i ■•■■>■ y' '■ : < - UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES UNIVERSITY of CALJFUKWlA AT LOS ANGELES LIBRARY THE REALM OF ENDS OR PLURALISM AND THEISM CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS ionljon: FETTER LANE, E.G. C. F. CLAY, Manager Cnjinfautsf) : loo. PRINCES STREET Sttlin: A. ASHER AND CO. Itiujig: F. A. BROCKHAUS ^lio gotk: G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS Bombag anli Calcutta: MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd. Fir. si Edition 191 1 Second Edition 19 12 All rights reserved THE REALM OF ENDS OR PLURALISM AND THEISM THE GIFFORD LECTURES DELIVERED IN THE UNIVERSITY OF St ANDREWS IN THE YEARS 1907-10 BY JAMES WARD, SC.D. (CAMB.), HON. LL.D. (EDIN.), HON. D.SC. (OXON.), FELLOW OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY AND OF THE NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES, PROFESSOR OF MENTAL PHILOSOPHY, CAMBRIDGE SECOND EDITION Cambridge : at the University Press 1912 i3S2!.l AH tended to mankind, And man produced, all has its end thus far : But in completed man begins anew A tendency to God. Browning. Aber die erkannten thatsachlichen Verhaltnisse konnen allein unsere Gedanken nach diesem Mittelpunkte der Welt wenigstens convergiren machen. Lotze. . • • • ci 5 5^ ^^ W^i r PREFACE THESE lectures are intended to serve as a sequel to the course delivered in the University of Aberdeen some ten years previously. If at that time I had foreseen that I should presently be favoured ^ with the opportunity to lecture on the Realm of Ends X ^ or Pluralism and Theism 1 mioht well have entitled the earlier lectures the Realm of Nature or JVaturalism and Agnosticism. There my endeavour was to establish i^ the priority of the idealistic, or — as it seems clearer to '■o say — the spiritualistic standpoint; and here I have tried to ascertain what we can know, or reasonably believe, concerning the constitution of the world, ijtterpreted throughout and strictly in terms of Mind. At the outset, this world immediately confronts us not as one Mind, nor even as the manifestation of one, but as an objective whole in which we discern many minds in mutual interaction. It is from this pluralistic standpoint that our experience has in fact developed, and it is here that we accjuire the ideas that eventually lead us beyond it. For pluralism, though empirically warranted, we find defective and unsatisfactory : but vi Preface the theism to which it points is only an ideal — an ideal however that, as both theoretically and practically rational, may claim our faith though it transcend our knowledge. Such is a meagre outline of the present lectures. The summary contained in the last of them may take the place of further prefatory detail. The two lectures on Hegel {Lectures VII and VIII) are, it must be confessed, largely a digression. It was my intention to treat of Kant's philosophy in like manner — in both cases in order to substantiate the contention that anyhow, avowedly or not, pluralism is the starting point of speculation. But on second thoughts I felt that perhaps I had already done too much. In Lectures XIX, XX I have embodied portions of a paper, entitled Faith and Science, read before the Synthetic Society in 1902. This has already appeared in a volume of that Society's papers privately reprinted by the Rt Hon. A. J. Balfour in 1909. The preparation and delivery of these lectures were frequently interrupted by an illness that began soon after my appointment and continued till its close. I desire to take this occasion to thank the Senatus of the University of St Andrews for their extreme patience and forbearance then and since ; and I can- not but rejoice that now at last these lectures, all defective though they be, are through this indulgence out of my hands. Preface \ii I have still to express my obligations to generous friends: first, and especially, to Professor J. S. Mackenzie of Cardiff both for his long and careful criticisms and for the arduous work which he kindly undertook of reading through all the proofs ; again to Professor G. F. Stout of St Andrews for many valuable and astute comments ; and finally to my colleague, Professor W. R. Sorley, not only for his literary help but for his continuous encouragement throughout my labours. JAMES WARD. Trinity College, Cambridge. September^ 191 1. P. S. A second edition of this book being called for within a year, it has only been possible for me to correct sundry misprints, which various friends have kindly pointed out, and to add at the end of the volume some Replies to Criticisms. J. W. July, 1 91 2. CONTENTS PART I.: PLURALISM. Lecture L iNXRODUcxoRy. The Realm of Nature and tlie Realm of Ends, the mechanical and the moral, as contrasted 'aspects' of the one world. Naturalism holds the former, Spiritualism the latter, to be fundamental Summary of the Spiritualistic position as argued in the writer's previous Gifford Lectures. The recognition of Experience as a duality in unity tends to Spiritualistic Monism ...... This, if sound, ought to furnish the interpretation of the reality underlying the phenomena that science formulates. Rise of the Historical Method and the passing of ' Physical Realism ' . . . The idea of the Good and the course of History ..... Pampsychism ........... The problem of the One and the Many, and the question of method PAGES 1—3 3-13 I.^- -18 18- -20 20- -21 21- -24 Lecture IL The One and the Many. What sort of unity does the world imply? (i) Nature as objective not the One 25—28 (2) Nor a Supreme Subject, taken alone ...... 28 — 30 (3) Nor the unity of Subject and Object, as Absolute Self-conscious- ness. The One and Acosmism. The One of Mysticism . . 30 — 35 The World-Soul of Platonism useless as a mediating principle . . 35 — 36 Absolute Object, Absolute Subject, Absolute Self-consciousness, all alike unreal because reached by abstraction ...... 36 — 41 What sort of unity is possible without absolutely transcending the Many? The oscillations of theology and speculation between Pluralism and Singularism . . . . . . . . . ■ .41—47 The start from Pluralism ......... 48 Lecture IIL I'i.urai.ism. Pluralism as a recoil from Absolutism now in the asccnd.nnt. Its stand- point and main features to be here described ..... 49 — 50 The standpoint is throughout the historical, and the behaviour of indi- viduals bent on self-conservation and betterment its leading idea, l^eiijniz's Monadology still the type ...... 50 — 54 Contents PAGES The pluralistic outlook illustrated from Economics, Bionomics and Physionomics .......... 54 — 59 Can the so-called inanimate world be regarded in this fashion? Stationary states, persistent types and inertia. ' Elective affinities.' ' No two indiscernible individuals.' The principle of Continuity. Uniformity and statistics. The pluralist's conclusion ..... 59 — 67 Purposive Activity and Orderliness 67 — 69 Lecture IV. The Contingency in the World. Chaos a myth, yet orderliness and regularity the result of conduct, not its presupposition .......... 70 — 72 Natura natttrans and Natura naturata ....... 72 — 75 Causal Efficiency and Causal Connexion ; Chance and Contingency ; Subjective Selection. ' Heterogony of Ends ' . . . . 75 — 80 Illustrations of contingency in the useful arts and in Nature. Fixity of Type and Variety of Conditions. The Grotesque in Nature . . 80 — 87 ' Worth ' and the natural ' Right to live ' 87—89 Contingency of Species; the gulf between Man and Brute; Contingency and Individuals .......... 87 — 94 Contingency in the so-called physical world ...... 94 — 96 Lecture V. Evolution as Epigenesis and Equilibration. Pluralism implies epigenesis or new formation not literal evolution or preformation .......... 97 — 10 r Epigenesis entails new properties which its component factors did not previously possess — hence it has been called ' creative synthesis ' . loi — 105 The prime source of this synthesis lies for the pluralist in the activity of experients. Organization the result of experience. The idea of ' potentiality' throws no light on the process .... 105 — 108 In the practical world this synthesis yields new values that are not only conserved but increased ........ 109 Interdependence of higher and lower: mechanization and direction . 109 — 112 Tendency to progression. Final Harmony ..... 112 — 116 Lecture VL The Pluralistic Goal. In what sense is Society a unity? Two contrasted answers considered 117 — 120 The transition from Man as animal to Man as social. ' Objective Mind' and Rational Persons. Meaning of 'Objectivity' . . 120 — 124 Mutual implication of Objectivity and Self-consciousness. Kant's Subjective and Objective, Deductions of the Categories criticized Society a living reality, though a complex and ' over-individual ' one . The advance towards a higher unity. No ' law of diminishing return ' here. No ' solidarity ' of Evil The Humanitarian Ideal and the Lord's Prayer ..... 124- -129 129- -130 130- -134 134- -137 Contents xi Lecture VII. The Pluralism of Hegel. PAGES Hegel at the historical standpoint: here he recognises both the con- tingency and the routine in Nature ...... 138 — 145 But Nature to become Spirit : the Higher the key to the Lower . 145 — 147 World-history, as Mind working out the knowledge of itself, begins with ' the unconscious.' Heterogony of Ends. The World-Spirit and its instruments compared to an architect using natural forces. But where is this World-Architect to be found? .... 147 — 152 It turns out that the completed plan is the architect . . . . 152 — 1-;6 Individuals not means but ends. The World-Spirit the living organiza- tion which they gradually evolve ...... 156 — 158 Lecture VIII. The Hegell'Xn Unity. Is it a unity differentiated into a plurality or a plurality organized into a unity? Hegel's doctrine of the Trinity appealed to in answer . 159 — 160 The Kingdom of the Father is pure thought : the difl'erences here are posited only as ideal: 'the Notion has yet to objectify itself . 160 — 164 In the Kingdom of the Son we come upon difference, the Objective as fact. But how are the two Others, the Son and the World, related, and how is the transition effected ? Der Abfall der Idee ! The first in thought the later in existence ...... 164 — 170 Hegel's doctrine of development. The potential and the actual differ only in form. But what is first, it seems, is "the impulse that puts forth into existence " ........ 170 — 174 So, in the Kingdom of the S/>trit we find unity to be the result of de- velopment. When, however, Ilegel tells us that this result is the beginning, he does not say what he means . . . 174 — 180 Lecture IX. The Limits of Pluralism. The Plurality of Worlds a problem both for pluralists and theologians. To deny it seems futile 181 — 1S4 Need for a Supreme Unity as Upper Limit. Appeal to the principle of Continuity : A. R. Wallace's arguments 184 — 189 Is the Unity a Society or a Person? Either way it cannot be absolute; but for the theist it transcends the series within which pluralism remains. But even so, if immanent it cannot be absolute . . 189 — 195 The Lower Limit of Pluralism also unattainable from within. The demands for a Primum movens connecting both limits . . '95^197 Voluntarism denies the necessity of this. But difficulties for pluralism still remain 197 — 201 xii Contents Lecture X. The Difficulties of Pluralism. PAGES /^/JtVa/ Ca^aj/ro//^^j and the Dissipation of Energy .... 202 — 204 Psychophysical Difficulties. Birth and death cannot be what they seem to be. Pluralism committed to some form of Pre-existence. The problem of Heredity 204—212 The problem of Death : here, for pluralism, metempsychosis in some form unavoidable. A higher Spiritual Order and the Conservation of Values now seem essential ....... 2:2 — 215 Metaphysical Difficulties. The Problem of Interaction propounded by Lotze met by his own doctrine of ' Sympathetic v?rt//^r^' . . 215 — 219 Teleological and cosmological arguments against pluralism : how far valid , 219—224 PART II.: THEISM. Lecture XI. The Idea of Creation. Metaphysics without assumptions criticized ..... 225 — 228 Practical and theoretical value of the Theistic Ideal, even though strict proofs of its reality are wanting ....... 228 — 231 Mistaken views of Creation ........ 231 — 234 God at once transcendent and immanent : creation then implies more than absolute thought or absolute self-consciousness . . . 234 — 238- Analogy between Creative Intuition and the Originality of Genius . 238 — 240- But any adeq.uate idea of God-and-the-World is beyond us ; yet this idea meets the defects of pluralism, and is the only idea of the Absolute we can admit ........ 240 — 242 Tendency of Theism towards Singularism. But if the world is real, it stands over against the reality of God. In making it, God limits himself : apart from it we have no basis for our ideal of God at all 242 — 246 Lecture XII. The Cosmology of Theism. Theism usually occasionalistic. Earlier and later forms of the doctrine. Leibniz's objections not decisive ....... 247 — 25 t Anyhow the Realm of Ends does not imply a prior system of means. On the pamphysical view such a system not necessary at all . 251 — 254 Monads as 'the real atoms of Nature.' Interaction as 'sympathetic rapport.' Organism and Environment as implying a twofold relation of monads ......... 254 — 259 Comparative merits of Pampsychism and Occasionalism . . . 259 — 262 Contents Xlll Nature as ' the preparation for Mind ' means only that self-conscious existence is attained to gradually from earlier stages of merely sentient life .......... Tracing this process backwards, we approach that lower limit which pluralism cannot explain. How does theism interpret it ? Theism is ready nowadays to accept evolution in the literal sense. But evolution as epigenesis raises formidable problems PAGES ■262 — 26^ 265 — 269 Lecture XIII. Freedom. To combine Pluralism with Theism we must reconcile finite freedom and divine foreknowledge. What do we mean by freedom ? Meanings of Cause. Law of Causality as a postulate Hence two senses of determination — the one including, the other excluding, the ideas of efficiency and guidance ; yet the thorough- going 'determinist ' identifies them ...... Analysis of Voluntary Action: Motives and Forces contrasted . A Man's volitions and his Nature. Determinism and Sensationalism. Flux and conflict of motives without a Self, absurd 270—273 273-277 277—283 283—286 286 — 291 Lecture XIV. Freedom and Foreknowledge. The doctrine of Kant and Schopenhauer — noumenal liberty and empirical necessity. Operari sequitur esse applied to men and things alike .......... 292 — 295 But are human characters and chemical qualities thus on a par? Schopenhauer's 'noumenal freedom' a dogmatic blunder, and Kant's 'nature-necessity' an inconsistency .... 295 — 300 Yet Kant's distinction of homo phenomenon and honto noumenon is important, the one an observed object, the other a subject per se. The phenonema of filled time produced by such subjects, which are thus not a part of the time-order that they make . . 300 — 304 Relation of abstract time to experience. Necessitarianism fails through assuming that there is nothing but filled time ; how time is filled it does not inquire ......... 304 — 307 But if the filling of time is eternally decreed, Necessitarianism is in- evitable ........... 308 — 312 Attempts to reconcile freedom and 'foreknowledge.' The Pluralistic via media ........... 312 — 316 Lecture XV. The Problem of Evil and Pessimism. This problem simple for those who first assume God's existence as certain. But we have to dispose of the problem first ; and so must take the defensive . . . . . . . • 3'?- -3'9 xiv Contents PAGES Pessimiam as excessive reaction against exuberant optimism . . 320 — 322 Schopenhauer and Hartmann's faulty psychology .... 322 — 330 Hartmann's Romantic Metaphysic includes a Theogony and a Cosmo- gony 330—333 His answer to the questions he set to Schopenhauer : his ' Evolutionary Optimism ' and his Scheme of Redemption .... 333 — 338 I Lecture XVI. The Problem of Evil and Optimism. The doctrine that happiness is the end, common to optimists and pessimists alike, implicitly denied by 'the Hedonistic Paradox.' The doctrine shown ' to entangle itself in a vicious circle ' . . 339 — 349 Evolution and the Relativity of Evil 349—351 But is the evolution we find in this world ideally the best? . . . 351 — 353 Omnipotence and so-called ' Metaphysical Evil ' .... 353 — 355 Alleged ' Superfluous Evil.' Is Experience in general worth what it costs? 555—357 And what of evils not obviously due to imperfect experience? The World's Conservative Factors 357—3^0 Will Progress be followed by Decline ? 360—361 Lecture XVII. Moral Evil and Moral Order. Theological doctrines and philosophical theories that ignore evolution leave Moral Evil an ' insoluble mystery ' 362 — 364 Innocence and Wrong-doing. The rise of Conscience . . . 364 — 368 This not a fall but an advance, and rids us of the doctrines of a Fall and of Original Sin 368—371 Without the possibility of Moral Evil an evolving world could not be- come moral at all 37i — 374 The Moral Evil in the world not such as to justify atheism . . . 374 — 377 But this evil, it is said, is not confined to human misdeeds : the so- called Divine Government is either immoral or it does not exist at all. The objection discussed 377~38o Evidence to replace the old belief in 'special interventions' . . 380 — 382 The tragedy of the world as a divine comedy 382 — 384 Lecture XVIII. Theories of a Future Life. For Man the present life inadequate, but the difficulty of conceiving any other has grown with the advance of knowledge . . . 385 — 388 Metaphysical arguments do not meet it, for personal continuity is what we require 3^8 — 393 The ' question of Immortality ' depends on the ' meaning of the world ' : apart from this we cannot decide it one way or other. Anyhow some Continuity of Memory and of Environment is essential to it . 393 — 395 Contents XV Memory implies both a subjective function and objective 'records': the organism not the sole repository of the latter. Analogy be- tween germinal soul and disembodied spirit. Organism the result of subjective interaction, not vice versa ..... Continuity of Environment secured in Transmigration, but to secure personal continuity it has to be assumed that latent memories are eventually revived, and that in 'the nascent state' the soul can select ........... Personal continuity secured by the Christian 'Transfiguration' but without continuity of environment. Possible combination of the two views. Purgatory as an intermediate state. Conclusion PAGES 395—401 401—405 405—408 Lecture XIX. Faith and Knowledge. The moral argument, and the main one, for a future life is a matter of faith not of knowledge and is further dealt with only in this con^ nexion here. A quotation from Kant introducing the wliole topic Agnostic objections ........ ' Primitive credulity ' as the source of knowledge ... Faith and Logic : Faith and Reason . The Meaning of the World and what it implies Necessity for Belief in God Belief in a Future Life. Counter-arguments The Moral Ideal and Faith 409—41.3 413—416 416-419 419-421 421—425 425—428 428 — 429 Lecture XX. The Realm of Ends The Course of our inquiry : — The Natural and the Ethical ; The Start from the Pluralistic Standpoint; The advance to the Theistic; The Problem of Evil; The two voices — Faith and Knowledge . 430 — 441 The positive results seemingly attained : — L As to Method . . 441 — 442 IL As to God 442-444 in. As to the World 444—448 IV. As to Faith in the Unseen 448 — 4.^0 Practical arguments: Nietzsche's natural 'Over-man ' and the Christian 'Spiritual man ' 45°— 4.'>2 The Absolute End 453 Supplementary Notes. I. Tlie Meaning of Contingency . II. Dr Howison on Creation . III. The Relation of Body and Mind IV. The Temporal and tlic Eternal V. The Divine Experience . SoMK. Replies to Criticisms . Index ...... 4.=;4 455 46. 468 477 494 495 PART I. PLURALISM, LECTURE I. INTRODUCTORY. Mr Bradley concludes his metaphysical essay en- titled Appearance and Reality with the admission that science is a poor thing if measured by the wealth ot the real universe: he finds that "in the end Reality is inscrutable," and is confirmed in " the irresistible impression that all is beyond us." Everyone must acknowledge this to be a more honest conclusion than the pretended demonstrations of many philosophers. Nobody now-a-days — save here and there a man of science off his beat, like Haeckel for example — has the hardihood to rush into print with a final explanation of the Universe. Still without perpetrating- this folly can we not attempt to advance, to get more insight than at present we have } Surely this is possible, for though ignorance be inevitable, no specific errors are necessary. But we must have some method : in particular we must be clear where we start from. It is a favourite phrase now widely current that the universe has many aspects, and such a conception has the merit ot making w. I 2 Introductory us vividly realise a source of error too often overlooked in the past — I mean confusion of standpoints. Precise orientation of these various aspects of the world is one of the first duties of philosophy, and the ascer- tainment of the supreme and ultimate standpoint is perhaps its chief concern. Now of these various aspects the two most sharply contrasted are those which lead us to speak of the world of mechanism and the world of morals, the subject-matter of the natural sciences on the one hand, and that of the moral sciences including- history on the other. The one Kant was wont to call the Realm of Nature, the other the Realm of Ends ; assigning to the former as its characteristic mark the notion of ' empirical necessity,' to the latter that of ' practical freedom.' It would be superfluous to spend time in picturing out this contrast in detaiP : we have only to think of comparing some classical work of science — say Newton's Principia — with one of history — as, for example, his contemporary Clarendon's Great Rebellion — to realise impressively the complete diversity of the two realms. Regarding the scientific ideal of Nature as a rounded whole, we may safely say that the world of science and the world of history have little or nothing in common : their terminology, their categories, their problems are wholly different ; and so too are the philosophical questions to which they severally and immediately give rise. The one never reaches the individual and con- crete, the other never leaves them ; for the one spon- taneity and initiative are impossible, for the other ^ Cf. my article: 'Mechanism and MoxdX?,,' Hibbert Jl, Vol. iv. 1905. PP- 79ff- Science and History 3 inertia and rigorous concatenation ; to the one the notions of end and value are fruitless, nay meaningless, for the other they are of paramount importance. And yet the two cannot be separated, for Nature not only provides the scenery and properties of history but the actors themselves seem to have sprung from its soil, to owe their position largely to its cooperation, and to come into touch with each other solely through its means. After all, these so-called realms are but ' aspects ' of one world ; and it is precisely this fact that makes their seeming contrariety and incompati- bility a problem for philosophy : where and how are we to find the final unification or mediation of the two? It will be one step towards a solution if we can deter- mine which aspect is the more fundamental. It hardly needs to be said that since the dawn of speculation the claims of both aspects have had, as indeed they still have, their advocates. Those who assign the priority to Nature we call Naturalists : those who contend for the priority of free agents we may call Spiritualists. In a previous course of Gifford Lectures^ which I had the honour to deliver in Aberdeen ten years ago, I en- deavoured to show the superiority of the spiritualistic position. The main lines of the argument can be very briefly indicated and I trust it will seem to you fitting that I should recapitulate them by way of introduction to the further inquiry into the nature of the spiritualistic realm and to the discussion of some of its problems, which I propose in the present course to attempt. Reviewing the progress of the natural sciences since the times of Galileo and Descartes we may note ■ Naturalism and Agnosticism, 3rd ed., 1906. I — 2 4 Introductoyy two characteristics. First, in so far as the qualitative variety and the complexity of concrete things are con- sidered, we find several distinct sciences each with its own special concepts and methods, though all are more or less inductive and experimental. But all qualities and complexities whatever that natural objects present, and all the changes that they undergo, appear to involve quantitative constants and configurations ad- mitting of more or less precise determination and measurement. As soon indeed as the movements of sensible bodies were found to admit of exact description by the science of mechanics the hypothesis at once pre- sented itself that, as Newton expressed it, "the other phenomena of nature might be deduced from mechani- cal principles." And, as we all know, the hypothesis has been amply justified, though not indeed absolutely verified in every detail ; mechanical explanation has therefore long been accepted as the ne plus ultra of what a scientific explanation can be. So much is this the case indeed that even the intractable problem of life is still generally regarded as only an outstanding dif^culty and not as a veritable exception to the universality of mechanical laws. We come now to the second characteristic. For long this mechanical theory was held to furnish us with the knowledge of the empirical reality which our sensible experience was supposed only obscurely to symbolise : it bore, in fact, the name of Natural Philosophy. But as its purely formal character became more apparent, and mathematical equations enabled it to dispense with the real categories of substance and cause, physicists themselves were the first to perceive The Conci^efe and its Symbols 5 and to proclaim that this mechanical theory was after all but an abstract and ideal scheme — a pure science, which can only be actually ' applied,' as we say, with the help of the calculus of probabilities. And what diversity and irregularity the seeming simplicity and uniformity of large numbers may cover human statistics sufficiently show. In place then of the concrete world of sense symbolising this abstract scheme, it has now become clear that it is the abstract scheme itself which symbolises the concrete world from which it set out. It also indeed reveals the law and order that there prevail ; but what the concrete world really is and what is the source of the law and order that it manifests are questions still wholly on our hands. But to call such descriptive scheme pure or rational science is to em- phasize its source in mind ; and when this intelligible scheme of our devising, with which the scientific inquirer greets Nature, is confirmed by Nature's response, are we not justified in concluding that Nature is intelligent or that there is intelligence behind it ? When however the physical realists — those I mean who regard the mechanical theory not as an abstract summary of Nature's routine but as presenting fully- orbed reality — when these realists are called upon to explain the relation of this mechanism to mind they become involved in hopeless inconsistencies. The mechanism is by definition an absolutely closed system, determinate in all its movements down to the minutest detail. Not merely does it brook no interference, but interference is strictly speaking inconceivable : the semblance of such could only mean the presence of 6 Introductory further mechanism hitherto concealed. Mind then is to be interpreted as an impotent and shadowy con- comitant of brain, which is itself but a part of this mechanism inextricably linked in with the rest: we are conscious to be sure, but only conscious automata. This would seem to be the one possible conclusion from the naturalistic premises, if any conclusion were possible at all. But it also becomes a complete refutation of them the moment we raise an obvious question which Naturalism, owing to its absorption in the material aspect, has entirely overlooked : the question, I mean, How from the standpoint of consciousness is any knowledge of this independent mechanical system to be accounted for ? Or, what comes to the same thing, how from the naturalistic standpoint can it be known that consciousness is concomitant with certain mechani- cal motions? Agreeably to its contention for the priority of its own standpoint, Naturalism terms the contents of its world phenomenal, and those of consciousness merely epiphenomenal. But now the tangible, visible, sonorous world, the world of external perception — from which the naturalist starts and to which in all his observations and experiments he appeals to verify the applicability of his theory — this world belongs entirely to the epiphenomenal series. So too does every con- cept in his theory as such ; so that his appeal to ex- perience to validate it is but an admission of its con- nexion with the perceptual, the so-called epiphenomenal. In short, awaken the naturalist from his mathematical ecstasy and the 'epi' at once drops away from our phe- nomena, while his phenomena — since he regards them as independent existences — turn out not to be phenomena Phenomena and Epiphenoniena 7 at all. On the other hand, if we leave him where we found him, oblivious of the essential implications of experience, and contemplating per impossibile a closed system of mass-points in motion, then assuredly the notion that these have dependent, epiphenomenal, con- comitants or 'collateral products' will never dawn upon him, or even admit of statement without contradiction. But a workable interpretation of experience compels us not only to reject this distinction of material phenomena and mental epiphenoniena, but to reject also the tacit assumption that our percepts are merely subjective modifications. This whole distinction of phenomenon and epiphenomenon is but the old story of the Cartesian dualism over again. But after puzzling the world for nearly three centuries, it seems — at least as a philosophical tenet — in a fair way to disappear. Make two mutually exclusive halves out of the one concrete world : in the one you will find only your own so-called subjective states and have to become a solipsist ; in the other the organisms you would find there you could call only automata at the best. This brings us to another inconsistency in which Naturalism is involved ; for, even if conscious, the automata as part of the continuous mechanism are, as already said, powerless to withstand or to control it : consciousness is only comparable to a shadow that incidentally in some mysterious way accompanies their working. To be sure we seem active, ever striving- for ends, and the historical world would become meaning- less if we were not. We do not infer this activity : it is prima facie an ultimate and constitutive fact of our daily experience and of its historical development. 8 Iiitrodtictory None the less we are asked to believe that it is false, because otherwise the mechanical theory cannot be upheld. Granting then for the moment that our sense of activity is illusory, we have at least in turn the right to ask how the illusion can have arisen. Pure mecha- nical science recognises neither activity nor passivity, but only mass that is inert and motions that are re- versible. But inertia is a negative term and becomes meaningless if we have no experience of activity. Such activity, however, as the historical world implies could not be found in the physical world unless that showed signs of being intelligently directed : but then such evidence could only be appreciated by beings who were themselves active. Moreover that evidence would be fatal to the mechanical theory itself — for a mechanism admitting of direction could not be a closed system — and so with the fall of the theory would fall also the objections to our common-sense conviction that were based upon it. All this however is negative argument; but positive arguments are not wanting. For instance, we say that * knowledge is power,' and so ' to be forewarned is to be forearmed.' In proof we can point to instances innumerable in which the very knowledge of what in ' the natural course of things ' will inevitably happen is the sure means of falsifying such a forecast. To take the very simplest illustration: lifeless masses do not get out of one another's way as masses under living guidance almost invariably do. Were it otherwise, the actual course of things would be vastly more calculable but would cease altogether to be intelligible. Solely because, though inviolable, what we signiiicantly call the Inert Mass and Living Guidance g Maws' of Nature can yet be turned to account, do they deserve the name of laws ; and what Hmits our power is not their inflexibihty but our own ignorance. Or again, compare Hving organisms and their pro- cesses, on the one hand, with inanimate objects and the changes that they undergo, on the other. We note at once an ever-increasing complexity as w^e rise in the scale of life, from the amoeba say to ourselves ; and also in our artificial products as we rise in the scale of civilisation, say from the African kraal to the European city. The steady downward trend, the katabolic, levellino- tendencies attributed to unchecked mechanism we find not merely suspended but reversed wherever there is life and mind. The notions of form, adaptation and control here force themselves upon our notice in contrast to matter and its blind, purposeless collisions. Undeterred by this amazing contrast, however, those who uphold the theory that Nature is really a closed mechanism must, and do, refuse to draw anv line : living and lifeless, artificial and natural, are distinctions of no account from the point of view of the mechanical whole : life and mind are the concomitants of certain of its workinofs but the determinants of none. Still the prevision just now referred to and this sharp con- trast are there, and have to be accounted for sonichozv : to allow that they exactly tally with the presence of lite and mind and advance continuously as these advance is but to state the problem, not to solve it. To be content with this is as veritable a specimen of what Germans call * beer philosophy ' as the profound remark that great rivers run through jjopulous towns. In the first place a series of coincidences so vast I o Introductory cannot be casual and disconnected ; and yet if the mechanism on the one side is a closed system, the living experience on the other cannot be even its 'collateral product,' as we have already seen. The hopeless impasse of dualism again confronts our naturalist, and he is fain to appeal to metaphysics ; but the appeal he trusts is harmless, since he only asks for an Unknowable Reality to unite his mechanical phenomena with the psychical epiphenomena that run parallel with them. It is needless to enlarge on the absurdity of such metaphysics: that has been effectively exposed more than once already \ It is enough to note that all this agnostic monism comes to is the admission that there is a connexion and the confession — perhaps I should rather say, the contention — that this connexion is inexplicable. But what precisely is this connexion as a fact, and why is it inexplicable ? We must turn to experience for an answer. There we find not indeed a dualism of material phenomena and mental phe- nomena, but a duality of object presented and subject affected, of subject striving and object attained : an interaction that is only inexplicable because for every finite experience it is ultimate — is its basal fact. With this fact of the duality in unity of experience before us we are at the historical standpoint, the stand- point of the concrete and individual. Tracing the gradual development of experience we can see how the distinction between the real and the phenomenal arose, how with the advance of intersubjective intercourse and the growth of language the so-called trans-subjective objects, objects that, so to say, were common property, ^ Cf. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, pp. 127 ff. Experience a duality in unity 1 1 ceased to be reg-arded as property — or relative to experiencing subjects — at all, while the objects of immediate experience were regarded as the pectclitwi of the individual and so as not objects at all : in other words, we can see how the psychology of dualism came to shut itself iji and the physics of dualism to shut itself out, by sundering the one world of experience into two halves, an internal and an external, both ab- stractions and so both devoid of reality. In particular such epistemological reflexion at once discloses the abstract character of the entire mechanical scheme, to which I have already referred. Again, the light which experience on its practical side throws on the whole process and progress of knowledge is of fundamental importance. We are not simply cognitive beings : moreover, knowledge does not evolve itself, as it were by some purely immanent process, while we merely look on. Even if it may be so unfolded when acquired, its acquisition is only secured piecemeal, by arduous effort, and many mis- adventures. All this implies motives, implies ends to be attained : we seek knowledge primarily because it proves an aid to more and fuller life. Apart from this its quest would be unintelligible : this brings it within the scope of the realm of ends. Finally, if we consider the main structure of knowledge, we find that its funda- mental principles of unity, causality and regularity are derived from this standpoint : in other words, the main structure of our concept of Nature is entirely anthro- pomorphic. The unity of Nature is the ideal counter- part of the actual unity of each individual experience, where synthesis ever precedes anal}sis, and things are 1 2 Introdiictory only distinguished relatively to each other so long as they are apperceived together by the one subject. The category of causality we owe to the interaction of active subjects with their environment and especially with each other, and we attribute it analogically to what we then call the interaction of natural agents. Then as to the regularity of Nature or the universal reign of law, this never has been, and never can be, empirically established, nor does its denial involve any contradiction : that is to say, it is neither demonstrable nor axiomatic. It is a postulate that has its root in our primitive credulity. Were this anticipatio mentis never confirmed, knowledge would be impossible ; but con- firmed as it is continually in our earliest experience we thus advance to an interpretatio naturae as an orderly and intelligible system, a cosmos that evinces directly or indirectly the all-pervading presence of mind. To sum up in words that I have lately used else- where : — "We are active beings and somehow control the movements of the bodies we are said to animate. No facts are more immediately certain than these, and there is nothing in our actual experience that conflicts with them. From these facts we advance to the abstract concepts on the strength of which Naturalism, by a grievous misapprehension of its own standpoint, attempts to question them. Stationed at the very outskirts of the knowable and intent only on the quantitative aspects of things — like those fabulous beings of geometrical romance, the inhabitants of Flatland — it finds impassable barriers which have no existence in the fuller dimensions of concrete ex- perience. But we, orientating from this more central spiritualistic Monism 13 position, may retort upon Naturalism with the words of Goethe, Das Unzulangliche Hier wird's PIreigniss : Das Unbeschreibliche Hier wird's gethan. Having satisfied ourselves, then, that mechanism is not the secret of the universe ; that, if it is to have any meaning, it must subserve some end ; and finding generally that increased knowledge of Nature's laws means increased control of Nature's processes, we accept the facts of experience in which subject and object interact, rather than the conclusions of dualism, that mind and matter are for us two alien worlds and all knowledge of Nature an inexplicable mystery^" — we accept the spiritualistic standpoint and its Realm of Ends as the more fundamental. I have called this position spiritualistic monism to distinguish it from materialistic monism, which we may disregard as obsolete, and from neutral or agnostic monism, which we may fairly treat as an inept and ineffectual attempt to get round the deadlock of dualism. But if this position be indeed the more fundamental, it ought to be possible, it may be urged, to see directly from this standpoint how the appearance of mechanism arises, or at least to make some progress towards accounting for it in terms of life and mind. Un- questionably it ought : and in fact, as we shall presently see, attempts have been specially numerous of late to meet this demand in a more or less scientific ' Philosophical Orientation and Scientific Standpoints, Berkeley, California, 1904. 1 4 Introductory fashion. Meanwhile we may remind those who demand of us an explanation of the appearance of mechanism, that, if the term be strictly taken, there need for spiritualism be no such appearance at all. The more completely we can interpret the world as a realm of ends the more completely the tables are turned upon naturalism. As this contends, in the words of Huxley, " for the gradual banishment from all regions of human thought of what we call spirit and spontaneity^" so that, for the gradual banishment of what we call inert stuff and directionless energy. To see how the case stands let us recall the contrast between science and history just now referred to. The first effect of this contrast was the extragavant common- place that history as unscientific had no interest for the philosopher. The final result may be the other extreme, that science as general and abstract has no interest \ for the philosopher ; since he is concerned only with reality, and that is concrete and individual out and out. At any rate the thought of the last century made a very decided advance in this direction : in the course of it what were formerly called the descriptive or natural history sciences culminated in the philosophy of evolution, while abstract physics is lapsing, as we have seen, from its old supremacy as the mechanical philosophy to the rank of a merely descriptive scheme^ As compared with the nineteenth century the eighteenth — though it produced great historians — was a century devoid of historic sense. I ts speculations ^ Collected Essays, Eversley edn, Vol. i. p. 154. ^ Cf. Boltzmann, quoted in Naturalism a?td Agnosticism, Vol. I. p. 166. The Historical Method 15 concerning the origin of society, of language, of re- ligion, show this. And, as the most recent historian of scientific thought has pointed out, the work of Laplace shows this too. Both his Mdcaniqiie celeste, " dealing with the sfeneral laws of motion and of lifeless masses," and his Thdorie de la Probabilitd^ " dealing with the arithmetical properties of large numbers of units, leave out of consideration that hidden and mysterious phenomenon [fact] to which alone is attached... all that commands interest in the created world — the existence of individuality \" And yet it was in the latter of these works that Laplace, brushing aside freewill as a palpable illusion, pro- claimed the implicit omniscience of the mechanical theory in a passage that I took for the text of my former lectures^ In like manner the belief in fixed and immutable species prevented Laplace's great con- temporary, Cuvier, from appreciating the genetic view of nature, where the supreme importance of the individual first appears as — to quote an expression of Hegel's — 'involving the species and genus in itself,' where variation and heredity become the central problems of biology and where the classifications of system-makers cease to be of value save as a pre- liminary clue. I have mentioned Hegel, and — what- ever may be thought of other sides of his philosophy — its value in this connexion can hardly be over- ' T- '!'• Merz, A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century, Vol. i. 1896, p. 124. ' It was reserved for Clerk Maxwell to point out clearly the inevitable limitation of the Laplacean data. Cf. his Li/ehy Campbell and Garnett as quoted by Merz, op. cit. Vol. n. 1902, p. 559. 1 6 Introductory estimated. " If the historical literature of our time," said Zeller, " no longer contents itself with eruditely- unravelling or critically sifting traditions, piecing to- gether and pragmatically elucidating particular facts, but seeks first and foremost to understand the funda- mental continuity of events, to comprehend broadly the development of history and the spiritual principles that control it, this advance is due not least to the influences that Hegel's Philosophy of History has exercised\" Now for Hegel human history meant struggle for rational freedom, as for Darwin natural history meant struggle for existence : both are teleo- logical concepts, both imply individual agents and unique events, for both the physical world is pro- visionally a means to ends. The historical method, then, we may say, is altogether the product of the nineteenth century and there we find it claiming " to have invaded and transformed all departments of thought." "A belief in this method," said Sidgwick in the course of a polemic against it, " is the most widely and strongly entertained philosophical conviction at the present day^" Even the negative side of this transformation, the waning of scientific realism, is largely due to the growing conviction of the central importance of the concrete and historical. It is not merely the truth that laws imply agents, nor again the truth that scientific laws are only abstract formulae — what here becomes apparent is that scientific generalisations are an economic device necessitated by our limitations. * Geschichte der deutschen Philosophie, p. 824. 2 'The Historical Method,' Alind, 1886, p. 203. The Passing of Physical Realism 1 7 But it is to Ernest Mach, a physicist who has turned philosopher, that we owe the most impressive presen- tation of this truth. "In reahty," he says, "the law always contains less than the fact itself, because it does not reproduce the fact as a whole, but only that aspect of it which is important to us, the rest being either intentionally or from necessity omitted\" If we were capable of that intellectual intuition of which some philosophers have dreamt, there would be no enforced omissions, no intractable residuum, no sundering of 'that' and 'what' in our knowledge; history would not be left outside science, but rather science be taken up into history. We should not start with the abstract and general, unable to reach the concrete and individual, but being fully acquainted with every individual we should be relieved of the incommensurability of fact and law. Omniscience of this sort would surely bring us nearer to reality than the omniscience of Laplace's imaginary spirit with its completed world-formula. Order there would needs be in such a world, if it is to be a world at all. But ^ Mach, 'The Economical Nature of Physics,' Popular Scientific Lectures, p. 193. This necessary Hmitation of discursive thought has led to two distinct but more or less complementary attitudes towards concrete reality. Elated by the power and precision that generalisa- tion secures, science was encouraged on the one hand to hope that by extending its network of general relations it would at length completely encompass the individual, on the other to despise the particular as mere 'stuff of no account save as it was formed by participation in general ideas. It was mainly the former tendency that led to the philosophic indifference to mere history and experience as unscientific that characterizes Descartes, Bacon and Hobbes for example. The latter tendency shows itself in Schopenhauer's singularly inconsistent contention that history is a mere hurly-burly ( \Vimvarr\ only the accidental form of the appearance of the idea. w. a 1 8 Introductory In a realm of ends the order and meaning would be primarily the outcome of the purposes of the active beings composing it; only to discursive intellects such as ours could this order emanatinof from individual agents appear as a warp and woof of external law shaping some primordial stuff. As naturalism claims to approximate to a complete formulation of this phenomenal order, so spiritualism may claim to ap- proximate to an interpretation of the underlying reality; but it will have this advantage, that while it may be possible, setting out from mind, to account for mechanism it is impossible, setting out from mechanism, to account for mind. Such an approximation to a spiritualistic inter- pretation we actually have in the history of the living world. Here we are ever in the presence of individual things, from which science indeed sets out, but to which it can never return, individuals marked down by dates and places and actually designated or ad- mitting of designation by proper names\ individuals who have no ' doubles,' whose like all in all we never shall meet again. The events with which we have here to deal are the unique acts and deeds that have their origin in individual centres of experience, not events that seem to occur uniformly as resultants of universal and unvarying law. Further, it is not the intrinsic nature of objects but their value for the par- ticular individual that immediately determines each one's attitude towards them; and as the individuals vary so do their interests and pursuits. But qtndquid petitur petitur S2ib specie boiti: the idea of the good, ^ To which therefore no concept is adequate. The Idea of the Good 19 as Plato long ago taught, is here the supreme category^ If however there were as many goods as there are individuals and all were disparate and independent, this would not help us much. But the individuals of history are none of them isolated, for though no two be altoeether alike no two are altogether different. So community and co-operation become actual goods, struggle a possible evil calling for readjustment, and the harmonious realisation of individual ends the ideal consummation, the " one far off divine event to which the whole creation moves." Meanwhile the course of history shows us the gradual building-up of society and civilisation and therewith the attainment at each advance of ends that were inconceivable at an earlier stage. But these ever- widening social groups and ends of ever-increasing scope are still in every case individual and concrete. The subordinate individuals or the particular aims which the wider embrace are still to be regarded as members or constituents of an articulate whole and not as instances of a general class, in which the content diminishes as the extent increases' ; for in these historical wholes, we must again insist, there is never complete homogeneity of parts. On the contrary, the higher, over-individual ends, as they are sometimes called, — politics, industry, science, literature, art — imply a differentiation among men that in spite of its significance would defy classification. The more organized the community the more diverse the individuals it includes, and the more man appears ' Rep. VI. 505 .\. - Cf. Rickcrt, Die Grenzcii der natunvissenichajt lichen Begriffs- bilduiig, 1902, p. 394. 2 — 2 20 Introductory as the historical animal. At the same time the reali- sation of these ends invests him, so to say, with a new environment, a metamorphosis of nature, an artificial, humanly created, medium, which throws the immediate environment of the naked and resourceless troglodyte more and more into the background. Entre r hoimne et la Nature, said Comte, it faut r Immanit^. Still, it will be objected, beyond humanity and history, beyond, if you will, the whole realm of sentient life. Nature is there all the while, and there as no mere background but as the basis of the whole, the fundamental plasma which can only be shaped because it is itself determinate and orderly. Granting this we may yet urge that there is nothing in Nature, when we try to envisage it as a whole, that is incompatible with a spiritualistic interpretation. In the historical world we place determinate agents first, and the order and development which we observe we trace to their action and interaction. It has never been shown that we need, nor made clear that we can, interpret Nature otherwise. One problem of supreme importance to such an interpretation does however arise, and this problem the objection we are considering directly suggests. We have only to an insignificant extent shaped Nature, we have not made it ; we are not even settlers from a foreign clime but aborigines seemingly sprung from the soil. But the principle of con- tinuity is supposed to turn the edge of this ob- jection, and to this principle pampsychism appeals, though it does not rest on that alone. " Nature never makes leaps," said Leibniz. Every organism has its peculiar environment, the simpler the one is the simpler Paiiipsychism 2 1 the other will be. Recent knowledge has shown the range of life to extend far into the region of what was once regarded as the inanimate, purely physical world, and it has further shown the lowest known organisms to be highly complex and extremely varied. But there is nothing to suggest that we have reached the limits of life : all we can say is that our senses and the artificial aids and methods of research at present available do not enable us to discriminate between yet simpler forms of life and their environment ; not that these do not exist. There is then, it is contended, no warrant for the assumption of a completely inanimate environment at all : we ought rather with Spinoza to conclude that " all individual things are animated, albeit in diverse degrees^" We ought so to conclude too, because — continuity apart — what can neither do nor suffer, what is nothing for itself, is truly nothing at all ; for — again as Spinoza maintained — every indi- vidual thing, so far as in it lies, endeavours to persist in its own being-. On this, the pampsychist view. Nature thus resolves into a plurality of conative individuals ; and the range and complexity of the . correspondence between a given individual and its environment marks the stage to which it has advanced in its interaction with the rest. But to cite Spinoza is to give point to the difficulty that has still to be met. Will a plurality of interacting subjects account for itself and for the unity which interaction implies } This is the cjuestion which in the following lectures we shall have carefully to discuss. Suppose we decide this question in the negative, that will not aftect the ' Ethics, II. 13, Schol. * Ethics, HI. 6. V 22 Introductory main issue as between spiritualism and naturalism: for such ground of the world of living and acting things would — if we should be led to assume it — surely be itself living and acting. In any case then we have a realm of ends, the only question is: — what is its con- V stitution, how is its harmony secured ; is it, so to say, a more or less orderly democracy, is it a limited monarchy, or is it possibly an absolute one? This is none other than the old and formidable problem of the One and the Many; and this, it has been said, will be the philosophical problem of the twentieth century. Certainly there are few questions more to the fore at the present time. It is fitting- then that with this we should begin. But with such a problem much depends on the side from which we begin ^ and the method that we adopt. The great idealistic systems of the nineteenth century began with the One as absolute and adopted what may be generally described as a speculative or a p7noid method. Of the greatest of these systems, that of Hegel, even its most sympathetic critics have allowed that, however perfect its ideal may be in itself, its attainment is, and must ever remain, humanly impossible. And this verdict, I do not think it audacious to say, is easy to justify: it simply amounts to protesting that we can never transcend ourselves. The first requisite of philosophy is organic coherence: it cannot, so to say, have two independent growing points, and so long as experience is the one there can be no finality about philosophy. As experience advances its meaning will unfold itself to reflexion more and more: so further progress makes further regress possible and what is last in the order of experience brings us nearer to what is first in the The question of Method 23 order of knowledge. On experience as it develops the ideal of the pure reason may rise to perish never, but it was certainly not discernible at first; and if present now, its full meaning is ineffable still. The superlative, the absolute, the infinite are limiting notions, and for aught we know are notions only: ideals of the reason they may be, but then reason itself is an ideal. There seems no end to the process of rationalising experience, but — as I said at the outset — at least there may be progress, and our confidence, that, as Hegel maintained, the real is rational and the rational real may deepen as we proceed. But we must start where we are and continue as we have begun, letting knowledge grow from more to more. To say this is to imply that those idealists who have attempted to begin with the Absolute have not really done so. That they have not has been amply proved by their critics and admitted by their apologists. But at any rate in the flights of pure thought up to the Absolute the atmosphere of empirical fact by which it is sustained is too diffused to be detected, and when that summit is reached the particular, the many, of actual experience tend to disappear or to be explained away. Thus their "alleged independence" — in which we empiri- cally believe — Mr Bradley declares "is no fact, but a theoretical construction; and so far as it has a meaning, that meaning contradicts itself, and issues in chaos.,.. The plurality then sinks to become merely an integral aspect in a single substantial unity, and the reals [the manyj have vanished^" Nevertheless the inevitable reaction, which the impossibility of philosophical finality involves, has already set in: indeed Mr Bradley * Appearance and Reality, 2nd edn, p. 143. 24 Introductory prophesied as much: " Monadism," he says, "on the whole will increase and will add to the difficulties which already exists" Whether the second half of his forecast will turn out to be as true as the first remains to be seen. At any rate the plurality of the realm of ends is what is most patent to us at the outset : if the difficulties of Pluralism point the way to Singularism^ they will at least serve to make the character of the One clearer than any ' cheap and easy monism ' evolved at a dialectical show — such as Mr Bradley in a famous passage has himself described^ — can ever do. It will be well too as regards method to let the spirit of the time lead us ; turning aside from what has been described as " Naturalism's desert on the one hand and the barren summit of the Absolute on the other," to follow the historical method as far as possible in tracing the gradual evolution of ideas, but trusting to speculative methods only in the endeavour to divine the most satisfactory solution of the problems to which they gave rise. In the next lecture then we must try to ascertain the genesis of the ideas which lead to the problem of the One and the Many, and then we may proceed to examine the solution which those who are called Pluralists or Personal Idealists uphold. ^ Op. at. p. iiSjJiH. ^ This term, first used by Kiilpe as the correlative of Pluralism {FAnleitiing in die F/iiiosophie, § 14), may not be happy; but it is after all better than Henism ; and it is not misleading as Monism according to present usage, i.e. with a qualitative as well as a quanti- tative sense, certainly is. Wolf, who invented the term, used it, as I have done, only in the qualitative sense as applicable either to materialism or to spiritualism. ^ Principles of Logic, p. 533. LECTURE II. THE ONE AND THE MANY. It is very commonly assumed that idealism or spiritualism is synonymous with theism, or at least inseparable from it. It is true that idealists are rarely atheists, but it would be dogmatism to assert offhand that they cannot be. Still less can we say that if not monotheists, they must be p^intkeists, in the sense of denying the reality of the world altogether as Spinoza is commonly credited with doing, and so was called by Hegel not atheist but acosmist. Pani\\Q\sm in the sense of identifying the world with God is but 'a polite atheism,' as Schopenhauer has said, but such a pantheism is not compatible with idealism. So " from a world of spirits to a Supreme Spirit is 2. possible step," is all I ventured to say in my former lectures at Aber- deen^; for it is not straightway evident that it is a necessary one. Many of those called pluralists or personal idealists deny the necessity, and some even^^^ question the possibility of any such step.-^We cannot, of course, admit a multiplicity without any unity. A One of some sort is obviously implied in talking of a world at all ; but may not the Many account for their own unity instead of requiring a One, an individual of • Naturalism and Agnosticism^ Vol. 11. p. 202. l^ 26 TJie One and the Many another order, to account for them ? May not the unity of the world be analogous to that of a society, so presupposing the individuals associated ? Or must we assume beyond and above the Many and their unity an Absolute One, of which they are somehow the appear- ance? This is the problem of the One and the Many -'- to which we have now to turn. As an essential pre- liminary to any attempt to deal with it we have agreed first of all to ascertain, if we can, how the ideas of the One and the Many arise in the course of advancing experience and thought. The correlation or duality involved in all experience, that namely of an individual subject and its objective environment, is often described as a duality of Ego and Non-Ego, of Self and Not-Self. But it is important to note, on the one hand, that this objective Not-Self is not presented as another self, but simply as an 'Other.' Also it is equally important to note, on the other hand, that this objective 'Other' has always for ex- perience a certain continuity or unity, which — though it differentiates more and more as experience develops — never completely disintegrates into a discrete manifold or mere plurality. Again the relation of the subject to this objective continuum is always one of more or less dependence. But the subject, as we have already seen, is not wholly inert : it is always active and selective to some extent ; otherwise, indeed, it could never be aware of its dependence. As experience extends and the objective differentiates, the subject too advances in initiative and acquires new powers; but never, so to say, overtops and outstrips the Non-Ego. On the contrary, increasing" knowledge though it secures in- r Nature as the One 27 creasing power also deepens this sense of dependence. Primitive man attempts to subjugate or circumvent Nature by magic, but science has long since taught us that our ends of self-preservation and physical better- ment are only to be attained by such adaptation and adjustment as Nature allows. But the advance of Science, it is said, does not merely deepen this sense of our ultimate dependence on Nature, it also tends increasingly to emphasize Nature's complete independence of us. We talk of our life as a struggle, but at least Nature does not deign to struggle with us. We talk of shaping and selecting; but the further our knowledge of this in- terminable Other confronting us extends, the more inevitable to many seems the conclusion that in truth it is we who are shaped and selected by Nature. Such in brief is die geliiitterte Natii^'-betrachtiuig des denkenden Natur^nenschen, as Haeckel calls it ; and the only Absolute One, in which Naturalism believes,^ is the result. And what ultimately is this Absolute which Haeckel's clarified vision discerns? It is per- manent substance; more definitely, it is the kinetic world-ether, whose mass and energy are eternally con- served, and whence the Many result as atomic souls by an inexplicable condensation or concentration. This world-ether is the only 'creative divinity' that Haeckel allows. And Herbert Spencer comes very near to this when, in the recent revision of his Fij'st Principles, he suggests that "the only supposition having consistency is that that in which consciousness inheres is the all- pervading ether'." We have then here that form of so-called /<:z;/theism — in which all the stress is on the * First Principles, 1902, p. 201. 28 The One and the Many '■pail'' — the pantheism that maintains — as Schopen- hauer put it — " that the world is there in virtue of its own internal energy and through itself" — a world in which consciousness, according to him, is a secondary and unfortunate episode. But this polite atheism, as I have already said, we cannot accept. Though but a reed, to use Pascal's words, man is a thinking reed, and cannot be merged in or emerge from such a world, however vast it be. Man only knows the world as it faces him and he inter- acts with it, and he knows it only so far as he finds it intelligible. And finding it intelligible he can only con- clude that it is not after all an alien Other but has its ground and meaning either in another self or in a com- munity of selves. This much we are taking as already clear. Let us turn then to consider the idea of the Many, which in fact we reach first and which leads to a concept of the Absolute still older than that of objective substance. The individual subject soon learns to distinguish certain objective differentiations or bodies, in form and behaviour resembling that particular differentiation which is present in all its own experience as the body or organism that it is said to animate. These other bodies it regards as each one animated by a self, and it often finds that it is itself so regarded by them. But such other selves only tell on the individual's experience, because their bodies form parts of the one objective whole that is so far common to them all, and through which all their intercourse and interaction are mediated. That is to say, only the bodies and their movements are presented as objects, the indwelling selves (or souls) and their experiences are not thus The Many as Ejects 29 presented. To mark this difference we may adopt Clifford's term and call these other selves and their experience 'ejects.' In the infancy of the human race this ejective analogy ran riot: primitive philosophy, if we may credit the untutored savage with such a luxury, found life and mind everywhere. But it was still life or mind set in the matrix of a common environment, pos- sessing always a definite embodiment and location there- in and manifesting itself solely by this means. We can imagine other selves transcending ourselves indefinitely, as we can imagine them indefinitely lower than our- selves, in what we call the scale of being. But if we hold to the continuity which a scale of being implies, we must imaofine them all — higrher and lower alike — as subjects in correlation with objects and not as in them- selves absolute or complete. As Hegel's unfortunate colleague, Beneke, was fond of maintaining in opposition to him: — "The human mind is incapable of devising or excogitating anything absolutely; on the contrary it must derive either from external or from internal experience the essential elements of all that it imagines or thinks'." On the lines then of that experience which brings us into communication with our fellow-creatures, the experience that underlies the animism, mythology, and polytheism of primitive culture, we can at best only imagine an experient who is primus inter pares, at any rate so far as the duality of subject and object is concerned: we cannot reach on these lines the thoui'ht of an Absolute One. Even the living and true God, who is the object of worship in monotheistic religions, cannot be identified with the Absolute, for worship im- * System der Alctaphysik, 1840, p. 496. 30 The One and the Many plies mutual distinction and mutual interest. Moreover the history of religion shows clearly that the idea of a supreme and only God has been developed through polytheism, and has so far an anthropomorphic basis. For "pure monotheism," as Dr Caird has said, "God was merely one subject among other subjects; and though lifted high above them, the source of all their life, was yet related to them as an external and inde- pendent wilP." But the point on which we have to insist is rather that to be a subject at all, in any sense that we can understand — so long that is as the term subject carries any meaning for us — is to be confronted by an Other as object. A supreme subject then taken alone, no less than the objective World so taken, is but a one-sided abstraction and cannot be veritably an absolute reality. Certainly, it will be said, the true, the absolute Absolute is not exclusively subjective, still less ex- clusively objective: it is the unity of both. — Mythology had its cosmogony and even its theogony, but in rising towards the idea of a Supreme Spirit, speculative monotheism, at all events, has tended to conceive both God and the World sub specie aeternitatis. The entire objective world and the many finite subjects which interact with it or within it, in all their totality and in all their distinctness, are, it is said, to be conceived as eternally present to God as His own creative intuition and self-manifestation. The world is for God too, but not as for us, merely as given fact, but entirely as thought or deed. This sublime ideal is again a limit towards which our thought can only approximate ; and the history ot thought shows not only how gradually ^ The Evolution of Religion, 1893, Vol. 11. p. 72. Ancient Ideas of Creation 31 the advance towards it has been made: it shows also that difficulties emerge as this ideal is more distinctly- conceived. But let us note the steps. All finite beings, we have found, are in part passive and only in part active ; but they appear as increasingly active the hitdier in the scale of being they stand : God as the Supreme is then to be regarded as purely active and wholly free from external constraint. Whereas we can only shape and arrange so far as the elements and forces of nature permit, for God there is no nature; no need for mechanism to transform 'chaos without form and void ' into a cosmos teeming with purpose and life: for him there is only his own creation. But this idea of creation, creation 'out of nothing,' is hard to seize. Not only does the Mosaic account — with its void and formless earth, its primeval darkness and the spirit of Elohim brooding over the waters — fail to reach it; but the philosophic sj^ccu- lations of Plato and Aristotle failed to reach it too. Both recognise a viateria prima as a sort of half-real, indeterminate, potential stuff — wholly receptive and yet more or less recalcitrant — to which form and life are imparted, but which itself was never made. All this suggests a generative process, nature but not creation; indeed Plato, in the Timacus at all events, compares this primary matter, as Aristotle called it, to a nurse or receptacle of all generation^ Such ideas point to a dualism not to an absolute Unity: Gnd and Nature are distinct. And, in fact, both Plato and Aristotle in different ways explicitly separate Nature as the sensible ' Cf. Timacus^ 49 ff- i-' 32 The One and the Many world from an intelligible world which is the direct object of the divine thought and contemplation. Between the two worlds they fail to establish any satisfactory connexion^' but if we leave the sensible world out of account, we have in the Platonic world of ideas and in the divine v6y)(ji% voijcrecoq of Aristotle a unity of subjective and objective which we may fairly call the Absolute, since it is perfect and complete in itself. Of this the sensible world is a superfluous and imperfect — nay an impossible — replica, that can neither really be nor be really known. And if we are to be in earnest with the notion of creation out of nothing does it not equally eliminate any idea of generation or of reproduction, does it not suggest that sort of eternal 'static perfection' which such processes as producing, impressing, or in-forming, exclude? A subject who is act2is pin^us, clear there- fore of all the limitations pertaining to space and time, who apprehends not by sense and comprehends not by discursive thinking, what object can he have which is not himself? Must we not say then that he does not make even out of nothing, for what is made cannot be its Maker? and yet if the Maker is absolute, what else can it be ? He acts, but his acts are immanent not transeunt: he becomes his own Other only that he may be conscious of himself, and so we call him causa suz, and interpret this as meaning an absolute self-consciousness. Such at any rate has been the usual outcome of philosophic monotheism: it tends to end in acosmism. Aristotle's position, for example. Is summed up by Dr Caird as " the pure selt-conscious- ^ Cf. Caird, The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Fhilosophers^ 1904, Vol. II. pp. 238 ff. The One and Acosinism 33 ness of God, in which subject and object and the activity that relates them to each other — vqv<;, vo-qrov and v6y]ai^ — are perfectly unified and which, therefore, is complete in itself without reference to any other object," — but such absolute self-consciousness "cannot logically be conceived as going beyond itself to create the finite world of movement and changed" The same dualism between God and the world reappears in the philosophy of Plotinus — a philosophy in some respects an amalgam of the Platonic and the Aristo- telian — the same inability, that is to say, to show, as Dr Caird puts it, "how God, who is absolutely complete in himself, can yet be the source of existences which are external to him and not included in the process of his own life'." In the philosophy of Spinoza, to which, as already said, the name acosmism was first applied, this difficulty is specially apparent. His many expositors have failed to show any con- ceivable connexion between what he called natura naturata and God, in whom all the modes and dis- tinctions of the former disappear, and whose existence, as Spinoza himself has said, is " toto genere different from theirs." In fact, observing that 'creation out of nothing' has another side — ex niJiilo nihil Jit — we might not unfairly say that this is the side which the acosmic tendency of Absolutism inevitably emphasizes. The world of finite existences created out of nothing is nothing ; that is to say, it is Schciii not Scin, ap- pearance not reality, as the Kleatics first proclaimed : * Op. cit. II. p. 241. * Op. cit. II. p. 257. w. 3 34 The One and the Many it is the Maya of Brahmanism, the inexplicable illusion enveloping the One, that ...like a dome of many-coloured glass Stains the white radiance of eternity. But the conclusion that reality cannot be Many led naturally to a yet further development of the idea of the Absolute. The Absolute in the end was conceived not so much as the unity of subject and object but rather as a unity that transcends both. Such an Absolutism we find, for example, in the One of Plotinus, the Substance of Spinoza and the Neutrum of SchelHng. And I fear we must allow that those who would add Hegel's Absolute Idea to the list are probably right, unless indeed we are willing to admit that it is — as he himself as good as says — not the Absolute but only its shadow. But there is still a step. After all, we and all our speculation belong to the world of so-called ' spurious existence ' ; and as to the One, so transcendently different from all that we know — none of our concepts are applicable to it. It is Nicht in contrast to Icht, as Eckhart quaintly says. We ascend to it, as the ' negative theology ' of the Scholastic mysticism taught, by dropping one after another every determinate predicate, so that we end by saying with Proclus that the One or God is above substance and life and intelligence, and cannot even be called One except figuratively ; or with Basilides that it is rather to be called absolute non-existence, or again with the author of the Tkeoiogia germanica that it must be called Nothing, by which is meant that it is nothing of all that created things can conceive, know, The One of Mysticism 35 think or name\ No doubt the mystics did not intend by this rejection of all positive determinations to imply that there was no God or that God was nothing : rather, as Hoffding puts it : — " In the mystical concept of God, as well as in the Buddhist concept of Nirvana, it is precisely the inexhaustible positivity which bursts through every conceptual form and turns every deter- mination into an impossibility." It was in this sense that Fichte said that "every so-called concept of God is necessarily that of an idol'-." Thus not merely graven images are disallowed, but in the end all determinate thoughts, of this super-essential, super- rational, super-personal, nay, super-absolute unity* that is neither subject nor object and in which all difference begins and ends. But there is yet a possible concept of the One to be noticed which experience directly suggests — that of the world-soul, the eject to which the world belongs as its organism. But for the present this notion only interests us in that it formed a sort of terti^im quid or mediating principle by which Plato and his Neo- platonic followers attempted to connect the permanent and intelliofible world with the sensible world of the finite many that ever change and pass. And the attempt is obviously futile, for from the point of view of the Absolute there is no sensible world with which to connect itself — were such connexion in itself possible. ' Cf. art. ' Mysticism ' by Prof. Pringle-Pattison in Eiicy. Brit. ; Manse), The Gnostic Heresies, 1.^74, p. 146; Hoffding, Fhilosophy oj Religion, i9io> § 21, and note 37. ' Werke, v. p. 267. • So Nicholas ot Cusa. Cf. Caird, Evolution of Religion, 11. pp. 73 t. 3—2 36 The One and the Many The world -soul is really one term in an emanation to which the very fulness of the Absolute somehow gives rise, but which as little concerns it, as the chance reflexion of its beams affects the effulgence of the sun itself This ingenious analogy of emanation suggested by the solar radiation, though common in ancient thought, is most fully elaborated by Plotinus. As it is the precise converse of the modern doctrine of evolution, this process might be conveniently called devolution ; for as that is a progress from the lower to the higher this is a decline from the higher to the lower. With every remove there is not only less perfection but seemingly also more plurality, more diffusion. The vovs, which proceeds immediately from the One, is already beset with the duality that even intuition implies ; the world-soul, which follows next, is necessarily plural ised into particular souls; each of these in turn is resolved into higher and lower faculties by its relation to the body which it shapes and informs, while this body again is infinitely divisible. Beyond all is matter as mere indeterminate emptiness, dark- ness and evil, the utter contrary in all respects of the absolute fulness, light and perfection of the One. In a word plurality and separation with their broken lights are the marks of imperfection and unreality : our very birth, i.e. the assumption of a body, is in part a sin, in part a punishment ; and the only remedy for this evil lies in a mystic reunion with, and absorption in, the One. We have thus passed in review several ideals of a supreme Unity which speculation, regardless of expe- rience, has elaborated — an Absolute Object, an Absolute Subject, an Absolute Self-consciousness, and various The Absolute as Object or Subject 37 attempts to transcend such duality as consciousness implies. The first two we reject not as being one but as being one-sided : since subject and object are essentially correlative, neither alone can be absolute. Still even these ideals point the moral that our whole review suggests — Ahit/a vestigia retrorsimt. An absolute reached by way of abstraction is the lion's den, where all plurality disappears. In what- ever sense you say absolute in that sense you cannot say many. If there were an absolute substance or an absolute subject there could not be many substances or subjects, unless these terms were equivocally used ; as substance for example was by Descartes, and subject by Fichte. And if absolute means perfect and com- plete, why should — nay, how can — what is in itself absolute become splintered up into infinite modes that are neither perfect nor complete } We can imagine them as mutually determining each other, but for it they are but ' invulnerable nothings ' with which it has no concern. This is the difficulty that has been specially emphasized by critics of Spinoza. It recurs in a more concrete form, but then as illustrating the one-sidedness of an absolute object, in the naive pro- cedure of such thinkers as Spencer or Haeckel when they jump from a homogeneous plenum or uniform all-pervading ether to the discrete atoms into which it somehow has to be, and yet nohow can be, resolved — unless some directing agency or prime mover be forth- coming from without. Similarly the Absolute Ego of Fichte can only be got under way with the help of an unintellic^nble Anstoss (or impact) determining it to posit its non-F^go. 1.3S >^ .1^ \> ^S The One and the Many We come then to the ideal of an absolute ex- perience as the unity, it might seem, of Absolute Subject and Absolute Object, an Absolute that is no longer one-sided and without distinctions. But again there can be only one such consciousness, and it must be transparently clear, a light, so to say, in which is no darkness at all. In our experience the contemplation of what we sometimes call the eternal truths of reason and again the intuitive certainty of our consciousness of self come nearest to this ideal. We find accordingly that ancient speculation laid more stress on the former, as in Aristotle's vdr^o-t? voija-eax; ; and modern on the latter, as in Hegel's sz'c/i selbst denkende Idee : though both aspects are always present. Outside such an Absolute there can be nothing at all, and within it nothing that is imperfect, mutable or obscure. The more clearly we realise this ideal the more inevitably three conclusions force themselves upon us: (i) Here there is nothing wanting : this intelligible world is perfect and complete in itself, {2) from this tran- scendent standpoint the existence of the finite Many — the sensible world — seems impossible, and (3), granting its existence, the connexion between the two worlds is inexplicable — inexplicable at least apart from assump- tions incompatible with the character of such an ideal. The way upward to this by abstraction and idealisation is comparatively easy — though such methods cannot pretend to yield knowledge ; but the way back has in fact only been possible by means of myths and metaphors, which are not even logically consistent. Not-being or the non-existent is always endowed with some sort of potentiality or receptivity, which Absolute Self -Consciousness 39 ...the One Spirit's plastic stress Sweeps through Torturing the unwilHng dross, that checks its flight, To its own likeness, as each mass may bear. We talk of creation out of nothing. But if the quahfication * out of nothing ' has any meaning at all it implies a transeunt activity on the part of the Creator and a certain lack of reality on the part of the creature — a lack of reality which sinks back to complete unreality when the creature is compared with the Creator, as Meister Eckhart, for example, maintained. But on the other hand what possible meaning can we assign to transeunt activity on the part of the Absolute } If then we emphasize the notion of creation simply and regard the creative activity as purely immanent, then as with Spinoza causa is the same as ratio ; what is said to be created is the intelligible world, where, sub specie aeternitatis, all things follow from the 'nature' of God "in the same way as from the nature of the triangle it follows from eternity and for eternity that its three interior angles are equal to two right angles^" I have referred to the method by which such ideals of the Absolute are reached as a method of abstraction and as, therefore, necessarily defective. It will be well, if possible, to make this clearer. What we may call the three unities of experience, the unity of the subject, the unity of the object, and the unity of both in self-consciousness, are hardly to be questioned. Now the objective side of experience, to begin with that, is always a complex or differentiated whole : the more * Ethics^ I. xvii. note. 40 The One and the Many primitive the experience the fewer, the simpler, and the vaguer the differentiations ; but an objective continuum wholly devoid of diversity would yield no experience. Yet such a homogeneous whole is just what we reach by abstracting first from all the quali- tative differences of particular bodies, and then from their particularity or discreteness : in place of an ordered cosmos there then remains only a continuous plenum, as in the Cartesian concept of matter or the modern concept of a primordial ether. Mistaking abstraction for simplification, we call that absolute which is really only above all relations because it is completely indeterminate. As we have already seen, the cosmos or concrete whole cannot be called absolute, if we regard it as what is experienced^ that is as ob- jective; but this abstract resolution of it into an aneipov i^ escapes such one-sidedness, only because this cannot be objective. Turning to the ideal of an Absolute Subject, we find that this again is reached by an abstract pro- cedure, though a different one. Generalisation up to an ideal limit is out of the question here ; instead of that we have one phase of the empirical subject selected and made absolute. Ignoring the receptive side of experience altogether we try to conceive a pure activity. In Fichte's phraseology, Gegenstand implies Widerstand, object implies opposite : a subject then for whom there can be no opposition is one for whom there can be no object, no other. It again escapes the charge of one-sidedness only because such an Absolute, though called by Fichte an Ego, is no subject in any sense that we can understand, as Fichte was careful to maintain. Finally, the ideal of an The Absolute reached by Abstraction 41 Absolute experience is reached by abstraction, whether we regard its contents as the intelHgible world of eternal ideas or as the identity of subject and object in self-consciousness. The Platonic system of archetypal ideas or eternal patterns is after all for our experience not independent of the many nor prior to them, but is simply a system of abstractions resulting from such comparisons, generalisations, and analogies, as the sensible world itself suggests to us. A consciousness ao-ain which is self-consciousness and nothing more, which is solely and completely a 'self-revelation,' whose whole content is self — self explicated in self and throuo-h self and for self, such a consciousness is from the point of view of experience an abstraction. A part of such experience as we can understand is taken for the whole ; for we are never conscious of self save as we are conscious of not-self. The two factors are analytically distinct but not actually separable : so far then self-consciousness alone seems to be an abstraction. If we nevertheless elect to regard this ideal as the sole and ultimate reality there seems no place left for finite experients and the sensible world, as I have already urged. And not merely so, but the impulse to pass beyond multiplicity to unity, to which we have so far yielded, carries us on to a final simplicity beyond all explication, where mysticism hails ' Naught as every- thing and everything as Naught.' If on the other hand, keeping to experience, we admit the abstract character of this ideal, then we have the problem of the unity of the many still on our hands. But what sort of unity can we reach if we reirain from all attempts absolutely to transcend the Many .^ 42 The One and the Many A mere totality or aggregate is obviously no true unity, even though we could know — which is, in fact, im- possible — that it was an absolutely totality. Some community or reciprocity there must be : the question is how little will suffice. It seems clear that either each must be connected with all in at least one way or that all must be so connected with some one. There must be either a universal principle directly relating all or a supreme, though not absolute, individual, to whom all are related. The latter will imply the former, so far as through their common relation to the Supreme One all would be related — though it were only indirectly — ^ to each other. But the converse will not hold ; that is to say, the direct relation of all to each other will not necessarily imply a Supreme One. Of such a funda- mental and universal relation we have an instance according to the atomic theory in universal gravitation. But of course in a realm of ends the universal relation can only be analogous to this in the one aspect of being universal : the two cannot be identified — though they may be related. Empirical evidence of such a universal relation there can hardly be : we are left then to assume it and to frame some more or less hazardous hypothesis as to its nature. I say nothing for the present of any difficulty besetting the idea of an absolute plurality of any sort, a plurality of beings only relatively dependent and therefore relatively independent — independent, that is, so far as their bare existence is concerned. This, on our present supposition, has to be taken as a fact. The idea of a Supreme One as primus iiite}'- pares again can hardly admit of empirical verification : the very supposition seems to involve an empirically unattainable u The vacillation of Theology 43 limit. If we nevertheless make believe that in 'pure thought ' this limit is attained and ask how we are to represent the relation of all to this Supreme One, the old ideal Absolute again looms upon us and threatens to absorb the Many altogether. We may recoil from this and say : There might have been an Absolute, provided there had been no Many, but holding to the reality of these we can regard God as supreme, but not as absolute : then we seem to save the Many, but we have only a ' finite God,' or rather the idea of one. Thus we seem shut up to what looks like a choice of evils. Without an Absolute One it seems hopeless to attempt to account lor, and hazardous to attempt to unify, the Many ; and with such an Absolute it seems as hopeless to attempt to retain what independence and freedom the Many appear prima facie to possess. And this seemingly inevitable perplexity shows itself throughout the history of religion in a constant alter- nation between first claiming and then abdicating a distinct position for Man over against God. Think, for example, of the counter doctrines of Augustine and Pelagius and the controversies to which both in ancient and modern times they gave rise. Or again take the vast literature of religious mysticism, from which one instance may suffice : — Eckhart who said: Couldst thou annihilate thyself for a moment thou wouldst possess all that God is in himself, also said, " I am as necessary to God as God is necessary to me." In this connexion I am glad of an opportunity of quoting- Mr Bradley, from whose main position I am forced to dissent. "Religion," he says, "prefers to put forth statements which it teels arc untenable, and to correct 44 The One and the Many them at once by counter-statements, which it finds are no better. It is then driven forwards and back between both, hke a dog which seeks to follow two masters.... We may say that in religion God tends always to pass beyond himself. He is necessarily led to end in the Absolute, which for religion is not God. God, whether a ' person ' or not, is, on the one hand, a finite being and an object to man. On the other hand, the con- summation, sought by the religious consciousness, is the perfect unity of these terms [the Absolute and God]. And, if so, nothing would in the end fall outside God. But to take God as the ceaseless oscil- lation and changing movement of the process, is out of the question. On the other side the harmony of all these discords demands... the alteration of their finite character. The unity implies a complete suppression of the relation, as such ; but, with that suppression, religion and the good have altogether, as such, dis- appeared. If you identify the Absolute with God, that is not the God of religion. If again you separate them, God becomes a finite factor in the Whole. And the effort of religion is to put an end to, and break down, this relation — a relation which, none the less, it essen- tially presupposes. Hence, short of the Absolute, God cannot rest, and, having reached that goal, he is lost and religion with him\" In the history of philosophy again we find the same perplexing alternation between asserting and denying a position for the Many incompatible with the absolute- ness of the One : we find this not only in the form of a reaction from absolutism to pluralism in successive ^ A^^carance and Reality, pp. 446 f. Alternations of Speculation 45 thinkers but what is more remarkable we find it — and find it invariably — within systems of philosophy that are avowedly philosophies of the Absolute. And yet in truth it is not remarkable, for it could not really be otherwise. Ex vi termini, there can be no reality distinct from the Absolute. But if X, Y and Z assert this absolute Reality they must thereby distinguish themselves from it, and even distinguish themselves the more the more distinctly they seek to realise their own inclusion within it. To deny their own individual reality at such a time is out of the question further, because only through this have they any notion of reality at all. But at other times they easily forget it ; as the naturalist, for example, forgets the subjective implications of experience when engrossed in its objects. Nay, they even assume, once the summit of their speculation is attained, that their necessary starting- point, the distinct reality of the Many, is transcended and annulled. But the feat of kicking down the ladder by which you have climbed is logically possible only when the conclusion reached is at once a necessary consequence of the premises and also in itself absurd. No doubt there is always the semblance of a purely a /r/(?r/ procedure in most philosophies of the Absolute : the entire construction claims to be the work of pure thought, true independently of all finite experience. But Descartes' Cogito ergo sum, the proposition round which, as Hegel said, the whole of modern philosophy revolves\ is in this connexion past all question. And hitherto all attempts, starting from the Absolute to respect the Many as this proposition demands, have * Encyclopaedia, % 64. 46 TJie One and the Many proved unavailing. The reality of the Many is either flatly contradicted as by the Eleatics ; or it remains inexplicable as with Spinoza or Hegel. Thus Spinoza, who begins with an absolutely infinite, that is inde- terminate, Substance, ends with a conative Many mu- tually determining each other. Again with Hegel, the Absolute seems at one time to be a perfect Self with no hint of aught beside or beyond its own completed self-consciousness, and at another not to be a self at all, but only the absolutely spiritual, — art, religion and philosophy — the over-individual ends, as they are sometimes called, which become realised in subjective spirits : not self-conscious Spirit but simply the im- personal Spirit in all spirits. Thus, as it has been said, " both philosophy and religion bear ample testimony to the almost insuperable difficulty of finding room in the universe for God and man. When speculation busies itself with the relation of these two, each in turn tends to swallow up the other. The pendulum of human thought swings con- tinually between the two extremes of Individualism [or Pluralism] leading to Atheism, and Universalism [or Absolutism], leading to Pantheism or Acosmism\" This reaction is most pronounced when, as has continually happened, the defects of an absolutist philosophy have given rise to an avowed pluralism or even naturalism. Such after Hegel's death wasconspicu- ously the case in the speculation of the Hegelian left, as Strauss called it. So Feuerbach describes his seces- sion from the Hegelian school by saying " God was my ^ Pringle-Pattison, Hegelianism and Fersonalii}\ 1st edn, p. 153 fin. The Start from Pluralism 47 first thought, reason my second, man my third and last." For him afterwards however Man is the. beginning, the middle and the end of religion : theology is thus at bottom anthropology: through social intercourse man attains to self-consciousness, to reason and morality, and the divine is but the idealisation of the best and highest. Hegel's positions then are to be inverted: we must say not that the Absolute is self-consciousness, but that self-consciousness is the Absolute ; not that God is love but that love is God, and so forth. — The rigorous pluralism of Herbart again is to be regarded as in large measure a rebound from the absolutism of his teacher Fichte. Still more markedly was the Monad- ology of Herbart's forerunner, Leibniz, a recoil from the pantheism or acosmism of Spinoza. Spinoza's one substance, essentially indeterminate — every determina- tion being for him a negation — is incompatible with even the imagination of finite things severally striving for self-conservation and mutually determining each other ; incompatible with the drama of man's bondage and eventual freedom, for example, which is the main theme of Spinoza's Ethics. Leibniz then takes his notion of conation in thorough earnest and defines "substance as an individual aoent." " Were it not for the monads," he allowed, " Spinoza would be right." The mediaeval controversies about universals and the principle of individuation are at bottom instances ot the same reaction, and finally the ancient atomism of Leucippus and Democritus was a revolt against the Eleatic singularism. Obviously the perennial renewal of this conflict is a sign that pluralism has equally failed to reach a 48 The One and the Many satisfactory solution of the problem of the One and the Many. We must allow, as Adamson has said, that no philosophy has ever managed to reconcile these two notions of an infinite power and of an infinite variety of limited individualised expressions of that power'. But at all events as regards method the teaching of history seems clear : the solution is not to be obtained by passing over the Many at the outset trusting to deduce them afterwards from an absolute One that is reached a priori. This method has proved itself illusory : the seeming attainment of the One has meant the disappearance of the Many. Against pluralism it can only be urged that it fails or has so far failed to account for the unity that it in fact involves — the unity of individual experience as enlarged by inter- subjective intercourse. But at all events it is, I trust, clear that we cannot begin by ignoring pluralism altogether. ^ TJie Development of Moder7i Philosophy^ 1903) ^' P- lo?* LECTURE III. PLURALISM. The most striking characteristic of the nineteenth century, so far as philosophical speculation is concerned, was, as we have already noted, the predominance of what we may call Absolutism or Singularism as presented by such different thinkers as Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and others less distinguished. In the lull which followed upon the common collapse of these various forms of Absolutism the rapid advance of scientific knowledge brought Naturalism or Physical Realism for a time to the fore. But the insufficiency of this physical realism to bear the strain put upon it is at length becoming apparent ; and so the necessity of interpreting nature in terms of mind is again widely recognised. But the recoil from Absolutism still per- sists ; and accordingly the twentieth century opens with the attempt to work out the idealistic interpretation not in the old way as essentially a devolution of the One, but rather — as far as possible — to represent it as an evolution of the Many. In England, in America, in France, even in Germany — once the stronghold of Absolutism — systems of pluralism, more or less pro- nounced, are rife. It is hardly practicable and would certainly be tedious to examine them separately and in detail. We shall get a better insight into the new movement if we try to secure distinct ideas of its main w. 4 50 Pluralism standpoint and its salient features, even though in so doing we have to play the dangerous part of eclectics and attempt to frame a composite synopsis of the tout ensemble, a sort of Galtonian portrait or generic image of the group. The pluralistic standpoint in the main is that historical standpoint which we have already contrasted with the naturalistic. But the ordinary historian is content to recognise Nature as indispensable, so far at least as it is the scene and provides the properties of the drama. But this contrast pluralism claims altogether to transcend. To the distinction of person and thing, of nature and history, it allows only a relative value. — Still we shall best realise the position of pluralism by first attending exclusively to the interaction of living agents in the world commonly recognised as historical ; and then, as far as we can and as well as we can, attempting to apply the concepts we derive from this to the interpretation of the world commonly regarded as physical, the phenomena of which science has succeeded in abstractly formulating in terms of matter and motion. Of these concepts perhaps the most characteristic is that of behaviour or conduct. Be- haviour is a term appropriate only to what is individual and unique, and is not a mere instance of law and uniformity. No one would ordinarily speak of the be- haviour of falling bodies ; for, in merely gravitating, bodies display no special character. But we might speak of a ship or a balloon as behaving well or ill : such things have a certain individuality and so receive a proper name. Per contra the term individuality always implies behaviour. Indeed whenever it is worth while ludhndnalify and BehavioiLr 51 to give a proper name it is possible also to assign a definite character. Thus Goldsmith talks of '' the lazy Scheldt" and the "wandering Po." Now pluralism assumes that the whole world is made up of individuals, each distinguished by its characteristic behaviour ; but of course it does not find its real individuals in the rough and ready way of popular impersonation : it would not regard a mountain or a river as a person. Conduct or behaviour implies always some objective or external situation as the occasion for every mani- festation of activity, but never as its sole and complete deterviinant. There is always some subjective spon- taneity or initiative, but there is never any absolute or unconditional activity. Thus, in spite of the ety- mological identity of atom and individual, pluralism has nothing in common with atomism beyond the bare fact that both recognise a many ; for the atom is credited with no spontaneity and is completely deter- mined from without. Atom and individual or monad are then contraries and cannot be identified or really combined. The so-called interaction of atoms will not account for the contingency displayed in the world ; but what we know as the conduct or behaviour of cognitive and conative individuals mav, it is contended, explain both the contingency ijfjfi the uniformity that we find there. But, before we proceed to consider at more length this attempt of pluralistic spiritualism thus to interpret the world, it will be well first to inquire what we are to understand by an individual or one of the many, and what by the unity that even their j;lura1ity implies. Uf course we cannot start at the beo;inninu:, for that 4—2 52 Pluralism is not where we are. How far towards a hypothetical beginning the principle of continuity will reasonably carry us is just one of the questions we have to decide. But we must start, where alone reflexion on experience can arise, at the level of self-consciousness. We have already seen that singularistic spiritualism or absolutism really commenced its speculative flight from this level, and pluralism is in no better position. In self-conscious- ness we attain to the explicit knowledge of that duality of self and not-self, of subject and object, without which experience ceases to have any meaning for us. The self of which we are conscious, then, furnishes us with our first paradigm of what we are to understand by the individuals of our plurality. It is assumed that there exists an indefinite variety of selves, some indefinitely higher, some indefinitely lower than ourselves. But even the highest, if there be a highest, will, it is assumed, be only primus iJtter pares, one among the many, and not an Absolute really including them all. Even the lowest also will possess whatever be the irreducible minimimi essential to being in any sense a subject or self at all. Such minimum implies behaviour directed towards self-conservation or self-realisation. An individual no doubt is oftendefinedas something thatcannot bedivided without being destroyed, as a clock for instance. But such things are not true individuals or selves : a clock has no interest in, or impulse towards, its own conservation. — Self-conservation alone however, strictly taken and re- garded as everywhere realised, would result in nothing better than a static world, in which there would be no new events and no history. Such a state as final would Self and Self-conservation 53 correspond to the complete rest and quiescence with which, according to Spencer's law of equilibration, the drama of evolution must close. As an initial state it would correspond to Leibniz's pre-established harmony contemplated from without, if that were possible : there would be no interaction between individual and in- dividual. But the actual world, as our own experience teaches us, is full of cross-purposes ; and therefore self- conservation in general calls for effort and perseverance. — But though self-conservation implies the minimum to be striven for, self-development or realisation is still the aim of many, and was perhaps at the beginning the aim of all. Any advantage gained, though it be merely the result of good fortune, will not usually be passively surrendered : its loss would be a painful con- traction. Thus a new standard, so to say, of the self to be conserved would be reached. It is plain then that when we talk of self-conservation the main stress is not to be laid on the bare conservation of some metaphysically simple entity, such as the soul of the old rational psychologists. What is meant is rather the maintenance of the most advantageous position attained by the actual self in relation to the world as a whole. This implies that each one is in touch with all the rest collectively and with some more specially. As I have expressed it elsewhere, there is for every subject one totii7n objectivum, which, save in the limiting case, which would answer to an inconceivable beginning of ex- perience, will be more or less differentiated. By way of summary it may suffice to say that the well-known Monadology of Leibniz may be taken as the type, to which all modern attei^ipts to construct 54 Pluralisin a pluralistic philosophy more or less conform^ But the theology on which Leibniz from the outset strove to found his Monadology, is, in the first instance at all events, set aside ; and in particular his famous doctrine of pre-established harmony is rejected altogether. The positions retained are first, that every monad 'perceives'^ every other, secondly, that every monad is appetitive, seeking pleasurable situations, or at least shunning painful ones. In other words, for every monad the totality of the remaining monads constitutes its objective world, in which continuously changing situations result through the persistent endeavours of each to conserve or improve its position. Each, so far as in it lies, is to \ be conceived as ' proving all things and holding fast that which is good.' Finally, every system of thoroughgoing pluralism accepts the Leibnizian prin- ciple of continuity, at least to the extent of maintaining that there is no infinite gap, no complete diversity be- tween, one monad and another, a principle against which the Leibnizian theology itself offends. We may now proceed to consider the pluralistic schemes as exhibited in the world we ordinarily call ' historical.' Let us imagine a great multitude of human beings, varying in tastes and endowments as widely as human beings are known to do, and let us suppose this multitude suddenly to find themselves, as Adam and Eve did, in an ample Paradise enriched sufficiently with diverse natural resources to make the attainment of a high civilisation possible. At the outset each ^ Cf. his Nouveaux Essnis, iv. § 21, and the excellent summary in Hoffding's History of Philosophy. - In the Leibnizian sense, that is to say. \^ The Historical World 55 must needs fend for himself, selecting the vocation and habitat best adapted to his liking and capacity which chance or his superior competitors left open to him ; though liable to be afterwards ousted by others less favoured in their first lot, but more capable of turning their experience to good account. " On all hands adventure and misadventure," so at the outset we might sum up the whole : the chapter of accidents would seem to be the first chapter of this history, and Fortune with her rudder or wheel the only power to be clearly discerned. In other words, to a reflective spectator at this stage nothing would be more impressive than the contrast between the stability of their natural sur- roundings on the one hand and the instability of this striving multitude on the other. But gradually this contrast would become less striking. The fittest would tend to rise in the struggle and partly to exploit and control, partly to educate the rest. Custom and imitation would more and more determine the be- haviour of the less gifted majority, while the inventions and discoveries of the gifted {^\n would tend in the end to improve the condition of all. Cooperation and division of labour would compass results impossible to individual enterprise, and would at the same time entail a more intimate dependence of each one on his fellows. — The ever accumulating traditions and products of the past would afford a steadily progressing vantage ground of wisdom and wealth for each succeeding age and a corresponding security against the vicissitudes of earlier times. In short, in place of an incoherent multitude, all seemingly acting at random, we should have a social and economic organization, e\ery memL>cr ot which 56 Pluralism had his appropriate place and function, while the ever increasing coincidence of private ends and public ends would tend continually to enhance the unity of the whole. Turning to the biological world, and regarding the several species of living forms as so many plastic individuals, we should find at an early stage a similar contrast between the continuity and stability of the physical environment and the mutual isolation and ceaseless variation of an indefinite multitude of more or less elementary organisms. And again we should find this contrast gradually diminish as, pari passu with the advance of certain forms of life to a higher level of development, what are known as bionomic adaptations came more and more into play. — The primary forms of life apparently are the so-called prototrophic bacteria, lowly organisms which have the power of working up non-living into living materials. But these have no such direct relation to, or concern with, other living beings as all the higher forms of life have and have to an increasing extent the higher in the scale they stand. It would be tedious to attempt to describe, for example, the wide range of such dependence even in the case of 2^7ecivilised man : the bare enumeration of the many plants and animals indispensable to man in the present state of civilisation would be practically impossible. And all these plants and animals, it must be remembered, depend in turn and in manifold ways on others. Half ' the romance of natural history ' lies in such bionomic facts. Think of the many curious adjust- ments between special plants and special insects on which the very existence of both depends, the plant preparing food for such insects as are fitted to pollinate The Biological IVorld 57 its flowers. Or aofain take the wonderful instances of mimicry by which animals make shift to evade their enemies or delude their prey ; or the complicated division of labour prevailing among certain colonies of ants and bees ; or, finally, those intimate partnerships between distinct species to which the name of symbiosis has been given, where in numerous cases the association is so intimate that the very life of both participants depends upon it. Readers of the Origin of Species will recall how Darwin illustrates the wide range of this correlation of organisms from the connexion of cats and red clover through the intervention first of mice and then of bees. The humble-bees fertilise the clover but "the number of humble-bees in any district depends in great measure on the number of field-mice, which destroy their combs and nests," but again "the number of mice is largely dependent, as every one knows, on the number of cats " : and thus the cats by keeping down the mice promote the increase of the clover. Similar illustrations might be multiplied indefinitely. Perhaps the most impressive of all is the great length of what are called ' nutritive chains ' ; under which head we may include the reciprocity that is maintained between plants and animals. Plants alone are able to assimilate inorganic matter : hence in a physiological sense it is true that 'all flesh is grass,' for the food of all animals either consists of vegetables or is ultimately derived from them. On the other hand plants decom- pose the carbon dioxide which animals exhale, and thus restore to the atmosphere the oxygen which animals need to breathe. " Some of the fresh-water fishes in a pond," one naturalist points out, "depend upon the 58 Pluralism supply of small crustaceans (copepods, etc.), and these again [depend] on much minuter organisms (infusorians, diatoms, etc.), and these again, to some extent, on the bacteria which cause the putrefaction of the dead organic matter." Another " has shown that even on the high seas bacteria are present, playing their usual part of ' middlemen between death and life ' by transforming dead organic matter into inorganic substances which can be used again by plants \" We may then fairly allow that there is a close parallel between the develop- ^ ment apparent in the economic aspects of human history and that apparent in the bionomic aspects of natural history. As in the former so in the latter we find a multitude of comparatively isolated and independent units gradually advancing, by the survival of the fittest among innumerable random variations, "^ towards the realisation of ' a vast and complex web of life,' whose myriad fibres are all intertwined, though every one is unique. If now, from the external correlations of organisms to each other, we pass to the internal correlations within each organism, or from bionomics to what might possibly be called physionomics, we note again the same progress from relatively independent parts, barely conjoined and hardly differentiated, to highly specialised organs intimately associated together in a single living whole. ' Loose colonies ' of single-celled organisms are supposed to bridge the gulf between separate uni- cellular, and individual multi-cellular, organisms ; the transition beginning with diminished competition and in- creased co-operation among the relatively unspecialised ^ J. Arthur Thomson, The Scietice of Life ^ p. 193. Bionomics and Physioiioniics 59 cells of each colony^ But the specialisation of function and consequent individuality to be found at first is very slight. The common hydra may be halved with im- punity so that each segment will restore its missing half, but we cannot in this fashion make two bees or two frogs out of a single mature one. Or again the hydra may be turned inside out and, unless forcibly prevented from resuming its natural shape, will even- tually right itself and once more become normal. Ob- viously no such liberties could be taken with an animal in which more definite sense-organs, limbs, and viscera had been developed. As in bionomics then so in physionomics : every advance entails greater restriction and specialisation of function, but also greater perfection — a more intimate mutual dependence and a closer consensus of members in a more complicated whole. Though the facts of bionomics and physionomics are most readily described as they are presented, that is to say in objective terms, they are, we may hold, only to be intelligibly interpreted like the facts of economics and social interaction ; as implying, that is to say, percipient and conative subjects behaving as severally or jointly intent on self-conservation and betterment. It is easy throughout to recognise more or less striking evidence of experiences discriminated, retained, and turned to account. But now the problem has to be faced of interpreting the inanimate world in like fashion. There we can discern, prima facie at all events, no signs of active striving or selective preference or progressive organization : there we find no unique ' Cf. r.eddes and Thomson, The Evolution of Sex, pp. 57, 88 ft"., 310 {i. '^ 6o Pluralism individuals, no competing purposes to be adjusted, no tentative efforts to be followed at length by success/ First and last, everywhere and always, there seems to be only fixity and uniformity. This is a serious crux for the pluralist, let us see how he may deal with it. First it is to be noted that in the historical world the progress and development of some societies, species and individuals halt at a certain point, so that a stationary state is reached in which custom, instinct and habit are supreme. Among societies we find savage peoples still as backward as the primeval men of the stone age, and we find others as advanced as the Chinese, who nevertheless have remained stationary for thousands of years. Again some existing forms of life, — such as the Nautilus or the Lamp-shell — so-called 'persistent types,' have remained practically unaltered almost from the beginning of the geological record, while others — as the horse or the dog, for example — have progressed remarkably within a period that is by comparison recent. And as there are some individuals who are restless, enterprising and inventive to the end of their days, so there are others who early become supine and contented, the slaves of custom and hide- bound with habits, individuals whose chief concern is to avoid disturbance and let well alone. The simpler their standard of well-being and the less differentiated their environment the more monotonous their behaviour will be and the more inert they will appear. Now it is to be noted that the environment, resolved into its ultimate constituents, is by the pluralist assumed to be, as Leibniz taught, substantially the same, for all percipients, consisting, in fact, of the percipients stationary States and Persistent Types 6t themselves. But the degree and the extent to which clear and distinct perception is reached and retained, in other words the differentiation of the environment for a particular monad, will be proportionate to the organi- zation which it possesses and controls. It is thus not unreasonable to suppose that the gradation found within the known world of life extends indefinitely below it. If then certain of the simplest forms of life that we can detect have persisted throughout the gradual evolution of higher and higher forms; and not merely so but if, further, the existence of such higher forms depends on that of lower, may we not fairly suppose that beyond our ken there are still simpler and more primitive forms capable of existing independently of the lowest that we know, and yet at the same time essential, and therefore prior, to the existence of these ? Such an assumption is akin to the bold hypothesis so confidently advanced by Leibniz in a well-known passage of his Monadology. " Each portion of matter," he says, ''may be conceived as a garden full of plants and as a pond full of fish. But each branch of the plant, each member of the animal, each drop of its juices is also some such garden or pond. And, although the earth and the air separating the plants of the garden or the water separating the fish of the pond, be neither plant nor fish, nevertheless they also contain plants and fish but [these] for the most part too minute to be perceptible by us\" On the important point just mentioned, Leibniz however does not insist. Though the elements, earth, air and water are esseiitiat to the plants and the plants ' Monadology, % 67, 68. 62 Pluralism to the animals, the converse does not hold. Apart from parasitic and symbiotic forms, low-grade organisms do not require the presence of more developed organisms within their environment ; and even if these are present, they do not bulk as differentiations of the environment for them, as they do for others higher in the scale. But at every stage the correlation of percipient and environment will still be found ; every order of plants or fish will have their appropriate garden or pond, which over against them is by comparison passive, whilst they over against it are by comparison active. It is this activity, this more or less spontaneous be- haviour, that according to Leibniz determines the character of every monad. From the physical stand- point it seems frequently possible to isolate special forms of matter, so that they remain chemically un- altered for an indefinite time. According to Leibniz's view what is done is only on a par with what the biologist might do by isolating a number of Protista in a globe of water. Let all the water evaporate and the life of its inhabitants is suspended and perhaps ex- tinguished. That some analogous change would not befall the said substances if all the rest of the universe should disappear, I take it no physicist would venture to say. The pampsychist, holding fast to the principle of continuity, maintains — I again repeat — that at all events there are no things wholly inert, devoid of all internal springs of action, and only mechanically related to each other. In a world of such things motion, that is to say change, would be impossible save through the intervention of a transcendent cause or prime mover. This difticulty, which the physicist allows, is, it is Is there an Inanimate World? 63 contended, only to be escaped by regarding matter in more or less Leibnizian fashion, as but the manifestation of the interaction of perceptive and appetitive monads or entelechies. The attractions and repulsions of which the physicist speaks only metaphorically are, so the pampsychist maintains, to be taken literally, that is as implying impulses initiated and determined by feeling. Empedocles speculating in the fifth century B.C. is to be hailed as 'the Newton of organic nature,'for his principles of love and hate, Nature's Wahlverivandtschaften, or * elective affinities,' have made the whole world kin\ Now, if we are prepared to admit that this pam- psychist or monadistic theory is in itself at least per- fectly conceivable and consistent, of a piece with and analogous to what we know and understand best, then it is contended in the next place that the facts which s^^vci. prima facie to make against it can be readily and reasonably explained. First of all we can all think of numberless instances in which what is sensibly simple and homogeneous is really extremely complex and heterogeneous. In fact we may fairly say that there is perhaps no case in which — either directly by closer inspection or indirectly by inference — we do not find some difference between objects that seem to be ' Haeckel, Die Weltrdthsel, 1900, pp. 259, 454. Cf. Renouvier, Le Personnaiisme, 1903, p. 500. Also Zollner, Die Natiir der Komekn, 3'*^ Aufl. pp. 113 ff. "All the work performed by natural beings," says Zollner, "is determined by feelings of pleasure and pain, and that too in such a manner that the motions within a closed field of phenomena are related as they would be if they were carrying out the unconscious purpose of reducing the painful feelings to a minimum" (p. 119). — A view adopted by biologists, such as Nageli, and probably Reinke and Driesch, and by philosophers such as I'aulsLii and WunJt. 64 Pluralism qualitatively and quantitatively the same. There seems then to be ample warrant a posteriori for the principle advanced on a priori grounds by Nicholas of Cusa and afterwards endorsed by Leibniz, " There is nothing in the universe," said the former, "that does not enjoy a certain singularity, which is to be found in no other thing\" In his correspondence with Samuel Clarke ^ Leibniz wrote : — " There are no two indiscernible in- dividuals, A clever gentleman of my acquaintance, talking with me in the presence of Madame the Electress [of Hanover], thought that he could easily find two leaves entirely alike. The Electress challenged him to do so, and he went up and down a long time seeking in vain, [Even] two drops of water or of milk looked at through a microscope will be found to be diverse. This is an argument against atoms, which not less than a vacuum are repugnant to the principles of true metaphysics^" But the modern pluralists do not usually follow out the principle of continuity as rigorously as Leibniz did. They hold with him that " there are never two beings which are perfectly alike and in which it is not possible to find an internal differencel" But they do not \/ usually maintain and indeed from their purely em- pirical standpoint they could not maintain that there is an actual infinity of monads. In particular they are in no way bound to assume that there are real beings corresponding to any concepts the physicist may find ^ On Nicolaus Cusanus as a precursor of Leibniz see Latta, Leibniz, The Monadology, etc., 1898, p. 222 n. and the references there given. "^ " Quatrieme Ecrit a Clarke," Oj>era, Erdmann's edition, p. 755. * Monadology, § 9. The Principle of Continuity 65 it convenient to frame regarding the ultimate consti- tuents of matter. Otherwise indeed, should the theory that matter is but a modification of the ether become established, that, it might be argued, would put an end to pluralism altogether, ether being real and not phe- nomenal. Pluralism in fact, as we have already seen, has no status at all save as a form of idealism or spiritualism : for it matter can only be phenomenal, it cannot be real. The tendency of science is to diminish the seeming variety of the world and ultimately to eliminate it. Qualities in the end are to be resolved into diverse arrangements of prime atoms, corpuscles, or electrons, differing in nothing but their positions and motions. For pluralism, on the other hand, quality, even haecceity — to use an old scholastic phrase — is vital. If there are real beings answering to the physicist's concept of ultimate atoms then indeed, if personal pluralism is to stand (I use the word 'personal' in the widest possible extent), this atomic pluralism can only be the outside appearance of so many active beings, each of which is something for itself. But all that the pluralist does is to appeal broadly to the principle of continuity and that, said Leibniz, "destroys atoms." In the real world we can nowhere find that exact similarity which the mathematician can readily conceive ; and the contention is that it nowhere exists. Appearances suggest it, it may be. But that leads us to a second point. There are statistical facts in plenty to show that, where large numbers are concerned, the conduct even of human beings presents aggregate results that are tolerably constant, in spite of the variety of the motives w. 5 V 66 Pluralism determining the individual agents and the absence of any concerted action among them. Now many of the constants of science are of the nature of statistical averages, and involve — as science interprets them — numbers enormously in excess of those of social statistics, while at the same time the individuals con- cerned must be indefinitely simpler. Starting from the statistics available in economics, the most scientific branch of sociology, and supposing that instead of trade returns from a score or two of countries we had returns from one or two thousand, the inhabitants of each being increased a myriad-fold and being also severally vastly more the creatures of habit than men now are, we can imagine such statistics would approxi- mate still more closely to those of the physicist. The physicist, like the statist, is always dealing with aggregates, but unlike the statist he finds the con- stituent individuals to be beyond his ken. The statist is aware that individual variations underlie his aggre- gates, but they do not interest him : the physicist is ignorant of those underlying his, and assumes that they do not exist\ Accordingly he rests content with abstract and general concepts that turn out in the end to be simply quantitative. But it is impossible to deduce quality from quantity or exhaustively to present concrete experience by means of any scheme of mathematical co-ordinates. Briefly then the pluralist at this juncture insists upon three points : — (i) We know that the appearance of uniformity and regularity is compatible with the ^ On the features common to Nature and History, ct. Les Lois ie I' Imitation, by the late G. Tarde, 3™'= edn, 1900, ch. i. Vniforniity and Statistics 67 spontaneity of living agents : (2) the uniformity and order which the physicist ascertains avowedly pertain to matter as phenomenal, i.e. as appearance — to the materia sectmda, which Leibniz referred to confused per- ception; (3) some adequate ground for this appearance there must be. It is reasonable to assume, the pluralist then concludes, that this ground is analogous to that which we know to underlie the law and order of the historical world. Regarding this last point we ought to notice, in passing, that a two-fold interpretation is possible, the pluralist's is one possibility, the theist may prefer another. The mutual relation and the possible conciliation of these two views is a problem that still lies before us. Just now it is only important to observe that 'the theistic hypothesis' affords /rm^ facie a more satisfactory explanation of Nature's laws — which, Laplace notwithstanding, are not self-ex- planatory — than pluralism at first sight seems to do. For we should expect the acts of a Supreme Being to show a more exact uniformity than the conjoint results of the actions of myriads of lowly monads severally and half unconsciously striving after mutual adjust- ment. We here come upon an aspect of pluralism, which — though referred to in the foregoing exposition — it will be well to consider in more detail and apart. Purposive action, it is commonly held, presupposes an established order, a reign of law, presupposes in fact that exact uniformity which naturalism formulates in mechanical terms. This is the physical basis which is supposed to turnish teleology with its indispensable TTov (JTOJ. But pluralisni attempts to get behind all ^ this. No doubt a man deliberating how to conipass 5—2 68 Pluralism some definite end, on which he has decided, may think out a chain of practical syllogisms in the way long ago described by Aristotle ; beginning with the last term in the causal series he works backwards till he reaches the first, some act that is which he is in a position immediately to perform \ But the practical syllogism, 'acting on principle' as we say, is an ideal ; we do not always act — above all, we do not begin acting — in this fashion. The earliest activity is apparently alto- gether impulsive, determined not by desire for future satisfaction but by aversion to a present ill. The stimulus of pain, as a veritable goad, leads to random efforts for relief. And relief, if it comes at all, may come in either of two ways. The situation may itself change for the better, or at length a fitting attitude or move- ment may be hit upon. In the former case the result might be attributed to pure chance : if the situation should recur the sufferer will be practically as ignorant and as helpless as before. But in reality all changes in the environment will be the result of conative im- pulses somewhere ; and from such of these as succeed, the agents, if we credit them with any retentiveness, learn something. A successful adjustment concurring with the release from pain will be specially impressive. In this way the evil and the remedy will be so far associated that on each repetition of the former the many tentative movements will become less, and the one effective movement more, pronounced, till at length it becomes an immediate, habitual, and eventually even a mechanical response. But this gradual development of purposive activity ^ Nicomacheari Ethics, ni. iii. Purposive Activity and Onierliness 69 is mere psychological detail, upon which it is not necessary to enlarge here\ True, it will be said, but all such development presupposes ' the orderliness of things,' and pluralism, we understand, undertakes to explain how this orderliness has itself been developed. Order is heaven's first law, we say, but pluralism essays to get back of all this and to start from chaos, where we can count on no repetitions and therefore on no progress. This is unquestionably a formidable ob- jection, and what we shall have in the next lecture to consider is how the pluralists may attempt to meet it. ^ Cf. the article, 'Psychology,' Eticy, Brit, nth edn. LECTURE IV. THE CONTINGENCY IN THE WORLD. We left Pluralism charged with the hopeless attempt of bringing order out of chaos. But the notion of chaos is after all altogether a myth : as much a bugbear as a chimaera. " No one," says Lotze, "who means to think clearly can form any idea of the existence of such an infinite agglomeration of countless possibilities.... [Such an] abyss of in- definiteness is unthinkable, and any attempt to set distinctly before ourselves the origin of natural forms must start from some definite primitive state, which — because it was this and no other — from the very first excluded from actuality much in itself possible, while of much else on the other hand it contained not merely the bare possibility but a more or less im- mediate and urgent positive ground for its realisation\" It is precisely such a definite primitive state that pluralism postulates, a totality of unique individuals each bent on self-preservation. But self here, we must remember, implies, not as in atomistic pluralism, a simple, unchangeable element that ex hypothesi must be conserved, though it does nothing and sufters nothing. What is here implied is a true self, whose ' Microcosmus, Bk iv. Ch. ii., Eng. trans. Vol. i. p. 432. The Beginning of the PVorhi not Chaos 7 1 feeling and action vary with, thouoh they are not ex- clusively determined by, its situation relatively to the rest. Such a definite situation will, as Lotze points out, then and there exclude certain possibilities and lead on immediately to the realisation of others. The mechanical theory too must postulate a primitive col- location of atoms which its laws can never explain ; but, these atoms being unalterable, the laws that for- mulate their successive changes of position are re- garded as also determinate and fixed. The individuals of spiritualistic pluralism, on the other hand, are held to be plastic and capable of development , and the new relations that become established among them are therefore regarded as the direct consequences of such development. At the start then the order that is to be has still to become : everything is inchoate, but nothing chaotic, unless inexperience and innocence are the same as anarchy and original sin. The pluralists, we must remember, take all their bearings from the historical standpoint and endeavour to work backwards from the facts of human personality and social intercourse. Their mode of thought is frankly, though not crudely, anthropomorphic : hence such titles as Personalism, Personal Idealism, Humanism and the like, which one or other has adopted Now in this personal domain, whether individual or social, we find orderliness and regularity in plenty From this orderliness and regularity we may derive premisses, at once general and definite, for pr.ictical syllogisms : it affords an ample basis ol reliable means for the realisation ol the most varied ends, and it makes education and further experience u 72 The Contingency in the IVorld always possible. But the whole of such development is the result of the conduct and behaviour, severally or collectively, of the persons concerned ; none of it existed previously as the presupposition of such conduct. Other forms of order and regularity — we may call them lower forms — no doubt there were, but not these. Of such lower forms we may say that they were indispensable conditions of the higher forms that followed — indispensable conditions indeed, but not sufficient. The future is grounded on the past, it may be, but we cannot in history, as in science, infer the one from the other : we cannot anticipate the super- structure from a knowledge of the foundations, or prophesy whenever we can remember. Looking back then on the career of an individual or on the progress of a community we may distinguish, at any given point, on the one side the habits, tastes and dexterities already acquired or the customs, institutions and polity already established, and on the other the new and often unexpected development that followed upon these. We may express the relation between the two by adopting — and adapting — the old scholastic distinction of natura natiirata and natura naturans. What is done forecloses some old possibilities and opens up new ones : Vulcan, who had spent his youth at the forge, could hardly hope to charm Olympus with Apollo's lyre, though he made a suit of armour worthy of the god of war : the Semites worsted in their struggles with Rome could no longer aspire to the supremacy of the world ; though, scattered everywhere and yet united, they still remain its masters in finance. What is done, nahtra naturata — the decisions made, Natura naturans and Natura naturata 73 the habits formed, the customs fixed — constitutes at any stage the routine, the general trend of things, within which future possibiHties He. What is still to do, nahtra naturans, implies further spontaneity and growth ; new decisions to be taken, fresh experi- ments to be made, with their usual sequel of trial and error and possible eventual success ; happy thoughts or inspirations occurring to the individual ; and the rise of great men inaugurating new epochs for their race or for the world. Even Bacon, who was certainly sufficiently impressed by the supremacy of law, we find saying : Super datiim corpus novam natttram, sive 7tovas naturas ge^ierare et STiperinducere, opus et intentio est Immanae potejitiae^. How little this generating of new natures is to be regarded as the inevitable con- sequence of the antecedent routine is shown by the myths which attributed the earliest arts to the inter- vention of gods and heroes, Triptolemus, Prometheus, Athene, Apollo. If now we were to contemplate an individual's career or a nation's progress at a later stage the same distinction could still be made, only that the line dividing the lifeless routine from the ' increasing purpose ' would be drawn at a new point. The painful efforts and strange experiences of the past are now re- placed by such masterly facility and perfect familiarity as can serve as ' stepping-stones to higher things ' ; the reforms and liberties, so hardly achieved, are now ' N^uvum Organum, Vol. ii. i. Kitchin's edn, p. 132. On this whole topic see the brilliant article, 'Great Men and their Environ- ment,' by that thorough-going pluralist, W. James, 'J'he IVi/i to believe, pp. 2 1 6 i\. 74 TJie Contingency in the World unquestioned, and so open up possibilities of * nobler modes of life, with sweeter manners, purer laws.' If, on the other hand, we contemplate things at an earlier stage than that with which we began, the converse will hold. What we then found consolidated into habit or custom, as so much fixed routine, would still be fluent and so to say adolescent , alternatives then finally determined would still be pending ; and much that later will be commonplace, still a marvel beyond the range of present surmise. Now this characteristic of the historical world the pluralist boldly generalises to the utmost. " All nature," to repeat a summary I have made elsewhere, " is regarded as plastic and evolving like mind : its routine and uniformity being explained on the analogy of habit and heredity in the individual, of custom and tradition in society ; while its variety is attributed to spontaneity in some form\" " The one intelligible theory of the universe," a prominent pluralist tells us, "is that of objective [i.e., 1 take it^ y personal] idealism, that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws'." Evidence of such mechanization — that is, of what originally was spon- taneous and tentative becoming eventually automatic and regular — is forthcoming up to the very verge of our knowledge of whatever can be regarded as individual and unique at all. But though individuals other than conceptual ones are beyond the physicist's ken, evidence has long been accumulating even here ^ ' Mechanism and Morals.' Adamson Lecture, Hibbert Journaly 1905, p. 92. ' C S. Peirce, 'The Architectonic of Theories," J/(9/-!/y/, Vol. x- 1890, p. 170. I Causal Efficiency and Causal Connexion 75 to strengthen the analogy between inorganic and organic evolution regarded en bloc^. It will be helpful at this point to recall a distinction too often ignored or confused in current expositions of causation — the distinction between efficient cause and occasional cause. The former leads us to say : Every event has a cause, an efficient cause, the latter finds its meaning in the generalisation : The same (occasional) cause is followed invariably by the same effect. Here in fact the notion of cause is transformed into that of law, for it is only on the ground of such regular recurrence that causal connexion is affirmed. Causal efficiency on the other hand is at once assured for us on a single occurrence, if that be our own act ; and though the occasion recur never so often, the act need never be repeated. With inanimate objects the occasion inevitably determines the result : this is the meaning of law. Hence, as Kant in substance put it, life is the death of all natural philosophy, for " life means the capacity to act or change according to an internal principle," means, that is to say, the presence of an efficient cause*. Now "chance," we are told, "is opposed to law in this sense, viz. that what happens according to law may be predicted and counted on'" : in the same sense the conduct of living beings, i.e. historical events, are opposed to law. Thus what one person might regard as due to chance may be really due to the act of another. According to the pluralistic Weltanschauung then there are no laws antecedent to the active individuals ' ("f. e.g. Sir Norman Lockycr's Inorganic Evohition, 1900, Bk v * (T. Naturalism and Agnosticism, 3rd eJn, \'ol. i. [). 177. • Fleming, Vocabulary of Pliiiosopliy. 76 The Contingency in the IVorld V who compose the world, no laws determining them, unless we call their own nature a law ; and then indeed the world would start with as many laws as there are individuals\ Such a view of course involves throughout an element of contingency such as we find in all personal affairsl Some pluralists, very ill- advisedly as I think, have identified this element with pure chance and even proposed to elevate it to the place of a guiding principle under the title of * tychism,' — rvyy] Kvfiepva iravra. But every act of a conative agent is determined by — what may, in a wide sense, be called — a motive, and motivation is incom- ^ patible with chance, though in the concrete it be not reducible to law. Possibly the objection will still be pressed that if, as all psychology teaches, the recurrence of like situations is essential to any advance in experience, it is difficult to see how without a previously established 'reign of law' experience could ever begin. In point of fact, even as things are now, with all the so-called laws of nature in full force, unless the range of an experient's distinguishable percepts and interests were restricted there could be no possibility of its advance in experience. We must postulate what I have called subjective selection, in other words we must assume ^ that many of the changes that take place around it are for a given subject severally imperceptible and that to many that are perceptible it is entirely indifferent. Without such restriction the progress of science itself would be impossible. Thus, so far as our observations and means of measurement are concerned, the solar ^ Cf. Lotze, Afetaphysic, § 32. ^ Ct. Supplementary Note I. Subjective Selection 77 system is an Isolated system : actually of course its motions are affected by those of all other stellar systems. But if the early astronomers had had to take these into account the complexity would have been beyond human powers to unravel. As it is, it has been remarked that if all the perturbations of the planets now known had been known to Kepler he could never have discovered the form of their orbits : as it was the problem proved one of colossal pro- portions and occupied him during ten years. But from the pluralist standpoint the term imper- ceptible is not accurate: the whole universe is perceived by every percipient. But such perception may be con- fused, as Leibniz used to say, or undifferentiated to an indefinite extent. The presence of this indefinite background of confused or undifferentiated objects, though it is not attended to and determines no special response, is still of vital importance : for example, we do not feel the pressure of the atmosphere, yet its absence would be fatal. The development of ex- perience however depends entirely on differentiated presentations and these in turn are commensurate to the position already attained. T\\it shoeblack stationed by the Royal Exchange will welcome a muddy day, but is unperturbed by the fiuctuations of the market ; the amoeba, confined to a drop of stagnant water, has only to do with the tiny fragments that float within it, and need not bewilder itself about the weather forecast. So too the atom, if it be real at all, that is, anything for itself, has only to mind its partners in the dance and avoid collisions : as far as it is concerned, the continuity of things reduces .ill beyond its infinitesi- mally narrow field to a permanent background for it 78 The Coiitmgency in the World devoid of change : mechanically expressed, all its action is so-called contact action. To resume then, the purposive act or deliberate intention of one agent may for the experience of a second be a mere happening or accident. It may \/ befall contrary to all that the latter regarded as possible and independently of all his aims ; but it still remains the outcome of another's purpose, is neither causeless nor aimless. Though contingent to others it was not in itself a case either of chance or necessity\ But as bearing on the objection that we have been con- sidering, there are two or three characteristics of a pluralistic world, a world partly fixed and partly fluent, partly naturata, partly naturans, which it may be well to emphasize as consequences of the contingency that such a world entails. First, since for pluralism there are no natural laws so to say 'in force' from the beginning, but on the contrary all natural laws are evolved, there will be no rigorous and mechanical concatenation of things such as naturalism is wont to assume : the fixity, so far as it is real, will embody the result of experience ; so far as it is apparent, it will be due, as we have seen, to the statistical constancy of large numbers. But, again, in a world consisting of finite individuals no single individual and no community of such can foresee all the consequences of what they do : over and above what was intended much will result that was not intended. While chipping his flint instruments or polishing his weapons of wood the savage, it is sup- posed, may incidentally have generated the sparks or heat which he sooner or later turned to account for the ^ Cf. Lectt. XIII. and xiv. * Heterogony of Ends '" 79 production of fire. When certain Phoenician sailors kindled a fire on the seashore, their sole purpose was to cook their food, but among the dead embers they presently discovered a mass of molten glass produced by the fusion of the potashes and the sand ; and so a useful art arose. When primitive men scratched rude pictures on mammoth tusks they did not foresee the passage of pictures into hieroglyphs or ideograms and of these into phonograms or an alphabet. Again, no one deliberately excogitated such institutions as human language, courts of justice or constitutional govern- ment. Each step in the progress made realised some unexpected advantage and made a new step possible ; but the progress as a whole involved no such practical syllogism as the old theories of convention and contract naively assumed. The literal meaning of such words as ' discovery ' and ' invention ' bears unmistakeable testimony to the truth of this. Such 'heterogony of ends,' as Wundt has called it\ the objective realisation of adaptations that were never subjectively intended, must have played a yet more conspicuous part in the earliest phases of evolution. As the result of what are aptly called blind impulses, whether due to positive pain or to mere restlessness, the successful individual or race gradually raises itself in the scale of life, shows a ' tendency to progression,' function perfecting structure, though the end attained may never be fore- seen. As I have said elsewhere and anticipating Wundt : " The tendency at any one moment is simply ' System der Philosophie, 1889, S. 337. But the whole idea is clearly formulated by Hegel: ct. his FhiloiOphic der Geschichtc, 1837, S. 30. 8o The Contingency in the World towards more life, simply growth ; but this process of self-preservation imperceptibly but steadily modifies the self that is preserved. The creature is bent only on filling its skin ; but in doing this as pleasantly as may be, it gets a better skin to fill, and accordingly seeks to fill it differently. All that is required is that to advance to a higher level of life shall on the whole be more pleasurable or less painful than to remain behind. Now this condition seems provided, without any need for a clear prevision of ends or any feeling after improvement or perfection as such, simply by the waning of familiar pleasures and by the zest of novelty \" Since, as I have said, the pluralistic view of the world necessarily involves an element of contingency in its very idea of a finite Many mutually striving for the best modus vivendi, it must be allowed that the actual presence — prima facie at least — of such con- tingency in the world of our experience is so far an argument for the pluralisms position : absolutism leaves no place for this contingency. Some amplification of this point seems then to be relevant and in order. In the first place an instructive analogy may be drawn between the diversity in tools, weapons, and processes, ^ Ejjcy. Brit. s.v. 'Psychology,' 1886, nth edn, p. 585. How- ever the Lamarckians and Darwinians may settle their differences, it is agreed on all hands that there are at any rate no really fortuitous variations or mutations. The pluralist, of course, is positive that the ultimate explanation is to be found only in the conative impulses of sentient individuals. It is worth noting by the way that even Weismann at length so far agrees with this as to admit that " the direction of the variation of a part must be determined by its utility," cf his article, 'Germinal Selection,' Monist, 1896, p. 267. Instances from the Useful Arts 8i which different races of primitive men have devised for the same purpose, and the diversity in the natural adaptations, instincts or contrivances . by which in different animals or plants the same functions are discharged. Thus among men centrifugal force is turned to account by some races who make slings, while others avail themselves of it in their use of the bolas or the lasso. Some shoot with bows, others with blow-guns, while yet others mainly use javelins, throwing-sticks or boomerangs. Canoes are made in various parts of the world from hollowed tree-trunks, from twigs and bark, from skins stretched over whale- bone, from a wooden framework covered with matting o or with reeds, and in yet other ways. Exhilarating- drinks are obtained in some cases by fermenting fruits — grapes, apples, dates — in others by fermenting grains, such as wheat, barley, rice ; or again by fermenting honey or milk. And doubtless in the great majority of these instances the discovery or invention was the result of a combination of happy accident and happy thought rather than of deliberate design and fore- thought. But what we have specially to observe is the identity of the need and the diversity of the materials which in different cases are turned to account to meet it. The collocation of the two can only be regarded as contingent. And the like holds good in numberless instances in the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Thus the bird owes its power of flight to those enormously developed .scales with frayed edges, which we call feathers, that are attached to its hands and fore-arm. In the bat this apparatus is replaced by a stretched membrane w. 6 82 The Contingency in the PVortd extending between vastly elongated fingers and fring- ing the sides of its body. In insects again the so- called wings are only physiologically limbs : morpho- logically they are but flattened folds of the integument, so to say extemporized wings. In the courting season some animals attract one another by sounds that are variously produced in different species — by voice, as with frogs and song-birds, by stridulation, as with crickets and the cicada, or by tapping on foreign sub- stances, as with certain wood-peckers and the death- watch ; some attract by their brilliant coloration, as in certain apes and the peacock, or by phosphorescence, as with the glow-worm ; and others by the production of peculiar odours, as with the musk-rat and deer. Some escape their enemies by the celerity of their movements, others by death-like stillness ; some by conspicuous coloration and a nauseous taste, others by sombre hues resembling their inanimate surroundings ; some by fetid exhalations, others by spines or a hard encasement. Plants in some cases trust to the wind — as we aptly say — to disseminate their seeds, which are provided with vanes or fluffy plumes, or are of dust-like minuteness ; the seeds of others attach them- selves by hooks or grapnels to the fur of passing quadrupeds ; while those of others are violently pro- jected by variously contrived springs. Some again pass through animals who have eaten their pulpy envelopes, while others encased in a hard shell float away on the water\ To suppose that all this variety should have been directly created for variety's sake, ' almost like toys ^ These and abundant like instances will be found more fully described by Darwin, Origin of Species^ Ch. vi. et passim. Illustrations from Nature 83 in a shop, to use Darwin's phrase, is indeed, as he urges, an ' incredible view,' as incredible as the view would be that the similar variety we find in human con- trivances was itself supernaturally preordained instead of being the contingent result of differently situated individuals havingf to work with different materials to arrive at the same end. To make this analogy clear it may suffice to consider the instance just now mentioned, that of flight. The feathers of the bird are homologous to, i.e. genetically connected with, the lizard's scales : the subsequent modification of those attached to the win^rs and tail so as to subserve flioht has no connexion with the original function of feathers as a dermal covering, which remains their sole function for the most part. It is just to the coincidence of their special plasticity with the new conditions of nascent bird life that their development is to be attributed. Bats are scientifically called Cheiroptera or hand-winged, but the fore limb in the adjacent order, the Insectivo7'a, is primarily adapted to running or climbing, and again is modified in the moles, in a direction the precise opposite to that of flight, viz. burrowing. But the family of the Insectivora nearest akin to the bats, consisting of the single genus, Galeopitliccus, and some of the rodents, the order next adjacent, "are assisted in jumping by a kind of para- chute, which consists of a cutaneous expansion, the patagiiiDi, stretched between the limbs on each side\" The bat's flight is but a development of this habit. To secure this result the one means available was the elongation of the fingers of the hand as a frame- * Sedgwick, A Student's Text-book oj Zoology, Vol. ii. p. 6-p. 6—2 84 The Contingency in the World work for the greatly extended patagiuin or elastic membrane, the original function of the hand being sacrificed almost entirely. The origin of the insect's wings is, I understand, still something of a problem. Professor J. A. Thomson writes about them : — " It seems plausible to compare them to the tracheal out- growths seen in some aquatic larvae, and to regard them as primarily respiratory, and secondarily loco- motor. One may venture to suggest that the additional respiratory efficiency derived from such outgrowths would increase the total activity of the insect, and more or less directly lift it into the air\" And so, mutatis mutandisy other instances of biological develop- ment may be explained. "It certainly is true," as Darwin has said, "that new organs appearing as if created for some special pur- pose, rarely or never appear in any being"." Imagine that a clock had been the first machine invented by men and that all other machines had to be modelled on this type. As it is, mechanisms for very different purposes are formed on this type, and human efforts, if necessarily restricted to it, would doubtless in time gradually devise many more by means of modifications analogous to those which Nature displays in adapting a given type of structure to very various conditions of lif^ Or again if we imagine that instead of a clock some other machine, say a loom, had been that from which the start was made, all subsequent machines being modelled on that. Many varieties of this form of mechanism too already exist, and it is not too much to assume that if necessary it could be indefinitely * Chambers's Encyclopaedia, Vol. vi. p. 167. ® Origin of Species, 6th edn, p. 156. Fixity of Type and Variety of Conditions 85 varied. Such is in fact the picture that the organic world presents to us. As Darwin puts it: "All organic beings have been formed on two great laws — Unity of Type, and the Conditions of Life. By unity of type is meant that fundamental agreement in structure which we see in organic beings of the same class, and which is quite independent of their habits of life\" Let us consider for a moment two such types — say the arthropod and the vertebrate. Widely as these two types differ we find some species of each adapted to every condition of life in every variety of climate and locality, mountain heights or sub- terranean caves, the surface of the earth or the depths of the sea. We find creatures of each type fiying, swimming, diving, or burrowing, active by niglit or by day, some sociable, some solitary, some preying upon specific living animals, others feeding more or less indiscriminately on the corpses of the dead ; or vegetable feeders, some confined to specific plants, others to particular parts or tissues, and so on ; for an exhaustive specification of the conditions of life to which these two types are alike adapted is impossible. Even when we take one of the leading modifications of each type — insects and birds, for example — the range of conditions is but slightly restricted. A collateral consequence of this adaptation of a fixed type to various conditions of life is perhaps worth notice in passing. I refer to the awkward and grotesque, even the ludicrous and hideous forms of some plants and animals. The graceful shape and agile movements of the horse, the gazelle, the squirrel, ^ 0/>. at., p. I ()6. 86 The Contingency in the World for instance, have been universally admired. Com- pared with them such creatures as the camel, the sloth and the wart-hog have been reckoned among Nature's abortions. But among- less familiar animals there are many more ungainly or ill-favoured than these, as such scientific names as Diabolus ursinus, Aloloch horridus^ Chimaera monstrosa, suggest. These seeming anomalies did not escape the notice of the earlier naturalists. Buffon, for example, after the manner of Leibniz, imagines Nature setting before herself all possible forms and selecting first of all the most beautiful and harmonious, but " into the midst of this magnificent spectacle," he tells us, "some unfinished {negligees) products and some less happy forms, thrown like the shadows in a picture, appear to be the remnants of those ill-assorted desiorts and those disparate compositions which she has only allowed to remain in order to give us a more extended idea of her projects^" Theologians too have been exercised by these blemishes which seem everywhere to obtrude themselves, marring the beauty and de- tracting from the perfection of Nature. After an enumeration of a whole string of these 'veritably hellish shapes,' as they have been called — toadstools, thorn-apples, scorpions, rattlesnakes, &c. &c. — it has been asked : — " Can such an appalling, Callotesque fancy be attributed to God : can he be held capable of creating the ugly "^ ? " The true cause of such ^ Histoire natiirelle; Des Oiseaux, t. viii. 1781, a propos of the Stilt {Hima7itopus candidus). ^ Cf. Rosenkranz, ' Die Verklarung der Natur,' B. Bauer's Zeltsch. f. spekulative Theologie, 11. 1837, p. 262, The Grotesque in Nature 87 deformities certain theologians have preferred to find in man's alienation from God and the consequent reaction upon nature, of which he was the crown and keystone, that his fall entailed. Whatever may be thought of their explanation of the fact of Nature's aesthetic defects, the recognition of the fact itself by such thinkers is noteworthy. But the contingency in the world presents itself in a still more striking light when we follow out the con- sequences of the pluralist theory of the world. Accord- ing to that, as we have seen, the world consists solely of finite individuals primarily dominated by private ends and for whom self-preservation is the first law of life. Each species develops for itself and never directly either for the advantage or the detriment of others ; though such incidental consequences to one species may arise continually from the development of another, as we have already seen. In fact, evolution in large measure consists in adaptations to meet these consequences, so as to avoid or counteract as far as possible those that are harmful and as far as possible to avail of, or cooperate with, the rest. But such processes in the main and tor long — so long, that is, as they are natural processes — are purely egoistic, not altruistic. Moreover the apostolic saying, God is no respecter ot persons, turns out to be true of Nature in a way which seems entirely to disprove the cardinal maxim of the old natural theology that all the lower creatures exist for the sake of man. Man is un- doubtedly ' the paragon of animals,' the highest link in a vast chain, but it is a chain in which one and the same right to live belongs to all. I rccdll a revolting 88 The Contingency in the IVorld sight that I saw in my youth, which rudely shocked my preconceived notions of the fitness of things. That man should slay and eat creatures lower in the scale than himself, that the song-thrush should feed on worms and snails or the gorgeously tinted kingfisher dart into the thick of a shoal of silly minnows to secure food for himself and his brood — all this seemed reasonable enouoh ; for here the lower subserved the hijjher. But once I chanced to see three young rabbits playfully gam- bolling, heedless of a cold clammy snake who stealthily glided forward, and struck first one and then another till after a few momentary convulsions all lay stretched and dead ; whereupon the sluggish reptile, without the faintest show of emotion, pleasurable or otherwise, proceeded slowly to suck down one after another these pets of my childhood — then indeed I felt that the world so far was neither well nor wisely nor beautifully ordered. Such an incident, however individually im- pressive, is, of course, utterly trivial compared with the terrible ravages, formerly regarded as the scourges of an offended deity, which we now know are wrought by the lowest forms of life with which we have any exact acquaintance, whereby not only our flocks and fields are continually devastated but millions of our fellow-men are painfully swept away. It is not however the physical evil, the dysteleology of all this that is now in point, but simply the fact that there is no necessary connexion between worth of life as we estimate it and fitness to survive in the evolutionist sense. In the physical struggle for existence worth does not count : distinguished men like Raphael, Howard, Keats and Hegel succumbed to microscopic The Natural Right to live 89 bacilli, and it is conceivable that the whole human race might thus ignobly disappear. Such anomalies seem even a priori to be an obvious, almost an in- evitable outcome of pluralism, and though perhaps not insuperable, still as far as they go, they are an argu- ment in favour of the pluralist's and a difficulty for the theist's position. But further the continQfencv in the world in oreneral seems to involve that the existence of mankind at all is itself but a special contingency. In the case ot other living kinds few persons would hesitate to admit this. According to the psalmist indeed God " causeth the grass to grow for the cattle... the high mountains are for the wild goats, the rocks are a refuge for the conies," But what is at all events immediately evident is rather the pluralist position, that these creatures are adapted to their conditions of life, not their conditions of life to them The existence of Qrrass does not depend on that of the cattle or goats or conies that browse upon it\ but contrariwise these creatures are variously modified to derive their sustenance from the grass, according as it is found on plains, on crags or in hollows. Similarly it is argued that trees came into existence and continue to exist independently of the birds that there make their nests or of the various other creatures that live among their branches. So had there been no forests there could have been no apes, but the existence of forests is due primarily to the conditions of vegetable lite and not to the needs of animals Assuming man's simian ancestry — and assuredly, as Darwin has said, "if man had not bet-n ^ Ct. Lect. III. p. 62. 90 The Coiitmgency in the World his own classifier, he would never have thought of founding a separate order for his own reception " — then the mode of life of those climbing, chattering, inquisitive denizens of the woods gradually led up to his wonderful hand and erect posture, his power of speech and capacity for knowledge. First the presence of trees made the Qiiadriunana or four-handed primates i possible, and then the advance of the higher forms 1 among these beyond the confines of the forest ushered I in the two-handed primates or Bimana with their bipedal mode of progression. Some fragments of one of the latest of the ' missing links ' in this chain were said to have been discovered about ten years ago among some volcanic ash in the island of Java, the so- called Pithecanthropus e7'ectus, and Professor Haeckel had previously thought it becoming to entertain his scientific readers with a fanciful picture of the family group under the title Pithecanthropus alalus. No doubt it is the psychological gulf rather than any biological gap between the speechless man-apes and Homo sapiens that is most impressive : it is not the physical difference but the mental difference that is so profound. This glaring psychological discon- tinuity between man and brute, as we know them, has led thinkers of every age and school to regard the origin of mankind and even of every individual man as something more or less supernatural, not wholly explicable by the ordinary processes that suffice to explain the nature and development of the lower animals. In the Mosaic account of creation, "God said, Let us make man in our image, after our like- ness " : here this difference is distmctly recognised. The gtilf between Man and Brute 91 It was this difference again that led Aristotle to regard the rational principle common to all men as not con- joined like sense and phantasy with bodily organs, not naturally generated like these, but as wholly separable from the body and divinely infused from without after the commencement of the bodily life. It was this difference that checked Descartes too from applying to man his famous automaton theory, which seemed to him adequate to explain the behaviour of brutes : in man alone he was constrained to allow that a soul is united with the animal machine. Even Leibniz, regardless of his cardinal principle of continuity, was driven to admit a difference in kind between the souls of animals and the spirits of men, a difference so great that he compares the relation of God to the animals with that of an inventor to his machine, but God's relation to men he compares to that of a prince to his subjects or a father to his children. At the moment of birth he supposed that God gave reason to each soul "by a special act or by a kind of transcreation\' Finally — to take one more example specially inter- estmg in connexion with our present topic — we have Mr Wallace, whose name is so honourably associated with Darwin's, firmly maintaining that the theory of natural selection, which they independently promul- gated, is insufficient to account for the development Oi man. As the existence of the poodle or the pouter pigeon is due to man's interference with the working of natural selection so, Mr Wallace assumes, the existence of man is to be attributed to a similar mter- ' Thcoduee, § 91. 92 The Contingency in the World ference of some superior or supreme intelligence. In short, as one of his ablest critics concisely puts it, Mr Wallace's view amounts to saying that " our brains are made by God and our lungs by natural selection" and that, in point of fact, " man is God's domestic animaP." Still this is something of a parody, and it cannot be denied that Mr Wallace's hypothesis is a perfectly legitimate one. But is it necessary ? In common with the other supernatural explanations of man as rational animal, that of Mr Wallace recognises the presence of the two factors which rationality and animality imply ; but all alike entirely refrain from inquiring whether sociology may not account for the one at least as completely as biology accounts for the other. Reason is not correlated to an orean in the way that sight and locomotion are : so far Aristotle was right; it comes from without and is not generated. Had the most transcendent genius been left to grow up wild in the woods he would certainly never have attained to reason On the other hand no biologist would pretend to find in difference of organization the equivalent of the vast interval between the genius and the savage. The difference then between Homo alalits and Homo sapiens is not a biological difference : in short for biology there is no such species as Homo sapiens. This is now generally allowed. But then so far there is no case against the contingency of man's origin biologically considered : not his lungs only but his brain also or rather his entire frame may be re- garded as equally the outcome of a pluralistic evolution. * Cf. Wallace, iVaiural Selection, 1891, p. 205 n. Confingeiicy and Individuals 93 Let lis now consider the sociological side. Cut off from society entirely the individual, we have seen, never attains to sapience at all; also the more advanced the social medium in which he lives the more advanced on the average his intelligence and humanity. Society of course presupposes language as the instrument of communicatino- and accumulating^ knowledoe : without it a tribe of men would be no better than a pack of wolves or a herd of deer. But there are few nowadays who imagine that speech was directly imparted to our first parents by some supernatural instructor just as it was afterwards taught by them to their children. Though we have no precise knowledge concerning its original acquisition we know enough to be satisfied that it developed gradually out of cries and gestures. For curiosity, imitativeness and excitability even the existing primates exceed all other animals except man. As regards the sociological side of man's origin then — the advance from animality to rational personality through inter-subjective intercourse — there is, it must be con^^ssed, p7Hma facie, neither any definite evidence of, nor any absolute need for, supernatural interference. The progress of knowledge and co- operation shows, so long as we can trace it, the same contingency, the same ' heterogony of ends' that characterize biological development. But if the existence of particular species, mankind included, can be regarded as prima facie contingent, still more obviously will contingency pertain to the existence of particular individuals, the great men who have often seemed to direct the course of human history also included. There is no need tor detailed 94 The Contingency in the World illustration here, but it is worth notice that this con- tingency is threefold; in respect, viz. of the individual's parentage, his nativity, and his survival to maturity. Those who breed and rear our domestic plants and animals take special pains to direct and control these circumstances, replacing nature's contingency by ideals of their own ; and daring innovators like Plato and the late Sir Francis Galton have even proposed to apply the same ' eugenic ' methods to the human race. Of " Eugenics," Galton recently said that it " dealt with what was more valuable than money or lands, namely, with natural inheritance of high character, capable brains, fine physique and vigour... It aimed at the evolution and preservation of high races and it well deserved to be strictly enforced^" Compared with those practices and this possibility it would, I believe, be hard to think of anything that sets the seeming contingency in the world in a more striking light. But history suggests endless similar reflexions, all trite enough to be sure yet none the less true. Had Letitia Ramolino not been so beautiful, some one has said, there would have been no Napoleon Bonaparte. The infant Isaac Newton, puny and prematurely born, was not expected to live many hours ; how many potential geniuses, it may be asked, succumbed to the untimely death that he barely escaped ? But as regards the physical world at all events it was long supposed that a pre-established harmony, a complete unitary system could be safely assumed. Long after the Ptolemaic astronomy — with its primum mobile, its crystalline spheres, its firmament of stars, ^ Nature, Vol. Lxxi. p. 401. Astronomy and Physics 95 the several planets with the sun and moon all revolvnig in concentric circles round the earth — had given place to that of Copernicus, it was still believed that there was somewhere a great central sun round which the entire stellar universe revolved. But this notion too has been exploded. " So far as we can judge at present," writes Professor Young, " it is most likely that the stai's are moving, not in regular closed orbits around any centre whatever, but rather as bees do in a swarm, each for itself, under the action of the predominant attraction of its nearest neighbours. The solar system is an absolute monarchy with the sun supreme. The great stellar system appears to be a republic, without any such central, unique, and dominant authority. Here perturbation prevails over regularity, and ' in- dividualism ' is the method of the greater system of stars, as solar despotism is that of the smaller system of planets'." Turning from stars to atoms we find a similar change of view. The five regular solids of Plato's cosmogony, the hard, massy corpuscles of Lucretius and Newton, the 'manufactured articles,' severally identical, ingener- able, and immutable, of Herschel and Maxwell, are all disappearing to make room for a theory of chemical evolution, which recognises degrees of simplicity and stability but finds no foi'ms absolutely elementary or absolutely permanent. The results of spectroscopic investigations conjoined with the recently discovered phenomena of radio-activity are, as Sir Norman Lockyer says, "on all-fours with the geological record. ..We ' C. A. Young, .1 Textbook of ueneral Aslronuiny, 1693. pp. 461, 5'4- 96 The Coiitiiigency in the IVorld note the same changes of form, sudden breaks in forms, disappearances of old, accompanied by appear- ances of new forms ; and with these we have to associate ...a growth of complexity. ..that is to say, the existence of our chemical elements as we know them does not depend upon their having been separately manufactured ...they are the result of the working of a general law, as in the case of plants and animals\" ^ Jnorgatiic Evolution, 1900, pp. 164, 166. LECTURE V. EVOLUTION AS EPIGENESIS AND EQUILIBRATION. In spite of the contingency which pluralism leads us to expect, and which, in fact, we have found every- where to characterize the world, there is at any rate one principle that from the pluralistic standpoint may be regarded as a priori. As a necessary consequence of the interaction of a plurality of individuals, intent on self-betterment as well as self-conservation, there should be a general tendency to diminish the mere contingency of the world and to replace it by a definite progression. And this, so far as our experience goes, we find to be in fact the case. Such progression we are wont now adays to speak of as evolution. But widely as the term ' evolution ' is used, it is rarely defined ; hence it is often without misgiving applied to processes that are diametrically opposed, to the differentiation of a unity and to the integration of a plurality. The history of this term is worth a moment's consideration. We begin with the literal sense, the unrolling of a scroll or volume, whereby what lies Written inside it is no longer latent but laid bare — becomes patent and evident. This as a figure is then transferred to the processes of thought ; and vv(.' talk of evolving or explicating whatever may be implied or involved in a concept, an argument or a theory. We find it later applied with a similar w. 7 98 Evolution as Epigeiiesis and Equilibration meaning to the supposed unfolding of an organism regarded as completely pre-existing in miniature within the germ. Such was the theory of biological evolution or preformation advocated by Leibniz. And throughout the i8th century this was the prevalent view among biologists and philosophers alike ; but now it is all but superseded by the very different theory of epigenesis or new formation ; for which nevertheless the term evolution is still retained. So different are the two theories in fact, that the earlier, strictly evolu- tional view would — unless essentially modified — render the Darwinian doctrine of the origin of species impossible. For according to that earlier theory "the germ was more than a marvellous bud-like miniature of the adult, it necessarily included in its turn the next generation, and this the next — in short all future generations. Germ within germ, in ever smaller miniature, after the fashion of an infinite juggler's box, was the corollary logically appended to this theory of preformation \" The successive unfolding of such a system of einboitement or involution, though the ne plus ultra of evolution literally understood, is then the direct negative of evolution as we understand it to-day. According to this later theory each new organism is not an 'educt' but a 'product,' to use Kantian phrases: its parts are in no sense present in the embryo but are gradually organized, one after another in due order, as the term epigenesis implies and as Harvey, who first used the term, prophetically maintained. — It is now known too that in this progressive integration the individual retraces the main stages through which the ^ Geddes and Thomson, The Evolution of Sex, p. 84, Epigenesis not strict Evolution 99 species has advanced: as Haeckel in technical language concisely puts it : Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Such a theory of evolution is in all respects con- formable to the pluralistic standpoint. The diverging lines of phylogenetic ascent indicate the various directions by which different species have extended and improved their adjustment to the environment : here all is history, the result of effort, trial and error, here we have adventure and ultimate achievement ; in a word natura natiirans, as I said before. The suc- cessive stages of ontogenetic development, on the other hand, though each step is an advance for the individual and justifies Harvey's term epigenesis ; yet from the point of view of the species it is mainly recapitulation, palingenesis as Haeckel has called it: here then we have on the whole only routine, heredity as the result of organic memory or habit, in other words, as natiira natnrata. The preformation theory on the other hand is only compatible with a singularistic, or as Professor James has called it, a block universe, in which With earth's first clay they did the last man knead And then of the last harvest sowed the seed : On the first morning of creation wrote U'hat the last dawn of reckoning shall read. Though this theory seems, so far as biology is con- cerned, to have originated in a certain faulty observation of Malpighi', the anatomist, it probably owed its long supremacy in large measure to the advocacy of philo- sophers, Regis, INIalebranche, and especially Leibniz. For Leibniz indeed it was but a corollary of his * Cf. Huxley's article ' Evolution,' Z-'z/tj. Brii. iith edn, \'oI. x. p. -M; aedie, ^ 24, Lecture Note i. 144 ^^^^ Pluralism of Hegel scious instrument of the soul, in and through which it expresses itself as if the body were the soul's work of art, and so forth — all this Hegel recognises to the full and describes in detail. It cannot indeed be said that he expressly traces back these psychological facts as far as the pluralist attempts to do ; but it might be fairly maintained that his view of nature justifies such a procedure. In the first place Hegel was no dualist : the whole process of nature is to become spirit, and spirit it is in itself or potentially from the beginning. But actually at the outset it is infinite isolation or dis- memberment ( Vereinzelung), and its unity is still to seek. It advances from this to the natural individuality or particularity of physical bodies and finally to the subjective individuality of organisms\ At this level sentience emerges and we pass over into the realm of mind, the individual existing for itself. The earlier, so-called inorganic processes pluralism explicitly inter- prets, in Leibnizian fashion, as also in some measure sentient and conative. In his PJiilosophy of Nature Hegel was too much under the influence of Schelling and dominated by his ' polarity myth ' for this. But occasionally he comes very near to the Leibnizian standpoint. Thus he describes a soul as such, as " in itself the totality of nature ; as individual soul it is a monad ; it is itself the posited totality of its particular world, so that this is shut up within it, is its content." And again : "In contrast to the macrocosm of Nature as a whole, the soul can be designated the microcosm, in which the former is compressed {z2isammenged7^angt^ * Naturphilosophie, § 252. Nahire to become Spirit 145 and its externality thereby overcome^" This meta- phorical language, by the way, looks very like non- sense : how the soul is going to condense the world or how compression is to put an end to externality is not evident. But what Hegel means, we may suppose, is what Leibniz also meant: the world is for every soul a presented, or — in the language of the first passage — a 'posited totality' — or continuum. Now all this, it must be remembered, is said, not of the higher stages of mental development, which Hegel distinguishes as spirit {Geisi); it is said of what he calls the natural and the sentient soul, the stage of obscurity {Dunkel- heit) before the soul has attained to a conscious and intelligible content^ — the stage, in a word, of Leibniz's ' confused perception.' And who is to say how far back this obscurity extends? All we know of it we know because we do not begin with it but approach it from the light and interpret it in terms of what it has become. And this is the method of pluralism. But now, it may be said, in the second place — indeed it has been said by a thoroughgoing Hegelian — that this principle of interpreting the lower on the analogy of the higher was recognised by Hegel too. Comparing the opposite processes of evolution and emanation — or, as I have proposed to call it, devolu- tion — both of which have been employed in the inter- pretation of nature, he expresses a preference for the latter. " To proceed from the more perfect to the less perfect is more advantageous," he says; "for then we have the type of the completed organism before 1 Philosophy of Mind, Encycl. ni. §§ 391, 403. Cf. also §352, Zusatz, I'.ncycl. ii. * Op. cit. % 404. w. 10 146 TJie Pluralism of Hegel us " : albeit he held both methods to be ' one-sided and superficial^' How then should we proceed, how, in fact, do we proceed? "It is clear," said G. H. Lewes, " that we should never rightly understand vital phenomena were we to begin our study of life by contemplating its simplest manifestations in the animal series ; we can only understand the Amoeba and the Polype by a light reflected from the study of Man." In quoting this passage the late Professor Ritchie, the Hegelian I just now referred to, adds the remark: "What makes it seem possible for the scientific investigator * to begin at the beginning ' is the fact that he is not doing so. The student of the Amoeba hap- pens to be, not an Amoeba, but a specimen of a highly developed vertebrate, and knows at least something about the differentiated organs and functions of his own bodyl" What we do then is by means of our knowledge of the higher to interpret the lower, while at the same time recognising that the actual process has been a development of the lower upwards towards the higher. With all this we may fairly say that Hegel was in complete agreement, once we have dis- allowed his attempts to play fast and loose with the two distinct kinds of developments — the historical and the dialectic. He does interpret the lower by the higher, he does admit an actual historical evolution, and he does insist that Nature is potentially mental from the first, so that the historical evolution is no ^ Naturphilosophie, Encycl. n. § 249, p. 35. ^ G. H. Lewes, Study of Psychology, p. 122; D. G. Ritchie, ' Darwin and Hegel ' in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. I. p. 59. . The Higher the Key to the Lower 147 generatio equivoca. " The appearance," he remarks, "as if [the existence of] Mind were brought about through an Other, is disposed of by Mind itself; for this — so to say — has the supreme ingratitude to resolve and mediate that through which it seems to be pro- duced, to reduce it to dependence on itself and to establish its own complete independence*." Let us now look at Hegel's handling of this evo- lution a little closer. His PJiilosophy of History is professedly little more than a philosophy of political history. The progress that it traces is the progress of freedom as realised in the objective mind or society; but freedom, it should be observed, is regarded as identical with spiritual perfection generally; and so he describes 'world-history' as "the exhibition of mind as it works out the knowledge of what it is in itself" The realisation of this ideal, he explains, is the final end, the working principle, the informing notion of history. But, as such, a principle is only general, abstract, and potential ; in order to its realisation a further factor is essential : in history proper this factor is the activity of human beings. But an end for which I am to be active must be in some sense my end: even if it have other aspects that do not concern me, still it is my own satisfaction that makes it interesting to me. He concludes then "that absolutely nothing is brought to pass without the interest of those who actively co- operated in it:... that nothing great in the world is accomplished without passion'"." Reason the card, but passion is the gale. * Philosophy of Mind, Encycl. ni. § 381, p. 23. ' I^hilosophie dir Geschichle, 1837. p. 28. 10 — 2 1 48 The Pluralism of Hegel The history of the world in the widest sense, how- ever, goes further back than this ; and though Hegel regarded it as neither fitting nor worthy of philosophy to take up the story before rationality comes upon the scene, he nevertheless has some introductory remarks concerning the pre-historic. These are important as further bearing out what has just been said about the spiritualistic continuity of the whole process of evolu- tion as Hegel conceived it, and as making clearer the pluralistic basis that it implies. Having insisted that "nothing happens, nothing is accomplished save as the individuals actively concerned in it secure their own satisfaction," he continues : " But the world's his- tory does not begin with any conscious end, such as we find in particular centres of men. The simple impulse to live together has already the conscious end of security for life and property, and so soon as this life in common is attained the end is [further] enlarged, The world's history begins only potentially (i.e. as Nature) with its general end, the full realisation of the notion of spirit. That end is its inner, nay its inmost unconscious impulse, and the entire business of the world-history is the labour of bringing it to con- sciousness. Thus making its appearance in the form of natural beings, natural wills, what has been called the subjective side [of history] is straightway present for itself \" Translated into pluralistic language this amounts to saying : A plurality of conative beings at first casually interacting in pursuance of their several particular and immediate impulses gradually come to have ends and continually widening ends in common, ^ Op. cit. p. 29. The Wor Id-Spirit 149 thereby advancing towards the complete reahsation of the one objective end of history that is now to be regarded as its potential principle from the first. We are not then surprised to find Hegel too describing and illustrating — as we have already done under the title ' heterogony of ends'' — the fact that in the course of the world's history the actions of man- kind are continually realising ends that they neither intended nor foresaw. But the explanation which he seeks to oive of this fact is very different from that of the pluralist. He regards human interests and actions in the first instance simply as instruments and means. Through them the absolute final purpose of the world's history is carried out, but carried out as something beyond and external to them — just as a house is erected by means of natural forces and elements that have no concern with its inner end, which in fact is to keep them at bay. But this illustration, which please under- stand is Hegel's own-, at once and very pointedly raises the question : Where in the case of the world's history is the guiding and controlling mind to be found that corresponds to the architect in the case of the house ? It must have a place somewhere in one or other of the three great divisions of Hegel's philo- sophy. But where ? Obviously not in the Logic, for tliat lies on the other side of everythino- like his- torical and natural development, as Hegel expressly ' Lect. IV. above, p. 79. ' Philosophie der Gcschichte, 1840, p. 34. This illustration was omitted by Cans, the editor of the 1837 edition, who professed to follow Hegel's own revision ; but it was inserted in the second edition by Hegel's son Karl, Gans having in the meantime died. 150 The Pluralism of Hegel maintained. It is the realm of pure thouo-ht, not the realm of ends. In the Philosophies of Nature and of Mind the Logic is applied ; but their contents, as such, do not enter into it or concern it Perception, imagina- tion and the like, which belong to self-conscious mind, are to be as completely excluded from logic as are the forms of space and time and the phenomena, inorganic or organic, which fill them out. The ' notion ' is not to be regarded as an act of the self-conscious, subjective, intellect : even the term ' objective thought ' is awk- ward as applied to it, for thought is usually referred only to mind or consciousness, and objective in like manner primarily only to the unconscious\ Let us turn next to the Philosophy of Mind \ for in his Philosophy of History Hegel often refers to the ' world-spirit ' as that which directs and controls the actions of men to subserve its own supreme end. But what does Hegel himself tell us in the Philosophy of Mind about this ' world-spirit ' ? " This movement," he says referring to the course of history, " is the way, whereby the spiritual substance is liberated — the deed, whereby the absolute final purpose of the world is accomplished in it, [whereby] the spirit that at first exists on\y potentially {an JzV/^)... becomes the world- spirit ^" Actually then, it would seem, the world- spirit corresponds to the realised plan of the house rather than to the architect who shapes and controls the materials. A plan does not ordinarily carry itself out. Still, it may be urged, a mere illustration is not to be pressed. That, of course, is true ; but on the ^ Cf. Logik, in. pp. 21, 18; Encyclopaedic, § 24. * Philosophy of Mind, Encycl. in. § 549 init. The Dialectic and the Time-illusion 151 other hand it is to be remembered that, according to Hegel's own statement, the world-spirit is only potentially present at first, only gradually attains to " consciousness and self-consciousness and so to the revelation and reality of its perfect nature, its nature \_Weseii\ as it is in and for itself" — a position which, as we may see presently, carries important conse- quences. It has to be remembered too that Hegel, as we have already seen, makes a point of insisting that the plan or principle or end of history needs means and instruments in order to its determinate realisation and is in itself only ' general, abstract, not completely real,' But at this juncture some disciple of Hegel may refer us back to the Looic for the true meaning of teleology. There Hegel tells us "we may say that in teleological activity the end is the beginning, the consequence is the ground, the effect is the cause, a case of becoming is a case of what has become, in it only what is already existing comes into existence, and so forth \" Afterwards, in the corresponding- section of the so-called Smaller Logic, he expresses himself still more strongly. "As a matter of fact," he here says, "the object is potentially [an sic/i] the notion ; and so when the notion, as end, is realised in the object, this is only the manifestation of the inner nature of the object itself. Objectivity is thus, as it were, only a covering under which the notion lies concealed The consummation of the infinite End, therefore, consists merely in setting aside {anflicben) the illusion [which makes it seem] as if the end was ^ Lo^ik, \n. p. 2 28. 152 The Pluralisni of Hegel not yet accomplished. It is under this illusion that we live, and at the same time it is this illusion alone that stirs us to activity \_das Bethdtigende\ and on which our interest in the world depends. The Idea in its process makes for itself that illusion — posits an Other over against itself — and its activity consists in setting this illusion aside \" The serpent with its tail in its mouth is an ancient mystic symbol, and if Hegel, like Herbert Spencer, had bethought himself of a book-plate to adorn his theory of evolution, doubtless it is this that he would have chosen. Moreover a devoted disciple has provided the motto : — Serpens nisi serpentem comederit non fit draco'^. It would be needless for our purpose to spend time in discussing the validity of a position that cannot even be stated without contradicting itself : it is sufficient to observe that an illusion that embraces the whole range of experience and is declared to be the source alike of all truth in theory and all zest in practice is no illusion for us. This appeal to the Logic then does not help us in our search : it only confronts us once more with the problem as to the relation of the dialectic to time. Coming back now to the historical again — which the employment of means and instruments to accom- plish with much pain and labour a superhuman end, in any case implies — there is only the Philosophy of Nature left. In Nature, from or in which the world's ^ Eticyclopaedie, i. § 212. In the phrase 'sets an Other over against itself,' — setzt ein Afiderer sich gegenilber, Hegel, like Fichte before him, seems to be trying to read his own philosophy in the German word for object, i.e. Gegenstand. ^ J. E. Erdmann, Geschichte der neueren Philosophie, Bd in. Abth. ii. p. 841. Twofold Relation of Nature to Mind 153 process begins, can we find the guiding executive whose workinof consummates itself in the fulness of time ? But if it be true that even in the realm of mind the world-spirit works at first underground like a mole, to use Hegel's own simile, and only at length emerges into consciousness and self-consciousness, surely we cannot expect to find it enacting the part of a supreme and intelligent director in Nature, where contingency runs riot like a bacchantic god and its impotence sets limits to philosophy, which that cannot overcome \ In his explication of the notion of mind Hegel begins : " Mind has for us Nature as its pre- SKpposition, the tnitk of which and so the absohite first of which it [nevertheless] is." Again, speaking of its development, he says: "Mind is preceded not only by the logical Idea but also by external Nature. For the knoivledge already involved in the logical idea is only the notion of knowledge that we think, not the knowledge that is there for itself, not actual mind but merely its possibility. The actual mind, which alone is our object-matter in the science of mind, has Nature for its proximate, as it has the logical Idea for its primary, presupposition'." This very oracular language is another instance of the seemingly double-dealing oi' Hegel's circular theory of development, and once again we must claim to distinguish sharply between the dia- lectical development — where "the Idea thought in its repose is indeed timeless " — and the historical develop- ment, where the Idea as concrete appears to be "not at rest but an existence progressing in time'." What ' Cf. above, p. 140. ' Philosophy 0/ Mind, § 381. » Cf. Gcschichtc ih-r Philosophie, i. p. 46. 154 The Plural ism of Hegel Hegel's explication comes to then seems to be this : Nature is 'Mind out of itself from the abstract stand- point of the Logic; but it is Mind not yet 'come to itself from the concrete point of view of historical development. Seeing that in the Logic we have not actual mind, not knowledge but only its possibility, it may well be questioned whether this mere possibility can become actual by passing out of itself: it may even be doubted whether mind out of itself can be called mind at all. No wonder, then, that thinkers largely in sympathy with Hegel — as, for example, von Hartmann, and still more, Volkelt — regarded his system as really a philosophy of the unconscious ; or that others, trained in the Hegelian school, like Strauss and Feuerbach, resolved it into a refined naturalism. From such constructions there seems to be no escape unless we take Hegel's unconscious nature in the Leibnizian or pluralistic fashion. And the continuity of the Hegelian historical evolution, which we have already noted, may be held to favour such an inter- pretation. No doubt the objection will at once occur, that for Hegel Nature is essentially a unity that only appears as a plurality. But is that after all so clear as at first sight it seems — assuming, of course, that we ignore the desperate leap from the Logic to Nature, in other words disallow any continuity between the dialectical and the historical evolution ? Not only does the con- tingency of Nature imply plurality, as already said, but Hegel repeatedly lays emphatic stress on what he calls the externality (Atissereinander) of Nature, not simply in relation to mind, but to itself; and on Nature as Plurality 15^ its infinite separation [Vei'eiiisehmo) where, the unity of form is still ideal, potential, and therefore still to seek, Nature remaining meanwhile an ' unresolved contradiction.' "Its differences...," he says, "are existences more or less independent of each other ; through their original unity indeed they stand in relation with one another, so that no one is con- ceivable without the rest ; but this relation is for them in a higher or lower degree externaP." Even when he has advanced so far as the Philosophy of Mind he represents the soul as at first only natural, not yet sentient or actual ; and a pi'Opos of this earliest stage he remarks : — " As the light breaks up into an infinite multitude of stars, so also the general Nature-soul breaks up into an infinite multitude of individual souls ; only with this difierence, that, whereas the light has the appearance of existing independently of the stars, the general Nature-soul attains to actual existence only in the separate souls'^" This comes very near to presentationism or the 'mind-dust theory' and would more than satisfy the pluralists of our day. So far we have been considering Hegel's interpre- tation of that heterogony of ends which in common with the pluralists he recognises throughout the course of the world's history. He attributes it to what he was fond of calling ' the absolute cunning of reason ' or the world-spirit in ensuring that the contingency of all things finite shall subserve its own supreme end. This end so far we have found him regarding as ' Cf. Philosophie der Naiiir, % 247, 2-;S, 25 j; Philosophy of Mind, § 381, Zusatz. - Philosophy of Mind, § 390. 156 The Pluralism of Hegel external to, and independent of, its instruments ; and even as directed against them, as a house is built by means of the forces of nature in order to set them at defiance. But we have been unable to find in Hegel's philosophy any evidence of this world-spirit in its 7'6le of superintending overruler. We have found the house in progress, but no architect ; or rather we have found the whole metaphor bursting its bounds, as Hegel would say ; for the completed house is to be the architect. Does the house then build itself? So the pluralist would say ; in so saying, however, he refuses to regard the finite agents in history as simply means and instruments to purely alien ends. And Hegel after all does likewise : as instance, the following : — "If now we are content to see individuals, their ends and the satisfaction of these, sacrificed, their happiness generally abandoned to the dominion of chance, to which it belongs ; if we are content to consider them in general, as falling under the category of means, still they have one side which we hesitate even in com- parison with the Highest to regard only in this light... viz. their moral and religious side." But he goes much farther, and presently continues: — "If we speak of a means we imagine it in the first instance as only external to the end and as having no part in that. In fact, however, natural things generally, let alone what is higher, — nay, the commonest lifeless objects that are used as means — must be so constituted as to answer to the end or have something in them that they share with it. Men least of all stand in that entirely external relation as means to the end of reason. ..on the contrary they have a part in that end Individuals always Ends 157 of reason and are, just because of this, ends of them- selves \" Now we must here, I think, admit that a very close approximation to the pluralist's theory of evolution is at least implied. Such approximation appears still closer when we take into account what Hegel has said a propos of the 'absolute cunning of reason' — how it stands aside and leaves things to inter- act according to their own nature ; rubbing together and frustrating each other, while it never itself directly interferes — how it allows full scope to human passions and interests, paying the tribute of transient existence [Daseiii unci Vergdnglichkeit) not out of itself but out of these, while it foresees the result to be not the accomplishment of our designs but of its own^ This very deistic account of an assumed spectator of the world's history, whether called reason or God or Provi- dence — and Hegel in turn calls it all three — we may leave entirely aside, for we have been able to find it only as the culminating Idea of the dialectical develop- ment and as the goal of the historical. All that immediately interests us is the near approach that Hegel here makes to the pluralistic position, which — as we have seen — is that all the agents at work in history, from the lowest to the highest, are not primarily means to external ends, not primarily things but persons in the widest sense ^; that by their mutual interaction and striving — since all seek the good — ' rhilosopJiie der Geschic/iie, 1837, p. 33. - Encyclopacdie, i. § 209. ' In saying this I have in view an interesting book written mainly from the pluraHstic standpoint, which I have only just come across — Person und Sadie by L. W. Stern, 1906. 158 TJie Plnralisni of Hegel gradually eliminate the contingency, which their com- parative isolation — Hegel's primitive Vereinzelung — at first entails, and gradually bring about the reign of reason and right. And this position could hardly be more concisely stated than in words that are Hegel's own : — " The history of the world shows only how spirit comes gradually to the consciousness and will of the truth : this dawns upon it ; [then] it discerns the chief features ; eventually it attains to the full consciousness of it\" The long introduction to his Philosophy of History is full of similar passages which suggest not a preconceived plan steadily carried out by a single overruling mind employing passive instru- ments, but a living organization slowly and tentatively achieved by the long and painful efforts of generations of struggling individuals. Der Tried der Perfedi- bilitdt ist die Bestimmufig der Menschen, Hegel has said, and all that history shows is this Tried at work. But the unity of the whole is the last word of philosophy: "All philosophy is nothing else than the study of the determinations [Bestimmungen) of unity... always unity, but in such a way that this is always further determined" said Hegel. And so too says the pluralist to-day : how far the two agree about the determination we must consider in the following lectures, when we shall have to look closer into this aspect of pluralism itself. ^ Philosophie der Geschichte, 1837, p. 51. LECTURE VIII. THE HEGELIAN UNITY. We have seen that there is a strone undercurrent of pluralism running through the whole of Hegel's philosophy regarded as ' the thinking consideration oi things' in distinction from his attempted 'dialectical development of pure thought.' But of course every philosophy must recognise both plurality and unity in some fashion, the important question then still remains : Is the unity with Hegel, as with the pluralist, result, or is it ground and presupposition ; historically is it the starting-point or is it the goal : in other words Is there a unity differentiated into a plurality or is there a plurality organized into a unity ? Here again I think we shall find much to justify us in affirming the second alternative. No doubt there is something to be said on the other side ; of that the disruption of the Hegelian school within five years of the master's death is sufficient evidence. The thinkers on the Hegelian right held that Hegel had taught the abso- lute priority of the unity as personal Creator and Providence. It is true that he had said in so many words that the content of philosophy and of religion is the same, the difference lying only in their form ; the form of the one being logical {Bcorijf), that of i6o The Hegelian Unity the other being figurative {Vorstellung). It is true that he had found speculative interpretations for the Christian dogmas of the Trinity, the incarnation, the atonement, and even the sacraments. Nevertheless the verdict of succeeding generations has been given almost unanimously in favour of the thinkers of the Hegelian left. But they disavowed altogether Hegel's attempt to incorporate the leading tenets of Christianity into his philosophy of absolute idealism, and main- tained its essentially pantheistic structure. Indeed it would nowadays seem needless to refer to any other interpretation, were it not that the leading exponents of Hegel amongst us have been till lately members of the right. The appeal to Hegel's doctrine of the Trinity as evidence of the theistic character of his philosophy is particularly unfortunate. So long as the Christian dogma is — so to say — read into it between the lines, it might pass as such. But taken, as it ought to be, with the context of the Hegelian philo- sophy as a whole, the doctrine is obviously and trans- parently pantheistic. In place of a triple personality there is no personality at all. The Trinity is simply equated to the main triad of the Hegelian system, Logic, Nature, Spirit as severally Thesis, Antithesis and Synthesis. Let us briefly consider each in turn. In an important and often-quoted paragraph de- fining the nature of Logic, Hegel concludes : — " Logic accordingly is to be understood as the system of pure reason, as the realm of pure thought. This realm is the truth as it is unveiled in and for itself. We can therefore say that this content sets God before us as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of Hegel^s Doctrine of the Trijiity i6i Nature and finite spirit \" God the Father then, or rather what Hegel describes as the Kingdom of the Father, answers to this realm of pure thought, this ' realm of shadows,' as he proceeds a few pages later to call it. All the unity we can expect to find here then is an ideal unity. But no, the orthodox Hegelian may reply, within the Kingdom of the Father we find, according to Hegel's own teaching, the generation of the Son and the procession of the Spirit : we have the archetype of all community, divine love. " In friendship, in love," Hegel himself has said, " I give up my abstract personality and by so doing win it back as concrete personality. The true in personality then is just this, to gain personality through this absorbing and being absorbed in the other." Yes, but in the case of the Trinity what exactly is this other ? Had Hegel been content to leave this 'silent mystery ' as he calls it still fermenting in the thoughts of men as he professed to find it, or had he been content on religious grounds to accept it as the directly revealed truth, which Christian theology proclaims it to be, we should have nothing to say. Nothing at least, unless it were to protest against a philosopher meddling with what is avowedly either mystical or 'revealed.' But he essays to explain it. "The relation of father and son is taken from organic life and is only figuratively used... and so never entirely corresponds with what ought to be expressed." Philosophy alone is competent to put the truth in adequate form and this form is the dialectic development through the moments or functions of the so-called Subjective ^ Logik, I. p. 35. w. 1 1 1 62 The Hegelian Unity notion, through universality and particularity to indi- viduality. In Hegel's fearfully laboured expositions this is the only thing that stands out clearly. The so-called Kingdom of the Father is, it is true, itself a triad within the first moment — universality ; and though the notion becomes increasingly adequate and concrete as we advance, still the whole movement falls within the realm of pure thought. Even this triune God, if we like so to call it, is still without the world and so not God, as Hegel himself has said in so many words. The terms which in the course of a few pages he applies to the first person of the Trinity are con- clusive so far. " The eternal Idea that is not yet posited in its reality but is itself still the abstract Idea"; "God as simply the Father is not yet the true" ; "The abstract God, the Father, is the universal " ; "This universal implies the complete Idea, but also only implies it, is only potentially Idea." In keeping with such language are the various — chiefly neo- Platonic — attempts to reach the truth, which Hegel thought deserving of recognition ; in the course of which we come across such phrases, as for example, the "Ov, the Abyss or Deep, that is as good as to say, what is as yet empty ; the -npotraToip who is a Father only mediately, the irpoap^-q. He who was before the beginning; and so on\ The 'process' within this universal Hegel describes partly in biological, partly — as we have already seen — in ethical, language, partly, that is to say, as life, partly as love. " Life," he says, ^ Philosophie der Religion, 2te Aufl. 1840, Bd 11. p. 244, Eng. trans, by Speirs and Sanderson, in. p. 30. Though references are given to this the translations in the text have been made independently. The Kingdom of the Father 163 "preserves itself, preservation means passing into difference, into the struggle with particularity, means finding itself to be distinct over agrainst inoro-anic nature. Life is thus only a result, since it has gene- rated itself; is a product that in the second place again produces :...what is produced is already there from the beofinninor. The same holds true in love and love returned^" Obviously this is the figurative language appropriate to religion, which for Hegel was but one remove from art : for philosophy such forms are still inadequate. Accordingly Hegel has no sooner elabo- rated his comparisons than he proceeds to tone them down. For the divine life there is no external ; and so here, "the process," he says, "is thus nothing but the play of self-preservation, of making sure of one's self^" So again, having described love as between two persons, he then characterizes the divine love, as involving "this distinction and the nullity of this distinction, a play which is not in earnest, the dis- tinction being just posited as abolished^" In the end then we find Hegel coming back to the realm of pure thought as alone furnishing an adequate account of this process as he all along maintained. Here, he says it is manifest "that every definite notion is this — to set itself aside {sich selbst ajifheben), as being its own contradiction, consequently to become its own difference and to posit itself as such. And thus the Notion itself still retains this one-sidedness or finitude, that it is some- thing subjective ; the determinations, the differences are posited only as ideal, not in fact as differences. This Op. cit. II. p. 241, E.t. III. p. 26. Op. cit. II. p. 241, E.t. III. p. 27. * Op. cit. II. p. 227, E.t. III. p. II. II — 2 164 The Hegelian Unity is the Notion that objectifies itself\" But again the question recurs : What exactly is this objectification ? Passing so to the Kingdom of the Son we come upon the Other, Difference, the Objective, as fact and not merely as thought : this is the region of ' infinite particularity' not of 'total particularity' or universality. Here plurality precedes unity. Referring back to the Kingdom of the Father — wherein the differentiation " is only a relation of God, of the Idea to itself, only a play of love with itself, in which it never attains to the seriousness of Other-being, to separation and dis- union {^E^itzweiungY^ — Hegel remarks "that we have not yet got to difference in its completeness, in the form that peculiarly belongs to it {in seiner Eigenthum- lichkeit)....\n order then that difference may ^^, and in order that it may come to its rights, Oi\\^r-being is requisite, so that what is differentiated may be Other- being as be'ent (Seyendes)^" — to use Dr Hutchison Stirling's term. This Other, let go as something independent, is the World in general, that is Nature and finite minds. But now comes the difficulty : how are the Son and the World related ? How does the playful, ideal differentiation, which amounts only to abstract difference in general, stand towards the com- plete and actual differentiation of a World let go in deadly earnest, in such wise 'let go' that Hegel, like Schelling, can even refer to it as cier Abfall der Idee, wherein the Idea is 'estranged from itself ? This is again the question we raised just now : what exactly is the Other ? ^ Op. at. II. p. 232, E.t. III. p. 16. ^ Oj>. at. 2nd ed. II. p. 249, E.t. in. p. 35. The Kingdom of the Son 165 If we stop at the Other in the Kingdom of the Father, we have not gone far enough ; but if we ad- vance to the Other in the Kingdom of the Son, we seem to have gone too far. In the one we have merely what, stripped of all more concrete metaphors, Hegel can only describe as 'a movement' in the realm of pure thought : in fact, however, when we look closer, it is hard to see how we can have even this. For though it be true that every ' definite notion ' implies negation, it is not easy to see why or how the ' pure notion, the notion apart from all limitation,' should imply it \ However even granting that this dialectical movement is in itself conceivable, the only point that interests us is that in it difference does not — to use Hegel's own phrase — "get its rights, the right of diversity {Ver- schieden/ieii) " or plurality, as, in view of the context, we may I think render it. Now it is in the Kingdom of the Son, he tells us, that this "advance to further determination takes place :...We thus enter into the sphere of determination, i.e. of space and the world of finite mind-." And here Hegel, as I have said, has too much on his hands. And he is far from oblivious of the fact. ^ We may talk of 'subjective need' in a finite life, a finite friendship; but to suppose that the content of the 'divine notion,' the first person in the Hegelian Trinity, implies anything analogous to this must surely appear meaningless, when we recall how that content is described. Well, then, may a critic describe this "life in the categories as the most inconceivable thing in the world" (A. Drews, Die deutsche Speculation seit Kant : das IVesen des Ahsoluten und die ros'onlichkcit Goths, 2te Ausg. 1895, Bd i. p. 248). It is certainly the veriest travesty of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. ^ Op. cit. II. pp. 250 f., E.t. HI. pp. 37 f. 1 66 TJie Hegelian Unity Two very different ' movements,' or processes, are clearly implied, but Hegel feels bound to show that these two are somehow one. So he refers to them as two moments in the analysis of the Son, which are kept apart and yet both contained in Him. The difficulty is really the old one of getting across the famous 'ditch.' How much at a loss Hegel is is shown by the fact that he thinks it illuminating to refer to Jacob Boehm's description of ' the transition ' between the two moments of the Son: how "the first only- begotten Lucifer imagined himself in himself, advanced to being and so fell ; and how immediately the eternally Only-begotten took his place'." On the strength of this piece of utter mysticism Hegel proceeds to refer to " a state before time was when the angels, God's children, sang his praises," and then more exactly defines this 'state' as the relation of thought to its object. Apparently then not only was there a Trinity in the eternal realm of pure thought, the Kingdom of the Father, but a complete and harmonious choir of ideas as well, reminding us of Plato's ideal world. Apparently too the world in space and time was after all not ' freely let go ' but, in advancing to its rights of Other-being and plurality, really revolted and fell. Without attempting to resolve this difficulty as to the Abfall der Idee and two Only-begotten, we may con- tent ourselves with noticing that it furnishes Hegel with an additional reason for distinguishing the two ' This passage calls to mind Goethe's account of his early theological speculations, in Dichtung und Wahrheit, bk vii. He too speaks of Lucifer 'believing that he found himself in himself and of the creation and fall that resulted. The two forms of 'the Other' 167 and keeping them apart ; for otherwise the false position would arise "as z/^" to quote his words, ''the eternal Son of the Father, the Godhead existing objectively^ for itself, were the same as the world, as if by that only this were to be understood"." And yet, notwithstanding all, he still maintains that the two are implicitly the same : the Idea, that is to say, is in itself the same, merely the form is difterent: it is only figurative thought ( Vorstellung) that holds the two apart as two wholly diverse spheres and acts. More explicitly, Hegel's final solution of the difficulty — in spite of all that he has said about divine history as the process of self-differentiation, of God without the world not being God, and much beside — is simply to sweep away time and declare the world of finitude to be only the eTepop, limited, negative etc., that as such has no truth. Regarded from the point of vie\v of time, " it is merely an instant {^Augenblick\ like the gleam of the lightning-flash, which in its appearing has immediately disappeared. But what we have really got to do is to get rid of every time-determination, whether duration or the now...: The world as temporal is just the region of contradiction, the Idea in a form inadequate to it I" The one Other then has two forms, one true and the other untrue ; the unveiled, eternal Other of the realm of pure thought, the Kingdom of the P^ather, and the phenomenal, half-concealed, half-revealed Other of the Kingdom of the Son ; the Other that makes no dif- ference in the unsullied light of the divine self-identity ' But has Hegel ever made this 'objective existence' clear? 2 Op. at. II. p. 251, E.t. III. p. 39. * Op. cit. II. p. 252, E.t. III. p. 40. 1 68 The Hegelian Unity and the Other that refracts and disperses it in endless particoloured beams ; God in his eternal essence and the world of infinite particularity, of subjective con- sciousness and ordinary thought, that is the world of experience, the historical realm of ends. Now surely in all this we may say that one thing at least seems clear: what Hegel undertook to ex- plain — the transition from the Kingdom of the Father to the Kingdom of the Son — "how this Idea passes out of its universality and infinity into finitude " proves to be inexplicable. The Kingdom of the Father, then, to which the Son as the eternally Only-begotten be- longs, is thus — as I attempted to show in the second lecture — the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns. The Absolute cannot be the startingpoint of real knowledge, — it may be the ulti- mate goal of philosophical speculation. Experience may lead us to frame the idea of the Absolute, but it will not enable us to deduce the world of the Many from it. Among the opening sentences of his ex- position of the Kingdom of the Son, Hegel has the following which comes near to admitting the truth of all this : — " First there was the Idea in the element of thought : this is the foundation and with it we have begun ; [for] the Universal and therefore more abstract must precede [all else] in science^" ; but in fact "it is the later in existence ; it is the potential {das Ansicli) but it comes later to consciousness and knowledge"." That is to say the Idea in the element of thought, to ^ Hegel uses 'science' here in a Fichtean sense, that is as equivalent to philosophy. 2 Op. cit. n. p. 247; E.t. III. p. Zo' The transition to the Kingdom of the Son 169 v.hich Hegel has relegated the persons of the Christian Trinity, lies behind existence and experience : as he goes on immediately to say, "the foTvi of the Idea comes to appearance as result, which however is essentially pote7itiality [das Ansich)." Clear in itself, such language is nevertheless not a little confusing in view of the context, that we were just now discussing, in which it occurs. For there the whole finite world of our conscious experience is declared to be illusory, inadequate, and untrue, and the movement within the realm of thought to be verily reality, truth, infinity. But there still, of course, remains the Kingdom of the Spirit, in which this estrangement of the Idea, which constitutes the inadequacy of the finite world, is finally overcome. This estrangement is puzzling not only for the reasons we have already considered, but also in yet another respect. Thus, at the end of the Logic, Hegel describes the Idea as impelled to realise itself beyond the confines of pure thought and pictures it as freely but with absolute self-confidence taking the plunge into another sphere. This, as we have seen, is a difficult situation to conceive, but the result is equally bewildering. For the plunge, when made, has at once to be undone : the Idea, dissipated and out of itself, has painfully to collect itself again and rise anew to its pristine unity. Fortunately it was not let go as a whole : it is only the second element or moment, that of particularity, that answers to Nature, and the externalisation which was the work of the first moment is internalised anew through the third. This Kingdom of the Spirit we have presently to consider: I anticipate 170 The Hegelian Unity it here because the continuation of the sentence just now quoted is somewhat clearer when this is taken into account. The whole sentence runs : — "Theybr;;^ of the Idea comes to appearance as restilt, which however is essentially potentiality ; as the content of the Idea is such that the last is the first and the first the last, so is what appears as result, the presupposition, the potentiality, the foundation^" This is the cardinal principle of Hegel's doctrine of development, to which I have already several times referred : the end is the beginning, for the beginning is its presupposition, and out of this nothing comes but what is already there. There is a sense in which this paradox may be true and have a meaning : there is a sense in which it is not true but self-contradictory. It may be justifiable when we are dealing with essence and its explication, with a dialectical movement ; it is not true of existence and of historical evolution. The plausibility — but also the falsity — of Hegel's position lay in identifying the two. Bare potentiality, the bare idea of an end to be ac- complished, however sublime, however completely explicated in respect of its essential import, will never become actuality. But is it so certain, it may be urged, that what according to Hegel philosophy places first of all is not the supreme reality ? Unquestionably if we could suppose that what he meant was simply that — though we only gradually attain to a knowledge of God, yet when we do — we may believe that God is not merely the ratio essendi, but is also the personal creator and conserver of all, we should have less difficulty. But ' Op. cit. n. p. 247, E.t. III. p. ■^Ty. Hegel's Doctrine of Development 1 7 1 the whole trend of his system is aofainst such an interpretation. Now Spirit for Hegel, it will be remembered, falls into the triad of subjective, objective and absolute Spirit. In keeping with such an inter- pretation, then, as Lotze has remarked, " we should have expected that absolute spirit... would have re- turned,... only with greater depth of meaning and perfection, to the form that spirit possessed in the first stage of this development, the form that is to say of personal, individual Spirit \" But as we are aware, Hegel's Absolute Spirit, the counterpart of the Abso- lute Idea in the Logic, was something wholly different from this. What Hegel places first is then neither a single substance nor a single subject. As the latest and one of his ablest commentators, Kuno Fischer, has said, " the main theme running through the whole of his philosophy is the development of the world in accordance with reason. What is developed is rational consciousness, spirit, the self-knowledge of humanity." All actual development of course presupposes its own possibility, and it is just this that Hegel places first as potential end and aim. He declares thought and being to be identical and yet places abstract thought at the beginning and then fails to effect its union with actual being again. Let me quote another commentary : " It may be all very well to declare that the life of ' "Of course," Lotze adds, "we could then properly regard the whole series of philosophical notions, that were to lead up to this climax, not as furnishing a history of the development of God himself, but only as the history of our ideas concerning his nature. In so tar as this interpretation of it is impossible the dialectical exposition must be changed." Geschichte der deuischen Philoso^hie zcit Kant, 1882, pp. 71 f. 172 The Hegelian Unity God and the divine knowledge is a play of love with itself; [but] such an idea sinks to the devotional or even to insipidity, if the seriousness, the pain, the patience and labour, of the negative are lacking in it. In itself that life, it may be, is undisturbed harmony and unity with itself, in which there is no concern about other-being and its estrangement, and as little about overcoming this estrangement. But this [life] in itself (dies Ansich) is abstract universality, wherein its nature, to \>^ for itself, is ignored." But 'nature,' let me parenthetically remark, implies process. This commentary is Hegel's own, and occurs in one of the very last paragraphs that he revised for the press. After another sentence or two he continues : " The true is the whole. The whole however is only the essence completing itself through its own develop- ment. Of the Absolute it is to be said that it is essentially result, that not till the end is it what it is in truth. ...What though the embryo be potentially man, it is still not actually so : it is that only as matured reason, which has made itself to what it is potentially \" The true inwardness of Hegel's paradox that the Idea must first make itself to what it is, that its end was its aim from the beginning, so that like the circle it only completes itself in returning into itself — should now be clear. The difference between the actual and the potential is regarded not as a difference of existence but as what Hegel somewhat oddly terms a difference of form. Here is an example that he gives • "The man who is ' Cf. F ha enomeno logic, pp. 15 — 17. Prof. Baillie's translation I. pp. 16 ff. The Potential and t/ie Actual 173 potentially rational has advanced no further when he is actually rational. The potentiality {das Ansich) is conserved and yet the difference is quite enormous. No new content has emerged, yet the form is an enormous difference. On this difference all the difference in the world's history turns\" This reminds us of his former allegory of the house : it is as if one said, the house and the plan of it are logically the same. When we have both we have a difference of form, or what he calls a duplication : we have the plan and the plan out of itself But suppose the house became self-conscious : it would, Hegel assumes, in that case recognise the identity between itself and its plan : the duplication would yield to identity, and the end coincide with the beginning. Yes, logically or ideally perhaps ; but still there is ' the enormous difference.' A conjuror throws up a picture and it comes down a watch : how are we going to account for that, especially how, if we have no conjuror ? But in truth it turns out that it is after all not a plan, a picture or an idea with which we begin, but a germ and an impulse. " The potentiality determines the course of the development" — so we say after the event — but it does not provide the motive. There is besides an impulse towards self- development, something "that cannot endure to be only potential " : this is * the germ ' that is thus already partly actual. "The impulse," says Hegel, "is the contradiction, that it [the germ] is only potential and yet ought not to be so. The impulse puts forth into existence^" This is the point where Hegel essays to ford his ditch : the impulse in historical development ^ Gcschichlc tier Piiilosophie, 1S33, '• P- 34- ^ Ibid. p. 35. 174 The Hegelian Unity and the contradiction in dialectical development are identified; and the former, as temporal and phenomenal, is, as much as may be, suppressed. To recognise this 'monstrous' vcrTepou irporepov, as Schopenhauer called it, of Hegel's panlogism is to recognise that in his zeal for thoroughness he over- reached himself. In order to make doubly sure of his foundation, and start without presuppositions he sundered what he could not afterwards unite. The unity which he places at the beginning, so far from being suppositionless, is but ' the shadow ' of the unity that by means of the historical method he reaches in the end — the slowly and painfully achieved unity that rests on plurality. The so-called transition to the Kingdom of the Son, from the Idea to Nature, turns out to be no veritable transition at all, to be not the spiritual in alienation from itself, but the spiritual at the outset of its development. The Kingdom of the Spirit is not the return of finite spirits to the eternal Father from whom they have wandered nor to the universal source whence they emanated : it is simply the advance of humanity towards an absolute conscious- ness of its own unity. Passages in support of this assertion might be quoted from all parts of Hegel's works. Here are some : " The consciousness of finite spirit is concrete being, the material for the realisation of the notion of God\" Again, " In the higher specu- lative consideration it (Spirit) is the absolute Spirit itself, which in order to be for itself the knowledge of itself, differentiates itself in itself, and thereby posits the finiteness of spirit, within which it becomes the ^ Fhilosophie der Religion, 2te Auf. ii. p. 551, E.t. ni. p. 365. The Kingdom of the Spirit 175 absolute object of the knowledge of itself. Thus it is the absolute Spirit in its community (or church), — the actual Absolute as Spirit and knowledge of itself ^" Again, " God is God only in so far as He knows himself: his self-knowledge is, further, his self- consciousness in man, and man's knowledge of God which proceeds to man's self-knowledge in God^" Once more, contrasting religious faith with historical evidence, he says of the former: "This rather than that is the rise of the community, is the community itself, the existing Spirit, the Spirit in its existence, God existing as community." And a sentence or two later on, in referring to the three persons of the Trinity : — "The first was the Idea in its simple universality for itself ...The second was the Idea in its externality, so that the external phenomenon is brought back to the first, is known as divine Idea — the identity of the human and divine. The third is this consciousness, God as Spirit, and this Spirit as existing in the coumunity'^y Finally, "God is infinite, Ego finite: these are false, objectionable expressions, forms that are inappropriate to the Idea, to the nature of the fact.... God is the movement to the finite... in the Ego, as that which is annulling itself as finite, God returns to himself, and only as this return is He God. With- out the world God is not God\" The full sio^nificance of these and many more passages of like import* only ^ yEst/ietik, I. p. 122. - rhilosophy of Mi?id. Encycl. in. § 564. ^ Philosophie der Religioti, iste Auf., 1832, 11. p. 261. * Op. cit. 2te Auf. I. p. 194, Eng. trans, i. p. 200. * Several of which will be found in Drews' Deutsche Speculation ti.s.w., vol. I. pp. 260 ff. and in McTaggart's Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology, pp. 208 tf. 176 The Hegelian Unity becomes apparent when we remember that, according to Hegel, God before this reahsation in the finite, this existence as the community, this self-consciousness in man, this return to Himself, is only this very result ideally regarded as its own presupposition. God comes to consciousness only in humanity, and otherwise is not God, not Spirit, but only Idea. But an Idea is not conscious, though it implies consciousness : hence God as Idea is either the unconscious, as Schopenhauer and von Hartmann maintained, or an abstract essence that 'comes later to existence,' as Hegel himself by turns concedes and denies as he alternates between the historical and the dialectical. But much more impressive than any string of quotations is the whole drift of Hegel's Philosophy of Religion and especially of the long section devoted to the so-called Kingdom of the Spirit. In the latteV referring to the divinity of Christ he says it is " clear that the Conwijmity of itself produces this faith Whereas grateful peoples have placed their bene- factors only among the stars, the Spirit has recognised subjectivity as an absolute moment of the divine nature. The person of Christ has been decreed by the Church to be the Son of God\" Miracles, the words of the Bible, Councils and such like have no- thing to do with it. " The true Christian content of faith is to be justified by philosophy, not by history." Not by history as ordinarily understood Hegel means, but taking the philosophy of history in its widest sense, then by that and nothing else. It is all 'divine history,' ' development in conformity with reason,' * Op. cit. II. p. 328, Eng. trans, in. p. 121. The 'Phenomenology of Spirit' 177 Hegel affirms. Yes, but chequered and distorted by contingency to an indefinite extent, emerging gradually out of superstition and phantasy, out of sorrow and disappointment. "The sorrow of the world," he has said, " was the birth-place of the impulse of Spirit to know God as spiritual in universal form and stript of finitude. This want was begotten throuQ-h the progress of history and the development of the world- spirit." Hercules was deified by the Greeks, the Roman Emperor was revered as God ; and Christ was decreed to be the Son of God only by the same effort of Spirit as that which lies at the basis of those earlier forms and can be recognised as present in them. "Out of the ferment of finitude as it changes into foam Spirit exhales its fragrance^" When we pass from Hegel's Philosophy of Religion to the Phenomenology of Spirit we find there a record of the same gradual process and the same ultimate result — an account which runs closely on all fours with that which the pluralist would give. It starts with mere sentient experience, which advances towards self-consciousness, as the subject, in shaping and con- trolling its environment, realises its own independence as an agent Finally it reaches the stage of reason, as such incipiently self-conscious agents enter into social relations and become fully self-conscious ; then too they develop a system of law and order and also begin to realise the spiritual world of art, religion and philosophy. I know of no better summary of this wonderful but terribly intricate work than the follow- ing given by Windelband in his Histoiy of Modei^n ^ Op. lit. 2nd ed. n. p. 330, Y.wg. trans, ni. 124. W. 12 178 The Hegelian Unity Philosophy. — " Hegel's aim is to... build up the whole of philosophy out of the continuity shewn in the historical development of the human mind. Man's self-conscious- ness is the world-spirit that has come to itself. The evolution of the human mind is the conscious self- apprehension of the world-mind, and the essence of things is to be understood from the process which the human mind has passed through in order to grasp its own organization and thereby the organization of the universe itself. The Hegelian philosophy regards itself as the self-consciousness of the entire development of the culture attained by the reason of the human race, and in this it sees at the same time the self-conscious- ness of the Absolute Spirit as it unfolds itself in the world. Thus this philosophy becomes on the one side a thoroughly historical view of the world ( Welt- anschaimng) but on the other lapses over into a completely anthropocentric speculation about the world {Weltbetrachhing), that is to say, it looks upon the development of the human spirit as the development of the ' world-spirit' \" In the light of this summary the famous sentences with which Hegel concludes his Phenomenology become more or less clear: — "The way to the goal, absolute knowledge, or spirit knowing itself as spirit, lies in the memory of minds " — the solidarity of heredity and tradition, I suppose we might say — "as they are in them- selves and as they accomplish the organization of their realm. Their conservation on the side of their free existence manifesting itself in the form of contingency is History, but on the side of their organization in notional ^ Geschichtc der neueren Fhilosophie^ 4te Aufl. 1907, 11. p. 329. The ' History of Philosophy ' 1 79 form {begriffe^ien) it is Science manifesting itself as knowledge. Both together, history in notional form, constitute the memory and the Golgotha of the Absolute Spirit, the actuality, truth and certainty of his throne, without which he would be the lifeless Solitary ; only ' From the chalice of this spirit realm Sparkles his Infinitude '^" The reference to Calvary recalls the negative element, the sorrow of the world that spiritualises it, on which Hegel had previously dwelt. With this we may compare a similar passage giving the 'result' of the History of Philosophy : — " The struggle of the finite self-consciousness with the absolute self-consciousness, which appeared for that to be beyond it, ceases. [For] the finite self-consciousness has ceased to be finite ; and thereby on the other hand the absolute self-consciousness has acquired the actuality, which it previously lacked. In general the entire history of the world so far, and in particular the history of philosophy, is simply the exhibition of this struggle. And now they seem to have reached their goal, where the absolute self-consciousness, of which they had a presentation ( Vorstellung), has ceased to be some- thing foreign, where, that is to say, the spirit as spirit is actual The Spirit produces itself as Nature, [and] as Society (Staat). The former is its unconscious action,... in the deeds and life of history as also [in the works] of art it brings itself forth consciously,... but only in science" — i.e. in philosophy — "does it know itself as absolute spirit, and this knowledge alone is spirit, is its veritable existence \" ' An inaccurate quotation from Schiller's poem Did Frcundschaft. ' GeschUhte dcr Philosophic, \\\. pp. 689 f. la — 2 i8o TJie Hegelian Unity Everywhere, then, in all his works, Hegel reaches unity as the result of a development, and everywhere emphatically declares it to be a result. Surely there- fore it is reasonable to believe that he means what he says. When, however, he adds that this result is itself the beginning, he does not say what he means. What he means is itself result — the speculative inversion ot the concrete development in the mirror of the so-called Logic : he himself compares it to standing on your head\ Even the Absolute Idea itself is so far a result that the notion of it is described as ' an object in which all differentiations have coalesced I' As to the actual unity that is its correlative — in spite of occasional passages in which Hegel refers to it as 'having personality,' it can hardly be called a person in the strict sense. This, I think, is evident from Hegel's account of the State or Society. Much the same language as he used in describing the religious com- munity is repeated here. The state is "the ethical spirit, the substantial will that thinks itself and knows and what it knows accomplishes"; "it is the spirit that is stationed in the world and there consciously realises itself, whereas in Nature it is only actualised as its own Other, as sleeping spirit." He even calls the idea of the state 'the actual God^' But we have still to see how far Hegel's actual unity is from de- serving the title Absolute ; and this will bring us round again to Pluralism, in which there is the same shortcoming. ^ Phnenomenologie, p. 21; E. t. p. 24. ^ Encyclopaedie, § 236. " Fhilosojihie des Eechies, iste Aufl. § 257, pp. 312, 318, 320. LECTURE IX. THE LLMITS OF PLURALISM. What after all, we have now to ask, was Hegel's actual unity ? It was entirely geocentric and anthro- pocentric. The earth, he says, is the truth of the solar system, just as animal nature is the truth of vegetable, and this the truth of the mineral. The earth is the planet : the sun has neither produced it nor thrown it off; but sun, moon, comets, and stars are only conditions for the earth {Bedingimgen tier Erde) which they serve. Among the continents of the earth, Europe, in virtue of its physical characteristics, forms its consciousness, its rational part, and the centre of Europe is Germany\ With his own philosophy, he had the sublime assurance to think, the history of philosophy closes ; and in the restoration of Prussia under Stein he thought the culmination of the world's history was attained. It is however not so much this unique anticlimax that now concerns us ; but rather the general position that there are not ' more worlds than ours,' which Hegel shared with the fifteenth century ecclesiastics. They, it will be remembered, had burned Giordano Bruno alive, who was one of the first in modern times to proclaim this doctrine ; and ^ Encyclopacdie, §§ 249, 2 So, 339. 1 82 The Limits of Pluralism they regarded even Columbus as verging on heresy. "As the planet, the eai'-th is the body of individual totality... its characteristic as organic is to digest the entirely general astral powers, which as heavenly bodies have the illusory appearance of independence, and to bring them under the control of its individuality, in which these Titanic members sink to moments F'rom a quantitative standpoint one may regard the earth as 'a drop in the sea of the infinite,' but magnitude is a very external determination." The earth " is our home, not as physical, but as the home of spirit^" This seems to be about all that Hegel had to say concerning the existence of a plurality of worlds. He appears never to have thought seriously of controverting It : it was too completely beyond his purview for that. The question : — To what end then all the rest of the universe '^. which vexed the soul of old Bohme — why, Hoffding asks, did it never trouble Hegel ? His contempt for Nature was too extreme, we reply : the man who compared the starry heavens to a 'light-rash' or ' a swarm of flies ' was hardly likely to have troubled his head further about them. Had he done so, facing the facts with an open mind and without parti pris, he would have found the realisation of the Absolute Idea as the Kingdom of the Spirit a far more serious problem than from his purely geocentric and anthropo- centric standpoint it proved to be. It would have been impossible then to call the earth ' the home of spirit ' par excellence. Now this is precisely the problem with which pluralism is on one side confronted. So far as our experience goes we seem unable to ^ Op. cit. % 280. The Plurality of JP^oylds 183 conceive how a plurality of worlds can ever become a single Realm of Ends, such as might fitly be called absolute. But the plurality of worlds seems not only to stand in the way of that complete consummation of the will towards a higher unity, which is the pluralist's ideal : it also presents difficulties for the Christian theologian. The continuity between natural and moral evil is so close that it can hardly be seriously maintained that the advance from a state of merely animal innocence to a ' knowledge of good and evil ' has not frequently, perhaps invariably, entailed actual sin and error and misery. If so, then for other worlds as for ours, what Hegrel has called a ' Golofotha' would be essential; and thus, if we are not to charge God with the arbitrary partiality of an oriental potentate, we seem driven to assume that 'the plan of salvation,' the divine progress from the manger to the cross, has been reenacted in worlds innumerable. Sir David Brewster apparently was'prepared, if need be, to assume this; but theologians, so far as I know, have been less presumptuous. Two other alternatives then present themselves. The existence of a plurality of worlds might be simply denied, as it was by John Wesley, by Whewell — in his famous anonymous essay — and as it has been denied again recently by Dr Alfred Russel Wallace. Both these later writers rely mainly on a use of the argument from probabilities, which seems clearly fal- lacious. If a given effect can only result from the cooperation of a single group of independent causes we may proceed to inquire about the probability of their concurrence elsewhere ; but if the given effect 184 The Limits of Pluralism can result in manifold other ways, then the absence of all the conditions present in a given case proves nothing. It may be true that a fauna and a flora analogous to ours are possible nowhere else, that human beings could only exist on this one planet. But metabolism, stimulation, and spontaneous direction may be possible in a protoplasm very different from that with which we are familiar, and evolution might progress indefinitely on quite other lines than those that have obtained for us\ Viewed from such more general standpoint the probability is not against, but enor- mously in favour of, a plurality of worlds, as men of science almost unanimously allow. We come then to the other alternative. Granted that in the one universe there are many worlds, the Christian theologian has the strongest grounds for believing that they are spiritually and historically, and not merely physically, interconnected. It was 'the infidel Tom Paine,' a quondam Quaker, who first made the plurality of worlds a serious stumbling-block for Christian believers by his once famous work, the Age of Reason. To meet his ob- jections without denying his premises, Andrew Fuller and afterwards Chalmers — mainly on the strength of isolated texts from the Old and the New Testament — sought to establish " the position," as the latter puts it, " that the history of our redemption is known in other and distant places of creation, and is matter of deep interest and feeling amongst other orders of ^ The protoplasm of our planet has determined once for all the possible foods and the possible senses of all its organisms ; but quite other protoplasms are perfectly conceivable. The Upper Limit of Pluralism 185 created intelligences\" The nature of such a connexion is the problem that pluralism in our day has to consider. We may call it the upper limit of pluralism. It seems obvious that unless some supreme spiritual unity is found the universe will remain in the highest sense an absolute plurality, if such a term is allowable. Such a universe would be a merely sporadic manifold of realms of ends having a common physical basis but devoid of all teleological continuity ; like so many village communities without a supreme federation, geographically neighbours but strangers politically. As society lifts the individual to a higher level, so we feel that a supreme unity would increase the worth of this universe both intellectually and morally. Such a unity is an ideal that we feel ought to be real. Can we conceive it more definitely or find any evidence of its existence ? The theoloo-ical writers — as the words just quoted from Chalmers show — rely on the Christian doctrine of a hierarchy of angels to render the con- nexion of a multitude of otherwise isolated worlds intelligible. Angels are to be regarded not only as the ministers of Providence but as spectators of universal history. Such a conception is entirely in keeping with the general standpoint of pluralism, as I have tried to describe it. The principle of continuity indeed almost forces us to posit higher orders of intelligence than our own ; and the fact" that ive are able to control and modify the course of evolution suggests that if there are higher intelligences they can exercise this power in a still higher degree. ' Christian Revdation in connexion witk Astronomy^ Disc. iv. ist c'dn, p. 145. ' Cf. Lcclurc V. p. 111. 1 86 The Lwiits of Pluralisin This latter possible function of intelligences of a higher order does not directly concern our main problem, that of an ultimate and supreme unity ; but it bears on it indirectly, in so far as any evidence of such control would be evidence of the existence of those superior beings ; and their existence again would strengthen the assumption of a still higher unity in the plurality of worlds. Is there then we may inquire any evidence of this sort? Evidence, I mean, of a purely objective and scientific kind, not merely evidence which could satisfy only persons with certain sub- jective convictions lying outside the purview of science proper. For on the lines of our present inquiry it might be held that we cannot fairly appeal, for example, to the specially Christian evidences in support of theophanies, incarnation, inspiration and the like. At the same time it should not be forgotten that spiritual- istic pluralism, unlike naturalism, can have no a priori objection to the 'supernatural' in this sense\ We have an instance of the sort of evidence we are seeking in Dr Russel Wallace's arguments, already ^ These remarks will of course suggest to everybody a topic which is in fact fundamental to the whole subject we are considering — the question, namely, of religious faith and religious experience. Such an experience implies a consciousness of the presence of a higher spiritual being— a consciousness which is wholly distinct from the belief in other selves which we reach by the ejective interpretation of what is externally presented. It is in such wise that to earnestly religious minds 'the evidence of things unseen'' is certain, immediate and practically verified. For them the problem of the unity of the many is already essentially solved. But their certainty after all is primarily subjective : it is faith, not knowledge. It cannot compel assent on purely scientific or merely speculative grounds. Hence I think we do well to follow Kant's example and for the present to leave it aside. Dy Russet Wallaces Arguments 187 noted in an earlier lecture, to show that man's appear- ance on the earth is due to such supernatural interference. After enumerating a number of human characteristics, such as naked skin, a brain largely in excess of animal needs, musical voice, moral sense, etc., he proceeds : — " The inference I would draw from this class of phenomena is, that a superior intelligence has guided the development of man in a definite direction, and for a special purpose, just as man guides the develop- ment of many animal and vegetable forms. The laws of evolution alone would, perhaps, never have produced a grain so well adapted to man's use as wheat and maize ; such fruits as the seedless banana and bread-fruit; or such animals as the Guernsey milch cow, or the London dray-horse. Yet these so closely resemble the unaided productions of nature, that we may well imagine a being who had mastered the laws of development of organic forms through past ages, refusing to believe that any new power had been concerned in their production, and scornfully rejecting the theory... that in these few cases a controlling in- telligence had directed the action of the laws of variation, multiplication, and survival for its own purposes. We know, however, that this has been done ; and we must therefore admit the possibility that, if we are not the highest intelligences in the universe, some higher intelligence may have directed the process by which the human race was developed, by means of more subtle agencies than we are acquainted with." In a note he adds: — "Angels and archangels. ..have been so long banished from our belief as to have become actually unthinkable as actual existences, and The Limits of Pluralism nothing in modern philosophy takes their place. Yet the grand law of ' continuity,' the last outcome of modern science... cannot surely fail to be true beyond the narrow sphere of our vision, and leave such an infinite chasm between man and the great Mind of the universe. Such a supposition seems... in the highest degree improbable \" As I have already said^ there is no denying the formal soundness of this reasoning, even if we hesitate to go further. It at least serves to set the continuity argument in a telling light. A similar, if less impressive argument is perhaps to be found in the prodigality in nature of beautiful colours and forms, which natural selection on grounds of bare utility seems altogether unable to explain. Take for example the gorgeous coloration of humming- birds or the so-called 'ball and socket* ornament in the secondary wing-feathers of the Argus pheasant^ In reply to the late Duke of Argyll', one of the few writers who have dwelt at any length on this particular ' mystery of creation,' Darwin admitted that natural selection was powerless to account for such facts, but he thought that sexual selection would suffice. Dr Wallace, who at first agreed with him in this, has since recanted ; and now, I take it, he would agree rather with the Duke of Argyll that " love of beauty is equally ^ Natural Selection and Tropical Nature, 1891, pp. 204 f. 2 Cf. Lect. IV. p. 91. ' Of Tennyson his friend Edward Fitzgerald relates that "picking up a daisy as we walked and looking close to its crimson-tipt leaves he said: 'Does not this look like a thinking Artificer, one who wishes to ornament?'" In Memoriam, A. W. Robinson's excellent edition, P- 255- * Reign of Law, ist edn, p. 236. The Aesthetical in A^ature 189 a purpose which we see fulfilled in Nature," and so implies some superior control. At any rate he con- cludes his chapter on the colour-sense by saying: — " The emotions excited by colour and by music alike seem to rise above the level of a world developed on purely utilitarian principles\" This whole subject of what we might call Natural Aesthetics seems to be a fruitful field of inquiry that, so far as I know, has been strangely neglected". The subject no doubt is beset with difficulties, and there are many pros and cons to weigh before the intervention of such superior and disinterested principles can be maintained with any confidence. Still, if their presence were credibly ascertained it would add greatly to the antecedent probability that, to repeat Dr Wallace's words, " the grand law of continuity cannot fail to be true beyond the narrow sphere of our vision." This ' grand law ' then encourages the pluralist to assume, though lacking sufficient direct evidence, that there exist individuals of a higher order, or rather a hierarchy of such orders — a speculative view with which Leibniz and Fechner have made us all familiar. But human beings owe their pre-eminence on this planet to social organization, which we regard as not merely an aggregate but as an over-individual unity. The law of continuity then would seem to suggest that individuals of a higher order in like manner are organized into over-individual unities, and so on — possibly ad indcfinitimi. This view would thus lead » Op. cit. p. 415- " August Pauly is an exception. Cl. his JJatwiiiismus und Lamaickismus^ i9-5) PP- 272 (T. IQO The Limits of Pluralism up to a society rather than to a person as the Supreme Unity of all. But apart from other difficulties that we shall have presently to consider — it might readily be brought into line with the Christian doctrine of a tri-personal God. The objections that have recently been brought against theism by Dr McTaggart — from the standpoint of what may fairly be called a Hegelian pluralism — might perhaps in this way be met. It is noteworthy that it is the theologians who have been most influenced by Hegel, who insist the most on what is technically called the ' essential trinity ' (rpoTro? vTToip^eays) of the divine nature in opposition to the Sabellian heresy of an ' undifferentiated unity,' which only assumed a triple form in its revelation to mankind, a so-called ' economic trinity ' (t/jotto? dno- KaXv\fjecos= Bearing this distinction in mind, an obvious ob- jection made by von Hartmann, which would otherwise be a fatal objection, loses some of its force. " The aseity of the [one absolute] Substance," he says, is " for our discursive understanding, restricted [as that is] to the category of causality, the problem of problems ; because it implies only the negative statement that this being is no more the effect of an other. When however the understanding still persists in applying the usual causal category in this case too, then it terms the [absolute] Substance its own effect and its own cause, — the understanding thereby only making a mockery of itself. That the [absolute] Substance groundlessly is 200 Tlie Limits of Phiralism and not is not, that is for us the wonder of all wonders." A system of philosophy, he then goes on to urge, which multiplies this wonder innumerable times, as pluralism in his opinion does, stands self-condemned \ It might perhaps be replied that wonderfulness is inversely proportional to frequency. So far then V. Hartmann would be convicted of subtly begging the question. But pluralism, in fact, does not maintain that a world of n monads is a world of n absolutes. The totality may be called absolute, if there is nothing to condition it from without, but no one individual within it can be called absolute. Whether in the abstract an absolute totality of individuals or an absolute individual be the greater problem or the greater wonder is surely an idle question. The only real question is the question of fact. If pluralism is self-consistent and self-sufficient it does not become a problem, merely because it is wonderful. And the like again, of course, would hold true of singularism. But there is this difference between them, we start with the Many as given: so far they do not need to be 'deduced.' With the One we do not thus start. At the same time it must be allowed that pluralism cannot furnish, has never attempted to furnish anything de- serving to be called a philosophical justification of itself — it is, as William James called it, radical em- piricism ; whereas for singularism in the abstract there have been ontological and . ^ This may entail a preliminary inquiry into the nature of knowledge, but epistemology is after all only a preparation for ontology. The T heist ic Ideal 229 Leibnizian language each mirrors the whole from a unique standpoint, and therefore not the whole, but only an aspect of the whole. The pluralistic whole, then, is a whole of experiences, but not a whole ex- perience, a whole of lives but not a living whole, a whole of beings but without a complete and perfect being. Is such a whole really a unity at all : is it more than a totality ? We have a type of a higher unity than this in our own experience as self-conscious subjects. Here there is a unity which is more than the related objective continuum, a unity to which all this belonofs and refers. Now remove from such an experience the relativity which ' standpoint ' implies and you approach the theistic ideal of an absolute ex- perience, the experience of a living and acting Spirit whose ' centre is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere,' an experience complete at all points and including every one. The pluralist's universe in the light of this transcendent Being would thus have a unity which it would otherwise lack. Not only so, but in the second place the pluralist's universe would itself be immeasurably enriched if the theistic idea of God's relation to this universe were accepted. For according to that God is not simply a transcendent Being, existing aloof and apart from the world, he is also immanent, and active within it. And such active presence of the One Spirit, who alone knows all, affords — manifestly — an assurance that the pluralist's ideal will be attained, an assurance which we have had to allow must else be wanting. For it would be extravagantly arbitrary to assume that this one transcendent Being alone would be more devoid of 230 The Idea of Creation benevolent purpose than finite beings are. At any rate the theist believes that this God who knows all loves all. And so in the third place it is evident that the theistic idea not merely adds to our confidence in the eventual realisation of the pluralist's ideal but it enhances the character of that ideal by all the inefiable blessedness that the presence of God must yield. But to determine what is reality, we have agreed, is the first business of philosophy. Can we then prove the existence of God ? Attempts innumerable to prove this have been made — as of course we know — all of them reducible to one or other of the three forms called respectively the ontological, the cosmological and the teleological argument. The fatal defects of all these have, it is almost universally conceded, been clearly exposed once for all by Kant. The ontological argument, as he has shown, involves the common metaphysical fallacy of hypostatizing an idea ; the teleological argument does not carry us beyond pluralism ; and the cosmological only does so by implicitly assuming the ontological. — But though de- monstrations of the existence of God are unattainable, it by no means follows that the idea is theoretically worthless. It has even in this respect — to say nothing of its practical value — a 'regulative use' as what Kant called a focus imaginarius, a use which he declared to be not only admirable but indispensable. What Kant meant by a focus imaginarius, it may be worth while to illustrate by an example. Suppose the earth were wrapt in cloud all day while the sky was clear at night, so that we were able to see the planets and observe Theoretical value of Theism 231 their movements as we do now, though the sun itself was invisible. The best account we could give of the planetary motions would still be to refer them to what for us in accordance with our supposition would only be an imaginary focus, but one to which was assigned a position identical with the sun's position. The pluralist's universe, according to Kant, answers to the wandering orbs that we see and God to the sun, which we are supposed not to see, but merely to conceive as giving to their motions both reason and unity. It behoves us then, especially in view of the acknowledged difficulties and incompleteness of the pluralistic scheme taken alone, to examine this sublime conception with reverence and with care. Is the theistic ideal verily without a flaw ? One thing is at once clear: theism is not simply the possible crown and completion of pluralism : such a transcendent addition will, it may be expected, change all. It introduces one essential modification, at any rate, viz., the idea of creation. It does not, that is to say, assume merely that one transcendent Being exists above and beyond the whole series of the Many, how- ever extended ; but it assumes further that this one Being is related to them in a way in which none of them is related to the rest : they do not simply coexist along with it, they exist somehow in it and through it. In this idea of creation there are two sides to consider, its relation to the world and its relation to God. As to the first — it cannot be said that the world as we know it involves the idea of creation as a fact. If it did, we should have direct and tangible evidence 232 The Idea of Great iott of God's existence. " The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament sheweth his handiwork," sang the Psalmist long ago. Possibly it is so, but there is nothing in all our physical experience that compels us to admit it : on the other hand there is nothing that would justify us in denying it. Further, the metaphor of making, of handiwork, which is the sole empirical content of the term 'creation,' is in- adequate : making out of nothing, in short, is a contradiction. But then this is not the meaning of creation : it is not a making or shaping at all. The idea is, in fact, like the idea of God, altogether trans- cendent. It is impossible therefore that experience should directly give rise to it at all. But, it has been urged, the universe cannot have existed for ever, since in that case, at any assigned moment, an infinite time would be completed, and that is impossible. The universe must then have had a beginning and so must have had a First Cause. Well, if this argument were valid, it would apply equally to the existence of God. If per impossibile we could transcend experience and contemplate the world from without we might, it has been thought, find that the world had a beginning : but then we should be there and as what should we have to be reckoned ? Keeping within experience we can only endlessly regress with no prospect of ever reaching the beginning or of forming any concept of what it was like. On the contrary, say certain physicists, we have empirical evidence of a beginning. But in all cases it will be found, I think, that the beginning affirmed is a purely relative one ; and moreover that its affirmation assumes Mistaken views of Creation 233 modern science to be exactly and absolutely, and not merely approximately, true\ There is equally little to support the view of creation as an event that occurred at a finite date in the past, when we attempt to regard it from the side of God as creator. Whatever the reason or motive for creation mav have been — and some motive or reason the theist must assume — it seems "absolutely inconceivable," as v, Hartmann put it, " that a conscious God should wait half an eternity content without a good that ought to be." If creation means anything, it means something so far involved in the divine essence, that we are entitled to say, as Hegel was fond of saying, that " without the world God is not God." In calling God the creator then it is simply the world's dependence on Him that we mean to express. If so, it seems clear that this dependence is not, as commonly maintained, a causal dependence strictly understood. For causation relates to change in existence ; but creation regarded from the side of the created is not a change in anything existing. To speak of it as a change in nothing, whereby nothing becomes something, is once again — it seems hardly needful to say — mere thoughtless absurdity. Creation in other words is not to be brought under the category of transeunt causation. Nor can we, regarding it from the side of God, bring it under the category of immanent causation, as being a change in Him, unless indeed we abandon the ' Cf-, e.g., The Unseen Universe^ 2nd edn, § 116 and Cliffords criticism, Lectures and Essays, 2nd edn, p. 156; also the article by Professor Arrhenius, 'Infinity of the Universe,' Alonist, vol. xxi. 191 1, pp. 161 ff. 234 T^^^^ Idea of Creation position that God is God only as being creative. To say that the world depends on God is tantamount to saying that could God cease to be, the world too would cease to be ; or that if the world should cease to be, it would be because God had ceased to be. In other words God is the ground of the world's being, its ratio essendi. The notion of ' ground,' it will, I assume, be conceded, is wider than that of cause, which is only one of its special forms. But we have not yet brought out the full meaning of creation as the theist conceives it. Spinoza, for example, also conceived God to be the ground of the world, but interpreted this relation in a way which the theist cannot accept. Spinoza, as his phrase Detis sive NahLva shows, identified the world and God as completely as he identified the properties of a triangle with the triangle itself: the reality of the One meant so much that there was no reality left for the Many at all. For pantheism God is the immanent ground of the world, for deism he is the transcendent ground, for theism he is both. How are we to conceive this twofold relation ? The most hopeful attempt perhaps is that which is nowadays associated with the name of Kant, though it is really, I believe, as old as Plato and recurs continually in ancient and modern philosophy alike. I may call it the theory of intellective intuition. Our knowledge according to Kant has two stems, both requisite to complete our experience. The one, sensi- bility, is receptive and passive ; but taken alone it is blind, that is to say it furnishes only the material of knowledge. The other, understanding, is active but yields only the form of knowledge : taken alone it is God as transcendent and immanent 235 empty, its content is abstract. But together these two sources yield what we call phenomenal knowledge ; so far we may, according to Kant, be said to shape Nature though we do not create it ; our objective knowledge, in other words, is the joint result of the manifold data that we receive and of the discursive synthesis of these which our thought achieves. Reality is first there, is given, and our work — all we are capable of — is to understand it. But now we are to imagine our sensory and passive perception replaced by an active, in- tellective ' position,' our discursive synthesis by an original thesis or intuition. The Being to whom this intellective intuition belongs will be creative ; its ob- jective experience will contain nothing that is merely given to it, but only what is ultimately ' posited ' by it : its objects will be not phenomenal but noumenal, not independent manifestations of an Other but the creation of itself But the world as presented to us is veritably an Other ; hence the passivity in our perception : we know the world only in this its external relation to us, not as it is in itself ; hence it is phenomenal. Here the distinction, the duality, of subject and object is real. But in intellective intuition all real difference between being and knowing, thought and thing, seems to have vanished. Such intuition, in fact, implies far more than we ordinarily understand even by omniscience'. For as our relative and imperfect knowledge does not partially constitute the being of its object, so absolute and perfect knowledge, if merely knowledge, would not, we seem entitled to say, constitute its object completely. ' Omniscience, literally taken, is still science, not intuition. 236 The Idea of Creation Our partial knowledore of a thing is knowledge of its utterances, attitude and behaviour as they are for us : hence we call this relative knowledge. But a know- ledge of all such characteristics of all things in all their interactions would still only be absolute as knowledge : i.e., it would be as absolute or complete as knowledge can be, which, by its very nature, is essentially relative. It would leave the things themselves still independent as reo-ards their existence, and so would fall short of this intellective intuition wherein, it is supposed, they are not merely known but whereby they exist. Thus then the idea of a transcendent experient, whose stand- point, so to say, is ubiquitous, does not reach to the still more transcendent idea of a creator, of one who is the ground of the objects that he ' knows.' Moreover immediate experience of another subject is beyond any knowledge that we have or can conceive : in fact it might, I think, be fairly maintained that the very idea involves a contradiction. If now it be further allowed that the actions of free and advancing intelli- gences make new beginnings possible, imply real initiative, it would follow that even complete and absolute knowledge (or omniscience), as knowledge is ordinarily understood, would still leave every finite subject in the position of an eject : each would be known completely as regards its utterances, its objective relations with the rest, but not as it is in itself. But more than this, it will be said, is implied in the divine so-called omniscience as theism understands it : " the Lord seeth not as man seeth ; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart." And why ? " He that keepeth thy soul doth not he God as transcendent and ininianenf 237 know it'?" Such 'omniscience' in a word presupposes creation ; thus it is only for creative intuition that the knowing and the being of objects could be said to be in any sense the same. But then, so far — on the principle of the identity of indiscernibles — is not this so-called knowledge or in- tuitive thought of the object as such itself just the object, and is not the object just this so-called knowledge or intuition ? In that case what becomes of the divine transcendence on which theism lays such stress? Do not theism and pantheism after all come to the same thing: God is the world and the world is God ? But identity, if it is to mean anything, must imply some difference : there is no point, for example, in saying ' This is the same ' unless I refer to something experienced pre- viously. The bare, and therefore meaningless, identity of God and World simply leaves us with God only, as in the acosmism of Spinoza; or with World only, as in the ' polite atheism of Schopenhauer. But, it is urged, there is, after all, a difference and one which our own self-consciousness enables us to understand. Here the knower and the known are one and the same, and yet are distinct in so far as the subject is its own object. Moreover self-consciousness is the only form of know- ledge that can be in a sense absolute. Knowledge of an Other, so long as the Other is veritably such, must ever be relative and incomplete ; whereas we cannot call our consciousness of self merely phenomenal. True, but — as I have already urged in the second lecture" — throughout our experience the consciousness of self involves the consciousness of not-self: the two ' I Sam. xvi. 7; Piov. xxiv. 12. - Lect. 11. pp. 30, 41. 238 The Idea of Creation being always correlative and coordinate. It does not surprise us then to find certain of the philosophies of the Absolute represent it as coming to self-consciousness in and through consciousness of the world. From such a view it is but a step to a philosophy of the Unconscious, such as v. Hartmann and others have constructed mainly on a Hegelian basis. And we may note by the way, as an odd illustration of extremes meeting, that v. Hartmann s ' clairvoyance of the Unconscious' or 'Over-conscious' is but a bad set- ting of the old idea of intellective intuition^ The attempt, therefore, to equate creation regarded as intellective intuition with a pure or absolute self-con- sciousness — if this were conceivable — will not avail for theism : it leaves no room for the divine transcendence and without this the distinctness of God and the world and the dependence of the world on God both alike disappear. Our result so far then is simply this : neither absolute knowledge nor absolute self-conscious- ness can take the place of the idea of creation ; and therefore, if the notion of intellective intuition or in- tuitive understanding is to help us, we must find more in the activity which it after all implies than thought or knowledge of any sort will cover ; and also more than such identity as self-knowing and self-known implies. We may discern perhaps a faint and distant analogy, one suggesting a better interpretation, in what we are wont to style the creations of genius. We never apply this phrase to the most marvellous dis- coveries in science or the most fruitful inventions in ^ Perhaps too Bergson's elan vital is but another variant of this idea. Creation and the Uriginality of Genius 239 the technical arts : nobody, I fancy, would say that Newton created gravitation or that Gutenberg created printing. If Newton had not discovered gravitation some one else would, and as for printing we know that it was invented more than once. But it is common to speak of such works as the Antigone of Sophocles, Shakespeare's Havilet, Michael Angelo's Moses, Raphael's Sistine AIadon?ia or Beethoven's Ninth SympJiony as creations; and we feel pretty confident that if their authors had not produced them they would never have been produced. This approximation to the divine that we find in the originality of genius leads us often to speak of its ' creations ' as inspired. In the case of discoveries and inventions we realise that sense and intellect, the receptive and active factors, are both concerned ; but the immortal works of art, the things of beauty that are a joy for ever, we regard as rather the spontaneous output of productive imagi- nation, of a free spirit that embodies itself in its work, lives in it and loves it. Yet however much the man of genius loves his work and lives in it, he is still dis- tinct from it, still greater than it. On the other hand, however dependent on him is his production, though he knows it through and through, yet it too is distinct from him : from its first inception, even in the full tide of his activity, he feels that it is working itself out and sees that it is good ; in other words he finds himself expressed in it and he respects his work. Yet after all, as we have allowed, this analogy is very imperfect, and it is just in the important point where it fails that our difficulties with the idea of intellective intuition begin. Between what we may 240 The Idea of Creation call relative creation, the origination of something re- latively new within the w^orld, and the absolute creation of the world itself there is an impassable gulf. The one presupposes experience previously acquired, the other is coeval and identical with the divine experience itself. God in short is the Absolute Genius — the World-Genius, as he has been called. Any analogy drawn from our experience must then be inadequate to such an experience : God's ways are not as our ways nor his thoughts as our thoughts. But the difference lies simply in transcending the limit to which our experience points but can never attain : it need not imply utter disparity. We may perhaps safely assume that the distinction of will and presentation is appli- cable to the divine experience as well as to our own ; and also that there too they are equally inseparable. At any rate we cannot say that volition precedes presentation nor that presentation precedes volition ; that the subject is first nor yet that the object is ; nor finally that both are originally undifferentiated \ If so, we cannot then represent creation as starting with a blind will to create followed by a discursive selection of the best possible plan of creation ; nor as starting with a dialectic development of the only possible plan followed by the resolve to let it be. It is at once 'pure activity and ' original insight,' idea and deed, life and light. God is transcendent to it, for it is not God, but his utterance and manifestation ; and yet, because it is his utterance and because he ever sustains it, he is immanent in it, it is his continuous creation. So then at last the theist is bound to admit that * Cf. Lect. IX. p. 199. TJieisni and Pluralism 241 this conception of God-and-the-world is beyond us : we can assign it no beginning' and so we say it is 'eternal' : we can find no ground for it and so we say it is the Absolute. At the same time we have to remember tAat the pluralist's position is no better, nay we must acknowledge, I think, that it is not so good. He too has to assume an endless regress for the world. For him too there is something groundless and therefore absolute, but it is the totality of a Many in their inter- action regarded as the ultimate reality. Of this plurality in unity he can give no account beyond saying that it is just this, and that it Is there. As I have already said this position cannot — so far as I see — be charged with inherent inconsistency ; but it is incomplete and un- satisfying, A plurality of beings primarily independent as regards their existence and yet always mutually acting and reacting upon each other, an ontological plurality that is yet somehow a cosmologlcal unity, seems clearly to suggest some ground beyond itself The idea of God presents itself to meet this lack. The Many depend upon God for their existence though still dependent on each other as regards their ex- perience. The idea of God would then be meaningless, unless God were regarded as transcending the Many ; so there can be no talk of God as merely prhnus inter pares. On the other hand it would be equally meaning- less to talk of God apart from the Many. A God that was not a Creator, a God whose creatures had no independence, would not himself be really a God. Herein theism differs from thorough-going singularism or absolutism. A theism that is reached through o pluralism can never end in an Absolute in which God w. 16 242 TJie Idea of Creation and the World alike were absorbed and lost : the only- Absolute then that we can admit is the Absolute which God and the World constitute. And yet the tendency of theism to pass over into singularism is notorious and we have noted it again and again. How may we account for this ? It follows partly, no doubt, from the besetting sin of speculative thinking to hypostatize abstractions — hence the so- called ' abstract monism ' or acosmism, of which Spinoza furnished the type. Partly it is the result of a religious spirit of self-abasement, self-abnegation, as in certain forms of Indian and Christian mysticism. But in large measure it is due to the difficulties In the idea of creation itself. We say God and the World constitute the Absolute ; but if God is the absolute ground of the World is not God alone after all the real Absolute ? In this question there lurks perhaps the error of concreting abstractions just now mentioned. If there were no world, God would cease to be the ground of it. He would still be the potential ground, it will be replied perhaps. But if he were only this, do we not require some further condition — some restraint to be withdrawn or some external impulse to supervene before the world can become actual ^^^ Or, if not that, are we not then driven to conceive God as not actually being all that it is his nature to be — if such an expression is allowable ? But no, the ^ "'Tis an established maxim... that an object which exists for any time in its full perfection without producing another, is not its sole cause ; but is assisted by some other principle, which pushed it from its state of inactivity." Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, Green and Grose's edn, vol. i. p. 378. Theism and Absolutism 243 objector may persist, if God is the absolute ground of the world — even granting that his creation has no time limits, still — the world cannot possibly, without ceasing to be created, share with him the title of Absolute. The more clearly we realise the entire and complete dependence that creation implies the more flagrantly absurd will such a claim appear. Even the potter may find the clay not ideally plastic; indeed the artistic creator at his best meets with some limi- tation in his material. For God there can be none, which is all that is meant by the phrase * creation out of nothing.' To this we may reply : — No theist can pretend that the world is coordinate with God : the divine trans- cendence is essential to the whole theistic position. No theist again assumes that creation involves ex- ternal limitation. But the point is that if creation is to have any meaning it implies internal limitation. It is from the reality of the world that we start : if this is denied, the divine transcendence becomes meaningless, nay, God, as the ideal of the pure reason, sinks to a mere illusion within an illusion. On the other hand, if the reality of the world be admitted, then this reality stands over against the reality of God. God indeed has not been limited from without but he has limited himself. But now new difficulties emerge. Self-limitation seems to imply a prior state in which it was absent, whereas a limitation held to be permanent — as we hold creation to be — suo^oests some ultimate dualism rather than an ultimate unity. Such an objection is in keeping with our ordinary experience confined as that is to 16 — 2 244 The Idea of Creation temporal processes, but it is not applicable to the notion of an absolute ground ; as a trivial example may suffice to show. The sides of a triangle are independent of its angles only if regarded merely as lines, and yet they are the ground of the angles ; also in forming these they limit themselves in so far as they thereby determine their several ratios. We do not say that God comes into being with the world, but only that as ground of the world he limits himself : duality in unity is implied here as in all experience, but not dualism. But how, it may be asked, can self-limitation be involved in creation, if creation is pure activity and original intuition, if God is all life and all light '^ How can God be omnipotent, as theism ordinarily assumes, and yet be limited ? Well, in the first place, we might reply, an omnipotent being that could not limit itself would hardly deserve the name of God; would, in fact, be only a directionless energy of unlimited amount. At the same time the Mosaic notion that God must needs rest from his labour and even Tertullian's bold assertion that his glory was the greater on this account, nobody nowadays, I suppose, would seriously defend. It is not any limitation of this sort that we have primarily in view, v^// determination is negation, that is limitation, we must say with Spinoza. But if God were what Hegel described Nature as being, ein bacchantischer Gott, der sick selbst nicht zilgelt und fasst, then indeed we might regard him as the Absolute notwithstanding possible creational vagaries, but he would be the absolutely Indeterminate. But God according to the theistic idea does not repudiate but Creative and Divine Limitation 245 owns and respects his world, a world that is cosmic, not chaotic, from the first, and through which we may beHeve that one increasing purpose runs. Even men abide by their pledges, cherish their offspring, show steadfastness and consistency in their purposes, and in manifold other ways limit and determine themselves by their own deeds. By their deeds, yes ; but not by their dreams. We surely then cannot suppose that God is less earnest, less steadfast than his creatures : rather we regard him as without variableness or shadow of a turning. Again, to argue that unless the world is merely a divine phantasy, God is determined by its existence, does less than justice to the pluralist's position : it is from the reality of the world that we start. Apart from this, I must again insist, we have no basis for our ideal of God at all. There still remains of course the difficulty, which from the outset we have allowed to be insuperable : hozu God creates the world and thereby limits himself we can never understands The idea of creation, like the idea of God, we admit is altogether transcendent. But — paradoxical though it may seem — this admission in a sense explains and removes our difficulty. Even if the idea of creation be valid, we must necessarily fail to understand the process, just because that cannot fall within our experience ; on the other hand any process that we could understand could not be the creative pro- cess, because it would fall within our experience. This may sound very like a final surrender ; for what, it may be urged, is the use of a hypothesis that can never be directly verified ? Nevertheless this objection rests on * See Supplementary Note II. 246 The Idea of Creation a complete failure to understand the function of philo- sophy. A scientific hypothesis is directly verifiable ; because the facts which it is framed to unify, simplify, or explain, fall within experience, and this is sure therefore sooner or later to furnish a crucial test of its validity. But philosophy is not science — though it is bound to be systematic and methodical — for it deals not with parts or aspects of experience in isolation but with experience as a concrete whole. To this whole it must appeal to justify its * ideas ' ; and they are justified in proportion as they enable us to conceive this whole as a complete and systematic unity. The pluralist halts at the Many and t-heir interaction : he declines to go further because he finds no direct warrant for so doing. But if the idea of creation will carry us further, and if nothing else will, then that idea, it is maintained, is rationally justified though it be not empirically verified. LECTURE XII. THE COSMOLOGY OF THEISM. The idea of creation, we have allowed, must in any case lead to modifications of the pluralistic Welt- anschauung. But it is questionable if these modifications need to be as radical as most theists assume. To these differences and their possible reconciliation we have now to turn. Pluralism and theism are — nowadays at all events — both monistic : for neither, is the distinction between person and thing, matter and mind, an ultimate dis- tinction. For both alike, material phenomena are only the manifestation of minds, of so-called ' things /^r se! These however are not literally things at all, but beings that are beings for themselves, i.e. — in the widest sense of the term — persons, who are conative and cognitive in varying degrees. But whereas pluralism regards all material phenomena as due to the direct interaction of such persons or monads, reduces the entire course of the world, in short, without reservation, to such interaction ; theism usually attributes material phenomena to the direct and orderly intervention of God, who in this way provides a medium and instru- mentality for the mutual intercourse and understanding of his creatures. Of the former position we have taken 248 The Cosmology of Theism the Leibnizian monadology as the type, discarding however the doctrine of ' pre-established harmony,' as Wolf and others did, who attempted to systematise Leibniz's philosophy. Of the latter position we have typical instances in the occasionalism of Berkeley or of Lotze in his later views; they agree in referring matter or the so-called mechanism of nature to the immanent activity of God himself. Such theism then, it will be readily seen, assumes two apparently quite distinct forms of divine activity : first, the creative and sustaining activity, whereby the finite Many exist, and secondly the continuous mediation whereby they are brought into living relation with each other. In proceeding then to examine what we might call the Cosmology of theism, the general theory of occasionalism comes up for consideration first of all. This theory, originated to bridge over the gulf that the Cartesian dualism had made between mind and matter, contributed in the end to that denial of the in- dependent reality of matter altogether, which is common to all forms of spiritualistic monism or idealism and was in fact implicit in the teaching of Descartes himself. At first all that was asserted was, that since the utter disparateness of matter and mind rendered any direct influence of one on the other impossible, their seeming interaction must be due solely to the ' assistance ' or intervention of the Creator of both. It was however still assumed that bodies causally and immediately affected each other. But as the consequences of the entire inertness assigned to matter came to be realised, and our own voluntary activity came to be regarded as the prime source of our sense of power, the theory Occasionalism 2./\i:) of occasionalism underwent a corresponding change. The idea of God as mediating between mind and matter gave place to the simpler idea of God as mediating between finite minds, the so-called material world being regarded no longer as the means by which this mediation was effected, but rather as the actual fact of this mediation itself. This is the form of occasionalism that was maintained by Berkeley and Lotze. This also we find already in germ within Descartes' own system^ ; and it was so far developed by the Cartesian Malebranche that a disciple of his, Arthur Collier, is said by his biographer to have anticipated the Berkeleian position by several yearsl At the outset too, as its name suggests, occasionalism implied the continuous interposition of the Deity in each and all of the innumerable cases of apparent interaction ceaselessly occurring throughout the entire universe. Against such a view Leibniz brought the charge of perpetual miracle, of irrational recourse to a Deus ex Diachina ; and the objection is commonly regarded as fatal. Well, no doubt intervention m the affairs of a multitude of distinct and unique beings does for us imply a corresponding multiplicity of separate acts ; and the thought of such a multiplex — so to say discursive — intervention is to us utterly bewildering. But for God, who is to be conceived as omniscient, the case is altogether different. For God, as its common Creator, the world is one whole : how- ever much differentiated, it never for him loses its meaning and therefore never lacks its intuited unity. ' Cf. e.g. his sixth Meditation. * Cf. Fraser's edition oi Berkeley's Works, ist cdn, vol. i. p. 253. 250 The Cosmology of Theism For God there Is no exclusive standpoint and there- fore no need to hurry hither and thither, attending now to this, now to that. Further, since continuity Is the common characteristic of the growth and de- velopment of all his creatures alike\ his compensatory adjustments, the supposed means of their interaction, will also be continuous and orderly. They may exhibit the regularity of increasing purpose rather than the rigidity of fixed mechanism, but at least they will be compatible with the idea of Law, of orderly control. But to talk of a Deus ex machina in such a case is to assume that there is some independent system to get tangled up into knots, to forget that Nature for the theist just is this continuous mediation of the Divine and not a mechanism independent of it. Again to call this a perpetual miracle, if that means more than a subject for perpetual wonder and admiration, is equally absurd. The fact is that Leibniz's own theory of pre-established harmony does not differ so much from occasionalism as is often supposed. Bayle pointed this out long ago and the resemblance has often been ^ Thus it cannot be objected that a man might, for example, will to fly, and that therefore there could be no orderliness in the world if God simply gave effect to whatever might be willed. In truth, however, a man cannot will to fly, and the mere wish to fly entails no change of attitude, no actual conation. Still he might possibly try to fly ; but then his first attempt would start from his status quo. But what can a finite being will to do, more generally what is such a being always striving for ? For self-conservation and self-betterment, we say ; but this again carries us back to the status qiio. There will then be a certain continuity in the actions of each and all such beings, and so there will also be a corresponding continuity in that mediating activity of God which we ordinarily summarise as the uniformity of Nature. Natura non facit salius. Leibniz on Occasionalis/n 251 noticed since. If we figure to ourselves two badly- made clocks (' horloges m^chantes '), and imagine the clockmaker continually interfering to correct their faulty adjustment — and this is Leibniz's caricature ot occasionalism — then indeed the objection to miraculous meddling would be in place. But the whole point is that there are not two clocks. To call Nature — the only clock there is, if there is a clock at all — a perpetual miracle is to ignore the fact that a permanent miracle is a contradiction in terms. For theism, when it is thought out, there is however not even one clock : to attribute to God the need or even the use of organs or instruments is but childish anthropomorphism \ " II n'y a point d'autre nature, je veux dire d'autres lois naturelles, que les volontes efficaces du tout-puissant," said Malebranche. Nevertheless the term occasionalism will always tend to suggest the part played by a broker, middleman or ' go-between ' in human affairs ; and this, it will be felt, is no worthy role to assign to the divine being. And yet such an objection is due simply to misunder- standing. It would be just as reasonable to maintain that to create finite beings at all is unworthy of the Infinite. So long as creation implies mediation — and this is the usual theistic position — the two activities, however distinct, are in fact inseparable, the one being- consequential on the other, and both together resulting in one complete cosmos. We find the life and inter- course of finite beings to depend on two things, first on their organisms, and secondly on their environments: these together make up the one whole we commonly ' Cf- Naturalism and Agnosticism, 3rd edn, vul. 11. pp. 274 1. 252 The Cosmology of Theism speak of as the physical or material world. And so in virtue of the continuity between any given organism and its environment — that is, eventually, the whole material world — we may regard this as itself the organism common to all living things alike, the uni- versal matrix within which their several individual organisms are differentiated but not separated. Again, as the several individual organisms, as the very term itself implies, constitute the instrumentality of the sentient agents or persons to whom they belong ; so we may say that the entire material world is in like manner the common possession or medium of life and intercourse for them, the only truly active beings. According to the cosmology of theism, in short, the physical world is simply a system of means provided for the sake of the realm of ends : it is only to be understood as subservient to them, and apart from them is alike meaningless and worthless. But though the existence of the material world is not dependent on us but is rather on this view the medium on which we ourselves depend, though it is indispensable as a system of means for us, we cannot from this conclude that it is in the same sense indis- pensable for God. We are not, in other words, justified in assuming that the realm of ends is created conform- ably to a prior system of means, life being primarily adjusted to matter, not matter to life. The creations of finite minds are, it is true, subject to material trammels, the exigencies of rhyme and metre, the small range of luminosity in pigments, the intractable nature of marble or bronze, and so forth. But we cannot suppose either that the divine creation is Creative and Mediating Activity 25 o necessarily beset by limits of this kind or that God has arbitrarily limited the world of living forms by a pre-ordained world of lifeless stuff. The creative activity is then, the theist holds, only the condition of, not at all conditioned by, the mediating activity ; and the unity and purpose of the former as a realm of ends involves and determines the law and order of the latter as a system of means. But do we need thus to distinguish between ends and means, between creative activity and mediating activity ? Does the idea of creation necessarily imply what we may call a unified and systematic occasionalism? If the interpretation of interaction towards which pluralism seems to tend is possible and sufficient, we certainly may answer this question in the negative. There may, in fact, be such a divine system or economy embracing and encircling the living agents of the world, furnishing, as it were, the properties and the scenery in which these dramatis personae of history enact their parts. Such subsidiary aids, I say, may exist, but according to the pluralist view they are not necessary. But can the pluralist position be thought out ? Why can it not, it may be replied, if it requires nothing more than the sort of mutual understanding or rapport which we daily observe in the personal intercourse of our fellow-men ? " As in water face answereth to face so the heart of man to man." Of course such mutual understanding is approximately complete only between persons similarly situated and similar in their interests and pursuits, who can thus become — as we aptly say — intimate with each other. It tails off rapidly in our intercourse with strangers, and tends to dwindle away 254 TJie Cosmology of Theism altogether as we pass to creatures further and further removed from us in the scale of being. You may train a dog to fetch and carry, but it is useless to tell a fly not to settle on your nose : like Milton's mariner dis- embarking on the leviathan's back, he takes you to be terra firma. Yet the flies understand each other and glide about in airy mazes without colliding. But it will be said, both flies and men have organisms, and without these their mutual adjustments of behaviour would be altogether inexplicable, and it is just this interaction by means of physical organization that is the problem \ This is true and the pluralist is fully aware of it. It was Leibniz himself, the founder of modern pluralism, who said that "a disembodied soul would be a deserter from the general order, which implies matter and movement and their lawsl" But the question is: What is matter.'* More exactly stated : What is the simplest concept of matter to which we are led, setting out from the realm of ends as the reason of its existence ? We note then, first, that for Leibniz, as for his modern successors, any given organism itself consists of organisms, which for it are organs, having special functions and working consentiently together as members of this one whole. This however implies an indefinite — Leibniz even said, an infinite — regress. But for the modern pluralist all it means, I take it, is that we cannot assume any given organism that seems simple, to be so really ; but that, none the less, since the complex involves the simple, bare — or as Leibniz called them, naked — monads must exist. And now ^ See Supplementary Note III. * Cf. Philosophische Schrifle/i, Gerhardt's edn, vol. vi. p. 546. What is the simplest concept of Matter? 255 how are we to conceive such a bare monad ? It cannot be a dominant monad, for this would imply subordinate monads : it cannot therefore have a body distinct from itself In some sense then, it would seem, it must be its own body or disappear altogether from the universal connexion of things. But we must not understand this to mean that apparently all mental characteristics are gone and only material characteristics are left. The true solution seems rather to be that we have reached the limit of both. The physical concept of such a limit is the dynamical concept of a mass-point as a centre of force. The corresponding psychological concept answers to what Leibniz happily described as mens momentanea seu carens recordatione'^. Some elucidation of both these concepts is requisite before we can attempt to formulate the conclusion to which this regress points. Leibniz spoke of monads generally as "the real atoms of nature, and in a word, the elements of things." Such language, which seems specially appropriate to his naked monads, should be sufficient to put us on our guard against identifying them with the mass-points of the modern physicist — which Leibniz held to be only phenomenal. They are more analogous to Boscovich's centres of force" : ' Theoriae motus abstradi Dejinitiones, Gerhardt's edition of his philosophical works, vol. iv. p. 230. ^ It is worthy of remark, that notwithstanding this analogy, to which Boscovich himself refers, he was so far from identifying monads and centres of force as to maintain that the 'seat of the soul' is more or less extended. Cf his Philosophiae riaturalis Thcoria, Venice, 1763, Appendix, De Anima et Deo, §§ 536 ff. It is also worthy of passing notice that it was through Boscovich that Priestley was led to his so-called materialism. 256 The Cosjiiology of Theism although they differ from these in being all qualitatively distinct, or unique, like Herbart's reals, not all qualita- tively the same, as Boscovich's elements were\ But they resemble these in another respect and that a very important one. Boscovich conceived his simple atoms as acting at a distance, which — paradoxical though it sounds — really means interacting directly without any intervening medium, doing, in fact, what according to the Newtonian mechanics is inconceivable. This immediacy of interaction is held to characterize the bare monad of the modern pluralist, the monad that is, so to say, its own body. Such interaction implies what Lotze called a sympathetic rapport. This brings us to the psychical nature of the bare monad, and here again immediacy is the thing we have specially to note. This immediacy answers to what psychologists now call pure sensation, an ideal limit to which our simplest experiences never descend : our sensations correspond rather to complexes or syntheses of the elemental sensations or ' petites perceptions ' of Leibniz. Moreover, for us it is true that all cognition is recognition, implies assimilation, and therefore memory in the widest sense, i.e. the retention of what has been either inherited or acquired. Pure sensation or cognition is the ' momentary consciousness ' of some dattuji, the perception or recognition of which, on the other hand, would presuppose previous experiences that still in some sense endure. Clear evidence of such a ' psychical ' or enduring present is only found in connexion with comparatively complex organisms, and ^ Cf. op. cit. § 3, quoted, also by Fechner, Aiomeniehre, 2nd edn, p. 240. Interaction as ' sympathetic rapport ' 257 this rangre in time is found also to increase as the biological differentiation of the organism increases. When then, on the contrary, we imagine this complexity decreased without limit, we reach the concept of the bare monad whose organism, so to say, reduces to a point, and its present to a moment ; which can only react immediately and to what is immediately given. In other words such monads deal only with their environment and, so long as they gain nothing by experience, so long, that is, as they remain bare monads, they severally deal with it always in the same way. The existence of an indefinite number of such monads would provide all the ' uniform medium ' for the intercourse of higher monads that these can require, without any need for such divine intervention as occasionalism assumes. The precise details of this psychical intercourse the pampsychist is unable to specify. But it is questionable whether — notwithstanding this — the occasionalist with his apparent psychophysical interaction is not in a worse position ; for he only dispenses with the need for any specification by assuming what we may call a ' dualism ' in the divine activity, and that to many minds will always appear too cumbrous and, so to say, unscientific, to be intellectually satisfactory. And after all the main outline of the pampsychic alternative can be clearly stated. The relation of a dominant monad {A) to any monad of its organism (or of its brain, when its organism is so far differentiated,) is different in kind from the relation to the same monad of the dominant monad (i5*) of another organism. The one relation we may call an internal, functional, or vital, the other an w. 17 258 The Cosmology of Theism external, foreign, or physical, relation. The totality of these internal relations at a given time answers to A's objective experience at that moment. Certain changes in this whole are, so far as A is concerned, initiated by certain of the subordinate monads : these changes answer to A's sensations, and as to these it is receptive or passive. Certain other changes, on the other hand, are due to A's active initiative : these entail sensations in certain subordinate monads, and their response is what we call ^'s movement \ But the monads of A's organism are not, we have said, related exclusively to it and to each other. If that were the case, the organism would fail altogether of its purpose and meaning : its existence at all would be inexplicable, unless it were an absolute whole and self-maintaining. In fact, however, these subordinate monads are related also to the environment, which we have called the common organism or matrix of all monads. This in the last resort is conceived as con- sisting of bare monads, which have only external relations to one another, or rather for which, as the limit of our regress, the distinction of internal and external ceases to hold. What is true of A''s> organism is true also of j5"s, and so we can understand how A's acts may give rise to sensations in B through this double mediation of organism and environment and how i5"s acts in turn may give rise to sensations in A. Presently as like sensations (or recepts) recur they become gradually more and more assimilated with previous experiences of them and the advance to definite percepts ^ See Supplementary Note III. Organism and Environment 259 is made. What were originally only immediate sensory data have now a meaning^ ; A and B, that is to say, are en rapport. Pari passu with advancing experience we find also increasing complexity of organization : functions originally controlled by the dominant monad then devolve upon subordinate organisms or organs, and so habitual or secondarily automatic processes, which for the dominant monad lapse into subconscious- ness, arise and extend. Thus the process of mediation, once begun, tends continually to increase ; and so, as the range of an individual's experience extends, he knows more and more of the external world, and yet is ever further removed from that immediate relation with it which psychologists call pure sensation. Both the pampsychist and the occasionalist alike agree, as we have seen, in holding all real existence to consist in experients and their experience ; they agree too, we may assume, in accepting the current psycho- logical analysis of experience into presentation, feeling and action. But in interpreting presentations as sub- jective modifications, assumed to be due directly to the divine activity, occasionalism becomes hampered with all the epistemological difficulties of what is known as subjective idealism, difficulties which made the exist- ence of the external world such a hopeless problem for modern philosophers till Reid began to clear the way by his criticism of the Cartesian 'theory of ideas.' ^ Thanks to the ' creative synthesis ' which the processes of recognition and perception imply. (Cf- Lect. v. pp. 104 f.) But in so far as they affect their subject even bare sensations always have a meaning, i.e. a value as pleasurable or painful. This is 'meaning' in a most vital sense. 17 — 2 26o The Cosmology of Theism Leibniz's famous paradox that, although they mirror the universe, the monads have no windows, is but another way of stating this theory. Modern pluralists on the other hand maintain that all monads have windows — more literally stated, that presentation is a relation among monads not a subjective state in a single monad. And this 'natural realism,' as Hamilton called \\}, is so much the simpler hypothesis — if that can be called a hypothesis which claims to be the bare statement of the facts — that we may say with some con- fidence that occasionalism would never have been heard of but for the Cartesian dualism of matter and mind and the Cartesian theory of ideas as subjective states. That God should have created the monads without windows and taken on himself the function of supplying their place — whether continuously, as the occasionalists assumed, or once for all, as Leibniz held — seems then a needless complication. Nevertheless, since we cannot actually verify the indefinite regress which the existence of bare monads implies, and since we cannot show that the indirect mediation of our finite intercourse is not a fact, we have no means of deciding empirically between the two alternatives. The most we can say is that the pluralist alternative is the prior as well as the simpler, and it seems adequate. To the objection that it reduces theism to the level of mere deism and leaves the world once started to go of itself, it is sufficient to reply that this supposed tenet of deism is really inconceivable. As we have already seen, the idea of creation by simple ^ Albeit in his own version of it he halts and trims in very half-hearted fashion. Pampsychism and Theism 261 ' fiat ' at a definite epoch will not work ; but deism on any other view is reduced to atheism. If there is a Creator at all he can never stand aside and wholly apart from his world. As Lotze has well said, such a proceeding '' is intelligible in a human artificer who leaves his work when it is finished and trusts for its maintenance to universal laws of Nature, laws which he did not himself make, and which not he, but another for him, maintains in operation"; but "the picture of God withdrawing from the world," the sole ground of which is himself, is incomprehensible^ But, it may be urged further, the sense-symbolism of Berkeley serves not only as a medium of intercourse for God's sentient creatures but it is also at the same time a revelation of God himself, is the language wherein he addresses us". Granted that as an in- dependent argument the appeal to the teleology of Nature is not decisive, still if there is a Creator, as we are now assuming, he must surely somehow manifest himself. But may we not reply : Surely if there is a Creator, the world of his interacting creatures will itself be a clearer manifestation of him than a mere medium of intercourse, alike available for very diverse ends and alike indifferent to all? The two seem to stand in ^ But the ascription of such a tenet to deists generally — to the English deists of the i8th century, for example — is a grievous misrepresentation. What they denied was not the divine immanence in toto, but only such occasionalistic interference as miracles, special revelations and special providences imply. They were in fact what we should now call rationalistic theists. " Physical catastrophes are a serious difficulty for the theist on this view. Cf. a striking article by Professor Howison, 'Catastrophes and the Moral Order,' Hibbert Journal^ vol. i. 1902, pp. 114-121. 262 The Cosmology of Theism much the same position as grammar to literature. Accordingly the theists who set out by distinguishing the realm of Nature from the realm of Ends allow that it is the latter that reveals God the more clearly and impressively. If so, the case for theism can hardly be impaired should this distinction turn out to be unneces- sary. But after all, it will be rejoined, your analogy betw^een language and literature is rather unfortunate, since literature presupposes language. In the abstract perhaps it does, but not in actual fact, in so far as all utterance has some meaning. It is precisely the absolute distinction of means and ends that is denied. So far then we seem entitled to conclude that while both alternatives are compatible with theism the thorough-going pampsychism of the pluralist which dispenses with a distinct medium of intercourse is, as simpler, so far preferable to occasionalism for which a mediating activity is essential. But as yet we have considered mainly the structural or, as the favourite phrase used to be, the statical aspect of the world : let us now turn to consider more directly its functional or dynamical aspect. Here again the pampsychical or Leibnizian seems preferable to the occasionalistic alternative. We must in any case admit that what we commonly call inorganic or physical processes precede and underlie those which all alike recognise as the processes in which life and mind are undoubtedly manifest. We must, that is to say, acknowledge that Nature is die Vorshife des Geistes, the prelude to Mind, in so far as so-called physical processes invariably introduce those that are distinctly psychical. If so, then, when life and mind Nature as ' the prelude to Mijid' 263 appear, have we not a break in the course of evolution — have we not that genei-atio cequivoca of something wholly new, to which the most infelicitous name imagin- able is often given, viz. 'the spontaneous generation' of the living by the lifeless ? But this naturalistic assumption is rejected by the theists who accept the occasionalistic distinction between nature and spirit. " I should certainly never," says Lotze, " set any one the task out of ten elements to make an eleventh arise equally real with them " — a curious understatement, by the way, of the enormous assumption involved in the naturalistic theory of life. " It is not from them" — the inorganic elements, Lotze continues, "that... the substance of the soul would spring ; nor would it arise above them or between them, or by the side of them, out of nothing. It would be a new creature, produced by the one encompassing Being from its own nature as the supplement of its physical activity there and then operating^.'' In thus speaking of the Absolute as "giving to every organism its fitting soul" Lotze seems to invert our ordinary notions of the relation of the two in the very way to which we had just now to object'. We do not talk of fitting inhabitants to their houses but of fitting houses to their inhabitants. Lotze's language reminds one of Herbert Spencer's view that when the organism becomes too complex to work automatically consciousness comes to its rescue. Yet Lotze was perfectly clear as to the relative importance of the two, as the following sentence may suffice to show : " Nor again is it out of nothing that the soul is created...; but to satisfy the phantasy we may say, ' Aleiaphysic^ % 2^1 fin. Italics mine. * Cf. above, p. 252. 264 The Cosmology of Theism it is from itself, from its own real nature, that the Absolute sets free {entldsst) the soul, and so adds to its one activity, the course of nature, that other which, according to the prescriptive meaning of the Absolute, is its completion^" Now for the downright dualist, who ascribes reality to matter and to mind alike, this priority of the course of nature to the evolution of life and mind, which it somehow helps to bring about, is conceivable at the outset at any rate ; and it is moreover what facts them- selves in the first instance suggest. That such dualism turns out to be eventually an unworkable hypothesis is in the meantime nothing to the point. But for the monist — who is aware of the impasse to which dualism leads and who is therefore prepared to recognise in the so-called course of nature, as distinct from the realm of ends, " only a system of occasions or means for pro- ducing presentations in spiritual beings^" — for the monist, I say, to suppose nevertheless that this system is maintained by the divine activity, when as yet there are no spiritual subjects to benefit by it ; nay, to sup- pose further that this system is actually itself not so much a means adapted to them but rather a means to which they are adapted — surely this is a vcrTepov irporepov not easy to match. It seems to imply a need for instrumentality, which — as I have already said — contradicts the whole notion of a Creator. May we not then conclude that when in Hegelian fashion people talk of die Natur als VorsUife des Geistes, what is meant is not that there is a breach of evolutional continuity but simply that the level of ^^//'-conscious ^ Op. cit. § 246 fin. ^ Lotze, op. cit. § 97. The Evolutional Regress 265 existence, of Spirit in the narrower sense, is reached continuously by development through earlier stages of more or less conscious life ? The question then which we have next to raise concerns what in an earlier lecture was called the lower limit of pluralism : in other words : What do we ultimately reach when we try to trace the process of evolution backwards ? And our chief concern will now be to ascertain, if we can, thetheistic interpretation of this initial situation or ideal limit, to which we attempt to regress. Herbert Spencer, it will be re- membered, maintained that what we should ultimately reach would be a state of homogeneity and that from such a state, in consequence of its essential instability, all the heterogeneity that we now find has been gradually evolved. And, on the supposition that evolution will explain everything, he reasoned correctly enough ; for, since what we now observe is continually increasing heterogeneity, this seems fairly to suggest an original state in which there was no heterogeneity at all. Leibniz and the modern pluralists on the other hand, as we know, while admitting homogeneity in so far as no two monads are altogether different, yet con- tend for the presence of heterogeneity throughout : no two monads or ' reals,' according to them, are or ever were altogether alike. If now we try to imagine all these in their initial condition we seem to reach a world of bare monads, since all the processes of organization fall within the scope of evolution, not of origin. But bare monads, we have seen, are described as having only a momentary consciousness without memory and as so far incapable of acquiring by experience : how then 266 TJie Cosmology of Theism from such an initial condition can the evolution of experience ever begin ? Can the bare monad acquire experience ? The joluralist, like Herbert Spencer, starts with a certain initial instability. But he gives a better account of it : describing it not in terms of matter but in terms of mind. Even his bare monads are conative, that is are feeling and striving subjects or persons in the widest sense, not inert particles or things. Even so it would be conceivable, of course, that every one existed in a certain neutral state that called for no efforts of self-conservation ; and then, unless we could credit some at least with impulses towards self-betterment, nothing would happen. Anyhow, as a matter of fact, some things have happened. In the course of these changes, it is assumed that certain monads come into relations that, as mutually helpful, they tend to main- tain. At the same time to this comparative intimacy within a group there corresponds a comparative differentiation — for each member of it — between such group and the world of monads at large; and with this differentiation within the present there arises pari passu an increase in its duration as conscious present ; so change is perceived, and plasticity tends to become memory. It is needless to reproduce in further detail the pluralistic Weltansckaicung; which I have attempted to describe in earlier lectures : what now interests us is the interpretation or modification that theism has to impose. But first it will be well to recall what theism as such in any case implies, viz. that the initial state, from which pluralism seeks to start as a iact, finds in God God as the 'Beginning' 267 its ground and reason. The bare existence of reality in the plural, it may be argued, seems no more to demand a ofround than its bare existence in the sinoular. But when the Many, regarded as existentially inde- pendent, are found to be mutually complementary, conspiring together to realise an intelligible organic whole, then the presence from the first of an underlying unity suggests itself. Why should the Many tend to- wards one end unless they had in the One their source? Otherwise, the further we attempt to regress must we not allow that the more inconceivable a supreme end becomes^? Those who decline to accept theism may either leave such questions unanswered, main- taining that for the world's evolution as ultimate there can be no sufficient reason other than the fact itself; or they may fall back on an Absolute in which the dis- tinction of God and world disappears. The former of these alternatives ignores two things : that we as rational beings are part of the world's evolution, and that the demand for a sufficient reason is thus a demand that the world itself has raised. The latter reduces the world to an inexplicable appearance which, somehow seeming to be there, it can only explain away. There is indeed another possible course, viz. to deny that things show any tendency towards the realisation of an orcfanic whole or that the world is a single realm of ends at all. Chance, it may be said, would suffice to account for all the mutual compati- bility that we find : in a manifold of indefinite extent we might expect indefinitely many coincidences. In such a supposition there is a covert appeal to the unknown ^ Cf. Lect. IX. p. 197. 268 The Cosmology of Theism that is specially out of place in such ultra-radical empiricism. In the world that we know there is, as the pluralist himself -assumes, that amount of unity which every plurality in order to be known necessarily in- volves. This world, moreover, in the course of its development has already advanced some way towards what we have called a higher unity, and at the stage of self-conscious reason has adopted this unity as its ideal goal. For these facts the theistic hypothesis furnishes an adequate explanation and so far no other or better is known or even wanted. We may then resume our inquiry : how does theism interpret that lower limit, towards which the pluralist attempts to trace all evo- lution back ? There can be no doubt, I think, that the hypothesis of evolution was foreign at any rate to modern theories of creation. Thus we find even the deist Voltaire preferred to account for the fossil shells found on mountain slopes by the passage of pilgrims who dropped them there, rather than admit the theories of the new science of geology. " Nothing of all that vegetates, nothing of all that is animated," he wrote, " has changed : all species have remained invariably the same : it would indeed be strange that the grain of millet should have conserved its nature eternally and that the nature of the entire globe should have varied^" But nowadays theism professes to accept the evolution hypothesis. To accept it, but in what sense ? Only I fear in the literal and original sense of merely unfolding what is there all along, not in the scientific sense of epigenesis or creative synthesis, described in an earlier ^ Les Frincij[>es de la Philosophies vol. in. § 45. Theism and Epigeiiesis ' 269 lecture. If so, all the difference there would be between creation without evolution and creation with it would be in the method not in the result ; it would be such a difference as, to take a simple example, there is between starting with a binomial, say (« + ^)'-, and starting with its expansion a: + 2ab + b-. Creation in either case must be through and through determinate and complete, embracing both all that is and all that happens ; only in one case its content would at first be explicit, in the other only implicit. Thus we have found Hegel saying : " The history of the world is the exhibition {Darstelhing) how spirit comes to the con- sciousness of what in itself it means ; and as the seed carries in itself the whole nature of the tree, ...so too the first traces of spirit virtually contain the whole of history \" This is the literal evolution in which every- thing is predetermined if not foreordained, a drama of which the book of final judgment constitutes the play and the history of the world just its representation {Darstellung), as the astronomer-poet of Persia had said centuries before Hegel was born. Up to this point the reconciliation of pluralism and theism seemed possible, but here the disagreement threatens to be radical : an evolution that is essentially dialectical demands more than pluralism, resting on the prwia _/^^z^ evidence of experience, can accept; while evolution as epigenesis seems even more clearly to conflict with the ideas of theism generally current. We come in fact upon the old problem of ' fixed fate, free-will, fore- knowledge absolute ' : intractable as it has proved we must needs try to discuss this problem with open minds. ^ Cf. above, Lect. v. p. loo. LECTURE XIII. FREEDOM. In our endeavour to reconcile or combine pluralism and theism we have reached a point at which they seem hopelessly to diverge, viz., in the interpretation of evolution. For theism, as ordinarily understood, evolution is literally the mere unfolding or expansion of what is implicitly present from the first : in creating the world God is held to know and ordain all that from our temporal standpoint is yet to be. The theist is not content with saying that not a sparrow now falls to the ground without God knowing it, but he insists that the very hairs of our heads were eternally num- bered by divine ordination. Creation in reality is once for all and for ever complete : it is not only a totiini simul but it is a totuni sempitefue : a mine stans in which all the past and all the future alike eternally exist. For us who move through it there is change ; but for God, who is omnipresent in what we call time as well as in what we call space, and who therefore does not move and is not moved, for him there is no change. To the pluralist on the other hand, as we have seen, the so-called evolution of the world is really epigenesis, creative synthesis ; it implies continual new beginnings, the result of the mutual conflict and co- Creatures as Creators 2^1 operation of agents, all of whom, though in varying degrees, act spontaneously or freely. For the pluralist, in short, these agents are themselves creative ; and if they were not they could never come to entertain the idea that they are creatures too. God may have made man in his own image, but it is from the image that men reason back to God as their maker. But the notion of making, the potter notion, is anything but apposite, and the pluralist will have none of it. God's creatures are not manufactured articles, and if we must have a figure to represent what utterly transcends us, that of generating the living is far apter than that of kneading clay. Singularist philosophers are fond of speaking of the world as the differentiation of the Absolute. But if this Absolute be verily spirit, then its differentiation into conscious automata, now pleased, now pained, by their pre-established movements, must strike us, however wonderful, as still but a very poor performance. If this Absolute be not spirit, then it may possibly correspond to the union of spirits, but in that case to call spirits its differentiations would be almost meaningless. ''Unless creato7's are created, says one impassioned pluralist, " nothing is really created\" The pluralist then may allow that God is the sole ground of there being a world to evolve, but he cannot admit that God, as many theists maintain, determined 'before the foundation of the world' every- thing;- that shall ever be done in it : for then nothing would verily be done in it at all. But it was not till deeds were done that men talked of fate ; then, falsely projecting the fixity of the past into the future and ^ Howison, llie Conception of God, 1902, p. 97. 272 Freedom thence reflecting it back again, they denied the very- source of the idea of fate itself by denying real freedom or personal initiative altogether. But quite apart from the difficulty of reconciling finite freedom with divine foreknowledge, the reality of true self-determination is questioned on more em- pirical grounds. It is obvious then that this question concerning the so-called ' freedom of the will ' must engage our attention first of all. This phrase, freedom of the will, however, is a very misleading one : Locke long ago protested against it, and we shall do well, as far as possible, to avoid it ; though it is so firmly estab- lished in common thought that its complete elimination from controversy is hardly practicable. And yet it will not be denied that whenever we talk of freedom or liberty, we always — unless these words are meta- phorically used — refer to a person or persons. Again it will not be denied that by will we mean not a person but a faculty or power that is attributed to a person. Finally it will not be denied that this concept of a power or faculty called will — like all such concepts — is but a generalisation based on actual instances of volitions or acts of willing. There is thus no will that wills but only a person or subject that wills. To quote Locke : '*We may as properly say that it is the singing faculty sings, and the dancing faculty dances, as that the will chooses \" The real question then is what is meant when it is asserted or denied that in willing a man is free ? Again this question is not clearly stated when de- scribed, as it often is, as concerned with the alternative ^ Essay concerfting Human Ufiderstanding, vol. il. ch. xxi. p. 17. Determuiism and liideterminism 273 y'ssues, determinism or indeterminism ; when the ques- tion, that is to say, is supposed to be, whether a voHtion has a cause or ground or has not. The determinist, confident that for every event there is a cause, assumes that he must therefore deny that the person in wiUine is free. The indeterminist, confident that this freedom is a fact, supposes that he must therefore deny that a volition has a cause. It is possible that each may be right in what he affirms, and wrong only in what he denies — possible that volitions have causes though these causes are free. That in some sense a volition is caused can only be disputed by one who is prepared to allow a positive reality to absolute chance, and to regard praise and blame as entirely meaningless and out of place ; to deny in fact at once, if he is an idealist, the existence alike of order and morality altogether. On the other hand, that in willing the agent is in some sense free can only be disputed by one who is prepared to maintain that a like necessi- tation applies both to the events of the so-called physical and to those of the moral world ; but that would be tantamount to denying any distinction between them. It seems plain then that there is some com- plexity in the subject-matter of this perennial con- troversy, which the bare antithesis — either determinism or indeterminism — does not resolve : in other words it seems still possible to maintain that a volition is in one sense determined and in another not determined. To ascertain and analyse this further complexity is what we must now attempt. We may begin with the concept of cause. Its source and priinary meaning we find unquestionably in w. 18 274 Freedom ourselves as active or efficient. Hence we derive the phrase 'efficient cause,' to which ' effect,' the name we give to the result of our activity, is strictly correlative ; so that, without an efficient, an effect is meaningless or impossible. To the question how an efficient or deter- mining cause produces its effect no answer has been, or seemingly can be, given that will enable us to resolve our sense of activity into simpler elements. The title bestowed by Aristotle on this form of causation, o.pyj] rrjs KLvijcrecoq, is perhaps instructive here : it is not itself a movement but what produces movement^ Again we find efficient causation used in two senses : we speak, that is to say, of a transeunt cause and also of an immanent cause. Thus we say a man eats his dinner and smokes his pipe ; and we say too he wakes, he breathes, he walks, and so forth. Metaphorically we also apply the concept of immanent causation to inanimate objects, as when we say that the sun shines or the tide rises. But inasmuch as whatever is inanimate is regarded also as inert and therefore incapable of changing of itself, the supposed immanent causality of mere things is resolved into transeunt causality. The sun's shining is resolved into molecular motion, the result of preceding mass motions ; and the tide is found to rise only because of the motions of the earth, the sun and the moon. Once more, even if we can give no answer to the question how we are active, we find that an answer to ^ In the case of physical causation, on the other hand, the so called cause is itself a motion, consequent on a precedent motion and so on in indefinite regress; so that the notion of efificiency also recedes indefinitely. Meanings of Cause 275 the question why in any special case we act at all, can usually be given. This reason for acting is what Aristotle called the final cause, and identified with the good as the end alike of all process and all motion. But science does not and, it may fairly be said, cannot take so wide a view. In dealing severally with the facts of the so-called material world, such ideas as final causes and the good are out of place : like vestal virgins, as Bacon said, they are here fruitless and so useless. Summing up then as regards the concept of cause, we may say that in the case of conative subjects it implies both immanent efficiency and purposiveness, but that in the case of inanimate things it implies neither. What it does imply in this case is still in large measure to seek. And so we come next to the idea of necessary con- nexion according to law, or the uniformity of nature, as it is otherwise called, for it is this, nowadays at any rate, that is meant first of all when the term causality is scientifically used. Thus Helmholtz, for example, says ** the principle of causality is in fact nothing more than the presupposition that in all natural phenomena there is conformity to law {Gesetzlichkeityy But now in what sense can this regularity or uniformity of nature be called also a case of necessary connexion } There is no logical necessity about a law of nature : it is neither in itself intuitively certain nor is it logically deducible from premisses that are themselves intuitively certain : to doubt or deny it entails no contradiction. Granted, it may perhaps be replied, the necessity is not formal or logical, it is real or natural necessity. * Ueber die Erhaltung der Kraft, Oatwald's edn, p. 53. 18—2 276 Freedom But what does this mean ? When we speak of a fact or event as real what we primarily intend to assert is its presentation to sensory perception. Such assertorial or categorical judgments are for the percipient not less necessary and inevitable than so-called apodeictic judgments \ I am quite as little able to deny the fact of daylight, when at noon my eyes are open, as I am at any time to deny the truth that 2 + 2 = 4, The grounds of the necessitation in the two cases are different, no doubt ; but that for the present does not concern us, save as it may lead us to repeat that causal necessitation is not of the apodeictic sort. The same real necessitation, so to call it, which constrains me to affirm that it rains, when I am caught in a thunder-shower, constrains me also to affirm that the thunder-clap followed the lightning-flash ; for all this is perceived. What I am not constrained to affirm, for that is not perceived, is any real connexion between the two events. But though all that we perceive is the posif hoc we no doubt frequently assert the pi'opter hoc as well, and that too on the strength of a single instance. Such a venture is however purely anthropo- morphic : it rests entirely on the analogy that we observe between our own behaviour and what we regard as the behaviour of some inanimate thing. The primitive and popular concept of transeunt causation is altogether anthropomorphic in this wise ; as the whole structure of human speech amply shows. Thus the more completely thought is confined to the standpoint of immediate experience, the more causality implies the connexion of efficiens and effectimi, or real necessity ; * Cf. on this point Sigwart's Logic, § 31. Causality as a postulate 277 but then the less, in the same proportion, does it imply of uniformity or law. The transition from the one standpoint to the other falls almost entirely within the period of modern thought, and in our day may be said to be at length complete. But as I have discussed this at some length elsewhere it is needless to enlarge upon it here\ If then neither logical necessity nor necessity in the sense of effectuation is involved in the scientific concept of causality, what necessity is there left ? Only the hypothetical necessity of Helmholtz's 'presup- position.' The scientific principle of causality, in short, is a necessary postulate : scientific knowledge — in other words, knowledge expressed in general pro- positions concerning matters of fact — is possible only on the assumption that events actually happen with strict and uniform regularity. Now there is one theory of the world, and one only, which would justify this assumption completely, and that one is the mechanical theory. Accordingly the postulate of the uniformity of nature is frequently converted into the theorem that nature is a mechanical system ; and thus a methodo- logical principle becomes an ontological dogma. We can now see, as we suspected at starting, that to say an event is determined still leaves the nature of the determination an open question, and is so far ambiguous. When the wayfarer says, I am determined to go on against the wind, and the man of science says, It is dctermmed that the dust will always go with it, * Cf. Naturalism afid Ai^nosticism, 3rd cdn, vol. i. pp. 62 ff., vol. 11. pp. 241 f. Ati excellent exposition of this transition is given by I)r Venn in his Empirical Logic, chs. ii. and iv. 27S Freedom this ambiguity is at once apparent. In the first case determination impHes efficient causation, self-direction and purpose : it does not imply any uniformity such that in all like circumstances a like determination always has recurred and always will. In the second case, on the other hand, this is precisely what is implied ; whereas here nothing is implied as to efficient causation ; also self-direction and purpose are either denied or treated as meaningless. But at this point the determinist may interpose, in- sisting that, to say nothing of habitual actions, there is abundant evidence of uniformity in human conduct even when most deliberate. There is unquestionably ; but for all that the two forms of determination remain as different as ever : moreover the uniformities in the two cases are also altogether different. In every instance of deliberate conduct, though the agents decide alike, each is still conscious of self-determination, of purpose, and of effort in the pursuit of it, conscious of that 'action' contrary to the line of least resistance, which in the case of inanimate things is impossible. And though in like situations there is often a corresponding likeness in the agents' conduct, often there is not ; there is here then no warrant for any such generalisation as natural law implies. If we ask a man why in a new and strange situation he acts as he does, it will hardly occur to him to explain his conduct by describing to us the im- mediately preceding situation. The answer he is likely to give, and that we naturally expect, ' will consist rather in describing the end at which he aims and the value that it has for him, as the reasons for his deter- mination. But if we ask the physicist to explain an Two forms of Deferinination 279 unusual phenomenon he can do so only by discovering its antecedents, tracing these to their antecedents, and so on indefinitely : in other words he can explain it only on the assumption that it is determined by its place in a single rigorous mechanical system. Pi'ima facie then the two forms of determina- tion are distinctly different: whether the difference is ultimate, and if it is not, which form is the more comprehensive — these are further questions. At all events the difference runs very deep. The one form, that of self-determination — implying such teleological categories as personality, utility and worth — dominates all our interpretations of the world as a realm of ends. The other form, that of determination according to fixed law, implying in the last resort only the categories of mechanism, underlies our scientific description of the so-called realm of nature or world of things. The one has been called the ethical postulate of freedom, the other the epistemological postulate of necessity\ But in truth self-determination extends beyond the self-conscious and rational autonomy that we find only in the ethical sphere, and is besides not simply an ideal or moral postulate. The contrast with which we have to deal then is the wider one between spontaneity or individual activity as prima facie a fact on the one side and the scientific concept of inert matter as a constant quantity on the otherl Individuality is ^ So far the old distinction of Libertarianism and Necessitarianism is really clearer and therefore, pace J. S. Mill, also 'fairer' than that now in vogue of Indeterminism and Determinism. ■ As already remarked (Lect. i. p. 8) the negative concept of inertia or inactivity presupposes the positive /a^/ of activity. 28o Freedom inseparable from mind and altogetlier foreign to matter, which loses nothing by disintegration and gains nothing by integration ; whereas to divide one mind into many or to aggregate many minds into one is meaningless and impossible. But for all that, the more individual minds cooperate the higher they rise and the more they achieve severally and collectively. Hence the steady advance in the efficiency of the world of ends, which Wundt has called the dominant law of spiritual life and entitled ' the increase of spiritual energy ' in contrast to the energy of the physical world that is held neither to increase nor to decreased Wherein then does the difference between them lie? Perhaps if we say that it lies in the different meaning given to direction in the two cases, the contrast we are considering will be made clearer on another side. When we regard the world as a realm of ends, direction implies guidance and control, and therewith activity ; but when we regard it as a physical whole, direction has simply its literal, spatial meaning. We describe the inertia of a moving body by saying that it cannot of itself change its direction or its velocity And whenever by the so-called ' action ' of another body either of these components of its motion is altered there will also, according to the mechanical theory, be a compensatory alteration in the components of the motion of that other body. Then generalising, and agreeably to the notion of inertia, we have the principle known as the Conservation of Momentum, a principle which perhaps expresses as clearly as any that the ' Wundt, 'Wachsthum der geistigen Energie,' System der Philo- sophies 1889, p. 315. Two senses of Direction 281 so-called uniformity of nature completely excludes all ideas of spontaneity and guidance. Yet that such guidance prima facie exists is no longer seriously disputed : every movement of every living thing is an instance of it. Nevertheless the fact of guidance is, by the very terms of the mechanical theory itself, a fact outside the range of that theory. Moreover, primarily for the sake of such guiding con- trol, and largely by means of it, the theory itself has been elaborated. And those who know it best only claim that it tells us what will happen so far as things are left to themselves, but not that it can show how guidance is possible nor when it will occur \ As often as it does occur then, we have an event which does not lie within the sweep of the so-called uniformity of nature regarded as a system determined throughout by mechanical necessity, determined in such wise that all its uncontrolled working admits of rigorous calcu- lation. Every such event, so far as the system is concerned, is a new beginning to which, as inert, the system simply submits, and yet for which it, as inert, cannot possibly account. It is just the continual accumulation of such unique events and conservation of their values that distinguishes the historical evolution of experience from the steady downward trend of the physical world conceived as independent of experience. The course of the one, its final equilibration, is theo- retically calculable from the beginning ; the course of the other, the final harmony of the realm of ends, is not. ^ Cf. an excellent article by Professor J. H. Poynting on 'Physical Law and Life,' Hibbert Journal, 1903, pp. 728 ff. 282 Freedom Much as Plato found the characteristics of justice more conspicuous in the state than in the individual, so perhaps we find that in the broad contrast between nature and history the difference we have been seeking to analyse and elucidate is more apparent than it is when we confine our attention to the individual alone. But for all that, the solution of our problem — and that of Plato's too — ultimately turns on the reality of individual existence. Efficiency and spontaneity, pur- pose and worth, these ontological and teleological categories are more and more ruthlessly extruded from the description of nature as a phenomenal whole the more that description succeeds in attaining to scien- tific precision. Yet these are the categories that in the main define what we mean by an individual or a person. The course of history we refer to self- determinations, the course of nature science regards as due to mechanical necessitations. But are these alternatives, determination by per- sonal agency and determination according to universal law, really mutually exclusive } We picture the course of history as continually foreclosing genuine alter- natives, and the course of nature as throughout completely determined : the future in the one case cannot, we think, in the other certainly can — theoretically at least — be deduced from the present. But there are many who think otherwise and who include the doings of men as well as the motions of matter under the phrase ' uniformity of nature.' These we may term thorough-going determinists ; for there is no ambiguity in the meaning they assign to deter- mination. It is simply the (hypothetical) necessity of Analysis of VoliDitary Action 283 science. Still whether such a position is compatible with the existence of a plurality of really conative agents remains to be seen. We must first examine the position itself. Hitherto we have not attempted to analyse the process of voluntary action itself, but as the contention of the thorough-going determinists turns upon this analysis we must now follow them. Their procedure in the main is to regard motives as forces, between which — in deliberation — there may be a varying con- flict till at length one proves itself the strongest, whereupon the action, that it is said to determine, ensues. The man meanwhile seems to play the part of a simply passive spectator. How little he deter- mines the result according to this view is shown, for example, by the reiterated statements of that classic determinist, Hobbes : " In deliberation there be many wills, whereof not any is the cause of a voluntary action but the last," "Will therefore is the last appetite in deliberating." Now there is no doubt that motives in relation to each other have a certain analogy to forces or to weights in a scale, whence indeed the word de- liberation is derived. But the relation of motives to the subject deliberatmg is not at all that of independent forces applied to an inert object, albeit Hobbes treats of them under the head of Physics \ Appetite and aversion, that is to say conation, implies something that seeks and shuns, a subject that actively strives according as it feels and as long as it lives. Psy- chologists do not ordinarily talk of motives save in connexion with deliberation, which in strictness is an * English JVor/cs, Molesworth's edn, vol. i. p 408. 284 Freedom intellectual rather than a conative process ; but for the purpose of our present discussion it will be convenient, and need not mislead, if we regard motives not as pleas or reasons for acting but as impulses or tendencies to action. So regarded their characteristic is not, that like external forces they move or tend to move the subject, but that they are themselves the subject moving or tending to move, or more accurately, acting or tending to act. We say indeed that hunger makes a man eat, but we do not interpret this statement as we should the statement that heat makes a glass crack. In both cases we have a certain situation, but in the one case the active subject changes the situation ; in the other the situation changes the passive object. Again in what we may call physical situations, where several forces concur, the change is always their resultant and each, strong and weak alike, produces its full effect. In psychical situations, on the other hand, where several motives are said to conflict, the eventual action is determined in accordance with one only, the so-called strongest motive : the rejected motives, if they tell at all, do so simply as testing steadfastness of purpose. It is perhaps hardly needful to say that strength does not here, as in the case of a force, imply any reference to an external standard. In a certain situation, which they share in common, so far as two persons can ever be situated alike, one will say : This motive weighs most with me, and the other. This the most with me. The analogy then between the relation of forces applied to an inert object and the relation of conations to an active subject seems to fail in all essential points. Motives and Forces 285 So long as the subject does not act but merely 'de- liberates or ponders ' how he shall act, there is some resemblance in his procedure to that of using a balance to determine weights, and the suggested metaphor is as old as Plato ; but it is only a metaphor after all. When, however, we consider the facts in their active rather than their cognitive aspect the disparity between the psychical and the physical seems complete. Forces, though distinct, combine their effects only because they converge on one body : motives, though distinct, con- flict only because they diverge, so to say, from one subject. The forces, that is, are applied to the body, the motives spring from the subject. The body moves in the one path which the forces collectively determine, the subject moves in the one path which it selectively determines. The magnitude of a force is referred to an objective standard, the strength of a motive depends on its subjective worth : the sufficient reason is in the one case mechanical, in the other it is teleological. Nevertheless, the thorough-going determinist will doubtless rejoin, these differences are comparatively superficial, and when we think the matter out what we come down to at last is in both cases alike the same necessitation ; the same complete determination of the consequent by its antecedents. We speak of a man's path through life as well as of a body's path through space, and this, however intricate it may have been, we know was throughout perfectly definite and at every point inevitably determined. Now what is true of the motions of a body is true of the doings of a man. Well, it is certainly true always that whatever is once determined is inevitably determined and that 286 Freedom in this sense the complete antecedents uniquely deter- mine the consequent. But is this a reason for ignoring the difference between the circumstances that determine the rolling of a stone and the volitions that determine the movements of a hero ? Or can anyone seriously maintain that we get to the bottom of things by thus ignoring it? If the said difference is merely an ac- cidental accessory, what is the essential characteristic that pertains alike to the physical event and to the voluntary act ? It is, the determinist will repeat, that the antecedents in both cases, in the rolling of the stone and in the willing of the man, are beyond control: as Hobbes has said, "The will is also caused by other things whereof it disposeth not\" If we ask for further explication, as we well may, we get two answers, more or less connected, which it will be best to consider in turn. First, it is said, a man's volitions depend on his nature, and that is not a matter of his choice. If it be urged that often they depend rather on the character which he has acquired, a character which may control his nature ; it is replied that acquired character is due to modification of nature induced by circumstances, so that after all we come back to nature or original character in the end. But what real distinction, we may ask, can anyone find between a subject and its nature or character^ } As to what an individual subject ^ ' Liberty and Necessity,' English Works, Molesworth's edn, vol. IV. p. 274. " It is not of course with such specific attributes as it shares with others of its kind but with its own peculiar traits that we are here concerned. A Mans Volitions and his Nature 287 is, there may be room for much metaphysical dispute. But at least we are certain that it is not an indefinite 'this,' or an abstract entity, having only an extrinsic connexion with its so-called nature. Thinking is re- lating, and we are sometimes led in consequence to talk as if reality were altogether resolvable into relations. It is this same habit of thought that leads the indeterminist to talk of the freedom of the will apart from motives, and that leads the determinist, as Priestley does, to talk of " motives as the proper causes of human actions, though it is the man that is called the agents" The efficiency and initiative that ' "No writer," says Schopenhauer, "has set forth the necessity of voluntary acts so thoroughly and convincingly as Priestley in his... Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity.'' I trust I shall be excused then, if I venture to give a specimen of his reasoning. It occurs in one of the most important sections of his work, in which he is arguing against his Libertarian friend, Price. "Suppose," he says, "a philosopher to be entirely ignorant of the constitution of the human mind, but to see, as Dr Price acknowledges, that men do, in fact, act according to their affections and desires, i.e. in one word, according to motives, would he not as in a case of the doctrine of chances, immediately infer that there must be z. fixed cause for this coincidence of motives and actions ? Would he not say that, though he could not see into the man, the connexion was natural, and necessary, because constant! And since the motives, in all cases, precede the actions, would he not naturally, i.e. according to the custom of philosophers in similar cases, say that the motive was the cause of the action? And would he not be led by the obvious analogy to compare the mind to a balance, which was inclined this way or that, according to the motives presented to it?... Therefore," he presently concludes, "in proper philosophical language, the motive ought to be called the proper cause of the action. It is as much so as anything in nature is the cause of anything else " — sentences which Schopen- hauer thought it worth while to quote. (J. Priestley, Disquisitions 288 Freedom the indeterminist seems to find in the man apart from his character the determinist professes to find in the character apart from the man. But whereas it is certain that there cannot be less in the concrete self than we know, there may very well be a great deal more ; and therefore, while it may be possible to clear indeterminism of its seeming paradox, it is not possible to reconcile thorough-going determinism with our actual experience. We certainly have no experience of events without causes, but we experience determination in both the forms which make up the two sides of causation : the effect as determined, the cause as determining ; and we experience both, not objectively as presentations of what is not self, but subjectively as immediate states of self. We have moreover no ground for regarding the one as a whit more real than the other : if pleasure and pain are verily subjective feeling or affection, conation is verily subjective activity or effectuation. What we are here calling a motive implies both ; and essentially distinct though they are, both arise together in certain situations. But not even the feeling, still less the conation, can be described as caused by the situation, if that is regarded simply as any science except psy- chology would regard it. Psychologically the situation must be interesting ; but this is not a quality pertaining to the situation as such, it is a character that the sub- ject as such gives to it. And gives why } Because the subject is not, like an inanimate thing, indifferent relating to Matter and Spii'it, 1782, vol. ii. pp. 64 ff.) I fancy, if I had myself put this forward as a presentation of the determinist's case, it would have been condemned at once as an unfair travesty. Determinism and Sensationalism 289 to circumstances, but has ends and aims to realise, and therefore assumes a different attitude towards its en- vironment according as this helps or hinders it in the pursuit of its purposes — purposes which conform to no general law save that of self-conservation and better- ment. Its own character determines the character that it gives to objects, and its behaviour towards them is so far essentially self-determination. To deny all this is tacitly to deny the reality of the self or subject of experience altogether. This brings us to the second answer, a psycho- logical analysis of experience in much favour with thorough-going determinists, wherein this denial is openly made. Hume, it will be remembered, de- scribed the mind as "nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which. ..are in a perpetual movement or flux." In this bundle his successors signalised appetites and aversions, which are also in perpetual flux. They agree then with him in main- taining that " it cannot therefore be from any of these impressions," as he says, " or from any other, that the idea of self is derived, and consequently there is no such idea^" — so that, speaking plainly, there is no such reality. If there were, said Bain, "a fourth or residual department [of psychology] would need to be consti- tuted, the department of 'self or Me-ation, and we should set about the investigation of the laws (or the anarchy) prevailing there, as in the three remaining branches [Emotion, Volition, Intellection]." " I can- not," he continues, " light upon anything of the sort ; ^ Hume, Treatise on Human Aatiire, Green and Grose's edition, vol. I. i>p. 533 f. w. 19 290 Freedom and in the setting-up of a determining power under the name of ' self/ as a contrast to the whole region of motives...! see only an erroneous conception of the facts\" The hopeless shortcomings of this doctrine — variously known as Sensationalism, Associationism, Presentationism — have been often exposed, and it is doubtful if In the present day there is a single psy- chologist who would defend it. We might then fairly content ourselves by saying that thorough-going de- terminism finds at once in this sensationalism its logical outcome and its refutation. But the reasons of its failure can be put very briefly. In the first place, determinism and sensationalism alike, in common with all naturalistic thinking, set out from the objective standpoint, as if it were absolute. The subjective factor in all experience, which the natural sciences can safely ignore, can, they assume, be ignored by the moral and historical sciences too. The category of ' attribute or property ' which implies possession is metaphorically used of things, though these, albeit qualified, in reality possess nothing. " Without pro- perty no person," Hegel has said: but we may convert this and say. Without a person no property. Ex- perience is in this sense property : it is always owned. Percepts and appetites that nobody has are not percepts and appetites at all. To talk of motives conflicting of themselves is as absurd as to talk of commodities competing in the absence of traders. ^ The Emotions and the Will, 3rd edn, 1875, p. 492. To 'contrast' self and motives in this fashion is indeed just that ' erroneous conception of the facts' referred to above, p. 2?>6 Jin. The Result 291 Again, if there is only a bundle of percepts and motives, but no self to determine or control, it is obvious that there can be no self to be determined or controlled. But since presentationism cannot con- sistently regard presentations themselves as purposive, there can be no purpose in the Many at all. Finally, since the only causality naturalism recognises is the hypothetical regularity of sequence, there is no place left for efficiency either : the world is resolved into mechanism, and so experience is explained away. Such a reductio ad absurdttm is surely an indirect proof of the reality of that self-determination which we directly experience. 19- LECTURE XIV. FREEDOM AND FOREKNOWLEDGE. We may perhaps claim to have found that the thorough-going determinism, which denies self-deter- mination and self-direction in toto, refutes itself by overshooting the mark and proving too much : by resolving the subject of experience into an abstraction it denies the reality of experience altogether. But there are those who profess to admit freedom in the sense of self-determination, in common with the Liber- tarian, and who yet maintain necessity in the sense of natural law, in common with the Necessitarian. I am thinking, of course, of Kant and his solution of this antinomy between the demands of pure science and pure ethics as he conceived them — a solution which Schopenhauer praises as among the most admirable and profound achievements of human genius. The self is here noumenal and its freedom transcendental, but its active manifestations are phenomenal and necessarily determined. Though many besides Schopenhauer have been impressed with the amazing ingenuity of this Kantian doctrine, he, almost alone, seems to have had the courage or the hardihood to accept it completely^ At this time of day then it would be unprofitable to begin by discussing it at length, though it may repay ^ Fichte and Schelling ought perhaps to be included. The Doctrine of Kant and Schopenhauer 293 us presently to consider whether after all beneath this splendid failure there does not lie a great truth. But it is Schopenhauer's exposition that more immediately concerns us. Adopting the scholastic principle, Operari sequitur esse, he says : — " It has been a fundamental error, a varepov TrpoTepov of all times, to assign the necessity to the esse and the freedom to the operari. On the contrary freedom pertains to the esse alone; but from this and the motives the operaj'i follows of necessity; and from what we do we know what we are\" And "necessary" he defines as "that which follows from a given sufficient grounds" So far and at first sight there seems nothing here incompatible with self-determination as the Libertarian understands it : a being that in a given situation is itself the sufficient ground of what it does is all that we mean by a spontaneous or free being. The only such beings that we know or can conceive are conscious, that is to say conative and cognitive, subjects. But we find no such restriction of freedom in Schopenhauer's doctrine. The freedom that he allows is not confined to conscious beings; and on looking closer we shall see that consciousness has essentially nothing to do with it. It is the inner essence of each thing, he maintains, whether it be physical force or vital force or will, that determines its characteristic reaction. The law operari sequitur esse applies alike to all : as its reactions disclose the nature of a chemical substance, so his motives disclose the character of a man. " Objectively ' Siimmtliche Werke, 'Freiheit des VVillens,' Frauunstiidt's edn, vol. IV. p. 97. * Op. cit. p. 7. 294 Freedom and Fo7'eknow ledge considered, a man's behaviour," he tells us, "like the action of every natural essence, is recognised as falling necessarily under the causal law in its utmost rigour : subjectively on the other hand everyone feels that he always does only what he wills. This however only amounts to saying that his action is the pure outcome of his own peculiar nature : even the meanest thing therefore would feel the same, if it could feel at all\" What all this comes to then is substantially and briefly as follows • — The esse of everything is noumenal and is will or energy of a definite kind, the kind differing for all the so-called physical forces, for all organic species and for all individual men. The operari of everything is phenomenal, and involves two factors ; (i) the original esse, i.e. force or will, and (2), in addition to this, the determining condition or occasion, answering to what in physics we term causes in the narrower sense, to what in biology we call stimuli, in psychology motives. All that these so-called causes account for is the when and where of the manifestations [Aeusserungeit) of the primitive things per se, which — themselves beyond explanation and causation — are the principles of all explanation and the source of all causation. As such a thing per se or noumenon, man according to Kant and Schopenhauer alike is free — free as a cause that is not in turn an effect. And now what is the result of all this freedom of the noumenal world? A phenomenal world of cast-iron necessity ; and since this is the only world we know about, the determinist, so far as objective experience extends, is completely in the right. But how from such ' Op. cit. pp. 57, 98. The Phenomenal and the Noiimenal 295 complete liberty does this rigorous necessity come about ? Because the essential nature or character of everything is unalterable : what is conscious and what is not are in this respect, according to Schopenhauer at any rate, completely on a par. In like manner Kant affirms that "all the acts of a man, so far as they are phenomena, are determined according... to the order of nature, and if we could investigate [them]... to the very bottom, there would not be a sinfjle human action which we could not predict with certainty and recognise from its preceding conditions as necessary, just as we do an eclipse of the sun or the moon\" It is not this assignment to freedom of a purely extra-phenomenal character that is at variance with the pluralistic interpretation of evolution, although it is against this that most of the objections to the Kantian doctrine have been directed. On the contrary, as I shall attempt presently to show, in this respect it contains, as I have already hinted, a great truth. But if the characters of men, say, are fixed and immutable, just as the qualities of the chemical elements are assumed to be ; and the course of history therefore is as amenable to calculation as the movements of the planets, then — so far as experience goes — we may as well accept at once 'the firmly rooted conviction of the ancients concerning Fate,' as Schopenhauer was prepared to do^ We must inquire, therefore, in the first place whether the statement so often made by determinists is really defensible, viz. that persons and things are so ' Critique of Pure Reason, ist edn, p. 550, M. M.'s trans, p. 474 ; Practical Rcasoft, Hartenstein's edn, vol. v. p. 1 04. a C/. cit. p. 60. 296 Freedom and Foreknowledge far on a par that from a complete knowledge of a man's present 'empirical character' all his future actions could be foretold. It is obvious however that more than this would be needed ; that in fact a complete specifi- cation of all the circumstances in which the man is hereafter to be placed would be equally indispensable. It is obvious again that nothing short of a complete knowledge of the characters of all his contemporaries as well would suffice to render such complete specification possible. But, once more, the thoughts and deeds of contemporaries on the one hand and physical events on the other obviously could not be regarded as two inde- pendent series ; for conduct is unquestionably affected by natural changes, while at the same time certain natural changes are the result of human interference. What we should have to deal with then would be one vast predetermined series. The idea of such a rigorously concatenated system is just what the thorough-going determinist understands by the Uni- formity of Nature. All the same, when the man of science proceeds to picture out this uniformity, he does so only on the supposition that the whole is a mechanism, whose ultimate constituents are qualitatively alike and differ only quantitatively, in respect of mass, configura- tion, acceleration, and so forth. Given a complete know'ledge of the ivhole of such a system at two instants and its state at any assigned date in the future or in the past is ideally calculable. Men also interact and affect each other, in so far as they are members of a social system; but then their characters and interests are not alike, and therefore for each the world, though objectively the same, is different too. The words of Mechanism and Morals 297 Terence, Quot homines tot sententiae, are here to the point. As Oliver Wendell Holmes has somewhere humorously put it, whenever two persons M and N converse together there are six individuals concerned, M as he is, M as he thinks himself to be, M 2iS N thinks him to be ; and a like trinity as respects N. While it is true that we find no two individuals of our acquaintance entirely alike, it is true also on the other hand that we know no one completely: indeed adequate knowledge about the individual is allowed to be logically impossible. So far Professor Royce is right in his emphatic contention that an individual — however intimately known — is, as known, but an instance of a type : that M or N \s the only instance we know does not make him essentially unique'. If on the strength of this partial knowledge we venture to predict his future conduct, we are generalising, following, that is to say, the hypothetical procedure of science, as truly as when we affirm that he will die. But in certain circumstances the one prediction would be as justifiable as the other, since both alike would be instances of the * uniformity of nature,' viz. when the man's action, like a forced move in chess, is externally constrained ; or when again, like some trick of manner, it is secondarily automatic, a case of mechanical routine, the outcome of the dead self, the woodenness of the man as distinct from the growing lite. The cases to which Schopenhauer so triumph- antly appeals are in part of this sort. And even in the rest we find our confident expectations often belied: the most humdrum mortals rising to great occasions, and ' T/ie ]Vorld and the Individual, vol. I. pp. 293-4. 298 Freedom and Foreknowledge others, in whom the hue of resolution seemed native and ingrained, growing pallid in the supreme crisis and finally renouncing their cause. But the literature of conversions and counter-conversions, of which Pro- fessor James in his Gifford Lectures has given such an admirable selection, is amply sufficient to turn the flank of Schopenhauer's position. Moreover not only Kant but even Schopenhauer, the more rigorous determinist of the two, is inconsistent enough to recognise these radical changes of character. To be sure they regard them as ' mysteries,' cases of regeneration or new birth, manifestations not of ' nature ' but of ' grace ' ; but it is enough for us now that they admit their possibility. If the appeal then is to be to facts, can anyone soberly maintain that it is even ideally possible to forecast what he, still less what another, will think and do a week hence ? Besides, even if the forecast could be made it would take the week to make it ; for none of the intervening thoughts and deeds could be safely omitted ; nor could their rate be accelerated unless a like acceleration held throughout the world — and then we should be relatively just where we were before. The so-called forecast in a word would be after the event\ Surely if there is an empirical common-place beyond dispute it is this, that no man knows before- hand even his own possibilities completely, to say nothing of those of another. So far as experience goes what we find is not simply uniformity and routine, ftatura natiirata, but also innovation and variation, natura naturans. Hence while it is possible to publish Bradshaws Guide as ' Cf. Bergson, Les Donnees immediates^ 2^" edn, pp. 140 ff. Freedom as Determinism 299 well as the Nmitical Almanack, ZadkieVs Almanack is a fraud, and other forms of clairvoyance an absurdity, in spite of Schopenhauer's confident appeal to them. But after all his thorough-going determinism — or 'noumenal freedom' — was not based on experience. Further his definition of necessary as " that which follows from a given sufficient ground" does not justify him in assuming that the ground is once for all fixed and unalterable^ That is an assumption which he simply took over straight from Plato's theory of ideas and grievously misapplied. If on this assumption there could be events, their rigorous concatenation would, of course, be inevitable. But though the fixed and unalterable character of the ' free,' noumenal, grounds of nature would necessitate a phenomenal world fast bound in fate, we cannot till we have found this iiifer that. To asserl such a character of the noumenal, and thence to deduce what the phenomenal, world must be, is mere dogmatism. Nevertheless it was to this solid mechanism or ' nature-necessity' as he called it that Kant appealed in support of his 'empirical' determinism. And most incon- sistently, for he has himself allowed that this miscalled 'necessity of nature' neither logically nor really deserves the name. The 'uniformity of nature' is indeed so far a priori, as being part and parcel of the postulate that the very possibility of any empirical forecast at all implies. But nowpostulation isa practical notatheoretical matter: ^ What, we wonder, would Schopenhauer have said ol" the Kea, the New Zealand parrot that has developed the extraordinary habit of picking holes in the back of the living sheep ; or of other instances of changed habits which Darwin gives ? {firigin of Species, 6th edn, PP- 141-3)- 300 Freedom and Foreknowledge what then in the last resort does it really mean? Experi- ence itself being practical, and theory the result not the presupposition of experience, we can put the matter most simply by saying of experience what Helmholtz has said: — Hiergilt nurdereineRath: Vertraue und handle ! Das Utizuldngliche Dann wird^s Ereigniss^. This then is our postulate reduced to its lowest terms, and with this the progress of experience entirely agrees. The Many have all alike had to trust and try, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing, but on the whole always learning and so gradually achieving the order that determinism assumes to exist a priori. This established order or nahtra naturata then implies free causes, as Kant and Schopenhauer maintained, for it is their work ; but why suppose that by their very first stroke they forge for themselves adamantine chains ? Yet this is what Schopenhauer certainly assumed^ and what Kant seems to assume. Such a supposition, so far from making experience possible, would rather make it impossible ; for if the nature or essence of all agents were irrevocably fixed, how could — nay why should — there be any evolution at all ? A Spinozistic world, existing sub specie aeternitatis but really devoid of change, is all we could expect. Nevertheless, as I shall now try to show, the Kantian distinction between intelligible and empirical character is of real importance ; although, of course, we must take it to mean not that a subject has two characters, one noumenal the other phenomenal, but ^ Handbuch der physiologischen Optik, 2'*^ Aus. p. 594. ^ Cf. Siinuntliche Werke, Frauenstadt's edn, vol. 11. p. 598, vol. iv. p. 97. Homo noumenon and Homo phenomenon 301 simply that in the latter we have sundry manifestations of what the subject's character really is : operari sequitur esse, as Schopenhauer said. But Kant, I think, never meant to regard the free subject as Schopenhauer did, that is, as related to its acts as a logical essence is to its predicates. When therefore he speaks of it as out of time he does not mean to exclude process and change in the sense in which logic excludes these : that he postulates immortality in order to the attainment of perfection is enough to show this. What then does he mean ? What he really means is, I think, far more clearly expressed in his distinction of homo notunenon and lioino phenomenon. As phenomenal, 'when we are merely observing'^^ a man, he is an object simply, not a subject. Like all observed objects, he is so far conceived as merely part and parcel of that continuous whole we call nature ; and the successive states through which he is observed to pass are con- ceived as regularly linked in with those of other phenomena in this one unbroken continuum. It is to this regular succession of phenomenal events that the category of causality as used in science applies. But besides this causal relation to other phenomena everything phenomenal is related, on the one hand to the subject to whom it appears, and on the other to the 'transcendental object,' of which it is the appear- ance. Whether consistently or not with the main position of his critical philosophy, it is at all events a fact that Kant never dreamt of questioning the exist- ence of things per se as the ground of the phenomena that we observe externally. It is equally certain that ^ Kant's phrase. Cf. the context of first passage quoted above, p. 295. 302 Preedom and Foreknowledge o he regarded the 'transcendental subject' or the ground of the facts that we experience internally as also such a thing per se ; and that not simply from the standpoint of practice but also from that of theory. In a word the experience of phenomena, whether external or internal, implies the existence of corresponding things per se as their grounds or causes ; as Leibniz, Herbart and Lotze maintained. Wie viel Schein so viel HindeutiLng aitfs Sein was as true for Kant as it was for them. But the causality in this case is not the phenomenal and relative causality of science, but the noumenal and absolute causality that pertains solely to the ultimate efficiency of the thing per se. To man conceived as noumenal this absolute or free causality belongs. The reasonable in thought and conduct affords the most adequate instances of such causality ; for " reason," as Kant says, " does not yield to the impulse that is given empirically and does not follow the order of things as they present themselves as phenomena, but frames for itself, with perfect spon- taneity, a new order according to ideas to which it adapts the empirical conditions^" But he also gives the following simpler example : — " If at this moment I rise from my chair with perfect freedom, without the necessarily determining influence of natural causes, a new series has its absolute beginning in this event, with all its natural consequences ad indefinitunt^'' The phenomenal world then we may compare, as Lotze has done, to a continuous texture or fabric con- sisting entirely of the joint effects produced, the overt 1 Critique, ist edn, p. 548, M.M.'s trans, p- 473. ' Op. cit. p. 450, M.M. p. 392. The Phenomenal as filled Time 303 deeds done, by innumerable things per se or agents. The pattern of this texture is what we call filled time, and the process of filling-in is, as we know, ever going forward. So far as we are merely cognitive, we are confined to observations, past and present, of this pro- cess and to such more or less probable inferences concerning the future as these suggest. As a matter of fact our inductions frequently turn out right, and they prove to be more reliable the more methodically Ave proceed. It is so ; but as already said there is no necessity, either logical or real, about it. " For we could quite well imagine," Kant himself allows, " that phenomena might possibly be such that the under- standing would not find them conformable... : all might be in such confusion that nothing would be found in the succession of phenomena which could supply a rule of synthesis corresponding to the category of cause and effect, so that this category would therefore be altogether null and void and meaningless^" Thus it is simply to the ideal of a ' rule' of succession, which the weaving of the phenomenal texture de facto suggests, that we apply the concept called by Kant 'causality of nature.' Entirely distinct from this phenomenal or empirical causality is that which Kant calls 'causality of freedom ' — intelligible or noumenal causality. So different are the two that positive science fights shy of the terms, ' cause and effect,' because of their association with this efficient or noumenal causality, the existence of which positive science ignores and naturalism dogmatically denies altogether". But to the grounds ^ Critique of the Pure Reason. Analytic § 13, M.M. p. 80. "^ Cf. Naturalism and Agnosticism, vol. n. pp. 241, 247. 304 Freedom and Foreknowledge for assuming its existence we need not now return. At all events, as the very causality that produces the pattern in 'the context of nature' — Kant's phrase by the way — this noumenal causality obviously cannot be identified with the phenomenal causality — so-called — that the pattern itself displays. The essential charac- teristic of the latter is objective time-order according to universal law : the essential characteristic of the former is subjective initiation. Since it freely inserts those 'links in the chain of nature' it cannot, I say, be a part of the time-order that It makes. As compared with the phenomenal solidarity or continuity that they jointly produce, these independent, real, causes may then be said to be out of time. Their acts are not 'events' that seem to come out of [evenire), or to follow from, what has preceded in the time-process: they are rather ' interventions ' that appear in this process and con- stitute its further evolution. Accordingly in reference to them and them only ' ought ' has a meaning ; for, as Kant truly says : " If we look merely at the course of nature, 'ought' has no meaning whatever.... It expresses a possible action, the ground of which cannot be anything but a mere concept," cannot be a phe- nomenon \ This concept, as we should say now, is the teleological concept of worth or of the good, whereby the realm of ends in which it obtains is still further differentiated from the realm of nature in which it is meaningless. In the one, events appear as deter- mined by preceding events ; in the other, actions are initiated to secure future ends. But can we then say that the realm of ends is out * Op. cit. p. 547, M.M. p. 472. Abstract Time 305 of time ? Certainly not, as I have already maintained, in the sense that it is, like Plato's world of ideas, an eternal world of immutable essences, a logical world but not a real world at all. In tending to equate 'intelligible character' to mere essentia -\- existentia, as Schopenhauer expressly did, Kant's procedure is in- defensible as well as inconsistent. But what is the time, beyond which, so to say, free agents are said to exist '^ It is that time which Kant conceived as yielding an exact science of chronometry, the pendant of geometry the exact science of space. It is time as a continuous quantity of one dimension, and so far comparable to a line, sav-e that its points or parts are not simultaneous but successive. Succession in this time is conceived as constant ; in other words this time is reo^arded as homog^eneous and so as measurable, divisible into intervals of equal length. In a word it is the abstract time of science in which we imag-ine the successive states of the whole phenomenal world to be plotted out, suggesting, as Bergson has admirably put it, the substitution for the complete world of experience of a set of kinematographic pictures. What then is left out of this abstract or empty time ? Paradoxical though it appear, what is left out, we shall find, are the mutually implicated facts of duration and change. An interval of time is not the same as the experience of duration, and the two different states situated at its extremes are no equi- valent for the experience of change. But these problems of time which we have here broached are far too complex for discussion now. The only farther eluci- dation I can offer is to raise one more question and w. 20 3o6 Freedom and Foreknowledge content myself with a very summary answer. How do we come by this schema of time ? We come by it solely because our experience involves both duration and change ; and thus, as has been well said, ** time is in us though we are not in time." But for experience duration is not something objective, is not a homo- geneous linear quantity that is abstracted from a multiplicity of presentations. What the term duration ultimately represents is our immediate subjective ex- perience as actively striving and wearing on: it implies the actual living, which only is actual in so far as it is not homogeneous and empty but full of changes endured or wrought. And change again as experienced is not merely a temporal succession, a, d, c..., where a is not when b is, and c is not till b is no more. Such a schema would never yield experience : it answers exactly to that zero limit of experience that, as I have already remarked, Leibniz ascribed to bodies, when he said omne corpus mens ino7nentanea est. But experience yields that schema ; and empirical psychology affords us a fairly complete analysis of its constituents and a fairly probable account of their genetic synthesis. Experience however yields that schema only because experience, as living, is the nattira naturajis that leaves behind it, as it were, the nahtra naturata to which the schema entirely belongs. Between the intemporal world of ideas and the temporal world of phenomena free agents then have their place\ ^ Cf. Bergson, U Evolution creatrice, p. 391. "The feature in Professor Bergson's contribution to the philosophy of experience which distinguishes it fundamentally from the views of previous thinkers, is his new conception of time as concrete time, or what Necessitarianism so far not proved 307 The necessitarian position is not then, we seem entitled to conclude, empirically warranted. As an argument from experience it rests on the assumption that phenomena are the whole ; that there is, in other words, nothing but filled time : whence and how time is filled, it does not inquire. Once this foundation is found faulty, all the empirical arguments that rest upon it may be overturned. Nor, with one exception, are the supposed a priori arguments more satisfactory. That every event must have a cause we may allow to be axiomatic, but not that the same cause — the same efficient cause, that is — must always produce the same effect. Again to identify such a cause with an essence, to equate it, as it were, to a reason was the mistake of rationalism, which Kant completely exposed in his important pre-critical paper on Negative Quantities. he calls Duration" (D. Balsillie, Mind, 191 1, p. 357). I think however that I may fairly claim to have anticipated him to some extent. In 1886, three years before the publication of Professor Bergson's Donuees, I had written a long paragraph on this topic, containing inter alia the following: — "Thus. ..there is an element in our concrete time-perception which has no place in our abstract conception of time. In time, conceived as physical, there is no trace of intensity ; in time, as psychically experienced, duration is primarily an intensive magnitude" {E?icy. Brit. 'Psychology,' nth edn, p. 577). I should probably have taken an earlier opportunity of mentioning this point, if I had known before, that one of Professor Bergson's compatriots had already called attention to it — of this however I only became aware quite recently. Cf. M. G. Rageot in the Revue philosophiqtie, t. LX. 1905, p. 84. In a reply to him Professor Bergson {ibid. p. 229), while establishing his own independence, strangely misses the point of resemblance, which is not, as he supposes, between my ' presentation-continuum ' and his duree reelle, but between this and my analysis of time as concrete. On the main question see further in Supplementary Note iv. 20 2 3o8 Freedom and Foreknowledge But if we start from theism the case is quite other- wise : then indeed the necessitarian position appears to be axiomatic\ It is, I think, generally allowed that in the long theological controversies, which for cen- turies have raged round our problem, logic has been on the side of those who, like Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin and Edwards, have maintained the doctrine of divine predestination, the doctrine "that God orders all events, and the volitions of moral agents amongst others, by such a decisive disposal, that the events are infallibly connected with his disposal""; or otherwise put, that second causes in nature are incompatible with the admis- sion that there is only one cause, the First Cause. What however does this start from theism imply ? It implies a supposed knowledge of God that is independent of experience — partly as innate, partly as revealed. It im- plies further that knowing what God is apart from the world we infer what any world that he creates must be. The absolute omniscience and omnipotence of God are regarded as beyond question; and from these follow as a corollary the absolute and eternal decrees. As Jonathan Edwards concisely put it : " All things are perfectly and equally in his view from eternity ; hence it will follow that his designs or purposes are not things formed anew, founded on any new views or appear- ances, but are all eternal purposes." But there is another corollary equally evident from which those intent on theism at any cost seek in vain to escape. There is — as already said — no room left for other * So we come round again to the divergence between pluralism and theism from which we first set out. Cf. Lect. xni. ////'/. ^ Jonathan Edwards, Enquiry, 4th edn, 1775, p. 406. Necessitarianism and Theism 309 causes, other purposes, no room for a real world with such a God at all. As a Scottish professor of divinity has said : — "If God is thus the real cause of all that is, the universe would seem to be merely God evolving himself, and there has been no true creation, no bringing into being of wills separate from his own\" In a word — as I attempted to show in the second lecture — starting from the One there is no arriving at the Many. If we attempt to conceive of God apart from the world there is nothing to lead us on to the idea of creation. On the other hand, if we start from the Many, it has, I trust, become more and more clear as we have ad- vanced, that we find there no justification for the notion of a 'block universe' — as Professor James called it — a universe, that is, in which every detail is decreed, in which real initiative, evolution as we understand it, is impossible. But, in fact, we have to start froni the Many, and accordingly always do — this too I trust has been made clear. Moreover, if thorough-going deter- minism were true, we should, it has seemed equally clear, never attain to the idea of a Creator at all. For if ourselves devoid of all originality what meaning could that idea have for us } The doctrine of predestination has been for theo- logians a hopeless and insoluble problem as well as a source of bitter strife largely because of this opposition between a prioj'i speculation and actual experience. "That in the actual passage of events something should actuall)- come to pass, something new which previ- ously was not ; that history should be something more than a translation into time of the eternally complete ^ Rev. Marcus Uods, Ency. Brit. 9th edn, s.v. rredeslination. 3IO Freedom and Foreknowledge content of an ordered world — this," said Lotze, " is a deep and irresistible demand of our spirit, under the influence of which we all act in life. Without its satisfaction the world would be, not indeed unthinkable and self-contradictory, but unmeaning and incredible^" But though I have used that ominous word 'pre- destination ' I am not going to attempt to adjudicate the theological differences of Augustine and Pelagius, Arminius and Calvin. It is the wider issue — that of reconciling pluralism and theism — that alone concerns us. Nevertheless there are two or three points con- nected with the purely theological controversy that are worthy of notice. First, in its most rigid and, as it seems to me, its most logical form — in what is called Supralapsarianism — the dogma of predestination has always appeared so shocking, so * excruciating ' as Augustine said, to ordinary humanity, that it has not only been charged on moral grounds with tending to atheism, but it has been used either openly or covertly to promote atheism. Readers of church history will remember the fates of Gottschalk and Vanini. But, secondly and as more important, we may notice the attempts that have been made to tone down the ex- treme rigour of the Calvinistic dogma — as represented, for example, in Jonathan Edwards's classical treatise — by distinguishing between the divine prescience and the divine purposes. The text of all such attempts is to be found in a famous saying of Origen : — " God's prescience is not the cause of things future, but their being future is the cause of God's prescience that they will be." To the relations of finite beings this dis- ' Meiap/iysk, §65, E. t. p. 117. The Predestinarian Controversy 311 tinction is certainly applicable. I may confidently expect what another will do, without any responsibility for his deed ; but in proportion as he has become what he is through my deliberate influence and effort the distinction lapses : so far, what I expect is just what I intended. If then the divine decrees and the divine prescience are coeval, if God is the sole cause of all that is and foresees infallibly all that can ever happen, a fortiori it seems futile to attempt to discriminate between what he decrees and what he merely permits. The philosopher Reid, who in opposition to Priestley attempted to reconcile divine foreknowledge and human freedom, made the extraordinary blunder of comparing foreknowledge of the future with memory of the past. He practically assumed that because memory of the past is memory of what was once both future and contingent, the fact remembered remains contingent though it is future no more. Nothing is easier than to turn this analogy against him with fatal effect, as his own disciple Hamilton has actually done. " Facttim infectum reddere, ne Deus quidem potest, has been said and sung in a thousand forms," says Hamilton. The past that is to say is necessary : if then God's prescience resembles our memory, it is only because the past and the future are both alike to him : as the past is not contingent so neither is the future\ But notwithstanding his exposure, Hamilton still sides with Reid, not with Priestley. And this brings to our notice another attempt to save the Divine Sovereignty, as it is called, without surrendering the ^ Tiie Works of T/ios. Reid, Hamilton's edition, p. 631 n. 312 Freedom and Foreknowledge freedom of man ; and that is the simple declaration that the problem is transcendent. The conciliation of divine foreknowledge and human freedom is, said Hamilton, "one of the things to be believed, not understood": all "attempts to harmonize these anti- logies by human reasoning to human understanding " are to be rejected as " futile...' vain wisdom all and false philosophy,' " But what if antilogy is only a euphemism for contradiction, and what of the logical cogency of the predestinarian view, about which, however repulsive, there is nothing obscure or in- conceivable ? I do not think Jonathan Edwards overstated his case, when he said : — " There is no geometrical theorem whatsoever, more capable of strict demonstration than that God's certain Prescience of the volitions of moral agents is inconsistent with such a contingency of these events, as is without all Necessity^" The pluralist then, it would seem, has no alternative but either to deny the complete prescience of the One or to abandon the self-determination of the Many, and thus wholly surrender his own position. There is however still an old attempt at conciliation, recently set forth anew by a former Gifford Lecturer, which we perhaps ought not to pass altogether without notice. ** Foreknowledge in time," says Professor Royce, " is possible only of the general and of the causally pre- determined, and not of the unique and the free. Hence neither God nor man can perfectly foreknow, at any temporal moment, what a free-w^ill agent is yet to do. On the other hand, the Absolute possesses a perfect ^ Op. cit. p. 182. Attempts at a Concitiation 313 knowledge at one glance of the tv/iote of the teinporal order, present, past and fiture. This knowledge is ill-called foreknowledo^e. It is eternal knowledofe\" But I fear that even eternity will not afford a secure refuge from the difficulty. It is noteworthy that, while it is of God that Professor Royce denies perfect fore- knowledge, it is of the Absolute that he asserts eternal knowledge. There is here more than an accidental difference of expression. Professor Royce in fact, like only too many theists, is guilty of that vacillation between God and the Absolute which Mr Bradley we found quaintly comparing to the futile attempts of a doQ- to follow two masters". The Absolute must be in every respect all-inclusive, but God, if his creatures are free, is so far not all-inclusive. As I have already said the Creator together with his creatures may be called the Absolute ; but unless the creatures — said to be made out of nothing — verily remain themselves but nothing, God is, no longer at any rate, the Absolute. To God we may attribute personality and therefore experience and knowledge ; since for him the world is a Not-self, although his own creation. But we cannot attribute personality to the Absolute, for there the duality of Self and Not-self is necessarily tran- scended. We cannot then speak of the Absolute as knowing ; but since it is all-inclusive we may perhaps say that it ' possesses knowledge ' — a vague phrase that will mean too little to help us much\ ' The World and the individual, vol. II. p. 374. Italics the author's. * Cf. Lcct. II. p. 44. * It would be equally true to say, as Mr Bosanquet has observed, that it possesses colour. 314 Fi'eedom and Foreknowledge But if now we turn for a moment to consider what Professor Royce understands by an eternal knowledge that takes in * at a glance ' — the expression is odd — the whole temporal order — again an odd but significant expression — we shall find that in fact we are not helped at all. He distinguishes two senses of present, an exclusive — as when we hear or apprehend a musical air note by note, where each note excludes the rest from coexistence with itself — and an inclusive — as when we take in or comprehend the melody as a whole and appreciate it. In this latter case the whole melody is present, included at once in what I have called a time perspective. The range of such inclusive present, or time-span, is for us extremely limited, but within such limits we experience a sort of temporal ubiquity. As I have already had occasion to observe, when this limit is reduced to zero, there is strictly no experience. Now, on the other hand, imagine all limits withdrawn and you have the sort of experience Professor Royce calls eternal knowledge. Comparing the whole temporal order to an infinite symphony, he holds that the Absolute knows it at once as we might know one brief rhythm. But now, we ask, when is it that we grasp this rhythm as an ordered whole? When it is complete — a parte post. And here surely the fatal defect of Professor Royce's solution for our purpose is evident. No wonder he talks of ' the temporal order' as if it were fixed! If the Absolute takes in at a glance the whole temporal order of the world, it can only be, according to Professor Royce's analogy, because, as Hegel supposed, the world's evolution is for it merely a rehearsal after the symphony is composed. The Phiralisfs Via Media 315 But such an absolute One, as we have seen many times over, has no need and leaves no room for a real Many at all. Further, it seems contradictory to attribute to it the limitations of the temporal stand- point along with the perfection of the eternaP: the composer can never be a mere auditor too. This remark brings us back to the pluralist's solution, and raises an obvious difficulty. Is God then not the composer it will reasonably be asked: are we not assuminof that the world is his creation ? Or has he only devised an -^olian harp and left the winds of chance to call the tune, being himself then only an auditor } Such questions suggest two extremes, neither of which is compatible with pluralism ; between which however there lies a via media that may be. All is not decreed : the world is not created like a symphony. Again, all possibilities are not left open : the Many have not severally unlimited freedom, that ' freedom of indifference ' which is indistinoruishable from chance. God's creatures are creators, the pluralist maintains : their ' nature ' is partly his doing, partly their own : he assigns the talents, they use or misuse them. Not everything that is possible is possible to any, yet some initiative is open to every one: none are left with no talent at all. The total possibilities then, however far back we go, are fixed ; but within these, contingencies, however far forward we go, are open. " An infinite Mind, with prevision thus extended beyond all that is to all that can be," said Martineau, "is lifted above surprise or disappointment. ..yet, in- stead of being shut up in a closed and mechanized * See SufJijlumentary Note iv. 3i6 Freedom and Foreknowledge universe, lives amid the free play of variable character and contingent history. Is this a limitation of God's foresight, that he cannot read all volitions that are to be? Yes, but it is a self limitation..,', lending us a portion of his causation, he refrains from covering all with his omniscience...." "There is no absurdity in supposing," said Dugald Stewart, "that the Deity may, for wise purposes, have chosen to open a source of contingency in the voluntary action of his creatures, to which no prescience can possibly extend." " God who is everything," said Jowett, "is not really so much as if He allowed the most exalted free agencies to exist side by side with Him." " Free will," said Tennyson, "was undoubtedly the main miracle, apparently an act of self-limitation by the Infinite, and yet a revelation by Himself and of Himself \" — A much longer catena of passages similar in purport could easily be provided. As a consequence of the growing acceptance of the pluralistic standpoint, this admission of what is very inaccurately styled the * doctrine of a finite God^ ' has become widely prevalent of late. It has its difficulties, no doubt, as the idea of creation for us must always have. But, on the other hand, by means of it, the problem of evil, to which I propose to invite your attention next, is greatly simplified. ' hi Mentor iam, Robinson's edition, p. 260. * Cf. below, Lect. xx. LECTURE XV. THE PROBLEM OF EVIL AND PESSIMISM. The problem of evil has been recently called ' the crux of theism': the phrase serves to emphasise how- thought has moved on since Leibniz, the philosopher and courtier, in obedience to royal orders wrote his famous Theodicy — a piece of 'superficiality incarnate,' Wm James has ventured to call it. Nowadays it is asked : How is the evil in the world compatible with there being a God at all ? For Leibniz the existence of God was demonstrable : thus for him the problem was simply to show that this world is the best possible. Whether he succeeded or not, it may fairly be maintained that, his main premises granted, no other reasonable supposition is possible. God would not be God, if his world were not the best. Even Hume explicitly admitted this. "There are," he says, "many inexplicable difficulties in the works of Nature, which, if we allow a perfect author to be proved a priori become only seeming difficulties for the narrow capacity of man, who cannot trace infinite relations." And again, after a lengthy summary of the circumstances on which natural evil in the main depends, he continues : " Shall we say that these circumstances are not necessary and that they might 3 1 8 The Problem of Evil and Pessiniisin easily have been altered in the contrivance of the universe ? This decision seems too presumptuous for creatures so blind and ignorant. Let us be more modest in our conclusions. Let us allow that, if the goodness of the Deity — could be established on any tolerable reasons a priori, these phenomena, however untoward, would not be sufficient to subvert that prin- ciple ; but might easily, in some unknown manner, be reconcilable to it\" And in fact this position is one continually adopted. Lotze, for example, holds fast to the goodness of God and so — while frankly admitting that for our finite wisdom the problem of evil is inso- luble — rests satisfied that there is a solution, though we do not understand itl But if we start from the evil that for our immediate experience seems really beyond question, it may be contended that the solution should come first, and that without this the theistic position is not only beyond proof, but impossible. It now becomes utterly futile to represent evil as essentially negative and unreal, however forcible in other respects this time-honoured argument may be. For immediate experience what is evil is just as real and positive as its contrary good. Again, from the pluralistic point of view it seems a useless mockery of the Many not a vindication of the One to put Leibniz into verse, as Pope did, and declare 'all partial evil universal good.' So long as the evil that I suffer brings no good to me, furthers nothing that I approve, so long God will not be God for me ; on the other hand in proportion as I ■* Dialogues concertiing Natural Religion, Green and Grose's edn, vol. II. pp. 412, 451 ; cf. also pp. 444 ff. * Cf. Microcosmus, Eng. trans, vol. 11. p. 717. The only Theodicy open to ns 319 discern a soul of good in things evil I may bless and trust him though he slay me. Complete certainty one way implies complete certainty the other : God and Evil, in a word, are contraries : if the problem of evil is altogether insoluble, there is an end of theism : if God exists, there is nothing absolutely evil. But it is important here to bear in mind a distinction on which Kant was wont to lay much stress : failure of proof is very different from disproof. It may be that in this life we shall ever fall as far short of a triumphant and definitive theodicy as we have of a rigidly demon- strative theology. But scepticism is not atheism : where there is room for doubt there is 'room for faith.' At any rate one thingr seems clear : whatever be the details of the divine vindication it must show that at least the possibility of evil is essential to the world's perfection ; and even if we cannot show this completely and in every case, yet to prove the contrary, it may be maintained, is equally impossible. Now at the outset of our inquiry we came to the conclusion that the theistic ideal, if it can be sustained, would add immeasurably to the worth of the world as pluralism alone has to conceive it. But we have found no theoretical proof of the divine exist- ence and cannot therefore directly outflank the so-called enigma of evil as an empirical problem. The problem then for us seems to formulate itself in this wise : — Granting that if there is a God, this world must be not only good but — so far as it is his creation — the best possible, have we any certain evidence that it is not ? Kee'ping strictly on the defensive the only theodicy we can attempt is to require those who accuse to prove their indictment. 320 The Problem of Evil and Pessimism The pessimists with their contention that the world is the worst possible or absolutely bad confront us first. A distinction is sometimes made between those who are pessimists by temperament and those who are pes- simists on purely theoretical grounds, as the result of dispassionate inquiry and conviction ; but in truth I doubt if there has ever been a pronounced pessimist who could be placed in the latter class alone. Schopen- hauer and Mainlander, who are accounted philosophers, were every whit as morbid as Byron or Leopardi. The pessimist sees the world not by the dry, objective light of reason, but rather looks out upon it through the subjective humours of his own sickly *pity for himself This leads him to magnify or even enjoy whatever misery, to minimize and perhaps envy whatever happiness, he finds without\ How can we accept the evidence of such diseased and pusillanimous souls, or trust the theories they propound ? But the temperamental op- timist, it may be said, is at least as one-sided, and the theoretical optimist is far more superficial. Not only is that true, but it is true further, as has been often urged, that the jubilant and fatuous optimism of the eighteenth century helped to bring into vogue the pessimism of the nineteenth, and even justified it as at least a salutary reaction. When the actual evil in the world is compared to the shadows in a picture, or to the dissonances in a sonata, that only enhance the aesthetic perfection of the whole, it is surely reasonable ^ " I rejoice to discover more and more the misery of men and things, to touch them with the hand and to be seized with a cold shudder as I search through the unblessed and terrible secret of life." Leopardi, quoted by Sully, Pessimism, 2nd edn, 1892, p. 27. Pessimism as a Reaction 321 to Insist on the one thing immediately certain, the inherent badness of these blemishes and discords as such. It is surely reasonable too to argue that if the actual evil of the world is part of its perfection as a whole, then to replace it by good, to change actual misery into happiness, actual vice into virtue, would only diminish not increase the world's perfection — a redudio ad abs7irdti7n, if ever there was one\ No wonder that such shallow formalism should strike earnest men as insincere". " I cannot refrain from declaring," said Schopenhauer, "that to me optimism appears not merely as an absurd but as a positively wicked way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the unspeakable suffering of mankind — anyhow," he con- tinues, " let no one perchance suppose that the teaching of Christianity favours optimism ; for on the contrary in the Gospels 'world' and 'evil' are used almost as synonymous expressions^" Yes, but world in the New Testament does not mean the whole sum of things but only 'the things seen and temporal,' the natural without the spiritual. And here we touch upon the point in which optimism and pessimism are equally at fault. The one seeks to show that this world is, to use Wallace's phrase, 'a feli- cific institution,' the other has no difficulty in showing that it is not ; and therefore, since both start from the * Cf. H. Rashdall, The Theory of Good and Evil, ^90?) vol. 11. pp. 242 f. "^ Several writers have maintained that Leibniz was not sincere and one even went so far as to say that Leibniz both in writing and in conversation admitted as much. Cf. O. Willareth, Die Lehre vom Uebcl bei Leibtiiz, Strassburg, 1898, p. 12. ' Die Welt als Wille und Vorsiellung, Bk 111. § 59. W. 2X 322 The Problem of Evil and Pessimism same eudaemonistic premisses, the pessimist claims to have won his suit, and disposed of the old theodicies and theologies altogether. Pessimism has certainly shown, as Wallace said, " that he who makes happiness the aim of his life is on the wrong tack," but then rational ethics, which is not pessimistic, also allows that. In bringing home to our modern consciousness the hopelessness of the hedonistic theories of this life that had dominated the thinking of the eighteenth century, pessimism then, we must admit, has been of lasting service. But deliberately, as Schopenhauer does, to endorse Byron's petulant stanza, Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen, Count o'er thy days from anguish free, And know, whatever thou hast been, 'Tis something better not to be; to maintain, whatever a man is, that in proportion as his life fails of pleasure it fails in worth, is to make a great assumption which experience does not bear out. That a world of happiness unalloyed, were it possible, would be the best — though so widely held — is just the position that we must presently carefully examine. But before we attempt to discuss this dogma common to optimism and pessimism alike\ it will be worth our while to subject the subsequent steps in the pessimist's argument to some criticism. Optimists were fond of saying that pleasure is positive and pain negative : Schopenhauer's first step is to assert that, on the contrary, pain is positive and pleasure negative. Perfect and continuous happiness would then have the value zero : there would be no pain. "Whatever is opposed to our will, thwarting ^ Cf. below, Lect. xvi. pp. 3378". Schopenhauer on Feeling and IV ill 323 and resisting it, that is, whatever is displeasing and painful — of all this," he says, " we are directly sensitive, at once and very distinctly : [on the other hand] we do not feel the healthfulness of our whole body, but only the one spot ' where the shoe pinches ' ; so also we do not think about the state of our affairs in general, so long as all goes perfectly well, but only about some insignificant trifle or other that annoys us. On this ground," he continues, " is based the negativity of well-being and happiness in contrast to the positivity of pain, upon which I have so often insisted^" Pes- simism based on the crumpled rose-leaf we might say : could anything be more perverse ! We cannot indeed forget the harrowing pictures that Schopenhauer loved to draw of all the vast and varied ills of life. But this after all is not the point. He tells us, for example, that " if we could even approximately conceive the sum of want and pain and misery of every sort on which in its course the sun daily shines, we should acknowledge that it would have been better if the earth like the moon had been but a lifeless mass"." But he forgets that such a conclusion would only be forced upon us if we accepted his assumptions. Grant that all the good the sun sees counts for nothing, lies below the threshold, as we now say, and that only the evil is positive for us ; then we might agree with him. Nay, if his psychology of will is sound, we must in any case do so. For "all volition," he maintained, "springs from want, implies defect and therefore suffering." Yet lasting satisfaction and contentment ^ Parer^a und Paralipomaia, Bd ll. ^ 150. * Op. cit. § 157 init. 21 — 2 324 The Problem of Evil and Pessimism are impossible, since fresh wants and new disappoint- ments arise continually. From the lowest stages of its manifestation to the highest, the will altogether lacks any definite end or aim : it is simply ever striving after something, for in such striving its whole essence lies. To look for meaning or progress in life or history is then absurd. " So the subject of volition lies per- manently on the revolving wheel of Ixion, pours for ever into the Danaids' sieve, is Tantalus eternally yearn ing\" In a word, A lies Leben ist Leiden. Whether Schopenhauer has succeeded better in prov- ing the good in the world to be negative than Leibniz In proving this of the evil in it, is a question. Certainly if the rosy pictures of the one are not decisive neither is the gallery of horrors of the other. But till Schopen- hauer's psychology of feeling and will is established, so long his pessimism will lack the foundation upon which he himself professed to rest it. This is the point on which I would now insist, the point which Schopen- hauer's readers, carried away by his masterly delinea- tions of human ill, are only too apt to overlook. His follower, von Hartmann, however allows — what indeed there is no denying — that pleasure and pain are alike positive, and also that there is progress and development in the world : he even takes some trouble expressly to refute Schopenhauer's teaching in these respects. Nevertheless he holds Schopenhauer's pessimism to have been in the main justifiable ; for he claims to show that there is a preponderance of evil in the world, a preponderance too that steadily increases as the world's evolution ^ Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, ^§ ^Z^ 56. Von Hartmann's Inductions 325 proceeds. He professes to prove this, first inductively as a fact, from an exhaustive survey of experience ; and secondly deductively, as a necessary consequence from established psychological and ethical principles. The empirical survey he regards as essentially a matter of accounts : just as we might proceed to ascertain whether there are more apples or more pears on a given table, so, he says, we must proceed to strike a balance between the amount of pleasure and the amount of pain in the world at a given time ; and then, comparing successive balance sheets, we shall see which way the world is tending. Here again as with Schopenhauer we notice the failure to distinguish between pleasure and worth : the contented pig is after all better off, it would seem, than the aspiring philosopher, since he suffers less. However, leaving this all-important distinction aside and keeping strictly to the question immediately raised — Is the algebraic sum of pleasure and pain in the world positive or negative ? — we have to ask how this sum is to be worked out. It is not simply a question of counting, as Hartmann's trivial reference to apples and pears assumes, it is a question of measuring. How are we to find the quantity that admits of common measure ? I can think of but one way. "Like brain vibrations," says Hartmann, "call forth in all individuals like sen- sations." At any rate there is a fundamental continuity in all protoplasm, so that like functions have everywhere like characteristics. Regarded from this side pains are but the subjective concomitant of disturbed function : already the physiologist can frequently estimate the amount of this disturbance, and as knowledge advances 326 The Problem of Evil and Pessimism physiology will doubtless become more and more a quantitative science. All the pain in the world seems unquestionably correlated to physiological process, of which protoplasm is the common basis. Here then, I say, there does seem to be some chance of working out Hartmann's hedonistic balance sheet. But aoain from the physiological standpoint it is unquestionable that pain as disturbance of function is abnormal, the exception rather than the rule. Pleasure in general tends to en-hance and promote life, pain to diminish and extinguish it. If the abnormal really prepon- derated, were in fact the normal, the world could hardly have advanced so far. The most hopeful method for his purpose then can hardly justify the conclusion to which Hartmann professes to be led. But he preferred to work from the subjective standpoint : here, however, he acknowledges two un- deniable difficulties. Let us see how he meets them. First, the estimate of the pure pleasure-pain total of two subjective states is more uncertain the more diverse they are. Accordingly he proposes ' as far as possible ' to leave such comparisons aside and to be content with ' a special balance ' for each class of feelings separately. "If now," he winds up by saying, "it turns out that every one of these classes apart yields a negative result, all need for an estimation of one against the other is entirely avoided : since all the negative special results simply add up to a negative total." //"all turn out as supposed this is beautifullysimple, of course: there seems no need even to add ; and, by the way, addino- is still impossible without a common unit. But then, so far as I can learn, neither Hartmann nor anyone Hedonistic 'Balance-sheets' 327 else has ever so much as attempted to work these special sums\ But secondly, there is 'the still greater difficulty ' of estimating the sensations of different sub- jects, one against the other. To avoid this, however, we are told again, is easy: "one strikes the personal balance of his life for every individual, and since all come out negative, one has only to add them up to reach the universal world-balance." The preliminary 'if is here dispensed with and the result straightway assumed. Identifying the supposed solul^ility of the question with its actual solution in favour of pessimism, Hartmann expresses surprise that empirical pessimism is nevertheless combated so much. But this opposition is partly explicable, he thinks, 'from the psychological motives and the sources of error incident to the working out of each one's own balance^ I ' A good specimen this of that charming naivete, for which Hartmann is unsurpassed. Remembering that Hartmann elsewhere has thought it advisable to " meet the suspicion that his pessimistic proclivities are due to a gloomy personal experience, by means of a pleasant little sketch of his home life, lit up by the presence of a sympathetic wife, of a beautiful engaging boy... and of a few congenial friends^" one naturally wonders how far 'psychological motives,' how far the inevitable 'errors contributed to * The superficial character of the summary which Hartmann's disciple, A. Drews, gives of this empirical proof of pessimism is noteworthy. Cf. his Eduard von Hartinanns philosophisches System im Grundriss, 2te Ausg., 1906, pp. 320-2. " "Zur Pessimismus-Frage," /V//A-'j-^//«Vr//i? Monats/iefte, xix. 79 f. Italics mine. This article is republished in Hartmann's Philosophische Zeii/ragen. ' Sully, Pessimism, ist edn, p. 114. 328 The Problefn of Evil and Pessiniism perturb his balance. At any rate he provides himself with an interesting dilemma. We may now inquire whether Hartmann is more convincing when he attempts to deduce pessimism from psychological principles. Here he is substantially at one with Schopenhauer and we may deal with both together. Both alike on the one hand confound all psychical activity with will and on the other identify will exclusively with desire. In the first sense both presentatioH and feeling would presuppose will, since they both imply psychical activity or life. But the converse would be true when will is restricted to the narrower sense of desire. Desire does not merely give rise to feeling ; it also presupposes it ; we do not want and then feel pain, but rather feel pain and then and there want its removal. Further and more important — so far as feeling is antecedent to pursuit — there may be pleasurable feelings which cannot be what Schopen- hauer called negative, the mere filling up of a want, for they may come without our striving and be wholly unforeseen. We do not need to cite only such rare cases of good fortune as unexpected legacies or sudden unearned increments ; there are few lives without any agreeable disappointments, any halcyon days, golden opportunities, or runs of luck. It is not only the lilies of the field that are clothed, though they toil not neither do they spin. Finally — and as the fundamental fact in the whole matter — spontaneity and an unimpeded energy, that is for a time at least self-sustaining, are sources of pleasure and well being to most creatures during a large part of their lives, quite apart from desire or antecedent pain. In a word absolute privation, like Pain, Desire and Will 329 absolute negation, is unthinkable : the world cannot begin in utter bankruptcy without any assets. Hart- mann's initial state of the Absolute as empty will is the most glaring contradiction of a writer who has perpetrated more absurdities than any other writer of repute that I know. How, it has been often asked, can the Absolute lack anything ? And how too, we may add, can the finite Many, if parts of the Absolute, lack everything ? Only to him that hath can be given : we cannot therefore equate life with privation, resolve all activity into desire nor all pleasure into the mere cessation of the pain to which unsatisfied desire gives rise. But it is not even true that wherever there is desire there is pain. The huntsman, for example, only desires to catch the fox because of the pleasure of the pursuit ; and, in general, we account that man happy who can follow his favourite pursuit ; for " it is not the goal, but the course which makes us happy," as Jean Paul Richter said. Still without 'progressive attainment' there would be no pleasure in pursuit^ ; and if will were nothing but desire, we should be as much at the mercy of vain desires, as Schopenhauer and von Hartmann suppose. But grown men are not the slaves of endless whimsies, they are not ever crying for the moon like a spoiled child. Again, strictly speaking, to will is not to desire but rather to control desires : its sphere is possible action and its essential characteristic, even according to Schopenhauer, is not want but energy. "We exist only as we energise ; pleasure is the rellex of unimpeded ^ To have insisted on this point, overlooked by Sidgwick, is a merit of Professor Mackenzie's Manual of EiJiics; of. ch. vi. Note i. 330 TJie Problem of Evil and Pessimism energy ; energy is the means by which our faculties are developed ; and a higher energy the endyN\\\z\i develop- ment proposes. I n action is thus contained the existence, happiness, improvement and perfection of our being\" These words of Hamilton are but an echo of the teach- ing of Aristotle, with which the teaching of Kant and Fichte had much in common. But now it was from Kant and Fichte that Schopenhauer and von Hartmann derived their doctrine of the primacy of will, a doctrine incompatible, as we have seen, with the identification of will and desire. Unless this identification is true, the pessimism is groundless, which they rest upon it. The question of its truth or falsity is one for psychology, and I can only say that I do not know of a single psychologist who would uphold it. In spite of pluming themselves on the inductive and scientific character of their method, Schopenhauer and von Hartmann have perhaps surpassed the most ' romantic ' of their countrymen in the wildness of their metaphysical speculations : here, if anywhere, we have mysticism and mythology in excelsis. And it is in these metaphysical speculations that their identification of will with blind desire, and the consequent complete separation between will and idea, work out their own refutation. Let error but develop a outrance and it explodes itself. This truth, which, as we shall see, is for Hartmann the golden thread of his pessimism, applies — as perhaps it ought to do — to his own meta- physics. "If will as such is blind how shall it in willing come by sigJit ? If as will it is endless, irrational impulse, how shall it in willing be other than just as * Sir W. Hamilton, Discussions on Philosophy, etc., p. 40. Hartmanii s qtiestions to Schopenhauer 331 endless and irrational ? How shall what is aimless set to work to give itself an aim^ ? " These are the ques- tions which Hartmann addresses to Schopenhauer, and which he rightly enough maintains Schopenhauer did not and could not answer. Let us see how he answers them himself. Schopen- hauer, he says, failed to reach the rational ; Hegel, to reach the real. By combining the Panthelisimis of the one with the Panlogisnius of the other, Hartmann claims to have corrected the one-sidedness of both ; and thus, in place of an Absolute that is only Will or only Idea, to reach an Absolute Spirit of which both will and idea are the attributes. The only objection he finds to calling this Absolute Spirit God, as Spinoza did, "lies in the exclusively religious origin" of that term. Such an all-powerful, all-wise Being could, if he would, we should suppose, create a world that is not only the best possible but absolutely good, not a world, that, though the best possible, is irretrievably bad. How came Hartmann, who seems to begin by agreeing so far with the optimist's views concerning God and the world, nevertheless to end by siding with the pessimist ? Unlike Leibniz and theists generally, Hartmann, as is fitting in a romantic philosopher, starts his philosophy not with a theology but with a theogony. Here we shall find the answer to our ques- tions. Before time was — filled time that is to say — Thought or the Idea in the Absolute was only 'latent' and could not of itself pass over into actual existence, and Will was only potential, had only the capacity ' " Ueber die nothwendige Unibildung der Schopenhauerschen Philosophic," riiUosophische Monats/ujte, 1S67, n. p. 465. 332 TJie Problem of Evil and Pessimism of willing or not willing 'according to circumstances.' How there can be circumstances where there is no actual being we will not stop to inquire. Actual willing requires a content and this only the Idea can give — the sine qua non of actual willing thus lies outside of the Will as such. But in that case how with only pure latency on the one side and only pure potentiality on the other did actual willing ever arise } A single bare possibility cannot advance to reality, how is the case mended if there are two } Here is the Achilles' heel of all Absolutist specula- tion as it appears in the speculation of Hartmann. The jump into existence that he denies to Hegel's Idea is, he thinks, less of a jump in the case of Will, to which, after all, ' initiative ' essentially belongs. Between the state of rest — and blessedness — of the mere potentiality to will or not and actual, determinate, willing with a con- tent, there comes 'empty willing,' the mere initiative of willing to will — a state of "absolute unblessedness, torment without pleasure and without pause." And now, since Will and Idea are both but attributes of the same Absolute Spirit, the Idea cannot for a moment withhold itself or escape when the empty Will lays violent hands upon it. But if the empty Will can thus secure its object the instant the impulse arises, why lay stress on its ceaseless and infinite pain, what ground is there for extending pessimism even to the Absolute? It is in answer to this question that Schopenhauer speaks through Hartmann. Will is everywhere infinite, so it is necessarily insatiable ; since a completed infinite is logically impossible, is a content therefore that the Idea cannot supply. Let Hartinann's Theogony and Cosmogony 33 o the world be never so good, and it is the best possible, yet beyond the world, for God himself, there is only absolute pain and unblessedness. This can only cease when the willing to will itself ceases. It is God then who more even than the world needs deliverance from evil. Even granting, as Hartmann maintains, that this willing to will on the part of the Absolute was a piece of absolute stupidity — and if stupid at all, we must perhaps assume that the Absolute is absolutely stupid — still, since it is just as truly absolutely wise\ will it then not at once retrieve the blunder ? At least it will retrieve it, Hartmann assures us. But how often do we find that a momentary folly on the part of one person takes another years to undo I The Absolute is in a like predicament : the whole world must run its course before the divine fall can be redeemed and the blind aimless will cease from troubling and be again at rest. This purely negative outcome is the supreme goal of the world as a realm of ends. But " how shall what is aimless set to work to give itself an end?" was, as we have seen, the question Hartmann proposed to Schopenhauer. And now at length we reach his own answer : Were the Absolute only Will the thing would be impossible , but it is also Idea and as such provides the end. Like Heofel he believes in the 'absolute cunning- of reason.' The Idea is powerless to resist the sort of rape, which he supposes the will to perpetrate, but it takes care ' The remark that used to be made of Charles II., 'he never said a tooHsh thing and never did a wise one," seems true also of the Absolute, according to Hartmann. As Will it is absolutely stupid, as Idea absolutely wise. 334 T^^^ Problem of Evil and Pessimism that at least the offspring shall be such as to put a term to the paternal folly. For though "the world gets its ' that ' from the father, its * what ' and ' how ' come from its mother" says Hartmann, adopting an old conceit of Goethe's, which Schopenhauer professed to explain\ It does not concern us now to examine in detail this process of deliverance from evil, * evolutional optimism' as Hartmann had the effrontery to call it: enough to note that its one essential feature is the evolution of self-conscious beings whose wills are not blind and aimless. These, as they advance in intel- ligence, must realise rnore and more distinctly the irrationality of the positive will to be, and — as negative will not to be — must finally suppress it. Hartmann is frank enough to confess that no apocalyptic vision of the final scene has been vouchsafed him ; so he can only vaguely conjecture under what conditions it would even be possible". One preliminary, however, is certain: the world must first be reduced to a state of rational despair. From beginning to end suffering has prepon- derated to an ever increasing extent, God himself or the Absolute Spirit being the greatest sufferer of all. Only through this climax of despair is release possible ; ^ Philosophie des Unbewussten, 6te Aus. 1876, p. 796. ^ Needless to say, the supposed conditions are improbable in the extreme. Hartmann has dilated at length on ' the three stages of illusion' through which the intelligent world must pass before it realises that positive happiness is unattainable. His one remaining consolation, that at least the world can then will itself out of existence, has been aptly called by a rival pessimist, Bahnsen, 'the fourth stage of illusion.' But for Hartmann, who begins by setting aside the first half of the old ontological maxim, Ex nihilo nihil, there can be no difficulty in setting aside the second, In nihiliwi nil posse reverti. Hartmanns 'Evolutional Optwiism' 335 and the world with this as its goal was devised by the divine Wisdom as the one means of effecting its own deliverance. And when the end comes, what then ? The will of the Absolute is reduced again to the state of pure potentiality to be sure, but it has learnt nothing ; for it is altogether devoid of intelligence. It may then instantly repeat its former faiix pas : also it may not. In place of the existing certainty of evil, there will be an even chance of its non-recurrence ; and this, says Hartmann, is "a gain not to be despised." When a cheerful medieval sinner was being borne away by the devil at the end of his earthly career, he is said to have exclaimed : Even so, of course, it might have been yet worse: For, though now, as you see, he's carrying me, An it pleased old Harry, I'd had him to carry. An optimist of this sort was the pessimist, Eduard von Hartmann. It is but a step from the sublime to the ridiculous ; and this pessimism would certainly strike the stoutest heart with terror if it did not at once strike every sane mind as nonsensical. The very superfluity of its naughtiness embarrasses the critic. But one point at least stands out clear : the supposed faux pas of the Absolute is simply Hartmann's o\\fx\ fattx pas ; and, as I hinted at the outset, the one like the other is its own undoing Hartmann has 7iot synthesized Heiyel's Absolute with Schopenhauer's : he has simply set them over against each other in irreconcilable conflict, so soon and so long as they are at all. Only while they are bare possibilities and actually nothing can 336 The Problem of Evil and Pessimism they be said to agree. Anyone, to whom it does not seem meaningless, may regard them in this non-existent state as ' subsisting ' in a single substance, but the moment they exist their incompatibility makes any real unity impossible, to say nothing of unity in one and the same spirit. The subtlest modal distinction or seczindum quid will not avail to bring contradictories into simple unity, least of all the unity of an absolute Spirit who may be called God. Hartmann's God qtta willing and absolutely irrational and his God qua thinking and absolutely rational may be two Gods perhaps, or God and something else ; but one God simply it cannot be. Instead of le Dieu mdchant of Manichaeism, what Hartmann gives us, as Secretan happily put it\ is the still greater absurdity of un Dieu bete. The dualism into which he is driven in spite of himself comes out clearly in the fine ethical appeal that he makes to us to sympathize and co- operate with God in effecting his redemption and our own. But surely we cannot sympathize with a God who is the source of all evil ; certainly we cannot cooperate with such a God. Moreover Hartmann makes a point of maintaining that for the existence of the world a " God as such " is not responsible : in this, he says, lies the superiority of his philosophy over that of the ordinary theist. That a mind daring — or shall we say, rash — enough to start from nothing or the other side of being and show how God came to be could not manage to reach a better theogony is sur- prising. Nevertheless Hartmann maintains that his speculation has a scientific basis. The truth is that ^ Revue philosophique, 1883, xv. 395. Hart]}ia]i]is Scheme of Redemption 337 it rests on the bad psychology of will which he inherited from his master, Schopenhauer ; and, as I have said, in de- veloping that error ^ (77^/r^;z^^ he has furnished the most telling refutation of their common pessimism : he has imitated his Absolute's suicide, as Bradley would say. The odd thing is that almost at the close of his chief work Hartmann explicitly recognises the truth that he began by implicitly denying. " There is no doubt," he says, "that 2i partictilar volition in man can be suppressed by the influence of conscious" reason," not indeed directly but by the suggestion of counter motives\ And without this truth, as he expressly allows, his whole scheme of redemption would become quite impossible. But all volition is particular volition : volition of nothing in particular or empty volition is surely a veritable chimaera. If the imperfect reason of man can sometimes control the will, why should this never be possible for the all-perfect reason of God ? Because God is the Unconscious, perhaps one might expect Hartmann to reply. But no, God is omniscient, possessed of an intellectual intuition equivalent to an absolute clairvoyance not only of this world and all that is therein but of all possible worlds besides. Only to differentiate this ' Over-consciousness ' from all such consciousness as we can conceive is the term ' the Unconscious' 'temporally' applied to it. It is the absolute Initiative of the primordial Will that prevents the divine Reason from influencing it. The fateful deed is done before that Reason emerges from its pristine latency. By what good fortune then, we may ask, does this Will, ' unenlightened by a single ' O^. cit., p. 768. w. 22 338 The Problem of Evil and Pessimism ray of rational intelligence ' out of all the possible worlds lying latent in the Idea, realise precisely that one that is the best ? This is substantially the question already mentioned, which Hartmann addressed in vain to Schopenhauer, and it now becomes clear that he can give no satisfactory answer to it himself. The fact that there is a world at all he attributes, as we have seen, to absolute chance. The fact that it is the best possible can have for him no better ground, so long as he refuses to extend to reason that influence over will in the creation of the world, which he allows is essential to its evolution when created. In a word intellectual intuition and a blind will cannot be con- joined. Again as severally but possibilities they can effect nothing. It is an error long since exploded that bare possibilities can precede all actuality. So then there is no e^npty will ; and no will with a content can be called blind. Thus we are entitled to conclude that, while their empirical pessimism is not proven, the so- called * metaphysical pessimism ' of Schopenhauer and Hartmann has no basis in experience and is but a bad dream. LECTURE XVI. THE PROBLEM OF EVIL AND OPTIMISM. The two leading systems of pessimism, which on account of their wide vogue, seemed to challenge our attention, deserve — most of you, I think, will allow — the title of irrational philosophies, which Windelband, a very fair and able historian of philosophy, has re- cently assigned to the chief of them. We may, then, now turn from these to consider whether other and less sweeping indictments against the constitution of the universe can be better sustained. First of all it is especially important, not only as bearing on our present problem, but also for the sake of our whole discussion, to examine the dogma, already re- ferred to as the basis of optimism and pessimism alike — the dogma, I mean, that an ideally perfect world would be one in which from first to last, permanently and universally, there was unmixed happiness ; in which physical and nioral evil were alike unknown. But only if complete happiness were the sole end of the world would its continuous and universal presence prove that the world was perfect ; and perfect simply because of that. Here then there is a manifest as- sumption, for if happiness /d?r se were the one supreme good, any conduct that conduced to it wuuld be so far 22 — 2 340 The Problem of Evil and Optimism justified and would be otherwise without any justifica- tion. The only standard of right would be the hedon- istic one. That happiness is involved as a positive constituent of the supreme end, only the thorough- going pessimist would have the hardihood to deny. But that happiness per se is not the end as such, hedonists themselves unwittingly allow in accepting what Sidgwick called the ' fundamental paradox of hedonism.' "The impulse towards pleasure, if too predominant, defeats its own aim," he says\ Pleasure may come unsought but to get it we must forget it. But now by * aim ' or end in this connexion — practical end, that is to say — we mean something that we aim at, that we actively strive to accomplish, the consum- mation of some definite purpose towards which we direct our efforts. Hence the literal meaning of sin as oLfxapTia or missing the mark, on which theologians love to dwell. Grant that pleasure is not the mark, but only the satisfaction felt on attaining it, and there is no paradox ; but insist that pleasure is verily what we aim at, then to maintain that we are not to aim at what we are all the while really aiming at is surely something more than a paradox. Clearly too in that case, as Sidgwick somewhat naively observes, " if we started with no impulse except the desire of pleasure, it might seem difficult to execute the practical paradox of attaining pleasure by aiming at something else^" It might indeed; but I think we may go further and say that with such a complete inversion of the order of nature the difficulty ^ Methods of Ethics, 6 th edn, p. 48. " Op. cit. p. 137. The 'Hedonistic Paradox'' 341 would, in fact, prove insuperable. The anticipation of a state of feeling that would be the same, no matter how it was attained, could never give rise to definite acts at all. Thus a subject animated solely by the ' mere desire of pleasure ' would never get under weigh ; but such a being is quite inconceivable. For experience, as already said, could never begin from a state of absolute privation, nor with the representa- tion of something in the future while as yet there was nothing definite in the present. Yet Sidgwick was of opinion that " even supposing a man to begin with absolute indifference to everything but his own plea- sure, it does not follow that if he were convinced that the possession of other desires and impulses were necessary to the attainment of the greatest possible pleasure, he could not succeed in producing these." Unfortunately Sidgwick makes no attempt even to suggest hypothetically how such a being, who obviously could not be a man, would set about this task\ Sidgwick contents himself with saying : " But this supposition is never actually realised. Every man, when he commences the task of systematising his conduct... is conscious of a number of different im- pulses and tendencies within him, other than the mere desire of pleasure... : so that he has only to place himself under certain external influences, and these desires and impulses will begin to operate without any efibrt of will'-." To the biologist or the psychologist ^ Such a being would closely resemble the blind will of Schopen- hauer or von Hartmann and doubtless would end by being a pessimist. Indeed we may say that it was the underlying hedonism of Schopen- hauer and von Hartinann that led to their pessimism. " Op. cit. p. 137. 342 The Problem of Evil and Optimistn even this statement must sound like a parody of the real facts of life. A mere aggregate of organs does not make an organism, nor does a number of merely different functions or impulses make life. Again a living being does not first exist aloof from its environ- ment and then ' have to place itself under external influences ' in order that its life may begin. When a man ' commences the task of systematising his con- duct on principle' he is already a definite individual, already organically related to a definite environment : in a word his life is already a * system,' so that in advancing from the natural plane of behaviour to the rational he only develops further what is already there. There is meaning and system in his behaviour at both levels : can we then suppose that there is no sort of connexion or continuity between the two ? And if there is any connexion or continuity between them how can the psychological character of their ends be fundamentally distinct?- This is a point that it will repay us to consider a little more closely. Since the publication of Butler's famous sermons on Human Nature, if not before, our moralists have admitted what rightly understood is indisputable, viz., that on the lower plane of animal life, the various springs of action are severally ' extra-regarding or disinterested ' and in a sense, ' blind ' ; but that in proportion as a ' self-regarding and interested ' spring of action develops, controlling these — such as self-love so-called — a higher level of life is attained, one charac- terised by rational insight and unity of purpose. The implication is that whereas those various 'propensions' are, so to say, automatic and spontaneous, self-love is 'Extra-regarding' and 'Self-regarding' 343 autonomous and deliberate : they suggest a sentient organism, this presupposes a controlling and self- conscious mind. But the terminology employed is apt to mislead. On the one side we have a system of extra-regarding, blind, and indifferent impulses ; on the other a single self-regarding, foreseeing, and in- terested person : on the one side, objective ends without a self; on the other, a self without any objective end. Now surely in all this there is too much antithesis, the contrasts are too extreme ; so that not only the advance from the one level to the other, which nowadays at any rate is conceded, becomes altogether inexplicable, but both as they stand are beset with contradictions. We may see this best by starting from the higher. The end of self-love is said to be happiness, a con- tinuous subjective state of pleasant feeling. But the self that we love is presumably the self that we know, and that certainly does not live by feeling alone. Nor is it absolutely identical with the self that loves, in such wise that — disregarding grammar — we might say I love I, or — concealing the breach of grammatical concord — John loves John. Here, as elsewhere, out of barren identities nothing can come. The self that I love, that is the self that I know, is my self holding intercourse, having reciprocal relations, with a com- munity of other selves and with an environment to an indefinite extent resolvable into selves. So essential are these relations of other selves to my self, of the objective to the subjective, that without them not only would the all-important possessive ' my ' disappear for lack of its correlatives, but the possessing I too would 344 ^^^^ Problem of Evil and Optimism become as meaningless as the centre of a circle that had no circumference. With no ' content ' to be conscious of, it could know nothing, feel nothing, and do nothing: such a bare I would thus be worth nothing. Consciousness or experience then is not purely sub- jective, is not simply a state. It implies also an objective factor, that is certain ; and it implies further the reciprocal interaction of subject and object, self and not-self. But till one's knowledo^e of others has advanced some way self-consciousness, the knowledge of one's self, cannot begin. Definite objective knowledge in turn arises only along with definite subjective interests, so that apart from such interests there would be no knowledge of self and so no interest in self, such as self-love or the desire of one's own happiness assumes. Briefly then, self-consciousness or knowledge of self presupposes consciousness or knowledge of objects, and this again presupposes interests in objects. We may call such interests extra-regarding not self- regarding, so far as they are distinct from the interest in self. But here two points are important. First, interest in self is secondary and presupposes these primary interests ; alone it would be empty and mean- ingless. Secondly, as interests of the self, without which there could be no interest in self, these primary interests cannot be called disinterested in the literal sense of unselfish: interests without a self would again be a manifest contradiction. They are then the interests of a self, though a self as yet without know- ledge of itself, and so without any reflex interest in itself, in other words, without any self-conscious interest Pleasure never itself the End 345 in its interests. These primary interests or ends are objective, but not in the sense in which the end of a watch — to use Butler's illustration — is objec- tive ; they are not merely the ends of another, they are the ends of a conscious self. So then the end of the j'^^-conscious self in controlling and extending" these objective ends must obviously be itself objective too. In fact a subjective end without an object and an objective end without a subject are both alike con- tradictory. The psychological character of all possible ends of conduct is then fundamentally the same, and so the advance from the lower or natural plane to the higher or the rational is conceivable. But, and this for us now is the main point, in neither is pleasure ever itself the end, but always simply the satisfaction conse- quent on the accomplishment of ends\ Nevertheless, the hedonist will reply, it is obvious that we must distinguish between means and ends ; and since the attainment of all objective ends would be worthless without happiness it is obvious too that this alone is intrinsically desirable, that this subjective ^ At first blush it seems conceivable that at any rate a self- conscious being could adopt pleasure as his end, and the ideal voluptuary is supposed to be such a being. In him, as Mr Bradley has said, *' the feeling of self-realisation is the end, which calls for reality, without respect for anything in which the self is to be realised, except as a means. It is not necessary to say," he continues, "that the abstract feeling of satisfaction, as an end, contradicts the very notion of an end and must fail to satisfy; nor is it necessary to add that the voluptuary as the man who consistently pursues that end, is an impossible character" {Ethical Slitdies, p. 245). Such an abnormality certainly could not be called a rational being nor could a society of such hold itself together. History affords proof enough of that. 34^ The Problem of Evil and Optimism end is the only ultimate end, in relation to which the so-called objective ends are in reality only means. Let us examine the following important passage from Sidgwick's Methods of Ethics, in which this position is clearly stated. "It may be said that. ..we may take ' conscious life ' in a wide sense, so as to include the objective relations of the conscious being... and that from this point of view we may regard ['Virtue, Truth, Beauty, Freedom '] as in some measure preferable alternatives to Pleasure or Happiness...." But Sidg- wick continues : " to me at least it seems clear after reflection that these objective relations of the conscious subject, when distinguished from the consciousness accompanying and resulting from them, are not ulti- mately and intrinsically desirable... that, when (to use Butler's phrase) we 'sit down in a cool hour' we can only justify to ourselves the importance that we attach to any of these objects by considering its conducive- ness, in one way or another, to the happiness of sentient beings^" Now, first of all, is there not here a radical confusion — one to which we are all too prone — the confusion, I mean, between analytical distinction and actual separation ? To say that " we may take conscious life in a wide sense as including objective relations" implies that we may also take it in a narrow sense as excluding these. But the psychologist as- suredly has no such choice : he must take what he always finds. No reflexion will enable him to take the consciousness accompanying ^r resulting from objective relations apart from these relations them- selves ; for there is no consciousness, or as we had * Methods oj Ethics, 6th edn, pp. 400 f. ' Objective ends ' not simply means 347 better say, no experience, unless these form an integral part of it. It is clear, from the context, I allow, that what Sidgwick here meant by consciousness was pleasure (or pain). But it is equally clear that feeling alone, a purely subjective state, though always an element in consciousness or experience, is never the whole of it. We cannot then talk of pleasure or happiness or, to speak generally, of pure feeling as in any measure an alternative to the cognitions or actions from which it is inseparable. And yet Sidg- wick not only admits this inseparability, but even urges that " if we finally decide that ultimate good includes many things distinct from Happiness\" hedonism becomes ' entangled in a vicious circle.' But if the inseparability be admitted, how is that decision to be avoided ? Why then does he still argue as if pleasure by itself could be a subjective end and the only ultimate end } Regardless of the fact already insisted upon, that a purely subjective end is a psychological contra- diction, Sidgwick's main contention, we shall be told, is not that pleasure is a ' thing ' we can experience apart from 'things' which are pleasant, but that these other ' things ' are only means to it. But this we remark in the second place is like saying, to use a trivial illustration of Mill's, that one of the blades of a pair of scissors is a means to enable the other blade to cut : it is to ignore that subject and object are both essential to all conscious life, desirable or undesirable. If one is a means then the other must be a means too, and as cutting is the end of a pair of scissors so * Op. cit. I St edn, p. 376 348 The Problem of Evil and Optimism happiness becomes the end for the sake of which sub- ject and object aHke are only means: the pure feeHng of pleasure, though a state of one of them, is the ultimate raison d'Hre of both\ All that matters is the capacity for pleasure in the one and the fitness to produce it in the other. Maximum pleasure being the end of the world, it would seemingly be indifferent whether the number of conscious individuals were increased and their capacity pro tanto diminished, or vice versa : in any case the attainment of the end would be the solution of the quantitative problem : — The greatest possible sum of pleasure wanted : how is it to be got^? When all the objective interests of life are emptied out of it as only means and not meaning, this is the one question that remains. ^ But Sidgwick used a different illustration, which he doubtless thought more apposite. Green's contention that "pleasure as feeling in distinction from its conditions, which are not feelings, cannot be conceived" (Hume, vol. n. p. 7) he said "is neither more nor less true than the statement that an angle cannot be conceived apart from its sides" {Mind, O.S., n. p. 36). He then proceeds to urge that this does not hinder us from comparing one angle with another without comparing their sides. But surely as regards the main contention this is irrelevant. The pursuit of an end may be aptly enough represented by the direction of a line, but without ends we have no lines and therefore no angles. Again, whereas directed lines enclose an angle of definite magnitude, this as purely quanti- tative can never determine definitely directed lines, two pairs of lines, though oppositely directed, having e.g. the same angle. How then can maximum angle, if it have any meaning, be the end ? 2 Cf. Sidgwick, op. cit., 6th edn, p. 415: "The point up to which, on utilitarian principles, population ought to be encouraoed to increase, is that at which the product formed by multiplying the number of persons living into the amount of average happiness reaches its maximum." The Hedonist and the Parasite 349 But now we may regard life as a series of processes, and in these, as in all processes, the mere means either disappear and are left behind as the process advances ; or they become so far worthless when the process is complete and its end attained. Moreover there is no ultimate advantage in means as such, and in fact we always seek to shorten and simplify such intermediaries as much as we can. But that the objective interests of life are not means in this sense is conclusively shown in parasitism, where many of them are dispensed with, but where too degeneration invariabty follows. The literal meaning of happy in our own language and of its equivalents in others — as, for example, evSat/Awi/, felix, gliicklich, heureux — more or less distinctly implies the favour of fortune but contains not a hint of success- ful striving. That the favourites of fortune often show the degeneracy of parasites is proverbial. Far fuller is the life of self-reliant effort for the worthiest ends, and far fuller too the blessedness and content that crown its achievements. The thoughtless may envy the easy life of the favourites of fortune, but this is not the life that wise men praise. A world in which unalloyed pleasure was meted out to every sentient being would then be very like a world of parasites and so far from being the best of worlds would, because of its inevitable vapidity, ennui and unprogressiveness, be almost the worst — a contradiction, of course, and yet, so far as we can see, a necessary consequence. But this only serves to show that such a world is not possible at all. We can now move on a stage. If this conclusion is sound, it follows that much at any rate that we call 350 i iie Problem of Evil and Optimis7n evil is only relatively such. The term evil in such cases is, in fact, ambiguous ; since what is in one sense an evil is in another sense a good. *' The world (it has been said) is, what for an active being it must be, full of hindrances'." Invincible obstacles that barred all progress would indeed be absolute evils, but not so the hindrances that can be overcome, for only in sur- mounting such is solid advance possible. As to these, it has been said again, a man may " bless God for the law of growth with all the fighting it imposes upon him," evil in this sense, ''i.e. what it is man's duty to fight, being one of the major perfections of the Universe'." Again, in another way this relativity of many so-called evils is apparent : in relation to the past, as marking progress, they are really good ; only in view of future progress which they may delay do they become evil. So far it is true to convert the French proverb and say Le bien est renneini du mieux: not only true but truer, so surely as progress is better than stagnation. " If a man has not wants, he will make no efforts," says Professor Sorley, "and if he make no efforts his condition can never be bettered. Thus social reformers have often found that the classes they have tried to elevate did not feel the evil of their lot as their benefactors saw it ; and they have had to create the consciousness of wants before attempting to satisfy them'." The new position we reach then is, that a world whose fundamental characteristic — now at any rate is ^ Vauvenargues, quoted by Eucken, Geistige Sirdmungen der Gegetm>art, 4te Aus. p. 288. ^ C. S. Peirce, Hibbert Journal, vii. p. 107. * Ethics of Naturalism, 2nd edn, p. 250. Evolution and the Relativity of Evil 35 1 evolution cannot at any given stage of its development have that perfection towards which it is still only moving, which it can only have by acquiring. It is childish and futile to ask if the world might not have been created perfect at once ; to question whether an evolving w^orld is the best. We cannot form the dimmest idea of what experience in a ' ready-made ' world would mean, if experience, as I have ventured elsewhere to define it, is the process of becoming- expert by experiment. So far as we can judge, a world perfect — in the sense of finished and complete at once — is a contradiction. But at any rate the question may be raised whether the sort of evolution that we observe in this world is ideally the best. Granted that in an evolving world there will be the imperfection or incompleteness that all becoming implies, need there be besides such positive defects as physical suftering, error and sin ? As we have first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear and can conceive each to be faultless, can it be impossible to conceive the development of a world in like manner ? And if that is not impossible, how can this world with its manifold physical, intel- lectual and moral defects be the best .■* This objection we must now in the next place endeavour to meet. The term evolution we have found used in two senses ; in the strict sense, for the gradual unfolding of what is implicitly present from the first, and again in a looser sense for what is better called epigenesis or the continuous creation of what is essentially new. The initial possibilities would in the one case virtually include the actual course of the process throughout the 352 The Problem of Evil and Optimisin future, in the other they would only exclude indefinite abstract possibilities as not compossible, to use Leibniz's phrase, that is to say, as actually impossible. In both cases certain possibilities would give place to actualities as the evolution advanced ; but in the latter new pos- sibilities would continually arise, in the former they would not. In the one there would be from the first a unity and harmony which in the other were only eventually achieved. The one would be what William James called a block universe, the other what he called a multiverse, or better perhaps a uni-multiverse. In a word, the concept of the world in the former case is that of a dialectical development of one Supreme Idea, such as Hegel essayed to delineate. In the earlier part of these lectures I endeavoured to establish two points, first that the transition from such a purely ideal process to the historical world is inconceivable, as Hegel in spite of himself made clear; and secondly, that from the point of view of the Idea or Absolute, such transition would be superfluous\ I must content myself by assuming that these points are established ; as also a third, reached in the present part, viz. that setting out from where we are, from the standpoint of the Many, we have no ground for assuming a Creator who does everything but only a Creator whose creatures create in turn. The real world must be the joint result of God and man (including under this term other finite intelligences both higher and lower in the scale), unless we are to deny the reality of that in us which leads us to the idea of God at all. The evolution of such a world then ^ Cf. Lectt. II. VII. Evolution and Contingency 353 plainly cannot be a case of evolution in the first sense. But if not, then where the Many have some initiative, — where development is epigenetic — contingency and conflict, fallibility and peccability seem inevitable; and these are at any rate relative evils, for they assuredly entail suffering. Even so, it will be asked again, can anyone pretend that he sees no unnecessary suffering in a world like this, where storms devastate and plagues strike ; where ignorance consigns the noblest to exile, to torture and to death ; where vice lapped in luxury grinds down the poor and from its very crimes argues that there is no God } In attempting to deal with the serious difficulty here raised it will be best to consider physical and moral evil apart\ Now if — to begin with the former — we were challenged to show directly that certain definite physical ills — fever germs or 'malignant' tumours, say — have somehow their requisite place in the world's eco- nomy, we certainly should be most presumptuous and unwise to take up the gage. But we may at least contend that on the other hand we are equally incom- petent to show conclusively that any assigned physical cause of suffering is really superfluous. But then at once we find ourselves confronted with an old objection. The notion of any evil as unavoid- able, we shall be told, involves the contradiction of a non-omnipotent, or finite, God, and is, therefore, not theistic but atheistic. Omnipotent, I fear, is one of those question-begging epithets that everybody uses ^ Intellectual evil, or error, may be practically regarded as belong- ing partly to the one partly to the other. w. 23 354 ^^^^ Problem of Evil and Optimism and nobody defines\ Thus it is not uncommonly taken to imply not merely the power to do whatever it is possible to do, but also the power arbitrarily to determine what shall be possible ; nay even that the impossible shall be possible ; in short that omnipotence absolutely excludes impossibility. Thus we find Schopenhauer saying: — "Even if Leibniz's demonstration, that among the possible worlds this one is the best, were correct : yet still it would not amount to a theodicy. For in truth the Creator is the author not merely of the world but of possibility too : he ought accordingly to have devised this in such a way as to admit of a better world"." Metaphysic of this sort is not to be met by argument. It is sufficient to remark that at any rate so long as there is no difference between possible and impossible so long omnipotence can have no meaning : two and two may be four or it may be five. Within this mystical region, where ' naught is everything and everything is naught,' determinate being or thought or action there can be none. If there were an omnipotent God he must emerge thence to act at all and then could only do what is possible ; though what is possible would be determined, of course, by what he is and only so. To proclaim creation restricted by determinate possibilities to be an idea derogatory to the sovereign majesty of God is but blind adulation ; ^ In a similar connexion it is interesting to find Mr Bradley saying : — " I shall be told that the Governor of the Universe is 077inipote7it. Perhaps ; but as I never could find out what that means, I can hardly be expected to admit it as true." Mind, O. S. VIII. 259. '^ Parerga und Faralipomenay 11. § 1 5 7. So-called 'Metaphysical Evil' 355 for it really amounts to denying that God is himself a definite being at all, is either intellectually or morally consistent. All determination is negation, Spinoza has truly said : to find in this an evil, a so-called meta- physical or logical evil, only shows what ambiguity the term may involve. From such miscalled evils no world can be free. To take a simple illustration. Our decimal system of numeration has the inconvenience that its radix 10 has only two factors, while 12, the radix of the duodecimal system, has twice as many ; and if we had had six finoers on each hand, we should doubtless have taken twelve as our radix and been so far, it is supposed, better off \ That in other respects we should not have been worse off is more than we know. Moreover the longer system still has defects — in fact, as many positive defects as the shorter'' — whilst against its superiority in respect of divisibility may be set its greater complexity. But the iDoint of our illustration is that no system of numeration is possible that shall be in all respects ideally perfect. Without being Pythagoreans and hailing number as 'omnipotent, the principle and guide of divine and human life,' we still cannot doubt, in these days when science calls itself measurement, that many of our so-called * physical evils ' depend ultimately on such miscalled ' metaphysical eviP.' So far as they go at any rate there is no problem. ' Herbert Spencer regarded this ' evil ' as so serious that he left, I understand, the bulk of his property to be expended in combating the decimal system and advocating the duodecimal. - Cf. Herbert Spencer's Autobiography, vol. i. p. 531. » Cf. A. Ott, Le Probleme du Mai, 1888, pp. 153 f. 23—2 35^ The Problem of Evil and Optimism We come back then to the alleged superfluous physical evils. It is futile to attempt to imagine a world different in type from ours. This statement, we assume, cannot be gainsaid and from this we set out. Now the world, as we directly know it, consists as we have seen in a plurality of individuals, whom we may call plastic in so far as they are capable of experience. All of them, again, are intent on self-conservation or betterment. This, however, is not guaranteed to them altogether apart from their own efforts ; but it is to be achieved in large measure through these. Even if there be a God he certainly has not made the world what it is to be, but rather endowed it with talents to enable it to work out its own perfection in conjunction with himself. This working out is what we call ex- perience, and experience can never pre-suppose the knowledge or the skill that is only gained by means of it. Where several possibilities are open, a creature acting on its own initiative can only find out the right one by way of trial and often of error. Such error we may say is an evil ; but we cannot straightway call it a superfluous, still less an absolute, evil, if it is an inevitable incident of experience as such, and if in general the experience is worth what it costs. Can we, however, say that in general experience is worth what it costs ? it will be urged. But can we say that it is not? we reply: we are not arraigning the con- stitution of the world and therefore it is for those who are to make their indictment good. Which way does the presumption lie t This for us is the final question. At this point there is one consideration that may help us. The more all things eventually work together for Alleged stiperflitous evils 357 good the greater our assurance that Goodness is at the root of all. The attainment of such complete and enduring harmony, however, may well entail an ex- haustive experience of possibilities as its indispensable condition. First thoughts are rarely the best, and the more haste we make often the worse we speed. The fittest to survive, we are told, appear only as the final outcome of innumerable continuous variations : Natiira non facit salhis. Herein lies the significance for us of Leibniz's contention that whereas ** a machine made by the skill of man is not a machine in each of its parts.... the machines of nature, our living bodies, are still machines in their smallest parts." Such thoroughness must imply slowness and much seemingly useless trouble if the process is to be that of experience and epigenesis. Like impatient children, we can hardly restrain the wish "to see the Supreme Good active in some other way than this which it has itself chosen,... or by some shorter path than the roundabout one " of creation through creatures, which it has itself entered upon\ But still there are those other physical evils, such as storms, droughts, earthquakes and the like, that can hardly be regarded as the direct consequence of in- cipient and imperfect experience. Can it be said that these are not absolute nor even superfluous evils .'* In attempting to deal with them we must recall another characteristic of the world's evolution. At any stage in this process the world, we have seen, may be described as being in part comparatively fixed, in part still fluent, in part comparatively stable, in part still ^ Cf. Lut/se, AlicrocosvniSf Eng. trans, ii. p. 7:17. 358 TJie Problem of Evil and Optimism developing : at once nahira naturata and natiira natiirans. That the Hfe and progress of society, all its spontaneity, initiative and individuality, would be in- effective without its conservative elements of stability — habit, custom, law and the like — is obvious. Yet these are not an unmixed good. Habit is ability indeed, but its blindness and fatal facility are proverbial. Custom, which according to Hume is the great guide of human life, Bagehot has called ' the most terrible tyranny ever known among men,' and yet, as again another has said, We draw Our right from custom : custom is a law As high as heaven, as wide as sea or land. Summum jus, su7Jtma injuria is the maxim of equity ; and yet injury means injustice. The dubious character thus attaching to the con- servative factors of the social world holds also of the more fundamental routine of what we often speak of apart as the physical world. Here, too, in what are called the conservations of mass and energy we have principles that are at once the indispensable conditions of stable construction, and yet tending always to destruction in so far as they count nothing stable that they can further level down — just as friction, again, renders locomotion possible and yet steadily retards it. All this perhaps may help to account for the world-wide association of matter with evil. How far down within this seemingly fixed mechanism the fluent processes of life extend we do not know ; if there are such processes their tempo, so to say, is so The World's Conservative Factors 359 different from ours that their significance escapes us. But in any case in their comparative fixity, not in their possible secular transformation, lie all their present advantages and disadvantages for us. That the advantages so far exceed the disadvantages is evident from the advances that the world has made, is making, and bids fair lonor to continue to make. Can we have the one without the other? If not, then the disad- vantages are neither absolute evils nor in general superfiuous evils : metaphysical or logical evils they may be called. But we may ask again if that means anything more beyond what all individuation seems necessarily to imply } What we might perhaps call the temporary solidarity of physical good and evil is brought home to us in two ways : first, by the rash attempts that have been frequently made to show how things might have been better ; and, secondly, by the ignorant prayers for favourable wind and weather or the like, that religion is supposed to countenance. The foolish- ness of the latter is obvious, inasmuch as the wind that was 'good' for the ship homeward bound would be bad for that bound outwards, and the weather that hastened the ripening of one farmer's corn might dry up the pasture of another. Such really impious peti- tions are as senseless as the belief in magic or the demand for perpetual miracles. If they were granted they would put an end to all order and render rational conduct impossible. As to the former — there are diseases indeed that seem to be unmixed evils, to be neither the collateral consequences of what once was good nor the indispensable conditions of any good 360 The Problem of Evil and Optimisin to come\ Leaving such cases aside it would be hard to find a single instance in which suggestions for the better remoulding of the physical world have not been shown by men wiser than their authors to be only specifications for a fool's paradise. But there is yet another difficulty connected with physical evil that is unquestionably serious, since it weighs heavily on many earnest minds. The course of evolution so far has conquered some evils and ame- liorated others, they allow ; but will this progress continue unabated or will it not one day cease and evil in its turn gain the ascendency ? " The theory of evolution," Huxley, for example, has said, "encour- ages no millennial anticipations. If, for millions of years, our globe has taken the upward road, yet, some lime the summit will be reached and the downward route will be commenced. The most daring imagina- tion will hardly venture upon the suggestion that the power and intelligence of man can ever arrest the procession of the great year^" This is the language of naturalism pure and simple, but if naturalism be accepted as the ultimate truth of things, it is useless to talk of a realm of ends at all : if the life of man and all that it implies are but episodes in what Spencer called the integration of matter and the dissipation of motion, then indeed there is no more to be said. But if, as we have seen reason for doing, we take a wider and deeper view of evolution and regard this so-called realm of nature as having itself all its reality and meaning ' But often they are the fruits of evil doing and often their removal is within our power and is more than a negative gain. ^ Evolution and Ethics, Collected Essays, ix. p. 85. Progress witJwiit Decline 361 within the one world of living agents, why should we suppose the supreme end of this to be simply its own undoing, or take the meaning of the part to be the stultification of the whole ? Only if nature is independent of spirit, and atheism, too, an established certainty, can we, as Huxley does, apply to evolution as a whole the words of Tennyson's Ulysses : — It may be that the gulfs will wash us down, It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles. If Spirit is supreme, its end must be sure of realisation and the procession of its great year know no decline. Nor, happily, does the doctrine of the dissipation of energy, rightly understood, in any way justify the gloomy forebodings to which its misunderstanding has given rise. But, while we have allowed that theism is essential before we can be confident that the world will not fail of the end that seems the only clue to its meaning, we have also had to allow that we have no theoretical proof of theism. On the other hand our discussion of the problem of evil has so far, we claim, brought to light nothing that disproves theism and removed much that at the outset appeared to make against it. We have still, however, to consider what is unquestionably the chief count in the whole indictment with which a theodicy has to deal — the fact of moral evil. LECTURE XVII. MORAL EVIL AND MORAL ORDER. " That must needs have been glorious the decays of which are so admirable. He that is comely when old and decrepit surely was very beautiful when he was young. An Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam, and Athens but the rudiments of Paradise." These famous words of a seventeenth century orator and divine fairly represent the standpoint from which even to-day the question of moral evil is frequently discussed. That our world in its present state should be a hopeless ruin, which nothing short of the intervention of infinite wisdom and goodness could restore, is, it is held, con- ceivable ; but that this world should be what it is as the result of a development on the whole steady and continuous is thought to be quite inconceivable. In short, God, it is said, created man in his own image and "he himself tempteth no man": to account for moral evil then we must, it is supposed, assume that man by his own wilful act has fallen from his hieh estate. But why should all have sinned and come short of the glory of God } To answer this question the doctrine of original sin is added as a corollary to the doctrine of the fall. The whole human race, past, Moral Evil in the light of Evolution 363 present, and future, is regarded as involved in one common perdition that is somehow the moral con- sequence of the action of the first and — as we must believe — the least experienced of its members. Is it not possible to account for the prevalence of moral evil in a way less shocking to ordinary morality than this ? But first we may ask, does this account for it ? With- out still further supplement we find it does not. That a man wiser than the wisest should heed the voice of sense or sophistry is only credible if he is already infected with ' original sin.' Accordingly either a timeless or a prenatal fall has to be assumed ; and, finally, the existence of a personal principle of evil in the shape of the devil with his maxim, Evil, be thou my good. In short, such speculations — all alike, be it noted, in ignoring the concept of evolution — fail al- together to explain the existence of moral evil, to say nothing of their inherent improbability : they leave it, as Kant had the candour to admit, an insoluble mystery. We have now then to inquire whether, when we do not ignore evolution, the problem of moral evil still remains equally insoluble. First of all, if we are to stand by evolution, we shall have to invert Robert South's rhetoric, and rank primeval man a long way behind Aristotle, and his primitive resources a long way behind even the rudiments of Athenian civilisation, Hegel's saying, that Paradise without the so-called fall was — what indeed the word means — ^just ein Park fur Thiere, a park for beasts, furnishes a better text for the evolu- tionist. For the human race, like the human individual, in the course of its development has certainly passed 364 Moral Evil and Moral Order through the brute stage; and the transition from the ignorant ' innocence ' of this level of life to * the know- ledge of good and evil ' is surely as such a rise rather than a fall. Let us then endeavour to trace the course of this development and see if it is not really an advance. Moral evil is doubtless essentially selfishness. Yet selfishness has its roots in that instinct of self-preserva- tion, which is called the first law of nature and which moralists of all schools recognise as a rational principle of action that arises as soon as self-consciousness is attained. When and how does what is thus, so to say, rooted in right nevertheless become wrong? To love himself a man must know himself, but he can know himself only through knowing other selves: neither self-love nor selfishness then is possible below the social level, as we have already had to remark more than once. With society moral order begins and in society moral evil may arise. Further, as society is based entirely on the mutual dependence and the mutual services of the persons who compose it, the cardinal principle of moral order is justice ; and all immorality, whatever else it may be, is injustice. The very words themselves bear witness to this, in so far as mores or customs are the origin of law. But already in the gregarious habits of many of the higher animals and in the family life of others we find that the uncon- scious germs of the altruism on which society rests are present along with the instinctive egoism all life im- plies. Now at the outset it is obvious that the age of innocence is characterized by acts which have all the objective qualities of moral evil, though no guilt can be Innocence and PFrong-dolng 365 imputed to the agents. When the moth flies into the candle-flame we might regard it as sacrificing its own future welfare for the sake of momentary gratifica- tion — behaviour which we should call imprudence, or injustice to self \ if the moth were a reasonable person. The habits of the cuckoo in ejecting its foster-brothers from the nest and maltreating its foster-parents strike us as revolting instances of injustice and ingratitude; and would indeed be such, if only the cuckoo knew better. To repeat: it seems, we say, in the first place indisputable that in the evolution of conduct acts objectively wrong are constantly committed before the individual has any consciousness of wrong-doing. How then, we have to ask in the next place, does this con- sciousness of wrong-doing arise — or, more generally, under what circumstances does conscience appear ? Before we can attempt to answer this question we ought, it may be thought, to make clear in what sense we understand such a very complex and ambiguous term as conscience. But happily we are not concerned with all that conscience ever means but only with what it means always. For one thing, it always means approval or disapproval : conscience always involves a judgment that ' accuses or else excuses.' Such judgment again is always passed by the person himself upon his own conduct and motives. It thus implies self-conscious- ness . without self-consciousness there is no conscience". ' Cf. Sidgwick, Methods of Ethics, 6th edn, p. 381. - Hence the close relationship between the two terms, conscience and consciousness in its original sense of self-consciousness — as we find it say in Locke or Reid — a relationship so close that in French the one word conscience is still used for both. 366 Moral Evil and Moral Order Finally conscience always implies a standard : only so is it completed Our question then amounts to this : How does the individual come by his standard? A general answer is at once evident : he acquires the knowledge of his standard as he acquires the knowledge of himself — throuoh social intercourse^ But we must try to be more specific. In the first place then we may note that this advance from the level of mere consciousness to that of self-conscious- ness is very gradual, so that with the child and the savage the merely conscious or objective attitude decidedly preponderates. Accordingly other selves, as belonging to the objective world, are observed con- tinually and directly, but the experiencing self only occasionally and reflectively — more or less retrospec- tively — in the exceptional circumstances that evoke the subjective attitude. Two consequences follow from all this : first, the one that we have just noted — viz. that acts which are objectively selfish will be constantly committed though there is as yet no con- sciousness of their selfishness ; secondly, that this objective selfishness will nevertheless be frequently apparent to others, and will be disapproved. The story of David and Nathan may serve as an illustration, if we compare the swiftness of David's condemnation of another's cupidity with his tardiness to realise his 1 It is worth remarking that Locke in the first three editions of his Essay defined conscience as " nothing else but our own opinion of our own actions." In later editions he changed this to "our own opinion or judgment of the moral reclitude or pravity of our own actions " — thus explicitly recognising the possession of a standard as essential. - Cf. above, Lect. vi. pp. 122 ff. The rise of Conscience 367 own. To be sure we cannot exonerate David, im- pulsive though he was, as we exonerate a child or a savage. But that after all only lends point to the instance ; for if, where conscience is developed, in the heat of passion such things are still possible, can we do else than suppose that they are indefinitely more possible where conscience has yet to be developed, and also that they are indefinitely more innocent? So then, while still unconscious of our own wrone-doine, we become judges of the wrong-doing of others ; and these two positions we continually interchange till at length we find both combined in our own person. Adam Smith in his Theoiy of Moral Sentivients was the first modern writer^ to deal with our question at all satisfactorily, and the answer may be recapitulated in his words : — " Our first moral criticisms are exercised upon the characters and conduct of other people — But we soon learn, that other people are equally frank with regard to our own. We become anxious to know how far we deserve their censure or applause.... We begin, upon this account, to examine our own passions and conduct, and to consider how these must appear to them by considering how they would appear to us if in their situation.... It is evident that in all such cases, I divide myself, as it were, into two persons : and that I, the examiner and judge, represent a different character from that other I, the person whose character is examined into and judged of"." But we may sum ^ He seems to have been anticipated by Polybius. Cf. Dugald Stewart's Introduction in his edition of Adam Smith's Theory, p. xxxi. • Op. cit. Part ui. ch. i. pp. 163 f. 368 Moral Evil and Moral Order up our answer still more succinctly in the language of a later writer, by saying that a man's conscience finds its first moral standard in ' the voice of his tribal self \' Though this first standard is woefully defective, still it carries within it the knowledge of moral good and evil : the knowledge of previously unknown evil that was already there but is now condemned, though it be not straightway abandoned ; the knowledge of previously unknown good that is henceforth approved, though it be not always pursued. The transition to this stage from the stage of innocence we find has been gradual ; and pari passu inevitable evil — as such non- moj'-al — has become avoidable evil, evil that is freely and consciously chosen — and as such bad. Is this an advance? we ask. If the evil, now known, were never forsaken and the good, now seen to be possible, never pursued : if the words of Ovid, Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor, were universally true of all human deeds, there certainly would be no advance. But that is not what we find. At any rate what we do not find, it will be said, is the knowledge of evil without the commission of it, or the knowledge of good without its omission ; and it is this fact after all that is the gravamen of the whole problem. It is, no doubt, and we must presently turn to it. Meanwhile we have gained something if we have found in the theory of evolution the means of divesting the problem of two of the mysteries that have hitherto enshrouded it — the doctrine of a fall from a state of moral perfection and the doctrine of original sin. And we may hail it as a * W. K. Clifford, Lectures and Essays, 2nd edn, pp. 290 — 293. The dogma of 'the Fair 369 hopeful sign of the times that there are now theologians who have the courage to admit this\ But this appeal to evolution, it may be replied, after all only throws the difficulty one step further back. For if the germs of moral evil are present from the first, what is this but to allow of a sort of original sin scarcely less repugnant to our moral ideas than the questionable theological dogma that has been dis- credited? On the contrary the difference is surely profound. Original sin is described in the West- minster Confession as an "original corruption, whereby we are utterly indisposed... to all good and wholly inclined to all evil." The theory of evolution furnishes no warrant for such innate depravity of disposition. To regard our primary and spontaneous impulses as if they were already the germs of moral evil is to ignore the ' I will quote one passage in evidence and I quote it the more readily because its author is a friend and former pupil of my own : — "There is thus every reason to believe that the awakening of man's moral sense or sentiment, his discovery of a law by which he came to know sin, was an advance accomplished by a long series of stages. Consequently the origin of sin, like other so-called origins, was also a gradual process rather than an abrupt and inexplicable plunge. The appearance of sin, from this point of view, would not consist in the performance of a deed such as man had never done before, and of whose wickedness, should he commit it, he was previously aware ; it would rather be the continuance in certain practices, or the satisfying of natural impulses, after that they were first discovered to be contrary to a recognised sanction of rank as low as that of tribal custom. The sinfulness of sin would gradually increase from a zero; and the first sin, if the words have any meaning, instead of being the most heinous and the most momentous in the race's history, would rather be the least significant of all." F. R. Tennant, The Origin and Propagation of Sin: Hulscan Lectures, 1902, p. 91. w. 24 370 Moral Evil and Moral Order true meaning of ' moral ' altoo-ether\ Those impulses constitute the basis alike for moral order and for moral evil, but they are actually the one as little as the other. To identify moral evil and sin defined as enmity to God is a still graver mistake, and one which has greatly aggravated the difficulty of reconciling the existence of moral evil with theism. But neither psychology nor the moral and religious development of humanity, so far as we can trace it, will support such a doctrine. According to that doctrine all particular evil thoughts or deeds are but indicia of the breach of the first and great commandment of love to God. But love, like morality, we have found to be possible only when the stage of social intercourse and self-consciousness is attained. Prior to that, man cannot be said consciously to love even himself; and till he has learned to love his ^'brother, whom he hath seen, how can he love God, whom he hath not seen .-* " In recent years, since the importance of the historical method has been recognised, an enormous mass of facts concerning primitive religion and morality has been collected, but we are still sadly lacking in insight into their true' meaning and con- nexion. In the earlier phases of its development religion doubtless powerfully reinforced the sanctions of the existing morality, but on the other hand probably morality at first did more to elevate religion than religion did to elevate morality. Under the influence of the higher religions however morality has unquestion- ably gained in what we may call inwardness as well as ^ Cf. Tennant, op. cit. on " The ambiguous usage of the term 'Sin' and its derivatives,' pp. i6o ff. The dogma of ^Original Sin 371 in authority\ Hence the deep sense of sin that is characteristic of the awakened Christian conscience. Sin, in fact, as Mr Hobhouse has well said, " borrows something of the infinitude of the Being against whom it offends and [so] puts a measureless gulf between Him and the sinner." Consciousness of sin cannot then be the first stage of moral evil. On the contrary just as morality is an advance upon the animal level, which as such cannot be called immoral, so this sense of sin is an advance upon the level of mere immorality, which as such cannot be described as one of enmity or estrangement between man and God. On the merely moral level self-righteousness is possible, on the higher religious level it is not : hence " there is joy in heaven over one sinner that repentetli more than over ninety and nine righteous persons that need no repentance." For such repentance is a new birth into a higher life ; but it is not deliverance from innate depravity : it is truly an advance on all that existed before, not a restoration of pristine innocence. Here however let us return to the main question just now mentioned. Granted, it is urged, that the attainment of a knowledge of good and evil is an advance, why need all further advance be interrupted by lapses? The lapses in question consist in what we ordinarily call yielding to temptation, as in the fall our first parents are said to have yielded. The average child or man does not yield to every temptation, but only to some, while others are resisted. We can, it is thought, imagine an individual never exposed to temptations too strong to be overcome, and yet liable * Ct. Malt. V. 27, II, 43 ; vi. i, 2, 16. 24 — 2 372 Moral Evil and Moral Order to temptations of ever increasing strength as his own moral strength increased ; just as a pine may tower a hundred feet above the plain with its leading bud still intact, if the strains it has to bear, though growing — and growing, because of its growth — never reach the breaking point. Why is the world such that moral characters don't grow in this manner? A wise parent, it is said, can do much to protect his child from excessive temptation ; and God, if he would, could surely do much more, could in fact do all that is needed. But that parents in this respect can be over-wise is proverbial : for ' fugitive and cloistered virtue ' proves but a feeble and imperfect thing compared with the virtue that 'sallies forth and sees her adversary.' Young Washington turned out a better man through being entrusted with that famous hatchet than he would have done if kept out of the mischief into which it led him. The leading bud of the forest-giant is in the end no greater than it was when the tree started as a sapling, nor is moral strength to be increased by cockering, though objectively good habits may grow apace as long as the conditions are favourable. In short, reflexion, I believe, will convince us that a world in which the possibility of wrong-doing was prevented by the exclusion of all temptations that were really such, could neither be nor become a moral world at all. " Call it a non-moral world then, if you choose," some will say; "at all events it would be a better world than this which presumably you call moral." So Huxley: "I protest," he said, "that if some great Power would agree to make me think always what is A PVorld in ' leading strings ' 373 true and do what Is right on condition of being turned into a sort of clock... I should instantly close with the bargain. The only freedom I care about is the freedom to do right ; the freedom to do wrong I am ready to part with on the cheapest terms to any one who will take it of me\" But freedom and clockwork, freedom and yet no choice ; clockwork and experience, absolute routine and yet continuous progress in self-knowledge and self-control, are not these flagrant contradictions ? That imaginary non-moral world would indeed be a perfect world of its kind ; but it would be only a world of automata between which complete harmony had been pre-established. This actual world of ours can lay no claim to such perfection ; it has still to work out its own salvation. But it Is certainly a moral world, for it acknowledges the authority of conscience even when it disobeys : conscience is ever a power in it working for the righteousness, in which alone the world finds its own meaning and its supreme ideal. A world entirely in leading strings may realise an ideal, but it can have no Ideal that Is truly Its own, no moral ideal. Which now is the better world .'* In asking this question we are reminded of Lessing's fine saying, though It relates only to the first of the two goods that Huxley wanted ready-made. " Did the Al- mighty," said Lessing, "holding in his right hand Trnth, and In his left Search for Truth, deign to offer me the one 1 might prefer; — in all humility but with- out hesitation, I should request — Search for TriUh 2 )» ' Methods and Results, Collected Essays, i. p. 192. * Quoted among a number of similar passages by Hamilton Metaphysics, i. p. 13. 374 Moral Evil and Moral Order As to moral good however no such alternative seems possible. " Nothing takes place morally," said Rothe, "except what takes place through ones own self- determination : this it is that converts it from a mere taking place into an action'^." This is the main fact, — ' main miracle ' if you will — " this power on thine own act and on the world " which evolution and morality alike imply. A world of so-called creatures devoid of all initiative would not be an evolving world as we understand evolution. Such a world might embody its Creator's will perhaps, if we could say that is willed which we need only conceive as thought ; but even if it could be held to express his will it still could never either know it or do it. The possibility of moral evil, in a word, is implied in any moral order that is evolved at all : to make this impossible is to make that im- possible too. Of course to one who should prefer to be an immaculate puppet rather than a man with all his shortcomings but also with all his capabilities, there is no more to be said. But is such an irrational person conceivable P"* The sort of ideal world that we have just discussed would cease to be non-moral if regarded, not as the result of a pre-established harmony, but as the achieve- ment of virtuous struggle crowned eventually with victory. So regarded we may call it the upper limit of moral evolution, the world in the era beyond good and evil, when evil is no more. At the other extreme we ^ Quoted by Martineau, A Study of Religion, 2nd edn, 11. p, 103. Martineau's whole section on Moral Evil is admirable. ^ I am well aware that Huxley of all men was not really one of this sort. The two Limits of Moral Evolution 375 can imagine a limit at and below which moral evil is impossible, because moral good is impossible ; where the impulses of sense are so exclusive and so strong that prudence and virtue are out of the question. It is useless here to talk of temptation : this then we may call the lower limit of moral evolution. Between these two extremes lies our world, where moral evil, at once possible and avoidable, is yet continuously present : is it a hopeless venture to believe in God where such a state of things obtains ? A world in which it could not obtain, we have argued, would assuredly not be better, for such a world would not be moral at all. On the other hand a world in which it did not, though it still might, obtain, would, we must admit, certainly be a better world. But, for all that, the actual existence of moral evil in our world is only Incompatible with a theocracy, if God is the author of this evil ; if, m other words, God is the sole free agent and his so- called creatures only so many impotent vessels of honour or dishonour. Then indeed God and the world would be bad together, but God only would be morally evil. And that surely is a supposition as absurd as it is monstrous. Before the presence of evil in the world can be cited as evidence that God is not present in it, it must be shewn that the evil is such as not merely to retard but absolutely to prevent the onward progress of moral order and render the attain- ment of the upper limit of moral evolution for ever impossible. Again we ask — Which way does the presumption lie.-* We are wont to say that a struggle between good and evil is now constantly going on, and then our 3/6 Moral Evil and Moral Order question takes the form : — Which side, so far as we can judge, bids fair to win? But in fact the question in this form is not truly put. There is no such duaHsm of good and evil : they are not two coordinate powers; in a word, there is no pi'inciple of eviP. There is a moral order, but evil is only disorder. This is the grain of truth in the contention so persistently main- tained, that evil is essentially negative. However woefully men mistake what is their real good, it is this none the less that each one constantly strives for : evil as evil is no man's aim. The devil's aim it is indeed said to be, but we are none of us pledged to believe in the devil. The struggle with evil then is not a struggle for supremacy like the battle of the gods and the Titans; it is an advance against hindrances, which exist only as hindrances, not as beings having ends of their own as Manichaeism supposed. The moment the true character of any form of evil is apparent that moment the struggle to overcome it begins : hence the world- wide association between evil and darkness So far then there is truth again in the ancient Socratic paradox that virtue is knowledge and vice involuntary. We cannot, of course^ identify virtue and truth, vice and error : conduct is more than cognition, though, in pro- portion as it is intelligent, it always implies cognition. In impulsive action, we act first and know after ; but sooner or later experience brings wisdom : otherwise in fact the plane of deliberativ^e action would never have been attained. On this level too, with its 'practical ^ Cf. Lect. VI. pp. 131 ff. ' As Aristotle in his criticism of Socrates long ago pointed out. Cf. Eth. VI. 13; VII. 5. Also Mackenzie, Manual of Ethics, viii. 7. No Principle of Evil '^'-j'l syllogism,' there may be genuine error — either as regards the major premise, the principle, or as regards the minor, the particular 'case,' but error of this sort too is corrigible and tends with growing experience to disappear. There may however be the self-sophistica- tion and casuistry which have made the ' wiles of the devil' proverbial, and to which the manifold euphemisms for every form of vice bear striking testimony. But they bear striking testimony also to the fact that evil can only flourish disguised sub specie boni, whicii doubt- less was part at least of what Socrates meant, and led him, as it has led so many since, strenuously to advocate moral education. When then we compare the unity and solidarity of the good with the motley, many- headed shapes of evil ever at cross-purposes with each other, the conservation common to all forms of good and to no forms of evil ; when too we consider the close connexion between the good and the true, on the one hand, between error and evil on the other — have we not ground for believing in the eventual triumph of the good, have we not ground for maintaining that such moral evil as we find in the world, terrible though it is, is after all not such as to justify the atheistic position ? But there is still an old difficulty to consider. The moral evil in the world, it is said, is not confined to human misdeeds, innumerable and often heinous though they be : over and above them there is the want of justice in what are supposed to be God's ways with men. "All things come alike to all: there is one event to the righteous and to the wicked... : this is an evil in all things that are done under the sun." Well, 3/8 Moral Evil and Moral Order if there is a God at all his ways are certainly not our ways. The writer of Ecclesiastes seems to rate them morally below our ways, the writer of Isaiah as much above them as the heavens are hig-her than the earth. What is the real difference ? Earthly monarchs have been known directly to interfere in the affairs of their subjects in order to exalt the worst and humble the best, but can we possibly regard the prosperity of the wicked and the suffering of the righteous as due to divine intervention in this way ? An immoral govern- ment of the world would indeed leave us no choice but atheism, and would so put an end to theodicies altogether. But untrained minds none the less picture to them- selves God's relation to the world as simply analogous to that of a sovereign to his subjects. And accord- ingly they find the solution of the difficulty raised, not in atheism, but in the view expounded by Job's com- forters. In spite of appearances to the contrary, that is to say, there is, they maintain, strict moral government and the Judge of all the earth does right. Seeming misfortune is really punishment. So men thought when the tower of Siloam fell, and so the wide world through many think still When then one man wilfully injures others he is the unwitting instrument of divine justice; and though society in punishing his crime performs a like office for him, what is to be said if, yielding to compassion, it proceeds to succour his victims ? De- liberate attempts to frustrate the ends of justice would surely themselves call for punishment. Again on this view might not the man in pursuit of worthy ends rely on the words of the Psalmist, which the tempter Moral Government in the PVorld 379 misquoted, and be confident, if he were indeed truly- doing right, that no evil could befall him^ ? In short, as Professor Royce, who has dealt excellently with this difficulty, sums it up, "the result is here indeed a moral fatalism, of an unexpected, but none the less inevitable sort^" Its logical outcome rigorously pursued would be to render moral evil impossible and moral good inevitable — and that, we have already seen, is contra- dictory. We may conclude then that the contingency in the world, of which physical evil is a part, cannot be construed into a sign of moral imperfection in its con- stitution : such contingency is inseparable from any creation that is evolutionary in such wise as to leave free agents more or less initiative. At this pomt it might be objected • But if God does not interfere either to reward or to punish, then the only moral government there is in the world is the work of his creatures : ' their initiative ' is the whole, and the imperfection we find is no longer surprising. But what sort of God is one that only conserves the world on its physical side, — maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust — but leaves it morally to itself, to sink or swim as it may ? No moral government is better certainly than an immoral government, but is it the best possible ? But this objection is still coloured by the same crude anthropomorphism as the foregoing. Just as creation used to be conceived as accomplished only in the piecemeal fashion of a human artificer, ' Cf. Matt. iv. 6; Ps. xci. ' The World and the Individual, a. p. 404: cf. the whole section, PP- 399—405- 380 Moral Evil and Moral Order completing now this now that, so it was assumed that divine government must take the form of special inter- ferences, as In plagues and thunderbolts, sudden death and other so-called 'judgments.' Special providences like special creations, however, belong to a creed out- worn ; though the ideas of creation and providence may- be valid still. But from the standpoint of pluralism they will be conceived as one continuous process of evolution, not as two distinct series of acts, one of which is an interference with the other\ Events that once impressed the untutored savage as supernatural are now recognised as belonging to nature's routine ; yet such events were doubtless im- portant factors in the early evolution of religion. Has this glimmer of the Divine beyond nature characteristic of primitive superstition utterly died out, or has it grown clearer with advancing knowledge ? Is the evidence for theism greater or less ? Less, unques- tionably — in fact none at all — if we seek only for miraculous signs, and maintain that apart from such special interpositions the whole cosmic order is non- moral. Then indeed, unless we are prepared to cast science to the winds, we are left to picture the micro- cosm pitted against the macrocosm, as Huxley did, and, having done its best, doomed perchance to failure^ But the evidence will be more, certainly — in principle * On the other hand apart from pluralism, apart that is to say from the co-operation of finite agents— from the standpoint of absolute singularism — in other words, there would be no meaning in process or evolution at all. Call time only appearance if you like; still meanwhile this appearance is the universe of our discourse. * Cf. preceding Lecture, p. 360. Moral GoveriDneut of the JVorld 381 all the external evidence that in an evolving world seems possible — if, regarding rational agents and their history as an integral part of the one cosmic order and the part that gives meaning to the whole, we find no hint of purpose or worth in it unless it be the realisa- tion of the good ; if, further, we find this ideal con- sciously adopted as their end by the best part of man- kind and unconsciously acknowledged by all inasmuch as all seek the good ; and if, lastly, we find that even physical evils are often ' trials ' that tend to strengthen virtue, to enhance and ensure the good attained, but never invincible obstacles presenting a solid front such that all the powers of good cannot prevail against it. All this, as I have said, we do find ; and it means that moral order is the order of the world. No one ever put this position so forcibly as Fichte : moral order — the ordo ordi7ians he called it, as the parallel of the Spinozistic natura naturans — was for him the Absolute, a pantheistic moral principle but not a personal God. But need we, nay can we, stop here } So far certainly we need not, and Fichte in the end did not. The immanence of the good in the world as the informing principle of its evolution, the standard of its worth at any stage and the end towards which the whole creation moves, is not in itself incompatible with the transcendent reality of this principle as a Supreme Being. To deny this reality may entail no formal contradiction ; but it leaves us to face the difhculties of absolute pluralism which theism removes and to forego the confidence which theism inspires. For order in the practical sphere, in the realm of ends, cannot be merely a relation, but must imply that which orders, as 382 Moral Evil and Moral Order Lotze used ever to maintain\ That which orders then, if it be not the One we have called God, can only be the Many who would then be miscalled his creatures. It must certainly be in part the latter, if morality is to have any meaning ; but why can it not be both ? For the existence of moral evil in an evolving world like ours would only debar us utterly from accepting this solution if such evil were radical and absolute. Still, it may be replied, even granting that we have no evidence of an essentially evil principle at work in the world so far as we know it, yet the part of it that we know is exceedingly small : elsewhere such a principle may exist. I can only reply by asking what conceivable reason could there be for the exist- ence of absolute evil ? Its existence would be the overthrow of reason altogether, and carry us back at once to the absurdities of the pessimism of Schopenhauer and von Hartmann. It may be well to anticipate a possible but some- what perverse objection for the sake of another topic to which it naturally leads. We have admitted that if theism is to be defensible this must be the best possible world, and yet have allowed that a world in which moral evil, though it might obtain, actually did not, would be a better world than this. Now these two positions, it may be said, are inconsistent. But are they, provided we carefully distinguish ? This world we say is one in which, though moral evil actually obtains, it need not. Why does it ? Not because of any necessitation on God's part but because of the free acts of us, who are joint-workers with him in the * Cf. Microcosmus, Eng. trans. 11. pp. 673 li. The IVorld as a Divine Comedy 383 world's evolution. So far as God's part in the world is concerned, this world and the better world supposed are on a par : the int'eriority in fact of this world is due to us. But can we conceive this world evolving orthogenetically, as a biologist would say, without its peccability passing over into sin just as its fallibility passes over into error ? Perhaps we cannot, but we need not therefore deny either that the straight course is ideally the better or that the fault is ours. But some who seek to vindicate the ways of God to men have implicitly denied one or both : the fall equally with the creation they refer to God's decree and justify as abounding to his glory: the history of the world, though a human tragedy, thus, as Martensen has said, becoming a divine comedy. It is strange that self-glorification should be attributed as a motive to God in a religion to which we owe the far higher and more appropriate conception of God as Love. But this is not the point to which I want now to refer, but rather the idea embodied in such words as O felix ailpa Adami qtiae flier iiit talem et tauhun habere redemptorem ! referring to the ddnoument of the said drama. Whatever else we may think of Jesus of Nazareth called Christ and of the relioion that he founded, at least we must recognise the soul of good, evoked by things evil, which they reveal. Nobody ever read Seeley's Ecce Homo without being profoundly impressed by this. No wonder then that Christian speculation, seeing in sin the occasion of this revelation, should have regarded the whole so-called ' plan of salvation ' and the evil which it presupposes as divinely foreordained. And yet surely this cannot be, for to make moral evil o 84 Moral Evil and Moral Order essential to the perfection of the world would leave us no choice, just as to make it impossible would leave us none ; the inevitable can have no moral quality. Such doctrine, in a word, overreaches itself. But the more good comes even through evil the more reason have we for believing the Good and it alone to be verily the Supreme. It is in this way that the Christian ideal promises to solve the problem of moral evil. LECTURE XVIII. THEORIES OF A FUTURE LIFE. Of all the ills that flesh is heir to, death is commonly accounted the chief. And yet if we look only at life on this earth and the general economy of nature here, it seems hardly disputable that death in itself — apart from its possible circumstances — is no evil either for the individual or for the species to which this belongs ; while it is good for the progress of development on the whole. For the individual animal, natural death means release after its end — the perpetuation of the species — has been accomplished. For the species, death in general means the survival of the better adapted, the more vigorous and the more enterprising; and therefore it means also increased opportunity for the advance to life of a higher form. As regards the mere animal we may say with Hegel, that "death shows the species to be the power that is superior to the immediate individual. For the animal, the process of the species is the highest point of its vitality. But it never gets so far as to have a being for itself within its species : on the contrary it is subservient to the supremacy of this\" And this is so, we may add, ^ Encyclopaedia, § 221. W. 25 386 Theories of a Future Life because the merely animal Individual shows little or no trace of true personality : so we have natural histories of species, but biographies only of persons. It is only in the case of self-conscious beings then that the fact of death, in removing them completely from out our bourne of time and place, gives rise to anxious questionings. We cannot say of tJiem that they existed solely for the sake of the species biologically regarded. Nor can we say, as Hume did, "' that if any purpose of nature be clear, we may affirm that the whole scope and intention of man's creation, so far as we can judge by natural reason, is limited to the present life\" If that were so, the universal belief In a future life and all man's moral and religious Ideals would be unaccount- able anomalies, a cruel and senseless mockery without a parallel : not in this wise do we interpret the swallow's migratory instincts or the squirrel's preparations for its winter sleep. Within the whole range of the wide world's literature we find no more constant theme than just this disparity between man's possibilities and aspirations on the one hand and the narrow scope afforded them in the brief space of the present life on the other. It is true, as we have had to note more than once already, that these possibilities and aspira- tions belong to the individual man only through his organic connexion with the over-individual, Man or humanity as a whole. But It does not follow that each person is but an Instrument subservient to this — le 1 " On the Immortality of the Soul." Essays, Green and Grose's edn, n. p. 400, one of the essays that Hume suppressed, and well he might, for its arguments rest on a cynical and ignoble estimate of humanity that has seldom been surpassed. Incompleteness of the Present Life 387 A grmid Eire so called — is himself in no sense an end but just a means : it does not follow that his one function is vivre pour autrui and nothing more. As a complex machine is only an arrangement of simple machines, so — if the individual were only a means — humanity at best could only be a system of means, and like the machine, could only have an end beyond itself, an end in which it had itself no share. If however humanity — or to speak more generally, if spiritual society — is an end for itself, then the persons who constitute it must share in this end. We cannot bring the parts under one category and the whole under another. This in- consequence is one fatal defect of the Comtian 'enthusiasm of humanity,' from which the Christian is free\ But there is the other defect. The conditions of our present life are inadequate to our highest personal and therefore also to our highest social ideals. " My kingdom," the Christian spirit — nay, the religious spirit everywhere — says, " is not of this world." More- over evil is not overcome unless it is overcome in each individual. But while this sense of the incompleteness of our personal life if death is to terminate it, has grown with our moral and religious progress and is most keenly felt by the best of men and by men at their best ; yet, on the other hand, the difficulties besetting all our attempts to specify — even m the vaguest way — the natural conditions of such a life have grown still more ^ There is the less need to dwell on this point since it has been already dealt with very fully by T. H. Green — cf. his Prolegomena to Ethics, % 184 ff. The fallacy involved is also clearly exposed by Dr McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology, % 1 2 fif. 25—2 388 Theories of a Fiitiire Life remarkably ; and they weigh most heavily on those whose knowledge is most profound and whose in- telligence is most exacting. We approximate, in a word, to a sort of antinomy : what our practical reason says ought to be, science tends to say cannot be. The qualifications I have used are important. First the opposition is not definitely an antinomy : what the heart affirms the head does not explicitly deny. Physical difficulties in the way of a future life do not detract from the moral worth of such life : they may even add to it, if moral advance is the condition of their removal. The many arguments now in vogue against a future life seem never to be directly opposed^ to its desirability: what they chiefly contest is its possi- bility. Again we say, difficulties do not make a thing either impossible or inconceivable ; all therefore that science can do is to urge the want of antecedent proba- bility, so long as we keep to what we at present know. The dogmatic rationalists before Kant's day usually disposed in advance of such difficulties by metaphysical arguments demonstrating the soul's essential simplicity and imperishability. It is true that the subject of experience cannot be resolved into a complex of subjects, although all experience as interaction implies such complexity. Nor can the subject be analysed ^ "An over-anxious desire to prove the immortality of the soul is not by any means an evidence of a religious temper of mind. Indeed, the belief in immortality may easily become an unhealthy occupation with a future salvation, which prevents us from seeking for salvation here." E. Caird, The Evolution of Religion, 1893, vol. n. p. 243. This sort of selfish ' other-worldliness ' has no doubt called forth condemna- tion and thus has tended indirectly to discredit the morality of the belief in a future life. The old * dogmatic ' argiunents faulty 389 into merely objective relations, as in presentationism, since objects always imply relation to a subject. So far we seem justified in regarding the subject of experience as ontal not phenomenal : it is certainly the source of all our categories concerning reality — substance, cause, end, and the like. But Kant revived a distinction which the rationalists' arguments for immortality too much overlooked; though Locke might have taught them better — the distinction, I mean, between substantial identity and personal identity. Such reasonings as those of the Leibniz-Wolffians can afford us no assurance of a personal future till personal identity is shown to be something more than a temporary form or property, any number of which m succession the same soul may acquire and lose. Of this sort is the immortality assumed in the ancient and widely-spread belief in the transmigration of souls. The soul is held to remain identically the same, the various lives it leads being in general determined by the bodies into which it enters. Kant however enter- tained a still stranger supposition, not the transmigra- tion of the same soul to different bodies, but the complete transference of the same personality, that is to say the same self-consciousness, to different souls or substances, on the analogy of the complete transference of the motion of one elastic sphere to another with which it collides. Thus on either view all that we know as our self-conscious life would have to be regarded as a mere accident of the soul whose reality it was none the less supposed to reveal. But what is preeminently of worth to us is not mere persistence of being but just this continuity of 390 Theories of a Futitre Life our personal life. This, which the theory of metem- psychosis seems to sacrifice more or less completely, would on Kant's supposition be entirely retained. So that if his supposition were sound, we might be content with urging, as Lotze has already done, that it yields everything that we practically care about. " No one who wished the doctrine of immortality to be assured," said Lotze, "could concern himself with anything but that continuity of his consciousness which he desired not to lose ; he would be heartily indifferent to the question whether the thing in itself which was to be the substratum of that continuance occupied in the series the position n or (?^+i)^" May be, but he would be but a very shallow thinker who co2ild be assured in such a case. What guarantee should we have, if Kant's analogy were sound, that our person- ality, being only a bundle of accidents, would always or usually be passed on entire ? If our whole conscious- ness is separable from its substratum, how are we to know whether this is one or many : how can we tell what it is, or be sure that it is anything at all ? To all these questions save the last Kant's reply is Ignora7nus : the last it never occurred to him independently to raise or seriously to entertain at all. A view of the soul, that could lead to such analogies, give rise to such questions, and yet furnish no answer to them, we surely may suspect. Nor is it difficult to find the source of these defects : ultimately and in the main It was none other than the Essay concerning Htwian Understanding of our own John Locke. Here we find the same analogy, the * Aletaphysic, Eng. trans. § 244. Category of Substance inadequate 39 1 same phenomenal dualism of matter and mind, the one perceived by external, the other by internal sense, and above all the same category of substance and accident applied alike to both. Yet all the while both Locke and Kant were aware of facts incompatible with thus levelling down all the constituents of experience to one plane and handling all with the same categories. This Locke showed in his recoonition of the knowledge of our own existence as intuitive and our knowled^re of the existence of other finite beings as only sensible ; and still more Kant in his recoo^nition — in what he called the synthetic unity of apperception — of every subject of experience as, to use Lotze's words, ' an independent centre of action and reaction.' The very abstractness of the category of substance which led Kant to formulate the principle now known as the conservation of mass, and his description of substance as the name given to the phenomenon that is thus conserved, show clearly the inapplicability of this category of substance and accident to what Kant him- self has over and over again emphatically declared is not phenomenal. His attempts to resolve it into some ierlium quid between phenomenon and thing per se plainly indicate that he had taken more of Hume into his system than it could assimilate. His constant shuffling of transcendental Ego, logical Ego and empirical Ego forcibly reminds one of thimble-rigging. Let us then make bold to regard our self-conscious life, not as a flux of accidents pertaining with we know not what all beside to some substratum or other, but as the actions and reactions of a thing per se or rather of a subject in a world of such, as the intercourse of such a 392 Theories of a Future Life subject with other subjects. Instead of regarding all souls as substances we have proceeded rather on the spiritualistic interpretation of all substances as souls. And it is worth remarking that a monadology of this sort still haunted Kant's speculation from his earlier days and was constantly cropping out in his later critical writings\ This is notably the case, for example, in his solution of the third antinomy ; for the logical possibility of freedom, whereby the solution is effected, presupposes the actual existence of a plurality of things per se or substances, whose actions determine the so- called course of nature^ Between the abstract category of substance and what we may call the real category of thinofs or substances, from which it is abstracted, there is a world of difference. The history of philosophy, I incline to think, shows this abstract concept of sub- stance to be, as Schopenhauer maintained, either useless or mischievous. If the individuality of the concrete thing is dropped then substance becomes synonymous with matter or stuff — for which * form ' is but an accident — this is indeed its popular meaning and the meaning too unquestionably the predominant one with Kant. The mischief, as respects our present problem, begins when mind too is regarded as substance, as it was by Descartes and Locke. But apart from the categories of individuality and activity that of sub- stantiality is inadequate to define either the idea of God or that of a soul. It is also too indeterminate and empty 1 Cf. B. Erdmann's Kanfs Kriticisjnus u. s. w., 1878, pp. 73— 75 : also a dissertation by a pupil of Erdmann's, O. Riedel, Die inona- dologischen Bestimmungen in Kanfs Lehre vom Ding an sich, 1884. * Cf. above, Lecture xiv. pp. 302 ff. TJie question a question as to Value 393 to admit of either individuality or causality being deduced or dialectically developed from it, though itself readily to be abstracted from the concrete ' things ' with qualities which manifest their being by their activity\ But if we were to discard the category of substanti- ality and content ourselves with that of mere actuality, what reasons would remain for expecting our life to continue indefinitely ? Well, at any rate the category of substance will not furnish a reason : it would at best only state the fact, or rather only subtly beg the question. So far perhaps we may agree with what Lotze intended in saying : — " The question of the im- mortality of the soul does not belong to Metaphysic. We have no other principle for deciding it," he con- tinues, " beyond this general idealistic conviction : — every created thing will continue, if and so long as its continuance belongs to the meaning of the world ; every one will pass away, whose actuality had only in some transitory phase of the world's course a place (Stelle) that justified it^" But it would still remain an open question whether the evolution of the world's meaning would not be at least as well met, (and a more intimate unity and continuity secured,) by the mutual adaptations and adjustments of the same individuals, as by the annihilation of some and the creation of others. Anyhow it is meanwhile safe to say — strange as it may sound — that we have no positive evidence, cither a posteriori or a prioj^i, that the latter is the ' Cf. Sigwart, Logik, 2nd edn, ^^77 (i); Lotze, Meiaphysik, % 245; Nadtralisfn and Agnosticism, 3rd edn, vol. n. pp. 192 ff. ^ Mftaphysik^ loc. cit. 394 Theories of a Future Life method which in fact obtains. We say All men are mortal, but not one of us has experienced death ; not one of us knows anything therefore of what for the subject immediately concerned it really is. If we knew that the individual's existence began with that of the body, we might argue that it would also probably end with it : but here again the empirical basis for such an argument fails us. Finally, if the materialist's con- tention were established, if soul and body were shown to be identical, that certainly would leave no further room for doubt. But we may say with some confidence that science itself has once for all renounced materialism of this sort\ Altogether — so far as the mere persist- ence of the individual subject now actually existing goes — we may fairly maintain that the burden of proof after all rests with those who would dogmatically deny it. But, as already said, the mere persistence of the individual subject will not content us : it is in the continuity of our personal life that we are supremely interested, and facts force us to admit that we cannot straightway infer the one from the other. It seems useless to say The eternal form will still divide The eternal soul from all beside, unless we have some basis for conjecturing how much ^ " If the belief in immortality is essential to morality, physical science has no more to say against the probability of that doctrine than the most ordinary experience has, and it effectually closes the mouths of those who pretend to refute it by objections deduced from merely physical data." Huxley, 'Science and Morals,' Collected Essays, vol. IX. p. 143. Contimdty of Memory 395 or how little can be 'eternal form.' Whatever has been gradually acquired, may for all we know be lost again ; and indeed much of it, so far as present experience goes, appears, at first sight, to be entirely lost. Some continuity of memory is indispensable to personal continuity, and is commonly held to require some continuity of organism. Continuity of environ- ment again appears not only to be a necessary condition of organic continuity, but to be also essential to any further personal development. But how is such con- tinuity conceivable beyond the grave.'* As regards memory the difficulties so commonly felt are largely due to bad psychology. Memory, though common thought and language associate it so intimately with objective records, obviously cannot be really identified with these ; for they presuppose it\ Of the subjective function, apart from which records are not records, no explanation, no definition or description even, that does not already imply it, has — so far as I know — ever been, or — as I believe — ever will be given. We are tempted perhaps sometimes to describe memory as the perception of what is distant in the past and to develop the many analogies there are between it and the perception of what is distant in space. But one difference at any rate there is and that difference is fundamental. Distance in space implies only objective order : two men walking together may both see the same landmark, say a mile in front of them ; but though they may look back a year in time, the experi- ences they remember will strictly speaking never be in a like sense the same. Memory furnishes us with no * Cf. Naturalism and A^noslicis/n, vol. il. pp. 156 — 159. 39^ Theories of a Future Life such common range in time as vision yields us in space : there is at least this much justification for Kant's treatment of time as the form of internal perception. The subjective marks peculiar to memory- proper cannot be identified with any merely objective order ; and so, we may question if all connexion between the subject and its past experience is permanently dis- solved simply by the apparent obliteration of certain objective records. Hence the truth — so far — of Fries's contention that the problem to explain is not memory but obliviscence : about that there is, however, no special difficulty \ Moreover, strictly speaking, the universe contains at this moment the potential record of every event that has ever happened ; and every subject, that has advanced beyond the ideal limit of the ' naked monad,' is able to some extent to read this record, and to read it to a greater extent and more distinctly the further its own experience has developed. And again, at the level of self-consciousness, over and above the merely passive memory or reminiscence, that has to wait till the record is clear, we have the active memory or recollection that can search its own archives; and we have also the intelligence that can seek out and interpret other records beyond any imaginable limit. The gradual achievement of such increased independence and ' Herein the analogy with space holds good. Distant objects in a landscape can in general only be clearly seen if they are of sufficient magnitude, and distant events in a lifetime can in general only be clearly remembered if they are of sufficient moment. Again as there may be positive obstructions in the way of our vision so there may be in the way of our memory, and the body — as in disease — is known to be a frequent source of such obstructions. Memory and Objective Records 397 initiative is just that advance from sentient individual to rational person, from soul to spirit, wliicli phiilosophy from Plato onwards lias steadily recognised as a fact, though it has seldom ventured to account for it as a continuous development. If now — in addition to the subjective factor implied in all memory — we take into account this increased independence which the spiritual level secures, and along with this the fact that in what we may call the world order the new is continuous with the old, we surely have some ground for thinking it possible that the departed spirit may re-collect itself, even without the body. Nay, it will not be absurd to suppose with Kant that at this level "the separation from the body would be the end of the sensuous employment and the beginning of the intelligible em- ployment of our faculty of knowledge. The body would then have to be considered, not as the cause of our thinking but only as a restrictive condition of it and therefore... as an impediment of our pure and spiritual life\" The spirit is often willing when the flesh is weak ; but here we have a literal rising through its death to higher things. At any rate we must hold firmly to the position that it is function that determines structure, not structure that determines function ; that the soul is the entelechy of the body, not vice versa, to use the phrase of Aristotle's which Leibniz adopted. It then surely becomes reasonable to suppose that the spirit that has so far transcended the body is not wholly undone with its undoing, emphatically reasonable if we find, when we come presently to inquire, that there are ' Criti(]ue of ike Pure Reason, ist edn, p. 7 7 8. Max Miiller's trans., p. 667. 398 Theories of a Futtire Life teleological grounds of supreme moment, why this should not be. And yet, we must allow that we can hardly frame more than the vaguest conjectures how — so far as it is verily disembodied — the soul or spirit proceeds, if needs be, to clothe itself anew ; albeit we have no reason to regard it, let me remark again, as reduced in the interim to the level of a naked monad. But there is at any rate a closely analogous case, where a like renewal actually happens, though our ignorance of the process is almost as complete. But if we knew abso- lutely nothing of embryology, and if it happened — as Leibniz in fact supposed — that the process of dying consisted in a reversal or ' involution ' of the process of growth and differentiation, so that the true corpse, so to say, should be again nothing but a tiny and apparently homogeneous speck of protoplasm — so small that a few consecrated pill-boxes might almost suffice for the campi santi of the world — we should, I fancy, be quite as sure as we can now be that the renewal of such a life was an idle dream. And yet in the embryo, a like speck, we have Although the print be little, the whole matter And copy of the father, — eyes, nose, lip, The very mould and frame of hand, nail, finger. May we not then suppose that if the germinal soul can accomplish so much the separated spirit can accomplish more^ } But it will be replied the germ is an organism, ^ I have, since writing the above, chanced upon the following interesting anticipation : — "Abstractly considered, that is considered without relation to the difference which habit and merely habit * Involution ' and Gerinmation 399 not a disembodied soul. That is true unquestionably and it is important ; for any continuity of life with no continuity of either organism or environment seems quite inconceivable. But there is nothing in our present knowledge to show that there cannot be any other mode of embodiment than that with which we are here familiar, and that we have not manifold other relations with our environment besides those which the organism as we know it is supposed to explain — or rather perhaps that our environment has not such rela- tions with us, of which we at present have no clear consciousness. It is futile to attempt to specify these possibilities by imagining an astral body, an ethereal body or the like ; and to talk of a subliminal self seems only to betray ignorance of the real problem, which relates not to the self but to the continuance after death of its rapporl with the world. But we may at least lay stress on the tremendous gap in our scientific knowledge concerning the inter- action of body and mind — a gap which there seems no prospect of our filling up, whether we work, so to say, outwards from psychology or inwards from physiology — if such inaccurate phraseology may be for brevity's produces in our faculties and modes of apprehension, I do not see anything more in the resurrection of a dead man than in the con- ception of a child; except it be this that the one comes into his world with a system of prior consciousness about him, w^hile the other does not : and no person will say that he knows enough of either subject to perceive that this circumstance makes such a difference in the two cases, that the one should be easy, and the other not so. To the first man, the succession of the species would be as incomprehensible as the resurrection of the dead is to us." Paley, Evidences of Christi- anity, Tcgg's edn of his works, p. 114. 400 Theories of a Fttttire Life sake allowed. Here there must be facts in plenty of which we are wholly ignorant, and here, it may be, that as an original but little known writer has supposed, " in the course of this life the nervous system by its ultimate habitudes should frame a finer organization, and that this in the moment and act of death should be disentangled from the coarser framed" Or more likely, it may be, as Bonnet and the younger Fichte supposed, that within the changeable * external body ' there is from the first an 'inner body' that shapes it and outlasts it^ Or again, with still more probability, it may be, as Thiele supposed, that this invisible body is not built up from without nor present from the first as ' form-principle ' of the external and changing body, but that it will be gradually elaborated as the soul's development requires, just as the bodies which it has outworn were elaborated to subserve its needs during the lower stages of its development^ But all such hypotheses, and there are many, like the gap in our knowledge that leaves room for them, do not reach beyond the dualism of common thought ; fail in fact to get down to the bed-rock of experience that underlies all such problems. More fundamental than any seem- ing dualism of body and soul is the duality of subject and object in experience, and this — for spiritualistic monism — means the interaction of subjects with other * W. Cyples, An Inquiry inlo the Process of Human Expetience^ London, 1880, p. 431. ^ C. Bonnet, La palinghieste philosophique, 1769. J. H. Fichte, Psychologie, 1864, I. pp. 63 f, A similar view, it is interesting to note, was entertained by the physicists, Balfour Stewart and Tait : of. The Unseen Universe, 2nd edn, 1875, PP- 159^' * {y.ThxoXQ, Die Fhilosophie des Seii^stsbewusstseins, 1895, pp. 5061. Continuity of Environment 401 subjects, transcends the opposition of person and thing. It means too, that the organism is the result of such subjective interaction, not that this interaction is the result of it ; more generally still, that subjects are the prime agents in maintaining the so-called physical world, not this the prime agent by which they are passively sustained. Till naturalism succeeds in con- verting this position the way to belief in a future life will always be open. But again as regards the future environment we must admit, as in the case of the future organism, that in the complete absence of any experience we can do no more than conjecture. And obviously, if we are ignorant of the organism that is to be, we must be ignorant also of its specific environment ; and vice versa. But after all, as just now said, there is for spiritualism no sharp line between the two, indeed even for materialism there is none : for the one as for the other, the organism is continuous with, and a part of, the objective world. All that we can reasonably assert is that between the old life and the new there must be some continuity of experience, if the new life is to be regarded as a future life and not as merely another life. There are two views to be considered : that of trans- migration or reincarnation, accepted by the majority of the human race, and that of transfiguration, if we may so call it, prevalent among Christians. The one secures a continuity of environment that satisfies the imagina- tion of survivors, but at the sacrifice more or less com- plete of that personal continuity \vhich we must regard as essential. The other preserves this, but transfers it to an unseen world difficult to realise. w. 26 402 Theories of a Future Life The objection to transmigration or metempsychosis^ has been met by assuming that the personal discon- tinuity is only temporary, and that the successive lives of a given subject may be eventually connected through continuous but latent memories that are revived after death or when all the soul's Wanderjahre are over^ But even so, if this series is to have any real continuity or meaning, if it is to be not merely a series but a pro- gression, then at every return to life, either Providence must determine, or the naturient soul must itself select, its appropriate reincarnation. Otherwise, if disem- bodied souls are to be blown about by the winds of circumstance like other seeds, we should only have a repetition of that outrageous fortune which the doctrine of transmigration was supposed to redress : the con- tingency that seems to pertain to the one birth we know of would only be manifolded, not removed. This difficulty in turn has been met by the further and bolder assumption, that disembodied souls do in fact steer their own way back to a suitable re-birth. An atom liberated from its molecular bonds is described as manifesting an unwonted activity, technically known as 'the nascent state' ; but still it does not recombine indifferently with the first free atom that it encoun- ters, but only with one for which it has an ' affinity.' And "there seems to be nothing more strange or 1 This term though commonly in use is obviously inaccurate. If we must needs have a Greek word, /^eTevcrw/xaTwo-ts used by Clem. Alex, is preferable. - So, for example, Professor Campbell Fraser thinks. Cf. his Theism, vol. ii. p. 249. And still more definitely Renouvier, Le Fersonnalisme, 1903, p. 220. A similar view was held by Max Drossbach, J. Reynaud and many others. Difficulties to be met 403 paradoxical," it has been said, "in the suggestion that each person enters into connexion with the body that is most fitted to be connected with him\" But the affinities of a given atom are, so far as we know, any- thing but select : not only will it combine with others of many kinds, but it seems to be absolutely indifferent to individuals within a kind. So far this analogy then, if it justified any inference at all, would, it may well be thought, hardly warrant us in expecting each person to find his next incarnation even within the species Homo sapiens. Still less would it lead us to expect that he could secure such parentage and surroundings as to admit of his turning the best of his past powers — as poet or patriot say — to full account, assuming that with the temporary lapse of definite memories these could be still retained. But on the other hand it may be fairly urged that a liberated spirit ought to be credited with vastly more savoir vivre than a liberated atom. Further it must be allowed that this suggestion is (^uite in keeping with the conservation of values, which men like Lotze and Hoffding regard as axiomatic — at any rate experience often verifies, and never certainly belies it*. Finally it minimises the objection to personal continuity that is often based on the facts of heredity". And for my part ^ McTaggart, Some Dogmas of Religion, 1906, p. 126. * Cf. Lecture x. pp. 2 1 2 f., andTennyson, In Metnoriam, canto xlv : — This use may lie in blood and breath, Which else were fruitless of their due, Had man to learn himself anew Beyond the second birth of death. ^ It is worth while to note that against this objection Kant proposed a similar reply, the "transcendental hypothesis, namely, 26 — 2 404 Theories of a Ftiture Life 1 must confess that this difficulty seems by far the most serious of any that beset the hypothesis of a plurality of lives. The traducian doctrine of the soul's origin is hard to reconcile with any true spiritualism, while the creationist doctrine is alien to the theory of evolution and open to other obvious difficulties besides. Indeed, if by difficulty we mean something that we fail to work in with, and adjust to, facts or ideas that we accept absolutely ; then I make bold to deny, Dr Rashdall notwithstanding\ that the theory of pre-existence ' creates new difficulties.' It involves ' a ramifying network ' of assumptions unquestionably ; but if it ' is certainly not capable of positive disproof,' the objector is bound to show that the result of the whole is worth- less. Till then, summarily to reject it involves the still more extravagant assumption that we have exhausted all possibilities and that what may be only our lack of knowledge of its empirical conditions is tantamount to a proof of its impossibility^ As Kant, whose words I have adopted, has said, this arrogance of negation does that all life is really intelligible only, not subject to the changes of time, and neither beginning in birth nor ending in death... that if we could intuite ourselves and other things as they really are, we should see ourselves in a world of spiritual natures, with which our only true community did neither begin at birth nor will end with the death of the body, both being merely phenomena" {Critique of the Pure Feason, M. Miiller's trans, p. 668). It is also interesting to learn that shortly before the publication of the Critique Kant dogmatically taught both the pre-existence and the immortality of the soul. Cf. Max Heinze, Vorlesungen Ka?ifs fiber Me/aphysik, 1894, p. 547 of the reprint from the Transactions of the Royal Society of Saxony. ^ Theory of Good and Evil, 1907, vol. n. pp. 346 I. * Cf. Kant, Critique, ist edn, p. 780, M.M. p. 681. Pre-existeiice 405 not eliminate in the least the practical value of such hypotheses. The appeal to ignorance no doubt cuts both ways : it does not allow us to treat hypotheses as knowledge, but on the other hand it does not destroy their working utility if, consistently with what we do know, they enable us even tentatively to reach a com- pleter and more satisfactory Weltanschamtng. As regards this particular hypothesis of pre-existence and a plurality of lives, its complexity is no advantage certainly ; but even so the disadvantage is reduced in proportion as the separate assumptions are analogous with actual experience and consilient with each other. After all it should give the scornful objector pause, to think how many of the vital processes, about which we have definite knowledge, involve an elaborate adjust- ment of multifarious details that would be utterly in- credible but for its familiarity. Is it then unreasonable to expect still more marvellous conjunctions in the wider dimensions of the world beyond the grave .'* And is it not also possible — ^just because of such wider dimensions — that what to us seems complicated or impossible is really as simple as say movement into a third dimen- sion, which yet a being confined to two might fail to understand } To the theist at any rate it is conceiv- able that, without any arbitrary interventions, subjective processes and objective influences may be there at work which are not merely retributive but remedial also. Such notions are of course more or less akin to the Christian doctrines of purgatory, angels, interces- sion and the like. This brings us naturally to the theory of the future life characteristic of Christianity, viz. as a final and 4o6 Theories of a Future Life irrevocable state of existence in a so-called unseen and eternal world. The difficulty here is not so much our inability to imagine such a purely spiritual form of life ; but rather the utter gulf that according to this doctrine must lie between this life and ours. That a man should pass at once from earth to heaven or hell seems irrational and inequitable ; and the lapse of ages of suspended consciousness, if this were conceivable, would not diminish this discontinuity. But between one active life and another there may well be such an intermediate state of mental rumination, so to say, and reflexion, as many theologians have assumed. This state, it has been said, "is not a domain of deeds and works, for the external conditions for these are wanting ...it is the domain of inwardness, of silent consideration and pondering, a domain of recollection {Erinnerung) in the full sense of the word\" We can perhaps suppose that this process may be a preparation for a new life, as just now hinted, provided — though with re-birth, the body, as Plotinus held, " be the true river of Lethe, and the soul plunged in it forgets all " — the change in character is notwithstanding still somehow retained. But it is hardly credible that any spiritual clarifying based on a single life — or series of lives — that is not more refined and matured than ours, could fit many, or indeed any, of the children of men for that final con- summation which Christianity describes as eternal life. At length, however, and sooner for some than for * Martensen, Die christliche Dogmatik, 1856, § 275. Such a self- purgatory of all souls seems a worthier idea than the one-sided ex- piatory purgatory of the Romish Church, which has so little moral efficacy that it may be curtailed by extraneous ceremonial. The Christian ' Transfiguration ' 407 others, a stage might be reached, when — so to say — the 'disembodied' spirit would pass beyond the range of attraction of the seen and temporal and enter the confines of the eternal world ; at once tending towards, and drawn on by, that outer constellation of the choir invisible, to which it is best attuned. But now in conclusion, again recognising to the full the conjectural character of all these details, we may nevertheless still maintain that they are of great use in helping us to realise more definitely the possibility of a future life. On the main issue round which these speculations turn, we must at least insist, viz. that if such life is to have any worth or meaning, a certain personal continuity and continuity of development is essential. From this point of view death becomes indeed but a longer sleep dividing life from life as sleep divides day from day ; and as there is progress from day to day so too there may be from life to life. And we may perhaps see another resemblance. As we often do things better for sleeping over them — though we remember nothing of the subconscious processes through which our plans have matured — so we may do better in a future life, though the new awakening has crowded out the memories of our sojourn in the other world. In one important point indeed the analogy seems to fail : our waking life is a continuous whole, the series of repeated lives at first is not. But even here on the assumption that in the purely spiritual life of the other world this continuity is resumed, the analogy again holds good. We have then however to equate our earthly lives to dreams and death becomes not a sleep- ing but an awaking: Mors janua vitae. And perhaps 4o8 Theories of a Future Life it will seem less strange so to regard it, the more we think of the possibilities that the spiritual world may enfold. It still remains, however, to consider what solid grounds we have for attaching any weight to these open possibilities. LECTURE XIX. FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE. It was the hopelessness of the problem of evil, if this life is all, that brought us to the question of further life beyond the grave. Having now found reason for thinking that such a life can quite well be, we come to the moral arguments why it should be. Of these at once the most ancient and the most universal is perhaps the juridical or retributive argu- ment : — a man's lot in this life is 'a judgment' on his conduct in preceding lives ; and in the next he will be rewarded or punished for what he has done here. But the morality of our time has largely outgrown the paedagogic functions of such external sanctions and has found a truer and worthier interpretation of what they but crudely and imperfectly express. The con- cluding proposition of Spinoza's Ethics is the last word here : " Blessedness is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself." And so, of course, rmitatis vmtandis, of vice. The one fundamental argument for more life is not the need for adequate compensations — but for adequate opportunities, not the demand for fairer wages but for fuller work. A man is immortal till his work is done, we say ; and it is because we see that his work is not done, that his capacities are not worked 4IO Faith and Knowledge out here, that we feel confident that death is not the end of him. For all things work together for good, we hold : indeed, to what other end and how else could they really or reasonably ivork together at all ? This is our fundamental postulate and the ultimate ratio cognoscendi of the theistic position. So then we may say with Professor Royce : — " If death is real at all it is real only in so far as it fulfils a purpose. But now, what purpose," he asks, " can be fulfilled by the ending of a life that is so far unfulfilled.-^"^ In fine, the problem of evil seems insoluble, and any theodicy impossible, if this life be all. "Whoever believes in a God'^ said Rothe, ''must also believe in the continuance of man after death. Without that there would not be a world that could be thought of as [realising] God's purpose"." Thus the one main argument, as I have called it, is entirely a moral argument : without it the ' open possi- bilities ' we have just been considering would have no weight, and even with it they are not converted into scientific certainties. It may lead to faith but it cannot anticipate experience of what is 'behind the veil' of all we know. This moral argument has been put several times with unusual power and eloquence in our recent litera- ture, as for example by Martineau, Royce, Laurie and others ; for this reason I do not propose to enlarge upon it here, but only briefly to return to it presently, when dealing generally with Faith. There is how- ever one earlier statement summing up the whole subject, part of which I will quote, as it leads on ' The World and the Individual, ii. p. 440. ^ Stille Slunden, p. 219, quoted by Martineau. The Moral Argument foy Iiuuiorfality 411 naturally to this topic, which I would now invite you to consider next. The passage occurs at the end of Kant's severe criticism of the supposed t keoretical -^rooh of immortality prevalent in his time. Having there shown ' the impossibility of settling anything dogmatic- ally with reference to an object of experience beyond the limits of experience' he concludes: — "Nothing is lost, however, by this with regard to the right, nay the necessity of admitting a future life The proofs which are useful for the world at larofe retain their value un- diminished, nay, they gain in clearness, simplicity, and power when stripped of such dogmatic pretensions ; for they bring reason back to its own peculiar domain, the realm of ends, which is, however, at the same time a realm of nature. But there too reason, as in itself a practical faculty, is entitled, without being confined to the conditions of nature, to extend the realm of ends and with it our own existence beyond the limits of our present experience and life. According to analogy with the nature of living beings in this world, concern- ing which reason must necessarily assume the principle that no organ, no faculty, no impulse, in short nothing superfluous or disproportionate to its use, and therefore aimless, is to be met with ; that on the contrary every being is precisely adapted to its vocation in life — according to this analogy, man, who yet alone can contain within himself the final end of all this, must needs be the only creature that is an exception to the principle. For not only his native capacities... but pre- eminently the moral law within him, go so far beyond all utility and advantage to be derived from them in this life, that the latter [the moral law] even instructs 412 Faith and Knowledge him, in the absence of all advantages, yes, even of the shadowy hope of posthumous fame, to esteem the mere consciousness of rectitude above all else and to feel an inner call, by his conduct in this world... to make him- self worthy to be the citizen of a better, of which he possesses [only] the idea. This powerful proof, never to be controverted, accompanied by our constantly increasing acquaintance with the purposiveness per- vading all that we see around us, by the prospect of the immensity of creation and therefore also by the consciousness of a certain illimitability in the possible extension of our knowledge along with an instinct commensurate to it, all this remains and always will remain, even though we must give up [the hope] from the merely theoretical knowledge of ourselves of understanding the necessary continuance of our existence\" Here we have necessary continuance of existence asserted, though from the nature of the case all know- ledge is denied, and asserted because of an incon- trovertible proof of what theoretically we cannot understand ! Surely this is a paradox if ever there was one. Yet underlying this paradox we shall find the basis on which the whole philosophy of theism rests. To Kant belongs the credit of having first made this clear, and that by his distinction, so often misunderstood, between the practical and the theoretical, use of reason and by his insistence on what he called the primacy of the former. Ignoring this distinction or assuming without question that the right to believe ^ Critique of the Pure Reason, 2nd edn, pp. 424 ft". Max Miiller's translation (amended), vol. 11. pp. 504 ff. The Priinacy of the Practical Reason 413 in God and a future life is no better than the wish, the agnostic simply asks with Huxley: "Why trouble ourselves about matters of which, however important they may be, we do know nothing, and can know nothing ?^ " Or still more emphatically with Clifford he sums up his ethics of belief by declaring that " it is wrong always, everywhere and for any one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidenced" One tale is good till another is told : so all this agnosticism is true and trite so far as logic goes. But there is more in life than logic, and it is just its primary factor that our agnostics overlook. " The state of things is evidently far from simple : and pure insight and logic, whatever they might do ideally, are not the only things that really do produce our creeds^" as William James said in a classical essay that has made this theme one of the burning questions of our time. This, the connexion of faith and knowledge, is our present topic. First of all we have only to recall facts that in the course of these lectures we have already had to deal with more than once. The whole process of the world, concretely regarded, we have found, so far as we have been able to trace it, is a process of evolution. Experience then means becoming expert by experi- ment. We do not begin by knowing but by learning. We gain knowledge by merely doing — and that whether we succeed or fail — and we gain it solely by doing : in the first instance at least, or by the race, it has been ' Collected Essays, vol. i. p. 162. - Lectures and Essays, 2nd edn, 18S6, 'The Ethics of Belief,' p. 346. » 'Ihe Will to Believe, p. 1 1. 414 Faith and Knowledge gained only in this way. Hence that 'primitive creduhty' or trustfulness that characterizes our earliest enterprises, when we do not wait till there are certain and sufficient reasons for action : it is enough for )Outhful energy if there are none such against action. And happily it is so ; for otherwise we might still be what according to the zoologists our earliest known forebears, the Social Ascidians, were in the long long past and so in the clear green sea to this day remain. Kant, it is worth remarking, was fully awake to this point and refers to it teleologically in connexion with this very question of the relation of the theoretical to the practical reason. "If we were not designed," he said, " to exert our powers till we were assured of our ability to attain our object, those powers would remain for the most part unused. For in general it is only by trying that we first of all learn what they are\" Life is made up of such attempts : self-betterment is its main endeavour ; knowledge is obtained only as fast and as far as this paramount interest prompts us to new efforts, and is valued primarily as a means to that end. What is learnt takes at first the form not of theoretical propositions, but of practical maxims, which are thought of not as true but as useful. This differ- ence is far deeper than it seems. In the first place, such maxims are subjectively imposed miperatives rather than objectively necessary affirmations ; in the next place, they imply always the concept of worth or value, a teleological category to which there is no purely objective counterpart ; finally, maxims are true ^ Kritik der Urtheilskia/t, Werke, Haitenstein's edn, v. p. 1S4 note. Connexion of Faith and Knowledge 415 — or, as we say, sound-^or they are the contrary, solely In view of their practical consequences ; de- duction from objective premisses is rarely thought of and would usually be impossible. Such is experience for the individual and in the concrete at all events. Conation is here the fundamental fact, at once the source of faith and the cause of knowledge. And there is here no dualism between the two : both mero-e in that primitive credulity which leads us to trust and to try before we know. And now if we take a wider sweep and glance back at the history of the organic world, describing it, if you will, analogically, in terms of experience rather than in the language of biology — in which, however, such terms are more or less covertly implied — the parable will not be uninstructive. We shall find that almost every forward step in the progress of life could be formulated as an act of faith — an act not warranted by knowledge — on the part of the pioneer who first made it. There was little, for example, in all that the wisest fish could know, to justify the belief that there was more scope for existence on the earth than in the water, or to show that persistent endeavours to live on land would issue in the transformation of his swim- bladder into lungs'. And before a bird had cleaved the air there was surely little, in all that the most daring of saurian speculators could see or surmise concerning that untrodden element, to warrant him in risking his neck in order to satisfy his longing to soar ; although, when he did try, his forelimbs were transformed to ' This being the process by which according to the teaching of biology reptiles first arose. 4i6 Faith and Knowledge wings at length, and his dim prevision of a bird became incarnate in himself \ So put, these instances will seem largely fanciful, I am well aware — too Lamarckian even for Lamarck. Still they serve to bring out the one fact, viz. that when we regard the development of living forms as a continuous whole, we are forced to recognise, as immanent and operative throughout it, a sort of unscientific trustfulness, that from the very first seems to have been engrained in all living things. This trustfulness — might I say ? — is comparable to the faith of Abraham, who, " when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an in- heritance, obeyed and went out, not knowing whither he went." No doubt with perfect knowledge all this would be otherwise ; but the point is that with limited knowledge such as ours there is always 'room for faith,' and always need for it : here the maxim holds, " Nothing venture nothing have." We trust and try first, not understanding till afterwards : our attitude in short is not unlike that of Anselm's famous Credo ut intelligavi. So far, then — psychologically and historically — there is nothing unique in the faith of theism at all ; it is only the full and final phase of an ascending series, beginning in an instinctive belief in the relatively better and ending in the rational belief in the abso- lutely Good, with its corollaries, the existence of God and the life hereafter. The gradual advance through impulse and desire to practical reason runs throughout on all fours with the advance through sensation and ^ The first birds, we learn from certain fossil remains, were developed from a sort of lizard. Faith and Logic 417 imagination to theoretical reason. At every stage the two form one experience, knowledge registering its progress and practical enterprise promoting it. Such enterprises imply faith, but we have this faith not solely ' on account of the very limited amount of our knowledge and the possible errors in it.' In such enterprises our attitude is not cognitive but conative : we are not from ' want of knowledge on any subject coming to a particular conclusion on that subject.' But as active beino-s strivino- for betterment we see that the way is not closed against us and so we try to advance : we do so because such is our nature, and because our past experience justifies our faith. But still, when we speak of reason qna practical having faith, we recognise that we have passed beyond the merely conative stage; just as when we speak of reason qua theoretical leading to science, we imply that we have got beyond what Leibniz called les consecutions des betes. Further if these two aspects of reason are not two kinds of reason but one, — since even at this level experience is still one, — it follows that the sup- posed deliverances of reason in the one case as in the other are amenable to logic and open to challenge. LoQfic can create nothino-, but it is entitled to criticise all. Science, it is commonly assumed, has also the rijiht to call faith to account. But the verdict of loLilc so far has always been : No case. Faith contradicts nothing that science is in a position to affirm, and asserts nothing that science is in a position to deny. Science cannot disclaim it as error, nor can it appeal to science as truth. But what science can neither posi- tively affirm nor positively deny may still count for w. 27 4i8 Faith and Knowledge something as being- more or less probable ; and ' proba- bilities are the guide of life.' In this sense the theist has been said to walk by faith not by sight : he is not sure, it is said, but he hopes for the best and acts accordingly. Religious apologists sometimes argue on these lines — Pascal, Butler and Paley, for example — but the prudence thus advocated is not faith; and assuredly it is not religion. Its effect on the indi- vidual's conduct, if he gets no further, will be pro- portional to his estimate of the probability of what still remains uncertain. We are then here still in the region of knowledge widely understood. Such prudence may be reasonable, but we must ascend to something more systematic before we are entitled to talk of practical reason and rational faith. This ascent philosophy should enable us to make and, if needs be, to criticise. Though the attempt to deal with theism from the standpoint of science is really an ignoratio elenchi, this cannot be said of philosophy, at least not till positivism and agnosticism are triumphant. That, we may content ourselves meanwhile in saying, they are never likely to be\ Let us now briefly recall the main steps by which, starting from the pluralistic standpoint, we have ad- vanced to the theistic position ; and see whether, even admitting that it is not a theoretical but a practical position, it is none the less deserving of the title rational, neither transcending the domain of reason nor falling short of it. But a word first as to what In this connexion we are to understand by reason. Reason is concerned with the world in its totality either as being ' Cf. J. Seth, A Study of Ethical Principles^ ist edn, pp. 393 ft". Faith and Reason 419 a system or as having a meaning : we may ask What is it? and also What is it for or why is it? The two questions are intimately connected. From the theoretical standpoint we do not inquire about the ' why ' till we know something of the 'what.' But, as I have had already to insist, the standpoint of theory is not the standpoint of life. Life is primarily active, not con- templative ; and thus it is only while striving for what is good that we learn what is true ; only as interested in the ' what for' that we inquire about the ' what' Even in common language to ask ' why ' is to ask for ' the reason,' — that is not merely for the cause but chiefly for the end. It is with reason in this sense that we have now to deal. There are those who say that to talk of the world as having a meaning or end at all is an unwarrantable assumption. This may be true as an abstract state- ment, that is so long as we separate structure and description from purpose and worth. And for science it is important to keep the two distinct : hence Bacon's depreciation of teleology, and hence too Kant's treat- ment of the category of End — unlike those of Substance and Cause — as only regulative and not constitutive. But can those who without reservation refuse to credit the world with a meaning give a reason for their position, and so justify themselves in stigmatizing as dogmatic or superstitious those who are not thus sceptical ? If the world has no meaning, must we not say that it is an irrational world ? But we are ourselves the highest beings in it of whom we have any direct objective knowledge. Unless then we are to stultify ourselves, all that we can mean in calling the world 27 — 2 420 Faith and Knowledge irrational is that it would be so apart from its relation to ourselves and other rational beings. It is but an awkward way of saying what Hamilton preferred to put more grandiloquently : " On earth, there is nothing great but man ; in man, there is nothing great but mind." We may call it faith, but we cannot call it irrational, to believe that the world has a meaning and a meaning for us. But even granting that the world has a meaning, it is contended in the next place that since for us this meaning is not here and now realised, we do not certainly know what it is. We would fain, it may be, mould the world nearer to our heart's desire, but we cannot, it has been said, ' argue from the reality of desires to the truth of dogmas.' A good deal depends surely upon the rationality of the desires. This is the next point — have we ourselves any supremely rational aim ? Till we have, we cannot claim to have emerged from the tutelage of nature, to be ourselves rational and free. In discussing this point it is enough to appeal to humanity at its present highest level. The best of men certainly recognise a moral ideal with which they identify their own highest good, and whose imperatives they therefore regard as absolutely binding and yet — because self-imposed — as also absolutely free. Now the moral ideal places the highest good of each in the highest good of all ; but for us it is only an ideal. But will any one say that it is irrational ? Happily, as it is, history furnishes us with many and striking instances of brotherly love and heroic devotion, and there is more zeal now than ever to promote goodwill among men : The Meaning of the World 421 does any one call these absurd or think the onward course of philanthropy and self-consecration to the public weal should be stayed ? We will not pause to remark how much more the moral ideal involves than these ideas of themselves suggest ; for already at this stage we shall be met by the objection, that man being what he is and the world what it is, the realisation of even this much of our ideal is impossible. And if man stands alone and if this life is all, the objection is hardly to be gainsaid. But then we are confronted by a serious dilemma. Either the world is not rational or man does not stand alone and this life is not all. But it cannot be rational to conclude that the world is not rational, least of all when an alternative is open to us that leaves room for its rationality — the alternative of postulating God and a future life. Without the idea of a Supreme and Ultimate Being, least inadequately conceived as personal, tran- scending the world, as the ground of its being, and yet immanent in it, as it is his idea — the world may well for ever remain that rer^mi concordia disco7^s, which at present we find it. Ever since man attained to self- consciousness and reason he has had ideals and will always have them ; and his ideals are the measure of his worth and the sure marks of his true progress or decline. But if we are to stop short with the pluralism which is all that in fact we find, where all are essentially finite as well as interdependent, how do we know that there will not always be incompatible ideals, ideals therefore always imperfect ? Perfectly to harmonize egoism and altruism, for example, has always been the oreat crux for moralists. A recent French moralist o 422 Faith and Knowled• And now to state succinctly the positive results we seem to have attained. They may be gathered up under four heads relating to Method or standpoint, to 442 The Realm of Ends God or the One, to the World or the Many, and to Faith in the Unseen. I. As to method — we have started from what we are, cognitive and conative subjects; and from where we are — so to say in mediis rebus — in a world consisting to an indefinite extent of other like subjects. No specula- tion, no dialectic, no ontological deduction, is needed to reach this position ; and without it all these alike are impossible. But beginning thus, we are led both on theoretical and on practical grounds to conceive a more fundamental standpoint than this of the Many, namely that of the One that ^\ould furnish an ontological unity for their cosmological unity and ensure a teleo- logical unity for their varied ends. In being — as it has been said — 'the impersonated Ideal of every mind^' — the One, as ultimate source of their being and ultimate end of their ends. But though we can conceive this standpoint, we cannot here attain to it or see the world from it. It is there, like their centre of gravity for the inhabitants of a planetary ring, but the aspect of the world from thence is more than we can conceive. Attempts to delineate this have been really but pro- jections of our own eccentric and discursive views : creative synthesis as human implies aspects, creative intuition as divine is beyond them. The result of all attempts to begin with the One is only to lower our idea of the world, not to raise our idea of God. His modus operandi, if even this phase is allowable, in creating, conserving, and ruling the world is beyond us. II. As to God from the point of view of man, then, we can only regard him as Spirit, as possessing * Howison, Limits of Evoiution^ 2nd edn, p. xiv. God 443 intelligence and will, and so as personal. But while we must admit such attributes carried to their limit to be beyond us, we cannot regard God as absolute in such wise as to deprive ourselves of all personality or initia- tive. How God created the world, how the One is the ground of the Many, we admit we cannot tell ; but since it is from the Many as real that we start we are forced to say that creation implies limitation; otherwise the world could be nothing. Such theism would be acosmism. But while we have to maintain that in determininsf the world — his world — God also determines himself, it would be absurd to suppose that in thus determining himself he, so to say, diminishes himself. Such determination may be negation, nay must be, to be real at all ; but it is not abnegation. God does not transform, differentiate or fractionate himself into the world, and so cease to be God. Such theism would only be pantheism, which is truly but atheism. But now, finally, if the world, though God's world, the expression and revelation of himself, is yet not God, if though he is immanent in it, he is also as its creator transcendent to it, surely the greater the world — the greater the freedom and capacity of his creatures — the greater still is he who created and sustains and somehow surely overrules it all. Oriental servility and a priori speculation have made God synonymous with an 'Infinite and Absolute' that leaves room for no other and can brook none. To express dissent from this view, the unfortunate term * finite God,' devised by those who uphold the view, has been accepted from them by its opponents. As used by the former, it implies and was meant to imply imperfec- tion and dependence, to place God in line with the Many 444 ^ ^^^ Realm of Ends and to deny his transcendent supremacy. So under- stood a finite God is a contradiction, of course. But the term 'finite God/ as accepted by the latter, means for them all that God can mean, if God implies the world and is not God without it : it means a living God with a living- world, not a potter God with a world of illusory clay, not an inconceivable abstraction that is only infinite and absolute, because it is beyond everything and means nothing, an aTretpo^eo? as Thomas Davidson, I believe, called it. III. And now as to this living world, of which God is the ground, this realm of ends which he respects because it is his end — it is, we say, a world of self-determining, free, agents, severally intent on attain- ing more good or at least on retaining the good they have. We note three main characteristics — contingency in part, stability in part and progress in part — all involved in experience as epigenetic. There is con- tingency, for a common modus vivendi is still to seek ; there is stability, for all effectual cooperation is con- served as good ; and there is progress, so long as the ills we have or the goods we know not of prompt to further efforts. But goods we know not of are ideal ; and ideal ends are only possible on the plane of rational life : the brutes at least leave well alone, and species as soon as they are adjusted to their environment remain stationary, so long at least as that remains unchanged. Such a stationary state may be possible where progress is due solely to the vis a tei^go of actual physical ills; it is impossible, even though these should cease, once the Good as an ideal has loomed in sight, and begun as a vis a f route to draw spirits onwards. But it has taken The World 445 untold ages to accomplish that finite amount of progress which the pressure of material want promotes ; can we then expect the indefinite progress that spiritual possi- bilities open Lip will be easily or speedily achieved ? Compared with the interval between the lowest forms of merely animal life and the highest, the interval between civilised man and man in the infancy of the race, is vast ; and yet, so far as we can judge, the time it has occupied is correspondingly brief. The greater definiteness and steadiness of purpose that intelligence brings and the permanent tradition that social coope- ration makes possible have then unquestionably ac- celerated the rate of progress on the whole. But now struggles of a new order arise through this very progress itself. Moral evils spring up and grow apace in the rich soil of worldly prosperity ; for the intelligence and social continuity that make nobler ideals possible can also subserve the ends of selfishness, injustice and oppression. Thus the greatest enemy of mankind is man : so it has always been, so it may long continue to be. Yet here too there has been progress ; and the vision of a new era, when righteousness shall cover the earth as the waters cover the sea, evokes the lip-service of multitudes and the life-devotion of a few. But time, that tries all things, will assuredly bring more and more to take the lesson to heart that Man must pass from old to new, From vain to real, from mistake to fact, From what once seemed good to what now proves best. But why, we ask, must the lesson be so slowly learnt ? Be- cause to be effectually learnt, it must be learnt by heart, every jot and tittle of it by actual living experience. 44^ The Realm of Ends Advanced to the plane of social intercourse and ra- tional discourse, man has sought out many inventions, preferring at first what looks easy to what seems arduous, what looks near to what seems remote, what looks tangible to what seems visionary. This we call worldly wisdom. The more all its schemes are found to fail, the more clearly will stand out the one straight and narrow way — at first so hard to find and still so hard to ascend — that verily leads to life. As from geology we learn of species after species that have disappeared in the process of adjusting organism to environment ; so in history we learn from the rise and fall of empire after empire that only righteousness exalteth a nation and that those that pursue evil perish. It is thus in the light of evolution that the mystery of evil becomes clearest. God is the creator of the world, we say : his end can only be the Good — no other is even conceivable. But in a world created for the Good there can be no inherent, no ineradicable evil. The process of evolution must then in itself be good, the one way possible to actual good for creatures that are created to achieve it. And if again we ask why the way is so long and the progress so devious and so slow, we can but suppose it is so because only so can the progress be thorough and the way assuredly the best ; this we may well believe is why " the mills of God grind slowly and grind exceeding small." Only after proving all things can we hold fast to that which is good. But now — and this leads on to our last head — does this not come near to saying, it may be asked, that the best of all possible worlds is a world without God and the IVorld 447 God ? is it not practically atheism, in short ? and if not that, still, if the world is left severely alone to work out its own salvation, what have we but the God-forsaken world in which the so-called deists are said to have believed ? Not atheism, certainly, for faith in God as the ground of the world affords us an assurance, which we could not otherwise have, that complete harmony and unity, the good of all in the good of each, is really attainable, nay, will verily be attained. Whereas, if we stop at a plurality of finite selves in interaction, we have no guarantee, cannot even reasonably expect, that such a totality will ever attain to perfect organic unity. Nor does the theism to which pluralism points leave no place for God in the world ; it is then not deism : creation, if we think, we shall see can be conceived only as continuous presence^ If God is the ground of the world at all he is its ground always as an active, living, interested, Spirit, not as a merely everlasting, change- less and indifferent centre, round which it simply whirls. Still God's action in the world must be for us as in- scrutable as his creation of it : indeed there is no reason why we should attempt to discriminate between them. In calling God transcendent we seek only to express that duality of subject and object which we take as fundamental to all spiritual being, not to suooest that his relation to the world must be thouo^ht under the category of external causation, like the interaction of object with object. This is obviously inadequate. Nor is the relation of God to the world comparable to the interaction of one finite subject with another ; for between them there is no such * Cf. abuvc, Lect. XII. pp. 260 (. 448 The Realm of Ends dependence as that which connects them both with God. W^e trench upon the mystical when we attempt to picture this divine immanence, 'closer to us than breathing- and nearer than hands and feet.' It is this which stirs the * cosmic emotion ' of poets like Words- worth, Goethe, Browning and Tennyson, to this that the inward witness of the spirit refers which is the essence of religious experience everywhere. In both there opens out in varying degrees of clearness and certainty The true world wilhin the world we see, Vv'hereof our world is but the bounding shore. This is the unseen world, the world not realised, in which faith moves, IV. In keeping with the great principle of continuity, everywhere displayed in the working out of the world's evolution, we have found this faith foreshadowed in the upward striving that is the essence of life. Consider for a moment the development of the senses. The first clear response is to mechanical contact, and we have as the first specific sense, the sense of touch. From this is presently differentiated the sense of hearing, when objects not yet present to actual touch give premonitions of their proximity by the vibrations they set up : hearing is thus the faith of touch. As hearing to touch so smell stands to taste : it is a foretaste that further extends the objective range. A freckle or pigment-spot is all that light at first produces ; but when its hints are heeded and the pig- mented retina that first arose is furnished by the organism's own prophetic efforts with directing muscles, it exchanges its passive sight for active vision, and opens out a vastly wider objective world. In keeping Faith 449 with all this is the place of faith on the higher plane where it contrasts with intellectual sight : it is like a new sense that brings us face to face with an unseen world. What does this mean ? Let us go back a step. Here as everywhere — in its highest as in its lowest form — faith is striving and striving is faith. The whole conscious being is concerned : there is not merely the cognition of what is, there is also an appreciation of what it is worth, a sense of the promise and potency of further good that it may enfold ; there is a yearning to realise this ; and there is finally the active endeavour that such feeling prompts. It is through this faith that man is where he is to-day, through it that mountains have been removed and the unattainable verily attained. More life and fuller achieved by much toil and struggle, an ascent to higher levels not movement along the line of least resistance — this is the one increasing purpose that we can so far discern, when we regard the world historically as a realm of ends in place of summarising it scientifically under a system of concepts. And how do we stand now ? That the present world and progress on the plane of the present world do not and never will meet our highest needs — about this there is little question. But where in what is, in what we have so far attained, can we discern those eternal values that point upwards and beyond this present world ? Surely in all that we find of the beautiful and sublime in this earth on which we dwell and the starry heavens above it ; in all that led men long ago to regard nature as a cosmos ; in all that is best and noblest in the annals of human life ; in these very needs themselves that the seen and temporal fail w. 29 450 The Realm of Ends to meet ; and above all, in that nascent sense of the divine presence which constitutes the truly religious life, and converts faith into the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. But now a third question at once suggests itself Faith on the lower levels was justified by its results: can we here too apply this test of success or failure ? The founder of Christianity at any rate did not hesitate to appeal to it : — " Beware of false prophets. Ye shall know them by their fruits : do men gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles ? " And, in fact, this is the test that is and will be applied ; for, as I have already said, however much in theory men consider premisses, in practice they consider only results. A powerful practical argument in favour of re- ligious faith might be worked out on the following lines : — first we might point to its universality : no race of mankind is wholly without that feeling of dependence on the supernatural and mysterious, which, as Schleiermacher thought, is the common characteristic of religious emotion. Next we might point to its sttrvival: no race has yet outgrown it. There have been periods of religious decline, no doubt ; but they have sooner or later involved moral and intellectual de- cadence as well. And in these days when faith is said to be waning, we find that ** things are in the saddle and ride mankind," and whither that tends history has made only too clear. Hitherto — in keeping with the judgment by results — such times have been followed by periods of revival and awakening ; and there are happily signs of such in our own day. Lastly we might point to the advance of religion that has usually Nietzsche 45 1 accompanied the increase of morality and intelligence ; nay we might show that religion has largely furthered such advance. And here by way of contrast I may refer briefly to a strange prophet, whose writings are at this moment exciting the keenest attention — I refer to Nietzsche. As the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest have brought man to the highest place as the paragon of animals, so in time they will lead, he teaches, to a yet higher being, the Ueber7nensch or Over-man. But this higher man, he foretells, will reject the existing morality of liberty, equality and fraternity, founded on the golden rule of benevolence and brotherly love — the morality of slaves as he con- temptuously names it. The new morality will be the morality of heroes, that is egoists : might will be right. As man now subjugates the lower animals to his own ends, so the Over-man will exploit feebler men and — as it has been sarcastically put — rise on stepping stones of their dead selves to higher things. In short a race is to appear, so Nietzsche and others would have us believe, that is to try the experiment of life wholly on the lines of what is called ' modern thought ' and wholly without faith in God or a world to come. I do not think the growing Nietzsche cult will last long or in the end do harm. If the terrible experiment must be made we may safely anticipate the result : it will be Hobbes's state of nature over again ; till the world retraces its steps. It will be said, perhaps : — ' The regenerate Christian is already an Uebei'vuiisck, no longer "natural man," but "spiritual" in the Pauline sense; nor is his ex- perience fairly described as subjective belief in God ; 29 — 2 452 The Realm of Ends it is actual love of God and conscious communion with him.' We have no right to question this ; though we must admit that such inward conviction of the reahty of rehgious experience is, for tlu ptirposes of our discussion, to be classed as faith, not as knowledge, in so far as it is — epistemologically, though not psycho- logically — subjective, incommunicable, and objectively unverifiable. In so far, however, as he lets his light shine and men see his good works, the religious man affords practical evidence of the worth of his faith. With enough of such light, the justification of faith would be sure. One final question, among the many that suggest themselves, 1 must not wholly omit. We have been contemplating the universe as a realm of ends. If we were asked what is the end of this realm of ends we might answer rightly enough that its end can only be itself; for there is nothing beyond it, and no longer any meaning in beyond. It is the absolutely absolute. Still within it we have distinguished the One and the Many, and we have approached it from the standpoint of the latter. In so doing we are liable to a bias, so to say, in favour of the Many : led to the idea of God as ontologically and teleologically essential to their completion, we are apt to speak as if he were a means for them. Those who attempt to start from the standpoint of the One betray a bias towards the opposite extreme. The world, on their view, is for the glory of God : its ultimate raison d'etre is to be the means to this divine end. Can we not transcend these one-sided extremes and find some sublimer idea which shall unify them both ? We can indeed ; and The Absolute End 453 that idea is Love. But here again we trench on the mystical, the ineffable, and can only speak in parables. Turning to Christianity as exhibiting this truth in the purest form we know, we find it has one great secret — dying to live, and one great mystery — the incarnation. The love of God in creating the world implies both. Leiblichkeit ist das Ende aller Wege Gottes, said an old German theologian. The world is God's self- liniitation, self-renunciation might we venture to say } And so God is love. And what must that world be that is worthy of such love ? The only worthy object of love is just love : it must then be a world that can love God. But love is free : in a ready-made world then it could have no place. Only as we learn to know God do we learn to love him : hence the long and painful discipline of evolution, with its dying to live — the converse process to incarnation — the putting off the earthly for the likeness of God. In such a realm of ends we trust " that God is love indeed, and love creation's final law." We cannot live or move without faith, that is clear. Is it not then rational to believe in the best, we ask ; and can there be a better ? SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES. I. The Meaning of Contingency. (Lect. iv. p. 76.) While preparing- these lectures for the press I have been asked by a friendly critic for a definition of contingency. Possibly the request was prompted by the conviction, com- monly enough entertained, that there is really no contingency in the world at all ; and this, it is supposed, any serious attempt to define contingency would sooner or later disclose. Absolute chance is certainly nonsense ; and relative chance, it may be said, is after all not really chance, and implies nothing but ignorance or — it may be — irrelevance to the matter in hand. The truth of this I have already fully admitted in the text ; but I have also distinguished between the contingency of chance and the contingency of freedom^ It is the latter contingency that is here in question, and, whatever may be said of its validity, its meaning at least seems clear. If the future of the world is partly determined by the conduct of free agents there will continually be new beginnings that were not foreseen ; and new possibilities will become imminent, that no knowledge of the past can surely forecast. All these possibilities will find a place within a certain 'domain' (to adopt a mathematical term), inasmuch as the world was never a chaos, but definite from the first 2; and so we say there is no absolute contingency, no utter caprice. 1 This has been stigmatized as a 'very scholastic distinction,' and one implying 'a system of pluralism,' as if that would suffice to dispose of it ! With this objection I have already attempted to deal elsewhere. Cf. Naturalism and Agnosticism^ 3id edn, vol. II. pp. 292 — 4. 2 Cf. Lect. IV. pp. 70 f. Dr Hon'ison on Creation 455 Though contingent for others, a man's acts are not con- tingent for him : if they were, we should have to admit absolute contingency or chance. But if not contingent for him, then must they not for him be necessary? So it has been argued as if 'conditioned by' were the same as 'con- ditioned for.' This further problem, however, is dealt with later. Cf Lectures XIII. and XlV. But the contingency in the so-called ' physical world,' referred to at the close of this Lecture, cannot, it may be thought, be the contingency of freedom : here then to deny immutable law is, it would seem, to assert absolute chance. We cannot, of course, affirm that a star or a meteor or a cluster of particles is an individual. But neither can we be confident that they are always and necessarily the merely inanimate aggregates we commonly take them to be. All that pluralism contends for, however, is simply that the real beings these phenomena imply have some spontaneity and some initiative^ ; and to these essential characteristics of all real individuals the uniformity, as well as the diversity, of the physical world is due — the former as Natura naturata^ the latter as Natura naturans. IL Dr Howison on Creation. (Lect. xi. p. 245.) " Not to know how a thing can be is no disproof that the thing must be and is," Mr Bradley has said, as Fries indeed had said before him. To this truth we have appealed while admitting that creation is to us inexplicable. But Dr Howison seeks to cut us off from this appeal by asserting vehemently and repeatedly that the idea of creation is self-contradictory — if the creatures, that is to say, are to be free agents and not merely machines. We must, he contends, either accept the logical consequences of Jonathan Edwards or deny their premise : he prefers to do the latter. " Better the atheism of a lost First Cause... than the atheism ot deified Injustice with * Cf. Lcct. ui. pp. 65 ff. 45^ Supplenieutary Notes its election and reprobation by sheer sovereif^n prerogative \" Very true, but the one vital question to settle first of all is whether or no we are really shut up to these alternatives — forced to relinquish any idea of creation or give up freedom altogether. Despite his impressive earnestness, however, Dr Howison seems not to have troubled himself about this wider question at all. As a pluralist he, of course, disallows the absolutist's version of the world — that the Many are but 'modes or expressions of the sole self-activity of the One.' This granted, he begins by simply assuming that there is nothing left but "the Oriental, Augustinian, monarcho-theistic idea of creation at a certain date by sheer fiat and out of fathomless nothing." From this assumption he next advances to his main position "that creationism must logically exclude the possibility of freedom. For the Creator cannot, of course, create except by exactly and precisely conceiving, otherzuise his product would not differ from 7ion-entity. The created nature must therefore inevitably register the will and the plan of the Creatorl" This is true, but it is at all events not to the point : on the contrary the sentence I have put into italics covertly assumes that this ' plan ' cannot be the existence of a world of free agents. An exact and precise conception of a machine is possible, but an exact and precise conception of such a world is, it is taken for granted, logically impossible. How then do we come to have it ? Dr Howison plays unawares with a double-edged weapon here. For that exact and precise definition of a free agent, which he declares to be a contradiction from the standpoint of the Creator, he regards as essential from the standpoint of the free agents themselves. They subsist only by ' defining or positing ' themselves, at once "in terms of their own inerasible and unrepeatable particularity and of the supplemental indi- vidualities of a whole world of others" — in other words they 1 The Limits of Evoltiiion, 2nd edn, 1905, p. 341 fin. Cf. also above Lect. XX. p. 438. 2 Qp^ ^n_ p 297. Dr Howison on Creation 457 assign themselves a place in a series "that must run through every real difference from the lowest increment over non- existence to the absolute realisation of the ideal typeV If exact and precise conception leave no room for freedom, what room can be left by unambiguous definition and position in a continuous series ? If Spinoza was right in denying freedom, as we understand it, in the one case, was not Schopenhauer equally right in denying it in the other ? Whether my essentia is really ' posited ' by God or by myself can make no difference to its logical character. If I must either be a non-entity or 'utterly pre-determined,' like a machine, by exact and eternal specification, it is all one as regards the question of freedom how my essentia is raised to existentia. But if I verily am a free being, ' rational and untrammelled, with will to choose unpredestined,' there can be no contradiction in this my essence ; and there is then certainly none in postulating God as the ground of its existence. And such postulation removes a serious difficulty in Dr Howison's own theory, precisely the difficulty in fact that has led us to advance from pluralism to theism. That the world of the Many should verily be a realm of ends if it have in the One its rational ground seems altogether credible. But that the Many should freely posit themselves so as to form a 'spontaneous harmony providing for all individual differences compatible with the mutual reality of all' seems infinitely improbable. In such a vast election how is the precedence settled ? After all Dr Howison, try as he may, does not escape ' the sheer sovereign preroga- tive' that creation implies. The One and the Many, he admits, " are different and uncJiangeably different ; they are even different in species"; for there is in every finite soul *a derivative life absolutely foreign to God,' on account of which, for lack of a better name, it has been called a 'creature-.' Dr Howison's initial assumption will strike most people as out of date. The creationism ' of the old theology and of the 1 Op. at. pp. 351-4 f. 2 op. cit. pp. 429, 363 f. 458 Supplementary Notes plodding realist alike' — as he styles it — so far from being the only one in vogue, has long been superseded. There are but few thoughtful people nowadays who regard the world as somehow made at a certain point of time by the transeunt activity of a so-called First Cause. Such a view I have already attempted to deal with. And now after all, what does Dr Howison himself tell us ? ^^Rcal creaiioji," he says, " means such an eternal dependence of other souls tipon God that the non-existence of God would involve the jwn-existence of all souls, while his existence is the essential S2ipplenienting Reality that raises them to reality ; zvithout him they tuould be but void names and bare possibilities'^. " ' Void names and bare possi- bilities ' in such a context may fairly be taken as a rhetorical periphrasis for 'nothing,' and 'supplementary' as therefore superfluous : in short God is here unequivocally declared to be the ground of the existence of the Many. Again, in a later passage he says : " The self-existent perfection of deity itself freely demands for its own fulfilment the possession of a world that is in God's own image and such a control of it as is alone consistent with its being so: a divine creation must com- pletely reflect the divine nature, and must therefore be a world of moral freedomV Surely here it is unmistakably recognised that though — or rather that because — God is the one ground of the world, the Many are free. What then are we to make of the contention that "creationism must logically exclude the possibility of free- dom " ? At first we might naturally suppose that creationism must here be used not with ' the real meaning ' just defined, but in the inappropriate sense of ' the old theology and the plodding realist' that is now discarded by Dr Howison in common with the rest of us. A free agent ' utterly predeter- mined ' as well as a machine not ' exactly and precisely ' specified is, we agree, a contradiction and a non-entity. Plainly then the souls that God 'raises to reality in fulfilment of his ' The Limits of Evolution^ 2nd edn, 1905, p. xvii. Italics Dr Howison's. 2 Op. cit. p. -Ji. Dr Howison on Creation 459 own perfection and reflecting his own nature' cannot be either: for all that, the real meaning of creation may remain. But no, it is the real meaning of creation, as we understand it, that Dr Howison declares to be impossible. But how can it be both real and impossible? Obviously one or other of Dr Howison's positions must be surrendered, and, in point of fact, we find him explaining away the first, keeping it to the ear and breaking it to the hope. " Creation has a most real meaning, though indeed not a literal but only a metaphorical one ^ 1 " The only ground of the world, Dr Howison maintains, is 'a principle of connexion between all minds, God included,' and this principle is not ontological but logical and teleo- logical. "As Final Cause, God is at once (i) the Logical Ground apart from which, as Defining Standard, no conscious- ness can define itself as /, nor consequently can exist at all ; and (2) the Ideal Goal toward which each consciousness in its eternal freedom moves-.'' Now a logical ground cannot be the ground of the existence of anything ; that much surely is certain. Again, to affirm that I am in virtue of my own self- definition or self-position seems only a Hegelian way of saying that I exist of myself and know of no other ground for my being. So iar (i) is just the position of the mere pluralist. And so in like manner is (2) : the Ideal there, is only the pluralistic goal, not a reality but an end. We may say indeed that ideals are always final causes ; but to talk of final causes as real is, I fear, but philosophical barbarism. Up to this point, then, it seems clear that Dr Howison has not got beyond 'uncompromising pluralism.' We have seen, however, that it is not only open to the pluralist to postulate the reality of God, but reasonable, theoretically and practically, to do so. But Dr Howison thinks, Kant notwithstanding, that his 'con- crete logic' enables him to supersede postulation by proof, * Op. cit. p. 392. Italics mine. There is here, I fear, some confusion between symbol and meaning, means and end. Meaning is never meta- phorical though olten conveyed by mctaplior. 2 Op. cit. p. 391. 460 Supplementary Notes and to resuscitate ' the thrice-slain ontological argument.' This in its amended form he has himself thus concisely summarized: "The idea of every self and the idea of God are inseparably connected, so that if any self exists, then God also must exist ; but any and every self demonstrably exists, for (as apiid Cartesiimt) the very doubt of its existence implies its existence ; and therefore God really exists ^" But is not the lirst premise here utterly dogmatic and flagrantly untrue, at least in the form which the present argument requires ? That Ave cannot have the idea of God without the idea of self is true ; but the converse, that we cannot have the idea of self without the idea of God, Dr Howison, though he is continually asserting it, has nowhere shown to be true. On the con- trary, in one interesting passage, he rightly urges that — as regards knowledge of his existence — God " only takes the common lot of every soul, the fact of whose being must be gathered by all the rest from the testimony of their own interior thought-." Dr Howison then, we may conclude, while rightly dis- allowing the creationism of Augustine and Edwards, along with that of Spinoza, as alike incompatible with the freedom of the created, has not succeeded in providing another in their place. Nor has he shown that the idea of creation advocated in the text involves any contradiction : indeed it would hardly be going too far to say that all that is intelligible on the subject in his own valuable book is really reconcilable with this. ^ The Li/nits of Evolution, 2nd edn, 1905, p. 359. To defnonstrate the intuitive certainty of one's own existence, by the way. is a feat of which Descartes was not really guilty. Further, Dr Howison's version is much nearer the old cosrnological argument than it is to the ontological; and it is perliaps needless to add that the cosmological argument, if sound, would be very damaging to him. 2 Op. clt. p. 258. 461 III. Relation of Body and Mind. (Lect. XII. pp. 254, 258.) The difference we have noted between the 'functional' relation of subordinate monads to their own dominant and their 'foreign' relation to other dominants, is the prime source of the difficulties that beset dualism, when — assuming two distinct and disparate substances — it attempts to explain the connexion of mind and brain. When, on the other hand, this connexion is regarded from the standpoint of monadism these difficulties seem to vanish, so soon as this difference is clearly recognised. There are two cardinal facts that together give rise to this so-called 'psychophysical problem,' both name and thing. First, there is the psychological fact that neither in perception nor in action is there any immediate experience of brain processes, intervening prior to the one and subsequent to the other. Most human beings live out their lives without knowing that the brain has any connexion with mind at all. Secondly, there is the fact that the physiologist, who traces the centripetal processes, that stimuli set up, till they reach the brain, and then traces the centrifugal processes that next ensue, till they reach the muscles, thereby learns nothing either of the perceptions that follow upon the former, or of the volitions that precede the latter, of these processes. Thus Aristotle — to take but one instance out of many — who knew a good deal about both psychology and physiology, was quite unaware of any connexion between mind and the brain ; which he regarded "simply as a cold, moist and sense- less organ destined to countervail the excessive heat of the heart." But the conferences of psychologists and physiologists have at length placed the intimate correspondence between psychosis and neurosis beyond doubt. The living being, that the psychologist regards ejectively as mind, the physiologist regards objectively as mechanism ; and together they find 462 Supplementary Notes that the more complex the mind the more complex the mechanism ; and vice versa. The problem is rightly to interpret this correspondence, so certainly, yet so indirectly, ascertained. At the outset there are two points on which we shall have to insist: one that we may fairly call an established truth, and another that is fundamental for monadism. First, whereas the mechanism that is the one object of the physiologist's study is altogether phenomenal, the mind that the psycho- logist studies is not — as the naturalist vainly strives to maintain — merely phenomenal or epiphenomenal; since it implies the subject, or dominant monad, to whom such phenomenal experiences belong. Secondly, the real agents, whose appearances alone constitute the physiologists' phe- nomena, are here regarded as monads that minister as subordinates to this subject, or dominant monad. We have then to account for the fact that these monads, which to the physiologist appear as extended matter, Leibniz's materia secunda, are for their dominant monad not in this wise phenomenal at all. In other words, we have — if we can — to explain how, corresponding to the brain that for the physiologist is but a small part of the external world and continuous with it, there is for the psychologist the pre- sentation to an active subject, distinct from it, of the whole of this external world — except, of course, that small part, the brain, presented only to the physiologist. To begin : we note first that the complexity and dis- tinctness of the world, as object for a given subject, vary with its point of view. But the standpoint, or, as we might also say, the rank of a monad depends on its retinue of subordinate or ministering monads. For it, these are not objective, i.e. constituents of its objective world. To become such they must lose their functional relation as ministering subjects and take on that other, the foreign relation, which they have only for an outside observer, like the physiologist ; and at the same time their dominant monad — unless they are Relation of Body and Mind 46 o replaced — must be impoverished to a corresponding extent. The two relations are in this respect incompatible. And now it is this incompatibility that gives rise to the psychophysical problem, so hopeless for the Cartesian dualism with its disparate substances, and so simple for the personal idealist. We observe next that functionality is the main category of life : it suffices to mark off the organic and individual from the inorganic and its divers aggregations. But, though there is a real analogy between the relation of a subordinate monad and its dominant and the relation of an opyavov or instrument to the worker who uses it, there is yet an important difference between the two. To the tyro, his instrument is at first a foreign object and nothing more; but as he masters it, he becomes less conscious of what it is and attends only to what it does. The surgeon, for example, Avhile operating, feels not his sound, but what it is probing ; when he lays it down however, it becomes for him but an object once more. The function of the subordinate monad, then, is more intimate than that of an organ or instrument, literally understood ; for the relation here is not that of subject to object, but rather that of subject to subject. It means all that can be meant by immediate rapport or, as 5ome in these days prefer to say — telepathy. But we get no light on this rapport from our individual experience as such : that it is and what it is, first dawn upon us at the higher level where, over-individual or social ends being present, social ^organization' becomes an object of reflexion ^ Here, as already pointed out, we observe cases innumerable of behaviour consequent solely on ' sympathetic rapport ' — between private citizens and public officials, for example"^. These officials are persons too, no doubt ; but so far forth ^ We have in this one more instance of our knowledge of the higher enabling us to interpret the lower. Cf. Lect. vil. pp. 145 f. * Cf. Lect. X. pp. 218 f. It is true, as Lotze has remarked, that "there may be many intermediating processes producing the conditions on which this rapport depends"; but if we look closer we find no media- tion so far as the rapport itself is concerned. 464 Sttpplementary Notes as their social functions are concerned, their position is analogous to that of subordinate monads ; and here all interest in them for 'the man in the street' comes to an end. They are like Mr Wemmick in Jaggers' office, so different from Mr Wemmick with his aged P. at the Fort. Nor has the average man any interest in the technical details on which the effective working of, say the post office or the police, actually turns : he only knows what they mean and confidently relies on their services. Now our social organi- zation secures to its individual members wider acquaintance with their environment as well as fuller control over it than are possible in a more primitive society, and this again more than is possible to the naked and isolated savage. And the like holds good of organisms. Again, in organisms as in societies the cooperation of their members, so far as it is effective, is due to consentience and mutual adaptation rather than to external constraint Once more, in organisms ' the technical details,' as we have called them — here the neural processes that come before perception and those that follow upon volition — are beyond the individual's interest or ken, till the reflective study of other organisms brings them to light as objective facts. It is in this way indeed that the ideas of organ and function first arise. But these extra-cortical and subsidiary processes, that have no concomitants in the immediate experience of the dominant monad, have still for all that their psychical side ; just as truly as the internal arrangements of the post-office, though unknown to people at large, have their own social rapport. Indeed the facts of what we may call comparative neurology, normal and abnormal, though they admit perhaps of objective description, can, we may fairly say, be interpreted only subjectively. And this biologists and even physiologists are coming to recognise more and more. As the Ptolemaic astronomy was overwhelmed by the complex machinery of cycles and epicycles which new facts led it to assume, so our modern physiology has been encumbered by the reflex mechanisms that have accumulated as the science has Relation of Body and Mind 465 advanced — a sign to many that a Copernican era for physiology also is at hand\ We may attempt, by parity of reasoning, either to advance from simple reflexes to more and more complex reflexes, keeping that is to the mechanical standpoint throughout ; or to regress from our own level of self-conscious experience to ever lower levels, without for- saking the subjective standpoint. Both attempts have been made; and the first has proved definitely a failure. Therefore some have supposed that possibly, as the complexity advances, the physical gradually becomes psychical ; but this is to take refuge in what at Oxford they call /iera/^acrt? et? aXko >ykvo 479- Some Replies to Criticisms 491 courting disaster. My critic ought to have seen this instead of complaining that this book is not likely " to lead an inquirer to... the tranquillity and the joy of final religious faith M" Professor A. E. Taylor in his only too laudatory notice of this book-, which nevertheless has greatly encouraged me, does not think " that it follows from the admission of freedom and contingency that there are future facts outside God's knowledge." " We expect," he says, " intimate friends to know how we shall choose to behave in danger or tempta- tion, and we should be hurt if they did not. ...If we may pass to the limit, then there is no logical difficulty in believing that much in the same way, God knows... how we shall comport ourselves in all. If a choice of mine could take God by surprise, how could He still be ' God who knoweth our necessities before we ask ' ? " I have already anticipated this objection ^ Its fatal defect, as it seems to me, lies in regarding divine predestination as equivalent to what our confident expectation would be if carried to the limit of absolute certainty. No, not 'predestination' but 'prescience' it may be replied. But I should rejoin in the words of Priestley's colleague, Belsham, also a pronounced necessitarian : " It is always to be remembered that the prescience of an agent necessarily includes predestination, though that of a spectator may not. It is nonsense to say that a Being does not mean to bring an event to pass which he foresees to be the certain and inevitable consequence of his own previous voluntary action*." Besides, a man's formed character or habits are never the whole of the man : the more original and creative he is the less what he may yet do will be disclosed by what 1 I would offer the same reply to Dr A. Crespi who in an interesting account of this book in the Italian magazine, Cccnobium (Nov. 191 1), has also regretted that I have left religious experience out of my argument. 2 Mind, 19 1 2, pp. 427-37- 3 Lect. XIV. p. 310 f. * T. Belsham, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, 1901, p. 307, quoted by Dugald Stewart. 492 Some Replies to Criticisms he has already done. Friendship would be a vastly tiresome — in fact, an impossible — thing were this not so ; and equally a divine creative love that could be satisfied with creatures ' exactly and precisely specified ' as machines must be and as only machines can be^ It is just the power to do and to initiate without being ready-made that constitutes a free agent, a person who can never be reduplicated, as a machine can always be. But it does not follow that with a world of such free agents God will always or ever be liable to surprises. It implies that he will always be interested : indeed he could not be a God of love if he were not. Yet the continuity between the actual and the possible and his complete knowledge of both make his main purpose secure : to use Martineau's words, " we cannot defeat his aim, but can only vary the track." But even this variation is not beside his purpose ; rather it is essential to it that there should be such variations. If a world of free agents is better than 'a block universe,' then we must, I think, agree with JVIartineau that " foreknowledge of the contingent is not a perfection," that God could not " but render some knowledge conditional for the sake of making any righteousness attainable." But if creation necessarily involves absolute prescience then I can see no alternative but to deny creation, as Dr Howison has actually done ; for there is no denying freedom^ Substitute providence for prescience, continuous control for eternal decree, and the whole difficulty vanishes and nothing of value is lost. I do not believe that if St Augustine were living in these days he would call ' impious' this solution of a question that pressed heavily on his mind. Another vexed question concerning which Professor Taylor dissents from me is that as to the pre-existence of souls. But I think he is under some misapprehension. He seems to think that in rejecting the 'creationist theory' of the soul's origin, as I have done (pp. 205, 404), I am denying its ^ Cf. above, pp. 458, 480. 2 Cf. above, p. 455 ff. Some Replies to Criticis/ns 493 creation altogether. But all that I understand by ' crea- tionism ' in this connexion is the doctrine upheld by Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin and many others, that each soul is specially created and made to vitalise the embryo at the moment of its conception. This doctrine, Leibniz — with whom Professor Tajlor supposes himself to agree — certainly did not accept. On the contrary, Leibniz set out a doctrine of pre-existence substantially identical with that I have here sought to defend. Finally, in two or three cases Professor Taylor thinks that I have misrepresented Christian theology at its best. First of all he tells me that if I had heeded ' the much better authority of St Thomas' instead of quoting the Westminster Confession I should have dealt more gently with the doctrine of original sin. Well, I am willing to believe that "in this respect," as Dr Tennant says, " the Roman theology is more philosophical than that of the symbols of Protestant Christendom ^" But I feel sure that any one who will consult the quotations from the XXXIX Articles, the decree of the Council of Trent and other confessions, given by Dr Tennant ^ will see that I have nothing of substantial importance to retract. Again, in quoting Mill's denunciation of ' the moral enormity ' of the dogma nitlla salus extra ccclesiani Mr Taylor thinks that I have been unjust to 'the great Christian Churches.' I wish I could think so ; but at all events it is hardly fair to suppose that I have laid this 'charge upon Christianity,' for I have expressly said: "Happily the spirit of Christianity is clearly against it, as Christians themselves are coming more and more to see." Even Mill had said : " It is nowhere represented that Christ himselt made this statement." But I am amazed that Professor Taylor should have appealed to Dante in support of his position. In the twentieth canto of the Del Paradiso, to 1 The Ofijiin and p7 opaoaiion of Sin, 1902, p. 153. 2 Of), cit. pp. 1 51-159. Dr Tennant however omits the Xth of the Anglican articles. 494 Some Replies to Criticisms which he refers, Dante tells how he learnt that both Trajan and Ripheus miraculously " quitted not their bodies as Gentiles but as Christians," and in the tenth canto of the Del PiLj'gatorio represents Trajan as actually delivered from hell by the prayers of St Gregory. Surely this is in keeping only with a belief that ' virtuous heathen could be lost eternally.' " Another theological matter upon which " Mr Taylor thinks I am " imperfectly informed is the Roman doctrine of purgatory." But why he should say this — though I will not deny it — I do not know ; for I have only found fault with that miscalled purgatory for being merely 'ex- piatory,' and this he himself admits and condemns. INDEX Absolute, The, ideals of reached by ab- straction, 39-4 r ; the world for tliese superfluous or illusory, 32-6 ; God- and-the-World as the concrete, 24 1 f. ; objection to this, 242 ; rejily, 243 Absolutism {see also Singularism), 52, 267 Action, springs of, the contrast of ' extra- regarding' and 'self-regarding' too extreme, 342-5 Activity, 7f. ; purposive, as presupposing order, 67 f. ; as producing it, 71 f., 75 f-. 78 Adamson, R., 48 Agnosticism, its so-called Monism, 10; what it overlooks, 413 Argyll, late Duke of, on the Argus pheasant, 188 Aristotle, on Creation, 31 ; his Absolute, 38 ; his practical syllogism, 68 ; on the discontinuity between man and brute, 91 ; on disjecta vienibra, 120; on efficient cause, 274 ; on action, 330 ; soul as entelechy of the body, 397; on the brain, 461; on perfect activity, 472, 476 Aspects of the world, i f., 430; the natural and the spiritual as contrasted, ii., 431 ; the latter as the more fundamental, 10-3, 431 f. Augustine, on predestination, 310; on time, 472 f. Bacon, F., on the generating of new natures, 73 ; on final causes, 275 Bagehot, on custom, 358 Bahnsen, on Hartmann, 334 «. Bain, denied the reality of self, 289 f. Behaviour, 50, 62, 433 ; continuity be- tween the natural and rational planes 'j'". 342-5 Beneke quoted, 29 Bergson, I'rof. H., h'xsiflan vital, 23S«.; referred to, 298 «., 305; on 'concrete time,' 306 n. Berkeley, his sense-symbolism, 216 f., as divine revelation, 261 f. ; his oc- casionalism, 248, 249, 482 Bionomics, as illustrating pluralism, 56-8 Birth, the problem of, 204 f. Boehm, Jacob, and Hegel, r66, 182 Bosanquet, Prof B., quoted, T36 Boscovich, his centres of force, 255 f. Bradley, Mr F. H., quoted, i, 24 ; on pluralism, 23 f., 201 ; on God and the Absolute, 43 f. ; on the idea of potentiality, 108 n. ; on the ideal voluptuary as impossible, 345 ;/. Buffon quoted on Nature's 'ill-assorted designs,' 86 Caird, E., on monotheism, 30 ; on Aristotle's theology, 32 f. ; on that of I'lotinus, 33 ; on the social character of self-consciousness, i28f. ; on selfish interest in immortality, 388 n. Categories, source of, 1 1 f . , Kant's table of, 228 Causa siii, the Absolute as, 32, 199 ; the Many as severally, 199 Causality, principle of, 275 ; as a postu- late, 277 Cause, as category, ir ; efficient and occasional distinguished, 75 ; its meanings, 273-5 ; the noumenal as cause of the phenomenal, 303 f , 438 Chance, 68, 75, 76, 267, 454 f. Change, 305, 469 ; and alteration dis- tinguished, 470 ; God as unchanging and yet living, 472 ; and imperfection, 473-5 Chaos, inconceivable, 70 Character, transmission of acquired, 2 1 o ; a man's character and his nature, 2S6-8, and his objects, 289 Clifford, W. K. , on conscience, 368; his ethics of belief, 413 Collier, A., as anticipating Berkeley, 249 496 Index Comte, A., on Nature and Humanity, 20; J. S. Mill on, 134 Conduct {see Behaviour) Conscience, what it means and how it arises, 365-8 Conscious automata, 6 f. Conservation of Mass and Energy, 103, 109; of the orgnnic, 212; of value, 213 ; of momentum, 280 Contingency, 76, 78, 316, 434; in the world, an argument for pluralism, 80; illustrated from the useful arts, 80 f. ; from zoology and botany, 81 f . ; analogies between the two, 83 f. ; and the 'Natural Right' to live, 87-9 ; and the existence of mankind, 89-92 ; and of particular individuals, 93 f. ; and the physical world, 94-6, 455 ; implies a definite 'domain,' 454 Continuity, the Principle of, 20 ; and Pluralism, 52, 54, 185, 188,433, 483 ff. Creation, ancient ideas of, 31 f.; idea of, from the standpoint of pluralism, 191 ; theistic idea of, 231 ; as respects the world, 231-3 ; as respects God, 233 f. ; as 'intellective intuition,' 234 f. ; does not identify God and the world, 237 ; analogous to the originality of genius, 238-40 ; dif- ficulties, 242-6; represents God as not absolute, 242 f. ; and so implies limitation, 243 f. ; this, even if self- limitation, incompatible with omni- potence, 244 ; the idea certainly transcendent, and yet not unphiloso- phical, 245 f. Creative Synthesis, 104 f., 434 ; the idea due to Lotze and Wundt, 104 ; instances of, 104 f. ; not appreciated by sensationalism, 105 ; results from the activity of subjects, 105, 106; source of new values, 109 ; secures an increase of directed energy and of determinate structure, 109 Cuvier, ignored evolution, 15 Darwin, C, on connexion of cats and red clover, 57 ; on the variety ia Nature, 82 f. ; on Unity of Type and variety of conditions, 84 f. ; on Man's simian ancestry, 89 ; on Natural Selection and progress, 115 f.; thought Sexual Selection would ac- count for animal ornamentation, 188 Death, the problem of, 212-4; for the mere animal, 385 f. Descartes, his dualism, 7, 260, 463 ; his Cogito ergo sum, 45, 460 n. ; on the difference between man and brute, 91 ; regarded mind as substance, 392 ; on body and mind as a sub- stantial unity, 467 Desire, 328-30 ; presupposes feeling, 328 ; its relation to will, 329 Determination, two forms of, 277-9, their difference, 279-81, 438, where- in it lies, 280, are they mutually exclusive, 282 f.; Self-determination, 279 f., 288 f. ; a determining self denied, 289 f. Determinism, and Indeterminism, am- biguity of these terms, 273; thorough- going, 282 f. Direction, as guidance of lower by higher, iii f., 280 f. ; two senses of, 280 f. Drews, A., a criticism of Hegel, 165 n. Dualism, 7, 10, 482 f. Duality in unity, of experience, 10, 26, 430 Duration, 305 f., 46S Eckhart, 34, 39, 43 Edwards, Jonathan, quoted, 308, 312 Effect, compound and heteropathic dis- tinguished, 102 f. ; the latter alone merely quantitative and abstract, 102 • Elective Affinities,' 63 Empedocles, ' the Newton of organic nature,' 63 Ends, ' Heterogony of,' 79 f., 93, 149, Energy, dissipation of, 203, 360 ; spiritual, increase of, 280 Environment, differentiation of, 61 ; adaptation to and adaptation of, 106, in; social and physical approxi- mated through habit, 60, 219 Epigenesis, theory of, propounded by Harvey, 98 ; its meaning, 98 ; as 'creative synthesis,' conflicting with theism, 270 f. Equilibration, as implied in Epigenesis, lor, 115 Eternity, as formal, 468 f. ; as onto- logical, 469-71 ; as axiological, 471-6 Eugenics, 94 Evil, no principle of, 131, 376, 439; no ' solidarity 'of, 133 ; physical, as a difficulty for pluralism, 202 f. ; not simply negative, 318, 376 ; problem of, in what sense soluble, 319, 439 ; what in one way evil in another good, 350, 440 ; such relative evil implied in evolution, 351 ; but is the Index 497 evolution of our world the best ? 351-3; where the Many have some initiative, contingency seems in- evitable, 352 f. ; in this world, it is replied, there are many superfluous evils, but can this be proved? 353 ; so-called metaphysical evil, 354 f., 440 f. ; alleged superfluous evils, 356-60; error incidental to ex- perience may be worth what it costs, 356 f. ; but there are physical evils not to be thus accounted for, 357 ; here we have to recognise the con- servative factors of iidtura naturata, 357-60, 439; inevitable dissolution a mistake of naturalism, 360 f. [See also Moral Evil) Evolution, meaning of, 97 f., 351, 434 ; the earlier theory alone a strict evolution, 98, incompatible with Darwinism, 98, implies pre-forma- tion and a ' block universe,' 99, originated for biology in a mistake of Malpighi, 99; and upheld by the philosophers, Regis, Malebianche and Leibniz, 99, and, as singularistic, by Hegel, 100 ; the later theory of Evolution {see Epigenesis), as plural- istic, is here upheld, loi ; beginning of, as inconceivable, 195, 265 f. ; theistic interpretation of, 267-9 > objection to the actual evolution of the world, 351-61 Experience, and difierentiation of presentations, 77 ; a definition of, 413 ; the divine, 477 Faith, as 'primitive credulity' or trust- fulness, 12, 414-6 ; analogies to, in the biological world, 415 f., 448, always ' room for faith ' and need of it, 416; rational belief, its final phase, 416 f., this amenable to logic, 417 ; distinct from prudence, 418; meaning of rational in this con- nexion, 4i8f. ; practical grounds for theistic iaith, 421-3, its theoretical value, 423 ; why only faith, when the need for knowledge is vital? 423-5 ; rationality of belief in a future life, 425-8, this depends on the value of man and his work, 425 f. ; faulty counter arguments, from the analogy of the lower forms of life, 426 f., and from evolution, 427 f. ; faith in the moral ideal a personal matter, not merely a matter of evolution, 428 f. ; faith and knowledge the two voices, 441; faith and life, 448 f. ; the test of faith, 450; religious faith, 186, 4:0 f., 452. 487-91 Fall, doctrine of the, 362 f. ; ignores evolution, 363, 368 f. Fate, as implying freedom, 271 f.; as denying freedom, 295 Feuerbach, his secession from Hegel, 46 Fichte, J. G., 35, 47, 198, 330 ; his Anstoss, 37, Gegenstatid and Wider- stand, 40 ; on moral order, 381 'Finite God,' 43, 194, 316, 353, 443 Fixity of Type, and variety of con- ditions, 83-5 ; and grotesque forms, 85-7 Foreknowledge, and purpose, 310 f. ; and eternal knowledge, 312-5, 473 FouilI6e, on unity of society, 117 «. Freedom, of the will, a misleading phrase, 272 ; freedom as noumena), 294 f., 303 f. ; freedom and fore- knowledge, 296-8, 473 Fries, J. F., on memory, 396; referred to, 455 Function, a unity depending on com- plexity of structure, 109 ; gradual mechanization of lower functions by habit, no; interdependence of higher and lower, no f. Future Life, difficulties about, 387 f.; not removed by dogmatic argu- ments, 388 f.; Kant's supposition of personality as transferable, 389 f. ; metaphysical doctrines about sub- stance here useless, 393 ; the question one of value, 393 ; no positive evidence against, 393 f-; for personal continuity need continuity of memory and of environment, 395 ; as to the former, objective records at all events persist and can be read more the higher the level of life attained, 396 f. ; the analogy between birth and re- embodiment, 398 f ; various hypo- theses about the latter, all implying dualism of body and soul, 400 ; but the interaction of subjects lies deeper, and makes the way to belief easier, 401 ; as to environment, two views to consider, (i) re-incarnation, 401-5, temporary discontinuity supposed to be bridged by latent memories eventually revived, 402, and pro- gression by 'elective affinities' that determine each re-birth, 402 f., these minimise the difficulty connected with heredity, 403 f. ; the theory of w, 32 498 Index pre-existence credible, 404 f.; (2) 'transfiguration,' 405-7; death and sleep, 407 f. ; moral arguments for, 409-12, 441 Gait on, F., quoted on Eugenics, 94 Geddes and Thomson, Troff., their Evolution of Sex quoted, 59 ; on the pre-formation theory of evolution, 98 God (see Theism) ; self-limitation of, 243 f., 316, 437; from the point of view of Man, 442-4 ; and eternity, 46S-76 Goethe's account of ' the fall ' and Hegel's, 166 «.; his notion about paternal and maternal traits adopted by Schopenhauer and Hartmann, 334 Good, Idea of the, 18 f., 114, 433, the highest not diminished by being diffused, 112 Green, T. H., his Prolegomena quoted, 133. 134. 135; on hedonism, 348 «. Habit as mechanization, 74 Hsecceity, 65 Haeckel, Prof. E., referred to, i, 27, 37» 63, 90, 99, 208 Hamilton, Sir W., his Natural Realism, 260 «. ; on predestination, 311 f.; on action, 329 f. Hartmann, E. von, criticism of Pluralism, 199 f.; clairvoyance of the unconscious, 238 ; criticisms of Schopenhauer, 324, 330 f.; em- pirical proof of pessimism, 325-8 ; psychological deduction of it, 328-30 ; the Absolute, as Will and Idea, 331, absolutely stupid and absolutely wise, 333 ; theogony, 331-3 ; cosmogony, 333-5 ; ' evolutional optimism,' 334 ; the end and after, 335 ; two Absolutes in conflict, 335 f.; his scheme of re- demption brings out his fundamental inconsistencies, 337 f. Hedonism, a characteristic of optimism and pessimism, 339 ; its assumption, 339 f., and the 'hedonistic paradox' inconsistent, 340, this implies ends distinct from pleasure, 340; without these experience inconceivable, 341-5; and these ends never simply means to pleasure, 345-7 ; if objective and subjective factors both essential to experience, the one cannot be merely means to the other, 347 f ; but we find an approximation to this in parasitism, 349 Hegel, 22 ; his Philosophy of History, 16, 13S; the real the rational, 23; his Absolute Idea, 22, 34, 38, 46; on Descartes, 45 ; recognised heterogony of ends, 79 «., 149 ; on evolution, 100, 269 ; his doctrine of ' objective mind,' ii9f. ; on the cunning of reason, 133, 155, 157 ; his Pheno- menology of Mind, i39«. ; relation of dialectic to time, 143 ; the time-illu- sion, 151; a symbol and a motto for his philosophy, 152 ; this said to have been a philosophy of the unconscious, 154; follows Jacob Boehm, 166; re- jected the plurality of worlds, i8r f. ; on Paradise, 360 ; definition of eter- nity, 468 f. ; time as Chronos, 469 ; his Pluralism, 138-58 : — dialectical and historical development, their relation, 139; he oscillates between them, 141 ; neglecting the problem of time that is implied, 143 ; acknowledges con- tingency in Nature, 139 f. , and therewith plurality, 140 ; finds a gradual progress from Nature to Spirit, 142, the former showing only routine but the latter novelty, 143 ; yet Nature potentially Spirit from the first, 144 f.; we interpret the lower by the higher, which yet is developed from it, 145-7 j to this development the interest of the agents concerned is essential, 147 ; though they are not conscious of its end at the first, 148, but only instruments of the World-Spirit, like natural forces for an architect erecting a house, 149; with this World-Spirit the Logic docs not deal, 149 f.; in the Philosophy of Mind it seems to be the realised plan of the house, 150; the doctrine of Teleology does not help, 151 f.; nor does the Philosophy of Nature, for here Mind is not yet 'come to itself,' 152-4 ; nor is it clear that for Hegel Nature only appears as a plurality, 154 f.; the house seems to build itself, and Hegel's Philosophy of History suggests not one mind but a living organization achieved by many, 156-8. 7^16 Hegeliaii Unity, 159- 80 : — seems to be a plurality organized into a unity, 159; to be pantheistic rather than theistic, 160; this apparent in his doctrine of the Trinity, 160-77; the Kingdom of the Father answers to pure thought, where all determinationists are Index 499 posited as ideal, not as real, 161-4 ; in the Kingdom of the Son we reach the objective as fact, 164; but the relation of the Son to the World discloses two forms of ' the Oiher,' one ideal, eternal and true, and one actual, temporal and illusory, 165-9; his doctrine of development should explain this transition from the ideal or potential to the actual, 169-72 ; but here we *ind that the actual is first, 173; accordingly in the Kingdom of the Spirit the Idea comes to consciousness of itself only in humanity, 174-7. In the Pheno- vuiiology,\.h\s gradual process towards ultimate unity is traced, 177-9, ^^^ here, as elsewhere in Hegel's works, unity is actually result, 180 Helmholtz, on causality, 275, as a postulate, 300 Heracleitus and Hegel, 139 Herbart, his pluralism, 47 Heredity, problem of, 206-12, 403 f. Historical Method, neglected in the 18th cent, dominant in the 19th, 14-6, 120; forwarded by Hegel, 16 History, contrasted with Science, 3, 14, 282, 433; and the Individual, 18 f. ; its Wholes not classes, 19 ; no transition from dialectical develop- ment to historical, 141-3, 352 ; from the standpoint of the Absolute such transition superfluous, 32 f., 352 Hobbes, on the problem of freedom, 283, 286 Hobhouse, Prof. L. II., on sin, 371 Hoflfding, Prof. H., on mysticism, 35; his theory of the conservation of vahie, 131 «.; a query about Hegel, 182 ; on the dualism of means and end, 475 Howison, Prof. G. H., 261 it., 271, on Creation, 455-60 Humanity, as End, the Comtian and the Christian view compared, 386 f. Hume quoted, 242 «.; on the idea of self, 289 ; on the problem of evil, 317 f.; on custom, 35S; on im- mortality, 386 Huxley, on the banishment of spon- taneity, 1 4; no arresting the pro- cession of the great year, 360 f. ; wanted a one-sided freedom, 372 f.; on belief in immortality, 394«.; an agnostic question, 413 Idealism {see Spiritualism) Iiidiscernibles, Identity of, 195, 433 Individual, the, 50 f., 52 ; always unique, iS, 50, 63 f., 65, 433; and atom, distinguished, 51, 433; of orders higher than man, 185-8, re- cognised by Leibniz and Fechner, 189 Individuality of men contrasted with that of plants and animals, 116 Inertia, a negative concept, 8 ; and guidance or spontaneity, 9, 279; and conservation of momentum, 280 f. Intellective Intuition, 234 f. ; implies more than absolute knowledge, 235-7 ; and more than absolute self-con- sciousness, 237 f. Interaction, the problem of, 215-9, differs in cases of things and of per- sons, 217 f. ; in the latter 'sympathetic rafJ)ort' is possible, 218 f., interaction so regarded, 257-9 James, William, on 'a block universe,' 309, 35 1 ; on Leibniz's Theodicy, 317; on belief, 413; referred to, 481 Towett, on divine self-limitation, 316 Justice, 115, 116, 364 Kant, on the Realm of Nature and the Realm of Ends, 2, 4TI ; on life, 75 ; distinguishes between 'educt' and 'product,' 98; his synthetic unity of apperception in relation to creative synthesis, 105; on mutiium cotn- viercium, 106, 114; denies jural re- lations between man and brute, 116; his ' deduction of the categories,' 124-8, as subjective, is inconclusive, 125, as objective, overlooks inter- subjective intercourse, 127; 'radical wickedness' denied, 131; impressed by the French Revolution, 135; on the primacy of the practical reason, 198, 330; his table of categories a piece of mistaken ingenuity, 228; the theistic ideal, its ' regulative use,' 230 f., on knowledge and intellective intuition, 234 f., his doctrine of free- dom, 292-5 ; inconsistent in main- taining'empirical' determinism, 2991'.; on man as noumenal and as pheno- menal, 301 ; the'causality of freedom,* 303 f. ; on Negath'e Quanlitics, 307 ; failure to prove does not disprove, 319; moral evil a mystery, 363; view on personality and substance criticized, 389 f. ; his category of substance, 391 f. ; traces of monadism in, 392 ; 500 Index on the bodyas possiblyan imperliment, 397 ; at one time taught the pre- existence and immortality of the soul, 404 n. ; the moral argument for future life, 411 f.; knowing by doing, 414; distinguishes between change and alteration, 470 Knowledge presupposes conation, 11, 106, 413 f. Lange, F. A., on ' Brain and Soul,' 467 Laplace, 15, 17, 67 Leibniz, 20, his Monadology, 47, as typical for pluralism, 53, its 'pre- established harmony' rejected, 54, 248, its pampsychism, 61, its identity of indiscernibles, 64, it 'destroys atoms,' 65 ; resembles occasionalism, 250, his Letters to S. Clarke quoted, 64; admits a discontinuity between man and brute, 91 ; held the pre- formation theory of evolution, 98, 205, asa corollary of his pre-established harmony, 99 f. ; on the tendency towards perfection, 130 «.; Hegel and Leibniz, 139, 145; on pre- existence, 205; on death, 212, 213; his objections to occasionalism, 2^9- 51; his petites perceptions, 256; his monads have 'no windows,' 260; the sincerity of his Theodicee ques- tioned, 321; on nature's thoroughness, 357 Leopardi quoted, 320 «. - Lessing quoted, 373 f- Lewes, G. H., quoted, 146 Life, and the mechanical, 4, 9; 'per- sistent types' of, 60, 61; dependence of higher forms on lower, 61 ff. Locke, his Indian philosopher, 226; on meaning of freedom, 272; on conscience, 386 11. ; on mind as sub- stance, 390 f. Lockyer, Sir N., on Inorganic Evolu- tion, 75 M., 95 f. Lotze, on Chaos, 70; referred to, 76, 302, 391; recognised 'creative syn- thesis,' 104 n.\ on Hegel's Absolute Spirit, 171; his objections to pluralism, 215-24, as regards 'transeunt action,' 215 f.; the world really the self- conservation of the Absolute, 216 f., here he resembles Berkeley, 216 ; his occasionalism, 248, 249; on the genesis of the soul, 263 f . ; on a block universe, 309 f. ; on problem of evil, 318; on our impatience with God's ways, 357; on moral order, 38 r f. ; on Kant's supposition of personality as transferable, 390; on immortality, 393 Mach, Prof. E., on Physics, 17; on the mechanical theory, 103 Mackenzie, Prof. J. S., his Manual of Ethics, 329 «. Malebranche, his occasionalism, 249; quoted, 251 Man, gulf between him and the brute, 90-2, recognised in the book of Genesis, 90, by Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Dr A. R. Wallace, 91 f., biological and sociological grounds for denying it, 92 f . ; 'natural man' and ethical person, 120; in becoming social man becomes rational, 121 Many, the, as 'ejects,' 29; no way from them to the Absolute, 29 Marshall, Prof. A., on a ' law of in- creasing return,' 132 Martensen, his Christian Dogmatics quoted about the Trinity, 190 ; on the world as a divine comedy, 383; on purgatory, 406 Martineau on divine self-limitation, 315 f., 492 Matter, the concept of, from the stand- point of pluralism, 254-7 M'^Taggart, Dr J. M. E., on future life, 403 Mechanical Theory, the, described, 3-5; its abstract character, 5,11; advocated by Laplace, 15; its inadequacy as regards evolution, in that it implies reversibility, 103 Memory, implied in our cognition, 255 ; and 'psychical present' or range in time, 256 f. ; not the same as objective records, 395 ; the subjective function presupposed in these seems inex- plicable, 395 f. ; and obliviscence, 396 Mcrz, J. T., History of European Thought quoted, 15 Metaphysic, without assumption, futile, 225-8 Metempsychosis, 205, 213; inaccuracy of the term, ^02 n. Method, of these lectures, i, 22 f., 442 Mill, J. S., on compounding and intermixing effects, 102; on the humanitarian ideal, X34; on the eternal perdition of the heathen, 425 Millennial dreams, 112 f., 360 Monads, the world of, 54 ; differentiation of the environment of, 61, 62; dependence of higher on lower, 62 ; Index 501 God la monade primitive (Leihniz) or Monas vionadiitn (Bruno), 190 f.; the 'bare monad,' 195, 254-7; 'dominant monads' or souls, 195, 196; and their organism, 257-9; 'functional' and 'foreign' relations distinguished, 257 f., 461-4; have 'windows,' 260, 466 Monism, Agnostic, 10; Spiritualistic, 12 f., if true, should explain the appearance of mechanism, 14, 18,20; Materialistic, 13 Moral Evil, and evolution, the transition from innocence to knowledge of good and evil, 364-8; wrong-doing without guilt, 364 f. ; not sin as theologically defined, 37of ', and temptation, 371 f; a world in which it Was impossible, not a moral world, 372 f., and inferior to this, 373 f. ; lies between two limits, 374 f. ; is the upper limit attainable? 375-7 Moral Government of the World, 377- 84; God's ways and our ways, 377 f.; the view of Job's comforters, 378 i. ; is it possible without special inter- ferences? 379 f. ; and what evidence for it is there apart from these? 380-2 ; an alleged inconsistency ex])lained, 382 f. ; the world as a divine comedy, 383 f- Moral Ideal, the, 136, 229 f., 420 f., 422, 425, 429, 441 Motives, contrasted with forces, 283-5 ; according to thorough-going deter- minism, both alikeimplynecessitation, 285 f. Mysticism, 34 f, 41, 43 Naturalism, 3 ; its theory of conscious automata, 6 ; its distinction of phe- nomena and epiphenomena, 6 f ; treats psychical activity as illusory, 7 f ; fails to account for living guidance, 8 f.; its alliance with Agnosticism, 10; misunderstands its own standpoint, 12 f.; 360 f. Natural right to live, 87-9. 116 Natural Selection, 115, and Rational Selection, 116 Naliira tiatiirans and Nattira naturata, 72 f., 298, 357 f., 433 Nature, 3, 5, 10, as the One, 27; as 'prior to Mind,' 252, 262-5 ; in what sense this true, 264 f Necessitarianism, not proved empiri- cally, .^07; but by many Theisls regarded as axiomatic, 308 f., 438 Necessity, on absolute, -226; so-called natural, 2 75 f.; logical, 275 ; real, 276f. Newton, Sir Isaac, his Principia, 3, quoted, 4 Nicholas of Cusa, 35, as precursor of Leibniz, 64 Nietzsche, his HeIdenmo7-al, 116; his Over-man, 451 Nutritive chains, 57 f. Objectivity, Hegel's 'objective mind,' 119 f.; cannot belong to a merely individual experience, 122-4; mutual implication of, and self-consciousness, 124, the two advance pari passu, 129; according to Hegel's Smaller Logic, Occasionalism, 248-53, usually assumed by Theists, 248, its origin in the Cartesian dualism, 248, and subse- quent modification, 248 f. ; defensible, 248-52; but not indispensable, 253; less simple than real interaction, 257, 260 ; its epistemological difficulties, 25? f- Omnipotence, 244, 353-5 Omnipresence, 250, 270 Omniscience, 235 f. One, The, and the Many, as problem, 22, 25 f , methods of approaching this, 22 f. ; vacillations of theologians and philosophers concerning it, 43-7 One, The {see also Absolute), as Abso- lute Object, 27 f., 37; as Absolute Subject, 29 f., 37; as Absolute Self-conscioufness, 30, 38 f. ; as mystical, 33-5 ; as World-smil, 35 f. ; 2.S primus inter pares, 42, 52 Optimism, superficial, 317, 320-2 Order, what it implies, 18, 20, 381, 433 ; how far presupposed in pur- posive action, 67 f., 71 f. Org.inism, external correlations, 56-8 ; internal, 58 f. ; as defined by Kant and Hegel, 118, as hierarchy of monads, 209, as primary medium of the soul's life, 211 f. Origen, on the divine prescience, 310 Paley, on conception and resurrection, 398 It. Palingenesis, 99, 206 Pampsychism, 20 f., 62 f.; advocates of, 63 n. ; theistic objections to, 260-2; other objections, 482-7 Pascal quoted, 208 Peirce, C. S., quoted, 74, 350 ':>2'-2, 502 Index Perception, implies creative synthesis, 104 I. Pessimism, morbid, j2o; as reaction to optimism, 320-2; of Schopenhauer, 322-4; of Hartmanii, 324-38 Physical World, so-called, analogies to it in the living world, 60; may be continuous with this, 61, 66 f. Physionomics, as illustrating pluralism, 58 f. Plato, on Creation, 31; his World-soul, 35 Pleasure and pain, as respectively nega- tive and positive, 322 f.; as both positive, 324 ; in relation to desire and will, 328 f.; the pleasures of pursuit, 329 Plotinus, his theology, 33; his doctrine of 'emanation,' 36; the body the river of Lethe, 406 Pluralism, 24, 49; the start from, 47 f., 432 ; its standpoint, historical, 50; is it final? 200 f., 435 ; its leading con- cepts, Individuality and Behaviour, 50 f. ; accounts for the contingency and the uniformity in the world, 51, as exemplified in the social world, 54-6, in the biological world, 56-9 ; in the so-called physical world, 59-67 ; upper limit of, discussed, 185-94 ; empirically unattainable, 42 f., 196, 436 ; the ' Supreme ' as only primus inter pares, 191 ; and, as immanent in this world, subject to its fundamental conditions, 193 f. ; lower limit of, 195-7, also unattainable, 196 f.; if not, what should we reach? 265 f.; a Priniuni vioveiis relating the two limits, 197, 436, this rejected by voluntaristic pluialists, 197-9 ; diffi- culties of, physical, 203-5, catastro- phes, 203 f. , dissipation of energy, 203 f . ; psychophysical, 204-15, as regards birth, 204 f., heredity, 206- 12, death, 212-4; need for con- servation of values and personal continuity, i\\i.', metaphysical, 11 e,- 24, as regards interaction, 215-9, the fact of sympathetic rapport, 220-2, and the unity that plurality implies, 222-4. If pluralism contradictory, singularism the only alternative, 201, but the way to theism is barred, 224, 245, 436. For pluralism, material phenomena due to the interaction of the many, 247, 253 Plurality of Worlds, rejected by the Church, Hegel, Wesley, Whevvell, and Dr A. R. Wallace, 181-3; a problem for the pluralist as well as for the theologian, 183 ; fallacious- ness of arguments against, 183 f . ; Tom Paine's objections to Christianity based on it, and the replies of Fuller and Chalmers, i84f. ; nature of the connexion between different worlds, 185 ; principle of continuity leads us to posit higher orders of intelli- gence, 185 f., 435 ; Dr A. R.Wallace's arguments, 186-9 Potentiality, source of the idea, 108 Poynting, Prof. J. II., referred to, 204, 281 Predestination, 308-12; attempts at conciliation, 310-5; prescience not causation, 310 f. ; conciliation a matter of belief not of knowledge, 312; distinction between foreknow- ledge and eternal knowledge, 312-5 ; the pluralist's via media, 315 f., 438 Priestley, his materialism, 255 «.; on motives, 287; Reid on, 311 Pringle-Paltison, Prof., quoted, 46, on Aristotle's philosophy, 138; on Hegel, 140 Progress, 79, 93, 97, ii3f., 115, 130, 434 ; as advance towards a higher unity, 131, 133, 134; no law of diminishing return here, 131 f.; seems small and slow, 133; past and future, 134; without decline, 361 Protozoa, the, transition from to the Metazoa, 58, 466 ; as illustrating the transition from ' natural man ' to society, 121 f. Providence, 380, 479 Purgatory, 406, 494 Rashdall, Dr H., on Optimism, 321; on pre-existence of souls, 404 Realism, physical, 5 ; the passing of, 17; 'Natural Realism,' 260 Realm of Ends, the, contrasted with the Realm of Nature, 2 f., 304 ; in what sense out of time, 305 f. ; society and the individual in, 386 f.; its End, 452 f. Reason, an ideal, 23; implies 'objecti- vity, ' 1 22 f. ; primacy of the practical, 198, 412 f.; its meaning, 418 Reflex action, 465 ' Regeneration,' recognised as a mystery by Kant and Schopenhauer, 298 Reid, Thos., his criticism of the Cartesian 'theory of ideas,' 259; compared fore- knowledge with memory, 311 Index 503 Richter, Jean Paul, quoted, 329 Ritchie, D. G., quoted, 129, 146 Rosenkranz, K., on the ugly in Nature, 86 Rothe, R., quoted, 374, 410 Royce, Prof. J., 129 «. ; on the indi- vidual as known, 297 ; foreknowledge of the unique and the free impossible, not so eternal knowledge, 312-5 ; on moral government, 379; on death, 410 Schelling, on Hegel, 143 ; on Nature, 143; his AbfaH der Idee adopted by Hegel, 164 Schiller, Dr F. C S., quoted, 472 Schopenhauer, 198 ; absolutely neces- sary being, absurd, 226; laudation of Priestley, 287 ; his doctrine of freedom, 292-5, a misapplication of Plato's theory of ideas, 299 ; on optimism, 321 ; on pleasure and pain, 322 f.; on will as insatiable want, 323 f.; on the categoiy of substance, 392 Science, tends to eliminate qualitative variety, 4, 65 Self-conservation, 31, 52 f.; of the Absolute, 2i6 f. Selfishness, and extra-social sanctions, 132, 422; and social sanctions, 132 f. Self-love, its objective implications, 343 f. ; the subjective implications of the • extra-regarding propensions ' it presupposes, 344 f. Sensation, pure, 256; in what sense it has a meaning, 259 «. Sensationalism, ignores creative syn- thesis, 105; denies the reality of self, 289 f.; its shortcomings, 290 f. Sidgwick, H., on Hedonism, 340-8; on the * theistic hypothesis ' as in- dispensable to perfect ethics, 423 Sin, the doctrine of original, 363, 369f. ; meaning of, 370 f.; views about, 493 Singularisni, 24, 201, 228, 271, 432; of the Eleatics, 46, 47; predominant in the 19th cent., 49; and monism, 481 Smith, Adam, on the rise of conscience, Society, analogies with organism, 1 17 f. ; its continuity of a higher order, 117, 387 ; nominalislic and realistic views of, 118-20, the result of 'creative synthesis,' i2of. ; as ovet-individual, I29f. , 440; wider than the state, 1 30 ; society and selfishness essentially opposed, 132 f. Socialic jiaradox coucerniog virtue and vice, 376, 377 Sorley, Prof. W. R., quoted, 350 Souls, as dominant monads, 195-6; pre-existence of, 205, 404 f.; tradu- cianism and crealionism as theories of their origin, 205, 404; \.\\mg% per se or subjects, 391 f. South, Robert, on Man before the Fall, 362, 363 Spencer, H., quoted, 37; referred to, 37 ; laid stress on equilibration, loi ; his absolute ethics, 113; on the beginning of evolution, 265 ; and the defects of the decimal system, 355 Spinoza, for, everything conative, 21, 431 ; his Acosmism, 25, 33, 47; all determination, negation, 244, 355 ; on blessedness and virtue, 409 Spiritualism (see also Monism), not necessarily theistic, 25 Spontaneity, 14, 51, 79, 279, 328 Statistics, moral and physical compared, 65 f-; 433 Stern, Dr L. W., his Person nnd Sache, 157 «.; on the dissipation of energy, 203 f. Stewart, Dugald, on divine prescience, 316 Structure, determined by function, 106 f., 397; this evident in human affairs, 107 Subjective Selection, 75 f., 115 Substance, category of, 391, 392 ; in- adequate for mind, 391 'Sympathetic rapport,' 2x8 f., 253 f., 256 f., 259, 463 f., 466 Tennant, Dr F. R., The Origin of Sin, quoted, 369 «., 493 Tennyson, on divine self-limitation, 316 Theism, transcends the upper limit of Pluralism, 192 f., 436; its superiority, 228-30, 241 ; does not admit of theoretical proof, 230, but yet has a theoretical value, 2 3of. ; God as transcendent and immanent, 234 f.; how distinguished Irom Absolutism, 241 ; yet it tends to pass over into it, 242 ; and evolution, 266-9. i^^^ God) Thomson, Prof. J. A., his Science of Life quoted, 58 ; on the insect's wings, 84 Time and the temporal, 133 1'., 141; the phenomenal as filled time, 303 ; absliact time, 305, lacks what we experience in duration and change, 305 f.; the scheme of time, how obtained, 306; as illusory, 151 f., •^73 f- 504 Index Trinity, doctrine of the, Hegel on, 160-77; Martensen on, 190; and pluralism, 190 Uniformity of Nature, a postulate, 12 Unity, as category, 11; 'the higher unity' as pluralistic ideal, X17, 435, the realisation of this, 136 f. Value or Worth, 18, 109, 131 «., 282, 304, 393, 414, 425 ; eternal values, 449 Variations, biological, and experience, 209 n. Voltaire, ignored evolution, 268 Voluntarism, 198 f. Voluntary Action, analysis of, 283-91 ; a man's volitions and his nature, 286-9 Wallace, Dr A. R., Man not the result of Natural Selection, 91 f., 187 f.J denies plurality of worlds, 183 ; the beautiful in Nature as implying 'superior conlrul,' 189 Wallace, W., on optimism and pessi- mism, 321 f. Windelband, Prof. W., his summary of Hegel's Phenomenology, 178 World, the, its meaning, 419-23; but has it one? 419 f.; and if so, do we know it ? 420 ; it is the moral ideal, 420 f. ; but is this realisable ? 421; it is, if we postulate God and a future life, 421 ; as Realm of Ends, 444-8 Wundt, W., on hetercgony of ends, 79; on creative synthesis, 104; on 'increase of spiritual energy,' 280; ' philosophy proves tlie necessity of faith,' 423 Young, Prof. C. A., his Text-book of Astronomy quoted, 95 Zeller, on Hegel's Philosophy of History, 16 Zdllner, his panipsjchisui, 63 «. CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY JOHN CLAY, M.A. AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS BV THE SAME AUTHOR NATURALISM AND AGNOSTICISM The Gifford Lectures delivered in the University of Aberdeen in the years 1896-1898. 2 vols. 3rd edition, 1906. London: A. and C. Black. New York : The Macmillan Company. This book is DUE on the last date stamped below ^PR 5 ms J^R 1 9 l93b MAY 2 e ^93^ - 1939 JUN12 A95B Form L-9-35»i-8,'28 / ■s^r- mtB-im. D WCTJCU- JUN231 J LD-LRl £. NOV Z 9 1971 1 7 1971 APR 131982 v-^ r- 3 1158 00744 1636 A A 000 185 250