is it a struggle of the evil with the good 
 involving enormous waste, at least as it superficially 
 appears waste of sentient lives, and much torture of 
 their sensibilities, but withal a residuum of gradually 
 victorious endeavour ? Struggle with evil, more or 
 less successful, yet somehow on the way to infinitely 
 good and righteous issues, may be the form which 
 the optimist or theistic conception of life is found to 
 assume, when we accept the guidance of history and 
 experience. 
 
 Butap- But this progressive abatement of the evil that 
 
 progressive is now mixed with the good, in individual lives and 
 mentIn an in. the social economy, is by itself inadequate to recon- 
 imperfect c ^ e the suspicious phenomena which suggest sceptical 
 nofS'itsdf pessimism with a perfect filial trust in the optimist 
 plain the interpretation of the world. In the first place, it does 
 present no t explain how, under the divine or perfect Ideal, 
 
 mixture 
 
 of evil. there can be need for improvement, or why man should 
 require to be raised to his ideal, instead of always, 
 and in all instances, illustrating it. Progress presup- 
 poses previous imperfection or evil ; in all develop- 
 ment the antecedent state is inferior to the consequent 
 state. The present imperfection, which calls for the 
 progressive correction, has to be explained. Why is 
 
PROGRESS. 201 
 
 the race of man ever found in a state and with sur- 
 roundings which require progressive improvement ? 
 More than this, if a person's departure from the divine 
 ideal of humanity is in any degree the act of the 
 person if he is found willing what he ought not to 
 will, and what he might have willed differently this 
 means more than the physical imperfection which may 
 be improved by physical progress or evolution : it 
 necessarily goes deeper than this : it implies not 
 merely a relative imperfection, which may disappear 
 in the course of physical evolution, but what is ab- 
 solutely evil. It involves the absolute evil that is 
 implied in personal blame worthiness for its coming 
 into existence, and which is not removed in an im- 
 provement of the social surroundings, or by expanding 
 personal intelligence. The blended greatness and little- 
 ness of man, on which Pascal enlarges, is not fully 
 recognised under the idea of a gradual elimination of 
 what is relatively imperfect, in and through a pro- 
 gressive natural evolution. 
 
 Notwithstanding these difficulties, faith in the grad- Empiri- 
 ual abatement of evils, under the method of progressive eraifsed n 
 evolution, in the course of which" they are supposed Es^u 
 to be gradually disappearing, is now the favourite 
 scientific faith : this faith may even be regarded as 
 the form which an unconsciously theistic trust in the is s , ' 
 
 vealed. 
 
 final principle of the universe is assuming in profes- 
 sedly agnostic minds. For it is of the nature of 
 moral or theistic trust, although it is scientifically 
 
202 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 illustrated only by a narrow and brief experience of 
 facts those presented by things and by persons in 
 this small world, viewed in the light of their past 
 history. It is an expression of confidence that, be- 
 cause the phenomena here presented seem to illus- 
 trate a natural history of progressive improvement, so 
 far as the evolution has yet gone, they may be ex- 
 pected to persist in being progressive during an in- 
 definite future. That the progressive evolution is to 
 be endless, or, if not endless, that it is some day to 
 reach perfection and then to persist in an unending 
 perfection the successive generations of men there- 
 after all fully realising their true ideal this of course 
 cannot be presented fact : it must be an act of faith. 
 On the contrary, we are told by some expositors of 
 the empirical evolutionist conception to anticipate 
 later on regress instead of permanent perfection 
 even a final disintegration of all the products of the 
 present progressive movement in mankind issuing at 
 last in the disintegration of the planet itself, and the 
 consequent disappearance of all living actors in the 
 meaningless drama of so-called progress that was once 
 acted on the earth, but of which, with the final ex- 
 tinction of the human actors and of the planet itself, 
 all conceivable record or result is for ever lost. The 
 universe has then become what it would have been if 
 man and the other living beings on earth, with the 
 earth itself, had never been the subject of the supposed 
 natural processes of construction and disintegration. 
 
PROGRESS. 203 
 
 But many in the now living generation, who profess inconsist- 
 
 Gncv of 
 
 to reject theism, seem notwithstanding to find a theistic a non- 
 satisfaction in an attenuated because empirical faith in f a i tn t n 
 physical progress : they meet the final difficulties of p 
 speculative thought by iteration of the words " pro- 
 gress," " development," " evolution " which strictly 
 speaking only suggest the mode in which the universe, 
 regarded as physically constituted, seems in the mean- 
 time to be behaving itself ; also in which it has been 
 behaving itself, as far back as men can see into the 
 past ; and in which it is expected to behave through 
 an indefinite future, and this notwithstanding the 
 professed agnostic withdrawal of all theistic or moral 
 faith in its trustworthiness. The justification of this 
 expectant trust is supposed to consist in " verifications," 
 offered by physical phenomena that have been emptied 
 of moral reason under the empirical evolutionist con- 
 ception, and which may therefore be the sport of a 
 malignant, or an indifferent, or a blind irrational 
 Power. Nothing deeper is recognised by those who 
 accept this attenuated semi-theistic confidence in the 
 improving tendency of evolving nature, and who in- 
 dulge in it seemingly unconscious that even this re- 
 liance, so far as it goes, contradicts their own agnostic 
 renunciation of final moral faith. 
 
 The conception of the world as at present naturally ^j^f 
 in progress towards a physical millennium, is a form which 
 
 J trusts or 
 
 of relief from the enisrma of the bad found mixed worships 
 
 the Uni- 
 
 with the good, in a universe still treated as so far verse, as 
 
204 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 progres- interpretable and therefore trustworthy. It has been 
 it has ' called "meliorism." Inadequate as a morally theistic 
 withdrawn faith in the temporal process of the universe, or as 
 an explanation of its evils, the idea of gradual, even if 
 often interrupted, individual and social amelioration 
 is nevertheless full of human interest, and is illustrated 
 by a large collection of facts. Indulgence in the idea 
 belongs to goodness and nobility of character. It gives 
 life to generous hope, and helps to correct the selfish 
 type of individualism, by educating that larger sort of 
 individualism, which finds the true idea of the indi- 
 vidual in his unselfish relation to other individual 
 persons, as well as to the Universal Power or Person. 
 If those now living are not themselves actually to see 
 the issue, there is still a consolatory faith in the 
 millennial comfort and satisfaction of later generations 
 of men and other animals. And all this because a 
 present tendency towards a higher ideal seems visible, 
 and this tendency is trusted in, like any other natural 
 law, even when the trust is not recognised by those 
 who indulge in it as ultimately moral and absolute. 
 Present ills, it seems, may well be endured by this 
 generation, as greater ills were endured by past ones, 
 on account of the potential promise of ideal good in 
 store for our successors ; this partly because we find 
 the now existing members of the human species so far 
 sharing in the advancement, and also because the idea 
 gives us the happiness of thinking that we are con- 
 tributing towards its fuller attainment by our sue- 
 
PROGRESS. 205 
 
 cessors. Social activities thus sustained seem to shed 
 some light in the darkness, and bring hope and joy 
 to a generation somehow unusually perplexed by pes- 
 simist despair, in the decay of conscious theistic faith. 
 But even this imperfect form of moral trust in the 
 Power at the heart of the universe may be more 
 sincere and productive of good, in some who profess 
 their agnostic inability, than in the merely conven- 
 tional theism into which modern agnosticism has in- 
 troduced a much-needed disturbance. 
 
 Organic growth or progress is, at any rate, a physi- The New 
 cally scientific watchword in the nineteenth century, pid, as 
 It is the expression of a prevailing conception into 
 which we are educated, partly by the recent increase 
 of man's power to adapt natural causes to human 
 purposes, thus obviously rendering this planet of ours 
 more fit to be lived in conveniently, because in organ- 
 isms brought more into harmony with their surround- 
 ings. It has not been always consciously so among 
 men ; nor is it so now in all minds. The ideal of 
 progress lies in the future : but some men and some 
 whole generations have found their ideal in the past, 
 or in the future only so far as it is hoped to be revival 
 of the past. There are always to be found minds, 
 as Bacon remarks, given to extreme admiration of 
 antiquity; others to extreme love and appetite for 
 novelty. Few are so happily tempered that they can 
 hold the mean, neither rejecting what has been well 
 laid down by the ancients, nor despising what is 
 
206 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 well introduced by the moderns. These affectations of 
 antiquity only and of novelty only, Bacon regards as 
 the humours of partisans rather than the sane judg- 
 ments of mankind ; and he seeks for his ideal, not 
 in the state of any one age, past or future, which is 
 unstable, but in the light of reasoned experience, 
 which is eternal. 
 A really The divine method of progressive evolution which 
 
 progressive 
 
 activity facts illustrate seems to involve a composition of the 
 
 unites past -. . , 
 
 experience two opposite tendencies. A supposed progress that 
 auticipa- a seeks wholly to sever itself from the past illustrates, 
 in the consequent regress, the irrationality of the pro- 
 cedure. But the ideal that is found wholly in the past, 
 and that induces desire only to preserve what has been, 
 arrests change; yet change is essential to life. True 
 progress, based on the Reason that is latent at once 
 in the mind of man and in the surrounding universe, 
 cannot lose continuity with the reason that has in a 
 measure become patent in the history of man. In all 
 advance, what is new seems to arise out of what is old, 
 in the way of metamorphosis, instead of absolute isola- 
 tion from and rejection of all that is old. As Bacon 
 says of progress in science, some of those who have 
 handled knowledge have been men who take pleasure 
 only in trying experiments empirically, while others 
 would make inherited dogmas supersede new trials. 
 The former are like the ant ; they only collect without 
 constructing. The others are like the spider ; they only 
 make cobwebs out of their present possessions. The 
 
PROGRESS. 207 
 
 bee takes the middle course, which is the right one : it 
 gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and 
 the field, but it transforms and digests them by a power 
 of its own. The rational dualism, which unites the past 
 and the future in a moral faith and hope that is edu- 
 cated and balanced by what has been, seems to be in- 
 volved in the real advancement, whether in knowledge 
 or otherwise, of a being like man, intermediate between 
 the animal and Deity, between sense and omniscience ; 
 and whose progress must be from the former towards 
 the latter of these extremes, gradually making patent 
 in his own consciousness the Divine Eeason of which 
 the changing universe is the revelation. 
 
 Faith in progressive evolution, as the divine law, Progress 
 must be modified by the consideration that the Past Regress, 
 presents to view persons whose intellectual or whose through 
 spiritual development is in advance of all living ex- Persons - 
 amples. Who, in the succeeding generations, has 
 surpassed Aristotle in comprehensive intelligence ? 
 Socrates and the Hebrew prophets were followed by 
 ages of comparative moral and spiritual darkness. 
 Saints and martyrs have shown a self - sacrifice that 
 is foreign to the experience and sympathies of more 
 selfish and faithless successors. Things and persons 
 are commingled in the temporal process, so that the 
 onward current seems often disturbed and deflected 
 from its course. The originative action of persons 
 seems to interfere, for unexpected good or evil, with 
 a physical order which faith expects to find continuously 
 
208 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 progressive. But these seeming anomalies are not de- 
 monstrably at variance with the deeper presupposition 
 of theistic faith in the universal system, according 
 to which the temporal procedure is an incompletely 
 comprehensible development of the Divine Idea. The 
 progress of mankind, as I think Wordsworth some- 
 where suggests, is not like a Eoman road which goes 
 straight to its goal ; it is rather like a winding river, 
 frequently forced to turn backward, in order to over- 
 come obstacles which cannot be directly eluded, but 
 moving in consequence of the deflection with addi- 
 tional forward impulse. 
 
 Pain and Physical evils and intellectual evils pain as well as 
 as means ignorance and error may be thus means of advance- 
 nd ' ment towards the imperfectly comprehensible end to 
 which the universe is moving. It is commonplace to 
 suggest that dissatisfaction or pain is at the root of 
 progressive improvement in individual persons and in 
 society. Suffering and sympathy with suffering is an 
 indispensable condition of personal education in good- 
 ness. Man's intellectuality and spirituality is brought 
 out of the latent state into the conscious state, by the 
 discomfort of its being only latent or unconscious. The 
 discomfort of the state of ignorance and error is a motive 
 to the discovery that relieves it. That we are in these 
 respects still out of harmony with our divine ideal 
 makes us unsatisfied : this dissatisfaction evokes the 
 reason innate in us, which is truly divine reason. The 
 educating influence of these uneasinesses may be re- 
 
PROGRESS. 209 
 
 sisted or perverted, if the person wills to persist in a 
 state in which he ought not to continue. But the 
 divine influence of pain is in innumerable ways on the 
 side of what ought to be of what indeed might be but 
 for the perverse will of the person who resists that edu- 
 cating pressure of nature which is really the expression 
 of divine power in the form of natural discipline. 
 
 "We have an illustration of intellectual progress luteiiec- 
 through apparent retrogression, according to the an- gre 
 
 alogy of the " winding river," in the past history of trateiHn 
 philosophical speculation. Systems seem to the super- of e p hiio- ry 
 rlcial student of history to succeed one another in an 
 aimless series, without permanent advance. One 
 may fail to discern in their succession the often inter- 
 rupted and slow education of human intelligence, and 
 the natural adaptation of each system to the age in 
 which it was evolved, as the divine condition of the 
 ultimate advance. Yet surely through the intellectual 
 sects and systems of the past an unceasing, even if an 
 unconscious, " purpose " has been running, so that the 
 thoughts of men have gradually " widened with the 
 process of the suns." The history of human intel- 
 ligence appears as a history of progressive development, 
 often interrupted or regressive, the issue of a composi- 
 tion of forces, each inadequate, and therefore while it is 
 in vogue still a source of intellectual dissatisfaction, but 
 then, in the form of pain, an impulse towards wider 
 and deeper conceptions in this a type of personal and 
 social progress in all its phases. 
 
 
 
210 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 The mean Has not the confused, and seemingly even self-contra- 
 
 between 
 
 extremes, dictory, philosophic past been a continuous struggle, in 
 
 and com- . ..,..: 
 
 position of which, on the one hand, various forms or idealistic con- 
 forces! ^ a struction, wherein the secret of the universe is supposed 
 to be evolved out of a single axiomatic principle, are 
 found arrayed against the different phases of sceptical 
 pessimism and indifferentism, with a consequent despair 
 of moral reason being finally latent in the universal 
 movement ? And may not the gradual outcome of the 
 evolutionary struggle purely rational idealisms op- 
 posed and slowly corrected by the sceptical criticism 
 be nearer approach to the philosophy which acknow- 
 ledges, as its constructive principle, with increasing 
 intelligence, the moral or theistic faith, that is inter- 
 mediate between the mental paralysis of Nescience, and 
 the Divine Thought which in its infinity evades the 
 philosophic grasp of man ? The natural impossibility 
 of permanently subsiding into the doubt which aban- 
 dons the universe as uninterpretable, either as a whole 
 or in any of its parts, together with the repeated failure 
 of ambitious human attempts to comprehend exist- 
 ence as the changing states of a single Power, lead 
 the philosopher into the intermediate path of Theistic 
 Philosophy, as the only one open to man ; on which, 
 nevertheless, his intellectual activity needs to be quick- 
 ened from time to time, by the attempts and failures of 
 exclusive Idealism and exclusive Empiricism. With 
 this irrefutable faith in the reasonableness of the Whole, 
 he lives assured that facts and events, however mysteri- 
 
PROGRESS. 211 
 
 ous, can never put either causal or moral intelligence 
 to permanent confusion, and thus make the funda- 
 mental faith of reason no longer tenable by man. To 
 follow this path intermediate between Nescience and 
 Omniscience is to acknowledge men as more than 
 animals, yet less than identical with God through their 
 sense organisms part of Nature, while in their spiritual 
 experience they may in different degrees participate in 
 the divine life. A philosophy which looks only to man's 
 visible organic connection with nature is logically athe- 
 istic, which means universally agnostic. And is not the 
 philosopher who supposes that he fully comprehends the 
 infinite macrocosm in and through his own finite micro- 
 cosm in a perfect identity with the " fulness of God " 
 logically acosmic, in a pantheism that is logically 
 atheistic ? What is man, Pascal asks in the spirit 
 of the human philosophy that accepts the intermediate 
 as the true what is man amidst the immeasurable real- 
 ities which encompass him ? At one point of view he 
 seems to lose himself in the Infinite ; at another, he 
 seems to lose himself in the abyss of Nothing. Yet he 
 is beyond the Nothing out of which he seems to sense 
 to take his rise, and he is found short of the Infinity 
 in which he seems, in his own necessarily incomplete 
 thought, to be swallowed up. The intermediate is 
 stamped upon all our faculties and all our experience. 
 We are alike unable to know all and to remain ignorant 
 of all. Yet, in another view of the case, unless we 
 know all we cannot know anything, since each finite 
 
212 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 thing and each individual person is connected with 
 every other, and is fully explained only when seen in 
 rational correlation with every other. In the only 
 permanent and humanly progressive philosophy many 
 things must in the end be "left abrupt." 
 
 is not That the progressive improvement of man involves 
 
 faith, so a gradual extinction of the religious conception of the 
 
 universe, and that the final victory of the gradual 
 evolution will consist in the disappearance of this con- 
 factorin ception, is the incoherent philosophy which Auguste 
 the pro- Comte has helped to diffuse in Europe and America 
 
 gressive 
 
 improve- f n the passing generation. Eelijnon, in the form of 
 
 ment of 
 
 man? superstition, is assumed to be an anachronism, which 
 the human race, in civilised countries, has now nearly 
 outgrown, so that everywhere it is found in a slow 
 decay ; maintaining a languid life among persons of 
 imperfect intellectual insight, but so inconsistent even 
 with the present stage of social advancement that, at 
 least in prosperous countries, it exists only as a com- 
 paratively harmless superstition, no longer a real and 
 always persecuting power in human affairs. For it 
 seems that we have arrived in the social evolution at 
 a stage in which the educated mind distinctly sees that 
 the universe, including man, is simply a succession of 
 passing appearances, which can only be interpreted 
 physically, according to their coexisting and successive 
 relations or modes of procedure. Yet is there not, 
 one may ask, an uncriticised and unconscious theistic 
 
PROGRESS. 213 
 
 faith, at the root even of this thin and shallow inter- 
 pretation of the world ? 
 
 Supposed consequences of the application of cosmic Comte's 
 
 .,, . ,. 1-1 e i, three stages 
 
 faith in the physical meanings of phenomena, are con- O f progres- 
 trasted by Comte with the effects of the crude religious tion, e in U 
 ideas under which ancient superstition ascribed events 
 
 to the irrational caprice of spirits, signalised all uu- 
 common events as eminently supernatural, and saw in 
 the miseries of man only the cruel anger of the gods, superseded 
 
 by an ex- 
 
 At a later stage in the history of man, Comte seemed clusively 
 
 physical 
 
 to find these childish mythologies giving place to empty faith. 
 abstractions of metaphysical thought : words, void of 
 all positive meaning that could be verified in sense 
 or imagination, were made to do duty instead of the 
 declining mythologies, and to conceal man's necessary 
 ignorance of all beyond the finite phenomena which 
 somehow succeed one another on the stream of time. 
 But the age in which these verbal abstractions ruled 
 the human mind the so-called metaphysical stage in 
 the social progress, next in succession to the mytho- 
 logical or superstitious is supposed, in its turn, to 
 make room for strictly scientific interpretation of phy- 
 sical phenomena, the only legitimate intellectual em- 
 ployment of mankind, and destined to be the universal 
 philosophy, in the further advance of society. 
 
 Whether this last is to be the final stage, in which What is 
 
 , . , , the further 
 
 progressive improvement is perfected, is not clearly outcome of 
 explained. Perhaps the exclusively physical science caffaithT 
 stage is expected to last till a process of disintegration 
 
214 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 begins, when the physically interpreted world itself 
 will resolve into pristine fire-mist. But even before 
 this planetary catastrophe, the pessimist issue of merely 
 physical faith, in what may therefore turn out to be a 
 wholly untrustworthy or even malignant universe, may 
 have relieved the planet of its minute philosophers, 
 by the suicide which would be the practical applica- 
 tion of an apotheosis of despair. 
 Comtepre- So Comte represents abstract metaphysics as in the 
 
 supposes 
 
 theincon- historical evolution subversive of theology, and the 
 theistic physical sciences as in the end disintegrative of both, 
 sicai faith. In each step of advance in the wholly physical and 
 alone legitimate interpretation of the universe, he sees 
 the retreat of so - called metaphysics, and so - called 
 theology, from the territory thus conquered by science ; 
 so that when the scientific victory is universal, the 
 universe it is supposed will be seen to be incapable 
 of being interpreted in the light of eternal necessities 
 of reason and of philosophical theism. Man must then 
 lose the moral faith by which I have supposed that his 
 interpretation even of physical nature is sustained at 
 last, and in which he finds his available strength, 
 instead of Does not a deeper philosophy than that of Comte 
 proceed, on the contrary, on the principle that the 
 - physical interpretation of the universe, instead of ex- 
 datk)nand eluding the really metaphysical and the really religious, 
 tioi^of ail i s itself sustained by each of these ; that ever ad- 
 naturai vancins discoveries of natural meanings, and of natural 
 
 science. 
 
 relations of means and ends, are concrete embodiments 
 
PROGRESS. 215 
 
 of abstract conditions imposed by intelligence ; and 
 that these last conduct to the final conception in the 
 faith that the Whole is the expression of perfectly 
 good and wise Power, or morally intending active 
 Keason ? An atheistic or agnostic faith in progress is 
 necessarily baseless and incoherent; for, if it really 
 means what it says, it is wanting in the moral assur- 
 ance that, notwithstanding intervals of seeming regress, 
 things must be working together for good to all those 
 who are struggling to live in conformity with the 
 divine ideal, and in whose persons the world is accord- 
 ingly becoming more divine. The idea of progress is, 
 tacitly if not explicitly, a teleological conception of 
 things and persons, and those who really accept it 
 must be virtually sustaining themselves, so far, in a 
 moral or theistic trust. 
 
216 
 
 LECTURE IX. 
 
 MIRACLE : WHAT IS A MIRACLE ? 
 
 The Mea of THE idea of miracle, however vaguely it may be con- 
 and its ceived, is particularly associated with the manifestation 
 with the- of God to man, and also with the enigma of moral 
 ' evil. A revelation of God incarnate in the ideal man 
 Christ Jesus is regarded as a miraculous entrance of 
 God into a man, for reconciling with God persons who 
 have made themselves bad, but who might be induced 
 to become good in response to this miraculous revela- 
 tion of divine goodness or mercy, and appeal to their 
 languid theistic faith. It is in proof of this appeal 
 being really divine revelation that physical miracles 
 are reported to have occurred ; and Christianity is the 
 one religion which has its claim on theistic faith vin- 
 dicated in this particular way. Physical wonders are 
 more or less associated traditionally with other re- 
 ligions ; but the one that has a series of physical 
 miracles, in justification of its authority, associated 
 
MIRACLE. 217 
 
 with it, and that is regarded as in itself a miracle, 
 is the Christian, including its early development in 
 Judaism. The Jews craved miracles ; the Greeks pre- 
 ferred speculation, and were repelled by a religion that 
 was represented as a miracle, and that seemed to ask 
 men to see God signally in what was miraculous. 
 
 Now what is meant by a miracle ? If it is con- Questions 
 
 suggested 
 
 ceived either as an external event or as a spiritual by the sup- 
 experience which cannot be explained by power latent miracle. 
 in outward nature or in human nature, and which must 
 therefore be referred extra-naturally to God, this raises 
 a question about the sort of events and of inward ex- 
 periences that can, and the sort that cannot, be scien- 
 tifically explained by natural causes explained, that is 
 to say, according to discoverable laws of the natural 
 evolution, and in the way of development by education 
 of the divinely constituted spirit that is latent in man ? 
 Is man able to determine between what is and what is 
 not done by God according to natural law ? Is he fit 
 to determine what the innate potentialities of his own 
 divinely constituted mind may be, or what the limits 
 of their outcome, in the form of an increased enlight- 
 enment of the moral or filial faith in the final principle 
 of the universe, which I have regarded as tacitly pre- 
 supposed in all man's dealings with experience ? Then 
 what is to be thought about the relation in reason of 
 miraculous outward events, and of miraculous mental 
 experiences that are supposed to be humanly inexpli- 
 cable, to the naturally progressive evolution which scien- 
 
218 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 tific man somehow assumes to be within the horizon of 
 his intellectual vision ? Is a miracle an event that can 
 assimilate with the physically progressive evolution in 
 outward nature, or with the original " inspiration " which 
 " gives understanding," in the form of Common Eeason ? 
 Can it be involved in either, or is it in antagonism to 
 both ? Is a miracle something that Universities, Eoyal 
 Societies, and persons who devote themselves to scientific 
 interpretation of nature, have in a pre-eminent degree to 
 do with ; or is it something so outside physical nature, 
 and even outside the moral or supernatural in human 
 agency, that it must be kept apart, as foreign to reason, 
 or something on which reason must not exercise itself ? 
 Is miraculous revelation to be received and assimilated 
 through some mystical process of dependence on author- 
 ity presupposed to be infallible ; or may it be tested, in 
 the ordinary critical way, by those accustomed to weigh 
 evidence ? Again, is a miracle absolutely such, or only 
 relatively to human intelligence ? What is the criterion 
 of miraculous, as distinguished from non - miraculous, 
 outward events ; or of miraculous as distinguished from 
 non-miraculous spiritual experiences ? Individual men, 
 and successive generations, differ widely in their ideas of 
 what is and is not naturally possible. An event which 
 in the opinion of one man, or one age, is considered 
 miraculously divine, is afterwards discovered to be a 
 divinely natural issue, evolved according to physical 
 law. What was regarded as a miracle by an ignorant 
 man is found by a scientific expert not to be a miracle ; 
 
MIRACLE. 219 
 
 at least if that only is miraculous which is wholly 
 abnormal, not referable to physical causation, nor to 
 the education of the incarnate spiritual Eeason in the 
 persons supposed to be miraculously inspired. In the 
 progress of science, may not all supposed miraculously 
 divine events of the past be reduced to intelligible 
 places in the cosmical order ? if they can be so ex- 
 plained they do not cease in consequence to be divinely 
 caused. Would the discovery of the natural cause of a 
 miracle, the discovery, for instance, that the introduc- 
 tion of life into an organism, or the restoration of the 
 dead to life, is after all under cosmical law would this 
 divorce the supposed miracle from God ? If all that 
 is called miraculous can be thus wholly assimilated 
 by the natural system, must theistic faith disappear, 
 in all persons who accept the discovery ? Can a mir- 
 acle, if thus relative to the degree of intelligence in 
 the individual spectator, mean anything really abnor- 
 mal, at the divine point of view ? Or are we to sup- 
 pose two distinct sorts of divine power the one 
 exerted cosmically, conditioned by what are called 
 natural causes; the other exerted supernaturally, uncon- 
 ditioned by any natural cause ; and must we suppose 
 that the second of these is a more difficult divine ex- 
 ertion than the other ? If so, what is the ground in 
 reason for this supposition or inference ? 
 
 These questions about miracle, apt to arise at this Is " mira- 
 culous " 
 point in our course of thought, bring memorable reports religion 
 
 . . . really nat- 
 
 oi miracles into prominence, and the abstract idea of uran 
 
220 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 miraculousness seems .to demand fuller consideration. 
 We have to look at their relation to the whole phil- 
 osophical rationale of theistic faith in the revelation 
 of God that is presented universally, and which we have 
 already found latent in all our experience. Is faith 
 in so-called miraculous revelation of God different in 
 kind from this theistic trust and hope, or only this 
 further unfolded, and so more intelligible ? 
 Can either It may seem at first that a miracle bears on its face 
 or natural that it is something wholly foreign to "natural" theology, 
 concerned even in the widest meaning of " nature." To refer to 
 miracle at all may be regarded as out of place, in a 
 philosophical inquiry into the reasonableness of moral 
 faith and filial hope in the final meaning of the uni- 
 verse ; out of place, too, in any scientific inquiry into 
 the natural causes according to which events are con- 
 catenated, and by their recognised relations in which 
 concatenation changing things become scientifically 
 intelligible. For what is called a " miracle " is com- 
 monly supposed to be an event that has emerged in the 
 history of the planet without a natural cause, perhaps 
 as a consequence of arbitrary magical will on the part 
 of the miracle-worker: the miraculous visible conse- 
 quence is moreover supposed to afford some sort of 
 guarantee for reposing faith in the divine infallibility 
 of the persons who appear as miracle-workers : their acts 
 or words, so far as these are associated with the 
 wonderful event, are supposed to become invested 
 with divine infallibility. It might be argued that 
 
MIRACLE. 221 
 
 if a claim to miraculous inspiration, which has been 
 verified, for example, by fulfilment of the claimant's 
 prediction of his own resurrection after his death, could 
 turn out after all to be undivine, then this permitted 
 coincidence in the temporal sequence of those events 
 would imply that the Power that finally determines all 
 outward events was morally untrustworthy because in 
 this instance, and therefore possibly in others, partici- 
 pating in a fraud. But no mere physical miracle can 
 thus destroy theistic, and therefore cosmic, faith: no 
 physical miracle can contradict the active moral Keason 
 that a reliable experience presupposes at the divine 
 centre, or verify an immoral revelation as divine. And 
 the widely received report of the resurrection of Jesus 
 has been followed by scientifically incalculable mo- 
 mentous consequences in the history of mankind, 
 above all other reported resurrections of men. If it now 
 touches human imagination more languidly, through 
 the lapse of time, it has already awakened the most 
 efficacious religious faith experienced by man, evoking 
 in Christendom the latent hope of eternal life. 
 
 Again. Whether or not events of this kind have The physi- 
 
 ciil imirvGls 
 
 long ago occurred on our planet may seem to be to us of natural 
 now only isolated matter of past history, and of this an d the 
 sort too even if those "wonders," which are regarded as miracles of 
 signal signs of God, are still of possible occurrence. r< 
 For their very definition isolates them from natural 
 science : if they are events that have no natural causes, 
 physical science, which is the issue of the search for 
 
222 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 natural causes, can have nothing to say to phenomena 
 for which it is assumed there is no place in the cos- 
 mical system. Scientific inquiry indeed is bringing 
 into light innumerable natural causes hitherto un- 
 known, and in its light men are enabled to adapt to 
 human convenience in unexpected ways the cosmic web 
 in which we all find ourselves involved. Discoveries, 
 and applied discoveries, of causal connections among 
 phenomena are called "miracles of science," but they 
 are miraculous only because they surprise men not 
 because they are events divorced in their origin from 
 all natural causes, although they are believed to occur 
 within the cosmical system. 
 
 Physical Thus excluded from natural science, physical miracles 
 ^isolated, may also seem if they do occasionally occur to be 
 tcTbeTout n k I GSS remote from metaphysical philosophy than 
 
 fr m scientific physics. In philosophy what is sought 
 rationale ^ or au( ^ satisfies must involve something fixed, per- 
 faith 61Stie manen ^ eternal, absolute, final whether found at last 
 in the form of perfect comprehension, out of which 
 all mystery is eliminated, or of final faith, in which 
 we are moved to unconditional trust, notwithstanding 
 its necessary remainder of incomplete knowledge, which 
 men call " mystery." But philosophy turns away from 
 what is only transitory, what belongs only to particular 
 times and places, what has happened only in a certain 
 year, and locally only on some part of the globe, 
 especially something reported as long past, and so less 
 and less connected with the present as the years roll 
 
MIRACLE. 223 
 
 on, leaving past " miraculous " events at an ever in- 
 creasing distance. The wonderful phenomena reported 
 as having made their appearance in the ancient world, 
 which form the stock of what are regarded as physical 
 miracles, possess this character. If they are neither 
 outward events that are persistently, because naturally, 
 bound up with the cosmical system, nor experiences 
 of the spirit in man that are necessarily involved in 
 the active Reason that is immanent at once in man 
 and in the universe, they seem unfit for recognition 
 in philosophy, and to be unconnected philosophically 
 with the moral and filial faith which I have put 
 before you, as the reasonable attitude of man towards 
 the changing universe. 
 
 As past events that are only occasional, and that Must not 
 are supposed to be absolutely isolated so far as natural miracles, 
 causation is concerned, our information about miracles course of 
 may seem to be necessarily only external and empirical, ' 1S 
 dependent on a human testimony that is gradually be- 
 coming inaudible, and which in course of time must 
 prove a weakening tie, if indeed it does not altogether his * ri 
 
 myths? 
 
 disappear after the lapse of ages. David Hume argued 
 that miracles must be impossible to prove, so far as 
 evidence of their occurrence depends on history and 
 tradition, inasmuch as faith in human testimony can 
 never be so credible as the cosmic faith that every 
 event must have a natural cause : human experience of 
 the uniformity of the physical evolution is more credible 
 than any historic record of its non-uniformity can pos- 
 
224 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 sibly be : witnesses are found to be fallible, but the 
 course of nature is not found to be fallible ; and even if 
 an infallible witness could be produced, when he was 
 pitted against the infallible natural order, the contradic- 
 tion between the two infallibles, it was argued, could 
 only produce that sceptical paralysis of all faith, alike 
 in nature and in supernature, into which the thinker, 
 baffled by the absolutely contradictory, inevitably sub- 
 sides. But leaving out of account this ingenious philo- 
 sophical puzzle of David Hume, which exercised theo- 
 logical reasoners in a past generation ; and granting 
 that, within narrow limits of time, the occurrence of 
 an event that had no natural cause may be made 
 credible through history and tradition, can it remain 
 credible after the lapse of ages has left the reported 
 miracle at an almost invisible distance. Just now, the 
 records of mankind may make credible events that hap- 
 pened a few hundred, or even a few thousand years ago. 
 But what can be their credibility after man has existed 
 on the planet for hundreds of thousands of years ? 
 How must miracles look that are reported to have 
 occurred a million of years before ? Can events so 
 inconceivably remote be still available for strengthening 
 and enlightening theistic faith and hope ; and can there 
 then be any security for a faith and hope that is sup- 
 posed to depend wholly upon an event attested by this 
 unimaginably prolonged tradition, instead of upon the 
 cosmical system, the eternal necessities of reason, or the 
 development of the divine spirit latent in man ? 
 
MIRACLE. 225 
 
 The critical temper of the time might suggest other Even if 
 
 an event 
 
 obstacles to the philosophical recognition of events sup- which is 
 posed to enter into the continuous physical evolution a m i ra cie 
 
 miraculously, or unconditioned by any physical cause, 
 Not only is history a precarious vehicle for the con- 
 veyance of information about events, and increasingly 
 so through thousands and millions of years, but even that it does 
 
 J not admit 
 
 our five senses are found to deceive us with regard to of bein g 
 
 caused 
 
 present events : at least men often mistake their own naturally, 
 
 according 
 
 fallible interpretations of what they see for something to some un- 
 
 discovered 
 seen. The ignorant seek for wonders ; and, not re- physical 
 
 spending to the divine inspiration of "the prophets," 
 imagine that they would be persuaded if they saw a 
 man miraculously rise from the dead. Miracles are 
 commonly found in the early histories of religions. 
 But did the reporters really see what they supposed 
 they saw ? Prejudice in a human mind is apt to induce 
 interpretations of presented phenomena that are in 
 harmony with some sentiment that is dominant in 
 the spectator: subjective visual perceptions produced 
 by the dominant idea are readily mistaken for objec- 
 tive realities. The historic record of miracles is in this 
 way apt to be poisoned at its source. Events that 
 do not really occur are supposed to be perceived : 
 the fancied perception is only a misinterpretation of 
 what actually happened. Or if the event which is 
 assumed to be miraculous did actually happen, is there 
 sufficient ground in reason for the assumption that it 
 must have been an event divorced from every natural 
 
 p 
 
226 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 cause ? Is not this a presumptuous assumption, on the 
 part of human beings who have discovered a small 
 number only of the innumerable natural causes that 
 are gradually disclosing themselves, in the course of 
 what is perhaps unbeginning and unending natural 
 sequence ? Perhaps the supposed miracle may turn out, 
 after further experimental inquiry, to be only one of 
 the marvels of science, with its natural cause detected. 
 Man, in his victorious struggle with nature, may even 
 discover the means by which the " wonder " may be 
 converted into a sign of his own mechanical, or chem- 
 ical, or biological skill, when he is able to repeat the 
 " miracle " as an experiment under his own hand. For 
 what limits can be set to the progress of science in the 
 discovery of natural causes ? Already facts confirm 
 this anticipation. What in early times were supposed 
 miracles of healing are now produced by means familiar 
 to the scientific physician. The natural results of the 
 telegraph and the telephone are miracles when tried 
 by the standard of the physical knowledge of a former 
 age. Are we justified then in taking for granted that 
 the visible restoration of life after its dissolution in 
 physical death is an event absolutely beyond the ordin- 
 ary laws of natural causes in the universe ; or even 
 that men may not become able to employ natural 
 causes so as to introduce conscious life where there 
 was none before, or to restore it after it had ceased? 
 The sup- I have suggested some considerations which may 
 surdity of make men who have been educated in modern ideas of 
 
MIRACLE. 227 
 
 historical criticism, and of the physical interpretation any event 
 of nature by experiment, disposed dogmatically to titute of 
 assume the absurdity of all past and present miracle, 
 as if this were an axiom of reason ; and to treat all 
 reports and observations of events said to be destitute 
 of natural causes, as concerned with something foreign 
 to philosophy and science, and unworthy of atten- 
 tion according to common -sense. That whatever can 
 be reported with truth as having happened must be 
 capable of some sort of physical explanation is the 
 implied postulate. Does life actually appear where 
 there was none before ? This appearance, it would be 
 dogmatically taken for granted, must be an illusion, 
 unworthy of investigation ; or, if it cannot be thus 
 overlooked, let it be referred for its natural explanation 
 to experts of the Eoyal Society ; or let the report of 
 its occurrence be tested by legal experts accustomed 
 to test documentary evidence. That it is absolutely 
 inexplicable physically is the one hypothesis which 
 would be dismissed without being tested : though of 
 course many events that are physically explicable are 
 allowed to be, as yet if not always, inexplicable by 
 man, it is taken for granted that they might all be re- 
 ferred to their respective natural causes, in a true and 
 full interpretation of nature if not by men, yet by 
 beings of larger intelligence and more varied experi- 
 ence than man. 
 
 The prevailing disposition to see miracles only in 
 
228 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 But is not this light recalls the theistic interpretation of causa - 
 
 nature, as . 
 
 orderly, tion already explained. What is meant by " nature, 
 tiaiiymira- and what by the natural causation which a physical 
 miracle is supposed necessarily to supersede ? If 
 nature means only what is coextensive with the fin- 
 ally mysterious sphere of wholly impotent physical 
 causes, and if all physical events must be supernatur- 
 ally caused moral causation by persons being the only 
 sort of power of which man has rational assurance if 
 this be so, then the evolving universe itself is through- 
 out a constant miracle : we are all living, and moving, 
 and having our being in a possibly unbeginning and 
 unending order of cosmical changes that is absolutely 
 and finally trusted in, as alone the really miraculous 
 manifestation of the ever-active moral Eeason that is 
 perfect. Is there any way of finally conceiving the 
 universe of natural change that is so reasonable, and 
 so satisfying to man as he ought to be, as this is ? It 
 carries all natural causation, or physical interpreta- 
 bility of nature, back to the eternal moral or spiritual 
 Agent, the eternally active moral Power; all other 
 known causes in existence except individual persons, 
 who can make themselves bad being only meta- 
 phorically causes, really the passive subjects of special 
 methods of evolutional metamorphosis ? Can any par- 
 ticular physical miracle be so miraculous, one is ready 
 to say, as the miracle of the natural universe that is 
 continually present to our senses ? It loses its sense 
 of novelty, and ceases to inspire consciousness of its 
 
MIRACLE. 229 
 
 miraculousness, only on account of its commonness, and 
 because of the unreflecting prejudice that the discovery 
 of the physical cause of an event is the discovery that 
 God is not the agent in its visible outcome ; so that 
 each newly discovered physical cause seems to put 
 God further away from the world. A metaphorical 
 "power" within the natural cause is in this way made 
 to narrow the sphere of divine operation, so that, in the 
 event of a universal victory of natural science, divine 
 power would be superseded, and the universe regarded 
 at last under a wholly natural or non-theistic con- 
 ception, with our conception of the finally mysterious 
 physical past and future emptied of all moral or 
 filial trust. 
 
 But the physical universe may be called a constant And is not 
 miracle, producing uniform change, under a physi- versaimir- 
 cal order and adaptations which are the persistent V oived in 
 expression of active moral Eeason. Man at least can causation 1 
 
 recognise no other originative power than moral or 
 spiritual power. And as an illustration of omnipo- 
 tent goodness, is not active moral Reason, it may be 
 
 miracle 
 
 asked, more impressively manifested in the universal could be? 
 physical evolution, on which theistic faith and hope 
 puts the moral interpretation, than in any imaginable 
 occasional instances of special events, which are referred 
 to the immediate agency of the same Divine Reason, 
 in some inexplicably abnormal exercise of power ? Is 
 not the gradual evolution of the solar system a greater 
 miracle, if one may speak of degrees of the miraculous, 
 
230 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 than the reported arrest of the sun in the sight of 
 Israel upon Gibeon, or of the moon in the valley of 
 Ajalon ? Does not the gradual evolution of living or- 
 ganisms (man included) which the planets within the 
 solar system now contain, seem a miracle of greater 
 power than the return to human life, on one of those 
 planets, of an organism that was dead ? 
 
 Can physi- In theistic faith and hope, the physically conditioned 
 cies be universe called outward nature throughout presupposes 
 
 really more ,. ,, .,, 
 
 divine than pervading moral power, or morally responsible person- 
 events 1 1 - 7 ality, as the ground in reason for trust in the regular- 
 caiisation al ^J ^ ^s evolutions, and even for trust in our individual 
 self-consciousness. In other words, it presupposes a 
 constant miracle if miraculous power means power 
 that is morally free from physical nature, and that 
 does not itself admit of a natural antecedent as the 
 condition of its exercise. This Power is accordingly 
 the divine object of an absolute trust which excludes 
 the universal agnosticism that makes all interpretation 
 of nature baseless, with its mixture of despair. That 
 theistic faith must be weak which fails to see the im- 
 mediate action of God in all change that occurs under 
 the conditions of natural uniformity or physical law ; or 
 which looks for direct divine action only in " interfer- 
 ences " with physical law, or in the occurrence of events 
 that are not naturally caused. Whence then the sup- 
 position that divine power must be more at the root of 
 "special creation" and "miracle" than at the root of or- 
 dinary moral providence ; more really present in par- 
 
MIRACLE. 231 
 
 ticular providences than in the universal providence 
 which comprehends all particulars; or that there is 
 absolutely something more divine in preserving the 
 three men in the furnace than there is in fire when 
 it is naturally burning, or in rain when it is naturally 
 falling in the incarnation of God in the perfect Man 
 than in the incarnation of God in universal Nature ? 
 
 But a further question rises here. Must all events But even 
 that happen be naturally conditioned ? Do events in not more 
 all cases need to have physical causes ? Is the original doesTnot 
 and constant miracle of the universe in its natural the "moral 
 uniformities the only possible miracle ? Is it the only 
 miracle that is consistent with a theistic faith and order 
 
 hope that is perfectly reasonable ? Whether the u ** f be t d 
 original and constant miracle, by which the world is alw , a ys 
 
 under the 
 
 kept in its providential natural order, when measured conditions 
 
 of physical 
 
 only by the physical effect, is or is not a greater causation. 
 miracle than the arrest of the sun or moon in their 
 apparent courses, or than the resurrection to bodily life 
 of a person who was dead still may there not be 
 room, under a more comprehensive purpose than that 
 which is expressed in merely physical causation, for 
 an occasional occurrence of events that are not the 
 outcome of the divine action as conducted under con- 
 dition of visible causes, but in which the divine power 
 is unconditionally, or extra-naturally, operative ? The 
 divine maintenance of the whole visibly conditioned 
 evolution may be imagined a greater miracle than any 
 
232 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 one of the alleged extra-natural or miraculous mani- 
 festations. Notwithstanding, in a universe charged 
 throughout with relations of means and ends, or in 
 which every event is not only connected under natural 
 law with every other, but in which every event is a 
 means to what man may regard as a " designed " end, 
 and in which, at least when looked at from the human 
 point of view, the Whole seems to be supremely related 
 to the moral good of persons, including persons who 
 have made themselves bad in reasoning about a uni- 
 verse so constituted, must we assume, or are we at 
 liberty, with our weak intelligence and narrow ex- 
 perience, to assume, as an axiom, that the physically 
 conditioned activity of the Supreme Power or Divine 
 Spirit is the only sort of Divine activity that is 
 reasonable ? May there not be reasonable purpose 
 in what is technically called " miraculous " divine ac- 
 tivity, an activity that is either absolutely indepen- 
 dent of physical conditions, or at least that must 
 appear to man, with his limited knowledge of natural 
 causes, to be independent of such conditions ? 
 No a priori Probably man's experience and teleological concep- 
 absoiute tion of the Power finally at work in the universe is 
 bmty S of not adequate to determine whether physical events 
 miracles is ever niake their appearance thus independently of 
 under the physical laws, through the 4 physically unconditioned 
 m?n*s f a enc y f the moral Power assumed in theistic faith 
 of the ledge to k constantly operative in nature according to physi- 
 Powercon- ca i methods. If this be so, it seems to follow that the 
 
MIRACLE. 233 
 
 abstract impossibility of an occasional miraculous sus- thmaiiy 
 pension of the physically conditioned form of divine Nature. 
 activity cannot be proved, and that any alleged instance 
 of what looks like miracle is open to the tests of experi- 
 ence. It is true that if miraculous events must be 
 destitute of physical causes, their miraculousness can- 
 not be tested by those inductive methods which lead 
 up to the discovery of physical causes : for in that case 
 there is no physical cause of a miracle to be discovered. 
 But what obliges us to assume that even perfect know- 
 ledge of all the physical causes in existence, and of all 
 the physical aspects or relations of events, must con- 
 tain the only possible, or the highest, revelation of the 
 Universal Power ? May a physical miracle not be an 
 event in nature that finds its rational significance in its 
 moral relation to the persons in the universe, rather 
 than in its physical relation to the things in the 
 universe ? Especially if experience presents a world 
 of human persons, existing in the strange state of 
 bringing into existence what ought not to exist, and 
 what there is no a priori necessity for the existence 
 of, may not experience, in connection with this, present 
 extra-natural or miraculous events, evolving themselves 
 in really rational correlation with the abnormal activi- 
 ties of persons who have made themselves bad ? Is it 
 intellectually necessary to suppose that moral reason 
 makes the omnipotent Will less free from the pressure 
 of physical causation than men are, when they produce 
 acts of will for which they are morally responsible ? 
 
234 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 May the infinite moral Power that is presupposed in 
 theistic faith and hope, not rise above the physically 
 conditioned form of divine activity as well as man 
 does, who is found to do so, in a measure, in all 
 acts for which the man is morally responsible ? Is 
 the supreme Power more obliged in reason to act 
 only in ways that must admit of being expressed in 
 terms of natural causes, than men themselves are ? 
 Moral and immoral acts of men are in manner human 
 miracles : the moral agency of man is incompletely in- 
 terpretable physically. May there not be agency occa- 
 sionally manifested in nature, for a moral purpose, that 
 is in like manner uninterpretable in physical terms ? 
 Spinoza's Spinoza's argument for the absolute impossibility of 
 physical miracles may be taken as expressing in a 
 
 possibility philosophical way the common scientific difficulty. 
 tak2 r fo c r les The infinite system of God or Nature, it is by impli- 
 
 ca ti n argued, if it is divine, must be perfect. Its 
 (iiTe to* 6 occasional miraculous modification would imply its im- 
 caprice, perfection ; for what is in perfect harmony with reason 
 manifests- already does not admit of being mended, as it were 
 
 tions of * 
 
 unreason, by an after -thought. Miraculous suspension of the 
 perfect reason, perfectly expresssed in whatever is by 
 nature, must mean irrationality in natural law thus 
 dispensed with : it implies inconstancy or caprice, not 
 the absolute perfection in which there can be no 
 room for second or amended thoughts. What is 
 already perfect does not leave a place for repair by 
 occasional miracle. For God to act in nature extra- 
 
MIRACLE. 235 
 
 naturally is for God to put a slur upon nature and 
 natural causation ; and as Nature is really divine, 
 occasional miraculous action would be God or Nature 
 becoming imperfect or irrational. On Spinoza's pre- 
 misses, it would involve a contradiction or discredit 
 of Nature ; and no doubt discredit of the reason that 
 is in nature leads to universal scepticism. In other 
 words, to interpose occasional physical miracles in the 
 physical system would be to make it other than the 
 perfectly rational system which natural science pre- 
 supposes that it must be. And so we are asked, on 
 these premisses, to conclude that the miraculous 
 entrance into existence of any visible event, or of 
 any invisible inspired experience, of which no natural 
 account can be given, is absolutely impossible, and 
 not merely a physically uninterpretable fact. 
 
 This might perhaps be a sufficient argument, if the Does not 
 universe were a wholly natural or non-moral universe argument 
 
 if it consisted of non-moral things only, and not also, u 
 and this too in its highest known aspect, of good and conception 
 bad persons. Then the only sort of science possible ultimately 
 would be found in the sciences commonly called j 
 
 " natural," which search for the caused causes, or vers< : * hat 
 
 consists 
 
 natural signs, of events. It mi^ht be an argument, of persons 
 
 ' as well as 
 
 if men at their highest, according to the true ideal of things ? 
 man, were only conscious automata, who could have 
 no more than a physically scientific interest in them- 
 selves or in anything else if this were a world in the 
 experience of which man could have no final moral 
 
236 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 trust, and in which he could not be responsible for 
 what he was or did, because he could not, in any 
 degree, make or unmake his own character. But is 
 this the sort of universe in which man actually finds 
 himself ? Is this not a world in which men can and 
 do act immorally, and in which, accordingly, without 
 unreason, omnipotent goodness may be revealed in a 
 larger reason than that measured in terms of the causal 
 connections visible in nature, yet not inconsistent with 
 this natural evolution ? The existence of individual 
 persons, moral forces may make reasonable an un- 
 folding of divine Purpose larger than that which ap- 
 pears in physical causation measured by sensuous in- 
 telligence. It seems not inconsistent with reason that 
 physical order and method of procedure should not be 
 the only, or the highest, form which omnipotence re- 
 veals, and that, in the final rationale of the universe, 
 the customary order of events should have a subordinate 
 place, in an incompletely understood yet intellectually 
 possible harmony. 
 
 The king- At any rate miraculous events cannot be irregular 
 Nature and events, if " irregular " means irrational. So far as it is 
 orof ace> really divine revelation, miracle must be the rnani- 
 fetation of what is reasonable, in the highest meaning 
 of intellectual and moral reason. But it does not fol- 
 low that all that happens must be finally referable 
 to the physical system of natural causes ; or that this 
 system is itself not subordinate to, yet capable of 
 
MIRACLE. 237 
 
 harmonious assimilation with, the perfect divine ideal. 
 There may be no physically natural law of miracles, 
 and yet there may be divine reason for and in 
 miracles ; whether that rational order is or is not 
 fully discoverable by man, either in science or in 
 philosophical theology. " I hold," says Leibniz, " that 
 when God works miracles He does it not in order to 
 supply the wants of nature, but those of grace; and 
 whoever thinks otherwise must have a very mean 
 notion of the wisdom and power of God." Miracles 
 are in that case divine or rational acts, proper to a 
 universe that includes persons under moral relations ; 
 while they would be out of place in a universe of 
 things wholly under physical or mechanical relations. 
 
 If God is miraculously as well as naturally reveal- Their bar- 
 able, and if the natural is finally involved in, or con- relations 
 tinuous with, the supernatural revelation so that, at p< 
 the supreme point of view, perfect intelligence might 
 pass in rational order from the lower or less compre- 
 hensive to the higher or more fully rational from 
 the realm of Nature to the realm of Grace, as Leibniz 
 puts it then the superficial antithesis of nature and 
 supernatural would disappear. And under the limita- 
 tion of human intelligence, the moral response which 
 a deeper and more comprehensive, so-called miraculous, 
 revelation receives from the spiritual constitution of 
 man might be a sufficient reason for assimilating it 
 too, in a thus deepened theistic faith ; provided that 
 this assimilation is not hindered by its demonstrable 
 
238 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 inconsistency with perfect reasonableness. All the more 
 if it can be shown that the fuller revelation evokes a 
 fuller and more intelligible outcome of theistic faith, 
 and is therefore more obviously reasonable than the 
 attenuated revelation of God presented in the cus- 
 tomary natural order. 
 
 That Chris- But if, in the progressive development of the human 
 should be mind, man's conceptions of what is natural could be- 
 come so enlarged as that the whole Christian revelation 
 f God should be seen to be a development of the ordin- 
 ar y course o f na ture theistic faith, the most deeply 
 Christian, would then be discovered to be the most 
 natural religion of all, but surely would not on that 
 account be undivine. It would rather be seen as the 
 culmination of the normal self-manifestation of God to 
 men, instead of being mysterious and abnormal, and 
 needing to be sustained in theistic faith by something 
 more in man than his sensuous power of interpret- 
 ing the universe. In the deeper and wider meaning 
 of " natural," all revelation of God must be in rational 
 harmony with what is absolutely or finally natural ; 
 otherwise it could not be thought or reasoned about 
 at all. For thought or reasoning, so far as applicable, 
 implies rational connection in whatever is thought or 
 reasoned about if not under physical laws of depen- 
 dent physical causes, yet under teleological relations 
 of means and end, or of yet higher categories in the 
 intellectual system of the universe. The legitimate 
 idea of a miracle is found in its teleological reason. 
 
MIRACLE. 239 
 
 Ordered progress and miracle as in last lecture and A co- 
 
 n -i mi n ordinate 
 
 in this are these conflicting ideas ? Iheir conflict deepening 
 is said to explain the sceptical sadness regarding theideas 
 the final question for man which has diffused itself 
 in this nineteenth century in Europe and over the 
 civilised world. But may not an honestly agnostic 
 spirit illustrate in this instance how critical negation is 
 
 miracul- 
 
 really a factor in the progressive movement towards a ousnessof 
 
 J the Uni- 
 
 larger and deeper affirmative faith 1 For is not the verse, 
 nineteenth century, in consequence of this negative 
 criticism, closing with a profounder sense than the 
 world has before reached, at once of the universality 
 of physical law, and of the miraculousness of the root 
 of all law in nature ? May we not begin to see that 
 the final presupposition of perfect moral Power at 
 the centre of things and persons is not subversion of 
 physical order, but rather its construction on a deeper 
 foundation ? Visible nature then appears no longer 
 on the hollow final foundation of a supposed wholly 
 physical uniformity. Beneath this otherwise uncer- 
 tain ground in things, it is further interpretable as 
 the constant revelation of perfect moral reason 
 providential procedure having for its chief end the 
 intellectual and spiritual education of persons, accord- 
 ing to an order that is in the last conception of it 
 moral or divine the temporal process being the 
 school of God, for the education and trial of the 
 spirit in man. 
 
240 
 
 LECTURE X. 
 
 THE MYSTERY OF DEATH: DESTINY OF MEN. 
 
 Phiioso- PHILOSOPHY, according to Plato, is meditation upon 
 
 phical 
 
 meditation death. This is the voice or poets and thinkers outside 
 Death. Christendom and within Christendom. That the ex- 
 pectation of death makes human life miserable, and 
 that this misery may be removed by the philosophy 
 which sees the peace of eternal sleep in the dissolu- 
 tion of the body, is the key-note of the most sublime 
 poem in Ptoman literature. The meaning of human life 
 and the destiny of men has attracted contemplative 
 thought in the generations of mankind which have 
 passed one after another into the darkness, asking 
 whence they have come, and whither they are going ? 
 The books which record human conjectures about the 
 secret kept by death might form a large library. 
 They belong to ancient, medieval, and modern times, 
 in all countries and races that have produced books. 
 Not the least interesting to some of us is the " Cypress 
 
THE MYSTERY OF DEATH. 241 
 
 Grove " of our countryman William Drummond, the 
 pensive poet of Hawthornden, in which this passing 
 world is conceived as a show-room, where it is un- 
 reasonable to wish to continue, after one has looked 
 at it, with the vision of a reality that waits for him 
 when by his departure he has made a place for suc- 
 ceeding spectators. The meditative tenderness of 
 Wordsworth's "Essay upon Epitaphs" presents the 
 subject in another aspect, taken again at a higher 
 point in his " Ode on Intimations of Immortality." 
 Moral faith in Death, tempered by modern doubt, is 
 the prevailing note of Tennyson in " In Memoriam." 
 Isaac Taylor's ' Theory of Another Life ' is an in- 
 genious exercise of physical imagination for the sup- 
 port of faith in what is apt to be distrusted or dis- 
 regarded as absolutely unimaginable. 
 
 Death is concerned with the problem of the universe The final 
 more immediately in one of its three presupposed exist- the uni- 
 ences namely, the individual person as distinguished reality, 
 from visible things and from the invisible God. Am ^ ^ e a e< 
 I after all really a third existence that is finally dis- 
 tinguishable from outward things and from God ? Or, 
 on the contrary, am I only a transitory phase of what 
 is really One Substance, called indifferently Matter or 
 Nature or God. Am I so mixed up with the material 
 world, in which I find myself now incarnated, that I 
 must share the fate of my visible organism, and cease 
 for ever to be personally conscious as soon as I have 
 ceased at death to be visibly incarnate ? The sensible 
 
242 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 world, of which through my bodily organism I am 
 now a part, is the subject of constant metamorphoses. 
 Is my conscious self, after all, not a third sort of 
 existence, but only one of the many metamorphoses 
 into which ever-changing Being under certain condi- 
 tions naturally resolves itself? But how can I be 
 only this, if I find myself uniquely distinguished by 
 a persistent identity through all past changes of con- 
 scious life, in the experience of memory ; identity to 
 which I find nothing corresponding in the changing 
 phenomena that are presented to the senses. Our 
 bodies and all outward things are in a constant flux : 
 the words " sameness " or " identity " apply to out- 
 ward things metaphorically only, as compared with 
 the application of those words to our self-conscious 
 personality. The person of yesterday, or of half a 
 century ago, is connected with the person of to-day, 
 in a way that is different in kind from that in which 
 our bodies, or surrounding things, are connected with 
 our bodies and their surroundings of yesterday or of 
 half a century ago. After a faint, or a dreamless 
 sleep, we are still obliged to connect the self before 
 these intervals of unconsciousness with the self of 
 which we are conscious when we awake, as one and 
 the same individual person. It is one of the condi- 
 tions of mental sanity that man should practically 
 recognise this unique sameness or persistency. It is 
 not one of the conditions of sanity there should be 
 recognition of like sameness in the individual things 
 
THE MYSTERY OF DEATH. 243 
 
 that are presented to our senses. Further, we are 
 obliged to believe that self-conscious persons, in ad- 
 dition to this imperfectly comprehensible difference 
 between themselves and unconscious things, have a 
 self-centred power of making and keeping themselves 
 good or bad, of which one finds no trace in visible 
 things. 
 
 Here the gravest of human questions rises. What Does the 
 in reason should men believe about the relation of this 
 persistent conscious person this one subject of ever- 
 changing pains and pleasures this creator of innumer- conscious 6 
 able good or evil acts to the dissolution by death of cj 1 
 
 the visible organism, through which he now finds him- th . e f. is " 
 
 solution of 
 
 self naturally connected with the world of sensible his body? 
 things outside ? Is the continuous moral identity of 
 the self-conscious person also transitory, so that at 
 death, like the bodily organism on which his conscious 
 life now depends, the hitherto continuous self -con- 
 sciousness finally ceases, and resolves itself into un- 
 conscious elements ? Do persons cease for ever to be 
 conscious when they finally cease to signify visibly 
 their conscious activity to other persons ? for cessa- 
 tion of manifested personal activity is of course the 
 consequence of the disintegration by death of the 
 visible organism, through which the otherwise invisible 
 conscious life and history of one person is more or 
 less signified to another person. On this planet alone 
 one finds hundreds of millions of conscious persons in 
 each generation signifying to one another their in- 
 
244 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 visible conscious life some of them showing signs 
 only for a few hours, a few it may be for a hundred 
 years after which each organism dissolves, and there 
 is no more any sensible sign of continued consciousness. 
 The But are there not facts, which each living person 
 
 uniqueness . ... , , . . 
 
 of the in- may recognise, which suggest that this conscious per- 
 
 conscious son, morally responsible for states into which he puts 
 
 FncOTtrast himself, and for states into which he brings others, 
 
 perennial ma 7 noi ^ e so involved in the flux of visible things 
 
 change in ag fo^ fo e dissolution of his body in death must 
 
 the world. 
 
 mean the final cessation of his self-conscious life ? Is 
 there not, as already suggested, something absolutely 
 unique in the invisible self-conscious personality ? Do 
 we not recognise that individual persons are under 
 spiritual relations, as well as under physical relations, 
 and that, by their individual personality, they are dis- 
 tinguished both from the reality implied in theistic 
 faith and from things presented to sense ? Can we, 
 with due regard to reason, think of morally respon- 
 sible persons and of non - moral things as alike in 
 their destiny, save and except the unique rational 
 consciousness, continuous identity, and moral respon- 
 sibility, which persons possess during an ephemeral 
 embodied existence ? Must we say that men and 
 brutes are at last alike in what befalls them ? " As 
 the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all 
 one breath; so that a man hath no pre-eminence 
 above a beast; for all is vanity. All go unto one 
 place : all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again." 
 
THE MYSTERY OF DEATH. 245 
 
 On the contrary, does theistic faith and hope in the 
 light of which we seem to find a humanly related 
 interpretation of the universe that assimilates the 
 merely physical or non-moral one does this final 
 moral trust justify us in prevision, not only of some 
 future events in this life that comes before death, 
 but also of persistent personal consciousness after the 
 dissolution of our bodies ? Without implied moral 
 faith in the absolute trustworthiness of the universe, 
 we have no reasonable assurance about anything that 
 is future: what we regard as our most reasonable 
 anticipations may all be put to confusion: we cannot 
 even count on order in nature. It is in a moral trust 
 in the worth of the Power finally at work on the 
 universe that we all live now. Does this funda- 
 mental faith also involve reasonable hope that phy- 
 sical death will not make an end of personal life, 
 and that something more manifestly divine than the 
 present strangely mixed world may be expected by 
 conscious persons ? Our bodies are not our unique in- 
 visible personality : they are this revealed to the senses. 
 
 It is a question whether an atheist can reasonably Can 
 believe in a person's life after physical death ? I would reasonably 
 put a previous question, Whether atheists, with their personal 11 
 
 unreason at the root of All, can consistently have faith 
 in any future event, either before or after death ? For death ? 
 faith in God is faith in universally active moral reason 
 or love as the moving life of the universe, and apart 
 from this moral trustworthiness the previsions of science, 
 
246 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 and the expectations of common- life, have no reliable 
 reason. What is called scientific verification presup- 
 poses the existence of analogies in nature, and the 
 reasonableness of reposing trust in natural analogies, 
 according to a postulated uniformity in nature. The 
 logical atheist, who virtually rejects this innate trust- 
 worthy reasonableness or interpretability of things, is 
 incapable of intelligent prevision ; for, at his point of 
 view, the universe may become physically chaotic, and 
 all unfit to be reasoned about or otherwise dealt with. 
 An atheistic universe has no root in ethical reason. 
 All after the present moment may become an experi- 
 ence in which all persons become finally miserable. 
 Physical death would then be naturally welcomed, as a 
 change which should for ever withdraw the conscious 
 person from endless physical and moral chaos. Fear 
 of the incalculable possibilities of the future would 
 make final cessation of conscious life seem the sup- 
 reme hope, in the nothingness in which alone relief is 
 assured. It was in order to awaken among men this 
 hope that Lucretius recommended a finally anarchic 
 conception of the universe. But under a still more 
 intrepid agnosticism, the negative hope of endless un- 
 consciousness is as little to be depended on for its 
 reasonableness as any other expectation about the 
 future, in an untrustworthy universe. Absolutely reli- 
 able expectation is essentially theistic, because theism 
 is just the principle of finally operative moral reason- 
 ableness or goodness. 
 
THE MYSTERY OF DEATH. 247 
 
 The infinite interest of the final question about this The reia- 
 ife of change in which conscious persons actually find pre visive 
 hemselves disappears, on the hypothesis that the per- theistic 
 ons after an interval of, it may be, a few hours trust? 
 >r a hundred years of life on this planet all dissolve 
 inally, and become unconscious things. Living habi- 
 .ually under this pathetic conception, men subside into 
 lopelessness if they are thoughtful, or into wholly 
 .ecular indifference if, like the majority, they are un- 
 eflecting. It may be true that theistic faith is indis- 
 reusable for hopeful, or even for expectant, life, during 
 .he continuance of the bodily organism, in its natural 
 ;tate of continuous change of its constitutive atoms; 
 md it may also be true that the idea of eternal 
 noral obligation equally remains, whether persons 
 ;xist, morally obliged to be good, only during the 
 nterval between birth and death or for a longer time. 
 3n the other hand, the moral or theistic conception 
 )f the universe takes its sublime interest for persons 
 n and through their faith that they are themselves 
 lestined to continue in conscious connection with the 
 ealities during more than the short life that now 
 lepends on the mortal body. And this continuance 
 seems foreshadowed by man's possessing ideas of the 
 eternal and infinite, and by his moral power of making 
 nimself bad or good, of living during the embodied 
 .nterval either in harmony or not with his true ideal, 
 iven under a distribution of happiness that often seems 
 iapricious. Must this intellectual and moral agent be 
 
248 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 annihilated, only because the visible organism through 
 which his conscious life is now signified to other 
 persons disintegrates ? 
 Suggested But while all expectation is essentially faith, and 
 
 natural 
 
 analogies all reasonable and hopeful expectation is essentially 
 tinuance theistic faith, there is an obvious difference between 
 afteVphy- physical prevision of the temporal future within this 
 ancUheir h ' rationally organised world, and a prevision of the per- 
 fidency. sistent life of the unique self-conscious person, after the 
 visible dissolution of the organism through which the 
 person now reveals himself to other persons, and lives 
 incarnate in his place and time. If the conscious and 
 continuous individual ego is a unique sort of being in 
 the universe, the death and disappearance of the organ- 
 ism, in and through which personal life is manifested, 
 is also a unique fact, in the sense that no adequate 
 analogy to death can be found within the experience 
 of any living person. No doubt the life of human 
 persons has persisted through several critical changes : 
 all animal life illustrates this. Life in the womb 
 and life after birth ; life with the body entire, and 
 life after the body has been deprived by accident 
 or by surgical operation of important organs these 
 are familiar physical changes, after which the per- 
 sonal consciousness is still found persisting continu- 
 ously. In a dreamless sleep, or in a swoon, the 
 continuity of conscious life seems to be interrupted. 
 "Sleep," says Sir Thomas More, "is the brother of 
 death, in which we seem to die without really dying." 
 
THE MYSTERY OF DEATH. 249 
 
 With Shakespeare sleep is the " death of each day's 
 life," and " all our little lives are rounded with a 
 sleep." But in all this sufficient analogy with death 
 Anting : the persistency of the person is here 
 actually verified: the broken consciousness returns in 
 continuity with the past: memory can cross the in- 
 terval of this temporary death as if it had never 
 occurred: moreover, the organism of the person was 
 undissolved, instead of sharing in the unconsciousness 
 of sleep by a corresponding disappearance, in tem- 
 porary analogy with the dissolution of the body in 
 death. (That memory can now bridge over intervals 
 of unconsciousness in sleep may, however, suggest the 
 possibility of a personal life before birth, the memory 
 of which may, in this life, be latent, but ready to be 
 revived in a posthumous life, under more favourable 
 conditions for revival) The suggested analogies of 
 animal transformations the caterpillar transformed 
 int'.t the butterfly, for instance are all inadequate, 
 when compared with the visible consequences of death. 
 
 The probable effect of physical death, and of the dis- Unique- 
 
 . . , . , . ness of the 
 
 appearance of a person s physical organism upon his self- phenome- 
 conscious and percipient life, can hardly be determined physical 
 
 by facts like these. For the problem which the final j 
 dissolution of the human body presents is absolutely 
 singular in several ways. Persons still living cannot 
 settle it by experiment, as they can determine by f ? t 
 experiment the outcome of a dreamless sleep; for in f?^ 5 ^* 1 
 order to do this they would need to die, and then their only 
 
250 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 natural have personal experience of the issue of death. Nor 
 communi- can the enigma be solved by communication with 
 person 1 persons who have died, inasmuch as the effect of 
 
 . is to withdraw the means of communication 
 
 between the living and the dead. The issue of death 
 is not physically communicated by the dead ; and of 
 course no living person has made the experiment, so 
 as to be independent of the now withdrawn physical 
 means of communication with persons who have died. 
 If faith in the continued consciousness of persons 
 after their death must depend upon either of these 
 two means of forecast, it may be said to have no 
 support in familiar evidence. 
 
 Faith iii Yet it does not necessarily follow that the hope that 
 sistenceof physical death is not the final end of individual per- 
 conscious- sons i s a baseless expectation. !STo doubt the case 
 death is* ^ s n0 ^ sufficiently analogous to physical prevision, as 
 not on that illustrated in the theistically sustained expectations 
 
 account 
 
 necessarily either of common life or of natural science ; for its 
 
 baseless. 
 
 very singularity lies in this that the physical 
 medium of verification is naturally dissolved in death. 
 But to assume, without further proof, that the invisible 
 conscious person is so dependent for his conscious 
 and continuous life upon an organism that his self- 
 consciousness must cease when the organism dissolves, 
 is to beg the question we are meditating about in a 
 very palpable manner. The question is, whether the 
 visible dissolution signifies the invisible dissolution; 
 and it will not serve the interest of reason to assume 
 
THE MYSTERY OF DEATH. 251 
 
 without permitting any questioning, or any other 
 mode of determining the probabilities of the case than 
 the physically scientific that this must be so. 
 
 For one thing we find a widespread faith, in all ages, it is, m 
 and among various nations and races of mankind, that able forms 
 human persons somehow survive the physical crisis of 
 organic dissolution. The more articulate conception of 
 what follows death doubtless differs widely in the tradi- 
 tions and religions of mankind. But while there has 
 usually been a sceptical minority, the mass of man- 
 kind, in the ancient, medieval, and modern world in 
 the East and in the West, in Egypt, Persia, India, 
 Greece, and Rome, Jews, Mohammedans, Christians 
 spontaneously entertain the unique and sublime faith 
 that persons persist after death, whether in a lower 
 and more attenuated, or in a nobler personal existence 
 than that consciously experienced before they died 
 physically. Their faith in most cases also implies that 
 the continued existence is not wholly unembodied, but 
 that the person retains, or gains, after death, some in- 
 tangible ghostly form of embodiment; or else, after 
 an interval of unembodiment, recovers physical rela- 
 tions in some worthier form a " body spiritual " 
 instead of the present natural body. That there is 
 a spiritual body after the natural body is involved 
 in the theistic faith of Christians. 
 
 That the genuine common faith of mankind is to Thepre- 
 
 . sumed 
 
 be presumed trustworthy is a postulate on which all divinity or 
 
 , . . ... absolute 
 
 natural science tacitly rests, in all the previsive in- rationality 
 
252 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 of genuine ferences by which the sciences are built up. Scientific 
 
 common . _ _ 
 
 faith. verification, as I have throughout argued, is finally 
 theistic faith. One is said to have got it scientifically 
 verified, that the sun will rise to-morrow ; but till the 
 sun shall have actually risen the assertion only ex- 
 presses a faith. All expectation, scientific or common, 
 is so far a leap in the dark ; for it is taken without 
 the light of sense. The expected event has not the 
 proof afforded by actual perception, till the event 
 has actually happened. If sense is our only light, it 
 follows that we must remain in the darkness of doubt 
 about every future event : all expectation must be 
 unreasonable. To be consistent in insisting upon that 
 only being reasonable into which no ingredient of 
 faith enters, we must cease to live ; for life depends 
 upon the reasonableness of expectation. Expectation 
 involves faith in the reasonableness of the universe; 
 and the reasonableness or moral reliability of the 
 Universal Power implies that men will not be finally 
 put to confusion by submission to an indispensable 
 faith. If they could, the universe of reality must be 
 essentially deceptive illusion, and therefore undivine. 
 AH scien- The widespread faith in personal persistence, through 
 sion, P as 6V1 and after physical death, may be incapable of experi- 
 expecta- * mental verification to those who have not died. But 
 common * s ^ ^ ess irrational to resist it, merely on the ground 
 even 'mem- ^at ^ ^ s on ^ unverified faith and not actual sight, 
 voTve^aith than it would be to resist the still unfulfilled expectation 
 in what is that the sun will rise to-morrow, or be eclipsed the day 
 
THE MYSTERY OF DEATH. 253 
 
 after, merely on the ground that this too is as yet only unseen 
 faith and not sight? For no one can to-day see the 
 sun rising to-morrow, or its eclipse the day after. The 
 expectation is rested on reasonable faith or trust, 
 which the course of events has not yet confirmed by 
 the actual occurrence of the event believed in. Actual 
 sense, in short, is a wholly inadequate measure of what 
 it is necessary in reason to believe, and so of what 
 it is unreasonable, and therefore unphilosophical, to 
 disbelieve. 
 
 It must be granted that there is sufficient reason May there 
 for the faith implied in ordinary expectations of nat- 
 
 ural events ; notwithstanding that it is only faith, or "xpecta- 
 rather reason in its final human form of moral faith. s^nife*" 
 To refuse this would be to reduce human reason to solution of 
 
 narrow dimensions indeed, or rather to extinguish it ^ e P erson - 
 
 ai organ- 
 
 altogether. But a confinement of reason which ex- ism > 
 
 equally 
 
 eludes, as necessarily irrational, the widespread ex- as in scien- 
 
 tific previ- 
 pectation that personal consciousness will persist after sion of 
 
 the future ? 
 
 its present connection with its visible organism has 
 been dissolved by death, may be due to dogmatic 
 narrowness of mind. It may be neglect to recognise, 
 not only that actual sense is not the measure of 
 reasonable judgments about physical nature, but also 
 that reasonable faith in physical nature is not the 
 measure of reasonable faith regarding the destiny 
 not of things but of unique self-conscious and mor- 
 ally responsible persons. May there not be more in 
 earth and heaven than is recognised in wholly physi- 
 
254 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 cal philosophy ? If so, this wholly physical must be 
 unphilosophical philosophy. 
 
 is this Look a little further into the larger faith or reason. 
 
 Isrfifcr 
 
 expectant It may be measured by physical, or metaphysical, or 
 
 found moral criteria. Of these three tests one or more may 
 
 reasonable, ^ e inadequate, as regards this unique sort of future 
 
 e^byphy"- event > an d yet satisfaction may be found in what re- 
 
 mete'physi- mams - Or ^ satisfaction is still wanting, it may be 
 
 cal, or because there is not unanimity about what premisses 
 
 criteria? are legitimate physical tests alone being recognised as 
 
 reasonable by the sceptic. None of the criteria need 
 
 admit as reasonable the crude materialistic fancies so 
 
 largely mixed up with the idea that the evanescent 
 
 embodied personal life does not exhaust the individual 
 
 personality. 
 
 An exclu- The physical presumption that self-conscious personal 
 
 sively phy- 
 
 sical con- life finally ceases, when it ceases to manifest its con- 
 
 ception of 
 
 death, as tmuance, in consequence of the withdrawal by death 
 
 presented of the manifesting medium, seems strong, so that if 
 
 dissolution trust in its continuance is wholly dependent on what 
 
 organism, we see > or on what can be inferred merely from what 
 
 r s S 'no * s seen ' ^ e ^ ea ^ personal persistence looks baseless 
 
 T foTex ect anc ^ ill usorv a widespread human delusion and ana- 
 ? 7 " chronism, which may be expected to disappear with 
 
 invisible the gradual increase of human intelligence and cul- 
 
 person. 
 
 ture. A generation in which leading men are physi- 
 cally scientific in their habits of reasoning is therefore 
 
THE MYSTERY OF DEATH. 255 
 
 naturally sceptical about what cannot be tested by 
 visible experiments, distrustful of metaphysical pos- 
 tulates, and of the moral faith on which their physi- 
 cal faith itself, perhaps unconsciously to themselves, 
 virtually depends. If one dogmatically assumes that 
 all questions of fact, whether about visible things or 
 invisible self - conscious persons, must be decided by 
 physical arguments only, and that all hyper-physical 
 arguments must be abstract and therefore wholly 
 hypothetical, the issue of the death of persons is of 
 course removed from the list of reasonable questions, 
 along with the removal of the only element in it that 
 is physical and perceptible to the senses the visible 
 and tangible organism. Only, as I have said, the same 
 dogmatic assumption is bound to remove, along with 
 this question, all scientific questions together ; for they 
 all at last depend upon a faith that is hyper-physical. 
 Unless we hyper -physically assume the rationality 
 and trustworthiness of external nature, external nature 
 must remain scientifically uninterpretable, beyond the 
 momentary datum of actual sense, which datum per 
 se is meaningless. 
 
 But let us look further into some of the physical Physical 
 
 , .-v, n . , difficulties 
 
 difficulties that lie in the way of faith in a posthu- that beset 
 
 mous conscious persistence of the individual and in- 
 visible person. For one thing, human experience of sonaicon- 
 the present relation between the organism and the in- ^Mch^re' 
 visible conscious life is, that changes in the one are apt to m " 
 
256 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 duceitsde- found in a constant corresponding connection with 
 
 cay, in a . 
 
 physically changes in the other : the ordinary course of experi- 
 age like the mental inference would, accordingly, lead to the con- 
 clusion, that greater changes in the body must, under 
 physical law, be followed by correspondingly greater 
 changes in the self - conscious personality ; and that 
 the total dissolution of the body must involve the 
 final dissolution of the continuous and invisible per- 
 sonal life that has been made manifest to other 
 persons only in and through the body. Again, an 
 entire separation of the personal consciousness from the 
 organised matter in which it is involved in its present 
 life is physically unimaginable. When the sensuous 
 imagination tries to realise what a self-conscious life 
 must be, after it has ceased to be incarnate, the 
 alteration must be recognised as infinitely more mys- 
 terious than any supposable change of locality or 
 date which an embodied spirit could pass through 
 in this material world. To be transported in the 
 body into one of the neighbouring planets in our 
 solar system, still more into one of the immeasurably 
 remote stellar systems, would indeed be an appal- 
 ling prospect ; but it would not be a prospect of 
 life out of all embodied connection with the material 
 world spaceless, timeless, as it must seem to be; 
 and solitary too, the dissolution of the only known 
 medium of communication between persons. Timeless 
 and spaceless, I have said; for without perception of 
 motion in space, what conceivable measure of duration 
 
THE MYSTERY OF DEATH. 257 
 
 remains; without that reliable measure of duration 
 which the periodic movements of the planets now 
 supply, it would seem that any distinct idea of dura- 
 tion must disappear, leaving the person practically in 
 a placeless and timeless life. Memory, too, in a mind 
 thus emptied of the idea of time, is confronted not only 
 by this obstacle, but by the difficulty of recollecting 
 a continuous personal history spread over millions of 
 years; not to speak of a supposed endlessness, which 
 raises an absolutely inconceivable issue. Language, too, 
 or sensible symbol, is now not only the medium of 
 communication between persons, but also an indis- 
 pensable condition of solitary thought. Language is 
 an aggregate of visible or audible signs, which needs 
 continued relation of the invisible personal conscious- 
 ness with the sensible world. The total and final 
 dissolution of this connection seems to involve a 
 withdrawal of an indispensable instrument of intel- 
 ligent life, without which all living thought must dis- 
 solve. The only self-conscious life of which persons 
 on earth have any example, is embodied conscious 
 life. And the commonly assumed unconsciousness or 
 non-existence of persons before the gradual organisa- 
 tion of their bodies at birth seems to be in physical 
 analogy with the assumption of their unconsciousness 
 after this organisation is seen to dissolve finally in 
 physical death. Then too the merely sensuous im- 
 agination sometimes works in another way. An ex- 
 clusive attention to the visible and tangible phenomena 
 
258 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 of things makes the invisible and intangible realities of 
 self-conscious personality look like empty abstractions : 
 so it is assumed that if the conscious spirit persists, 
 after the death of its present visible organism, it must 
 be in and through an organism subject to conditions 
 of place and time too like those with which we are 
 familiar. And this restricted conception of future 
 possibilities gives rise to the physical difficulty of an 
 overcrowded material universe, in which, in the in- 
 finite future, with its endless accumulation of personal 
 organisms, room cannot be found, in planetary homes, 
 for the overwhelming -number of persons. As they 
 may be supposed to be accumulating in thousands of 
 millions in connection with every star or planet, the 
 accumulation must issue in a lack of places to hold 
 the organisms. 
 
 The inade- These are illustrations of perplexities of the wholly 
 physical physical or sensuous imagination, when it is dealing 
 for per 6 - 11 S with a question that is necessarily foreign to the 
 after ^ course of nature, as the course of nature comes within 
 death. ^e experience of persons not yet dead. Sceptical 
 silence seems the appropriate mental attitude, on this 
 question, of those who suppose that faithfulness to 
 truth makes it necessary to reject all but physical 
 criteria and sensuous imagination for the determina- 
 tion of concrete questions. They ask with reason 
 what physical analogies, presented in the ordinary 
 course of nature in the present life, can prove the 
 reality of a state of life which no one now can con- 
 
THE MYSTERY OF DEATH. 259 
 
 ceive, or is able to verify by natural experiments; 
 which is absolutely abstracted from all that is physical, 
 and which can in no way resemble anything that has 
 been or can now be perceived by human beings. Who 
 can rest upon premisses of ordinary experience an in- 
 ference so absolutely singular, regarding the invisible 
 destiny of conscious persons, who thus far find them- 
 selves always incarnate ? 
 
 But if continuous personal life after physical death Metaphy- 
 seems incapable of analogical proof through the senses, meatsSiow 
 perhaps it can be shown, nevertheless, to be metaphys- stract pos- 
 ically necessary. A supposed abstract impossibility of rathe/than 
 the final extinction of any self-conscious entity has fiJt )0 f self- 
 been sometimes offered as a hyper-physical reason for 
 the persistence of conscious personality, notwithstand- 
 ing the death of the body. But this abstraction can 
 hardly be accepted as a legitimate foundation for a 
 conclusion about a matter of fact; although it may 
 suggest need for so unique a fact as this of personal 
 life being treated differently from all facts in the uni- 
 verse that are presentable to the senses. The dogma 
 of the natural immortality or deathlessness (variously 
 defined) of the self-conscious principle is another form 
 of metaphysical postulate. This " natural immortality " 
 need not mean that the conscious person cannot be 
 finally reduced to nothingness by the Omnipotent 
 Power, but only that continuous personal existence 
 is not found to be so conditioned by the mechanical 
 
260 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 laws of motion, to which the constituent atoms of 
 the body are subject, as that the bodily disintegration 
 naturally involves its cessation. " Nothing can be 
 plainer," we are told, "than that the changes, decays, 
 and dissolutions which we are continually seeing in 
 natural bodies cannot possibly affect the active, simple, 
 invisible substance of which we are conscious : such a 
 being is indissoluble by the force of external nature : 
 that is to say, it is naturally immortal." Bishop 
 Butler seems to argue that presumption of death being 
 the destruction of persons must go upon the supposi- 
 tion that they are composed of atoms, and so capable 
 of being dissolved. Eeferring to the fact that each 
 human person is now an embodied person, he even 
 argues that, upon the supposition that what each man 
 calls himself is truly a single being, incapable of being 
 classed with physical things, which are all aggregates 
 of molecules, it follows that " what we call our bodies 
 are no more ourselves, or part of ourselves, than any 
 other matter around them." It is, abstractly speaking, 
 as easy to suppose that we can exist without bodies 
 as with them; or that we may after death animate 
 other bodies as that we animate our present ones now : 
 the deaths of our successive bodies may have no more 
 tendency to annihilate the continuous personal con- 
 sciousness than the dissolution of any material object 
 outside our bodies has. It is in this way easy at least 
 to imagine the invisible personal consciousness going 
 on, uninterrupted by the physical dissolution, nay, even 
 
THE MYSTERY OF DEATH. 261 
 
 having all its present sensible experiences, without the 
 intervention of what we call " our bodies." It is pos- 
 sible to suppose a living perception of colours without 
 the percipient possessing eyes, and of sounds without 
 ears ; for seeing and hearing are invisible states of liv- 
 ing consciousness, which may be conceived as going on 
 independently of an organisation of " living matter." 
 
 Yet these are only abstract speculations. They tend They fail to 
 to show the abstract possibility of much that transcends the scepti- 
 physical imagination and sensuous experience ; but sumption 
 they are too remote from ascertained matter of fact by S fhe e 
 to overcome the sceptical presumption to which the appearance 
 visible dissolution of the personal organism gives rise. 
 Abstract reasonings and " easiness to suppose " leave 
 us still in a hypothetical universe : they may suggest 
 dreams, but without determining the reasonableness 
 of faith in the dream. 
 
 Thus experience through the senses seems to afford The ethical 
 
 basis of 
 
 no evidence that a person persists in conscious life faith in 
 after his visible manifestation of himself has finally Fife S after 
 ended, indeed suggests on the whole that the self- 
 conscious person has finally ended too ; and meta- 
 physical speculation about the invisible personality 
 only expands speculative vision, yet without being able 
 to sustain a reasonable faith in the speculation, as an 
 actual reality. But are we still left in sceptical help- 
 lessness, when we turn from outward phenomena and 
 abstract metaphysical reasonings to the necessary ra- 
 
262 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 tional implicates of moral or theistic faith ; when we 
 acknowledge the finally reconciling divine existence 
 presupposed in the triplicity of actual reality; and 
 when we reflect upon the spiritual ideas and convic- 
 tions that are latent in man, although hardly evoked 
 into consciousness in many, and not fully evoked in 
 any? Does not the spiritual constitution of man's 
 self-conscious life suggest that the conditions under 
 which it is maintained in its present physical organi- 
 sation are inadequate to its moral meaning and purpose ; 
 so that the supposition of the cessation of individual 
 personal life, after a continuous existence " in the 
 body" of only a few days, or even a hundred years, 
 would somehow put moral intelligence to confusion, 
 and so raise doubt even about the physical interpret- 
 ability of external nature, when such a life as the life 
 of man ought to be could be thus hollow and transitory ? 
 Is there not something, too, in the involuntary entrance 
 into existence of persons, who, unlike things and their 
 constant passive metamorphoses, are each of them able 
 to make their own character who are able to resist as 
 well as to assimilate with their true ideal, and who are 
 therefore morally responsible for their management of 
 themselves is there not something in those character- 
 istics of individual persons that opposes itself to the idea 
 of their being finally withdrawn from moral personality 
 into nonentity, almost as soon as their moral personal- 
 ity begins ? Is not the supposition of the annihilation 
 of all beings of this sort, when they had hardly time 
 
THE MYSTERY OF DEATH. 263 
 
 enough to become aware of the infinite miraculousness 
 of existence, a supposition that is out of harmony with 
 the implicates of theistic faith and hope in the omni- 
 potent goodness and mercy of God ? Does not this so 
 transitory an admission of individual persons into a 
 dangerous moral life, on a planet that seems to have 
 been gradually prepared for them, look like caprice of 
 unreason rather than a revelation of eternally active 
 moral reason or goodness ? Can the supposition of the 
 final unconsciousness of conscious persons after the 
 death of their bodies be reconciled with theistic trust and 
 hope in that moral reasonableness of the universe, which 
 I have already urged as at once the tacit assumption 
 in all human experience and the last word of true 
 philosophy ? If positive answers to these questions 
 seem presumptuous, at the point of view which the 
 human philosopher has to occupy so remote intellec- 
 tually from the infinite or divine centre of intelligence, 
 does not theistic faith at least imply that absolute 
 trust and hope in the infinite love of God is the eter- 
 nal and only reasonable principle according to which 
 man can die; and that to live and die in this moral 
 trust and hope may be ethically better for the persons 
 who rest in it than intellectual demonstration, which 
 would supersede the education of moral faith regarding 
 that to which the sensuous imagination is inadequate ? 
 To those whose lives are habitually directed in theistic 
 trust towards fulfilment of the divine will, or the realisa- 
 tion of their true spiritual ideal, physical death cannot 
 
264 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 be a leap in the dark when it may be taken in this 
 divine light. Faith in the persistence of morally re- 
 sponsible persons, notwithstanding the visible dissolu- 
 tion of their bodily organisms, is not, indeed, like 
 philosophical faith or theistic trust, the indispensable 
 postulate of all reliable intercourse with the evolv- 
 ing universe of things and persons ; but its sceptical 
 disintegration may disturb this final faith, and so lead 
 indirectly to universal doubt and pessimism. 
 
 The enigma of evil leaves us in front of a further 
 question, raised by moral faith in the posthumous per- 
 sistence of persons, which I do not find that philo- 
 sophy can answer. Is the existence of those persons 
 who make and keep themselves lad, only a transitory 
 episode, or is it an endless element in the universe ? 
 Notwithstanding the ambiguous appearances which the 
 world of sentient and moral beings presents in this 
 corner, and the uncertain adjustments of pleasure and 
 pain to their good and evil acts so apt to paralyse 
 theistic faith and hope, are pain and error and vice 
 divinely destined in the end to disappear ? Are all self- 
 conscious persons in the universe certain at last to be- 
 come what they ought to be ; and are all men destined 
 in the end to realise in their individual personalities 
 the divine ideal of man, or at least to be for ever 
 approaching to this, on the path of the just, which 
 shineth more and more unto the perfect day ? 
 
 The alternative answers to this grave question are 
 
*M B a *4\ 
 
 V* OF THF ^1 
 
 UNIVERSIT' 
 
 THE MYSTERY OF DEATH. 265 
 
 full of difficulties which seem to be incapable of relief Hypotheti- 
 from the resources of reason. That the freedom of timis. 
 persons their power to put themselves into states that 
 are at variance with the true moral ideal states deep- 
 ened and it may seem finally confirmed by habit may 
 become an absolutely final election to evil by themselves, 
 which even the moral obligation of omnipotent love can- 
 not overcome, consistently with the continued free per- 
 sonality of the persons who thus persist in thus keeping 
 themselves evil, is one supposition : it involves the 
 overwhelming mystery of the existence in the divine 
 universe of persons living endlessly, increasing in num- 
 ber, and always becoming morally worse. On the other 
 hand, that self-conscious persons, as well as the things 
 presented to sense, may be all naturally capable of dis- 
 solution ; or at least that only the morally progressive, 
 whose determining motive is towards the higher or 
 divine life, are finally to retain conscious personal life, 
 while all others, on the downward grade, are finally 
 annihilated, so that evil naturally dies out of existence, 
 or is continued only in new equally transitory persons, 
 is a second alternative: the plausible hypothesis of 
 some religious thinkers, including among others the 
 philosopher Locke. It is yet another alternative that, 
 in mysterious consistency with the conditions of free 
 personality, all moral perversion, along with the suffer- 
 ing thus introduced among sentient beings, will in the 
 end disappear, in a final rise into goodness, through 
 God's love of goodness, of all the persons who make 
 
266 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 themselves bad. A universe that is thus at last and 
 eternally perfect, is the hypothesis which divine love 
 of goodness, and the consequent divine will for its 
 universal prevalence, may seem ethically to require. 
 Yet to assume that this must be the final issue, 
 indeed that it can be, consistently with free moral 
 agency, or that it is otherwise possible, may be undue 
 presumption, under our finite intelligence and experi- 
 ence of the realities. Perhaps man's present moral 
 discipline requires that in the now embodied life this 
 mystery should remain unrelieved. 
 
 The final With this cloud resting on mankind, the course of 
 the uni meditative thought, awakened by the final problem of 
 
 verse or of , , . , -, -, 
 
 man's life the changing universe and our personal relations to 
 ence^an 6 " its changes, from which it took our departure at the 
 eve/new commencement, comes to an end. It is the perennial 
 l ues tion for humanity, which in each successive gener- 
 ation has attracted those who can recognise the pathos 
 of the life and its surroundings in which human beings 
 are incarnated at birth, and in which, within a little 
 interval of time, they disappear at death. The mean- 
 ing of personal life has more than exhausted the spec- 
 ulative genius of Plato and Aquinas, of Spinoza and 
 Hume, of Leibniz and Hegel, and far transcends the 
 sublime imagination even of Dante or Milton. The 
 theological conception of things and the question of 
 the destiny of persons may always be new, although 
 it has engaged men from the beginning, and it neces- 
 sarily takes new forms in advancing thought. When 
 
THE MYSTERY OF DEATH. 267 
 
 the final problem is approached only in the spirit of 
 speculative curiosity, or with the preconception that 
 it must be intellectually soluble or else an unintel- 
 ligible contradiction, it seems then to avoid the only 
 human solution. Those again who insist upon the 
 need in reason for the physical method as the only 
 legitimate method logically conclude that the final 
 question is an idle question. But its abstract and 
 its physical insolubility, I have tried to show, need 
 be no insuperable bar to its reasonable treatment in 
 moral trust and hope ; unless speculation is able to 
 show that the Power that is supreme in the universe 
 must be intellectually and morally incoherent if not 
 diabolic, and that accordingly self-conscious life is 
 not worth living; for faith in all the relations of 
 man to his surroundings is bound to dissolve, along 
 with the supreme moral faith, in universal uncertainty 
 and despair. No one can be more aware than I am 
 how inadequately I have delivered myself in these 
 lectures of the true ultimate thought about things 
 and persons. Let me now at the close offer a com- 
 prehensive retrospect of the whole. 
 
 At the outset of this Gifford enterprise, I sought to Synoptical 
 
 retrospect 
 
 evoke our latent sense of the mysterious infinitude of ofthetheis- 
 the ever-changing Universe, into which we are ushered 
 as strangers and without our leave when we become 
 percipient, and from which, after an uncertain period 
 
268 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 of morally responsible life, men disappear in the mys- 
 terious change called Death, which all organisms of 
 "living matter" are found to undergo. 
 
 is the real- Meditation upon the predicament in which we thus 
 we all find involuntarily find ourselves, urges final questions about 
 absolutely one's self, one's environment, and the Power that is 
 unethical universally operative in the changes that are going on 
 iMiy 6 eThi-~ * n thing 8 and in persons, of all which history (in the 
 caitnphc- largest sense) is the imperfect record. One is moved 
 to ask the meaning of this short term of personal 
 life, so dimly lighted amidst the surrounding dark- 
 ness ? What, too, is the office and significance of its 
 ever fluctuating organic and extra - organic environ- 
 ment ? Above all, what means the invisible Power 
 that instinctive faith in all and reflective faith in 
 a few recognise, as the finally synthetic or recon- 
 ciling principle of the fluctuating universe of things 
 and persons ? Are the ever-changing manifestations 
 the properties and metamorphoses of things, and the 
 self-conscious states and acts of persons the mani- 
 festations of One and only One infinite non-moral 
 Substance and Power ? Or must the persistent per- 
 sonality of which I and other men are conscious 
 in the brief interval between birth and death; the 
 world of perceptible things which surrounds and as- 
 similates us all; and the invisible Power revealed 
 in and through persons and things, must these 
 three be finally or philosophically distinguished from 
 one another, in a threefold articulation of the realities ? 
 
THE MYSTERY OF DEATH. 269 
 
 When, in sympathy with monist philosophers Neither the 
 materialistic, panegoistic, and pantheistic I tried to sentecUo 
 adopt the former of these two alternatives, I found 
 that even the fragments of interpretation of our sur- 
 roundings which in daily life we all tacitly assume 
 that we are in possession of, and to which the nat- totlli . s 
 
 question. 
 
 ural sciences are supposed to be gradually adding, 
 I found that these seemed to have lost their trust- 
 worthy reconciling principle, and that thus even the 
 dim philosophical light of physical science was threat- 
 ened with extinction. I seemed to be losing myself 
 in purposeless struggle in a meaningless universe the 
 One infinite Eeality reduced to non-moral infinite 
 Thing a universe empty of persons either moral or 
 immoral man with all his science only the latest 
 phenomenon in an inexplicable procession of changes, 
 the revelations, if they can be called revelations, of 
 irrationality, but it may be of diabolic power and pur- 
 pose, or at least of Power concerning which I am for- 
 bidden to postulate enough to justify me in concluding 
 anything, or in doing anything. So what we call science 
 and morality become transitory events in a purposeless 
 succession. A resigned despair accordingly appears to 
 be the last issue of man's endeavour, either empirically 
 or by abstract unaided reasoning, to comprehend as One 
 the finally mysterious existence in which we participate 
 when we become percipient and self-conscious. The 
 boundless and endless reality necessarily escapes the 
 grasp of a purely logical intelligence measured by 
 
270 
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 The homo 
 mensura 
 method of 
 dealing 
 with the 
 final ques- 
 tion atjout 
 the uni- 
 verse of 
 realities. 
 
 mere sense, and of abstract intellect unaided by the 
 moral and spiritual experience of Man. Absolutely 
 unique "a singular effect" the infinite universe of 
 change repels as inadequate all physical analogies, and 
 refuses to be contemplated db extra, as if it were only 
 one of the innumerable finite objects of empirical 
 science. For one cannot get outside one's faculties, 
 or compare with other universes the infinite universe 
 of what we call "reality," in the way objects and 
 events are compared with other objects and events in 
 our ordinary interpretations of external nature. 
 
 But is there not, I proceeded to ask, is there not 
 another method in which this final question about life 
 and the universe may be dealt with ? Although I 
 cannot grasp the infinite reality as if it were a physical 
 fact, or a sufficiently intelligible premiss in a scientific 
 argument, may I not come into sufficient final rela- 
 tion with it as it were db infra ? May I not live in 
 intellectual and practical intercourse with it, under the 
 final relations of a knowledge that is human rela- 
 tions which may be eternally necessary at man's only 
 limited and intermediate point of view ? May not the 
 universal reality be sufficiently interpretable finally, 
 by and for man, on this homo mensura principle and 
 method ? But then it must be the complete ideal 
 Man, not the sensuous intelligence only, nor the purely 
 intellectual intelligence, unaided by the moral and 
 spiritual experience which is distinctive of Man in 
 his true selfhood. The natural sciences, concerned 
 
THE MYSTERY OF DEATH. 271 
 
 with non-moral things, therefore, afford a very inade- 
 quate application of the homo mensura method to the 
 realities. But by a deeper and truer use of that 
 method, the otherwise unknowable Power, that is now 
 revealed through the universe of things and persons, 
 may be regarded by man as loving righteousness per- 
 sonified, as Perfect Person, and not merely physically 
 as Boundless Thing, in the way Spinoza according to 
 purely intellectual method, and David Hume in em- 
 pirical fashion, virtually postulate. 
 
 The final conception of the universe of things and The via 
 persons, worked out on this enlarged homo mensura 
 principle, does not logically explicate the infinite reality 
 in its infinitude as Spinoza tries to do, nor does it leave 
 man paralysed in universal uncertainty with the sceptic. 
 But it postulates morally perfect Power as at the root 
 of the physical, eesthetical, and spiritual experience of 
 mankind, although with a background of inevitable 
 mystery, a revelation this which may become enough 
 for directing life and conduct, while it leaves un- 
 eliminated innumerable unanswerable questions. It 
 recognises us on the via media which seems alone 
 adapted to man's place, intellectually intermediate 
 between omniscience and mere sense. 
 
 Accordingly, in the present series of lectures I have The moral 
 tried to deal with the final questions of existence, postulate 
 
 ..,.., .1 -, e ... . which un- 
 
 neither in the method of sensuous empiricism nor in deriiesex- 
 their abstract rationality, but in their application to per 
 
272 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 of things man as a moral and spiritual being who is in correla- 
 sons. tion with a moral and spiritual universe. Unable to 
 comprehend our environment as at the centre, I have 
 considered whether an assumption of its essential 
 divineness or moral trustworthiness must not be the 
 postulate that always underlies man's personal inter- 
 course with manifested reality a working postulate 
 found charged with more or less meaning in propor- 
 tion as the persons who think and act upon it approach 
 in spiritual development to the ideal Man. How lias 
 this method fared with us on trial ? 
 
 The final In the first place, the theistic postulate seemed to 
 postulate be justified by the impossibility of even making a 
 cious as-'" beginning in the way of intelligible experience or 
 im P ion. mora i conduct without an absolute, conscious or un- 
 conscious, trust and hope in the Power that is mani- 
 fested in the unceasing change of which life in the 
 universe is made up. All our intercourse with things 
 and persons presumes filial faith in the Power that is 
 at work throughout the Whole. To attribute what 
 amounts to dishonesty, deceit, injustice, want of good- 
 ness, to the Power supremely at work in the universe, 
 is virtually to forbid all intellectual and practical in- 
 tercourse with its manifestations presented in experi- 
 ence. We should avoid a finally uudivine environ- 
 ment as we should avoid a suspected person. In 
 all calculated activity I practically take for granted 
 the ethical reliability or goodness of the infinite or 
 mysterious Eeality that I am obliged to suppose is 
 
THE MYSTERY OF DEATH. 273 
 
 being continuously revealed in the universe of change. 
 The timeless necessity of ethical obligation, and the 
 impossibility of at all interpreting ourselves and any 
 of our surroundings, if the universal process is either 
 a prolonged accident, emptied of all moral meaning, 
 or the revelation of a final purpose that may be 
 more or less deluding and diabolical in any of these 
 ways putting us to intellectual and moral confusion 
 at last all this justifies the theistic or moral con- 
 ception as the final one. The sufficient moral reason 
 found for its adoption is, that unless theistic or 
 optimist faith is the final truth about the universe 
 there can be no truth about anything. If the self- 
 conscious life that emerges between birth and death 
 rises at birth out of, and at death subsides in, a 
 morally meaningless, purposeless, and therefore un- 
 trustworthy, universe or if it may be in this way 
 the sport of Power that is essentially diabolic, then, 
 one is ready to say, Let me at once escape from 
 conscious existence, and return if it be possible into 
 the unconsciousness out of which I involuntarily 
 emerged when I was born. Personal annihilation 
 becomes the chief end of life, if indeed, after paralysis 
 of the fundamental ethical postulate, I can still be said 
 to have any end, chief or other, to struggle for, and 
 must not rather passively subside in despair into a 
 speechless, motionless agnosticism. 
 
 In all my intercourse with the universe let me For siir- 
 therefore regard myself as an individual person dealing the moral 
 
274 
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 ortheistic 
 
 postulate 
 
 paralyses 
 tegrates 
 
 with the infinite or perfect moral Person therein 
 
 .,..,,,. 
 
 revealed not as an individual thing, or conscious 
 automaton, that is only an evanescent phase of the 
 eternal Thing or non-moral Being. Let me take 
 this as virtually the constant postulate in all my 
 interpretations of the experiences, lower and higher, 
 through which I pass physical, sesthetical, spiritual. 
 But this is just to argue that theistic or ethical faith 
 and expectation is the indispensable basis and rationale 
 of human life at once its silently accepted pre- 
 liminary, and the culmination of the deepest and truest 
 human philosophy. Moral faith is therefore deeper 
 than the deepest possible intellectual doubt, and pre- 
 supposed in all doubt that is reasonable. And the 
 ethical trust that is needed for the progressive interpre- 
 tation of experience must be more fundamental than 
 the pessimist doubt and despair about everything, into 
 which one found that all strictly monist philosophies 
 at last resolve themselves. However sympathetically 
 one tried to enter into a wholly agnostic conception 
 as final, there was always found below it a germ 
 of theistic trust and expectation moral confidence in 
 the character of the Power that is universally operative, 
 a Power that is neither finally indifferent to rational 
 order, nor diabolic in its final ends, but perfectly good, 
 and therefore making for the goodness of all good and 
 all bad agents. Thus the main drift of the time pro- 
 cess, as far as man is related to it, may be presumed 
 to be to make and keep persons in the state in which 
 
THE MYSTERY OF DEATH. 275 
 
 they ought to be, or to restore them to their true ideal, 
 if they have made themselves what they ought not to 
 be so far as their own righteously delegated power to 
 make and keep themselves bad is not in contradiction 
 to the idea of a universe of persons all of whom are 
 kept by God progressively unselfish or good. 
 
 This virtually moral and spiritual personification of The ever- 
 
 ,, . n j- T> v i changing 
 
 the universally pervading Power, implied in reason universe, 
 and not capriciously postulated, justifies man when he moral im- 
 
 takes for granted the scientific interpretability of the 
 chauging phenomena of the universe, and the ultimate 
 interpretation of things as significant of perfectly re- the S absoi- f 
 liable, because perfectly good, moral purpose ; so that j^^^i 
 the temporal procession may be read throughout as a Person - 
 historical revelation to us of the eternal life of God 
 save and except the changes for the worse which human 
 or other personal agents are able to make, when they 
 become what they ought not to become, and what there 
 is no divine necessity for their becoming, as when they 
 isolate themselves in selfish separation from the moral 
 universe. To this extent the universe of things and 
 persons presented in human experience, and including 
 of course the eternally necessary intellectual and moral 
 implicates of that experience, becomes (for man) the 
 perpetual progressive revelation of the otherwise un- 
 known and unknowable Universal Power. 
 
 The otherwise infinite or mysterious all-pervading Theincar- 
 
 nation of 
 
 Power may in this way be truly said to be on speak- God in 
 ing terms with man, in and through a cosmical and through 
 
276 
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 which the moral order which in all its ramifications is presumed 
 
 Universal . 
 
 Power is to be interpretable because charged with moral pur- 
 on speak- pose. The intelligibility is also presumed to be ideally 
 perfect; the purpose not capricious, but absolutely 
 good although the human position necessarily leaves 
 much that is by man physically and morally inexpli- 
 cable. That the infinite Power should be on speaking 
 terms with man, through the sense symbolism of out- 
 ward nature and the inward light of the spirit in- 
 carnate in the natural order, and, above all, in the 
 ideal Man this is surely no derogation from the ab- 
 stract infinity and ultimately inaccessible mysterious- 
 ness of the Eeality we have continually to do with. A 
 revelation through sensible and spiritual signs, charged 
 with meaning and moral purpose intelligible enough to 
 regulate man's life in an otherwise mysterious universe, 
 seems to be the only way for answering the final ques- 
 tions that is adapted to man's receptive capacity. The 
 presence throughout the whole of latent meaning and 
 moral purpose is not indeed a conclusion that can be 
 logically drawn from the few physical or moral pheno- 
 mena themselves that are actually offered to us in our 
 experience ; but the assumption is warranted if it can 
 be shown to be rationally involved in the phenom- 
 ena, as the needed condition of our escape from speech- 
 less and motionless Pyrrhonist despair. If the uni- 
 versal change the temporal procession supposed to 
 be interpretable may possibly be a lie, faith in the 
 meaning of any event presented in that experience 
 
THE MYSTERY OF DEATH. 277 
 
 is paralysed, and the world becomes uninterpretable 
 even in part. The only escape from this which I 
 can find is in the preliminary postulate that the cos- 
 mical utterances must be morally rational or divine, 
 not diabolic not a mixture of good and evil not 
 wholly chance or purposeless. Thus faith and hope 
 in God is the true motive force of life and conduct, 
 of our scientific reasonings about things and persons, 
 and of our sceptical questionings themselves, so far 
 as they are coherent and not wholly suicidal. 
 
 The earlier part of this second course was concerned The 
 with the rationale of theistically founded philosophy, O f Theism, 
 as applicable to the ultimate interpretation of Nature, 
 causally and teleologically, so far as man's limited re- 
 lations and intermediate position permit him to go. 
 
 The five remaining lectures were connected with The 
 one central fact, obtruded in human experience, which Theism, 
 seemed flatly to contradict the finally ethical and spirit- 
 ual construction of experience. For the Universal 
 Power seems to speak to us, in the divine language 
 of human life, in an ambiguous way, in terms that are 
 apt to give rise to moral distrust. It seems to reveal 
 at the best an uncertain purpose of mingled good 
 and evil, unless we annihilate morality and suppose 
 that good and evil is determined by arbitrary will. 
 This conclusion seems inevitable if the past and pre- 
 sent state of sentient beings and persons, as found 
 
278 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 on this planet, must be taken as the sole evidence of 
 the character of the Power universally at work. The 
 tragedy that is continually going on here seems to 
 forbid the postulated moral trust and hope which in- 
 spires and elevates personal life. How can the uni- 
 verse as we find it be a revelation of omnipotent 
 goodness ? This is largely a world of suffering and sin. 
 The unsatisfactory social conditions of mankind on 
 this planet, the irregular distribution of happiness and 
 pain among its sentient inhabitants, the appalling 
 severity of the sufferings, the morally abnormal per- 
 sons who introduce what ought not and needs not to 
 exist, makes the whole, to a gradually developing and 
 now comparatively refined sense of justice and mercy, 
 more like moral chaos than the moral cosmos which 
 indispensable moral trust in the Power that is speak- 
 ing to us would require. With this appalling spectacle, 
 daily presented, can we still retain hold of the primary 
 postulate of an essentially trustworthy universe ? Must 
 we surrender it, and so cease to have an elevating 
 motive and adequate foundation for intelligent and 
 good life ? Or can the suspicious facts be reconciled 
 with the postulate, and this breakdown of experience 
 be avoided in consideration, let us suppose, of the 
 limited intelligence and experience of Man, whose 
 reason necessarily culminates in what is unimaginable, 
 mysterious, or infinite ; so that the enigma of a morally 
 mixed universe, which migKt seem to precipitate men 
 into speechless and motionless sceptical despair, may, 
 
OF THK 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 THE MYSTERY OF DEATH. 279 
 
 without proved inconsistency, be brought under the 
 optimist or theistic ideal ? 
 
 In this dilemma between theistic faith in life and Considera- 
 
 . , . , tions which 
 
 final negation various considerations were suggested mitigate 
 to mitigate the pressure of the strange facts which S ure P of the 
 threaten to subvert needed initial moral trust in the 
 supreme Power. For one thing, for all that we can 
 show to the contrary, it may be a sign of perfect good- " 
 
 ness that there should be in existence, on educational tojs*&* 
 
 oi its un- 
 
 trial, individual persons who, as persons, must have trustworth- 
 iness. Per- 
 absolute power to make and keep themselves bad, with sons can 
 
 make 
 
 all the implied risks, as we might call them, of this themselves 
 divine experiment in personal responsibility rather 
 than that there should not be individual persons thus 
 on moral trial at all, and instead a wholly physical, 
 non-moral, and physically necessitated, universe. If 
 one takes account of finite and fallible moral agents, on 
 educational probation, as the humanly regarded purpose 
 which the Whole is making for, seen at the limited 
 human point of view and in relation to Man, it may 
 well be that the universe emptied of persons such as 
 men have made themselves would realise a less perfect 
 ideal than that in which men appear trusted, for a 
 time at least if not finally with their own character 
 or moral destiny ; and this although temporary, or even 
 persistent, antagonism or indifference to the higher life, 
 on the part of some or all of them, should seem to 
 darken a universe that may nevertheless be consistent 
 with righteousness. 
 
280 
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 Signs of 
 progres- 
 sive im- 
 provement. 
 
 A larger 
 revelation 
 than the 
 physical 
 one, more 
 adapted 
 to the 
 recovery 
 of the bad. 
 
 The condi- 
 tions of 
 human life 
 
 Moreover, one may well suppose that the enigma of 
 theistic trust in omnipotent goodness immanent in a 
 morally mixed universe, is further relieved by the signs 
 of progressive development which are presented in the 
 history of man, when it is interpreted as the history 
 of a divinely conducted education in individual self- 
 sacrifice and active moral reason of all persons who 
 permit themselves to be divinely educated. Progres- 
 sive improvement, in a resisting medium which often 
 seems to convert progress into regress, rather than 
 original and endless moral perfection, may be the 
 economy truly adapted to a world that consists of 
 persons. 
 
 Still more when reason leaves room for the rein- 
 forcement of the progressive movement by the action 
 of the Divine Power, " at sundry times and in divers 
 manners," according to a rational order more com- 
 prehensive than that which men are accustomed to 
 recognise in ordinary physical experience, and which 
 in this sense may be called supernatural or marvellous, 
 determined by its relations especially to persons who 
 have made themselves bad in rejecting their true 
 ideal, so that their theistic faith and hope has to be 
 awakened, vivified, and enlightened, in order to their 
 moral recovery all through divine incarnation in the 
 perfect Man, in consummation of the divine incarna- 
 tion in physical nature. 
 
 Furthermore, sceptical disintegration of theistic faith 
 may be arrested by the consideration that the temporal 
 
THE MYSTERY OF DEATH. 281 
 
 drama of personal life on this planet is not extended ou earth 
 
 , . , seem to ask, 
 
 enough in time to justiry or explain its own final mean- under the 
 ing and issues. The curtain falls almost at the beginning postulate, 
 
 of the first act. If men are really living in a morally 
 trustworthy universe, in filial confidence that the issues 
 cannot in the end put personal agents to intellectual 
 and moral confusion, this would seem to imply a further 
 development of the initial conditions, and an assimila- 
 tion of the personal agents themselves in a larger life, 
 in which a manifestly perfect moral government shall 
 be found by the morally tried agents to underlie the 
 apparent indifference, caprice, and cruelty of the pre- 
 sent physically organised discipline. More may there- 
 fore not unreasonably be expected to follow death, in 
 the personal history and experience of each person ; 
 and perhaps more than can now be recollected by him 
 may have preceded, in the pre-natal history of persons 
 who seem disposed, when they enter life, to keep them- 
 selves bad. The semblance of moral chaos on this 
 planet, so unsatisfying and disintegrative of moral trust 
 in the Power universally at work, seems to be causally 
 connected with the history of the moral agents after the 
 curtain falls in death, if not also before it was raised at 
 birth. 
 
 These, at any rate, are aids to theistic faith, afforded Aids to 
 by a larger philosophy than that which is wholly Faith. 63 " 
 physical and sentient, all tending to sustain the moral 
 trust and hope in the Universal Power at the root of 
 all fruitful experience, without which human life is 
 
282 PHILOSOPHY OF THEISM. 
 
 a hollow illusion, after suppression of the divine voice 
 otherwise expressed in the sense symbolism of outward 
 nature and in the inner light of moral reason, and in 
 every form of natural or extra-natural revelation, the 
 whole transformed into an uninterpretable lie, with 
 human consciousness in all its faculties a vain illusion. 
 It is the irrational alternative in this dilemma that 
 makes optimist trust the highest human philosophy, 
 instead of the pessimist doubt that subverts personal 
 life, in subverting the necessary postulates of intel- 
 ligence and moral obligation ; so that we are obliged 
 in reason to accept it, unless moral and intellectual 
 incoherence can be shown to be involved also in theistic 
 trust, dissolving experience and its moral implicates in 
 a common ruin. 
 
 The highest Deus illuminatio nostra. It follows that the highest 
 human life end of the life of persons on this planet, during the 
 
 uncertain interval between conscious birth and death, 
 under this final conception of the realities of existence, 
 
 amfmean- ^ s ^ e deepening and enlightening of moral or theistic 
 faith and hope, through increasing discernment of spirit- 
 ual law in the natural world the elevating emotional 
 expression of this faith in religious gratitude and aspira- 
 tion with a practical outcome in that approximation 
 to its divine ideal which those present who " do justly, 
 and love mercy, and walk humbly with their God." 
 
 Perverted Optimi corruptio pessima. There is another side of the 
 
 religion. 
 
 shield. That morally elevating faith in the Universal 
 
THE MYSTERY OF DEATH. 283 
 
 Power, with its implied eternal gospel for mankind, 
 which might sustain the higher life in men, making 
 them more reverential, less intolerant, more charitable, 
 more hopeful, and more helpful to one another, has 
 been perverted into an occasion of some of the most 
 signal instances of the moral evil that makes the whole 
 history of mankind so mysterious. Instead of hopeful 
 trust in God, what man has called Eeligion has been 
 largely craven fear, or worship of diabolic Power in 
 the cruel forms it has assumed, and in the degrading 
 customs and frivolous controversies which it has en- 
 couraged in the course of its gradual development, 
 making men more hateful, not more helpful, to one 
 another so that even Christendom is as noted for 
 the persecutions and sectarian separations by which 
 its unity is broken as for victorious union in the 
 struggle with Evil, all this perhaps the most memor- 
 able and surprising illustration of the great enigma 
 which perplexes us in the history of the world. This 
 corruption and reversal of theistic faith and hope opens 
 a field for meditation hardly less extensive than that 
 which has been travelled over in these lectures ; but 
 further consideration of what it contains is foreign to 
 their immediate design. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 . Kschylus, 162. 
 
 Ahriman, 162. 
 
 Anselm, 107, 108. 
 
 Aquinas, 113, 266. 
 
 Argyll, Duke of, xii. 
 
 Aristotle, ix, 22, 113, 207. 
 
 Atheism, and faith in a future life, 
 
 245 ff. 
 
 Augustine, 106, 108, 151. 
 Authority, xii, 128, 137 ff. 
 
 B 
 
 Bacon, xii, 7, 22, 44, 57, 110, 
 
 113, 132, 205, 206. 
 Balfour, Mr A. J., xi, xii, 27. 
 Berkeley, 108. 
 Butler, Bishop, xii, 154, 260. 
 
 ality is divine, 45 ff., 228 
 natural agency is divine 
 agency, 46 inadequately real- 
 ised in physical experience, 49 
 ff. more fully explicated in 
 human personality, 51 ff. and 
 universal natural teleology, 68 
 ff. , 90 ff. and conscience, 144 
 individual personal agency 
 may be undivine or sinful, 167 
 ff. and miracles, 221. 
 
 Christianity, 38, 115, 137 and 
 Hegelianism, 113, 138 ff. and 
 miracle, 216 may be natural 
 and yet divine, 238. 
 
 Cicero, 69. 
 
 Clarke, 47, 107. 
 
 Coleridge, 33, 34, 37. 
 
 Comte, 22, 212, 213, 214. 
 
 Conscience and causality, 144. 
 
 Cosmological proof of Theism ana- 
 lysed, 41 ff. 
 
 Cudworth, 157. 
 
 D 
 
 Caligula, 167. 
 
 Causality, ultimately a theistic Dante, 266. 
 
 conception, 41 the supreme Death, 240 ff. uniqueness of the 
 intellectual postulate of change, event, 249 scientific prevision 
 42 ff. presupposed in natural and prevision of our own self- 
 science, 43 ff. natural caus- conscious life after physical 
 
286 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 death, 253 difficulties, 255 
 and the final moral postulate, 
 261 ff. 
 
 Descartes, 7 and the trustworthi- 
 ness of our faculties, 18 ff., 107- 
 
 Design in nature, 68 ff. its re- 
 lation to man and its super- 
 human relations, 73. 
 
 Devil, 163. 
 
 Drummond of Hawthornden, 241. 
 
 Du Bois Raymond, 29. 
 
 Duration commingles finitiide and 
 infinitude, 118, 135, 147 ff. 
 
 E 
 
 Euclid, 30. 
 
 Evolution and sudden Creation, 
 
 82 and Design, 97 ff. and 
 
 Progress, 199 ff. 
 
 Heraclitus, 43. 
 
 Homo Mensura, its narrow and 
 its wide meaning, 270, 271. 
 
 Hume, xi, 7, 74, 75, 83, 157, 
 158, 159, 266, 270 and mir- 
 acles, 223. 
 
 Immortality and Naturalism, 
 254 ff. and Metaphysics, 259 
 ff. and Moral Reason, 261 ff. 
 
 Infinite Quantity its significance 
 for human knowledge and faith, 
 5 ff., 86, 99 and Hegelianism, 
 136 ff. 
 
 Jesus, 132, 216, 221. 
 Job, 162. 
 
 K 
 
 Kant, 7, 15, 17, 40, 76, 107, 109. 
 
 F 
 
 Faith, philosophic, xii, 121 ff. 
 
 and thought, 122 ff. implied 
 
 finally in a human knowledge of 
 
 the universe, 127 ff, 159 the 
 
 reflex of theistic faith, 141 and 
 
 moral evil, 161 ff., 172 ff 1 . and 
 
 optimism, 190 and prevision or 
 
 expectation, 248 ff. 
 Freedom and Personality, 175 ff., 
 
 180 ff. 
 
 G 
 
 Gifford Lectures, vii, xi, 2, 112. 
 Gladstone, Mr, xii. 
 Goethe, 129. 
 
 H 
 
 M 
 
 Hamilton, Sir William, 132. 
 
 Hegel, 7, 22, 104, 112, 113, 136, Man and natural adaptations under 
 137, 26G. human relations, 73. 
 
 Leibniz, xii, 108, 167, 185, 187, 
 
 237, 266. 
 Locke, 7, 47, 63, 124, 125, 126, 
 
 127, 265. 
 Lotze, 7, 119. 
 Love, infinite, of God implies the 
 
 perfect moral trustworthiness of 
 
 the universe of reality, ix, 34. 
 Lucretius, 7, 246. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 287 
 
 Matter and Evil, 165. 
 
 Milton, 266. 
 
 Miracle, 102, 216 if. and Chris- 
 tianity, 216 and Causality, 221 
 and Philosophy, 222 and 
 hyper-physical Reason, 236 ff. 
 
 Monism, 269. 
 
 Moral evil, 136 the supreme 
 enigma of Theism, 153 ff., 277 
 ft'. various attempts at its ex- 
 planation, 162 ff. and indi- 
 vidually responsible personality, 
 as in man and all other finite 
 moral agents, 176, 193 ff. its 
 ultimate issues, 265 ff. 
 
 Moral reason practically solves 
 the mystery of physical change, 
 and presupposes the final 
 moral trustworthiness of the 
 universe, 13 ff., 52, 80, 90 ff., 
 143 ff. its relation to Theism, 
 143 ff. and immortality, 261 ff. 
 
 Moral relations imply persons, 
 149. 
 
 More, Sir Thomas, 248. 
 
 X 
 
 Natural Science only a partial 
 arid provisional interpretation 
 of the universe, 13 ff., 54 ff. 
 cannot conflict with theistic 
 faith, 57 ff., 146 ff. 
 
 Natural Theology, 1 ff. 
 
 Naturalism, 66 ff. and Immortal- 
 ity, 254 ff. 
 
 Nero, 169. 
 
 Novum Organum, 36. 
 
 
 
 Ontological proof of Theism, 104 ff. 
 
 as in Hegel's dialectic, 112 ff. 
 Optimism, 167 ff. and Theism, 
 
 171 and personal existence, 
 
 183 ff, 193 ff. and theistic 
 faith, 190 and progress, 199 ff'. 
 Ormuzd, 162. 
 
 Pain a problem for Theism, 160 
 an occasion of spiritual edu- 
 cation, 208. 
 
 Paley, 69, 70, 97. 
 
 Parmenides, 108. 
 
 Pascal, 7, 201, 211. 
 
 Personal existence its signifi- 
 cance for Theism, 10, 51 ff., 65, 
 80 ff., 87, 197 ff. its relation 
 to physical causality, 11 and 
 ontological dialectic, 118 and 
 consequent possibility of moral 
 evil, 176 ff, 180 ff. consistent 
 with optimism, 193 ff. the 
 true reality, 195 and miracle, 
 233 its identity, 242 and im- 
 mortality, 244. 
 
 Personality as applied to the 
 morally trusted Universal Power, 
 149 ff. applicable to existence 
 as finally conceived under moral 
 relations, 149. 
 
 Pessimism the logical alternative 
 to Theism or Optimism, 192. 
 
 Plato, 7, 104, 106, 240, 266. 
 
 Plotinus, 106. 
 
 Progress, 192 ff. faith in, virtu- 
 ally theistic, 199 ff. through 
 apparent Regress, and as modi- 
 fied by agency of persons, 207 
 and pain, 208 intellectual, 209 
 theistic or moral faith the 
 fundamental factor in, 212. 
 
 R 
 
 Reality of material things, 195 
 of personal existence, human 
 and divine, 196. 
 
288 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Religious faith, not necessarily un- 
 reasonable, although at last logi- 
 cally undemonstrable, 36 ff., 93 
 ff., 132 ff. 
 
 S 
 
 Salisbury, Lord, 79. 
 
 Schopenhauer, 7. 
 
 Seneca, vii. 
 
 Shakespeare, 249. 
 
 Socrates, 69, 207. 
 
 Spencer, Mr Herbert, 7, 22 ff., 
 
 112. 
 Spinoza, x, xi, 76, 116, 124, 135, 
 
 182, 235, 266, 270, 271. 
 Spiritual agency not necessarily 
 
 inconsistent with natural law or 
 
 order, 60 ff., 80 ff. 
 Stirling, Dr Hutchison, 112. 
 
 Tarquin, 167, 186. 
 
 Taylor, Isaac, 241. 
 
 Teleological interpretation of the 
 universe analysed, 68 ff. 
 
 Tennyson, 241. 
 
 Theism in relation to Atheism 
 and Pantheism, 8, 9 Kant's, 
 15 latent in Descartes' recog- 
 nition of the trustworthiness of 
 our faculties, 18 ff. latent in 
 Mr Spencer's Agnosticism, 27 
 presupposed in reasonable life, 
 because universal scepticism its 
 logical alternative, 35, 272 ff. 
 its relation to scientific proof, 
 
 37 ff., 103 ff. finally involved 
 in causality, 41 ff., 228 cannot 
 conflict with natural science, 
 57 tf. , 146 ff. and Naturalism, 
 66 ff. , 212 ff. not out of man's 
 reach through the inevitable 
 human limits of physical science, 
 152, 153 and moral evil, 161 
 ff., 172 ff., 277 ff. and optim- 
 ism, 171 and progress, 199 ff. 
 
 Things and Persons contrasted, 
 10, 175. 
 
 Time-relations and ontological dia- 
 lectic, 118. 
 
 U 
 
 Universal Nescience, the logical 
 alternative to Theistic Faith, 
 17, 19, 273. 
 
 Universal Power, The, virtually 
 on speaking terms with men, 
 275. 
 
 Universe, The final moral trust- 
 worthiness of, or theistic faith 
 in, ix, 13, 18-21, 34 this moral 
 trust not proved to be incon- 
 sistent with a mixture of evil, 
 181-185, 192-199. 
 
 w 
 
 Weismann, 79, 81. 
 Wordsworth, 208, 241. 
 
 Zoroaster, 162. 
 
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