LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. Class GOD WITH US EY THE SAME AUTHOR THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM IN ITS RELATION TO PSYCHOLOGY (In * Personal Idealism.' Edited by Henry Sturt) LONDON : MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD. 1902 A PHILOSOPHICAL INTRODUCTION TO ETHICS LONDON : SWAN SONNENSCHEIN AND CO., LTD. 1904 RUDOLF EUCKEN'S PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE Second Edition With Frontispiece Portrait of RUDOLF EUCKEN Crown 8vo., cloth, price 35. 6d. net LONDON: ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK, SOHO SQUARE 1907 (With the co-operation of AUGUSTA KLEIN) THE PROBLEM OF LOGIC Demy 8vo., cloth, price 125. 6d. net; post free 135. LONDON : ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK, SOHO SQUARE 1908 AGENTS America THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 64 & 66 Fifth Avenue, NEW YORK Australasia OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 305 Flinders Lane, MELBOURNE Canada THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA, LTD. 27 Richmond Street West, TORONTO India - MACMILLAN & COMPANY, LTD. Macmillan Building, BOMBAY 309 Bow Bazaar Street, CALCUTTA GOD WITH US A STUDY IN RELIGIOUS IDEALISM BY W. R. BOYCE GIBSON, M.A. (OXON) LECTURER IN PHILOSOPHY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON LONDON ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK 1909 TO RUDOLF EUCKEN GREAT AND WORTHY IN HIS THOUGHT AS IN HIS LIFE, I DEDICATE THIS AFTERMATH FROM HIS OWN FIELD 197531: PREFACE THE present volume may be considered as a sequel to my work on ' Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy of Life/ The first two chapters resume in a new form, and from fresh points of view, the essentials of the New Idealism, whilst the third attempts to connect this philosophy of life and of action with Professor Stanley Hall's great work on Adolescence, and to provide it thereby with an appropriate psychological basis. Chapters IV. and V. may be taken as a development of Professor Eucken's Activism along the lines of a Religious Idealism, in which the conception of ' fruition ' is, perhaps, more explicitly emphasized than in Professor Eucken's own personal work. But since Activism is itself a Religious Idealism, this development must be conceived as taking place within the framework of Professor Eucken's own ideas, and not as passing beyond it. Indeed, the chapter on Religion and Morality, which immediately follows, sufficiently attests the fact that the outlook of a Fruition-Philosophy is still essentially activistic. In Chapters VII. and VIII. the fundamental conceptions of love and action are vii viii PREFACE more closely considered, and the convictions of Re- ligious Idealism brought into line with the recent psychological work of Mr. Shand and Professor G. F. Stout. Chapter IX. discusses the relations between Religious Idealism and Pragmatism, and Chapter X., with which the volume concludes, attempts to explain and apply, in close connection with the problem of Evil, the anthropotheistic idea for which the title ' God with Us ' explicitly stands. My original intention had been to write a work which should bear the simple title ' Religious Idealism/ and be as intimately concerned with intellection as with action or fruition. But as my thought took shape, it became increasingly evident that, under the circumstances, the project was too ambitious. It was found necessary to concentrate on the concreter problem of the religious life, and exclude or defer all direct consideration of the further problem as to the nature and limits of Religious Knowledge. The pur- pose of this book is restricted to the formulation and defence of a philosophy of the religious life from the point of view of the personal experient, the religious life being throughout conceived, not as any mere refinement of the ' natural/ but as a life whose dis- tinctive inspiration and supreme motive is the con- viction that God is with us. And the key to this anthropotheistic position is found to be Love. The attempt is accordingly made to study the relation in which Love stands to the needs of adolescence, to moral PREFACE ix conduct, and religious faith ; and it is from the central point of vantage which life wins through its loyalty to this master-passion that the crucial problems of Monism and of Evil have been considered and discussed. The leisure requisite for the writing of this book has been gained through a year's leave of absence from the routine of University teaching. My sincerest thanks are due to those in authority over me, whose graciousness and goodwill gave me this sabbatical year, as also to my colleagues who undertook in my absence the charge of my classes. My best thanks are also due to many kind friends at Geneva, notably to M. Adrien Naville, for the kindness shown to me and my work during a winter's stay abroad. Once again I am indebted, and deeply indebted, to the generosity of the Hibbert Trustees. The expenses incurred in the publication of my work on ' Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy of Life ' were defrayed by a grant from the Hibbert Trust, and a liberal grant from the same source has since been allowed me in connection with the writing of the present work. I take this opportunity of gratefully acknowledging the sub- stantial help and encouragement I have derived from this timely and disinterested generosity. My best thanks are due to Messrs. D. Appleton and Co., by whom the ' Adolescence ' (by President G. Stanley Hall) is published and copyrighted, for their kindness in allowing me to quote the numerous extracts from that work which appear in Chapters III. x PREFACE and VI. I would add that for the translations from the French and the German which appear in this volume my wife and I are jointly responsible. Some three or four chapters of the present volume were delivered as lectures at Rosslyn Hill Chapel, Hampstead, during the month of November, 1908. I owe the sincerest acknowledgments to the Rev. Henry Gow, pastor of the church, to my wife, and to others, for valuable criticisms given in connection with the preparing of these lectures and the discussions which followed their delivery. W. R. BOYCE GIBSON. 9, BRIARDALE GARDENS, PLATTS LANE, N.W. January i, 1909. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE INTRODUCTION - Xlli I. RUDOLF EUCKEN ON THE MEANING AND VALUE OF LIFE I THE ANTHROPOTHEISTIC STANDPOINT OF RELIGIOUS IDEALISM - I II. THE ALLEGED REVOLUTIONISM OF EUCKEN'S PHILO- SOPHY - - 16 III. ACTIVISM AND ADOLESCENCE - - 28 IV. THE RELIGION OF THE SPIRIT - 53 V. THE PRINCIPLE OF FRUITION - 83 VI. RELIGION AND MORALITY - - 99 VII. FRUITION AND ACTION - 128 VIII. THE PASSION OF LOVE - 145 IX. PRAGMATISM AND RELIGIOUS IDEALISM - - 1 74 X. UNIVERSALISM AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 207 Of T UNIVERSITY Of INTRODUCTION As the religious philosophy advocated in the following pages has been already referred to in the Preface as a philosophy of fruition, and as the concept of fruition plays a leading part in the argument, it is important that we should state clearly at the outset the sense in which we understand the term. In the ' Oxford Dictionary ' we find the word de- fined as ' the action of enjoying ; enjoyment, pleasur- able possession, the pleasure arising from possession.' Many examples of its use are given, dating from the fifteenth century onwards, and the significant clause is added that the term * fruition ' has been ' erroneously associated with fruit.' ' The blunder,' we read, ' is somewhat common both in England and in the United States,' but is * not countenanced by dictionaries in this country, nor by Webster or Worcester.' Illustra- tions of this erroneous use of the term are then given, certain dictionaries being instanced which define the word as ' the bearing of fruit,' or as ' coming into fruit or fulfilment.' The meaning which the term bears in the present volume is a specification of the idea of ' enjoyment ' in that broader and deeper sense of the term, in which its meaning blends with that of * joy,' and becomes in- wardly related to religious needs. It is that intimate xiv INTRODUCTION realization of God's presence which instils a restfulness into our striving, and brings into all the sequences of our actions, even from their earliest beginnings, the repose and inspiration of the spiritual life. Its inmost nature is joy the joy of the eternal striking redeemingly through time, and endowing the fleeting moment with a meaning and a mission. Perhaps the closest precedent for this specifically religious meaning of ' fruition ' is Mr. Philip Wick- steed's use of the term in his essay on ' The Religion of Time and the Religion of Eternity.'* With Mr. Wick- steed, the experience of fruition is that which gives life an ' eternal value, a value for its own sake.' It is the intimate realization ' that truth is not only worth the winning but worth the having ' (id., p. n). It is that ' higher ' enjoyment which makes life intrinsically worthy (id., p. 19), the enjoyment of those ' treasures of knowledge and of love, the possession of which is at once the most exalted activity and the deepest peace ' (id., p. 20). It is that which can bring us ' to a sense of the worth of life which will triumph over any downfall or wretchedness that may be in store for us ' (id., p. 25). On the other hand, a life which loses itself in the forlorn pursuit of the false infinite, in that ' endless deferring of perfection ' misnamed perpetual progress, is a life which is at once fruitionless and illu- sory. ' If we mean that life has brought and brings to us nothing of intrinsic and abiding worth, nothing that is good to keep and to live with, only things good enough to go on to something else from ; if we mean that * This essay is the first of a series collectively published under the title of ' Studies in Theology,' by J. Estlin Carpenter and P. H. Wicksteed. 1903. INTRODUCTION xv attainment is disillusion, and that we ought to desire never really to reach the absolutely highest point accessible to us, because life consists in moving towards what we have not, rather than in " enjoying " what we have, then surely our aspirations are self-contradictory, and we have lost the true note of life ' (id., p. 20). The specifically religious meaning of the term ' fruition,' presupposing as it does the presence in us and over us of a Life that is spiritual and eternal, should be distinguished from certain other uses of the term which are more distinctively hedonistic and utili- tarian.* As Mr. Wicksteed reminds us, ' the medieval thinkers say that we " use " that which we desire for the sake of what it leads to, and " enjoy " that which we desire for its own sake/ and it is this conception of ' joy in an object for its own sake ' a joy which, though intrinsically disinterested and reverential, is still intimately and profoundly personal which Mr. Wicksteed has in mind in his use of the term ' fruition.' But when Grote, for example, states that ' Utili- tarianism . . . looks upon man as fruitive, or enjoying, in the first instance, and active only in the second instance,'! it is not to be imagined that the statement presupposes that man is a religious animal, and his fruition a function of the spiritual life. It will be seen that my own use of the term ' fruition ' * The meaning of ' fruition ' varies, of course, with the standpoint adopted, which may be that of Hedonism, of the Aristotelian Bewpia, of Christian or Hindoo Mysticism, etc. For the Christian Mystic it signifies a reverential joy, instinct with the blessedness of God's Presence, and therefore with the need of fulfilling itself in worship, holiness, and the Christ-like service of man. t Vide Murray's Dictionary under ' Fruition.' xvi INTRODUCTION is closely sympathetic, if not identical, with that adopted by Mr. Wicksteed. Fruition, as I conceive it, is no mere feeling of enjoyment, nor need it rise or fall to any height or depth of mystical ecstasy. It is rather that permanent, steadying, redeeming relation which links our mortality to the Life Immortal, and authorizes the conviction that God is with us, and that the resources of our personality are not to be measured by any standard which presupposes our finitude or isolation, or any restrictions of bodily endowment or tenure of life. It is in this sense also that we must interpret the immediacies of the Spiritual Life, or Geistesleben, as understood by Professor Eucken. ' God with us,' interpreted in a sense which challenges our devoted co-operation, is the very essence of Pro- fessor Eucken's philosophy of the Spiritual Life, and is centrally implied in his fundamental concept of the Geistesleben. This philosophy is at once a Religious Idealism and an Activism the former in so far as the emphasis falls on Fruition, the latter in so far as it falls on Action. And if the activistic note dominates the fruitive in the development of Professor Eucken's work, it should not be forgotten that Activism itself still stands for a fundamentally religious conception of experience.* Perhaps the most distinctive feature of Professor Eucken's philosophical work is what we may venture to call its prophetic character. I say ' prophetic,' not so much because I believe as, indeed, I firmly do that its main motive will dominate the deeper philo- * Vide ' Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy of Life/ second edition, 1907, Appendix, pp. 169-180, on ' Eucken's Philosophy as an Activism.' INTRODUCTION xvii sophical thought of the future, but because it has that supremely vital quality of creating the very insight which is needed for appreciating it. There is un- doubtedly a strong philosophical bias against admitting the relevance of prophetic inspiration for speculative inquiry, and especially against accepting such inspira- tion as the very soul and support of reflective thinking. But even if we grant nay, insist that philosophy shall pursue her work in perfect freedom, uninspired by any muse save her own, may it not still be true that she herself would fain recapture something of the old prophetic strain ? At the root of such a feeling there is, at any rate, this conviction : that since the matter of philosophy's fact- world must tally with her spiritual insight, a deeper in- sight must reveal a truer fact-world. Hence, at what we might call the growing-point of Reality, where the signi- ficance of fact is most vital for our spiritual interests, and most profoundly concealed from all superficial scanning, there seems to be a philosophic need for what is not inappropriately called prophetic insight the insight, that is, which is sensitive to what is most vital and inward in the fact-world and so permanently and penetratingly sensitive to it that it can make it central for thought as well as for feeling, and so raise our human life to a higher level. Nor should it be for- gotten that the deepest principles are also the simplest and most fruitful interpreters of reality, so that the visionary power that can fathom a new inwardness in the life of the world discovers a fresh centre for the reconstruction and renewal of that life, and may become the inspired herald of a new philosophy. Now it is precisely this prophetic quality that is so inwardly dis- xviii INTRODUCTION tinctive of Eucken's philosophical work; as distinctive of it if I may venture on a personal reminiscence as the power to illuminate and make palpable to the reason the things of the spirit was distinctive of the teaching of Moral Philosophy during my student days at Glas- gow. The presence of the prophetic power in Eucken's writings may be vaguely defined even by the one who, at the close of his reading, feels genuinely inspired, though without precisely knowing why. But it may also grow upon the reader irresistibly till its secret stands out like a revelation, and the feeling of being inspired yields to the consciousness of having gained a fresh principle of inspiration for thought and conduct alike. The full development of the great prospects opened out by Professor Eucken's Theory of the Spiritual Life, by the Immanuel doctrine of Religious Idealism as we might, without irreverence, though perhaps not with- out peril, venture to call it would, of course, far exceed the intentions or capacities of the present volume. There is, moreover, a further restriction which my respect for the prophet in philosophy may make it all the more necessary to indicate. This work has the inevitable limitations of a philosophical treat- ise : it seeks to reach the heart through the head. It is, in brief, a philosophy of the religious life, and in no sense a manual of devotion. And yet I am persuaded that the devotional and philosophical aspects of religious culture never stood in greater need of mutual support and inspiration than at the present time, when piety is no longer ' protected ' and reason has outgrown the long tutelage of science. I would refer in this connection to Professor Royce's INTRODUCTION xix recent work on the ' Philosophy of Loyalty '* a work which must have helped me much had I had it before me during the writing of this study in Religious Idealism. Professor Royce has found in the practice of loyalty on a peace-basis of freedom and social service a moral equivalent for the loyalty bred into soldier and sailor by the bracing and coercive rigours of the military life, and has reorganized round this one word ' loyalty ' his entire ethical system. That a writer of such outstanding merit a writer, moreover, who recognizes his intimate affinities with ethical indivi- dualism should be thus systematically championing the cause of loyalty is a precious sign of the times. It should help to convince the modern mind that whatever value there may be in military or clerical discipline, the great virtue of loyalty is substantially rooted in the spiritual experience of individuals, and may grow from the decentralized life of a free-thinking democracy with at least as much vitaltiy and promise as from the authoritative culture of the Roman Church or from the military system of the Fatherland. I have only to add that the conception of faith as faithfulness which the present volume advocates is also one which draws all its vitality from that freedom of life and thought whose charter is personal and spiritual, and whose firmest credentials are the science, order, and vitality which its action brings forth. * ' The Philosophy of Loyalty,' by Josiah Royce, Professor of the History of Philosophy in Harvard University (published March, 1908; reprinted August, 1908). IVERS1TY 1 All' GOD WITH US CHAPTER I. RUDOLF EUCKEN ON THE MEANING AND VALUE OF LIFE :* THE ANTHROPOTHEISTIC STANDPOINT OF RELIGIOUS IDEALISM. ' HUMAN life/ writes Professor Eucken, ' has given two main answers to the supreme question concerning its own meaning and value. One of these two answers dates from the far past, the other is relatively recent. The older solution represents the common conviction of Religion and Idealism which agree in focussing attention upon an invisible world which can only be spiritually discerned ' (p. 5). The more recent answer expresses the positive spirit of our modern era. Unable as it is to enter intimately into the secret of the more ancient standpoint, whether idealistic or religious, it has resented the depreciation of Nature's obvious and practical appeal to the senses, and the * See ' Der Sinn und Wert des Lebens fiir den Menschen der Gegenwart,' von Geheimrat Professor Dr. R. Eucken in Jena, 1908. The page references inserted in the text are to the German edition. A translation of this book into English will appear in the autumn season, 1909 (publishers : Messrs. A. and C. Black, London). I 2 GOD WITH US postponement of that appeal to the claims of a mys- terious, invisible power, and has insisted on remoulding its conception of life from a more realistic point of view. The claims of the Invisible on man's allegiance have been denied, and humanity summoned to devote itself to the simpler and more obvious service of the sense-world : only in and through his work in the sense- world and under conditions which that world dictates may he hope to realize the meaning and value of his life. Now, the sense-world is a hard taskmaster, and yet our human nature, once bent to its requirements, might gratefully recognize in a work which ruthlessly rebuked its caprice a source of rest and strength. The realistic answer to life's great question might even be accepted as adequate, could man but reconcile himself to the loss of his soul. This, however, he finds it hard to do, and there arises the inevitable collision between the demands of the individual soul, on the one hand, and the insistent compulsion of the organized work- world on the other. The systematized product of man's activity Nature, organized in the interests of sense and utility follows mechanical laws of its own, which make no concessions to man's spiritual needs ; and man himself cannot but eventually discover that in attempting to dispense with Religion and Idealism he has sold himself to a machine. The conflict between soul and world which this discovery inevitably precipitates might perhaps be appeased by submitting the soul unreservedly to the world. This, at any rate, is the solution which the evolutionary theory seems at first to recommend, for why should man resist re-incorporation with the Nature from which he has originally sprung ? Let him wel- THE MEANING AND VALUE OF LIFE 3 come the inevitable and accept with glad resignation Nature's consoling quietus to all such illusory problems as those of personal freedom and responsibility. Adaptation to the environment once adopted as the one thing needful, life will be immeasurably simplified. Yes, we reply, but will it then mean anything, and will it really be worth the living ? ' Is it possible for man, the product of a long historical evolution, to go back to his natural primitive stage, divest himself of all that makes him distinctively man, and hope by this process to reach his essential nature and satisfy his craving for happiness ?' (p. 32). Following up this very question, Professor Eucken shows how the attempt to answer it in the affirmative leads us into a nest of contradictions, and concludes that ' it is only through the intensity of its opposition to what it holds to be superstitious and illusory that Naturalism can be deceived as to its own emptiness and its lack of any spiritually productive power ' (p. 34).* We are left with the question whether life's meaning and value may not be secured, independently still of all reference to a life invisible, by making that to which Naturalism failed to do justice viz., human nature the centre and pivot of the natural order. But no sooner is the suggestion seriously followed up than there breaks out the opposition between society and * If, driven by the stern logic of fact, we desert sense for thought, and seek our soul's salvation in the service of the latter, we meet the full counter-shock of a tyrannous Intel- lectualism. The thought-world proves as merciless to the life of the soul as did the sense-world. The Systems of Science, dedicated as they are to the service of natural law, ' hold aloof from the interests of man, and demand from him an uncondi- tional and complete surrender ' (p. 42). I 2 4 GOD WITH US the individual, between the ideals of social solidarity and of individual emancipation. Socialism, through its postponement of the individual to the general good, tends to level downwards in the interests of mediocrity and to discourage originality and genius. Indi- vidualism, on the other hand, restricted, ex hypothesi, to the sphere of the merely natural life, fails to do justice to the idea of a Common Good. For though the Good may be indirectly fostered as the result of the competition of individuals, it cannot be that which its nature requires it to be, the actuating motive of the individual's endeavour. We conclude, then, that all attempts to realize a natural order are doomed to inevitable failure. Nor can we save ourselves by simply resuming the older paths of Religion and Idealism. They have lost their ' spiritual immediacy/ and can no longer be accepted as a matter of course. * Progress along this path is impossible until we reach a clear understanding as to the relation between Old and New, and, in particular, give a plain answer to the question whether and by what means it is possible for man to overcome the limitation of his individual nature and advance to a higher order of life ' (p. 69) . There remains, indeed, no other choice but that of either renouncing all attempts at making life rational, or else probing further and deeper into the secret of our human life. The former alternative may well seem the lighter. But the way of renunciation is made hard for man by the hunger of his infinite nature, by that Infinite in him ' which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite/* * Thomas Carlyle, ' Sartor Resartus/ p. 127. Cf. the fol- lowing dictum from the Confucian Canon . ' Great as the THE MEANING AND VALUE OF LIFE 5 This infinite nature summons him to the nobler task of deepening his life. ' In one way or another, to greater or less extent, he must find in the depths of his being a spiritual release from the cramping narrowness of his merely natural existence. ... It may be that the deepening of the relation between man and world will enable him to transcend the oppositions that otherwise distract and disintegrate his life the opposition of Nature and Intelligence in reference to the world, that of Society and Individual in reference to man ' (pp. 80, 81). The essential, however, is that an inner change be wrought shall we call it a conversion ? a change involving the transcendence of what is selfish and sense-bound in his nature. Such inward transforma- tion is hard, and must involve strenuous conflict, but it is humanity's only hope. In this effort to realize a deeper self the choice of a starting-point is all-important. The starting-point determines the goal, and the direction towards the goal ; it determines what shall be treated as of funda- mental and what of subsidiary importance. ' How profoundly has the character of life been modified by the change from the older to the newer way of thought the one making the world the starting-point for the Universe is, man, with the infinite moral nature in him, is never satisfied ; for there is nothing so great but the mind of the moral man can conceive of something still greater which nothing in the world can hold. There is nothing so small but the mind of the moral man can conceive of something still smaller which nothing in the world can split ' (extract from ' The Conduct of Life, or the Universal Order of Confucius ' a translation of one of the four Confucian books hitherto known as the ' Doctrine of the Mean,' p. 23). 6 GOD WITH US study of man, the other making man the starting-point lor the study of the world ' (p. 98). But neither the one position nor the other is available to-day. The subject is too domiriating an aspect of the whole to allow any reversion to the ancient starting- point, but, on the other hand, who will contend that man constitutes ' the uncontested centre of existence '? Professor Eucken proceeds to state his own conviction : ' The recognition of an Independent* Spiritual Life in man at once permits and justifies a new treatment of the problem ' (p. 99). For in starting from the Spiritual Life, as it manifests itself in our own experience, we can start from that religiously inspired action (V olltatigkeit] which, precisely because it is religiously inspired, envelops both terms of the opposition between man and world in a sense which gives to life a distinctively religious meaning and value. The solution as so stated appears essentially sound. It implies that the true starting-point is anthropothe- istic. We do not start from the blossmenschlich i.e., from man in his finitude but from the Spiritual Life in man, from that Action which is at once an ex- altation of our human nature and the ripe expression of our freedom. The meaning and value of life is still its meaning and value for the human experient. Thus, allowing that man's freedom finds its ' truth ' only in * The ' independence ' of the Spiritual Life, as the whole drift of the present volume should show, is essential to the true union of human and divine. It implies no apartness, has no deistic implications, and can be understood only from the standpoint of religious freedom. The following chapters consist largely in an interpretation of this conception. See also what immediately follows on the anthropotheistic point of view. THE MEANING AND VALUE OF LIFE 7 unconditional surrender to God,* and that in this sense the Independence of the Spiritual Life is the supreme essential, yet, inasmuch as the start is still made from ourselves, from the deepest relationships of which we are capable, it follows that to this extent, at least, the contention of modern humanism the contention, namely, that the proper starting-point for the study of the world is man still holds good. We come closer to world and soul alike when we reach down to what is at once most universal and most individual in human nature. In starting, then, from the Spiritual Life in man we start from ourselves on the spiritual level. We start on an infinite quest from man's own spiritual nature as a basis. We start from man qua spiritual expedient. This need imply no presumption. We do not thereby make man in his finitude the centre of the universe. The attempt would, indeed, be meaningless, for this universe in space and time has no centre and no cir- cumference. We do, however, presume to hold that the spiritual life is central for human aspiration, and that it is central wherever it is active. God as omni- present is always at the centre of things, and our own human life is central in so far as its self-presence is also its presence with God. And if the objection is raised that this view implies as many starting-points as there are personalities, and that this again implies pluralism, the counter-question may justifiably be asked, whether a multiplicity of starting-points is not * Professor Eucken does not use the word ' God ' in the work we are considering, but the idea of God, as also that of ' Providence ' (vide pp. 125-130, especially p. 130), is implied in that of the Spiritual Life. 8 GOD WITH US essential to an ultimate unity which should be as rich and varied as it is one and steadfast, and whether, indeed, any Monism which is not grounded in the free diversity of human lives is a Monism which can satisfy man's needs, and give meaning and value to his life. The essential requirement of a dynamic Monism and no other is compatible with the requirements of Evolution is convergence. Unity of goal there must be, and if all roads lead to the one terminus, the plurality of roads is a manifest advantage. We con- clude, then, that human life being central for human philosophy, and every human life central in an ultimate sense (for human aspiration) when rooted and grounded in what Professor Eucken calls " the Independent Spiritual Life in man," we have good reason for inter- preting this as meaning that the inevitable starting- point for the new philosophy must be the God-de- pendent human experient. We may state this fundamental requirement in another form. We may distinguish, as Professor Eucken does, between the petty (kleinmenschlich) and the heroic (grossgeistig], and seek in a life of heroism our true spiritual standing-ground. But the progress from the petty to the heroic is in no sense a mere ex- pansion or refinement of the lower nature, unaccom- panied by any inward transformation. The inner transformation or conversion (Umkehrung) is essential. We must find an immediacy other than that of sense a new immediacy which shall be for us a centre of fresh life, of life that is at once ours, engaging all our feelings and activities, and yet more than ours, leading us inwardly and unconditionally into the service of the over-individual ideals of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. THE MEANING AND VALUE OF LIFE 9 Such an immediacy and fresh incentive to selflessness and heroism we find in the revelation of an independent spiritual life in race and individual alike. ' Every civilized form of life/ we read, ' demands from its mem- bers the exercise of a self-determining activity, but such self-determination is not possible unless our human endeavour find a fresh source of inspiration in the depths of a new life ' (p. 119). We are thus prepared for Professor Eucken's characteristic pronouncement that ' this line of thought is in direct antagonism to that which rests all hope of salvation on a peaceful pro- gression, a development little by little ' (p. 121). Such continuous progress has, indeed, its just claims and advantages this Professor Eucken readily admits but it has no rights where the whole whose interests it seeks to further is itself in need of radical reform. When we take our own finite self as a starting-point for a life-philosophy, we are apt to be oppressed by a difficulty which disappears when, as spiritual beings, we start from the sense that God is with us and that we are sharers of His greater Life. For there seems to be a radical opposition between that which the idea of the Spiritual Life demands of us, and that which, as finite beings, we are capable of supplying ' (p. 124). This is the problem which Greek philosophy never solved. The yearning of the world after God, ' the earnest expectation of the creature ' which, according to Aristotle, is the motive power of its development, was not a yearning in which God's own love and pre- sence was itself felt. That the divine is itself present in the infra-divine, that God not only is loved by, but Himself loves the world, is the Christian solution. They that seek shall find, because, as Pascal's fine io GOD WITH US saying suggests, the very search presupposes the in- dwelling presence and stimulus of that which is sought. From this deeper point of view the gradual progress of the world first becomes intelligible. In its slow march from Nature to Spirit ' it would be impossible for Nature to achieve all she does were she not sustained and animated by some deeper-lying Reality ' (p. 130). The progress of our world and race presupposes the immanence of the Spiritual Life. At every stage of human development there have been elements in man's life appearing at the height of his endeavour or in the depth of his distress, which have proved the stepping- stones by which he has been able to exalt himself above himself and rise to higher things. Man has been able to concentrate his forces around these scattered points of vantage, and make them centres of spiritual influ- ence. It is indeed through his power to seize thus on these first disconnected intimations of spiritual life that he can be said to transcend his own human en- deavour. ' Not only do we fight in the ranks ; we also control the issues, and it is the vigorous prosecution of this higher function that gives to our life an inward stability and gladness ' (p. 131). Professor Eucken gives a number of excellent illustrations of the gradual transformations which progress implies, transforma- tions which are unintelligible apart from the im- manent presence of the Spiritual Life. In love we have a fundamental natural impulse gradually trans- formed into an enthusiasm for humanity ; in work, a mere means of livelihood or self-preservation trans- figured into an end in itself, in the service of which we realize our spiritual selfhood. Thus, throughout our human relationships, we can trace life's gradual THE MEANING AND VALUE OF LIFE n emancipation from the native selfishness which at first dictates all its activities. It is love and work that furnish the most conspicuous examples of this liberating movement love showing how it changes our attitude to our fellow-men ; work, how it changes our attitude to the world of objects. ... In love and work we have a merely outward contact transformed into an inward relation, and at the same time a subordination of mere pleasure and utility to the higher spiritual in- terests ' (p. 126). So, again, in the establishing of a spiritual history, ' in this fashioning of an esoteric history within the very time-process itself ' (p. 130), we have ' a transcendence ' and a very gradual one ' of the opposition which otherwise exists between the Temporal and the Eternal ' (p. 128). ' A spiritual history is a mediator between the Temporal which con- ditions our merely human existence and the Eternal Present which the Spiritual Life demands ' (p. 130). It is the inertness and limitation of our finitude which is responsible for the further doubt as to whether the fruits of the Spiritual Life are such as to justify our effort to realize it. If the Spiritual Life is the key to the life-problem of humanity, how is it that the wicked so often flourish while the righteous beg their bread ? In dealing with this difficulty, Professor Eucken bids us remember in the first place ' that the building-up of life proceeds from inner to outer, and not from without inwards ' (p. 134). So long as we look for a solution without attempting to contribute to it by our own endeavour, we shall never see what we look for. As in the past (e.g., in the early Christian Church), so now, ' it is only a fresh influx of spiritual life that can free us from the paralysis of doubt ' (p. 136) . 12 GOD WITH US This is the central point, but it is important to add that the doubt and mistrust in the efficiency of the Spiritual Life proceeds largely from our failure to realize what success in the spiritual world really means. Is ' prosperity and comfort ' to be here the criterion, or ' a deepening of character '? If the former, then the doubts which life's wretchedness and injustice excite cannot be silenced. If the latter, the question may legitimately be raised whether ' suffering ' may not itself be indispensable to this spiritualizing of life. Experience answers in the affirmative. Sorrows are cleansing fires. Not that sorrow in itself has any intrinsic value : ' the sentimental valuing of sorrow for sorrow's sake has not infrequently been a hindrance rather than a help ' (p. 142). The blessing of sorrow lies not in itself, but in the spiritual activities which it excites. In summing up the main contentions of the volume we have been considering, Professor Eucken lays primary stress on the fact that the attempt to find meaning and value in the mere furtherance of things as they are is bound to fail. Neither for the race nor for the individual ' can life be worth living if aspiration be limited to getting comfortably through the routine of daily existence. If by " happiness " we mean mere brute " satisfaction," then all our progress brings us no nearer to achieving the happiness of humanity, if, indeed, it does not take us farther away from it. It is only a crude optimism that can imagine the busy web of human activities transforming itself into a rationally ordered world' (p. 151). 'Such elements of spirituality as the older Order contained,' writes Pro- THE MEANING AND VALUE OF LIFE 13 fessor Eucken in another context, ' were lacking in definiteness and vigour, and were mixed up with much that was alien in kind. The Spiritual Life can only realize itself, and at the same time become conscious of its intrinsic solidarity with a spiritual world, in so far as it rids itself of this alien admixture, assumes towards it an attitude of direct antagonism, and from its position of independence develops for itself a dis- tinctive form of self-expression ' (p. 146). We are thus brought back to our author's central contention : a Conversion is essential. Outwardly the world may appear to be moving continuously forward without radical upheaval, but nevertheless, in so far as there is progress, or even steadiness, there must have been in many centres of human activity a spiritual concentration, a recognition and appropriation of the resources of a new life and a new world, a self- identification with its ideals and requirements. Such conversion is essential, for no man can accept his spiritual life from another or inherit his faith. And what is true for the individual is true also for the age in which he lives. Each age must realize afresh its own spiritual mission. Moreover the conversion of the individual may be bound up indissolubly with that of his age. But here we must distinguish between two types of civilization : the one which ' feels itself firmly rooted in some established spiritual Order ' (p. 157), and the other which does not. In illustration of the former, Professor Eucken cites the Renaissance and the Classical Humanistic Age of Goethe and Schiller ; as illustrative of the latter he mentions Stoicism, Christianity, and the Enlightenment. Our own age he holds to be in this essential respect more 14 GOD WITH US closely related to the Enlightenment than to the Neo- Humanism of Germany's Classical Period.* It is characteristic of the reforming ages that they trans- form the data of their time into problems. The main problem at such times is to find and fix a fresh centre from which the life of the age can develop a new spiritual culture. Not until this central ground is prepared can we usefully consider the further question of the superstructure. The recognition of ' an Inde- pendent Spiritual Life present in the realm of our human experience ' constitutes, on Eucken's view, the basis which the present age requires. Spiritual Reform * This distinction of Professor Eucken's suggests a corre- sponding distinction as applied ontogenetically to the develop- ment of the individual. Are there not stages in individual development which are essentially reforming, nay, creative others in which the need for regeneration gives way to the need for ' establishment ' ? Adolescence would be a ' reform- ing age ' in individual development, where all life starts, as it were, from a new standpoint. And is not the whole post- adolescent period the period for maturing and preaching the gospel of adolescence ? Perhaps we might even conjecture that when a man's life is maturest w r e have the need for a new reforming-period, when life takes root in immortality, and the intuition of an immortal spiritual present becomes the starting-point of life's last and greatest reform. Granted that the love-life has its first deep roots in our adolescence, of which the obvious destiny is to pass through maturity into senescence, and so to perish, may we not still reasonably question whether in a deeper and a truer sense our developed adolescence is not called to live on and realize its dream of an eternal youth ? May it not be its less obvious but far higher destiny to be born again within the depths of the spiritual life, to realize through a new faith- fulness the secret of a new love, and through this new love the secret of its immortality ? THE MEANING AND VALUE OF LIFE 15 is the watchword. Men should co-operate or work apart according as they do or do not acquiesce in taking a spiritual view of the universe. They are divided into two camps ' accordingly as they recognize, or fail to recognize, the existence of an independent Spiritual World and man's organic connection therewith.' ' Only when men are agreed in affirming the funda- mental truth of the Spiritual Life can they effectively proceed with the attempt to reconcile such oppositions as may still remain ' (p. 159). It is Professor Eucken's conviction that the Synthesis which shall organize our scattered activities and ideas must take as its basis the principle of an Independent Spiritual Life immanent in the Kingdom of Man. CHAPTER II. THE ALLEGED REVOLUTIONISM OF EUCKEN'S PHILOSOPHY. IT is Professor Eucken's conviction, so we have seen, that the present age is an age of Transition, and calls urgently for a reconsideration of the principles on which its action essentially rests. We are therefore to search the very foundations of our life, and, if necessary, reconstruct it from the bottom.* We shall do well not to saddle this revolutionary policy with interpretations which render it more sub- versive than it really is. For there is a sense in which we, as rational beings, capable of memory, thought and forethought, are natural heirs to a spiritual inheritance which we forfeit only as we lose our reason. And this Professor Eucken would, of course, admit. Our fore- fathers and our still remoter ancestry have not lived and fought in vain. Self, world, and society have an organized stability, the importance of which for the steadying of life it would be hard indeed to overesti- * For an illuminating statement as to what Professor Eucken's Spiritual Philosophy stands for, see his own ' Ein- fuhrung in eine Philosophic des Geisteslebens,' pp. 118-130 (published 1908). An English translation of this work 'The Life of the Spirit' has already been published in Messrs. Williams and Norgate's ' Crown Theological Library.' 16 IS ACTIVISM REVOLUTIONARY ? 17 mate. We inherit from the start a firm, practical standing-ground from which to wage our life-struggle against the pull of our lower nature. At certain epochs the ground may even appear so firm to the tread of a group or a nation that, as Eucken himself allows, a spiritual destiny may be achieved by simply disen- gaging and organizing the riches at one's feet. These are the classical epochs when human nature, more than content with its own spiritual prospect, achieves a spiritual work from an already existing basis. But there are other times and, in Eucken's con- viction, ours is one of these in which the very vastness and urgency of the problem which human nature has to face reveals at once the inadequacy of its natural resources and the need of replenishment from a deeper spiritual root than it can find in itself or its environ- ment. It is at such times, when humanity is, as it were, groping and feeling for its spiritual world, that it needs the assurance that there is something supremely real and attainable that can answer to its need. Eucken's philosophy is an attempt to impart this assurance. It leaves us with the conviction that there is a Spiritual Life, not to be explained away as a mere spiritualization of our human nature, for it alone renders such spiritualization intelligible, but to be honoured and loved as that Supreme Life the sharing of which gives meaning and value to our own. It shows us that such participation can be won only through our own personal action, through a self-reconciling en- deavour, strong to discover and transcend the deep- rooted antagonisms which perplex the development of our spiritual life. Eucken's view of the present age as an age which 2 i8 GOD WITH US needs to search out and fix afresh the basis of its spiritual endeavour will commend itself to all those who feel that the old ideals of religious Authority, with their insistence on fragile infallibilities of some kind or another, which remain infallible only so long as they remain unquestioned, stand self-convicted before the crushing indictments of Science, History and Philo- sophy, and have forfeited all claim upon the allegiance of free thinking* peoples. Impressive as their work may once have been as a temporary bulwark against the disorders and superstitions of slavishness and ignor- ance, it is manifest to all familiar with the modern movements of science, criticism and democracy that their day is done, and that nothing but the relapse of humanity into barbarism can ever call them back. For the future their strength must be borrowed from the spiritual weakness of men and women : no longer can they lead or instruct the free faiths of the future. The waters of the present are troubled enough, but there is no free mariner to-day who would accept release from the storm through any unnatural miracle of calm which stole the virtue from the waters and the rudder from his boat. But if we elect to weather the storm, the question of anchorage becomes all-important. There is no safety in drifting. Our line must touch bottom somewhere and the anchor must hold. Moreover, our freedom commits us to a quest within the inward depths of our own life, to such fathoming as shall sound deep enough to reach the Eternal in ourselves. We must find an authentic authority native to the realm of the spiritual life, an authority whose credential is its capacity to * Not ' free-thinking.' IS ACTIVISM REVOLUTIONARY ? 19 revivify and redeem. We must reach down to the intrinsic authoritativeness of God, the Life-Bringer ; search out the nature of the higher life He brings us, its principles and its laws, and establish these as authoritative over the lower. And in so far as the present age cannot be said to have its moral conscious- ness rooted in this religious conviction, it is in very truth an Age of Transition, an age which lacks its spiritual basis and cannot rest until it finds it. If this is the supreme task of the Age that lies before us, a task of which all other tasks can be but the varied specification, we may safely say that there is no one to-day who has striven more insistently and tenaciously to bring this obligation home to the thought of his time than has Professor Eucken. Moreover, the appeal to break from the past and concentrate upon the Eternal Present comes with peculiar force from a thinker who has made a name not only as a Kultur- philosoph, but as a Philosopher of History, and has in all his treatment of the history of speculative thought shown the utmost sympathy with every movement he has dealt with, sparing no pains to study it from within, and bring out any element of worth or greatness in it.* The thinker whose ' Revolutionism ' is almost punc- tiliously tender to the matter it condemns, may be trusted to urge no permanent break with aught that is great or worthy in the past : if he urges a break with * Cf. Professor Eucken's ' Die Lebensanschauungen der grossen Denker/ Siebente Auflage, 1907, passim, and the study of the Naturalistic Lebenssystem in his ' Einheit des Geisteslebens.' A translation of the ' Lebensanschauungen,' by Professor Williston Hough and the present writer, is being published this spring by Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons under the title of ' The Problem of Human Life.' 2 2 20 GOD WITH US the past as the precondition of a fruitful experience, it is because he realizes that the past is tyrannizing over the present, and that it can be of spiritual value to us only in so far as we are able to return upon it from an eternal standpoint, and to appropriate its resources in a spirit at once of reverence and of freedom. Moreover, though this radical revolutionism is indeed more explicit in Eucken's writings than in those of any other thinker, it appears to me to be implied in the teaching of every school of Christian Idealism which rests its spiritualistic conviction on the principle of conversion or ' dying to live/ on the belief that we can find our self only by losing our selfishness. For no one can hold this conviction strongly without realizing the essential distinction between the selfish life tricked out with superficial spiritualities and the life which is a spirit-life at heart, dedicated to the common-good. And once this distinction is clearly realized, the distinction between the two types of life, the kleinmenschlich and the grossgeistig must in- evitably tend to dominate all other moral distinctions, and so set the ' natural ' and the ' spiritual ' ideals in direct opposition to each other. For the ' natural ' usurps for a lower range of interests that which belongs by birthright to the spiritual life, and this usurpation, which is ' sin/ must be equally abhorrent to Christian Idealists of every shade of opinion. Thus in the passage we quote below from Professor Green's lay-ser- mon on ' Faith '* we have what is essentially Eucken's Revolutionism, softened only in the manner of its * ' The Witness of God and Faith.' Two lay sermons by T. H. Green, edited by Arnold Toynbee. New impression, 1904. IS ACTIVISM REVOLUTIONARY ? 21 expression. ' We are born, so to speak/ writes Green, ' into a world ... in which the consciousness of God has already so far embodied itself, that the problem of faith for us is rather to overcome the selfishness and conceit which prevent us from taking into ourselves individually the revelation of God which is every- where about us, than to develop that revelation more fully.'* We have only to reflect, however, that the very process of overcoming selfishness and conceit is a rooting of the deeper self in the Spiritual Life a process which the Spiritual Life itself makes possible and that, in proportion as this process is accomplished, a new organ of apperception for God's presence in the world is developed, in order to see that the exercise of such a new organ must needs be the very method through which God's revelation in the world is more fully developed. Again, when we go on to consider what Green precisely means by the ' problem of faith/ we find that it is nothing more nor less than what we have referred to as Eucken's Revolutionism. In his sermon on ' The Witness of God ' Green contrasts the attitude of the Christian who finds his life only by losing it with the self-righteous Jew and the self -wise Greek. The Jew whose observance of the Law became a ' matter of personal pride ' (p. 4) develops thereby the egotistic self-seeking self ; he does not gain the righteousness of God, ' which, because it is of God, unlike the self-elaborated righteousness of the Jew, instead of exalting men in conceit against each other, blends all in a common society of the redeemed ' (p. 12) . Similarly, ' the wisdom of the world comes to naught, because it puts its own pretension between itself and * 'The Witness of God and Faith,' p. 90. 22 GOD WITH US God. It will not die that it may live ' (p. 9). * As the Jew, going about to establish his own righteousness, had not attained unto the righteousness of God, so the Greek, seeking for a wisdom which should be his own discovery, not a revelation of God's Spirit (i Cor. xi. 10), had lost at every step what he seemed to be finding. The wisdom which he gained was in word, not in power. It had no power over his will. It helped him not to attain to the new life, to the emancipation from sense, to the resurrection of the dead ' (p. 5) Conversion, in a word, is accepted as ' the primary Christian idea ' (p. 16), and as bringing with it ' the power of a present and spiritual resurrection ' (p. 20) ; and the essence of Eucken's Revolutionism consists precisely in his insistence on this ' Conversion/ It may perhaps serve to set my contention in a clearer light the contention, namely, that Eucken's Revolutionism, in its essence, is simply the more explicit expression of what is latent in the writings of other Christian Idealists if I venture to quote an ingenious criticism by Mr. James Lindsay bearing upon a study of mine on Rudolf Eucken's ' Philosophy of Life ' (Bibliotheca Sacra, 1908, p. 179). ' Mr. Gibson's exposition,' runs the criticism in question, ' does not always hang very consistently together ; for example (p. 18), he quotes approvingly . . . from a writer who says " the effective reformer . . . must find his fulcrum for raising society in things as they are. He must live within the world if he is to make it better, and arm himself with its powers in order to conquer it." Compare with that the passage on p. 174 : " It is hope- less, from the level of the given, to attempt any mutual adjustment of these opposing powers, for the stand- IS ACTIVISM REVOLUTIONARY ? 23 point from which to control the adjustment must lie beyond the given. Nothing can be controlled from a point on its own surface. Archimedes cannot move the world except from a fulcrum outside it," and further, " our only course is to ... win our way slowly forwards and inwards beyond the given." Surely a "fulcrum" that must be inside and outside at one and the same time is in a bad way !' The quotation, I might add, which occurs on p. 18, as mentioned above, was from an article by Professor Henry Jones in the Hibbert Journal, October, 1905, p. 60 ; the passage on p. 174 represents the views of Professor Eucken. The verbal contradiction is manifest, but, on re- flection, it appears to me that the contradiction is not more than verbal, and that the view which presents reform as a working within the material is at root one with the view which represents it as a working outside it ; or, in other words, the ideal, working within the actual, as Professor Henry Jones understands that operation, is precisely the same thing as the ideal, working from a point without the actual, according to Professor Eucken. For the terms ' within ' and ' with- out ' are, after all, metaphors, and neither thinker is at the mercy of the metaphor he uses. Spiritual ' withinness,' or immanence, implies intimacy of in- sight or communion an intimacy which, far from tending to confuse seer and object seen, lover and be- loved, accentuates and develops their distinction from each other. The greatest intimacies beget the greatest mutual reverence, the truest love for a person the sincerest respect for his personality. It is only when the love for another is self-love in disguise that the moral barriers fail to be strengthened through in- 24 GOD WITH US timacy. This spiritual distinctness which immanence implies is a transcendence which in no way goes vitally beyond the immanence which implies it. All spiritual inwardness, in the words of Dr. James Ward's famous formula, is ' a duality in unity.' When A, through love, or sympathy, or interest, is ' inwardly one ' with B, he is at once immanent and transcendent in relation to B immanent in virtue of the element of interpenetration which the intimacy implies, transcen- dent in virtue of the ' distancing ' implicate of intimacy. The duality (which is, of course, no dualism) is here constituted by the distancing implicate, which in so far as it implies no externality in the relationship (and therefore no dualism) is itself a condition of immanence or interpenetration ; the unity is the ' inward oneness ' or ' intimacy ' which can develop only in the form of a duality. Now, it is with just such thoughts in the back- ground of his mind that Professor Henry Jones, in speaking of the nature of self-consciousness, maintains that ' the very intimacy of its indwelling in every element of its experience makes it transcend that ex- perience.' ' We can believe,' he adds, ' in a God who is transcendent because He is immanent,' for imma- nence and transcendence ' are but different phases of the same truth/* Hence when an Idealist like Professor Henry Jones speaks of the ideal working within the actual, he does not mean to imply that the ideal has no vital self-distinction from the actual ; on the con- trary, he means to imply that this vital self-distinction does exist. The ideal immanent in the actual is also transcendent to it ; it is at once a principle of develop- * Article on ' Divine Immanence/ Hibbert Journal, July, 66 7 6 7 IS ACTIVISM REVOLUTIONARY ? 25 ment and a standard of progress. So God is at once immanent and transcendent in relation to the Soul which shares His Life ; He is at once ' closer than breathing ' and farther than the farthest heaven ; an Object of love and an Object of reverence. But the love implies the reverence and the closeness could not be but for the humility which deepens sympathetic- ally with it. Similar considerations apply to Professor Eucken's interpretation of ' withoutness/ It is a withoutness that implies no externality.* It is, in fact, the trans- cendent aspect of ' withinness/ just as Professor Jones's ' withinness ' is the immanent aspect of ' withoutness/ Hence the spiritual fulcrum, at once inside and outside, at once immanent and transcendent, is through this very opposition, which is far indeed from implying any contradiction, just asserting its spiritual nature as a duality in unity. It would be in a bad way could it be utilized immanently but not transcendently, or vice versa. ' Things as they are ' means ' things as they are to the reformer/ so that the fulcrum rests as neces- sarily in the reformer's aim and intention as it does on the misch-masch he aims at reforming ; and in so far as it rests in the reformer's aim and intention it is transcendent to the misch-masch, and in this sense beyond it and outside it. We conclude, then, that Eucken's Revolutionism has nothing in it which could move the impatience even of our sanest commonsense, provided our sanity is of the true spiritual order. Its central contention that the lower nature cannot spiritualize itself, but needs * See ' Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy of Life,' second edition, p. 176. 26 GOD WITH US the influx and grace of a Higher Life through participa- tion in which the higher nature is first realized, is a formula of reform which simply re-emphasizes the cardinal doctrine of Christian Idealism the doctrine of redemption through self-renunciation and is revo- lutionary only in the sense in which the message of Jesus to the world is permanently and in principle revolutionary. And yet, apart from a certain qualification, this general conclusion as to the alleged revolutionism of Eucken's philosophy might tend to be misleading. We must allow due weight to his insistence that the present Age cannot, like some that have preceded it, carry out its convictions within a congenial spiritual atmosphere. New problems have arisen which call for new solutions. More particularly, the time-spirit is out of sympathy with the traditional conception of Religious Authority indeed, radically antipathetic to it. Its faith must be the faith of religious reason, and its religious conviction the rationale of a living faith. The concepts of ' Life/ ' Reason ' and * Faith ' are no longer the presuppositions, but the central problems of the present Age, and the spiritual upheaval conse- quent on the transference of these problems to the centre of interest has presented the permanent re- quirements of Christian Idealism in a more than usually revolutionary light. It is above all the Reason which calls for intimate alliance with Life and Faith. The Reason itself needs to be born again. If it is to re-find itself in the spiritual world, in the world of religious freedom, it must transcend the deterministic postulate which is its essential support in the study of Nature, and work with the categories of Freedom and of Faith. IS ACTIVISM REVOLUTIONARY ? 27 Not until it does this can the Spiritual Life become authoritative for the Reason as well as for the Emo- tions and the Will. But though we define ourselves as rational animals, we are as a rule rational only in regard to Science, not in regard to Philosophy. We understand Nature as a Mechanism, but not ourselves as Spirit. Hence the unrest and uncertainty of this essentially reflective Age. And since it is the Reason which can alone recompose a life which the Reason has itself disturbed, we can look for full release from the pains of the present transition which the religious consciousness of the time is effecting in the direction of its free, spiritual basis, only through the closest alliance of the Reason with the fundamental convic- tions of the spiritual life. We have won our Science through a self-renunciation or self-abstraction of our Reason, through a self-limitation of its freedom to the sphere of natural law. And now Psychology and even Biology are thrusting the concept of Purpose upon us, and compelling us to realize its significance, and thereby the deeper nature of our own Reason, with new and unprecedented force. The very problems of the Age are summoning us to that redemption of the Reason which its long self-renunciation is now rendering possible ; and with the redemption of the Reason, Religion will reassert its ancient authority over the human mind, but far more stably than in the past, for its authority will rest on the personal forces and spiritual laws which express the power and the freedom of our higher nature, the power and the freedom of our life in God. CHAPTER III. ACTIVISM AND ADOLESCENCE. OF the various currents which, moving in the sense of Activism, support in various ways the main contentions of Professor Eucken's philosophy, we may cite that of the new philosophy of Adolescence of which Professor G. Stanley Hall, President of Clark University, is at once the originator and most distinguished representa- tive. In Professor Hall's epoch-making work we have a new note struck, which in the decades that are coming appears destined to become more and more dominant a note of remarkable and indeed profound originality, that should give clear direction to many who are eager for the spirit-life, but seek a basis for it in human experience that is wider and more universal than the specific experiences of the mystic or the saint. For Professor Hall, the spirit-life springs from the ferment of Adolescence, so that the main credential for our religious vocation lies not so much in our being human as Sabatier and others contend as in our having been young. The higher inspirations of the soul come from ancestral depths which are mainly opened up at puberty : they are the resonance in the individual's life of racial emotions that have had their day of 28 ACTIVISM AND ADOLESCENCE 29 splendour in the dim recesses of prehistoric times. At Adolescence, or earlier, they re-emerge in impulsions and tendencies which cannot be neglected or heedlessly repressed without quenching the spiritual life at its fountain-head, and sapping the immeasurable possi- bilities of love, religion, and idealism. Adolescence supplies the new material of the spiritual life, and an education adequate to the vast and complex claims of this seething period of human growth must respect its material. The native energies of ' Boydom and Girldom ' should be refined without being weakened ; they should be controlled and co-ordinated without being sapped of the vitality they draw from that great transmitter of spiritual possibilities heredity. We have here suggestions of immense importance for the saving of man's lesser life through the sharing of a greater. There is held out to us the possibility of an education so liberal that it shall free us from all arbitrary conventions of all artificial codes, and yet so conservative that there is no ancestral impulse, no reverberation from the past that may not be nurtured and controlled so as to subserve the perfect- ing of our spiritual nature. The spirit -life, as we here discern it, is seen enveloping the individual and cor- porate life of humanity, flooding it from below ; and from above, shaping, guiding, and redeeming it. In its primitive function as the fountain of adolescence, it seizes us, irrespective of nationality, condition, sex, or creed, and bears us along in the fresh wind of its inspiration. We are at one with it through the mere virtue of our youth ; it is our breath, our very being, in a sense of which pantheism is the only adequate religious expression, truer at this stage than the poly- 30 GOD WITH US theism we have left behind us or the monotheism that is still to come. But this is spirit-life hi the rough. Youth has still to discover the secret for refining it, and that secret is love. With the birth of the sexual feeling, a later birth than that of earliest adolescence, a power comes into play which, in proportion as it is healthily developed and controlled, will eventually shape and transfigure the tumultuous fervour of our youth into the still more golden age of parenthood, citizenship, and priesthood. Our alliance with this deeper, richer, redemptive life of love is conditioned not only by the wisdom of our educators, but by the freedom of ourselves. In so far as we freely ally our- selves with this power that springs from the fountain of our youth and direct this greatest of passions, however vaguely, to the greatest of all objects, God, we have, in our adolescent way, already solved the problem of life in principle, and all the graces of religion and idealism, and even genius, must follow from our loyalty to this alliance.* * Compare the following from the Confucian Canon : ' The moral law takes its rise in the relation between man and woman, but in its utmost reaches it reigns supreme over heaven and earth ' (extract from ' The Conduct of Life, or the Universal Order of Confucius ' a translation of one of the four Confucian books hitherto known as the ' Doctrine of the Mean,' p. 24). According to Professor Hall, Adolescence is the nascent period of all the deeper emotions, enthusiasms, and insights. See ' Adolescence, its Psychology and its Rela- tions to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education/ by G. Stanley Hall, Ph.D., LL.D., President of Clark University, and Professor of Psychology and Pedagogy (London : Appleton, 1905), vol. i., p. 323 ; vol. ii., p. 394 ; and especially vol. ii., p. 70. Cf. vol. i., pp. 313, 318 ; and vol. ii., p. 2. The page references in the text are to this treatise on ' Adolescence. 1 ACTIVISM AND ADOLESCENCE 31 There are two main points about which the adoles- cent life revolves. Each of these is a meeting-point of antagonistic tendencies. The pivotal point of earlier adolescence marks the conflict between the egoism natural to the period of childhood, and the more altruistic tendencies which awaken with the birth of the sexual emotions. ' The child from nine to twelve is well adjusted to his environment and proportion- ately developed ; he represents probably an old and relatively perfected stage of race-maturity.' But ' at dawning of adolescence this old unity and harmony with nature is broken up ' (' Adolescence/ vol. ii., p. 71) . ' Powers and faculties, essentially non-existent before, are now born, and of all the older impulses and instincts some are reinforced and greatly developed, while others are subordinated, so that new relations are established and the ego finds a new center' (ii. 70). A little later and ' life is no longer ego-centric, but altro- centric ' (ii. 81, and cf. ii. 301), Nature requiring that the will to live be subordinated to love, that the natural unself-conscious egoism of the prepubertal period surrender to the new-born power which, with all its attendant potencies, is now in the ascendant.* The requirement ushers in a period of storm and stress. Egoism becomes self-conscious, and, tending towards ambition and selfishness, strives against the impulses of love in the interests of self-centred individualism. Love, on the other hand, claiming that ' the best life is that which is best for the unborn ' (ii. 139) urges devotion to the service of the race. * This yielding to the altruistic ideal, as Professor Hall understands it, is naturally gradual, ' Enjoyment and self- culture must slowly yield to service,' ' group-selfishness ' being ' the first step in overcoming individual isolation ' (ii. 430). 32 GOD WITH US With the expansion of the love-life comes an urgent call for its control. The second of the two great pivotal points of adolescence is that around which Nature and Spirit battle for the empery of love. Nature, the passionate will to live, counsels abandonment ; Spirit urges restraint. Hence a supreme conflict which re- capitulates in the individual the old struggle between Phallicism and Christianity. Phallicism stands for the worship of natural love, Christianity for its re- demption into the love of God. The Bible-story is full of this conflict. ' The long wars with the Canaan - ites and Baal-worshippers were conflicts with phallicism, to the gross orgies of which the chosen people were always lapsing ' (ii. 126). And in the New Testament we have the story of how ' the chief danger that threat- ened our race (ii. 294) was met by the insight of Jesus, and by that ' transcendental phallicism ' which, as Professor Hall puts it, ' is one of the great, if not the greatest, achievements of the race ' (ii. 100).* And yet in this struggle for the control of Adoles- cence the rights of Nature must be respected. Indeed, the central idea in Professor Hall's theory of psychic evolution is that each natural power of the soul * Love-transcendence should be carefully distinguished from any and every form of perversion of the sexual instinct. Pro- fessor James's attack upon the writers who interpret religion as a love-perversion i.e., as a decadent form of sexual emotion would be entirely irrelevant if applied to the trans- cendence-theory of Professor Hall. Professor Hall's trans- cendence-theory is, in fact, diametrically opposed to this perversion-theory, as his whole treatment of eroticism, phal- licism, and all forms of self -abuse amply testifies. Vide ' The Varieties of Religious Experience,' by William James, pp. 10-12 (footnote) . ACTIVISM AND ADOLESCENCE 33 must live for itself, and be encouraged to live for itself until its very growth has prepared the way for the more potent power that is to supersede it. This more potent power will itself be a new product, the chief condition for whose appearance is precisely the sufficient develop- ment of the lower powers which it is its function to control in the interests of its own ampler and deeper life. When Professor Hall is speaking of the restless symp- toms of young children, he points out that many of these ' are simply the forms in which we receive the full momentum of heredity, and mark a natural rich- ness of the raw material of intellect, feeling, and especially of will. Hence they must be abundant. All parts should act in all possible ways at first and untrammelled by the activity of all other parts and functions. . . . Here, as everywhere, the rule holds that powers themselves must be unfolded before the ability to check or even to use them can develop ' (i. 161). And, speaking more generally of the motor tendencies of this age, he adds : ' Perhaps the more rankly and independently they are developed to full functional integrity, each in its season, if we only knew that season, the better ' (i. 162). In a word, we must ' waken all parts to function ' before we seek to connect and control. ' Each lower level . . . must have its full development, for it is a necessary condition for the unfoldment of the higher ' (i. in, cf. ii. 320). We must obey ' the wholesome rule of exhausting each stage of life as it is lived ' (ii. 107).* Control, in a word, must not be premature. Growth and cultiva- tion must precede it. It will be all the more natural * For a concrete instance of this great bionomic law, see ' Adolescence,' vol. ii., pp. 732, 733. 3 34 GOD WITH US and effective if it is suggested by the maturer develop- ment of the powers themselves, and has a richer and riper field upon which to work (cf. ii. 89). But if the natural impulses of childhood are to be thus cherished, the requirement is none the less binding for those of adolescence. Here, too, we need to re- interpret the traditions of liberal education ' by in- sisting that the only way to fit for the next stage is to exhaust the possibilities of the present one ' (ii. 520). At this period ' the educational ideal is ... to develop capacities in as many directions as possible, to indulge caprice and velleity a little, to delay consistency for a time, and let the diverse prepotencies struggle with each other (ii. 89). ... Nearly every latency must be developed, or else some higher power, that later tempers and co-ordinates it, lacks normal stimulus to develop ' (ii. 90). But there is in this respect an important distinction between the preadolescent and the adolescent periods. The former, say from eight to twelve, is relatively stable, and the lines of approach towards adolescence relatively well-marked ; the latter is eminently un- stable, and points but dimly to the newer birth beyond it. ' The child comes from and harks back to a re- moter past ; the adolescent is neo-atavistic, and in him the later acquisitions of the race slowly become prepotent ' (Preface, p. xiii). The adolescent in his earlier teens is thus in many respects more of an infant than the child. He has less understanding of his own powers, less experience in the use of them. The boy, in this sense, is father to the man, more self-confident and more adapted to his environment. This marked ferment and instability of the adoles- ACTIVISM AND ADOLESCENCE 35 cent period brings with it the fundamental need of prolonging it. So varied and so rich are its potenti- alities, so essential is it that these diverse endowments should be cherished in their season, and so all-important their early development for all the subsequent epochs of maturer life, that the premature passage from adoles- cence to maturity is above all things to be avoided. The inspirations of later life have their main source in this springtime of the soul, ' the age when all become geniuses for a season, very brief for most, prolonged for some, and permanent for the best ' (i. 187).* And old age itself is mainly dependent on adolescence for whatever freshness it takes with it to the grave, for, as Professor Hall so happily puts it, ' one of the func- tions of this flood-time of life is to irrigate old age and make it green ' (ii. 120). The essential condition for the prolonging of adoles- cence is self-control. The want of control implies arrest both physical and psychical, the arrest of a growth which reaches its normal culmination only at the close of the adolescent period. Youth is ' the 4 golden age of sense,' when ' the soul exposes most surface, as it were, to the external world ' (ii. 37), and its natural acclivity is towards sensuousness. But ' yielding to mere and gross sensuous pleasure shortens the growth period, and the only way to prolong it and attain an ever higher and fuller maturity for the race is by the plain old virtue of self-restraint ' (i. 438). Moreover, as we have seen, it is, for Professor Hall, a cardinal principle of development that every function * Genius itself, the genius that lasts, is denned by Pro- fessor Hall as ' intensified and prolonged adolescence ' (ii. 90 ; cf, also i. 309, i. 547, and ii. 315). 32 36 GOD WITH US of body and mind should exist in the first instance for itself ere it die into the service of some higher function. ' The apex of individuation must be attained before genesis, but only for the sake of the latter, to which it is subordinate. This means the postponement of every nubile function till as near the end of the growth period as possible, so that maturity may realize as far as possible the ideal of Sir Galahad, who had the strength of ten because his heart was pure. The most rigid chastity of fancy, heart, and body is physiologic- ally and psychologically as well as ethically imperative till maturity is complete on into the twenties. . . . Restraint is now true manhood and makes races ascen- dant ' (ii. 120). Professor Hall's view of transcendence is based on the biological principle of heterogeny, ' by which move- ments as well as structures are carried on, but trans- ferred to higher levels ' (i. 156). Thus ' grasping was partly developed from and partly added to the old locomotor function of the fore-limbs/ And the hand itself, the structure whose function is that of grasping, developed along the lines of heterogeny when, on man's acquisition of the upright position, it was ' freed from the necessity of locomotion and made the servant of the mind ' (i, 227). As another instance Hall mentions the organs we make use of in the act of eating. These are largely the same as those we make use of when we speak. ' As Hughlings- Jackson has well shown, speech uses most of the same organs as does eating, but those concerned with the former are controlled from a higher level of nerve-cells. By right mastica- tion, deglutition, etc., we are thus developing speech- organs ' (i. 207). This instance also aptly illustrates ACTIVISM AND ADOLESCENCE 37 Professor Hall's bionomic law, according to which life passes from a lower to a higher level through the relevant exhaustion of the lower. To frustrate the operation of this law is to commit ' the old error of amputating the tadpole's tail rather than letting it be absorbed to develop the legs that make a higher life on land possible ' (ii. 231). As an illustration of this principle of heterogeny in its more direct application to the psychical life, we may note what Professor Hall says about the trans- cendence of anger. ' Repulsive as are the . . . grosser and animal manifestations of anger/ he argues, ' its impulsion cannot and should not be eliminated, but its expression transformed and directed towards evils that need all its antagonisms. To be angry aright is a good part of moral education, and non-resistance under all provocations is unmanly, craven and cowardly. . . . Hence, instead of eradicating this instinct, one of the great problems of physical and moral pedagogy is to rightly temper and direct it' (i. 217 ; cf. also i. 355, 356). ' Perhaps nothing is more opposed to the idea of a gentleman/ we read, a few pages further on (i. 220), ' than the sceva animi tempestas of anger. A testy, quarrelsome, mucky humour is antisocial, and an outburst of rage is repulsive. Even non-resistance, turning the other cheek, has its victories, and may be a method of moral combat. A strong temper well controlled and kept in leash makes a kinetic character ; but in view of bullying, unfair play, cruel injustice to the weak and defenceless, of outrageous wrong that the law cannot reach, patience and forbearance may cease to be virtues, and summary redress may have a distinct advantage to the ethical nature of man and 38 GOD WITH US to social order, and the strenuous soul must fight or grow stagnant or flabby. If too repressed, righteous indignation may turn to sourness and sulks, and the disposition be spoiled. Hence the relief and exhilara- tion of an outbreak that often clears the psychic at- mosphere like a thunderstorm. . . . Rather than the abject fear of making enemies, whatever the provoca- tion, I would praise those whose best title of honour is the kind of enemies they make. Better even an occasional nose dented by a fist, a broken bone, a rapier-scarred face, or even the sacrifice of an occa- sional life of our best academic youth, than stagnation, general cynicism and censoriousness, bodily and psychic cowardice, and moral corruption, if this indeed be, as it sometimes is, its real alternative ' (i. 220, 221). Pro- fessor Hall follows up this view on the true education of anger with the characteristic recommendation that every healthy boy should be taught boxing at adoles- cence, if not before. ' The prize-ring is degrading and brutal, but in lieu of better illustrations of the spirit of personal contest I would interest a certain class of boys in it, and try to devise modes of pedagogic utilization of the immense store of interest it generates. Like dancing, it should be rescued from its evil asso- ciations and its educational force put to do moral work, even though it be by way of individual prescriptions for specific defects of character. At its best, it is indeed a manly art, a superb school for quickness of eye and hand, decision, force of will and self-control. The moment this is lost stinging punishment follows. Hence it is the surest of all cures for excessive irasci- bility, and has been found to have a most beneficent effect upon a peevish or unmanly disposition' (id., i. 218). ACTIVISM AND ADOLESCENCE 39 The leading factors in this process of levelling up the life to a higher stage are, in Professor Hall's terminology, ' prepotent/ According to the law of prepotence the old factors are as it were knit into the new (cf. i. 308). It is in this sense that the egoistic tendencies of childhood are set towards service under the prepotence of love ; anger disciplined through courageous self-control, and what is sensual in love oriented towards the spiritual under the prepotence of religion. We have said that Professor Hall's conception of transcendence is essentially biological in character. Even such qualities as ' the ministry of nursing, pro- tecting, providing for, and teaching the young ' may be performed, so Professor Hall suggests, ' by the same im- pulses, now sterilized and diverted, that once produced offspring' (i. 44), and are in this sense 'secondary sexual qualities.' Education itself becomes thus ' the com- plement of procreation and increases the reproductive sacrifice and rapture,'* so that we understand why it is that the young ' must first of all be loved in order to be rightly taught' (ii. 134). In a section on Con- firmation in the Roman Catholic Church, we find an application of this same thought. ' There has always been,' we read, ' a body, never so large as now, of devoted nuns and priests who, as Plato's " Republic " first suggested, renouncing family ties, have turned that same rich and deep tide of affection, which most * Id., ii. 135. Professor Hall refers in this connection to a treatise by Mr. D. E. Phillips on ' The Teaching Instinct,' Ped. Sem., March, 1889, vol. vi., pp. 188-246. Compare with the above the theological view that ' Redemption is part of Creation.' 40 GOD WITH US spend on spouse and offspring, to this holy apostolate of childhood and youth, as their sweetest and dearest life-work, in a way that has not only supplemented but quickened, instructed and elevated parental love, and helped to build up the holy city of " Man-Soul " in the heart. It is to this long-circuiting and sublima- tion of the sexual and parental instinct that I ascribe the entirely unique character that pervades the labour and writings of the great child-lovers in Catholic Christendom . . .' (ii. 267). This tendency towards explanations of a biological character is not accidental with Professor Hall, for his treatment of Adolescence, as a whole, is at root biological. The ' cardinal principle ' of his Genetic Psychology is nemo psychologies nisi biologus (ii. 55), and its ' basis ' is in the ' basal will to live,' which, in a sense, is simply ' the will to eat ' (i. 252). ' The true beginning of a Psychology essentially genetic is hunger, the first sentient expression of the will to live, which, with love, its other fundamental quality, rules the world of life ' (ii. 9). ' From the flagella up, hunger and love preside over the evolution of the body ' (i. 41). Professor Hall is frequently insisting on the close connection between life and mind, and the whole treatment of his subject presupposes and illustrates the connection. The first few chapters in the book, as their very titles indicate,* are whole-heartedly loyal to the cardinal principle. They amply confirm Professor Hall's assertion that ' the first chapter of a scientific Psychology ... is metabolic and nutritive ' * ' Growth in Height and Weight/ ' Growth of Parts and Organs during Adolescence,' ' Growth of Motor Power and Function/ ' Diseases of Body and Mind/ ACTIVISM AND ADOLESCENCE 41 (ii. 63). Moreover, it was as a physiologist that Pro- fessor Hall himself, ' full of the conviction that the study of the mind could best be approached through that of the body ' (i. 129), started on his career of psychological study. In an autobiographical con- fession which is peculiarly interesting and instructive* he tells his readers how the prolonged study of ' certain functions of one of nearly a score of the muscles the gastrocnemius of a frog's leg ' (i. 129) eventually opened up to him the whole universe of body and mind, leaving him with the profound conviction that the world is ' lawful to the core ' (i. 130). ' I realized/ he writes, ' that the structure and laws of action of muscles were the same in frogs as in men, that such contractile tissue was the only organ of the will, and had done all man's work in the world, made civiliza- tion, character, history, states, books, and words. . . . In fine, in the presence of this tiny object I had gradu- ally passed from the attitude of Peter Bell, of whom the poet says ' " A primrose by a river's brim A yellow primrose was to him, And it was nothing more," up to the standpoint of the seer who plucked a " flower from the crannied wall " and realized that could he but know what it was " root and all and all in all," he would know what God and man is ' (i. 131). From Biology to Religion through Psychology, from the nutritive to the spiritual, past the new psychical springs of Adolescence this, on Professor Hall's view, is the true genetic order in research as in life. It is with life and study as it is with the ' motor poetry ' * Vide id., i. 129-131. 42 GOD WITH US of play. ' Play,' we read, * is at bottom growth, and at the top of the intellectual scale it is the eternal type of research from sheer love of truth.' Here as else- where we study the function genetically and truly only in so far as we follow its progress on ' heterogenetic ' lines up from the instinctive to the spiritual level. It is a favourite thought with Professor Hall that Adolescence, as the most plastic of all the ages of man, must be the starting-point for all attempts at raising and redeeming his present nature. ' If regeneration is ever to lift us to a higher plane, the adolescent nisus will be its mainspring ' (i. 324). ' The point of departure for higher and more evolved forms is adoles- cence and not adulthood, just as upward steps in the development of the phylon have not been from the terminal types of earlier periods, but have started from stages farther back ' (i. 128). ' For those pro- phetic souls interested in the future of our race and desirous of advancing it, the field of adolescence is the quarry in which they must seek to find both goal and means. If such a higher stage is ever added to our race, it will not be by increments at any later plateau of adult life, but it will come by increased develop- ment of the adolescent stage, which is the bud of promise for the race ' (i. 50). Adolescence, ' and not maturity as now defined, is the only point of departure for the superanthropoid that man is to become ' (ii. 94). Of all the attempts to realize the superman in human nature or the oversoul, as some might prefer to call it that of religion is recognized by Hall himself as the most conspicuous and important. ' Every higher stage of development involves not only reinterpretation but ACTIVISM AND ADOLESCENCE 43 re-revelation on a higher plane, and religious advance- ment is the consummation of human development ' (ii. 328). Now, the central function of Religion is that of purifying and normalizing love, and it is mainly as the rescuer of love that Christianity appeals to Professor Hall. It would, indeed, seem as though, in the spiritual- izing of love through religion, of sex-love and fellow- love through the love of God, man were summoned to realize a new and a higher adolescence ; and that such ' advancement ' would be a ' re-revelation on a higher plane/ brought about by the influx of a newer and deeper life than that which floods the soul at adolescence. And this, in effect, is the conclusion towards which the Psychology of Adolescence undoubtedly points. It is true that there is a tendency to lay stress on the parallelism* (i.e., the close analogy, similarity, co- variation) of love and religion where, in conformity with Professor Hall's own principle of heterogeny, it is the transcendence or redemption of love by religion which constitutes the spiritual link between them. But the very terms in which this ' parallelism ' is referred to enable us to realize that the indissoluble bond which ' God and nature have wrought between religion and love ' (ii. 293) is a parallelism only in the name. How else could it be ' one of the most sublime and fruitful themes of our day, which Kant would very likely have added to the starry heavens and moral law * Vide id., 295-300 ; but cf. also ii. 45. ' Just now even psychologists are addicted to making subtle but utterly scholastic distinctions between theories of parallelism and interaction, with arguments I would far rather be refuted by than use.' 44 GOD WITH US within as a third object of supreme awe, reverence and interest ' (ii. 293) ? Moreover, in close connection with this very passage, the suggestion is put forward that ' perhaps Plato is right, and love of the good, beautiful, and true is only love of sex transfigured and trans- cendent alized/ a suggestion supported by a deeply sympathetic reference to the ' mystic idealism ' of the ' Symposium/ ' Truly, before this mystic idealism, we may well feel that current conceptions of love are either a very rudimentary bud or else a crumbling ruin, but yet that the purest love and the highest truth were created for each other, and that if the world is at root real and sane, it will culminate in their union ' (ii. 295).* The Spiritual Monism to which the Psychology of Adolescence most naturally and inevitably points is one essentially akin to the Activism or Religious Idealism of Professor Eucken. Professor Eucken's philosophy, on the other hand, seems to me to require the support of just such an empiricist Psychology of Life as is supplied by the ' Adolescence ' of Professor Hall. I have spoken elsewheref of the need in which Professor Eucken's philosophy stands of a relevant psychological basis. As a philosophy of the Spiritual * Cf. also the sympathetic reference to Schleiermacher's statement that ' if man does not become one with the Eternal in the immediate unity of his intuitive feelings, he remains for ever separated from it in the derived unity of Conscious- ness.' ' This,' says Professor Hall, ' is the Monism that is in philosophy what Monotheism was of old, which asserts its supremacy above all dualism ' (id., ii. 327). Note also the spirit of the reference to ' spiritual monism ' on p. 329. f Vide ' Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy of Life/ second edition pp. 10, 12, 13, 144-148. ACTIVISM AND ADOLESCENCE 45 Life it appeals to what is deepest and most inward in human experience, but of the vital and psychical conditions under which the philosophy can become an effective power in the life of the individual, making for truth of insight and stability of convic- tion, relatively little is said. The philosophy is thus in some danger of losing that hold upon human life and that significance for our human striving which an adequate psychological substratum would give it. A philosophical synthesis of the meaning and value of life is the very message of which Adolescence stands in need, but what is Adolescence, and how can it best assimilate Religious Idealism ? For an answer to these questions we must turn to the pioneering work of Professor Hall. Through his detailed treatment of the ' marvellous new birth ' of Adolescence, we are made to realize how ' the new powers now given sud- denly and in profusion ' may be ' husbanded and directed ' towards humanism, idealism, and religion (vide Preface, xv). We are made to feel how central for youth is the authority of love, and how indis- soluble the bond which unites love with religion. And with this realization we reach the climax of the Psycho- logy of Adolescence, a climax which, for its fit denoue- ment, needs the help of philosophical insight and analysis. For if Activism has to search itself and ask ' What is Adolescence ?' it is equally true that the Psychology of Adolescence has, in its turn, to look towards ' mystic idealism ' and ask ' What is the Spiritual Life ? If Religion is the redeemer of love, whence comes the power of Religion ? And in what relation does Religion stand to the life of Adoles- cence ?' 46 GOD WITH US We may put this question in another way. We may start from Professor Hall's conviction that the phyletic inspiration of childhood is paleo-atavistic, that of adolescence neo-atavistic. On the recapitulation theory which Professor Hall extends from the ante- natal to the post-natal stages of human growth, our childhood harks back to ' a long stationary period during which life had been pretty fully unfolded and could be led indefinitely and with stability and security in some not too cold Lemuria, New Atlantis, Eden, or other possible cunabulum gentium ' (i. 44, 45 ; cf. also i. 48). The child from eight to twelve, on this theory, would be the arrested savage writ small, a theory which supplies a useful hint towards explaining the close affinities between child and savage life. Adolescence, on the other hand, would, on this phylogenetic theory, recapitulate a storm and stress period of far later date in the history of the race. Now, if we start from these assumptions, we may go on to ask what ultra-neo- atavistic tendencies the emergence of the oversoul or spiritual life ontogenetically represents. The question would be difficult to answer if heredity must furnish the solution. Of what relatively recent ancestral experience can the spiritual life be the recapitulation ? Professor Eucken's philosophy of history suggests a more reasonable answer than can be given from the standpoint of heredity (cf. ii. 342). When our conscious thought and study freely sifts, selects and appropriates the great and enduring elements in the historic records of our race, and having appropriated them remoulds them into forms that fit our present need, it is, in a very genuine sense, causing the past to relive in our present experience, and the past which thus revives ACTIVISM AND ADOLESCENCE 47 is historic and relatively recent. The spiritual life of humanity is thereby freely recapitulated, and we have a confirmation of the saying that ' faith is not inherited/ of the view so characteristic of Professor Eucken's philosophy, that what we spiritually are, that we must have earned by the strenuous exercise of our freedom. Our personality or spiritual self, on this view, is still in the making, but the influx of a higher life, which can alone differentiate the spiritual from the natural, has its source, not in ancestral depths of the soul, but in an inwardness which faithful endeavour alone can sustain. This last and latest inspiration does not come to us from the past but from the eternal present, nor can it come at all unless we go to meet it. With Activism we pass from heredity to freedom, from the power of racial instinct and impulse, subdued to spiritual aims through education, to the deeper in- spiration which sustains the educator, makes possible the transcendence of love through religion and gives to life an immortal significance.* With Activism we * Professor Hall's attitude to ' the immortality prospectors that neglect the past ' (ii. 67) is undoubtedly hostile, and in so far as ' Psychical Research ' seeks in its quarry for intimations of an after-life, it wins scant sympathy from Professor Hall. ' Till our science can cut entirely loose from every soterio- logical influence and drop the future, which has its true place for study elsewhere ' e.g., in pedagogy, when God and a future life become ' the most imperative of all hypotheses ' (vide Professor Hall's treatise on ' Youth,' pp. 330, 331) ' and turn to the past, it cannot flourish' (id., ii. 67). 'The psychologist of the future, if his science is to have a future, must turn to the past ' (i. 62 ; cf. ii. 41-44). It is, however, quite possible that Professor Hall would feel more leniently 48 GOD WITH US realize that our latest and truest ancestral Self is the Self we depelop through the free and self-conscious appropriation of the spiritual in Nature and History. We have here a transcendence of Professor Hall's theory of ancestral inspiration, for this spiritual self, as a self- world, is the joint work of past and present, of our forbears and ourselves. We are here most true to the spirit of our predecessors because we work freely with them, most true to the past because, in linking it to the present, we reorient it towards the eternal. It is indeed doubtful whether Professor Hall's re- spect for Consciousness and Self-Consciousness would be sufficient to justify him in acquiescing in such a development of his own philosophy as is here suggested. It is hard to reconcile the reference to ' the sublime structure of science, the greatest achievement of the soul thus far ' (ii. 67), with the suggestion ventured on the same page that consciousness ' may be a wart raised by the sting of sin, a product of alienation or a remedial process.' Nor is the wart-metaphor lightly thrown off in the interests of picturesqueness. It is an interesting and a persistent conviction of Professor Hall that consciousness may after all be only a ' remedial ' or ' corrective ' process, ' a therapeutic agent ' like ' the rash and tetter of evil ' (ii. 308). ' The more vital a tissue, organ, or function/ he signifi- cantly says, ' the less conscious we are of it, and the weaker or more decadent it is, the more it comes to towards the conception of a present immortality, realized by moving inwards rather than forwards, though this view may, perhaps, fall under the ban of that Ultra-idealism which Professor Hall holds to be ' pathological ' (ii. 45). ACTIVISM AND ADOLESCENCE 49 the front ' (ii. 309). It is perhaps also significant that Professor Hall should appreciate as ' profound ' Froebel's fine remark that ' the unconsciousness of a child is rest in God' (vide 'Youth/ p. 351). These and other passages are apt to leave the reader with the impression that the higher self-consciousness to which we feel ourselves destined would, on Professor Hall's premises, be only a deeper unconsciousness. We are warned against the limitations of such as have ' no intimation of the wisdom, depth below depth, that has been organized into our bodies, brains, auto- matisms, and instincts, which is vastly and incomparably greater than all that is in the consciousness of all men now living combined' (ii. 324). But if this were so, the prospects of consciousness would not be inspiring, and we should almost be tempted to conceive them as illusory, and wait patiently for the hour when this remedial agent had perfected its work and restored us to the deeper vitality of the wisdom that works beyond the reach of our free endeavour. Against what we must hold to be a tendency towards the illegitimate extension of the atavistic into the sphere of the spiritual, Activism, with its central theory of an Independent Spiritual Life which is primarily and directly open to our self-conscious moral effort, is an essential and much needed corrective. But if Activism thus carries on the work of the ' Adolescence, ' and gives it a profounder and more satisfying philo- sophical outlook, it is still the ' Adolescence ' which supplies the appropriate psychological starting-point for a philosophy which is at once idealistic, activistic, and religious, and vital to the heart of it. The points of sympathy between these two great movements are 4 50 GOD WITH US deep-reaching and fundamental. If the ' Adoles- cence ' is atavistic, Activism is historical : in each case, though in different ways, the teaching has its roots deep-set in the past. The standpoint, again, is in each case evolutionary, and whether we are dealing with the Weltanschauung of adolescence or with that of the spiritual life, we are still dealing with a world in the making, and with ' possibilities that are not neces- sities/ For the psychology as for the philosophy life is the dominating category, and there is this further affinity that in each case life's supreme word is action. Professor Hall's fine chapter on ' The Growth of Motor Power and Function ' in the first volume of his treatise might quite well be entitled : ' An Introduction to Activism from the Standpoint of Adolescence.' On such a generous and genuine basis of common agreement, Activism may well look to the ' Adoles- cence ' for its sympathy and support. And of the many ways in which the ' Adolescence ' can be of service to Activism there are perhaps two which are more particularly important. The ' Adolescence ' is in the first place capable of supplying Activism with a positive basis in human nature for the direct, synthetic development of its own philosophical superstructure. There are no doubt great advantages in Professor Eucken's characteristic, though indirect, method of approaching his own position through the elimination of alternative possibilities, or of vindicating his con- victions by mastering paradoxes through their aid or reconciling fundamental oppositions. But these pro- cesses, valuable as they are in themselves, cannot be a substitute for the direct, empiricist plan of ground- ing a philosophy in the facts of experience. Now, ACTIVISM AND ADOLESCENCE 51 Adolescence to use Professor Eucken's own nomen- clature is the most fundamental of Lebenssystemen or organizations of life.* We do not need to justify its selection in any of the indirect ways already men- tioned. We have but to study its nature and its needs and test our philosophy of life by its capacity to develop that nature and satisfy those needs. If Activism can justify itself as the philosophy which best satisfies the Lebenssystem of Adolescence, it need seek no other credential, and its future will be assured. It is at this point that the New Genetic Psychology renders its second main service to the New Idealism. It makes it abundantly clear that Activism can satisfy the life of Adolescence only by firmly grounding its principle of Action in the more intimate principle of Love. The suggestion has, moreover, a peculiar appropriateness, for by such a development of its own position Activism would but be reasserting its deeper function as a Religious Idealism, and maturing its own intrinsic convictions. It is with a defence of Activism so understood that the present work is concerned ; and in the stress which it lays on Love as the ground of action it may perhaps be considered as a further determination of Activism in the direction of spiritual inwardness. This shifting of the emphasis draws us into close sym- pathy with the so-called ' subjective ' tendencies of such a writer as the late Auguste Sabatier, whose philosophy of life in so far as it is less distinctively activistic than that of Professor Eucken, is so in the very sense we would seek to justify ; for the intimacies of the spiritual life, its resources of faith and communion receive from * Vide ' Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy of Life,' second edition, pp. 43, 44. 42 52 GOD WITH US M. Sabatier a central recognition which Professor Eucken's more ' objective ' outlook somewhat fails to give them. There are, no doubt, important differences between the Symbolo-Fideisme of M. Sabatier and the Activism of Professor Eucken, especially in the matter of method.* But in the main there is fundamental agree- ment between the two thinkers in respect of the cardi- nal question of Philosophy ; for both agree in relating philosophy and life so closely to each other that the central problem of the one is also the central interest of the other. Both maintain as their ultimate conviction that there is a Supreme Life, the sharing of which redeems our own, and the life-work of each of the two thinkers revolves about this central article of trust. * M. Sabatier's method is psychological ; Professor Eucken's noological (vide ' Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy of Life,' second edition, pp. 141-148). The discussion there given may serve to show that the two methods are far from being necessarily antagonistic. Thus, the more psychological tendency of M. Sabatier's historical method, while it serves to give to such a fundamental opposition of the religious life as that between freedom and authority exceptional concreteness and vividness, does so in a sense which most helpfully supports and reinforces Professor Eucken's ' Revolutionism ' and his treatment of the ' negative movement ' (vide id., chap. v.). CHAPTER IV. THE RELIGION OF THE SPIRIT. IN the ' Esquisse d'une Philosophic de la Religion d'apres la Psychologic et 1'Histoire,' * we have a philo- * For our present purpose, at any rate, the two most im- portant works of M. Auguste Sabatier are : 1. The ' Esquisse d'une Philosophic de la Religion d'apres la Psychologic et 1'Histoire,' 8 e edition (Fischbacher, Paris). 2. ' Les Religions d'Autorite et la Religion de 1' Esprit/ 4 e edition (Fischbacher, Paris). In the former treatise we have Sabatier's attempt to sum up and to systematize the religious convictions in which his life-work had culminated (vide ' Esquisse,' pp. 3, 255) ; in the latter, intended by the author as a sequel to the former, the Leitmotiv of the earlier work the search for a religious solution of the problem of life still persists, but, until the climax of the work is reached, mainly as an undertone. What is domi- nant in the later study is the strife between Authority and Freedom. The conflict of spiritual interests, whilst still apparent from cover to cover, evolves here into a conflict of methods. In the ' Esquisse ' we have the application of the ' method of freedom/ the psychologico-historical method ; in the ' Sequel ' we have the justification of the method applied in the ' Esquisse/ as against the claims of the great counter- method of Authority. As the second volume is a sequel to the first, we shall, in the interests of brevity, frequently refer to the two volumes respec- tively as the ' Esquisse ' and the ' Sequel.' 53 54 GOD WITH US sophy of the religious life built up through the perse- vering application of a certain distinctive method, the method based on strict psychological observation and historical study. ' Religious philosophy/ writes the author, ' can henceforth draw from two sources only : psychology and history ' (' Esquisse/ p. 15). And from this twofold source flows a single method. For the psychologico-historical method, as Sabatier under- stands it, is one method, not two. It is in no sense a confounding of two disparate tendencies. ' History is psychology working minutely back to the farthest limit of documentary evidence. Psychology is history followed up to the present moment, and pursued into the personal experience of the thinker.' ' The reproach of dualism/ concludes M. Sabatier, ' cannot therefore be levied against the method we are advocating in theology ' ( Sequel/ p. 528; cf. p. 518). The central fact to which we are brought through the application of this method in the religious sphere is the religious consciousness of Jesus. Jesus, for Sabatier, is the central figure of religious history and therefore of all history (vide ' Esquisse/ p. 107) and his reli- gious experience the norm and essence of the Religion of the Spirit. The Religion of the Spirit is the Religion of the Spirit of Christ, and its charter the Christian Bible or New Testament (vide ' Sequel/ bk. iii., chaps, ii., iii.). ' What is essential in Christianity is not a theoretical doctrine but a religious experience, the ex- perience realized originally in the consciousness of Christ, and since then continually renewed in the con- sciousness of his disciples ' (' Esquisse/ p. 344; cf. also ' Esquisse/ p. 183, and ' Sequel/ p. 430). And what does Sabatier understand by the ' essence ' THE RELIGION OF THE SPIRIT 55 of this experience ? What is that in the experience of Jesus which has a central and permanent religious value ? Sabatier's use of the term ' essence ' is far from being unambiguous : when he wishes to bring out what he holds to be the essence of a historical fact, he resorts to a variety of figures, logical and biological. The essence is the ' germ ' (' Esquisse,' p. 221), the ' soul ' as opposed to the body (id., pp. 345, 222, 265), and in last resort independent of it (id., pp. 206, 219) ; it is also the ' substance ' as opposed to the accident (id., p. 403), the form as opposed to the content (id., p. 373). But on the whole the most fundamental thought with Sabatier is that the ' essential ' in history is the ' divine' element in it the divine alone persisting, the merely human falling away (id., pp. 60, 400, 254, 257, 357). And this agrees well with a further conception of ' the religiously essential ' suggested by certain passages (cf. id., p. 285, in connection with p. 142), the concep- tion of it as ' experience which can be assimilated through our faith.' Thus what is ' essential ' in the historical fact of Jesus is seen to be that element in it which our religious faith can assimilate namely, the filial piety of his relation to God. We are Christian just in so far as there is reproduced in us the personal piety of Jesus, the sense of divine sonship ' (' Sequel/ p. 462). It is in this evangelical Religion of the Spirit that the problem of Authority finds its true solution. The pagan authority of the rite and the rabbinical authority of the letter are inconsistent with the religious liberty of the individual conscience. But the authority of the Gospel understood as the authority of the Spirit of Christ, is not only consonant with our religious freedom 56 GOD WITH US but is the condition and substance of it, and it becomes authoritative for us just in so far as we assimilate it and realize ourselves through it ('Sequel/ p. 458). Moreover, if we turn to the norm of our religious faith, to the per- sonal experience of Jesus, we there find the full practical realization of the inner oneness of freedom and author- ity. ' Never was a will more wholly submitted to the will of God ; yet never was a will more truly master of itself ' (' Sequel/ p. 495) . We may, then, conclude that the Religion of the Spirit is the Religion of True Authority, for it is ' the fruitful and harmonious recon- ciliation of dependence and freedom ' (' Sequel/ p. 493). Such in outline is the Religion of the Spirit which, for Sabatier, is at once ' the Essence of Christianity ' and ' the Essence of all Religion.' To some the conception has seemed too ' subjective/ and it may therefore be worth while to consider in what sense Sabatier's spiritual religion bears a subjective character.* It is * Such terms as ' Subjectivism/ ' Transcendentalism/ ' Empiricism/ are labels which, under diversity of title, may conceal essential unity of spirit and convergence of aim. We cannot, at any rate, conclude ab initio that an analysis of these ' isms ' as respectively represented, for instance, by such writers as M. Sabatier, Professor Caird, and Professor Stanley Hall will be unable to reveal this essential agreement and convergence. The names in themselves reveal very little. Subjectivism is not necessarily Sentimentalism, and it is an open question whether in its aspiration after inwardness and depth it may not be grasping life's problem at its centre. The current diatribes against Subjectivism resemble, in this respect, the caricature of Protestant Individualism drawn by the Anti-Modernists of to-day, who are as persuaded that Individualism spells Atomism and Disintegration as Anti- Subjectivists are that Subjectivism spells Solipsism, and must involve cutting asunder what God originally united. We had THE RELIGION OF THE SPIRIT 57 subjective, and profoundly so in one sense only. It is intensely personal and inward. It is ' the heart's prayer ' and the life's ' salvation ' (' Esquisse,' p. 27). It is far indeed from being subjective in any sense which implies the higher selfishness. ' Men are divided only through the externals of their worship. In proportion as they go deeper and penetrate into the innermost recesses of their spiritual nature, they dis- close the same altar, recite the same prayer, aspire after the same goal. There is thus a profound reason why individual revelations should become universal ' (' Es- quisse,' p. 55). So ' Jesus has nothing that he keeps better see what Subjectivism means before we condemn it. Similarly, Transcendentalism need not stand for Intellectualism . The term may, indeed, be so denned as to include Intellec- tualism as its implication, but Transcendentalism, as a given thinker understands it, may be vital to the heart of it. A Transcendental Logic, or Logic of Transcendence, may reason- ably enough be the indispensable servant of a philosophy essentially religious in character a philosophy of Self- sacrifice and Redemption. To 'transcend' is not to abolish, but to renew ; not to evade, but to readjust. We may, there- fore, reasonably maintain that transcendence and redemption are in principle identical, and that Transcendentalism may perhaps be the truest exponent of our deepest religious needs. Finally, the nature of Empiricism depends entirely on its con- ception of fact. Every philosophy of experience, and Eucken's most emphatically, may appropriately lay claim to be an Empiricism ; and if Empiricism is to be radical, it must rest on spiritual insight. Moreover, in self-conscious action, ex- perience must include the experient and his inward point of view, and we have here a ' fact ' which is at once personality and world. We conclude, then, that it is not at all absurd to seek for the convergence of kindred movements under the disguise of names which at first sight appear to stand for mutually destructive policies. 58 GOD WITH US for himself ' (' Esquisse,' p. 192). His filial piety, by reason of its very depth and purity, expressed itself in the love and service of man. ' His filial piety became a fraternal piety. The First Commandment, " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart/' was followed by the inevitable corollary, " Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself " ' (' Esquisse/ p. 197) Sabatier is thus able to include the social sentiment in his definition of a Christian. ' It is this sentiment filial as applying to God, fraternal as applying to man which constitutes the Christian ' (' Esquisse/ p. 187). And the reason is not simply that at a sufficient depth of spiritual experience the soul sheds off its individual- ism, but that the new life which springs from God's union with the soul shares life's fundamental instinct of self -communication. ' It is the nature of all religion to propagate itself. Such propagation is an implicit affirmation of the truth that religion is made for all men ' (' Esquisse/ p. 112). Hence the fraternal ' com- munion of souls ' is as essential to the spiritual life as the soul's own union with God, and the latter state implies the former. In some eloquent pages of the ' Esquisse/ Sabatier describes the moral ' edification ' which marks the social action of the religious life and depicts in psychological terms the plenitude of over- individual life which invades and possesses the souls of men gathered together for religious worship or reli- gious work. In particular, he emphasizes the exalted sense of religious freedom which supervenes when reli- gious emotions expand within the enveloping embrace of this larger life. ' Those who rise to this level are conscious of a melting of the barriers that shut off their private existence. They become free ; they inter-pene- THE RELIGION OF THE SPIRIT 59 trate with the souls of their fellows, so that all are ani- mated by one life which is none the less personal and intense for being thus wide and, one might almost say, universal ' (' Esquisse,' p. 104). It is impossible not to realize that a subjectivism so inward and so vital as this has its roots in what is central for our human life and is already grappling with the fundamental prob- lems of the world. Even when Sabatier speaks of prayer as the soul of religion (' Esquisse,' p. 126), and defines it as ' religion in action that is to say, real reli- gion ' (' Esquisse/ p. 24) his subjective activism is radically Christian. Was it not a central conviction of Jesus that the seed of evil lay behind the bad act in the inward indulgence from which it sprang, and that the purification of the heart through prayer was the sove- reign safeguard against impurity of deed ? If the roots of social action are imbedded in the intimacies of the individual thought, imagination, and will, then a sound objective Activism is surely just the natural develop- ment and expression of the Subjectivism which fixes on the problems of the inner life, makes piety central, and holds social solidarity and world-conquest to be signifi- cant and valuable only in so far as they express the blossoming of the inward life into brotherly-kindness and zeal for the Evangel. And, finally, if any further vindication of Sabatier 's ' subjective ' Activism were needed it would be enough to point to the scientific disinterestedness which pervades his whole treatment of history. Like Hegel, Caird, Eucken, and others whom no one would accuse of Subjectivism, Sabatier treats history as a self-development, an evolution that can confidently be left to criticize itself. Schiller's dictum ' die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht ' was 60 GOD WITH US as much a guiding-star to Sabatier as it was to Hegel. That the former should have held that the logic of his- torical movements has a psychological basis, already sufficiently differentiates his historical method from that of Hegel. But the difference only sets in more striking relief the conviction common to both thinkers that the great world-movements have their own dis- tinctive life to which their own self-development can alone supply the key. It would thus appear that the ' Subjectivism * of Sabatier constitutes at any rate no obstacle to the con- sistent elaboration of a peculiarly lofty and comprehen- sive view of human life and history. On the contrary, it imparts to his outlook upon the past a deep religious import, and enables him to see that in studying the religious development of humanity he is placing himself ' at the central point of history, at the very fount of the stream of human destinies, where their tide flows strongest, where the fates of civilizations, races, nations and individuals are mysteriously linked and severed ' (' Esquisse,' p. 107). It is a corollary from Sabatier's ' subjectivism/ and it is also Sabatier's own firm conviction, that the problems of religious history and of the religious life should mean little, if anything, to the man who is not religious. In purely scientific research the studied elimination of the personal factor makes it possible, within limits, that a man should be at once a good scientist and a bad man. But in religion, where the subject-matter is itself intimately personal, the badness of the life would vitiate at its source the quality of the thought. 'An astronomer need not be a man of high character to convince us of the reality of his THE RELIGION OF THE SPIRIT 61 discoveries. On the other hand, a man who is clearly immoral will always be most objectionable as a teacher of ethics.' And he adds : ' It needs religious men to disseminate religion ' (' Esquisse/ p. 383). What is it makes a man religious ? Sabatier's answer is simple enough, and has at first the effect of an anticlimax (id., p. 29). It is the fact that he is a man. ' Briefly, I am religious because I am a man and cannot escape from my humanity '; or, as he puts it in another context : ' I am religious because I am a man, and do not wish to be anything less ; but alike for me and my race, the first and last word of humanity is religion ' (id., p. 255). ' I have no choice/ we read elsewhere ; ' it is a moral necessity of my nature ' (id., p. 6). Now, it is indeed the sentiment of moral obligation which first gives meaning and value to the life of man, and in this sentiment, which is also a sentiment of profound spiritual dependence, we have the germ of all religion. But in its humbler and more primitive forms this complex sentiment of dependence and obligation appears as an instinct of self-preserva- tion. Driven beyond himself by his sufferings and fears, the soul of man obscurely but inveterately feels the indwelling and saving power of a life that is more than his own, and clings tenaciously to the promise of a new destiny thus held out to him. Religion asserts itself biologically as a religious instinct, a second and deeper instinct of self-preservation ; for man now feels the promise of a new selfhood, the self that is to live and move and have its life in the Spiritual Being we have come to call God. This religious instinct is faith, ' the religious need which, properly understood, is only a manifestation in the moral sphere of the 62 GOD WITH US universal instinct of self-preservation ' (id., p. 10). ' Faith in life is in the spiritual world precisely the same thing, both in its nature and its working, as the instinct of self-preservation in the physical world. It is this instinct in a higher form. Blind and inevitable in the realm of organic life, it is attended in the moral sphere by consciousness and reasoned will, and, thus transformed, assumes a religious significance ' (id., p. 19). It is his faith in this larger life, his instinct to persevere in it, which, in Sabatier's view, first makes man truly a man. He feels himself awaking inwardly into the infancies of a new existence, realizes his help- lessness in relation to it the dependence, as it were, of a new-born child and with this realization enters upon a career worthily and completely human. Sabatier's conception of man as essentially religious in virtue of his capacity for faith connects itself sug- gestively with other views that have been held con- cerning the essential nature of man. The typical Greek view has been handed down to us in the stereo- typed formula, ' Man is a rational animal/ The teleological implications of the formula are, however, not unfrequently overlooked. To the Greek, rationality meant knowing one's own mind that is, aiming at an end, with a clear consciousness of the means neces- sary to its attainment. Reason, in Plato's view, was that which enabled a man to live for something that is, to conceive the end he was fitted by Nature to reach after, and to devise the means for realizing it. But the highest human good was open only to the highest human nature, to the few who through severe mental discipline were able to see the Form of the Good, and make it the supreme pattern of their life. In the THE RELIGION OF THE SPIRIT 63 Ideal Republic, where the philosopher is King, the ordinary artisan fulfils his nature through the self- control which bids him recognize the limitations of his class, and desist from trespassing beyond the lines laid down for him by the man who knows. More generally it is the supreme function of man, whether in a private or a public capacity, to act as the principle of Justice or Order requires him to act. The privi- leges of the Ideal City are open to each, according to his class and capacity, but what is denied to man is the right to be revolutionary. The carpenter who should chance to discover a new conception of human nature deeper than that upon which the Republic broadly rests, would, on seeking to apply it, be dismissed with less ceremony than the poet. The highest, in a word, is unavailable to man as man : the only kings are the philosophers. With Kant the supreme worth of man as man is frankly recognized. The sense of duty and there- fore of justice exacts reverence for an inward law imposed by no philosopher or earthly ruler, but pro- ceeding from the depths of his moral nature. The artisan is morally autonomous, and the goodwill with which he ennobles his work is as supremely and un- conditionally good as that of the most powerful and most gifted. Man is by nature his own lawgiver, and the Ideal City to which his nature permits him to look forward is a Kingdom of Ends, in which he is at once sovereign and subject sovereign as a person or end in himself, subject in so far as royalty essentially implies the service of the common good. But, alas ! this kingdom is, on Kant's view, unrealizable. It is merely an Ideal, regulative of human aspiration, but in no 64 GOD WITH US sense constitutive of human life. The prospect of a Great Republic, a Human Brotherhood on a spiritual basis, is held out to man as an Ideal which he must seek to realize, but can never hope to attain. Now, the Ideal City of the Gospel, the Kingdom of Heaven which Jesus preached, lies immeasurably nearer to man's hope. It is the birthplace and the birthright of the human soul. The Kingdom of God is within the soul and in the midst of all who have the faith to see it. For the faith which Jesus proclaims to be the root-principle of human nature is not a stretching after something ' afar from the sphere of our sorrow/ but the vital realization that the sphere of sorrow is itself the Kingdom of Heaven. It is the new alchemy which teaches the turning of sorrow into joy, through the power of a new spirit. It was the great discovery of Jesus that the need which suffering brings with it is itself the seed of the new life. Happy are they who have this need, for the Kingdom is already within them. The finite heart that yearns betrays by its very aspiration the infinite passion which feeds it, and the ' finished and finite clod, untroubled by a spark/ remains infra-human till the cleansing fires have done their work, and the need is awakened. Man, in a word, is not man until the depths of his nature have been stirred, for not until he is aware of his ultimate need can he be aware of his true nature. But the ultimate need of life is to conquer death ; and if what we take to be our true life cannot promise us this victory, is not that true life falsely called true, since it falls short of our deepest need ? Either, then, our deepest need remains unsatisfied, or some greater life THE RELIGION OF THE SPIRIT 65 must itself conquer the lesser, which must otherwise be conquered by death. The Christian accepts the latter alternative. The life that cannot conquer death may die into a greater life that can. It is this death into the life of God which Jesus proclaims to be man's true vocation ; and the distinctive mark of true per- sonality becomes the faith, or ' instinct of spiritual self-preservation/ which grasps as life's fundamental fact the immortalizing presence of God's life in man's. Such religious faith first raises man to the dignity of a ' person ' or ' end in himself.' For how can man be an end in himself if he is so constituted that his deepest need remains unsatisfied ? To be an end in himself he must have in himself what can ultimately satisfy him. If the Kingdom of God is within him, then, and not till then, is he an end in himself. Shall we, then, ground our personality on our capacity to share, here and now, the power and intimacy of the life that can conquer death ? If so, then it is our participation in God's life which gives us the rights and duties of personality. Such, as I conceive it, is the Christian view, and it is essentially one with Sabatier's contention that man can be adequately defined only by reference to the religious faith through which he is born again. A further insight into the meaning of Religious Faith may be gained through a thought of Pascal's which appears to have had a profound and illuminating effect upon Sabatier himself. He quotes it at the opening of his chapter on ' Religion and Revelation,' and adds : ' This thought flashed on me like an illumina- tion. It was the solution of a problem which had long seemed to me insoluble.' It may therefore be worth while to consider the thought somewhat carefully. 5 66 GOD WITH US It may be found in Pascal's works under the heading ' Le Mystere de Jesus/ and is stated in two slightly different forms. In each case it stands for God's word of encouragement to those who are earnestly seeking to find Him. ' Console-toi,' runs the French version, ' tu ne me chercherais pas si tu ne m'avais trouve,' and again : ' Tu ne me chercherais pas, si tu ne me possedais ; ne t'inquiete done pas.'* ' In this thought,' says Sabatier, ' the whole mystery of piety is laid bare ' (' Esquisse/ p. 32). I can hardly think that this is an exaggeration, and am the less inclined to think so as I am myself one of the many who have succumbed to the spell of Pascal's paradox. I vividly remember the sense of vision and discovery that sudden shock of the infinite which leaves the soul ' silent upon a peak ' when I first came across the illuminating words, reproduced in one of Emile Faguet's literary Essays. And the years that have elapsed since then have made them increasingly signi- ficant. The paradox stares us in the face seeking is searching for what is already found ; yet despite the conviction that we do not seek an object, or a post, or anything else of which we are already in possession, the riddle still maintains its inward hold upon us. * ' Le Mystere de Jesus,' ii. and vi. ' Take comfort ; thou wouldst not be seeking Me hadst thou not already found Me.' ' Thou wouldst not be seeking Me if thou didst not possess Me ; then trouble not thyself.' Cf. also the follow- ing Latin verses quoted by Sabatier (' Esquisse,' p. 52) : ' Le vieux theologien avait raison qui disait en deux vers latins : ' Nulla fides si non primum Deus ipse loquitur ; Nullaque verba Dei nisi quae in pcmetralibus audit Ipsa fides.' THE RELIGION OF THE SPIRIT 67 When Agathon, at the Platonic love-feast, praises the god Eros, and declares him to be more beautiful, virtuous, courageous, and wise than any other god in the Pantheon, he is blandly rebuked by Socrates for having confused the loving and the beloved. The object of love is indeed a paragon it is the good, the victor over evil and death ; but love itself is not this : it is the defect or the lack of it. Love is an aspiration after the beautiful and the good, and yearns to be full because it is empty. And now, said Socrates, I will ask about Love : Is Love of something or of nothing ? Of something, surely, he replied. Keep in mind what this is, and tell me what I want to know whether Love desires that of which love is. Yes, surely. And does he possess, or does he not possess, that which he loves and desires ? Probably not, I should say. Nay, replied Socrates, I would have you consider whether ' necessarily ' is not rather the word. The inference that he who desires something is in want of something, and that he who desires nothing is in want of nothing, is in my judgment, Agathon, absolutely and necessarily true. What do you think ? I agree with you, said Agathon. Very good. Would he who is great desire to be great, or he who is strong desire to be strong ? That would be inconsistent with our previous admissions. True. For he who is anything cannot want to be that which he is ? Very true. * * * * * And the admission has been already made that Love is of something which a man wants and has not ? True, he said. Then Love wants and has not beauty ? Certainly, he replied. 52 68 GOD WITH US And would you call that beautiful which wants and does not possess beauty ? Certainly not. Then would you still say that love is beautiful ? Agathon replied : I fear that I did not understand what I was saying. You made a very good speech, Agathon, replied Socrates ; but there is yet one small question which I would fain ask : Is not the good also the beautiful ? Yes. Then in wanting the beautiful love wants also the good ? I cannot refute you, Socrates, said Agathon : Let us assume that what you say is true. Say rather, beloved Agathon, that you cannot refute the truth ; for Socrates is easily refuted.* Now, what Plato holds to be irrefutable in the case of love should also hold good, in particular, of the instinct of religious self-preservation which Sabatier calls ' faith ' the instinct to realize one's self through the search after God. Like the aspiration of love, the venture of faith appears to have no meaning unless it is made with empty hands. How, then, can faith be already the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen ? How can it be, as Pascal defines it, ' Dieu sensible au cceur ' ? How can the faith which seeks for God be said to have already found Him? Foregoing any attempt to answer this question in the abstract, let us pass at once to the specifically religious import of the paradox. Its value for religious sentiment lies in the assurance which it gives that our search after God cannot be in vain. ' " If with all your hearts ye truly seek Me, ye shall surely find Me," * 'The Dialogues of Plato,' translated into English by B. Jowett, third edition, 1892, vol. i., pp. 570, 571. THE RELIGION OF THE SPIRIT 69 thus saith the Lord.' But why so ' surely,' unless the finding is implied in the search itself, and God, by a spiritual law, is already present in the heart that seeks ? We are a step nearer Pascal's solution when we can say, with Augustine : ' Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our heart is restless till it find rest in Thee '; for the fundamental instincts of our human nature are here an additional guarantee that we shall not seek God in vain. But where is the Artificer when He has finished His work ? And if He has fashioned man to love Him, has He also insured his being loved in return ? Pascal's answer silences all these uncertainties. With the insight of genius he brings together, as integrally interdependent, elements which our discursive thinking is apt to separate. May not the search after God, truly understood, be but the prolongation of the more fundamental ex- perience of our union with Him ? Is not the central truth ' Immanuel, God with us ' ? Is not faith, in its essence, faithfulness ? and could it really be faith in a Presence still to be found unless it were also fidelity to a Presence with which it was already spiritually united ? The religious solution of the paradox seems to me to be bound up with the following consideration : that if we are truly seeking God, seeking Him ' with all our hearts,' then ' seeking for Him ' means ' seeking with Him.' The expression ' seeking for God ' is mis- leading : it suggests an externality of relationship between the subject seeking and the ' object ' sought, which is inconsistent with the search itself having a religious meaning. For the basis of the whole religious life so the paradox compels us to affirm is God's 70 GOD WITH US Presence in the soul and His co-operation with it. No movement which implies the solitary quest of the soul in search of God and the ideals of the spiritual life can, from this point of view, have any religious issue ; for if the soul, in its seeking, is motived only by ideals which are of its own making, nothing it can ever attain to can be anything more than a developed and aggrandized self. Pascal's paradox turns out, then, on analysis to be but a striking expression of the funda- mental truth which we are accustomed to associate with Christian conviction in all its varied forms that the source and essence of the religious life is the union of the divine with the human, or man's participation in the Spiritual Life, and it is from this anthropotheistic centre of conviction that constructive philosophies of Christian experience will naturally start. In his recently published lectures on ' Personal Idealism and Mysticism ' Dr. Inge has attacked ' the modern conception of rigid impenetrable personality/ which, as he adds, ' seems to have its historical begin- ning with Kant ' (id., p. 97). He contends, and justly, that ' this notion of " impervious " spiritual atoms is flatly contradictory to Christianity ' (id. t p. 95) ; for it ' destroys the basis on which Christian love is supported. ... It was the good news of the Gospel that those barriers which are now solemnly declared to be for ever insurmountable are non-existent ' (id., p. no). And he clinches his argument with some strong and striking phrases : ' This much is certain : that if the " impervious ego " can ever and anywhere succeed in realizing himself, it can only be in hell ' (id., p. 182) ; ' Nothing burneth in hell but self-will ' (id., p. 107) ; ' " Know thyself " is a great maxim, THE RELIGION OF THE SPIRIT 71 but he who would know himself must know himself in God. To attempt to find self (the individual) without God (the universal), says Professor Ritchie, is to find . . . the devil ' (id., p. 103). I would accept the language, and even find some relish in the intensity of the imagery. I feel bound, however, as a Personal Idealist whose zeal for personal integrity may have led at times into expressions which would suggest the broad path and the descensus Averni, to urge that there is still a sense in which the personal integrity is inviolable, and that the more intimate the union of human and Divine, the more will the respect for personality which is of love's essence be safeguarded by the intimacy itself. ' Le premier effet de r amour,' says Pascal, ' c'est d'inspirer un grand respect ; Ton a de la veneration pour ce que Ton aime.'* The defence of personality as impervious by ProfessorPringle-Pattison and other anti-individualists may have overleapt its just intentions, but it may well have done good, as a reaction against the cosmo- centric view which, in championing the cosmic character of self-consciousness, has tended to deny self -feeling its human dues, and unduly to depreciate the philo- sophical significance of Psychology. But we have still to pursue certain further reflec- tions arising out of the analysis of Pascal's paradox. It may help us at this point if we revert to the argu- ment from the ' Symposium.' Plato, as we have seen, urges with most impressive insistence that the love of the good cannot be itself called good, because if it * ' Pensees de Pascal/ edition Gamier, p. 424. * The first effect of love is to inspire a great respect. One reveres that which one loves.' 72 GOD WITH US were already good, its aspiration after what it already possessed, or was, would be unintelligible. Love, ' the greatest thing in the world,' cannot logically be called ' good.' Love's object, not Love itself, is good. And when we recollect that the will-to-be-good would on precisely similar grounds be refused the epithet ' good,' we see that the goodwill which Kant declared to be the only thing in the world or out of it which was unconditionally good, is proved by this argument to be not good. And if we seek a sufficient reason for the disparity of the two points of view, we may find it in this : that the Good which to Plato was the object of aspiration has become with Kant an Imperative immanent in the will itself, an Imperative, again, which for the Christian consciousness is realized as a Personal Life whose interpenetration of his own gives birth to his religious aspiration. Hence, as we have already attempted to show, religious desire is misinterpreted when construed as a desire for an absent God : the true object of religious desire is not the Personal Principle, who is already so intimately near to us, but the Spirit-world, or God-Heaven, as we might venture to call it. In a word, it is not God that we seek, but His kingdom. What is directed forwards, as to an object still unattained, is the pur- pose to realize God's will in our life and world. We may, then, agree with Plato, as perforce we must, that this latter purpose suffers from the defect of being as yet unrealized, and that we cannot therefore qualify it as completed, satisfied, self-contained. Love, pos- sessing God already not, indeed, as a God-Heaven, but as a Principle of personal life desires the God- Heaven which is still inwardly remote. And yet it is THE RELIGION OF THE SPIRIT 73 not because it is empty that it desires this God-Heaven for at its religious source love is fruition, and not a need but that it may communicate far and wide a fulness of life which grows still richer through being shared. It is from the perfect filial love implied in the words ' Our Father !' that comes the cry, ' Thy Kingdom come !' We may therefore praise Love more gener- ously than Socrates could praise Eros. We may call love ' good/ for it is fundamentally a communion and fruition ; and even when its purpose seeks fulfilment in the world, there still may breathe through all its striving a native undersoul of possession and peace. It is this Christian conception of God in man and with man that has redeemed the significance of love, and enables us to call it good and beautiful, brave and wise. To this extent Agathon, the poet, was right, after all, though he could not see why Socrates, the philosopher, was wrong. It may be useful at this point to touch on one or two difficulties which arise out of the distinction we have been drawing between the seeking after an absent God and the seeking for the God-Heaven, the Kingdom of which God is the constitutive Personal Principle. It may be questioned, in the first place, whether we have not been too ' anthropomorphic * in our treat- ment of God's Personality. Can the Soul of our soul be appropriately referred to as a Great Companion who is with us as we seek to do His will ? The objection, in so far as it has weight, is likely to be grounded in an inadequate conception of what is meant by man and his spiritual nature. On the view we have taken, man has no personality, no spiritual 74 GOD WITH US nature, and is no end in himself, except in so far as he is a sharer of the Life of God, so that an analysis of man's personal nature should lay bare the spiritual relationships which exist between the human and the divine, and thus unravel the meaning and value of God's Life for ours. Of the divine out of relation to our own spiritual nature we do not profess to have any consciousness, not because we hold such divinity per se as unknowable, but because we cannot conceive that it should exist at all. If our own spiritual nature is spiritual only in so far as it is instinct with God's Immortal Life, then it is hard to see how God in Him- self can be ' out of relation to our spiritual nature/ For then we should have to admit that God was in some sense out of relation to Himself.* Hence, if our interpretation of human nature is but sufficiently human, it must at the same time be an interpretation of the redeeming nature of God in relation to ours. The danger of anthropomorphism lies in a low con- ception of human nature. We conceive ourselves * If the category of ' relation ' is itself condemned as in- adequate for such high argument, we may reasonably refer the inadequacy from the category itself to the view which is taken of it. The category of relation, we might say, is inadequate only if it is inadequately conceived. Even should a pitiless dialectic so multiply the defects of the category that we are almost ashamed to think of the poor thing, it cannot be so merciless as to reduce it to an unmitigated inconsistency. Self-contradiction is always a stultification of thought, and is, moreover, so radically destructive of meaning, implying, as it does, sheer nothingness, that the self -contradictory cannot exist, not even as an illusion. Hence, since relationships do some- how contrive to exist, and relations with them, we may rationally assume that they mean something, and concentrate our energies on searching out what that meaning truly may be. THE RELIGION OF THE SPIRIT 75 punily, and then resent God being similarly conceived. But whilst it is obviously true that the finite cannot be accepted as an adequate representative of the Infinite, it should surely be no less obviously true that man's infinite nature, ' the temple of the Holy Ghost,' may furnish spiritual relationships that speak truly, and not in mere metaphor, of God's dealing with ourselves. Waiving, then, the objection of anthropomorphism, we pass to a further and more real difficulty. It may be argued that since God is Infinite, He must Himself be the very spiritual world we seek to realize with Him ; for if that world is in any sense external to God, then God remains convicted of finitude. And if the God who loves the world is Himself the world He loves, then, in seeking to realize God's Kingdom, we are still seeking God, and remain in the grip of the old paradox, seeking that which we have already found. We may at once admit, in dealing with this difficulty, that the world we aim at realizing, with God's help, cannot be in any sense external to God. The Spiritual Life must be the vital principle of the Spiritual World. But though no intimacy could be closer than that between an organizing principle and the organization it renders possible, the principle yet remains other than the system of which it is the principle. Otherness does not imply externality, and God as a Personal Principle may be other than His world, the God- Heaven, without its being in any sense external to Him. In other words, the Infinity of God does not imply His indistinguishable sameness with the spiritual world we seek to realize with Him. It implies His immanence within it, but not His indistinguishability 76 GOD WITH US from it. Indeed, since finitude means spiritual limita- tion, such indistinguishability of life and world, by limiting the freedom of the life, would stamp the life as finite. Let us consider, by way of steadying our mental insight, the analogous problem of the relation of action to the subjective activity which it includes. It is a favourite theme of Eucken's that in action we have the vital union, for better or for worse, of subject and object, of subjective activity and object acted upon. But within this action itself we are not to suppose that the activity of the subject enjoys no relative in- dependence in relation to its object. It is true that activity is as inconceivable apart from something acted upon as it is apart from an agent that acts. But it is precisely this indeterminacy of the object which insures to our activity a reality of its own, apart from its actualization in this or that specific action. Activity, we may say, in so far as it is an abstraction from the concrete conception of action, is an abstraction which still leaves the saving residuum of possible connection to constitute the vital bond between itself and its ob- ject. We may therefore have a Psychology of mental functions, and even of mental faculties, capacities, or dispositions, without labouring under the depressing suspicion that the objects of our science are mere abstractions, distinctions for thought, but not for life. We can speak of the Self with as much sense of the reality of what we say as when we speak of the Uni- verse or World within which it, as a ' part ' of Nature, is active ; and we can refer to the Self's activity as a power, latent or operative, which, as such, stands in a vital though virtual relation to all possible objects THE RELIGION OF THE SPIRIT 77 of conscious experience, with which it may at some future time coalesce fruitfully in action. It is in a similar sense that a self, as Personal Principle of its own world, still retains control over its own formal and formative principle of selfhood. It is not so wedded to the circumstances of its world as not to stand at all its own growing-points free and disengaged from it. Through the liberating medium of the possible or the potential, this personal factor of the spiritual life may be effectively severed from its world-context without either destroying its own vitality or its vital connections with the world from which it is severed. Though a hand reft from the body is, as Aristotle puts it, no longer a hand, the self-principle may be realized in spiritual apartness from the self-world, without any forfeiting of its characteristic selfhood.* * More generally we may say that it is the essential property of all life to hold its universe thus potentially within itself. Life, in this sense, contains within itself its own raw material, its own ' manifold ' of possible experience. Its environment is, therefore, not initially alien to it. The unintelligible can- not form part of the environment of a thinking being, nor the unconquerable of a volitional being, nor the unloveable of an emotional being. Thus, in man's environment there can be nothing intrinsically unintelligible, unconquerable, unloveable. So Jesus saw that all were redeemable, that faith could move mountains, and that death itself was not only not unintelligible, but the very truth of life. Cf. Edward Caird, ' The Critical Philosophy of Kant/ ii., p. 626. ' As Kant observed, the idea of organic unity is the only one through which we can interpret life ; and the circle of organic unity, if we may use the expression, must be regarded as including the inorganic which furnishes its environment.' Cf. Sabatier's ' Esquisse,' pp. 204, 205. Also Eucken's ' Wertund Sinn desLebens,' p. 112. 78 GOD WITH US Do we not, then, seem entitled, on the basis of the foregoing considerations and on the assumption that God is at least not more circumscribed than we are ourselves, to extend this fundamental privilege of human selfhood to God Himself, and to argue that He too whether through self-limitation or otherwise must enjoy a genuine detachment from the destinies of His own Universe ? And may we not, then, conclude that in seeking to realize God's Kingdom we are not seeking for the Personal Principle of our spiritual life, but are seeking, in intimate union with this Principle, to organize under human conditions the Kingdom of which He is the spiritually distinguishable Life and Soul ? The God-Heaven we seek is the Personal Principle risen to the stature of a Heaven, but we should not be seeking the God-Heaven unless we had already found the Personal Principle. NOTE. No treatment of Sabatier's religious position would be in any sense complete which did not refer to a problem of which the stimulus profoundly influenced the shaping of his convictions, and determined their final and distinctive form. We allude to the great life-problem which arises from the conflict of Faith with Reason. If we have failed to deal with this issue in the text, it is because its adequate treatment would have inevitably opened up the whole vast problem of Religious Knowledge, the discussion of which falls outside the limits of the present volume. A personal confession of Sabatier's shows us at once how deep-rooted and far-reaching was the influence exercised over him by this fundamental antinomy. ' As the heir of a religious tradition/ he writes of himself, ' in which my whole moral life is rooted, and also as a disciple of the scientific methods to which modern thought owes its uncompromising exactness, I have lived in a state of internal THE RELIGION OF THE SPIRIT 79 discord which began with the awakening of conscience, and has acted ever since as a spur and stimulus to my spiritual life. . . . Between my heart and my brain, my emotions and my ideas, the dialogue has never ceased ' (' Esquisse/ PP- 4, 5); It is significant that Sabatier claims to have found the solution of this conflict, not in philosophy, but in religion. ' It is through the conflict between the theoretical and the practical reason that religion is perpetually reborn within the heart of man. We may liken this conflict to the fissure in the rock through which the living spring flows out. . . . The issue of the conflict is religion ' (' Esquisse/ p. 363). And the solution is religious because it intimately concerns the meaning and the value of life. The passion for science and the enthusiasm for morality are, according to Sabatier, ' the two ultimate motives of life and action ' which stir every serious soul (' Esquisse/ Preface, p. ii). Unless we can reconcile these rival claims, we must lose our most powerful stimulus to live and to act ; and in solving the antinomy, we find that which stimulates action, heartens life, and re-establishes confidence in a word, we find the peace and power of religion. The religious philosophy which, on Sabatier's view, ex- presses most satisfactorily that reconciliation between faith and reason, of which the f Religion of the Spirit ' is itself the vital solution, is commonly known as Symbolo-Fideism.* What Fideism stands for may best be gathered from the fideistic formula supplied by M. Menegoz, Sabatier's col- league at the Faculty of Protestant Theology at the Uni- versity of Paris : ' We are saved by faith, independently of our beliefs.' Let us briefly note what M. Menegoz under- stands by the terms ' salvation,' ' faith/ ' belief/ ' Salva- tion/ as he understands it, is just the rooting of the human life within the divine. ' We wish to live, to live happily, * The relation between the Religion of the Spirit and Symbolo-Fideism is clearly stated by Sabatier in one of the concluding pages of his latest work. ' The vital, practical synthesis of critical symbolism and fideism . . . will be found in the Religion of the Spirit ' (' Sequel/ p. 516). 8o GOD WITH US to live eternally. The whole notion of salvation is summed up in these words.'* Indeed, the very will to live implies the will to be saved, for ' there is no life save in God. He who wills to live must seek union with Him who has life in Himself. A leaf, torn from the tree, withers ' (id., p. 208). The state of sin, on this view, consists in the separation of the soul from its true life in God. It is the severance of the leaf from the tree. Salvation is the vital reunion. ' Faith ' is the act which consummates this reunion with God. It is the simple, elemental movement of trust in the Unseen, the germ out of which man's whole religious life progressively develops. On its negative side Faith is Repentance. ' Repentance and Faith are one and the same movement, considered from two different points of view Repentance a movement away from sin, Faith a movement towards God ' (id., p. 25). Similarly, ' pardon ' and ' justification ' stand for ' one and the same fact looked at from two different points of view ' (id., p. 16, footnote). By ' beliefs,' M. Menegoz understands persua- sions or convictions of an intellectual order. These, he protests, cannot do more than express in a symbolic form which can never be either adequate or final the truths which for faith have a vital and saving significance. ' It is faith, not belief,' says Sabatier, ' that saves the soul. God asks for man's heart because a changed and conse- crated heart brings all the rest with it, whereas the gift of all else, if the heart be kept back, is only a mockery, and leaves man just where he was ' (' Sequel,' p. 511). It will be noticed that in the quotation just cited from Sabatier 's work the difficulties which centre round the idea of the soteriological independence of faith and belief are avoided by the omission of the term which gives to M. Menegoz's statement of the formula its distinctive peculiarity ; but Sabatier, as we have seen, accepts else- where the formula as his colleague has stated it, and the term ' independently ' still remains a key-word, the dis- * ' Publications diverses sur le Fideisme et son Application a I'Enseignement Chretien tradition nel,' par Eugene Menegoz, 1900. Vide id., p. 7 ; cf. p. 389. THE RELIGION OF THE SPIRIT 81 cussion of which would furnish an instructive chapter in a treatise on Religious Knowledge.* It is Sabatier's conviction that one cannot be a fideist without also being a symbolist, and that all who accept the soteriological distinction between faith and theological belief ' with any degree of logic and sincerity arrive at Symbolism' ('Esquisse,' p. 406, footnote). And when Sabatier states that religious knowledge is necessarily symbolical, he means, to quote his own words, ' that all the ideas which it shapes and organizes, from the first metaphor in which religious sentiment finds expression up to the most abstract theological speculation, will necessarily fall short of their object, and can never, as in the case of the exact sciences, be offered asits equivalent ' (' Esquisse,' p. 390) . Symbolism, then, on Sabatier's view, is that Theory of Knowledge, or rather of the Limits of Knowledge, which is necessitated by the fideistic principle. This relation con- stitutes the bond of union between the two tendencies. Their distinction consists in this that whereas Fideism expresses the principle of the Religion of the Spirit in its relation to life, Symbolism expresses the same principle in its relation to knowledge, f The following passage, taken from a work of M. Menegoz, J * On the meaning of the term in relation to the problems of the religious consciousness, vide footnote, p. 13. t Cf. ' Esquisse,' p. 406, footnote. ' The bringing together of these mutually complementary views M. Menegoz's and mine has won for the new conception the name of symbolo- fideism. There is good justification for the name, since it expresses the two elements of religion, emphasizing at the same time their essential distinctness and their organic unity.' J ' Publications diverses sur le Fideisme et son Application a 1'Enseignement Chretien traditionnel.' The passage in question (p. 227) occurs in the tude in which M. Menegoz is reviewing M. Sabatier's recently-published ' Esquisse ' under the heading of ' A Theological Event.' ' There are some books,' he writes, ' which are events. The book just published by Dean Sabatier is certainly one of these. It is a work of outstanding merit.' 6 82 GOD WITH US sheds an interesting side-light on the origin and meaning of Symbolo-Fideism : ' I shall soon have been working in our Faculty with M. Sabatier for twenty years/ writes M. Mene- goz, ' living during that time in close touch with his thought. I have followed his development ; he has followed mine. Our progress has gone on in each other's company. Though we started from different points of view, our ways have met in the end. My Lutheran education had imbued me with the material principle of Protestantism. I was nourished on the dogma of justification by faith, and have arrived at the doctrine of " salvation by faith, independently of beliefs/' the doctrine to which I have given the name of fideism. My colleague, brought up in the Reformed Church, found himself in an atmosphere in which the main stress was laid upon the formal principle of Protestantism. His interest has centred round questions of authority, of method, and of the principles relating to religious know- ledge. Recognizing the essential difference between the religious substance of the Christian faith and its con- tingent, symbolic form, he has embodied his final con- clusion in what he calls critical symbolism. Thus, the formal and the material principles of Protestantism have found their reconciliation in symbolo-fideism. There could not be a stronger, richer, more successful treatment of this conception than that given in M. Sabatier's latest book.' What we have already said and quoted may, perhaps, sufficiently explain the purport and scope of Symbolo- Fideism, as the theological expression of the Religion of the Spirit. The limits of our inquiry exempt us, however, from the further duty of considering whether a solution which for Sabatier himself healed the breach between Faith and Reason does justice to the problem it professes to solve. CHAPTER V. THE PRINCIPLE OF FRUITION. IN the preceding chapter, following the main lines of Sabatier's Theory of Faith, we discussed a principle which, more than any other, seemed to express the inmost conviction of Christianity, and was accepted by Sabatier himself as fundamental. Its burden was that God is not remote from the soul that seeks Him, but so intimately near that the search for Him is the search with Him, and our faith in Him already a faith- fulness to Him. We might call this principle the Principle of Fruition, for its purport is that the whole religious life, from the first sense of sin to the perfection of holiness, is a participation in the life of God. Our purpose in the following chapters will be to develop the implica- tions of this principle, and fix the true outlook and orientation of life which the recognition of the principle of necessity brings with it. With this object in view, our first and main concern must be to establish the relation in which the Principle of Fruition, accepted as the principle of religious experience, stands to the moral life. In a noble and inspiring chapter of his ' Introduc- 83 62 84 GOD WITH US tion to the Philosophy of Religion '* a chapter treating of the Religious Life and the relation between Morality and Religion Principal Caird has dealt with this very problem. He insists, in the first instance, that man's very constitution as the meeting-ground of nature and spirit dooms him to a life of struggle. Natural impulse tends to express itself according to its own nature, whilst reason and love claim the right to control such impulse in the interests of a higher selfhood. The claim is resisted, for the natural impulses possess a hereditary impetus and the acquired momentum of habit, so that whatever element of inertia exists in the aspiring self tends, in harmony with Nature's law of least action, to consort with and to reinforce the animal propensities. But with this reinforcement from the spiritual side ' the lower tendencies lose their simplicity, and become capable of a new and intensified hostility to the higher ' (id., p. 257). ' They draw down into them, so to speak, from the higher nature, a kind of illegitimate universality, and in the strife with reason become armed with a force stolen from the power with which they are at war ' (p. 258). It is with these appetites and passions, ' armed with a spurious force of reason ' (p. 261), that the moral consciousness has to con tend, f and, according * The page references that follow in the text are to pages in this treatise. f In the vivid language of Antonio Fogazzaro, ' la dignite morale consiste a combattre certaine union tres etroite de notre etre avec un animal d'espece obscure et innommee qui s'agite encore dans le cceur humain, temoignage vivant du passe, qui aspire sans treve a s'en rendre maitre et qui y lutte centre la domination d'un principe inconnu de lui, la conscience morale ; THE PRINCIPLE OF FRUITION 85 to Principal Caird, morality cannot do more than give a partial solution to the problem which this conflict offers. The full solution can be given only by religion. But morality can take us a long way. And by ' morality or the moral life ' is to be understood ' the renunciation of the private or exclusive self and the identification of our life with an ever-widening sphere of spiritual life beyond us ' (p. 263) . This renunciation may be so complete that ' selfish indulgence at the expense of others would be a greater self-denial, a thing fraught with a keener pain than any private suffering ' (p. 265), and our moral sympathy may come to be of so universal a reach that the love of self becomes the love of the whole human race. Moreover, with this progres- sive enlargement of social sympathy there may go the most perfect subordination of the lower to the higher nature.' This need not imply any ascetic rebuke to the natural desires ' for the moral life is not a passionless life ' (p. 276) but rather their transmutation into organs of the higher life. ' Love and self -surrender il veut, cet animal, se servir d'une autre force qui n'est pas entierement nouvelle pour lui, 1'intelligence, et, s'il triomphe, il s'empare du visage de I'homme, il regarde par ses yeux, tantot dissimule et insidieux, tantot ridicule, tantot horrible, selon la nature et les mouvements de la passion qui prevaut en lui, selon qu'il a du employer a ses fins plus ou moins d'intelligence ; s'il s'est peu servi de cette force intelligente, si la passion est restee presque uniquement bestiale, si le triomphe est durable, il rimprime sur le front conquis, il marque son empreinte sur les traits, il nous fait voir un etre .ambigu qui descend par des chemins tortueux vers un etat qui n'est ni bestial ni humain, et qui est bien pire que ces deux etats ' (' Les Ascensions Humaines,' fivolutionnisme et Catholicisme, traduit par Robert Leger, 1901, p. 236). 86 GOD WITH US transfigure appetite into a spiritual affection, and purge it of its baseness ' (p. 275). And yet the solution is only partial, for since no cor- porate life is ideal either in its constitution or its aims, the self-identification with such life even in its noblest forms still leaves the soul self-distracted, straining after ' an infinite ideal which neither society, nor the indi- vidual who reflects its moral life, has attained an ideal which it would seem to be man's everlasting destiny to pursue, and which therefore must remain for ever unrealized ' (p. 279). This residual unrest, this despairing sense of distance from an ideal that ever recedes as we approach it, dis- appears only with that supreme religious insight which discovers that in a certain profoundly vital sense the Ideal we so despair of attaining exists already as a Real Presence in whom we live and move and have our being. * It may be said to be the essential characteristic of religion as contrasted with morality, that it changes aspiration into fruition, anticipation into realization ; that instead of leaving man in the interminable pursuit of a vanishing ideal, it makes him the actual partaker of a divine or infinite life. . . . Religion rises above morality in this, that whilst the ideal of morality is only progressively realized, the ideal of religion is realized here and now ' (p. 284) . The moral life does not, indeed, cease to be progressive on becoming religious. The religious life itself is progressive, but with a difference, for ' religious progress is not progress towards, but within the sphere of the infinite ' (p. 284). And by way of explanation the writer adds the following com- mentary on the nature of religious progress as above defined. ' It is not the vain attempt by endless finite THE PRINCIPLE OF FRUITION 87 additions or increments to become possessed of infinite wealth, but it is the endeavour, by the constant exer- cise of spiritual activity, to appropriate that infinite inheritance of which we are already in possession ' (p. 284). And he concludes by pointing out that it is this sense of fruition which gives its distinctive character to religious worship ; for in prayer ' we gather up our fragmentary temporal life into its anticipated eternal harmony ' (p. 287) ; yes, even when we pray that evils may cease ' we realize . . . that they have already ceased, because we are in a sphere in which we discern the nothingness of all that is not of God.' The chapter in religious philosophy which we have been all too briefly outlining is replete with interest and lofty suggestion. The fundamental problems of the moral life, as such, and more especially the nature of moral conflict, are admirably stated. The truth that ' appetite in a rational nature cannot remain what it was in a merely animal nature ' (p. 275) is finely de- veloped, and the further truth that the moral life can be won only through a transcendence of self-assertive- ness and sensual desire, a transmutation of these into sympathy with moral ends, is impressively brought out. Moreover, the central idea that religious life means fruition and that its progress is a progress within ' the sphere of the Infinite/ appeals to me as profound, just, and illuminating. There are, however, two or three points on which a certain amount of dis- cussion seems necessary, with a view to avoiding certain misleading implications which the writer's own lan- guage seems rather to encourage than to reject. We have noticed the just importance which Principal Caird attaches to the conception and process of trans- 88 GOD WITH US cendence to the idea, in a word, that the higher truly conquers the lower only in so far as it can tame it to its own service. Thus, the domesticated animal of to-day remains a living witness to the genius shown by our remote forbears principally, it is supposed, by the women in the practical application of this funda- mental principle. The Romans showed a similar genius in dealing with conquered tribes. Indeed, all true pro- cesses of assimilation, from the assimilation of inorganic by organic life to the assimilation of natural appetites by spiritual aspirations, do but formulate biological equivalents for the logical processes of transcendence through which we seek in building up our thought- structures not to destroy but to fulfil. Now, it seems to me that in the transition by which we are led from the moral to the religious life, Principal Caird has failed to do adequate justice to his own method. It is not easy to see under what new forms the virtues of the moral life persist within the religious life of fruition. Perhaps the most direct allusion to these moral qualities qua transcended is to be found in the statement that religious progress is ' the endeavour, by the constant exercise of spiritual activity, to appropriate that infinite inheritance of which we are already in possession ' (p. 284) . Unfortunately the ' possession ' is understood in a sense which renders all moral effort, whatever its transcended form may be, superfluous and abortive. For, in man's religious life, ' in that inner sphere in which his true life lies, the struggle is over, the victory already achieved ' (p. 285). And in prayer when we are enjoying the full life of fruition, and even whilst praying that evils may cease, we realize that for the life of fruition ' they have already ceased.' It would seem THE PRINCIPLE OF FRUITION 89 to follow that the infinite inheritance of which we are already in possession brings with it the stultification of our moral freedom. Hegel expresses the writer's view more explicitly when he says that ' the consummation of the infinite End . . . consists merely in removing the illusion which makes it seem yet unaccomplished. . . . This is the illusion under which we live.'* But if this is true, if the Good is already ' in full actuality accom- plished, 'f then, from the point of view of the Good, morality is but a struggle with illusion, a struggle which, in the religious sphere, where the illusion dis- appears, reduces to a struggle with nothing. The difficulty we are here concerned with is no doubt a very real one. On the one hand, it seems necessary to grant that the religious life can be experienced and understood only as the truth of the moral life, and that no solution which leaves the moral consciousness justly rebellious by stultifying the function and freedom of the will can be accepted as a satisfactory transcendence of morality by religion. And yet, on the other hand, it seems equally necessary to admit that the finite can realize its infinite destiny only through divesting itself of its finitude. And if our human personality is at once finite and moral, and its morality an expression of its finitude, it might seem as though ecstatic mysticism were right after all, and that we must shed off our self- hood, and with it all moral distinctions, as we dissolve into the life of God. But are we, then, so finite that we must needs forfeit ourselves to redeem our finitude ? It is no doubt the * ' The Logic of Hegel/ translated by William Wallace, PP- 35 X > 35 2 ; c f- also P- 373- t Id., p. 352. go GOD WITH US case that, as a bodily presence distinct from all others, our individuality is limited by other embodied individu- alities, and is in this clear sense mortal and finite. But is it not also palpable to moral sense and observation that each personal experient has as such the intrinsic capacity of indefinitely appropriating all the possi- bilities of the spiritual realm, and is hindered from doing so not because he is a person but because he is not per- sonal enough. If two men share a loaf or a shilling, what one gets the other loses. If two men share an idea, the gain is common. To impart an idea is not to part with it, but to root it more securely in one's mind. Love, again, grows in the giving, and mercy, as we know, is twice blest. All spiritual possessions are in their nature universal in this sense, that the more they are shared the more does each participator realize how rich he is. No spiritual individuality, then, is finite in nature, but only in achievement. But, it may be argued, if each individual person is shut up in his own immediacy of experience, so that no one feels any other's identical feeling, does not this imply that each is shut up in the finitude of his own experience ? Not at all, we would answer. This individuality of personal experience may very well be the essential condition of that true spiritual intimacy between persons through which all limitation, and therefore all finitude, is overcome. The eagle that can fly in the air could, in the air's absence, move only along the ground. Are we to say, then, that the air is a hin- drance to the eagle's flight, and that to remove it would be to remove a finite limitation. Similarly the so-called finite limitations of personal experience are its oppor- tunities for spiritual realization. In particular, that THE PRINCIPLE OF FRUITION great law of spiritual space which maintains that no two individuals shall, as spiritual presences, share the same immediacy of experience, but must each of them give the other sufficient soul-room to be its own spiritual self, that great law which guarantees our spiritual in- tegrity is also, as I conceive it, the supreme condition of spiritual intimacy. It is only in so far as we are two, or many, that we can ever be truly one. We may then, as anthropotheists, boldly plant our- selves at the individual experient's personal point of view, and deny that we are finite or inwardly limited by anything save the failure to be truly ourselves. The religious question is not ' How can our finitude find God ?' but ' How can our infinite nature work faithfully with Him, and redeem what is finite into His own image ? We conclude, then, that as all our spiritual activities, moral or religious, are the expression of our infinite nature, of the life we share with God, there is no call to for sake moral distinctions in the interest of religion. Meeting with the Divine means renouncing our selfishness, and selfishness is a moral disintegrant. Such ' self-renunciation/ therefore, must needs leave us more securely moral than we were ; in dropping our selfishness we have dropped the great impediment to morality. Religious awakening implies, then, no weak abdication of moral duty, no collapse of moral strenu- ousness, no exit of free-will. Rather does it mark a growing intensity of volitional life as we pass from the periphery of our selfhood to its centre. Truly the peripheral, undeveloped selves must be renounced, as the blossom renounces the bud and the fruit the blossom : the passage from the periphery of self to its diviner centre is certainly in this sense a continuous 92 GOD WITH US self-surrender. But it is also a continuous volition, the volition through which the nature which is nearer to God, and therefore more self-possessed, expresses its right to control that less integrated and more restless self which is at once less human and less divine. Much of the confusion on this point seems to be due to the failure to distinguish between a will at peace with itself and a will that has ceased to be, as though making a fuss were essential to moral existence. It is quite true that the deepening of moral into religious insight brings with it a peace as of home-coming, the peace, too, that comes from realizing that the spiritual life is no lonely struggle in the dark of our isolated con- sciousness dark because the familiar dominance of the sense-world has already been renounced but a progress of unnumbered souls together in the dawning light of a new spiritual intercourse ; the life in God gives a heightened sense of fellow-feeling : we realize how mutually intervolved are our aspirations and our destinies, and by our very interactions kindle for our- selves that supersensual religious light ' that never was by land or sea.' But this peace is still a peace of will. It is, however, no longer turbulent and dis- tracted, for the new insight has steadied it to certain large and noble ends. If we compare the apparent movements of the planets with their real movements, the distraction of the former with the harmony of the latter, we have a fair image of the effect upon the desires and the will of the discovery of the Copernican standpoint in the spiritual life, when the centre of self no longer coincides with the centre of finite individu- ality. We conclude, then, that the religious life is not non- THE PRINCIPLE OF FRUITION 93 voluntary, is not raised aloft beyond all good and evil, but represents the most effective truth of the volitional or moral life. Our personality becomes more vivid and distinct as it becomes more religious enters, that is, more and more closely into oneness with God. But let us return to Principal Caird's conception of Fruition. We find it clearly expressed in the follow- ing passage : ' Religion rises above morality in this : that whilst the ideal of morality is only progressively realized, the ideal of religion is realized here and now/ Now, if fruition does not mean that the ideal of religion is realized here and now, what does it mean ? In attempting to deal with this question, we must first state what we understand by ' the ideal of religion.' By the religious ideal we under- stand the goal of our religious purpose, and this we have already identified with the ' Kingdom of Heaven ' or the ' redemption of the world ' in a word, with the fulfilment of God's work. The religious ideal is what we aspire to realize in our progress ' within ' the infinite. It is something not yet in any sense achieved, nor does the principle of fruition require that it should be. The principle of fruition asserts only that we cannot hope even to fulfil it progressively except through working with God. More positively, it sets the union of human and divine at the fountain- head of all religious endeavour, and bids us work with the peace of God's presence in our hearts. But it does not understand this mystical union as in any sense a consummation either of love or of work. We have still to fulfil our work, and so indirectly realize ourselves, and as the work is God's, realize ourselves in God. What we seek is the fulfilment of God's work ; 94 GOD WITH US what we have found is the peace and power which, by leaving the worker at peace with himself and strong in the sense of God's companionship, enables the work to be fulfilled in the only spirit in which it can be fulfilled at all. Again, when Principal Caird suggests that in the prayer-life of fruition we realize that evils have already ceased, there appears to be a similar misconception as to what the realization of fruition consists in. In so far as religious fruition just means the realized im- mediacy of God's presence with us, then, if we hold that in God there is no evil, and that our own soul is cleaving to that which is good, this limited prayer- universe may intelligibly be said to be free from evil. We may realize that, owing to the complete surrender of our will in prayer, there is nothing evil to obstruct the pure intimacy of our life in God. But that the complete harmony of wills apart from which evil must surely still exist should appear to the soul in prayer as already achieved, not only on our own planet, but throughout the whole constellated realm of space this surely is but the shadow of a great trust, and is not in any sense an implicate of the state of fruition. That we hold the charter of our personality from God, and that we are ourselves only in so far as God is with us and within us, is one thing ; that this fundamental assurance which gives peace and power to our life implies that all possible prayers for the world's redemp- tion are already answered, and that reasonable worship passes thenceforward from prayer into praise, is quite another thing, and, as I conceive it, an illusion, and a most unpragmatic one, of the will to believe. Principal Caird's solution is capable, however, of a THE PRINCIPLE OF FRUITION 95 more sympathetic interpretation, which would bring his conception into line with a cardinal conviction of ' Christian Science/ It may be taken as indicating that the truly religious method of dealing with evil is to treat it as non-existent. This is the transcendence of evil in a sense which indeed tallies neither with Principal Caird's previous applications of the method nor with his views on Christian Ethics ; but, as we have already pointed out, the Principal's application of his method is at this point defective, and the view that evil is best met by assuming its non-existence seems to be the most valuable interpretation of his meaning. As Principal Caird himself puts it, the fruition of religious communion makes the devout soul realize the nothingness of all that is not of God, and, in particular, the non-existence of evil. Hence, in so far as fruition expresses a permanent religious attitude, the conviction that there is no such thing as evil would become a permanent religious conviction. Christian Science, in its assertion of the non-existence of evil, would then simply be applying in ordinary life what the Hegelian philosopher holds to be applicable in the sphere of religious fruition. If what is ' eternally ' true can be said to be true here and now, then from ' the Good is already accomplished ' to ' there is no evil/ the inference is sound. But the theory that religious fruition implies the realizing, from a supra- mundane point of view, that the universe, as seen from this supernal standpoint, is already disburdened of its evil, is far indeed from being even religiously accept- able, so that Christian Science could gain little from its logical alliance with the theory. For if the beatific vision gives the true view of the world, the implication 96 GOD WITH US is that either the world is, here and now, what the vision shows it to us to be, and that we should in- fallibly see it as such could the scales but fall from our eyes ; or that the world we live in is not in any sense the vision-world itself, which is a mere foreglimpse of the glories that may be realized when the present dis- pensation is over. In the latter case, our endeavour may have something to do with the coming of the kingdom, and then there is indeed something to fight for, and the foreglimpse may be a great inspiration, helping to sustain us in that conflict with the evil which bars our way to the vision-world. But if the former supposition is the true one, and the world is, here and now, what the vision shows it to be, then either we must admit that vision, illumination, tran- scendental intuition, is the mystic key to life, and Indian wisdom has spoken the last word in religious philosophy, or else that the seeing which is to free us from the bondage of evil is only a metaphorical equi- valent for the acting through which the liberation has really to be effected ; and if this is so, then the sooner we substitute for the symbol the reality which it sym- bolizes, the better both for logic and for life. The term ' realize ' is indeed a slippery expression, for we can realize either through sense or through action, through intuition or through personal effort. When some moving music dissolves us into ecstasies, the Heaven it brings before our eyes is a realization. We realize its meaning, as we see it, hear it, feel it ; we realize it with gratitude as a grace and inspiration of the spiritual life, something given without the asking, not earned in the sweat of our brow. There is no transition here from confused beginnings to a per- THE PRINCIPLE OF FRUITION 97 fected end. All, as in the vision of a beautiful land- scape, is perfect from the start. But a builder does not realize a house through building it in the same sense in which he realizes with his eyes the presence of the ground on which he builds the house, or even in the same sense as he realizes in his thought the possi- bilities of the site. He cannot simultaneously say, ' I am building ' and ' I have built/ as he can ' I see ' and ' I have seen/* The realizations of labour are one thing, and the realizations of vision quite another. They are as distinct as discursive reasoning from pre- misses to conclusion is from the intuitive insight with which we welcome the truth that two and two are four. Now, there may be many occasions in which it would be irrelevant or pedantic to attempt to dis- tinguish the one meaning of ' realization ' from the other. But the distinction may be essential ; and in the problem under discussion such is indeed the case. Can we realize the victory over evil in the same sense as we realize the presence of the evil we have to con- quer ? Can we realize the good by simply seeing through the evil ? Is it not rather true that the interval between seeing evil and seeing through it beyond it is impenetrable except to moral effort, and religiously inspired ? May we not, then, conclude that realizations of fruition are not revelations of the eternal extinction of evil, but only a sacred intimacy between man and God, in which the worthlessness of all that is not of God is so impressed upon the soul that the conflict with evil, in one form or another, becomes for the sincere a spiritual necessity. Such fruition cannot spirit away evil on the contrary, it * Cf. Aristotle, ' Nicomachean Ethics,' Book x. [ 4]. 7 98 GOD WITH US can only intensify our sensitiveness to the curse of it but it can supply us with the whole armour of faith, and give to the conflict with evil a religious inspiration. And yet, after all has been said, we readily admit that the conviction that evil is non-existent may still, for those who can believe it, have great religious value, giving a fresh meaning and worth to life, and a vastly increased sense of spiritual freedom. It may have great efficacy in casting out fear, and to this extent prove a rival of love itself. If evil, suffering, pain have no ground in the nature of things, and are as illusory in the will as in the world, it is folly to fear them. And with such victory over fear, how are the flood-gates of adolescence reopened and life re- juvenated from its depths ! But the conviction, though it may pave the way for the profoundest religious experiences, has not in itself any redemptive value. It cannot meet evil with good, for this implies the recognition that evil exists to be met and mastered. It can cast out fear, but can it, otherwise than in- directly, foster and discipline the supreme emotion of love ? Moreover, is it well that fear should be alto- gether cast out ? Are there not, as Aristotle affirms, things that ought to be feared ? Nor should we forget that the spiritual value of redemption from fear depends vitally on the method through which the redemption is effected. When love conquers fear, fear survives as reverence ; but when subdued by the extinction of its object, fear simply withers away. And we would ask in conclusion whether, if evil is illusory, the illusion itself is not an evil. For we cannot say that the illusion itself is non-existent without rein- stating the evil. CHAPTER VI. RELIGION AND MORALITY, IN his treatment of the relation of morality to religion, Principal Caird, as we saw, starts with a morality conceived as pre-religious, and discusses the develop- ment of this pre-religious moral life up to the point where moral aspiration turns to fruition, and morality into religion. Morality is thus swallowed up of religion, and this process consummated, we hear nothing more of morality. But that is surely a pity. It is indeed most important that we should recognize the just merits of a morality that starts from its own basis, and proclaims the strict ethical gospel of duty for duty's sake. ' " Do the Duty which lies nearest thee," which thou knowest to be a Duty ! Thy second Duty will already have become clearer.' The Cate- gorical Imperative has for Kant no religious sanction ; it is a principle of autonomy, and is independent of any religious support so much so, indeed, that the in- trusion of religious love into the sublimely disinterested sentiment of reverence for the Moral Law must, in so far as it is non-practical, infect it with a patho- logical taint.* There is, then, we admit, a science of * Cf. Edward Caird, * The Critical Philosophy of Kant,' ii. 279, 280. It is only fair to add that in his treatise on 99 72 ioo GOD WITH US the Summum Bonum, in which abstraction is made of the Bonum Consummatum for which Religion supplies the credentials. But once it is admitted that fruition is the truth of aspiration, and that Religion is the truth of Morality, we can no longer rest content with pre-religious moralities. Once we are convinced that we have found in religion what we sought in vain for in morality, we can never again be moral in the old sense. The pre-religious morality is abandoned for a morality inspired and fructified by the new religious principle. Morality is for us henceforth rooted in Religion. Thus anyone who, like Principal Caird, finds in religion the ultimate solution of the moral problem, is bound down to one of two alternatives. Either he must hold that moral distinctions cease beyond the moral frontier, and that the stepping-stones by which we rise to religious fruition are verily the gravestones of our moral consciousness, or, having lodged his moral aspiration within the heart of his religious faith, he must set up in this higher realm of religious values a new temple to morality. Or, to put the alternative quite blankly, the religious man must either be re- ligiously moral or not be moral at all. He may, of course, contrive to live two lives, but he will to that extent be two persons, and not one. He may be prereligiously moral on week-days and fruitionally religious on Sundays ; but to that extent he is a conglomerate, and not truly a man. Qua man, he is ' Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason/ Dr. Caird traces an endeavour on Kant's part to connect his moral principles more closely with the Religion of Love than he does in his purely ethical treatises (see id., ii. 562). RELIGION AND MORALITY 101 pledged to the unity of his own consciousness, and cannot lead two lives save by betraying his manhood. The ultimate relation, then, in which morality stands to religion is that of a specification of religion itself. As the principle of Justice in Plato's ' Republic ' is the soul and organizing principle of all the other virtues, so that it is at once everywhere, and yet no- where by itself present in the temperance, wisdom, and courage of the citizen, yet never present except where there is either temperance, courage, or wisdom so the religious principle, the principle of fruition, is the soul and organizing principle of all the arts, moralities, and sciences, present in all these organs of its own inclusive life, and yet never present where these are not. When the religious principle is so conceived, morality can be vie wed only as the central and supreme expression of the religious principle. The creation of personality takes precedence of all other creations. Art is the ensouling of sense, Science and Philosophy the en- souling of thought, Morality the ensouling of conduct, and of these three harmonies, the harmony of wills is, for man, fundamental. It is in this sense that Re- ligious Idealism is a Voluntarism ; its creed is that for the purposes of human life man is essentially what his will is, his will being his whole personality as active in conduct. Hence, whilst frankly admitting and welcoming the religious mission of the artist, the philosopher and the pioneer of science, we would identify the religious mission most centrally with the representatives of the claims of the moral conscious- ness. We have spoken of this ethico-religious view of life 102 GOD WITH US as the characteristic conception of Religious Idealism. And such, indeed, it substantially is. For Eucken's philosophy, for instance, Religion, as we are here using the term, stands emphatically for the truth of morality, and our moral endeavour is but the social expression of our religious freedom. Moreover, the central meaning and value of life, according to Professor Eucken, lies in the distinctively moral action through which such freedom finds expression, in the labour through which the resistent element in man's social world is made the vehicle and embodiment of the spiritual life. The New Idealism is in this sense primarily and centrally ethico-religious. And yet in the development of this philosophy we find certain variations in emphasis and in nomen- clature which at first sight tend to obscure the intimacy of the relation between morality and religion. Thus, in Professor Eucken's earlier work it is the moral note which, on the whole, rings out the stronger ; later the emphasis becomes more definitely religious. In work that is still more recent in date, notably in the ' Grundlinien einer neuen Lebensanschauung,' this ethico-religious philosophy, which oscillates between the kindred poles of a Moral and a Religious Idealism, asserts itself as in essence Activistic. But when we come to analyse this philosophy of Action, and con- sider the nature of the action in which life finds its meaning and value, we find that we are still in the old atmosphere, and that the ' saving action ' which the philosophy proclaims implies the closest intimacy of the moral and religious tendencies. The philosophy of Action reveals itself as the philosophy of fruition in action. Laborare est orare here supersedes the motto RELIGION AND MORALITY 103 Om el labora, and we are made to feel the prayerful- ness of labour itself. What the author of Ecclesias- ticus says of the labourer and artisan only, Eucken would say of all who think and act : ' In the handy- work of their craft is their prayer.'* But Activism is not Professor Eucken's last word. For in the two most recent publications from his pen,f ' The Meaning and Value of Life ' (1907) and the ' Introduction to a Philosophy of the Spiritual Life ' (1908), the emphasis has tended to rest more and more stably and conclusively on the more fundamental note of Spirituality. This concentration on the Geistes- leben as such, this resetting of Activism within the broader conception of Spiritual Life, accords well with Professor Eucken's earlier positions. It is but a fresh reformulation of his ethico-religious convictions, a new reminder that our action can be truly moral and per- sonal only in so far as it expresses our spiritual freedom. At the same time, the persistent use of the term ' spiritual ' in place of the term ' religious ' to indicate the unifying principle of the personal life, and the frequent reference to Religion as combining together with Morality, Knowledge, and Art to constitute so many diverse specifications of the Spiritual Life, or Geistesleben, leaves it clear that we can no longer refer * Ecclesiasticus, chap, xxxviii., verse 34. Cf. verses 24-34. The 34th verse runs as follows : dXXa KTifffJ,a aiuvos Tf)pfoovffiv Kal i] dt-rjcris avr&v eV epyacriq. TtxyW* I am indebted to my friend the Rev. Maldwyn Hughes for kindly drawing my attention to this reference, f If we except reprints and new editions. 104 GOD WITH US unambiguously to Professor Eucken's philosophy as a Religious Idealism. It is rather a Spiritual Idealism a Spiritual Idealism with an activistic bias, and in- volving as many distinct applications as there are distinct forms of human endeavour. Such Spiritual Idealism is ' religious ' only in so far as it concerns the ' religious ' in contradistinction from all other related forms of its inclusive spiritual interest. In one sense, no doubt, the distinction between Professor Eucken's use of the term ' spiritual ' and our own use of the term ' religious ' is a mere matter of words. The truth expressed in the words ' God with us ' remains equally true whether we choose to refer to it as a spiritual, religious, or ethico-religious truth, and it matters little, perhaps, whether we speak of our personal freedom as spiritual or religious. The root- principles of Eucken's philosophy are in no way affected by these changes. It is only old associations that are affected. If we are to remain quite true to Professor Eucken's present position, we must associate the name of God more closely with the Spiritual Life than with that specific form of Spirit- uality which we call Religion. But old associa- tions have their importance, and there are probably many who will regret this disinclination on Professor Eucken's part to identify the religious with the spiritual. Religious rebirth has come to stand for a renewal of the whole life in all directions, for a con- secration of all secular interests, whether these be ecclesiastic or civic, artistic or intellectual. From this point of view all spiritual activity is at root religious, and every Spiritual Idealism a Religious Idealism. And it is a point of view which the religious conscious- RELIGION AND MORALITY 105 ness of our age will be reluctant to abandon, as the alternative of rebaptizing itself as a ' spiritual ' con- sciousness would involve too serious a break with the old and cherished associations that cluster about the revered name of Religion. The conception of Religion as a supreme principle enriching with a deeper significance and a profounder life all the various branches of human activity, whilst concentrating its central inspiration along the main channel of the moral life, clearly represents the con- viction of. Professor Edward Caird, to whom religion is ' the key to all other interests/* ' the great principle of unity in human life/f and, above all, the realiza- tion ' that " morality is the nature of things," the ultimate reality even of sense and matter.*! The principle of fruition has, on Professor Caird's view, the same fundamental significance for religion as it has for Principal Caird. What he holds to be the Gospel secret and ' the basis of the thought of Jesus ' ' that what the soul of man recognizes as the highest ideal is at the same time the deepest reality of the world ' is also for him the ultimate secret and basis of the religious life. But the conviction that the moral ideal is not itself ultimately moral until it has been transfigured into a living reality of the religious life is held with a clearer consciousness of the * ' The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers/ i. 12. f Id., i. 15. Cf. ' The Evolution of Religion,' i. 30, 37, 8 1, 140 ; and ' The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers,' i. 40. J ' The Critical Philosophy of Kant,' ii. 311. ' The Evolution of Religion/ ii. 139. 106 GOD WITH US moral issues involved. It is morality itself for which the conviction is precious. The realization that ' morality is the nature of things ' gives to the moral life ' an infinite access of strength.'* ' To hold that what we regard as best and highest is also the ultimate reality the principle from which all comes and on which all depends is the great religious spring of moral energy.'f And in his criticism of Kant's ground for postulating Immortality the ground, namely, that since the conformity of our sense-nature with the moral law can never be more than approximative (for with Kant the opposition between nature and spirit is absolute), such approximation must therefore be a progressus ad infinitum, and demand infinite time for its fulfilment he points out that ' infinite time is not enough for an impossible task/f and that ' we must not infer that we shall live for ever because there is an irreducible surd in the passions which it will take endless time to eliminate, but because the principle of morality is universal, and therefore con- tains in it an exhaustless spring of life. . . . The faith in immortality/ he adds, ' which arises in con- nection with the moral life must be a consciousness of the infinite possibilities that are contained in the very principle of that life, as it is already present in the moral subject, and not, as Kant makes it, a feeling of the defect that separates us from the attainment of the moral ideal. ' Thus the principle that ' that * ' The Evolution of Religion/ ii. 177. f ' The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers,' i. 50. Cf. ' The Evolution of Religion,' i. 237. J ' The Critical Philosophy of Kant,' ii. 303. Ibid., ii. 308. RELIGION AND MORALITY 107 only is rational which is real ' is accepted by Professor Caird as proclaiming the spiritual immanence of the ideal in the actual, supplying morality with a religious sanction and inspiration, and furnishing a secure basis for our faith in immortality. Here we find clearly formulated the essential requirements of a philosophy of Fruition.* And yet, despite the clearness of insight which these convictions reveal, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Professor Caird has himself partially succumbed to the same treacherous implications of the Hegelian maxim as wrought such havoc with the fruition-theory of Principal Caird. The conviction that the fruition- life of religion must be moral, and that, too, in a still higher sense than the moral life which remains un- inspired by the faith that morality is the very nature of things, is steadfastly maintained ; but how such fruition can be realized without demoralization is a question to which Professor Caird, so far as I know, gives no satisfactory answer. To make clear what is involved in this objection, we propose to consider two passages in Professor Caird's work on ' The Critical Philosophy of Kant/ passages in which the fruition-idea occupies a central place. In the first of these (id., ii. 310-314) Professor Caird is concerned with making clear that ' morality is directly connected with religion, unless the former be reduced to the pursuit of an Ideal which has no necessary reality/ In the course of the argument he points out that if Kant's ' I can because I ought ' is to be so understood as to render intelligible the task which it implies that, namely, of realizing the moral * Cf. ' The Evolution of Religion/ i. 345. io8 GOD WITH US law the maxim must be understood as implying the necessary reality of that which ought to be. ' The consciousness of right is the consciousness of might ' (id., p. 311) only in so far as it is also the conscious- ness of spiritual oneness with a power that can turn every hindrance into a means of self-realization. After a further argument, into which we need not enter, the writer concludes that ' the faith that the moral ideal will be realized is thus one with the faith in it as the absolute reality '; and he adds : ' It ought to be realized, because it can be realized, and even because, in a sense, it is realized already at least, for one who can discern the deepest meaning of the facts before him.' And this fruition-insight of religious faith which sees that the Summum Bonum is, in a sense, realized already, is characterized by Professor Caird as the * last movement of Idealism.' Now, the words ' in a sense ' are disquieting, and when we seek to discover in what sense the faith of reason can reveal the ideal as already real, the only answer we seem to get is that such insight shows us that the Summum Bonum, far from being unrealized, is always realizing itself, and that there is nothing in the nature of things which can radically resist it. We are thus left with the old antinomy between ' is realized already ' and ' is always realizing itself ' that is, with the very problem we wish to solve. Moreover, in seeking for further light within the texts already quoted the mind is left confused with the clashing senses of three formulae, all of which appear essential to the solution : ' I can because I ought,' ' The moral ideal ought to be realized because it can be realized,' ' The moral ideal ought to be realized because, in a RELIGION AND MORALITY 109 sense, it is realized already/ Let us briefly attempt to consider the meaning which these maxims have for a philosophy of fruition. The first, ' I can because I ought/ which we may express in the form ' I ought, therefore I can/ is, from the point of view in question, a compressed argument of which the middle term is suppressed. The full argument would run somewhat as follows : I Ought,* therefore my will is inwardly inspiredf by a power whose authority, for me at least, is ultimate. And because my will is thus inwardly inspired, I am both free and able to fulfil what I Ought to fulfil. Hence the ' Ought ' of religious obligation implies the ' Can ' of religious freedom. Or, to put the argument more succinctly : I Ought, therefore I am at heart one with God (formula of religious fruition) . I am at heart one with God, therefore I can (formula of religious freedom). Hence, ' I Ought, therefore I can/ It will be noticed that the ' I Ought ' is here cate- gorically posited as having unconditional authority. Whence it follows that the obligation is religious, for it can be categorical only in so far as it proceeds from the deepest nature of things. We pass now to the second formula : ' The moral * The ' Ought ' (as the symbol of religious obligation) is here spelt with a capital letter to distinguish it from the 1 ought ' of moral, or pre-religious, obligation. f ' External compulsion ' would be the proper inference from ' I must/ no GOD WITH US ideal ought to be realized because it can be realized '; or, to put it more pointedly, ' I ought to realize the moral ideal because I can do so.' This maxim simply continues the argument presented by the first maxim, carrying it one stage farther. But here the ' ought ' is the ' ought ' of moral obligation, and expresses the inward constraint of an ideal, to be progressively realized under the conditions of the religious life. Since union of my being with God leaves me free and able, despite all resistance, to achieve a perfect work, I am under moral obligation to carry that work through. The moral obligation, as the philosophy of fruition requires, is thus rooted in the religious obligation of which the ' I Ought/ as above defined, is the appropriate categorical expression. Taken together, the two formulae might be expressed as follows : I Ought, therefore I am dependent on God. I am dependent on God, therefore I am re- ligiously free. I am religiously free, therefore I am under moral obligation to seek the highest human good in a religious spirit. And for the completion of the ethico-religious scheme of life which these phrases serve to express, we only need to go one stage farther, and add the crucial formula of self-surrender : I ought to seek the highest human good in a religious spirit, therefore I will. It would seem, then, that the third formula the formula, namely, that ' The moral ideal ought to be realized because, in a sense, it is already realized ' RELIGION AND MORALITY in is superfluous. And such, indeed, I hold to be the case. It is an attempt to give to the formula of moral obligation a religious character ; but this religious character is already sufficiently guaranteed by the inference from ' I Ought ' to ' God is with me/ And it is, moreover, guaranteed in a sense which does not stultify moral endeavour, as the formula in question apparently does. If the Supreme Reality is so inti- mately with us, we may proceed with confidence and courage to the conflict with evil ; but if the moral ideal is, in any sense, already realized, were it not better to accept accomplished fact in a fit spirit, and divert all our moral energies to the task of training ourselves to intuit the perfection we can never hope to fashion through our will. The second passage it may be useful here to consider occurs towards the close of the same great work on Kant (id., ii. 625). Professor Caird has been criti- cizing the tendency to atomic individualism, to that imperviousness of the moral consciousness which Kant's doctrine of the Categorical Imperative seemed to bring with it. ' Isolated responsibility ' and the ' intransferableness of moral good and evil ' are, for Kant, essential characteristics of the moral conscious- ness (id., ii. 622). The presence in the world of ' a Church or Tugendbund, to conquer the associated forces of evil by a greater associated force of good/* is * Elsewhere Professor Caird finely characterizes a Church as ' a bond of human beings as all directly related to God, and only through God related to each other ' (' The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers/ ii. 353). In con- nection with this definition, Professor Caird gives a reference to Wellhausen, ' Israelitische und Judische Geschichte/ chap. xv. H2 GOD WITH US indeed admitted by Kant, but only ' as the type of an ideal and invisible Church, existing merely in thought ' (id., iii. 632). And this accords very well with what Professor Caird graphically describes as Kant's tendency, so to speak, to keep one foot on what to him is the solid work of the independent moral personality of man, and to be ready to draw back the other whenever the sand sinks beneath it ' (id., ii. 565). The principle at issue here is ' the Christian view of the solidarity of the human race, both in evil and in good ' (id., ii. 638) a view which Kant holds to have phenomenal significance only, but which Professor Caird declares to be a fundamental moral truth. Re- ferring to Kant's impervious moral self, he writes thus : ' Only a revived social consciousness, which carries us beyond this isolating attitude, can bring moral deliverance ; and he who will not take upon him the burden of the evil of others, and even accept it also as if it were his own guilt, can never get rid of his own ' (id., ii. 624).* Then follows a passage which it will be necessary for us to quote in full. ' But for him who does accept this responsibility for all evil because he has in himself the evil bias, the root from which all evils spring and who feels that he must conquer it in all its apparent infinity within and without him, evil is already conquered. For the very principle that makes him, so to speak, throw down the barrier between his own life and that of others, * Cf. Professor Stanley Hall, ' Adolescence,' ii. 309. ' Our Western and democratic demand to be judged solely on our own merits or demerits is a product of overblown Titanic heaven-storming individuality, and its demand to open the debt and credit account-book of life with a clean page is itself preposterous.' RELIGION AND MORALITY 113 and take all their sorrows and sins as his own, also gives him a consciousness of unity with that power of goodness which is " above all, in all, and through all." He for whom all evil and sorrow is his own, has con- quered sin and sorrow. This was the secret of Jesus Christ, as it was read by St. Paul. It is a secret which might seem to be the grave of all morality, as it seems to be the negation of individual responsibility ; and it might really be so, if it were not taken as the deeper truth to which morality points, and which, therefore, presupposes the moral consciousness, while it goes beyond it. An Antinomian claim of freedom from law, a self-will that will not bear its own burden, is toto ccelo removed from that freedom of spirit which counts all the burdens of others its own ; though it is quite true that the one equally with the other is the negation of the sense of individual responsibility, and of that sense of indelible personal guilt that goes with it.' In the first part of this passage we find, I think, the same unfortunate identification of a fruitional experience with the conviction that ' evil is already conquered/ against which we have, in one form or another, been continually protesting. The conscious- ness of unity with God, which inspires and fortifies our truly personal or over-individual life, may indeed convince us that good is stronger than evil, and furnish a sound basis for a radical optimism, even though a Christ-like sympathy may have rendered us sensitive to the sins of the whole world ; but in what sense it can assure us that ' evil is already conquered/ and clothe that assurance with religious meaning and value, is indeed hard to understand. Were the whole 8 H4 GOD WITH US time-process so illusory that it could retain no spiritual meaning, however remote, in the eternal present which transcends it, it might make no real difference whether we held the evil we oppose to be conquered before or after our conflict with it ; but in that case the eternal present would cease to have any intelligible meaning, for it would no longer be time transcended a conception we can at least understand but time- lessness in the strict sense, that substitute for time to which all time-distinctions are indifferent, and which therefore stands in no closer relation to time than to space, or motion, or anything else. It is, moreover, important for the discussion of the latter end of the passage that we should ask what is meant by throwing down the barrier between one's own life and that of others. What is meant by the invasion of sympathy, the ' invasive charity ' which assumes responsibility for the sins of the world ? When sympathy has turned the barrier into a bridge, and the cities of Mansoul which the bridge connects enter into redemptive contact with each other, fighting each other's battles, each making the other's cause his own, may we not safely say that such contact must prove an infinite stimulus to the development of individuality ? The soul of most universal sym- pathies is surely the most individual, for it is precisely through the stimulus of its spiritual environment that individuality takes shape and grows. And as the individual multiplies his points of spiritual contact with others, the very interests of spiritual sanity and integrity drive him to self-concentration. The price we have to pay for multiplicity is unity. We cannot afford to be many unless we can also afford to be one, RELIGION AND MORALITY 115 and if we are a great many, we must also be a great one. The penalty we must pay for extending the branches of our sympathy without at the same time rooting ourselves firmly in our own unique individuality is that we place ourselves at the mercy of every cosmic wind that blows. Our manifold loves must contradict each other endlessly unless each and all bear the un- mistakable impress of our personality. The indivi- duality that dies to live does not in the process lose itself, but only its selfishness ; and as the selfishness is self-destructive, its removal must aid the deeper integration of the selfhood that persists. ' The sacrifice of selfishness/ says Professor Caird, ' is the birth of the true self.'* So the Christian, ' in ceasing to contend for his rights against others, . . . has made all their rights his own.'f But whether we ally our- selves with the rights or with the wrongs of our neigh- bours, such alliance, in proportion as it is loyal and practical, must constitute a growing network of moral sympathies, the rich complexity of which will be the measure of the unity of personal life which supports it. The degree of individuality must also be the measure of the degree of individual responsibility. Animal, idiot, child, man, statesman, represent successive stages both of individuality and of responsibility. He, then, whose individuality has become so firm and deep- rooted as to be able to support the responsibility for all evil must have thereby acquired a supreme sense of individual responsibility. What is negated can be only the inadequate sense of individual responsibility proper to a discarded stage of selfhood now outgrown. But it * ' The Evolution of Religion/ ii. 155. t Id., ii. 155- 82 n6 GOD WITH US is not in this sense that the Antinomian negates his individual responsibility, or loses the sense of it. Hence we seem entitled to conclude that the secret of Jesus, as read by St. Paul, does not suggest in any way ' the grave of all morality/ nor can it seem to be the negation of individual responsibility. It could suggest the doom of morality only in so far as the sympathetic appropriation of all evil and sorrow was taken to imply in itself a present conquest of sin and sorrow, and this, as we have seen, is not the case. To have conquered sin and sorrow in principle through a rare grandeur of devotion is not to have already overcome the evil, but only to have won steadfast hold on the principle the principle of good, to which the evil shall eventually surrender. And if this is granted, the secret of Jesus cannot, as we have seen, imply any negation of individual responsibility, for breadth of sympathy necessitates depth of individu- ality, and depth of individuality a correspondingly strong sense of personal responsibility. The essential intimacy of morality and religion is a central doctrine of Auguste Sabatier. Only through finding morality, and identifying itself with it, does religion first find itself. ' The unmistakable mark of a perfect religion is this : that it looks upon the loftiest piety towards God and the most ideal morality as one and the same thing ' (' Esquisse,' p. 128). The mark of an imperfect religion, on the other hand, is its subordination of the moral interest to legal, aesthetic, or intellectual considerations. Thus the essentially moral piety of Christianity had to assert itself at the outset against two fundamental heresies of man's RELIGION AND MORALITY 117 religious nature, the pagan and the Judaic, the former showing mainly the lack of moral responsibility, the latter that of religious faith ; whilst in its subsequent history, from the days of the Apostles onwards, Christianity has not only had continually to reassert itself against these reversionary tendencies, but to cope with the still more formidable heresy of religious intellectualism, of the postponement of morality to dogma. Sabatier's doctrine of the absolute oneness of a pure morality and a pure religion the most essential characteristic, in his view, of the Religion of the Spirit connects itself vitally with a further conviction, no less central for his religious philosophy than that of the oneness of religion and morality the conviction, namely, that Christianity represents the perfect and final form of religious development.* ' The thing which strikes us most forcibly, both in the Sermon on the Mount and in the parables what best evinces the superiority of Christianity over the forms of worship that had preceded it, and stamps it most clearly as the perfect and final religion is just the interpretation, fusion, nay, identification, of religion * M. Sabatier's defence of this conviction will be found in the ' Esquisse,' pp. 174-183, in the chapter entitled ' De 1'Essence du Christianisme,' especially pp. 180-183, where our author deals with Strauss's famous dilemma : ' Either Chris- tianity will disengage itself from the person of Jesus, or else it will cease to be the ideal religion of humanity.' A further reference to Sabatier's view as to the finality of the Chris- tianity of Jesus will be found in the book entitled ' Auguste Sabatier : sa Vie, sa Pensee et ses Travaux quatre Conferences par MM. John Vienot, Frank Puaux, J. E. Roberty et Henri Monnier,' on pp. 76, 77. u8 GOD WITH US and morality, which had so far been separated, and very often opposed. Christ desired that there should be nothing in religion which was not moral, and nothing in morality which was not religious. . . . Thus he makes the religious life and the moral life absolutely auto- nomous. Henceforth they are one, not two ; they are but the twofold expression of one and the same spiritual interest, directed inwardly towards God in the one case, and in the other directed outwardly towards the world * (' Esquisse,' p. 236). It therefore follows that every tendency to belittle the moral imperative, or to despise the dependence and humility of religious faith, is a deviation from Christianity and the Gospel of Christ. And Sabatier shows an extraordinary keen- ness of spiritual perception in detecting and unmasking the various forms under which these perversions of the Christian faith may make their disquieting appear- ance. One passage is so profusely explicit that I take the liberty of quoting it almost in full. On the one hand, we read : ' Every attempt to foster religious emotion without reference to the conscience, all that savours of magic and occultism, aesthetic piety, re- ligious romanticism, Christianity a la Chateaubriand, sensual mysticism, the experiments so familiar to us to-day in philosophic or literary gnosticism, all these new religions which insist neither on repentance nor conversion, all these forms of worship which have no strain of moral holiness in them, are nothing more than corruptions of the Christian principle, consequences, more or less remote, of an undying paganism ever lurking in the human heart.' The Christian principle, on the other hand, ' is that which so scandalized the Pharisees in the attitude of Jesus towards publicans RELIGION AND MORALITY 119 and sinners : pardon unembittered by reproach, restora- tion and salvation through repentance and love, the impulse of the heart held of more account than pharisaic righteousness in a word, all that is most opposed to the bonds of legalism, to self-satisfied meritorious virtue, to a formal religion and a ritualistic piety. In short, everything that tends to separate Father and child, that treats man's freedom and virtue as something external to God and possessing merit in His eyes, all pelagianism, every theory of salvation by works, everything that makes the gift of divine grace depend on anything else than the faith which is necessary to receive it, adhesion to doctrinal formulas, observance of sacraments, priestly absolution, bodily mortifica- tion, asceticism whether of monk or puritan all that splits up morality, and in the name of some imagined holiness introduces dualism into God's handi- work all this must be realized for what it is, a relapse into the legal formalistic spirit of Jewish Pharisaism ' (' Esquisse,' pp. 211, 212). But we have yet to point out the distinctive feature of Sabatier's views as to the oneness of religion and morality in the teaching of Jesus. How, we ask, does he interpret Jesus' reconciliation of morality and religion, of justice and love ? Sabatier's solution of this problem proceeds from the conviction that Jesus fulfilled the law by insisting on an application of it so inward and so stringent that the very process of seeking to realize it as a new law stirred into being the need for a new life, and opened the heart to see in God not only the Law-giver, but, above all, the Lif e-bringer. The law said : Thou shalt not commit adultery. Jesus insisted on a respect for 120 GOD WITH US the law so searching and so intimate as to purify the very fountains of the life, and regenerate fancy, feeling, inclination, will, and all the hidden sources of our being. But such inward control of the sexual impulse, especially in adolescence, implies, as Modern Psychology is showing more and more convincingly, its sanctification : it gives it a deep religious bias, and raises the whole life to a spiritual level. To fulfil the law against adultery by purifying one's heart is to enjoy the life of God, and to know the power thereof. ' Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.' Justice, then, calls for the fulfilling of the law. But the justice of Jesus, by reason of its thoroughgoing inwardness, proves to be the justice of love ; for they who thus inwardly fulfil the law meet the Life-bringer by the way. And the Life-bringer is also the Lover of souls. Such, in briefest outline, is the form under which Sabatier conceives the coincidence in Chris- tianity of the moral and religious life. ' These two elements/ he writes, ' unyielding law and unconditional grace, are so inextricably blent together in the Gospel of Christ that this Gospel cannot retain its originality and power save by their complete fusion and constant interaction. Apart from the un- bending sternness of the moral ideal, repentance would not be possible or, at least, would never be deep enough to bring about a change of heart. But with- out faith in the divine mercy, repentance itself would change to despair, and be barren and profitless. Fruitful as are these two elements of the Christian life when working in close union, they degenerate the moment they are separated or opposed one to the other. Without the emotion of love and the impulse of mercy, RELIGION AND MORALITY 121 what can Christian law become but a kind of Moral Stoicism, hard and unsympathetic ? And without the stern sanctities of law, would not the doctrine of grace be just a theory of cheap indulgence or pagan mysticism ? Dissolve not the salt of the Gospel, lest peradventure its virtue go from it and it forfeit all its savour ' (' Esquisse/ p. 202).* The central significance of religion for life, and the close alliance of religion with morality, are impres- sively brought out in Principal Hall's work on the ' Psychology of Adolescence.' The point of view from which Professor Hall regards the problem of life is that of the educationist. f He is, above all, interested in developing to the full the rich possibilities of adoles- cence. This interest points, therefore, in two main directions for its material to the Psychology of Adoles- cent life, and for the shaping of this material to Morality and Religion. The central fact in Adolescence is the birth of sexual love, and it is with the irradiations, restraints, and transformations of this fundamental passion that morality and religion are essentially concerned. Morality and religion are co-operative powers in the service of Love. From the point of view of the educator they are principles for love's guidance to what is best and deepest in life ; from the point of view of the experient they are that loftier life of love * See also the eloquent conclusion to the second book of the ' Esquisse,' pp. 254-257. f Cf. ' Adolescence,' ii. 55, where Professor Hall points out that the New Psychology ' regards Education as man's chief problem, and the home, school, State, and Church valuable exactly in proportion as they serve it.' 122 GOD WITH US to which all the promptings of adolescence vaguely point a new and a higher life, rooted in the altruistic instincts and emotions which surge up at adolescence, and chastened through the directing of these impulses to the greatest of all objects, God and Man. In the ferment of adolescence the old ego-centric tendencies which in pre-adolescent years held natural sway over the life still persist and expand. Indeed the Ego, become more self-conscious, would now ' expand itself to the uttermost ' (id., ii. 303), and ' maximize ' its individuality. And yet with the conversion of basis which adolescence brings with it the doom of this native selfishness is sealed. It has had its day, and if it persists in seeking still the leadership of life, it must fight against nature, and prove the fertile source of all the perversions of adolescent faculty. Morality and religion here take sides with nature, and give to the natural conversion, which is ' as normal as the blossoming of a flower ' (id., i. 464), its deeper spiritual meaning. ' Religion has no other function/ we read, ' than to make this [conversion] complete, and the whole of morality may be well defined as life in the interest of the race, for love of God and love of man are one and inseparable.'* There is, then, no transition for Professor Hall from * Cf. ' Adolescence,' ii. 132. ' Ethics as a science, and morals as a life, have as their chief purpose to bring man into aline- ment with the laws of love, whether we are concerned with the minor morals of etiquette or with ultimate sanctions of good.' So, again, ' from a broad biological standpoint we conclude . . . that . . . the best life is that which is best for the unborn. Ideal conduct is that which first develops the indi- vidual and then subordinates it to the larger interests of the race ' (id., ii. 139). RELIGION AND MORALITY 123 morality to religion. From the point of view of the educator we may say that moral and religious training, if they are to be effective and lasting, must both begin in the cradle,* though it is only at and after Adolescence that such training can have an inward meaning for us. From the point of view of the experient, the inwardly moral and religious life dates from the birth of the sexual emotions, or rather from the dawn of love, which is the inward light of earliest adolescence. Here love, religion, and morality are indisseverable, and the problem of the relation of religion to morality becomes that of determining how these two great powers co- operate and interpenetrate in the sublime task of feeding and redeeming the passion of love. There is much in Professor Hall's writings which suggests that in this co-operation the religious stimulus is the deeper and is the inspiration of the moral. Pro- fessor Hall himself points out that for the Christian the love of God takes precedence of the love of man, for he defines the Christian interpretation of love as ' the greatest power of the soul fixed upon the greatest object, God, and next to Him, man ' (id., ii. 295). Moreover, the central intimacy of life is that between love and religion. ' Love is as old as life itself, and stronger, and is therefore alone capable of reconstruct- ing it from the bottom ' (id., ii. 315). But it is only through religion that love can thus become the trans- figurer of life and ' the power that makes for righteous- ness in the soul ' (id. t ii. 315). Thus it was ' the great work of Jesus . . . when all else save love alone * ' Youth : its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene,' by Pro- fessor G. Stanley Hall (Sidney Appleton, London, 1908), p. 351. i2 4 GOD WITH US was dead, to create the world from this vital germ ' (id., ii. 127). ' True piety is earthly love transcendental- ized, and the saint is the lover, purified, refined and perfected. To have attained this insight, to have organ- ized it into life, cult, and a Church, is the supreme claim of Jesus upon the gratitude, reverence, and awe of the human heart. No such saving service has ever been rendered to our race, and we can see no room in the future for any other to be compared with it ' (id., ii. 294; cf. ii. 100). So, in another passage, Professor Hall looks forward to the day when we shall have ' a psychology of Jesus which will restore his sublime figure from the degradation to which patristic meta- physics have so long banished him/ a psychology of religion that will make religion once more ' central in the soul ' (id., ii. 327).* The view that for Professor Hall religion is fundamental is borne out by the more specific discussion of its defini- tion which he gives on pp. 351, 352 of the ' Adolescence ' (vol. ii.). After having collected and examined forty- two definitions of religion, all more or less instructive, but in last resort mere ' broken lights ' refracted through diverse subjective media, he concludes that the best provisional definition of religion is that of a rebinding, bringing back, restoration, a ' reinstallation of the indi- vidual or the race into its true place in the world, re- covery to health or wholeness ' (id., ii. 352). He then * Cf. 'Adolescence, ' ii. 330, where the author declares his con- viction that when the influence of the New Psychology becomes dominant, ' religion, the oldest and most absorbing of human interests, will not only have a place in every college and University, but its spirit will pervade the laboratory and observatory.' RELIGION AND MORALITY 125 differentiates this generic definition under four heads.* Religion, as natural, is ' re-established unity with nature ; as ethical, a reunion of conduct with conscience ; as theoretical, it is a re-at-one-ment of the mind with truth ; as feeling, it is the ecstatic closing in again of the highest love with its supreme object, a fresh impulse along a forsaken but recovered path/ ' The common element/ he adds, is atonement with implication of previous estrangement, . . . the ecstatic closing in by faith or intuition with what is felt to be normative and central ' (id., ii. 351). This conception of religion as a re-union or recovery agrees with the prevailing conviction that the ' fall- motif ' is essential to religion. Professor Hall does not discuss ' how man came to deviate from his ideal/ but as he holds that sin is derivative, and, like disease, ' develops only by the momentum of normal vitality ' (id., ii. 307), he must also hold that sin presupposes goodness, and its very presence consequently implies a fall. But, as Professor Hall himself puts it, ' the reunion must be in the field of the higher nature/ so that the ' reinstallation ' or ' recovery ' does not imply any return upon a previous state of innocence (id., ii. 352). Once adolescence has left our human nature normally altruistic, the ego-centric passions must renounce their old undisputed supremacy. At this period ' no one * Professor Hall points out that the definition is given from 1 the view-point of Psychology/ but it should be remembered that for Professor Hall psychology ' is slowly taking the place once held by theology as the intellectual expression of the religious instinct' (id., ii. 324). Compare also the follow- ing : ' The religious life and growth of thought might be almost said to consist in gradually transforming theological into psychological ideas ' (id., ii. 325). 126 GOD WITH US is harmonized with the law of his own being who does not feel the passion of surrender' (id., ii. 305). The refusal to surrender and die into the new life, the resistance offered by the ego-centric nature to the conversion required of it by the new love-life of adoles- cence this, on Professor Hall's view, is the ' fall ' that constitutes sin. The ' fall ' is therefore no fall below the level of ' innocence,' for it does not take place in the ego-centric world. It is a fall within the religious realm itself, and can only be understood in relation to the claims of religion to be supreme over the new life. It is primarily a rebellion against new claims that have never been recognized, not a deviation from an ideal that has once been acknowledged. The re- union, then, consists not in any recovery of a state of health previously enjoyed, but in the complete trans- cendence of the old ego-centric savagery through its full subdual to spiritual aims. The definitions given by Professor Hall are signifi- cant in connection with the problem of the funda- mental nature and function of religion. For in the first place they are all so wide as to be no definitions at all unless the scope of religion is taken to be coextensive with that of life ; and in the second place morality here figures as directly concerning only one of the four speci- fied directions of religious activity. There can, I think, be no doubt that Professor Hall intends the religious impulse to be interpenetrative of all other impulses, and all-comprehensive in its influence. The following passage from the chapter on ' Moral and Religious Training,' the last chapter of his latest book (' Youth/ p. 351), is almost conclusive on the point : ' Religion is the most generic kind of culture as opposed to all RELIGION AND MORALITY 127 systems or departments which are one-sided. All edu- cation culminates in it because it is chief among human interests, and because it gives immunity to the heart, mind and will/ If religion is more generic than morality, morality is of all its specifications the most central and important. ' In all studies of man's psychic life moral distinctions are supreme' (id., ii. 700; cf. ii. 32). Moreover, Professor Hall's philosophy of life, as we have already pointed out, is essentially activistic. This is clearly brought out in the striking chapter on ' Growth of Motor Power and Function/ though it is apparent all through the work on ' Adolescence/ ' Thought is re- pressed action, and deeds, not words, are the language of complete men ' (id., i. 132). ' What frees the mind is disastrous if it does not give self-control ; better ignor- ance than knowledge that does not develop a motor side ' (id., i. 204). ' We really retain only the know- ledge we apply' (id., i. 273). 'The person who de- liberates is lost, if the intellect that doubts and weighs alternatives is less completely organized than habits ' (id., i. 234). 'All beginnings are easy ... it is the supreme effort that develops ' (id., i. 234, 183).* Finally, we may add that Adolescence itself finds its climax in a moral maturity that is rooted in religious principle, for its central meaning is conversion, dying to live. ' To make catharsis of our lower nature and to attain full ethical maturity without arrest or perver- sion this is the very meaning of Adolescence ' (id., ii. 337)- * Cf. ' Adolescence/ ii. 119. See also i. 150-152 on 'Second breath.' CHAPTER VII. FRUITION AND ACTION. THE view that the principle of fruition calls for a morality that is rooted in religion, making effective in the service of man the convictions which spring from communion with God, compels us to inquire more closely into the nature of such moral action as is religiously inspired. Is there any distinctive basis of religious endeavour which differentiates it from such moral action as does not profess to be grounded in religious conviction, or to stand in need of religious sanction ? We may, perhaps, make a serviceable start in the answering of this question by taking up, in a psycho- logical spirit, the relation of action to the stimulus which inspires it. It has been held, e.g., by Professor C. S. Peirce,* that the real stimulus to action is not belief, but doubt. Doubt is a state of perplexity and conflict, a restless- ness which nothing but belief can assuage. Belief once attained, the stimulus of felt defect which urged doubt to pass beyond itself is no longer felt, and in its * The Popular Science Monthly, November, 1877, in a paper entitled ' The Fixation of Belief.' 128 FRUITION AND ACTION 129 place there supervenes the self-possession or com- posure which seeks rather to maintain itself than to pass into any further action. There is an important sense in which this analysis may be accepted as sound. It is sound in so far as the process we are considering is conative in the stricter sense of the term. It is of the essence of a conative process, as such, that it should have its origin in some felt need or defect, that it should include as its central characteristic a felt tendency towards some object or end calculated to relieve the defect or satisfy the need, and that between this felt need and its fulfilment there should be a close, intrinsic connection, such that the fulfilment, when reached, is realized as the fulfil- ment of the need.* So understood, it is the question, the problem, the dissatisfaction, the doubt which is at the root of our endeavour ; the answer, the solution, the satisfaction, the belief, are the fulfilment which meets the felt want, the terminus in which the tendency to act for the relief of the want finds its natural quietus. But in so far as the principle of fruition is accepted as the mainspring of the religious life, the need from which the conative process starts is seen to be the out- growth, not of restlessness and doubt, but of trust and conviction. Belief, conceived as confidence or trust, is the mother of all the religious activities. Such trust, as we have seen, is in its essence faithfulness, the loyalty of the life which works with God for the Coming of the Kingdom ; and, as human history has * See Professor G. F. Stout's article on ' The Nature of Conation and Mental Activity ' in the British Journal of Psychology, July, 1906. 9 130 GOD WITH US amply proved, there is no greater stimulus to con- centrated and undaunted activity, no greater spur to heroic achievement, than religious loyalty. Springing as such loyalty does from the depths of a new spiritual life, it is not only active in work, but self-communica- tive in love. And its striving, in so far as the striving truly expresses the loyalty from which it springs, is not a yearning, but an ardour ; not the tension of desire, but the expansion of joy. Or if yearning can- not be banished so lightly, is it not now expressive of the relief rather than of the distress of love ? Is there not a spiritual kathariss in ' Lycidas/ ' Adonais,' and the ' In Memoriam ' ? Does not the fruition of poetic genius, the vision and the power of a spiritual over- life, strike through the tragic burden of these great elegies, revealing ' the root of sunshine that is above the storms ' ? And, on the other hand, in so far as the Laocoon and other masterpieces of tragic art give no hint of a peace within and beyond the stress and agony they portray, is it not because they lack the consecrating quiet which religious feeling can alone infuse into the aspirations of the artist ? Religious aspiration and endeavour spring, not from the restlessness of discontent, but from the peace and power of communion. ' Wist ye not that I must be about My Father's business ?' It is not doubt or distress, or even the yearning of aspiration, that steadies the face which is turned towards Jerusalem. The tendency of all conative effort to pass beyond itself, out of effort into ease, out of struggle into achievement, finds its most significant expression in the phenomenon of habit. By ' habit ' we mean an endeavour become uniform, and therefore facile in FRUITION AND ACTION 131 its action. Through frequent repetition, irrelevant movements have been eliminated, and clumsy attempts at adaptation trimmed and disciplined into successful adjustment. The formed habit is an acquired skill. As such, it has its own motor mechanism through which it operates. It is not itself that mechanism, but the activity that skilfully utilizes it. That the habit is still an activity may be seen from the fact that 'we are prone to do what we are used to do/* the proneness implying a tendency which, if interfered with, is apt to cause discomfort and annoyance. It is true that, in proportion as a habit is formed, the conation loses its character as attentive effort. It is, indeed, the supreme advantage of a formed habit that it leaves the attention free for other things. But though habitual action is not, as such, self-conscious, it is still an active propensity, and ' when the cus- tomary course of action is interrupted or repressed by obstacles or by the absence of some of its neces- sary external conditions, the propensity becomes a conscious desire, accompanied by aversion to the disturbing conditions ' (id). If we consider the process through which we acquire habits of bodily skill, we can see how the satisfactions which attend all successful adjustments gradually give place to a feeling of settled assurance, which itself eventually becomes unconscious, and we apprehend it no longer. With a vague feeling of the kind of organized movement we wish to master, we make more or less random efforts in a certain general direction ; one or more of these are found to be approximately effective, and in making them we have a momentary, * Professor G. F. Stout, ' Analytical Psychology/ i. 259. 92 132 GOD WITH US partial, and yet pleasurable, sense of attainment. The satisfaction, fleeting as it is, is still sufficient to single out the successful movements and stamp their im- portance in upon the feelings ; so that when further attempts are made to master the movements and achieve the habit, there is a tendency, which our feeling fosters, to emphasize and improve upon those particular movements which brought us pleasure on the previous occasion. But in proportion as the movements become purposively organized, and pass without obstruction to their goal, the feelings of satisfaction and elation become blunted, dulled, and, finally, having no further function to fulfil, are no longer felt at all. The activity of habit is, as such, not a felt tendency, and therefore not conative. When the habit reaches mechanical perfection, we have gained facility, rapidity, and uniformity of action, but we have lost both the zest of pursuing and the joy of attainment. We may therefore distinguish clearly between the ' fruition ' of habitual action and the fruition which inspires our religious endeavour. The latter is an experience which, if not intensely, is at least pro- foundly felt, and is felt the more deeply or vividly the more the experience becomes central and dominant in the life. The former, on the other hand, is a rela- tively feelingless experience, which becomes more and more ' subconscious ' the more perfectly it is realized. But if the fruition or the ' blessedness/ to adopt Carlyle's equivalent lies not in the formed habit, in that achieved perfection of movement which the soul of our intenser life at once utilizes and ignores, it by no means follows that the two are disconnected. On U P* I v C. r\<* FRUITION AND ACTION 133 the contrary, the connection is intimate and vital. For the dead perfection of habit is still a perfection of action, and the action it so perfectly accomplishes bears upon it the impress of the purpose of which it is now so effective an instrument. The function of the habit depends thus on the idea and the soul which presided over its formation. Hence, when the principle of fruition inspires our endeavour, it impresses its own distinctive stamp upon all the habits, bodily or mental, which our action initiates and realizes. Since it is one principle, the habits will be organized in relation to it, and therefore in relation to each other, and will thus effectively and economically subserve one and the same end ; and since the principle is religious, its incorporation into an ancillary system of habits will eventually have the effect of supporting life unself- consciously with a network of activities religiously inspired, thereby raising the life, as a whole and per- manently, to a steadfast religious level. Finally, since the principle is that of fruition, the purpose whose inspiration will invade and organize in its own name the whole plexus of habits will be that of establishing within the spiritual life of mankind an anthropotheistic Order, an Order which rests on the conviction that God is with us. And since the renunciation upon which religious fruition depends is the relaxing of our hold on the life which death must eventually conquer, that we may find the life which must eventually conquer death, the Order for which we work will be the Order of our Immortality. The Principle of Fruition requires that we work, not for time, but for eternity, and the essential function of a Religious Idealism as a Philosophy of Fruition 134 GOD WITH US must be to systematize for thought the implications of the spiritual experience which is ours through our death into the life of God. Hence, since our Immor- tality is an implicate of this Spiritual Life, for ' that which shares the Life of God with Him surviveth all,' the Philosophy of Fruition must be something still more specific than a Philosophy of Life : it must be a Philosophy of the Life Immortal. In a recent article in the Hibbert Journal* Professor Eucken has considered the problem of the Spiritual Life from the standpoint of our interest in personal immortality. He points out that, whether we inter- pret such immortality as the life after death or as the deeper experience of our present life, no assurance of immortality can be gained from the standpoint of our human finitude. ' The chief question ... is this : whether it is possible, from the experiences and needs of a specific being, to infer a new condition of the universe, as the assertion of immortality really takes upon itself to do. Must we not first of all have attained some certainty that man is more than a specific being ; that, in his sphere, world movements are completed and experiences of the universe re- vealed ?' (id., p. 845). And yet if it is our personal immortality that is at issue, it is not enough that man should recognize the presence of the infinite in his experience. It is true that ' if man could only bring forth some productions of a spiritual kind a know- ledge, for example, of eternal truths in them some- thing eternal might operate. But he himself would * ' The Problem of Immortality,' Hibbert Journal, July, 1908. FRUITION AND ACTION 135 have gained no eternity, so that the denial of personal immortality by Aristotle was logical enough ' (id., p. 847). It is only as a person that man can lay claim to personal immortality, and ' personality implies that man recognizes the whole of the spiritual world as his own life and being, and that he endeavours with all his might to develop it ' (id., p. 847). But when we thus come to view the immortality problem from the only relevant standpoint that of the spiritual life in man we realize, as did Plato (vide id., p. 851), that the real significance of the immortality belief lies ' not so much in pointing man to the future as in making the present great and rich for him in content.' And this, again, implies a deeper conception of the ' present.' We can realize our present immor- tality as members of a spiritual world only in so far as we are able, with Spinoza, to view our life and the universe sub specie ceternitatis. But we must not forget that ' Spinoza's assertion that all true know- ledge takes place sub specie ceternitatis holds good not only in respect of knowledge, but of the whole of the spiritual life-' (id., p. 846). We are thus led on in- evitably to the central problem of the eternal present, to the conception of an experience of duration in which the eternal, without dissociation from time, transcends it and takes precedence of it in all the functions and valuations of our life. ' Human life, . . . so far as it is of a spiritual character, seems thus to be placed between time and eternity ; so far as its deepest depths are concerned, it must be rooted in an order raised above time ; yet it can only reach its more inner meaning through work in time and the experiences of time. Owing to this transformation, 136 GOD WITH US time no longer appears as the central fact of life, which eternity only encompasses ; but eternity gives the true standpoint, and time recedes into the second rank/ Finally, Professor Eucken points out that once this superiority to the merely temporal is recognized as a genuine mark of all spiritual experience, we have a solid basis from which to infer an immortality beyond the grave. For ' a serious contradiction would be introduced into the whole of spiritual life were it to undertake what is superior to time, and then be entirely sacrificed to the destroying power of time. ' Hence/ we read, ' it is the belief in the independence of a spiritual life superior to time, and in the imme- diate presence of that spiritual life in the soul of man, on which faith in his immortality rests ' (id., p. 848). Our belief in personal immortality beyond the grave is thus indissolubly bound up with the central con- viction of Religious Idealism, with the belief that God is with us. Here, as Eucken himself puts it, ' we are in agreement with Augustine, the greatest thinker of the Christian world, when he says, " What does not perish for God cannot perish for itself " (Quod Deo non pent, sibi non peril).'* * Cf. ' The Evolution of Religion,' by Edward Caird, pp. 241- 243. ' The only religious proof of a future life is, in short, that " God is not the God of the dead, but of the living " i.e., as I understand it, the evidence of any destiny of man higher than that of other beings is that which springs out of the divine principle already manifested in his life here, and, we might even say, out of the fact that he possesses a con- sciousness of God. For in these words, as has been well said, " Christ does not proclaim resurrection ; he denies death, and asserts the indestructibleness of all life that remains in com- munion with God " ' (id., p. 242). FRUITION AND ACTION 137 It is apparent from the foregoing epitome of Pro- fessor Eucken's argument for a future life that the possibility of attaching significance to the prospect of an immortal destiny is rooted in such actual experience as we have of the Spiritual Life and the eternal present which such life presupposes. It follows that any light which philosophical thought can shed on the meaning of this spiritual present must also illuminate the related problem of our immortality. Now, it is mainly in his philosophy of history that Professor Eucken develops this conception of a spiritual present.* His whole treatment of history presupposes a certain capacity, inherent in our spiritual nature, of transcending the time-flux which so fundamentally conditions our con- scious life. Let us, then, look more closely at the nature of the time-experience which is here presupposed. * See the essay entitled ' Die Philosophic der Geschichte, ' which occurs in a volume called ' Systematische Philosophic ' (1907) . This volume is the first of a series which is at present being published under the title of ' Die Kultur der Gegenwart,' and edited by Paul Hinneberg. See also the author's treatise on ' Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy of Life,' chaps, ii. and iii. The reader may also be referred to an article by Professor Eucken in La Revue de Synthese Historique, Decembre, 1907, entitled ' L'Histoire et la Vie,' the translation being due to Dr. S. Jankelevitch. In view of certain misconceptions as to Professor Eucken's historical method, the opening sentence of this article may be usefully recorded here : ' We must dis- tinguish between two conceptions of history between its meaning for science and its meaning for human life. We must also distinguish between two corresponding historical methods that of ascertaining what actually took place, on the one hand, and that of relating the past inwardly to our own life and activity, on the other.' It is with this latter method that Professor Eucken is alone concerned in his 1 Philosophy of History.' 138 GOD WITH US It has become a commonplace of idealistic specula- tion that the activity of mind cannot be accounted for as a mere activity in time, for the consciousness of a time-series cannot itself be an event in the time-series. The time-series is itself an ideal construction, and that which constructs cannot itself be a mere part of that which is constructed. Indeed, in the mere act of nursing an idea, we have already transcended the fleet- ing character of the time-element in which we live, for if such ideal thought is to be estimated as a ' present ' possession, this ' present ' must mean much more for us than the present of the passing moment. It must also mean much more for us than a mere succession of such moments, for the defect of an experience cannot be remedied by merely multiplying the experience, thereby multiplying the defect. It must mean a con- tinuum which is in some sense persistent. We have the clearest experience of such transcendence of time when our interest is more than usually strong and intense. The time-continuum seems then to suffer a spiritual change : we cease to appreciate it as a succession, or even as an unbroken, continuous onflowing ; it becomes for us an ^flowing, and we feel that time is in some profoundly real sense ebbing towards eternity. It is true that the time-continuum and the obser- vation holds good of other continua, such as those of space or energy is constantly being broken up by the activities that make for individuation, by processes of counting and construction, by sense-discrimination and mental analysis. In this way, experience gets variously dismembered, and, as it were, individualized. But this dismembering does not imply any disintegration of experience. On the contrary, the very process FRUITION AND ACTION 139 through which we break up the time-continuum when we divide it, ideationally, into time-intervals, has the effect of so saturating it with the unity of our own spiritual activity as to give it an ' eternal ' significance. The time-divisions which give form to music, or rhythm to verse, have a meaning that is more than temporal. A sonata has indeed a beginning and an ending, but who would measure the interval in seconds of time ? The time-beginning of the sonata implies precedence of a spiritual order, a precedence dictated by the require- ments of the harmonious movement as a whole, and though the time-succession undoubtedly subsists and may be appreciated by sufficiently mathematizing the interest, it subsists only in the service of Art. It lies buried in the music, though it may at any time be dug out through the spiritual force of abstraction. And yet, as subliminally operative within the musical con- sciousness, it is the latter's indispensable auxiliary and support ; for time-transcendence does not imply the annihilation, but rather the spiritualization, of time. The uniform continuum of the time-process reappears transfigured within the unity and continuity of the interest which transcends it ; in transcending the time- sense, we ransom it into the freedom of the eternal. Now, it is with this spiritualization of time that Eucken is essentially concerned in his treatment of history and the historic present. He starts from the conviction that the past can have no meaning or value for the present unless the present has something of an eternal significance. Thus the supreme function of history is to build up a historic present, to master the meaning of the past in the light of the latest and deepest insight which the world's progress has revealed e.g., the 140 GOD WITH US idea of development itself and so confirm and enrich the solidarity of the human race. As Bacon has re- minded us, the more solid contributions of successive ages tend to sink deep in the time-current which bears the lighter material forward on its surface, and the task of History is to recover this vanishing treasure and secure it on the firm basis of that ' esoteric ' present in which all ages and races find themselves spiritually united. " Thus History in its reference to man is not a mere drifting with the time-stream, but a pulling against it. ... It is an endeavour, by an output of spiritual force, to hold fast that which, of its own nature, would inevitably sink.'* Historical Culture is thus a lever which raises our time-consciousness to a higher level. In so far as we cease to struggle for exclusive rights and thereby make the rights of others our own, in so far as we thus become more and more our true selves, does the sense of a deeper present control the beating of the lower rhythms which mark the passage from the past that is no more to a future that is not yet. The time-flux subsists, but its reality becomes more and more derivative as the spiritual in our nature redeems the sensual. ' Then sawest thou/ says our own great prophet of Work and Well-doing, ' that this fine Universe, were it the meanest province thereof, is in very deed the star-domed City of God ; that through every star, through every grass- blade, and most through every Living Soul, the glory of a present God still beams.' f The passage j ust quoted suggests an important differ- ence between the prophetic time-sense of Eucken and * ' Die Kultur der Gegenwart/ i. 268. t ' Sartor Resartus,' Bk. III., chap, viii., 21. FRUITION AND ACTION 141 Carlyle. Both point us to an Eternal Present as the truth of time, but whereas the Eternal is for Carlyle a Vision of which the meaning transcends ' our whole Practical reasonings, conceptions, and imagings or imaginings/* it is for Eucken a Fruition of the Will, which, if we are but earnest enough, must enlist our whole practical life in its service. Both thinkers hold that the Eternal is Time in its inwardness, but for the one it is an almost apocalyptic vision, needing a power- ful imagination to support it ; for the other it is a reve- lation that opens within the intenser steadfastness of our spiritual decisions. The difference is that between a visionary and an activistic mysticism. ' Is the Past annihilated, then,' says Carlyle, ' or only past ; is the Future non-extant, or only future ? Those mystic faculties of thine, Memory and Hope, already answer : already through those mystic avenues, thou, the Earth- blinded, summonest both Past and Future, and com- munest with them, though as yet darkly, and with mute beckonings. The curtains of Yesterday drop down, the curtains of To-morrow roll up ; but Yester- day and To-morrow both are. Pierce through the Time-element, glance into the Eternal. 'f So runs the message of Carlyle. But for Eucken the transcending of the time-flux is no mystic feat ; it is the ordinary and indeed necessary condition of all spiritual life, of all genuine work and well-doing, as well as of all true understanding of history. We do not work in time, and pray and prophesy in Eternity. The Eternal is the active fruition of all true spiritual labour, and can be sustained anywhere and everywhere by rightly directed force of will. The Spiritual Life which, from the point * 'Sartor Resartus,' Bk. III., chap, viii., 18. t Id. t 18. 142 GOD WITH US of view we have been considering, is just the revela- tion of the eternal in and through time, may, as Eucken conceives it, be justly characterized as a progressive harmonizing of fruition and action. Fruition is not spiritual except in so far as it rests on a basis of reli- gious freedom, and is inwardly supported through sus- tained spiritual decision and devoted action. On the other hand, it is only in so far as such decision, strength- ened with inspiration from that which it supports, becomes effective through the diverse media of our temporal life, that our action can be truly called spiritual. ' The Eternal/ we read, ' is not a completed fact, given once and for all.' Rather is it a desideratum, ' a difficult problem always forcing itself on us afresh.'* ' Our insight into the deeper and more enduring mean- ing of life must be actively sustained. There must be no relaxation of spiritual tension. . . . Rather the very condition of permanence is a constant re-creation. 'f ' In the sphere of the Spiritual Life/ as we read in another context, ' the law of the natural world no longer holds good. It is no longer true that that which is persists until modified by changes from without. On the contrary, it collapses the moment it ceases to be animated and re-created by the spirit of man. Even where its outer form persists, it degene- rates inwardly into mere formality, into hollow, half- hearted routine/ J Thus it is that we find our spiritual self-realization in and through our work, and find it in this sense, that this spiritual labour becomes in itself the supreme reality, and one with our participation in the * ' Die Kultur der Gegenwart/ i. 273. | Id., p. 272. | ' Sinn und Wert der Lebens,' p. in. FRUITION AND ACTION 143 Spiritual Life. All that is implied in the idea of realized fact the joy of attainment, the peace of possession, composure, fruition is for Eucken vested in the very struggle through which we strive inwardly towards what is deepest in ourselves. Like Nelson, or William of Orange, we are to find our sublimest self-possession in the thick of battle. Or, to resort to a more trivial comparison, the very hum and vibration of action must be eloquent of the inward restfulness of our life, as a spinning-top is still if it spins fast, or a tuning-fork musical if its trembling is sufficiently rapid. And yet it is not a mere endless agitation which brings to life this healing and repose. The task implies a goal, and it is the steadying presence, the intimate indwelling of what ought to be realized, which relieves the stress of action and takes the fever from our life. The ' Eternal ' is thus at once datum and problem, fact and task. As fact, it can subsist for us only through a sustained decision, which is the supreme test of our spiritual faith. And the fact which we thus sustain is nothing completed which we can hold before us, as we can a rose or an orange. It is a spiritual world built to the music of our own activity, and such music is still far from being a finished symphony. We, the builders, remain a problem to ourselves, and the world in which we seek to realize our universal nature is similarly a problem, the supreme life-problem both of man and of humanity. The nerve of Eucken's philosophy of life is to be found in this activistic reconciliation of datum and problem, fact and task. But underlying it there is a still deeper conviction, which has indeed found scantier expression in his more recent writings, though it is none 144 GOD WITH US the less implied even when not explicitly emphasized the conviction, namely, that the life of fruitive action has its roots in the Gemutsleben, or life of the Heart. The spiritual life in which human and divine meet has its serene depths and intimacies, its sublime passivities as well as its heroic inspirations and achievements ; and it must needs be a holy intercourse as well as a sacred solidarity for spiritual achievement, since intercourse is itself the most fundamental form which interaction can take. God and man initially meet where man is most inward, and the heart, or Gemiit, is the birthplace of man's spiritual life. This Gemiit is no mere feeling or emotion, but the concentration-centre of our full personal experience. ' It is the spiritual home to which our life incessantly returns for its re- vivification. It is also the vital starting-point for that constructive philosophy of life which Eucken has called ' the New Idealism.' CHAPTER VIII. THE PASSION OF LOVE. WHAT are we to understand by a ' passion ' ? The term ' passion ' is used popularly in two different senses. It may indicate either a sudden violent emo- tion, or else a deep and steadfast sentiment. In the first case it is a passion of a passion of grief, longing, rage, or indignation ; in the second case it is a passion for some object a passion for Truth, for Beauty, for this or that occupation or hobby. But whether it is a passing emotion or an abiding sentiment, passion is always that which bears the individual, as it were, passively along, something either incontrollable or else mightily controlling the individual. Passions of tend to be uncontrollable our passions for things, our inspired enthusiasms, control us, and in both cases the affection is so sudden or so strong that it overbears all others, and dominates the moment or the life. Now, the passion that controls us, the master- passion which, according to circumstances, sustains us or sweeps us along, cannot be identified with any single emotion : it is rather the permanent possibility of many emotions and desires, and of many kinds of emotion and desire. In the language of Professor Stout, ' it is a complex emotional disposition which M5 10 146 GOD WITH US manifests itself variously under varying conditions '; and ' these varying manifestations are the actual experiences which we call emotions.'* What Professor Stout calls an emotional disposition Mr. Alexander Shand calls a passion, in that sense of the word which we have just referred to as a passion for."\ As such it has innumerable forms of emotional manifestation. ' In the love of an object . . .' we read, ' there is pleasure in presence and desire in absence, hope or despondency in anticipation, fear in * ' A Manual of Psychology,' p. 578. f See Mr. Shand's article on M. Ribot's ' Theory of the Passions ' (Mind, October, 1907). Mr. Shand refers to love as a passion, a passion being ' an organized system ' (or 'succession') 'of emotions and desires' (id., p. 489). A passion thus denned is not an emotion, but ' a complex system of emotions ' (id., p. 493). Moreover, Mr. Shand gives reason for supposing (vide pp. 490-493) that love and hate are the only passions, or, at any rate, that ' if there be other passions than love and hate, they must be comparatively obscure and infrequent' (id., p. 493). Thus, anger and fear are not passions in the sense denned, but ' primary and independent emotions ' (id., p. 492). ' A stable fear, like an inconsolable sorrow, ... is always the same emotion ; but a passion is sometimes one emotion, sometimes another, according to circumstance ' (id., p. 491). Of the two passions of love and hate, love alone is native and fruitful. ' We grow into love naturally ; but we are driven into hate by a kind of inversion of our natural life. From the child to the old man, love multiplies and branches into new directions, reorganizing the same old emotions in new objects ; but hate is an ugly episode from which we are in a hurry to escape, unless our nature be peculiarly evil. Hence hate is so often a barren passion, which by destruction of its object destroys itself, and branches into no new systems ' (id., p. 491). Thus the one fundamental passion is love, and it is with the analysis of love that Mr. Shand is mainly concerned. THE PASSION OF LOVE 147 the expectation of its loss, injury or destruction, surprise or astonishment in its unexpected changes, anger when the course of our interest is opposed or frustrated, elation when we triumph over obstacles, satisfaction or disappointment in attaining our desire, regret in the loss, injury or destruction of the object, joy in its restoration or improvement, and admiration for its superior quality or excellence/* We may illustrate this emotional plasticity of the passion of love by a reference to the humbler affec- tions of the dog. A dog's love is not always fondling and caressing. This may be the appropriate expression under certain conditions ; but the affection of a dog for its master may express itself in many other ways in active delight when it sees its master take his cap from the peg, or seize a stick when in the vicinity of a pond ; it may show itself in subdued, almost tearful sadness when it sees that it is being left behind ; in anger and fury when its master is attacked ; in jealousy or disgust when it perceives attentions being lavished on the cat. All these emotional forms, their changes and their character, become first intelligible when regarded as the varying manifestation of a single permanent passion of love and devotion. Let us take other illustrations exemplifying this complex and fundamental character of passion. M. Menegoz, the protagonist of Modern Fideism, some- time colleague of the late Auguste Sabatier in the Faculty of Protestant Theology at Paris, gives to faith the dominant function which Mr. Shand ascribes to love. Faith, for Professor Menegoz, takes love's * See Mr. Shand's article on ' Character and the Emotions ' (Mind, New Series, No. 18, April, 1896, pp. 217, 218). 10 2 148 GOD WITH US place as the fundamental passion. ' As in the Bible,' we read, ' so in our concrete life of every day, Faith will appear under a variety of forms. Sometimes it will express itself as repentance and the return to goodness, sometimes as filial trust in the divine provi- dence, sometimes as fidelity to a difficult duty, some- times as a faith in remission of sins, free pardon, and the mercy of God, sometimes as the intimate com- munion with Christ, sometimes as devotion to the Church, sometimes as the bold avowal of religious truth, sometimes as the practice of works of charity, sometimes as the spirit of sacrifice for the propagation of the Gospel. There is no such thing as Faith bare and abstract. It is an active, spiritual force, express- ing itself at each moment of our life in a living, concrete, definite form. 5 * A good corrective of any one-sidedness in M. Mene- goz's glorification of faith as the presiding genius of religious emotion will be found in the thirteenth chapter of the First Epistle to "the Corinthians. This is the locus classicus of the theory of love as a complex passion, showing diversity of manifestation. ' Love suffereth long, and is kind ; love envieth not ; love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not its own, is not provoked, taketh not account of evil ; rejoiceth not in unrighteous- ness, but rejoiceth with the truth ; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Love never faileth.' We have only to trans - * ' Publications diverses sur le Fideisme,' p. 210. See also id., p. 112, and p. 113: 'Faith is continually specifying itself. . . . The faith of Jesus took specialized form in his fidelity to his vocation.' THE PASSION OF LOVE 149 late these various expressions of love from the language of action into that of emotion to have the best possible illustration of Mr. Shand's theory of love as a passion. From the Pauline conception of Love as the supreme passion it is no far cry to Plato's conception of the function of Justice, as stated and developed in the ' Republic/ We can do no more, however, than just note the interesting parallel between the Christian view of Love as lord of the emotions and the Platonic view of Justice as the intimate soul of Order, alike in the indi- vidual and in the State, expressing itself in and through the virtues of temperance, courage and wisdom, and binding these distinct activities harmoniously together. Of the various emotions through which a passion may express itself, it may be that one is more central and dominant than the rest. For Mr. Shand the fundamental emotion of love is joy. ' Joy,' as he puts it, ' seems to be the fundamental, the indispensable emotion in the development of love ' (id., p. 500). Without the guiding agency of joy, love simply could not grow. ' If, earlier or later, joy were not felt in the presence of the object, there would be no feeling of pain in its absence, no sorrow in its injury or destruction, no desire for its presence, possession, or improvement, no hopes or anxieties on its behalf, no disappointment in our expectations of it, no despon- dencies at failure to reach it, to help it, or be reconciled to it, and no regrets for its injury or neglect ; and therefore no love ' (id., p. 496). In particular, it is in and through the emotion of joy, though perhaps ' chiefly in the recurrence of joy after sorrow and desire ' (id., p. 495), that is constituted ' that valua- 150 GOD WITH US tion of the object in and for itself/ that ' intrinsic valuation of the object ' which is ' an essential feature of all love ' (id., p. 495). In the joy which the true lover feels in the mere presence of the one he loves there is a valuation of the beloved for her own sake, a valuation conspicuously absent in ' the restless appetite of sex ' (id., p. 496). We meet with a similar valuation in the mother's ' tender delight in the sight of her offspring ' (id., p. 496) . Is it not, indeed, this dis- interested valuation of the object which differentiates true joy from pleasure, and gives it its spiritual quality ? Mr. Shand points out that mere interest as such will not give us this respect of the object for its own sake which is indispensable to true love. We are interested in whatever arouses our curiosity. ' But such interest does not lead to love unless there arise an enjoyment in the thing for itself. For as soon as our curiosity is satisfied, we are done with that thing, and pass on to some other ' (id., p. 500). If it is to pass into joy, the interest must be deep or else intense, must be disinterested, and capable of an ideal attachment to its object. It is in and through this reverential joy in an object that love is raised from its instinctive basis to the passional level. For such joy, by safeguarding the individuality of the object, excites love to that very attitude towards its object which gives it the power and purity of a passion. ' Thus, while an unsatisfied impulse often precedes the first emotion of joy, until its object be discovered and joy for it be felt, the instinct cannot develop into passion, having no common centre to which its several emotions can be referred ' (id., p. 505). THE PASSION OF LOVE 151 But though joy is thus indispensable to love, Mr. Shand does not contend that the love-passion passes with the cessation of joy. ' Having developed the love, the joy may now be absent for long intervals without destroying the love ' (id., p. 500). The memory of the joy still remains to sweeten those sorrows which are as inseparable from the develop- ment of love as are the more positive joys from which it springs. Moreover, not only joy, but also sorrow, may be temporarily absent from love, without love ceasing to exist. Thinking may neutralize emotion without killing the passion. Indeed, 'since passion requires so much thought and reflection to organize its emotions and desires, and to accomplish and har- monize its ends, there will be recurrent phases of its history in which it is without emotion ' (id., p. 490). A passion, though it must imply the permanent possi- bility of emotion, need not be at any given moment emotionally active. Love ' is always a great possi- bility.' Moreover, even in its emotional manifestations, it has more possibilities than those which come to fruition. ' For if it is now inconsolable grief, or frustrated desire, or a final hope of reunion, or remorse for wrongs done to a loved object, the same disposition which caused these emotions in certain situations would in others have caused different emotions ' Mr. Shand clinches his discussion of the nature of love by supplying what he calls its causal definition. ' Love,' we read, ' is the system which, under the action of joy, organizes the dispositions of the primary emotions and desires, and of the prospective and re- trospective emotions, on behalf of one and the same 152 GOD WITH US object, and which, according to circumstances, is manifested either as emotion or desire ' (id., p. 501). It would be irrelevant to our purpose to enter into the detail of this psychological definition of love. We have already said enough, perhaps, to bring out what is essential in Mr. Shand's conception of the passion. The central thesis is that love is not a mere emotion or a mere desire, but a passion that is, an organized system of emotions and desires and that this passion develops through the predominant in- fluence of an emotion the emotion of joy whose function it is to confer on, and find in, the object towards which the passion is directed a true intrinsic value. The theory that joy is the guiding emotion of love is of capital importance for a religious philosophy of life, and challenges our closest consideration. We would note, in the first place, that joy can fulfil its supreme function as the ' soul ' of love only in so far as it can persist dimmed, it may be, or even submerged, but still potentially triumphant through all the sorrows which love's development brings with it. For the various tender emotions which serve to express the passion of love have all a strain of sorrow in them,* so that love's ' fundamental emotion ' or principle, as we conceive it, must be stronger and deeper than the power of sorrow. In his chapter on the Tender Emotions, Mr. Shand compares the motor impulse of sorrow with that of joy. He points out that sorrow is by nature both faithful and redemptive, that its characteristic impulse is at once to cling to its object and to restore or renew * Vide ' Groundwork of Psychology/ by G. F. Stout, p. 217. THE PASSION OF LOVE 153 it. ' Sorrow, as a primary emotion, has its own com- plex striving. It is not the same as that of other painful emotions. Anger strives to injure or pain its object ; Fear to hide or flee from it ; Disgust to avoid or reject it ; but Sorrow just to cling to it ' (id., p. 204). Again, ' Sorrow has a second characteristic impulse, which may be repressed, but is never extinguished. When its object is injured or defective, it strives to restore or improve it. And this impulse goes out not only to persons, but things to broken glass, to holes and rents and stains, to everything we value, and whose defacement we regret ' (id., p. 204). This second impulse, according to Mr. Shand, is not found in the emotion of joy. For though joy, like sorrow, ' tends to maintain the presence or thought of its object/ it ' tends to maintain this object as it is, not to improve it. For where there is nothing present to arouse grief, there is no impulse to restore or im- prove ' (id., p. 216). Now, granting that joy and sorrow alike tend to maintain the presence of their object, the question naturally suggests itself whether it is the strain of joy in the sorrow, or the strain of sorrow in the joy, which is the deeper source of this impulse. It is evident from Mr. Shand's own account of this develop- ment of love through successive episodes of joy, sorrow, and desire, that the sorrow in love has its acquired aura of joy, and joy its hidden vein of sorrow ; so that both joy and sorrow must be mutually involved in all the activities of love, including that of the main- tenance of the object towards which love is directed. But it may well be that, of the two emotions of joy and sorrow, one is more fundamentally involved in this 154 GOD WITH US activity than the other. Let us, then, consider the facts. Our joy in an object turns towards sorrow when the object is taken from us, and a strong desire for its recovery springs into being, a desire for a vanished joy, as well as for a lost object. With the recovery of the object, sorrow, bringing with it its impulse to restore or improve, passes into the joy of attainment, pro- foundly modifying the character of the joy. Our joy is now the joy of transcended sorrow, a joy which, through invasion of past grief, has become more jealous of intrusion, more watchful, and more clinging. More- over, the sense of transitoriness won from the insight of sorrow awakens within the joy an impulse towards inwardness, an impulse to seek for that in its object which cannot pass lightly away, but shall be proof against loss and estrangement. We may therefore truly say that it is sorrow which infects the abandon- ment of joy with the subdued yet mobile anxieties involved in the attitude of ' clinging.' But the impulse to rest freely in an object is more fundamental than the impulse to cling tightly to it, so that, as it is joy which bids us expand towards the object and rest within it, it would seem that the tendency to hold and maintain is more truly characteristic of joy than of sorrow. Both emotions are involved in the impulse of maintenance, as Mr. Shand truly insists, but our analysis would tend to show that this impulse is more truly a joy-impulse than an impulse of sorrow. The distinctive impulse of sorrow is rather the redemptive tendency which Mr. Shand refers to as sorrow's ' second characteristic impulse/ We would even say that it is the power of this redemptive impulse THE PASSION OF LOVE 155 which is sorrow's essential contribution to the vitality and efficiency of the still deeper power of joy. Do we not find that, as joy and sorrow blend in the developed activities of love, the impulse to recover or regain enters integrally, with rejuvenating effect, into the impulse to retain ? The sorrow-motive latent in our joy inspires the desire to protect the object of our passion against all occasions of further sorrow ; and, in proportion as our attachment grows deeper, this desire, born of past sorrow, becomes an aspiration towards the eternal, towards that which cannot be taken from us an aspiration which fortifies the fruition of joy, inducing within the very restfulness of joy a progress towards a deeper attainment and a more inward peace. Sorrow is thus the hidden spur to our quest of the immortal, covertly directing the expansive tendencies of joy in the direction of in- wardness and depth. And yet, though it is the inwrought strain of sorrow which emotionally controls joy's tendency to abandon- ment, and directs it towards inwardness and spiritual depth, joy still remains the dominant principle of love. Who would wish to minimize the saving virtues of sorrow ? But we must remember, in the first place, that it is not sorrow, as such, which heals, but a sorrow engaged in seeking for a joy which it has lost, so that in last resort it is the joy immanent in sorrow which sustains the redemptive impulse. Moreover, it is joy's distinctive and positive function to vindicate the intrinsic value of its object, to be glad in it for its own sake, and so give it that inward dignity which, as it stirs our wonder and admiration, and awakens the spontaneous reverence of love, exalts us above our- 156 GOD WITH US selves, and marvellously enriches our spiritual insight. And once again it is the experience of joy which shows us what such exaltation truly implies. For joy, unlike sorrow, which in itself has a contracting influence on the life, and implies depression rather than exaltation, is essentially a vital expansion. Joy in the object means self -enlargement, for in loving the object for its own sake we are demonstrating our capacity to live on through the life of another. Our plasticity to the vital needs of others reveals the power we possess to penetrate undisintegrated the great realm of life, and find ourselves afresh in the joy of each new intimacy. Hence, when in disinterested joy we ' erect ourselves above ourselves,' we are rising to our own true spiritual stature, maximizing our individu- ality, enlarging our own soul-room, and acquiring for ourselves the freedom of the City of Man. It is in this sense that we realize through disinterested joy the meaning of self -transcendence. It would appear, then, that the impulse to rest freely in an object is more fundamental than the impulse to cling tightly to it ; fruition more funda- mental than the aspiration which develops and fortifies it. Hence, whether we consider the clinging or the redemptive impulse of sorrow, we seem led in either case to the same result to the conclusion, namely, that joy is deeper than sorrow, and more essential to love. If we endeavour at this point to sum up in a word the main conclusions of the foregoing discussion con- cerning the nature of joy, we would say, in close sympathy with the views of Mr. Shand, that joy, as the vital source at once of our own self-ennoblement THE PASSION OF LOVE 157 and of the wonder, respect, admiration, reverence with which we venture into the secrets of other lives and other ways than ours, is indeed the spiritual principle, the emotion directrice, of love. Such joy is a delight in the object loved, a joy which in virtue of its expansive abandonment, bears into the love with which we inwardly search the object our freest and most generous selfhood. Our joy insures that love shall be reverent in love's way of that which it loves, that it shall be reserved and yet tender, reverential and yet self- communicative, and all without any spiritual strain, since joy develops naturally through a love which is not only reverent of otherness, but self-true or self- sincere. It is thus native to joy to work for the common good, and to set its own distinctive seal upon its work. The true common good, as we conceive it, is that which springs from joy as its fountain-head. The capacity to revere another as itself finds its culminating expression in Love's universalism. The law of Love is Inclusiveness. Love's good is the common good. It nourishes its own being in and through the very act of self -communication. It is the great transformer of degraded energy, for the utter absence of self-assertiveness, distinctive of the soul that really loves, enables it to work within the self- will of another without provoking any spirit of anta- gonistic self-assertion. Working inwardly, it can carry on its healing, redeeming function, disintegrating selfishness, liberating energies which in self-will obstruct and cancel each other, and reorienting them so that they all eventually conspire to carry this same love- work further afield. And the love that helps another 158 GOD WITH US also helps itself, for helping, saving, restoring, is love's natural function, whereby it purifies itself and realizes a fuller and intenser life. Having no envy, it cannot feel the competition of others as an injustice to itself, but is free to bend all its energies to ennobling the competitive impulse in others, and directing ambition into channels of social service. And if love is without envy, it is also without pride. It receives with as much gladness as it gives. It is as triumphant in its gratitude as in its generosity. The currents of the common good can thus circulate freely where love is the ruling principle, for where love is, there envy and pride are not. There is no power that can hold out against love ; for love, by one and the same movement, makes for personal freedom and social solidarity. The passions of self-will, on the other hand, are all more or less self-destructive, for they seek some exclusive good in and through society i.e., in and through a medium whose true good is the good of solidarity, inclusive and common to all. Ends and means are thus at cross- purposes, and precious energies run tragically to waste. It is the all-inclusiveness of love which inspires its devotees with the passion for oneness. For if every movement of true love is a cementing influence, and there is no limit to its action, save in weaknesses and ignorances and evils which are ever clashing with each other and cancelling each other's work, it would seem to follow that that Spiritual Life of Love which our religious experience calls God must itself be inclusive of every redeemable life and quality. God is One because God is Love. For any existent two-foldness which implied spiritual separation would be a challenge THE PASSION OF LOVE 159 to love, whose very function it is to turn the barrier of separation into the bridge of communion. The Monism of the Fruition Philosophy is thus the Monism of Love. And this Monism is the true Monism of Freedom, for it is the conviction that God is Love, and that the New Life is a love-life, which alone makes clear the intimate relation between freedom and self- surrender. ' Love God and please yourself is a safe maxim of morality where the love is religiously true, for the life of the self, though distinct, is no longer separate from that of God ; and in surrendering to love, we surrender to a power whose concern for the spiritual possibilities of our human nature must be deeper than any concern we may have in the integrity of our personal freedom. The service of Love is perfect free- dom, for the Master would not be Love did he not respect to the uttermost the moral inwardness of the nature that submits itself. Such service makes us doubly free : it frees the higher from the tyranny of the lower self ; it also secures for this higher self the positive religious freedom of the Spiritual Life. The moral worth of love may be measured by its capacity for reverence, the healthfulness of its freedom by the respect it shows for that which it adores. Con- science itself is just the reverence of our whole being for that which is most intrinsically lovable. It is our love's reverence for God. All disinterested love is love that reveres its object. The artist who worships beauty in the flower is a truer, more disinterested flower-lover than the child who gathers for the pleasure of picking, smelling, and carrying the booty home. The naturalist who studies the life of animals and birds in their native haunts is a better lover of Nature 160 GOD WITH US than the sportsman who kills the same for sport. The same law obtains in human relationships. Human love rings true in proportion as the personality of the person loved is respected by the lover. The senti- mental lover who considers his own feelings rather than the dignity of the person for whom he languishes is less a lover than a sentimentalist. On the other hand, the lover who considers his own dignity rather than the feelings of the one he professes to love knows less of love than of pride. The reverence of true love for its object is not some- thing other than the love itself. It is that self- specification which love undergoes when its object acquires for it a spiritual meaning and value. The respect for selfhood which grows pari passu with the development of love is no mere concomitant of such development. Not only is it true that we acquire, as persons, our spiritual distinctness precisely in pro- portion as we come to see ourselves in the religious light of love, but the distinctness is a function of the intimacy which reverences most where it loves deepest. The analogy from the physical heavens, though it can hint but darkly of the love-world, may still distantly assist the argument by showing that a regime of uni- versal attraction need not imply the fusion of worlds into one central, distinctionless conglomerate, but that, as planetary and stellar systems may still exist, not only in despite of, but in virtue of, the forces which are ever drawing them together, so the selves of a love-world may concentrate inwardly upon dis- tinct personality-centres in virtue of the very vitality of love within which they move and have their being. The conception of Love as the all-inclusive passion, THE PASSION OF LOVE 161 as the passion which aims at the common good, suggests the important question as to the relation of love to volition. It is, indeed, more usual to approach the problem of the Common Good from the standpoint of volition than from that of passion or emotion. The problem certainly concerns the moral will i.e., the self as active in deliberation and decision and con- cerns it most vitally. This, at least, is the conviction of all who deny that the Common Good is a mere result of natural selection, operating amid the complex inter- play of selfish interests, but accept it in a teleological spirit and on idealistic premisses as a motive of con- duct. Our own position being radically idealistic, we conceive the Common Good as an End of action, not in the abstract sense of the term ' end ' as equivalent to ' ending ' or ' terminus/ but in its concreter sense of a goal striven after, however blindly, and, in some ideally foreshadowed form, immanent in the will as a decisive principle of action. But it must not be supposed that in thus maintaining the necessity of the good-will for the promotion of the common good we are in any way substituting, as the spiritual principle of conduct, the will to be good for the passional joy in the object, thereby perplexing, and even stultifying, our previous conclusions. A passional joy in the object, as we understand this principle of love, is the will to be good in its most effective form that form in which the will to have one's own way has become chastened and transfigured into a reverential love for the ways of God. Moreover, as we have already seen, in treating of the relation of morality to religion, the fruitional experience which all disinterested joy presupposes in no way implies an extinguished or ii 162 GOD WITH US superseded will, but rather a will at peace with itself, a will which through surrender to love has already won the key to its religious freedom. We may therefore, without inconsistency, hail love's joy in its object as the pure fruitional form of the will to be good ; and when the joy of life, overborne by pain or distress, disappears as a present emotion, we may still conceive it as functional in a latent volitional form as a will to be faithful to the end, for instance, or as a sense of duty in which the joy of service has shrunk, through the stress of trial, into a mere concentrated cry of the will.* The intimate relation between the joy of love and the will to be good conceived as principles of moral conduct is still clearly apparent when we accept the * This view as to the intrinsically volitional character of love as a passion is in entire sympathy with the definition which Mr. Shand gives of love as ' an organized succession of desires and emotions, involving self-control, including an emotional belief in the intrinsic value of its object, and pos- sessing recurrent passages in its history more or less long and frequent, in which the concentration of its thoughts does not allow of the formation of definite emotions.' The organizing of desire through self-control, the subordination of impulse to system, so that lesser desires are subordinated to greater (id., p. 488), the ' thought and reflection ' i.e., the delibera- tion expended on this work of organization (id., p. 490) are all functions of will, so that love, as Mr. Shand interprets it, is a passion only in virtue of its being also a passional volition. Moreover, Mr. Shand interprets the ' self-control ' which he introduces into his definition of love in a way which clearly shows that it is conceived not as a mere result, but as a prin- ciple of development. ' In every passion,' he writes, ' there is a system of self-control regulating more or less efficiently the intensity and behaviour of its emotions ; whereas, when emotions act independently, there is at most the restraint which one exerts on the others ; there is no system of self- restraint within the emotion ' (id., p. 488). THE PASSION OF LOVE 163 interpretation of ' the will to be good ' as given in Professor T. H. Green's ' Prolegomena to Ethics/ Here we find the ideal of a Common Good based strictly on the will to be good, with results essentially analogous to those we reach when we start from the fruitional or passional standpoint. ' The only good/ writes Professor Green, ' in the pursuit of which there can be no competition of in- terests, the only good which is really common to all who may pursue it, is that which consists in the universal will to be good in the settled disposition on each man's part to make the most and best of humanity in his own person and in the persons of others. The conviction of a community of good for all men can never be really harmonized with our notions of what is good, so long as anything else than self- devotion to an ideal of mutual service is the end by reference to which these notions are formed. Civil society may be, and is, founded on the idea of there being a common good, but that idea, in relation to the less favoured members of society, is in effect un- realized, and it is unrealized because the good is being sought in objects which admit of being competed for. They are of such a kind that they cannot be equally attained by all. The success of some in obtaining them is incompatible with the success of others. Until the object generally sought as good comes to be a state of mind or character, of which the attain- ment, or approach to attainment, by each is itself a contribution to its attainment by everyone else, social life must continue to be one of war a war, indeed, in which the neutral ground is constantly being extended, and which is itself constantly yielding new II 2 164 GOD WITH US tendencies to peace, but in which, at the same time, new vistas of hostile interests with new prospects of failure for the weaker, are as constantly opening/* Green makes his meaning still more explicit by reference to forms of common good which are only accidentally such, seeing that the motive is no longer the will to be good, but desire for pleasure. Thus, in the case of buying and selling, the result may well be satisfactory to both parties in the transaction. ' A's desire for the pleasure to be got by the possession of some article leads him to give B a price for it, which enables B, in turn, to obtain some pleasure that he desires. But even in this case it is clear, not only that the desires of A and B, as desires for pleasures, are not directed to a common object, but that, if left to their natural course, they would lead to conflict ' (id., p. 334). For, qua desiring pleasure, A ' has an aversion to the loss of means to other pleasures ' involved in his paying a price for what he buys from B ' (id., p. 385). ' There are also pleasures/ adds Green in a footnote, f such as the enjoyment of the common air and sunshine, of which the sources cannot be appropriated, and for which, therefore, under the simplest conditions of life, the desire as entertained by different men cannot tend to conflict. Under any other conditions, however, the opportunity for enjoying such pleasures, though not the source of them, would become matter of competition, and thereupon the desire even for them would become a tendency to conflict/ The passages which we have just quoted serve to * ' Prolegomena to Ethics/ fifth edition, pp. 288, 289. t Id., p. 335. THE PASSION OF LOVE 165 emphasize from different points of view this one single point that that, namely, which is intrinsically, and not merely incidentally, a common good can be realized only when the good is sought in ' an object for which there can be no competition between man and man ' (id., p. 336), in an object which, by its very nature, excludes all possibility of competition for it. And this object is more precisely defined as that of making the most and best of humanity, both in our own person and in the persons of others. The pursuit of the Common Good, as Green thus analyses it, rests on a thoroughgoing respect for personality, such as is im- plied in the Gospel precept to love our neighbour as ourselves, and formulated in Kant's Imperative of the Practical Reason : ' Always treat humanity, both in your own person and in the persons of others, as an end, and never merely as a means.'* The pursuit and attainment of the Common Good is, in a word, founded on the sacredness of the person, and the thesis that the Order of Love is based on joy in the object is but the concreter expression of this very conviction in terms of our passional nature ; for, as we saw, it is joy's distinctive function to attach intrinsic value to the object it delights in, to cherish it for its own sake, and thus, by virtue of the very disinterestedness of this valuation, to find its own good in that of its object. When we speak of the sacredness of the person as the indispensable basis for the realization of a Common Good, the personality we have in view is that of the Spiritual Order. Here the interests which attach to individuality are so wedded to those which concern * Cf. Edward Caird, ' The Critical Philosophy of Kant/ ii. 219, ii. 278, 279. 166 GOD WITH US the realization of the Order that the sacredness of the person must needs imply the sacredness of the Cause* with which the personality is so indissolubly bound up. A spiritual personality, as we have already seen, is also a spiritual world: the personal principle, though it exists and acts in vital distinction from the world with whose realization its own self-development is so intimately connected, is distinct from it only as its principle, and not in any sense which implies a separa- tion from it. On the other hand, the infinite realm of divine possibilities within which our spiritual nature opens can define itself only as a personal world. Hence when the object of love's delight is conceived as a person, the joy which goes out to the person must through this same movement of devotion go out to the Cause which the personality at once represents and embodies. Father Tyrrell, in his ' Lex Credendi/ has excellently brought out the significance of this truth in relation to the central problem of the Christian's love for Christ. He finds ' the key to true devotion ' in the motto, ' For my sake and the Gospel's,' and adds, with a reference to Abbe Grou's book on ' The Charac- teristics of True Devotion ' : ' It is not enough to love Christ in any way ; we must love Him precisely as the representative and embodiment of the cause for which He lived and died, the cause of the Gospel, of the Kingdom of God. . . . Only when we understand and feel with that which was the central interest of His life, that sovereign end with which He identified Himself, which was the core of His moral personality * ' Cause ' here signifies ' that for which a man works,' and not ' that which produces an effect.' THE PASSION OF LOVE 167 and spirit ; only when we love that in Him to which He most wanted to win our love, and for which alone He cared to be loved only then is our loving interest in all other things that concern Him a pure and wholly acceptable sentiment, an outflow or redundancy of that central and substantial devotion to the Divinity revealed in Him.'* And what is true of the joy of love also holds true of its sorrow. The pity turned towards the sufferings of Christ is turned back by the Sufferer upon those who sorrow for Him. ' " Weep not for Me," He says to the women, on His way to Calvary, " but weep for yourselves and your children " (id., p. 30). To sorrow for Him is to sorrow with Him, and to sorrow with Him is to cling to His Cause and work with Him for the redeeming of the world. ' The true sentiment of pity/ in a word, ' must flow not from any sort of love of Him who suffers, but from that sort which He most desires ' (id., p. 30). The foregoing analysis of the passion of love as developed through joy in the object will, no doubt, have suggested the just conclusion that the principle of joyous devotion to an object is but the principle of Fruition in another form. For once we admit that the joyous devotion of love is a power that works for unity, harmony and solidarity, based on reverence for the object loved, we raise at once the old problem as to whether these ends or motives are merely ideal, or in some sense real. We have already discussed this fundamental problem at some length, and the conclusion we reached was that the end or motive was neither a mere ideal (i.e., an ideal transcendent, but * ' Lex Credendi, a Sequel to Lex Orandi,' by George Tyrrell, pp. 23, 30. 168 GOD WITH US not immanent, beckoning us from afar, and yet not intimately inspiring us), nor the ideal as already realized, but a power born of the soul's union with the Spiritual Life, and unintelligible apart from this union. On this view, the disinterested joy of love has its source in the individual's passional union with the Spiritual Life, and the principle of fruition, which maintains as the fundamental spiritual fact the union of human and divine, and holds that all spiritual striving is a religious endeavour a striving with God for the realization of a God-Heaven or Spiritual- World must needs imply that reverential love of the object, that joy in it for its own sake, which, following Mr. Shand, we have referred to as joy in the object. The theory of a love which works by joy is thus the natural and, indeed, inevitable development of a Philosophy of Fruition. NOTE. Modern Psychology has every reason to be grate- ful for the pioneering work of Mr. Shand in connection with the emotions of our ideational consciousness, and idealists in particular will be grateful for the idealistic spirit in which his theories are conceived and developed. The article on ' Character and the Emotions ' (Mind, New Series, vol. v.) marks an epoch in the history of the Psycho- logy of Sentiment,* and the start thus made has been followed up by Mr. Shand in a chapter on ' The Sources of Tender Emotion ' (which appears as chap. xvi. in Pro- fessor G. F. Stout's ' Groundwork of Psychology '), and in the article in Mind on M. Ribot's ' Theory of the Passions.' * The idea of a spiritual principle of which all virtues are the varied specifications is familiar in Idealistic Ethics. It is the systematic application of the idea in its psychological form which constitutes the originality of Mr. Shand 's Theory of the Passions, and its essential interest lies in its suggestion of a rebirth of Idealism on a psychological basis. THE PASSION OF LOVE 169 Mr. Shand's views have, moreover, been adopted by Pro- fessor Stout, and developed by him on the lines of his own theory of dispositions in the ' Manual of Psychology,' book iv., chap, ix., pp. 575-580 ; in the ' Groundwork of Psychology/ chap. xvii. ; and in unpublished writings on the same subject. The sympathetic reader of Mr. Shand's work will be struck by the idealistic spirit which pervades his treatment of his subject. I am not sure whether Mr. Shand would thank me for the word, but I am convinced that it is just ; for it appears to me that the essential originality of this whole work of Mr. Shand consists precisely in its being an application in the field of Psychology of Hegel's dis- tinctively idealistic conception of Identity as Identity in Difference, or Organic Unity.* This view of Identity is * ' Modern Philosophy/ writes Hegel (vide ' The Logic of Hegel/ translated by William Wallace, p. 219), 'has often been nicknamed the Philosophy of Identity ; but . . . it is precisely Philosophy, and in particular speculative logic, which lays bare the nothingness of the abstract, un- differentiated identity, known to understanding, though it also undoubtedly urges its disciples not to rest at mere diversity, but to ascertain the inner unity of all existence.' In discussing the meaning of ' Identity/ as embodied in the so-called first Law of Thought that ' A is A/ Hegel has little trouble in discrediting it. If we cannot get beyond such state- ments as ' a planet is a planet/ ' mind is well, mind ' we have not fulfilled even the first requirements of a statement which is to state something about something else. Moreover, the repeated application of this Law of Identity the sea is the sea, the moon is the moon, the air is the air leaves us with a number of unrelated identities with what Hegel calls diversity or variety. We have not yet got to difference, foi difference implies a relation between two things that differ. In fact, the question ' How Identity comes to Difference ' is meaningless on the abstract view of Identity ; for such Identity cannot possibly supply us with any standing-ground from which we could effect the transition. The philosophy based 170 GOD WITH US implied not only in Mr. Shand's very conception of a passion as that which remains identical with itself in and through all the variety of its emotional manifestations, but also in the concluding words of his recent article in Mind, in which he asserts that whether the term ' love ' be employed in a wider or narrower sense, whether it be taken to include or exclude ' the instinct at its base/ ' there would still be preserved that fundamental distinction to which the whole of this article has been directed between any one of our emotional or appetitive dispositions and that system in on Abstract Identity is, therefore, logically undevelopable, for it cannot pass into difference (id., p. 215). It is, of course, possible for ' a third thing, the Agent of Comparison,' to establish external relations between the units of which this intrinsically non-interrelated variety is made up. We then have objects externally related to each other as like and unlike. It is the business of the Comparative Method to carry out these comparisons systematically, and Hegel fully admits the value of the results achieved by this method. ' Its results are indeed indispensable,' but he adds, ' they are still labours only preliminary to truly intelligent cognition.' The Categories of Comparison likeness and un- likeness soon reveal, in fact, their correlativity. Science takes no interest in comparing the radically unlike e.g., a pen and a camel but insists in its definitions and classifications on the differences standing out from a proximum genus, from the greatest possible amount of likeness. Briefly, ' in the case of difference, we like to see identity, and in the case of identity we like to see difference ' (id., p. 216). It is from the basis of these preliminary considerations that Hegel reaches forward to the true conception of an identity to which difference is essential, a conception which pervades his whole philosophical work ; for if there is one doctrine which is more distinctly Hegelian than any other, it is the doctrine that true unity is not structureless and static, an identity that excludes difference, but is the identity of an Idea or Spiritual Principle which maintains itself in and through its differentiations . THE PASSION OF LOVE 171 which they are organized with or without consciousness of their object and end.' This theory of the organic unity of passion forces upon us the crucial question as to the nature of the unifying principle which thus organizes a related plexus of emotions and desires into a single system. Mr. Shand himself is inclined in this matter to start from empirical ground. He refrains from calling love a ' prin- ciple/ referring to it rather as an organized system or suc- cession of emotions and desires based on a very complex instinct. Moreover, this instinct itself the instinct on which the development of love is based ' is not any one of the instincts at the root of the primary emotions, nor all of them in a collection, but is their total existence as an organized system ' (id., p. 498). Thus, the maternal instinct in animals ' is in some way a system of many emotional dispositions, and the particular instincts con- nected with them, and gives rise to that emotion and conduct appropriate to the circumstances' (id., p. 499). If her young are in danger, the emotional disposition towards fear is excited, and manifests itself in the instinc- tive movements of flight or concealment ; if they are at- tacked, the emotional disposition excited is that of an anger which manifests itself in instinctive protective reactions ; if they are lost, we see the manifestations of sorrow and frustrated impulse displayed through the instinctive tendency to wander disconsolately in search of them, and so on indefinitely. At all stages, then, of love's development, from its instinc- tive basis upwards, its ultimate constitution appears as an organized system, whether of emotional dispositions with their corresponding motor instincts or of actual emotions and desires. But a system is inconceivable except in so far as its parts or factors are the manifold expression of the growth or operation of some single formative principle. Empiricism may dislike the ring of such terms as ' unifying principle,' as it chafes against such ideas as those of ' self ' and ' universe,' but it is only in so far as one is caged within the limitations of an abstract method that the 172 GOD WITH US imperativeness of a unifying principle for the formation of an organized system can be seriously contested. Thus, the whole systematized language of imitative gesture presup- poses as its formative principle that of intrinsic affinity between sign and thing signified, whereas the system of conventional signs presupposes that of a conventional cipher to which the dictionary is the artificial key.* Apart from these formative principles, language would be a mere ' broth of unintelligible syllables/ If love, then, is an organized system, there must be some formative principle which controls and unifies its develop- ment. And if we turn to Mr. Shand with apologies for the form in which the question is couched, and ask him to point out what this formative principle may be, it is quite plain that he must tell us that the principle of love is ' Joy in the Object.' For if joy is ' the system which organizes the dispositions of the primary emotions and desires, etc.,' the organizing is fulfilled, we read, ' under the action of joy' (id., p. 501). Moreover, when Mr. Shand is con- sidering the function of joy in the development of love, he points out that it is ' no mere otiose accompaniment '; on the contrary, it not only gives to the object a meaning and value which fits it for the worship of love, but so attaches love's service to it ' that not merely one of the emotions of its system, but all of them, and not merely at one time, but at various successive times, may find in this object an identical point of reference' (id., p. 499). But this is precisely the function of a unifying principle. It is, I think, a misfortune that in its reaction against the abstractions of an over-intellectualized Logic, Modern Psychology should have so largely forfeited the bracing and vivifying force of such conceptions as those of identity, principle, and transcendence, apart from whose support the idea of the spirit-life tends to grow distressingly thin. It is truly a great gain in concreteness that such a notion as that of 'joy in the object ' should be substituted for the psychologically barren concept of ' unifying principle,' but once the psychological notion has victoriously established * Cf. G. F. Stout, ' A Manual of Psychology.' p. 480. THE PASSION OF LOVE 173 itself, its rejection of the good services of the logical concept becomes most regrettable ; for though the logical concept cannot, qua logical, take the place of the psychological idea, it can strengthen it and deepen its meaning. It enables us, for instance, to conceive love's joy in an object as an ' identity in difference/ as a power which persists through all the changes in love's growth, passing with redeeming effect into the sorrows and depressions which so inevitably alternate with the gladnesses and triumphs of the passion, and, despite every variation of feeling-tone, remaining conscious of its own ability to sweeten the asperities of life as well as to ennoble its pleasures. The logical armoury of Hegelian Idealism is forbidding enough, but it is at least spiritually suggestive. It gives a skeletal draft of the spirit-life, suggesting through a kind of shadow- sketch the rich possibilities of the coloured canvas. The Hegelian categories cannot, indeed, inform us as to the meaning and value of joy in the development of love, but they can assist us in expressing our conviction that such joy is more than mere pleasure, and that the erection of joy into a principle, far from implying Hedonism, announces and establishes an idealistic philosophy of Fruition. It is a great gain to Psychology that Mr. Shand's treat- ment of joy presupposes throughout this logical apparatus ; though, anxious perhaps to avoid the appearance of evil, it keeps it well out of sight. And perhaps wisely, for the consequence of such reserve is that almost without know- ing it, and with scarcely a shock to empiricist prejudices, we are provided with a spiritual interpretation of the passion of love, and of joy, its central emotion. CHAPTER IX. PRAGMATISM AND RELIGIOUS IDEALISM. THE view of religious experience which we have so far been developing may already have suggested to readers of the ' Varieties ' and other works of Professor James certain connections, sympathetic and antipathetic, between the fundamentals of Pragmatism and those of Religious Idealism. It may be worth while to consider what these connections are, in so far, at least, as they serve to elucidate and develop the point of view we have already adopted. The religious significance of the pragmatic solution of the problem of life may, I think, be best understood in the light of a certain development of Professor James's thought clearly traceable in the succession of his writings, notably the ' Principles of Psychology,' the ' Will to Believe/ the ' Varieties of Religious Ex- perience,' and ' Pragmatism.' The great work on Psychology is written from a purely inductive standpoint. Psychology is there treated as a Natural Science, and the ' minds ' which are accepted as the main subject-matter of psychological study are studied as objects in a world of other objects (' Principles of Psychology,' i. 183). And the de- scriptive Psychology thus inductively built up rests, PRAGMATISM AND RELIGIOUS IDEALISM 175 consistently enough, on a physiological basis : so far as the interpretations of mental phenomena profess to be explanatory at all, they are given in terms of ' laws of neural habit/* It is on the lines marked out by this method of treatment that Professor James reaches his well-known conclusions concerning the nature of the Self, both as subject knowing and as object known. As object known, the Self appears to resolve itself into a mere sensation-complex ; as knower, it resolves itself into a postulate. ' In a sense,' writes Professor James, ' it may be truly said that, in one person at least, the " Self of selves," when carefully examined, is found to consist mainly of the collection of these peculiar motions in the head or between the head and throat ' (' Principles of Psychology/ i. 301). ' I do not for a moment say,' he goes on, ' that this is all it consists of, for I fully realize how desperately hard is introspec- tion in this field. But I feel quite sure that these cephalic motions are the portions of my innermost activity of which I am most distinctly aware. If the dim portions which I cannot yet define should prove to be like unto these distinct portions in me, and I like other men, it would follow that our entire feeling of spiritual activity, or what commonly passes by that name, is really a feeling of bodily activities whose exact nature is by most men overlooked.' And as regards the Self as knower, we have the following explicit state- ment : ' It seems as if consciousness as an inner activity were rather a postulate than a sensibly given fact, the postulate, namely, of a knower as correlative to all this known ' (' Elementary Text-Book of Psychology, ' p. 467) . * Cf. ' Principles of Psychology,' chapters on ' Habit/ ' Memory,' ' Association,' ' Emotion.' 176 GOD WITH US But if the radical empiricism of Professor James reveals itself here in a form which seems to say, ' The present passing pulse of thought can be known only as a sensation/ there is yet apparent in different parts of the treatise certain tendencies, partly 'subliminalist/ partly * pragmatist/ which set the problem of the Self in quite a different light. In the chapter on 'The Relation of Minds to other Things,' the reader's attention is drawn to the immense importance of recent experiments which conclusively prove that a man's personality is vastly more complex than the older Psychology took it to be. In particular, ' it must be admitted that, in certain persons at least, the total possible consciousness may be split into parts which coexist but mutually ignore each other ' (' Principles of Psychology,' i. 206). Ob- viously the Self is here treated neither as a postulate nor as a sensation-complex ; indeed it seems almost as though the Self were first acquiring its reality through this extension into the subliminal. But it is in the distinctively pragmatist chapter on Belief that we are made to realize the supreme reality of selfhood even in its more conscious forms. Belief is defined as the sense of reality, and of all objects which our belief thus invests with reality none is more indubitably believed in than the Self. The Self, we read, is ' the fons et origo of all reality.' All other reality is, as it were, derivative ' dangling ' from the Self as from a hook. It is thus manifest that the ' postulate ' has become very real indeed in fact, the most real thing in the Universe. This Belief in a Postulate finds its developed expres- sion in the ' Will to Believe/ The ' will to believe ' presupposes that there are certain decisions which we are compelled to make on grounds other than intel- PRAGMATISM AND RELIGIOUS IDEALISM 177 lectual. Of these the most fundamental bears on the Existence of a Personal God. Professor James denies that such existence can be proved as an ' Inevitable Inference/ but maintains that as the conduct of life cannot but be different according as we do or do not act as though such a God did exist, our very life is itself a prolonged pragmatic decision with regard to this living and momentous option. Thus the general thesis of the ' Will to Believe ' runs as follows : ' Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on fntellectual grounds ; for to say under such circumstances, " Do not decide, but leave the question open, "is itself a passional decision just like deciding yes or no and is attended with the same risk of losing the truth.' The central application of this thesis is in relation to the question, ' Shall I take the world religiously as a "Thou" or not ?' This living and momentous option is forced upon us, because to waive decision is here tantamount to self -committal. Scepticism is not avoidance of option ; it is option of a certain particular kind of risk : ' Better risk loss of truth than chance of error.' The religious consciousness says : ' Better risk chance of error than loss of truth ' (' The Will to Believe,' p. 26). The belief in the Universe as a ' Thou ' is thus prag- matically accepted ; accepted, that is, ' as a practical working hypothesis to be tested by its practical results/ The belief in a postulate here becomes the acceptance, on risk, of the hypothesis of a Personal God. And this passional belief, by its very nature, invests this hypothesis with a living reality. ' To trust our reli- 12 178 GOD WITH US gious demands means, first of all, to live in the light of them, and to act as if the invisible world which they suggest were real' (id., p. 56). Professor James then goes on to argue that since the will at its best and deepest requires a Personal God, the existence of a Per- sonal God admits of being pragmatically proved ' as a hypothesis we are bound to make in the interests of our volitional nature.' ' At a single stroke, Theism changes the dead blank it, as also the equally powerless me, into a living Thou, with whom the whole man may have dealings ' (id., p. 127). There remains the further question of deciding how the passional acceptance of the Universe as ' Thou ' is itself to be interpreted. Here two main possibilities suggest themselves, for the term ' passional ' will bear a twofold interpretation. It may be understood as predominantly and primarily emotional and intuitive, or as predominantly and primarily volitional and active. If we except the issue which concerns the func- tion of thought in relation to our passional nature, we may, I think, truly say that the main interest in the further development of Professor James's philosophy lies in the attempt to deal justly and thoroughly with these two possibilities. Now, as Professor James is not one of those thinkers whose psychology and philosophy develop apart in air- tight compartments, we have good reason for supposing that in the contest between these two hypotheses, the emotional ' possibility ' is seriously handicapped. For his well-known theory of emotion reduces emotion in all its fundamental forms, e.g., love, fear, anger, pride, to a feeling of certain bodily changes or symptoms, to a plexus of organic sensation. ' If we fancy some PRAGMATISM AND RELIGIOUS IDEALISM 179 strong emotion, and then try to abstract from our con- sciousness of it all the feelings of its bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind, no " mind-stuff " out of which the emotion can be constituted, and that a cold and neutral state of intellectual perception is all that remains ' (' Principles of Psychology,' ii. 451). The bodily expression of emotion, qua felt, is the emotion. On the basis of such a theory as this, it is impossible to take an edifying view of the emotions, or to hold that love is the greatest thing in the world. In his study of Volition, on the other hand, Professor James makes his well-known indeterministic exit from the bondage of necessitarianism. Free-will is saved, though as by fire, and our volitional nature thus insured in advance an easy primacy over an emotionalism which is, after all, only a specific form of sensational experience. As the pragmatism in James's work reaches deeper than the sensationalism, so his respect for voluntary action necessarily reaches deeper than his respect for love. Bearing in mind what this handicap must needs imply, even to so fair-minded a thinker as Professor James, we pass on to the ' Varieties of Religious Expe- rience ' where the emotional or intuitive form of reli- gious consciousness is presented in many varied aspects and subjected to the pragmatic test. It is true that in discussing these forms of religious feeling the author maintains an attitude of judicial aloofness which has appealed to many readers as a striking mark of scientific disinterestedness. But it is manifest that in two ways at least the feeling-life of religion has a real attraction for the author. In the first place, both the crisis of 12 2 i8o GOD WITH US conversion and the life of saintliness,* as Professor James here studies them, appear to him to bear witness to the influx of a larger life through the medium of the subliminal. f The experiences he studies seem to show that God makes His entry into human life through the channels of man's buried self. The phenomena of sudden conversion, at any rate, point to the uprush of vital powers from the hidden depths of our being, carry- ing everything before them and flooding the conscious soul with ecstasy and the joy of deliverance ; and saint- liness itself is a regenerated state in which all the ordi- nary inhibitions that so check and minimize our total activity are swept away by a gust of conviction which even the conscious experient accepts as an inexplicable inspiration. It thus seems quite natural that a philo- sopher who has consistently shown an enthusiastic interest in the study of the subconscious should feel a spontaneous sympathy with froms of experience which, it would seem, so clearly bear the marks of subconscious inspiration. But there is a further reason why Professor James should feel attracted towards these types of religious experience. For their descriptive study suffices to show howintensely real they are to the experients them- selves. It is a form of realization which, though not in itself ostensibly pragmatic, challenges the pragmatist's keen interest in realities, and obliges him to discuss them in the light of his pragmatic criteria. And there is no doubt that Professor James himself is profoundly * Cf. ' The Varieties of Religious Experience/ p. 271 : ' The saintly character is the character for which spiritual emotions are the habitual centre of the personal energy.' t Cf. id., pp. 511-513- PRAGMATISM AND RELIGIOUS IDEALISM 181 impressed by the way in which the ecstasies of the saint and mystic stand the test of experience. Visitations which fill the soul not only with rapture but with the courage that despises poverty, disease and death, can- not but be impressive to a philosophy which attaches such supreme importance to these spiritual victories. We may take it, then, that though Professor James claims to know mysticism only from the outside, he still treats of the saint's experience con amove. He ac- cepts it as the revelation of an invisible order more exalted than the visible order in which uninspired mortals move and have their being.* But there are many varieties of religious experience, and the type that builds its faith on a possibility may be building as truly upon the rock as the type that builds upon the firmest sense of presence. Faith may be a venture as well as an assurance, and the religious value of each and every type of religious experience must be exclu- sively judged by the fruits which it brings forth. Professor James's sympathetic treatment of the saintliness that is rooted in a sense of Presence cannot, indeed, blind us to his own confessed preference for a faith fixed upon a God that is apprehended not as a Presence but as a Postulate. Let us, then, attempt to fix Professor James's own variety of religious belief as clearly as we can with a view to discovering the relation in which the spiritual life, as he conceives it, stands to the type of ethico-religious life we have been upholding, and to the Principle of Fruition which it implies. Perhaps the most significant of the earlier passages * Cf. ' The Varieties of Religious Experience,' pp. 283, 284. See also pp. 357-360, and 362-369. 182 GOD WITH US in Professor James's writings which bear vitally on what the writer would call his own over-belief, is a passage which occurs in the second of the Essays in ' The Will to Believe/ Professor James has been dis- cussing the question ' Is life worth living ?' to which his answer briefly runs : ' Yes, if you believe that it is ' (p. 62) . This belief which makes life worth living is a religious faith, i.e., a * faith in the existence of an unseen order of some kind in which the riddles of the natural order may be found explained ' (p. 51) . In what sense, then, are we to take the existence of this unseen order, if life is to be really worth the living ? Is the unseen world to be taken as eternally existing in finished per- fection whilst mortals struggle with their phantom pains and sorrows in this world of time and sense ? Or is it so vitally related to our own activity and belief that our belief in its existence is, paradoxically enough, a very condition of its existence ? Professor James asserts that for his own part life is worth living only in so far as his faith in the unseen is a faith in an order which he himself by his own spiritual activity and belief can help to bring into existence. ' I confess that I do not see,' he writes, in a deservedly famous passage, ' why the very existence of an invisible world may not in part depend on the personal response which any one of us may make to the religious appeal. God Himself, in short, may draw vital strength and increase of very being from our fidelity. For my own part, I do not know what the sweat and blood and tragedy of this life mean, if they mean anything short of this. If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But PRAGMATISM AND RELIGIOUS IDEALISM 183 it feels like a real fight as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our ideali- ties and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem ; and first of all to redeem our own hearts from atheisms and fears. For such a half-wild, half -saved universe our nature is adapted. The deepest thing in our nature is this Binnenleben (as a German doctor lately has called it), this dumb region of the heart in which we dwell alone with our willingnesses and unwillingnesses, our faiths and fears. As through the cracks and crannies of caverns those waters exude from the earth's bosom which then form the fountain-heads of springs, so in these crepuscular depths of personality the sources of all our outer deeds and decisions take their rise. Here is our deepest organ of communication with the nature of things ; and compared with these concrete move- ments of our soul, all abstract statements and scientific arguments the veto, e.g., which the strict positivist pronounces upon our faith sound to us like mere chatterings of the teeth. For here possibilities, not finished facts, are the realities with which we have actually to deal ; and to quote my friend William Salter, of the Philadelphia Ethical Society, " as the essence of courage is to stake one's life on a possibility, so the essence of faith is to believe that the possibility exists." ' I have quoted the passage in full, as we find con- centrated within it the main essentials of Professor James's philosophy of life. It discloses deep within us a hypersensitized soul-life, a subliminal appercep- tion of God, bringing God passionally near to us, so that we are not really alone with our faiths and fears ; and, moreover, by enforcing the supreme conviction 184 GOD WITH US that to believe in a possibility is to believe in what is more real for our will than any perfected reality, it suggests that God reveals Himself to us as the Supreme Possibility, so that our will and faith, whose very function it is to turn possibilities into actualities, and give reality to the unseen, may co-operate in the shaping of a Spiritual Order in which we shall, perhaps, some day see Him face to face. The closing words of ' The Varieties of Religious Experience ' echo this persuasion that our action is of vital consequence to the nature of things. ' Who knows whether the faithfulness of individuals here below to their own poor over-beliefs may not actually help God in turn to be more effectively faithful to His own greater tasks ?' And what is here expressed as a pious hope is for Professor James a matter of pragmatic religious faith, a conviction so far established that he considers it worth while to label it with the name of the ' crasser supernaturalism * (id., p. 520). ' Notwithstanding my own inability/ he writes, ' to accept either popular Christianity or scholastic theism, I suppose that my belief that in communion with the Ideal new force comes into the world, and new departures are made here below, subjects me to being classed among the supernaturalists of the piecemeal or crasser type ' (id., p. 521). This crasser supernaturalism ' admits miracles and provi- dential leadings, and finds no intellectual difficulty in mixing the ideal and the real worlds together by inter- polating influences from the ideal region among the forces that causally determine the real world's details. In this the refined supernaturalists think that it muddles disparate dimensions of existence. For them PRAGMATISM AND RELIGIOUS IDEALISM 185 the world of the ideal has no efficient causality, and never bursts into the world of phenomena at par- ticular points. The ideal world, for them, is not a world of facts, but only of the meaning of facts ; it is a point of view for judging facts. It appertains to a different ' -ology/ and inhabits a different dimension of being altogether from that in which existential propositions obtain. It cannot get down upon the flat level of experience and interpolate itself piece- meal between distinct portions of nature, as those who believe, for example, in divine aid coming in response to prayer, are bound to think it must ' (id., p. 521). The same conviction that faith is a venture and that personal endeavour counts in the development of the Universe, reappears in the Lectures on ' Prag- matism/ Pragmatism is here brought forward as the mediator between two opposite tendencies, those of ' tender-mindedness ' and ' tough-mindedness ' respec- tively. The tendency to rest in an Absolute is perhaps the characteristic mark of the tender-minded ; the radically tough-minded, on the other hand, ' needs '* no religion at all : the ideal of an Invisible Order means nothing to him, though he esteems himself a great respecter of facts. Between these two types of belief stands Pragmatism, holding the balance, anxious to apply its criterion of fruitfulness in as candid a manner as possible. Its main conclusion is that the respecter of facts cannot, without loss of effectiveness, ignore the fact of faith in an Unseen Order, for apart from such faith it is questionable whether life is worth the living. On the other hand, the tender-minded * ' Pragmatism/ p. 301. Must not ' needs ' here be taken as meaning ' is convinced that he needs ' ? i86 GOD WITH US takes the gospel of relaxation too seriously ; its energies are more or less paralyzed by monistic convictions, which tend to refund into the Absolute all responsi- bility for the world's redemption. In particular, it is apt to associate itself with the belief that ' behind our de facto world, our world in act, there must be a de jure duplicate fixed and previous. . . .' (id., p. 262), that ' perfection is eternal, aboriginal, and real/ and that there abides ' an eternal perfect edition of the universe, coexisting with our finite experience ' (id., p. 270). Such predetermination of things, if true, would stultify all our moral endeavour, and cannot, therefore, lay claim to the pragmatic sanction. As against these two ways of accepting the Universe, Professor James maintains his own over-belief, which is at once theistic, pluralistic, and melioristic. As we have already seen, he accepts the Universe as ' Thou ' because his volitional nature, of which thought is but the instrument and sense the working basis, so demand it. But the Universe need not be infinite, for all that our human nature requires is the privilege of co- operating with a Power who is greater than we are as much greater, for instance, as we ourselves are greater than the pets of our own household. As our life is an unseen world to the dog, so God's may be an unseen world to us, but God need not be Infinite or All-inclusive ; we may share His larger life, even though He should be but an Elder Brother, a ' primus inter pares.'* Such a view of God, as Professor James frankly admits, brings it very close to polytheism. ' All that * See ' The Will to Believe,' Essay II. ; also ' Pragmatism,' pp. 298, 300. PRAGMATISM AND RELIGIOUS IDEALISM 187 the facts require is that the power should be both other and larger than our conscious selves. Anything larger will do, if only it be large enough to trust for the next step. It need not be infinite, it need not be solitary. It might conceivably even be only a larger and more godlike self, of which the present self would then be but the mutilated expression, and the Universe might conceivably be a collection of such selves, of different degrees of inclusiveness, with no absolute unity realized in it at all. Thus would a sort of poly- theism return upon us.'* Such polytheism implies a pluralistic view of the Universe. The Invisible Order in which we hope to realize our larger life becomes, on the ' polytheistic ' hypothesis, a world which does not grow integrally in accordance with the preconceived plan of a single Architect, * but piecemeal by the contributions of its several parts ' (' Pragmatism/ p. 290). We were born into this world without consultation, but we may strive into the next through our own zeal and courage, and in so doing mould the world somewhat to our will, and ' add our fiat to the fiat of the Creator ' (id., p. 291). Professor James's melioristic conviction is more par- ticularly associated with the supreme question of human destiny, the question of redemption. Shall every human life be eventually ' saved ' ? The tender- minded says ' Yes.' But ' may not the claims of tender-mindedness go too far ? May not the notion of a world already saved in toto, anyhow, be too saccharine to stand ?' Professor James holds that we cannot reasonably expect that the last word shall be * ' The Varieties of Religious Experience,' pp. 525, 526. i88 GOD WITH US altogether sweet. The venture of faith is essentially a risk, and even the spiritual life is at root a great adventure, an epic rather than an idyll. Accepting such a universe, Professor James declares himself ' willing that there should be real losses and real losers, and no total preservation of all that is ' (' Prag- matism/ pp. 295, 296). Such, in brief, are the outlines of Professor James's religious synthesis, and I would not only gratefully admit its originality and stimulating quality, but recognize, in the main aspirations which underlie melioristic pluralism, the ally and friend of Religious Idealism. Professor James's philosophy is a philo- sophy of life and a philosophy of action. It reposes on the conviction that the will is free. It opposes predetermination in the interests of personal endeavour. It respects the experient's inner point of view, and sees in Psychology the best friend of Philosophy and The- ology. It gives precedence to the passional life, and engages our thinking to work freely and intelligently in its service. It believes in an Unseen Order in which the riddles of the Natural Order may be found explained, and holds that, apart from the incentive of the invisible, life would not be worth the living. It makes for the reality of God, and encourages our deep-rooted belief in personal immortality. In these various agreements, and in the many convergencies of interest and effort which they imply, there is surely a sufficient basis for a common understanding between Pragmatism and Idealism. But perhaps the greatest service which Pragmatism, and Psychologism generally, is at present rendering to Idealism is the insistence with which it is compelling PRAGMATISM AND RELIGIOUS IDEALISM 189 the latter to reconsider the psychological bases of personality. Absolute or ' Constructive ' Idealism un- doubtedly tends to sacrifice Psychology to Logic, and by so doing cuts itself off from that living contact with individual experiences which radical empiricism, under pragmatic patronage, justly esteems to be an indispensable forecourt of philosophy. If the philo- sophy of the Absolute is to be a philosophy of the Spiritual Life, it must surely condescend to the ex- perient's standpoint, die to its old logical bias, and build up a Higher Empiricism on a substratum of a more radically biological and psychological kind. There is here an admirable opportunity for it to put into practice its sublime motto of ' dying to live.' My own conviction is that the alliance of Logical Idealism with a relevant Psychology would, without any prejudice to its logical vitality, involve its trans- formation into some form of Moral, Personal, or Religious Idealism. And yet though Religious Idealism, as I conceive it, owes so much to Pragmatism, and has so much in common with it, it would be idle to conceal the very substantial differences which still subsist between the two philosophies. These are, indeed, so important that if it were not for the fact that Religious Idealism regards Pragmatism as an Idealism in the making, and Pragmatism, on the other hand, regards Religious Idealism, in its personalistic form, as a somewhat perverse specification of Pragmatism, the differences might all but overshadow the common understanding and darken it with a sense of hopeless divergence. For it must, in all honesty, be confessed that Re- ligious Idealism, despite all its sympathy with Prag- igo GOD WITH US matism, remains inveterately monistic, monotheistic, monocosmic. And if its view of God's relation to man is so substantially different, so too is its conviction as to Freedom and Immortality. Far from seeing any radical opposition between freedom and depen- dence, or any necessity for degrading freedom to the status of chance action, it sees in a religious freedom, moving in accordance with the laws* of love, the very expression of man's spiritual dependence on the larger Life which redeems his own a dependence which, in leaving all to love, leaves nothing to chance, f And Immortality, again, as we conceive it, looks not so much beyond the grave as through it. Religious Idealism holds that we are immortal through our death into the Life that is mightier than death, and that our immortality is a present experience, in that sense of ' present ' which time's ' inward ' dimension seems to impress upon our religious insight and, * Not, of course, mechanical, but spiritual laws which qua spiritual presuppose freedom. f It seems to me that Professor James would have argued more consistently with his own principles if, in his essay on ' The Dilemma of Determinism ' in ' the Will to Believe,' he had treated ' chances ' as relatively pure chances, chances for a certain limited practical point of view, and not as absolute chances and indeterminisms. Such a treatment would have excellently illustrated the conception of Abstraction and Abstract Method elaborated in the essay on ' Great Men and their Environment,' and supported there by reference to Darwin's policy of taking a limited relatively self-sufficient whole, and working strictly within those limits. A reinterpretation and further development of Professor James's theory of virtual freedom, as based on the conception of possibilities that are not necessities, will be found in Ch. X. PRAGMATISM AND RELIGIOUS IDEALISM 191 indeed, in greater or less degree, upon all our experience of the overflux in Science, Art, and Conduct. From this point of view, death is a crisis, a new birth within the immortal life itself. But the whole theory of the Eternal Present is idealistic in structure, and utilizes categories foreign to the Pragmatic Logic in its present form. And there are other important differences between Pragmatism and Religious Idealism in relation to the problem of the religious life. Religious Idealism holds that religiousness is not an idiosyncrasy, that man, as man, is essentially religious in the sense that he is not himself till he shares the power of God's Immortal Life, and this conviction is bound up with this other that the solidarity of humanity is such that no one is fully saved until all are fully saved, the parable of the Lost Sheep illustrating aptly and vividly the fundamental postulate of its Soteriology. But we have, perhaps, said enough to suggest the sense in which we hold that Pragmatism needs the strengthening support of Religious Idealism. We propose now to concentrate attention on one or two essential issues, the discussion of which may serve to bring to a focus the religious differences between the two philosophies. ' You see/ says Professor James, in his chapter on Pragmatism and Religion (' Pragmatism/ p. 300), ' that pragmatism can be called religious, if you allow that religion can be pluralistic or merely melioristic in type/ Granting this unreservedly, we have still to ask whether the monism and universalism of Religious Idealism is not compatible with the principles which provoke Pragmatism to assert the opposite doctrines, IQ2 GOD WITH US and whether the pragmatic criterion must not itself decide in favour of a monism and universalism recog- nized as consistent with its own principles. The issue between Monism and Pluralism un- doubtedly presents a living option to Professor James, an option in which each of the two hypotheses between which a choice is to be made appeals as a real possi- bility to him to whom it is proposed. The monistic- pluralistic alternative, we read, is ' the deepest and most pregnant question that our minds can frame ' (' Prag- matism/ p. 293). If Professor James has chosen to cast in his lot with Pluralism, it is not through any dislike of Monism as such, but only because Monism, as he conceives it, appears to him to be incompatible with Moralism. The theist of the ' Will to Believe ' is at least a potential monotheist. ' Shall I take the world religiously as a " Thou," or not ?' he asks ;* and the Theism which he accepts in response to a resistless demand of his passional nature, ' at a single stroke changes the dead blank it, as also the equally power- less me, into a living thou, with whom the whole man may have dealings ' (id., p. 127). But already within the same volume we have the fine, intrinsically re- ligious suggestion brought forward that the very existence of the invisible world which our faith demands may in part depend on the personal response which any one of us may make to the religious appeal. We too may be needed to redeem the present world and create the next. This is the ' unstiffening ' thought which, more than any other, seems to me to deter- mine Professor James's pluralistic outlook, and leads him, in his statement of the pluralistic doctrine (' Prag- * Cf. ' The Will to Believe/ p. 3. PRAGMATISM AND RELIGIOUS IDEALISM 193 matism/ p. 161), to insist that not only is the world still imperfectly unified, but, depending in part, as it does, on man's use of his own freedom, may perhaps always remain so. It is a great concession that Pluralism, as conceived by Professor James, does not stand for a policy of disunion. Pluralism is the champion, not of dis- union, but of variety. ' Provided you grant some separation among things, some tremor of independence, some free play of parts on one another, some real novelty or chance, however minute, she [Pluralism] is amply satisfied, and will allow you any amount, however great, of real union. How much of union there may be is a question that she thinks can only be decided empirically. The amount may be enormous, colossal ; but absolute monism is shattered if, along with all the union, there has to be granted the slightest modicum, the most incipient nascency, or the most residual trace, of a separation that is not " over- come " ' (' Pragmatism/ p. 161). Professor James's Pluralism is, then, not antagonistic to the monistic postulate as such. It is not unifica- tion which Pluralism resents, but a unity already so unified that further unification is impossible, or at least illusory. Recognizing, as it does, the weakness of any policy which deliberately makes for disunion, Pluralism agrees with Monism in admitting the force of the monistic postulate. Union is strength to pluralists and monists alike. The divergence occurs only in relation to the sanction of this postulate, the pluralist asserting that the pragmatic sanction is the only sanction available, the monist asserting that the postulate has its justification as a postulate in the very nature of things. The 13 194 GOD WITH US monistic postulate, says Monism, is a demand which is intrinsically implied in the very nature of love as a spiritual principle ; or (if the discourse bears more directly on knowledge) is a demand necessitated by the very structure of our reason. But Pluralism, with its aversion to the a priori in every shape and form, disputes the validity of any non-pragmatic reference to the nature of things. The only substance is activity, and activity can have no sanction other than the pragmatic. The issue as here presented suggests a whole array of differences between the two philosophies, but, so far as Religious Idealism is concerned, we may, I think, reduce these to one so fundamental as to depress the others at once to the status of derivative discrepancies. The difference in question concerns the interpretation of the terms ' spiritual ' and ' spiritual life.' Pluralism, as I understand it, fails to do justice to the reality, the religious reality, of the spiritual life. We may put this criticism in another way. Pluralism, in its pragmatic form, has grounded itself on the notion of real possibilities. By depending the vitality of the ' possible ' against the tyranny of the ' neces- sary/ it has rendered a most valuable service to Philo- sophy, and to Idealism in particular. It has freed our morality from the nightmare of predetermination, and rescued our freedom from the illusory labour of carry- ing out in time what is already completed sub specie ceternitatis. It is from this point of view that I realize the force of the closing words of Professor James's treatment of Pragmatism : ' Between the two extremes of crude naturalism, on the one hand, and trans- cendental absolutism on the other, you may find that PRAGMATISM AND RELIGIOUS IDEALISM 195 what I take the liberty of calling the pragmatistic or melioristic type of theism is exactly what you require ' (' Pragmatism/ p. 301). This type of theism, ' with its reliance on possibilities that are not neces- sities/ is at least free from all the perplexities of fore- knowledge and predeterminism. But if the ' possible ' is justified in its defence against the ' necessary/ we may safely say that it has not adequately adjusted itself to the claims of the ' spiritual/ When Professor James tells us that ' the whole clash of rationalistic and empiricist religion is over the validity of possibility ' (' Pragmatism/ p. 282), he has in mind the defence against necessitarians and present perfectionists of possibilities that are not necessities. But it appears to me that the clash in question affects still more vitally the relation between the possible and the spiritual. In what sense and to what extent is Professor James's belief in possibilities and postulates an adequate substitute for belief in a spiritual principle ? It would readily be admitted by Professor James that the belief in possibilities that are not necessities is implied in the very structure of Pluralism, as he conceives it. Pragmatic Pluralism cannot do without it, so that, relatively to such Pluralism itself, this methodological necessity is a priori. There is, how- ever, a further postulate which Professor James is compelled to make, the postulate of the Self as Knower, and this postulate is a priori relatively to Thought itself. Implicitly or explicitly, this postulate must be made. A known without a knower is self-contradictory, for ' known ' means known by a knower. Moreover, this postulate is made by the knower himself, who 133 196 GOD WITH US thereby postulates his own existence as a knowing subject. And the knowing subject thus self-postulated is the spiritual principle in logical form. Moreover, should the logical form be resented, it is easy to dis- pense with it. For the Self that postulates itself has surely a living spiritual reality : otherwise how could it be logical, or posit itself in the abstract form of a postulate ? A mere postulate cannot postulate itself. Professor James, as we have seen, unreservedly admits the reality of the Self,* a reality so rooted in our belief that all other reality is relatively derivative. There can, therefore, be no pluralistic objections to accepting the Self as a spiritual principle, a principle which thus remains a postulate in this sense only that postulation is the fundamental form of its activity. We thus see that, in so far as Pluralism is committed to the doctrine of a Real Self, it is committed ab initio to a ' possible * which is possible only because it is ' spiritual/ But centres of selfhood are many in number. The further question, therefore, remains whether this plurality of selves, this variety of personal experience, is not the fundamental spiritual fact, and all unitary considerations derivative. This appears to be Dr. Schiller's conviction : ' The ultimate reason/ he writes, ' why we may not argue monistically from the actual plurality of things to the higher reality of an all-including world-ground is that the plurality is actual (evepyeia), while the unity is only implicit (Swa/iet), and rests on our experience of * Granted that the Self still remains a ' problem/ we must not forget that it remains a problem to itself. It is ' the pressure of the answer ' which sets the problem, and it is the pressure of Selfhood which sets the problem of Self-realization. PRAGMATISM AND RELIGIOUS IDEALISM 197 the former. It is, therefore, of secondary reality and value ' (' Humanism/ pp. 224, 225, footnote). This conviction is undoubtedly shared by Professor James himself, and it still remains a formidable barrier between Pluralism and Religious Idealism. For Re- ligious Idealism holds that the plurality is actual, spiritually actual, only through the immanence of a Life which is the locus of all spiritual experience what- soever.* God, as the all-inclusive Spiritual Life, does not here play the role of the Supreme Possibility (this would be to confuse the possible with the spiritual), but the r61e of the Great Life-Giver, and a Unity so conceived is not implicit, but vitally immanent and active. It is not a substratum implied in the indi- vidual's existence, but the Life of the individual's life, and the Soul of his soul. Religious Idealism, in a word, starts from an anthro- potheistic position, whereas Pluralism starts, or tends to start, from a position essentially anthropic or anthropocentric. The union of human and divine is the fundamental principle of the former, the dignity and freedom of man the fundamental principle of the latter. And the difference in last resort is a difference in the conception of Spiritual Life. For Religious Idealism the fundamental spiritual fact is not the mere plurality of selves, but the plurality of selves within a Spiritual Life, in intimacy with which the freedom of selfhood gains its power and ultimate justification. The intelligibility of such a view depends largely on the * Professor James himself admits, as an over-belief, the immanence of a God in the subconscious life, and unless each of us is to have a separate or a tribal God it would seem that the God of each must be the God of all. OF THE UNIVERSITY 198 GOD WITH US recognition of such categories as those of ' all-inclusive- ness ' and ' organic unity/ and these are apt to be interpreted in ways which render them religiously ineffective. The all-inclusive is apt to suggest the absorption of the included personalities in a sense which would militate against the just claims of variety, morality, and freedom. But personalities do not include each other like Japanese boxes, so that the greater personality completely conceals the lesser. It is, indeed, the mark of a great personality that its dominance over lesser lives is the very means whereby these lesser lives become great and heroic. By sinking into them it brings them out. And if the interpene- tration of many lives by a nobler life exalts the many, it also exalts the one. The more a life is all-inclusive, the more distinctly does it differentiate itself from the lives which it includes. The great lover to whom nothing human is alien does not lose himself in his love, but rather finds himself in it. Or, if we would speak more abstractly, the personal principle of a spiritual organism, far from being vitally indistin- guishable from the organs which it feeds, becomes self-integrated in proportion as the organism itself grows through its action. Thus, if the life-bringing love of God were the principle, and the brotherhood of man the organism which it sustained, should we not expect to find that, not only the consolidation of human interests thus brought about was broad-based on the freedom of the people's will, but that the Bringer of Life and Love, far from passing without remainder into the solidarity or union of the race, stood out in sublime distinctness as the transcendent God of Humanity ? Does not the very notion of PRAGMATISM AND RELIGIOUS IDEALISM 199 spiritual inwardness imply an immanence that is also a transcendence a transcendence which, since the only spiritual separation or death is sin, implies no separation from that which is transcended ? But if separations are incompatible with life, the distinctions (the vital or personal, not the mere logical distinc- tions) which give us such soul-room as we need in order to realize our selfhood are essential to the life whose principle is the freedom of love. A distinction such as this, a distinction within the life, involving no act of separation or exclusiveness in reference to any ' parts ' of the life, but rather binding the parts more securely together through the spiritual connec- tions of freedom such self-distinction, with the ' otherness ' which it implies, is as necessary for the health of the body spiritual as selfishness, with its outerness or externality, is prejudicial to it. Dr. Schiller's assertion that the plurality is actual, whilst the unity is only implicit, might lead one to suppose that his conception of God was that of a Supreme Possibility. But, as a matter of fact, Dr. Schiller is far from resting content with an implicit God. The true Ultimate, as he conceives it, is a Being that has realized all its potentialities, a pure fruition, a perfected evepyeia. We find this view developed in an important essay on ' Activity and Substance/ in which the author attempts to replace the idea of the Absolute by that of the Ultimate.* The Ideal of Being, the genuine Substance of Reality, is to be found in a state of perfected activity, in an e * Vide Humanism : ' Philosophical Essays/ 1903, Essay XII. See also Professor James, ' Pragmatism,' p. 159, footnote ; and ' The Varieties of Religious Experience/ p. 422, footnote. 200 GOD WITH US or rjpe^La, which should express not only the positive nature of the Divine Being ' a positive nature which precludes the conditions which engender time-consciousness ' (' Humanism/ p. 212) but the nature of the deliverance to which the frailer life of human beings may also attain. Dr. Schiller starts from the position that to be is to be active (id., p. 209), and points out that activity, as evepyeia, or ' function,' does not essentially or necessarily imply motion or change (id., p. 211). He points us to Aristotle's view that, ' in the typical case, the perfect exercise of function by the senses, there is neither " motion " (tcwTjo-Ls), nor " change " (o\\otWi$), nor " passivity " (irda^eiv)' and holds out the prospect of an activity eventually perfecting itself as an evepyeia dKivrjaias, or exercise of function, that has transcended motion, time, and change. This ideal is, moreover, suggested by the facts themselves (id., pp. 213-218), and furnishes a metaphysical foreglimpse of heaven, the contemplation of which may have some practical value, ' even for the proximate purposes of ordinary life,' stimulating us ' to be active, and to develop all our powers to the utmost ' (id., p. 227). The main interest of this solution, which is developed by Dr. Schiller with great clearness and fulness, is that it is confessedly a return to the Aristotelian con- ception of the Ideal Life, a conception mainly de- veloped, to quote the words of Dr. Caird, ' in that great theological tractate which is the culminating result of Aristotle's Metaphysic (' Met.,' xii. 6-10),* a tractate which, unfortunately, is very succinct and difficult to interpret, but which has had more influence upon the * This reference is cited by Dr. Caird in a footnote. PRAGMATISM AND RELIGIOUS IDEALISM 201 subsequent history of theology than any other philo- sophical writing.'* The central thought in this theory of Aristotle's is central also for Dr. Schiller's modernized version. It is the thought that the ideal activity knows no change, consisting in a full and unimpeded self-realization. According to Aristotle, the conditions for such activity can be realized only in the speculative life. The evepyeia d/civrjatas, the activity without movement or change, must be a ^6770-1? vorjaea)*;, a pure self-conscious- ness having itself for its own sole object, and it must further be unconditioned by matter, and therefore no longer a process from potentiality to actuality, but 1 the outgoing of an unimpeded energy which yet rests for ever in the joy of its own completeness. 'f Such pure self-consciousness, such outgoing of unimpeded energy, is realizable by man through the energy of contemplation when the intelligence thinks itself and subject and object are identified. This realisation is, for man, an ideal and a task ; for God it is an effortless and frictionless fruition. ' " The life of God," says Aristotle, " is like the highest kind of activity with us : but while we can maintain it for a short time, with him it is eternal ; for it is an activity which is at the same time the joy of attainment." ' J It is hard, with these views before us, not to ap- proach together the ' Ultimate ' of Dr. Schiller and the ' God ' of Aristotle. And the parallel becomes closer still in the light of Aristotle's conception of God as the Unmoved Mover. From this point of view, God * ' The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers/ ii. 7, 8. t Id., ii. 8. % Id., ii. 8, g. 202 GOD WITH US ' moves the world by being the Object after which the whole creation strives, and not as if it were in any way determined by His action. In other words, it is not that God loves the world, but that the world loves and longs for God. He is the ideal to which all other things are more or less remote approximations ; He is the end to which they move ; but we are not to conceive of Him as acting on or in them.'* Have we not here the ' Ultimate ' which draws us by the force of its perfection, but is in no sense divinely immanent in the longing which aspires after it ? Aristotle's Ulti- mate, however, is the ripe outcome of his philosophy, ' the culminating result of his Metaphysic.' Is the Pragmatic Ultimate similarly related to the Philo- sophy of Pragmatism ? A life without movement or change, perfected in a sense which allows of no ' pro- gress in perfection/ is surely, for Pragmatism, an anti- climax. It is the very heaven of Quietism. This motionless functioning, ' suffused with a glow of aesthetic delight, 'f does not complete, but stultifies, the moral endeavour, respect for which is central for Pragmatism and vital to it as a philosophy of Human Life. Aspiration here yields up its morality as it passes over into fruition, and the fruition itself is but a poor reward for a forgotten morality. In the place of the Aristotelian ' Ultimate/ Re- ligious Idealism would set the Christian ' Intimate. 'J For Christianity has shown, in the most effective way, * ' The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers,' ii. 12. f ' Humanism/ p. 212. J The ' Intimate ' is, of course, an ' Ultimate ' also, but not in the Aristotelian sense of the term. PRAGMATISM AND RELIGIOUS IDEALISM 203 that the world's Redeemer had more power to win its love than the Unmoved Mover. Aristotle's theory that the sublime egoism of an infinite self-centred life could exercise genuine drawing-power over the world's affection showed a singular misconception of the true nature of love. The rapture of a God which is at once unshareable, saved perhaps by the philosopher, and unchangeable, persisting unperturbed whilst the whole creation suffers unassisted, is a poor incentive to the love and worship of the world. Were the Aristotelian God the true one, it is safe to say that the world could not have loved Him. Nor can it love the Ultimate, save in so far as the Ultimate first loves it. ' We love, because He first loved us.' If God, under any name, is to draw the world to Him, must He not be immanent in it, and the fruition of His presence, the peace which the world cannot take away, strengthen and inspire for the great task of redemption each soul that dies into His life ?* The Christian bias characteristic of Religious Ideal- ism seems, indeed, to be more genuinely pragmatic than the Aristotelian bias characteristic of Dr. Schil- ler's doctrine of the Ultimate. f It secures effective * We should add that the Ultimate, as Dr. Schiller conceives it, cannot be ours until the perfecting of the time-consciousness carries us out of time into Eternity ; but the eternal present, as we have already tried to show, is the very soul and truth of the time-flux. It does not hover at the edge of time, very far off, but is time's own ' inward ' dimension, the dimension distinctive of the Spiritual Life (vide ' Humanism,' p. 212). f In a recent paper on ' Science and Religion,' written ' for consideration at the Pan-Anglican Congress, 1908,' Dr. Schiller favours a conception of God which suggests the ' Intimate ' far more convincingly than it does the ' Ultimate.' ' Above all/ we read, ' God must sympathize with man. This is the 204 GOD WITH US power at the start of the spiritual life, instead of securing for it an ineffective harmoniousness of being at the close. It gives to the moral life, for which Pragmatism is so zealous a sponsor, the powerful stimulus of religious inspiration. Moreover, the great law of love, the law of inclusiveness which is the spiritual guide of the life of fruition, serves to develop a deep and intimate sense of solidarity, weaving all destinies together, and offering a firm religious basis for the development of the universalistic idea. Religious Idealism, as I conceive it, is universalistic in virtue of the principle of Love which it professes. The demand that no soul shall be ultimately lost ultimately disqualified, that is, for sharing the Spiritual Life springs from the all-inclusive propensity of Love. The ideal of a Common Good demands of us that the highest be shared by all, whilst the Sense of Solidarity which the love-life engenders forbids us to suppose first and most enduring postulate of the religious attitude. God, to be really worthy of our -worship, must be man's Helper nay, his Saviour, his ideal Refuge from the grinding pressure of the cosmic mechanism. ' Now, this loftiest ideal no religion has embodied with any- thing like the perfection of the Christian. . . . Christianity . . . conceives the Divine as lowering itself to the human nay, to quite an inconspicuous form thereof in order to save it by betokening its love. It has thus transformed the historic Jesus into the Eternal Symbol of God's sympathy with man, and through man with all that struggles and surfers in the scheme of being. ' For it is only a suffering world that needs to be saved, and it is only a suffering God that can save a suffering world ; for sympathy means suffering with others. This is why the Crucifixion is the greatest and Divinest of all symbols, which cannot lose its meaning so long as suffering endures ' (id., p. 7). PRAGMATISM AND RELIGIOUS IDEALISM 205 that the highest and completest good can ever be attained by the individual in isolation, but can be won by and for the individual only in so far as it is won by and for all. The difficulties of the problem are, no doubt, very great. Our ignorance of the deeper nature of our own personality hinders us from realizing to what extent the destiny of each is linked with the destinies of others, but the developed social consciousness of the Western mind disables it, despite a pronounced individualistic bias, from turning to the Karma doctrine, according to which each soul bears, in isolation, its own inexorable burden, and is responsible for itself alone.* The saved soul, if * ' Christianity and the higher Hinduism,' writes Mr. Hogg, ' are at one in criticizing the conception of life as a system determined by Karma. In this point of harmony one may find an encouragement to hope that Christian and Hindu have yet much to learn from each other, and may ultimately be united in a faith wide enough to satisfy both. . . . Beneath the strikingly contrasted forms of doctrinal conception there runs a secret current of common aspiration. The Hindu believes in a phenomenal system dominated by Karma, but longs to escape from it. The Christian denies the existence of such a system, and believes himself to be already living in a nobler and freer world. Surely a divergence like this can- not constitute a barrier which reverent thought should find permanently impassable ! To end the separation, what is needed ? That the Hindu should develop his dissatisfaction to its logical result in a denial of the Karma-system ; that the Christian should transform his often too easy satisfaction with life into something deeper. Is not this all ? And yet this " all " is no small undertaking. To the Hindu it would involve an entire abandonment of the general direction of past Hindu thinking, although not an abandonment of its spirit. For the Christian it would mean a closer reproduction of the spirit of the Christian origins and a new effort to think out the meaning 206 GOD WITH US saved in Love's name, must itself become a saviour, for the Spiritual Life, as Love conceives it, is by nature self-communicative, invasive, redemptive. of his spiritual inheritance with the aid of the culture of a widened world ' (A. G. Hogg, The Madras Christian College Magazine, vol. xxii., No. 7, pp. 359, 360). The above extract is from one of a series of articles by Mr. Hogg on ' Karma and Redemption.' The first of these articles appeared in the December issue of this monthly periodical, 1904, and the fifth and last in the April issue, 1905. It is much to be hoped that the writer's masterly treatment of the great problem he is dealing with and discussing from a Christocentric point of view will be rescued from the relative obscurity of a college magazine and embodied in some more permanent and more widely accessible form. I am indebted to my brother, the Rev. Paul Gibson, of Trinity College (C.M.S.), Kandy, for drawing my attention to these articles. CHAPTER X. UNIVERSALISM AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL. BEFORE entering into any details of discussion, let me state by anticipation the sense in which I conceive that Religious Idealism is unable to embrace, as it stands, the meliorism of Professor James. It is unable to admit that there is any possibility of evil ever proving finally triumphant over good. In this sense, Religious Idealism is an Optimism, as opposed to the Meliorism of which Professor James is the sponsor and accredited representative. God, to the Religious Idealist, is not only an Ultimate within whose life struggling human beings may or may not eventually find refuge and salvation. He is also an Intimate, and as such, the very destiny of God Himself appears to me to be bound up indissolubly with the salvation of us all. On this fundamental issue we part company with Pluralism. We believe that the last word will be sweet, though we protest that the sweetness won through suffering is anything but saccharine, and would urge as insistently as Professor James himself that this sweetness is not an heirloom, but a laurel that it must be wrought for, fought for, and won, and even when won must still be held, and held eternally, in the spirit of those who realize that ' 'tis the most difficult of 207 208 GOD WITH US tasks to keep heights which the soul is competent to gain/ With a view to working towards a Universalism so conceived, let us first consider, as briefly and as rele- vantly as possible, the conception of Freedom from which we start* Professor James, as is well known, calls himself an Indeterminist. Determinism, he says, denies the ambiguity of future volitions. Indeter- minism, on the contrary, affirms this ambiguity un- equivocally, and gives it its true unequivocal name, ' Chance.' ' Whoever uses the word " chance " instead of freedom,' we read, ' squarely and resolutely gives up all pretence to control the things he says are free. . . . It is a word of impotence, and is therefore the only sincere word we can use if, in granting freedom to certain things, we grant it honestly, and really risk the game. Any other word permits of quibbling, and lets us, after the fashion of the soft Determinists, make a pretence of restoring the caged bird to liberty with one hand, while with the other we anxiously tie a string to its leg, to make sure it does not get beyond our sight/ I do not myself care for this word ' chance/ It is too desperate. Besides, if Pragmatism is to have a future, Professor James's Philosophy of Chance cannot be reconciled with his own stated conviction, as * The question which concerns us is this : How can the idea of Freedom be rendered genuinely intelligible ? This is the ' Critical ' aspect of the problem in contradistinction from the ' Constructive ' aspect. The great constructive problem of moral and religious freedom might be formulated somewhat as follows : ' How can we realize our freedom in actual life ? How are we to be freed from the obstacles to the free develop- ment of a spiritual nature to which freedom is a birthright ?' UNIVERSALISM AND PROBLEM OF EVIL 209 expressed in his essay on ' The Sentiment of Ration- ality/ that no philosophy will ultimately succeed which does not justify expectancy ; and this, at any rate, Chance cannot do. But Professor James has lately laid much emphasis on another and a better word, the word ' Possibility.' He has brought to the front the idea of ' a possibility that is not a necessity/ and has laid so much stress on the idea that we might suitably refer to it as the pluralistic postulate. ' The whole clash of rationalistic and empiricist religion ' of Monism and Pluralism, in short ' is/ writes James, ' over the validity of possibility ' (' Pragmatism/ p. 282). Let us see, then, whether this idea of a real possi- bility, a possibility which unequivocally implies the ambiguity of future volitions, will help us to find a via media between the arbitrariness of Indeterminism, on the one hand, and the necessities of Determinism, on the other. We should, in the first place, disembarrass our- selves of the prejudice that possibilities have no reality. The truth is rather, as Professor Stout has recently expressed it in an article in Mind* that the nature of actual things is saturated through and through with possibility. Glass is brittle, fusible, transparent, hard. But ' a piece of glass is brittle, even though it never will be broken/ Similarly, glass is hard, though its hardness is not realized by us as we look through * ' Immediacy and Coherence ' (Mind, January, 1908, pp. 21-24). See also an article in the International Journal of Ethics, October, 1907, by Professor R. F. A. Hrernle, entitled ' The Conception of Possibility in its Relation to Conduct.' 210 GOD WITH US its transparency into the garden or the street. So, again, we say of gold that it is malleable, soluble in aqua regia, etc. Matter, again, is impenetrable, mobile, etc. We point to a man as he is asleep in his chair, and say, ' He is a wise man/ We do not neces- sarily mean that he is wise to be napping ; we may simply mean that he is wont to speak and act wisely, though at the moment he is neither speaking nor acting wisely or unwisely. Or we may say, as we see him at his breakfast, ' He is interested in Mathematics/ meaning that he has a tendency that way, and not at all that he is actually solving equations whilst cracking his egg. I like to think of a similarly permanent link sub- sisting between our will on the one hand and the world of objects on the other, the link of possible connection through action. This view seems to me to detach the subject from the object sufficiently to insure that its exercise of freedom shall be genuine, and yet does not imply any discontinuity with the Universe ; for the possible connection is, as such, a very real connec- tion. We have here a genuine choice between possi- bilities as yet unrealized, and yet the very choice presupposes these possibilities, these subtle links of con- nection between our will and its world. It is not easy to realize the extent to which each of us is thus clad about with possibilities, girt on every side with these potential relations to objects. And yet it is just in so far as these real possibilities radiate from our individuality, as from a focus, that we may claim boldly and unreservedly that we are virtually free, or free in principle. We may reach this same conclusion from a slightly UNIVERSALISM AND PROBLEM OF EVIL 211 different point of view. If freedom and progress are to be real, the future, we argue, cannot be predeter- mined. The indeterminacy of the future must be radical and genuine, and yet it cannot imply any such detachment from the sources of reality as would involve rupture of continuity within the universe. How, then, shall such vital indeterminacy be secured ? Only, we would venture to say, on this one condi- tion that the future be woven to the present and the past by threads other than those of fate, by ghostly filaments still plastic to the will in a word, by possi- bilities whose best claim to reality lies precisely in the fact that they are still unrealized. But does ex- perience ratify this suggestion ? Its verdict, it seems to me, is quite unambiguous. All the highways of our life are paved with such possibilities : the ground- work of our destiny is but a tissue of them. Wave upon wave, depth beyond depth if we may so vary the metaphor these unsensed, unrealized realities stretch immeasurably away into the stillness of the future. They alone divide us from our better self. Between what we are and what we would be, what is there but the mystical Sea of Possibility ? We hold, then, that our freedom becomes intelligible so soon as we recognize that there are possibilities which are not necessities, and that these possibilities are real. And we must also recognize that these possibilities are links of connection between ourselves, as free agents, and the rest of the universe. If they are not in this sense pre-existent connections, our freedom is illusory ; it becomes a mere empty fiat, which pretends to create ex nihilo a bridge of connec- tion between our will and the world. I need not stay 14-a 212 GOD WITH US to belabour this inconceivability. To create is not to make something out of nothing, but to turn a possi- bility into an actuality. It is in this sense that our free acts are creative creative of good and evil in the world. Our freedom is thus linked, from the outset, with the whole structure of reality, and may make its influence effective over the universe through these subtle threads of connection, which, as possibilities, are still very real, precisely because they are not as yet realized. The continuity-claim of Monism is thereby satisfied. Freedom does not imply discon- tinuity, disconnection, and the Indeterminist claim that freedom shall be allowed to work within a vacuum is seen to be not only suicidal, but superfluous. This is my defence of ' virtual freedom ' i.e., of freedom as an intelligible factor within the unity of the universe. It appears to me that when I say to myself, ' Shall I or shall I not ?' I am confronted by two possibilities, and can formally, though still effec- tively, assert my virtual freedom by making a capricious decision in favour of the one to the ex- clusion of the other. This decision may, if sufficiently important, have some weight in determining the course of human affairs. The world will thereby receive an impulse in a slightly new direction. It appears to me necessary to insist that this formal exercise of freedom need not in any sense be ineffective. The caprices of a tyrant may, as I conceive them, be genuine choices, and as such may initiate movements of great historical importance. But the formal exercise of a capacity to choose and to decide, though psycho- logically it is a very significant fact, has, as such, no specifically moral quality. The moral problem arises UNIVERSALISM AND PROBLEM OF EVIL 213 with the recognition that this free choice of ours may be either for good or for evil. Free choice, in a word, brings with it not only the possibility of good, but also the possibility of evil. We proceed now to define the fundamental position which we propose to take up in connection with the problem of the relation of our freedom to the great problem of Universalism. We have already suggested a name for this point of view : we have referred to it as anthropotheistic. The anthropotheistic position pre- supposes man's virtual freedom and a God in whom we live and move and have our being. Its central implication is the simple truth, ' God with us/ What is ultimate for Anthropotheism is not ' God ' in severance from ourselves, but God ' in and with man ' i.e., the Spiritual Life. By ' God ' we understand the Supreme Personal Principle of the Spiritual Life, the Principle through union with which we ourselves first become persons and ends in ourselves. This Personal Principle, as we conceive it, is at once im- manent and transcendent in relation to us, the Soul of our soul, and also its Oversoul, and in this sense God may be said to be inclusive of us as personalities. But when we say that God is inclusive of us actually or potentially interpenetrant of our thought, our feel- ing, and our action we do not mean to imply that such inclusion is in any sense destructive of our self- hood. On the contrary, it is our view that God's presence with us first gives us to ourselves. Professor Knight cites the pertinent question, once put by a child of four years of age : ' If God is everywhere, how can there be any room for us ?' The child could hardly suspect that, as Spirit, it might be God's 214 GOD WITH US presence that first brought with it that spiritual space which gives us our soul-room, the room to be our- selves, that we become our own true selves only through the death into His Life. And if it is as Love that God includes our being, then that which is most precious for us, our freedom and our selfhood, must be most inviolate in His regard. It is this conception of God as inclusive of us and of our freedom, the view of God as ' God with us,' which we have identified with the conception of ' Spirit ' or ' Spiritual Life.' Now, in so far as we ourselves qua spiritual are integrally included within the Spiritual Life, present within its Totality as responsible agents, it would seem to follow that all the problems of our religious con- sciousness must be discussed from the anthropo- theistic point of view. The venerable monistic problems of the Omniscience, the Omnipresence, and the Omnipotence of God, when studied from this standpoint, are necessarily and indissolubly involved with the postulates of our whole spiritual endeavour, postulates for the justification of which we cannot logically hold ourselves irresponsible. We postulate a Presence which, as Insight, Love, and Power, shall penetrate and redeem the Universe, but from the point of view we have adopted it is illogical to suppose that we who make this demand are justified in making it of a Being not ourselves. And even though we strip the postulate to its barest logical form, reducing the demand to a mere assumption, we must still claim the same ineffaceable reference to ourselves as essential factors in the solution of our ultimate problems. Thus, as regards the presupposition of Intelligibility, it would be illogical, from the anthropotheistic point UNIVERSALISM AND PROBLEM OF EVIL 215 of view, to interpret it in any sense which would stultify the freedom of our will, for our religious freedom, as a personal experience, is acceptedly the very ground from which we start. Hence, if the problem of Divine Foreknowledge be brought up for discussion, we must formulate each and every question which the problem suggests in a form which respects this experience, and is relevant to the needs and the Ideals of our ethico-religious consciousness. We must ask in what sense can Love foreknow, in what sense is the future v/hich lies before us intelligible in advance to an Eternal Wisdom which respects our freedom, and we must then seek to answer this question, and not another which has no relevancy to the ground- work of Religious Idealism. Finally, as regards the crucial problem of Omnipotence : this, too, we must discuss from the anthropotheistic point of view, from a standpoint which posits at once God's Love and the freedom and responsibility of man. From this point of view, the postulate that the Spiritual Life is omni- potent must be taken as our freedom's demand that Love shall eventually prevail. The postulate of Omni- potence, so understood, necessitates a gospel of Re- demption. It expresses at once a faith that Love will prevail and a will that our freedom shall be redemptive in its action. It is in the light of this postulate that we must study the Problem of Universalism when we approach it from the anthropotheistic standpoint. So far we have been insisting mainly on the impor- tance of not neglecting the postulates of our freedom when discussing these ultimate problems from the anthropotheistic point of view. The freedom of the anthropotheist is, however, necessarily a religious 216 GOD WITH US freedom, and, as such, its demands must be the demands of the Spiritual Life. But Spirituality is more than postulation, as Monism itself is more than any monistic postulate. Apart from the presence and power of the Life-bringer, we should lack the ultimate credential of the solubility of our problems. The faith that Love will prevail might be no more than a pathetic hope were it not a faith that already had sight of the Personal Principle of Love itself, and were not Love itself the one demonstrable master-key to the mystery of Life. Thus it is the power of Love which gives point, dignity, and depth to our faith in the Omnipotence of the Spiritual Life, leaving us persuaded that, whatever the issue of the stupendous struggle between Love and Evil may be, nothing that Evil can do is able to snap the last connections of the Spiritual Life. Sin may indefinitely postpone the complete realization of the Kingdom of God: it cannot break Love's will to be all-inclusive ; it cannot, therefore, break away from all connection with the Spiritual Life. There can be no great gulf fixed between Evil and the Kingdom of Heaven. There is no gulf, but a battle-field. Nor is it the sinner that throws the gauntlet down. The challenge comes from the depths of the Spiritual Life. The loyalty to evil in the soul that takes Evil as its Good is a loyalty lost to the Kingdom of Heaven, and it must be recovered ; and there seems only one way of recovering it, and that is to redeem the soul that has misappropriated it. Heaven's plan of campaign thus becomes a scheme of redemption, and where there is war and suffering there is still hope. To this extent I hold that Monism is rooted in the nature of things, and more particularly UNIVERSALISM AND PROBLEM OF EVIL 217 in the nature of Love as the Ultimate Power in the Universe. The suggestion may be raised that such Redemption may be forestalled by the annihilation of the soul it seeks to redeem. To this plausible and familiar objection I should hold it sufficient answer to reply, in the words of Augustine : ' What does not perish for God cannot perish for itself (vide p. 136). Plato's view that the soul cannot be destroyed by its own evil points to the same conclusion. ' I am inclined to think/ says Glaucon, in Book x. of the ' Republic/ 'that we shall find that injustice kills other people, if it can, while it endows its possessor with peculiar vitality, and with sleeplessness as well as vitality. So widely and permanently is it removed, to all appear- ance, from any tendency to destroy its owner/ ' You say well/ says Socrates in reply, a reply which contains the admission that ' the soul cannot be killed and destroyed by its own depravity and its own evil/ And yet, though I do not see that the distraction and perversion wrought by evil can lead to the annihila- tion of the evil-doer, it can, I think, be shown that if evil were triumphant, it would at the same time be annihilated. Let us suppose that, in the great conflict between Love and Evil, Evil were victorious. What could that mean ? It could only mean that * Evil, be thou my good/ was to be accepted as the universal formula of morals, and the forces of the universe organized under the leadership of Evil. But the Evil could no longer work itself out upon anything external to itself ; master of all, it could have but one future open to it that of 3i8 GOD WITH US warring against the good within itself. When evil is fighting against good, there is still honour among the thieves. On no other condition is Evil's victory con- ceivable. But once the thieves are enthroned, honour among thieves would mean the realization of the common good, and this would be inconsistent with Evil's supremacy. The ties of honour contracted by the forces of evil to strengthen them in their warfare with the good must therefore be renounced, and Evil enthroned show itself more evil than when disen- throned. By its very nature Evil implies opposition to good, and is restless till it finds no more good within itself against which to struggle. Hence, with the com- plete disappearance of the good goes the evil that opposes it, and we are left with the paradox that Evil finally triumphant is non-existent. Whence we con- clude that so long as evil exists at all it is not completely triumphant. There can be no monism of evil, for Evil cannot become all-inclusive without itself ceasing to be. It is quite otherwise with Love. Love cannot rest content until it is all-inclusive, and when it is all- inclusive, and evil is depressed to the status of a mere latency, it is then at its apogee of life and power, and in a position of stable equilibrium, where each deflec- tion from the common good brings the whole force of the universe to bear redemptively on the incipient weakness or sin. Thus, in being all-inclusive, love becomes perfect. The triumph of love, when evil is a mere depressed possibility of rebellion, and has in that sense ceased to be an actual reality, is the moment of its fullest life and power. And when this millennium is reached, then, as the Scholastics, and Swedenborg UNIVERSALISM AND PROBLEM OF EVIL 219 after them, expressed it, Love, far from ageing or falling off, ' grows younger every day/ The difficulties involved in the solution of the ancient problem, ' How can God be all-inclusive with- out Himself being evil ?' may be met in two simple and summary ways. One of these is the doctrine of the annihilation of evil, already briefly considered ; the other is that Evil is an illusion, and has never really existed at all. This is, no doubt, the easiest solution, and effectively cuts the knot. But it is hard indeed for the religious consciousness to persuade itself that sin and there- fore redemption also is a meaningless word, and that selfishness and cruelty are negligible phenomena in the inventory of the Universe. Hence the religious consciousness which, in one form or another, holds hard to the belief that the Spiritual is all-inclusive that God is all in all but cannot allow Him to be in any way evil, is led to maintain that it is only from a certain point of view that evil ceases to exist, but that this point of view is the most inward and divine of all, and can alone give us a truly real view of the world.* We have, however, already shown in a previous chapter how this shifting of the centre of perspective from the temporal to the eternal is of no service to the contention for which it is adopted unless it carries with it a total denial of the reality of time and of all things temporal. But this denial is flatly unintelligible. Unless the eternal is, in Professor Royce's phrase, * Vide 'Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy of Life,' pp. 35-37, 72, 74- 220 GOD WITH US ' time-inclusive,' it is synonymous with the incon- ceivable, and if it is in any sense ' time-inclusive,' then it is also, in that same sense, inclusive of all the frailties which the time-order brings with it. We conclude, then, that however valuable the assumption that evil is non-existent may prove in practice to those that can believe it, and to those whose suffering benefits through the belief, the thesis that God is All and God is Good cannot be intelligibly supported by the simple device of cancelling the evil. The better way, we hold, is to recognize at the outset that the very existence of a moral, and therefore of a religious, order implies the possibility of evil a posi- tion which does not, of course, pledge us to the view that the actual practice of evil is involved in the existence of this ethico-religious order, or is in any sense necessary to the attainment of spiritual per- fection. We would hold, then, that the existence of a spiritual order implies the possibility of evil, and our reason for holding to this view is that the existence of such an order implies the opposition of the spiritual and the natural, an opposition which itself implies the possi- bility of evil. It implies this possibility since, from the side of the natural man, it is liable at any time to pass into a rebellion against the uncompromising claims of the spiritual, and such rebellion, from the standpoint of Idealism, is sin. From the standpoint of Idealism, we say, since the distinctively idealistic conviction is here assumed that the spiritual is the truth of the natural that is, that nature can realize itself fully only in subordination to the claims of the spiritual life. The justification of UNIVERSALISM AND PROBLEM OF EVIL 221 this great theme of modern Idealism must rest primarily on the evidence of spiritual experience, but we must also add that the opposite thesis, that the truth of the natural is the natural, obliges the believer in a spiritual life to oppose the natural and the spiritual in a sense which implies that there is a dualism rooted in the nature of things. For its purport is that man can adequately realize himself by a process of un- broken development from a basis of sense-immediacy, and if this is the case, the natural order is self-con- tained and genuinely independent of the spiritual realm. But is there any call for this lapse into dualism ? Is it not a matter of experience that our animal appetites can satisfactorily fulfil their own distinctive functions only through their subdual to spiritual aims ? Is it not by dying to live, by losing itself as natural to recover itself as spiritual, that human nature fulfils its own true destiny ? Granting, then, that in this sense the spiritual envelops the natural, thereby including within itself the possibility of evil, we have still to point out how the natural man qua actually rebellious or sinning can be conceived as included in the Spiritual Life. In what sense, we ask, can God be with us even when we sin ? Our view is briefly this : Sin, by its very nature, implies a separation from God, but this separation itself still implies the possibility of reunion ; and there- fore, inasmuch as this possibility remains a very real connection indeed, it does not constitute a refutation of the view that God, as the Spiritual Life, is in some sense all-inclusive. On this view, though God is not actually inclusive of the life of the sinner qua sinner, 222 GOD WITH US He still remains potentially inclusive of that life. To the sinner God still remains the Great Possibility. Belief in the existence of evil would thus seem to be consistent with the view that God, as the Spiritual Life, is potentially all in all. The evil-doer is still potentially spiritual, nor can his evil-doing stultify our faith in the redemptive power of love. This view commits us, however, to the conclusion that God will be, in full actuality, All in All only when there is no more evil. That evil will eventually die be depressed, that is, to the status of mere latency, whilst the soul which it distorted is redeemed into the true image of goodness this is the central persuasion of Christian Optimism. It is an Optimism rooted in the faith that God is with us and God is Love. The expression ' depressed to the status of mere latency ' needs some emphasizing ; for it contains, in my opinion, the true answer to Professor James's challenge to Absolute Monism to show, along with all the union it insists on, ' the slightest modicum, the most incipient nascency, or the most residual trace, of a separation that is not " overcome." Professor James asserts that the concession would shatter the claims of Absolute Monism. But when he speaks of a separation that is ' overcome ' or transcended, he has in mind a separation transformed through this process of ' overcoming ' into a union so very close that, in being overcome, it forfeits its own nature. No, he would say, evil is not good in the making ; we must make room in the Universe for evil that persists in remaining evil, and will not be overcome ; if our Universe has no room for such perversity, we must just be content with a Multiverse* UNIVERSALISM AND PROBLEM OF EVIL 223 Is this last conclusion, then, so necessary ? Can we not find room in a Monistic universe for the evil that perversely frustrates the good ? Let us see. The ultimate victory of Love over Evil is guaranteed by the very nature of Love. Evil could not be trium- phant without perishing in the act. Love's triumph is one with its own self-realization. But Love's triumph does not mean the total extinction of Evil. Evil subsists, though not as an actuality. It subsists as an eternal possibility. The frustrating will has eternally the reality which belongs to real possibilities ; for the good, as I conceive it, is inconceivable apart from the possibility of evil. And this eternal possi- bility of evil constitutes the only hell, the only eternal status of evil, of which I can conceive. Moreover, inasmuch as the good implies this possibility of evil, the latter is seen to be an essential element in the life of heaven ; so that in last resort such hell as I find it necessary to admit proves to be lodged within the confines of heaven itself. The true hell would seem to be some purgatorial discipline, such torment of suffering as is implied in redemption when redemption is long delayed and evil has sunk deep into its victim. Such hell is genuine, but is it, can it be, either eternal or everlasting if Love is present and persistent, and with each victory grows stronger and more truly lord of its own nature and of that which resists it ? In such a theory as the foregoing have we not a separation the separation we call evil a separa- tion, moreover, which in an important sense is not overcome ? Evil remains, and remains separate ? It remains as a permanent possibility, and as such separated from the actuality or fruition of the spiritual 224 GOD WITH US life. But the separation implies no multiverse, since the possibility of sin is essential to Goodness essential, that is, to Love, God, and the Spiritual Life. Let me conclude with an illustration taken from those annals of medical practice in which the patient is a dissociated personality, and the cure a reintegration of the dissociated selves.* Dr. Morton Prince, of Boston, in the United States, is summoned to attend professionally on a neurasthenic patient, whose pseudonym is Miss Beauchamp. He finds that, whilst he has only one body to deal with, he has several dissociated selves to ferret out, distinguish from each other, and reunite. He finds, in other words, that the original Miss Beauchamp has been lost, and that her place has been taken by a set of more or less con- flicting selves, the three most important of which are referred to as B i., B iv., and Sally. Sally is the imp of the family, the most interesting, the most intelli- gent, the most uncanny, and the least moral. She seems almost to differ in kind from B i. and B iv. But all three are perfectly genuine personalities, who alternate with each other in sharing the privilege of being the Miss Beauchamp whom Boston society has to recognize and deal with. And yet none of them is the Real Miss Beauchamp, and the search for the Real Miss Beauchamp is the one absorbing pre- occupation of Dr. Prince. At length, largely through the assistance of Sally, the Real Miss Beauchamp is discovered. She is found to be the Synthesis of B i. and B iv., but her recovery is found to necessitate the permanent depression of Sally. Speaking of this * ' The Dissociation of a Personality : A Biographical Study in Abnormal Psychology,' by Morton Prince, M.D., 1906. UNIVERSALISM AND PROBLEM OF EVIL 225 living Synthesis, as he sees her in bodily presence before him, Dr. Prince writes : ' She was a person so different from B i. and B iv., so natural and self- contained, and so free from every sign of abnormality, that there could be no doubt that I had again the Real Miss Beauchamp. There was none of the suffering depression and submissive idealism of B i., none of the ill-temper, stubbornness, and reticent antagonism of B iv. . . . She knew me, and her surroundings and everything belonging to the lives of B i. and B iv. She had the memories of both ' (id., p. 519). Then follows a short dialogue between Dr. Prince and the Real Miss Beauchamp, which, in its simplicity and profound suggestiveness, appeals to me as the most striking episode in an unusually remarkable book. ' " Who are you ?" I asked. ' " I am myself." ' " Where is B i. ?" '"lamBi." '"Where is B iv. ?" ' " I am B iv. We are all the same person, only now I am myself " ' (id., p. 520). This Synthesis of Personalities is thus herself a personality. ' Of Sally, her life and doings,' writes Dr. Prince, ' she knows nothing, excepting indirectly.' And he adds : ' With the resurrection of the real self she (Sally) " goes back to where she came from," imprisoned, " squeezed," unable either to " come " at will or be brought by command. Automatic writing, speech, and such phenomena cease, and it has not been possible as yet to communicate with her, and deter- mine what part, if any, she plays in Miss Beauchamp's subconsciousness, or whether as a subpersonality she 15 226 GOD WITH US exists at all. When, however, as a result of some mental catastrophe, she appeared again as an alter- nating personality, her language implied a persistent existence as a subconsciousness. . . . Nevertheless, the resurrection of the Real Miss Beauchamp is through the death of Sally ' (p. 524). In this picture of the Real Miss Beauchamp have we not a striking symbol of what must be implied in the redemption of a personality ? In the real person- ality B i. and B iv. exist in redeemed, transcended, reconciled form, though at the same time the possi- bility of a relapse of the Real Miss Beauchamp into these old associations still remains, and on many occa- sions this possibility has been actualized on those occasions, namely, subsequent to the cure, when, through over-pressure, the Real Miss Beauchamp has temporarily broken down, and at the same time broken up. Sally, too, persists as a permanent possibility. Whether she is more than this whether in her squeezed state she retains a distinct and actual existence, un- known to the Real Miss Beauchamp has not yet been clearly decided. If it should prove that Sally does retain her distinct and defiant existence when squeezed, then to that extent the symbol we have been picturing ceases to be adequate to our monistic convictions. If the Real Miss Beauchamp can thus sever herself in thought and affection from a Sally who, in severance from her, retains a distinct and alien personality, Love cannot in similar wise sever itself from Evil. Love cannot rest till all that is left of Evil is the eternal possibility of its actualization. Evil as an actuality will have vanished from the world. Universalism is thus the culminating conviction of UNIVERSALISM AND PROBLEM OF EVIL 227 the Anthropotheism we have adopted as mediating between the anthropocentric and the theocentric extremes. Anthropism, in so far as it is not also anthropotheistic, leaves man to save himself. Theism, again, in so far as it also is not anthropotheistic, leaves man's salvation to God alone, and is Calvinistic in tendency. But Anthropotheism commits the work of Redemption to a Power which is other than man, only because it is intimately one with him, and works for righteousness in and through the religious freedom of his spiritual life. It is for an Anthropotheism so conceived that this present volume specifically stands for an Anthropotheism, moreover, which, through its assertion of a necessary connection between God's immanence and His transcendence, avoids at one stroke the two counterdangers of Deism and of Pan- theism, and safeguards all the vital interests of the ethico-religious consciousness. It is the writer's con- viction that the essentials of this religious philosophy are to be found in Eucken's theory of the Spiritual Life, though in last resort they owe their deepest and most central inspiration to the Gospel of Jesus. NOTE. A concluding word may, I think, be appropriately devoted to signalling certain misconceptions which the term ' Anthropotheism ' might seem to encourage. Pro- foundly different as is Anthropotheism from mere Anthro- pism, there is still room within it for such irreligious over-emphasis of the human factor as would constrain us, in Sincerity's name, to prefer above all such belittling of the Divine a clear, undiluted Anthropism in which every occasion of irreverence is ruled out by the doctrine of the Divine Irrelevance. It has consequently been the author's main aim throughout a purpose only very partially realized to emphasize the eternal significance of God for 152 228 GOD WITH US the soul, and to suggest that God must mean vastly more to us than any language which is not unjust to the soul, its selfhood and its freedom, can possibly indicate. If it is true to say that we should not be seeking Heaven had we not already found God, it is still more true that we should not be seeking Heaven had God not already found us. If it is blessed to believe that God is in us, it is still more blessed to believe that we are in God. The deepest truth in the promise of Immanuel is the Gospel message of God's Love for man ; the deepest meaning of ' God with us,' the Love of God for us. A second misconception is connected with the so-called ' limitations ' which the term ' Anthropotheism ' might seem to imply. Granted that God is indeed closely and eternally related to man, may He not, we ask, be similarly related to the life on innumerable other worlds, visible and invisible ? And, if so, is not the term ' Anthropotheism ' an inadequate title for an ultimate philosophy ? Would not ' Zootheism ' or ' Cosmotheism ' be at once more com- prehensive and more adequate ? I do not think so, and for the simple reason that I believe that there is nothing which Cosmotheism stands for that cannot be appreciated from the anthropotheistic position ; whereas, in starting, as Cosmotheism does, from the assumption that it is in- different at which point of the Universe the start is made, provided this starting-point is recognized as organically one with the Universe as a whole, there is great risk of overlooking the significance of individual experience in the shaping of human destiny, and underrating the importance of the psychological point of view. Anthropotheism is, in fact, a Cosmotheism which starts from those immediacies of personal experience which the words ' God with us ' inwardly indicate. But the starting-point makes a notable difference, and I have given reasons elsewhere* in support * See ' A Peace-Policy for Idealists/ Hibbert Journal, January, 1907. Cf. also pp. 6-8, 89-92, of the present volume. See also ' The Inner Light ': A Study of the Signifi- cance, Character, and Primary Content of the Religious Con- sciousness, by Arnold R. Whately, M.A. (Camb.), D.D. UNIVERSAUSM AND PROBLEM OF EVIL 229 of this contention. The anthropotheistic solution, in a word, appears to me to be not only free from the objections just mentioned, but to be as infinite in promise and outlook as any cosmotheistic solution can possibly be. The true starting-point for Religious Idealism is where man and God inwardly meet, and the deepest and broadest relations, social and cosmic, may grow from this personal union, and spread along all the radii of the cosmic compass. Dr. Caird's conception of a Church as consisting of ' a bond of human beings as all directly related to God, and only through God related to each other ' (vide p. in), is sugges- tive in this connection. It suggests the further reflection that the primary personal oneness of the soul with God can alone be truly determinative of all those subsequent relationships into which man is capable of entering, not only with his fellows, but with the remotest powers of the Universe. It is, at any rate, the conviction of Religious Idealism that the roots of Ultimate Mefcaphysic are sunk deep in the religious freedom of personal experience and in the fundamental facts of the Spiritual Life. (Lond.), with Introductory Note by Alfred Caldecott, D.Litt., D.D., 1908, chapters i., ii., iii., especially chapter ii. on ' Intuitive Theism.' I am particularly glad to be able to draw the reader's attention to this able and original presenta- tion of the Religious Problem. The standpoint and outlook of ' The Inner Light ' are substantially one with those of the present volume, though Dr. Whately refuses to label his views either as monistic or as idealistic. The earlier chapters of the book may be specially commended in connection with the the problem of Religious Knowledge. BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD. BY THE SAME AUTHOR RUDOLF EUCKEN'S PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE SECOND EDITION With Frontispiece Portrait of Rudolf Eucken. Crown 8vo., cloth Price 3/6 net SOME PRESS OPINIONS 1 We are indebted to the author of this work for so ably introducing Professor Eucken to the English people. Indeed, for such a task it would be difficult to find one better qualified by knowledge and power of sympa- thetic criticism than Mr. Boyce Gibson." Hibbert Journal. 1 Mr. Gibson may be congratulated very heartily on the worthy subject he has chosen, the skilful, sympathetic exposition he has given, and the valuable contribution he has thus made to philosophical thought tending toward Christian Faith.' Review of Theology and Philosophy. ' A most suggestive and stimulating book. In a very real sense it has brought philosophy down to earth, and is deserving of serious study.' Aberdeen Free Press. ' No better introduction to a study of Eucken's writings could be imagined than is provided in this little volume.' Daily News. PUBLISHED BY ADAM & CHARLES BLACK, 4 SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W. BY THE SAME AUTHOR THE PROBLEM OF LOGIC BY W. R. BOYCE GIBSON, M.A. Lecturer in Philosophy in the University of London WITH THE CO-OPERATION OF AUGUSTA KLEIN Demy 8vo. f cloth Price 12/6 net (Post free, price 13h) SOME PRESS OPINIONS 1 An invaluable work which at once supersedes older books on logic, and is likely to take its place, in this country at least, as the standard text-book on the subject.' Scottish Review. 1 We have no doubt that the work will take its place among the standard monuments of logical thought and enquiry.' Manchester Courier. 1 This is a book of real merit, written in a clear and attractive style. . . . The book is strong both in exposition and in criticism. Judged from the standpoint of exposition, there is no part more satisfactory than that which deals with immediate inference. This in any treatise on logic should be a testing section. . . . Under the head of immediate inferences are included the processes of opposition and eduction, and these are handled very fully and suggestively, and each section is furnished with an excellent set of concrete examples, culled from many sources. This recognition f the necessity of concrete examples is admirable, for if logic is to have c ~e practical value, it must at all points have reference to the concrete. . . . Freshness also is given to the handling of the Syllogism (simple categorical, and other), effected in part by an abundance of appropriate examples. In reviewing Fallacies, telling instances are given, and a very luminous mode of grouping is suggested. . . . We would refer in special to the sections on Hypothesis and Generalization, and to the whole chapter on Causation, entitled " The Goal of Induction: Causal Explanation." Felicity of phrase, clearness of presentation, copiousness of illustration, all character- ise the treatment here, and render it effective. . . . This book is a distinctly valuable addition to works on logical doctrine, and should be widely welcomed.' Aberdeen Free Press. ' This is the first of two volumes which together will form a complete treatise on Logic. If the second does not fall below this level, we take it that the complete work will be the most important contribution to the study of Logic since Mill.' Expository Times. PUBLISHED BY ADAM & CHARLES BLACK, 4 SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W. THIS 300K IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE ., , StAMPED ; BELOW AN INJTIAL FINE OF 25 CENTS WILL BE ASSESSED FOR FAILURE TO RETURN THIS BOOK ON THE DATE DUE. 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