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 DIVINE IMMANENCE
 
 same 
 
 Sermons preached in a College Chapel, with an Ap- 
 pendix. Second Edition. Crown 8vo, 5^. 
 
 Personality, Human and Divine. Being the Bampton 
 Lectures for the year 1894. Crown 8vo, 6s. 
 
 University and Cathedral Sermons. Crown Svo, $s. 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD., LONDON.
 
 DIVINE IMMANENCE 
 
 AN ESSAY 
 
 ON 
 
 THE SPIRITUAL SIGNIFICANCE OF MATTER 
 
 BY 
 
 J. R. ILLINGWORTH, M.A. 
 
 AUTHOR OP 'PERSONALITY HUMAN AND DIVINE' 
 
 OToN pip IKACTO'N e'cri THC peNeceooc reAecOeiCHC, TAYTHN 4><uieN 
 THN <>yciN etNAi CKA'CTOY. ARIST. Pol. 
 
 HonDon 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED 
 
 NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 1898 
 AU rigku rutrvtd
 
 HORACE HART, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY
 
 PREFACE 
 
 MUCH of the best philosophical writing in 
 England, of late years, has been critical, or, in the 
 technical and proper sense of the word, sceptical. 
 But critical and sceptical phases, in the progress 
 of thought, can never, from their very nature, be 
 other than temporary things : they sift and question 
 the constructions of the past ; but only with a view 
 to prepare for those that are to come. For the 
 world, after all, is a fact ; sun, moon, and stars are 
 real ; men and women live and love ; the moral 
 law is strong ; in a word, the universe exists, and 
 some positive account of it must needs be true; 
 it can never be finally explained by a negation. 
 Hence the result of recent criticism has been to 
 make the need of reconstruction more apparent; 
 and men are consequently feeling, in various direc- 
 tions, after positive, synthetic ways of thought. 
 
 The following brief essay is not an attempt to 
 make any new or original contribution toward such 
 thought : but it is written in the interest of synthesis,
 
 vi PREFACE 
 
 and aims at combining some ideas, which are 
 familiar enough in themselves, but are not always 
 viewed in combination ideas on the relation of 
 nature to religion. For one love, amid all our dis- 
 cord, unites the modern world ; we all of us love 
 nature in our several ways ; men of science, poets, 
 painters, men of religion, men of affairs, are equally 
 affected by its spell the wonder of its processes, 
 the glory of its aspect, the contrast of its calmness 
 to the coil of human care. And with this feeling 
 for nature which, we are probably right in sup- 
 posing, was never so widely diffused as at the 
 present day comes an increased susceptibility to 
 those spiritual emotions which the presence of 
 nature inspires, and which lie at the root of what we 
 call natural religion. The sense of natural religion 
 is therefore strong in the modern mind ; and this 
 of itself is an important step towards positive, 
 constructive belief. But we, of later ages, for whom 
 history has happened, can never again revert to a 
 mere religion of nature ; any more than to a state 
 of nature, in society, or policy, or morals. For we 
 have learned, from nature itself, that the law of life 
 is evolution, and that evolution means an increase 
 of distinctive form. Religion, like all other things, 
 must have become, as in fact it has become, in- 
 creasingly articulate with the process of the years ; 
 its development more definite, or, in religious lan- 
 guage, its revelation more precise. And the plea of
 
 PREFACE vii 
 
 this essay is that the Incarnation is the congruous 
 climax of such development ; that the more we 
 analyse natural religion, the more it tends to such 
 an issue ; while conversely the Incarnation presup- 
 poses such a past. This is no more, of course, than 
 theologians, in all ages, have maintained ; and to 
 many readers, therefore, it may seem a common- 
 place. But its restatement will, perhaps, be per- 
 mitted for the benefit of those who are more 
 attracted by the question than acquainted with its 
 history ; in the hope that some who, under modern 
 influence, have felt the fascination of natural re- 
 ligion, may be led to recognize its culmination in 
 the Christian creed. 
 
 As this essay is in some sense a sequel to my 
 lectures on ' Personality ' being a further applica- 
 tion of the same line of thought I have here 
 assumed certain positions, which are there defended 
 at length ; and at the same time enlarged upon 
 certain others more especially in the Appendix 
 which seemed, in their present connexion, to need 
 further emphasis.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 MATTER AND SPIRIT. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. The distinction between matter and spirit dates 
 from the 'body and soul' of primitive 
 philosophy 2 
 
 Matter and spirit, however different, are only 
 known in combination .... 2 
 
 Therefore neither can be completely known . 5 
 
 But they represent very distinct and dis- 
 tinguishable phases of experience . . 6 
 
 For spirit is what thinks, and wills, and loves ; 
 matter is what moves in space ... 6 
 
 II. While matter is of use to spirit, spirit is of 
 
 no use to matter 9 
 
 Illustrations of this fact .... 9-13 
 This suggests a ideological relation between 
 
 the two ; i.e. that 
 
 Spirit is the final cause of matter. . . 14-15 
 Bacon and Spinoza criticize final causes . 15 
 But (i) Bacon's objection is only to their 
 
 misuse 16 
 
 (2) Spinoza's objection involves an 
 impossible separation between 
 man and the universe . 1 7
 
 x CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 III. Spiritual intensity, in human judgement, 
 
 outweighs material immensity . . . 1819 
 And thereby justifies its right to subordinate 
 
 the latter to itself . 20-21 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE OF THE 
 MATERIAL WORLD. 
 
 Among the uses of matter to spirit its religious 
 
 influence is the chief 22-23 
 
 Historical illustrations of this. 
 I. Ancient literature : 
 
 Egyptian hymns .... 24-25 
 
 The Vedas 26-28 
 
 Zend A vesta ..... 29-50 
 The Hebrew Psalms . . . 30-31 
 
 II. Greek and Roman literature : 
 
 Poets 32-33 
 
 Philosophers 34 
 
 III. Christian literature : 
 
 Fathers . . ... 35-37 
 
 Mediaeval writers . . . . 38 
 
 IV. The Renaissance : 
 
 Campanella 39 
 
 Petrarch 40 
 
 V. Later Theologians : 
 
 Suso 41 
 
 Zwingli 42 
 
 Fe'ne'lon 43 
 
 W. Law 43
 
 CONTENTS xi 
 
 PAGE 
 
 VI. Modern Literature : 
 
 Shelley 45 
 
 Byron 46 
 
 Wordsworth 47 
 
 These illustrations are typical of innumerable 
 others; and evince a mystic emotion more 
 
 fundamental than any varieties of creed . . 48 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE. 
 
 The religious influence of external nature is a fact 
 of greater magnitude than any one of its Inter- 
 pretations 49-50 
 
 This fact points to a spiritual reality behind things ; 
 unless 
 
 (1) It is an illusion 50 
 
 (2) The faculties which feel it are untrust- 
 
 worthy 50 
 
 The suggestion that it may be an illusion raises 
 the question, What do we mean by reality ? . 51 
 
 We find on reflection, that we cannot mean ' exist- 
 ence in space'; but permanent relation to 
 personality 51-56 
 
 Judged by this criterion, the sensible is quite as 
 real as the scientific aspect of the world ; the 
 two things impressing different faculties in us, 
 but with equal justification .... 56 
 
 The objection that feeling is less trustworthy than 
 reason, ignores the fact that they are co-ordinate
 
 xii CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 elements of the selfsame personal experience; 
 and that the influence in question is not merely 
 emotionally, but personally felt . . . 57-61 
 
 But if this influence cannot be discredited, it points 
 
 to a spiritual presence in nature . . . 62-64 
 
 The relation of this spirit to nature can only be 
 interpreted on the analogy of human personality 
 (for we know no other) 65 
 
 Human Personality combines 
 
 (1) Transcendence of matter ... 65 
 
 (2) Immanence in matter ... 67 
 This analogy therefore excludes 
 
 (1) Pantheism (mere immanence) . . 69 
 
 (2) Deism (mere transcendence) . . 69 
 
 (3) Monism (mere identity) ... 70 
 While it harmonizes with Trinitarianism . . 72 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN. 
 
 If God is immanent in nature, He must be imma- 
 nent in man (as being part of nature) . . 74 
 Evidence of this in conscience ... 75 
 Evidence of this in inspiration ... 76 
 This points to the Incarnation as its climax . . 77 
 I. The tendency to believe in incarnations is 
 urged as an argument against the truth of 
 
 the Incarnation 78 
 
 But this only holds good if an incarnation is 
 
 antecedently improbable . . . . 79 
 Otherwise it points in the opposite direction . 80
 
 CONTENTS xiii 
 
 PACK 
 
 II. Again, the Incarnation is thought improbable 
 
 because miraculous . . . . . 81 
 But being ex hypothesi an unique event, it is 
 not ' miraculous ' in the sense of the objec- 
 tion 81-86 
 
 III. The primary evidence for the Incarnation is 
 
 spiritual; being the self-revelation of a 
 Person 87-88 
 
 It then rather supports its accompanying 
 miracles, than they it .... 88-90 
 
 While the lapse of time, which weakens the 
 weight of miracles, strengthens that of 
 prophecy 90-92 
 
 IV. Moreover, the Incarnation is redemptive, its 
 
 object being to restore a law already broken 92-95 
 And this fact must affect our view of its 
 miracles : 
 
 (1) The Virgin birth .... 95-96 
 
 (2) The miracles of healing . . . 97 
 
 (3) The cosmic miracles . . . 98 
 
 (4) The Resurrection . . . 99-100 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES. 
 
 The objection to miracles is chiefly based on 
 the uniformity of nature. Mozley's answer to 
 this 101-102 
 
 But we now think more of the 'unity,' than the 
 
 ' uniformity ' of nature 103
 
 xiv CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 And this is a spiritual conception . . .104 
 But spirit asserts its own superiority to matter . 105 
 The analysis of our conception of causation points 
 
 in the same direction . . . . 106-110 
 Dr. Newman on the superiority of moral to 
 
 physical law in 
 
 Personal experience is the root of all knowledge . 112 
 And this reveals the moral law, whose claim to 
 
 supremacy justifies miracles . . . .113 
 Lotze on the relation of the ' absolute ' to matter 114-115 
 The Incarnation has a cosmic, as well as a human 
 
 significance, and its miracles harmonize with 
 
 this ....... 116-118 
 
 The general cessation of miracles was as needful 
 
 as their occurrence 119-122 
 
 But they have assisted to emphasize the belief in 
 
 particular providence, which is their modern 
 
 analogue 122-124 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE INCARNATION AND SACRAMENTS. 
 
 Matter has a secondary as well as a primary con- 
 nexion with religion, due to the reaction upon 
 it of the human mind .... 125-127 
 
 For primitive man inevitably associates 
 
 (1) his gods with particular places . . 128 
 
 (2) and his service of them with particular 
 
 rites 129 
 
 (3) Illustrations of this .... 130
 
 CONTENTS xv 
 
 PAGE 
 
 But wherever an omnipresent God is specially 
 
 realized, He specially is . . . 131-132 
 
 The Incarnation sanctions and spiritualizes this 
 principle 
 
 (1) Christ's attitude toward the body . 133 
 
 (2) His attitude towards nature . . 134 
 
 (3) His symbolic teaching . . 135 
 
 (4) His symbolic action . . . .136 
 Matter is utilized but subordinated to spirit 
 
 throughout 137 
 
 The same principle runs through Christian history 
 
 (i) In the treatment of the human body 138-139 
 (a) In the sacramental system . . 139-143 
 (3) I n art .... M3- J 47 
 
 Hence the religious influence of art and sacra- 
 ment is as real as that of material nature, which 
 they emphasize and intensify . . . 147-150 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE INCARNATION AND THE TRINITY. 
 
 The doctrine of the Incarnation (with that of the 
 Trinity which it involves) though philosophical 
 in aspect, was essentially practical in origin 151-154 
 
 For the purport of the Incarnation was to reveal 
 God as love ; and this would have been unin- 
 telligible without the revelation of a plurality of 
 Persons in the Godhead, between whom love 
 exists . 1 54- '57 
 
 And the object of this revelation was to influence 
 human life in the only way in which it can be 
 completely influenced : i.e. by love . . 157-160
 
 xvi CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 But deeds are more than words of love ; hence the 
 revelation appropriately began with the actual 
 life of Christ .161 
 
 And the practical power of this life reflects retro- 
 spective light upon the metaphysical doctrines 
 which it involves 162 
 
 And is thus the strongest evidence of their truth 163-165 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 I. Personal Identity 167 
 
 II. Freewill 190
 
 DIVINE IMMANENCE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 MATTER AND SPIRIT 
 
 THE nature of the relation between spirit 
 and matter may perhaps be thought too ab- 
 struse a problem to be of general interest. Yet 
 it is a question which lies at the root of all our 
 different theories of life ; of our art, of our moral 
 conduct, of our religion or irreligion ; of the gloom 
 that darkens, or the hope that glorifies the sunset 
 of our days. We all have opinions of one kind or 
 another on the point, and it deeply concerns us, 
 seeing the nature of the issues they involve, that 
 those opinions should, if possible, be true. 
 
 The subject is not therefore really unpractical, 
 or remote from common interest ; and, as it has 
 been much discussed of recent years, for various 
 reasons, and from various points of view, no 
 apology will perhaps be needed, for one more 
 recurrence to the question, in its bearing on re- 
 ligious life and thought. 
 
 B
 
 a MATTER AND SPIRIT [CHAP. 
 
 Body and soul is a distinction which dates 
 from primitive philosophy ; we find it, in crude 
 conception, among the earliest and rudest races ; 
 whether drawn from the visions of dreamland or 
 elsewhere. And with the progress of reflection 
 this distinction gradually passed, after much sifting 
 and refinement by successive schools of thought, 
 into the more complete and comprehensive anti- 
 thesis, between what we now call spirit and matter. 
 
 Now the first thing to notice about spirit and 
 matter is that, however we regard them, whether 
 as totally different things, or as different aspects 
 of the same thing, we only know them as a fact 
 in combination. 
 
 First, there is the material world outside us, 
 earth, sea, sky, and sun, and stars ; the manifold 
 movement of its processes, the life with which it 
 teems, the beauty of its aspect, the music of its 
 sounds. It existed before we were born this 
 solid universe of things and will continue to exist 
 when we are gone. We cannot easily be brought 
 to regard it as in any way dependent upon our- 
 selves, and we are always ready to 'vanquish 
 Berkeley with a grin.' Yet a little reflection will 
 convince us that our knowledge of the world is 
 largely qualified and coloured by the constitution 
 of our mind. The mind receives its information, 
 to begin with, from the senses, and the impressions 
 of sense are very different from the things which
 
 l] MATTER AND SPIRIT 3 
 
 they reflect. The hues of the sunset and the rain- 
 bow, with all their power to move the soul, are 
 due to movements among atoms to which we can 
 ascribe no colour; and the musical sounds that 
 seem to us so spiritual, flow from vibrations 
 merely mechanical vibrations of the air. The 
 same is the case with the other senses ; they only 
 present us with effects. While scientific men assure 
 us that even sensitive perception is by no means so 
 simple a process as it seems, and involves acts of 
 combination, and comparison, and inference which, 
 however instinctively performed, are in their nature 
 intellectual. And when we pass from simple to 
 complex perceptions, this action of the mind be- 
 comes quite obvious. In looking at a landscape, 
 for instance, we see more than a parti-coloured 
 panorama, which is, of course, all that is reflected 
 in the eye ; we distinguish and recognize its features, 
 trees, flowers, houses, cattle, birds; and this im- 
 plies previous knowledge, and memory, and thought ; 
 we interpret what we see, and though custom has 
 made the process automatic, it is none the less of 
 mental origin. The primary aspect of the world 
 therefore does not show us matter by itself, but 
 matter as it affects our mind, in a particular way, 
 through the senses, and is at the same moment 
 affected in particular ways by our mind. Nor does 
 science alter the case. Science indeed penetrates 
 behind this primary aspect of the world, and 
 B 2
 
 4 MATTER AND SPIRIT [CHAP. 
 
 presents us with a different picture. It discovers 
 the machinery by which the scenic effect is pro- 
 duced ; atoms, energy, ether, and the laws which 
 they obey, or in other words, the ways in which 
 they act. But all this brings us no nearer to the 
 knowledge of matter by itself. On the contrary, 
 it lands us in a region of theories, hypotheses, ideas, 
 which, however true we may believe them to be, 
 are not material but mental. Thus matter, as we 
 know it, is everywhere and always fused with 
 mind : and in the nature of the case it always 
 must be so ; for ' to know a thing,' of course, means 
 to bring it into relation to our mind ; and our 
 mind, as we have seen, is not a mirror which 
 passively reflects, but an agent which helps to 
 constitute the object of its ken. 
 
 The case is the same when we turn to spirit, for 
 that also, as we know it, is always connected with 
 matter. Not only do we depend on the senses, 
 which are material things, to awaken our intelli- 
 gence, and feeling, and will ; but we cannot think 
 at all, we cannot be conscious, without a brain, 
 changes in which accompany our every change of 
 thought. 
 
 The fact, indeed, that we are unaware of the 
 movements taking place in our brain, may some- 
 times mislead us into speaking of purely spiritual 
 experience ; but no experience, however spiritual, 
 can be other than a state of consciousness, and
 
 l] MATTER AND SPIRIT 5 
 
 therefore of the material organ upon which con- 
 sciousness depends. 
 
 But if matter and spirit are thus only known in 
 combination, it follows that neither can be com- 
 pletely known ; since we cannot disentangle their 
 respective contributions to the joint result which we 
 call ' experience.' Hence it is that every possible 
 shade of opinion has existed on the relationship 
 between the two; from the view that regards 
 mind as a passing harmony of matter, to the view 
 that regards matter as a dream of mind. What 
 we actually know, at first hand, is our personal 
 experience, in which the two factors are inex- 
 tricably combined ; and directly we go beyond this 
 to speak of matter or spirit by themselves, we are 
 making abstraction of one element from our con- 
 crete experience, without any means of knowing 
 whether such an abstraction can exist, except in 
 the mind that makes it. It is, of course, logically 
 possible that the two things may be independent 
 and separable realities, as the natural dualists or 
 natural realists believe ; or that either may be a 
 mere mode of the other, as idealism and material- 
 ism respectively maintain ; or yet again, that the 
 two may be co-ordinate aspects, or manifestations, 
 or functions of one reality. The claims of this 
 latter opinion have been revived of recent years 
 under the name of monism; but it should be 
 remembered that monism is not really newer than
 
 6 MATTER AND SPIRIT [CHAP. 
 
 any of the alternative conjectures ; they are all as 
 old as philosophy, and remain conjectures still. 
 
 But leaving conjecture for the present, and limit- 
 ing our thoughts to what we know, we find that 
 though we cannot in fact separate spirit and 
 matter, yet the two words represent very distinct 
 phases of our total experience ; and phases which, 
 whatever the nature of their ultimate connexion, 
 are perfectly separable in thought. Thus the 
 fundamental characteristic of spirit, as we know it 
 in human personality, is self-consciousness, the 
 power to make mental distinction between self and 
 other things, and to regard all other things as 
 objects over against our subjective self: while 
 spiritual life consists in the free selection, and con- 
 scious pursuit of the various objects of knowledge, 
 affection, or practical endeavour, which we are thus 
 able to present to ourselves. Our action is thus 
 determined, in technical terms, by final causes ; 
 that is, by causes which do not exercise a physical 
 compulsion, but appeal to the mind as ends, aims, 
 purposes, ideals, which we are free either to follow 
 or refuse. Hence we are self-determined ; since, 
 from the objects that occur to us, we can choose 
 the one which we shall make our own ; and as by 
 successive acts of choice we gradually mould and 
 shape our character, we are, in a measure, self- 
 creative, causes of ourselves (caussae sui). This 
 capacity of self-determination, and therefore of
 
 l] MATTER AND SPIRIT 7 
 
 self-creation, compels us to place spirit in a rank 
 by itself. Other things are determined from with- 
 out; they are what external forces make them; 
 they do not choose what they will be. But spirit 
 chooses its own end, elects what it will become, 
 and thereby asserts its existence, as having a value 
 for itself. And a being which thus claims to exist 
 for its own sake, and be its own end, thereby justi- 
 fies its existence : it has in our eyes a right to 
 exist, by the very fact of willing its own existence. 
 It has, as we say, an absolute value compared with 
 merely material things, whose reason for existence 
 lies in their relation to other things outside 
 themselves ; like cogs in a wheel, links in a 
 chain, fragments of a machine or picture that 
 possess no meaning when detached from the 
 whole. 
 
 Regarded simply from a metaphysical point of 
 view then, as self-conscious and self-determined, 
 spirit reigns in a realm apart. But of course it is 
 much more than a metaphysical abstraction ; it is 
 ethical and emotional as well. Its power of self- 
 determination enables it to act from a sense of 
 duty, to obey a moral law, and in so doing become 
 good ; while its goodness finds highest expression 
 in the life of self-sacrificing love, which is only 
 possible to a being that is both self-conscious and 
 free ; and which we recognize as the end of ends, 
 the reality that needs no explanation.
 
 8 MATTER AND SPIRIT [CHAP. 
 
 ' For life, with all it yields, of joy and woe 
 And hope and fear, believe the aged friend, 
 Is just our chance of the prize of learning love, 
 How love might be, hath been indeed, and is 1 .' 
 
 Then as to matter: what do we know of it? 
 The term is often used as if it implied some common 
 stuff, of which individual things are made. But no 
 analysis has yet been able to detect such a common 
 stuff. On the contrary, we find a number of primi- 
 tive elements, which recent science, instead of 
 diminishing has considerably increased. Matter 
 is the sum total of all these elements, regarded as 
 possessing a particular attribute, namely materiality, 
 or the property of occupying space : while, as all 
 the occupants of space are in motion, molecular 
 or molar, occupation of space may be said to be 
 practically synonymous with movement in space. 
 Matter then is the name for what moves in space. 
 It is at present believed to consist of atoms which 
 have different chemical characteristics, that may 
 possibly be due to different mechanical arrange- 
 ments ; but here we pass into the region of hypo- 
 thesis, and beyond this all is hypothetical as to 
 what atoms ultimately are. At any rate, their 
 ultimate constitution is out of reach of our senses ; 
 and it remains that matter as we know it is an 
 effect, a phenomenon or appearance, a manifestation 
 of something other than meets either hand or eye. 
 1 Browning, A Death in the Desert.
 
 l] MATTER AND SPIRIT 9 
 
 Briefly then spirit is what thinks and wills and 
 loves ; and matter is what moves in space : and 
 whatever their ultimate relationship may be, we 
 may fairly speak of two things whose modes of 
 manifestation are so different, as for practical 
 purposes two different things. Adopting this use 
 of language then, the next fact which we wish to 
 note is that, while matter is of use to spirit, spirit 
 is of no use to matter. 
 
 One might, of course, put the case in a more 
 general form, by substituting 'consciousness' for 
 ' spirit,' and saying that, while matter is of use to 
 consciousness, consciousness is of no use to matter ; 
 thus including in the statement every form of con- 
 scious life, from the lowest sensitive organism 
 upward. But what is true, in its measure, of all 
 conscious life, is true in a much more eminent 
 degree of spirit. And, as spirit is the thing with 
 which we are dealing, we will confine our attention 
 to that ; merely remarking that the same line of 
 thought admits of this wider application. 
 
 While then matter is of use incessant and 
 inevitable use to spirit, spirit, on the other hand, 
 is of no use to matter. Man can improve material 
 things, of course, from his own point of view, by 
 employing them for purposes of science or of art ; 
 but in so doing, he only alters their relation to 
 himself; he does not and cannot change their 
 nature. Electricity gains nothing by guidance
 
 io MATTER AND SPIRIT [CHAP. 
 
 along wires; marble remains marble, as much in 
 the statue as in the rock; gold is no better for 
 coinage, nor flowers for cultivation, except in their 
 relationship to man. Human interference does not 
 anywise affect, either the constitution of natural 
 elements, or the action of natural laws. 
 
 But reverse the picture, and the opposite is the 
 case. Our every state of consciousness depends, 
 as we have seen, upon the brain, and therefore upon 
 the blood that nourishes the brain, and therefore 
 on the chemical elements that form the blood. 
 Without oxygen, and nitrogen, and phosphorus, 
 and carbon, we could neither think, nor will, nor 
 love. 
 
 But thought and will and love must needs com- 
 municate themselves to others ; spirit craves inter- 
 course with spirit ; and here again we depend on 
 matter. Tongue and ear are material things; 
 words are movements of the air; and printing 
 press and telegraph extend their sway. Machinery 
 again, with its coal, and steam, and iron, is ever at 
 work to enlarge the practical dominion of our will ; 
 while art art takes up the stubborn elements of 
 earth and transmutes them in its crucible to spiritual 
 things. Hellenic sculptures, Gothic cathedrals, me- 
 diaeval painting, modern music, are only modes of 
 matter, when regarded by themselves : yet through 
 them the soul of man has given utterance and per- 
 manence to all the varying phases of his inward
 
 l] MATTER AND SPIRIT it 
 
 spiritual story ; which else would have been fugitive 
 and dumb. 
 
 Further, to give expression to a thing is to realize 
 it, in the sense of making it more real ; and hence 
 matter, as being the language of spirit, is also the 
 medium of its realization. Thoughts float idly 
 across the mind, till they have been precipitated in 
 print ; theories remain abstract and uncertain, till 
 they have been tested by experiment ; good inten- 
 tions are of no avail, till they have faced the resis- 
 tance of the outer world, and in overcoming its 
 opposition become moral acts ; and love can never 
 rest, till it has proved its own intensity by a thou- 
 sand tender, thoughtful, self-sacrificing deeds. In 
 every case contact with matter strengthens the 
 spiritual fibre, forcing vagueness into outline, con- 
 fusion into clearness, doubt into decision, hesitation 
 into act. It is the necessary means by which our 
 spiritual life becomes actual, concrete, real. Nor 
 is it only as a means of expression that matter 
 ministers to spirit. It has also an important 
 reaction upon character and conduct. 
 
 'The floating clouds their state shall lend 
 To her ; for her the willow bend ; 
 Nor shall she fail to see 
 Even in the motions of the storm 
 Grace that shall mould the maiden's form 
 By silent sympathy.
 
 ta MATTER AND SPIRIT [CHAP. 
 
 'The stars of midnight shall be dear 
 To her ; and she shall lean her ear 
 In many a secret place 
 Where rivulets dance their wayward round, 
 And beauty born of murmuring sound 
 Shall pass into her face 1 .' 
 This is more than a poet's conceit. It is a 
 description of what happens daily, and in more 
 ways than most men are aware ; the gradual 
 moulding of our thoughts and feelings, our habitual 
 expression, our face and form, by subtle influence 
 of outward things. Plato first called attention to 
 this principle, and it has been called from him, 
 platonic. But all great thinkers have recognized 
 its action, from Plato to the present day. None 
 more so than Browning. Has a man reasoned 
 himself into unbelief? Then 
 
 'Just when we're safest 
 There 's a sunset touch, a fancy from 
 A flower bell 2 ,' 
 
 and the reasoning fades away. Have the souls of 
 two lovers been melted into one ? 
 1 The forests had done it ; there they stood ; 
 We caught for a moment the powers at play: 
 They had mingled us so for once and good, 
 Their work was done 3 .' 
 
 1 Wordsworth, ' Three years she grew.' 
 * Browning, Bishop Blougranfs Apology. 
 8 Id. By the Fireside.
 
 l] MATTER AND SPIRIT 13 
 
 Have two others missed their mutual vocation? 
 They have profaned in so doing a natural sacra- 
 ment, which c made things plain in vain/ 
 'What was the sea for? What, the grey, 
 
 Sad church, that solitary day, 
 
 Crosses and graves and swallow's call? 
 
 Was there naught better than to enjoy? 
 
 No feat which, done, would make time break 
 
 And let us pent-up creatures through 
 
 Into eternity, our due? 
 
 No forcing earth teach heaven's employ 1 ? * 
 Nor are such things exceptional ; they are 
 common situations of every day, and must have 
 recurred, since primaeval man first wove his legends 
 of the dawn ; matter everywhere and always, 
 fashioning, inspiring, controlling, quickening, the 
 processes of spiritual life. 
 
 Here then we are face to face with a plain fact 
 of experience. Throughout the entire range of their 
 co-existent activity, matter subserves spirit, and that 
 not in one way only, but in a variety of subtle, 
 and delicate, and complex ways; while in the 
 opposite direction, nothing of the kind takes place. 
 When therefore we find that the material world, 
 which can derive, as we have already seen, no 
 possible benefit from spirit, is in countless ways 
 adapted to further spiritual life; it is hard to 
 resist the conclusion that matter exists for this 
 1 Browning, Dis Aliter Visum.
 
 14 MATTER AND SPIRIT [CHAP. 
 
 very end, and that all its ingenuity of intricate 
 arrangement is meant to serve the purpose, which 
 in fact it so elaborately serves. If matter lay at 
 our feet, as a thing to be employed or neglected 
 at will, the case would be different; and we might 
 then regard its use as accidental. But its fusion 
 with spirit is, in fact, far too intimate, its correla- 
 tion too exact to admit of any such idea. It is 
 obviously part and parcel of the same system with 
 spirit ; and if so must, we argue, be qualified through- 
 out by the final causality which is spirit's goal. 
 
 ' Since, in the seeing soul, all worth lies, I assert, 
 And nought i' the world, which, save for soul 
 
 that sees, inert 
 
 Was, is, and would be ever, stuff for trans- 
 muting, null 
 And void until man's breath evoke the beautiful 1 .' 
 
 The case may, for the sake of emphasis, be 
 re-stated thus. We attribute an absolute worth and 
 dignity to spirit, simply because it possesses the 
 power of purpose, purposeful thought, purposeful 
 action, purposeful love. Purpose is our standard, 
 our inevitable standard of value ; not this or that 
 particular purpose, which may be useful to our- 
 selves, but purpose as such, the free determination 
 to realize a foreseen end. Our mental constitution 
 compels us to attribute this importance to the 
 1 Browning, Fijine at the Fair, 55.
 
 l] MATTER AND SPIRIT 15 
 
 power of purpose ; or, to put it otherwise, our 
 reason justifies us in so doing. Now this does not 
 merely mean that we prefer things which have 
 a purpose to things which have none. It means 
 that purpose, when once recognized, becomes the 
 necessary and self-evident key to existence ; the 
 final category, or form of thought, under which 
 we are compelled to regard the world. For 
 a system which culminates in purpose must be 
 purposeful throughout. Its entire process must 
 be qualified by the character of its conclusion. 
 And hence the material order which is so marvel- 
 lously ministrant to spirit must, we conclude, be 
 intended so to be. Spirit must be its final cause. 
 
 There is of course a prejudice, in many minds, 
 against all consideration of final causes ; which 
 Bacon calls ' anthropomorphic conceptions, rather 
 than cosmic realities' (ex analogia hominis magis 
 quam universi), and Spinoza, ' mere figments of the 
 human brain ' (nihil nisi humana figmenta). But 
 what really provoked this criticism was the frivol- 
 ous and futile teleology, which substituted the 
 thought of final for that of physical causation ; 
 leading men to think they knew enough about 
 a thing, when they knew its presumed purpose 
 often a very credulously and crudely presumed 
 purpose and to neglect all further inquiry into 
 its process of production, that is to say, all interest 
 in physical science. But Bacon fully admits, else-
 
 16 MATTER AND SPIRIT [CHAP. 
 
 where, that ' final causes have their place ' : and as 
 the subject is important and his authority has 
 weight, it may be worth while to quote him at 
 length. 
 
 ' For to say that the hairs of the eye-lids are for 
 a quickset and fence about the sight ; or that the 
 firmness of the skins and hides of living creatures 
 is to defend them from the extremities of heat or 
 cold ; or that the bones are for the columns or 
 beams, whereupon the frames of the bodies of living 
 creatures are built ; or that the leaves of trees are 
 for protecting of the fruit ; or that the clouds are for 
 watering of the earth ; or that the solidness of the 
 earth is for the station and mansion of living 
 creatures and the like, is well inquired and collected 
 in metaphysique, but in physique they are imper- 
 tinent. . . . Not because those final causes are not 
 true, and worthy to be inquired, being kept within 
 their own province ; but because their excursions 
 into the limits of physical causes hath bred a vast- 
 ness and solitude in that track. For otherwise, 
 keeping their precincts and borders, men are 
 extremely deceived if they think there is an 
 enmity or repugnancy at all between them . . . 
 both causes being true and compatible, the one 
 declaring an intention, the other a consequence only. 
 Neither doth this call in question, or derogate from 
 Divine Providence, but highly confirm and exalt
 
 l] MATTER AND SPIRIT 17 
 
 it. For as in civil actions he is the greater and 
 deeper politique, that can make other men the 
 instruments of his will and ends, and yet never 
 acquaint them with his purpose, so as they shall do 
 it and yet not know what they do, than he that 
 imparteth his meaning to those he employeth ; so 
 is the wisdom of God more admirable, when nature 
 intendeth one thing, and Providence draweth forth 
 another, than if He had communicated to particular 
 creatures and motions the characters and impres- 
 sions of His Providence.' 
 
 Spinoza's objection is more thorough-going, but 
 rests upon an impossible separation between man 
 and the universe. For a universe, apart from and 
 in contrast with the mind that knows it, is a mere 
 creature of the imagination, which cannot be con- 
 strued into thought ; an utterly unthinkable, mean- 
 ingless abstraction ; while a universe that is known 
 to mind must be known in subjection to the laws 
 of mind, among which is the teleological principle. 
 But Spinoza's imaginative picture, for all its 
 philosophic impossibility, has been widely influ- 
 ential, during the last two centuries ; through the 
 emphasis it has given to the contrast, so congenial 
 to a scientific age, between the grandeur of the 
 material universe, and the insignificance of man. 
 It is important therefore to notice that such a con- 
 trast is entirely fallacious, and merely arises from 
 
 C
 
 i8 MATTER AND SPIRIT [CHAP. 
 
 the fact that we see the magnitude of matter, but 
 cannot see the magnitude of mind. To gain a truer 
 view of their relative proportions, we must begin 
 by confining our attention to the earth ; as the 
 only field where we know the two in correlation. 
 For the rest of the stellar universe we see only on 
 its material side ; and while all analogy leads us to 
 infer that this must have a spiritual counterpart, we 
 know nothing of its existence, nature, or extent ; 
 and discussion of the subject is therefore utterly 
 impossible. 
 
 When we confine our view to the earth then, it 
 looms large, when compared with its inhabitants, 
 and endures while their successive generations pass 
 away. But if intensity, rather than extension, be. 
 as we cannot help believing, the true measure and 
 criterion of worth, a single human spirit far out- 
 soars material things. What then of the millions 
 upon millions now inhabiting the earth ? and what 
 of all the generations that have passed away, or 
 are to come ? Surely, in mere number, and much 
 more when measured by their souls' immensity, 
 they form an aggregate which dwarfs to nothing- 
 ness the size of their temporary home ; while if, 
 after all, they should prove immortal, the relative 
 permanence of earthly things will be an illusion 
 a mere optical illusion. 
 
 We will return therefore, without further apology, 
 to the conclusion that we had reached, the con-
 
 i] MATTER AND SPIRIT 19 
 
 elusion that matter exists for the sake of spirit. 
 Some such assumption, indeed, has always been 
 implicitly present in the popular mind ; but our 
 contention is that this assumption, like many 
 another of the implicit convictions of common 
 sense, has a strong metaphysical foundation, in 
 the necessities of human thought ; though for the 
 sake of those who are either sceptical or shy of 
 metaphysic, it will suffice to say that it has at 
 least serious probability in its favour. 
 
 The statement that matter exists for the sake 
 of spirit, is, it will be noticed, a general formula. 
 It does not imply either that we can trace the 
 utility of every material phenomenon, or that we 
 need suppose every material phenomenon to be 
 subservient to human use: it merely asserts that, 
 within the field of our experience, there is a 
 constant order of relation between the two, which 
 is never reversed ; and which justifies the judge- 
 ment in point. But as we finite beings who use 
 matter, and find it so adapted to our use, have no 
 share in its original production, or control of its 
 general course ; we infer that it must be guided by 
 a spiritual Being, of commensurate capacity and 
 will ; while further light must of necessity be 
 thrown upon the character of this Being, by the 
 nature of the spiritual purpose which He enables 
 matter to subserve. 
 
 This is not, it should be noticed, the form of 
 C 2
 
 ao MATTER AND SPIRIT [CHAP. 
 
 teleology, or argument from design, which relies 
 upon detailed cases of adaptation within the 
 material region, and which has been attacked of 
 late years on the ground that the adaptations in 
 question may be only the survivals of many 
 failures. The attack indeed has been adequately 
 answered, but with that we are not now concerned. 
 What we are here contending is that the entire 
 material order, with all its infinite complexity, 
 ministers to another and a higher order of being, 
 from which it receives no reciprocal return, and is 
 therefore intended or designed so to do ; and it is in 
 the width and variety of these ministrations that 
 the strength of the argument consists. This may 
 be called the higher teleology; and while it 
 immensely strengthens the probability of design 
 within the material order itself, is unaffected by 
 objections from the material side. It can only be 
 met, as we have seen, by denying the veracity of 
 our faculties. Man, from the dawn of history, has 
 asked why ? as well as how ? why am I ? and 
 why is the world ? as well as how came it all to 
 be? And as long as he refuses to be satisfied 
 without an answer to that Why ? he remains an 
 unconscious metaphysician, a believer in final 
 causation. When we are complacently told in 
 certain quarters that the Copernican astronomy 
 revolutionized man's view of his relation to the 
 universe, we should remember that to say the
 
 l] MATTER AND SPIRIT ai 
 
 least, this is a considerable overstatement of the 
 case. In minds of a materialistic bias, it would 
 undoubtedly have this effect ; but not in those who 
 estimated man by the claims of his spiritual nature, 
 which is as unaffected by the size of his dwelling- 
 place as by the cubits of his stature. And what 
 Copernicus did for space, modern science has done 
 for time. It has dwarfed the spiritual history of 
 man by comparison with the infinitude of ages, 
 during which the material system that he inhabits 
 was evolved. But still it is true that spirit thinks, 
 and wills, and loves, while matter only moves in 
 space ; and man's judgement of their relative im- 
 portance, therefore, remains what it was before. 
 
 In conclusion, it should be noticed that if there 
 is truth in the foregoing remarks, it is absolutely 
 unaffected by any theory which we may adopt, as 
 to the ultimate nature of matter ; for it deals with 
 the relations between matter and spirit as we know 
 them ; and is as compatible with the most realistic 
 conceptions of matter, as with those more sub- 
 limated views of it, to which some modern thinkers 
 seem disposed to return.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE OF THE MATERIAL 
 WORLD 
 
 AdONG the various uses of matter to spirit, 
 which we have mentioned in the preceding 
 chapter, one of the most striking throughout all 
 history has been its religious use ; the part which 
 it has played by its mere aspect, or by obvious 
 inference from its aspect, in awakening and sustain- 
 ing religious ideas. 
 
 Sun-myths, star-myths, storm -myths, myths of 
 the mountains, and the rivers, and the trees, lie 
 at the root, as we now know so well, of all early 
 religion. And when with the progress of reflection 
 these myths were criticized and sifted, man still 
 found in the grandeur, the harmony, the beauty, 
 the marvellous mechanism, the exuberant life, the 
 exquisite adaptations of the natural world, evidence 
 of the existence and character of God ; evidence 
 which, whatever may be urged against its value, has, 
 as a simple fact of history, weighed with man in 
 every age. Nor has all our modern enlightenment 
 materially altered our case. We have long out- 
 grown mythology, and are intolerant of doubtful
 
 RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE OF MATERIAL WORLD 33 
 
 logic ; but the religious influence of external nature 
 is as strong upon us as it ever was, possibly even 
 stronger than in some bygone times. For the 
 strength of the influence in question is emotional 
 rather than intellectual, and consists in a sense of 
 nearness or communion, of one kind or another, with 
 the divine. And though this admits of intellectual 
 analysis, and can be fashioned into argument, it is 
 the sense of experience in the background which 
 gives the argument its force. 
 
 Now this is a fact of greater significance than is 
 commonly supposed ; and to estimate it duly we 
 must endeavour to form a mental picture of the 
 scale on which the influence in question has obtained. 
 Though, therefore, it may almost seem like offering 
 a brick, as an adequate specimen of a house, we will 
 quote a few passages bearing on the subject : the 
 point to notice in them being the fact that in all ages 
 of the world, and under every variety of culture, and 
 of creed, nature material nature the course and 
 aspect of the outer world has been an influence, 
 and a main influence, making for religion. 
 
 To begin with what Egyptologists assure us is 
 the oldest poem in the world ; the i5th chapter of 
 the Book of the Dead contains a hymn to the rising 
 and setting sun : 
 
 ' Hail to thee, Ra, the self-existent. . . . Glorious 
 is thine uprising from the horizon. Both worlds
 
 fl4 THE RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE [CHAP. 
 
 are illumined by thy rays. All the gods rejoice 
 to see the king of heaven ... all men rejoice to see 
 thee marching in thy mystery towards them . . . 
 thee who art given anew to them every morning . . . 
 thy splendour is beyond compare ... it has all the 
 colours of Arabia. . . . Hail to thee who makest 
 glad the lands, and all their towns and temples with 
 the blessings of thy goodness . . . thou who bringest 
 forth food and sweet nourishment. . . . Hail to thee, 
 Ra, when thou returnest home in renewed beauty, 
 crowned, and almighty 1 .' 
 
 The same thoughts are expanded in a later hymn, 
 which is still not later than the age of Moses : 
 
 1 Praise to Amen-Ra : 
 
 the good god beloved : 
 
 giving life to all animated things: 
 
 to all fair cattle: 
 
 Maker of men, Creator of beasts : 
 
 Lord of existences, Creator of fruitful trees: 
 
 Maker of herbs, Feeder of cattle : 
 
 Maker of things below and above, Enlightener of 
 
 the earth: 
 sailing in heaven in tranquillity: 
 
 at whose pleasure the Nile overflows: 
 1 Trans, from French of Lefe"bure.
 
 ll] OF THE MATERIAL WORLD 95 
 
 Lord of mercy most loving : 
 at whose coming men live : 
 opener of every eye : 
 proceeding from the firmament : 
 causer of pleasure and light. 
 
 thy love pervades the earth : 
 
 maker of grass for the cattle : 
 
 fruitful trees for men : 
 
 causing the fish to live in the river: 
 
 the birds to fill the air : 
 
 giving breath to those in the egg: 
 
 feeding the bird that flies : 
 
 giving food to the bird that perches : 
 
 to the creeping thing and the flying thing equally : 
 
 providing food for the rats in their holes : 
 
 feeding the flying things in every tree. 
 
 Hail to thee for all these things : 
 
 homage to thee in all their voices: 
 
 Hail to thee say all creatures: 
 
 salutation to thee from every land: 
 
 to the height of heaven, to the breadth of the 
 
 earth : 
 
 to the depths of the sea : 
 the gods adore thy Majesty: 
 the spirits thou hast created exalt (thee):
 
 a6 THE RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE [CHAP. 
 
 rejoicing before the feet of their begetter : 
 
 they cry out welcome to thee : 
 
 father of the fathers of all gods : 
 
 who raises the heavens who fixes the earth V 
 
 It is a far cry from Egypt to the plains of India, 
 both in distance and in race : yet in the Vedas, the 
 earliest literature of our Indo-European kindred, 
 a similar note is struck. Their theology is for the 
 most part polytheistic, passing at times into pan- 
 theism ; but the spectacle of nature in its varying 
 aspects of power, beauty, and beneficence, is the 
 dominating motive of it all : 
 
 ' May the Earth and the Heaven hear us, the 
 Water, the Sun with the stars, the wide Atmosphere.' 
 
 ' May Mitra, Varuwa, Aditi, Ocean, Earth, and 
 Heaven gladden us.' 
 
 'May Aditi, the mother of Mitra and the opu- 
 lent Varuwa, preserve us from every calamity.' 
 
 ' Aditi is the sky ; Aditi is the air ; ... Aditi is 
 all the gods.' 
 
 ' Neither heavens nor atmospheres nor earths have 
 equalled Indra the thunderer in might. By Indra 
 the lights of the sky have been fixed and established. 
 Those which are established he has not removed.' 
 
 ' He has settled the ancient mountains by his 
 might ; he has directed downwards the action of 
 the waters. He has supported the earth, the uni- 
 1 Records of the Past, ii. 129.
 
 li] OF THE MATERIAL WORLD 87 
 
 versal nurse. By his skill he has propped up the 
 sky from falling.' 
 
 'Dawn on us with prosperity, O Ushas, daugh- 
 ter of the sky. . . . O luminous and bountiful 
 goddess. Ushas advances . . . arousing footed 
 creatures, and makes the birds fly aloft. The 
 flying birds no longer rest after thy dawning, 
 O bringer of food. In thee, when thou dawne^-t, 
 O lively goddess, is the life and breath of all crea- 
 tures. Ushas, like a dancer, puts on her gay attire, 
 . . . like a fair girl adorned by her mother, . . . like 
 one rising out of the water in which she has been 
 bathing. Ushas dawning restores consciousness ; 
 fair in her aspect she has awakened all creatures to 
 cheerfulness.' 
 
 ' Mother of the gods, manifestation of Aditi, fore- 
 runner of the sacrifice, mighty Ushas, shine forth ! 
 Arise, bestowing approbation on our prayer. . . . 
 May Mitra, Varua, Aditi, the Ocean, the Earth, 
 and the Sky, bestow upon us those brilliant and 
 excellent resources which the Dawns bring to the 
 man who offers sacrifice and praise.' 
 
 * Thou Greatest light, O Surya, and illuminatest 
 the whole firmament. . . . Thou, O Surya, pene- 
 tratest the sky, the broad firmament, measuring out 
 the days with thy rays, spying out all creatures. 
 Seven ruddy mares bear thee onward in thy chariot, 
 O clear-sighted Surya, the god with flaming locks.' 
 
 ' Come hither, Maruts (storm * gods) on your
 
 a8 THE RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE [CHAP. 
 
 chariots charged with lightning. . . . Harness the 
 red mares to the chariots, harness the ruddy horses 
 to the chariots. ... I call hither this your host, 
 brilliant on chariots, terrible and glorious. . . . 
 Through fear of you, ye terrible ones, the forests 
 even bend down, the earth shakes, and also the 
 mountain (cloud). May your water-carriers come 
 here to-day, all the Maruts who stir up the rain. . . . 
 When you have come forth, O Maruts, the waters 
 gush, the forests go asunder V 
 
 1 Now for the greatness of the chariot of Vata ! 
 Its roar goes crashing and thundering. It moves 
 touching the sky, and creating red sheens, or it goes 
 scattering the dust of the earth. . . . 
 
 ' When he moves on his paths along the sky, he 
 rests not even a single day ; the friend of the waters, 
 the first-born, the holy, where was he born, whence 
 did he spring? 
 
 ' The breath of the gods, the germ of the world, 
 that god moves wherever he listeth ; his roars 
 indeed are heard, not his form let us offer sacrifice 
 to that Vata 2 !' 
 
 When we turn to the kindred, but far more 
 ethical, religion of the Avesta, the distinction be- 
 tween creator and creature is more clearly drawn; 
 but the recognition of the former, in and by means 
 of the latter, is none the less apparent : 
 
 1 Main's Sanskrit Texts, vol. v. 
 
 8 Sacred Books of the East, xxxii. 449.
 
 Il] OF THE MATERIAL WORLD 09 
 
 ' I desire to approach Ahura and Mithra with my 
 praise, the lofty, eternal, and the holy two ; and 
 I desire to approach the stars, moon, and sun . . . 
 with my praise . . . and I desire to approach all the 
 mountains with my praise, glorious with sanctity as 
 they are, and with abundant glory. 
 
 4 And I offer ... to Ahura and Mithra, . . . the 
 holy two, and to the stars which are the creatures 
 of Spewta Mainyu, . . . and to the Moon which 
 contains the seed of cattle in its beams, and to the 
 resplendent Sun of the fleet horses . . . and to these 
 places, districts, pastures, and abodes with their 
 springs of water, and to the waters and the lands, 
 and the plants, and to this earth and yon heaven, 
 and to the holy wind, and to the stars, and the 
 moon, even to the stars without beginning (to their 
 course), the self-appointed, and to all the holy 
 creatures of Spewta Mainyu. 
 
 1 We worship thee, the Fire, O Ahura Mazda's 
 son . . . and we worship the good and best waters 
 Mazda-made, holy, all the waters Mazda-made and 
 holy, and all the plants which Mazda made, and 
 which are holy. 
 
 ' Thus do we worship Ahura Mazda, who made 
 the Kine . . . and the waters, and the wholesome 
 plants, the stars, and the earth, and all ... objects 
 that are good. Yea, we worship Him for His Sove- 
 reign Power and His greatness, beneficent . . . and 
 we worship this earth that bears us, together with
 
 90 THE RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE [CHAP. 
 
 Thy wives, O Ahura Mazda ! . . . O ye waters ! now 
 we worship you, you that are showered down, and 
 you that stand in pools and vats, ... ye female 
 Ahuras of Ahura, you that serve us in helpful ways, 
 well forded and full-flowing, and effective for the 
 bathings. 
 
 'And we sacrifice to the fountains of the 
 waters, and to the fordings of the rivers, to the fork- 
 ings of the highways, and to the meetings of the 
 roads. 
 
 ' And we sacrifice to the hills that run with tor- 
 rents, and the lakes that brim with waters, and to 
 the corn that fills the corn-fields ; and we sacrifice 
 to both the protector and the Creator, to both 
 Zarathu.rtra and the Lord. 
 
 * And we sacrifice to both earth and heaven, and 
 to the stormy wind that Mazda made, and to the 
 peak of high Haraiti, and to the land, and all things 
 good V 
 
 Passing from Persia to Palestine, we enter a still 
 purer religious atmosphere ; but the clear mono- 
 theism and high morality of the later Hebrews only 
 enhance the prominence of nature in their devotional 
 literature : 
 
 ' The heavens declare the glory of God, and the 
 firmament sheweth His handiwork.' 
 
 ' He telleth the number of the stars, and calleth 
 them all by their names.' 
 
 1 Sacred Books of the East, xxxi.
 
 Ill OF THE MATERIAL WORLD 31 
 
 'The sea is His, and He made it, and His hands 
 prepared the dry land.' 
 
 'Who in His strength setteth fast the mountains, 
 and is girded about with power.' 
 
 ' He gathereth the waters of the sea together as 
 it were upon an heap, and layeth up the deep as in 
 a treasure house.' 
 
 ' He bringeth forth the clouds from the ends of 
 the world ; and sendeth forth lightnings with the 
 rain, bringing the winds out of His treasuries.' 
 
 ' It is the Lord that commandeth the waters ; it 
 is the glorious God that maketh the thunder. It is 
 the Lord that ruleth the sea, the voice of the Lord 
 is mighty in operation, the voice of the Lord is 
 a glorious voice.' 
 
 'He rode upon the cherubims and did fly: He 
 came flying upon the wings of the wind.' 
 
 'He made darkness His secret place; His 
 pavilion round about Him with dark waters and 
 thick clouds to cover Him.' 
 
 'He giveth snow like wool, and scattereth the 
 hoar-frost like ashes; He casteth forth His ice 
 like morsels ; who is able to abide His frost ? 
 He sendeth out His word and melteth them, 
 He bloweth with His wind, and the waters 
 flow.' 
 
 ' Praise Him, sun and moon, praise Him, all ye 
 stars and light. . . . Fire and hail, snow and vapours, 
 wind and storm, fulfilling His word ; mountains and
 
 y> THE RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE [CHAP. 
 
 all hills ; fruitful trees and all cedars, beasts and all 
 cattle ; worms and feathered fowls.' 
 
 ' Thou deckest Thyself with light as it were with 
 a garment, and spreadest out the heavens like a 
 curtain.' 
 
 'Thy way is in the sea, and Thy paths in the 
 great waters, and Thy footsteps are not known.' 
 
 ' Thou that makest the outgoings of the morning 
 and evening to praise Thee V 
 
 Passing on from Hebrew to Greek and Roman 
 literature, we return to pantheistic and polytheistic 
 modes of thought, but the influence of nature is 
 evident in both. 
 
 ' Zeus is the air, and Zeus the earth and heaven, 
 And all things ; and what else is over all V 
 says Aeschylus. 
 
 ' Men have inferred,' says Virgil, ' from the in- 
 stincts of the bees, that they partake of the divine 
 mind, and breath of heaven : ' 
 
 'for God pervades the whole 
 
 Earth and the spacious sea, and heaven profound 3 .' 
 
 And again 
 
 'An inward spirit feeds earth, heaven, and sea, 
 The shining moon, and giant stars; a mind 
 Pervades their limbs, and moves the mighty 
 mass V 
 
 1 The Psalms. * Clem. Alex. Strom, v. 
 
 s Virgil, Georg. iv. 220. * Id. Aeneid, vi. 724.
 
 Il] OF THE MATERIAL WORLD 33 
 
 And Lucan, again 
 4 Whate'er thou seest, where'er thou goest is Jove.' 
 
 Such pantheistic passages might easily be multi- 
 plied, while those of a more polytheistic tone are 
 too numerous to admit of selection. A single 
 typical instance must suffice the famous apo- 
 strophe of Prometheus : 
 
 *O holy heaven, and ye winged winds 
 And springs of waters, and unnumbered smiles 
 Of ocean waves ; and thee all-mother earth, 
 And thee all -seeing circle of the sun, I call 
 To witness what I suffer 1 .' 
 
 In an artificial age such language might be called 
 merely poetical, in the sense of meaningless ; but 
 there is no question that for the Greek it was full 
 of serious reality. 
 
 But after all, as Bacon remarks, 'Ethnicis moralis 
 philosophia vice theologiae erat,' the moral philo- 
 sophers were the religious teachers of pagan 
 antiquity. 
 
 And though it is difficult, of course, to generalize 
 on so wide a subject as Greek philosophy, one may 
 safely go so far as to say that in all its forms and 
 stages, with the exception of one somewhat sub- 
 ordinate school, it was characterized by the recog- 
 nition of reason in nature. The early thinkers with 
 their pregnant sayings ' All things are full of 
 1 Aesch. Prom. Vinct. 88. 
 D
 
 34 THE RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE [CHAP. 
 
 gods' 'All was chaos till mind arranged it' 
 ' Thought and being are one ' ; Socrates, Plato, and 
 Aristotle, with their insistence on rational causa- 
 tion ; the Stoics and Neo-platonists, with their 
 diverse forms of pantheism, were alike influenced 
 by the picture of the material world, its order and 
 its harmony, its beauty and its use, as suggestive 
 of divine guidance, either from above or from 
 within. Plato viewed the world, and especially its 
 beauty, as the manifestation of divine ideas that 
 were more real than itself; Aristotle tended to 
 view it as the realization of divine ideas, that 
 without material embodiment would have been 
 abstract and incomplete. The one doctrine led 
 to the transcendent God of the Neo-platonists, the 
 other to the immanent God of the Stoics ; but for 
 both schools alike, though in different ways, matter 
 was religiously significant. 
 
 'The thoughtful contemplation of nature,' says 
 Cicero, 'is food to our minds. We are ennobled 
 and uplifted above human affairs, and learn to look 
 down on our own littleness, by thinking on the 
 grandeur of the heavens above V 
 
 ' For what else is nature ? ' asks Seneca, ' but 
 God and Divine reason, immanent in the world and 
 all its parts V . . . ' What is God ? The sum total 
 of all thou seest, and of all thou canst not see V 
 
 1 Cic. De Nat. Dear. ii. 41. * Sen. Nat. Qu. ii. 45. 
 
 8 Id. Prol 13.
 
 ll] OF THE MATERIAL WORLD 35 
 
 Christianity, with its correlative doctrines of the 
 Trinity and the Incarnation, laid equal stress both 
 on the transcendence and immanence of God, or in 
 less technical terms upon His supremacy and His 
 omnipresence, and was enabled therefore to appro- 
 priate and utilize both Neo-platonic and Stoic 
 thought, but with a tenderer appreciation of nature 
 that is distinctively its own. Origen, the first 
 systematic teacher of theology, is described to us 
 as beginning his instructions with the 'high and 
 holy and most beautiful ' study of ' the sacred 
 economy of the universe-' s And modern readers, 
 whose notion of the Christian Fathers is often 
 merely of ponderous folios upon dusty shelves, 
 would be surprised at their loving interest in the 
 sights and sounds of the natural world. 
 
 ' The wider our contemplation of creation,' says 
 St. Cyril, ' the grander is our conception of God V 
 
 ' Earth,' says St. Basil, ' Earth, air, sky, water, 
 day, night, all things visible, remind us who is our 
 benefactor V ' The more profoundly we penetrate 
 the laws on which the universe is founded and 
 sustained, the more do we behold the glory of the 
 Lord V 
 
 And again 
 
 ' If ever on a bright night, while gazing at the 
 stars in all their beauty, you have thought of the 
 
 1 Cyril Jerus. Cat. ix. 2. * Basil, Hex. iii. 10. 
 
 1 Id. In Ps. xxxiii.
 
 36 THE RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE [CHAP. 
 
 Creator of all things ; if you have asked yourself 
 who it is that has bespangled heaven with such 
 flowers, and endowed all things with usefulness 
 even greater than their beauty ; if ever in the day- 
 time you have studied the wonders of the light and 
 raised yourself by things visible to the invisible 
 Being, then you are a fit auditor (of Christian 
 truth) 1 .' 
 
 Gregory of Nyssa, Basil's brother and fellow- 
 follower of Origen, has similar thoughts : 
 
 ' Look only,' he says, ' at an ear of corn, at the 
 budding of a plant, at a bunch of ripe grapes, at 
 the beauty in fruit and flower of the early autumn ; 
 at the mountains, their bases green with grass 
 which no human hand has sown, while their 
 summits cleave the azure of the sky ; at the 
 springs that issue from their swelling slopes like 
 fruitful breasts, to run in rivers through the glens ; 
 at the sea that receives all waters, yet remains 
 within its bounds ; its waves, stayed by the shore- 
 side, which they can never pass beyond. Look at 
 these and such-like sights, and can the eye of reason 
 fail to read in them lessons of eternal truth 2 ?' 
 
 For ' Matter had its origin in the uncreated love- 
 liness, and throughout the whole range of matter 
 there are echoes of spiritual beauty, through 
 
 1 Basil, Hex. vi. I. * Greg. Nyss. De mart. inf.
 
 ll] OF THE MATERIAL WORLD 37 
 
 which we may be led to their immaterial arche- 
 types V 
 
 Nor is it only the Greek Fathers who say things 
 like this : 
 
 'Who can look on nature/ asks St. Hilary, 'and 
 not see God 2 ? ' 
 
 * Every aspect and process of nature,' says 
 Augustine, ' proclaims its Creator ; with diverse 
 moods and changes like a variety of tongues V 
 
 And again, Gregory the Great : 
 
 'If we look attentively enough at outward, 
 material things, we are recalled by them to inward, 
 spiritual things. For the wonders of the visible 
 creation are the footprints of our Creator ; Him- 
 self as yet we cannot see, but we are on the road 
 that leads to vision, when we admire Him in 
 the things that He has made. And so we call 
 created things His footprints, since they are made 
 by Him and guide us to Himself 4 .' 
 
 Such sentences might indeed be culled from 
 almost every patristic writer, and are frequently 
 echoed even in the austere pages of the school- 
 men, while we gain glimpses of the same feeling 
 on the dainty pages of illuminated books, in the 
 choice of sites for monastic houses and hermits' 
 homes of prayer, in the countless legends of tender 
 
 1 Dioa Areop. Cel. Hier. c. ii. * Hilary, In Ps. lii. 
 
 ' Aug. Lib. Arb. iii. 70. ' Greg. Mag. Moral, xxvi. c xii.
 
 38 THE RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE [CHAP. 
 
 sympathy between the animals and holy men. 
 The Celtic saints in especial are full of the poetry 
 of nature, but perhaps its best expression is in the 
 famous hymn of St. Francis of Assisi : 
 
 ' Praised be my Lord God with all His creatures, 
 and specially our brother the sun, who brings us 
 the day, and who brings us the light ; fair is he 
 and shines with a very great splendour : O Lord, 
 he signifies to us Thee 1 
 
 ' Praised be my Lord for our sister the moon, 
 and for the stars, the which He has set clear and 
 lovely in heaven. 
 
 ' Praised be my Lord for our brother the wind, 
 and for air and cloud, calms and all weather by 
 the which Thou upholdest life in all creatures. 
 
 ' Praised be my Lord for our sister water, who is 
 very serviceable unto us, and humble and precious 
 and clean. 
 
 ' Praised be my Lord for our brother fire, through 
 whom Thou givest us light in the darkness ; and he 
 is bright and pleasant and very mighty and strong. 
 
 ' Praised be my Lord for our mother the earth, 
 the which doth sustain us and keep us, and bringeth 
 forth divers fruits and flowers of many colours, and 
 grass 1 .' 
 
 When we pass to the Renaissance and the 
 Reformation with their multitude of writers, selec- 
 1 Qu. fir. Sabatier, Life of St. Francis, p. 306.
 
 Il] OF THE MATERIAL WORLD 39 
 
 tive quotation from the mass of material becomes 
 almost impossible. Men returned to the study of 
 nature at first hand in every department of life, 
 philosophers, poets, preachers, artists, all alike ; 
 and though of course the effect on some was 
 renewed materialism, countless others recognized 
 the spirituality of matter. This was the case, 
 for instance, with many of the Italian natural 
 philosophers, the men who practically inaugurated 
 that renewed study of nature of which Bacon was 
 content to talk. The poetical pantheism of 
 Giordano Bruno is well known ; but here is a more 
 theistic expression of kindred thoughts from his con- 
 temporary Campanella, who was much impressed by 
 the discovery of magnetic attraction, and himself the 
 first to recognize the sexes in plants : 
 
 4 All things,' he says, 4 feel, or the world would 
 be a chaos. For fire would not aspire, nor stones 
 gravitate, nor waters seek the sea, unless they 
 knew that their continuance depended on leaving 
 their opposite to find their like. . . . For God 
 who is the first power, first wisdom, and first 
 love, has bestowed upon all things the power of 
 existence, and with it such wisdom and such love 
 as shall suffice to continue their existence, for the 
 time that His ruling providence wills them to 
 be. ... God said, let all things feel, some more 
 some less, as they have more or less necessity to
 
 40 THE RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE [CHAP. 
 
 imitate My being ; and let them love to live in 
 that element which they know to be good for 
 them, lest My creation come to naught. Sky and 
 stars are endowed with keenest sensibility ; and we 
 may well suppose that they express their mutual 
 thoughts to one another by the interchange of light, 
 and that their sensibility is full of pleasure V 
 
 Mere fantastic poetry this may seem to some, 
 but it has modern affinities among philosophers as 
 well as poets. 
 
 Then in literature we find Petrarch, who is the 
 first to show the modern sense of scenery, and 
 whose letters are full of the love of it, speaking of 
 the spiritual thoughts which it inspires : 
 
 'This little spot under the rocks, in the midst 
 of the waters, is more suited than any other to 
 inspire profound thoughts by which the most idle 
 minds may feel themselves lifted to lofty con- 
 templation. . . . How often has night found me 
 still wandering in the fields ! How often have 
 I risen in the silence of a summer night to offer up 
 my prayers and midnight orisons to Christ, and 
 then to steal forth alone ... to wander by the 
 light of the moon over the fields and mountains 2 ! ' 
 
 While the same note is continually struck by the 
 great painters, who in those delicate backgrounds, 
 
 1 Qu. fr. Hallam, Lit. Eur. ii. 374. 
 * Trans, in Century Rev. liv. 4.
 
 ll] OF THE MATERIAL WORLD 41 
 
 which were the first beginnings of all our modern 
 landscape art, delight to associate the aspects of 
 nature, its smiling pastures, and its storm-rent 
 rocks, with all the varying phases of spiritual life. 
 
 Protestant theology stands in sharp contrast 
 with the other movements of the Renaissance. It 
 is the more instructive therefore to notice that in 
 this point they are at one. Here is a passage from 
 the German mystic, Suso : 
 
 * Oh, how cloudlessly and cheerfully the beautiful 
 sun rises in the summer season, and how diligently 
 it gives growth and blessings to the s<5il ; how the 
 leaves and the grass come forth ; how the beau- 
 tiful flowers smile ; how the forest, and the heath, 
 and the meadows resound with the sweet songs of 
 the nightingale and other small birds ; how all the 
 animals which were shut up during the hard winter 
 come forth and enjoy themselves and go in pairs ; 
 how, in humanity, young and old manifest their 
 joy in merry and gladsome utterances! O tender 
 God ! if Thou art so loving in Thy creatures, how 
 fair and lovely must Thou be in Thyself ! Look 
 further, I pray you, and behold the four elements, 
 earth, water, air, and fire, and all the wonder- 
 ful things in them ; the variety and diversity of 
 men, beasts, birds, fishes, and the wonders of the 
 deep, all of which cry aloud and proclaim the 
 praise and honour of the boundless and infinite
 
 42 THE RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE [CHAP. 
 
 nature of God ! O Lord, who preserves all this ? 
 Who feeds it? Thou takest care of all, each in its 
 own way, great and small, rich and poor. Thou, 
 God ! Thou doest it ! Thou, God, art indeed God M' 
 
 Luther, again, was notorious for his religious 
 love of nature. But it is not so well known that 
 Zwingli felt the same : 
 
 'From God,' he says, 'as from a fountain, and 
 if I may use the expression, a first material, all 
 things arise into being. By God's power all things 
 exist, live, and operate ; even in Him who is 
 everywhere present ; and after His pattern who 
 is the essence, the existence, the life of the uni- 
 verse. Nor is man alone of divine origin ; but all 
 creatures, though some are nobler and more august 
 than others. Yet all alike are from God and in 
 God, and in proportion to their nobility they 
 express more of the divine power and glory. . . . 
 We recognize in things inanimate, not less than in 
 man, the presence of the divine power by which 
 they exist, and live, and move. God is in the stars ; 
 and inasmuch as the stars are from Him and in 
 Him, they have no essence or power or movement 
 of their own ; it is all God's, and they are merely 
 the instruments through which the present power of 
 God acts. For for this cause He called creatures 
 into being, that man, from the contemplation of 
 
 1 Qu. fr. Hagenbach, Hist, of Doct.E. T. ii. 230.
 
 Ill OF THE MATERIAL WORLD 43 
 
 their mutual uses, might learn to recognize God's 
 active presence everywhere, and especially in him- 
 self, when he saw it in all things else around V 
 
 Catholic theology, again, is fundamentally op- 
 posed on many points to Protestant. Yet here 
 they too are agreed. The following passage from 
 Fene'lon is thoroughly typical of the great Catholic 
 writers of the seventeenth century. But it might 
 almost be mistaken for a continuation of the above. 
 
 1 1 see God in everything ; or rather, I see every- 
 thing in God. . . . All that exists, exists only by the 
 communication of God's infinite being. All that 
 has intelligence, has it only by derivation from His 
 sovereign reason, and all that acts, acts only from 
 the impulse of His supreme activity. It is He who 
 does all in all ; it is He who, at each instant of 
 our life, is the beating of our heart, the movement 
 of our limbs, the light of our eyes, the intelligence of 
 our spirit, the soul of our soul. All that is in us, 
 life, action, thought, will, is the product of His 
 eternal power, and life, and thought, and will V 
 
 To these we will add one English voice from the 
 eighteenth century, unlikeliest of times ! William 
 Law, who in his later writings was so much in- 
 fluenced by Jacob Boehme, himself an important 
 
 1 Zwingli, De provident i a. 
 
 ' F^ndon, Exist, de Dieu, \\. c iv ; Necess. de con. Dftu, 
 n. 18.
 
 44 THE RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE [CHAP. 
 
 link in the tradition we are tracing, has many 
 passages to the following effect: 
 
 ' Look at all nature, through all its height and 
 depth, in all its variety of working powers, it is 
 what it is for this only end, that the hidden riches, 
 the invisible powers, blessings, glory, and love of 
 the unsearchable God, may become visible, sensible, 
 and manifest in it and by it. 
 
 ' Look at all the variety of creatures ; they are 
 what they are for this only end, that in their 
 infinite variety, degrees, and capacities, they may 
 be as so many speaking figures, living forms of the 
 manifold riches and powers of nature, as so many 
 sounds and voices, preachers and trumpets, giving 
 glory and praise and thanksgiving to that Deity of 
 love, which gives life to all nature and creature. 
 
 * For every creature of unfallen nature, call it by 
 what name you will, has its form, and power, and 
 state, and place in nature, for no other end but to 
 open and enjoy, to manifest and rejoice in some 
 share of the love, and happiness, and goodness of 
 the Deity, as springing forth in the boundless 
 height and depth of nature 1 .' 
 
 To turn, once more, from theology to literature : 
 Rousseau and Goethe typically exemplify the kind 
 of men whose religious conceptions, though of the 
 vaguest, are profoundly influenced by nature ; but 
 
 1 Law, Spirit of Love, ii.
 
 Il] OF THE MATERIAL WORLD < 5 
 
 the best, as being the extreme instances of this 
 class that can possibly be quoted for our purpose, 
 are Byron and Shelley ; men who but for nature 
 might have been wholly irreligious, and who there- 
 fore exhibit nature's influence in its simplest form, 
 as being exercised on minds which not only brought 
 no religious element to its interpretation, but by their 
 rejection of all positive religion were biassed in an 
 opposite direction. Yet they are full of the mystic 
 emotion which natural sights and sounds inspire. 
 
 Take the opening passage, for instance, of Shelley's 
 A las tor: 
 
 ' Earth, ocean, air, beloved brotherhood ! 
 If our great mother has imbued my soul 
 With aught of natural piety to feel 
 Your love, and recompense the boon with mine ; 
 If dewy morn, and odorous noon, and even, 
 With sunset and its gorgeous ministers, 
 And solemn midnight's tingling silentness ; 
 If autumn's hollow sighs in the sere wood, 
 And winter robing with pure snow and crowns 
 Of starry ice the gray grass and bare boughs ; 
 If spring's voluptuous pantings, when she breathes 
 Her first sweet kisses, have been dear to me ; 
 If no bright bird, insect, or gentle beast 
 I consciously have injured, but still loved 
 And cherished these my kindred ; then forgive 
 This boast, beloved brethren, and withdraw 
 No portion of your wonted favour now !
 
 46 THE RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE [CHAP. 
 
 Mother of this unfathomable world! 
 Favour my solemn song, for I have loved 
 Thee ever, and thee only 1 .' 
 
 Or again, Byron's lines in Childe Harold: 
 
 ' To sit on rocks, to muse o'er flood and fell, 
 To slowly trace the forest's shady scene, 
 Where things that own not man's dominion dwell, 
 And mortal foot hath ne'er, or rarely been; 
 To climb the trackless mountain all unseen, 
 With the wild flock that never needs a fold ; 
 Alone o'er steeps and foaming falls to lean ; 
 This is not solitude ; 'tis but to hold 
 Converse with nature's charms, and view her stores 
 unroll'd 2 .' 
 
 1 Then stirs the feeling infinite, so felt 
 In solitude, where we are least alone ; 
 A truth, which through our being then doth melt, 
 And purifies from self: it is a tone, 
 The soul and source of music, which makes known 
 Eternal harmony 3 .' 
 
 'I love not man the less, but nature more, 
 From these our interviews, in which I steal 
 From all I may be, or have been before, 
 To mingle with the universe, and feel 
 What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal *.' 
 
 1 Shelley, Alastor. 2 Byron, Childe Harold, ii. 25. 
 
 Ib. iii. 90. * Ib. iv. 178.
 
 Il] OF THE MATERIAL WORLD 47 
 
 But our quotations must, by this time, have 
 grown tedious, so with one passage from Words- 
 worth we will conclude the well-known passage 
 in the lines on Tintern, which may be called the 
 locus classicus upon the subject : 
 
 1 1 have felt 
 
 A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
 Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime 
 Of something far more deeply interfused, 
 Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
 And the round ocean and the living air, 
 And the blue sky, and in the mind of man : 
 A motion and a spirit, that impels 
 All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
 And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still 
 A lover of the meadows and the woods, 
 And mountains; and of all that we behold 
 From this green earth ; of all the mighty world 
 Of eye and ear, both what they half create, 
 And what perceive ; well pleased to recognize 
 In nature and the language of the sense, 
 The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, 
 The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul 
 Of all my moral being V 
 
 Now it will be noticed that the above quotations 
 range through the whole of recorded history ; they 
 might have been indefinitely multiplied ; and every 
 1 Wordsworth, Lines on Tintern Abbey.
 
 48 RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE OF MATERIAL WORLD 
 
 one of them expresses, not the experience of an 
 individual, but of endless generations of men ; 
 psalmists, poets, and even philosophers only 
 becoming popular, as they utter the innermost 
 feelings of humanity at large. Here then we have 
 evidence that nature the material world with its 
 sights and sounds has exerted, throughout all 
 ages, a profound religious influence on the thoughts 
 and affections of men. There are famous excep- 
 tions, of course, like Lucretius ; but they are 
 critical and reflective rather than spontaneous ; and 
 by the fact that they are recognized as excep- 
 tionsparadoxical opponents of habitual opinion 
 they conduce, if anything, to prove the rule. 
 It should further be borne in mind that the 
 influence in question is independent of any par- 
 ticular theological interpretation ; co-existing alike 
 with monotheism, polytheism, pantheism a mystic 
 emotion, more fundamental than the varieties of 
 creed a primary, permanent, worldwide agent, in 
 the education of the human soul. Thus matter 
 has, as a fact, from the very dawn of human 
 history, ministered to the religious development 
 of spirit ; and when we remember what religion is, 
 and all that it has done for man, it is not too much 
 to say that among all the ministries of matter, this, 
 its service to religion, is beyond comparison the 
 chief.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE 
 
 WE have seen, in the foregoing survey, that the 
 religious influence of external nature is a fact 
 of experience ; nothing rare or exceptional, but an 
 ordinary fact of normal human experience. And 
 as the significance of this fact depends upon its 
 magnitude, its agelong existence and world-wide 
 extent, it is very important to bear in mind the 
 distinction between the experience itself and its 
 interpretations. For its interpretations being in- 
 evitably coloured by the spirit of their age, have 
 varied with every variety of culture and of creed. 
 And as men easily tend to confuse the original 
 impression with the philosophic or theological 
 belief into which they instinctively translate it, 
 they often appear to be going further than their 
 premisses allow, and so bring the whole process 
 into disrepute. One man, for example, claims to see 
 in nature a benevolent creator ; another a dualism ; 
 another a plurality of spiritual beings ; another a 
 
 E
 
 So DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE [CHAP. 
 
 universally diffused spirit. But all these are inter- 
 pretations of an immediate experience in the light 
 of a general belief; and are liable to obscure, by 
 their contradictory character, the universality of 
 the experience in question. Still, beneath them 
 all that experience remains ; a sense, in the pre- 
 sence of nature, of contact with something spiritual ; 
 a sense of affinity, or kinship, as the Neo-platonists 
 described it, with the material world, implying 
 spirituality within or behind it. The feeling is 
 hard to describe in more definite terms, since even 
 the emotions that it arouses are very different in 
 different minds ; but though undefinable it is in- 
 tense, and, as we have seen, unquestionably normal 
 to humanity. 
 
 Now unless this experience can be discredited, 
 it must be recognized as weighty evidence of a 
 spiritual reality behind material things. And it 
 can only be discredited either by proof that it is 
 an illusion, or by proof that the faculties which feel 
 it are unworthy of trust. 
 
 To say that it is an illusion is of course equivalent 
 to saying that it arises from an instinctive inference, 
 which the growth of knowledge has enabled us to 
 correct. The world as scientifically understood in 
 the present day, is very different from the world as 
 sensibly perceived ; and the former is in conse- 
 quence often supposed to be more real than the 
 latter atoms, energy, and ether, that is to say,
 
 Ill] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE 51 
 
 more real than the lights and shadows which their 
 movements cast. Hence the emotions, it is argued, 
 which sensible phenomena arouse have no adequate 
 counterpart in fact ; and as being founded on unreal 
 appearances must needs be themselves unreal. 
 
 This objection at once raises the question, ' what 
 do we mean by reality ? ' and this is more easily 
 asked than answered. In a sense and perhaps 
 this would be the most ordinary answer whatever 
 exists is real : a real thing is a thing that actually 
 exists. But as soon as we have said this we see 
 that the problem has only been transferred from 
 ' reality' to 'existence.' For dreams exist ; hallucina- 
 tions exist ; love exists ; the external world exists ; 
 but with very different kinds or degrees of exist- 
 ence. Existence therefore must be more defined, if 
 it is to be our criterion of reality. And this has 
 led to the popular opinion, supported by much 
 popular philosophy, that reality is constituted by 
 existence in space : in accordance with which, what 
 were called the primary qualities of bodies, that is 
 their spacial characteristics, such as size and shape, 
 came to be regarded as more real than their secon- 
 dary qualities, such as temperature, colour, or scent. 
 But this distinction does not help us, for it is 
 utterly untenable, and together with the view of 
 reality which it implied is fast becoming obsolete. 
 On the one hand, all sensations, inasmuch as 
 they are affections of our bodily organism, exist 
 2
 
 5 a DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE [CHAP. 
 
 equally in space, the redness of an apple, as well 
 as its roundness : while, on the other hand, all sen- 
 sations alike require mental acts of inference and 
 interpretation, to convert them into perceptions or 
 sources of knowledge. Hence it is impossible to 
 make * reality ' turn upon any distinction between 
 inward and outward, or as it is commonly called, 
 subjective and objective existence ; for the simple 
 reason that these two phases, or aspects, of being 
 perpetually interpenetrate and pass into each other, 
 and though separable by mental abstraction, are 
 inseparable in fact. 
 
 But if for spacial we substitute personal exist- 
 ence we are at once on a more hopeful road. For, 
 whatever our use of language, there can be no 
 doubt that, in actual life, every man regards his 
 own personality as the most real thing that he 
 knows ; not only because its existence is most cer- 
 tain, but because its content is most rich and full. 
 ' I profess/ as Browning says, 
 
 ' To know just one fact my self-consciousness 
 'Twixt ignorance and ignorance enisled V 
 
 By a natural and instinctive process we extend this 
 conviction to other persons, and regard them as 
 more real than impersonal things. Hence, however 
 little we may have reflected upon it, personality is, 
 as a matter of fact, our tacitly acknowledged 
 1 Browning, Francis Furini.
 
 in] D1V1KE IMMANENCE IN NATURE 53 
 
 standard of reality ; and other things are accounted 
 real, in proportion as they are related to, and so 
 embraced within, the sphere of personality. Thus 
 my friends and neighbours, my property, the books 
 that I have read, the science that I have acquired, 
 the deeds that I have done, the things that gratify 
 my senses, or offer resistance to my muscles, ' my 
 star that dartles the red and the blue,' are more real 
 to me than all the world beside, with which as yet 
 I have only negative relations. In a word what 
 affects me personally, and thereby becomes part of 
 myself, is real for me ; while what affects me most 
 persistently and most powerfully is most real. 
 I recognize the same to be the case with other 
 persons ; that each has his own world of reality : 
 and further that, while some things only affect 
 individuals, and may therefore be called subjec- 
 tively or relatively real ; other things affect all 
 alike, and are therefore real for all, that is to say 
 universally or objectively real. And when I cor- 
 rect my subjective impressions, by reference to 
 objective reality, it is this that I mean by the term, 
 not what is external, but what appeals equally to 
 all. For 'what appears to all,' as Aristotle says, 
 ' that we say exists ' (& wao-i 5ocei TOUT' /eu <a/*&). 
 Now the condition of this ' appearing to all ' is pre- 
 sentation in external space, since even a thought, if 
 it is to appear to all, must be written in a book. 
 Consequently space is a medium, but not therefore
 
 54 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE [CHAP. 
 
 a constituent of reality. Thus we consider a word 
 more real than a thought, and a deed than a word ; 
 and this is because they successively involve more 
 of our entire personality. In uttering and enacting 
 our thoughts, we have the courage of our opinions ; 
 \ve put our will into them and show that we mean 
 them ; and therefore that they are real for us. 
 While at the same time, through the medium of 
 utterance, or bodily expression, we bring them into 
 contact with other persons, and thus enlarge the 
 sphere of their reality. So when a man writes 
 a book, carves a statue, paints a picture, he is said 
 to realize his thoughts or make them real ; not 
 merely because he externalizes them in space ; but 
 because he puts his will into them ; changing the 
 creations of his mere imagination into creations of 
 his very self; while, in so doing, he also publishes 
 them, or makes them public ; that is he recreates 
 them in the minds and affections of countless other 
 persons. 
 
 Objection is sometimes made to our admitting 
 degrees of reality; but there is abundant philoso- 
 phical authority for so doing; and if reality is to 
 imply existence, it must, as we have seen, vary in 
 degree. It follows that personality, the highest 
 form of existence which we know, must be our 
 standard of reality ; and if so, what is most inti- 
 mately and permanently connected with personality 
 must be for us, that is for the world of persons,
 
 ill] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE 55 
 
 correspondingly real. Things are real, not in pro- 
 portion as they are independent of us, or removed 
 from us, but in proportion, on the contrary, as they 
 are related to us: their removal in space only 
 making them more real, because it invests them 
 with a permanent possibility of relationship to a 
 larger number of persons. Hence, to return to our 
 starting-point, atoms and their properties, as re- 
 vealed by science, are not more real than the sen- 
 sible impressions which they create in all normally 
 constituted persons : while those impressions which 
 profoundly touch the feelings, and modify the con- 
 duct of innumerable men, may even be called more 
 real, in the only intelligible sense of the word, than 
 their mechanical causes, known only to a small 
 minority of the race. 
 
 Take the sunset for example a series of etherial 
 vibrations, merely mechanical in origin, and, as such, 
 other than they seem ; whose total effect is to create 
 in us an optical illusion, making the sun, and not 
 the earth, appear to move. Yet, as men watch its 
 appearance, thoughts and feelings arise in their 
 hearts, that move their inmost being in unnumbered 
 ways. Youth is fired with high ideals ; age con- 
 soled with peaceful hopes ; saints, as they pray, see 
 heaven opened ; sinners feel conscience strangely 
 stirred. Mourners are comforted ; weary ones 
 rested ; artists inspired ; lovers united ; worldlings 
 purified and softened as they gaze. In a short half-
 
 5 6 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE [CHAP. 
 
 hour all is over : the mechanical process has come 
 to an end ; the gold has melted into grey. But 
 countless souls, meanwhile, have been soothed, and 
 solaced, and uplifted by that evening benediction 
 from the far-off sky ; and the course of human life 
 to-day is modified and moulded by the setting of 
 yesterday's sun. In the same way, a piece of music, 
 a sonata or a symphony, is more real to its audience 
 than the acoustic laws which cause it, or the instru- 
 ments upon which it is performed. The world of 
 science, in other words, is no more real than the 
 world of sense ; the two being only different aspects 
 of one continuous whole, of which the human 
 organism is also a part. It follows that we have 
 no ground whatever for discounting the religious 
 influence of external nature, as less real than the 
 mechanical phenomena, on which physically speak- 
 ing it depends, and of which, in fact, it may be called 
 a manifestation. The two things impress different 
 faculties in us, but with equal justification. 
 
 This leads us to the second objection above- 
 mentioned, which is really the same objection, urged 
 from another point of view ; the untrustworthiness, 
 namely, of our emotions. It is too often assumed 
 that the emotions, as contrasted with the intellect, 
 are untrustworthy guides to truth ; and many even 
 of those who think otherwise, still allow the emotions 
 to be called irrational ; as though belief in them 
 were an act of faith, in some sort needing an apology.
 
 Ill] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE 57 
 
 Thus, in the present case, the prospect of nature 
 confessedly fills us with emotion ; but such emotion, 
 it is argued, has no right to be its own interpreter ; 
 no right to assure us of its contact with a spiritual 
 object ; no right, in a word, to give us any know- 
 ledge, beyond that of its own existence. Now 
 this sharp distinction between feeling and under- 
 standing, the emotions and the intellect, is wholly 
 artificial, and untrue to fact. Knowledge starts 
 neither with mere understanding, nor mere feeling, 
 both of which are abstractions, but with personal 
 experience ; the experience of a person who both 
 thinks and feels, and in whose unity thought and 
 feeling are inseparably fused and blent. 'When 
 the soul feels, it is called sense . . . when it under- 
 stands it is called mind,' as Alcuin admirably put 
 it long ago. Experience begins with sensation, that 
 is to say, feeling; but sensation, as we have seen, 
 no sooner begins to be felt, than it begins to be 
 interpreted by thought ; while thought itself, the 
 critic and interpreter, is the thought of a being full 
 of feelings, which in one degree or another qualify 
 every process of his mind. It is true that we can 
 isolate parts of our personal experience, by exclusive 
 attention, and make them objects of independent 
 pursuit ; but this always involves a process of limi- 
 tation, or abstraction, which in proportion to its 
 completeness removes us from the totality of truth. 
 Thus a tea-taster, or a piano-tuner, confines his
 
 58 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE [CHAP. 
 
 attention to particular sensations ; a pure mathe- 
 matician to abstract thought ; while an artist will 
 employ different faculties from a soldier, and a soldier 
 from a judge. And it is very easy to be so biassed 
 by our special occupations, that we become incom- 
 plete, one-sided, fragmentary men, like Wordsworth's 
 philosopher 
 
 'One that would peep and botanize 
 Upon his mother's grave. 
 
 One to whose smooth rubbed soul can cling 
 
 Nor form, nor feeling, great nor small ; 
 
 A reasoning, self-sufficing thing, 
 
 An intellectual all in all 1 .' 
 
 But the way in which common sense always resents 
 such specialism is sufficient proof of our instinctive 
 feeling that,after all, we are persons and not machines ; 
 and as persons we confront not a part only of our 
 environment, but the whole. The plain man as well 
 as the philosopher, has and must have his theory of 
 life, however little he may put it into words; his 
 view that is to say of his relations to the whole of 
 his surroundings ; nature, society, and for all who 
 believe in Him, God. But the whole of our sur- 
 roundings, our total environment, impresses and 
 appeals to our total personality ; that is to say, to 
 our personality not regarded as a group of separate 
 faculties, but as a unity or whole. Consequently it 
 1 Wordsworth, A Poefs Epitaph.
 
 in] DIYINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE 59 
 
 can only be apprehended aright by our total per- 
 sonality, our whole self with its complex interaction 
 of emotion, intellect, and will ; in which persistent 
 feeling is as important an element as consistent 
 thought. 
 
 Reason is of course always at work to understand 
 the world, and by that very fact implies its belief 
 that the world is, in the last resort, intelligible, or 
 capable of being ultimately understood ; and its 
 consequent right to reject what is demonstrably 
 irrational or contradictory of reason. But things 
 may be unintelligible, in the sense that we do not 
 now understand them, without being in any way 
 irrational or intrinsically absurd. The world indeed 
 is full of such unintelligible things things of whose 
 nature we know nothing, but of whose reality we are 
 sure ; and a rational man accepts them as facts, 
 however unable he may be to explain them. We 
 are familiar enough with this principle in ordinary 
 life, where we daily accept and utilize facts, which, 
 though scientifically explicable, we ourselves do not 
 personally understand. A plain man does not under- 
 stand his sensations of hunger and thirst or heat 
 and cold, but when he accepts them as facts, and 
 feeds and clothes himself accordingly, he is as rational 
 as the physiologist who has a complete understand- 
 ing of all the processes of animal life. And the 
 same is the case with things which are at present 
 beyond all human comprehension. Time, space,
 
 60 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE [CHAP. 
 
 motion, life, love, and indeed the whole of our ex- 
 perience, in its last analysis, is inexplicable. We are 
 obliged to accept it as a fact, before we can reason 
 about it at all ; and no amount of subsequent reason- 
 ing can ever explain how it came to be a fact. 
 Hence reason, in all concrete cases, has to deal with 
 materials which it never fully understands ; and its 
 action is limited accordingly. It is like a discoverer 
 who can assert that what he has found exists, but 
 cannot add that what he has not found does not 
 exist. In discussing any part of our personal ex- 
 perience, therefore, the first question that arises, is, 
 not whether it is rational, but whether it is a fact. 
 If it is a fact, if it exists, if it is really there, reason 
 cannot set it aside, for any present inability to under- 
 stand it. And this is precisely the condition of the 
 particular experience before us. It is a fact as old 
 as history ; normal and natural to man ; and to dis- 
 credit it, as merely emotional, because we cannot 
 explain it, is absurd. It is not merely emotional ; 
 it is personal : it is the effect, that is to say, of the 
 natural world, not upon our feelings, abstracted 
 from the rest of us, but upon our feelings in their 
 vital connexion with the rest of our personality. 
 And in this connexion we have as much justification 
 for trusting our feelings as for trusting our reason ; 
 since in either case it is the one personality behind 
 them which we really trust. If I trust my reason, 
 I am trusting one function of my complex per-
 
 in] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE 6t 
 
 sonality ; that is to say, I am trusting my person- 
 ality in one of its activities. And when, by so doing, 
 I reach results which can be verified, as for instance 
 in the discovery of a new planet, I prove my trust 
 to be justifiable. I prove that my personality to 
 that extent acts truly. But this very fact inevitably 
 leads me to conclude that the other functions of the 
 same personality, its other modes of activity, must 
 be equally veracious ; and that feelings which are 
 natural and normal, may be trusted in evidence of 
 what they feel ; for in either case it is one self-same 
 personality that acts. I might be sceptical, if I could 
 suppose that my whole personality misled me ; but 
 science, by proving that part of my personality tells 
 the truth, banishes this supposition, and makes 
 scepticism impossible. Henceforth I must trust my 
 personality, and if in one of its functions, then in 
 all, for they stand or fall together. 
 
 Returning, then, to the point from which we 
 started, the religious influence of external nature ; 
 this cannot, we see, be discredited on the ground 
 that the sights and sounds on which it rests are 
 illusory mere phenomena mere appearances ; for 
 the very fact of the effect which they produce in 
 us is their sufficient title to reality. It is precisely 
 because they appear, and by appearing profoundly 
 affect us, that they are real. Neither can the 
 influence in question be disparaged for being 
 emotional rather than rational ; since there is no
 
 6a DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE [CHAP. 
 
 possible ground for elevating one element of our 
 personality above another, or above the action, 
 which is what here occurs, of our personality as 
 a whole. 
 
 But if all this be true, and the experience in 
 question cannot be invalidated, then it remains, 
 a stupendous evidence that the material universe 
 is a manifestation of spirit. This question is too 
 often treated as if it were merely an argumentative 
 inference an inference from beauty, or the need 
 of causation, or the traces of design, or the like ; 
 in oblivion of the fact that behind, and prior to, 
 all these inferences, there is the spiritual influence, 
 which nature does, as we have seen, undoubtedly 
 exert. And our reason for emphasizing the dis- 
 tinction between this influence and its interpreta- 
 tions, is to bring its universality into stronger 
 relief. However variously men interpret it, they 
 all feel and have ever felt it alike. 
 
 Now we often hear it said that the first aspect 
 of nature its prima facie aspect makes for 
 materialism. But in the light of the foregoing 
 facts, this is unquestionably not the case. The 
 prima facie aspect of the world conduces to 
 spiritual belief, and the view which makes for 
 materialism is not the prima facie view, but that 
 which we obtain by going behind the prima facie 
 view, to examine its machinery. But in so doing 
 we pass from the whole to a partial view. The
 
 in] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE 63 
 
 prima facie view is the judgement of our personality 
 as a whole, in contact with nature as a whole ; that 
 is, a judgement in which our entire being takes part. 
 But the analytical or scientific view is a partial 
 view, with important elements left out ; it makes 
 abstraction, for its own purpose, of certain properties 
 of things, and omits the remainder. And though 
 the physical sciences have been called concrete, in 
 comparison with the still more abstract mathe- 
 matics, yet they are all abstract to this extent, 
 that they regard only the physical relations of 
 phenomena, which possess also moral and emotional 
 relations. Such abstraction is of course as necessary 
 for the development of thought, as is its practical 
 equivalent, the division of labour, for the develop- 
 ment of life. As social progress only begins, when 
 the different members of a society confine them- 
 selves to the performance of different functions ; so 
 intellectual progress only begins, when the various 
 aspects of the world are distributed for analysis, 
 each to a separate science. But neither the special- 
 ization of science, nor the division of labour, are 
 ends in themselves. If we wish to understand 
 human nature, in its fullness, we do not confine our 
 attention to particular classes of the community 
 soldiers, statesmen, merchants, thinkers, artists, 
 artisans; but pass on to the total society, which 
 includes, and is enriched by all these partial lives ; 
 and supplements, and correlates, and unifies them
 
 64 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE [CHAP. 
 
 all. In the same way, if we wish to understand 
 material nature, in its fullness, we must pass on 
 from its partial analysis to its total effect ; from 
 the examination of its mechanical structure, its 
 chemical properties, its organic development, its 
 aesthetic appearance, to the actual result of all 
 these things in synthesis, that is, in their living 
 combination, as presented to the personality of 
 man. We then find that nature, in its concrete 
 unity, has a spiritual character which cannot be 
 discovered from its abstract parts ; any more than 
 the subject of a puzzle picture can be known before 
 we have put its isolated portions together ; or the 
 meaning of a word before we have arranged its 
 letters when given us to spell. In order to empha- 
 size the fact that this spirituality of nature is not 
 an inference but an experience, we have purposely, 
 as above stated, set the variety of its interpreta- 
 tions aside ; though that very variety is of course 
 additional proof of the reality of the experience in 
 question ; since it shows that, however differing 
 in all their theories of the world, men have always 
 agreed that here was a fact, a persistent something, 
 to be explained. But now that we are clear upon 
 this point, we may return to the further question 
 of its interpretation. What is the relation of the 
 material universe to that Spirit of which it so 
 persistently seems to speak ? The experience with 
 which we are dealing has, as we have seen, been
 
 Hi] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE 65 
 
 historically compatible with theories of every 
 description ; but those theories are not all equally 
 tenable on other grounds. 
 
 Polytheism and dualism, for instance, are no 
 longer possible interpretations ; for the universe is 
 obviously one. Its unity of structure and develop- 
 ment, though often maintained in other ages, has 
 been placed by modern science in an entirely new 
 light ; and that unity leaves no place for the 
 thought of contradictory beings at its helm. If 
 the system of things be guided by spiritual power, 
 that power must be ultimately one. And if we are 
 to form any further conjecture of the way in which 
 this Spirit is related to the material order, we must 
 recur to the starting-point of all our knowledge, 
 namely, ourselves. Human personality, however 
 little we may comprehend it, is yet the thing that 
 we know best, as being the only thing that we 
 know at first hand, and from within. And further, 
 human personality exhibits spirit and matter in 
 combination ; such intimate combination that, as 
 we have seen above, they do not admit of being 
 completely sundered. It is in human personality 
 alone, therefore, that we must look for light upon 
 our subject ; the limited light indeed of a lantern 
 carried in our own uncertain hand, but still the 
 only light that we can possibly possess. 
 
 Now we find on reflection that what we call our 
 spirit transcends, or is, in a sense, independent of 
 
 F
 
 66 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE [CHAP. 
 
 the bodily organism on which otherwise it so 
 entirely depends. Metaphysically speaking this is 
 seen in our self-consciousness, or power of separ- 
 ating our self as subject from our self as object, 
 a thing wholly inconceivable as the result of any 
 material process, and relating us at once to an 
 order of being which we are obliged to call imma- 
 terial. But as metaphysical analysis is * caviare to 
 the general,' while the metaphysically- minded will 
 find this point amply illustrated by most modern 
 philosophers, it will be sufficient for our purpose 
 to appeal to the more familiar field of morals. 
 
 Morally speaking, we are responsible for our 
 actions. That is a fact which no sane man doubts. 
 It is the assumption on which the whole course of 
 our political and social life is carried on; and if 
 a man takes leave to deny it, except in theory, 
 law soon interferes for his correction. There is 
 no fact in the world that, in their misery, men 
 would more gladly have denied ; yet they are 
 agreed to treat its denial as a manifest absurdity. 
 Surely, then, it is as strong a conviction as any 
 that can be conceived. And this conviction is 
 amply sufficient for our purpose ; for it implies that 
 we are self-identical and free, the same personal 
 unit to-day that we were when born whereas all 
 the matter of our bodies has changed and capable 
 of determining ourselves from within, whereas all 
 matter is determined by something else, and from
 
 Hi] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE 67 
 
 without l . Our present object is not to argue these 
 points, which have been argued abundantly else- 
 where, but simply to refer to them, as results of 
 past argument, in illustration of the fact that, with 
 all our dependence upon matter, we yet transcend 
 it ; we move in a plane above it, and are, though 
 in a limited degree, its masters and not its slaves. 
 This, then, is one aspect of the relation between 
 spirit and matter, as known within the circle of our 
 own personality. And when we pass beyond that 
 circle to mould the external world to our use, through 
 various forms of scientific invention, and artistic 
 creation, it becomes still more apparent that spirit 
 has a dominant and transcendent relation to matter. 
 But from another point of view our spirit may be 
 described as ' immanent ' in matter. It not only 
 works through the brain and nervous system, but, 
 as a result, pervades the entire organism, animating 
 and inspiring it with its own ' peculiar difference ' ; 
 so that we recognize a man's character in the 
 expression of his eye, the tone of his voice, the 
 touch of his hand ; his unconscious and instinctive 
 postures, and gestures, and gait. Nor is this ' imma- 
 nence' confined to the bodily organism. It extends, 
 in what may be called a secondary degree, to the 
 inanimate objects of the external world. For a 
 man imprints his spiritual character upon all the 
 things with which he deals, his house, his clothes, 
 
 1 See Appendix. 
 F 3
 
 68 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE [CHAP. 
 
 his furniture, the various products of his hand or 
 head. And when we speak of a man's spirit sur- 
 viving in his works, the expression is no mere 
 metaphor ; for through those works, even though 
 dead and gone, he continues to influence his fellow- 
 men. And when we look at the pictures of Raffaelle, 
 or listen to the music of Beethoven, or read the 
 poetry of Dante, or the philosophy of Plato, the 
 spirit of the great Masters is affecting us as really 
 as if we saw them face to face : it is immanent in 
 the painted canvas and the printed page. 
 
 Spirit then, as we know it in our own personal 
 experience, has two different relations to matter, 
 that of transcendence, and that of immanence. But 
 though logically distinct, these two relations are 
 not actually separate ; they are two aspects of one 
 fact; two points of view from which the single 
 action of our one personality may be regarded. 
 As self-conscious, self-identical, self-determined, we 
 possess qualities which transcend or rise above the 
 laws of matter ; but we can only realize these 
 qualities, and so become aware of them, by acting 
 in the material world ; while conversely material 
 objects our bodies, and our works of art could 
 never possibly be regarded as expressions of spirit, 
 if spirit were not at the same time recognized as 
 distinct from its medium of manifestation. 
 
 If then we are to raise the question, 'what is 
 the relation of the supreme Spirit to the material
 
 in] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE 69 
 
 universe ? ' this is the analogy upon which we must 
 proceed; for we have no other. We may indeed 
 decline the problem as wholly insoluble ; but if 
 we attempt its solution at all, it must of necessity 
 be upon the lines of the only experience which we 
 possess this experience in which transcendence and 
 immanence are combined. 
 
 This at once excludes pantheism, the belief that 
 God is merely immanent in matter ; for attractive 
 as this creed has often seemed to worshippers of 
 nature, it cannot really be construed into thought. 
 Spirit which is merely immanent in matter, without 
 also transcending it, cannot be spirit at all ; it is 
 only another aspect of matter, having neither self- 
 identity nor freedom. Pantheism is thus really 
 indistinguishable from materialism; it is merely 
 materialism grown sentimental, but no more ten- 
 able for its change of name. 
 
 The logical opposite of pantheism is deism, in 
 the sense of belief in a merely transcendent God ; 
 and this is equally inconsistent with our analogy ; 
 for as we have no experience whatever of spirit or 
 matter as existing apart, we cannot conceive either 
 term of the deistic universe. But deism of this 
 kind, though it has occupied an important place in 
 history, is scarcely a form of thought with which at 
 the present day we need to reckon. It belongs to 
 a metaphysical rather than a scientific atmosphere 
 and age.
 
 70 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE [CHAP. 
 
 Yet another view of the question has been sug- 
 gested under the name of monism ; the view that 
 'matter in motion is substantially identical with 
 mind,' that they are two aspects of one thing, which 
 from the outside we call matter, and from the inside 
 mind. At first sight this seems only another name 
 for materialism ; and, in fact, the word monism is 
 expressly used by Haeckel as synonymous with 
 scientific materialism. But its use has also been 
 advocated in a theistic sense ; the mental aspect 
 being regarded as prior in importance, though not 
 in existence to the material, a position very much 
 akin to Spinozism. Now the supposed advantage of 
 this theory is, that it abolishes all the difficulties 
 of dualism. But it is obviously no more than an 
 imaginative conjecture, and upon what does it rest? 
 'We have only to suppose that the antithesis be- 
 tween mind and motion subject and object is 
 itself phenomenal or apparent, not absolute or real V 
 That is to say that, when we are confronted in our 
 personal experience with a dualism, whose mystery 
 we cannot solve, we may at once attain intellectual 
 satisfaction, by the simple expedient of assuming it 
 to be an illusion. But this is precisely what the 
 materialist does, and is condemned for doing ; and 
 we are no more justified in discrediting the primary 
 facts of consciousness in the interests of spirit, than 
 in the interests of matter. Monism, in short, whether 
 1 Romanes, Mind, Matter, and Monism.
 
 in] D1V1KE IMMANENCE IN NATURE 71 
 
 material or spiritual, is not based upon what we 
 know in ourselves, and what is, to that extent, 
 solid fact ; but upon distrust of what we think we 
 know in ourselves a sceptical foundation, which 
 cannot possibly support a positive conclusion. 
 It should further be noticed that, in the above 
 quotation, mind and matter are treated as synony- 
 mous with subject and object. This in itself is a 
 mistake, but a mistake essential to the theory. For 
 it is only by considering mind as a mere series of 
 subjective or mental states, that we can plausibly 
 consider motion as its parallel concomitant. But 
 the characteristic of mind, as we know it in our 
 personal spirit, is that it is both subject and object 
 at once ; it is capable of becoming its own object, 
 and saying I am I. It is through this power of 
 self-consciousness, or self-diremption, that spirit 
 transcends matter, as we have already had occasion 
 to point out ; and it is precisely this power which 
 we are unable to conceive as having any material 
 equivalent. Monism, in fact, started from the 
 physical side, from analysis of the cerebral con- 
 ditions of thought ; it rests on physical analogies, 
 and is coloured by physical modes of thought ; 
 and the attempt to make it metaphysically tenable 
 seems an impossible tour deforce. 
 
 It remains then that we confine ourselves to the 
 analogy of our personal experience, and conceive 
 of God as at once transcending and immanent in
 
 72 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE [CHAP. 
 
 nature ; for however incomprehensible this relation- 
 ship may be, we know it in our own case to be 
 a fact, and may legitimately infer its analogue 
 outside ourselves. 
 
 On this analogy then, the divine presence which 
 we recognize in nature will be the presence of 
 a Spirit, which infinitely transcends the material 
 order, yet sustains and indwells it the while. We 
 cannot indeed explain the method, either of the 
 transcendence, or of the indwelling ; but we come 
 no nearer to an explanation, by attempting, with 
 any of the above-mentioned theories, to obtain 
 simplicity by suppressing either aspect of the only 
 analogy that we possess. But it will be remem- 
 bered that in our own case we noticed two degrees 
 of immanence ; our essential immanence in our 
 body, which is consequently often called our 
 person ; and our contingent immanence in the 
 works which we are free to create or not at will. 
 The question therefore inevitably arises, under 
 which of these analogies are we to think of God's 
 relation to the world. Is the universe His body, 
 or His work ? Different answers have been given 
 to this question by different thinkers ; and it is 
 obvious that no answer can be more than con- 
 jectural or hypothetical. 
 
 Under these circumstances we are entitled to 
 urge, that the Trinitarian conception of God, which 
 we Christians have independent reasons for believ-
 
 ill] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE 73 
 
 ing to be true, is intellectually the most satisfac- 
 tory; since it embraces both the kinds of immanence 
 in question, and therefore harmonizes with the 
 entire analogy of our personal experience. For 
 according to this doctrine, the Second Person of 
 the Trinity is the essential, adequate, eternal mani- 
 festation of the First, ' the express image of His 
 person,' ' in whom dwelleth the fulness of the God- 
 head bodily,' while 'by Him all things were made.' 
 Here then we have our two degrees of immanence ; 
 the complete immanence of the Father in the 
 Son, of which our own relation to our body is an 
 inadequate type ; and, as a result of this, His 
 immanence in creation, analogous to our presence 
 in our works ; with the obvious difference, of course, 
 that we finite beings who die and pass away, can 
 only be impersonally present in our works ; whereas 
 He must be conceived as ever present to sustain 
 and animate the universe, which thus becomes a 
 living manifestation of Himself; no mere machine, 
 or book, or picture, but a perpetually sounding voice.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN 
 
 THE thought of God's immanence in nature has 
 commended itself at the present day, on quite 
 independent grounds, to many of the students both 
 of science and philosophy. But if God is immanent 
 in nature, He must also be immanent in man, since 
 man is a part of nature ; and if it is not so, our 
 previous belief will be discredited, while if it is so, 
 it will be strongly confirmed. 
 
 Now when we turn to man, we are struck at 
 once by the phenomenon of conscience : the most 
 mysterious of all his attributes. What we com- 
 monly call conscience is a complex thing ; various 
 strands are woven into its woof. It has a long 
 history behind it, and was not, in early ages, either 
 as intelligent or as definite as now ; nor, of course, 
 is it equally educated among all races at the pre- 
 sent day. But what we find in its highest develop- 
 ment must have been implicitly present in its 
 earliest germ ; and what we do find is a sense, 
 within our inmost self, of something 'not ourself
 
 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN 75 
 
 which makes for righteousness ' ; a categorical im- 
 perative, an authoritative voice, which we can only 
 ascribe to God. This is the religious account of 
 conscience, and it cannot be explained away. No 
 hypothesis that has ever been suggested will really 
 account for its unique authority ; and moreover we 
 have not to deal with past possibilities, but present 
 facts. We know perfectly well what we mean by a 
 categorical imperative, an absolute, unqualified, un- 
 conditional command ; and we know perfectly well 
 that it is thus, and only thus, that conscience speaks. 
 And it is this that leads us to regard conscience 
 
 'As God's most intimate Presence in the soul 
 And His most perfect Image in the world 1 .' 
 
 Moreover in proportion as conscience is consis- 
 tently obeyed, goodness and holiness of character 
 result ; and this is a process which the good and 
 holy, the men who by experience know most about 
 it, habitually ascribe to the co-operation of God, 
 ' God working within them,' in scriptural phrase, 
 *both to will and to do of His good pleasure.' 
 'Amor Dei intfllectualis' says even Spinoza, 'pars 
 est infiniti atnoris, quo Deus seipsum amat* ' Our 
 love of God in its highest form is but a portion of 
 God's infinite love for Himself.' It is easy to say 
 that such men misinterpret their own history, and 
 attribute to divine assistance what is but a function 
 1 Wordsworth, Excursion, iv.
 
 76 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN [CHAP. 
 
 of themselves. But those who have confessedly 
 succeeded in attaining what other men have failed 
 to attain, must, in common sense, be credited with 
 knowing best what has been the secret of their own 
 success. Nor as a matter of fact is the experience 
 in question at all confined to the saintly few, the 
 elect minority in every age, who have been eminent 
 for character and conduct. It is echoed and has 
 been echoed, from the dawn of history, in countless 
 human hearts ; far and wide men have believed 
 that, in the spiritual struggles of their inner life, 
 they were aware of divine intervention and assis- 
 tance ; while in proportion as the struggle has been 
 more successful, the conviction has grown more 
 sure. The fact that such a phenomenon cannot be 
 expressed in scientific terms, and is entirely out of 
 the range of our psychology, must not be allowed 
 to blind us to its enormous magnitude the im- 
 mense place which it fills, and has filled in the 
 spiritual life of our race. 
 
 Thus God's immanence in nature, we may 
 reasonably assert, reappears as inspiration in man. 
 Meanwhile our spiritual character reacts upon the 
 material instrument of its realization, moulding 
 the brain and nervous system, and thence the entire 
 bodily organism, into gradual accordance with 
 itself; till the expression of the eye, the lines of 
 the face, the tones of the voice, the touch of the 
 hand, the movements, and manners, and gracious
 
 iv] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN 77 
 
 demeanour, all reveal, with increasing clearness, 
 the nature of the spirit that has made them what 
 they are. Thus the interior beauty of holiness 
 comes by degrees to be a visible thing ; and through 
 His action upon our spirit, God is made manifest 
 in our flesh. While in proportion as we are 
 enabled to recognize this progressive manifestation 
 of God in matter, we are prepared to find it cul- 
 minate in His actual Incarnation, the climax of 
 His immanence in the world. 
 
 It must not of course be forgotten that one of the 
 popular objections to Christianity is founded upon 
 this very fact ; that it is so congruous with human 
 thought. Man, we know, in uncritical ages, tends 
 to believe in incarnations ; they are a common 
 form of thought with him; he is predisposed in 
 their favour ; medicine men, priests, kings, prophets, 
 and abnormal individuals of every kind, being con- 
 stantly regarded as embodied gods. And the 
 Christian Incarnation, it is argued, is but the last 
 lingering survival of these obsolete modes of 
 thought. Its resemblance to countless other base- 
 less beliefs of the kind creates a presumption that 
 it is not true. This argument is usually answered 
 by a reference to history ; to the external evidence 
 and internal character of the Christian story, as 
 contrasted with all other accounts of incarnations. 
 But as many minds are prevented, by the very 
 argument in question, from approaching the facts
 
 78 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN [CHAP. 
 
 of history without antecedent bias, it may be well 
 to notice that there is a logical as well as an 
 historical answer. 
 
 The tendency to believe in incarnations involves 
 two elements a belief in their probability, and 
 a belief in their actual occurrence ; a belief that 
 they may happen any day, and a belief that they 
 have happened here and now ; the one being a 
 general principle of thought, and the other a par- 
 ticular judgement of fact. And it is obvious that 
 no number of mistakes on this latter point would 
 affect the credibility of a new instance. The mere 
 fact that a possible event did not happen, in ninety- 
 nine supposed cases, is no reason for arguing that 
 it will not happen in the hundredth, as the familiar 
 story of the boy and the wolf may suffice to show. 
 
 It is therefore with the other element that the 
 argument is concerned, the general tendency to 
 believe incarnations probable. But a general 
 tendency in the human mind to expect a thing 
 cannot possibly be twisted into a presumption 
 against its occurrence. * Men were always expect- 
 ing it, therefore it cannot have occurred,' is, when 
 baldly stated, a manifest absurdity. Of course it 
 will be answered that what is meant is ' Men were 
 always expecting it, therefore they invented its 
 occurrence.' But the fact of the expectation does 
 not logically make invention a likelier alterna- 
 tive than occurrence ; except upon one hypothesis,
 
 iv] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN 79 
 
 namely, that the occurrence is impossible. And 
 here we have the root of the whole matter. An 
 incarnation is first ruled out of court, as being 
 a priori impossible; and then the expectation of it 
 is treated as an illusion. But this is what logicians 
 call begging the question. That is to say, the 
 tendency to believe in incarnations creates no pre- 
 sumption whatever against the reality of a particular 
 incarnation, except upon the previous assumption 
 that the tendency is false. Thus the argument 
 before us does not really rest upon the fact in 
 human nature which it quotes, but upon a purely 
 arbitrary interpretation of the fact. We may say 
 baldly and boldly, ' incarnations are impossible ' ; 
 but we cannot strengthen the statement by adding 
 4 because mankind has always believed them.' An 
 assumption may look more plausible when disguised 
 as an induction, but it does not therefore gain 
 logical force. 
 
 Nor is this negative conclusion all that we are 
 justified in drawing. For when fairly faced, the 
 tendency in question is not only no argument 
 against the Incarnation, but rather creates a pre- 
 sumption of its truth. For it is only part and 
 parcel of man's general sense of the divine nearness 
 nearness to and interest in himself. Man's 
 habitual, and almost instinctive belief in the exis- 
 tence of a God or gods, has always been regarded 
 as among the strongest evidences of natural reli-
 
 8o DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN [CHAP. 
 
 gion. Its universality, that is to say, has been 
 recognized as weighty evidence of its truth. But 
 almost everywhere we find this belief to be insepar- 
 ably connected with the further conviction, that 
 their gods desire intercourse and friendship with 
 men. And if the universality of the one belief is 
 recognized as an argument in its favour, the prac- 
 tical universality of the other must be so too ; it 
 must be regarded as pointing to a truth. Again, 
 we recognize that the religious instinct, in its earlier 
 stages, continually misinterpreted itself finding 
 gods in stocks and stones, sun, moon, and stars, 
 birds, beasts, and fishes. But we do not consider 
 the instinct itself as discredited by the fact, or our 
 present conception of God as less true, because it 
 was only slowly disentangled from these absurdities. 
 It was not the religious instinct, we consider, that 
 erred, but the crude philosophy which could not 
 interpret the instinct And it would seem to have 
 been the same with the special tendency that we 
 are considering. Men took it for granted that 
 their gods were desirous of intercourse with them ; 
 and this instinctive expectation made it easy to 
 believe, that among other modes of manifestation, 
 the gods had not only spoken through inspired 
 men, but had themselves from time to time assumed 
 human form, either in the way of theophany or 
 incarnation. But here again no number of mis- 
 taken facts can invalidate the instinct behind them.
 
 iv] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN 8r 
 
 Folklore and mythology find endless traces of sup- 
 posed incarnations which are quite as unspiritual, 
 and even immoral, as they are unscientific ; and 
 conflict not only with all canons of rational criti- 
 cism, but even with the ordinary dictates of plain 
 common sense. Yet these fictions only emphasize 
 the persistence of the instinct which continued to 
 invent them, because it continued to demand them. 
 And when at length we are confronted with a tale 
 of Incarnation, whose spiritual sublimity and actual 
 influence are alike absolutely unique, its believers 
 may fairly recognize in the previous expectation 
 of mankind, an additional proof of its truth. The 
 event has occurred, they may reasonably say, which 
 man's prophetic soul divined. The Incarnation, 
 that he often so fantastically dreamed of, has at 
 last become a fact. 
 
 But it may still be said, and often is said, that 
 the Incarnation, in which Christians believe, is really 
 as incompatible with reverent notions of God as 
 the unworthier legends to which we have alluded ; 
 since it involves a miraculous interference with the 
 order of nature, which is utterly unbecoming of 
 the author of nature ; and ought in fact to shock 
 our scientific sense, as the earlier stories shock our 
 moral sense of what is appropriate to the character 
 of God. 
 
 This is a very familiar objection, and has still 
 great weight with many minds, but it involves 
 
 G
 
 8a DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN [CHAP. 
 
 various assumptions which, to say the least, are 
 open to dispute. 
 
 In the first place, it involves a false antithesis, as 
 will easily appear from what has gone before, be- 
 tween nature and man. 'Is the great order of 
 nature likely to be altered, it magniloquently asks, 
 in deference to the insignificant interests of man ? ' 
 But man and nature are inseparable parts of one 
 whole, as we have already seen; and foremost 
 among man's attributes is his belief in his own 
 spiritual importance ; the absolute worth of his 
 personality, as against all impersonal things. This 
 instinct may be justified by philosophical analysis, 
 as we have already had occasion to point out ; but 
 it is far more vividly vindicated in ordinary eyes, 
 by the martyr who dies for a creed. For martyr- 
 dom is the complete refusal to compromise our 
 spiritual consistency, by denying what we believe ; 
 the extreme assertion that spiritual integrity out- 
 weighs all material things ; that at all costs we 
 must remain ourselves, and not contradict our- 
 selves; that our personality has absolute worth. 
 There can be no question whatever that this con- 
 viction is inherent in the very make and constitu- 
 tion of man : and as such it is an element in the 
 universe ; a phenomenon or part of the universe ; 
 and as real as any of its other phenomena or parts. 
 What we find therefore is not an order of nature on 
 the one side, and human interest on the other ; but
 
 ivj DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN 83 
 
 a single system of which this conviction is a part ; 
 an order of nature in which it is included ; a com- 
 bination of two elements of which one possesses the 
 attribute of claiming supremacy over the other. 
 We cannot study external nature except through 
 our spirit, and our spirit brings this inevitable con- 
 viction with it to the task. In the very act of 
 knowing matter we judge it subordinate to spirit, 
 while matter itself subserves the judgement through 
 the brain by which it is made. To say therefore 
 that the order of nature is not likely to be altered 
 for man, or in other words, that matter is not likely 
 to be altered in the interest of spirit, is to contra- 
 dict our fundamental conception of the relative 
 importance of the two. And no such argument, 
 from moral improbability, can be raised against 
 miracle as such. 
 
 Moreover, when the miraculous character of the 
 Incarnation is attacked, it is important to distinguish 
 between the fact of the Incarnation, and its mode, 
 the conditions and circumstances by which it was 
 accompanied. For upon reflection we may easily 
 see, that there is no justification whatever for regard- 
 ing the fact of the Incarnation, the fact of God 
 becoming man, as a miracle in any ordinary sense 
 of the word. For by a miracle we mean an inter- 
 ference with the usual order of events, something 
 which happens differently from other cases of its 
 kind, as when a dead man comes to life again, or 
 G 2
 
 84 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN [CHAP. 
 
 water is made wine. But an event which by its 
 nature is, ex hypothesi, unique the sole and only 
 possible occurrence of its kind has no usual order 
 with which to come in conflict ; and unless it be 
 intrinsically irrational, there can be no antecedent 
 presumption against it. It may be strange, sur- 
 prising, stupendous, but, in no intelligible sense of 
 the word, miraculous. Thus nothing in the course 
 of nature, nothing in the previous history of man, 
 could create a shred of rational presumption against 
 the occurrence of an Incarnation. It stands 
 free to be judged without bias on its own intrinsic 
 claim. 
 
 It may of course be replied that this distinction 
 between the fact and the mode of the Incarnation 
 is unfair ; since the two things are inseparable 
 elements of one supposed event, which must be 
 discredited as a whole, by the incredible character 
 of either part. But the whole point of the distinc- 
 tion in question is to preclude such an objection, 
 by showing that the fact stands in a necessary rela- 
 tion of logical priority to the mode, and must be 
 considered first : that the Incarnation is the in- 
 evitable presupposition of its miracles. If Jesus 
 Christ was the divine Author of our human life and 
 death, it is manifestly absurd to say that He could 
 not, or would not, heal the sick and raise the dead. 
 Such miracles, taken by themselves, would be in the 
 last degree improbable ; but as results of an Incar-
 
 iv] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN 85 
 
 nation they are so probable that we should even 
 call them natural. Thus the incredibility of the 
 mode entirely vanishes, if the fact be true ; and we 
 can never ask about a Christian miracle simply, ' Is 
 it likely to have happened ? ' but ' Is it likely to have 
 happened, if Christ was God ? ' Consequently, when 
 we hear the Gospels rejected on account of their 
 miracles, it is obvious that the divinity of Christ has 
 been rejected first. But if so, upon what ground ? 
 evidently and necessarily upon an a priori ground 
 the a priori ground that an Incarnation is im- 
 probable. Hence it is important to show, as we 
 have done above, that such a presumption has no 
 logical foundation. It is merely a baseless prejudice 
 for which no sound reason can be produced. For 
 what are the facts of the case? The picturesque 
 simile of the bird flying in from the night, we know 
 not whence, and out in the night again, we know not 
 whither, is as true of human life to-day, as when it 
 was first urged, in the hall of Eadwine, as an argu- 
 ment for listening to the Christian teacher. With 
 all our science, we know nothing, unless from reve- 
 lation, of the ultimate origin or final destiny of man ; 
 why he exists, and how the purpose of his existence 
 can best be carried out. Even of what man really 
 is, we have probably at present no more knowledge, 
 than an egg would convey of an eagle, or an acorn 
 of an oak. And if this is true of our knowledge of 
 man, it is true a fortiori of our knowledge of God.
 
 86 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN [CHAP. 
 
 Apart then altogether from any question of revela- 
 tion, can there be a shadow of reason for presuming 
 that God, of whose essential nature we are abso- 
 lutely ignorant, cannot become man, of whose 
 essential nature we know hardly more. It may be 
 as natural, so to speak, for God to become man, as 
 for God to create man ; and the Incarnation may, 
 for all we know, be an inevitable consequence of 
 creation, as some theologians have ventured to 
 assert. Any prejudice therefore that we may feel, 
 against the probability of the Incarnation, is not 
 a reasonable conviction but an irrational bias ; due 
 to the shock of its great mystery upon the mind. 
 We are so unaccustomed to think of mysteries, in 
 the trivial round of daily life, that their unexpected 
 presentation is an affront to us. Yet all ultimate 
 realities are equally mysterious, when once we pause 
 to think of them, being, life, sense, thought, love, 
 will, God; omnia exeunt in mysterium,zs> theschool- 
 men said ; there can be no possible presumption 
 against the occurrence of an event merely because 
 its mystery is profound. 
 
 Still, the absence of contrary presumption, it may 
 be urged, does not carry us far ; and there must be 
 very strong evidence in favour of the Incarnation, 
 before it can be received. There is of course very 
 strong evidence, in the judgement of its believers ; 
 but its strength is still often obscured, by the mis- 
 taken idea that it consists chiefly of miracles. For
 
 iv] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN 87 
 
 miracles, at the present day, far from supporting 
 anything else, are popularly supposed to be them- 
 selves much in need of support ; so that, for many 
 minds, they tend to invalidate, rather than to fortify, 
 the credit of any document wherein their occurrence 
 is recorded. And though this position requires 
 criticism, it may for the present be passed over ; 
 since miracles neither are, nor ever were regarded 
 by the Christian Church as, the primary proof of 
 the Incarnation. For the Incarnation is primarily 
 and essentially a spiritual fact, and no conceivable 
 amount of evidence that was merely material could 
 prove it ; spiritual things must be spiritually dis- 
 cerned. And so the personality of Jesus Christ is 
 its own self-evidence. ' Which of you convinceth 
 Me of sin ?' He asks, and ' If I speak the truth, why 
 do ye not believe Me ? ' A sinless man must speak 
 the truth, and therefore be what He asserts Himself. 
 He appeals to His character to substantiate His 
 claim : bids men look at Him and recognize that 
 He must be what He says. Now such an appeal 
 is directly addressed to the spiritual insight of His 
 hearers, and can only succeed where that insight 
 exists. It was rejected as a matter of course by 
 those who did not know goodness when they saw 
 it ; the self-satisfied or sensual men who assumed 
 bad motives for good actions ; the morally and 
 spiritually blind. But it was accepted by His 
 faithful followers, His intimate friends of every day ;
 
 88 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN [CHAP. 
 
 the men and women whom His glance had kindled, 
 and His voice had quickened to new life ; and in 
 whose souls, as they looked and listened, insight 
 arose out of much love. And it was this inner circle 
 of ' witnesses ' that were gradually trained by Jesus 
 Christ, first to believe in Him, and then to under- 
 stand Him, and finally to proclaim Him to the 
 world. 
 
 This then was the primary proof, the essential 
 evidence of the Incarnation ; the self-revelation of 
 a person to persons. But it was unquestionably 
 accompanied, as Christians believe, by works of 
 superhuman power, and sealed by the crowning 
 miracle of resurrection from the dead. The attempt 
 to deny these miracles, or to reject the Gospels on 
 account of them, lands us amid worse problems 
 than those which it seeks to solve. For we cannot 
 eliminate from history either the person or the work 
 of Christ ; and the more we discredit the recorded 
 account of them, the more hopelessly perplexing 
 does their supremacy become. 
 
 But if the Incarnation was a fact, and Jesus Christ 
 was what He claimed to be, His miracles so far 
 from being improbable, will appear the most natural 
 things in the world. For no one will deny, that in 
 this case, He could have worked them ; and when 
 we look at them, it seems likely that He would; 
 for they harmonize completely with His whole 
 character and work, being mainly acts of charity
 
 iv] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN 89 
 
 and mercy, either to the bodies or the souls of men ; 
 and at the same time profoundly symbolical of 
 spiritual truth. They are indeed so essentially a 
 part of the character depicted in the Gospels, that 
 without them that character would entirely dis- 
 appear. They flow naturally from a Person who, 
 despite His obvious humanity, impresses us through- 
 out as being at home in two worlds. Moreover the 
 possessor of these miraculous powers is described 
 as tempted to misuse them. No one, who reads the 
 account of the temptation, can suppose for a moment 
 that it was related with any reference to the credi- 
 bility of miracles. But for that very reason its 
 indirect bearing on their credibility is great ; for 
 nothing can suggest more forcibly that the miracu- 
 lous power was real, than the statement incidentally 
 made, that it was the subject of temptation ; with 
 the further implication that in many cases it was 
 consciously present but unused. The issue also of 
 this temptation tallies, in a very remarkable degree, 
 with the nature of the miracles recorded in the 
 Gospels. One or two indeed of those miracles 
 may seem, as Dr. Newman says, ' more or less im- 
 probable, being unequal in dignity to the rest ' ; and 
 it has been suggested in consequence that they may 
 be apocryphal. But Dr. Newman's own view is 
 critically quite as reasonable, that ' they are sup- 
 ported by the system in which they are found, as 
 being a few out of a multitude, and therefore but
 
 90 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN [CHAP. 
 
 exceptions (and as we suppose but apparent excep- 
 tions) to the general rule.' And with these question- 
 able exceptions, there is a dignity, a beauty, a reserve 
 of power, a restriction of use, a depth of spiritual 
 significance, in the miracles attributed to Christ, 
 which makes us feel that they are not merely con- 
 gruous with His whole personality, but part of it. 
 We cannot separate the wonderful life, or the won- 
 derful teaching, from the wonderful works. They 
 involve and interpenetrate, and presuppose each 
 other, and form in their indissoluble combination 
 one harmonious picture. But that picture, to repeat 
 once more the old but unanswerable dilemma, 
 cannot by any ingenuity be construed into the mere 
 likeness of a man ; while it is the most adequate 
 portrait that imagination can conceive of an Incar- 
 nate God. It is not indeed the kind of Incarnation 
 that if left to ourselves we should have invented ; 
 but for that very reason it is the kind that must 
 be true. 
 
 This, then, was the original evidence on which 
 the Incarnation was received. It was the gradual 
 self-revelation of a Person to spiritually minded 
 persons. But among the attributes of this Person 
 was included the power of working miracles ; and 
 there cannot be a shadow of doubt that this was 
 an integral element in the total impression which 
 He produced. His miracles did not prove His 
 character, but they essentially confirmed the claim
 
 iv] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN 91 
 
 which His character meanwhile predisposed men to 
 accept. 
 
 Now it is obvious that these miracles cannot 
 appeal with such force to us, as they once did to 
 contemporary eyes. But the very same lapse of 
 time, which has diminished their effect, has increased 
 that of another kind of evidence. For every suc- 
 cessive century, that weakens the weight of bygone 
 miracle, intensifies the wonder of bygone prophecy. 
 And the Gospels are full of prophecy. Jesus Christ 
 speaks with an absolute authoritative certainty of 
 the everlasting nature of the kingdom which He 
 came to found. ' The gates of hell shall not pre- 
 vail against it ' ; ' Heaven and earth shall pass 
 away, but My words shall not pass away ' ; and 
 ' Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of 
 the world.' These and similar utterances are only 
 indicative of His entire attitude towards the remote 
 future. He speaks of it with unconditional certi- 
 tude throughout. He is come to inaugurate a change 
 within the souls of men which shall continue to 
 operate till the end of time. When we remember 
 to whom this promise was originally made a few 
 Jewish fishermen against the world, and those but 
 half understanding their Master the boldness of 
 its prophecy is apparent. Yet its boldness is only 
 equalled by its truth. For after overcoming the 
 world for nineteen centuries, in the precise way 
 that He foretold, the power of Christ is as strong
 
 9a DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN [CHAP. 
 
 as ever upon earth to-day. This then is our 
 modern equivalent for the signs and wonders of an 
 earlier age. The same unique Person confronts 
 us with the same question as of old : ' Which of 
 you convinceth Me of sin ? ' and ' If I speak truth, 
 why do ye not believe Me ? ' But the words have 
 a new significance ; for included in their scope are 
 nineteen centuries of prophecy fulfilled. We cannot 
 regard the miracles of Christ therefore as merely 
 things of long ago ; for they are integral parts of 
 a living system which confronts the world to-day, 
 and vindicates its wondrous origin, by the actual 
 fact of its present wonder. 
 
 Moreover, it must be remembered that, in our 
 Christian view, the Incarnation was redemptive. 
 It was an atonement. Sin, or moral evil, is a part 
 of our total human experience, which philosophy 
 is bound to take into account ; and sin, though 
 primarily due to the will, has infected the bodily 
 organism of the whole human race ; moral and 
 physical depravity mingling with, and reacting on 
 each other, till the entire resultant may be spoken 
 of as 'the body of this death' a complex whole in 
 which it is impossible to disentangle the spiritual 
 element from the diseased conditions and perverted 
 functions of organ and tissue, which personal and 
 ancestral sins have brought about. 
 
 And this amounts to saying, that there is one 
 department of the world in which demonstrably
 
 iv] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN 93 
 
 the reign of law breaks down. The motions of the 
 stars are mathematically accurate ; vegetable life 
 pursues its annual round ; animals, till man has 
 touched them, follow the instincts of their kind. 
 But with man the case is different. His appetites 
 and instincts are as well adapted as those of other 
 animals to ensure the preservation of the individual 
 and the race, yet he continually misuses them to 
 the detriment of both. His reason endows him 
 with an unique capacity for promoting the progress 
 of his kind, yet his almost habitual use of it is self- 
 regarding and anti-social. His will is conscious of 
 a moral law, yet disobeys it. His whole body and 
 soul are involved in one complex, composite disease, 
 due to the violation of the appropriate and natural 
 laws of his species. This condition therefore is 
 quite accurately described in the New Testament 
 as lawlessness (avo^ia), and involves a real breach 
 of universal order a miracle in the objectionable 
 sense of the term. And it cannot be too often 
 repeated that this condition of humanity is no 
 philosophical hypothesis, or theological dogma, but 
 a perfectly familiar fact of our daily experience; 
 an experience which is apt, indeed, to be over- 
 looked in our more ordinary moments, simply 
 because it is so habitual, but which from time to 
 time arrests us with an intensity of awfulness 
 which language has no power to express. It is at 
 once as certain as, and more stupendous than, any
 
 94 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN [CHAP. 
 
 other fact that we know. Now a primary object 
 of the Incarnation, as Christians believe, was to 
 remedy this lawlessness, to restore this inordinate 
 state of humanity to order. And historically this 
 has been its effect. Real Christians in every age 
 have both experienced and exhibited the gradual 
 restitution of their entire personality to order. The 
 work of Jesus Christ therefore comes before us, not 
 as an hypothetical breach of nature's laws, but as 
 the actual restitution of these laws when obviously, 
 and beyond controversy, broken the counteraction 
 of the ' miracle ' of sin. 
 
 Now this consideration does not of course affect 
 the physical possibility of what are commonly 
 called miracles, which is a thing that few sane 
 men would deny. But it profoundly affects the 
 a priori probability of their occurrence, which is 
 really the point at issue in most arguments upon 
 the subject. For, instead of asking, ' Is God likely 
 to interfere with His own laws?' we should ask, 
 ' Is He not likely to restore them when already 
 interfered with ? ' The interference is a fact ; it is 
 daily before our eyes ; its appalling consequences 
 are within us, and around us. Yet it is an anomaly 
 in the universe, and the more we learn of the 
 otherwise harmonious order of that universe, the 
 more irresistibly we feel that such a fact cannot 
 be final ; and thus the likelihood of God's inter- 
 vention assumes the highest possible probability.
 
 iv] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN 95 
 
 But if such a counteraction of sin is to be brought 
 about, it must be by the production, in one way 
 or another, of a sinless humanity ; which would 
 be in harmony with the order of the universe. 
 While in proportion as human beings are out of 
 harmony with the order of the universe, a sinless 
 person would not only appear, but be, from the 
 human point of view, miraculous. We should have 
 no standard with which to compare Him, and 
 therefore no capacity to criticize either the condi- 
 tions of His existence, or the range of His powers. 
 Now all this has an important bearing upon the 
 miracles recorded in the Gospels. First and fore- 
 most among these miracles stands the virgin birth 
 of Christ. And the real ground on which it is 
 rejected is the a priori one of its intrinsic improba- 
 bility. For the various mythological and critical 
 considerations which are adduced against it are all 
 dependent upon and subsidiary to this. But in 
 the light of what we have been saying, is it 
 intrinsically improbable? The tradition of the 
 early Church was that only so could the sinful 
 entail be broken off ; and that at a time when the 
 relation of soul and body was conceived as far less 
 intimate than we now know it to be. But with 
 our modern knowledge of their mutual interdepen- 
 dence, it is doubly impossible to conceive that 
 natural human generation should issue in anything 
 else than a contaminated personality. It may be
 
 96 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN [CHAP. 
 
 urged that we have no reason to think otherwise, 
 even in the case of a virgin birth. But the cases 
 are widely different. For of natural generation we 
 have positive knowledge, based on universal experi- 
 ence, that it does as a fact issue in a sinful person. 
 Whereas of virgin birth we have no positive know- 
 ledge ; it is wholly outside our experience ; we 
 can only conjecture what its consequence would 
 be. And in the absence of all knowledge, it is 
 a perfectly conceivable conjecture, that a mode of 
 birth from which an essential factor of ordinary 
 heredity is absent, should involve independence 
 from hereditary taint. 
 
 When, therefore, we find a virgin birth asserted 
 in Christian history and tradition, there can be no 
 possible probability against it. Given ordinary 
 human nature alone, it would be impossible ; but 
 given an Incarnation, whose object was to introduce 
 a sinless personality into the world to which an 
 immaculate body is as essential as an uncontami- 
 nated soul its congruity, and therefore its prob- 
 ability, are obvious. In a word, it can only be 
 rejected on a priori grounds ; and these grounds 
 rest on the assumption that sinful humanity is 
 normal; but once recognize that it is abnormal, 
 an anomaly in the universe ; a priori objections 
 vanish and historic tradition resumes its sway. 
 A complete break with sinful heredity is of the 
 very essence of the Incarnation: and the account
 
 iv] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN 97 
 
 of the method of that breach which has come down 
 to us, rests on precisely the same evidence as our 
 account of the Incarnation itself. 
 
 Then there are the miracles of healing which 
 occupy so prominent a place in the Gospels. These 
 seem to many minds more credible, as being con- 
 ceivably capable of naturalistic explanation. But 
 it should be noticed that, however far such conjec- 
 tural explanation may carry us, it does not reach 
 the root of the matter. Christ emphasizes the 
 connexion between sin and disease, as two aspects 
 of one disordered personality; and connects His 
 healing of the one with His forgiving of the other, 
 as parts of the same redemptive work. He does 
 not appear as the mere pitiful physician of excep- 
 tional ability; but as having power on earth to 
 forgive sins, and therefore to remedy their physical 
 effects. He claims to have come to destroy the 
 dominion of evil in the world, by striking once for 
 ever at its spiritual root ; and as the sin of the 
 soul has grown incorporate in the flesh, He heals 
 diseases, not only in mercy, but in actual mani- 
 festation of the change which He is come to effect 
 in the entire personality of man. In other words, 
 while Christ's acts of physical healing are quite 
 subordinate to His spiritual teaching, and are 
 treated by Him as such, yet they are not merely 
 incidental acts of mercy ; they are an integral part 
 of His entire work, an essential element in the 
 
 H
 
 98 DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN [CHAP. 
 
 total impression which He plainly designed to 
 create, that He was Lord of the material as well 
 as of the spiritual order, and came not merely to 
 teach, but to exercise absolute authority over the 
 bodies as well as the souls of men. 
 
 The same principle underlies what may be called 
 the cosmic miracles, those, that is, which more ob- 
 viously imply power over the general processes of 
 the material universe; with which should be classed 
 the raising of the dead. These evince superhuman 
 power, but power which moves along rational lines, 
 and is controlled. Christ sternly refuses to work 
 them for a personal end, or to gratify a faithless 
 curiosity which they would not convince. They 
 have always some tender, merciful, spiritual pur- 
 pose ; and the momentary marvel is carefully linked 
 again to the customary course of nature, in a way 
 to suggest that it is nowise intended to supersede 
 ordinary law. Food is multiplied, but its fragments 
 are immediately ordered to be economized. The 
 dead are raised, but their friends are bidden to feed 
 them, and release them from the cerements of the 
 grave. There is to be no unpractical lingering in 
 a world of wonder : human life must at once resume 
 its course. And the total picture is not of one who 
 recklessly worked wonders, such as ignorant ages 
 have loved to attribute to their heroes ; but of one 
 who, possessing superhuman power, only employed 
 it with extreme reserve ; to manifest and symbolize
 
 iv] DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN 99 
 
 the superhuman character of His personality and 
 work. 
 
 Finally, there is the crowning miracle of the 
 Resurrection, on which the early Church laid so 
 much stress. It is easy enough to say that the 
 continued existence of Jesus Christ, and not His 
 corporeal Resurrection, is the important thing to 
 believe. But this ignores the previous question, 
 ' Who and What was Jesus Christ ? Did He, in the 
 way that we have stated, connect disease and death 
 with sin, and control material things at His will? 
 Was His absolute supremacy over death as well as 
 sin an integral part of the claim which He made, 
 and which He promised to substantiate? and is 
 matter an essential element in human personality 
 as we know it ? ' If so, whence comes the presump- 
 tion that He either could not, or would not, re- 
 assume His immaculate body, and indefinitely 
 extend its powers ? Simply from the fact that all 
 other human bodies decay in the grave, and are 
 turned again to their earth. But all other human 
 bodies are intimately contaminated by sin, whereas 
 Christ's is, ex hypothesi, immaculate ; and while we 
 know that throughout life the soul moulds and 
 modifies the body, we have no means whatever of 
 knowing what the nature or extent of this modifi- 
 cation would be, when induced, not only by a sinless 
 soul, but by a divine personality, on a sinless body. 
 We cannot conceive that anything short of dissolu- 
 H a
 
 ioo DIVINE IMMANENCE IN MAN 
 
 tion should eradicate the taint from the sinful body. 
 It must be unmade if it is to be remade at all. 
 But a sinless body, moulded by a sinless soul, is in 
 no such case ; and we have no reason whatever to 
 suppose that it might not be resumed at will: while 
 such a resumption would be the appropriate the 
 obviously appropriate climax to the whole of 
 Christ's previous attitude towards matter ; the final 
 manifestation of His personal triumph over the 
 totality of sin its consequence as well as its cause 
 and thus the earnest of His power to restore 
 man's entire personality to ultimate order.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES 
 
 WE have urged, in the last chapter, in general 
 defence of the Christian tradition, that the 
 miracles recorded in the Gospels are not merely 
 inseparable from their context, but also profoundly 
 harmonious with our conception of the Incarnation 
 as a whole. But there is a class of thinkers in the 
 present day who tend, in some sense, to believe 
 the Incarnation, and yet to disbelieve in miracles ; 
 and who would therefore substitute for the Christian 
 tradition a non-miraculous Christianity, as being 
 more in accordance with the spirit of the age. 
 Now it must be remembered that the opposition 
 to miracles is as old as Christian history, and has 
 passed through many phases which the Christian 
 creed has outlived and survived. And this natu- 
 rally leads us to ask whether its present phase is 
 really final ; or only one more wave of negative 
 opinion whose strength is already beginning to be 
 spent ? The modern form of objection to miracles 
 comes chiefly, of course, from Spinoza and Hume,
 
 i oa THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES [CHAP. 
 
 than whom it has never found, nor is ever likely to 
 find, abler exponents. But its particular revival in 
 the present day would seem, especially, to date 
 from the time when 'uniformity' became the 
 dominant category of thought ; when logic was 
 being based upon the ' law of uniformity ' ; when 
 uniformitarianism was overpressed in geology ; and 
 natural selection was allowed, in consequence, 
 unlimited millions of ages for its action ; with the 
 general result that present phenomena were too 
 readily assumed to be adequate criteria of the past. 
 And at a time like this, when the popular logicians 
 laid stress on the uniformity of nature, and yet 
 admitted that this so-called law could in no way 
 be proved, but must be 'begged,' Dr. Mozley de- 
 fended miracles by accepting this position, and 
 showing that we could give no reason whatever for 
 our belief in the order of nature ; and consequently 
 that an interference with that order could not be 
 called irrational ; it might conflict with our expec- 
 tation, but not with our reason. And this was 
 a valid argumentum ad hominem ; a valid answer 
 to any rejection of miracles, drawn from the uni- 
 formity of nature. But that phrase, of shallow 
 meaning and questionable value (seeing that no two 
 things in nature were ever exactly alike), has now, 
 to a great extent, lost its vogue. There was an 
 undue simplicity about it, which has been consider- 
 ably modified by the subsequent progress of science.
 
 v] THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES 103 
 
 For our increase of scientific knowledge has also 
 increased our scientific agnosticism, by widening 
 the horizon of what remains to be known ; and 
 men are becoming far more ready to recognize that 
 'there are more things in heaven and earth than 
 are dreamed of in our philosophy.' And we now 
 think less of the uniformity than of the unity of 
 nature ; that unity which the very word ' universe ' 
 implies ; the intimate correlation between the whole 
 and its parts, between the parts and their whole ; 
 which Tennyson's ' flower in the crannied wall ' is so 
 often quoted to illustrate : 
 
 'Little flower but if I could understand 
 What you are, root and all, and all in all, 
 
 I should know what God and man is.' 
 
 
 
 At first sight this conception may seem to make 
 the difficulty of miracles become graver, since it 
 increases the magnitude of the ' interference ' or 
 'alteration' which they involve. But this is not 
 in reality its ultimate effect. For uniformity may 
 be merely mechanical ; but unity is essentially a 
 spiritual conception. ' The ego is the only unity,' 
 says Royard Collier, ' that is given us immediately 
 by nature. We do not meet with unity in sensible 
 experience, but the mind finds it within itself, and 
 thence transfers it to the outer world by analogy.' 
 We can easily see that this is so : for if, by an effort 
 of abstraction, we separate the material element in
 
 io 4 THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES [CHAP. 
 
 experience from the spiritual, what is it that we 
 find : a succession of passing phenomena, external 
 to each other ; whose every fresh phase and 
 moment obliterates the last ; like the waves upon 
 a torrent, or the transformations of a dream ; a 
 world of which the old sceptical dictum would 
 be true, iravra pel KOI ovbev p-ev ei, ' all things are in 
 perpetual flux, and there is no permanence at all.' 
 In actual life, however, we do not make this 
 abstraction ; but habitually and instinctively read 
 our own spiritual unity into the manifold variety 
 of things. We connect and correlate the various 
 impressions of our senses, things as different as 
 scent and sound and touch ; we look before and 
 after, and link the present to the past, the past 
 which would otherwise have ceased to be ; we 
 gather and group and compare, within the mirror of 
 our mind, the scattered phenomena of distant space ; 
 we weave out of what by themselves would be 
 disconnected, incoherent elements, an unity, a 
 system, a whole. But in so doing we are not 
 creating but only recreating for ourselves, a world 
 which already exists without us. That world is 
 not a chaotic flux, as it would be if merely material, 
 but an orderly system of things. Atoms combine 
 in mathematical proportion ; stars move in their 
 courses by mechanical rule ; organic life in plant 
 and animal is minutely, elaborately teleological ; 
 man is guided and developed by a moral law.
 
 v] THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES 105 
 
 And the result is a coherent universe whose ele- 
 ments are intimately bound together, by the mutual 
 ministrations of all to each and each to all. But 
 all these links are obviously spiritual ; and analo- 
 gous to what we find within ourselves. And thus 
 the unity of nature must be due to the action of 
 a spiritual power. The phrase indeed has no other 
 meaning ; for we cannot conceive a merely material 
 unity ; since spirit is the only unifying agent that 
 we know. Thus the more science impresses upon 
 us the unity of nature, the more does it, by impli- 
 cation, assert that nature is rooted and grounded in 
 spirit. Now spirit, as we have repeatedly seen, 
 affirms the absolute supremacy of its own ends. 
 It claims as of right to govern, and never to 
 subserve matter; to use matter for spiritual pur- 
 poses, and never the reverse. And whenever the 
 reverse takes place, and we see spiritual beings 
 using their powers in pursuit of animal, and there- 
 fore material ends, we recognize at once that they 
 are contradicting the very essence of their nature, 
 and are therefore unrighteous or wrong. 
 
 If then the whole of nature is rooted and grounded 
 in spirit, and the primary characteristic of spirit is 
 this absolute self-assertion, the antecedent prob- 
 ability of miracles is immensely increased. In the 
 days of deism, when nature was regarded as a 
 machine set going once for all, interference with 
 its regularity may well have seemed impossible;
 
 io6 THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES [CHAP. 
 
 and the exaggerated estimate of the uniformity of 
 nature was largely a legacy from those days. But 
 if nature is only sustained by its intimate union 
 with spirit, and spirit is what we have above de- 
 scribed, it is no wonder that the processes of nature 
 should be modified for an adequate spiritual end. 
 
 It was moreover more or less implied in the 
 older objection to miracles, that we had a complete 
 knowledge of the processes of nature ; and could 
 therefore see that there was no room, so to speak, 
 for the miraculous element to intervene. But the 
 more we recognize that nature has always a 
 spiritual coefficient, the less confident does this 
 assurance become. For in this case all causation, 
 however mechanical upon the surface, must obvi- 
 ously run back into the spiritual region, or in 
 other words be ultimately spiritual. This indeed 
 is a conviction which has been gaining ground ever 
 since Hume's analysis of causation. We have 
 come to see with increasing clearness that physical 
 causes are not causes at all, in the sense which our 
 reason or causal instinct demands. They are only 
 antecedents or conditions that transmit causation 
 which they cannot themselves originate. 
 
 For our whole notion of cause is confessedly 
 derived from what takes place within ourselves. 
 As self-conscious beings we can be also self-deter- 
 mined ; we can frame our own ideals, fashion our 
 own plans, choose which, of many suggested motives,
 
 v] THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES 107 
 
 we will make our own ; and all this without any 
 compulsion from without. We can then realize 
 our ideals, prosecute our plans, pursue our purpose 
 in the outer world ; and in so doing, initiate events 
 of which our own will is the veritable starting- 
 point, since it includes both their ' how ' and their 
 ' why/ is at once both their origin and explanation. 
 Thus our will is an agent whose reason for action is 
 contained within itself, and as such a self-explana- 
 tory agent. When we have traced an occurrence to 
 the intervention of the human will, we are at once 
 content. It is fully accounted for. We know not 
 merely how it began, but why, (its raison d'etre} 
 and have therefore reached its absolute beginning. 
 This then is the source of our conception of cause, 
 and this is what we mean by the term : something 
 which initiates changes without external compul- 
 sion, and therefore out of its own inner nature, and 
 is hence their real starting-point ; a self-determined 
 and therefore self-conscious, and therefore spiritual 
 being. And this is what we postulate in the uni- 
 verse at large, when we say that it must have a 
 cause. It must originate in a will which is its own 
 law, and therefore its own explanation (caussa suz), 
 or, in mediaeval phrase, a being whose will and 
 intellect are one. 
 
 And it is only in the light of this postulate that 
 we can talk of secondary or natural causes. They 
 are parts of a caused whole which in their context
 
 io8 THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES [CHAP. 
 
 partake of the causality of that whole, and therefore 
 of its ultimate spirituality ; but by themselves they 
 are not causes at all, but merely media for trans- 
 mission of causation. ' We never exhaust the whole 
 mass of conditions,' says a modern logician, * which 
 produce the effect. The event never comes, and it 
 never could come, from the abstract selection which 
 we call the cause. We imply the presence of 
 unspecified conditions, but since these are normal 
 we omit to mention them V And foremost among 
 those conditions is the vital connexion of the uni- 
 verse at every moment with its first cause ; for this, 
 as we have seen, is what its unity implies. He 
 sustains it in being ; and the mechanical laws, on 
 which what we commonly call natural causation 
 depends, are, as Lotze says, not ' laws which the 
 divine action "obeys" but which it really at each 
 moment creates.' ' For they could not have 
 existed prior to God as a code to which He accom- 
 modated Himself; they can only be the expression 
 to us of the mode in which He works.' 
 
 'And though He thunder by law, the law is still 
 His voice 2 .' 
 
 Hume's negative criticism of causation was, as 
 we said, the involuntary means of turning thought 
 into the above direction. For it was impossible to 
 rest content with his sceptical conclusions, which 
 
 1 Bradley, Logic. * Tennyson, Higher Pantheism.
 
 v] THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES 109 
 
 would have made science and philosophy alike 
 impossible; and in the process of meeting them, 
 Kant and others came to recognize the fact that 
 the causal nexus is ultimately spiritual. But Male- 
 branche, long before Hume, had expressed both 
 sides of the case with admirable clearness. * Les 
 causes naturelles} he says, ' ne sont point de ve>i- 
 tables causes, ce ne sont que des causes occasionnelles, 
 qui n'agissent que par la force et 1'efficace de la 
 volonte" de DieuV 
 
 But if the action of natural causes is thus depen- 
 dent on divine concurrence, or is in other words 
 an aspect of the divine energy at work, our previous 
 conclusion is further fortified. For so far from 
 knowing the whole of any physical process, it is 
 obvious that we only know a part the appearance 
 in fact or part that meets the eye : while the 
 spiritual power which from moment to moment 
 produces natural phenomena, may be reasonably 
 conceived to change them, on occasion, for an 
 adequate end. We shall not need therefore at the 
 present day to use Mozley's argumentum ad homi- 
 nem that belief in the uniformity of nature is an 
 irrational impulse except with those who are still 
 slaves to that uniformity. On the contrary, we 
 recognize that the unity of nature, and the causal 
 connexion of its parts, is a rational conviction, but 
 one which inevitably lands us in the spiritual region ; 
 1 Malcbranche, De la Method*, vi. ii. 5.
 
 no THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES [CHAP. 
 
 and therefore makes it easy to believe that the 
 spirit which habitually controls matter, may some- 
 times exhibit its supremacy in extraordinary ways. 
 Human analogy and it is the highest we have is 
 entirely in favour of this. For the greater a man 
 is, the more methodical and consistent he will be in 
 all the usual situations of life ; one whose conduct 
 can be calculated, and whose character relied on. 
 But, in a crisis, the same greatness will be shown 
 by ability to extemporize and courage to innovate ; 
 while lesser men are paralyzed by slavish adher- 
 ence to routine. The great man does not contra- 
 dict himself, but, for a new purpose, calls new 
 powers into play, and at the next moment is as 
 regular, as orderly, as punctual as ever : the fact that 
 he has habits does not alter the fact that he is free. 
 So the habitual course of nature, which alone makes 
 life and knowledge possible, may well be traversed 
 by lightning flashes from the spiritual world, if both 
 alike are being guided by one power to one end, 
 and that end, in the strict sense, supernatural. 
 
 Hence it is obvious that the probability of 
 miracles cannot be settled by a rough and ready 
 appeal to experience, but depends upon the kind 
 of experience which we include under the term ; or 
 in other words upon the presuppositions with which 
 we approach experience. This is forcibly expressed 
 by Dr. Newman, in a passage which may be worth 
 quoting, from his Essay on Miracles.
 
 v] THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES in 
 
 1 When the various antecedent objections which 
 ingenious men have urged against miracles are 
 brought together, they will be found nearly all to 
 arise from forgetfulness of the existence of moral 
 laws. In their zeal to perfect the laws of matter 
 they most unphilosophically overlook a more sub- 
 lime system, which contains disclosures not only of 
 the Being, but of the Will of God. Thus, Hume 
 observes, " Though the Being to whom the miracle 
 is ascribed be Almighty, it does not, upon that 
 account, become a whit more probable, since it is 
 impossible for us to know the attributes or actions 
 of such a Being, otherwise than from the experience 
 which we have of His productions in the usual 
 course of nature. This still reduces us to past ob- 
 servation, and obliges us to compare the instances 
 of the violation of truth in the testimony of men 
 with those of the violation of the laws of nature by 
 miracles, in order to judge which of them is most 
 likely and probable." The moral government of 
 God, with the course of which the miracle entirely 
 accords, is altogether kept out of sight ... And a 
 recent author adopts a similarly partial and incon- 
 clusive mode of reasoning, when he confuses the 
 Christian miracles with fables of apparitions and 
 witches, and would examine them on the strict 
 principle of those legal forms which from their 
 secular object go far to exclude all religious dis- 
 cussion of the question. Such reasoners seem to
 
 iia THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES [CHAP. 
 
 suppose, that when the agency of the Deity is 
 introduced to account for miracles, it is the illogical 
 introduction of an unknown cause, a reference to 
 a mere name, the offspring, perhaps, of popular 
 superstition ; or, if more than a name, to a cause 
 that can be known only by means of the physical 
 creation ; and hence they consider religion as founded 
 in the mere weakness or eccentricity of the intellect, 
 not in actual intimations of a divine government as 
 contained in the moral world V 
 
 What this means is not that the moral and mate- 
 rial order are in any contrast or contradiction ; they 
 are obviously and incontestably part and parcel of 
 one and the self-same system. But whereas we 
 know that system, in its material aspect, only from 
 without its surface, so to speak, and perhaps an 
 inch or two below ; there is one point at which we 
 penetrate within it, and feel that we are nearer to 
 the heart of things ; and that is our personal expe- 
 rience of our own internal state 
 
 ' I myself am what I know not ignorance 
 
 which proves no bar 
 To the knowledge that I am, and, since I am, 
 
 can recognize 
 What to me is pain and pleasure ; this is sure, 
 
 the rest surmise 2 . 
 
 1 Newman, Essay on Miracles, 2, p. 20. 
 
 2 Browning, La Satsiaz.
 
 vj THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES 113 
 
 Mere surmise : my own experience that is 
 knowledge, once again * ! ' 
 
 And at the very root of this personal experience, 
 which is our only first-hand knowledge, we find the 
 moral law, with its imperious claim to subordinate 
 all things to itself. Thus what I know to be at 
 once the most certain, and the most fundamental 
 fact of experience is the moral law with its claim to 
 supremacy. There is nothing irrational, therefore, 
 in believing that, on occasion, in deference to that 
 claim, the material order may give way to the 
 moral, and 
 
 'Miracle was duly wrought 
 When, save for it, no faith was possible. 
 Whether a change were wrought i' the shows 
 
 o* the world, 
 Whether the change came from our minds 
 
 which see 
 Of the shows o' the world so much as and no 
 
 more 
 Than God wills for His purpose 8 .' 
 
 This then is, in brief, our position. We fully 
 grant that nature is uniform, in the sense that 
 similar causes, under similar conditions, will always 
 produce similar effects ; but we entirely deny that 
 
 1 Browning, La Saisiaa. 
 * Id. A Death in the Desert. 
 
 I
 
 u 4 THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES [CHAP. 
 
 this principle justifies the assertion that what does 
 not happen to-day cannot ever have happened : 
 firstly, because we never know all the conditions 
 even of what is happening to-day, and much less 
 of what was happening centuries ago ; secondly, 
 because among those conditions is the presence of 
 the spiritual power, on which their existence and 
 operation depends ; and which as spiritual, and 
 therefore rational and free, can initiate a change at 
 any point a change not against nature, but against 
 our ordinary experience of nature, non contra 
 naturam sed contra quam est nota natura, as 
 Augustine well expressed it long ago. 
 
 On this presence and operation of the absolute 
 spirit in all cases of causation Lotze has some re- 
 marks, which are precisely to our point : 
 
 ' We are not,' he says, ' to picture the absolute, 
 placed in some remote region of extended space, and 
 separated from the world of its creations, so that its 
 influence has to retraverse a distance and make a 
 journey in order to reach things ; for its indivisible 
 unity, omnipresent at every point, would fill this 
 space as well as others. . . . Wherever in apparent 
 space an organic germ has been formed, at that 
 very spot and not removed from it the absolute is 
 present. Nor ... is it simply this class of facts 
 which compels us to assume such an action of the 
 absolute. We may regard the process by which
 
 v] THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES 115 
 
 things that possess a life and soul are formed as 
 something unusual and superior ; but the presence 
 of the absolute which makes this process possible 
 is no less the basis necessarily implied in the most 
 insignificant interaction of any two atoms. Nor 
 again do we think of its presence as a mere uniform 
 breath which penetrates all places, and this par- 
 ticular spot among them, like that subtle, formless, 
 and homogeneous ether from which many strange 
 theories expect the vivification of matter into the 
 most various forms ; but the absolute is indi visibly 
 present w*ith the whole inner wealth of its nature 
 in this particular spot, and in obedience to those 
 laws of its action which it has itself laid down, 
 necessarily makes additions to the simple conjunc- 
 tions of those elements which are themselves only 
 its own continuous actions, simple additions where 
 the conjunctions are simple, additions of greater 
 magnitude and value where they are more compli- 
 cated. Everywhere it draws only the consequences, 
 which at every point of the whole belong to the 
 premisses it has previously realized at that point V 
 
 Now the Incarnation, in our Christian view of it, 
 is a supreme instance of this action of the Absolute ; 
 the Being who is behind all things therein coming 
 to their front, and exhibiting as a necessary part 
 of the process His authoritative relation to the 
 
 1 Lotze, Metaphyric, $ 246. 
 I 2
 
 n6 THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES [CHAP. 
 
 world. We believe it primarily for a combination 
 of moral and spiritual reasons, but once believed 
 it affects our whole view of the material universe. 
 For it has a cosmic, as well as a human significance. 
 It is not merely an event in the history of man, but 
 an event, at least as far as our earth is concerned, 
 in the history of matter ; analogous upon a higher 
 plane to the origin of life, or the origin of person- 
 ality ; the appearance of a new order of being in the 
 world. And precisely as, in Browning's language, 
 
 ' Man, once descried, imprints for ever 
 His presence on all lifeless things 1 ,' 
 so 
 
 'the acknowledgement of God in Christ 
 Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee 
 All questions in the earth and out of it 2 .' 
 
 That is to say, it must for all who believe it 
 become the absolutely central truth of their philo- 
 sophy. Just as the Copernican astronomy, or the 
 doctrine of evolution, have enlarged and modified 
 our views of the universe, so the Incarnation, once 
 accepted, throws a new light upon the entire world. 
 For on the one hand, against mere idealism, it 
 emphasizes the value and importance of matter, as 
 being the agent through which God's spiritual pur- 
 pose is effected : and on the other hand, against 
 mere materialism, it interprets this value and im- 
 
 1 Browning, Paracelsus. * Id. A Death in the Desert.
 
 v] THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES 117 
 
 portance, as consisting in the capability to subserve 
 that purpose. Thus while rejecting the respective 
 negations of idealism and materialism, it sanctions 
 their positive elements the supremacy of spirit and 
 the reality of matter ; and so supplementing each 
 by the other, combines both in a concrete whole. 
 
 This view of the Incarnation is sometimes, 
 ignorantly, regarded as if it were only an ingenious 
 afterthought of modern apology. But that is 
 merely because it sank into comparative abeyance, 
 in the eighteenth century, when men were more 
 occupied with negative criticism than with positive 
 systems of thought. As a matter of fact it is as 
 old as Christianity : it is latent, not to say patent, 
 in the prologue of St. John, and the Epistles of 
 St. Paul: it has been proclaimed by Christian 
 philosophers, in every philosophic age : and, with 
 the revival of constructive thinking, it has of 
 necessity revived. 
 
 To object that revealed truths can have no 
 speculative value, and that philosophy cannot take 
 account of revelation, as such, is to under-estimate 
 the range of philosophy. For philosophy must 
 deal with the totality of knowledge. It contem- 
 plates in Plato's phrase ' all time and all existence.' 
 It cannot, without self-destruction, ignore any kind 
 of fact. But if there has been a revelation, it must 
 have brought new facts and those important ones 
 to our knowledge ; and once within the field of
 
 n8 THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES [CHAP. 
 
 knowledge, they are of necessity within the field 
 of philosophy. Thenceforth, to philosophize without 
 them is not merely to leave them open questions, 
 but implicitly to rule them out of court as being 
 untrue; while to philosophize with them is to be 
 modified by them, in the way and degree that we 
 have described to make the Incarnation the centre 
 of our speculation, as well as of our practical life ; 
 the light of our thoughts, as well as the guide of 
 our acts. 
 
 But even so, it is sometimes asked, can we not 
 conceive an Incarnation without miracles; and 
 might not such a conception be equally the centre 
 of a yet very different view of the world ? 
 
 Undoubtedly; within limits we might frame such 
 a conception. But we do not believe in the Incar- 
 nation because we can conceive it, but because we 
 have a conviction that it happened. And the only 
 evidence we have that it happened, is also evidence 
 that it happened in a certain way. To borrow 
 from that evidence the general notion of an Incar- 
 nation, and then proceed to clothe it in the colours 
 of our own imagination, is absurd. And the only 
 alternative is to accept the miraculous accompani- 
 ment of the Incarnation as we find it, and, so doing, 
 to view the world in its light. 
 
 There is one further question to which these con- 
 siderations inevitably lead. 
 
 Why do not miracles happen now? If the
 
 v] THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES 119 
 
 power of Christ on earth is as real now as in the 
 first century, why should it not be accompanied by 
 similar results ? Does not the absence of miracle 
 now, from the only Christian life that we can really 
 test, go far to disprove its presence in the past? 
 Now this question, though it is often asked, and 
 constitutes a real difficulty to many minds, tacitly 
 assumes that in accepting the miracles of Christ, we 
 accept the position that Christianity was meant to 
 be a miraculous religion. Whereas the precise 
 converse is the case. We regard the miracles of 
 Christ as unique manifestations of His unique 
 personality : things which indeed we could not 
 have foreseen, but which we recognize, when once 
 recorded, as eminently congruous with His life and 
 work. He claimed to be superhuman, and the 
 claim required substantiation to gain a hearing. 
 Attention had to be arrested ; expectation had 
 to be aroused ; the advent of a new era had to be 
 emphasized ; and that in an age, and among 
 a people that was ready to accept miracles, and 
 therefore to whom miracles were a natural not 
 to say inevitable mode of address. Authority, 
 absolute, unqualified, paramount authority, is the 
 essential characteristic of the life of Christ ; and 
 that authority must needs be exhibited, in order to 
 be received. It is difficult even to conceive how 
 otherwise a beginning could have been made. 
 But the very fact that the miracles of Christ
 
 120 THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES [CHAP. 
 
 seem, from this point of view, so natural, makes it 
 all the more instructive to notice the severe economy 
 with which they are used. He never once employs 
 them to relieve His personal necessities, but lives 
 and suffers in strict obedience to the ordinary laws 
 of nature. He refuses to work them to confute 
 enemies, and warns His disciples that after all they 
 are subordinate things. He carefully connects 
 them, as we have noticed above, with the customary 
 course of life, in a way to show that they were not 
 meant to supersede it : e. g. ' Go shew thyself 
 to the priest.' * Go wash in Siloam.' ' Gather up 
 the fragments that remain.' ' He commanded that 
 something should be given her to eat.' 'Loose 
 him, and let him go.' There is no sign in all this 
 of any intention to introduce a reign of miracle, 
 bringing intellectual confusion into the world. 
 On the contrary, the fact that Christ manifestly 
 could, yet habitually would not overrule it, gives 
 additional emphasis to the reign of law an 
 emphasis which the whole tenor of His teaching 
 serves further to enforce. For the burden of that 
 teaching is that the course of nature is the will of 
 God, and that faith should recognize that will 
 everywhere : in the clothing of the lilies, the feeding 
 of the ravens, the fall of a sparrow, the sunshine 
 and the rain ; not less than in the sicknesses that 
 punish, or the catastrophes that execute swift 
 judgement upon sin. Christian life accordingly
 
 v] THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES xai 
 
 consists in accepting the order of events, not in the 
 spirit of fatalism, but in the spirit of faith ; not 
 expecting to be exempt from what is common to 
 man, but, patiently enduring to the snd, ' as seeing 
 Him that is invisible.' This recognition of spiritual 
 significance, where the bodily eye sees none, is the 
 very essence of the Christian probation ; the charac- 
 teristic distinction of the Christian life. It is that 
 walking by faith and not by sight, that belief of 
 those who have not seen, upon which the Gospels 
 and Epistles alike lay all their stress. And to 
 make this possible, miracles, in the ordinary sense, 
 must cease. But they cease, it should be noticed, 
 as the scattered lights of sunrise fade into the full- 
 ness of an ampler day. They cease because the 
 fact which they sporadically emphasized has now 
 become a Christian commonplace; the fact that 
 divine providence everywhere and always uses 
 matter /or the furtherance of spiritual ends. They 
 do not vanish out of history as though they had 
 never been, and leave man to lapse into apathetic 
 acceptance of the inexorable order of events. They 
 have inaugurated a new epoch : they have inter- 
 preted the order of events afresh: they have 
 accentuated and intensified the providential aspect 
 of the world. And their perpetual trace remains 
 in the abiding consciousness of Christians that 'all 
 things work together for good to them that loveGod.' 
 The cessation therefore of miracles was as needful
 
 laa THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES [CHAP. 
 
 as their occurrence : and we no longer look to meet 
 with them in ordinary life. But they have irradiated 
 the world for us, and left a glow behind them 
 which is still ' the master light of all our seeing.' 
 For they have led us to face nature not with passive 
 resignation, but with active faith, faith which not 
 only reads in its general aspect a revelation of God, 
 but often also in its particular incidents a mission 
 and a message to individual men. Such faith can- 
 not of course be tested by the methods of a labora- 
 tory or a law-court ; and is too private and peculiar 
 even to be publicly proclaimed. But there is no 
 question that it is a normal element of spiritual 
 experience with which Christians have been familiar 
 in every age ; the conviction that outward events 
 have at times been so appositely ordered in relation 
 to their personal needs, as to prove beyond power 
 of doubting that the processes of nature are, at 
 least on occasion, utilized in the interest of man. 
 This is a belief, which it is obvious, cannot be 
 produced in argument ; though at the same time it 
 profoundly affects the Christian attitude towards 
 argument ; by endowing its possessors with a 
 certitude which no critical attack can shake. * At 
 ubi sunt illi depicti... ' maybe quoted against it in 
 vain. Though therefore it cannot be used in argu- 
 ment, the fact of its widespread existence should 
 have weight. For it is no mere sentimental fancy, 
 or superstition of the ignorant and foolish. It has
 
 vj THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES 193 
 
 been shared by the wise and practical, the men of 
 ideas, and the men of affairs. In every age and 
 nation, Christians of every sort and kind have 
 believed themselves in contact with a living, personal, 
 particular providence, working through material as 
 well as spiritual means. They have felt that, in 
 answer to prayer, or at critical moments in their 
 life, outward events have aroused and controlled 
 them, as distinctly as a voice or hand ; things which 
 often at the time seemed merely natural phenomena, 
 yet afterwards were recognized as ministers of God. 
 
 'I can but testify 
 
 God's care for me no more, can I 
 It is but for myself I know ; 
 
 No mere mote's-breadth but teems immense 
 With witnessings of providence : 
 
 Have I been sure, this Christmas-Eve, 
 
 God's own hand did the rainbow weave, 
 
 Whereby the truth from heaven slid 
 
 Into my soul? I cannot bid 
 
 The world admit He stooped to heal 
 
 My soul, as if in a thunder-peal 
 
 Where one heard noise, and one saw flame, 
 
 I only knew He named my name 1 .' 
 
 This belief in a special providence is not the 
 same as a belief in miracles ; but it rests on a very 
 1 Browning, Christmas Eve.
 
 i2 4 THE INCARNATION AND MIRACLES 
 
 similar view of the world. For it implies that the 
 souls of men, in their separate history and destiny, 
 are objects of peculiar, personal interest to God : 
 while nature material nature that seems so 
 changeless in its course, is yet an instrument, when 
 rightly viewed, through which that interest is 
 shown. Now though these thoughts had often 
 risen in men's minds before, there can be no 
 question that they received a novel and final 
 emphasis from Jesus Christ. He first taught men 
 to regard the world, as children look upon their 
 father's house, with a secure sense in it, of being 
 everywhere at home. And it is an old remark 
 that even physical science owes more than we often 
 think, to the friendly attitude towards nature which 
 this teaching introduced. But miracles were among 
 the means, as we have seen cause to believe, which 
 Christ employed to give weight to His words : 
 leading men to trust His interpretation of the world 
 by visible proof that the world was His own. If 
 then our intimate faith in providence comes to us 
 from Christ, it is lineally connected with the 
 wonders that He wrought. For it is the inner 
 reality, the essential truth, which those wonders 
 were used to enforce, in an age and among a race 
 where it could only have gained credence by their 
 means. And now, in its turn, it makes them 
 credible, by the ever-recurring experience of its own 
 intrinsic wonder.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE INCARNATION AND SACRAMENTS 
 
 TTTE have seen that the aspect of the material 
 * universe has a profound religious influence 
 on man ; but matter has another kind of connexion 
 with religion, which is hardly less important, arising 
 from the reaction upon it of the human mind. 
 A flower growing in the field, quick with form 
 and scent and colour, is far fairer than one dried 
 between the pages of a book; yet though the 
 former may indeed give us ' thoughts that do often 
 lie too deep for tears/ the latter may be linked 
 with tender memories of bygone love, which invest 
 it with greater power over our personal life. So 
 beside the general religious impression which the 
 beauty and wonder of the world creates, we find 
 special associations of spiritual import gathered 
 round particular material things ; and matter has 
 thus what may be called a secondary as well as 
 a primary connexion with religion. Historically 
 speaking, indeed, the former is even more promi- 
 nent than the latter in the early stages of human
 
 ia6 THE INCARNATION AND SACRAMENTS [CHAP. 
 
 development. For the distinction in question closely 
 corresponds to that between myth, and ritual or 
 cultus, with which we are nowadays so familiar ; 
 and of these, cultus in early religion so often over- 
 shadows myth, that it has even been supposed by 
 some to precede it. Thus myths embody what 
 may be called the primary teachings of nature, the 
 simple spiritual ideas which its aspect inevitably 
 awakes in the mind of man ; while cultus depends 
 upon the various secondary associations, by which 
 man has invested particular places and actions and 
 things with spiritual significance, of a more or less 
 arbitrary kind. 
 
 Cultus then, in its widest sense, is concerned 
 with an immense variety of rites and things, of 
 very different degrees of dignity and worth. In 
 early religion, for example, there is the senseless 
 fetish ; the sacred animal regarded as an ancestor 
 or god ; the solemn feast at which the clans- 
 men renew their vital union by feeding together 
 the flesh, or life-blood, or emblem of their god ; 
 on the various kinds of sacrifice which apparently 
 arose out of these communions ; the sacred spots 
 which divers causes had invested with spiritual 
 awe ; the ceremonial customs whereby life's epochs, 
 of birth, puberty, marriage, and death, were conse- 
 crated by the sanctions of religion. While when 
 we come to more civilized ages, and cultivated 
 races the same things reappear upon a higher level
 
 vi] THE INCARNATION AND SACRAMENTS 127 
 
 of refinement. The rude idol gives place to the 
 shapelier statue ; the sacred grove or cave to 
 the stately temple; the tribal communions to the 
 solemn mysteries graced with art and song ; cere- 
 monies are multiplied, and sacrifices offered with 
 grander pomp and circumstance. Nor did the 
 progress of enlightenment as we may trace it in 
 the various religious books of India, Persia, China, 
 and Egypt, in any way diminish the importance of 
 this material side of religion. It led to that clearer 
 distinction between symbols and things symbol- 
 ized, between external actions and internal motives, 
 which attained its most complete expression in the 
 Greek philosophers and Hebrew prophets. Yet 
 even Plato, the great idealist, would have infinite 
 attention bestowed upon the material conditions of 
 spiritual culture ; and Ezekiel, the especial prophet 
 of personal responsibility, with all his insistence 
 upon the immediate relation of the soul to God, 
 reaffirms the elaborate ritual and symbolism of the 
 Temple. Thus, throughout pre-Christian history, 
 the phases of man's spiritual life are closely con- 
 nected with material forms. 
 
 Now this connexion is often represented as simply 
 and solely superstitious ; especially since we have 
 been enabled to trace its evolution from the primi- 
 tive processes of savage thought, in which every- 
 thing is animated, and material objects are naturally 
 endowed with spiritual meaning, because they are
 
 ra8 THE INCARNATION AND SACRAMENTS [CHAP. 
 
 literally supposed to have souls of their own. But 
 this misinterpretation of the principle of evolution, 
 as if it degraded all things to the level of their 
 earliest form of appearance, has again and again 
 been pointed out. The true teaching of evolution 
 is that the higher form is implicitly contained in 
 the lower, and consequently that there is more 
 in the lower form than at first sight meets the eye. 
 And many of the instincts of primitive man were 
 truer than the explanations of them which he 
 attempted to give. His judgements were better 
 than his reasons. So in the present case : man is 
 progressive, and his religion has been the chief 
 factor in his progress. No essential element of his 
 religion, therefore, can have been wholly irrational ; 
 and a very little reflection will suffice to show that 
 the connexion in question is an essential element in 
 his religion. For spirit, as we have seen above, is 
 only known to human experience in combination 
 with matter, and primitive thought scarcely dis- 
 tinguishes the two. When therefore a savage 
 believes in gods and spirits, who act upon him in 
 various ways, it is inevitable that he should localize 
 them in the supposed spheres of their activity : the 
 forest that thrills him ; the mountain top that awes 
 him ; the corn and wine that sustain his life ; or 
 the flash of lightning that may strike him dead. 
 This is no mere play of fancy, or irrational associa- 
 tion of ideas : at a certain stage of culture it is
 
 vi] THE INCARNATION AND SACRAMENTS 109 
 
 a psychological necessity, if divine presence and 
 divine action are to be realized at all. And when 
 later on this crude localization gives place to sym- 
 bolic representation, the involved principle is the 
 same. It is a far cry from the fetish to Athene of 
 the Parthenon ; but they both result from the like 
 inability to realize spirit apart from matter. 
 
 But the relation of gods to men is only one side 
 of religion ; there is also the relation of men to the 
 gods ; and this again, if it is to be real, must issue 
 in physical action. Thus the partaking in the tribal 
 communion, the offering of sacrifice with its pre- 
 scribed ritual, the due performance of epochal 
 ceremonies, the observance of taboo, constitute the 
 practical religion of an carry race. Such things 
 may seem to us unspiritual, and so of course to 
 a great extent they were ; the external action 
 being all that was thought of, Idos avev <j>i\ocro<t>ias 
 as Plato calls it. But they were the necessary 
 means by which spiritual life first came to recog- 
 nize itself ; they called the will into play, and thus 
 actualized religion ; they kept ordinary life under 
 a control, which was ultimately spiritual, however 
 dimly understood as such, and which therefore con- 
 tained the potency of all its subsequent develop- 
 ment ; while for the higher minds they were the 
 inevitable stepping-stones to the higher forms of 
 conduct. It is a mistake therefore to regard the 
 association of religious belief and practice with 
 
 K
 
 130 THE INCARNATION AND SACRAMENTS [CHAP. 
 
 material things as inevitably superstitious or irra- 
 tional ; for it is founded on a psychological neces- 
 sity, from which there is no possibility of escape, 
 in a world where spirit can only be realized through 
 matter. Such association is of course a fruitful 
 parent of superstition, when its underlying religion 
 degenerates; but it is, nevertheless, the natural 
 method by which religious progress has been made. 
 Nor is it always possible, in a given case, to say 
 where superstition began and progress ended, for 
 the simple reason that we cannot replace ourselves 
 either on the intellectual or moral level of the 
 remote past. 
 
 Jacob's anointing of the stone at Bethel, where he 
 dreamed of heaven, is an illustration of our point. 
 It is a familiar instance of a custom once common 
 the whole world over, and which has left its 
 memorials in every land, degenerating at last 
 into mere superstition. But in Jacob's case it is 
 connected with a spiritual crisis in which a deeply 
 religious character was deeply moved, and shows 
 us how much reality may often underlie such 
 customs. Indeed the Old Testament is full of 
 instances to the point : ceremonies like circumcision, 
 or the blood-anointing of the passover, or the dis- 
 missal of the scapegoat, are paralleled by modern 
 anthropologists in every quarter of the globe : and 
 can perhaps be traced to what are intellectually 
 very crude conceptions, for their rise. But in the
 
 vi] THE 1NCARNA TION AND SACRAMENTS 131 
 
 Old Testament we see with what profound spiritual 
 significance they were capable of being invested, 
 and of how much real religious development they 
 may have been the vehicles ; and though these may 
 be extreme cases, we may reasonably assume that 
 similar feelings occurred elsewhere ; and that many 
 a relic, which now only excites antiquarian interest 
 in a museum, was once a spiritual symbol, an ele- 
 ment in some soul's tragedy, charged with all the 
 pathos of religious hopes and fears. 
 
 But the same line of thought will carry us 
 further. The spiritual meaning, of which we have 
 been speaking as connected with material things, is 
 usually regarded as subjective and due to a more 
 or less arbitrary association of ideas. But we have 
 already had occasion to remark that the separation 
 of subject and object is easier in language than in 
 fact. The most intelligible sense which we have 
 been able to give to ' reality ' is permanent relation 
 to a person or persons. If therefore a particular 
 person realizes the divine presence, which we 
 believe to be latent everywhere, with exceptional 
 vividness in a particular place, does not this con- 
 stitute an actual manifestation of God to that 
 person in that place ? For in what sense can it be 
 said that God is not really present, when we appre- 
 hend His presence to such good purpose, that the 
 whole of our subsequent conduct is coloured by 
 the fact? The same could not of course be said 
 K 2
 
 i 3 a THE INCARNATION AND SACRAMENTS [CHAP. 
 
 of a being who was not omnipresent, or immanent 
 throughout the universe. But a Being who is 
 omnipresent is, vi termini, present at all times and 
 in all places. When therefore He is recognized at 
 a particular time or place, the recognition is not 
 imaginary but real. He is there and causes His 
 own recognition, or reveals Himself. So far indeed 
 from God's universal immanence being incompatible 
 with such particular presence, as is sometimes mis- 
 takenly supposed, it is the natural and necessary 
 presupposition of it. Because God is everywhere, 
 He can appear anywhere ; while because man is 
 not everywhere, but limited to a particular time 
 and place, his relation to God must be realized 
 under the like particular conditions. 
 
 ' Earth 's crammed with heaven, 
 And every common bush afire with God ; 
 But only he who sees takes off his shoes, 
 The rest sit round it, and pluck blackberries, 
 And daub their natural faces unaware 
 More and more from the first similitude 1 .' 
 
 Now if religion be true at all ; if there be any 
 such relation of God to man, as the human race 
 has always, in one form or another, believed ; this 
 psychological necessity for its material expression 
 is an additional argument for the Incarnation. For 
 the most perfect organ of material expression is 
 1 E. B. Browning, Aurora Leigh.
 
 vi] THE INCARNATION AND SACRAMENTS 133 
 
 confessedly the human body: and we cannot but 
 assume that if God really desires intercourse with 
 man, He will adopt its most perfect means. And 
 thus again from this fresh point of view the Incarna- 
 tion is antecedently probable : while, as we have said 
 in another context, once grant the probability, and 
 the life of Christ becomes its obvious fulfilment. 
 
 The life of Christ in the flesh then, as Christians 
 regard it, is the visible and tangible manifestation 
 (' that which we have seen and our hands have 
 handled ') of God's true relation to man, and man's 
 due relation to God. It thus sanctions the instinc- 
 tive tendency that we have traced in every stage of 
 culture, to realize this double relation by material 
 means ; and at the same time sublimates those 
 means to a power of spiritual expression which they 
 never possessed before. 
 
 In the first place the life of Christ shows us the 
 human body in a new light; shows us how that 
 body of flesh and blood, which even Plato called 
 a prison, may be the intimate ally as well as the 
 adequate organ of the soul. For the body of 
 Christ was not merely the instrument of His 
 intercourse with men. It was that, with its gracious 
 presence, its healing touch, its tears of sympathy, 
 its words and looks of love and warning, or of 
 righteous indignation. But it was more than that ; 
 an integral element in His life and work. He 
 controls its appetites under temptation; He goes
 
 134 THE INCARNATION AND SACRAMENTS [CHAP. 
 
 about when weary doing good ; He foresees yet 
 faces suffering ; He masters pain to speak words 
 of kindness ; He accepts death by crucifixion. And 
 these things do not merely show, they actually 
 make His human character. The stress and strain 
 of them fashions and forms it matter thus con- 
 tributing to shape the interior life which it also 
 serves to express. And thus we see that the bodily 
 organism, so far from being a hindrance, is an 
 essential ingredient in the progressive development 
 of holy personality. 
 
 Then there is Christ's attitude towards nature, 
 and the external world : He declares that God is 
 omnipresent in it. Heaven is God's throne and 
 the earth is His footstool ; and without Him not 
 a sparrow falls on the ground. Consequently, we 
 are to see in it the proof of God's care and love. 
 ' Behold the fowls of the air ... your heavenly 
 Father feedeth them.' ' Consider the lilies of the 
 field.' ' If God so clothe the grass of the field, shall 
 He not much more clothe you ? ' ' He maketh His 
 sun to rise upon the evil and the good, and sendeth 
 rain upon the just and on the unjust.' Thus natural 
 religion, as obviously flowing from the primary 
 aspect of the material world, is the very starting- 
 point and basis of Christ's teaching. But not less 
 striking is His emphatic sanction of what we have 
 called its secondary religious use, by the constant 
 investiture of earthly objects with a spiritual signi-
 
 vi] THE INCARNATION AND SACRAMENTS 135 
 
 ficance. Salt, light, wheat, tares, mustard-seed, 
 leaven, pearls of price, the sheepfold, the vineyard, 
 the harvest, the sunset, the lightning shining from the 
 east unto the west, are all pressed into the service 
 of the spirit. Everywhere He 'touches things 
 common till they rise to touch the spheres.' And 
 not only so, but He uses language that suggests 
 a deep meaning for all this. Earthly things sym- 
 bolize spiritual, because they come from one author 
 and are the expression of one mind, which repeats 
 its creative phrases in a succession of ascending keys. 
 Hence every lower foreshadows a higher in which 
 its meaning is fulfilled, ' No chaffinch but implies 
 the cherubim.' Thus the clothing of the grass and 
 the feeding of the ravens are prophetic of the cloth- 
 ing and feeding of man. And the disciples are 
 said to be the salt of the earth, the light of the 
 world, labourers in the harvest, fishers of men ; 
 because they literally repeat the selfsame functions 
 in a higher plane of existence ; while finally Christ 
 speaks of Himself not as resembling, but as being 
 the veritable vine, the veritable bread, the verit- 
 able light of the world ; implying that He is the 
 absolute truth of all these things ; the supreme 
 reality which they partially manifest in their several 
 spheres : the actual source of all material nutrition 
 and illumination, as well as the spiritual life and 
 light of men. 
 
 Nor does He only use symbolical language : His
 
 136 THE INCARNATION AND SACRAMENTS [CHAP. 
 
 life is full of symbolical action. He was baptized ; 
 He was anointed ; He put forth His hand and 
 touched the leper ; He sighed and said Ephphatha ; 
 He spat and made clay and anointed the eyes of 
 the blind ; He stooped and wrote on the ground ; 
 He lifted up His eyes to heaven ; He made a 
 scourge of small cords ; He washed His disciples' 
 feet ; He breathed on them ; He lifted up His 
 hands and blessed them. And He died by the 
 only mode of death which could be visibly por- 
 trayed for ever, with all its profound appeal, to the 
 eyes of men. Lastly, He ordained sacraments ; 
 selecting, as their media, the two simplest, most 
 symbolical, most universal religious rites, the sacred 
 ablution, and the sacred feast. Both these things 
 were familiar to the world, as we have seen, and had 
 their place under all kinds ol religion. He raised 
 and re-enacted them in their purest forms to be 
 thenceforward means of union with Himself; and 
 thus gave final recognition to the law we have traced 
 by which matter is made ministrant to spiritual life. 
 Now when we review the life and teaching of 
 Christ, we see at once upon what condition this 
 ministry of matter takes place; what it is that 
 makes it religious and not superstitious ; progressive 
 and not retrograde. The condition is that matter 
 be always subordinate to spirit. We see this first 
 in the bodily life. ' Man doth not live by bread 
 alone ' ' My meat is to do the will of Him that sent
 
 Yi] THE INCARNATION AND SACRAMENTS 137 
 
 Me* that is the principle by which the body 
 becomes a spiritual instrument. And in propor- 
 tion as it is forgotten, and bodily appetite is 
 viewed as an end instead of a means, the body 
 ceases to be the spirit's organ, and becomes first 
 its prison, and then its grave. The man loses his 
 power of self-determination, the distinctive charac- 
 teristic of spirit, and is inevitably determined from 
 without ; till he ends by becoming the mechanical 
 automaton* (the man machine) that materialism 
 believes him always to be. 
 
 So with the parabolic teaching, there are those 
 who see but do not perceive, because they cannot 
 rise above the level of the letter which killeth 
 killeth, that is, if it is not risen above. While the 
 forms of phrase which we have noticed above seem 
 expressly designed to emphasize the supremacy of 
 the spiritual element I am, not I am like, the 
 good shepherd, the door, the way, the vine ; as 
 though to say, I am the reality, before which the 
 image sinks into unimportance ; or again, the fields 
 are ripe already to harvest, the real fields to the 
 real harvest and ye are, not ye are like, the salt of 
 the earth, the light of the world. And in like 
 manner in the matter of ordinances ; ' the sabbath/ 
 we are told, ' was made for man, not man for the 
 sabbath.' ' It is the spirit that quickeneth.the flesh 
 profiteth nothing.' ' The words that I speak unto 
 you, they are spirit, and they are truth.'
 
 138 THE INCARNATION AND SACRAMENTS [CHAP. 
 
 Thus we see that the immemorial union of matter 
 and spirit in religion was emphatically sanctioned 
 by the practice and precept of Christ ; while the 
 complete subordination of the former to the latter 
 was declared to be the condition of its legitimacy 
 the sole condition on which the functions of either 
 could be duly fulfilled. And when we turn to 
 Christian history we see the full effect of this. 
 
 In the first place there is the treatment of the 
 human body ; that body which had so often pre- 
 viously been despised in theory and indulged in 
 practice, that it had come to be the very enemy of 
 the soul. Christianity changed all this. It swept 
 away the sham contempt of the philosophers, and 
 exalted the body to a position of unique dignity, 
 by declaring it to be the temple of the Holy Ghost ; 
 while for the same reason It curbed its indulgence 
 by showing that temperance and chastity are parts 
 of the reverence due to so august a thing. It thus 
 unified body and soul, as It unified the other 
 elements of human personality ; and all subsequent 
 morality was coloured by the fact. The body lost 
 its false independence, and reverted to its true 
 function; while as the body grew more obedient, 
 the spirit in proportion grew more free, as having 
 an adequate instrument for all its uses at command. 
 The realization of this ideal could not of course 
 be accomplished without a struggle, and in that 
 struggle the mortification of the body was carried
 
 vi] THE INCARNATION AND SACRAMENTS 139 
 
 at times too far. But neither the theoretical nor 
 the practical excesses of particular ascetics can 
 conceal from us the general aim of the Christian 
 society at large ; which was to restore body and 
 soul to their true relation of harmonious unity, by 
 investing the body with the sacrosanctity of the 
 soul which it subserved. Hence we find in early 
 Christian teaching great stress laid on bodily 
 behaviour sobriety, modesty, seemliness of pos- 
 ture and gesture and voice and dress, gentle 
 manners, in short, of every kind, and upon every 
 occasion, as becoming the visible manifestation of 
 the Christian soul ; while the same thought, further 
 emphasized by the hope of resurrection, led to 
 increased tenderness and reverence in the treatment 
 of the dead. Thus the place of the body in human 
 personality, its intimate connexion with our inmost 
 self, and consequent participation in all the phases 
 of our moral and religious life, was recognized as it 
 had never been before. 
 
 Then there is the sacramental system to which 
 baptism and the eucharist gave rise. This was 
 not of course as elaborate at first as in process of 
 time it came to be ; nor do we find in the early 
 church those definitions and distinctions to which 
 subsequent controversy led. But we see clearly that 
 from the very first, the material elements of these 
 two sacraments were intimately connected in the 
 Christian consciousness with the grace which they
 
 i 4 o THE INCARNATION AND SACRAMENTS [CHAP. 
 
 conveyed. The early fathers dwell not only on 
 baptism, but on the water of baptism, that ' water 
 united to the word/ as Clement calls it ({J5o>p 
 AoytKoV),'the blessed sacrament of water'(/^/?> sacra- 
 mentum aquae), which has an angel of its own like 
 that of Bethesda, in Tertullian's belief. Tertullian 
 indeed goes so far as to say of his own treatise 
 upon baptism, ' I am afraid that I may seem rather 
 to have been accumulating the praises of water 
 than the reasons for baptism.' It is once called 
 by Origen a symbol ; but plainly for most it was 
 more than this a symbol penetrated and trans- 
 fused by the illuminating presence of what it sym- 
 bolized, and therefore a holy thing. So too with 
 the eucharistic elements. Ignatius call the eu- 
 charist ' the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ.' 
 Justin Martyr, 'no common bread or drink . . . 
 but the flesh and blood of the incarnate Jesus.' 
 Irenaeus, ' no longer common bread, but the eu- 
 charist, consisting of two things, an earthly and a 
 heavenly.' ' We are distressed,' says Tertullian, ' if 
 aught of the chalice or bread fall upon the ground.' 
 Such expressions would have to be qualified, if we 
 were discussing the precise doctrine of the early 
 church, by others from Clement, Origen, and the 
 Greek fathers; but they suffice to show from how 
 early a date the material elements of the eucharist 
 were regarded as, to say the least, of a peculiar sanc- 
 tity, though its precise nature had not as yet been
 
 Vl] THE INCARNATION AND SACRAMENTS 141 
 
 critically defined. Here then we have a parallel to 
 the Christian view of the human body water and 
 bread and wine, raised to a position of new dignity 
 as vehicles of a spiritual benediction upon men ; 
 while the entire dependence of their value, upon 
 the spirit with which they were linked, is at the 
 same time clearly and emphatically maintained. 
 
 But these new sacraments had, as we have seen, 
 like all things else, a history. They date back to 
 primaeval religion, and are the offspring of earlier 
 rites ; rites which in the course of ages had acquired 
 their appropriate ceremonial. Hence it was not 
 unnatural that in the process of time the Christian 
 sacraments should attract to themselves the acces- 
 sories of Jewish and Graeco-Roman worship ; pos- 
 tures, gestures, vestments, sacred symbols and 
 utensils, solemn processions, religious music, incense, 
 chrism, lights ; raising the old-world ritual to a higher 
 and holier use. It is of course easy from a modern 
 point of view to regard this process as retrogressive ; 
 a return from Christian spirituality to Jewish and 
 pagan materialism. But as a matter of fact, this is 
 far too narrow and unsympathetic a judgement. 
 All religion as it becomes popular is apt to be 
 degraded ; and the Christian sacraments were un- 
 doubtedly degraded in their popular use. But on 
 the other hand, all religion has and must have its 
 material side. This material side of religion is its 
 body, its necessary organ of expression and mani-
 
 i 4 a THE INCARNATION AND SACRAMENTS [CHAP. 
 
 festation, and has persisted in unbroken continuity 
 from the earliest days. Every successive religion 
 has entered upon some part or other of this com- 
 mon heritage, this great ritual tradition ; elevating, 
 inspiring, improving, it may be, but still using the 
 time-honoured forms. And Christianity, with its 
 world-wide appeal to all races and classes of man- 
 kind, could be no exception to the rule. Moreover 
 the Incarnation was, by its very nature, as we have 
 been arguing above, the final sanction and justifica- 
 tion of this great principle in things ; the extreme 
 recognition of the fact that the all spiritual truth 
 must be embodied in material form. Had Chris- 
 tianity been merely a spiritual religion supposing 
 such a thing possible and subsequently adopted 
 sacraments, this might conceivably have been called 
 a decline. But the religion of the Incarnation 
 could not possibly be merely spiritual. It not only 
 started with sacraments from its very origin ; but 
 it was essentially and fundamentally sacramental 
 to the core. For what is the Incarnation itself 
 but a sacrament, the sum and substance of all 
 sacraments? When therefore theologians called 
 baptism and the eucharist extensions of the Incar- 
 nation, they were using no rhetorical metaphors; 
 they were literally and accurately correct. For 
 these ordinances, with the sacramental network 
 which insensibly gathered round them, were the 
 means and witness of that consecration of the body,
 
 Vl] THE INCARNATION AND SACRAMENTS 143 
 
 as an integral element in our whole personality, 
 which it had been the work of the Incarnation to 
 effect. And it was inevitable, in accordance with 
 all laws of historic evolution, that these sacraments 
 once instituted, should gradually clothe themselves 
 with the colours and associations of those earlier 
 rites which, in the deepest sense, they came not to 
 destroy but to fulfil. Thus the growth of the 
 sacramental system was an historical necessity; 
 which, despite of the religious materialism into 
 which it too frequently lapsed, was part and parcel 
 of that great reclamation of the material world for 
 God, which began with the Word made Flesh. 
 
 And this naturally leads our thoughts to the 
 influence of Christianity upon art. The connexion 
 of art and religion was a thing of immemorial age : 
 
 'Pictores quis nescit ab Iside pasci.' 
 And we are not surprised to see how soon, in the 
 catacombs, art was pressed into the Christian ser- 
 vice. But fierce controversies had to rage, before 
 art was made finally at home in the Church. The 
 Iconoclasts felt its danger, and protested against its 
 use, with a puritan austerity which cannot but com- 
 mand our respect. But Iconoclasm was foredoomed 
 to failure by the very nature of the case. For what 
 has been said of the sacramental system applies 
 equally to art. The Incarnation involved artistic 
 development as part of its redemption of the mate- 
 rial world, its restoration of matter to the service of
 
 144 THE INCARNATION AND SACRAMENTS [CHAP. 
 
 the spirit. And accordingly the note of all great 
 Christian art is the subordination of material beauty 
 to spiritual use. Of course all Christian art was not 
 great ; and where religion was degenerate or taste 
 degraded, we meet with bloodstained crucifixions 
 and realistic martyrdoms which are as hideously 
 inartistic as they are alien to the true spirit of Chris- 
 tianity. And equally, of course, all great art was 
 not Christian ; when pursued, in modern phrase, for 
 art's sake, colour and form and impression becom- 
 ing ends in themselves. But this does not alter the 
 fact that the religion of the Incarnation breathed 
 a new life into art, and endowed it with new power 
 over the thoughts and affections of men. 
 
 First and foremost there are the Gothic cathedrals, 
 
 ' Everlasting piles 
 
 Types of the spiritual church which God hath 
 reared. 
 
 Where bubbles burst, and folly's dancing foam 
 Melts, if it cross the threshold ; where the wreath 
 Of awe-struck wisdom droops V 
 
 Stone seems in them to lose its stubborn nature, 
 as it soars, in obedience, tier over tier, to the infinite 
 
 aspiration of the soul. 
 
 ' With living wiles 
 
 Instinct to rouse the heart and lead the will 
 By a bright ladder to the world above 1 .' 
 
 1 Wordsworth, Ecclesiastical Sketches.
 
 VI] THE INCARNATION AND SACRAMENTS MS 
 
 They are perhaps the most striking instance of 
 spirit's power to subdue matter, since it is matter 
 of the most obstinate, concrete, solid kind which is 
 thus subdued. But the same is the case with 
 Christian painting, in a still subtler degree; 
 Cimabue, Giotto, and their followers not only 
 raised and dignified pictorial art, by their dedi- 
 cation of brush and pencil to the Christian service ; 
 but, in so doing, they discovered in it new depths 
 of possibility, wholly unsuspected capacities of 
 spiritual expression, fresh powers in the sensuous 
 image to show the innermost secrets of the soul. 
 
 'The early painters, 
 To cries of " Greek Art and what more wish 
 
 you ? " 
 
 Replied, "To become now self-acquainters, 
 And paint man, man, whatever the issue! 
 Make new hopes shine through the flesh they fray, 
 
 New fears aggrandize the rags and tatters: 
 To bring the invisible full into play! 
 
 Let the visible go to the dogs what matters ? l " ' 
 
 It is the same, again, with music, which may be 
 called pre-eminently the Christian art. For what- 
 ever earlier traditions paved the way for it, the 
 development of music from the Gregorian age to 
 that of Handel and Bach, was virtually a new crea- 
 tion. It arose out of the Christian worship, under 
 1 Browning, Old Pictures in Florence. 
 L
 
 146 THE INCARNATION AND SACRAMENTS [CHAP. 
 
 the Christian inspiration, and was matured by 
 Christian artists, and for Christian use. Not un- 
 naturally therefore it is the art in which matter 
 is most completely subordinate to spirit. For 
 sound, as it floats upon the viewless air, can scarcely 
 be called a material thing. Its mechanical origin 
 is forgotten in its invisible effect. And when these 
 airy, unsubstantial, wandering tones are caught by 
 the musician and transfigured with the magic of his 
 art, they seem to lose the last lingering remnant 
 of material restraint. Wherever the spirit ranges, 
 music is free to follow. No joy is too ecstatic, no 
 sorrow too deep, no action too impetuous, no pas- 
 sion too intense, no phase of thought or feeling too 
 rare, to come within its scope. It thrills and throbs 
 with every movement of the life which it interprets 
 and reveals. And we feel that matter can go no 
 further ; it has reached its limit ; it has become, as 
 Hegel truly says, independent of space and time : 
 
 ' Miserere, Domine! 
 The words are utter'd, and they flee. 
 Deep is their penitential moan, 
 Mighty their pathos, but 'tis gone. 
 They have declared the spirit's sore 
 Sore load, and words can do no more. 
 Beethoven takes them then those two 
 Poor, bounded words and makes them new; 
 Infinite makes them, makes them young ; 
 Transplants them to another tongue,
 
 vi] THE INCARNATION AND SACRAMENTS 147 
 
 Where they can now, without constraint, 
 
 Pour all the soul of their complaint, 
 
 And roll adown a channel large 
 
 The wealth divine they have in charge. 
 
 Page after page of music turn, 
 
 And still they live and still they burn, 
 
 Perennial, passion-fraught, and free 
 
 Miserere, Domine / l ' 
 
 The arts indeed as they have reached their 
 maturity, have acquired an independent life of 
 their own; and are no longer so obviously con- 
 nected with the Christian worship, or illumined by 
 the Christian faith, as once they were. But this 
 apparent secularity, if art can ever be called secular, 
 must not blind us to the essential sacredness of all 
 true art, and to the fact that it arose in sacred 
 places, and was destined for a sacred use. It is, as 
 we now possess it, a gift of Christianity to the 
 world ; just as our common morality which is now 
 public property, the possession of believers and 
 unbelievers alike, and which is often credited, in 
 consequence, with a secular origin really grew up 
 under Christian influence, and was fostered by 
 Christian devotion till it grew strong enough in 
 the end to stand alone. 
 
 Thus the religion of the Incarnation raised the 
 sacramental and artistic capabilities of matter to 
 
 1 Matthew Arnold, Epilogue to Lessing's Laocoon. 
 L 2
 
 i 4 8 THE INCARNATION AND SACRAMENTS [CHAP. 
 
 a new level, as it raised the human body itself; 
 making them minister to that 'coming of the 
 kingdom of God,' that development of a society 
 of holy persons, whose object was to regenerate 
 the world. 
 
 Hence the religious effect of art and sacrament 
 is the reproduction, on a higher plane, of that same 
 influence which we have seen the mere spectacle of 
 the world to exert. It is the religious influence 
 of material nature, focussed, localized, intensified, 
 by the conscious intervention of man ; precisely as 
 the natural forces of heat and light and electricity 
 are focussed and localized by human agency, to be 
 turned to human use. 
 
 It follows that the spiritual influence of art and 
 sacrament must be as real in modern phrase as 
 objectively real as that of nature, which they do 
 but emphasize. We have argued at length that the 
 religious influence of nature is too obviously real 
 to be attributed to mere subjective sentiment, mere 
 feeling without objective counterpart; and that it 
 must be conceived of as the divine omnipresence 
 making itself felt. When therefore we emphasize 
 this presence, either by the help of inspired genius 
 as in the arts, or in a higher and more solemn 
 way, by celebration of the sacraments ordained by 
 Christ, the like reality must attach to those points 
 of emphasis. Carlyle speaks of art as 'eternity 
 looking through time ' ; Newman of music as ' the
 
 vi] THE INCARNATION AND SACRAMENTS 149 
 
 outpourings of eternal harmony in the medium of 
 created sound ' ; Browning as 
 
 C A flash of the will that can, 
 
 Existent behind all laws, that made them, and 
 lo they are 1 .' 
 
 And these are more than rhetorical phrases. 
 They express the common conviction of serious 
 minds, that just as science does not invent but 
 discovers the laws of the material world, so art 
 does not create but reveals the truth of spiritual 
 things. There is a spiritual power in the universe 
 to illuminate our minds, to enkindle our hearts, 
 and to stir our wills ; and the genius of the artist 
 is among the instruments through which this spirit 
 speaks. 
 
 And what is true of art is from the Christian 
 point of view still more true of sacraments. We 
 cannot indeed, and need not, define the method of 
 their operation, as rival theologians have so often 
 attempted to do. For we know nothing of the ulti- 
 mate nature of either of their elements, nor how 
 those elements, even in our own persons, are com- 
 bined. And this is the point which is really 
 involved, rather than any strictly theological issue, 
 in all the various sacramental theories, which lie 
 between the poles of Zwingli and the Council of 
 Trent But, however we regard them, the fact 
 remains that the sacraments were selected and 
 1 Browning, Abt Vogler.
 
 i S o THE INCARNATION AND SACRAMENTS 
 
 ordained by Christ to be means, in one way or 
 another, of union and communion with Himself. 
 Had they been arbitrarily chosen things, we might 
 perhaps have been content to call them symbols. 
 But they are very far indeed, as we have seen, from 
 being arbitrary inventions. They have a history 
 behind them as old as humanity, and a context 
 around them as wide as the world ; and point us 
 back to sacramental customs of immemorial age. 
 And if these earlier rites derived reality and value 
 from God's immanence in the world, and found 
 Him at particular times and places because He 
 is everywhere present and ready to be found, the 
 Christian sacraments must possess this reality in its 
 highest degree. While in their case it is further 
 fortified by the fact that they are divine com- 
 mands ; and carry with them the direct promise 
 of a personal response to the personal allegiance 
 which they claim ; the promise not that God may 
 be found, but that He will definitely meet us, at 
 the time and in the place of His appointment. 
 Thus the sacraments, in our Christian view of them, 
 are the key to the material world, as the means of 
 union with the supreme reality, the personal God ; 
 while the form of them an ablution and a meal 
 our simplest bodily needs reminds us that our 
 bodies are an integral element in that entire 
 personality, whose destiny is union with the Word 
 made Flesh.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE INCARNATION AND THE TRINITY 
 
 F T will have been observed that the preceding 
 * pages are in no way intended to summarize the 
 general evidence for the truth of the Incarnation ; 
 which is a thing that must be studied in its full 
 detail in order to be felt with its full weight. Their 
 object in dealing with the Incarnation has merely 
 been to vindicate and emphasize one of its aspects ; 
 its place, namely, in our philosophy of nature, its 
 relation to our conviction of God's immanence in 
 the natural world. But all attempts to present 
 religious doctrine in a philosophical connexion run 
 a certain risk of conveying the impression that it 
 is only philosophical a speculative suggestion, an 
 intellectual after-thought, an unsubstantial vision in 
 the air. And such impression is doubly dangerous, 
 in the present day, from the fact, that it may seem 
 to give colour to the commonest form of contem- 
 poraneous attack on Christianity ; which represents 
 the Incarnation, with the Trinitarian theology that
 
 i5a THE INCARNATION AND THE TRINITY [CHAP. 
 
 it involves, as metaphysical corruptions of what was 
 once a simpler creed. It may be advisable there- 
 fore, as a safeguard, as well as a confirmation of 
 what has gone before, to point out the practical 
 character of both these doctrines, as well as the 
 practical method of their introduction to the world. 
 
 ' Faithful souls,' says St. Hilary of Poitiers, ' would 
 be contented with the word of God, which bids us 
 " Go teach all nations, baptizing them in the name 
 of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy 
 Ghost." ' ' But alas ! ' he continues, ' we are driven 
 by the faults of our heretical opponents to do things 
 unlawful, to scale heights inaccessible, to speak out 
 what is unspeakable, to presume where we ought 
 not. And whereas it is by faith alone that we 
 should worship the Father, and reverence the Son, 
 and be filled with the Spirit, we are now obliged to 
 strain our weak human language in the utterance 
 of things beyond its scope ; forced into this evil 
 procedure by the evil procedure of our foes. Hence, 
 what should be matter of silent religious medi- 
 tation must now needs be imperilled by exposition 
 in words.' 
 
 This passage is from the first great dogmatic 
 treatise of the Christian Church, that of St. Hilary 
 on the Trinity ; and it is admirably typical of the 
 patristic attitude towards all dogmatic definition. 
 The fathers, unlike the schoolmen, had no love of
 
 vn] THE INCARNATION AND THE TRINITY 153 
 
 it ; they recognized its occasional necessity, but 
 recognized it, for the most part, with regret ; and 
 never without a sense that the ground they trod 
 was holy ground, the mysteries they handled, 
 things of awe. Accordingly, it will be noticed that 
 Hilary here, like Augustine after him, bases the 
 doctrine of the Trinity entirely on a simple fact, 
 namely, the baptismal formula of the Christian 
 Church ; which from the first must have carried 
 with it some traditional interpretation, yet which 
 confessedly has nothing metaphysical about it. 
 This form of words presided over the greatest 
 change that has occurred in history, and it is 
 obvious that sooner or later it would have had to 
 be explained. But the process of this explanation 
 lies open before us in its every stage ; and it is per- 
 fectly plain that from first to last it was regarded 
 as the interpretation of a revealed fact. The inces- 
 sant appeal is to what the Scripture says, or what 
 the saying of the Scripture means. No speculative 
 element is introduced at any point : and the result- 
 ing creeds are nothing more than the authorized 
 epitomes of what, in the view of their composers, 
 the Gospels contain. Concrete facts, when they are 
 translated into the terms of science or philosophy, 
 look very unlike themselves. A daisy, for example, 
 is not like its botanical description, nor a sonata 
 like its musical score. And so the simple password 
 that gives entrance to a world-wide family, will
 
 154 THE INCARNATION AND THE TRINITY [CHAP. 
 
 naturally differ from the intellectual statement of 
 what a great religion means. 
 
 Viewed, then, in the light of its history, the 
 doctrine of the Trinity is no metaphysical inven- 
 tion like the Platonic ' ideas,' or the Aristotelian 
 ' form ' ; but simply the expression in philosophical 
 language of what had entered the world as a state- 
 ment of fact the fact that there is plurality, triune 
 plurality in God. And though at first sight this 
 might seem a mystery too transcendental to be 
 worth revelation, its revelation was in fact a thing 
 of the profoundest practical import. 
 
 ' I am come that they might have life,' said Jesus 
 Christ, ' and that they might have it more abun- 
 dantly.' Truer, fuller, fairer life is the ultimate 
 issue of the religion of the cross ; no mere theory, 
 but a plain, palpable, practical result. Yet the 
 entire possibility of this result depended upon such 
 an increased knowledge of God's nature as should 
 enable a clearer comprehension of His whole re- 
 lationship to man. ' God is loving,' had been said 
 by others before the time of Jesus Christ, but 
 never ' God is Love ' : and there is a world of 
 difference between the two propositions. The 
 statement of the psalmist, that ' God is loving unto 
 every man/ does not of necessity imply that love 
 is more than what may be called a relative and 
 secondary attribute of God ; an affection elicited 
 by the existence, the ephemeral existence of His
 
 vii] THE INCARNATION AND THE TRINITY 155 
 
 creatures, and which, apart from that existence, 
 would cease to operate, and therefore to be. God 
 in His unknown essence might still be something 
 other than Love : but the statement that ' God is 
 Love ' is very different from this : it is a real reve- 
 lation beyond all that we could otherwise have 
 learned : it lifts Love at once into the absolute, as 
 the essential and eternal cause of all ; thereby 
 exhibiting the whole world in a new light. For 
 there is all the difference between a mysterious, 
 unintelligible universe, whose fathomless depths 
 are never pierced by the uncertain gleams of love, 
 which play fitfully from time to time upon their 
 face ; and one whose first and final cause, whose 
 very root and ground is love ; one amid whose 
 mysteries we can therefore move with confidence, 
 and whose unsolved problems we can face with 
 hope. 
 
 But if love is to be thought of as thus absolute, 
 or in other words synonymous with God, as dis- 
 tinct from being merely contingent on creation, 
 there must of necessity be conceived a plurality of 
 persons in the Godhead ; for when we speak of love 
 we mean the affection of one person for another, 
 and except it be taken in that sense, the word is 
 utterly and blankly meaningless. If, therefore, the 
 proclamation that God is Love does not mean this, 
 it has no more value or significance than that the 
 unknown is the unknowable.
 
 156 THE INCARNATION AND THE TRINITY [CHAP. 
 
 Hence if human life was to be renewed, and 
 human society reconstructed on the basis of the 
 faith that ' God is Love/ there was paramount need 
 that enough of the veil should be lifted from the 
 Godhead, to assure us that those words really 
 meant what they must inevitably appear to mean. 
 Thus, what is often misrepresented as a speculative 
 superfluity turns out upon analysis to be the most 
 practical of truths. 
 
 To say this is not, of course, to imply that intel- 
 lectual illumination was the primary object of the 
 Christian religion, but merely that Christianity 
 could not have been taught along the ages, without 
 some such illumination of the intellect as that by 
 which, in fact, it was accompanied. 
 
 Hence this illumination has always been regarded 
 as an integral portion of the Christian Creed, enhanc- 
 ing and not diminishing its practical efficiency, by 
 including head as well as heart in its appeal. For 
 it supplies us with an analogy that we can follow 
 out in thought. The fairest thing we know on 
 earth, the truest practical solution of life's problem, 
 is a society or family whose members are united 
 by a common bond of love. Within the charmed 
 circle, such love is reflected from each to all and 
 all to each, and gathers in the process an intimate 
 intensity, far beyond all power to express ; while, 
 to those who are without, it ever burns to impart 
 some fragment of its own inspiring energy and joy,
 
 vn] THE INCARNATION AND THE TRINITY 157 
 
 by thoughts of tenderness and words of sympathy, 
 and deeds of kindly care. 
 
 Here, then, we have a picture drawn from the 
 noblest thing we know, which illustrates, however 
 feebly, the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, that 
 Divine Society, whose co-equal members are one in 
 infinite eternal love, and who in that love's exuber- 
 ance come forth, in a sense, from out themselves, to 
 create, to sustain, to redeem, to sanctify, to bless. 
 
 It must not for a moment be supposed that we 
 can follow this analogy in detail, or that it does 
 not still leave much that is obscure. The human 
 picture melts away into the light that no man 
 can approach unto. The Father remains incompre- 
 hensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy 
 Ghost incomprehensible. Such has always been 
 the language of the Church. In a word, her doctrine 
 is sufficient to make our thought of God more full, 
 more real, more adequate to influence human life ; 
 while in contrast with all philosophies which at- 
 tempt to criticize the Absolute, it leaves His 
 ineffable mystery alone. Those philosophies, on 
 the other hand, have never succeeded in presenting 
 us with either a likelier or a clearer conception of 
 God ; while in power to control conduct, to console 
 sorrow, to develop life, they are immeasurably sur- 
 passed by the Christian creed. 
 
 And this is after all the true test of a theology ; 
 the extent and character of its influence on life.
 
 i 5 8 THE INCARNATION AND THE TRINITY [CHAP. 
 
 For no modern form of Theism views God as 
 a mere logical abstraction, whose unity can only 
 be maintained by isolation from the world. How- 
 ever variously men think about Him, in the present 
 day, they would at least agree, that He must be 
 regarded as the real, concrete, source and ground 
 and goal of things ; by His intimate, immanent 
 omnipresence making the universe one whole, or in 
 older language, ' upholding all things ' and ' filling 
 all in all.' 
 
 But foremost in the universe of our experience is 
 man. God, even if we call Him the unknown, must 
 yet be the source and ground and goal of human 
 personality, and all its powers. If therefore He is 
 to control His universe, He must be able to control 
 man in the precise way in which man's nature 
 instinctively demands to be controlled, that is, by 
 personal influence. Hence He must Himself at 
 least be personal. ' Supra-personal ' is thought by 
 some to be more descriptive of a personality that 
 must infinitely transcend our own. And the term 
 may be permissible, if it is clearly understood to 
 imply the inclusion of the essential attributes of 
 personality; as we might call chemical pheno- 
 mena supra-mechanical, or vital phenomena supra- 
 chemical ; meaning that in each case the higher 
 order included and utilized the lower. But in 
 fact the term ' supra-personal ' is often taken to 
 imply such an absorption of personality as would
 
 vii] THE INCARNATION AND THE TRINITY 159 
 
 obliterate its distinctive features ; much as water in 
 absorbing a crystal destroys its unity and form. In 
 this sense the word is merely a disguised, and 
 therefore misleading synonym, for the plainer term 
 4 impersonal/ of which it must in consequence share 
 the fate. 
 
 To resume then, any adequate notion that we 
 can form of God must include the capacity for 
 influencing persons ; and persons, in the last resort, 
 can only be influenced by love. For appeals to 
 the reason, and even appeals to the conscience, are 
 partial in their effect, and do not comprehend the 
 entire man. But appeals to the heart compel the 
 allegiance of our whole personality ; and are more- 
 over the sole form of compulsion to which a being 
 endowed with freedom, can, without loss of his 
 integrity, submit. If therefore God is to be master 
 of the human element in His universe, He must be 
 so by appealing to its love. 
 
 ' For the loving worm within its clod, 
 Were diviner than a loveless god 
 Amid his worlds, I will dare to say 1 .' 
 
 Hence the superiority of the Christian to all 
 other theologies. The God of Plato, the God of 
 Aristotle, the God of Spinoza, cannot appeal to the 
 heart. They cannot hold the universe together, for 
 there is a thing in the universe which eludes their 
 
 1 Browning, Christmas Eve.
 
 160 THE INCARNA TION AND THE TRINITY [CHAP. 
 
 grasp ; and to that extent, therefore, at least, they 
 are not gods. The same may be said of all 
 Unitarian or Sabellian conceptions. They leave 
 no room for attributing love, in any intelligible 
 sense, to the divine nature ; and cannot therefore 
 satisfy the craving of humanity for union with 
 a Being who loves because He must, who loves 
 because His essence is love. Love, in a word, is 
 the sole solution of life's problem ; and the doctrine 
 of the Trinity is the sole metaphysic of love. Of 
 course if it were only a metaphysical theory, it 
 would have no advantage, except that of greater 
 probability, over other theories ; but its distinction 
 is that it did not enter the world in theoretic but in 
 practical form. 
 
 Jesus Christ came speaking in simplest language 
 of the love of God ; and then of Himself, to an 
 inner circle, as the proof and exhibition of that 
 love ; and then of those relationships within the 
 Godhead which made His Incarnation possible in 
 fact, and capable of being in a measure compre- 
 hended in thought And there is congruity in this. 
 True love does not speak without acting ; and the 
 proclamation that God is love would have been 
 self-contradictory, if it had not been accompanied 
 by its own practical proof. The fact of the Incar- 
 nation came first, and then its doctrine; but the 
 two involve and presuppose each other. Now men 
 forget this fact when they speak lightly of the
 
 vn] THE INCARNATION AND THE TRINITY 161 
 
 doctrine of the Trinity, as if it were a mere 
 speculative paradox, wholly out of relation to the 
 practical needs of a practical age ; they forget that 
 it supports and is supported by the whole weight 
 of a fact in history, with which nothing else in the 
 wide world can even for a moment be compared. 
 That fact is the age-long empire of Jesus Christ 
 over the hearts of men. The picture of that empire 
 has been drawn with unrivalled power, and its 
 significance pressed home with unanswerable logic 
 by the great French preacher of our age ; but 
 nevertheless in much current controversy its evi- 
 dential value is ignored. Yet there it is, an unique 
 fact, that has lasted now through nineteen centuries, 
 and is, without question, as energetic in the world 
 to-day, as in any bygone age. The survey of man's 
 nature assures us that its only key is love, and we 
 are forced to infer that if God controls the universe 
 by laws appropriate to its modes of being, He must 
 draw humanity by the cords of a man, that is by 
 the law of love. One has come, claiming to be God 
 made manifest, manifest in order to attract our 
 love. He has attracted and retained it : ' with 
 limitations,' it will be said. Yes, with limitations, 
 but limitations which Himself predicted as exactly 
 as He predicted the attraction that should know no 
 end. So that, in fact, the perpetual miracle of the 
 love that He inspires is enhanced by the prophetic 
 power that foretold its course. 
 
 M
 
 t6a THE 1NCARNA TION AND THE TRINITY [CHAP. 
 
 This then is the position of the Christian theology. 
 It presents us with a doctrine of God, which, while 
 claiming to be revealed, justifies the claim by being 
 clearer than any adverse view. And moreover it 
 presents this doctrine supported by a great historic 
 fact the greatest, the most wonderful, the most 
 important fact in history. This fact, the empire of 
 Christ, so supernatural and yet so human, presup- 
 poses the truth of the doctrine, and could not 
 otherwise have come to pass ; while on the other 
 hand the doctrine finds its natural, its necessary 
 outcome, in the historical occurrence of the fact. 
 
 Now this is a combination of theory and practice, 
 thought and thing, that should appeal with especial 
 power to the mind of a practical age. For practical 
 men, who are in any sense to be worthy of the 
 name, will be the first to admit that action pre- 
 supposes reflection, practice rests on principle; 
 while success in our active efforts is the gauge and 
 guarantee of soundness in the thoughts from which 
 they spring. Hence the supremacy of the Christian 
 religion in the field of practical achievement should 
 commend, to men of action, the central doctrine it 
 involves. 
 
 That it has been, and is, so supreme in achieve- 
 ment, few serious thinkers will deny. For it has 
 inspired a love which, both in kind and degree, 
 remains, as we have seen, unique. It has quickened 
 by its presence all the forces that make for progress,
 
 vil] THE 1NCARNA TION AND THE TRINITY 163 
 
 even in what are called the secular movements of 
 the world : while among the dim sad things of life, 
 which no secular progress can remove poverty, 
 pain, shame, sorrow, doubt, despondency, and death, 
 it reigns, as the great consoler, incontestably 
 alone. 
 
 What then is the real root of the objection to the 
 doctrine of the Trinity and the Incarnation, if it is 
 neither speculative improbability, nor want of prac- 
 tical support ? There can be little doubt that the 
 secret cause of its unpopularity consists in its claim 
 to be a revelation from God. Such a claim of 
 course cannot fail to provoke antagonism in many 
 minds, by the demand upon character and conduct 
 which it inevitably makes ; and this antagonism 
 may exist as an unconscious bias even among men, 
 who, without being otherwise immoral, yet shrink 
 from the spiritual progress that a definite revelation 
 is felt to imply. But apart from this moral draw- 
 back, common to all ages, modern thinkers have an 
 objection of their own. The unity of nature, they 
 urge, and the uniform action of its laws, create a 
 presumption against personal divine interference, 
 of which unscientific minds and ages cannot appre- 
 ciate the weight. Without further pausing on the 
 philosophical criticism to which this argument is 
 open, it will be sufficient for our present purpose to 
 call attention to one fact. Nature includes human 
 nature; and 
 
 M 3
 
 id4 THE INCARNATION AND THE TRINITY [CHAP. 
 
 "Man, once descried, imprints for ever 
 His presence on all lifeless things." 
 
 Human nature is an integral portion of our sum 
 total of experience ; and while comprising instances 
 within itself of all the classes of phenomena, that 
 nature elsewhere exhibits in a wider way 
 mechanism, chemistry, energy, organization, life 
 it possesses other characteristics which are pecu- 
 liarly its own. And while the study of external 
 nature is confessedly a thing of yesterday, the study 
 of the human spirit is as old as its records of itself, 
 and has been conducted by many a genius, before 
 which modern names grow pale. 
 
 Now religious instincts and aspirations are, as is 
 perfectly well known, among the deepest, the most 
 universal, the most essential attributes of man. 
 These instincts, from time immemorial, have craved 
 a revelation, and the Christian revelation meets and 
 satisfies this craving, in a manner and a measure 
 that are alike unique. At least then it is entitled 
 to the same consideration as would be accorded to 
 a scientific theory, in parallel case. Modern science 
 is familiar with theories, which are far from possi- 
 bility of proof, and yet, from their correspondence 
 with the facts of experience, are regarded as prac- 
 tically true. We may reasonably claim therefore 
 that if tested, as we test other hypotheses, the 
 Christian revelation stands in similar case. It fits 
 the facts within its province, as no other scheme
 
 vn] THE INCARNATION AND THE TRINITY 165 
 
 can fit them ; and that, without conflicting with 
 any other kinds of fact : whereas its rivals are all 
 partial, and however much they may explain, leave 
 life, and love, and death, and spiritual experience 
 unexplained. Yet if the world can be explained at 
 all, and is therefore rational, as all science is bound 
 to maintain, its highest product, the human spirit, 
 must be rational and explicable too ; and some 
 answer to its aspirations, some solution of its 
 problems must exist. Why should not the one 
 answer which has appeared, and is adequate, be 
 true? 
 
 'So, the All-Great, were the All-Loving too 
 So, through the thunder comes a human voice 
 Saying, " O heart I made, a heart beats here ! 
 Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself, 
 Thou hast no power nor may'st conceive of mine, 
 But love I gave thee, with myself to love, 
 And thou must love me who have died for thee I 1 " 3 
 
 1 Browning, An Epistle.
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 I. PERSONAL IDENTITY 
 
 ' A PERSON,' says Reid, ' is something indivisible, 
 ** and is what Leibnitz calls a monad. My per- 
 sonal identity, therefore, implies the continued exis- 
 tence of that indivisible thing which I call myself. 
 Whatever this self may be, it is something which 
 thinks, and deliberates, and resolves, and acts, and 
 suffers. I am not thought, I am not action, I am not 
 feeling ; I am something that thinks, and acts, and 
 suffers. My thoughts, and actions, and feelings, 
 change every moment they have no continued, 
 but a successive existence ; but that self or I, to 
 which they belong, is permanent, and has the same 
 relation to all the succeeding thoughts, actions, and 
 feelings, which I call mine. . . . The proper evidence 
 I have of all this is remembrance. 
 
 'The conviction which every man has of his 
 identity, as far back as his memory reaches, needs 
 no aid of philosophy to strengthen it ; and no 
 philosophy can weaken it, without first producing
 
 168 APPENDIX 
 
 some degree of insanity. We probably at first 
 derive our notion of identity from that natural 
 conviction which every man has from the dawn of 
 reason of his own identity and continued existence. 
 The identity which we ascribe to bodies ... is not 
 perfect identity. ... It admits of a great change 
 of subject, provided the change be gradual. . . . 
 But identity, when applied to persons, has no ambi- 
 guity, and admits not of degrees, or of more and 
 less. It is the foundation of all rights and obliga- 
 tions, and of all accountableness, and the notion of 
 it is fixed and precise/ (REID, Intell. Powers, iii. 
 c-4.) 
 
 ' When it is asked,' says Butler, ' wherein personal 
 identity consists, the answer should be the same, as 
 if it were asked, wherein consists similitude, or 
 equality; that all attempts to define would but 
 perplex it. Yet there is no difficulty at all in 
 ascertaining the idea. For as, upon two triangles 
 being compared or viewed together, there arises to 
 the mind the idea of similitude ; or upon twice two 
 and four, the idea of equality : so likewise, upon 
 comparing the consciousnesses of one's self, or one's 
 own existence, in any two moments, there as imme- 
 diately arises to the mind the idea of personal 
 identity. . . . And though the successive conscious- 
 nesses, which we have of our own existence, are not 
 the same, yet are they consciousnesses of one and
 
 /. PERSONAL IDENTITY 169 
 
 the same thing or object ; of the same person, 
 self, or living agent. The person, of whose exis- 
 tence the consciousness is felt now, and was felt an 
 hour or a year ago, is discerned to be, not two 
 persons, but one and the same person ; and there- 
 fore is one and the same. . . . And one should 
 really think it self-evident, that consciousness of 
 personal identity presupposes, and therefore cannot 
 constitute, personal identity ; any more than know- 
 ledge, in any other case, can constitute truth, which 
 it presupposes/ (Of Personal Identity.) 
 
 The above passages indicate with sufficient clear- 
 ness what we mean by personal identity. It is 
 a fact, thus understood, of every sane man's inner 
 experience, an ultimate fact which we cannot get 
 behind. Common sense and sound metaphysic are 
 agreed upon the point. But there is a vague notion, 
 in some quarters, that the conception of personal 
 identity as thus described, has been discredited by 
 the investigations of physiological psychology. It 
 may be well therefore to point out why this is not, 
 and, in the nature of things, cannot be the case. 
 And this will perhaps best be seen if we confront 
 with the above passages a typical statement of the 
 physiological point of view, from M. Ribot's 
 Diseases of Personality. 
 
 'The organism and the "brain, as its highest 
 representation, constitute the real personality, con-
 
 170 APPENDIX 
 
 taining in itself all that we have been and the 
 possibilities of all that we shall be. The whole 
 individual character is inscribed there with all its 
 active and passive aptitudes, sympathies, and an- 
 tipathies ; its genius, talents, or stupidity ; its 
 virtues, vices, torpor, or activity. What emerges 
 and reaches consciousness is little only compared 
 with what lies buried below, albeit still active. 
 Conscious personality is never more than a feeble 
 portion of physical personality. The unity of the 
 ego, accordingly, is not that of the single entity of 
 spiritualists, dispersing itself into multiple pheno- 
 mena, but the co-ordination of a certain number of 
 incessantly renascent states, having for their sole 
 support the vague sense of the body. This unity 
 does not pass from above to below, but from below 
 to above ; it is not an initial, but a terminal point. 
 . . . The unity of the ego, in a psychological sense, 
 is, accordingly, the cohesion, during a given period, 
 of a certain number of distinct states of conscious- 
 ness, accompanied by others less distinct, and by 
 a multitude of physiological states which, though 
 not accompanied by consciousness like the others, 
 yet operate as powerfully as they, if not more so. 
 Unity means co-ordination.' (RlBOT, Diseases of 
 Personality, Eng. Trans.) 
 
 Now the experience which this passage attempts 
 to explain away, is, as above stated, a fact of our
 
 7. PERSONAL IDENTITY 171 
 
 internal consciousness : but the evidence on which 
 the explanation rests, is a collection of external ob- 
 servations observations of different organic func- 
 tions, effects of physical temperament, bodily moods, 
 perversions of sensibility, monstrous births, diseases, 
 insanity, hypnotic conditions, and the like. 
 
 It will be obvious at a glance, therefore, that 
 the entire passage is, from first to last, a petitio 
 principii. It begs the question at issue ; as has 
 always been the case, since the days when Cud- 
 worth said of Hobbes and his followers, they c do 
 plainly dance round in a circle.' For the gulf 
 between our knowledge of matter and our know- 
 ledge of spirit is impassable. From the outside 
 we can never see a movement think ; and from 
 the inside we can never feel a thought move. And 
 as long as this is the case, we can tell absolutely 
 nothing of the ultimate nature of their relationship. 
 But this gulf, in the passage before us, is leaped at 
 a bound, ' The organism constitutes the personality.' 
 . . . ' The unity is not that of the spiritualists.' . . . 
 ' The unity of the ego is the cohesion,' &c. Each 
 of these phrases is an assertion that there is no 
 more in the spiritual element of personality than 
 can be discerned from the material side. And 
 this is no accidental illogicality of the particular 
 writer ; it is inherent in his point of view. Any 
 attempt to dissolve the unity, which we only know 
 as a fact of internal consciousness, into elements
 
 i 7 a APPENDIX 
 
 which we only know as facts of external observa- 
 tion, must beg the question. 
 
 As a matter of fact, the more cautious psycho- 
 logists are aware of this, as the following passages 
 from Hoffding may show : 
 
 * Even though the individual organism, which in 
 spite of its completeness and relative independence 
 is still a republic of cells, were to be explained as 
 compounded out of elements, and its origin made 
 intelligible through the law of the persistence of 
 energy, this would not explain the individual con- 
 sciousness, the formation of a special centre of 
 memory, of action, and of suffering. That it is 
 possible for such an inner centre to come into 
 being is the fundamental problem of all our 
 knowledge. Each individual trait, each individual 
 property, might perhaps be explained by the 
 power of heredity and the influence of experience ; 
 but the inner unity, to which all elements refer, 
 and by virtue of which the individuality is a 
 psychical individuality, remains for us an eternal 
 riddle. ... It is impossible to apply to the mental 
 province anything analogous to the persistence of 
 energy. Psychical individuality is one of the 
 practical limits of science.' 
 
 ' The peculiarity of the phenomena of conscious- 
 ness, as contrasted with the subject-matter of the
 
 I. PERSONAL IDENTITY 173 
 
 science of external nature material phenomena 
 is precisely that inner connexion between the 
 individual elements in virtue of which they appear 
 as belonging to one and the same subject.' 
 
 ' Physiology, like every natural science, explains 
 a material process by means of other material 
 processes. Its assumptions are not framed to include 
 a case in which one member of the causal relation 
 shall be spatial, the other non-spatial.' 
 
 ' Mental existence . . . has for its fundamental 
 form, memory, synthesis ; and synthesis presupposes 
 individuality. The material world shows us no 
 real individualities, these are first known to the 
 psychological standpoint, from which inner centres 
 of memory, action, and endurance are discovered.' 
 
 ' In recognition and in memory is expressed an 
 inner unity, to which the material world affords no 
 parallel.' (H6FFDING, Outlines of Psychology t Eng. 
 Trans.) 
 
 These statements are especially noteworthy, as 
 coming from an empirical psychologist. 
 
 But it may be urged that though not logically 
 demonstrable, the physical analysis of personality 
 rests on so many analogies as to be highly probable. 
 This again cannot be maintained as long as the 
 gulf in question remains unbridged. For the two 
 sets of facts have nothing in common, and no
 
 174 APPENDIX 
 
 analogy can extend from one region to the other. 
 Compare Professor T. H. Green : 
 
 ' If the function relative to our consciousness, 
 which belongs to neural process, were involved in 
 our consciousness in the same way in which chemical 
 processes are involved in those of animal life, every 
 step gained in our acquaintance with this function 
 would also advance our knowledge of consciousness. 
 But it is not so. There is no continuance of neural 
 process into our consciousness as there is of 
 chemical processes into life. Life is indeed more 
 and other than chemical changes; these changes 
 only contribute to it in a living organism ; but 
 they do enter into it, are ascertainable elements 
 in it. If chemistry cannot tell us how the living 
 body is constructed, it yet can tell us of what it 
 is constructed. If we analyze the growth of a 
 tissue, or the formation of the blood, into its con- 
 stituent processes, we find at any rate among these 
 such as are strictly chemical. It may not be 
 a complete account of the origin of animal heat 
 to say that it results from the union of oxygen, 
 derived through respiration from the atmosphere, 
 with the carbon contained in certain food-stuffs ; 
 but there is no doubt that such oxidation is a 
 constituent in its production. But when we analyze 
 any determination or mode of consciousness, we do 
 not come upon neural tremors. If we take the
 
 /. PERSONAL IDENTITY 175 
 
 physiologist's consciousness of the function of 
 the brain, or the musician's of a tune which he 
 "carries in his head," and inquire what are its 
 constituents, what are the conditions which together 
 make it what it is, it is with ideas or determina- 
 tions of consciousness that we are left in the last 
 resort. Nothing that the physiologist can detect 
 no irritation, no irradiation, or affection of a 
 sensitive organ enters into it at all. The relations 
 which these terms represent are all of a kind 
 absolutely heterogeneous to, and incompatible with, 
 the mutual determination of ideas in the unity of 
 consciousness. They all imply distinctions of space 
 and time which that unity perhaps renders possible, 
 but which it excludes from itself.' (GREEN, Phil. 
 Works, i. 475-) 
 
 And again, 
 
 ' The sentient organism is not in any proper sense 
 the subject of the feelings to which it is organic. 
 It is not conscious of them as its feelings. If the 
 expression may be pardoned, it is not an it for itself 
 at all, but only for us. The apparatus of nerve and 
 tissue has no unity for itself, but only for us, to 
 whom it presents itself as one in virtue of its function. 
 Its unity means merely the combined action of many 
 elements, in relation to one irresoluble effect, viz. 
 feeling. The conversion of successive feelings into 
 an experience, on the other hand, implies a subject
 
 176 APPENDIX 
 
 consciously relating them to itself, and at once 
 rendering them a manifold (which in themselves, as 
 successively vanishing, they are not), and unifying 
 this manifold by means of that relation. Such a sub- 
 ject has or is the unity which, under the name of 
 our understanding, enables us to find community 
 of function in the elements of the sentient organism, 
 and which thus renders it, derivatively, one for us. 
 To imagine an "evolution" of the self-conscious 
 subject from the gathered experience of the sentient 
 organism an evolution of the unifying agent from 
 that which it renders one is the last form which the 
 standing vorepoj; -nporfpov of empirical psychology 
 has assumed.' (GREEN, Works, i. 466.) 
 
 The first objection therefore to our regarding 
 personality as a mere product of the bodily organ- 
 ism is, that the attempt to do so involves a logical 
 fallacy. But there is a more important metaphysical 
 objection to which Professor Green alludes, in the 
 above passages, and which it is the especial object 
 of his elaborate criticism of the empirical psychology 
 to exhibit. Briefly it is, that all knowledge of 
 objects must presuppose a subject; which cannot 
 therefore be derived from the things of whose intel- 
 ligibility it is itself the constitutive condition. This 
 is very clearly put by Lotze, in a passage which 
 I have quoted elsewhere ; but whose importance may 
 justify its repetition in the present context
 
 7. PERSONAL IDENTITY 177 
 
 ' It has been required of any theory which starts 
 without presuppositions and from the basis of ex- 
 perience, that in the beginning it should speak only 
 of sensations or ideas, without mentioning the soul 
 to which, it is said, we hasten without justification to 
 ascribe them. I should maintain, on the contrary, 
 that such a mode of setting out involves a wilful 
 departure from that which is actually given in expe- 
 rience. A mere sensation without a subject is 
 nowhere to be met with as a fact. It is impossible 
 to speak of a bare movement without thinking of 
 the mass whose movement it is ; and it is just as 
 impossible to conceive a sensation existing without 
 the accompanying idea of that which has it or, 
 rather, of that which feels it ; for this also is in- 
 cluded in the given fact of experience that the 
 relation of the feeling subject to its feeling, what- 
 ever its other characteristics may be, is in any case 
 something different from the relation of the moved 
 element to its movement. It is thus, and thus only, 
 that the sensation is a given fact ; and we have no 
 right to abstract from its relation to its subject 
 because this relation is puzzling, and because we 
 wish to obtain a starting-point which looks more 
 convenient but is utterly unwarranted by experience. 
 . . . Any comparison of two ideas, which ends by 
 our finding their contents like or unlike, presupposes 
 the absolutely indivisible unity of that which com- 
 pares them. . . . And so our whole inner world of 
 
 N
 
 178 APPENDIX 
 
 thoughts is built up ; not as a mere collection of 
 manifold ideas existing with or after one another, but 
 as a world in which these individual members are 
 held together and arranged by the relating activity 
 of this single pervading principle. This then is 
 what we mean by the unity of consciousness ; and 
 it is this that we regard as the sufficient ground for 
 assuming an indivisible soul.' (Metapkysic, 241.) 
 
 The result of Professor Green's analysis of Locke, 
 Hume, Spencer, and Lewis (Philosophical Works, 
 vol. i) is to show that this principle cannot be 
 explained away without first being tacitly assumed ; 
 or in other words that it is the inevitable prius of 
 all knowledge. In brief he says : 
 
 ' The one consciousness, equally present to, yet 
 distinguishing itself from, successive feelings, without 
 which there could be no such synthesis of them as 
 is necessary to a recognition of their difference in 
 kind and degree, and to their constituting a con- 
 sciousness of change, is first taken for granted and 
 then represented as resulting from the synthesis 
 which presupposes it. It must be presupposed, in 
 order to the possibility of feelings being held to- 
 gether as related by the subject which experiences 
 them, and except as so held together they give no 
 ' materials for its establishment." ' 
 
 One more statement of the case may be quoted, 
 for its clearness, from Mr. D'Arcy :
 
 /. PERSONAL IDENTITY 179 
 
 ' Self-consciousness consists not merely in having 
 feelings or thoughts, but in that consciousness which 
 becomes explicit in the recognition of a feeling as 
 " my " feeling, a thought as " my " thought, a book 
 as the book which " I " see or touch or read. Self- 
 consciousness is the strange power which the mind 
 possesses of objectifying itself. It is implicit in all 
 experience ; for, otherwise, experience is impossible. 
 The unifying agency of the self, by which it passes 
 from self to not-self and from every element in the 
 not-self to every other element and combines all in 
 one, is essentially the agency of self-consciousness. 
 The subject is a unifying principle only in so far as 
 it is self-conscious, i.e. in so far as it is able to rise 
 above itself and its own opposition to the object. 
 The objectified self is therefore no " group of mental 
 states which form a permanent nucleus in the mental 
 history." (ALEXANDER, Moral Order and Progress, 
 p. 75.) No group of mental states could ever form 
 a self in any but an improper (or derivative) sense 
 of the term, for every group needs the self to consti- 
 tute it, and in the very act of constituting it the 
 self must be already implicitly self-conscious or the 
 act could never take place. Self-consciousness is 
 presupposed in the very formation of this so-called 
 "empirical self." This empirical self is no more 
 properly called " the self" than the body is properly 
 called "the person."' (D'ARCY, Short Stndy of 
 Ethics, p. 12.) 
 
 N a
 
 i8o APPENDIX 
 
 The difficulty that is often experienced in real- 
 izing the cogency of this reasoning arises simply 
 from the fact of its being metaphysical. And some 
 writers and thinkers have endeavoured accordingly 
 to supplement it by empirical evidence, drawn from 
 the phenomena of sleep, somnambulism, trance, and 
 abnormal ' psychical ' manifestations, and indicating 
 the existence of a self or soul that is independent 
 of the bodily organism. But this is an argument 
 whose weight must, after all, be inevitably confined 
 to those who have had sufficient experience of the 
 evidence in question to be convinced by it. And 
 though it may be useful as a counterblast to 
 empiricism on the opposite side, it does not possess 
 the rigorous necessity of metaphysical demonstra- 
 tion. For the point is essentially a metaphysical 
 one and its proper proof therefore is metaphysical. 
 I can only use my faculties as I do, because I am 
 a self-conscious being ; and their use can neither 
 create nor exhibit what is the necessary presup- 
 position of their use ; any more than my senses can 
 create or exhibit, in the act and moment of my using 
 them, the nervous mechanism on which they depend. 
 
 For a full treatment of the question, see Green 
 ( Works, vol. i), and for a further criticism of some 
 recent writers, Ladd (Philosophy of Mind). 
 
 But it is in the moral region, as stated in the 
 text, that our personal identity becomes most plain. 
 Self-consciousness indeed is the necessary presup-
 
 /. PERSONAL IDENTITY 181 
 
 position of self-determination, and therefore of 
 morality, but it is in the concrete form of moral 
 conduct that it is most easily recognized by the 
 majority of men. I am conscious of being morally 
 responsible for what I remember doing ten, twenty, 
 thirty, forty years ago. I am certain that I am the 
 same person who at those dates made a free choice 
 between good and evil, and both this identity and 
 this freedom place me in a category which if the 
 term nature is to be used as synonymous with 
 the realm .of physical causation must be termed 
 supernatural. This again is a point which has been 
 elaborately demonstrated by Professor Green in his 
 Prolegomena to Ethics: and that it should be re- 
 garded by the empirical psychologists as an illusion 
 (HOFFDING, vii. B. 4) need not in any way disturb 
 us, as this inevitably follows from their failure to 
 recognize the true nature of the self-consciousness 
 upon which it depends. 
 
 This permanent self then, which is the subject 
 of all our thoughts, and which we know by self- 
 consciousness, and can know in no other way, is 
 the basis of our personality, in the sense of being 
 that which makes us persons. It is not our entire 
 personality, when personality is used in the sense of 
 concrete character, any more than the seed is the 
 full-blown flower; but it is that which makes 
 the development of our concrete character possible. 
 And it would contribute to clearness of thought, if
 
 i8a APPENDIX 
 
 the term ' personality ' were reserved to denote the 
 quality of being a person, or self-conscious subject ; 
 while ' mood ' and ' character ' are used to designate 
 the particular state or kind of person. In popular 
 language, for instance, we speak of a person in 
 different moods of joy and sorrow as being quite a 
 different person, but when Mr. Ribot does this in 
 a scientific treatise, the result is destructive of all 
 accurate thought. 
 
 A concrete person then, as he knows himself from 
 within, is a self-conscious subject with a certain 
 character, existing in connexion with a bodily 
 organism. And though the bodily organism pro- 
 vides material for the formation of the character, it 
 does not constitute it. A man is not the result of 
 his bodily organism, but of the way in which he 
 has reacted on his bodily organism ; in other 
 words, of his will. The body has its appetites, its 
 instincts, its hereditary tendencies, its idiosyncrasies 
 of disposition and temperament, its nerves and 
 cerebral impressions. But a man's character does 
 not depend upon the mere existence of these 
 things, but upon the use made of them ; the way 
 in which some have been selected for encourage- 
 ment, and others have been suppressed ; the par- 
 ticular portion of the total potentiality which has 
 been voluntarily realized. And though it is quite 
 true, of course, that there attach to every man 
 a number of minor characteristics, which help to
 
 /. PERSONAL IDENTITY 183 
 
 constitute his individuality, and yet have never 
 been made objects of will, these are essentially 
 subordinate to, and qualified by the central charac- 
 ter, which the man has fashioned for himself. Now 
 the fashioning of character is a moral process. If 
 a man makes no effort at self-control, but follows 
 the impulse of the moment, his character becomes 
 unstable, incoherent, inconsistent, irregular ; and in 
 the strict sense of the word, dissolute; for its 
 elements are dissolved, and have no cohesion or 
 consistence of any kind ; it is not a unity, but an 
 aggregate of states. If, on the other hand, a man 
 pursues a high ideal, and pursues it with con- 
 sistency, he learns by degrees to subordinate his 
 inordinate impulses and instincts ; to concentrate 
 his attention on one object ; to direct his actions 
 to one end ; to intensify, and simplify, and unify 
 his life. Thus his metaphysical unity of person is 
 realized in moral unity of character, and he is in 
 harmony with himself. Between these two extremes 
 all human character moves ; as a rule neither entirely 
 uncontrolled, nor completely self-determined ; the 
 flesh lusting against the spirit, as St. Paul describes 
 it ; the charioteer, in Plato's simile, struggling with 
 unequal steeds. 
 
 Now of the various and often discordant elements 
 which appear in consciousness, it is only those 
 which have been made objects of will, and so 
 brought into connexion with our moral being, that
 
 184 APPENDIX 
 
 we strictly consider parts of ourself. No one, for 
 example, feels responsible for the actions of his 
 dreams, because they are not under the control 
 of the will ; and it is precisely the same, in our 
 waking moments, with the various sensations and 
 suggestions to which our bodily organism, or the 
 outer world, give rise. They may all be called our 
 own, in the sense of happening to us as distinct 
 from another person. But they are not parts of 
 our self till we have made them so by voluntary 
 acceptance. The bad man is so, not because he is 
 aware of bad impulses, but because he acts upon 
 them; while by the effort of resisting the very 
 same impulses, of which he may be equally aware, 
 the good man becomes good. And thus there is 
 a great deal of truth in the popular use of language 
 which speaks of a good man as a man of character, 
 and of a bad man as a man of no character. For 
 the good man actually has more character to the 
 extent that he has exercised his will, while the bad 
 man is, as we often say, ' not himself/ but the 
 creature of impulse, or the creature of circum- 
 stance ; the sport and plaything of external forces 
 less like a person than like a thing. Yet this 
 man all the while is metaphysically speaking a self 
 or self-conscious being, and as such can distinguish 
 himself in thought from the influences which he has 
 lost the power to resist, with consequent feelings 
 which range from self-pity through self-contempt
 
 I. PERSONAL IDENTITY 185 
 
 to the deepest remorse. And in the many cases 
 where moral error has gone so far as to unhinge 
 the mind, the interior discord may easily give rise 
 to such a sense of plural personality, as was ex- 
 pressed in the words ' my name is legion, for we 
 are many.' It may be noticed, for instance, that 
 the strongest cases of ' plural personality ' quoted 
 by the physiologists are those whose antecedents 
 have been profoundly immoral. 
 
 It is perfectly true therefore that our unity of 
 character is a thing of gradual development, wrought 
 out of infinitely complex elements, and varying in 
 degree ; and physiological psychology throws much 
 interesting light upon the material conditions of its 
 formation. But the whole process is only possible 
 in virtue of that self-conscious personality, which 
 has no physiological analogue and can only be 
 known from within. This self-conscious personality 
 is, indeed, only known to us in connexion with 
 a bodily organism, and totally disappears at its 
 dissolution. But what then disappears, it must be 
 remembered, is not merely our self-consciousness, 
 but the concrete character which that self-conscious- 
 ness, in its association with the body, has gradually 
 formed, the moralized or demoralized self. Death 
 is an episode in a moral as well as a physical life, 
 and as such must be morally and therefore teleo- 
 logically regarded. We are thus led to qualify 
 what the senses perceive in it by what the con-
 
 i85 APPENDIX 
 
 science demands ; a continuation of that moral 
 history which in this life is incomplete. And the 
 same moral consciousness which assures us of our 
 personal identity leads us to anticipate its con- 
 tinued existence. Thus the beginning and end of 
 personal identity is metaphysical and moral, and 
 morbid pathology does not affect it. For the fact 
 that its manifestation is obscured by certain diseases 
 is only part of the wider fact that it disappears at 
 death ; and if the latter fact does not disconcert 
 our belief, neither need the former. Indeed, both 
 Hoffding and Ribot, whom we have quoted above, 
 admit, though it may be thought at the cost of 
 their consistency, that there may be a deeper point 
 of view than the physiological. 
 
 ' We note, incidentally, that the theory maintained 
 here, although materialistic in form, can be adapted 
 to any metaphysics. We essay to reduce con- 
 scious personality to its immediate conditions the 
 organism. As regards the final conditions of those 
 conditions, we have nothing to say.' (RlBOT, 
 Diseases of Personality, p. 154.) 
 
 ' The empirical formula, with which we here 
 end, does not exclude a more comprehensive meta- 
 physical hypothesis. . . . On the contrary, the theory 
 of knowledge leads us to regard the phenomena of 
 consciousness as the most fundamental facts in our 
 experience, since, looked at logically, the subjective
 
 /. PERSONAL IDENTITY 187 
 
 point of view is deeper than the objective. From 
 this point of view the most natural conception is 
 that which regards the mental life as the essential, 
 and the corresponding cerebral activity as the form 
 in which it is manifested to sensuous intuition.' 
 (HoFFDING, Outlines of Psychology, ii. 8 d.) 
 
 Much valuable sifting of the conception of self 
 will be found in Mr. Bradley's Appearance and 
 Reality, where he very truly remarks that ' in per- 
 sonal identity the main point is to fix the meaning 
 of person, and it is chiefly because our ideas as to 
 this are confused that we are unable to come to a 
 further result.' And though the general tendency 
 of his criticism is at first sight destructive, he admits 
 that ' self-sameness exists as a fact, and hence some- 
 how an identical self must be real.' Moreover, it 
 should be noticed that many of the difficulties which 
 he raises, in connexion with this real self, arise from 
 the peculiar canon of reality that he adopts, making 
 it impossible to predicate reality of anything but 
 the Absolute or God ens realissimum ; which in a 
 sense, of course, is perfectly true. But if we are 
 content to recognize degrees of reality, we may fairly 
 call the self, as above described, the most real thing 
 that we know, though fully admitting that its reality 
 is and must be derivative and dependent upon God ; 
 while of persons, as they exist in the concrete, those 
 who are most moral, and therefore consciously or
 
 iS8 APPENDIX 
 
 unconsciously most united to God, are, as we have 
 seen, the most real, and intimately one ; whereas 
 those who are immoral, and to that extent alienated 
 in will from God, are unreal and discordant, to a 
 degree that raises a question in our mind, at times, 
 whether dissoluteness may not end in dissolution ; 
 and the self that has failed to justify its existence 
 cease to exist. 
 
 Briefly to resume then : there is 
 
 i. A logical fallacy involved in the attempt to 
 resolve the personal identity of which we are im- 
 mediately conscious into elements which are only 
 empirically known : a fallacy which no amount 
 of increase in our empirical knowledge can in the 
 slightest degree affect. 
 
 a. Positive metaphysical proof of our personal 
 identity: proof which, though metaphysical, is in 
 no way remote from common sense ; being simply 
 the justification, by philosophical analysis, of what 
 common sense asserts. 
 
 3. Moral evidence, which is still more obvious, 
 of the same ; and which consists in (a) our sense of 
 responsibility, (ft) our demand of immortality. 
 
 And when asked wherein this identity consists, 
 we may be content to reply with Lotze, ' Every 
 soul is what it shows itself to be, unity, whose life 
 is in definite ideas, feeling, and efforts.' In other 
 words, we do not attempt to explain this unity we 
 merely assert that it exists, and that the efforts of
 
 /. PERSONAL IDENTITY 189 
 
 physiology to account for it are transparently in- 
 adequate. There is always a materialistic tendency 
 abroad in the world, and each new science is pressed 
 into its service in turn. But, as a matter of fact, 
 physiological psychology no more makes for mate- 
 rialism than astronomy, or any of the older sciences 
 which were once thought so to do. Tennyson spoke 
 as a philosopher, and not merely as a poet, when he 
 said in words with which we are now familiar : ' You 
 may tell me that my hand and my foot are only 
 imaginary symbols of my existence, I could believe 
 you ; but you never, never can convince me that the 
 / is not an eternal Reality, and that the spiritual is 
 not the true and real part of me.' (Life, ii. p. 90.)
 
 II. FREEWILL 
 
 SOME passages from various writers on the 
 subject of freewill, will be found in a note to 
 my lectures on Personality (p. 227): collected 
 partly to show how strong a consensus of opinion 
 there is upon the point, among writers of very 
 various schools, and partly to emphasize the identity 
 of doctrine contained in their different phraseology. 
 But here too, as in the case of self-identity, we are 
 met with objections drawn from physiological 
 psychology; which may justify a few further 
 remarks upon the subject. 
 
 In the first place, one must recall the fact that 
 freewill (like personal identity, of which it is a 
 function) is defended on grounds of experience, 
 and denied on grounds of antecedent improbability. 
 As Dr. Johnson once put it when irritated with the 
 argument, 'all theory is against freewill, but all 
 experience is in its favour.' This is important to 
 notice, because it is the exact converse of what is 
 often supposed to be the case; and of what has
 
 II. FREEWILL 191 
 
 always been the case, whenever physical science 
 has permanently altered popular opinion. For 
 science is based upon facts of experience, and 
 when in conflict with popular prejudice, the whole 
 secret of its success has always lain in its power of 
 appeal to those facts. But in the present instance 
 this is not the case. The consciousness of freedom 
 is a fact of practically universal experience ; not of 
 reported experience in the past, but of present and 
 past experience alike. While its opponents ground 
 their opposition, not upon a refutation of the fact, 
 nor even upon its inconsistency with other facts ; 
 but upon its inconsistency with a theory which they 
 have drawn from other facts, and can only so draw 
 by previously ruling the fact in question out of 
 court. In other words, they beg the question, and 
 offer presumption instead of proof. And such a 
 procedure, though due to the influence of scientific 
 prepossession over certain minds, is radically un- 
 scientific and must not be allowed to plead the 
 authority of science in its behalf. 
 
 1 Surely the universal conviction of all mankind, 
 not merely felt but practically adopted in every 
 action of the whole life of every individual, even by 
 the philosophers who deny its existence, must be 
 allowed to count for a great deal in a controversy 
 of opposing probabilities, for it must be clearly 
 understood that the argument extends to nothing
 
 i$a APPENDIX 
 
 more than probability. The opponents of freedom of 
 the will do not pretend to prove by the evidence 
 of facts that this freedom does not exist, but only 
 that it is highly improbable, because it is, as they 
 contend, inconsistent with some other accepted 
 theories.' (Cox, Mechanism of Man, i. p. 399.) 
 
 Then, after all that has been said upon the 
 question, there is still a great deal of misconception 
 as to what is meant by freewill. Every one knows 
 that- it neither means a motiveless nor a limitless 
 will ; and yet on both points there is still a great 
 deal of confusion. 
 
 In the first place it is not motiveless, and to 
 make this clear, the word self-determination is now 
 used. But this term, in its turn, has given rise 
 to misunderstanding, in consequence of its being 
 appropriated by necessitarians, and utterly distorted 
 from its original sense. It is universally agreed 
 that human conduct is determined by motives : 
 and the only question is whence those motives are 
 derived. Self-determination means the power of 
 choosing the motive by which our action shall be 
 determined, and thus in the last resort, of determin- 
 ing our conduct of our own accord, or as the phrase 
 says, determining ourselves. Its possibility depends 
 upon our being self-conscious. For because we are 
 self-conscious, we can distinguish our ' self not only 
 from the external world, but from all the various
 
 II. FREEWILL 193 
 
 thoughts which come into our minds. We can hold 
 them at arm's length, as it were, and contemplate 
 them as objects which, though present to our 
 imagination, are distinct from our self. Now 
 among these thoughts which come into the mind 
 are a certain number which arouse our desires, and 
 therefore appeal to us as motives ; urging us to act 
 or to forbear. But we can treat these precisely 
 like all other thoughts ; we can stand free from 
 them ; we can contemplate them ab extra. And 
 tJien we can choose from among them which we 
 will elect to follow. And it is at this point that 
 we are aware of being free. At the moment 
 of action we undoubtedly follow what is then 
 the strongest motive but it does not become the 
 strongest till we have made it so by our previous 
 act of choice : and that act of choice is an act of 
 pure self-assertion. 7 will make this my motive. 
 7 will identify myself with this. Self-determination 
 therefore is simply a more accurately descriptive 
 name for what is commonly called freewill : and its 
 accent, so to speak, is upon the ' self.' But various 
 necessitarians have caught it up and changed its 
 accent on to the ' determination.' Self-determina- 
 tion, they say, means the fact of being determined 
 by self, used as a synonym for character ; and is 
 thus only a particular form of determinism ; human 
 conduct being as necessarily determined by character 
 as material motion by external force. Now this is 
 
 O
 
 194 APPENDIX 
 
 exactly what the phrase in question does not mean, 
 and was never meant to mean by those who intro- 
 duced its use. 
 
 Self as synonymous with person, or self-conscious 
 subject, as such, is quite distinct from self as synony- 
 mous with character, or developed personality, as 
 we have had occasion to point out in the previous 
 note ; and it is in the former sense, and not the 
 latter, that the word is used in the phrase self- 
 determination. It denotes the power that we 
 possess, as self-conscious beings, of selecting our 
 own motives, and so determining our conduct, and 
 through our conduct our character. Of course we 
 have the rudiments of a character, in the shape of 
 disposition and temperament, to start with ; and as 
 this character grows, its influence on our conduct 
 increases. But so far is this influence from being 
 equivalent to self-determination in the proper sense 
 of the term, that we may say with strict accuracy 
 that, in proportion as our character determines us, 
 we are not self-determined ; we do not act as 
 selves, consciously using our power of choice. It 
 is quite true, and a very important truth, that our 
 character, as time goes on, becomes the summary 
 and register of all our previous acts of choice ; and 
 thus expresses our dominant bent, and continues to 
 act automatically, in all the ordinary circumstances 
 of life just as we write or play music without 
 thinking of the letters or the notes. But though
 
 II. FREEWILL 195 
 
 this action is practically automatic, we are conscious 
 of being able, by a sufficient effort, to counteract it ; 
 and it is only because we adopt it by acquiescence, 
 that is by a fresh act of mental self-determination, 
 that we regard it and expect it to be regarded as 
 truly our own. 
 
 Self-determination then is only another name for 
 freewill. But it is a more accurate name, for it 
 implies the necessity of motives, as against mere 
 indeterminism, or liberty of indifference ; while it 
 reminds us that those motives are not mere desires, 
 but objects of thought to a self-conscious subject ; 
 who, as such, can distinguish himself from them, 
 and freely decide or decline to make them his own. 
 
 The whole process is well described, in some- 
 what different phraseology, by Professor Case, and 
 the difference of phrase may further emphasize the 
 point : 
 
 ' Old-fashioned as it may now appear, the moral 
 commonplace which tells us to govern our passions 
 by our reason, is the real solution of the freedom of 
 the will ; and it is worthy of remark, that every- 
 body remembers this power of the intellect when 
 speaking of virtue, and yet most moralists forget it 
 when they are discussing the will. The real ques- 
 tion is, whether the will is independent of the 
 strongest desire, and whether it can choose to follow 
 it or not. The answer is, that the will is free from 
 O 2
 
 196 APPENDIX 
 
 desire by determining to do what the intellect after 
 deliberation declares to be good, and that it can 
 without reference to the strength of the desire 
 choose to follow it or not, to follow it, if the intellect 
 declares the object to be good, to reject it, if the 
 intellect declares the object to be evil. . . . The 
 will is neither the child of desire, nor unbegotten, 
 but is the child of the intellect. Though it be true 
 that intellect by itself does not cause action, yet 
 a conception of good in the intellect does cause a 
 volition of good in the will, and is thus through 
 the medium of the will an ultimate cause of action. 
 We control our desires by our will, and our will 
 by our intellect, or by what Butler called "a capacity 
 of reflecting upon actions and characters, and making 
 them an object to our thought." Will then may be 
 defined as the determination to do what the intellect 
 concludes to be good after deliberation. . . . Even 
 if I have not enumerated all the constituents of 
 a free will, I have at least disproved the Necessarian 
 theory, that a man always acts from his "desires, 
 aversions, habits, and dispositions, combined with 
 outward circumstances," by proving that he some- 
 times deliberates about the objects of all these 
 motives, and determines to follow them only so 
 far as he judges them to be good. The mere 
 existence of the deliberative intellect is sufficient 
 to disprove Necessarianism.' (CASE, Realism in 
 Morals, pp. 16, 19, 24.)
 
 //. FREEWILL 197 
 
 It may be interesting to compare this with the 
 concise language in which St. Thomas expressed 
 the same doctrine six centuries ago : 
 
 ' Intellectus movet voluntatem finaliter, quia bonum 
 intellectual est objectum movens voluntatem ut 
 finis.' (Sum. r. 82. 4.) 
 
 So far then on the meaning of the phrase self- 
 determination. The evidence for the fact of it 
 the fact that we are free to choose between opposing 
 motives I have attempted briefly to summarize in 
 my lectures on Personality, with further reference 
 in the notes to more authoritative writers, who have 
 treated the subject at greater length. Briefly the 
 evidence consists in our consciousness at the moment, 
 confirmed by our subsequent approval or disapproval 
 of the choice. This verdict of consciousness can 
 only be set aside by the arbitrary assertion that it is 
 (and has been from the dawn of history) an illusion 
 or delusion (both terms are used) ; and to support 
 this assertion, two further assertions, of an equally 
 arbitrary nature, are generally made. 
 
 i. That we think we could have chosen differently 
 in the past, because on looking back at a later date, 
 and with an altered character, we feel that this 
 altered character would have made a different 
 choice. And on this two remarks may suffice. 
 Firstly, on the necessitarian hypothesis that one 
 choice inevitably leads to the next, the character
 
 i 9 8 APPENDIX 
 
 could by no conceivable possibility be so altered 
 as to condemn any of its previous decisions, since 
 it would still be moving on the lines which they 
 involved. Secondly, it is not in retrospect, but at 
 the moment of choosing that we are most keenly 
 conscious of our freedom to choose as when every 
 fibre of our moral being is strained almost to break- 
 ing in the agonizing effort of the choice. The 
 subsequent review of a wrong act is, indeed, very 
 far from assuring us that we should have courage to 
 act differently now, as in the case of Sir Walter 
 Scott's Hannah Irwin, quoted by Schopenhauer 
 in his favour: what it does assure us is that we 
 ought to have acted differently then\ and that is 
 precisely what we remember feeling at the time, and 
 what convinced us theti, that we were free. 
 
 2. The other assertion is that, as a body which 
 is moved by forces would, if endowed with con- 
 sciousness, think that it moved of itself, because it 
 followed the strongest force, that is, the force which 
 appealed to it most; so human beings imagine 
 themselves free simply because they are conscious, 
 and therefore aware of acquiescing in the motive 
 that determines them, or wishing what they do. 
 But, as a matter of fact, our consciousness of free- 
 dom does not consist in the mere sense of wishing 
 what we do, but in the contemporaneous sense that 
 we could wish or will otherwise if we chose. We 
 know very well what it is to be conscious spectators
 
 //. FREEWILL 199 
 
 of our own automatic activities, for it is a familiar 
 experience of everyday life ; but we know, at the 
 same time, that this kind of consciousness differs, 
 toto caehy from our attitude toward acts of will. 
 Yet the statement in question asserts the two things 
 to be identical. It would really seem therefore to 
 be due to confusion a rather serious confusion 
 between physical and moral freedom, the freedom 
 of unimpeded, and that of voluntary action. A stone 
 discharged from a catapult, if it suddenly became 
 conscious, would doubtless feel its movement free, 
 in the sense of unimpeded ; but what it emphati- 
 cally would not feel would be power to change its 
 direction at will. Yet this latter is what we mean 
 by moral freedom ; and the hypothetical analogy 
 in question, therefore, does not touch it, for it only 
 applies to physical or unimpeded, not to moral or 
 voluntary freedom. Hence the supposed delusion 
 of the latter remains precisely where it was before ; 
 except that one more attempt to explain it con- 
 spicuously fails. 
 
 The same is the case with all attempts to explain 
 the sense of freedom as illusory. They are hypo- 
 theses, and from the nature of the case unverifiable 
 hypotheses, invented to justify a foregone conclu- 
 sion. Freedom must be an illusion because it ought 
 to be an illusion, is the sum total of the necessitarian 
 position, when stripped of all disguise. And it 
 ought to be an illusion, because otherwise it would
 
 200 APPENDIX 
 
 conflict with the reign of law ; or more specifically, 
 with the doctrine of the persistence of energy ; in 
 accordance with which we are assured, ' a physical 
 movement does not change its direction except 
 under the influence of a physical force,' and there 
 is consequently no room for freewill to intervene. 
 
 An illustration will perhaps better enable us to 
 appreciate the case. A financier receives his letters, 
 and, after turning their contents over in his mind, 
 telegraphs his business instructions to various quar- 
 ters of the world. Or, a woman is seated at the 
 piano, and a friend asks her to play. She thinks 
 over his favourite melodies, or considers his present 
 state of mind, and chooses a particular sonata of 
 Beethoven as the result. Or, again, news is brought 
 to a general of an enemy's movement ; he plans 
 how to meet it, and selects a special regiment for 
 the work. Now, in each of these cases, we have 
 physical antecedents, followed by physical conse- 
 quences. But at a point between the two the 
 human will has intervened, and determined the 
 entire character of the consequences. Other instruc- 
 tions might have been given, other music played, 
 other men sent to risk their lives, and endless 
 differences resulted in the subsequent condition of 
 the external world. Human deliberation has en- 
 tered as a modifying factor into a series of other- 
 wise physical events, and determined their direction 
 by a conscious act of will. The physical move-
 
 II. FREEWILL aoi 
 
 ments do not simply pass into the darkness of the 
 brain, and thence after a while reissue in a definite 
 direction : they report themselves in the full light 
 of consciousness, and are discussed and debated in 
 that light ; and it is exclusively in consequence of 
 what takes place within the sphere of consciousness 
 that they reissue as they do. We have therefore 
 the clearest, the most immediate, the most intimate 
 evidence possible, that our will does, as a fact, direct 
 physical energy. 
 
 When, with this in mind, we turn to the state- 
 ment that ' physical movements do not change their 
 direction except under the influence of a physical 
 force,' we see more clearly to what it amounts. It 
 seems as if it were merely an ' universal affirmative ' 
 in physics; but, when used against freewill, it is 
 illegitimately extended into an 'universal negative* 
 in metaphysics ; and ' universal negatives,' as we 
 know, are dangerous to deal with, even in an appro- 
 priate sphere. The utmost that the physicist can 
 possibly assert is that within the physical region, 
 which is equivalent to saying in the physical region 
 viewed from the physical side, the law in question 
 holds good. But if there is a power outside the 
 physical region, and therefore wholly inappreciable 
 by physical instruments or methods of inquiry, it 
 is obvious that the physicist as such knows neither 
 what it can or cannot do. And that there is such 
 a power, the universal experience of mankind, con-
 
 aoa APPENDIX 
 
 firmed by the verdict of critical philosophy, asserts 
 with an emphasis on which, by this time, it is wholly 
 superfluous to enlarge. As Dr. Johnson said, ' we 
 know that we are free, and there's an end of it.' 
 
 We have here, therefore, a metaphysical fact of 
 simply incalculable weight, the universal testimony 
 of human consciousness, to what goes on within 
 itself, as against a physical hypothesis, which by 
 its nature can never be universally verified, and 
 least of all in the very region where its verification 
 would be to the point that is, the living human 
 brain. At the present moment, for instance, we 
 are assured that, ' The relation between nerve-fibres 
 and nerve-cells is very obscure ; the physical pro- 
 perties of the ganglia-cells, and consequently the 
 physical origin of the simplest reflex movement, 
 are not yet understood ; it is not even quite certain 
 that the ganglia-cells form the connecting-link be- 
 tween the afferent and efferent nerve-fibres. Nor 
 has it been possible to point out the anatomical 
 connexion between the centres of the centripetal 
 and those of the centrifugal nerves in the spinal 
 cord.' (HOFFDING.) 
 
 But let us suppose that all these obscurities have 
 been cleared up by the science of the future, and 
 that the whole mechanism of nervous action can be 
 traced. The verification in question would still 
 be no nearer than before. For even if we could see 
 the continuous action of a living human brain (a
 
 //. FREEWILL ao 3 
 
 considerable concession to the science of the future), 
 we could not tell whether its accompanying con- 
 sciousness was, or was not, a condition of what we 
 saw. For, as Tyndall characteristically put it, we 
 have not the necessary organ, nor the rudiments of 
 such an organ. There might be no visible breach 
 of continuity, and yet the whole process might be 
 spiritually qualified ; much as a living organism 
 qualifies the mechanical properties of its constituent 
 molecules. 
 
 It is of course obvious to reply that we cannot 
 logically draw a distinction between the character 
 of movements which are equally physical whether 
 inside or outside the brain. If physical antecedents, 
 without any spiritual coefficient, invariably deter- 
 mine the latter, what right have we to suppose that 
 the former are in different case ? When this objec- 
 tion is made by a pure materialist we can only refer 
 him back to those ultimate considerations before 
 which we believe that materialism breaks down. 
 But if it is urged, as is often the case, by those who 
 admit the existence of spirit in the universe ; we 
 reply that in that case all physical movement must 
 be conceived to have a spiritual coefficient, as we 
 have argued at length in the text. But if all 
 physical movement has a divine spiritual co- 
 efficient, or condition, which is only unobserved 
 because its normal action is uniform, there is 
 nothing illogical, or even improbable, in supposing
 
 204 APPENDIX 
 
 that the movements of the brain are specially con- 
 ditioned or controlled by the spirit of man. More- 
 over it must be remembered that, after all, human 
 personality is, within our experience, unique : to 
 argue therefore that what does not happen else- 
 where is not likely to happen in the human brain 
 is by no means so logical a proceeding as at first 
 sight it may seem. For granting that the human 
 brain when considered by itself is like any other 
 ' parcel of matter ' ; yet in actual fact it only 
 exists in combination with a unique phenomenon, 
 a phenomenon which has no parallel within the 
 range of our experience ; and it is a mere common- 
 place to say that we cannot infer from what happens 
 under one set of conditions, what will happen under 
 another set of conditions, which are not only 
 different, but as different as we can possibly con- 
 ceive. Thus it still remains a case of metaphysical 
 fact versus physical presumption ; and the more 
 the presumption is analyzed the less reasonable is 
 it found to be. 
 
 We may fitly conclude this aspect of the subject 
 with the following quotation from Lotze, whose 
 whole treatment of the question should be read : 
 
 'Admitting the incomparability of things physical 
 and material, it would still be an unfounded pre- 
 judice to suppose that only like can act on like, and 
 a mistake to imagine that the case of an interaction
 
 //. FREEWILL 905 
 
 of soul and body is an exceptional one, and that we 
 are here to find inexplicable what in any action of 
 matter upon matter we understand. ... To our 
 sensuous imagination, it is true, no interaction but 
 that of similar elements (similar at least in their 
 external appearance) presents itself as a connected 
 image ; but it is only our sensuous imagination that 
 seeks to retain for every case of action the homo- 
 geneous character which it fancies it understands 
 to be an essential condition in this particular case, 
 and this is just where it deceives itself. . . . The 
 working of every machine yet known rests on the 
 fact that certain parts of it are solid, and that these 
 parts communicate their motions ; but how the 
 elements manage to bind one another into an un- 
 changing shape, and how they can transmit motions 
 and this is what is essential in the process of the 
 action of matter on matter remains invisible, and 
 the similarity of the parts concerned in the action 
 adds nothing to its intelligibility. When then we 
 speak of an action taking place between the soul 
 and material elements, all that we miss is the per- 
 ception of that external scenery which may make 
 the influence of matter on matter more familiar to 
 us, but cannot explain it. We shall never see the 
 last atom of the nerve impinging on the soul, or 
 the soul upon it ; but equally in the case of two 
 visible spheres the impact is not the intelligible 
 cause of the communication of motion ; it is nothing
 
 ao6 APPENDIX 
 
 but the form in which we can perceive something 
 happening which we do not comprehend. The 
 mistake is to desire to discover indispensable 
 conditions of all action; and we are only repeat- 
 ing this mistake in another form when we declare 
 the immaterial soul, as devoid of mass, incapable of 
 acting mechanically on a dense material mass, or 
 conceive it as an invulnerable shadow, inaccessible 
 to the attacks of the corporeal world.' (LOTZE, 
 Metaphysic, bk. iii. c. T, p. 436). 
 
 But while it is essential to emphasize the exis- 
 tence of freewill, it is almost as important to 
 recognize its practical limitation. For a great 
 deal of the obscurity that surrounds the entire 
 subject is due to the confusion of these two things ; 
 the extremely limited nature of our freedom giving 
 superficial plausibility to the denial of its existence. 
 As a matter of fact the power to deviate by a hair's 
 breadth from the chain of physical necessity con- 
 stitutes freedom, as described above, and renders us 
 in consequence responsible moral agents. And this 
 may be called formal, as distinct from material or 
 practical freedom ; meaning that it is a form which 
 has to impress itself on matter; a potentiality 
 (6iW/!Ais) which has to be realized, a faculty which 
 has to be used, before we can be called actually 
 and positively free. We are in fact free to become 
 free ; free in the first sense to become free in the
 
 11. FREEWILL 907 
 
 second sense. And this process of becoming 
 positively free, or realizing our potential freedom, 
 is limited in various ways. 
 
 i. We are physically limited by the fact that we 
 cannot create, but can only direct physical energy. 
 This distinction (which Hofifding calls a subterfuge) 
 is in fact a very real and important one, for it con- 
 stitutes the answer to the charge that freewill 
 would introduce confusion into the order of the 
 world. Of course the power to direct is as disturb- 
 ing as the power to create energy at will, in the eyes 
 of any psychologist who ever hopes to construct an 
 exact science of the human mind ; but this hypo- 
 thetical science is the only thing that it disturbs. 
 But otherwise, the fact that we can only direct 
 existing energies effectively prevents our disturbing 
 the order of the world ; being only the counter- 
 part to Bacon's Natura non nisi parendo vincitur. 
 The world is full of forces that every moment are 
 changing their direction, and human action is 
 confessedly one of the factors in this change. But 
 the fact that the action, when regarded from within, 
 is free, docs not alter the fact that, when regarded 
 from without, it is like any other physical antecedent, 
 which modifies, but in no way confuses the natural 
 sequence of events. While we are deliberating we 
 are free, but do not alter the material order ; but 
 as soon as we begin to act we enter into that order, 
 and thereby become a part of it, and obedient to its
 
 ao8 APPENDIX 
 
 laws. Thus freewill is prevented by its obvious 
 physical limitations from disturbing the order of 
 the world, and what may be called its truly creative 
 force is thereby limited to the sphere of the moral 
 character. 
 
 2. But here again it is constitutionally limited, 
 for it cannot create ex nihilo ; it can only fashion 
 those rudiments of character which we already 
 possess, in the shape of temperament and dispo- 
 sition, talents, tendencies, and taints. We are free 
 enough to bring a moral or an immoral result out 
 of these elements ; but the elements themselves, 
 assisted by the opportunities and circumstances of 
 life, will determine the particular shape of that 
 result, and the consequent individuality of the 
 person. Thus we are constitutionally free to be- 
 come good or evil, but not to make one hair black 
 or white. We can only realize the individuality 
 with which we were born. 
 
 3. But, once more, we are morally limited ; for 
 this very process of realization becomes a further 
 process of limitation in its turn. ' Acts form habits,' 
 said Aristotle long ago, ' because,' adds the modern 
 physiologist, ' nervous energy flows along the line 
 of least resistance,' and habits are, of course, limita- 
 tions; for the stronger a habit becomes, the less 
 able or likely are we to counteract it. Habits, 
 therefore, grow upon us, good, bad, and indifferent, 
 and ' custom lies upon us with a weight ' as life
 
 II. FREEWILL 309 
 
 goes on ; and so by degrees our character, or 
 habitual mode of action, is permanently formed. 
 This character, as we have seen above, may still 
 be altered with sufficient effort ; but as the effort 
 becomes more difficult, it becomes proportionately 
 improbable, till, in average cases, the necessitarian 
 contention is practically true, that a man's conduct 
 may be predicted from his character, or is, in other 
 words, determined by his past. 
 
 Thus our freewill is practically limited in a 
 variety of ways ; and it is under cover of these 
 limitations, as noticed above, that its existence can 
 be so plausibly denied. But as a matter of fact 
 neither the physical nor the constitutional limits 
 above mentioned, affect its essence ; they merely 
 circumscribe its range. It is only the moral limita- 
 tion that really affects it, and that is its own crea- 
 tion, for the habits that at last enslave it were at 
 first the objects of its choice ; and thus, however 
 much a man's character determines him, he is 
 always and rightly held responsible for the result. 
 
 And this leads us to a further point of view. 
 The freewill or power of self-determination which 
 we have hitherto considered, is, as above stated, 
 a potentiality to be realized, a faculty to be used, 
 and its realization is freedom, or the state of being 
 free. But the faculty of freewill is limited on 
 every side. How then can it attain to a state of 
 freedom ? Only by making the forces, which limit 
 
 P
 
 a io APPENDIX 
 
 it, its own ; so that they cease to be limitations, and 
 become extensions of itself. Thus a man may 
 assert his formal freewill, by refusing to be con- 
 trolled, and crossing a railroad in front of a train. 
 He defies his limitations, and immediately loses all 
 freedom in death. While conversely by consenting 
 to be confined within the train, he extends his 
 powers of locomotion to a distance, which they 
 could never otherwise attain, and to that degree 
 enlarges his freedom. By accepting his physical 
 limitation, he enlists its energy on his own behalf, 
 and changes it from a master into a slave. So 
 a criminal asserts his formal freewill to contravene 
 the law of the land, and loses his liberty in prison ; 
 while the man who obeys the law of the land, reaps 
 all the fruit of its protection, and thereby obtains 
 a far greater freedom than if the law did not exist. 
 In familiar phrase, we are not free from the law, 
 but by the law ; for to obey the law is to identify 
 ourselves with its action, and so to make all its 
 power our own. But to obey law is to surrender 
 our freewill by an act of freewill. Hence, paradox- 
 ical as it may sound, freewill (our initial, ' formal,' 
 potential freewill) exists in order to be surrendered, 
 and only by its surrender do we become practically 
 free. At the same time it is the power to make 
 this surrender that constitutes our freedom ; it is 
 only because we can choose the law that we can 
 become its agents and not its slaves : and so though
 
 //. FREEWILL an 
 
 our formal freedom is consumed in the using, it is 
 the necessary condition of our being ultimately 
 free. Hence the habits which gradually stereotype 
 our repeated acts of choice, while they limit our 
 freewill, increase our freedom, in proportion as 
 our acts of choice are right. For every region of life 
 has its appropriate laws ; and if we disobey them, 
 and by so doing form habits of disobedience, they 
 oppress us with increasing severity till all our 
 liberty is gone ; while if we learn habitually to obey 
 them, they extend our power. Healthy habits 
 give us bodily capacity, business habits wealth, 
 studious habits learning, moral habits virtue, 
 spiritual habits piety ; and in no case till we have 
 acquired the habits are we really free. Thus the 
 larger the number of rightly chosen habits that we 
 have acquired, or the larger the number of laws 
 that we have learned to obey, the more positively 
 free do we become ; since every fresh law that we 
 make our own becomes a fresh instrument for our 
 use ; we grow increasingly at home in the world, 
 and its forces are increasingly at our command. 
 While the very fact that our growth in freedom 
 means growth in harmony with the laws of the 
 universe, effectually prevents our freewill from being 
 an element of confusion in the system of things, as 
 some writers and thinkers have supposed that it 
 needs must be. 
 
 This leads us to a further and final thought.
 
 2ia APPENDIX 
 
 The laws of nature are, for theists, synonymous with 
 the will of God. Hence in learning to obey those 
 laws, we are uniting our will to that of God ; and 
 His power becomes our power ; ' Whose service, 5 in 
 consequence, ' is perfect freedom.' 
 
 ' Our wills are ours, we know not how, 
 Our wills are ours to make them Thine 1 / 
 
 Or, as Tennyson otherwise expressed it in prose, 
 ' Man's Freewill is but a bird in a cage ; he can stop 
 at the lower perch, or he .can mount to a higher. 
 Then that which is and knows will enlarge his cage, 
 give him a higher and a higher perch, and at last 
 break off the top of his cage, and let him out to be 
 one with the Freewill of the Universe.' (LIFE, i. 
 
 ' Primum liberum arbitrium, quod homini datum 
 est . . . potuit non peccare, sed potuit et peccare : 
 hoc autem novissimum eo potentius erit, quo pec- 
 care non poterit. Verum hoc quoque Dei munere, 
 non suae possibilitate naturae. Aliud est enim, 
 esse Deum ; aliud participem Dei. Deus natura 
 peccare non potest ; particeps vero Dei ab illo acci- 
 pit, ut peccare non possit . . . ita primum liberum 
 arbitrium posse non peccare, novissimum non posse 
 peccare.' (Aug. De Civ. Dei, xxii. 37.) 
 
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