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 Theism in the light of present science a 
 
 olin 
 
 3 1924 029 058 308 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of this book is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029058308 
 
THEISM 
 
 IN THE LIGHT OF PRESENT SCIENCE 
 AND PHILOSOPHY 
 
-y$y&& 
 
THEISM 
 
 IN THE LIGHT OF PRESENT SCIENCE 
 AND PHILOSOPHY 
 
 BY 
 
 JAMES IVERACH, M.A., D.D. 
 
 AUTHOR OF "IS GOD KNOWABLE ? " "EVOLUTION AND 
 CHRISTIANITY," ETC. 
 
 PUBLISHED FOR 
 
 THE NEW YORK UNIVERSITY 
 
 BY 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 1899 
 

 Copyright, 1899, 
 By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 
 
 Nortooati tynw 
 
 J. S. Cuahing Sc Co. - Berwick k Smith 
 Norwood Mass. U.S.A. 
 
THE CHARLES F. DEEMS LECTURESHIP 
 OF PHILOSOPHY 
 
 The University accepted, April 15, 1895, from the 
 American Institute of Christian Philosophy an en- 
 dowment of Fifteen Thousand Dollars for the sup- 
 port of a lectureship to be called the Charles F. 
 Deems Lectureship of Philosophy, under the follow- 
 ing rules : — 
 
 The University agrees to maintain said lectureship 
 by securing for each year, or each alternate year, a 
 Lecturer, eminent in Science and Philosophy, who 
 shall treat in not less than six lectures some one of 
 the most important questions of Science and Philoso- 
 phy, with a special reference to its relation to the 
 revealed truths of the Holy Scriptures and to the 
 fundamental principles of Theistic Philosophy. 
 
 The Lecturer shall be chosen by the University's 
 Committee upon the Charles F. Deems Lectureship, 
 which shall consist of the Chancellor and two mem- 
 bers of the Faculty of Arts and Science and two 
 members of the University Council, to be named as 
 the Council may direct. The subject for each year's 
 lectures shall be agreed upon between this Committee 
 and the Lecturer. 
 
vill THE DEEMS LECTURESHIP 
 
 The University shall provide, free of charge, a 
 room for the lectures, and shall, at its own expense, 
 make due public announcement of the time and 
 place of each lecture. The University shall also 
 publish, in book form, each series of lectures, and 
 put the same on sale with one or more reputable 
 book firms, provided this can be done without fur- 
 ther expense than can be met by the accumulation 
 of income over and above the expense of maintaining 
 the annual or biennial series of lectures. 
 
 The University's Committee at present is consti- 
 tuted as follows : Chancellor MacCracken, Dean 
 Baird, Dean Prince, Mr. William S. Opdyke, and 
 Rev. Dr. George Alexander. 
 
 The inaugural course upon this foundation was given 
 in April, 1899, by Professor James Iverach, D.D., of 
 the Free Church College, Aberdeen, Scotland. 
 
 These lectures are now published by the Uni- 
 versity. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The scientific view of the world, and its bearing on Theism I 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 The inorganic world a preparation for life: the physical 
 
 characteristics of life 34 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 Life : its genesis, growth, and meaning .... 66 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 Rational life and its implications ..... 98 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 The Making of man 131 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 Is a rational religion possible? Mr. Benjamin Kidd and 
 
 Mr. Arthur Balfour 163 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 Personality : its character and its meaning , . . 195 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 Religion : its nature, history, and demands . . . 227 
 
 ix 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Philosophy in its agnostic aspect : its postulates, its char- 
 acter, and its truth ....... 260 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 Idealistic philosophy : its merits and its defects ; the con- 
 ception of God ; how shall we conceive the synthetic 
 unity of God, man, and the world? — the kingdom of 
 God 293 
 
THEISM 
 
 IN THE LIGHT OF PRESENT SCIENCE 
 AND PHILOSOPHY 
 
I 
 
 THE SCIENTIFIC VIEW OF THE WORLD, 
 AND ITS BEARING ON THEISM 
 
 My first duty in connection with this lectureship 
 is to express my warmest thanks to the authorities 
 of the New York University for the high honour they 
 have conferred upon me in choosing me to be the 
 first Deems lecturer. It is the greatest honour of 
 my life, and it bears with it a corresponding respon- 
 sibility. It came on me with surprise, and I accepted 
 it with fear and anxiety ; for I had some idea of the 
 work done in America in theology and philosophy. 
 I do not mention the achievements of America in 
 other fields ; I speak only of those with which I am 
 familiar. It was surprising to me that I should be 
 asked to speak to this University, and to this public, 
 on topics with regard to which they had so many 
 workers of renown on this side of the water. I had 
 read many of the works of American writers on 
 theology and philosophy; I had learned much from 
 them ; I had striven to follow the evolution of Amer- 
 ican thought and life, from the epoch-making work 
 of Jonathan Edwards onward to the present time; 
 and I had come to have a high appreciation of the 
 
2 THEISM 
 
 value of that work. So numerous are the works of 
 American writers on the subjects connected with the 
 topic I have to discuss that I shall not mention any 
 names. It you find in my lectures traces of the 
 influence which your own writers have exerted on 
 my mind, I hope you will not find fault with me on 
 that account ; I hope you will take it as a tribute to 
 the value of American work. 
 
 The subject of my lecture is Theism, in the light 
 of present science and philosophy. I shall endeavour 
 to look at the world with the eyes of science, as 
 science sets forth for us the story of the world in the 
 ages of the past, and unfolds for us the magnificence 
 of the world as it now is. I desire to learn from the 
 masters of science what kind of world I live in, what 
 has been its past history, and what is its probable 
 outlook. Having learned from science all that I can 
 grasp, I may have to ask questions which science can- 
 not answer, ultimate questions which science leaves to 
 philosophy and theology, and we shall ask what is the 
 present attitude of philosophy toward these questions 
 which science has left unsettled. It looks like a large 
 order, and, on the face of it, it seems rather presumptu- 
 ous for any man to profess to deal with so large a 
 theme. It would be presumptuous were I to profess 
 to teach all that science has to say on every topic, or 
 even profess to have mastered all the sciences. I am 
 not so presumptuous as to profess anything of the 
 kind. A man may understand something of physics, 
 
SCIENTIFIC VIEW OF THE WORLD 3 
 
 although he has not read the "Principia" of Newton, 
 and he may have a general knowledge of mathematics, 
 though he is unfit to read all the works of Cayley or 
 Sylvester. The scope and range of geological work 
 he may understand, though he may not be familiar 
 with all the details of the successive epochs of geo- 
 logical evolution. At all events, a man may study 
 science for the purpose of seeing for himself that 
 system of the universe which science may disclose 
 to his mind, and may inquire what elements require 
 to be added to the scientific view in order to obtain 
 a rational view of the world as a whole. The pre- 
 supposition of science is that the world has a mean- 
 ing, is intelligible, and that the world is a whole, and 
 forms a system. We presume that we are in a 
 rational world, that things have a meaning, that they 
 work together, and that the method of their working 
 may be found and expressed. Acting on -this presup- 
 position men have gone to work, and in the several 
 departments of science have formulated a number of 
 rules or laws which have been verified as true, and 
 when acted on have turned out to be adequate and 
 accurate. Science, so far as it goes, is the record of 
 man's understanding of the world in which he lives, 
 and his mastery over it. I say so far as it goes ; for 
 great as have been its achievements, and vast as 
 have been its conquests, it only stands on the thresh- 
 old of the world it has to conquer. The world is one, 
 and the sciences are many. The world moves to- 
 
4 THEISM 
 
 gether, and the sweep of its movement is always real, 
 concrete, and complete. Our abstract sciences toil 
 after it in vain. We break up the world into aspects, 
 and we suffer for it; as each aspect tends to substi- 
 tute itself in the place of the whole reality. The 
 world thinks things together, we think them apart; 
 and we are apt to put the aspect we see in the place 
 of the whole. 
 
 It is our lot, as finite beings, to be able to attend to 
 few things at a time. We have our ways of neglect- 
 ing many aspects of reality, in order to attend only 
 to that which attracts us, and to the understanding of 
 which we bend all our strength. We have fallen 
 on many methods by the use of which we seek to 
 simplify the multiplicity of the problems set to us in 
 life, and to make them such as we may grasp. We 
 are baffled by the complex problems set to us by the 
 simplest particle of matter. Even if we can picture 
 to ourselves a particle of matter, it is impossible for 
 us to grasp in one thought all that is involved in the 
 notion. For there is in it, first, the notion of matter, 
 which, simple as it appears to unreflective common 
 sense, is yet one of the most complex notions which 
 a long process of abstraction has bequeathed to us. 
 Then it is by no means easy to grasp the notion of 
 a particle, and the larger our knowledge is the more 
 difficult is it to give a satisfactory account of a 
 material particle. Suppose that we have come to 
 some satisfactory definition of a particle of matter, 
 
SCIENTIFIC VIEW OF THE WORLD 5 
 
 such as we may find in our text-books of physics or 
 chemistry, it is still too large for us to deal with it as 
 a whole. In our statics we proceed to deal with it as 
 it is at rest in its present position, whatever it may 
 be, but in order to do so we must neglect all that is 
 characteristic of it save only the one feature of it 
 to which we attend. Then conceive it in motion, and 
 we may deal with it under the title of the dynamics 
 of a particle. Only those who have studied the 
 mathematical complexities contained in a text-book 
 with such a title can have any adequate conception of 
 the intricate analysis and mathematical difficulty in- 
 volved in a satisfactory treatment of the subject. In 
 order to deal with it at all we have neglected all 
 those aspects of the particle which do not lend them- 
 selves to our treatment. We simply treat it as a 
 something which occupies space, and can be moved 
 under certain forces from place to place. We do 
 not think of it as having bulk, weight, resistance ; nor 
 do we think of it as being matter in a certain state. 
 Temperature, chemical properties, electric condition, 
 and a thousand other properties are non-existent for 
 us, or, at all events, are neglected by us. In reality 
 every particle of matter has physical, chemical, and 
 other properties, and has them all at the same time. 
 Every particle of matter has a certain weight, a cer- 
 tain chemical property, is at a certain temperature, 
 and is in a certain electric state, but to grasp these 
 all at once lies beyond our power. We need some- 
 
6 THEISM 
 
 times to remind ourselves of these most obvious 
 truths. Amid the many and varied sciences that 
 claim our attention, physics, — chemistry, biology, 
 psychology, and so on, we are apt to think that the 
 world of nature and of men is split up into so many 
 compartments, which have little or no connection 
 with one another. The separate sciences are apt to 
 make us lose sight of the fact that we are dealing 
 with one world. To limit our view at present to 
 the inorganic world, let us think for a moment of 
 the way in which we break up the unity of the 
 world into aspects and fragments. I come to one 
 of your great universities to study physics, and 
 I put myself under the guidance of one of your 
 great teachers. I am told that a certain amount 
 of mathematical training is needed for the proper 
 study of physics. I am told that all that has mag- 
 nitude admits of measurement, and all that can be 
 measured is subject to mathematics. I am taught 
 mathematics, rising in time to its higher branches. 
 The result is that I am led to look at the world as 
 a great mechanism, working and being wrought in a 
 way that can be calculated. It is a magnitude exist- 
 ing in space and time, and it works in a measurable 
 fashion. That is the kind of notion given me by my 
 study of mathematics. 
 
 Prepared thus, I go to a master in physics, and I 
 find myself still in a world of mechanism, only now it 
 is a world of a more intricate sort. There are bodies 
 
SCIENTIFIC VIEW OF THE WORLD J 
 
 in it which I am told are real bodies. There are laws 
 at work which I am told are real laws, and these I 
 have to investigate and learn. I am taught that there 
 are laws of motion, and I learn them as set forth by- 
 Newton, with whatever modifications of them have 
 been made since his time. Properties of matter are 
 set forth to me, and I am told of the various states 
 which matter may assume ; and I am told that what- 
 ever may be its state, it attracts all other matter in 
 the universe inversely as the square of the distance. 
 I learn something of the kinetic theory of gases, of 
 the laws which govern matter in the gaseous, the 
 liquid, and the solid state. But these states depend 
 largely on temperature, and I must learn of heat and 
 its laws, so the whole subject of thermo-dynamics 
 opens up before me. This in turn is connected with 
 electricity, and the subject of electricity next en- 
 gages my attention. Suppose a man to be thus led 
 around the whole round of physics as it is presented 
 to him in any of our well-equipped universities, and 
 to have acquired a well-grounded knowledge of the 
 field of physics, what is his impression of it? It 
 seems to me that the first thing he ought to do would 
 be to touch mother earth once more. The unity of 
 the physical world has been attenuated in his mind 
 into a number of separate aspects. He has concep- 
 tions of a number of separate sciences, and of a world 
 which so far corresponds to each abstract science, 
 but not of a world which corresponds to the unity 
 
8 THEISM 
 
 which underlies them all. Light, heat, electricity, 
 gravitation, properties of matter, all the separate 
 sciences which make up the whole conception of 
 physics, lie as separate sciences in the mind, and 
 the need of a concrete universal is great. Even 
 the great doctrine of the conservation of energy is 
 insufficient to bring our physicist back to concrete 
 reality, for it, too, is an abstraction. 
 
 We are so proud, too, of our abstractions, and of 
 those general laws which we have been able to 
 express. We grow eloquent about the law of grav- 
 itation, of the conservation of energy, and other 
 great generalizations which mark the greatness of 
 the human mind. Men talk grandly of the persist- 
 ence of force, and think they can explain the universe 
 in terms of matter and motion, and their distribution 
 and redistribution. I do not find fault; but I seek 
 to remember that the explanations which I read are 
 not in terms of the reality of the world, but in terms 
 of the abstractions which have been made by finite 
 intelligence, and that they may have only a finite 
 reference. The process of abstraction and general- 
 ization, by means of which we seek to pass from the 
 particular to the universal, lead us farther and farther 
 from reality. Certain aspects are isolated. We take 
 those qualities in which particular things resemble 
 each other, and we neglect the differences, and we 
 invent general names for those qualities they have 
 in common. When the process is so far complete, 
 
SCIENTIFIC VIEW OF THE WORLD 9 
 
 we are apt to substitute the qualities we have 
 abstracted for the complex reality of which they are 
 only aspects. It helps us to call green, violet, red, 
 by the general name of colour, it helps our thinking 
 to have a general name for plants, animals, men, and 
 so on, if we remember that the unity thus manufac- 
 tured is only formal, made by us for our convenience, 
 and does not represent a real unity. It is no real 
 bond of union that we reach by a process of general- 
 ization. In fact, the more we generalize, the farther 
 do we remove ourselves from reality; and the objec- 
 tive truth of things cannot be reached by that process. 
 Our books on logical and scientific method teach 
 with sufficient fulness and clearness the process by 
 which we rise to the recognition of wider and wider 
 laws. Here they leave nothing to be desired. Our 
 university lectures also teach the theory of the 
 process of generalization adequately and fully. I 
 do not find in our books descriptive of scientific and 
 logical method what I find in the practical teaching 
 of science. There I am taught not only to rise to 
 higher and higher generalizations, I am taught to 
 recognize that synthesis of particulars which con- 
 stitute the thinghood of the thing. This reverse 
 process is in fact always going on. The process of 
 science depends not only on the recognition of wider 
 generalizations, but also on the discovery of those 
 unities which have features peculiar to themselves. 
 It was a great discovery to find out the mechanical 
 
IO THEISM 
 
 equivalent of heat, and to be able to say that heat is 
 a mode of motion ; it was also a discovery quite as 
 great to find out Argon, with its unique characteristics. 
 General laws are, after all, not the greatest part of 
 human knowledge, nor the most important. While 
 we speak about them and use them, we always do so 
 with a kind of unconscious caution, and with the 
 reserve that they must conform to the objective 
 reality. Our practical teachers, who have always 
 before them the tremendous criticism which nature 
 passes on our abstractions, insist that their students 
 shall have, not only a knowledge of abstract mathe- 
 matics and physics, but they also insist that students 
 shall make themselves acquainted with the qualities 
 and characteristics of those materials with which they 
 will have to deal in the active business of their profes- 
 sion. Thus the concrete particularity of each kind of 
 thing is of the utmost importance ; and the method of 
 ascertaining these is not recognized in our text-books. 
 Still, it may be admitted that the attainment of 
 universality is eminently desirable. To be able to 
 make universal judgments is indeed indispensable. 
 How shall they be made ? Generalization, or the 
 method which arrives at a kind of universality by 
 leaving out differences, does not seem a hopeful 
 method. True, we may thus arrive at a certain kind 
 of universality, but when we have done so, it is a 
 kind which has no objective reference, and is not 
 true save of our subjective notions. That there are 
 
SCIENTIFIC VIEW OF THE WORLD II 
 
 a unity and universality in things is a conviction as 
 deep as any to be found in the human mind ; but how 
 shall we attain to that unity ? May we hope to find 
 a universality which will not express merely the 
 invention of the observing and classifying mind, but 
 a unity and universality immanent in the things 
 themselves, and expressive of their very nature ? 
 May we hope to find a method which shall take up 
 particular things in all their particularity, and yet see 
 them, not in isolation, but in their relation to the 
 system of which they form a part ? It were a con- 
 summation devoutly to be wished. Certainly there 
 is such a system, and the intelligible universe is such 
 a system. There, in concrete reality, are the things, 
 beings, persons, actually subsisting in one space and 
 in one time, each in its concrete reality, with all its 
 peculiarities and characteristics ; and without suppres- 
 sion of difference they take their place and perform 
 their functions in the ongoing of the universe. We 
 shall never reach any nearer to an apprehension of 
 the real universe by running upward to the highest 
 abstraction we can express, — call it substance, being, 
 or force, or by any other name, — and then reverse the 
 process and descend downward, adding difference 
 to difference as we need them, till we arrive at the 
 concrete world. We are in an unreal world all the 
 time, and our abstractions simply delude us. Worlds 
 are not made in that way, nor can they by that way 
 be understood. 
 
12 THEISM 
 
 In our descriptions and definitions we take what 
 we conceive to be essential, positive, and sufficient, 
 and we are ready to forget those qualities which we 
 have left out of account. By simply taking those 
 properties which we have abstracted from the con- 
 crete reality, we have not caused the other relations 
 to disappear. They remain as a disturbing element, 
 to remind us again of their neglected existence. 
 Those which we have regarded as essential proper- 
 ties, fixed in a definition, and marked by a common 
 name, are real ; but the neglected are also real. 
 Matter may be described as a set of individual units, 
 or as a set of things bound together in chemical 
 relations, but neither conception expresses all that we 
 mean by matter. Each expresses one aspect of real 
 existence, and we may use it without error, so long 
 as we remember that it represents only an aspect, 
 and that aspect the one we are most interested in for 
 the time. 
 
 We do injustice to the actual procedure of scientific 
 men when we formulate it as we have done in our 
 text-books of logic. Conceptions, general names, 
 notions, are set forth as if they are the results of a 
 process of abstraction, in which specific differences 
 are neglected and left out of account. The real 
 process of science, as exemplified by the practice of 
 scientific men, is something very different. It is the 
 attempt to recognize in things the concrete relations 
 to each other which they involve. I do not think I 
 
SCIENTIFIC VIEW OF THE WORLD 1 3 
 
 can describe it better than by a description of the 
 process of an actual discovery. Professor Ramsay, 
 in the conclusion of an article on "The Kinetic 
 Theory of Gases," in the Contemporary Review, says: 
 " We have seen that the discovery by Lord Rayleigh 
 of a discrepancy in the density of atmospheric nitro- 
 gen has resulted in the discovery of a new constituent 
 of air, argon ; its discovery has led to that of a 
 constituent of the solar atmosphere, helium ; specu- 
 lations on the ultimate nature and motion of the 
 particles of which it is believed that gases consist 
 has provoked the consideration of the conditions 
 necessary in order that planets and satellites may 
 retain an atmosphere, and of the nature of that 
 atmosphere ; the necessary existence of an undis- 
 covered element was foreseen, owing to the usual 
 regularity in the distribution of the atomic weights 
 of elements not being attained in the case of helium 
 and argon, and the source of neon was therefore 
 indicated. This source, atmospheric air, was investi- 
 gated, and the missing element was discovered. A 
 new fact has been added to science, and one not 
 disconnected from others, but one resulting from the 
 convergence of many speculations, observations, and 
 theories, brought to bear on one another." {Con- 
 temporary Review, November, 1898, p. 691.) 
 
 Here we have a telling illustration of the difference 
 between the universal as a law of nature and the 
 universal which is merely an abstract conception. 
 
14 THEISM 
 
 In the wonderful story of scientific success recorded 
 by Professor Ramsay, we never touch the region of 
 mere abstract conceptions. There is first the recog- 
 nition of the difference of density between nitrogen 
 from one source and another, and there is the in- 
 telligent search for the cause of this difference. The 
 result is the discovery of an element having prop- 
 erties distinct from all other elements. Here is the 
 search for a concrete thing successfully conducted, 
 and there is no parade of abstract formulae employed 
 in the search. At the basis there is a magnificent 
 conception ; but it is one not reached by a process of 
 mere generalization arrived at by leaving out specific 
 differences. It is reached by recognizing the specific 
 differences of all the elements known, their mutual 
 relations, and the laws of their distribution, and thus 
 a new element is added to the family of chemical 
 elements. It is to be observed, also, that a regard to 
 the law of periodicity of the weights of the elements 
 led on to the further discovery of neon. The beauty 
 of the real process of discovery, whether it be the 
 discovery of a new element, or of a wide law like 
 that known as the "periodic arrangement of ele- 
 ments," is that it is no abstract conception that is 
 reached, but a conception which strives to set forth 
 clearly, fully, adequately, the concrete relations of 
 the objects in view. A conception which correctly 
 formulates the actual relations of things has thus 
 real objective value. Taken by itself it is a mere 
 
SCIENTIFIC VIEW OF THE WORLD 15 
 
 abstraction, and is only a symbol, which may mislead 
 the mind by a false appearance of reality. 
 
 The difference here emphasized between a scien- 
 tific conception and a mere abstract conception is 
 dwelt upon because it will greatly, help us in the 
 course of our discussion. To take an illustration 
 which may anticipate what will be more fully dis- 
 cussed later on, but is used here to show why we 
 have insisted on the distinction. Spinoza says, 
 " Omnis determinatio est negatio " ; and this has been 
 made the basis of much argumentation of the nega- 
 tive sort. It has been applied to the theistic argu- 
 ment ; it has been used to show that the absolute and 
 infinite are only negative notions. If we are perched 
 on the ladder of generalization as it is described 
 in a book of pure logic, it is true that every definition 
 limits. We mark this object out from others by its 
 positive qualities and its specific difference. But 
 when we pass on to the consideration of a concrete 
 being in all its manifoldness of concrete qualities, 
 we simply reverse the maxim of Spinoza, and say, 
 "Omnis determinatio est affirmatio." We go on to 
 add quality to quality until we have summed up the 
 whole of the qualities of this being in its concrete 
 unity and reality. The larger the number of quali- 
 ties, and the higher the rank of qualities sphered 
 in any one being, the greater we reckon that being 
 to be. Every attribute we see in that being, and 
 express in our notion of it, is not a negation of any 
 
1 6 THEISM 
 
 quality which it may be supposed to possess, but an 
 affirmation of the truth that the being has this partic- 
 ular excellence in addition to all the others we have 
 spoken of, and possesses them in the harmony of 
 one existence. Conceptions which have real worth, 
 that is, those conceptions which express the imma- 
 nent nature and relations of the concrete world, 
 are set free from the merely negative limitation set 
 by the maxim of Spinoza, and rejoice in the freedom 
 of doing real positive work, and of building up a 
 world of real knowledge which will approximate 
 closer and closer to the world of real existence. 
 But this is the real method and work of science 
 when we regard it in the practice of the masters 
 of science, who have widened the boundaries of 
 knowledge. No doubt, Spinoza tells us (" Ethics," 
 Book I., Prop. IX.), that "the more reality or being 
 a thing has, the greater the number of its attributes," 
 but that is only to say that Spinoza sometimes forgot 
 his axiom, " Omnis determinatio est negatio," for by 
 this axiom we can reach nothing save the most general 
 and empty abstraction, being without attributes, a 
 mere indeterminate something. It was not the pur- 
 pose of Spinoza to start from being in general, or to 
 reach that conception as the outcome of his reason- 
 ing. He desired to attain to the knowledge of the 
 absolute totality of things, conceived as a unity in 
 which all particular existences might find a place and 
 serve as elements in an intelligible whole. He has 
 
SCIENTIFIC VIEW OF THE WORLD \J 
 
 a real apprehension of the unreal and imaginary 
 character of mere conceptions, and he warns his 
 readers against them. Straightway he himself falls 
 under their yoke, and actually proceeds according 
 to the method of abstraction. Being with no attri- 
 butes at all gives place to the most determinate 
 being conceivable, namely, being constituted by an 
 infinite number of attributes. What he did accom- 
 plish was to dissolve all into the ultimate abstraction 
 of being from which there was no way of return to 
 an actual world ; what he meant to do was to relate 
 all the parts to that absolute being which he con- 
 ceived to be the presupposition of thought and 
 being, and the unity of all existence. His is a con- 
 spicuous instance of the fate which befalls great 
 thinkers and great systems, when they depart from 
 a method which alone can conserve the manifold re- 
 lations of reality with a regard to the necessity 
 of thinking them as related parts of a system. 
 
 Being attenuated till it is altogether without attri- 
 butes, substance, without any determination or char- 
 acterization, force, or the persistence of force, gives 
 no intelligible starting-point for the knowledge of 
 reality. These are merely abstractions, easy to reach, 
 and worthless when we have reached them. Leav- 
 ing them on one side and following in the steps of 
 the masters of science who have striven to see the 
 world in its actual movement, let us see what kind 
 of world is revealed to us through their guidance. 
 
1 8 THEISM 
 
 It is an intelligible world, a world existing in one 
 space and in one time, a world which moves under 
 law. No doubt our masters present that world to 
 us under aspects, and each presents it under that 
 aspect in which he is most interested, and with which 
 he is most familiar. It takes many sciences to bring 
 us near to the real world, but by bringing the sci- 
 ences together we may come to some apprehension 
 of the magnificence of the world. At least we may 
 have some notion of the complexity and simplicity 
 of the world, and that it looks like a work worthy 
 of an infinite intelligence. It is a greater world than 
 our fathers dreamt of, it has lengthened in time, 
 broadened in space, and has a wider sweep of order 
 and a vaster rhythm than men thought of till recent 
 thoughts were apprehended by the human mind. 
 The story of the making of the worlds is written 
 on the wastes of space, and carried on the waves of 
 light to the remotest stars. When we go out on a 
 clear starlight night and look up to the Milky Way, 
 or gaze on the bands of Orion, at first we think that 
 we are reading a contemporary story. We are soon 
 told, and it is difficult to realize it, that we are read- 
 ing pages of the history of the universe, some written 
 a thousand years ago and some yesterday. I am not 
 to trouble with figures, which might be easily given, 
 but it may be said that the light which falls on our 
 eyes tells us of the state of the star from which it 
 comes as that star was when the light started on 
 
SCIENTIFIC VIEW OF THE WORLD 19 
 
 its tremulous way. It tells us of the state of that 
 star when Marathon was fought, so long it has taken 
 to reach us across the depths of space. Inconceiv- 
 able magnitudes, distances unimaginable, yet across 
 them light can travel, and the ether, the undulations 
 of which are light, stretches all the way. Had we 
 eyes to read the story of what we see on any evening 
 on which we look up to the starry heavens, what 
 a story it would be. The drama of the separate 
 worlds which make up the universe of matter might 
 be read there. There are worlds in the making, 
 some of them only in their infancy, not yet arrived 
 at definite form. There are masses of glowing gas, 
 the raw material of ordered worlds, masses gathered 
 into something like form, worlds in the full maturity 
 of worldhood, and worlds that seemingly have had 
 their day, and have passed into the ways of decay. 
 
 Everywhere, too, as these worlds and systems exist 
 in one space and one time, so they seem to be built 
 up of the same kind of stuff, and to be ruled by the 
 same laws that obtain on this earth. The light that 
 reaches us from the most distant star may be broken 
 up and dispersed on its arrival here, and on being 
 wisely asked will tell us what were the conditions 
 of its source, and what were the elements of matter 
 that sent it forth. The main thing for me is that 
 there is a story to tell, and a story which we have so 
 far read, so far at least as to give us reason to be- 
 lieve that it is an intelligible story. Written in the 
 
20 THEISM 
 
 light that speeds across space, told by the light itself 
 as it reaches us, do you not think that if our intelli- 
 gence can read it, some intelligence akin to ours 
 instructed the light to record it ? At all events we 
 may rest in the belief that we are in one universe 
 with the most distant body in space, that light there 
 and here is constituted the same way, and that there 
 is one medium which makes the transmission of light 
 possible. Nor is this the only universal statement 
 we can make about the universe. The stuff which 
 makes up our world is the same stuff made up in the 
 same kinds as we know on the earth and in the solar 
 system. Hydrogen is hydrogen, vibrating in the 
 same time, emitting or absorbing the same light as 
 it does here. The same attractions and repulsions 
 characterize the matter of the stars, and the particles 
 of matter attract each other directly as the masses 
 and inversely as the square of the distance. This 
 seems true of all material worlds, that they are made 
 of the same stuff, and are ruled by the same laws. 
 Along with the sameness which unites them, there 
 seems to be endless variety in the systems which 
 occur in the sidereal heavens. Systems of binary 
 stars revolving round a common centre of gravity, 
 systems like our solar system only more complex, 
 and systems so varied and complex that they pass 
 our understanding. Nay, science is dreaming of 
 an earlier evolution, lying beyond the stage of atoms 
 and molecules, as these are known to us. It dreams 
 
SCIENTIFIC VIEW OF THE WORLD 21 
 
 of a pre-atomic state of matter, in which the so-called 
 atoms of the chemist represent not the origin of 
 things, but only early stages of the evolutionary 
 process. Science deems that at present in the atmos- 
 pheres of the suns and stars there are forces at work 
 which prevent the formation of atoms and molecules, 
 such as are aggregated at the temperature of the 
 earth. However that may be, and we may wish our 
 scientific friends success in every attempt to widen 
 the bounds of human knowledge, certain it is that in 
 the systems that make up the material universe we 
 know of matter in all the stages of evolution. There 
 are stars which are growing hotter, stars at their 
 maximum of heat, stars and systems that are growing 
 cooler. Worlds in the making, worlds made, and 
 worlds passing into decay ; we are bewildered with 
 the magnificence of the world disclosed to us by 
 science. It is an ordered world which we are called 
 on to contemplate. If there is a pre-atomic state 
 of matter, it exists under other conditions than those 
 which obtain on the earth, and our means of dissoci- 
 ation are too limited to enable us to reproduce that 
 condition of matter. For us, atoms are ultimate and 
 cannot be brought to a finer shape. This, also, has 
 a bearing on the intelligibility of the world which 
 is a postulate of theism. The original stuff is made 
 with a bias, and has an invincible tendency to aggre- 
 gate itself into certain irreversible patterns. Chemi- 
 cal elements are formed which maintain their 
 
22 THEISM 
 
 identity and continuity in all circumstances, and no 
 amount of work which we can bring to bear on them 
 can break them up into simpler forms. One stuff 
 which at certain temperatures passes into irreversible 
 forms ; forms which abide amid all changes as the 
 elementary atoms out of which ordered systems are 
 built up ; this simply gives us a wider, grander pur- 
 pose than we were wont to think of. In that primi- 
 tive state of matter there is an inherent tendency 
 to aggregate itself into certain abiding forms, and 
 these forms have certain properties and relations 
 which enable them to build up a stable system, and 
 on that stable system there have been built other 
 systems, such as life, intelligence, a mind capable 
 of reading the whole story. Such is the kind of 
 universe we live in. 
 
 When we pass from astronomical physics to the 
 world which chemistry discloses to our view we come 
 to a story equally wonderful, and equally intelligible. 
 These atoms which to us are ultimate have proper- 
 ties which can be understood. They are of various 
 kinds, each perfect in its kind, and are related to each 
 other in such a way as to form a system. To de- 
 scribe them would simply be to transcribe what is 
 within the reach of every one. Their weights, their 
 combining properties, their preference for one combi- 
 nation rather than another, their periodicity, which is 
 so remarkable that elements were predicted, their 
 properties described before they were discovered, 
 
SCIENTIFIC VIEW OF THE WORLD 23 
 
 reveal to us an ordered world which may well arouse 
 our admiration, and reward our investigation. Tak- 
 ing for granted the facts disclosed to us by chemistry 
 and the theoretic conclusions established by chem- 
 ists, we observe that we have made an advance and 
 have become acquainted with a new set of properties 
 and laws. Gravitation is still with us, and matter 
 still attracts matter according to a certain law, tem- 
 perature abides, force, as we knew it in physics, re- 
 mains, but we become acquainted with other forces 
 and other laws than those we knew in physics. Two 
 elementary bodies combine together on certain con- 
 ditions, and stick together until work is done on 
 them to make them part. Each atom of matter has 
 its own way of action, and insists on combining with 
 others, only on its own conditions. Many other 
 things might be said had we time. These are said, 
 however, for the purpose of showing that chemistry 
 is compelled to make its own assumptions, and it cer- 
 tainly has the right to do so. You may say that here 
 we are still in the domain of mechanism, and are 
 working under the dominion of mechanical law. I 
 am not disposed to quarrel about terms, but if you 
 insist on calling this mechanical, you must recognize 
 a difference in the physical and chemical mechanical 
 assumptions. In physics you deal only with the rela- 
 tions which can be subsumed under gravitation, heat, 
 and so on ; in chemistry you deal with attractions and 
 repulsions of another order. Oxygen and hydrogen 
 
24 THEISM 
 
 do not obey the law of inverse squares, nor can you 
 calculate the law of repulsion of atoms in an explo- 
 sive mixture. Or if you can make the calculation, you 
 must use a calculus other than that which you use in 
 mere physics. I make this observation for the pur- 
 pose of showing that each science has its own method, 
 makes its own assumptions, and deals with its own 
 subject in its own way. I shall have occasion to say 
 this frequently as we pass on, and I make it broadly 
 now. A physical problem is one thing, a chemical 
 problem is another ; physical dynamics is approached 
 in one way, a problem in chemical dynamics is solved 
 only by a chemical method. These observations are 
 necessary in view of the vast generalizations in some 
 of the great systems in vogue at the present hour, in 
 which it is assumed that the method and the assump- 
 tions of physics are sufficient for the explanation of 
 the universe. It is assumed that mechanical law is 
 sufficient for the explanation of all phenomena. On 
 the contrary, we find that this is insufficient, even for 
 the explanation of the simplest problem in chemistry. 
 For physics deals only with ponderable matter, while 
 chemistry deals with its own conception of energies 
 arising from intrinsic differences of matter, and con- 
 sequently it penetrates into a region inaccessible to 
 physics. It may be possible to arrive at a dynamic 
 of the energy set up by the interaction of chemical 
 elements, but this will be a mechanism of a finer 
 order. The contention is that the method of the 
 
SCIENTIFIC VIEW OF THE WORLD 2$ 
 
 simpler, more abstract, science is inadequate to deal 
 with problems of another order. No doubt physics 
 is helpful to chemistry, as both are helpful in biology, 
 and all three are helpful in psychology, but the help- 
 fulness would cease, or become hurtfulness, if they 
 attempted to rule out all they could not grasp. As we 
 shall see, this is constantly being done, to the injury 
 of clear thinking ; and fruitful progress in our attempt 
 to understand the world in its concrete reality is hin- 
 dered by over-generalization, and by the extension of 
 a method beyond its limits. 
 
 When we unite the results of physics and chem- 
 istry, we reach a fuller view of reality than when we 
 look at the world with the eyes of each separately. 
 We recognize that matter is one, and that matter is 
 made up of parts ; that there is an energy of mass 
 and position, and also an energy arising out of the 
 relations of different kinds of matter each to each. 
 The uniformity of mechanical law which has regard 
 only to impressed force is supplemented by the law 
 of attraction known as chemical affinity, and the 
 compounds arising out of chemical combination. 
 Masses count, but atoms count also; and there is 
 the unity of many elements in one system. 
 
 Ere we leave the vision of the world disclosed to 
 us by physics and chemistry, let us take a glance 
 at another aspect of their work. These sciences 
 deal not only with those aspects of reality which 
 have already been mentioned, they strive to deal 
 
26 THEISM 
 
 with the unseen agent or medium which has been 
 postulated to account for the phenomena of light, and 
 other related phenomena. Assumed to account for 
 the phenomena of light, it has been found necessary 
 for the understanding of other phenomena. The 
 characteristics of the ether are thus set forth by 
 Clerk Maxwell : " It appears, therefore, that certain 
 phenomena in electricity and magnetism lead to 
 the same conclusion as those of optics ; namely, 
 that there is an aetherial medium pervading all 
 bodies, and modified only in degree by their pres- 
 ence ; that the parts of this medium are capable 
 of being set in motion by electric currents and 
 magnets ; that this motion is communicated from 
 one part of the medium to another by forces aris- 
 ing from the connection of these parts ; that under 
 the action of these forces there is a certain yielding 
 depending on the elasticity of these connections ; and 
 that, therefore, energy in two different forms may 
 exist in the medium, the one form being the actual 
 energy of motion of its parts, the other being the 
 potential energy stored up in the connections in 
 virtue of their elasticity. Thus, then, we are led to 
 the conception of a complicated mechanism capable 
 of a vast variety of motion, but at the same time so 
 connected that the motion of one part depends, ac- 
 cording to definite relations, on the motion of other 
 parts, these motions being communicated by forces 
 arising from the relative displacement of the con- 
 
SCIENTIFIC VIEW OF THE WORLD 27 
 
 nected parts, in virtue of their elasticity. Such a 
 mechanism must be subject to the general laws of 
 dynamics, and we ought to be able to work out all 
 the consequences of its motion, provided we know 
 the form of the relation between the motions of the 
 parts." (Quoted in Glazebrook's "James Clerk Max- 
 well and Modern Physics," p. 179.) 
 
 Maxwell was able to deduce the mechanical 
 and electric actions which take place, and these 
 have been verified by subsequent experiment. Wire- 
 less telegraphy and other wonderful phenomena 
 illustrate the insight of Maxwell, and bear witness 
 to the existence of the mechanism of the ether, the 
 stresses of which seem equally related to the phe- 
 nomena and electricity and light, if these are not 
 at bottom one and the same, as they are certainly 
 most intimately related. I mention these things 
 without dwelling on them, as I desire to call at- 
 tention to the boldness of the conception and the 
 magnificence of the results worked out by means of 
 it. To suppose a medium filling all space, pervad- 
 ing all forms of matter in every state of matter, 
 stresses in which can be propagated with the speed 
 of light across the spaces of the universe, which 
 could be a means of communication between the 
 worlds which make up the universe, and to be able 
 to say what must be the properties, or, at least, 
 what some of its properties must be, was certainly 
 a bold conception, and a great achievement of the 
 
28 THEISM 
 
 human mind. If to discover such a medium and 
 to investigate its properties is a great triumph of 
 intelligence, what must the reality be ? Suppose 
 the ether to exist in the form and with the quali- 
 ties and functions described by Clerk Maxwell, and 
 with other properties and functions unrecognized as 
 yet, are we simply to recognize the fact, accept it 
 as ultimate, and pass on ? Is that all ? Are we to 
 recognize the functions of the ether, to see clearly 
 enough that the existence of some such medium 
 and of such work as is done by means of it is the 
 condition of light and heat in a world otherwise 
 dark, cold, and lifeless, and are we not to be allowed 
 to think of a purpose and meaning in connection 
 with its function and work ? It took intelligence of 
 a high order to discover the existence and mean- 
 ing of the ether : has the existence of it no rela- 
 tion to intelligence ? Are we simply to accept it 
 as a fact and think no more about it ? That is the 
 attitude which many assume, while some go further 
 and say to us with more or less authority, that 
 order, law, and mechanism are ultimate, and when 
 we find these we can dispense with intelligence. 
 That raises the question of the relation of order 
 and intelligence, and as to whether the human 
 mind can ever rest in any explanation of the order 
 of the world which leaves it unrelated to intelli- 
 gence. Leaving aside all questions as to the seat 
 of the intelligence, whether immanent or tran- 
 
SCIENTIFIC VIEW OF THE WORLD 29 
 
 scendent, within or without the world, surely on the 
 general question there can be no manner of hesi- 
 tation as to the answer of a rational being, con- 
 scious that he is in a rational universe. We know 
 that the world, as it appears to science, has a most 
 definite relation to intelligence. Science is the work 
 of mind, of the intelligence of a succession of 
 thinkers, who received the work from them who 
 went before and handed it down to those who 
 bore the torch onward to ever larger results. If 
 we bow in reverence before those who made science, 
 and gratefully recognize the worth and greatness 
 of their intelligence, what is to be our attitude in 
 presence of the great reality of the universe, so 
 much greater than the mind of the wisest, ablest, 
 and greatest of men can conceive ? Is there not 
 in the phenomena of the universe, roughly out- 
 lined, traces of an intelligence akin to the intelli- 
 gence of Newton and Maxwell ? Of the character 
 of that intelligent power manifest in the universe, 
 disclosed to us by physics and chemistry, we are 
 able to say nothing further at present, save that 
 the intelligence is of an order equal to the pro- 
 duction of the phenomena. Look at it from the 
 mechanical point of view, consider the phenomena 
 of the ether, its relations to ponderable matter, and 
 the functions it performs in the universe ; and can 
 we not say that as it has a meaning, so it must 
 have a purpose ? Think of the vastness of the 
 
30 THEISM 
 
 movement of the universe, of its interrelations, of 
 its sweep through time, everchanging but chang- 
 ing in a way that can be understood, working out 
 coordinated harmonies of the most magnificent 
 kind, some of which we can read, and shall we 
 not say that the grandest thing we know is pres- 
 ent here ? 
 
 At all events, whether our men of science allow 
 us to say that mind is here or whether they do not 
 allow us, we may feel grateful to them for the con- 
 ception they have enabled us to form of the mag- 
 nificence of the universe. They have enabled us to 
 look out at the wonder of the universe as it seems 
 to exist now ; they have taught us to look back on 
 an illimitable past, and to see the evolving worlds 
 on their way to something, and they show us that 
 everywhere there are method, order, law. If they 
 insist that we shall simply rest content in the gran- 
 deur they enable us to see, and constrain us to 
 regard it as an ultimate fact, well, we must part 
 company with them at this point, and respectfully 
 say that we must take up our burden without them, 
 and seek to interpret the facts for ourselves. A 
 system that at this end needs an intelligence to 
 understand it must have something to do with in- 
 telligence at the other end. Such a one-sided refer- 
 ence as is presented to us by them is, to speak with 
 all respect, scarcely intelligible. At present we are 
 content to rest our case on the fact of order, and to 
 
SCIENTIFIC VIEW OF THE WORLD 31 
 
 say that order implies intelligence. The greatness 
 of the order, the vastness of the rhythm of the uni- 
 verse, may increase our wonder and deepen our 
 apprehension of the greatness of the intelligence 
 which caused and made the order, but it does not 
 increase the strength of the argument. 
 
 We then go on, whether science accompanies us 
 or no. We cannot rest in the mere discovery of 
 the order, law, method of procedure, of the uni- 
 verse. This, for us, can never be ultimate. We 
 know of one kind of cause which can account for 
 an order that can be understood, and we know of 
 only one. We know intelligence as it has produced 
 the works of artists, poets, philosophers, men of 
 science, and we do not know enough to put any 
 limit on the extent and kind of work which intelli- 
 gence may produce. True, the intelligence which 
 we know is not quite of the creative kind, it works 
 within the limits of human experience, and in most 
 cases it is striving to read a meaning already given 
 in the facts of nature. But the intelligence that we 
 know — limited, conditioned, receptive though it be — 
 is yet sufficient to give us the idea of an intelligence 
 which has no limits, to which we can set no bounds, 
 which can set the bounds to the material on which 
 it acts and prescribe its nature, and the method of 
 its working. 
 
 I have made no remark about the fact that there 
 is power at work in the universe, because that fact 
 
32 THEISM 
 
 is not disputed. Nor is it questioned that the power 
 at work in the universe is a regulated power that 
 works according to a plan, and produces intelligible 
 results. Even Mr. Herbert Spencer asserts as much 
 as this. He can speak of " an infinite and eternal 
 energy from which all things proceed." He will 
 not, indeed, allow us to say anything regarding it 
 save that it is. It is, he says, absolutely unknow- 
 able, and yet he can speak of it as energy, as infinite 
 and as eternal. It works in the universe, and the 
 method of its working Mr. Spencer claims to have 
 traced and described in the synthetic philosophy, 
 and yet he says that it is unknowable. If it has 
 manifested itself, it surely can be known, at least 
 as far as it has manifested itself. But we do not 
 deal with Mr. Spencer's argument at present. I 
 cite his view, that there is power in the universe. 
 I call it an intelligible power because it works by 
 methods which I can partially understand, to results 
 which are orderly and intelligible. As has been 
 often observed, I have no other ground than this for 
 the inference that the moving bodies I see in the 
 street are men and women with an intelligence like 
 my own. The grounds of inference are the same, 
 and the inference from intelligible results to an in- 
 telligence are precisely the same. 
 
 True, the intelligence which informs the universe 
 is as much greater than mine as the universe is 
 greater than my thought of it. What then ? The 
 
SCIENTIFIC VIEW OF THE WORLD 33 
 
 power at work in the universe is greater than any 
 which I can exert, but that has not hindered men 
 from speaking of an infinite and eternal energy. 
 It is as legitimate to speak of an eternal intelligence 
 as to speak of an eternal energy. 
 
 So far then we have come as to have good grounds 
 for saying that the power at work in the world is 
 an intelligent power ; we proceed to ask whether we 
 can fairly say anything more about that power. 
 
II 
 
 THE INORGANIC WORLD A PREPARATION 
 FOR LIFE: THE PHYSICAL CHARACTER- 
 ISTICS OF LIFE 
 
 Taking the universe as a whole, as disclosed to 
 us by science, we have learned that it can be under- 
 stood. We infer, also, that it has a meaning wider 
 far than the meaning we have been able to grasp. 
 Our reading of it is somewhat vague and indefinite, 
 and we see that it comes far short of the fulness of 
 meaning in the concrete reality. So far we have 
 seen only aspects of the reality, but these aspects 
 are set in relation to intelligence. Narrowing our 
 sphere of operations, and coming to those modes of 
 existence nearer to us than the fixed stars, limiting 
 our view to the system of which our own planet 
 forms an integral part, let us ask here, too, the 
 guidance of science. I again take from science 
 simply what I need. Following the lead of science 
 I read a wondrous story. I am led back into a past 
 that begins long ago. The story of our system that 
 is told began some fifty million years ago. That 
 beginning is not absolute, it is only the stage at 
 
 34 
 
INORGANIC WORLD A PREPARATION FOR LIFE 35 
 
 which science takes up the story of the solar system. 
 It does not pretend to speak of the stages of the 
 history of the solar system, before the material of 
 it lay as an attenuated cloud of nebulous matter 
 stretching from the centre, out on all sides to the 
 utmost bounds of the orbit of the most distant 
 planet. That mass of nebulous matter being given, 
 subject to the ordinary attractions and repulsions, 
 and other properties characteristic of matter, it 
 has been thought that the evolution of the solar 
 system may be explained. Difficulties of various 
 kinds may be raised, but I do not raise them now. 
 For whatever may be made of them, and however 
 perplexing they may be, there is no doubt that some 
 form of the nebular theory is true. At all events 
 we may have a clear vision of our planet existing as 
 a molten globe, moving in an orbit not widely dif- 
 ferent from the orbit traced out by it at present, in 
 its annual circuit around the sun. The double revo- 
 lution round its own axis and round the sun are 
 there, and the consequences of these movements 
 can be traced on the shape and form of the earth. 
 The form of the earth is precisely that which a 
 molten body, moving under such conditions, would 
 assume. 
 
 Starting afresh from that position, and tracing 
 out the results of it, science reads for us the life 
 history of the earth so far as it can. A body slowly 
 cooling in the same way as bodies do cool, with the 
 
36 THEISM 
 
 regulated changes of form, which ensue on the 
 process of cooling, with the chemical changes of 
 material form, which arise when a lowered tempera- 
 ture allows chemical affinity to have freedom of 
 action. There comes a time when the earth obtains 
 a solid crust. A series of changes worked out under 
 law leads on to an earth with a diversified surface. 
 Into the details of geology it is not necessary to 
 enter. They are familiar and easily accessible. 
 The stately procession of orderly facts may be read 
 in any text-book of value. As we read we see that 
 we are led on from the more simple to the more 
 complex, from a state of matter comparatively simple 
 to a state of the utmost complexity, from a stuff 
 comparatively homogeneous to one highly hetero- 
 geneous ; and we are constrained to think not of a 
 unity made up of one property, but of a unity con- 
 stituted out of many elements held together in virtue 
 of their relations each to each and each to the whole. 
 The differentiations become more numerous and 
 more decisive, while the unity becomes more distinct. 
 The story of the evolution of the inorganic world is 
 long, and full of interest, and, whether they mean to 
 do so or not, our scientific guides have told it — have, 
 in fact, been constrained to tell it — as a preparation 
 for the introduction of life. I do not think they 
 meant to tell the story so, but they have told it, and 
 have shown us a world actually being prepared for 
 the introduction of life. What a series of converging 
 
INORGANIC WORLD A PREPARATION FOR LIFE 37 
 
 conditions was needed in order to make life possible, 
 as life exists on the earth. Apart from the question 
 of whether this convergence of conditions was in- 
 tended or no, we lay stress on the fact that the con- 
 vergence is there, and the result is the same as if they 
 were meant. To enumerate some of these conditions : 
 The distance of the earth from the sun ; the revolu- 
 tion of the earth round its own axis, which makes the 
 succession of day and night possible ; the circuit of 
 the earth round the sun, which gives the succession 
 of seedtime and harvest, summer and winter ; the 
 distribution of the surface of the earth into land 
 and water, elevations and depressions ; the great fact 
 that the earth was enabled somehow to keep those 
 chemical elements which are indispensable to life, so 
 that even the most volatile of them should not escape 
 into the wastes of space ; the capacity of these ele- 
 ments to be worked up to higher levels and to more 
 complex forms under the touch of life; the relations 
 of the atmosphere and the qualities of it, and the 
 seemingly exact calculation of the range of tempera- 
 ture within which life would be possible, — these are 
 some of the conditions which have converged in order 
 to make life possible on the earth. 
 
 These are not, however, all the conditions which 
 might be set forth in this connection, but they are suf- 
 ficient for our purpose. Observe the story is told by 
 science and told in its own way. It is dealing, ac- 
 cording to its wont, with a system of efficient causes. 
 
38 THEISM 
 
 It has not gone beyond its own sphere, and has made 
 no assumptions beyond what it can verify. It has 
 called on no forces save those which are at work now. 
 It told us of the molten earth, of its gradual cooling, 
 of its consolidation, of the slow differentiation into air, 
 water, land ; it told of igneous rocks, of their denuda- 
 tion, of the wearing down of rocks and the building 
 of rocks, and of many other processes, all told in the 
 way of science ; and then it told us of the introduction 
 of life, and showed to us the first trace of life at a 
 certain geological epoch. We find on reading the 
 story that it has been telling us a story of prepa- 
 rations for the introduction of life. We are inclined 
 to say there is a Divinity that shapes our ends, rough- 
 hew them as we will. 
 
 I do not expect them to draw the inference that I 
 draw. Indeed, many of the men of science expressly 
 repudiate such an inference, and get quite angry and 
 say hard things of the capacity of those who venture 
 to draw such an inference. Well, if I were to tell 
 the story of the introduction of life from the point of 
 view of purpose, I would tell it in precisely the same 
 way and in the same terms as it has been told by 
 science. Long preparations stretching to the bounds 
 of conceivable time, reaching to the farthest world, 
 ether with its undulations, matter in all its qualities, 
 all set in certain relations, and made to take a certain 
 course through millions of years, and life becomes 
 possible, and life is. I call it a purposive line of 
 
INORGANIC WORLD A PREPARATION FOR LIFE 39 
 
 action, and who has the right to gainsay me ? I have 
 followed the leading of science, and as I followed I 
 saw that it used its own method, and no other. The 
 conception of causality, nay, the conception of me- 
 chanical causation, was the main conception through 
 which science looked at the changes of the history of 
 the world, and we find that even that conception led 
 us on to this result, that mechanical law was a prepa- 
 ration for the introduction of life. The conception of 
 causality as employed in the physical sciences does 
 not require a scientist to say more than that there 
 are certain fixed conditions under which all the 
 changes in the world take place. It is certainly a 
 great gain to know the fixed conditions under which 
 changes take place, and we rejoice to know these. 
 When, however, following out the changes that take 
 place under these fixed conditions, and tracing out 
 these changes themselves, we find that they converge 
 toward a fixed point, what are we to say ? May we 
 not go back and read the story again with a fresh 
 light, and from a new point of view ? The fixed con- 
 ditions under which all changes take place are them- 
 selves indicative of intelligence, all we do when we 
 regard the changes from the new point of view is 
 simply to enhance our idea of the character of the 
 intelligence that causes these fixed conditions to con- 
 verge toward a predetermined end. 
 
 The question of a predetermined end might have 
 been raised at almost any point in the story which 
 
40 THEISM 
 
 science tells of the making of the worlds, but to raise 
 it then and there would not have added to the clear- 
 ness of the issue. It seems best to raise it at the 
 point where, in the history of time and time's changes, 
 the great transition from non-living to living matter 
 took place. For with the introduction of life the 
 terminology of science, and the conceptions with 
 which science works, necessarily change. From this 
 time onwards purpose is in evidence, and the lan- 
 guage descriptive of changes in living matter, even 
 when used by those who profess to think that such 
 changes are ultimately mechanical, is full of indica- 
 tions of purpose. Now it is not well to split nature 
 up into compartments, or to fill it with distinctions 
 which seem to shut one part out from relation to 
 another part, and therefore we take our stand on 
 the conception that even, in that part of nature 
 which seems under the domain of mechanical law, 
 purpose is not excluded. Mechanical law is the way 
 whereby purpose realizes its end. In our own ex- 
 perience necessity is the presupposition of freedom. 
 Assuming at this stage of our argument that free- 
 dom is possible, then we say that it is possible only 
 in a world ruled according to fixed laws, and which 
 changes under fixed conditions. Speech is possible 
 because of the fact that words have definite meanings, 
 and because language has determined laws of con- 
 struction. I say nothing of other fixed conditions, 
 such as the laws of acoustics and so on, which are also 
 
INORGANIC WORLD A PREPARATION FOR LIFE 41 
 
 necessary conditions for the possibility of communica- 
 tion from man to man. To this I may return later on, 
 and in other connections ; I make the remark here to 
 show that the fixed necessities which can be expressed 
 in mechanical law are both the presupposition of pur- 
 pose and the means by which purpose is realized. 
 
 Thus we do not interfere, in any way, with the 
 work or the method of mechanical science, when we 
 take their results and show that they may be read in 
 another fashion. Nor do we bring to the reading of 
 their results any new or unheard-of principle. We 
 are simply doing what, in other spheres of thought, 
 we do every day. Nor is it contended that it would 
 be wise or safe to take the idea of purpose as a clew 
 to guide us in the investigation of physical phenom- 
 ena. There are many considerations which warn us 
 that such a clew might lead astray, and be unfruitful. 
 The main reason is our ignorance, and our tendency 
 to see purpose where we cannot give any satisfactory 
 reason for its existence. But surely that is no reason 
 why we should refuse to recognize purpose, when it 
 is almost forced on us by science itself. The very 
 fact that we are suspicious of final causes, and that 
 we rigidly exclude the thought of them in physical 
 investigation, ought to enable us to recognize them 
 with all promptness, when they present themselves 
 to us as the outcome of a series of physical inves- 
 tigations conducted without regard to them, from 
 which they were altogether excluded. 
 
42 THEISM 
 
 Such seems to be the case with the convergence 
 of causes, which brought about the introduction of 
 life on this globe. We are driven to the conclusion 
 that this was no accident, but the outcome of a long 
 series of preparations, and that it was meant. There 
 can be no controversy as to the convergence of con- 
 ditions. No one lays more stress on this than the 
 evolutionist, or even the mechanical evolutionist, who 
 attempts to set forth evolution as a distribution of 
 matter and motion. Accepting the accounts of the 
 distribution and redistribution of matter and motion, 
 we see that the process of distribution had proceeded 
 very far, and differentiation and integration had run 
 their course for a very lengthened period before things 
 were ripe for the advent of life. 
 
 I do not lay stress here on the mere fact of this 
 fresh departure. I do not ask science to account for 
 the origin of life, for I should be told that science 
 has nothing to do with origins. Nor do I care to 
 rest the theistic argument on origins alone. For if 
 I cannot find the Divine Being in what is fixed, 
 stated, settled, I fear I shall not find Him any- 
 where. Clearly, however, he who believes in intelli- 
 gence and power, as being at the basis of things, is 
 not in the same position, in the presence of new de- 
 partures, as he is who has undertaken to account for 
 all things by means of principles, which he has known 
 only in connection with the world as it was before 
 the new departure was taken. It means that up to 
 
INORGANIC WORLD A PREPARATION FOR LIFE 43 
 
 the point at which life entered into the world, science 
 had no reason to widen its conception of the world 
 so as to recognize the conception of life. It did not 
 need to recognize organization, or organic relations 
 in its conception of being. Being as conservative as 
 are all the attitudes of the human mind, science is 
 unwilling to widen its conceptions, or recognize the 
 need of coordinating its notions — with conservative 
 energy it has clung to the desire to make its old 
 machinery cope with the new problem. Hence the 
 efforts, which we make free to call despairing efforts, 
 to reduce the facts of life to such a minimum as 
 would make methods of physics and chemistry ade- 
 quate to their explanation. The phenomena of life, it 
 is contended, must be explicable by the principles of 
 physics and chemistry. Did not inorganic exist- 
 ence precede organic existence ? was there not a 
 time when life was not ? Now life is ; and must not 
 life be the product of inorganic existence ? 
 
 It is not necessary to enter deeply into the dead 
 controversy about the origin of life. I am old enough 
 to remember the shout of triumph which arose when 
 an experimenter declared that he had seen the rise 
 of living from non-living matter, and the consequent 
 gladness of those who desired to exclude the recogni- 
 tion of forces other than those which were physical 
 and chemical. Nor can one remember, without a 
 smile, the short-lived Bathybius. Speedily it turned 
 out that the spontaneous generation of Dr. Bastian's 
 
44 THEISM 
 
 bacteria arose, not from non-living matter, but from 
 infusions imperfectly sterilized, and nowadays it is 
 the sure conviction of science that life comes only 
 from life. Still the longing to believe the opposite 
 lingers, and now the wish to believe takes the form of 
 an inverted prediction, that is a prediction not with 
 respect to the future, but with respect to the past, 
 that if the gentleman, who wishes to believe, had 
 lived at the time when life appeared, he would ex- 
 pect to see it evolve from non-living matter. At all 
 events, the transition of non-living into living matter, 
 without the intervention of life, does not belong to 
 our era. 
 
 " What is implied in the origination of life is not 
 that inorganic nature produced life, but that a new 
 form of existence presented itself at a certain period 
 of time in the history of the earth. But this life, 
 although it has for the first time presented itself, is 
 not something that has come into being by a power 
 belonging to inorganic things. And no one would 
 be so absurd as to say that it originated from itself. 
 Its origination can be explained only on the supposi- 
 tion that it was implicit in the nature of existence as 
 a whole. Outside of the unity that comprehends all 
 possible existence, there is nothing ; and therefore life, 
 when it appears, merely manifests in an explicit form 
 what was already wrapped up in the one single exist- 
 ence that is manifested in all modes of existence. But, 
 if this one all-inclusive unity is now seen to involve 
 
INORGANIC WORLD A PREPARATION FOR LIFE 45 
 
 within itself organic as well as inorganic existence, 
 its nature cannot be comprehended by looking at 
 either apart from the other. It is neither inorganic 
 nor organic, but both. Further, it implies that or- 
 ganic existence is of this nature that, while it con- 
 tains all that is implied in inorganic nature, it also 
 manifests characteristics that are peculiar to itself." 
 (" Outline of Philosophy," by Professor Watson, p. 
 181.) The paragraph from Dr. Watson expressed 
 my meaning so exactly that I could not help appro- 
 priating it. Yet I do not commit myself to all that 
 is implied in it, for the passage quoted is organically 
 related to a whole system of philosophy, which I do 
 not hold in all its implications. I quote it, therefore, 
 without prejudice. I agree with it in saying that life 
 cannot be derived from inorganic matter, and also in 
 the implication that the intelligent ground of the 
 world must be a living power ; what further is to be 
 said will appear in due time. 
 
 Meanwhile let us look at the world as it appears 
 under the light shed on it by this fresh appearance. 
 From the scientific point of view the contrast be- 
 tween living and non-living matter has been made the 
 ground for the division of the natural sciences into 
 two great groups, known as the biological and the 
 physical sciences. Here we have to do with matter 
 which has entered into a peculiar state or condition. 
 Without entering into the vexed question of the exist- 
 ence of vital force, or claiming a distinctive existence 
 
46 THEISM 
 
 of vitalism, we may at least point out that matter 
 takes on new forms and peculiar properties which 
 are not found in inorganic matter. These properties 
 are still properties of matter, and many claim that 
 they can be explained mechanically. Professor Hux- 
 ley said in his Belfast address (1874), " In the seven- 
 teenth century the idea that the physical processes 
 of life are capable of being explained in the same 
 way as other physical phenomena, and, therefore, 
 that the living body is a mechanism, was proved to be 
 true for certain classes of vital action; and, having 
 thus taken firm root in irrefragable fact, this concep- 
 tion has not only successfully repelled every assault 
 which has been made upon it, but has steadily grown 
 in force and extent of application until it is now the 
 expressed or implied fundamental proposition of the 
 whole doctrine of scientific physiology." It is evident 
 that Professor Huxley uses the word "mechanism" 
 in a wider sense than that which the word has in 
 physics. If it be a mechanism, it is one of a peculiar 
 kind. For Huxley, speaking when he was not on the 
 war-path, uses words which concede all that we need 
 for the great distinction between living and lifeless 
 matter. Speaking of the distinctive properties of 
 living matter, he says, " Its chemical composition 
 containing, as it invariably does, one or more forms 
 of a complex compound of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, 
 and nitrogen, the so-called protein (which has never 
 yet been obtained except as a product of living 
 
INORGANIC WORLD A PREPARATION FOR LIFE 47 
 
 bodies) united with a large proportion of water, and 
 forming the chief constituent of a substance which, 
 in its primary unmodified state is known as proto- 
 plasm." (" Encyclopaedia Britannica," art. Biology?) 
 All that is needed is contained in the statement with- 
 in brackets, in the foregoing quotation, namely, that 
 protein has never been obtained except as a product 
 of living bodies. It is open to the inorganic chemist 
 to insist on the properties of the various elements 
 which are found in protein ; he may point out the 
 vigorous combining power of oxygen, the inertia of 
 nitrogen, the great molecular mobility of hydrogen, 
 and the allotropic properties of carbon, sulphur, 
 and phosphorus, as has been done by Mr. Herbert 
 Spencer is his "Principles of Biology," and it may 
 be shown that all these are of significance when con- 
 sidered as properties of living matter; but the fact 
 remains that these properties remained hidden until 
 they were revealed by the touch of life. 
 
 Taking at present only that feature of life which 
 deals with the chemical composition of living matter, 
 we see that life has revealed to chemists a new do- 
 main. It is easily understood how reluctant they 
 would be to recognize something involving facts and 
 principles which they had not seen while dealing with 
 inorganic matter. We can sympathize with them in 
 their efforts to build up without the aid of life those 
 compounds which are the usual products of living 
 bodies. In some respects they appear to have been 
 
48 THEISM 
 
 successful, but they accomplish at great cost and 
 labour and with many appliances what life is doing 
 easily every moment. The success has not as yet 
 been very great. Even were it more successful the 
 result would have little bearing on the controversy 
 between vitalism and non-vitalism. It is well to be 
 assured that life has no substance peculiar to itself, 
 and that every element found in living matter is 
 found also in lifeless matter. It is well to know that 
 living matter is subject to all the physical conditions 
 which obtain in body as such. It is subject to gravi- 
 tation, it exists only within certain limits of tempera- 
 ture, it breathes, when it does breathe, in accordance 
 with laws of gaseous diffusion, and in fact the laws of 
 physics and chemistry are operative on the matter 
 which is living as on matter which is dead. For all 
 these facts assure us that we are in one world, and 
 that the organic and inorganic are most intimately 
 related to one another. 
 
 It is not to be denied that the advent of life re- 
 vealed within the world of matter new possibilities, 
 and achieved positive results of the most wonderful 
 kind. Without the introduction of anything new in 
 the way of chemical elements, or without drawing on 
 any physical force unknown, or unused in physics, it 
 has seized the elements and transformed them, lifted 
 them to a higher level, and sent them forth to new 
 issues. How it has done it we may faintly guess, but 
 we do not know. Certainly we shall never know if we 
 
INORGANIC WORLD A PREPARATION FOR LIFE 49 
 
 stubbornly refuse to recognize that we are unable 
 to explain them by the methods and assumptions 
 which we found adequate in other spheres. 
 
 Life enters into the world and suddenly the world 
 takes on a new meaning. The elements seem to 
 recognize the hand of a master and quietly assume 
 new combinations, enter on new forms, obey new 
 laws, and begin a new course of evolution. Not only 
 does it teach to chemistry a new series of lessons, 
 and give to physics new meanings, it opens to us a 
 new world for the understanding of which we must 
 learn a number of new conceptions. Living matter 
 does not only contain those peculiar bodies which we 
 call proteids, it has the power of manufacturing them 
 out of other substances. Every living organism is a 
 stream into which a number of elements of matter 
 constantly flow in, and a number as constantly flow 
 out. But the inflow and outflow are arranged so as 
 to be kept from any interference with the identity of 
 the organism. The material particles of the organism 
 are never the same at any two moments ; the organ- 
 ism is one and the same throughout all its history. 
 Moment by moment it is being disintegrated, and 
 moment by moment it is renewed by the taking in of 
 new matter which it raises to a level fit for its use. 
 Thus in a constant series of changes it maintains its 
 identity, and keeps up its correspondence with its 
 environment. Clearly here we have to do not with 
 the composition of forces and a resultant. Pressure 
 
SO THEISM 
 
 from behind and movement in the line of least re- 
 sistance will not avail toward the complicated move- 
 ment of a living organism, however simple it may be. 
 Nor will it help us to call to our aid the behaviour of 
 crystals, however beautiful and wonderful they may 
 be. For crystals grow, if growth be a proper descrip- 
 tion of the process, by accretion from without, and 
 the matter of crystals undergoes no modification as 
 it is laid down according to the pattern of each 
 kind of crystal. In an organism the matter is not 
 added from without, but taken within, and made to 
 undergo a process of union and differentiation until 
 it becomes like the molecules it replaces. 
 
 When we read the description of the behaviour of 
 living bodies by those who know, and specially when 
 they are simply describing them without a controver- 
 sial aim, we see that they describe them as if the 
 chemical elements obeyed a new law, and were con- 
 strained to a new service. Sometimes it is said, as 
 by Huxley, that "oxygen seizes on those organic 
 molecules that are disposable, lays hold on their ele- 
 ments, and combines with them into the new and 
 stabler forms, carbonic acid, water, and urea." This 
 was only a way of putting the matter which has been 
 departed from by more recent science which has seen 
 it to be far from a real description of what happens. 
 The relations between oxidation and life seem to be 
 more complicated. Oxygen does not lay hold, but is 
 itself laid hold of, and is disposed according to the 
 
INORGANIC WORLD A PREPARATION FOR LIFE 51 
 
 needs of the organism. It may be simply handed or 
 forced onwards by the living cells which grasp it. 
 The living cell, and not the amount of oxygen in the 
 blood, regulates the consumption of oxygen. As 
 with oxygen so with all other elements that enter 
 into the structure of living bodies. As soon as they 
 enter into the service of life, they are acted on in 
 new ways, made part of the organic system, and are 
 kept in that service while they form part of the 
 organism. The freedom of the molecules and their 
 return to their simplicity and relative independence 
 come with the dissolution of the organism, or with 
 the release of the molecule from any connection with 
 the organism. 
 
 For any proper understanding of the organism we 
 must accept the assumption of the unity of the 
 organism. We start not from physics, nor from 
 chemistry, but from a conception that recognizes 
 the unity of the organism as a whole made up of 
 many related parts, each of which has meaning only 
 in relation to all the others and to the whole. Any 
 description of life involves this, and we must just 
 accept life as given, and be content though we are 
 unable to derive it from non-living matter. Spencer 
 has said, "We find it impossible to think of life as 
 imported into the unit of protoplasm from without; 
 and yet we find it impossible to conceive it as emerg- 
 ing from the cooperation of the elements." (" Princi- 
 ples of Biology," Vol. I., p. 122, edition 1898.) 
 
52 THEISM 
 
 We may accept his testimony to the conclusion 
 that we are unable to conceive life as a resultant of 
 the components, and we may find it difficult to think 
 of life as an addition from without, and yet dissent 
 from his peculiar theory of metaphysics, and his 
 frequent reference to "alternate impossibilities of 
 thought." It is scarcely open to any one but him- 
 self to keep the unknowable as a convenient store- 
 house for the warehousing of difficult problems. His 
 followers have ever sought to reduce the number of 
 unknowables which he has laid up in store, and some 
 of them are impatient with the great "unknowable," 
 the father of all the smaller unknowables which ap- 
 pear in the Synthetic Philosophy. In the present 
 instance, however, we can agree with him that we 
 cannot conceive the unity of the organism as emerging 
 from the cooperation of the elements. Nor can we 
 conceive it as the result of any action of the parts. 
 It is curious to find how many of the teachers of 
 biological science are unwilling frankly to accept the 
 unity of the organism as ultimate. 
 
 To discuss all the questions that arise in connec- 
 tion with the conception of the unity of the organism 
 would lead us very far afield. The metaphysics of 
 biology is something wonderful, equalled only by the 
 metaphysics of physical science. We cannot discuss 
 it here. Biologists seem always to strive after a deri- 
 vation of the unity of a living organism. Research 
 seems to give us an organism that works together, 
 
INORGANIC WORLD A PREPARATION FOR LIFE 53 
 
 that holds many qualities together in the doing of 
 work, and biology strives to account for the origin of 
 the unity. Biologists reduce it to a unity of quality, 
 or they postulate some agent to the working of which 
 they ascribe the unity which is present to their obser- 
 vation, or they split up the unity of the organism and 
 place a number of elements in mere external relation 
 to the organism, and wander about in hopeless at- 
 tempts to restore the lost unity. 
 
 It would seem, therefore, that in presence of the 
 phenomena of life we ought to widen our concep- 
 tions, or, rather, we ought to form new conceptions 
 applicable to a new form of experience. We ought 
 to learn that there is a wider sense of unity than that 
 which we learned in connection with our experience 
 of the world without life. An abstract unity was, 
 for the most part, quite sufficient for our purpose in 
 dealing with problems of physics or chemistry. No 
 doubt in chemistry we had to learn that two and two 
 did not always make four, sometimes they made one. 
 We learned also that a number of separate elements, 
 sometimes a large number, come together to make 
 one. But it was still possible to consider that the 
 unity was constituted by the cooperation of the parts. 
 It did tax our power of conception to think them so, 
 and it was difficult to think of the chemical fact that 
 a number of elements present in the compound in 
 exactly the same proportions, and in the same quanti- 
 ties, should produce bodies so unlike as they some- 
 
54 THEISM 
 
 times do. The facts of isomerism show that this is so. 
 Thus gradually we came to attach a wider meaning 
 to unity. Then came life to give us a still wider con- 
 ception to unity, that is, if we are to be true to the 
 facts of the case. Now we have to learn to think of 
 a unity holding together many elements in a system, 
 maintaining that unity while the materials compos- 
 ing it come and go, maintaining that unity in the 
 midst of changes within itself and in relation to its 
 environment, and able not only to maintain itself but 
 to reproduce other organisms after its likeness. 
 
 To take into our minds the possibility of such a 
 unity as we have described indicated a great advance 
 in our power of thought. And I for one do not 
 wonder that men have found it difficult to make the 
 advance. There were difficulties from the side of 
 science, and difficulties from the side of metaphysics. 
 Science was unwilling to widen its terms, and meta- 
 physics was unwilling to admit the possibility of a 
 unity that was not absolute, or rather to admit any 
 unity save that of the absolute. The metaphysical 
 difficulties have found expression in Mr. Bradley's 
 "Appearance and Reality." Without entering into 
 the metaphysical difficulties at this time, we may say 
 that, so far at least as biology is concerned, we must 
 learn to think in conceptions which, as far as possi- 
 ble, will grasp the real ongoing of that about which 
 we think. We must think of a unity, the parts of 
 which are what they are only in relation to one 
 
INORGANIC WORLD A PREPARATION FOR LIFE 55 
 
 another and to the whole. It is not allowable to 
 take one in abstraction from another, or to think 
 of it as if independent. We may try to do so if 
 we please, but at the cost of moving away from the 
 concrete reality which we seek to understand. We 
 may speak, if we choose, of an environment and of 
 an organism, and speak of them as brought together, 
 but we must constantly remind ourselves that this 
 is only our way of speaking, for these are only given 
 in relation to one another. We may also speak of 
 parts of the organism, and break it up into aspects, 
 but that again is only our way of speaking, and we 
 have to strive to think things together, as we find 
 them exist together in our experience. 
 
 When we have won this new experience, and have 
 widened our notions to correspond, we go back to 
 look at the universe in a new light. It is a universe 
 of a new kind containing in it a kind of existence not 
 recognized before. It is also a universe that has 
 made a greater demand on our intelligence, and 
 called for a greater intellectual effort to understand 
 it. The ongoing of it is more complex, and the 
 wonder of it infinitely greater. Also the relative 
 independence of what is in the world is greater. 
 Here is something that lives, maintains itself, sub- 
 dues alien matter, and turns it to its own uses, that 
 grows, and produces other things that live and grow, 
 which is so made that it is made to make itself. Its 
 maintenance depends on its own activity. Shall we 
 
56 THEISM 
 
 not say that this is a greater world than that dis- 
 closed to us in the worlds revealed to us in all the 
 sidereal heavens? If quality rather than bulk is 
 to be our criterion, then the smallest speck of life 
 may have more significance than a world of lifeless 
 matter. It was customary not long ago to speak of 
 the structureless cell as the characteristic of living 
 matter. All living animals, it was found, could be 
 traced back to a single cell, and from this cell by 
 repeated division all the component cells are derived. 
 It was also found that certain animals remain single 
 cells all their lives, and others became multicellular, 
 and this evidently is one of the most important dis- 
 tinctions in zoology. It was thought that it was 
 easier to bring zoological phenomena under the 
 general conception of evolution if a beginning was 
 made from the simplicity of a structureless cell, and 
 by successive differentiations and integrations follow 
 its growth until it arrived at the adult stage. But a 
 change has come over the spirit of that dream. The 
 structureless cell has vanished, and recent investiga- 
 tion reveals innumerable complexities even within 
 the single-celled animal. 
 
 Our present interest in the cell theory is not to 
 describe it, even in the most general terms, but to 
 take that which lies at the very beginning of life, 
 the single cell, and to see what a problem it is to 
 think it. We may take from a master in this depart- 
 ment of science the following : " It would appear 
 
INORGANIC WORLD A PREPARATION FOR LIFE 57 
 
 from these more recent researches, of which time 
 has only permitted me to give a brief and most 
 imperfect summary, that the cell theory, great and 
 important as it is most undoubtedly, is rather the 
 commencement of a great movement, a fresh 
 starting-point from which to begin investigations 
 anew, than a complete scheme, or final explanation ; 
 and the one great lesson for us to learn is that pro- 
 cesses of apparently the simplest kind are really of an 
 extremely complicated nature, and will well repay the 
 most minute and attentive study; for a right under- 
 standing of the changes that occur during the act 
 of division of an ordinary epithelial cell, and of the 
 causes determining those changes, would throw most 
 welcome light on the more complicated processes ac- 
 companying the ripening and fertilization of the egg, 
 which microscopists of all nationalities are at present 
 studying with such intense earnestness." (" Biological 
 Lectures," by Arthur Milnes Marshall, pp. 190-1.) 
 Thus if we look at the simple cell as it is in itself 
 at the earliest moment, we see a most complicated 
 structure, and the structure is held together in a 
 unity. When we have regard to its life history and 
 to the changes through which it passes in the course 
 of its growth, — and all these changes have also to 
 be regarded as a unity, — then we would do well to 
 revise our conception of a unity and its possibilities. 
 These qualities, relations, processes, are there as 
 one, and it would be well for us to recognize them 
 
5 8 THEISM 
 
 as one. If our thinking is to have a relation to 
 reality, we must not substitute a mere aspect of the 
 whole for the complicated process which actually 
 goes on. The mere word "cell" must not take the 
 place of the fact, nor ought we to break up the fact 
 into a number of separate processes, select one of 
 these as cause, and make the other results of that 
 one we perhaps selected in a somewhat arbitrary 
 way ; for the cell is there with so many relations, 
 qualities, properties, all belonging together, and form- 
 ing a real unity. We shall find as we proceed that 
 we are under the necessity of enlarging our concep- 
 tions of a unity, and we shall be under the necessity 
 of thinking, or trying to think, of the many in the 
 light of one. That is actually what nature is doing, 
 and we must remind ourselves of the fact, if we are 
 to understand nature. Thus we dwell on the sim- 
 plest form of life, and speak of it even to weariness, 
 just to make ourselves realize how great is the 
 problem that it represents to our thought. 
 
 If we have been able to think a single cell in 
 its isolation, its simplicity, and complexity, we must 
 remember that we have done so by a process of 
 abstraction. We neglected everything, and fixed our 
 attention on the single cell. That is to say, we neg- 
 lected its relation to the environment, the conditions 
 of the world which made its existence possible as a 
 living cell, the past history of time and its changes, 
 and before our thinking could represent the reality 
 
INORGANIC WORLD A PREPARATION FOR LIFE 59 
 
 these relations should be restored. But things are 
 so in their reality, they are placed so in time and 
 space, and are so related to all else that the history 
 of a single cell implies the former history of the uni- 
 verse. We toil after this in vain, but even the dis- 
 tant glimpses we obtain of reality suggest that there 
 is a thinker whose intellectual processes are adequate 
 to the perfect understanding of the universe as it is, 
 and as it works. 
 
 Looking at the universe from the point of view we 
 have now attained, we see it is a unity which has life 
 in it. We see also that, while we may think of the 
 cell in abstraction, we are immediately reminded that 
 the abstraction is ours. The life of the cell is in 
 relation to the whole, and is one phase of the life that 
 is in existence. And the world as a whole is some- 
 thing more than a system of mechanical forces, it 
 has in it the principle of life. As our argument 
 unfolds itself we shall see how much is implied in this 
 great fact. We shall find in connection with life as 
 it unfolds itself within the world, there are many new 
 qualities brought within our view, which will help us 
 to know something of the nature of the living power 
 which, so far, we have already come to know. We 
 have seen that the world is both organic and inor- 
 ganic, and that these are one world, not tied together 
 merely as cause and effect, but standing in recipro- 
 cal relation to one another. The advent of life is an 
 unveiling of the power that is at work in the world, 
 
60 THEISM 
 
 and if in its simplest form life presents so grave a 
 problem to our intelligence, what will the fulness of 
 life present to our view ? We may not answer that 
 question at this stage, but we may again lay stress 
 on the fact that the advent of life has made known 
 to us a new world, and a world that has brought with 
 it its own method and action, and calls on us to meet 
 it with a widening of our methods and actions if 
 our intelligence is to keep pace with the working of 
 the world. 
 
 The one cell which remains a single cell through 
 its life history has already presented us with prob- 
 lems sufficiently hard and perplexing. What shall 
 we then say of the advance from unicellular to multi- 
 cellular being, which has been called one of the most 
 important and significant steps taken by living being ? 
 The single cell which, be its origin what it may, 
 proceeds on its course, passes beyond the stage of 
 selfhood, and becomes a being of many cells. By 
 modifications of itself, by splitting up into many cells, 
 it grows ever more and more complex. It sets par- 
 ticular cells to specific work. It differentiates the 
 structure so as to make each structure fit for certain 
 functions. Some become bone cells, some muscles ; 
 some assume one form, some another, for the division 
 is endless. I do not enumerate them, as they are 
 accessible to every one, and my purpose is not to set 
 forth the details, but to look at them in the light 
 they cast on our thesis. As we pass from the being 
 
INORGANIC WORLD A PREPARATION FOR LIFE 6 1 
 
 of one cell to the being formed of many cells, differ- 
 entiated and integrated to meet a larger purpose, we 
 pass from the thought of a unity of comparatively 
 simple functions to one of a very great complexity. 
 It is as if we passed from the study of a single indi- 
 vidual to the study of a community made up of many 
 individuals. All the individuals are of the same kind, 
 and arise in the same way from modifications of the 
 original cell, but they become most diverse in kind, 
 and perform functions of the most unlike order. 
 While each one of the number becomes what it is, 
 and sets itself to its own individual work, it lives and 
 acts in harmony with all the others, and in subor- 
 dination to the whole organism. There is no com- 
 munity so well-ordered, so law-abiding, as is the 
 community of cells which makes up the substance of 
 a healthy organism. 
 
 As we follow on in our thought the history of the 
 organism, we see other facts quite as striking. It is 
 not merely a community of cells working together 
 that we see, it is a community the individual mem- 
 bers of which are ever changing. The cells, or the 
 matter of which they are composed, pass and a new 
 set takes their place. The organism is ever prepar- 
 ing, out of matter which it assimilates, the new cells 
 which take the place of the old whose energy has 
 been expended in doing the work of the organism, 
 and the new cells seem to serve themselves heirs to 
 the experience of the old, and the work goes on. 
 
62 THEISM 
 
 The process of training seems to be very speedily 
 accomplished, for in this institution there seem to 
 be no dull or self-willed pupils. 
 
 Not only has the organism the property of making 
 alien matter a part of itself, and of making it serve 
 the purposes of the organism, but there are even 
 more surprising transformations still. Hitherto we 
 have looked at the organism as a unity that maintains 
 itself, sustains itself, and holds itself together during 
 the time of its life history. We must look at it from 
 another side. For we find that it has established 
 certain fixed ways of communication with the envi- 
 ronment, and these ways are made by a specializa- 
 tion of its own substance. One of these ways was 
 implied in what was said when we spoke of its power 
 of taking in alien matter and transforming it to its 
 own uses. There are ways of which we have not 
 yet spoken which enhance our conception of the vast 
 complexity of an organism. It lays hold of the rays 
 of light and transforms the undulations of the ether 
 into a subjective state which we call vision. It seizes 
 the vibrations of the atmosphere, and they, also, take 
 a subjective form, and sound becomes hearing. It 
 recognizes tastes, smells, resistance, and these exter- 
 nal movements are turned into something altogether 
 different, and yet related to the qualities of the envi- 
 ronment so that these subjective states are a guide 
 to the action which the organism should take for its 
 own maintenance. Still further these inner states 
 
INORGANIC WORLD A PREPARATION FOR LIFE 63 
 
 of the organism, related to states of the environment, 
 give rise to something which seems to have no cor- 
 respondence to anything outside of the organism. 
 Sensations which are related to particular states of 
 certain definite organs can be understood by refer- 
 ence to a definite organ of sense. But there is feel- 
 ing which seems to need no definite organ for its 
 existence ; it is neither sight, taste, touch, smell, nor 
 hearing, it is localized nowhere ; as Sir William Ham- 
 ilton said, it is subjectively subjective. 
 
 Without entering into the psychology of feeling 
 here, — confessedly the most difficult question in psy- 
 chology, — it is sufficient for me at present to call 
 attention to the fact that feeling seems to be the 
 accompaniment of life, if ,not universally, at least of 
 life which has attained a certain measure of organiza- 
 tion. We have therefore to add to our view of or- 
 ganization this subjective side in order to have a view 
 of the manifoldness of this unity. It cannot be un- 
 derstood ; it cannot, even, be stated, without a refer- 
 ence to purpose. For the biologist always speaks of 
 the organism as adapted to the end of living, as sur- 
 viving in the struggle for existence, and in so doing 
 he has given it a meaning other than that which be- 
 longs to a series of physical processes. Such tele- 
 ological references imply feeling, and effort, and 
 impulse as the result of feeling. It may be that the 
 explanation of the maintenance and striving of the 
 organism does not admit of explanation without a 
 
64 THEISM 
 
 reference to the subjective state of feeling, which is 
 the source of all its effort. At all events there must 
 be a centre to which all the states of the organism 
 must be referred, and from which all its actions go 
 forth. 
 
 We have come thus far under the guidance of 
 science. We see an organism at work, we see it 
 making use of the environment for its own purpose, 
 we see it holding together the various elements of 
 matter of which materially it is composed, keeping 
 them under its control while they are in its service, 
 and as we turn to the inward condition of the or- 
 ganism itself, we see a new, subjective world of sensa- 
 tion and feeling unlike anything which we found in 
 the world of matter or even in the lower forms of life. 
 At all events if feeling is in the lower forms of life it 
 is so feebly manifested that we are unable to recognize 
 it. So we come to the conclusion that this is a uni- 
 verse in which there is not only power, intelligence, 
 life, but we are able to recognize that there is feeling 
 in the universe. Again, we must widen our concep- 
 tion of reality, and call on thought for a greater effort 
 than before, if our thought is to grasp reality. As 
 yet we may not be able to interpret rightly the phe- 
 nomena of power, intelligence, life, or feeling which 
 have met our view as we ascended the stream of a 
 developing universe. We may need a principle of 
 interpretation which has not yet been manifested, 
 but at all events we see so far the facts which need 
 
INORGANIC WORLD A PREPARATION FOR LIFE 65 
 
 explanation. We may not understand feeling till 
 we see it as it exists in a self-conscious being, or any 
 principle of the lower world until we see it in its 
 highest relations. The source of explanation and the 
 principle of explanation may not lie in the beginnings 
 of things, but in the end. However that may be, let 
 us recognize what has been found by us up to this 
 point, and follow on to the larger issues yet to come. 
 
 F 
 
Ill 
 
 LIFE: ITS GENESIS, GROWTH, AND 
 MEANING 
 
 To enable us to realize the complexity of an organ- 
 ism, we have only to recall the fact that naturalists 
 are constrained not only to speak of the whole system 
 of a living being, but also of a number of systems 
 within that system. They speak of the alimentary, 
 the circulatory, the nervous, the motor, the sensitive, 
 and the reproductive systems. Each of these is suffi- 
 ciently definite to demand a separate treatment. Each, 
 also, has a distinctive character, and as set forth in 
 the text-books one is apt to forget its relation to 
 the other systems with which it is coordinated in the 
 unity of the organism. At the conclusion of the 
 section on the structure of living things Messrs. 
 Sedgwick and Wilson say : " Up to this point we 
 have considered living organisms from an anatomical 
 and analytical standpoint, and have observed their 
 natural subdivisions into organs, tissues, and cells. 
 We have now only to remark that these parts are 
 mutually interdependent, and that the organism as a 
 whole is greater than any of its parts. Precisely as 
 a chronometer is superior to an aggregate of wheels 
 
 66 
 
LIFE 67 
 
 and springs, so a living organism is superior in the 
 solidarity of its parts to a mere aggregate of organs, 
 tissues, and cells." (Sedgwick and Wilson's " Intro- 
 duction to General Biology,'' 2d edition, p. 19.) 
 Again: "The process of cell division does not in this 
 case go so far as complete cell separation, and the 
 cells do not acquire a complete individuality. They 
 do, it is true, acquire a certain independence of struc- 
 ture and function ; and their individual characteristics 
 may even depart widely from those of neighbouring 
 cells. Nevertheless they remain closely united by 
 either material or physiological bonds to form one 
 body. The body is not, however, to be regarded as 
 merely an assemblage of independent, individual cells. 
 The Body is the Individual; its more or less per- 
 fect division into cells is only a basis for the physio- 
 logical division of labour, of which cell differentiation 
 is the outward expression." (p. 156.) 
 
 In this singularly able and instructive book we 
 find stress laid on the unity of the organism, and 
 those who study biology from a wider view than the 
 biological find themselves greatly helped by the dis- 
 tinguished authors. At all events my own debt of 
 gratitude to them is great. I needed help to think 
 the organism, and help was sought by me from all 
 sources, and I was not able to see the manifold re- 
 flected into unity till I read the book to which I refer. 
 They enabled me to see that the body is the individ- 
 ual, and the unity of the body is not to be lost sight 
 
68 THEISM 
 
 of in the multiplicity of details. It is not explained 
 by the cooperation of the parts, rather it is the ex- 
 planation of them. The meaning of a unity is thus 
 growing on our hands, and the end is not yet ; it will 
 grow to larger issues still. Meanwhile we look at it 
 once more, and we see not merely a series of cells 
 in constant movement and change, but we see system 
 within system, or system beside system, all working 
 together in harmonious order, and all the systems 
 have a meaning only in relation to the system of the 
 whole of which they form a part, and which is more 
 than the sum of them all. The adequate way of 
 treating the organism would be to think it together, 
 even as, in fact, it is held together in actual existence. 
 This may be too great a task for our power of think- 
 ing, but it is a task which has been done. A thought, 
 an idea, is in the organism, for the organism is there, 
 exists in its manifoldness and unity, as an actual fact 
 in this world of space and time. If we cannot grasp 
 it in its greatness, at least let us acknowledge it as 
 a goal to our thought, and seek to grasp it at least 
 in outline. 
 
 One does not find much help from the authorities 
 on biology in the attempt to think the organism in 
 its unity, nor much practical recognition of the unity 
 of the organism. Rather we find a constant attempt 
 to evade the difficulty of the problem and a tendency 
 to substitute something more easily grasped. Huxley 
 calls the body "an aggregation of quasi-indepen- 
 
LIFE 69 
 
 dent cells," and Virchow says "the organism is 
 not a unity, but is a company or rather a society." 
 And Professor Geddes says, " For actual biological 
 purposes the life of an organism is the sum of 
 its functions, internal and external." (" Chambers's 
 Encyclopaedia," art. Biology?) The problem of life 
 is attacked now from the side of the cell, now from 
 the tissue, and again from the protoplasm, and the 
 point of view varies according to the aspect in which 
 it is viewed. But from biologists generally we get 
 but little help in our desire to study the individual 
 as a unity. Every theory seems to move by the 
 disintegration of the individual into self-efficient and 
 unrelated parts. Sometimes these are physical or 
 chemical elements, sometimes a company of cells, and 
 sometimes physiological units. So much stress is 
 laid on the similarity, and on the independence of 
 cells, that the individual disappears. The true indi- 
 viduals appear to be the cells, and the organism 
 seems to be explained as a result of the behaviour 
 of the cells as they grow, reproduce, and differ- 
 entiate themselves. But the relation of whole and 
 part cannot be studied by the microscope. If we 
 are to get at the secret of the organism, we must 
 study it in relation to the organism, and look at all 
 the qualities as properties of the organism. " Of this 
 organization itself as such — that is, of the mechanical 
 apparatus it presents to us — 'the microscope tells us 
 nothing whatever. The microscope only enables us 
 
20 THEISM 
 
 to see a single cell, a single germinal particle in con- 
 nection with more or less of its own formed material 
 — a single coral, so to speak, and the polype that 
 died into it ; it tells us nothing whatever of the vast 
 machine which these polypes have all unconsciously 
 built up with their coral. The mighty and complex 
 frame of man is, after all, despite its innumerable 
 parts, a unity ; all these parts but go toward that unity, 
 are sublated into it. Now, what of all that does mi- 
 croscopic observation tell us ? Why, simply nothing. 
 Myriads of miserable Egyptians carried stones to 
 the pyramid, but no microscopic watching of any of 
 these, stone and all, would ever explain the pyramid 
 itself — its many to a one." (Hutchison Stirling, 
 "As Regards Protoplasm," p. 75.) 
 
 The substitution of the idea of a community for 
 that of a unity seems to give an easier problem for 
 solution, because a community is thought of as a 
 loose and apparently fortuitous concourse of individ- 
 uals, each independent of all the others. Whether 
 society can be regarded as a crowd and not as a real 
 unity is another question on which something may be 
 said later, but from a certain standpoint society may 
 be looked at as a crowd of independent or quasi- 
 independent units. If this is the sense attached to 
 the term, it is a term quite inadequate to express the 
 unity of the body, and can only mislead. For biology 
 it may suffice to say that the life of an organism is 
 the sum of its functions, but for real thought the 
 
LIFE yi 
 
 organism is more than a sum. It is something that 
 holds together the whole ongoing of the organic quali- 
 ties, functions, etc., and makes them work together 
 for the aims and purposes of the organism. Every 
 cell, while it is within the body, is in the service of 
 the organism, and its modifications, its changes, its 
 food, its waste, its very form, are determined for it by 
 the whole. It is maintained only while it is within 
 the body, when removed from the organism it perishes 
 and passes to a lower chemical condition. 
 
 Thus, also, we must think of the variations to which 
 the organism is subject. They cannot be arbitrary 
 nor can they be unlimited. For the organism is so 
 tied together that a variation in one part gives rise to 
 a number of correlated variations so great as to be 
 beyond reckoning. The supposition of innumerable 
 variations is a hypothesis that has bulked largely in 
 the theory of evolution, and it seems to me to be 
 greatly exaggerated. Confining our view to a single 
 organism, it certainly does not admit of indefinite 
 variation. It is not my intention, however, to criticise 
 the adequacy of the multitudinous machinery which 
 has been invented to make the theory of evolution 
 intelligible. For from my point of view, at present, 
 I have no interest in such criticism. I am willing to 
 accept the fact of evolution, though I do not think 
 the factors of evolution have been discovered as yet. 
 We know that life appeared on the earth in a simple 
 form, that it proceeded in forms which grew from 
 
72 THEISM 
 
 more to more, that there is a gradation and a se- 
 quence in the appearance of life on the earth, and 
 that the latest form of life is the highest form that 
 has yet appeared. So far agreement reigns ; further 
 agreement may be attained if we say that each lower 
 form of life precedes the higher in point of time, in 
 order of organization, and, perhaps, also in causal 
 preparation. It may be that each form was evolved 
 from a lower by successive modifications, and that all 
 forms of life are organically and causally connected 
 with the first forms which appeared. Species may 
 be not fixed and unchangeable, but subject to a law 
 of progress and change. If this be so, all the refer- 
 ence it has to my argument is to make me widen my 
 view of unity, and to call on me to grasp, if I can, a 
 larger manifold in a single unity. It has been diffi- 
 cult enough to grasp the conception of a single 
 organism, so complex have we found it to be. We 
 have found also that we were ever trying to substitute 
 an abstract conception for the concrete reality. To 
 what straits shall we be driven when we find ourselves 
 in the presence of a vast reality persisting through 
 the ages, growing, changing, ever in adaptation with 
 its environment, yet ever fixing itself in relatively 
 permanent forms, and always in active movement. 
 We might predict that we shall have a larger crop of 
 abstractions than before, since the phenomena are 
 more complex. And so we have. Heredity, varia- 
 tion, the struggle for existence, natural selection, the 
 
LIFE 73 
 
 survival of the fittest, and a number of other phrases 
 appear, some of which have passed into' common speech. 
 
 As I said, I am not concerned to criticise these 
 terms and what they stand for, except so far as they 
 have become the symbols of a mechanical evolution ; 
 and thus tend to make mind derivative and second- 
 ary. Some of them seem to be without meaning and 
 some seem to be mere expressions. Take the sur- 
 vival of the fittest, and, looking at the world of life 
 as it is to-day, ask what it means. It really tells 
 us nothing, affords us no criterion of life, gives no 
 intimation of progress. Everything that survives is 
 the fittest whether it be a unicellular being, or multi- 
 cellular; whether it be a degraded form, or a form 
 that is in the exercise of all its functions, with all 
 its structures perfect. It adds nothing to our know- 
 ledge, nor does it give us any insight into the mean- 
 ing of the changes that life has passed through. 
 
 Natural selection seems to be a name for a vast 
 complexity of conditions to which life is subject, and 
 now one and again another is to the front as it is 
 most needed. It has sometimes to become more 
 particular, and becomes cell selection, physiological 
 selection, sexual selection, germinal selection, as the 
 more general formula becomes clearly inadequate 
 for its purpose. It is applied, too, for the purpose 
 of explaining the advance of life into higher forms. 
 It cannot, at the same time, and with the same 
 machinery, explain the persistency of the lower and 
 
74 THEISM 
 
 the advent of the higher forms of life. If there is a 
 struggle for existence among the lower forms of life, 
 how is it that they remained the same for all time, 
 made no change, and have had no variation so far 
 as we know? If there is no struggle for existence 
 among the lower organisms, there is an utter absence 
 of the motive for change which underlies the Dar- 
 winian hypothesis. It does not seem possible to 
 find occasion for any advance from the simplicity 
 of the immortal single celled beings to the danger- 
 ous struggle for existence that, according to Darwin, 
 awaits the higher organisms. The single cell has 
 every advantage; it is first in the field, and it per- 
 sists still. Why did some cells become multicellu- 
 lar ? The Darwinian machinery is silent. 
 
 Many other things might be said of the inade- 
 quacy of natural selection. Indeed, many things 
 have been said, and these have, for the most part, 
 been ignored by the thorough-going advocates of 
 natural selection. Though it has been clearly 
 shown that natural selection cannot originate any- 
 thing, yet men continue to speak as if natural selec- 
 tion could do this, that, and the other thing. Though 
 it appears that its function is negative, the killing 
 off of the unfit, yet positive functions of the most 
 productive sort are ascribed to it. At one time, it is 
 said, natural selection does produce species, and with 
 the next breath it has to wait for the appearance of 
 a variation on which it may work. 
 
LIFE 75 
 
 Some contend that natural selection is sufficient 
 to account for the origin of species ; some, that it 
 has a place along with other factors in the develop- 
 ment of new forms of life ; and some say that its 
 function is mainly negative, inhibiting certain 
 departures from the type, and so it is a some- 
 thing that makes for the stability of species. But 
 underlying all the variations of the meaning of 
 natural selection is the conception of the struggle 
 for existence and fortuitous variation in all direc- 
 tions. It is a grewsome picture that they present 
 to us under the name "the struggle for existence," 
 and the demand for variation is so extensive that to 
 comply with it would land us in a world governed 
 only by chance. To speak first of the struggle for 
 existence, and to speak with all brevity. It is most 
 extensive. It is a struggle between organism and 
 organism, between species and species, and between 
 species and environment in all cases. The parts of 
 a creature are also represented as struggling with one 
 another, one set of cells struggling against another 
 set, and food for brain cells may mean lack of food 
 for motor cells, and so on. The idea of struggle has 
 been followed out in all directions, and there is no 
 possible relation between one part of the body and 
 another part, between one organism and another, 
 between one species and another, but may easily 
 be presented as a struggle. Struggle thus presented 
 tends to become an empty form, 
 
J6 THEISM 
 
 Of course it is quite easy to present things so, 
 and it is as useless as it is easy. But the presenta- 
 tion of the struggle is possible because we first take 
 out of their relations the beings which struggle, 
 look at them abstractly, and then seek to conceive 
 of them as struggling to get back into relations. 
 But we do not find any being subsisting out of rela- 
 tion to other beings. Relations and conditions may 
 be set forth as if they were a struggle, and, indeed, 
 a goodly number of the pictures of struggle are 
 just the relations in which the creature stands, and 
 the conditions of its existence without which it could 
 not be. Neglecting the other aspects of struggle, 
 let us look at the main picture. It has never yet 
 been shown that a species is more numerous than 
 can be supported by its means of subsistence, and 
 in fact it does not seem ever to approach the limit 
 of its subsistence. Many imaginary features have 
 been introduced into the picture. The life of a 
 species is looked at as something that strives to 
 expand in all directions, and this tendency to expan- 
 sion tends to bring it into collision with other beings, 
 and being brought into collision they strive for 
 advantage, and the one that obtains the mastery 
 obtains the prize. Every organism is thus on the 
 watch for any modification which may give it the 
 mastery, and having found the modification it per- 
 petuates it. Such is the picture presented to us. 
 
 Of the struggle we shall only say that it is universal, 
 
LIFE 77 
 
 at least it is represented as if it were. But general 
 laws do not account for particular effects. What is 
 needed is a knowledge of the specific causes which 
 here or there place a check on the expansion of 
 a species, and this is what is never forthcoming. 
 There must be limits to the increase of a species, 
 and Mr. Darwin in this relation says, " If asked 
 how this is, one immediately replies that it is deter- 
 mined by some slight difference in climate, food, or 
 the number of the enemies ; yet how rarely, if ever, 
 we can point out the precise cause or manner of the 
 check.'' It reminds us of the favourite argument 
 of another evolutionist who when he is confronted 
 with a change which he cannot particularly explain, 
 says what has happened must have happened, other- 
 wise force would have ceased to persist. Such an 
 explanation is purely formal. If the struggle were a 
 fact of natural history, it would be quite easy to point 
 to the struggle, and to indicate in detail the precise 
 cause or manner of the check. 
 
 Apart from its environment and the conditions of 
 its existence a living creature is for us inconceivable. 
 By turning the creature into an abstraction it is pos- 
 sible to represent it as struggling with its environ- 
 ment, but the relation to its environment is simply 
 that which makes its life possible. Similarly we may 
 make every relation in which it stands to other beings, 
 and every quality it has, a symbol of the struggle. 
 But these relations, conditions, qualities, may be pre- 
 
78 THEISM 
 
 sented, and more truly, from another point of view. 
 All other existence is needed in order that this par- 
 ticular being should exist in this time, place, and in 
 this particular form. For this end the sun must 
 shine, the rain must fall, seedtime and harvest, sum- 
 mer and winter, must come and go, the tides ebb and 
 flow, the grass grow, and other living things labour 
 that this form of being may have a life of its own. 
 So easy is it to turn the struggle inside out, and turn 
 it into a set of enabling conditions without which this 
 form of life would not be possible. 
 
 As to the demand for indefinite variation which is 
 necessary to provide the material on which natural 
 selection may work, we need not say much about it. 
 The time of such indefinite variation, if it ever was, 
 is long past. Living matter has been sorted into 
 definite lots, and species has been pretty well fixed 
 for a long time. The limits of the variation are very 
 definite as far as present species are concerned. 
 Whales do not vary in the direction of feathers, nor 
 do birds tend to vary in the direction of fins. Varia- 
 tion might have been somewhat indefinite long ago, 
 but species vary now only within very definite limits. 
 In fact, variable life is in the same condition as the pre- 
 chemical matter of Sir Norman Lockyer — it has all 
 been worked up into definite forms. Indeed, if it 
 were not for the desire to avoid the introduction of 
 anything like guidance into the conception of the 
 causes which account for the phenomena of life, it 
 
LIFE 79 
 
 would have been a more likely account of the facts 
 to suppose that the variations were definite and not 
 indefinite. That something like guidance is needed 
 is very evident, and from one point of view natural 
 selection gives that guidance; while, on the other 
 hand, natural selection is itself nothing but a set of 
 conditions which may be dealt with quantitatively 
 and mechanically. It keeps the word of promise to 
 the ear, by showing us a principle at work which 
 seems to lead life on to greater and greater issues ; it 
 breaks the word of promise by showing us that any 
 kind of guidance is altogether absent. Professor 
 Poulton, in criticism of the hypothesis of physiological 
 selection of the late Mr. Romanes, says (he is speaking 
 of fertility and infertility) : " Mutual infertility is due 
 to a single and uniform constitution rigidly kept within 
 the narrowest limits, while a minute change of consti- 
 tution in any direction means infertility. Mutual infer- 
 tility is, in fact, but the single external indication of 
 numberless changes of constitution. The necessary 
 precision of adjustment of the male to the female germ- 
 substance is only kept up in the species by unremitting 
 selection, and there is no cause for surprise that it 
 should cease when selection is no longer forthcoming 
 for its support." Again, " Mutual fertility depends 
 upon the exact relationship of two extraordinarily 
 complex bodies, the germ cells of male and female ; it 
 depends upon a reciprocal adjustment of almost infi- 
 nite precision." (" Nature," December 8, 1898, p. 122.) 
 
80 THEISM 
 
 This is quoted in order that we may have a con- 
 ception of the marvellous things done by natural 
 selection. Adjustments are kept up by unremitting 
 selection, and under that selection a "reciprocal 
 adjustment of almost infinite precision " is accom- 
 plished. Yet there is no sufficient agency set forth 
 by which this work of infinite precision can be done. 
 When we ask what it is, we are presented with a 
 bewildering variety of conditions, some of which are 
 highly problematical, and most of them vague and 
 indefinite. At one time the struggle is set forth as 
 universal, and again it is intermittent, for Professor 
 Poulton speaks of a state in which " selection is no 
 longer forthcoming." An agency so vague, and so 
 indefinite, which at one time acts, and at another 
 time ceases to act, which is now set forth as a con- 
 servative agent, and again as the most active power 
 in revolution, ought at any rate to be sufficiently 
 described. And this, we submit, has never been 
 done. 
 
 There is, indeed, a selective power in life, there is 
 a power at work of almost infinite precision, there 
 is unremitting selection in the maintenance of what 
 is gained so that there may not be retrogression, and 
 also unremitting attention to the movement of life 
 in relation to wider unities and large meanings ; 
 but the question is, can you rationally predicate such 
 qualities of a series or congeries of varying agencies 
 hypostatized under the name of natural selection ? 
 
LIFE 8 1 
 
 At no time in the history of thought, or in the history 
 of science, has there been so much attention given to 
 the magnificent adjustments of life and the infinite 
 precision of every one of them. We may gratefully 
 acknowledge our indebtedness to the advocates of 
 organic evolution for the wonderful light they have 
 cast on the unity of life and on its endless diversity. 
 We gratefully acknowledge that they have enabled 
 us to see a much more wonderful variety of adjust- 
 ments than the older teleology ever dreamed of. 
 They have constrained the older teleologists to admit 
 that the notion of an external artificer is no longer 
 adequate. We cannot now think of an organism 
 being put together as a watch is. On the other 
 hand, they must also admit the consequences of their 
 own work. When they call attention to the infinite 
 precision of the adjustments of life, and dwell on the 
 unremitting selection they find at work, they cannot 
 dwell to any purpose, as in other relations they do, 
 on the wastefulness of life, nor compare the steps 
 that led to an adjustment, to the process of firing 
 a thousand shots at an object, and hitting it only 
 once. Infinite precision in one point is scarcely 
 consistent with such bad shooting. 
 
 It does not yet appear what mode of speech they 
 ought to depart from. From one point of view such 
 aimless shooting is essential to their theory. For 
 on their view such profusion of experiments is 
 necessary to afford them an occasion for hitting on 
 
82 THEISM 
 
 that happy accident which has a chance of per- 
 manence. Nature tries and tries again, and after 
 innumerable failures, hits on a success, and then she 
 buries her failures and goes on her way rejoicing. 
 We prefer to follow them as they point out the 
 infinite precision of these adjustments ; we decline 
 to believe them when they say that these have 
 emerged as the outcome of an infinite series of 
 trials and errors. If these adjustments are there 
 now in almost infinite precision, we naturally think 
 that the steps which led up to them were not lack- 
 ing in precision. If the outcome of the process is 
 full of such wonderful interrelations as are de- 
 scribed in every book that treats of evolution, surely 
 we may infer that the processes are also intelligible. 
 At all events we are justified in withholding our 
 assent to the production of a world of life, out of 
 processes in which no intelligible process can be 
 discovered, at least until we have overwhelming 
 evidence for such a conception. Evidence is not 
 likely to be forthcoming, for nature has buried her 
 failures. Meanwhile, we follow the guidance of 
 those who unfold for us the history of life, and 
 we leave on one side all the machinery which they 
 have manufactured for the purpose of explaining 
 the progress of life and the origin of species. 
 These two things are by no means organically 
 united, and that hypothesis is not the only, or the 
 best one, for the explanation of the facts. 
 
LIFE 83 
 
 Historically, then, life appears as a simple cell, 
 and in that form it is recognized in those geological 
 strata in which it first appeared. Life goes on 
 and appears in more and more complex forms. 
 It is not necessary to enumerate these. Nor is 
 it needful to enumerate the systems of classifica- 
 tion, nor the species which have appeared in the 
 history of the earth. Soon living things appear in 
 various forms which have a relative permanence, 
 for some of the earlier forms are here at this hour. 
 The persistence of the earlier species goes on side 
 by side with the introduction of newer and more 
 highly evolved species, until the tree of life puts 
 forth its greatest and most evolved fruit. There is 
 permanence, there is gradation, there is progress ; 
 and all these are combined in the view of life 
 disclosed to us by evolution. As to the kinds of 
 living beings recognized by zoologists, we do not 
 find agreement among them. " They all recognize," 
 says Professor MacBride, " a certain number of 
 phyla. Each phylum includes a group of animals 
 about whose relation to one another no one enter- 
 tains a doubt. Each zoologist, however, has his 
 own idea as to the relationship which the various 
 phyla bear to one another." (Professor MacBride 
 in Spencer's " Biology," Vol. I., p. 386, edition 1898.) 
 He enumerates seventeen phyla from the protozoa 
 up to the chordata, which last includes the verte- 
 brata. 
 
84 THEISM 
 
 As we follow the description of the various phyla 
 from the protozoa, both with regard to their peculiar 
 characteristics, and with regard to the order of 
 their appearance in time, we are struck with the 
 contrast between the clear, sharp discrimination of 
 each from each, and with the definiteness of this 
 work ; and on the other hand, with the vague 
 speculative account of the manner of the origin of 
 each phylum, and the causes of their modifications 
 into the form they now have. In the one case 
 we have to do with the intelligible marks and con- 
 ditions of a definite existence, distinguished from all 
 other indefinite modes of life ; in the other with the 
 attempt to derive conditioned existence from a con- 
 geries of accidents, which makes any ordered out- 
 come unintelligible. One cannot make such a 
 transition. From intelligible results one can argue 
 only to intelligible causes and processes. But this 
 is not the only sphere in which men strive to make 
 non-intelligence do the work of intelligence. 
 
 Each order of being is presented to us as being 
 with a determinate kind of existence, conditioned 
 in time and place, definitely related to other beings 
 of the same kind and of other kinds. There is 
 nothing uncertain or indeterminate in their quali- 
 ties, nor anything to indicate that they are the prod- 
 uct of accidental combinations. It would require 
 an extension of the calculus of probabilities, hope- 
 lessly beyond our reach, to calculate the chances 
 
LIFE 85 
 
 of a transition from a sphere of accidental com- 
 binations to a sphere of definite determinate exist- 
 ence. That calculation has not been made, nor 
 can it be made. 
 
 As we follow the stream of life, we pass from 
 the relatively simple to the complex, and the greater 
 the complexity the greater becomes the depen- 
 dence of the parts each on each. Certain forms of 
 life seem to have in every part the power to re- 
 produce the whole, but the higher organisms have 
 lost that power. A highly organized nation knows 
 when it is beaten, a nation loosely held together 
 may keep up a partisan warfare for years. Unicel- 
 lular life is almost indestructible, organized life 
 may be extinguished by a breath. Still, we do not 
 obtain an adequate conception of life until we 
 look at its highest development, and obtain some 
 idea of how it came to be. With this thought 
 there opens out before us a great and luminous 
 conception which we may regard apart from the 
 external machinery of evolution. The conception is 
 that the history of each individual is the history of 
 life up to the point at which the form of life to 
 which it belonged appeared. There is sufficient 
 truth in this conception for us to use it, though it 
 has been stated far too absolutely. Recapitulation 
 is a fact so far at least as regards all creatures that 
 have an embryonic life. Whether it is true of 
 larvae is questioned. No doubt there are some 
 
86 THEISM 
 
 omissions, and many steps seem to be shortened, 
 and yet there is enough to enable us to say that 
 life seems to remember the steps by which it 
 climbed upwards to higher and higher ends. If 
 the recapitulation has nothing accidental or tenta- 
 tive about it, have we any good reason to think 
 that the steps recapitulated were accidental ? 
 
 In the recapitulation, too, the organism outruns the 
 original method. It sets to work prophetically, and 
 forms organs to fit a medium with which it is to be 
 in relation only in the future. It forms eyes for the 
 light that they have never seen, and ears adapted to 
 the vibrations which they have never heard. This 
 fact, which Mr. Spencer calls preadaptation, reveals 
 to us a striking peculiarity of life, however we may 
 explain it. We referred to eyes and ears as instances 
 of preadaptation, but the whole organism of all crea- 
 tures that pass through an embryonic stage of life is 
 formed and adapted to a medium in which they do 
 not live at the time of their formation. There can 
 be no thought of chance combinations producing so 
 wonderful a relation. 
 
 Life, then, whether we look at it as manifested in 
 the individual, or as manifested in all living things, 
 presents us with a vast and wonderful system of 
 thought. It presents definite qualities as it appears 
 in its simplest form ; it seems to proceed in orderly 
 progression from stage to stage; and wherever we 
 find it, it is in exact relation with preceding and sue- 
 
LIFE 87 
 
 ceeding forms of life ; and in exact relation also, not 
 with an abstract environment, but with surroundings 
 as definite and conditioned as it is itself. Here is no 
 abstract organism to be thrust into an abstract envi- 
 ronment, to which it must respond by some variation 
 which will enable the one to correspond to the other ; 
 what we everywhere have is a real and definite cor- 
 respondence, established as the very condition of the 
 existence of the creature. There are changes in 
 both, and larger correspondences arise as life be- 
 comes wider and more definite. May we not postu- 
 late in life this power to adapt itself to the changing 
 conditions of its existence, and postulate also that 
 this power acts in a regular and orderly fashion ? 
 Why should we postulate a blind thrusting out of 
 life in all directions, and leave the result to accident ? 
 That is not the way of the life we see around us on 
 all sides. We see economy, thrift, ends accomplished 
 at the smallest cost of matter and energy ; and an ex- 
 act and infinite precision in the adjustment of means 
 to ends. If the life we see is so wise and provident, 
 shall we suppose it to be ignorant and wasteful in 
 those processes which we hardly know at all ? 
 
 As my purpose is not to follow the growth of life 
 as it has appeared in the history of time, but to learn 
 what is the meaning of that history, I shall not enter 
 into details. It has many riddles, and many myste- 
 ries, yet we may safely say that, looking to the record 
 of it, there have been method, advance, progress. 
 
88 THEISM 
 
 It has grown, developed, and advanced as if it had 
 been guided by a power, who foresaw the end from 
 the beginning and took steps to accomplish that end. 
 We may never be able to say definitely what were 
 the ends of life, but we may say that there are ends. 
 We may never know why life seems to lead up to a 
 cul-de-sac as in the case of mollusca, insecta, arachni- 
 dse, and Crustacea, and apparently in other branches 
 of the tree of life. Taking the tree in Spencer's " Bi- 
 ology," it looks as if life had set forth on an explor- 
 ing voyage, and had come to a position from which 
 there was no further advance. While advancing in 
 part on the right and left, it also advanced on the 
 central line, and through the ascending line of the 
 vertebrata came at last to a form, in which it became 
 conscious of itself and of its meaning. 
 
 This is a difficulty to any theory of life, as much 
 to the evolutionist as to any other. For the evolu- 
 tionist is bound on his theory to find a use for every- 
 thing and an advantage to the possessor of every 
 quality which life has, even to the spots on a pea- 
 cock's tail. It has also to explain why the changes 
 and variation, which led from the simplest form of 
 life up to insects, ceased at that point on that line, 
 and went no further. The question may be put to 
 me, and I shall answer — I do not know. There 
 may be reasons which are unknown to me, which 
 may never be known to me. Be that as it may, 
 enough is known to me of the wisdom of that power 
 
LIFE 89 
 
 made manifest in the relations of living beings to 
 enable me to trust that wisdom is manifested here 
 also. Darwin has shown us the toils of the earth- 
 worm in the service of the higher life ; research may 
 show us that these forms of life, which have stopped 
 short at a certain stage of organization, as if no 
 further advance could be made on that line, may be 
 of indispensable service to those higher forms that 
 reached their higher development on another line. 
 Perhaps the work done by these could not be done 
 by forms of life determined by another line of ascent. 
 For the manifold forms of life seem to be a gigantic 
 system of cooperation, in which each exists for all 
 the others. Certainly there are many facts that seem 
 to lead to that conclusion — facts set forth in a new 
 and interesting form by Prince Kropotkin, Professor 
 Geddes, and others, on which I cannot dwell here. 
 
 Apart, then, from the machinery of evolution and 
 the difficulties which it brings with it, we have learned 
 to look at life as one. It has a continued history. 
 The first form is bound up with the latest outcome of 
 life. The highest form of life is the epitome of the 
 whole history of life, and all life as at present consti- 
 tuted is united together by many bonds, some visible, 
 and some invisible. This great thought we owe to 
 organic evolution and its expounders. It looks much 
 more of a rational scheme than that which our fathers 
 learned from their scientific teachers. They thought 
 of a series of unrelated, special creations, each special 
 
90 THEISM 
 
 creation being suddenly thrust into an environment. 
 (See Milton's description.) Creatures are made not 
 without their own cooperation, and they are made so 
 as to make themselves. This, also, we have learned 
 from evolution. Evolution has laid stress on the 
 striving of life after greater fulness, on the stern 
 grip of life on every advantage gained, and on the 
 readiness of life to press on to larger issues. Inheri- 
 tance cannot be merely received by it, the heir must 
 be equal to the inheritance, or it will pass away. In- 
 herited qualities are, in the most real sense, also 
 acquired, while acquired qualities are transmitted, 
 Weissmann notwithstanding. But it is not really of 
 importance for us to advert to that controversy, 
 which seems to be a somewhat idle one. For the 
 main impulse to the denial of the transmission of 
 acquired qualities arises from the attempt of Weiss- 
 mann to substitute another unity for the unity of the 
 organism. But we pass it by at present. 
 
 Looking at life from the standpoint we have now 
 attained, we see a web of the greatest complexity. 
 We see growth, gradation, adaptation, preadaptation, 
 organization, means adapted to ends, and larger ends, 
 dimly arising before our view, as, under the prompt- 
 ing of evolution, men are pressing on to explore the 
 vistas which beckon them on. Without controversy 
 the unveiling of the processes of life has given us a 
 larger conception of the wisdom of the power at work 
 in the phenomena of life. Something was learned of 
 
LIFE 91 
 
 wisdom even when we looked at life from the external 
 standpoint of Paley. It gave us a lofty conception 
 of the skill of the artificer. For the machinery was 
 so much more skilfully constructed than any machine 
 made by man, that the wisdom of the human and the 
 divine artificer could not be compared. Then there 
 were machines that produced other machines, to 
 speak of organisms as machines for a moment, and 
 making better machines as time went on, so that the 
 carpenter did not give us an unworthy conception of 
 the matter so far as mere skill of adaptation and use 
 were concerned. But even Paley felt that the car- 
 penter theory was inadequate, and the use he made of 
 the argument and illustration was to show that these 
 skilful contrivances were not without an adequate 
 cause. 
 
 The effect of evolution has been simply to transfer 
 the cause from a mere external influence working 
 from without to an immanent rational principle. 
 The skill of the carpenter is now within the living 
 creatures, and they work onward and upwards to the 
 issues now becoming manifest to the beholder. At 
 all events the wisdom and the skill are there, account 
 for them as we may. They are connected, too, with 
 the actual working of life as that is manifested in the 
 living beings we see in the world. At present it is 
 too early to ask if the living power we see at work in 
 the world of life is also a transcendent power, which 
 means something for itself. As far as we have yet 
 
92 THEISM 
 
 looked at the world and the phenomena presented to 
 us by it, we have no data even for the consideration 
 of such a question. For we see that a world of in- 
 organic phenomena has become a world of life, and 
 the story of the inorganic world could be rationally 
 read as the story of a preparation for life, and the 
 story of life — its existence, growth, and progress — 
 was a story of the interactions between life and its 
 environment, so that we have not had cause, as yet, to 
 raise the question of the ground of the world and the 
 character of that ground, save in so far as it is inti- 
 mated to us by the manifestations we have seen. We 
 may obtain more light as we proceed ; meanwhile it 
 is evident that there is power at work greater than 
 we can measure, that there is wisdom of the highest 
 kind at work, and that power is not a stranger to life. 
 It is not an unknowable power, for it is a manifested 
 power, and a power so far as it is manifested is known, 
 or may be known. It may transcend in its greatness 
 and excellence our capacity of knowledge, we may 
 have to speak of it as unlimited, and may have to use 
 all kinds of adjectives to negative any limits to the 
 positive excellence of it, but negative adjectives do 
 not alter the positive character of the power. Un- 
 limited power is power, and endless life is life. It is 
 one of the most curious freaks of metaphysics that 
 a power manifested in the whole universe should be 
 described as unknowable. Underlying such a con- 
 ception must lurk a curious theory of substance and 
 
LIFE 93 
 
 attributes, which can only regard attributes as a way 
 of concealing the substance. Attributes reveal sub- 
 stance, they are the qualities which define it, show 
 its way of being and working, and enable it to be 
 known. This way of speech is forced on us, for, if 
 we could, we should never speak in that way. For 
 the way of speaking supposes that we can separate 
 being from its modes of manifestation ; we may speak 
 of substance in that way, as speech is sometimes 
 unreal, but substance without attributes is nothing, 
 and is unthinkable. 
 
 Beings who think at all cannot place at the basis 
 of all things an unthinkable or postulate irrational- 
 ity as the ground of an intelligible universe. The 
 world does appear to exist in relations that can be 
 thought, and the operations of it correspond to those 
 which thought establishes among its objects. At all 
 events, evolutionary science has shown us such rela- 
 tions between the life of the present and the life of 
 the past as to make the relation between them one 
 that we can understand. If the advocates of evolution 
 have postulated accidental causes, and done much to 
 make the transition from the category of cause and 
 effect to the category of means and end unthinkable, 
 well, that is their misfortune, and may have arisen 
 from inexact ways of thinking ; but apart from that 
 they have been successful in showing us a world of 
 life which is intelligible. We take their results, and 
 leave their philosophy on one side. We are grate- 
 
94 THEISM 
 
 ful to them for enabling us to see that the world of 
 life is a world governed by rational methods, and 
 thus they have enabled us to say that there is a 
 rational living power at work in the world. That is 
 the only conclusion we infer at this stage. 
 
 As life unfolds itself, and as the possibilities of it 
 come forth to view, other inferences may be drawn 
 as to the character of the power at work in the uni- 
 verse, but we may not push any argument beyond its 
 due limits. Only this we must say, that for purposes 
 of rational explanation the highest and not the lowest 
 is the standard of reference. If we are to explain the 
 process of evolution, we must have regard, not to the 
 starting-point, but to the goal. It is true that a hy- 
 pothesis, precisely the opposite of this, lies at the basis 
 of the synthetic philosophy of Mr. Herbert Spencer, 
 and, also, at the basis of much current writing on 
 evolutionary topics. This is the key to a great deal 
 of their argumentation, and to their strenuous at- 
 tempts to explain the higher in terms of the lower. 
 One has sympathy with those who labour at an im- 
 possible task. It is hard on one who has undertaken 
 to explain evolution in terms of the distribution of 
 matter and motion to arrive at a stage where matter 
 fails, and then to be compelled to deal with super- 
 organic evolution. Hard, also, to have to speak of 
 subject and object, and of other conceptions which 
 decline to be subjected to a process of distribution 
 and redistribution of matter and motion. We can but 
 
LIFE 95 
 
 express our sympathy, and pass on to the conviction 
 that the source of explanation lies not where they are 
 seeking it. What has appeared in the process of 
 evolution was there in the source from which evolution 
 flowed. And what has appeared is a revelation of the 
 living energy from which all things proceeded. 
 
 On this topic we quote from the Master of Balliol. 
 " When, indeed, we turn back from the developed 
 organism to the embryo, from the man to the child, 
 we find that a study of the process of genesis casts 
 no little light upon the nature of the being which is 
 its result. The man becomes in a higher sense 
 intelligible, when we trace him back to the child. 
 But, primarily and in the first instance, it is the 
 developed organism that explains the germ from 
 which it grew, and without having seen the former 
 we could have made nothing of the latter. No 
 examination of the child could enable us to prophesy 
 the man, if we had not previously had some expe- 
 rience of mature manhood ; still less would an ex- 
 amination of the embryo reveal to us the distinct 
 lineaments of the plant, or animal, or man. Nor 
 would our insight be greatly helped by a knowledge 
 of the environments in which the process of develop- 
 ment was to take place. 
 
 " It is the full growth and expansion of this mighty 
 tree, under whose shadow the generations of men 
 have rested, that enables us to understand its obscure 
 beginnings, when it was the least of all seeds. De- 
 
g6 THEISM 
 
 velopment is not simply the recurrence of the same 
 effects in similar circumstances, not simply the main- 
 tenance of an identity under a variation determined 
 by external conditions. Hence it is impossible from 
 the phenomena of one stage of the life of a develop- 
 ing being to derive laws which will adequately explain 
 the whole course of its existence. The secret of the 
 peculiar nature of such a being lies just in the way 
 of regular transition in which, by constant interaction 
 with external influences, it widens the compass of its 
 life, unfolding continually new powers and capacities 
 — powers and capacities latent in it from the first, 
 but not capable of being foreseen with any definite- 
 ness by one who had seen only the beginning. It 
 follows that, in the first instance at least, we must 
 read development backward and not forward, we 
 must find the key to the meaning of the first stage in 
 the last, though it is quite true that, afterwards, we 
 are enabled to throw new light upon the nature of 
 the last, to analyze and appreciate it in a new way, 
 by carrying it back to the first. We may derive an 
 illustration of this characteristic of development from 
 the idea of development itself ; for the idea of de- 
 velopment is one of the latest ideas whose meaning 
 and value have been brought to light by the progress 
 of man, and is itself the much wanted key to the 
 history of that progress." ("The Evolution of Re- 
 ligion," Vol. I., pp. 44-8.) 
 
 To understand the processes of the world and the 
 
LIFE 97 
 
 light they cast on the ground and source of it, we 
 must take our stand on the highest outcome of the 
 life that is in the world. True, our highest explana- 
 tion will not be ultimate, for the end is not yet, and 
 our interpretation is available only for the stage at 
 which we have arrived. A further manifestation 
 will arrive by and by ; meanwhile our appreciation 
 may be true and valuable, so far as it goes. 
 
IV 
 
 RATIONAL LIFE AND ITS IMPLICATIONS 
 
 Following the line of development of life we 
 come to a form which seems to sum up in itself all 
 the characteristics of the lower forms, and to present 
 to our view marks unknown before. At present we 
 do not dwell on the line of descent, or of ascent 
 from the first to the final form of living beings on 
 the earth. We acknowledge that there are many 
 links of connection between man and other forms 
 of life. That has been made plain enough to all. 
 On the physical side man is an animal, perhaps the 
 highest and most complicated of all animal forms, 
 but yet with evident marks of his relationship to 
 them. Leaving the doctrine of descent untouched, 
 for an inadequate treatment of it would serve no 
 good purpose, and an adequate treatment of it, even 
 if I had the requisite knowledge, would far exceed 
 my limits, I remark that a determination of this 
 question is not important for the aim I have in view. 
 All that is necessary from the point of view of the 
 doctrine of descent is, that we admit that in all physi- 
 cal respects man is closely related to other forms 
 
 98 
 
RATIONAL LIFE AND ITS IMPLICATIONS 99 
 
 of life. It is confessedly difficult to choose a form 
 from which man may be said to have been descended. 
 But physiologically and anatomically man is like all 
 the higher animals. No doubt there are differences, 
 but these are admitted even by those who advocate 
 the doctrine of descent. We pass on, therefore, to 
 another aspect of the subject. 
 
 Nor do I spend, at this stage, any time on the 
 views of Darwin and Romanes as to the relation 
 of animal to human intelligence. Much might be 
 said on this topic, and something may be said later. 
 What I am concerned with here is not how man 
 came to be, nor how physically he was evolved from 
 lower forms of life, nor how his intelligence is re- 
 lated to lower intelligences, but what can we discern 
 man to be physically, mentally, morally, and reli- 
 giously now that he is here. 
 
 The first thing that we note about him is that he is 
 differently related to his environment from any other 
 living being. As far as mere organic equipment 
 is concerned, man is one of the most helpless of 
 animals. He is not so swift as some, nor so keen 
 of sight as others ; his sense of smell, of sound, or of 
 touch is imperfectly developed in comparison with 
 the extraordinary development of the keenness of 
 the senses in some creatures. He has not teeth and 
 claws like the tiger, nor horns like a bull, nor can 
 he use his teeth for carpentering like the beaver. 
 There is scarcely a single physical quality in which 
 
100 THEISM 
 
 he is not surpassed by one or other of the lower forms 
 of living creatures. Yet he has become master of 
 them all. How ? Well, first of all, he has found out 
 a way of making his environment compensate for his 
 organic defects. He has done this not as lower 
 organizations do by organic modification, but by 
 making instruments and tools to serve his purpose. 
 That is the first note of man on which I lay stress. 
 He makes tools. How much is implied in that fact 
 I do not inquire at present, but it does mean some- 
 thing ; at least there is a new departure. There is 
 nothing of this kind to be met with among lower 
 animals. Apes may fling stones or fruit at the 
 passers-by, but no ape has ever set himself deliber- 
 ately to fashion a tool to carry in his hand in readi- 
 ness for the hour of need. The rudest tribes of 
 which we have any knowledge have this power 
 of making and using tools. In fact, we classify the 
 ages of human development by reference to the tools 
 they made and used. The first tools may have been 
 those which lay ready to hand, as Tylor says, 
 " Pebbles for slinging or hammering, sharp stone 
 splinters to cut or scrape with, branches for clubs and 
 spears, thorns or teeth to pierce with." ("Anthro- 
 pology," p. 183.) In possession of tools and the 
 power of making them he was furnished with the 
 means of coping with animals far stronger than he. 
 
 In the first tool made, in the first instrument 
 fashioned, there lay the possibility and the promise 
 
RATIONAL LIFE AND ITS IMPLICATIONS IOI 
 
 of all the vast instrumental command over nature 
 characteristic of modern civilization. We do not 
 need to dwell in detail on the development of this 
 human art. It is a most interesting history, and 
 much has been written on it. Men learned to make 
 instruments of a more useful and powerful kind, they 
 found more suitable and more ductile material for 
 their instruments, they subjected the raw material 
 they found in their environment to processes of 
 manufacture, until they had bronze, and iron tools, 
 and weapons. On the form of these weapons they 
 also lavished their power of invention, so as to sat- 
 isfy their sense of beauty as well as their desire to 
 make the instruments effective. Tools, instruments 
 for use, yes, and something more, — they discovered 
 the use of fire. Very early in the history of man fire 
 was discovered and pressed into their service. Hav- 
 ing discovered fire they had a still more powerful 
 means at their command. With it they had the 
 power of modifying the climate in which they lived, 
 and of modifying the products of nature into a form 
 more fit for human use. Other results followed from 
 this tool-making faculty. Clothing to protect them, 
 houses to shelter them, and a thousand things, all of 
 which formed new departures on the part of this, the 
 latest form of life. 
 
 Clearly life has put itself to new uses, and taken 
 on new qualities unknown in connection with lower 
 forms of life. The relation to the environment is 
 
102 THEISM 
 
 something new. Every change of life in response 
 to the change of the environment has been organic. 
 The only response living creatures could make was 
 to put forth structures to provide for new needs. 
 Feet were modified so that birds might swim, necks 
 were elongated so that the creature might have a 
 wider range from which to obtain food, and so on 
 over the whole range of adaptation of living creatures 
 to their environment. They could meet external 
 changes only by corresponding changes of the or- 
 ganism. The expensiveness of organic change set 
 an obvious limit on the possible advance of the living 
 being. Up to the advent of man the condition of 
 progress seemed to have been the possibility of or- 
 ganic change. With the advent of man the nature 
 of progress seems to change. 
 
 Not that we are to regard man as altogether in- 
 dependent of his environment, nor are we to think 
 of him as able to modify it so as to change it al- 
 together. If we were to dream of such a possibility, 
 the facts of the case would immediately refute our 
 imagination ; for gravitation works on us as on 
 other organisms. Heat and cold affect us, and the 
 seasons in their changes deal with us in their own 
 way ; our food and our drink must be taken in and 
 assimilated, and, in short, our whole physical nature 
 is in endless ways in relation to our environment. 
 Nor is the influence limited to the daily and yearly 
 changes that we experience in the slow succession 
 
RATIONAL LIFE AND ITS IMPLICATIONS 103 
 
 of the ages. These changes accumulate, and thus 
 man has been differentiated into the various races 
 of mankind, with their characteristic marks and 
 divisions. Differences of colour, stature, physical 
 conformations of skull, skeleton, eyes, hair, and so 
 on, appear as differences wrought in the various 
 races of mankind, whose likeness to each other 
 marks them as one. Man lives under conditions 
 of time, space, climate, and a thousand other as- 
 pects of the environment, and he must respond to 
 them all. 
 
 But the difference is that, while animals appear 
 to respond to these conditions only in the way of 
 organic modification, man responds to them in the 
 way of organic modification, but also in another 
 and an additional way. He adapts the environment 
 to him by putting it to a use which he impresses 
 on it — a use which was not there until he invented 
 it. The stone which he chips until he can take a 
 firm grasp of it means the appearance of a new 
 quality of life, a new way of adaptation to the en- 
 vironment. On this we lay stress, as it is sufficient 
 to give us a point of difference between man and 
 other organisms, with regard to which there can be 
 no difference of opinion. It is difficult to reach a 
 satisfactory limit physically, intellectually, or psy- 
 chologically at which we can say, here the differ- 
 ence between man and the lower animals begins 
 to be manifest. Physically, there is a number of 
 
104 THEISM 
 
 differences, but the correspondence between part 
 and part throughout the organism of some animals 
 and of man is so great that a satisfactory delimita- 
 tion can scarcely be obtained. So, also, it may be 
 said of the feelings, emotions, cognitions, that for 
 every aspect of the mental nature of man, some- 
 thing resembling it may be forthcoming on an ex- 
 amination of mind in animals. So instead of taking 
 our stand on these, with regard to which there 
 might emerge endless argumentation, we simply 
 mark this, on which there is no dispute, man is 
 a tool-making animal. This one difference, rightly 
 understood, gives in itself a number of other differ- 
 ences. It reveals the advent of a power which can 
 use its environment in a new way for its own benefit. 
 Looking at this from the point of view of advantage, 
 the power of using instruments not organically re- 
 lated to the organism is of incalculable benefit in 
 the struggle for existence. It gave the rational ani- 
 mal a superiority over those better equipped than 
 himself in the race for life. Some creatures were 
 swifter, some stronger, some better armed, some 
 more cunning; but this new power enabled him to 
 be, in effect, swifter, stronger, and wiser than all 
 of them, and in large measure to press them into 
 his service. 
 
 Stress is laid on this aspect, as it is a favourite 
 way of stating the fact on the part of evolution- 
 ists. Reason did give the human species an ad- 
 
RATIONAL LIFE AND ITS IMPLICATIONS 1 05 
 
 vantage which grew from more to more. I do not 
 protest, for it represents a truth. Intelligence is a 
 weapon of enormous power, and the use of it has 
 enthroned man as the most powerful of all crea- 
 tures. Whether, regarded in this abstract way as 
 only a weapon, it could have led on to the results 
 we see, is another question. It is, of course, pos- 
 sible to look at reason only in this light, and to 
 regard it as a cunning device fitted to give the 
 possessor of it an advantage in the struggle for ex- 
 istence. It has been so regarded, and it has been 
 insisted on by those who desire to explain human 
 phenomena in terms of biology. Reason has been 
 represented as if it acted only in the interests of the 
 individual; but this topic we postpone for the mo- 
 ment, and shall return to it when we look at the 
 theory of Mr. Benjamin Kidd. 
 
 Meanwhile let us follow for a little the significance 
 of the change which has happened to living things by 
 this new departure. Tools once made, and the power 
 of making them once discovered, became one of the 
 permanent gains of the race of men. Of this there 
 was no reversal. More and better tools were made, 
 better materials for the purpose were discovered, 
 and tools might pass from hand to hand. It gave 
 to man a new view of the uses to which he might 
 put the environment, and he found that the environ- 
 ment lent itself readily to such uses. It led on to 
 greater discoveries. With tools he could build a 
 
106 THEISM 
 
 better and more commodious shelter from the ex- 
 tremes of heat and cold, could command a more 
 steady supply of food, and a more convenient form of 
 clothing. As he advanced in the application of his 
 power to his environment, he found that it responded 
 to his attempts, that it was not a fixed, unyielding 
 thing with which he was in intercourse, but one 
 that seemed elastic, accommodating, ready to take on 
 the forms and adaptations which he desired. The 
 earth would grow grain for him, would keep it for 
 him, if he could persuade it to take the form of a 
 storehouse, thus he could secure his food for a year 
 or two before it was needed. Thus he caused his 
 environment to meet his needs, to provide him with 
 more ample accommodation, more and better food, 
 warmth, when the natural source of warmth was 
 obscured, clothing, when he lost the power of modi- 
 fying himself to meet the varying seasons of the 
 year, and so on. It is not necessary to add other 
 particulars. We see the story. 
 
 We note that all this gain is at the expense of the 
 environment. Gain made by life before the advent 
 of man, was attained by the forthputting of more 
 adapted structures on the part of the organism. 
 Life advanced by modification of structure, and 
 adaptation to a climate of large variation was con- 
 ducted by changes of the organism, by growing a 
 thicker coat of hair, and of a different colour, or by 
 the use of many devices to which our attention is 
 
RATIONAL LIFE AND ITS IMPLICATIONS 107 
 
 drawn by writers on natural history. All of them, 
 however, were due to organic modification. But the 
 rational being has ceased so far to modify himself, 
 and modifies his environment instead. Clearly this 
 is a significant change, and one which gives us a 
 new conception of the significance of life and its 
 possibilities. 
 
 Then we pass on to ask how this gain is to be con- 
 served, and how it is to be handed on to the succeed- 
 ing generations of the human race. Up to this time 
 the gain made by one generation or one individual 
 animal could be handed on only to his own posterity, 
 that is, if we suppose that acquired qualities can be 
 transmitted. The line of transmission of acquired 
 qualities could only be the line of descent. This was, 
 however, a hazardous line of action. For accidents 
 might happen to the strongest, most highly evolved, 
 individual of the species ; and his qualities could not 
 be transmitted if he had no offspring. Organic 
 modification was clearly an unsatisfactory means 
 either for the acquisition or the transmission of the 
 gains won by the species in the race for good. One 
 might predict that the rational being who had found 
 a way, or for whom a way had been found, of making 
 an advance without modifying himself, would also 
 find a way by which the gain would be preserved. 
 
 Here there comes to our view the first sign of the 
 truth that reason is not a disintegrating, disuniting 
 power, but a power which makes for unity, progress, 
 
108 THEISM 
 
 and integration. To preserve and increase the gain 
 won by him who had made the first tool, there was 
 needed a way by which that power could be com- 
 municated to others not necessarily in the line of 
 direct descent. Reason found a way, a way unknown 
 before. Whatever may be the extent of communica- 
 tion between animal and animal, it is evident that that 
 way is not to be compared with the way in which 
 man may communicate with man. The instrument 
 which man has found for the conservation of his hard 
 won gain is language, which, when once won, in- 
 creased the practical power of reason immeasurably. 
 It preserved the past, it led on to greater gain in the 
 future. 
 
 Now this instrument which is the offspring of 
 reason, which reflects and embodies reason, is mani- 
 festly a social product. The very rudiments of 
 speech indicate the fact that it arose because men 
 had learned to work together. To be able to name 
 a thing so that others might recognize it by the name, 
 to have a cry which would indicate the approach of 
 anger, to have a word the speaking of which would 
 give a signal for a pull altogether, the power to com- 
 municate to his fellow what was in his own mind, 
 and all the other facilities so well known to us that 
 we seldom think of them, are of immense significance 
 as we look at them when they were a new thing in 
 the manifestation of life. It is another illustration 
 of the fact that man advances by modifying his en- 
 
RATIONAL LIFE AND ITS IMPLICATIONS 109 
 
 vironment The tongue and ear, in the service of 
 reason, use the atmosphere for their own intelligent 
 purposes. First for communication to one another 
 of their thoughts, wishes, desires, and then for the 
 conservation of their gains. Manifestly the power 
 gained by men was vastly increased by the discovery 
 of this new instrument. Words spoken could be re- 
 membered, the experience of one could be communi- 
 cated to another by the use of this instrument, and 
 a youth could set out on the warpath instructed by 
 the warning of those who had had experience of 
 war. 
 
 The lessons of experience could be handed on to 
 others. What men had learned of land and sea, of 
 wood and river, of the nature, habits, and mode of 
 life of the animals they followed in the chase, might 
 be told, and the gain could be conserved and handed 
 on merely by the use of speech and not by hereditary 
 transmission alone. So far as we have come we find 
 that the advent of reason means deliverance from the 
 control of mere biological processes. The making 
 of tools was the discovery of a less costly way of ad- 
 aptation to the environment than that which life had 
 heretofore followed. The discovery of the power of 
 speech was the establishment of a means of main- 
 taining and extending the gains of men beyond the 
 means of transmission by descent, apparently the only 
 means of transmitting gain which life had formerly 
 discovered. We shall have many other illustrations 
 
110 THEISM 
 
 of this as we proceed. At present we lay stress on 
 these two, as in themselves a sufficient proof that 
 biology is helpless in the presence of these new 
 phenomena. The processes described by biology, as 
 adequate for all beings up to man, are clearly inade- 
 quate here. It is not possible to deal with man as 
 a mere biological animal. 
 
 Nor is it possible to deal with man as if he were 
 a mere individual. Looking back to the advent of 
 speech, we see that the very condition of its advent 
 was that man was a social being. Obviously speech 
 implies men living together, conscious of common 
 needs, of common aims, and of common powers 
 requiring expression. A solitary individual would 
 neither feel the need nor have the power of speech. 
 But a solitary individual need not be considered, as 
 he is only the abstract possibility which exists simply 
 for the purpose of making a certain philosophy con- 
 ceivable. What that philosophy is we shall see by 
 and by. Meanwhile we may take it as axiomatic 
 that language is a social product. Its existence is a 
 proof that the individual exists as a rational human 
 being in relation to society, that he can be, grow, 
 develop his rational powers, only in intercourse with 
 his fellows. 
 
 Tool-making and speech introduce us to such 
 modifications of the environment as make it largely 
 new. If we are to understand the progress of man, 
 we must look at him not as if he were in intercourse 
 
RATIONAL LIFE AND ITS IMPLICATIONS III 
 
 with an environment which is fixed and unchange- 
 able, but with one which changes from age to age 
 by those modifications which are due to the rational 
 being himself. A world modified by the instruments 
 made by man is a different world from what it was 
 before the advent of that advance. At all events 
 it is different to man. A larger difference appears 
 when man discovered the way to speak. Now the 
 environment is not the old environment which sur- 
 rounded men before speech was discovered; it is the 
 old, plus the change wrought for him by the presence 
 of human beings who can speak and tell him of their 
 experience. The environment is no abstraction ; it is 
 a real concrete thing of amazing complexity, a com- 
 plexity that varies to every individual. We are apt 
 to place an abstract individual in an abstract en- 
 vironment, but that is not the way of reality. The 
 environment of the rational being who had advanced 
 so far as to make tools and to speak had taken on 
 new meanings, and every rational being born into it 
 had an environment enriched by all the experience of 
 the race. Not wind and weather, sun, moon, or stars, 
 not all the physical surroundings of his existence, 
 made up his environment, but to these were added 
 the care of parents during his prolonged infancy and 
 his helpless childhood, the training he received, the 
 beliefs he saw in his acquaintances, and the thousand 
 influences which moulded him. This was the envi- 
 ronment of the rational being. 
 
112 THEISM 
 
 Again, we say we must widen our biological method 
 if we are to understand the nature of a rational being. 
 To speak of environment in the large and general 
 way now fashionable, is to mislead. The environ- 
 ment is relative to the organism, as the organism is 
 relative to the environment. A dog seems to live in 
 a world of smells, and other animals in a world suited 
 to their prevailing characteristics. A thousand kinds 
 may live in a square mile of ground, and each of 
 them may have a different environment. An organ- 
 ism so far selects its own environment, and takes 
 from it what it needs. It is time to put something 
 like an arrest on the attempt to apply to the rational 
 being those methods of interpretation which may 
 have been found adequate in a lower sphere, but 
 when applied here can only mislead. Man's environ- 
 ment is largely made by man. 
 
 As we follow on down the stream of time we see 
 this rational being making more advances. We do 
 not see that advance is always made, or that reason 
 always hits the mark. On the contrary, we see 
 enough of mistakes, many blunders, much stumbling, 
 as it tries unaccustomed ways. Reason has had 
 sometimes to pay a price for the advantages it has 
 won for man. The tentative blundering way in 
 which it reaches forth after the accomplishment of 
 its aims, the way it uses inadequate means for its 
 ends, the miscalculations and failures it makes, are 
 in striking contrast to the sureness, accuracy, and 
 
RATIONAL LIFE AND ITS IMPLICATIONS 1 13 
 
 completeness with which other animals achieve their 
 more limited results. It takes time for reason to 
 find out what means will achieve certain ends. 
 Trial after trial is made, failure is added to 
 failure, but reason has the power of learning from 
 its failures, and of making them stepping-stones to 
 higher things. 
 
 Nor is the heritage which rational men have handed 
 on to their successors always a heritage of goodness, 
 or righteousness, or truth. It is no story of unmin- 
 gled good nor of untroubled progress that history has 
 to tell regarding the human race. From one point of 
 view the story of life may be told as a story of progress, 
 if we neglect the failures and have regard only to those 
 who have succeeded. But not even this can be said 
 of the human story. The advent of reason, if in one 
 way a signal advance, is in another way a story of 
 retrogression. True, it won for man the mastery over 
 other races, but it did not enable him to master him- 
 self. Powerful to enable him to adapt himself to his 
 environment, and his environment to him, it seemed 
 powerless to guide him on to truth, goodness, and 
 love. As we look at reason at work, in the earlier 
 races of men, it seems to be in the service of every 
 lust and every passion that rise within the heart or 
 lure the mind on to the gratification of the baser 
 feelings and desires. Reason does not seem to be 
 even coordinated with the desires and passions, it 
 seems to be a servant to them. It is far from having 
 
1 14 THEISM 
 
 attained the supremacy which it apparently ought to 
 have. The advent of reason, from an ethical point 
 of view, results in a degradation and a fall. In some 
 ways it brought man below the level of the higher 
 animals. Lust, desire, passion, in a rational being, 
 took a deeper and a more malignant form. Reason 
 enabled the rational being to picture the object of 
 desire in more alluring forms, and put something like 
 an infinite element into it. 
 
 The lusts and desires of other animals were excited 
 only while the objects of them were within their 
 reach ; but the rational being could treasure them up 
 in memory, paint them in imagination, linger over 
 them in anticipation and in retrospect, until he or- 
 dered his reason to use all means for the gratification 
 of his desire. Passions and desires partake of the 
 higher nature of reason. They may be transformed 
 from their original teleological function, and the grati- 
 fication of them may and sometimes does become an 
 end in itself. With the higher animals, feelings, pas- 
 sions, desires, seem to be always teleological ; they are 
 for the furtherance of the good of the individual and 
 of the race. When the teleological end is reached, 
 the animal seems satisfied. With the rude human 
 being the mere teleological reference seems to become 
 confused, uncertain ; as if reason had paralyzed in- 
 stinct, and the gratification of the lust of the moment 
 had become an end in itself. How shall the human 
 being learn self-knowledge, self-reverence, self-con- 
 
RATIONAL LIFE AND ITS IMPLICATIONS 115 
 
 trol? It is the problem of destiny for the human 
 being. For other animals had a guide for conduct ; 
 they were under the imperious dictation of instinct, 
 that proceeded to its end with a precision that seemed 
 infallible. Their ideal was easily realized, if it can be 
 called an ideal. But for the rational being the advent 
 of reason seemed to have set him free from the sure 
 guidance of teleological function, and to have cast 
 him loose on a sea of adventure. Reason had at once 
 raised him higher and sunk him lower than the other 
 animals. 
 
 Thus we see him set out on his perilous path, 
 slowly trying to feel his way to the recognition of 
 a standard of conduct, and to substitute rational 
 self-guidance for the leading of instinct. It would 
 be long to tell the story of his failures and success ; 
 and in what I do say, I wish not to go beyond the 
 domain of science. It is a pathetic story that sci- 
 ence tells us of the efforts of the earliest men in their 
 search after a standard of conduct. The story is often 
 told in an unfriendly, unsympathetic way, as if science 
 rejoiced to show us how rude and lowly were the be- 
 ginnings of our science, our ethics, our philosophy, 
 and our religion. True, their beginnings were lowly 
 and rude enough, but still a beginning was made. 
 There is something to me very great in the first sign 
 of recognition by man of a rule of conduct, other 
 than the gratification of his own desires. Science 
 may tell me truly that the taboo, or the command 
 
Il6 THEISM 
 
 which prohibited a certain course of conduct, was 
 superstitiously believed and observed, and I shall 
 say nothing to the contrary ; but I do say that the 
 recognition by man of something sacred, of some- 
 thing which he must not touch or desire, of com- 
 mands which he must unconditionally obey, was a 
 great step on the way by which he might learn 
 that for him there was a rational ideal which he 
 was bound to realize. As yet he had nothing worthy 
 of the great names of science, philosophy, ethics, 
 or religion. He is simply a rational being, whose 
 rationality has not realized itself. 
 
 With rationality exercised in the way of making 
 tools and employed in speech, some restraints on the 
 lawlessness of human desires must speedily have 
 arisen. Habits were formed, actions were discovered 
 to be harmful to one's self and injurious to others, 
 and these were prohibited. As experience widened, 
 the number of these grew until there would exist 
 something like a code for conduct. At present 
 I am not dealing with supernatural sanctions for 
 conduct, though almost all actions were regarded by 
 primitive man as subject to, and prescribed by, a 
 supernatural power. Leaving that fact alone for the 
 present, let us follow on along the line I have 
 indicated. 
 
 How is reason to act in harmony with all the other 
 faculties of man ? In other words, how shall man 
 become altogether rational ? How shall reason en- 
 
RATIONAL LIFE AND ITS IMPLICATIONS 1 17 
 
 ter into and transform the emotions, cognitions, and 
 volitions of man, until they become the feelings, 
 thoughts, and actions of a rational, self -guided being? 
 For reason is used by me in that wide sense, and the 
 goal of a rational being is that he is to become 
 rational all through. As we read the story of a man 
 pictured to us by the students of anthropology, we 
 see him in a very rude and uncultured state. He 
 has tools, fires, shelter, food; he has speech, as the 
 earliest records of him abundantly show. He has 
 subdued certain other animals and pressed them into 
 his service. He has certain thoughts about the 
 world in which he is, but it is largely a world not 
 realized. He has not reached the thought of a fixed 
 order of the world; forms of life and death have 
 given to him certain thoughts about them, and about 
 himself. He has learned that certain actions he 
 must not do, certain things he must not touch, and 
 certain ceremonies he must perform. He believes 
 that if he transgress the one or omit the doing of the 
 other, he will pay the penalty. Habits become fixed, 
 beliefs grow, and a standard of conduct emerges, and 
 these develop into institutions, which again have a 
 reflex influence on those who live under them. 
 These are realities for those who are born and grow 
 up under their influence. They are part of their 
 environment. 
 
 A little later we find that man has formed for 
 himself a rule of conduct, consisting of rules of a 
 
1 1 8 THEISM 
 
 very drastic kind. The individual is almost lost to 
 sight, and what we find is a company of men the 
 actions and relations of which are prescribed, and 
 whose very thoughts are bound into a system of 
 rules. The unit seems to be, not the individual, but 
 the family or the tribe, and the individual has no 
 rights and no freedom ; he is merely a member of 
 the tribe. As soon as organization appeared it seems 
 to have been carried to an extreme. The existing 
 savage and the rude man of primitive times are 
 bound together in the most rigid fashion by a set of 
 most elaborate rules, all of which are enforced by the 
 most awful sanctions. Whatever may be the origin 
 of these rules which bind the mind and guide the 
 action of the ruder tribes of men, there can be no 
 doubt of their existence. The evidence is abundant 
 and clear. Rules regarding his relation to the world 
 of objects around him, rules regarding his relations 
 to the other members of the tribe, rules concerning 
 marriage, rules regarding his attitude toward the 
 unseen powers on which he felt his dependency, 
 were ever present and operative on him. 
 
 Thus a check on the lawlessness of the individual 
 was obtained, but apparently at a high price. The 
 individual was sacrificed to the society, and the good 
 of the tribe seemed to be the end of these elaborate 
 rules. At all events, whether that was what was 
 meant, that was accomplished. Among the rudest 
 tribes and in the beginnings of civilization, what we 
 
RATIONAL LIFE AND ITS IMPLICATIONS 1 19 
 
 find is not the individual, but the clan or tribe. 
 Power is in the hands of the father or the mother, in 
 the hands of the chief or the priest, and every rule 
 served to add to the further consolidation of that 
 power. This was one way of harnessing reason and 
 of making it work within bounds and on certain 
 lines. Having dislocated the action of instinct, and 
 having introduced uncertainty where certainty ob- 
 tained in lower animals, reason was uneasy until it 
 obtained another kind of instinct, one instituted, 
 guided, and made by itself. For the characteristic 
 of reason is that it must justify to itself the action 
 it prescribes. It must give a reason for its action. 
 Whether it was a true or adequate reason is another 
 question. 
 
 Customs, habits, beliefs, arose among men and 
 grew into a system, a system which has varied in 
 content and form with the different races of men. 
 One thing we observe with regard to them all is that 
 each had its explanation of the origin, meaning, and 
 sanction of their rites and customs. Having obtained 
 the rule and acted on it, having established the 
 custom and made it binding, the rational being set 
 himself to find reasons for his practice. What he 
 set forth as explanation is to be found in the my- 
 thologies of the race. Mythology is largely expla- 
 nation. It is the science, the philosophy, the theology, 
 of the races of men. As we read these mythologies, — 
 and nowadays they take much time to read them, — 
 
1 20 THEISM 
 
 we greatly admire the ingenuity and versatility of our 
 ancestors. They were not content with mere accept- 
 ance of the customs, rites, ordinances, which were 
 handed down to them, and made binding on them ; 
 they endeavoured to make their assent to their 
 observance rational. The explanation found was 
 such as was possible to a rational being whose 
 rationality was not yet consciously realized by him- 
 self. But the main thing to observe is that an 
 explanation was felt to be needed ; the kind of ex- 
 planation that was forthcoming is not so important 
 for our purpose. 
 
 It is another element in the system of differences 
 between the being who is at least implicitly rational, 
 and the animal that remains irrational to the end, 
 that the one seeks for an explanation of his expe- 
 rience and the other does not. The primitive man 
 asked himself and others regarding the origin of 
 things, their meaning, their ongoing, their goal ; he 
 asked also about himself, and his relations to what 
 was beneath, around, and above him. His answers 
 to these questions are to be found in the mythologies 
 and religions which are so sympathetically studied 
 to-day. We have our theories of mythology, we 
 speak of animism, of the worship of ancestors, of 
 polytheism, of theism, and of the strange expe- 
 rience of the human race, and of the explanation 
 of their experience which they set forth for them- 
 selves. Sometimes our theories are a bed of Pro- 
 
RATIONAL LIFE AND ITS IMPLICATIONS 121 
 
 crustes for the poor facts, which are mangled and 
 tortured in the process. Happily the facts survive, 
 and their sufficient explanation will be reached by 
 and by. 
 
 Meanwhile let us say that in these mythologies of 
 the past we have the rudiments of the science of 
 to-day. Here is man's first recorded recognition 
 of the uniformities of nature. That water would 
 assuage thirst to-day and to-morrow, that fruits 
 would satisfy hunger, that the animals he chased 
 and caught to-day indicated that animals of the 
 same kind would behave in a similar way when he 
 followed again in pursuit, that the sun would con- 
 tinue to rise and give him light and heat, and that 
 there was a time for the growing and ripening of 
 things and for their decay, would soon be borne 
 in upon his mind, and serve to regulate his conduct. 
 Other uniformities would be added as experience 
 widened, likely. The fact that things maintained 
 their properties from day to day must have been 
 soon learned by him. Likeness and unlikeness im- 
 pressed the primitive man as they impress his de- 
 scendants, and a rude classification of them would 
 be formed. So science began to be, not in its sepa- 
 rateness as with us, but mixed up with many ex- 
 planations which were not scientific. 
 
 But the unscientific explanation of the primitive 
 man does not affect the fact that here were the be- 
 ginnings of science, or the truth of the science which 
 
122 THEISM 
 
 has grown from such a beginning. Science of a kind 
 is there, even if it be only in the form of a recogni- 
 tion of a permanence in things and their behaviour. 
 Is it contended that early man looked at all things 
 from his own standpoint and thought that everything 
 had a spirit and life in it ? Is animism the science 
 of the primitive man ? It is so said by Dr. Tylor. 
 I have some doubts as to whether there is evidence 
 to warrant such a conclusion. That man could not 
 distinguish between the living and the non-living 
 seems to me an incredible proposition. That he 
 thought some non-living things to have a kind of 
 life seems to be true, but he had some special reason 
 for that belief. Mr. Spencer explains the matter by 
 the supposition that the primitive man thought a 
 ghost had taken possession of the non-living object, 
 and he therefore accepted it as living. It is allow- 
 able to accept Mr. Spencer's testimony that there 
 is a fact to be explained, though we cannot accept 
 his explanation. But the question is too large for 
 discussion here. 
 
 What I am concerned with is the fact that science 
 began as soon as man recognized the uniformity of 
 nature in some things at least. That these uniformi- 
 ties were recognized is apparent from the mytholo- 
 gies themselves. Still further, these mythologies 
 furnish us with the rudiments of a philosophy and 
 an ethic. They contain the first reflections of men 
 on the beginnings of things, and on the causes 
 
RATIONAL LIFE AND ITS IMPLICATIONS 123 
 
 which produced them. Very childish and very 
 pathetic they seem to us as we read of the rise of 
 the world and the making of man, but we again 
 say that they form a tribute to the greatness of man. 
 To ask the question, even though they could find no 
 answer, shows that life had put forth new phe- 
 nomena. If early man found an explanation of the 
 universe in chaos, and dwelt on a way in which chaos 
 did come to an ordered world, well ! modern philoso- 
 phy, in some moods and in some minds, does go back 
 to a lifeless chaotic cloud of fifty million years ago. 
 Others again dwell on the persistence of force, and 
 tell of a wonderful transformation by which the 
 homogeneous becomes heterogeneous. It would ap- 
 pear that with regard to origins we are as helpless 
 as they. 
 
 To mythology as bearing on theology and religion, 
 we shall return at a later stage of our argument. 
 For the right understanding of the philosophy and 
 ethics of early man, we have to look at the institu- 
 tions which he has formed. The fundamental insti- 
 tution is the family. It was a long time in the 
 history of man before the family was recognized 
 in its ethical significance. The history of marriage 
 is a sad story, and the whole business can scarcely 
 be described. The relations between the sexes were 
 no doubt subject to certain regulations even in the 
 rudest tribes, and a restraint of some kind was laid 
 on the lusts of man. But it is evident that until 
 
124 THEISM 
 
 monogamous marriage became the rule, ethical 
 progress could scarcely be attained. This lies at 
 the foundation of family life ; and the moral state of 
 a community may be estimated by the regard they 
 have to the holiness of family life. For the family 
 is the first and most important of those institutions 
 which help to mould the opening life of a young 
 man or woman. The unsatisfactory character of 
 man's ethical development may be largely traced 
 to the fact that the ideal of a family appears com- 
 paratively late in the history. Instead of a family 
 in the proper sense of the word, we may have a 
 matriarchate in which kinship was reckoned by the 
 mother, or a polygamous establishment in which the 
 relation of parent and child had little ethical signifi- 
 cance, or there may be polyandry ; in fact, you may 
 have and actually have all kinds of relationships 
 established between men and women into which 
 purity, permanence, and equality did not enter. 
 Still into such imperfect relationships there entered 
 something of the tender self-sacrifice of a mother's 
 love, and something of a father's providing care. 
 The helplessness of a child during its prolonged 
 infancy made a strong appeal to the mother, and 
 drew forth something of love, of exquisite tender- 
 ness, and devoted service. 
 
 Thus, while the ideal of a real family lay in the 
 distant future, and could not be realized until reason 
 had come to a larger fulfilment, enough was attained 
 
RATIONAL LIFE AND ITS IMPLICATIONS 12$ 
 
 to show forth what a family ideal might come to 
 be, when human character would attain to a more 
 rational completeness. As it was in the olden world, 
 marriage could not attain its ideal end. It was too 
 often the source of contradiction and confusion, 
 and both the physiological fact of sex and the emo- 
 tional fact of sexual love became antagonistic to the 
 very notion of ethics. They were too often sepa- 
 rated from their teleological function, and men were 
 powerless to transfigure them into that higher order 
 in which the light of reason works through love. 
 Still, even in their imperfection, they enable us to see 
 in the mutual love of parents and children, in the 
 mutual bonds that made the family one, and in the 
 service of self-sacrifice which the members of a fam- 
 ily felt bound to render to one another, the promise 
 of a larger future. In the family the first lessons 
 of experience are learned, the discovery is made that 
 the child is one among others, bound up with others 
 in a larger unity, and held together with them in the 
 bonds of common interests and common work. Such 
 lessons as these could be learned in the imperfect 
 family of the ancient world. Further, the children 
 of the house had at their disposal all the experience 
 of the parents. In the family they learned to 
 speak, to name things and to use them, they learned 
 to love and to work. On the other hand, parents 
 simply as parents rose to a greater height as human 
 beings, their hearts throbbed with a greater love, 
 
126 THEISM 
 
 they looked at life with a wider outlook, and they 
 rose in the scale of being, because of the young 
 beings whose life was bound up in theirs. 
 
 In the family life, even of the olden world, we find 
 the great sphere of ethical training. Here is the first 
 lesson that reason learned in its endeavour to make 
 for itself a rational world. Here an individual pre- 
 disposed to use reason for himself alone as a mere 
 instrument for his own pleasure, or glory, learned 
 that reason had a grander meaning and a wider 
 purpose. The individual learned that he was not 
 separate and isolated, that in fact he could only 
 find himself by losing himself, and find himself 
 transformed and glorified by knowing himself (as 
 Hegel has said) as the unity of himself with another 
 and of another with him. Such is the love that lies 
 at the basis of family life. Then comes the larger life 
 of the family, when fathers and mothers find them- 
 selves in the unity which is made up of parents 
 and children. Glorified in fatherhood and mother- 
 hood as children are given to them, glorified still fur- 
 ther as the children win more room in their hearts, 
 parents give more and more love as they watch 
 the growing intelligence, the warm affection, and 
 the thousand winning ways of children. This is the 
 first school of humanity, good for the lessons taught 
 to parents and to children. Here we learn the 
 first lessons in self-reverence, self-knowledge, self- 
 control. Here we find the first example of the great 
 
RATIONAL LIFE AND ITS IMPLICATIONS 1 27 
 
 ethical law that a man must lose himself in order 
 to find himself. 
 
 Speaking for myself, I must say that I feel un- 
 speakably grateful to Hegel and to the many eminent 
 men who work in philosophy under the inspiration 
 and the hope inspired by Hegel, for the wondrous 
 light they have cast on the significance of the family. 
 I say this all the more emphatically as I do not agree 
 with them in some of their contentions. " The unity 
 which is founded on natural feeling," says Professor 
 Mackenzie, " must precede that which depends on 
 acquired sympathies and thoughts. To begin with 
 the love of humanity, would be to begin with a cold 
 abstraction. The family is like a burning glass, 
 which concentrates human sympathies on a point. 
 Within that narrow circle selfishness is gradually 
 overcome, and wider interests developed. Each 
 one is supplied with the opportunity of knowing 
 a few human beings thoroughly, than which nothing 
 is more important as a first stage in the transcen- 
 dence of the merely individual self. One who knows 
 only himself inwardly, and sees others only by a 
 kind of outward observation, which in a large cir- 
 cle is an almost inevitable result, is apt to become 
 for himself too entirely the centre of his world, 
 if, indeed, he ever forms a world or cosmos for 
 himself at all. The family enables a few persons 
 to become not merely objects for each other, but 
 parts of a single life; and the unity thus effected 
 
128 THEISM 
 
 may then be very readily extended as sympathies 
 grow." (" Social Philosophy," pp. 363-4, 2d edi- 
 tion.) 
 
 Parts of a single life — it is a significant phrase, 
 and states in few words the ethical significance of the 
 family when it is properly constituted. But it pre- 
 supposes that the family proceeds from one union 
 and not from many, from one centre formed by two 
 who have found themselves in each other. But we 
 shall not return to the undeveloped family life of the 
 early races of mankind. On that, enough has been 
 said already. We may reassert, however, that im- 
 perfect though it was, it yet had an important bear- 
 ing on the training of men, and it helped them to 
 know that reason was not theirs in order to be used 
 as an instrument for the gaining of merely individual 
 ends, but that it was theirs in order that man might 
 recognize himself as a part of a whole, and that he 
 could not realize himself save in relation to a whole. 
 This has an unspeakable significance for the develop- 
 ment of man, as a sane and sound, moral and rational, 
 being. We have laid stress on the family as the 
 sphere in which this has been effectively done. The 
 unity of the family is a moral and spiritual unity, 
 constituted by spiritual bonds. The unity of an 
 organism is physical and visible, and is constituted 
 for organic ends. It is one of the functions of 
 reason to transcend the unities constituted by organic 
 ends, and to recognize larger unities, based on bonds 
 
RATIONAL LIFE AND ITS IMPLICATIONS 1 29 
 
 which do not reveal themselves to sense, and cannot 
 be traced by physical causation. The bond which 
 holds the family together is moral and spiritual, and 
 is cognizable only by a rational being, as it can be 
 constituted by rational beings alone. The begin- 
 ning of such a possibility is to be thankfully recog- 
 nized, and the growth of it is one of the signs 
 which herald the coming of a better day for hu- 
 manity. It was a great triumph when the rational 
 being recognized himself as a member of a larger 
 whole, and comprehended that bonds which he could 
 not touch, nor see, nor handle, were stronger, and 
 held him with a firmer grasp than any physical bond 
 could do. There were many agencies needed to 
 bring about this great end. And of these agencies 
 the family was the first and one of the strongest. 
 But then the family was only after all one circle 
 within a larger circle, and the life which had no in- 
 terest beyond the family was a contracted life. It 
 might look at reason as an instrument to be used 
 only for the advance of the family, and the struggle 
 of reason against selfishness might be repeated in 
 this larger sphere. The completeness of the family 
 and the satisfaction which the members found in one 
 another might hinder them from the recognition that 
 the family could find their ethical significance only 
 in the recognition of the fact that they were members 
 of a still larger whole. Thus on every step of the 
 upward spiral, the conflict between the selfish and 
 
1 30 THEISM 
 
 the rational was renewed. It still goes on and will 
 go on, until the worth and freedom of the individual 
 are recognized, and the fact accepted that the worth 
 and value of the individual can only be realized in 
 a society which receives his all from him and returns 
 it to him enhanced a thousand fold. 
 
V 
 THE MAKING OF MAN 
 
 Something of the significance of the family has 
 been seen ; and the part it plays in the evolution of 
 man is great. Part of the heritage of humanity 
 belongs to the parents before they have come 
 together; stores of spiritual energy laid up for 
 them in the tradition of the ages. But it is in the 
 faces of the father and the mother that the child 
 finds, in concrete form, the touch that wakens up 
 the dull materials of humanity and quickens them 
 into emotional and spiritual life. Spiritual parent- 
 ship takes the place of merely natural parentship, 
 and in the interchange of affection between parents 
 and children, fatherhood and sonship take on an 
 added glory. The child reveals to the parents depths 
 of life undreamed of before ; gives a new centre to 
 existence, a new stimulus to effort, and builds for 
 them a wider horizon and a larger future. 
 
 As has been said already, the family is only one 
 stage of the progress of man. Beyond the family 
 is dimly seen the wider circle of the tribe, and the 
 city. We say dimly seen, for in the early ages the 
 
 131 
 
132 THEISM 
 
 vision is not distinct. The gain was very slow, and 
 not for a long time have we the emergence of the 
 state. True, we have at an early stage in history 
 gigantic specimens of world empires, in which the 
 few seemed to use the many for their own pur- 
 poses, simply as instruments. The ancient world 
 empire was no realized ideal of happiness or prog- 
 ress for men. True, the works remain to this hour; 
 symbols of many things, and are fitted to give rise 
 to many reflections. We wonder at the skill, labour, 
 cooperation, and resources of the generations that 
 built the pyramids, and baked the bricks of Babylon. 
 But these — triumphs of organization though they 
 were — did not give the promise of permanence, for 
 the organization was impressed on the individuals 
 from above and from without, and did not guaran- 
 tee a corresponding inward growth of the individual. 
 The building of world empires was premature, and 
 they passed away. 
 
 All along the line of progress we see the con- 
 flict between the individual and what we may call 
 society. The individual tends in irrational fashion 
 to look at reason and all its implications as some- 
 thing to be used for himself, irrespective of the 
 claims of others. While association in family life 
 gives him some idea of the obligation that lies on 
 him to regard the claims of others, speedily the 
 family becomes simply a larger unity, the interests 
 of which may be regarded as in conflict with the 
 
THE MAKING OF MAN 1 33 
 
 interests of others. Rivalry, competition, and con- 
 flict are renewed on the larger scale, and the 
 family is held in abstraction precisely as the in- 
 dividual was held in abstraction and looked at as 
 a separate being bound up in his own interests. 
 Similarly, the tribe became a unit of abstraction, 
 and its interests were held to be in conflict with the 
 interests of others. Thus the course of history is 
 marked by conflicts of all kinds, and conflicts which 
 assumed a larger scale as the organized unities of 
 men became larger and larger. Wars between in- 
 dividuals became the vendettas of families ; these 
 became wars between villages, and these in turn 
 became the strife between states, and the struggle 
 continued on a larger scale, and it is not over yet. 
 
 The conflict was not altogether evil. There were 
 many features of the human character which could 
 be developed only through conflict. Courage, en- 
 durance, skill, foresight, command of oneself and 
 of the resources of life, might be developed through 
 the call which war made on the faculty of man. 
 Nor were these all. The other-regarding virtues, 
 also, found opportunity of realization. Loyalty to 
 leaders, obedience, trust, self-sacrifice, and a pas- 
 sion for the country which gave a man birth, grew 
 in the conflict. The effect produced on the mind 
 of a people by a continued conflict with their neigh- 
 bours may be the production of the other-regard- 
 ing disposition. Much might be written from this 
 
134 THEISM 
 
 point of view, and a great deal of what is good 
 and worthy has been written. What a wealth of 
 inspiring thought and high-souled emotion lies in the 
 war songs of a people ! The iron hand of war 
 gripped them, welded them into a unity, made them 
 feel the pulse of a common life, made them quiver 
 at the thought of a common danger, made them 
 feel vividly, as they would not otherwise have felt, 
 the unity of a mother country, as if she were their 
 mother indeed, and reinforced the feeling of pa- 
 triotism with a thousand associations in which there 
 was nothing mean or sordid. Patriotism aroused 
 somehow, stimulated and quickened by all the asso- 
 ciations of dangers manfully faced and overcome, of 
 triumphs won by bravery, courage, and endurance, 
 forms one of the stages in the upward progress of 
 humanity. 
 
 A flood of war to rebaptize the nations ; yes, war 
 has had that effect once and again in the history 
 of the world. The trials and triumphs of war have 
 had their permanent effects on human character 
 and development. If we limit our view to one peo- 
 ple, and refuse to look across the border, we might 
 speak at length on the development of the manly 
 virtues, might sing that it is sweet to die for one's 
 native country, and dwell on the reflex results on 
 human character, and the widening of the bounds 
 of feeling, and so on. In the same way we might 
 dwell on the struggle for existence in the lower world, 
 
THE MAKING OF MAN 1 35 
 
 and show eloquently how the strong became stronger, 
 and the swift, swifter, until the higher races ap- 
 peared. In neither the one case nor the other is 
 the picture an alluring one. In both cases, I must 
 say, that as I read, I long for a heaven for the 
 failures, for some compensation for the unsuccess- 
 ful. And verily they have had their compensation, 
 and the meek inherit the earth. But of this I shall 
 speak later on. 
 
 The story of this incessant competition may be 
 read from another point of view. I read it not so 
 much in relation to the victory which one people, 
 city, or tribe wins over another, as in the light 
 which it casts on the growth of human character. 
 It is a step in the process of welding men together, 
 it is one of the cases in which something produces 
 its opposite. The war, which had such sad results 
 when looked at from one point of view, had good 
 effects on the nation who made war. It taught the 
 rational being that he had wider interests than his 
 personal interests, that he had larger aspirations 
 than those of his family or his tribe, and it taught 
 him that all his rational powers ought to be used in 
 the service of the wider unity. The devotion of a 
 man to the state, the development of the thought 
 of duty to the fatherland, the discovery of himself as 
 a citizen of the state, as a responsible member of a 
 larger whole, was a great gain, won, as all ethical 
 gains are won, at a tremendous cost. 
 
I36 THEISM 
 
 The cost is great, and grows in magnitude as one 
 thinks of it. Strife everywhere, man against man, 
 tribe against tribe, city against city, state against 
 state, reason turned from its ideal and made an in- 
 strument of disintegration, is that the record of his- 
 tory, and the condition of progress ? Are men to 
 grow into larger and larger unities, to organize 
 themselves into wider communities, in order to co- 
 operate for war on a larger scale ? Every stranger 
 an enemy, and every one of unknown speech one to 
 be attacked, such appeared to be the state of the 
 human race at one time, and it is not unusual to-day. 
 The problem is to think out how this process will 
 result in our higher civilization, with its ethics, philos- 
 ophy, religion, with its sense of the value of the in- 
 dividual, and of the worth of human life. It is a 
 great and difficult problem, look at it as we may. 
 
 A problem less difficult may occupy us first. How 
 shall there be brought into existence a visible com- 
 munity of men and women united together in such 
 a way that there will result a coordination and sub- 
 ordination of individuals and their actions toward 
 some common end that belongs to all, and can be 
 enjoyed by each ? The first solution of the problem 
 is the family. There it has found a partial solution, 
 but only on a small scale, and for a short time. The 
 unity, observe, is not merely organic ; if it is to exist 
 at all, it must be constituted out of elements so far 
 independent of each other as to be individuals who 
 
THE MAKING OF MAN 1 37 
 
 can move, act, think, feel, and will on their own ac- 
 count. In other words, the unity must be consti- 
 tuted on rational grounds and upheld by rational 
 beings, who have the power of disrupting at their 
 pleasure. I am aware that the social contract no 
 longer appears in philosophy, and aware, also, that 
 constitutions grow and are not manufactured. I 
 have put the matter as I did merely for the sake of 
 stating the problem, and of enabling us to realize 
 what a problem it is. Carlyle puts a parallel prob- 
 lem, " Given a world of knaves, to deduce an honesty 
 from their united action." Given a world of appar- 
 ently disunited beings, how will you train them to 
 act together, to care for a common interest, and to 
 recognize that they must work together, if they are 
 to obtain a good worth having ? As I said, the first 
 answer is the family. In it a common interest is 
 obvious, and feeling and affection help to build up 
 this unity of love and mutual benefit. 
 
 Beyond the family there are again obvious com- 
 mon ways of action, and bonds of union. Trade, 
 commerce, union for a temporary purpose, which 
 requires cooperation and mutual trust for its realiza- 
 tion, these readily occur to us all. Outside of partic- 
 ular families, and yet within the larger unity of the 
 state, people unite themselves in a thousand ways 
 for different ends, drawn together because they form 
 friendships with each other, or united because they 
 follow a common pursuit. These bonds are volun- 
 
I38 THEISM 
 
 tarily constituted, and are all the stronger and more 
 disinterested on that account. Within the larger 
 society there may be many people associated to- 
 gether for special ends, and the educative power of 
 such unions may be great. In these the compulsory 
 character of merely natural unions slips into the 
 background, and men learn that though they have 
 formed bonds for themselves, they are not less bound, 
 but more. Along the line of such association freely 
 formed, and carried out with honour and fidelity, is 
 to be found a large part of the moral education of 
 mankind. For the need is to prevent the gift of 
 reason from being merely the addition of a disruptive 
 element to life. 
 
 That such a view of the quality which distin- 
 guishes man from other animals may be taken is 
 quite apparent. It has been taken by the possess- 
 ors themselves, and, also, by those who have spec- 
 ulated on the question. By the possessors them- 
 selves, for, as we have seen, it is one of the hardest 
 problems that have emerged in history to persuade 
 men that a selfish use of reason is irrational. It 
 seems almost to be a law of history that only one 
 good result can be won at one time. Human growth 
 seems to be made by the process of laying emphasis 
 on one thing at a time, to the neglect of another 
 which in the long run is of equal importance. It 
 would almost seem that in order that a truth may 
 be recognized at all, it must be emphasized as if it 
 
THE MAKING OF MAN 1 39 
 
 were the whole truth. The immediate illustration 
 of this law is that of the relation of the individual 
 to society. In order that the individual may learn 
 to know that he is little in himself, apart from his 
 fellows, the way of his training, as we see it in his- 
 tory, is to bind him with his fellows in so drastic a 
 fashion that he is scarcely able to make any move- 
 ment on his own account. 
 
 Rules gird him about, customs cluster around him, 
 his feeling, thought, action, are prescribed for him, 
 and apparently for him there is no initiative, and 
 scarcely any independent course. Actions are done 
 because others have done them, observances are held 
 because they have been handed down, and in all 
 the round of the experience of every day the course 
 is prescribed. Certain trades are hereditary; men 
 are bound to live and work as their fathers did; 
 castes are formed ; in fact, illustrations of this are 
 so numerous that it is not needful to enter into 
 detail. Formed as they were in the early ages of 
 the human race, they must from the nature of the 
 case be rude, irrational, and inadequate. But it may 
 have been the only way of teaching the rational 
 being the necessity of recognizing the wider claims 
 of reason. As obedience was the way of fitting a 
 man for the responsibility of command, so the way 
 of teaching the individual the responsibility attached 
 to rationality as such, was to bind him in bonds 
 which almost rendered disobedience impossible. At 
 
140 THEISM 
 
 all events that has been the historical method of 
 training the rational being and of teaching him the 
 right use of reason. 
 
 As at one time the making of rules for the guid- 
 ance of man seemed to be the main object of society, 
 there came a time when the breaking of rules, shown 
 to be inadequate, and the criticism of beliefs proven 
 to be without evidence, came to be the highest duty 
 of man. The making of rules, as well as the break- 
 ing of them, was alike the work of the rational being. 
 Late in human history came the recognition of the 
 fact that rules were made for man, not man for rules. 
 To put it more clearly, the discovery of the individual 
 person and his worth appears as one of the latest 
 achievements of man. We might write a philosophy 
 of history from this point of view. We might set 
 forth the strenuous work of the earliest races of the 
 human family to subdue the merely selfish rational 
 being and make him subject to the dominating 
 claims of the whole. The success of that task 
 might seem to be almost too complete. Then there 
 might be set forth the slow process of the emancipa- 
 tion of the individual from the chains and shackles 
 forged for him by the rules, traditions, and customs 
 of society. 
 
 How many mighty movements of the historic ages 
 converge toward this end ! For us modern men 
 the mightiest are Rome, Greece, and Palestine. The 
 great structure of Roman law is one of the mightiest 
 
THE MAKING OF MAN 14 1 
 
 achievements of the human mind. Its vast and ma- 
 jestic form stands at the beginning of our modern 
 civilization, and, in its completeness, it sets forth and 
 vindicates the mutual coordination of all in the one 
 great system in which both gods and men had their 
 place and their part. Each person had his position 
 and his rights, and these could be vindicated if any- 
 one encroached on them. Much might be said on 
 this were there time. Alongside of the debt we owe 
 to Rome is the debt we owe to Greece. The philoso- 
 phy of Greece, its reflection on nature, on art, on the 
 city-state, on man as a thinker, on man as an indi- 
 vidual, as a member of the state, as a being free and 
 yet under law ; in fact, all the mighty achievements of 
 Greece in science and philosophy were elements for 
 the solution of the great problem of the relation of 
 man to men and of men to man. But not from Rome 
 nor from Greece did the greatest service come toward 
 the recognition of the worth of the individual. To 
 another people much is due, and from another source 
 did the greatest influence toward the emancipation 
 of the individual from the irrational bonds that bound 
 him come. From the Hebrews, too, came the recog- 
 nition of the immense worth of the individual life and 
 of the contribution which the individual might make 
 to the worth of humanity. It was from the Hebrews 
 that the largest contribution came, the worth of which 
 we shall not attempt now to measure. From Rome, 
 Greece, and Palestine came those mighty influences 
 
142 THEISM 
 
 that moulded man, and fitted him to ask the question 
 of how society is to be built up, without the sacrifice of 
 the individuality of the individual. Notwithstanding 
 the mighty influences of these historic peoples, and 
 notwithstanding the new spirit that breathed over man 
 at the advent of Christianity, it was a long time before 
 men consciously faced the question, — of the relation of 
 man to men. When it was raised by Descartes in his 
 own way, and when he asked for a rational sanction 
 for everything that he could question, he opened the 
 way for a reaction that isolated the individual, insisted 
 on his independent worth, and actually left the notion 
 of society out of account. It was a time great in ab- 
 stractions : an abstract mind was beside an abstract 
 body, and men made for themselves the great problem 
 of getting body and mind again in relation. It was 
 a time, too, when men looked at everything as fixed, 
 static, unchangeably determined in its own nature, 
 and the problem is like the problem of biology to- 
 day, — how to get the organism back into unity after 
 they have disrupted it into fragments. 
 
 So, also, with regard to the relation of the indi- 
 vidual to society, men had to invent ways of restoring 
 the lost unity. The abstract individual restored to 
 some recognition of his relative independence, had 
 his revenge on the society which had enslaved him. 
 So, too, the abstract individual set his discoverers to a 
 task harder than ever was Egyptian bondage. Given 
 the abstract individual in his completeness and inde- 
 
THE MAKING OF MAN 1 43 
 
 pendence, to construct society, that was the problem 
 of a philosophy which started from the individual. 
 It would be long to tell the story of the social con- 
 tracts, of the liberty, equality, and fraternity ; of the 
 devices which were set forth as the way in which so- 
 ciety was constituted out of independent individuals. 
 It was a reaction against that method which neglected 
 the individual, which made him merely a link in a 
 chain, and gave him no position of worth in relation 
 to society. But like all reactions it went too far. It 
 in its turn neglected the other factor. 
 
 The literature of the Aufklarung is instructive in 
 many ways. Nor are we done with it yet. It is with 
 us to-day on our side of the water, and, perhaps, on 
 your side too. From it, in particular, we have got 
 those definitions of reason and rationalism which have 
 made it seem to be the private property of the indi- 
 vidual, which has set it in opposition to other parts 
 of human nature, and given occasion to the contrarie- 
 ties of reason and faith, reason and authority, and 
 of other contradictions within human nature, which 
 have played a great part in modern thought. Of 
 course, if you begin with the individual, whether it be 
 an individual atom, or anything else, you can scarcely 
 persuade the individual to become part of a system. 
 It is easy to take a watch to pieces, it takes a skilled 
 workman to put it together again. Starting as it did 
 from the individual, laying stress on his separateness 
 and isolation as it did, the philosophy of individu- 
 
144 THEISM 
 
 alism had to fall back on artificial ways in order to 
 restore somehow the social unity which it had dis- 
 rupted. It was the counterpart of the previous age- 
 long movement that had resulted in the suppression 
 of the individual. It did a good work for human 
 thought in laying emphasis on the neglected factor. 
 It taught us that if we are to understand ourselves 
 and our cosmical position, we must travel from society 
 to the individual, and from the individual to society, 
 and not till we have done both shall we be prepared 
 to make that synthesis which shall recognize that each 
 is for the other, in the other, and that taken apart 
 they fall into meaninglessness. 
 
 Leaving for subsequent treatment the conception 
 of personality, let us set ourselves to think of the 
 largest unity we have yet reached. Humanity is 
 one, subsisting in real connection of whole and part 
 from the first appearance of man until the present 
 day ; all the generations are linked together in un- 
 broken sequence, and each generation adds to the tra- 
 dition of its predecessors ; it is a great thought, but 
 one that we can scarcely think. Yet it is true and 
 real that the words I use in order to convey my 
 thought to you actually have been formed by the 
 mental striving of all men who have lived and 
 worked on the earth. The instruments I use from 
 day to day to do my work are a direct inheritance 
 handed down from the first tool-maker. The ship 
 on which I voyaged to these Western shores is 
 
THE MAKING OF MAN 14$ 
 
 descended from the rude canoe which first made 
 the water that separates land from land to serve 
 as a way of communication. The mighty machin- 
 ery of to-day which places all the resources of the 
 planet at the service of every man, is the fruit of 
 that inventive faculty displayed by the earliest work- 
 ers of mankind. 
 
 These things come first to mind as we seek for 
 illustrations of the solidarity of man. But, while 
 they are the most obvious, they are not the strongest 
 or the most vivid of such illustrations. The emotions 
 of men are of the same kind from the beginning 
 until now. Pain and pleasure are sought and avoided 
 all through the ages, and desire and aversion are 
 still the motives which spur to action. No doubt 
 the experiences of the ages have enriched the con- 
 tents of the emotions, if they have not changed 
 their character. Nor has the intellectual character 
 changed through the ages, however much the 
 settled data on which intellect works have been 
 increased. Man is one through all time, and the 
 connections between the successive generations are 
 exceedingly close. The first emotions, desires, af- 
 fections of men have flowered and come to the fruit 
 they bear to-day, and the earliest experience of good 
 and evil has had in it the great ethical principles 
 which guide the action of the wisest and best to 
 this hour. 
 
 Nor do we find anything different as we question 
 
146 THEISM 
 
 the philosophies of the past and present. Long 
 ago appeared the materialist, the positivist, and the 
 idealist. The primitive man looked at the world 
 outside, and seemed to think of himself simply as 
 part of that world, determined by it, and made by 
 it. Ere reflection following on action taught him 
 to know himself as a source of energy, he regarded 
 himself, so far as he had thought at all, as a product 
 of the world outside. Nor is that way of thinking 
 dead yet. Uniformities of succession generate uni- 
 formities of thought, we are told, and the advocate 
 of that view spends volumes to prove that matter 
 makes mind, and necessities of matter may be trans- 
 formed into mental necessities. To look at matter 
 as first and causal, and productive of mind, has been 
 always with men, and still is here, and the unity of 
 thinking is so far proven. But the idealist view did 
 not linger far behind. For soon the early man found 
 that he could do something and be something. He 
 knew himself as a worker, as one that had feelings, 
 desires, wants, and who could take steps to carry 
 out his wishes ; thus the world became transformed 
 before his mind, and became a world figured in his 
 own likeness. So the great ideal philosophies took 
 their beginning, and these also appear perennially, 
 for they, too, have their roots deep down in the spirit- 
 ual nature of man. From the beginning men have 
 asked the same questions, and they will continue to 
 ask them to the end. The answers to these ques- 
 
THE MAKING OF MAN 1 47 
 
 tions make up the science, the ethics, the philosophy, 
 and the theology of the world. 
 
 I deal with the questions and the answers in order 
 to illustrate the theme I have in hand, namely, the 
 unity of man. However great the advance that has 
 been made, however wide our knowledge, and how- 
 ever great our command over the forces of nature, 
 the advance itself is a testimony to the unity of that 
 human nature to which it is due. Physically, morally, 
 and intellectually man is one. We shall not find 
 the union to be constituted, as the organism is con- 
 stituted, by physical bonds. To understand the unity 
 of man in any adequate way, we must transcend the 
 physical and the visible, and seek the bond of union 
 in the invisible, that is, in the intellectual, moral, and 
 spiritual, or, to use the word which includes all these, 
 in the rational sphere. 
 
 The demand which reason makes on reason to 
 think humanity as a unity is confessedly great, and 
 it is difficult to say whether we can think it so. It 
 is difficult to think of the past generations of men 
 in their concrete reality ; it is difficult to think the 
 people living in their concrete reality at the present 
 hour, and it is scarcely possible to realize at all the 
 generations yet to be. When we try to realize the 
 past, we break it up into histories of nations, of in- 
 stitutions, of philosophies, of religions, and so on, 
 and perhaps that is the best we can do. But we 
 ought to remember that all these histories are only 
 
I48 THEISM 
 
 aspects of the great reality that has been, and has 
 been acted in sorrow, trial, and suffering in the lives 
 and acts of men on this round earth. At all events, 
 this thought should make us a little more humble, 
 a little less sure as to the conclusions we draw from 
 our reasonings and philosophies — the unity of man 
 is there whether we can think it or no. And in a 
 measure we can think it, at least so far as to recog- 
 nize that it is there. 
 
 We may rise to the magnitude of the thought 
 slowly and gradually. From the family to the tribe, 
 from the tribe to the city, from the state-city to the 
 state, from the state to the great federal union, and 
 from the great federal union to the federation of the 
 world, and to the recognition of the fact that God 
 has made of one blood all the nations of the earth. 
 In some way we must rise to this magnitude if we 
 are to understand the problem which we set to our- 
 selves. It is easier to grasp the lesser unities in 
 our thought, and to apprehend the significance of 
 the family and so on; but our thought cannot rest 
 until we recognize the larger unity in which these 
 lesser unities are. Nor can we recognize fully our 
 own significance as moral beings existing here and 
 now, unless we see in a measure our relations to all 
 the rational beings which have been and shall be. 
 It is the business of reason to realize relations and 
 to act on the recognition of them. Nor will the 
 recognition of these invisible but real bonds which 
 
THE MAKING OF MAN 1 49 
 
 bind us to the past of humanity be without influence 
 on our thought, character, and conduct. 
 
 I am aware that in this contention of mine I am 
 running the risk of contradiction by many of our fore- 
 most workers in philosophy. Professor Wallace says : 
 " The rule for man is not merely to accept the given, 
 but to mould and fashion it for himself. In him 
 nothing merely is ; it is to be ; it has taken on it a new 
 law, the law of becoming, as the law which governs 
 him and the things he deals with. With his emer- 
 gence on the scene, the world has, as it were, got 
 a new relative centre; all things have become, or, 
 rather, are more and more becoming, anthropocen- 
 tric." ("Natural Theology and Ethics," p. 1 12.) Pro- 
 fessor James, of Harvard, to whom we all owe so 
 much, for he has shown how philosophy may also be 
 literature, says, in an oft-quoted passage, which also 
 he has quoted from himself: "We have no organ or 
 faculty to appreciate the simply given order. The 
 real world as it is given objectively at this moment is 
 the sum total of all its beings and events now. But 
 can we think of such a sum ? Can we realize for an 
 instant what a cross-section of all existence at a 
 definite point of time would be? While I talk and 
 the flies buzz, a sea-gull catches a sea fish at the 
 mouth of the Amazon, a tree falls in the Adirondack 
 wilderness, a man sneezes in Germany, a horse dies 
 in Tartary, and twins are born in France. What 
 does that mean ? Does the contemporaneity of these 
 
I SO THEISM 
 
 events with one another, and with a million others as 
 disjointed, form a rational bond between them, and 
 unite them into anything that means for us a world ? 
 Yet such a collateral contemporaneity, and nothing 
 else, is the real order of the world. It is an order 
 with which we have nothing to do but to get away 
 from it as fast as possible. As I said, we break it ; we 
 break it into histories, and we break it into arts, and 
 we break it into sciences ; and then we begin to feel 
 at home." (" The Will to Believe," pp. 1 18-9.) Pres- 
 ident Hyde quotes the passage from Professor James 
 and adds : "The passage from Professor James shows 
 that the world in which we live is a construction made 
 by the mind in the interest of the heart and will : and 
 that in this one great world there are subordinate 
 worlds of history, science, and art. It shows how 
 utterly unintelligible and uninhabitable and unendur- 
 able a real as opposed to an ideal world would be ; and 
 that practical idealism is simply a presentation of the 
 familiar facts of everyday life in their rational rela- 
 tions, as elements in a logical process and parts of an 
 organic whole." ("Practical Idealism," pp. 5-6.) Mr. 
 Herbert Spencer has a passage in which he enume- 
 rates a number of simultaneous occurrences happen- 
 ing at the same moment, and his inference is that the 
 unknowable power must be something higher than 
 intelligence, for no intelligence could endure so heavy 
 a strain. Thus from Hegelians, Non-Hegelians, and 
 agnostics there is a consensus of opinion which seems 
 
THE MAKING OF MAN 1 5 1 
 
 to condemn my argument as it has been set forth up 
 to this time. 
 
 I find myself in agreement with these authorities 
 in so far as they set forth the necessity under which 
 we lie as to the breaking up of things, and the fact 
 that the world we live in is constituted by our own 
 activity. We do and we must break up things ; but 
 then we do and we must unite the breakages into a 
 unity again, and make them as like the original unity 
 as we can. In fact, Professor James does this very 
 thing himself in the sequel to the passage we have 
 quoted. " We make ten thousand separate serial 
 orders of it, and on any one of these we react as 
 though the others did not exist. We discover among 
 its various parts relations that were never given to 
 sense at all (mathematical relations, tangents, squares, 
 and roots, and logarithmic functions), and out of an 
 infinite number of these we call certain ones essential 
 and lawgiving, and ignore the rest. Essential these 
 relations are, but only for our purpose, the other 
 relation being just as real and present as they, and 
 our purpose is to conceive simply and to foresee. 
 Are not simple conception and prevision subjective 
 ends pure and simple ? They are the ends of 
 what we call science ; and the miracle of miracles 
 — a miracle not yet exhaustively cleared up by 
 any philosophy — is that the given order lends it- 
 self to the remodelling. It shows itself plastic to 
 many of our scientific, to many of our aesthetic, to 
 
152 THEISM 
 
 many of our practical purposes and ends." (pp. 
 119-20.) 
 
 It is a striking paragraph, eloquently and felici- 
 tously expressed, and yet a great deal is implied in 
 it which has not found expression. The thousand 
 separate serial orders can be made by us, because 
 there is one order lying at the basis of them, as the 
 condition of their possibility. If some seem to re- 
 spond, as we react on them, as if the others do not 
 exist, the response is not complete, but measured 
 and conditioned by the others, and we, perhaps, un- 
 consciously, make allowance in our reaction for their 
 existence and their influence. Illustrations of this 
 have been given already, and we need not repeat 
 them here. I confess that it is difficult to follow 
 Professor James when he asks, "Are not simple 
 conception and prevision subjective ends pure and 
 simple ? " What, then, becomes of the objectivity of 
 science, and of the fact that nature will carry out our 
 purpose, if we can intelligently instruct her to do so ? 
 We at once get back the objectivity of science in the 
 miracle of miracles which no philosophy has yet ex- 
 haustively cleared up. The given order lends itself 
 to the remodelling. Yes, but that is only one-half 
 of the story. The remodelling would do well to lend 
 itself to the given order. 
 
 In truth, there seems to lie at the basis of the view 
 of Professor James a kind of belief that there is an 
 irrational, contingent, and irreducible element in the 
 
THE MAKING OF MAN 1 53 
 
 given order. Hence the way in which he piles up 
 the number of events which happen contemporane- 
 ously all over the world, which we cannot reduce to 
 any order. The number might be indefinitely in- 
 creased, and the impression made by them might 
 also be multiplied. It is quite true that we have to 
 make our selection out of the actualities of the world, 
 if we are to understand its ongoing at all. But the 
 talk goes on as if the world were unintelligible until 
 we came into it. We speak as if we constitute the 
 order of the world, and as if the rationality of the 
 world depended on our remodelling of it. I venture 
 humbly but emphatically to enter my dissent. The 
 thousand serial separate orders which we make of 
 the world are possible because the relations are 
 there already, and, while in a sense we make them, 
 we in a truer sense simply recognize them. How is 
 it that our separate serial orders are always under- 
 going reconstruction, and our histories of science, 
 literature, art, philosophy, need ever to be rewritten, 
 if it were not for the necessity of bringing our serial 
 orders into closer conformity to the given order ? 
 
 Take the works of science, and let us ask ourselves 
 what is their history ? Is it not true that the great- 
 est and most severe critic of science is just the given 
 order ? The conceptions of physics and chemistry 
 have been recast within our own time. The old ter- 
 minology has almost passed into abeyance, and the 
 talk now is in terms of energy and evolution. The 
 
154 THEISM 
 
 world of science presents another aspect at the 
 end of this century from that which it ever had 
 before. If it is the business of science to conceive 
 simply and to foresee, then it fulfils that function 
 more completely than before. Why ? Because it 
 tries to see the thing and its working as they are 
 in the given order. It tries to see, as Clerk Max- 
 well said in his youth, the "particular go" of the 
 thing. There is a standard and a goal for science, 
 and that standard would seem to be the recognition 
 and the statement of the rationality of the given 
 order. 
 
 While this is true of the physical sciences, it is 
 still more true of the sciences which deal with man. 
 In those sciences, we have to deal not only with the 
 immanent rationality of the world, which manifests 
 itself as irreversible and irresistible order, but with 
 the manifestations of finite intelligence which is on 
 the way to realize itself. Histories of knowledge, 
 ethics, philosophy, and religion deal, as one might 
 say, with rationality in the making. The making of 
 a finite rational being seems to be a long and costly 
 work. Account is to be taken of the ultimate 
 rationality of the world, and also of the tentative 
 efforts of the finite being who has to make his own 
 world. But we should never be able to make the 
 worlds in which we dwell, in each of which there is a 
 centre and circumference relative to the individual, 
 if there were not in each of us a trust that in the 
 
THE MAKING OF MAN 155 
 
 larger world, which includes the separate serial worlds, 
 there is a rationality as much greater than ours as the 
 real world is greater than our ideal worlds. 
 
 Each of us is equal to the world which we have 
 constructed for ourselves. Everything in that world 
 is relative to the person who was active in the 
 making of it. May we not suppose a rational 
 intelligence for which the world is, and to which all 
 the simultaneous and successive changes may be 
 present as really as the world of our experience is 
 to ourselves ? May not the given order be the 
 rational order after all, and our serial editions of it 
 be simply attempts after something not yet seen by 
 us ? At all events the statement that the real is the 
 rational is a proposition for which a good deal may 
 be said. 
 
 So we come back to our proposition that we must 
 strive to rise to the thought of the wider and wider 
 unities that meet us as we read the unfolding history 
 of the world. We must try to think things together, 
 and not merely in the separate serials presented to 
 us for our easier reading. We must try to think 
 things together, for they are together. Our serials 
 may be useful and profitable reading, if we remember 
 that they must be bound together and read together 
 if we are to reach the goal. Even then they must 
 be read only as approximations to the great reality. 
 The great order of the world has made room for the 
 order which a rational being constructs for himself 
 
1 56 THEISM 
 
 within it; it would be strange if the rational being 
 were to conclude that there was no reason in the 
 world until he put it there. The response which 
 the world makes to our intelligent efforts, the plas- 
 ticity of the world under our remodelling hand, looks 
 as if provision were made in the nature of things for 
 the advent of such a being as man. At all events, 
 it is true that a rational being has found a place in 
 the system of things, and has room and freedom to 
 work there. 
 
 The race of rational beings has lived and worked 
 here for a long time, and has left traces of them- 
 selves and their work. They have transformed the 
 place in which they have lived, have made for them- 
 selves a home in it. The fruits of the earth have 
 been modified to meet their wants, the plants have 
 taken on new forms to gratify their taste and to feed 
 and clothe them, the winds of heaven serve their 
 pleasure, fire has become their servant, and the 
 lightnings carry their messages. Cities have risen 
 at their command, and, while they have subdued 
 the earth to their purpose, they have themselves 
 grown from more to more. They have worked on 
 the same lines from the first to the last, only with an 
 intelligence that has grown with the demand made 
 on it. They have left the record of their hopes, 
 fears, beliefs, aims, and purposes, and have enabled 
 us to see how they looked on the heavens above, and 
 the earth beneath ; what they thought of the past, 
 
THE MAKING OF MAN I 57 
 
 the present, and the future. We know how they 
 regarded the great mystery of existence, and we 
 can read their growing apprehension of the great- 
 ness of the world in which they lived. Is it any 
 wonder that we are constrained to think of them as 
 a unity ? 
 
 Here, too, may come forth considerations similar 
 to those which Professor James set forth in another 
 connection. We may be told that we have no organ 
 to grasp so large a unity. If we cannot grasp the 
 contemporaneity, how shall we grasp the contem- 
 poraneity and the succession, too? And yet it 
 must somehow be grasped, for we all recognize it 
 as a fact. If we begin with any unity in which we 
 may imagine ourselves to be placed, we shall find 
 ourselves pushed in thought on and on till we are 
 face to face with the whole race as they have existed 
 in space and in time. Our thought refuses to be 
 shut up in compartments. Begin where we stand 
 with any individual now present, and from him we 
 shall be thrust forth to the thought of this great 
 city, and of all the complex relations which make up 
 the history and the present constitution of this city. 
 From the city we shall be driven in thought to the 
 state, and to the great nation of which it forms an 
 integral part. Then our thought will find no resting 
 place until we think of the relations of this state to 
 the other states of the world. You cannot write a 
 history of the United States without a glance at the 
 
158 THEISM 
 
 countries on the other side from which your fore- 
 fathers came ; you cannot explain your ethics, phi- 
 losophy, religion, without regard to the rock whence 
 you are hewn, and the ancestral traits you carried 
 with you to your home here. No doubt you have 
 also made your own contribution to the thought 
 and life of men — a contribution which grows larger 
 every day. 
 
 The matter in hand is that you cannot begin 
 anywhere without assuming in your thought the 
 whole history of mankind. And you cannot con- 
 tinue thinking to any purpose without the postulate 
 of the larger unity of the human race which un- 
 derlies all your thinking. It may not have come 
 clearly before your consciousness, but as soon as it 
 is pointed out, we all recognize that it has been 
 the tacit assumption of all of us. So I am not to 
 be debarred from the use of this unity of man by 
 any difficulty which may be brought against my 
 power adequately to conceive it. Difficulties as 
 great, and, in the opinion of some, as insuperable, 
 can be brought against the conception of any unity 
 whatsoever. You have only to read "Appearance 
 and Reality," by Mr. F. H. Bradley, to find as fine 
 an assortment of difficulties as can be found in 
 any place in the world. The difficulties are perplex- 
 ing enough, whether you speak of time, or space, 
 or self, or of anything else which you think as 
 one. In this related world you can never take a 
 
THE MAKING OF MAN 1 59 
 
 thing out of its relations, for, as soon as you bring 
 in the relations, it may be shown that you have 
 broken up the unity. It may be shown that you 
 have no right to speak of the weight of any par- 
 ticular body, for when you do, you are simply 
 speaking of a relation which this particular thing 
 has to all the things which make up the universe. 
 In fact, difficulties arise when we speak of any 
 unity in which differences occur, and which is 
 made up of differences. There is no greater in- 
 herent difficulty in thinking of a unity made up of 
 many differences, than there is in thinking of a 
 unity made up of a few. 
 
 It is quite true that thought cannot rest until 
 it reaches a final unity in which all existence finds 
 its place, which will, also, give to every difference a 
 place and a function in the unity of all. Thought 
 ever tends that way, and many have been the at- 
 tempts made to find a unity of that kind. We are 
 not yet ready for the consideration of these. We 
 are familiarizing ourselves with the wider and 
 wider unities which have met our view as we fol- 
 lowed the history of the world set forth to us by 
 science. We have come in man to a new kind of 
 unity, which in many ways has transcended those 
 we met before. Not merely an organic unity, nor 
 a mechanical unity held together by pressure, but 
 a unity of independent, self-guided, rational beings, 
 held together by an inward motive, and bound by 
 
160 THEISM 
 
 bonds which are moral and spiritual. Constituted 
 for each individual by descent, tradition, upbringing, 
 education, family, and social intercourse, it has to 
 be constituted anew by him of his own choice 
 and rational desire. Into that union the individual 
 has to bring himself with all that has been given 
 him, and all that he has made himself to be ; and 
 he has to find himself, as he can find himself only, 
 in the society. It is open to him to refuse to enter 
 into the unity of humanity on the terms which 
 alone can make the union beneficial to the society 
 and to himself. He may in a short-sighted and 
 irrational way refuse the wider outlook, disregard 
 the limitations and restraints, which the good of 
 the whole has laid on the individual ; he may look 
 at all things from an individual standpoint; he may 
 use the means provided by the labour of the gen- 
 erations for what he thinks his own benefit, and 
 the strength, skill, and power he owes to society 
 may be turned against it: these considerations only 
 show how difficult it is to constitute a rational 
 unity out of individuals who are only partially 
 rational, and have not become rational enough to 
 know wherein their highest interests lie. 
 
 At this point emerge other considerations on 
 which we have not touched as yet. We have to con- 
 sider the beliefs of humanity from a point of view 
 which throws into relief another aspect of man. 
 If the ideal of humanity is higher than we have 
 
THE MAKING OF MAN 161 
 
 yet seen, if we have to look at man as continu- 
 ing in existence beyond this world of time, if we 
 are to regard the members of the human race as 
 living at this hour, somewhere, after they have 
 passed from this life, clearly our conception of the 
 unity of humanity receives a breadth unspeakably 
 great. If we continue to live on, and if the other 
 life is in connection with the present life, then the 
 relation of the individual to the unity of humanity 
 assumes a new form, and the bonds of union be- 
 come still more spiritual than before. We feel at 
 once that we are members of a larger whole, and 
 the responsibility to the whole assumes a graver 
 aspect. Whatever we do here has an eternal as- 
 pect. We are ourselves transformed under the 
 grander, deeper light, and our feelings, desires, 
 aims, thoughts, have a deeper meaning, for we 
 recognize that we are not the children of time. 
 
 It may be asked whether at this stage we have 
 not passed beyond rational grounds, and have 
 brought to light hopes or fears which reason can- 
 not verify. It has been contended that reason has 
 to do only with the present world and the present 
 life, and to go beyond these is to bring in what 
 passes the bounds of verification. Precisely as it 
 has been contended that reason has only to do 
 with the interests of the individual, so it has been 
 contended that it has to do only with the present 
 life. Both these propositions have been advocated 
 
1 62 THEISM 
 
 by Mr. Kidd in his work on " Social Evolution," and 
 it seems right to look at his argument. Meanwhile, 
 let us observe that even if we limit our view to the 
 present life, and to the disclosures of history, it is 
 clear that the bonds between the individual and 
 society are of the most real and practical kind. 
 We can discover these bonds, can discern these 
 conditions; indeed, they have been discovered and 
 set forth, so that he who runs may read. The rela- 
 tions are as real as those set forth in physics, and 
 the sanctions for social conduct are as real and 
 as conspicuous as those which dictate a regard to 
 the welfare of the individual. But it may be well 
 to hear what Mr. Kidd has to say on the subject, 
 and to discuss the matter with him at some length. 
 
VI 
 
 IS A RATIONAL RELIGION POSSIBLE? 
 Mr. BENJAMIN KIDD AND Mr. ARTHUR 
 BALFOUR 
 
 It may be well to begin with a quotation from the 
 work of Mr. Benjamin Kidd on " Social Evolution." 
 That book has had a great vogue with us, and it 
 seems also to have attracted attention on this side of 
 the Atlantic. Its recognition of the part which re- 
 ligion has in social evolution, its insistence on the 
 altruistic character of social morality, and the coura- 
 geous maintenance of the proposition that the hope of 
 humanity lay in the development of religious feeling 
 and of the conduct that springs therefrom, won- the 
 approval of all who felt the need of religious sanctions 
 for the guidance of their own lives. They were so 
 much entranced with the clear and emphatic insist- 
 ence of the necessity of religion for man, that they 
 forgot to ask whether a religion was possible on the 
 terms and within the limits prescribed by Mr. Kidd. 
 As I read the book and watched the reception given to 
 it, I came to the conclusion that the Aufklarung was 
 not yet dead. Here was a book with all the notes of 
 
 163 
 
164 THEISM 
 
 the Aufklarung, with the tendency of the Aufklarung 
 to shut up nature and human nature into compart- 
 ments, and to introduce discord and anarchy into 
 the separate compartments, that placed religion and 
 morality out of rational relation with one another, 
 and pitted religion against rationality so far as to say 
 that a rational religion is impossible ; and yet the book 
 was praised beyond measure, and edition after edition 
 was rapidly sold. 
 
 I was reminded of Henry Thomas Buckle and 
 his " History of Civilization." The two men and the 
 two books were not unlike each other. They dealt 
 largely with the same problem and they used the 
 same method. It is true that the principle of prog- 
 ress to which the advance of civilization is due is 
 not the same, but in both the principle is one-sided, 
 and in both it proceeds on the assumption of a radical 
 contradiction in human nature. The principle of 
 progress is with Mr. Buckle intellectual ; with Mr. 
 Kidd it is extra-rational. With Mr. Buckle religion, 
 at least in its historical manifestations, is super- 
 stitious, irrational, and a hindrance to progress ; with 
 Mr. Kidd it is also extra-rational, irrational, but a 
 help, indeed the only help to progress. Cultivate 
 the intelligence, enlighten the mind, spread the light 
 of knowledge everywhere, and the millennium is 
 sure to come, so spoke the earlier prophet, as he pero- 
 rated with such eloquence as he could command on 
 the advance of the species, and contrasted the patt 
 
IS A NATIONAL RELIGION POSSIBLE? 1 65 
 
 with the present. The prophet of the present tells 
 a different story. Enlightenment is not increasing, 
 and it would not be good for the human race if it did 
 increase. The human mind has not grown through- 
 out the ages, for was not a Greek as intelligent as we 
 are ? There is no rational sanction for progress, for 
 the secret of progress lies in the unintelligible and 
 the irrational. Let us struggle to overcome our own 
 reason, and let us subordinate it to the irrational, so 
 shall we hasten the wheels of progress and advance 
 civilization. 
 
 Thus we have in both writers the essential princi- 
 ple of the Auf klarung, — the splitting up of man into 
 unrelated factors, the rupture of the unity of intelli- 
 gence, the assumption that essential and related 
 parts of human nature are in entire antagonism to 
 one another ; and the consequence follows that they 
 must brand that part they do not use, and cast it out 
 as an intruder, and a disturber of the peace and prog- 
 ress of humanity. It is quite an accident that Mr. 
 Buckle regards religion as the intruder, and Mr. 
 Kidd looks on reason, in his sense of the word, as the 
 enemy ; for the positions might be reversed and the 
 same result would follow. I for one protest against 
 the breaking up of the mind into separate faculties 
 that in the phraseology of some seem to act inde- 
 pendently of one another, and against that assump- 
 tion that the manifold of sense has to wait till it is 
 gathered up into the unity of apperception ; and I 
 
1 66 tMeism 
 
 protest, also, against the introduction into philosophy 
 of phraseology which will prevent me from seeing 
 that feeling, thinking, acting, is done by the whole 
 being, and is not a series of unrelated processes con- 
 ducted by abstractions. 
 
 Let us, however, hear Mr. Kidd. " This orderly 
 and beautiful world which we see around us is now, 
 and always has been, the scene of incessant rivalry 
 between all the forms of life inhabiting it — rivalry, 
 too, not chiefly conducted between different species, 
 but between members of the same species. The plants 
 in the green-sward beneath our feet are engaged in 
 silent rivalry with each other, a rivalry which if al- 
 lowed to proceed without outside interference would 
 know no pause until the weaker were exterminated. 
 Every plant, organ, or quality of these plants which 
 calls forth admiration for its beauty or perfection has 
 its place and meaning in this struggle, and has been ac- 
 quired to ensure success therein. The trees of the for- 
 est which clothe and beautify the landscape are in a 
 state of nature engaged in the same rivalry with each 
 other. Left to themselves they fight out, as unmistaka- 
 ble records have shown, a stubborn struggle extending 
 over centuries in which at last only those forms most 
 suitable to the conditions of the locality retain their 
 places. But so far we view the rivalry under simple 
 conditions; it is amongst the forms of animal life as 
 we begin to watch the gradual progress upwards to 
 higher types that it becomes many sided and complex. 
 
IS A RATIONAL RELIGION POSSIBLE? 1 67 
 
 It is at this point that we encounter a feature of 
 the struggle which recent developments of biological 
 science tend to bring into ever increasing prominence. 
 The first necessity for every successful form engaged 
 in this struggle is the capacity for reproduction be- 
 yond the limits which the conditions of life for the 
 time being comfortably provide for. The capacity 
 for multiplying in this way is at first one of the princi- 
 pal resources in the development upwards, and in the 
 lower forms of life it is still almost the sole equip- 
 ment. But as progress begins to be made, a deeper 
 cause, the almost illimitable significance of which 
 science is beginning to appreciate, requires that all 
 the successful forms must multiply beyond the limits 
 of comfortable existence. 
 
 Recent biological researches, and more particularly 
 the investigations and conclusions of Professor Weis- 
 mann, have tended to greatly develop Darwin's orig- 
 inal hypothesis as to the conditions under which 
 progress has been made in the various forms of life. 
 It is now coming to be recognized as a necessarily in- 
 herent part of the doctrine of evolution that, if the 
 continual selection which is always going on amongst 
 the higher forms of life were to be suspended, these 
 forms would not only possess no tendency to make 
 progress ; they must actually go backwards. That 
 is to say, if all the individuals of every generation 
 in any species vuere allowed to equally propagate 
 their kind, the average of each generation would con- 
 
1 68 THEISM 
 
 tinually tend to fall belozv the average of the genera- 
 tion which preceded it, and a process of slow but 
 steady degeneration would ensue." (" Social Evo- 
 lution," pp. 38-9.) 
 
 We have quoted at length, as the quotation sets 
 forth one of the main elements of Mr. Kidd's argu- 
 ment. At the outset we notice the stress he lays on 
 struggle. Rivalry everywhere, cell against cell, part 
 against part, organism against organism, species 
 against species, and genus against genus. It is set 
 forth in the most extreme and one-sided way, with 
 utter blindness to the other side of the story. There 
 is no word of that which made the so-called struggle 
 possible, and no thought of the fact that every spe- 
 cies is serviceable to every other. Nor is there any 
 mention that the plant life must precede animal life, 
 in order to lift matter to that chemical level at which 
 it may become the vehicle of animal life. Nor is 
 there any regard to the fact that the various species 
 of animals depend on one another to a degree which 
 passes calculation. The soil on which corn is grown 
 has been worked over and over again, until it has 
 attained that condition which makes it fit for the 
 growing of corn. In truth, Mr. Kidd, following his 
 masters, has isolated one set of phenomena, fixed his 
 thought on it exclusively, until he has quite forgotten 
 that, if there be a struggle, it is a struggle within one 
 system. 
 
 Nor has he observed that the higher the organism 
 
IS A RATIONAL RELIGION POSSIBLE? l6g 
 
 the less the fertility. On this Mr. Spencer has writ- 
 ten much that is to the purpose, and has gone far 
 to prove that there is a law of fertility. But then 
 Mr. Spencer, though a thorough-going evolutionist, 
 is, unlike Mr. Kidd, a disbeliever in the adequacy of 
 natural selection. Mr. Kidd says grandly, " Amongst 
 the higher forms it is an inevitable law not only 
 that competition and selection must always accom- 
 pany progress, but that they must prevail amongst 
 every form of life which is not actually retrograd- 
 ing. Every successful form must, of necessity, mul- 
 tiply beyond the limits which the average conditions 
 of life comfortably provide for. Other things being 
 equal, indeed, the wider the limits of selection the 
 keener the rivalry, and the more rigid the selection 
 the greater will be the progress." (p. 41.) It is 
 so easy to make general statements, and to speak 
 of inevitable laws, and yet the greater part of Mr. 
 Kidd's book is taken up with a proof that the suc- 
 cess of humanity as a social system is due to the 
 fact that men have somehow disregarded the stern 
 competition and rivalry which he speaks of with 
 so strong an emphasis. No wonder that he regards 
 such conduct as irrational. But of this more in the 
 sequel. 
 
 We note further the adherence of Mr. Kidd to the 
 opinion of Weismann. In his usual fashion he speaks 
 of Weismann's view, as if it had been accepted by 
 those who know. He might have told us which of 
 
1 70 THEISM 
 
 Weismann's views he holds by, for Weismann has set 
 forth at least half a dozen different ones. But take 
 the one Mr. Kidd has chosen, and on which he dilates 
 at some length. It is scarcely possible to follow the 
 reasoning of Weismann and the elaboration of that 
 reasoning by Mr. Kidd. They make the strange sup- 
 position of the cessation of natural selection. In one 
 breath they tell us that this is the law of life and 
 progress, and then calmly speak of its cessation, and 
 seek to trace out its consequences. It seems to me 
 that I could make the supposition of the cessation of 
 gravitation, and on that supposition trace out a good 
 many consequences of an inconvenient kind. Really 
 they must make their choice. Natural selection is 
 universal or it is not. It seems to me that it is uni- 
 versal in the sense that there must be a correspond- 
 ence between the organism and its environment. The 
 fittest must survive whatever the fittest may be. The 
 survival tests the fitness. To speak from the stand- 
 point of evolution of " a process of slow but steady 
 degeneration " is to go beyond the mark, and to bring 
 in a standard not derived from evolution. 
 
 The stress and strain of rivalry and competition 
 may work for progress, or may work for degrada- 
 tion. Change the environment of this place a few 
 degrees, and lower it on the average until it became 
 what it is in the Arctic regions, and the fittest would 
 survive, but it would be a different kind of fitness. 
 What we may call a degraded form would inevitably 
 
IS A RATIONAL RELIGION POSSIBLE? IJl 
 
 be the outcome of such a state of matters. It is 
 noticeable that Mr. Kidd makes another assumption 
 which he has not attempted to justify. He simply 
 asserts it as indubitable. Assuming for the sake of 
 examining his proposition on its merits, that the ces- 
 sation of natural selection is possible, why does he 
 assume that the result would be degeneration ? Un- 
 derlying the assumption is the . thought, never ex- 
 pressed, but always understood, that variation would 
 cease, or that the organism would vary only in one 
 direction. How does this assumption agree with the 
 hypothesis of indefinite variation ? This is one of the 
 points which have emerged in the controversy be- 
 tween Weismann and Spencer, on which Spencer 
 lays great stress, and to which Weismann has given 
 no satisfactory answer. If, as Mr. Kidd says, " the 
 higher forms of life would tend to sink back again by 
 a degenerative process through those stages of devel- 
 opment by which they reached their present position," 
 this could only be characterized from the standpoint of 
 evolution as a case of the survival of the fittest. In 
 truth, one gets a little tired of this kind of argument, 
 and one wishes for a little consistency of thought and 
 of adherence to one point of view for a time. Mr. 
 Kidd cannot eat his cake and have it. If he is to use 
 the language and to unfold the arguments of evolu- 
 tion, he has no right to speak of degeneration, for 
 that is to bring in another measure than that used by 
 evolution. He can only speak of the survival of the 
 
172 THEISM 
 
 fittest, and whatever survives is the fittest. Thus his 
 talk about progress is swept away, as being beyond 
 the sphere to which judgment is limited by the 
 premises. 
 
 Greater wonders meet us as we follow on in the 
 perusal of Mr. Kidd's book. He brings the laws 
 of biology to the interpretation of human life ; he 
 makes no discrimination between the more involved 
 life to which he comes and the less involved life he 
 has previously studied, and we rather expect that 
 he will soon get into difficulties. Even in the lower 
 life he has refused to look at anything save rivalry, 
 competition, and the struggle for existence. He has 
 refused to look at the tenderness and devotion of a 
 mother to her little ones, and there are such among 
 animals. He has not noticed union and subordina- 
 tion to their leader of a herd of grass-eaters, nor how 
 they work together for their common advantage. 
 These herds set sentinels to watch while others feed ; 
 they obey the signal of their leaders. If there are 
 struggle and suffering, there are among animals love, 
 gentleness, care for their young, and the germs of 
 many virtues which in flower and fruit are the glory 
 of humanity. These have been omitted from Mr. 
 Kidd's picture. 
 
 Biology has to be widened and narrowed when 
 we come to look at the being who has become ra- 
 tional. In a sense, our author recognizes a differ- 
 ence between rational and irrational beings. He 
 
IS A RATIONAL RELIGION POSSIBLE? 1 73 
 
 carries with him, however, the idea that "no form 
 can make any advance, or even retain its place with- 
 out deterioration, except by carrying on the species 
 to a greater extent from individuals above the aver- 
 age than from those below it," and makes the prob- 
 lem presented to the rational being to be, what shall 
 his behaviour be under the onerous conditions of his 
 existence. It is only fair to let him state his case : 
 " Here at last was a creature who could reason about 
 these things and who, when his conduct is observed, it 
 may be noticed, actually does reason about them in this 
 way. He is subject to the same natural conditions 
 of existence as all the forms of life that have come 
 before him ; he reproduces his kind as they do ; he 
 lives and dies subject to the same physiological laws. 
 To him, as to the others, the inexorable conditions 
 of life render progress impossible in any other way 
 than by carrying on his kind from successful varia- 
 tions to the exclusion of others ; by being therefore 
 subject to selection ; by consequently reproducing in 
 numbers beyond those which the conditions of life 
 for the time being comfortably allow for; and by 
 living a life of constant rivalry and competition with 
 his fellows with all the attendant results of stress and 
 suffering to some, and failure to reach the full possi- 
 bilities of life to large numbers. Nay, more, it is 
 evident that his progress has become subject to these 
 conditions in a more stringent and onerous form than 
 has ever before prevailed in the world. For as he 
 
174 THEISM 
 
 can reach his highest development only in society, 
 the forces which are concerned in working out his 
 evolution no longer operate upon him primarily as an 
 individual, but as a member of society. His inter- 
 ests as an individual have, in fact, become further 
 subordinated to those of a social organism, with 
 interests immensely wider and a life indefinitely 
 longer than his own. How is the possession of 
 reason ever to be rendered compatible with the will 
 to submit to conditions of existence so onerous, re- 
 quiring the effective and continual subordination of 
 the individual's welfare to the progress of a develop- 
 ment in which he can have no personal interest 
 whatever." (pp. 68-9.) 
 
 This is his statement of the problem, and we 
 shall look at it as stated, or we may take it as set 
 forth by himself in all the dignity of italics. " The 
 interests of the social organism and those of the in- 
 dividuals comprising it at any particular time are 
 actually antagonistic ; they can never be reconciled ; 
 they are inherently and essentially irreconcilable." 
 So we get the matter at last with all the breadth and 
 absoluteness characteristic of the Aufklarung. The 
 social organism becomes an abstraction on the one 
 side, and the individuals comprising it become ab- 
 stractions on the other, and the whole contents of 
 both for the time are just this opposition which has 
 also been abstracted from all else. Apparently the 
 author has forgotten that if the individuals compris- 
 
IS A RATIONAL RELIGION POSSIBLE? 1 75 
 
 ing the social organism disappear, the organism 
 disappears also, and with the disappearance of 
 the organism goes all that gave the individual his 
 significance. It might just as reasonably be said 
 that "the interest of the social organism and those 
 of the individuals comprising it at any particular 
 time can never be separated, they can never be 
 antagonistic, they are inherently and essentially in- 
 separable." As an axiom, ours is as good as his, and 
 it has the advantage of being more consistent with 
 the facts. 
 
 Without the social organism the individual could 
 not be, and certainly could not be what he is. Take 
 him as he stands in New York to-day, and let the 
 stress of competition be as great as you please, see 
 how you have equipped the individual for his work. 
 At his command you have placed the gift of com- 
 mon speech which unites him with his fellows, and 
 places at his service the immense tradition of the 
 experience of men in all ages and climes. You have 
 trained and educated him in your schools, and have 
 placed at his service the trained intelligence of men 
 and women who can help him in the task of unfold- 
 ing his powers, and of enabling him to know the 
 world in which he lives, and of making it realize his 
 purposes. You place at his command the resources 
 of all that the industry of former times has accumu- 
 lated, all that the inventive power of all time has 
 discovered, and as he grows up he has at his break- 
 
176 THEISM 
 
 fast table the news of the world. It is really not 
 necessary to multiply instances of the service which 
 the social organism has done in the making of the 
 individual. 
 
 He is trained and fitted for his work by the social 
 organism, and not merely intellectually ; he has had 
 his affections drawn forth, his social qualities devel- 
 oped in daily intercourse with his fellows, and his 
 moral and religious nature has been strengthened 
 by his place in, and by the part he has taken in, the 
 moral and religious institutions in which he has been 
 brought up. So far intellectually, morally, and reli- 
 giously he has had the opportunity of making him- 
 self, in interaction with his fellows in the social 
 organism. It is not too much to say that to-day 
 in your country and in ours, the resources of civili- 
 zation place at the command of our workingmen 
 opportunities which kings could not command a 
 thousand years ago. But, says Mr. Kidd, the social 
 organism lays on the individuals comprising it oner- 
 ous burdens for which there is no rational sanc- 
 tion. Yes, onerous burdens are laid on every man. 
 It is the law of life that man must be a worker, and 
 only in work can he realize himself. But that law 
 does not lead us to the partial conclusion of Mr. 
 Kidd. 
 
 A rational sanction ! what does Mr. Kidd mean by 
 the phrase and what does he mean by the word 
 " reason " ? It is one of the puzzles of his book. We 
 
IS A RATIONAL RELIGION POSSIBLE? 177 
 
 are surprised as we find that the only function 
 ascribed by him to reason, is that it is a power 
 which enables the individual to look after his own 
 interest. It enabled him to overcome his competi- 
 tors in the struggle for existence, and the possessor 
 of reason subdued the irrational animals. It enabled 
 him to discover that the onerous conditions of exist- 
 ence still continued as they were before his advent. 
 Still reason did not throw these off, for it was circum- 
 vented by another set of instincts — shall we call 
 them so ? — which serve the social organism, and 
 help man to subordinate his own reason. So in this 
 artificial way Mr. Kidd tries to repair the rupture 
 which he himself had made. Reason with him 
 simply means reasoning, the power of breaking up, 
 analyzing, of seeing separate particulars, and of 
 dwelling on these exclusively. It can discover the 
 onerous obligations of existence laid on the indi- 
 vidual, and can see that these are irreconcilable with 
 those of the social organism. He protests that " the 
 terms ' reason ' and ' rational ' are here, as every- 
 where throughout this book, used in their ordinary 
 or natural sense, and not in that transcendent sense 
 in which metaphysicians toward the end of the last 
 century set the fashion of using them." (p. 73.) 
 
 Suppose we use the word in his sense, we have 
 still to contend that he has unduly limited the scope 
 of reason. For reason is able to recognize, not only 
 the fact that it is under onerous obligations, as regards 
 
1 78 THEISM 
 
 the work the individual has to do ; it is, also, able to 
 recognize all the conditions under which men exist 
 on the earth, and to shape its course accordingly. It 
 can recognize that the individual is no mere indi- 
 vidual, and that when he endeavours to separate 
 his own interests from those of the social organism, 
 he is acting irrationally. To limit reason as Mr. 
 Kidd has done, is to set down a limit that does not 
 exist, save in his own imagination. For man is set 
 here under a number of conditions, in a certain 
 number of relations, and he has to know, as far as 
 he can, these conditions and relations. Through 
 these he has to realize himself, live his life, and do 
 his work. It is the business of reason to ascer- 
 tain all these conditions and relations, and not merely 
 some of them. The relations that bind him to 
 society are real and rational relations, and the ob- 
 servance of them are for the interest of the indi- 
 vidual. So on his own ground we say again to 
 Mr. Kidd that to regard the interests of the society 
 and the individual as irreconcilable is an irrational 
 proceeding. 
 
 In truth, according to Mr. Kidd, we are in a world 
 that is fundamentally and utterly irrational. There 
 is no rational sanction for the conditions of exist- 
 ence necessarily existing, there is no possibility of a 
 rational religion, and the universe is one in which 
 irrational procedure seems to be the rule. Yet 
 science has gone to work on the supposition that 
 
IS A RATIONAL RELIGION POSSIBLE? 179 
 
 the world was intelligible, and found that it was so. 
 And men have lived and acted on the assumption 
 that things have a law, and a meaning, if they could 
 find that law and meaning, and they thought they 
 had found both in some measure ; but here comes 
 Mr. Kidd with the discovery that in the highest of 
 all the phenomena in the world the conditions of 
 existence have no rational sanction. It is very 
 wonderful, and it has been discovered by the reason 
 of Mr. Kidd. It must have been a sad thing to 
 find out that reason is without kith or kin in this 
 wide universe, and that this solitary endowment is 
 unable to bring the conditions of existence into 
 harmony with itself, or itself with them. At this 
 stage it might have occurred to Mr. Kidd to retrace 
 his steps, and to try to find out whether this contra- 
 riety in the very centre of life did exist. He might 
 have asked whether his abstraction of the individual 
 from the social organism had not been carried to an 
 extreme. 
 
 It is easy to make abstractions, easy to split up 
 the individual into faculties, and to place one mode 
 of the action of a being into irreconcilable contra- 
 diction with another, if we lose sight of the unity 
 which really conditions all the actions of every 
 creature. But on the whole we may say that that 
 mode of procedure has been overdone. We may 
 say, also, that it has been overdone in the more 
 recent study of the relations of the individual and 
 
l8o THEISM 
 
 society. It does not work to sink the individual 
 in the social organism, or to do the reverse. The 
 individual can only realize himself in the organism, 
 and the organism suffers when the individual is kept 
 from realizing his ideal. Reason has a higher work 
 than that assigned to it by Mr. Kidd. It has to 
 seek to know all the relations in which rational 
 beings stand to one another in the social organism ; 
 the relations also in which they all stand to the 
 world beneath them, and to what is above them all, 
 and to define the rational constitution of the world 
 in view of all these relations as a rational system, at 
 least as a system that can be thought. For any indi- 
 vidual to look merely at himself, at his work, at the 
 conditions under which he does his work, to disregard 
 all other interests save those which seem to belong 
 to the individual for the moment, is possible for an 
 individual, but only if he disregards the wider unity 
 which alone can render his life and work fruitful. 
 To speak of reason as if it meant an instrument only 
 for the advantage of the individual, or as if it could 
 not discern any other or wider bond, is to degrade 
 the name and to do violence to the ordinary use 
 of language. Reason is eminently social, and can 
 make use of society for its own growth and further 
 realization. Instead of limiting reason to the func- 
 tion to which it is reduced by Mr. Kidd, it would be 
 more consonant to fact to widen its use and to make 
 it coterminous with all the activity of a rational 
 
IS A RATIONAL RELIGION POSSIBLE? 181 
 
 being. Looking at the rational being, we see the 
 coming of the time when all the feelings, emotions, 
 desires, all the knowledge, and all the voluntary 
 activity of the rational being will be suffused with 
 reason, and all will move in harmony with the ideal 
 set forth by reason as the goal to be reached by each 
 and all. 
 
 As Mr. Kidd has unduly limited the use of reason, 
 and made it only an instrument for the benefit of the 
 individual, so he has also unduly narrowed the sphere 
 of religion. He has recognized in a very vivid way 
 the influence of religion in the progress of man, and 
 he has set it forth in such a way as to call attention 
 to it, when it was rather neglected by writers on 
 evolution. It was looked at as altogether supersti- 
 tious, as injurious, and as a hindrance to the progress 
 of civilization. But Mr. Kidd is emphatic in his 
 statement of its power and its worth as the instru- 
 ment of social progress. But he seems to us to leave 
 out of the conception many elements which are nec- 
 essary to the very idea of a religion. Here is his 
 definition : A religion is a form of belief, providing 
 an ultra-rational sanction for that large class of con- 
 duct in the individual where his interests and the 
 interests of the social organism are antagonistic, and 
 by which the former are rendered subordinate to the 
 latter in the general interests of the evolution which 
 the race is undergoing, (p. 112.) 
 
 This is a description of religion simply by one of 
 
1 82 THEISM 
 
 its effects. It tells us nothing of religion as a belief 
 in a power higher than ourselves on whom we feel our 
 dependence, nothing of the necessity for fellowship 
 with that power, nothing of what seems to disturb that 
 fellowship, and of how it is to be restored, nor does 
 it say anything of the commandments of the power. 
 Every religion that has appeared among men has had 
 its beliefs, its commands, and its consolations. These, 
 however, do not appear in the definition of Mr. Kidd. 
 His definition seems to have been prescribed by the 
 necessities of his system. He had found that there 
 was no rational sanction for progress, he must there- 
 fore provide an irrational sanction, for the existence 
 of progress is a fact. Religion is the instrument by 
 which the blank is supplied. Our contention is that 
 religion could not accomplish the task he assigns to 
 it, if it did not accomplish a great deal more. It has 
 the power he assigns to it, it does give us an ideal 
 of unselfish living and working, but it does not limit 
 itself to that. 
 
 Indeed, the first work of an adequate religion is to 
 restore the synthesis which Mr. Kidd has arbitrarily 
 ruptured and cannot get together again. One of its 
 chief ethical commands is, " Love thy neighbour as 
 thyself." That is to say, that for religion the self- 
 regarding virtues are not unimportant. It is as much 
 interested in those things that make for the true in- 
 terests of the self, as it is in those that make for the 
 interests of the social organism. It does not subor- 
 
IS A RATIONAL RELIGION POSSIBLE? 1 83 
 
 dinate individuals to the race, and it does not hesitate 
 to say, " What shall it profit a man though he should 
 gain the whole world and lose his own soul ? " The 
 highest form of religion known to man is distinctive 
 in this respect, and is clearly distinguished from 
 other religions in the stress it lays on the value and 
 the worth of the individual, on the necessity of devel- 
 oping the individual to the height of the ideal which 
 he only can realize, and on that distinct peculiarity 
 which makes every person almost a type by himself. 
 Religion is the greatest power in the universe for the 
 making of the individual, for the insistence on every 
 help which can tend to develop the distinctive per- 
 sonality of each ; in fact, there is no power known to 
 man that works so much to develop the personality 
 of the individual as religion. This fact is altogether 
 lost sight of by Mr. Kidd. 
 
 Religion does not work by setting the interests of 
 the individual against those of the race. Ye are mem- 
 bers one of another. In fact, religion was first in the 
 field, before science, before philosophy came to being; 
 and it had made in its own way that synthesis which 
 science and philosophy have not yet made, after ages 
 of toil. Somehow it grasped the whole in its whole- 
 ness, raised men up beyond the limited and the 
 imperfect, outran its own powers of thinking, and 
 gave to man such a sense of his own worth, and of 
 the worth of others, as even in the imperfect forms, it 
 had long ago, made man somewhat of an ideal being. 
 
1 84 THEISM 
 
 Religion has no such limited function as that pre- 
 scribed to it by Mr. Kidd. It is not an instrument in 
 the general interests of the evolution which the race 
 is undergoing. It is something greater than that. It 
 is in the interest of the individual quite as much. 
 
 In a page, previous to his treatment of religion, Mr. 
 Kidd, in a simple and artless manner, says, " We are 
 speaking, it must be remembered, of a rational sanc- 
 tion, and reason has, in an examination of this kind, 
 nothing to do with any existence but the present, 
 which it insists it is our duty to ourselves to make the 
 most of." (pp. 72-3.) We need not be surprised that 
 he says later, " No form of belief is capable of func- 
 tioning as a religion in the evolution of society which 
 does not provide an ultra-rational sanction for social 
 conduct in the individual. In other words, a rational 
 religion is a scientific impossibility, representing from 
 the nature of the case an inherent contradiction of 
 terms." (pp. 109-110.) It seems a very sad result 
 for the rational being. He seems shut up to the di- 
 lemma, either to lose his rationality or to cease to be 
 religious. If he follows our author, he must choose 
 the horn of the dilemma on which he is to be impaled. 
 He was wont to think that a belief in God and im- 
 mortality was a belief which was justifiable on rational 
 grounds. May we humbly ask why a form of belief 
 which provides a rational sanction for social conduct in 
 the individual may not be capable of functioning as a 
 religion in the evolution of society ? I express my own 
 
IS A RATIONAL RELIGION POSSIBLE? 185 
 
 conviction that if Mr. Kidd is right in calling " a ra- 
 tional religion a scientific impossibility," we shall soon 
 see an end of religion altogether. For it is a necessity 
 of the rational being to bring his beliefs into some kind 
 of order, and to justify them to himself; and if you shut 
 him out from that hope, you will drive him to despair. 
 After reading passages like these, — and they 
 abound in the pages of Mr. Kidd's book, — we might 
 expect something like a demonstration of the funda- 
 mental irrationality of religion. A statement, at least, 
 of its opposition to the interests of the individual might 
 be expected. As we read, we find that, whatever re- 
 ligion may be in itself, and whatever be the nature of 
 its sanction, its results are intelligible, and can be 
 stated with precision. At first we start, led by Mr. 
 Kidd, with the notion that religion is a method of 
 subordinating the individual and his interests to the 
 interests of the social organism. We read on and we 
 find that the scene is changed, and another attitude 
 presents itself. The social organism is in the service 
 of the individual. The social organism somehow 
 labours not in its own interest; it works in order 
 that all the people may be brought into the rivalry 
 of life on equal conditions. If this be so, then all we 
 need to do is to make this plain to the intelligence 
 of man, the individual; and we shall immediately have 
 a rational sanction for progress, and religion may 
 also be regarded as rational. Lest we should be 
 thought guilty of unfairness to Mr. Kidd, we quote 
 
1 86 THEISM 
 
 the following : " Now the prevailing impression con- 
 cerning this process of evolution is that it has been 
 the product of an intellectual movement, and that 
 it has been the ever increasing intelligence and en- 
 lightenment of the people, which has constituted the 
 principal propelling force. It would appear, how- 
 ever, that we must reject this view. From the nature 
 of the case, as we shall see more clearly later on, the 
 intellect could not have supplied any force sufficiently 
 powerful to have enabled the people to have success- 
 fully assailed the almost impregnable position of the 
 power-holding classes. So enormous has been the 
 resistance to be overcome, and so complete has been 
 the failure of the people in similar circumstances out- 
 side our civilization, that we must look elsewhere for 
 the cause which has produced the transformation. 
 The motive force we must apparently find in the 
 immense fund of altruistic feeling with which our 
 Western societies have become equipped ; this being, 
 with the extraordinarily effective sanctions behind it, 
 the characteristic and determinative product of the re- 
 ligious system upon which our civilization is founded. 
 It is the influence of this fund of altruism in our civ- 
 ilization that has undermined the position of the 
 power-holding classes. It is the resulting deepening 
 and softening of character amongst us which alone 
 has made possible that developmental movement 
 whereby all the people are being slowly brought into 
 the rivalry of life on equal conditions." (p. 177.) 
 
IS A RATIONAL RELIGION POSSIBLE? I%J 
 
 Surely when the average man sees that people are 
 brought into the rivalry of life on equal conditions, 
 and that by the effort of the social organism, he will 
 cease to believe that there are no rational sanctions 
 for progress, and will cease to think, if he ever did 
 think, that his interests and the interests of the 
 social organism are irreconcilable. It is a curious re- 
 sult that even Mr. Kidd should show how interests, 
 said by him to be irreconcilable, work together for 
 mutual advantage. We notice, in passing, a curi- 
 ous instance of Mr. Kidd's way of taking aspects 
 for realities, and of making abstractions do the work 
 which abstract notions can never do. Note how he 
 speaks : " The intellect could not have supplied any 
 force sufficiently powerful," and so on. An abstract 
 intellect could not supply any force to anything, but 
 neither could abstract feeling do it. No great move- 
 ment, and no movement however insignificant, could 
 be motived apart from the intellect, feeling, or the 
 conations of men. To speak of a fund of altruistic 
 feeling, as if it stood by itself, and flowed on without 
 touching the intelligence and the will, is, with all 
 respect, to speak psychological nonsense. But this 
 is Mr. Kidd's way. While we are grateful to him 
 for the service he has done in the emphasis he has 
 laid on the power of religion in evolution, we accept 
 that result with the qualification that religion is a 
 reasonable service. 
 
 It may be useful here to make a few remarks on 
 
1 88 THEISM 
 
 Mr. Arthur Balfour's book — "The Foundations of 
 Belief," as it is largely on the same lines as the book 
 of Mr. Kidd. They agree in using the word "reason" 
 in the same sense as simply reasoning, and they simi- 
 larly lay stress on the irrational character of human 
 beliefs. Mr. Balfour professes to deal with the 
 foundations of belief. He seeks to ascertain the 
 causes and the genesis of belief. For this end he 
 dwells on the impressions made on us, on effects 
 wrought on us, on beliefs effected in us by causes 
 which are non-rational in themselves, and he has 
 many wise things in his book in this connection. 
 After the questions of the origin and growth of our 
 beliefs have been discussed a more important ques- 
 tion emerges, What are our beliefs worth and are they 
 valid ? and this is scarcely discussed by Mr. Balfour. 
 Mr. Balfour approaches the question under the influ- 
 ence of the traditional philosophy, and has not, even 
 though he has recognized that there is a difference 
 between the existence of a belief and its validity, 
 dealt with the necessity of a criterion of belief. He 
 has shown us no way of discriminating between be- 
 liefs which are valid, trustworthy, related to reality, 
 and those which are baseless, irrational, and degrad- 
 ing. As far as psychology is concerned one belief 
 is as good as another ; when its nature, its genesis, 
 are ascertained, the work of psychology is done. 
 English psychology always maintained the validity 
 of the original element of mind, or the original 
 
IS A RATIONAL RELIGION POSSIBLE? 189 
 
 beliefs, as Stuart Mill called them. To find what 
 these were, it was customary to refer to that baby 
 which has appeared so frequently in treatises of 
 English psychology, it is fashionable now to refer to 
 the primitive man. It has been an irrelevant proced- 
 ure from first to last, for if the genesis of every belief 
 could be traced so that we could refer every one to 
 its adequate cause, we should still have no criterion 
 to distinguish between beliefs as true or false. The 
 truth or falsehood of a belief is not to be determined 
 by a consideration of its origin, but by an examina- 
 tion of its contents, and the grounds offered for its 
 acceptance. From a rational point of view a belief 
 must be self-evident, or it must be proven, or at least 
 its truth must appear probable. Either in itself or 
 in its relation to other beliefs, a belief must have 
 reasons which warrant its acceptance. 
 
 One objection to be taken to Mr. Balfour's argu- 
 ment is that he speaks of our beliefs as if they were 
 mere effects wrought in us by non-rational causes. 
 The assumption of the passivity of the mind is car- 
 ried through consistently. He never looks at the 
 possibility of the mind having a say in the matter. 
 Our beliefs are wrought in us we know not how, and 
 no account is taken of the nature and activity of the 
 mind. No mental experience is a mere effect, the 
 stimulus is reacted against in a way characteristic 
 not of the stimulus but of the mind. But this is 
 now so commonplace that it need not be dwelt on. 
 
I go THEISM 
 
 Nor does it seem necessary to speak of the conten- 
 tion that our beliefs are due to non-rational causes. 
 For be the character of the causes what it may, the 
 beliefs are beliefs of a being who is, at least, im- 
 plicitly rational, and every experience of his is implic- 
 itly rational. On this I do not dwell. 
 
 Only one thing in "The Foundations of Belief" do 
 I refer to, and I refer to it because it, also, was a fa- 
 vourite antithesis of the Auf klarung. " Authority and 
 Reason" is the title of the chapter and of the antith- 
 esis in Mr. Balfour's book. "The source of error 
 which has next to be noted presents points of much 
 greater interest. Though it be true, as I am contend- 
 ing, that the importance of reason among the causes 
 which produce and maintain the beliefs, customs, and 
 ideals which form the groundwork of life has been 
 much exaggerated, there can yet be no doubt that 
 reason is, or appears to be, the cause over which we 
 have the most direct control, or rather the one which 
 we most readily identify with our own free and per- 
 sonal action. We are acted on by authority. It 
 moulds our ways of thought in spite of ourselves, 
 and usually unknown to ourselves. But when we 
 reason, we are the authors of the effect produced. 
 We have ourselves set the machine in motion. For 
 its proper working we are ourselves immediately re- 
 sponsible ; so that it is both natural and desirable 
 that we should concentrate our attention on this par- 
 ticular class of causes, even though we should thus 
 
IS A RATIONAL RELIGION POSSIBLE? 191 
 
 be led unduly to magnify their importance in the 
 general scheme of things." ("The Foundations of 
 Belief," p. 203.) 
 
 This is part of the general contrast between au- 
 thority and reason drawn by Mr. Balfour, in which the 
 opposition between the two is exaggerated, and their 
 relations to one another obscured. One statement 
 is worthy of notice. It is this, "When we reason, 
 we are the authors of the effect produced." We are 
 no more the authors of the effects produced by rea- 
 soning than we are the authors of our experience 
 generally, or rather we are just as much the authors 
 of the one as of the other. Our experience is in one 
 sense given, in another it is constructed by our own 
 activity. So when we reason, we construct our argu- 
 ment, arrange the steps of it, and seek to set forth 
 the truth of the matter in hand ; but we are not the 
 authors of the premises or the conclusion, if these 
 are to have an objective reference. The worth of 
 the argument must be determined by some objective 
 standard. In all its experiences the mind is as active 
 as it is in reasoning. What we lay stress on is the 
 opposition which our author supposes to exist be- 
 tween authority and reason. We insist on it because 
 it is an illustration of the prevalence of that mis- 
 chievous habit of the Aufklarung, which we saw 
 prevailing so greatly in the reasoning of Mr. Kidd. 
 Here is the same thing in Mr. Balfour, and we may 
 find it elsewhere. "When we turn, however, from 
 
I g2 THEISM 
 
 the conscious work of Reason to that which is un- 
 consciously performed for us by Authority, a very 
 different spectacle arrests our attention. The effects 
 of the first, prominent as they are through the dignity 
 of their origin, are trifling compared with the all-per- 
 vading influences which flow from the second. At 
 every moment of our lives, as individuals, as members 
 of a family, of a party, of a nation, of a Church, of 
 a universal brotherhood, the silent, continuous, un- 
 noticed influence of Authority moulds our feelings, 
 our aspirations, and, what we are more immediately 
 concerned with, our beliefs. It is from Authority that 
 Reason itself draws its most important premises." 
 (pp. 227-28.) The last sentence may be turned 
 round, and it would thus lose none of its impressive- 
 ness or its truth. It is from reason that authority 
 draws its most important premises. For all the in- 
 stitutions to which reference was made as influen- 
 tial in moulding our beliefs are institutions formed 
 by rational beings acting in concert with one another. 
 Families, parties, nations, churches, brotherhoods, are 
 themselves rational institutions, and are the work of 
 rational creatures who were conscious of the bonds 
 which helped them to make themselves into a unity. 
 Every one of these organizations is constituted by 
 the efforts of the rational beings who realized them, 
 and any influence they exert on the individual is 
 really due to reason. We fearlessly assert that every 
 instance of the action of authority as opposed to rea- 
 
IS A RATIONAL RELIGION POSSIBLE? 1 93 
 
 son, set forth by Mr. Balfour, may be turned round 
 and easily read as an instance of the influence of 
 reason. We might take the case of language and by 
 it illustrate the contention of Mr. Balfour. 
 
 Language moulds our feelings, emotions, desires, 
 aspirations, beliefs, even our thoughts. Whatever 
 he has said of authority may be said a fortiori on 
 behalf of language. We are always under its influ- 
 ence ; without its aid we could neither think ade- 
 quately nor express our thought nor convey our 
 thought to another. If we were to contrast lan- 
 guage and reason as he has contrasted authority 
 and reason, we could make a pretty effective contrast 
 indeed. But then we should be at once told that 
 we were engaged in an idle and unprofitable task, 
 for language is itself the product of reason, and 
 its influence is the influence of reason. That is our 
 answer to Mr. Balfour; his antithesis between au- 
 thority and reason is misleading, and it is irrelevant. 
 The institutions which mould our lives, actions, and 
 thoughts are themselves rational institutions, the prod- 
 ucts of that reason against which they are pitted by 
 Mr. Balfour. Before he could make good the antithe- 
 sis between reason and authority, he must do some 
 work on both notions, he must first eliminate every- 
 thing rational from the institutions he has named, 
 and everything authoritative from reason, and when 
 he has reduced the one to irrationality, and de- 
 prived the other of authority, then he may run the 
 
I$4 THEISM 
 
 antithesis as he pleases, and it will not be worth 
 much. 
 
 There are elements in Mr. Balfour's book worthy 
 of high praise, and there are conclusions with which 
 I heartily agree, but to dwell on these at present is 
 not my purpose. I found the argument of Mr. Kidd 
 lying athwart my course, and I could not proceed 
 until I got it out of my way. Mr. Balfour's work 
 is so far coincident with that of Mr. Kidd ; his an- 
 tithesis between authority and reason is on all fours 
 with the paradoxes of Mr. Kidd; and so far I have 
 dealt with both. Perhaps the method common to 
 both is even worse than the results to which they 
 come. For the habit of setting part against part, 
 and of straining the relation in which two or more 
 elements in a larger unity stand to one another, until 
 nothing but a relation of contradiction is left, is so 
 fatal to all fruitful thinking, that I did not think 
 the time wasted to show its falsity in the particular 
 instances we have examined. 
 
VII 
 
 PERSONALITY: ITS CHARACTER AND ITS 
 MEANING 
 
 We have read the story which science has un- 
 folded to us, and the wonder of the story has grown. 
 We have come to see that the unity has grown 
 greater and more complex, and the diversity tends 
 ever more to unity. We have come to a unity 
 greater than we can grasp. Not a fixed, static, 
 unchanging unity, but one that grows, develops, 
 becomes more and more, and yet maintains itself. 
 Thus we came to the great organism of humanity — 
 an organism made up of organisms, relatively inde- 
 pendent of one another, but held together not by 
 visible or physical bonds, but by bonds of another 
 kind but not the less real. A unity made up of liv- 
 ing unities, each of which is so far a self-contained 
 whole, calls on us to widen our conceptions if we 
 are to grasp the reality. Unities conscious of them- 
 selves, self -moved, self-guided, self -trained, in a meas- 
 ure, and held to the whole by bonds which can at 
 any moment be broken ; the thought of a unity com- 
 posed of such makes us acquainted with a kind of 
 force or power unknown before. So varied are the 
 
 l 9S 
 
196 THEISM 
 
 bonds that hold the social order together, that every- 
 one of them in turn has been looked at as a relation 
 of opposition to the others. Self-interest was re- 
 garded as irreconcilable with the universal interest, 
 authority was pitted against reason, intelligence 
 against belief, and yet no one of these could be dis- 
 pensed with if the social organism were to hold 
 together and to make progress. Reason and author- 
 ity are needed, self-interest is as necessary as the 
 interest of the whole, science is needed as much as 
 religion, and religion as much as science; in fact, 
 without any of these qualities and acquirements of 
 humanity, which men are so prone to place in ir- 
 reconcilable opposition, the social organism could 
 not exist, at least could not exist in its well being. 
 So out of the life of the social organism in its relations 
 to its members and its environment have arisen 
 the sciences, arts, intellectual, ethical, and religious 
 systems, in action among us to-day, the histories of 
 which make up so much of the recorded thoughts 
 of men. As we look at these thoughts and systems 
 we see them living, moving, growing, ever approxi- 
 mating to an ideal, which is partly given and partly 
 won by patient thought and work. The conviction 
 deepens with the ages that there is a thought greater 
 than our thought, a system larger than we can yet 
 grasp, and an ideal formed for man and not merely 
 by man. 
 
 Up to the present, we have looked at the world 
 
PERSONALITY \q-J 
 
 disclosed to us and unveiled to us by science merely 
 as it unfolded itself to us, as it would appear to a 
 spectator gazing at it from without. We looked at it 
 mainly for the purpose of learning what the story of 
 the world would disclose to us of the intelligence and 
 purpose at work in it. We have found intelligence, 
 purpose, life, at work in the world, and all on a scale 
 almost passing our comprehension. But now the 
 question rises, What do we really know of intelligence, 
 purpose, life ? We know of many works of intelli- 
 gence, and of many kinds of life. We know that 
 an intelligent system may be impressed on a system 
 of mechanical causes, and these may be constrained 
 to work out a purpose. Watches, clocks, electric 
 machines, steam-engines, and all machines made by 
 men are intelligible systems in which mechanical 
 causes work out a purpose according to the design 
 of the worker. Looking as a spectator we saw an- 
 other kind of mechanism, a mechanism in which the 
 skill of the designer was within the mechanism, and 
 the purpose was wrought out not by impressing a 
 plan on alien material, but by an immanent move- 
 ment from within. The skill of the designer was 
 within the organism, and the process was by growth. 
 An organism we saw was greater than a mechanism. 
 Still we learned that there were organisms and 
 organisms. Growth was common to them all, but 
 some grew, not knowing the aim and purpose of 
 their growth, impelled onwards by impulses of which 
 
198 , THEISM 
 
 they were unconscious, drawn by desires which ruled 
 them, and which they did not rule. 
 
 In the unfolding of life we came to the advent of 
 a being who to a certain extent knew himself and 
 his purpose, who could reach his purpose and attain 
 his ends by bending the environment to his purpose. 
 This being could form a purpose and invent means 
 for its realization. Can we obtain a nearer view of 
 the life, which we saw to be manifested in the 
 sciences, philosophies, and religions of the world ? 
 It was the most wonderful of the wonderful things 
 of the world disclosed to us by science, and we natu- 
 rally desire to know it more intimately. For our 
 conception of the life at work in the world must be 
 largely determined by the knowledge we may attain 
 of the life at work in the being who has made the 
 sciences. Can we look at that being, not merely as 
 spectators of his work and of his way of doing it, 
 but can we get inside, and see him in the inward 
 working of his very nature, and watch himself and 
 his purposes in the making ? 
 
 Happily we are at home in this world, too. We 
 are ourselves, and we are able to look at ourselves 
 from within, and are able to look at the other side 
 of the world, which from one side has engaged our 
 attention so long. The world has a subjective side, 
 and we look at it now from that point of view. 
 Here we may well begin with Hume, who has set 
 the problems which since his time are the main 
 
PERSONALITY 1 99 
 
 problems of psychology, ethics, and metaphysics. 
 " For my part, when I enter most intimately into 
 what I call myself, I always stumble on some par- 
 ticular perception or other of heat or cold, light or 
 shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can 
 catch myself at any time without a perception, and 
 never can observe anything but the perception. 
 When my perceptions are removed for any time, as 
 by sound sleep, so long am I insensible of myself, and 
 may truly be said not to exist. And were all my per- 
 ceptions removed by death, and could I neither think, 
 nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate, after the dissolu- 
 tion of my body, I should be entirely annihilated, nor 
 do I conceive what is farther requisite to make me a 
 perfect non-entity. If any one, upon serious and un- 
 prejudiced reflection, thinks he has a different notion 
 of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer 
 with him. All I can allow him is that he may be 
 in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially 
 different in this particular. He may, perhaps, per- 
 ceive something simple and continued which he calls 
 himself, though I am certain there is no such prin- 
 ciple in me. But setting aside some metaphysicians 
 of this kind, I may venture to affirm of the rest of 
 mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or col- 
 lection of different perceptions, which succeed each 
 other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a 
 perpetual flux and movement. Our eyes cannot 
 turn in their sockets without varying our perceptions. 
 
200 THEISM 
 
 Our thought is still more variable than our sight; 
 and all our other senses and faculties contribute to 
 this change ; nor is there any single power of the 
 soul which remains unalterably the same, perhaps 
 for one moment. The mind is a kind of theatre, 
 where several perceptions successively make their 
 appearance ; pass, repass, glide away, and min- 
 gle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. 
 There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor 
 identity in different ; whatever natural propensity 
 we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity, 
 the comparison of the theatre must not mislead us. 
 They are the successive perceptions only, that con- 
 stitute the mind ; nor have we the most distant 
 notion of the place where these scenes are repre- 
 sented, nor of the material of which it is composed." 
 Thus spoke Hume in his chapter on " Personal 
 Identity" in his "Treatise on Human Nature," Part 
 IV., Sect. VI. Again he says: " It is evident that the 
 identity which we attribute to the human mind, how- 
 ever perfect we may imagine it to be, is not able to run 
 the several different perceptions into one, and make 
 them lose their characters of distinction and differ- 
 ence, which are essential to them. It is still true that 
 every distinct perception which enters into the com- 
 position of the mind is a distinct existence, and is 
 different and distinguishable and separable from every 
 other perception, either contemporary or successive." 
 And one more sentence, " What we call mind is 
 
PERSONALITY 201 
 
 nothing but a heap or bundle or collection of dif- 
 ferent perceptions united together by certain rela- 
 tions, and supposed, though falsely, to be endowed 
 with a certain simplicity and identity." 
 
 The questions thus stated by Hume and the an- 
 swers to them have appeared in almost all treatises 
 on psychology which have been written since his 
 time. His answers have in the main been the an- 
 swers of the English school of psychology, and they 
 are found almost in their naked simplicity in the 
 works of the two Mills, in Bain, Huxley, and Spen- 
 cer. He has also set the problem of the self for psy- 
 chologists generally, and they toil at the problem 
 in your country and in ours. One may read the in- 
 cisive discussion of the problem in James's " Psychol- 
 ogy," and in the able discussions of Dr. Ward, and 
 in many others. I take from the discussions simply 
 what I need. 
 
 The introspective glance cast by Hume into his 
 own mind and its working is graphically described. 
 " The mind is a kind of theatre where several per- 
 ceptions successively make their appearance, pass, 
 repass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety 
 of postures and situations." True, we are satisfied 
 for a time, and then we ask, What is the theatre, and 
 for whom is the show? Hume rather anticipates the 
 question, for he warns us that " the comparison of a 
 theatre must not mislead us," and then goes on to say 
 they are " the successive perceptions only that con- 
 
202 THEISM 
 
 stitute the mind. " Having made use of the theatre 
 and suggested a possible spectator, the theatre and 
 the spectator are at once withdrawn, while the sug- 
 gestion of them remains. As we continue to think 
 of the matter, we come to the conclusion that we are 
 in the presence of a unique kind of thing, which seems 
 be at the same time knower and known, actor and 
 spectator, a show and the spectator for whom the 
 show is. The spectator and the gliding perceptions 
 attracted our attention, and played the part of 
 occupying our thought, until we forgot to ask the 
 important question of the person who is aware of the 
 movements of the gliding sensations. Then we found 
 that Hume had left out one-half of the whole busi- 
 ness, and that the half without the action of which 
 there would have been no report. 
 
 The gliding perceptions come and go, but not 
 unobserved or forgotten. They are not separate, 
 unrelated, or unreferred. They are present to a con- 
 sciousness which is also present to them. Hume's 
 spectator is a convenient person in psychology, and 
 fulfils a useful function. As a fact, he is brought in 
 now and then, when some such functionary is indis- 
 pensable. All of us postulate him at some point or 
 other, and we usually fancy we are looking on from 
 without at the consciousness of somebody else. As 
 a matter of fact, the only consciousness I can ever 
 hope to know is my own. I can interrogate my 
 own consciousness ; I can compare it with what others 
 
PERSONALITY 203 
 
 tell me is within their consciousness, but really my 
 perceptions are mine ; I am the only being aware of 
 them : their gliding, passing, and repassing are for me 
 alone, and apart from my recognition of them they 
 are unrecognized. 
 
 We have thus to amend Hume's description, and 
 say the mind is a theatre in which it is itself actor 
 and spectator, and the perceptions do not constitute 
 the mind, for they are not even perceptions until 
 they are referred to the mind. To put it in more 
 modern phrase, there is not only a series of states of 
 consciousness, there is also a consciousness of these 
 states, and this last is the element neglected by 
 Hume and by his successors. It is quite true that we 
 can never interview a blank self, or stand face to face 
 with a consciousness devoid of contents ; true, also, 
 that the mind is always found in a particular state of 
 consciousness, but it is equally true that it is found in 
 every state, and it is distinct from any state, for it is 
 the condition of the existence and recognition of them 
 all. We are not to look for the mind as if it were a 
 thing among other things, a sensation among sensa- 
 tions, or a perception among perceptions, or as the 
 sum of a series of sensations, rather we are to look 
 for mind as the universal condition of the possibility 
 of all experience. As Hoffding says : " Conscious 
 life has three characteristics : (1) change and con- 
 trast as condition of the individual elements entering 
 consciousness ; (2) preservation or reproduction of 
 
204 THEISM 
 
 previously given elements, together with connection 
 between these and the new element; (3) the inner 
 unity of recognition." 
 
 There is the series and the awareness of the 
 series, and neither of the two can be neglected in 
 any adequate account of consciousness. Presenta- 
 tion, preservation, recognition, and the combination 
 of them all into the unity of experience — this is 
 the fact which must be accepted, and cannot be 
 explained. The toil imposed on the followers of 
 Hume by their attempt to build something, which 
 might pass for mind, out of the separate elements of 
 the series of states of consciousness casts the labours 
 of Sisyphus altogether into the shade. To make 
 ropes out of sand is an easy task in comparison. 
 When Mr. Spencer reduces the beginnings of ex- 
 perience to nervous shocks, and endeavours to build 
 up experience out of these, he appears to succeed, 
 because he brings in surreptitiously the idea of unity 
 of the nervous organism, which speedily becomes 
 transformed into a unity of consciousness. In truth, 
 the unity has been present in the shocks all along, 
 only Mr. Spencer kept it hidden until he needed it, 
 and brought it out at a certain stage, when it could 
 no longer be kept back, and he made it appear as a 
 newly manufactured article. 
 
 In fact, the two are inseparable, though we seem 
 to attend only to one of them at a time. Conscious- 
 ness may be fully occupied with the object on which 
 
PERSONALITY 205 
 
 attention is concentrated, and that to the exclusion of 
 the thought of itself. I watched the helmsman on 
 the great ship on which I once crossed the Atlantic. 
 He had enough to do, for there was a considerable 
 storm on hand. I saw him watch the waves with his 
 hand on the helm, I saw the tension of his arms, the 
 firm planting of the foot, the swaying of the body, 
 and the tug of war as the helm met the waves, and 
 all the time there was no recognition of the self as 
 the centre to which all the coordinated movements of 
 mind and body were referred. To me, the onlooker, 
 what was visible were the skilful watching of the 
 ever varying movements of wind, water, and ship, 
 the skilful adaptation of the helm to these, and the 
 strenuous work which he did. His description of his 
 work would scarcely have a reference to his mental 
 processes, while mine as descriptive of his work 
 would be full of such terms as would describe his 
 mental apprehension of the varying conditions and 
 the adjustment of his action to meet them. 
 
 To the fact that the man is directly conscious of 
 the object, and only conscious of himself as the 
 subject when he directs attention that way, may be 
 ascribed the plausibility of the account Hume has 
 given of the process. When we attend to the pro- 
 cess of seeing, we attend to what is seen and to the 
 seeing of it. There is a double process, and it is 
 little wonder that a plain man does take little interest 
 in the workings of his own mind. What is present 
 
206 THEISM 
 
 to every state of consciousness is not distinctive of 
 any state. But even a plain man is aware that to 
 the ordinary states of consciousness there is added 
 a consciousness that they have come and gone. It is 
 not a proper recognition of the fact to suppose that 
 several perceptions being given, their collective con- 
 sciousness is also given, for the awareness of the 
 series is something not given in the series. In short, 
 there is, we repeat, a series of states of consciousness 
 and a consciousness of the states. Consciousness is 
 the specific feature or condition of all mental states ; 
 not as something added to, apart from, or antecedent 
 to mental states, but as that element which consti- 
 tutes them as mental states. Feeling, knowing, 
 acting, are conscious states, modes of consciousness, 
 and consciousness is not the sum of these, but the 
 condition of their existence. We may write of feel- 
 ing, knowing, willing, as unconscious, if we please, but 
 these are phrases which have no contents for con- 
 sciousness. 
 
 Faculties are modes of consciousness, but con- 
 sciousness is not a faculty. It is impossible to 
 regard it as the outcome of unconscious forces, nor 
 can it be deduced or derived from anything else ; we 
 must just accept it in its uniqueness as the explana- 
 tion of everything that can be explained, itself un- 
 explained. We have the happiness of knowing it 
 from both sides, we know it from without, in the 
 same way as we know other objects of science ; and 
 
PERSONALITY 20"J 
 
 we know it from within, can surprise it in its work- 
 ing, and constrain it to disclose its secret and mani- 
 fest its nature and its vocation. While we affirm 
 that consciousness must be assumed, and while it 
 cannot be derived nor resolved into something 
 simpler, still the conditions of its exercise may be 
 studied. As we know it in ourselves it has a begin- 
 ning, a growth, and a history. Thrust into the midst 
 of conditions not realized, slowly learning to find 
 itself at home in the world, and gradually coming 
 to the knowledge that there is an external order to 
 which it is related, the self-conscious being, in inter- 
 course with things, comes, so far, to the knowledge 
 of self and of the world. The story may be taken 
 for granted here, at least so far as to assume that the 
 finite personality grows to the recognition of itself. 
 It comes to distinguish between self and not-self. 
 There is the self and there is the not-self. But 
 this does not carry us very far. It would give 
 only a very vague objectivity, without a definite 
 content. 
 
 Consciousness emerges from this vague state when 
 it recognizes that there are distinctions among its 
 objects, relations in which these may be gathered 
 up. One thing is related to another, and the relations 
 run together, and in virtue of these, consciousness 
 begins to find itself in an ordered world, and comes 
 to know that its own principles are realized in the 
 objects it finds around it. In virtue of its own rational 
 
208 THEISM 
 
 nature it recognizes that it is in a rational universe. 
 One remark is necessary here on two distinctions 
 which are often used as if they were conterminous. 
 One is the distinction between self and not-self, and 
 the other is that between subject and object. These 
 are by no means of equal extent and content. The 
 boundaries of the first distinction are fixed and deter- 
 mined, the boundaries of the second are constantly 
 changing. The one may be called an ontological 
 distinction, for it relates to the distinction between 
 two things, which in their distinction may be supposed 
 to make up the whole sphere of being. The dis- 
 tinction between subject and object describes a mental 
 function. The contents of the two are constantly 
 changing. At one moment the object may be this 
 table, with its shape, colour, its material, and the 
 next moment the object may be the mental process 
 which passed through the mind when the table was 
 the object. The object may be either the things in 
 the outer world, or it may be the states of conscious- 
 ness by means of which we deal with the outer 
 world. It may be the thing I seem to see, or it may 
 be the vision through which I see it. 
 
 This remark is necessary, for a great deal of talk 
 has come into existence about subject and object, 
 and many inferences drawn from the contrast, such 
 as that there cannot be an infinite consciousness, for 
 a subject implies an object ; and if the self is subject, 
 it cannot, also, be object, and so on, all of which 
 
PERSONALITY 209 
 
 disappears when we remember that the distinction 
 between subject and object is not an onto logical 
 distinction, but only the form under which conscious- 
 ness takes place. They are relations within one 
 experience. 
 
 Let us remember, also, that we are dealing here 
 and in the first place with finite selves, each of which 
 has had an individual history, a growth to conscious- 
 ness ; not with a self rational, and fully self-conscious 
 from the beginning. As we wisely form our concep- 
 tion of a man from the fully developed man, thor- 
 oughly furnished in all that concerns humanity, so 
 we take our ideal of consciousness, not from the 
 process by which it came to itself, but from what it 
 manifests when it is fully realized. It is not neces- 
 sary for our purpose to dwell on the natural history 
 of the individual, but we must lay stress on one thing. 
 The conception of self, like all other conceptions, is 
 one of gradual growth, and the time of its perfect 
 realization is, for us, not yet. If you ask a child 
 what its idea of the self is, the most likely answer 
 will be a reference to the outward appearance. The 
 body is regarded as the self, and most people, not 
 trained in philosophy, if asked about the self, will 
 look for it as if it were laid on a shelf, a thing among 
 other things. They are so immersed in present ex- 
 periences that they never ask for whom and whose 
 is the experience ? The conception of self is not 
 given ready made, it grows, it is acquired. 
 
210 THEISM 
 
 While the experience of self is always present to 
 every mind, the conception of the self as the subject 
 of experience may never come to clear consciousness. 
 There is a clearness and vividness in self-conscious- 
 ness which puts all other things into antithesis with 
 itself. There is an assertiveness about it which is 
 unique. The world falls into two divisions for each 
 of us, — there is myself, and there is the universe of 
 other persons and things, — and this antithesis is of a 
 kind that abides. Other people there may be, they 
 also may think, they may have experiences of the 
 same kind, but these experiences lack the vividness 
 and_ impressiveness of my experience of myself, as a 
 living, feeling, thinking being. It is in this real con- 
 crete life of feeling that selfhood acquires vividness 
 and reality. Self-experience may be the only form 
 which self-consciousness may assume. The self may 
 be so absorbed in the process of experience, so lost 
 in the feelings, desires, thoughts, which occupy it 
 from moment to moment, that it may never reflect 
 on itself, and never ask consciously what it is. It 
 may remain on this level all through its earthly life. 
 Absorbed in its objects, living out its experience of 
 pleasure, engrossed in its pursuits, and interested in 
 the success of its plans, it may never seek to reflect 
 on its own nature or on the wonder implied in the 
 most simple experience. We may be active, ener- 
 getic, far-sighted, and wise to the uttermost, and 
 yet we may have never given a single hour to the 
 
PERSONALITY 2 1 1 
 
 thought of that self which has all these character- 
 istics. 
 
 The mind may direct itself on either element of ex- 
 perience to the neglect of the other, it may focus its 
 attention on the subject or on the object. Self-con- 
 sciousness may remain at the level of the simple expe- 
 rience of itself, or it may advance to a conception of 
 the self as the subject of all possible experience for 
 the self. In any case, a perfect self-consciousness is 
 implicit in every consciousness. It is possible for a 
 self to advance to the conception of itself as the sub- 
 ject of experience, which takes up all impressions, 
 rules them, binds them into a system, and makes them 
 parts in one consistent experience. In that case self- 
 consciousness would have attained its ideal, for it 
 would have reached the goal of self-knowledge and 
 self-control. The conception of a perfect self-con- 
 sciousness consists in the fact that it is in posses- 
 sion of itself, and can set the bounds of its own 
 experience. Self-knowledge, self-reverence, self-con- 
 trol, in these, and not in its finitude or infinitude, lies 
 the conception of a perfect selfhood. 
 
 Here, then, is the fundamental element in the con- 
 ception of personality, the highest conception which 
 we know. A person is one who has experience of 
 self, and may advance to the conception of self as 
 the subject of all possible experience, at least, of all 
 experience of that self. Having obtained this point 
 of view, we ought to go farther and regard the self 
 
212 THEISM 
 
 as subject of all possible knowledge, for knowledge 
 is possible, because all the objects of knowledge are 
 or may be brought into relation to the self. Objects 
 out of all possible relation to the self are for that self 
 non-existent. Apart from the questions raised by 
 the theory of knowledge, we look at the ethical side 
 of conception of the self, as it is of the highest sig- 
 nificance. Psychology tells us that there is a self, 
 the theory of knowledge affirms the worth of the 
 self as the subject of knowledge for which all objects 
 are, and ethics enables us to look at the self in the 
 process of self-realization and self-determination. 
 Ethically, the self is presented to our view as in the 
 light of its own ideal, determining itself in certain 
 directions and to certain ends. It has to choose its 
 ideals and to realize them. 
 
 The distinction between psychology, theory of 
 knowledge, and ethics is not absolute, for every 
 problem has these three aspects, and all meet to- 
 gether in the problem of the self. How is the self 
 to be realized and to come to its ideal ? To answer 
 this question would lead us very far, but the answer 
 which concerns us now is mainly ethical. From this 
 point of view all our science is to be looked at in its 
 bearing on conduct, in its tendency to build up char- 
 acter, and to guide conduct. As knowledge lies in 
 its reference to the self, so ethics has its significance 
 as the intelligible means for the realization of the 
 self, not in its mere selfhood, but as a member of a 
 
PERSONALITY 213 
 
 kingdom of selves, each of whom is a self which 
 ought to be helped to realize its ideal. Take sym- 
 pathy, for example, and look at it psychologically, it 
 is a feeling which has in it pleasure or pain. We 
 may analyze it into its elements and set forth its psy- 
 chological meaning, but when psychology has done 
 its work, ethics begins, and shows that by means of 
 sympathy the self realizes that it is only one in a 
 kingdom of selves, each one of whom has a right to 
 count for one in the kingdom of good. The self 
 learns to judge not from the feeling of pleasure and 
 pain which he experiences, but he judges his actions 
 by the good or harm they do to others. 
 
 As the reference to self is the unity of our know- 
 ledge and of our experience, in the ethical life a 
 similar synthesis must take place. We must take 
 care lest we pay too large a price for our intellectu- 
 alism, and for our tendency to reduce all things to 
 system. We must not lose hold of the concrete, liv- 
 ing, throbbing, palpitating individual, with all his 
 interesting experience, and substitute a cold series 
 of abstractions in his place. Nor ought we to make 
 the ethical life a thing of mere feeling. It is of the 
 essence of a self-conscious being that he can look 
 back on the changing, impulsive, fluctuating life of 
 himself, submit it to his own review and to his own 
 reflection, and seek to find the principle on which he 
 has lived, and to gather it up into a rational whole. 
 The self-conscious being who can and will, with 
 
214 THEISM 
 
 insight, foresight, and deliberation, set himself to do 
 this is on the way to be a person in the fullest 
 sense of the word. He takes what is given to him, 
 transforms it and himself into a larger whole, and 
 in so doing he has realized himself and attained to 
 personality. Personality for finite beings is a goal 
 to be attained, not an inheritance they have received. 
 Individuality and personality are to be distinguished 
 from each other. Individuality is given, personality 
 is won. An animal has individuality, it has all the 
 impulses and feelings which tend to self-preserva- 
 tion and race-preservation, and can maintain itself 
 in the struggle for existence. Man is also a self 
 in this lower meaning of the word. He has his ap- 
 petites, desires, passions, impulses, which demand 
 satisfaction, and urge him on to action. These 
 exist in him, and rise in him as readily as in any 
 animal. If allowed to have their way uncontrolled, 
 in their total working they would constitute the man 
 as they appear to constitute the animal. But they 
 do not, at least they need not, constitute man. As 
 a fact they do not so, for man can subdue his im- 
 pulses, rule his passions, control his desires, and 
 make them servants to a higher purpose. He can 
 reflect on the phenomena which make up his mani- 
 fold life, and look at them in their relation to a final 
 and permanent good. Man may take a critical 
 view of his sentient and impulsive life, subject it to 
 a judicial review, choose which tendencies may be 
 
PERSONALITY 215 
 
 repressed, and which may be strengthened and en- 
 couraged, and thus become a moral personality. 
 " Man goeth forth to his work and his labour until 
 the evening." Man may review, he has the power 
 to review the impulsive course of his past life, can 
 criticise it, arrest its course, change and subdue the 
 lower, animal, merely natural self, and make himself 
 subject to a rational ideal, and so build up, out of 
 the plastic material of sensibility, a stable moral self. 
 Character in this sense does not belong to an animal. 
 Its life seems to be a life of natural and immediate 
 sensibility, unchecked by any glimmering of life as 
 a whole. But for man there is a human task. All 
 the natural tendencies to activity, all the surging 
 elements of natural sensibility, all the clamant im- 
 pulses of his nature, have to be looked at by the 
 rational self, criticised, judged, appraised, their rela- 
 tive worth established in the judgment of the rational 
 being who measures the good of life as a whole. 
 The life of man is not a struggle of natural tenden- 
 cies, he is the subject which feels all the promptings 
 of passion and desire, but he is also the critic and 
 judge of these, and it is as critic that he is master of 
 his own destiny. 
 
 " He saw life steadily and saw it whole," is a 
 saying the profundity of which grows on us the more 
 we think of it. It was spoken only of one, it is 
 ideally true of every rational self-conscious person. 
 Not lost in mere individuality, not swept along like 
 
2l6 THEISM 
 
 a thing by the stream of feeling and impulse, but 
 master of himself and of his work, ruler of himself 
 and of his impulses, having regard to the worth of life 
 as a whole, and measuring every experience by its 
 worth for the whole of life ; this is something of the 
 meaning of the saying. Much is given to us, but 
 the given is the individuality out of which the per- 
 sonality is to be made. To man is given the material 
 out of which the rational personality is to be realized. 
 Much is given, — race endowments, all that heredity 
 can convey, temperament, constitution, — in fact, it 
 would be tedious to enumerate all that is given to 
 the individual. Time, place, circumstances, racial 
 conditions, the atmosphere of society, and many 
 other things are given, but the character is not given, 
 it is wrought out by the man himself. These are 
 given that we may realize our personality. To other 
 beings the law of their life is given ; man has to sub- 
 ject himself to law, and to choose the highest law to 
 which he will subject himself. 
 
 The rational being has thus a work to do. The 
 several elements in the individual life, the antithe- 
 sis into which they tend to fall, the seeming con- 
 tradictions between the sensual and the rational, 
 between the individual and society, and all the other 
 divergencies which might be stated, are to be har- 
 monized in the unity of the personal life. But this 
 is only one part of self-realization. To unite the 
 several elements of the individual life so that there 
 
PERSONALITY 21 J 
 
 will ensue a realized harmony is a great achievement ; 
 it is still greater to unite the several personal lives 
 in a synthesis of a larger sort. The individual is 
 particular, personality is universal. All humanity is 
 potentially in every man. Each of us has to out- 
 grow the individual, and to attain to somewhat of 
 that personality which is the conciliation of the 
 several individual lives. 
 
 " Be a person and respect others as persons." 
 " Always use the humanity in thine own person and in 
 the persons of others," never as a means, but always 
 as an end, or as it is in Shakespeare, " To thine own 
 self be true, and it must follow as the night the day, 
 thou canst not then be false to any man." Each 
 person an end in himself, with a right to demand 
 from the universe the means for the realization of 
 himself, and every person a law to himself in virtue 
 of the realized rationality within himself, that is the 
 ethical ideal set before us, alas ! how far from being 
 realized ! Still in our best moments we feel that this 
 is the right ideal for a man. To feel the oneness of 
 the rational self with all other rational selves in the 
 world, to know that just as far as we realize the 
 rational ideal of humanity in ourselves, we are ipso 
 facto brought into oneness with all others who bear 
 the mark of personality. This oneness does not 
 mean the obliteration of differences, it does not do 
 away with that characteristic note of a man which 
 makes him himself something distinct from all other 
 
2l8 THEISM 
 
 in the world, but it gives a place to him in the com- 
 mon kingdom, which is constituted by such a union 
 of all as is consistent with the freedom of each. Our 
 study of the personality of man leads to this 
 conclusion, that personality is not to be suppressed, 
 not to be submerged in a larger whole which will swal- 
 low it up as the river swallows up the snowflakes 
 which fall on it ; rather whatever the synthesis may 
 be, it at least must be of a kind which will leave the 
 person free to continue in his self-conscious activity, 
 as a being that has worth and significance in himself. 
 That is to say, that the larger unity of which we are 
 in search must be constituted on another basis, and 
 after another sort than any we have met in the course 
 of our exploration. The cells which we came to 
 know in their differentiated state as parts of one 
 organism had a union among themselves only on 
 condition that they were in subordination to the 
 whole. They no longer maintained a separate exist- 
 ence. But the persons who make up a society main- 
 tain their relative independence ; there are character- 
 istics which they cannot give up if they are to remain 
 persons. They must continue to exert all the modes 
 of their consciousness, must live out their own feel- 
 ing, thinking, acting, and, in a word, they must be 
 themselves and not others. In this continuance of 
 their personal life and growth consists their worth 
 for society, and their worth in themselves. Not to 
 be ground in a social mill until all angularities are 
 
PERSONALITY 219 
 
 rubbed off : no, that is not the ideal ; rather the ideal 
 is to sharpen the angularities and keep them in all 
 their picturesqueness, so that there may be the fullest 
 development of the uniqueness of every personality, 
 along with the fulness of the rational unity consti- 
 tuted by a spiritual integration of such personalities. 
 Such a unity can only be constituted by the rational 
 choice of such personalities. The unity of a barrel 
 is made by the hoops, the unity of an organism is 
 constituted by a principle of life acting from within, 
 the unity of a social organism must be constituted by 
 the self-surrender of the members to the whole, and 
 of the whole to the members. Such a unity is not 
 yet, but it is coming nearer. At all events, we have 
 made such progress as to be able to set forth in some 
 adequate way the conditions of such a social union. 
 We can see that the ways of holding peoples and 
 nations together which have prevailed through the 
 past have not been ideal ways. Standing armies, 
 brute force, repressive legislation, one people holding 
 another in subjection, — these are not ideal ways of 
 reaching social union. But on these I am not called 
 to dwell. What I am concerned with is the necessary 
 condition to any social union, namely, that there must 
 be full scope in it for the development of the individ- 
 ual to a personality, and that the surrender of the 
 person to the good of the society must be deliberate, 
 rational, free, in a word, it must be rational self- 
 surrender. 
 
220 THEISM 
 
 The spirit of the society may pass into the mem- 
 bers of that society, and the social ethos be realized 
 in each member, but it will be realized by him in his 
 own characteristic way. Character may be as dis- 
 tinctive as faces are, the common type is there, but 
 each face has something distinctive. So with the 
 personality, it is one, but with distinctions. For this 
 spiritual thing which we call personality is the most 
 unique product of time. Imperfectly realized as it is, 
 it yet presents us with the most complete type we 
 know of imperviousness, and resistance to all merely 
 external influences. Force may be brought to bear 
 upon it, it may be crushed out of visible existence, 
 you may cage it, imprison it, and the caged imprisoned 
 thing may sing, " My mind to me a kingdom is." It 
 may maintain its sturdy independence, and if it is to 
 be subdued, it must be by influence of another kind. 
 If it is to recognize itself as a member of a larger 
 unity, that unity must come to it in a fashion which 
 will recognize the worth of the person. There are 
 limits to the demands which the social organism may 
 make. None can have the right to demand from 
 a person the surrender of that which would make 
 him cease to be a person and which would turn him 
 into a thing. 
 
 These remarks have a wide significance, which is 
 not limited to the discussion of social questions, on 
 which I do not enter. They have a bearing on phil- 
 osophical and ethical questions, the discussion of 
 
PERSONALITY 221 
 
 which is occupying the attention of the deepest 
 thinkers on this side and on our side of the water. 
 These questions will be looked at later. Meanwhile 
 let us look at the process by which the rational being 
 may be persuaded to serve, obey, love, and work in 
 union with his fellows. For by persuasion alone can 
 this result be rightly wrought out. It is by ideals 
 that the rational man is led to self-surrender. It is 
 by an appeal to his rational nature that the process 
 of self-realization can be guided to its destined end. 
 Each aspect of our complex nature makes its own 
 contribution to the ideal. Nor can science make any 
 progress without an appeal to an ideal. From the 
 experience that the self has of the energy it exerts 
 in its own action, science leaps forth to the conception 
 of an infinite and eternal energy from which all 
 things proceed. From the intelligent action of the 
 self and the room for that action which it experi- 
 ences in the world, science obtains the conception of 
 an intelligence which is equal to the ordering of the 
 world. Reason is postulated as the cause of the 
 rationality of the world. From the appreciation of 
 beauty and harmony which man finds in the world, 
 the aesthetic ideal of an infinite source of beauty is 
 constructed. The conscience of man thirsting after 
 righteousness cannot rest until it reaches an ideal of 
 perfect righteousness in which there is no becoming, 
 and the heart of man demands an ideal of perfect 
 goodness and love. As long as any demand of 
 
222 THEISM 
 
 intelligence, conscience, heart, or reason is unrecog- 
 nized, there can be no peace for man. Only when 
 all the claims of the many-sided nature of man are 
 recognized in the conception of an all-wise, holy, lov- 
 ing, all-powerful God, can man realize himself. 
 
 Are these ideals real ? Are they not the objecti- 
 fication of our own needs ? Are they the Brocken 
 shadows of ourselves cast upon the wastes of space ? 
 Does not the idea of an infinite personality land us 
 in contradiction ? Well, I do not hesitate to say 
 that for the interpretation of our experience, we are 
 entitled to make those assumptions without which 
 experience is not possible. This is axiomatic. In 
 fact, it is done by every one who ventures to make 
 universal propositions. Every one assumes in his 
 philosophy that, to use the words of Mr. Spencer, 
 " I am in the presence of an infinite and eternal 
 energy from which all things proceed." We are 
 entitled to ask, whence this conception has come ? 
 For it is certain that our finite experience, consid- 
 ered in itself, cannot make such an affirmation. As 
 merely quantitative, we cannot measure, weigh, or 
 reckon an infinite. We reach the idea of infinite 
 power by recognizing that we cannot set any limit to 
 it, yet our positive notion of power is derived from 
 our own activity. If we grant to Mr. Spencer the 
 conception of infinite and eternal energy, we still 
 maintain that the notion is positive, not negative. 
 Infinite and eternal are not negative, they merely 
 
PERSONALITY 223 
 
 set forth that there are objects to the worth and 
 excellence of which we can set no limits. 
 
 The main object of these remarks is to show the 
 inconsistency of those who first make universal prop- 
 ositions themselves, and refuse to others the same 
 right. If we can form an idea of power, if we can 
 without contradiction speak of an infinite and eternal 
 energy, we have opened up the way to the affirmation 
 of other ideals. The affirmation of an energy is the 
 raising of one part of our experience to its ideal, and 
 the idea of force has no better inherent right to be 
 thus raised to the infinite than any other idea has. 
 But a great many raise this conception to an ideal 
 height, and then use it to criticise all other ideals. 
 If we speak of perfect righteousness, of infinite 
 intelligence, of perfect beauty, or of eternal good- 
 ness and love, we are at once told that we are an- 
 thropomorphic, and those who say so forget that 
 the notion of energy is quite as anthropomorphic as 
 any of these mentioned. In truth, the contention, if 
 carried out consistently, would destroy science alto- 
 gether, and limit our thought to what happens in 
 our own time and within the narrow circle of our 
 purely personal experience, and that in the narrow- 
 est sense of the word "experience." If, as the cor- 
 relative of our experience of power, Spencer can 
 speak of an infinite and eternal energy, he may not 
 limit the rights of others. If infinite power is in- 
 volved in our experience of finite power, then with 
 
224 THEISM 
 
 a right as good infinite reason is involved in the 
 exercise of the finite reason we know, aye, and with 
 a much better claim. Perfect righteousness, holi- 
 ness free from all imperfection, goodness, and love 
 are involved in the finite experience of the righteous- 
 ness, holiness, and love realized among men. I know 
 no reason why they claim reality for their ideal, and 
 refuse reality to mine. I am in relation to an ex- 
 ternal world which reveals itself to me through my 
 senses, and I can interpret these manifestations into 
 a system. If my experience thus interpreted is jus- 
 tified by the result, as it is, is the objective reference 
 exhausted by this interpretation of sense experience ? 
 Have we not acted on the supposition that all our 
 experience must have an objective reference? In 
 my intellectual action I must think there is an intel- 
 ligible world, in my moral action I make the same 
 assumption, namely, that heart and conscience in 
 me are related to an objective authority which has a 
 right to guide my life and dictate my action. 
 
 These ideals stand on the same level, or, if there is 
 any preference, the preference is in favour of these 
 ideals prescribed by the necessities of the higher 
 nature of man. But I do not pitch them against 
 each other. For we need for our thought and for our 
 life the conception of the infinite and eternal energy, 
 and we go on to say that this energy is, also, the 
 realization of all ideals, and all these ideals are real- 
 ized in the One Eternal energy from which all things 
 
PERSONALITY 225 
 
 proceed and to which they all tend to return. The 
 theistic belief is that all these positive ideals are real- 
 ized in one infinite personality to whom we are 
 related in many ways, whom we may know, and 
 who may make Himself known to us. Now the only 
 category we know in which and by means of which 
 we may set forth the infinite qualities of such a being 
 is just that of personality. It is the widest word 
 known to us and the greatest unity. Even in the 
 finite person, how many qualities meet ! Mind and 
 body, matter and spirit, instinct and reason, feeling, 
 thought, and action, consciousness of pleasure and 
 pain, of good and evil, all brought together within the 
 synthesis of one experience. We say then, if we have 
 the right of raising any part of our experience to its 
 ideal, a fortiori we have the right to raise the whole 
 synthetic unity to its ideal, and that gives us the con- 
 ception of a perfect personality. 
 
 But personality is a limitation, and how can you 
 ascribe a limitation to the unlimited ? We hear this 
 urged by many in our land, indeed, it is the favourite 
 agnostic position. It has been often argued during 
 the last half century, and I shall not spend much time 
 on it. With Lotze, I would say that perfect person- 
 ality can only be found in the infinite. The ideal 
 personality is one in which there is no becoming, 
 no limits save those set by itself, which is in perfect 
 possession of itself, and sets the bounds of its own ex- 
 perience and determines all its states. To the reality 
 Q 
 
226 THEISM 
 
 of such a personality we are led by all the experience 
 of man. It is the demand of the reason, the postu- 
 late of our moral nature, the claim of the will, which 
 requires it as the guarantee of its venture of faith, 
 launched as it is on a world not realized. To me the 
 difficulty is not whether personality should be predi- 
 cated of God, but whether so great a word should be 
 a predicate of man. At the best, we are imperfect 
 persons, with a personality not realized, dependent, 
 having our states and our experience largely set for 
 us, not by us, not able to determine wholly either the 
 character or the limits of our experience. Yet the 
 personality in ourselves is so far given as to enable 
 us to see what a perfect personality is. 
 
 In fact, I would sum up the whole argument in this 
 one word, "personality." I do not employ the word 
 " self-consciousness," as some do, for it seems to me 
 that self-consciousness is only one element of person- 
 ality. It is simply the outline of personality which has 
 to be filled up with the elements of concrete experience 
 to redeem it from mere abstractness. Reason, intelli- 
 gence, righteousness, love, are mere metaphors when 
 divorced from their significance as qualities of a per- 
 son. This is the conclusion to which we are led by 
 the history of science and philosophy, and, as we shall 
 see, this is the supreme demand of religion, and if it 
 is not conceded, religion is impossible in any true 
 sense of the word. 
 
VIII 
 
 RELIGION: ITS NATURE, HISTORY, AND 
 DEMANDS 
 
 In speaking of religion, there are two proposi- 
 tions I desire to make regarding it at the outset. 
 The first is that religion is universal and belongs 
 to man as man. All men have been conscious of 
 their dependence on a power greater than them- 
 selves, and have felt a necessity of being on good 
 terms with that power. They have believed in the 
 existence of such a power; they have sought to 
 propitiate that power in many ways ; and they have 
 recognized that that power had prescribed for them 
 a certain kind of life. The result of investigation 
 leads to the historical conclusion that there has 
 been no people without a religion ; at least, such 
 a people has not yet been discovered. A religion 
 gives a creed to believe, commands to obey, and 
 consolations to be enjoyed. And these are ele- 
 ments in every religion. 
 
 A second proposition I venture to make is that 
 religion is universal in another aspect ; namely, it 
 belongs to every part of human nature. It is not 
 a matter merely of the reason, nor is it merely 
 
 227 
 
228 THEISM 
 
 based on feeling, nor is it only directed toward 
 action. It appeals to the whole consciousness of 
 man, and to every mode of it. It is rational, emo- 
 tional, and volitional. It gives truth for the in- 
 telligence, consolations for the heart, motive and 
 guidance for the will. It is necessary to insist on 
 these commonplaces, for religion has been identi- 
 fied with philosophy, and the problem of the one 
 has been stated as if it were the problem of the 
 other ; it has been denuded of every rational ele- 
 ment and transformed into a mere matter of feel- 
 ing; and it has been identified with ethics, and its 
 commands made to be simply ethical injunctions. 
 Now my contention is that religion is a philosophy. 
 It has truth to proclaim, but it is more. Religion 
 is emotional ; it addresses the emotions, quickens 
 the affections, and purifies the heart, but it is 
 more. It does command and prescribe a certain 
 kind of life, but it does more. In fact, religion is 
 at home within the whole complex nature of man, 
 and makes its appeal to the whole man, and insists 
 on being with him in all his thinking, feeling, acting. 
 Thus addressing the whole man, and thus in- 
 terested in all his activity, it follows that no effort 
 and no work of man is indifferent to his religion. 
 It is sometimes said that there is a conflict between 
 religion and science, between religion and philoso- 
 phy, but such a conflict is not necessary nor is it 
 reasonable. It might as well be said that there is 
 
RELIGION 229 
 
 a conflict between religion and commerce, between 
 religion and architecture, and between religion and 
 any other form of human activity. No doubt such 
 conflicts have been, and books have been written 
 to set forth the history of the conflict between 
 science and religion, between philosophy and re- 
 ligion, just as books have been written to describe 
 conflicts between different forms of religion. It 
 seems to me that such conflicts are unnecessary ; 
 and it would be well to say broadly that religion 
 has its rights, and these have to be recognized in 
 any thoughtful treatment of human life, thought, 
 and history. It is happily not necessary to insist 
 on this nowadays, when every statement as to the 
 phenomena of religion in any part of the world and 
 from any age of history is eagerly welcomed, and 
 forms material for serious study to the most thought- 
 ful of living men. They eagerly investigate the phe- 
 nomena of religion, if from no other interest, at 
 least from the point of view that here are real be- 
 liefs of men, and it is important for men to know 
 and understand them. Thus the activity of thought 
 in this department is immense, and books by the 
 dozen issue from the press dealing with the philoso- 
 phy of religion, the making of religion, the history 
 of religions, and so on. We cannot complain of a 
 want of interest in this great question, even though 
 we may complain of the inadequate account given 
 of the origin, the nature, and the truth of religion. 
 
230 THEISM 
 
 Of religious belief Mr. Spencer says truly, " Thus 
 the universality of religious ideas, their independent 
 evolution among different primitive races, and their 
 great vitality unite in showing that their source must 
 be deep-seated instead of superficial. In other words, 
 we are obliged to admit that if not supernaturally de- 
 rived as the majority contend, they must be derived 
 out of human experiences, slowly accumulated and 
 organized." ("First Principles," pp. 14-15.) Again, 
 " Considering all faculties, as we must do on this sup- 
 position, to result from accumulated modifications 
 caused by the intercourse of the organism with its 
 environment, we are obliged to admit that there exist 
 in the environment certain phenomena or conditions 
 which have determined the growth of the feeling in 
 question, and so are obliged to admit that it is as 
 normal as any other faculty." (P. 16.) When we ask 
 what is the function of this faculty, admitted by Mr. 
 Spencer to be as normal as any other, we find on ex- 
 amination of his voluminous works that it has scarcely 
 any function at all. It has the strange peculiarity, 
 surely very strange for a normal faculty, of always 
 being in the wrong, of taking illusions for realities, 
 and of reaching wrong conclusions during all the 
 years of its operation. Mr. Spencer assigns all that 
 is knowable to science, and leaves to religion all that 
 transcends knowledge, with the assurance that let 
 religion strive as it may, it can never reach reality, 
 and never attain to knowledge. It seems rather hard 
 
RELIGION 231 
 
 to treat at the outset all the religious strivings of reli- 
 gion as without a goal or a legitimate result, and all 
 the religious experience of mankind as vain. Yet 
 this is what Mr. Spencer does, he leaves to religion 
 its mystery, but he leaves it nothing else. Still, let 
 us take his admission that the religious faculty is 
 as normal as any other faculty, and that there are 
 conditions and phenomena in the environment cor- 
 responding to man's religious nature. With this 
 concession we may take our own way of ascertaining 
 what in the environment corresponds to the religious 
 needs of man, and what man has discovered that 
 feature of the environment to be. 
 
 We take with us the presupposition that there is a 
 correspondence between experience and reality, that 
 as room has been found in the world for human ac- 
 tivity, that as methods corresponding to the rational 
 methods of human reason are found at work in the 
 world, and as man has found his mathematics and 
 his logic at work in the world, so this great part of 
 human experience which we call religion has its 
 sphere and function, its place and its truth, in the uni- 
 verse in which man has found himself. There is no 
 reason why religion should be limited to what tran- 
 scends knowledge, or why its function should be to 
 deal only with the unknowable. We submit that a 
 philosophy which aspires to be perfectly unified know- 
 ledge, fails if it does not deal with religious experi- 
 ence, or take into account the action of this faculty 
 
232 THEISM 
 
 admitted to be normal. In fact, philosophy, in all the 
 forms and phases of it in vogue at the present hour, 
 admits the obligation, though it must be said it dis- 
 charges the function most imperfectly. Religion is 
 for it a special form of the philosophical problem as 
 their system sets it forth. For the Hegelian idealist, 
 it is only the last and highest form of the philosophi- 
 cal thesis ; for the positivist, it is only a kind of after 
 thought added by the founder to make room for a 
 new experience of his own. For the agnostic, religion 
 represents, so far as it has ideas, the necessary failure 
 which comes to man when he tries to formulate his 
 notions of what transcends knowledge. Thus, while 
 philosophy seeks to have its philosophy of religion 
 for the most part, the religion seems to escape, and 
 the philosophy alone remains. 
 
 It is not my purpose to dwell on the history of 
 religion, nor on the various modes of its manifesta- 
 tion ; nor do I mean to set forth, still less to criticise, 
 the various theories of the origin, nature, and function 
 of religion in vogue at the present hour; nor shall I 
 spend my time endeavouring to set forth a philosophy 
 of religion. Any of these would be a worthy work, 
 were there time for it. What is sought to be done in 
 this lecture is, simply, the sequel of what has been 
 attempted up till now. We say that as the thought of 
 man has widened he has been constrained to recog- 
 nize the existence of wider and wider unities in the 
 synthesis of his knowledge in relation to reality. 
 
RELIGION 233 
 
 From physical unities held together by pressure, to 
 organic unity of the organism, to the higher unity of 
 life, to the unity of personal life, to the spiritual unity 
 of the social organism, we found ourselves bound to 
 rise, and we felt that each higher unity made a larger 
 demand on our power of conception. We felt tempted 
 at every upward turn of the spiral to substitute for 
 the concrete reality some easier conception, something 
 more easily grasped and handled. Yet we found that 
 these higher unities were rational unities constituted, 
 perhaps, by a higher reason than ours ; and we ought 
 to treat them as the goal of our thinking. Purposely, 
 these higher unities were looked at from various points 
 of view, and the question of religion was omitted from 
 the treatment, lest it would complicate it unduly. Of 
 course, religion was an all-important factor in personal 
 and social experience from the beginning, and the 
 higher unities could not have been constituted apart 
 from it. But the consideration of religion widens the 
 problem immeasurably. It brings with it an eternal 
 element, it widens the horizon of the present by bring- 
 ing into our life the relations in which we stand not 
 only to our fellow-men, but the relations in which we 
 stand to God. It widens the boundaries of the past, 
 for it compels us to think of the human beings who 
 have lived and died, as living at this hour, and of all 
 the dead as contemporaries, all existing somehow in 
 the eternal present. It casts our thoughts forward 
 to the future, and compels us to face not only the prob- 
 
234 THEISM 
 
 lems of the present life, but to face them with the 
 added burden of the bearing they have on the eternal 
 future of ourselves and others. 
 
 Thus religion by its thought of God and immortal- 
 ity widens our horizon immeasurably, and transforms 
 every scientific and philosophic problem into a prob- 
 lem of much wider significance. It therefore needs 
 larger resources for adequate dealing with its special 
 problems than are needed by science and philosophy. 
 It needs a deeper than philosophic faith, a wider than 
 scientific experiment. For from the nature of the 
 case many of its beliefs cannot be subjected to scien- 
 tific verification. None of us know yet what it is to 
 die, and none of us have experience of what comes 
 after death ; and so the beliefs, the ineradicable belief 
 in the life which follows after death, must be based on 
 hope, or on our belief in the testimony of one who 
 knows. The belief in immortality has been one of 
 the most persistent beliefs of men, and it has all the 
 marks of a rational belief worthy of a rational being ; 
 but from the nature of the case it cannot be verified 
 in the way in which I have verified for myself the 
 existence of New York. We may expect to verify it 
 by and by, but the time is not yet. 
 
 If the fact corresponds to the belief, if all who have 
 lived somewhere in the eternal present, if Moses, 
 Isaiah, Socrates, Plato, if the great thinkers, prophets, 
 poets, religious guides and leaders of the human race 
 are living at this hour, surely that widens our thought 
 
RELIGION 2$5 
 
 of the unity of men, more specially if we believe, as 
 we must, that they are still in some sort of relation to 
 us and we to them. It shows to us that religion with 
 its characteristic beliefs brings into the problem ele- 
 ments which philosophy laid little stress on, which 
 indeed it has for the most part neglected. The en- 
 vironment for religious people becomes much wider 
 and deeper. It is not for religion what it is for phi- 
 losophy, — the concourse of people living at the present 
 hour, with all the inherited influences, transmitted 
 tendencies, and accumulated thought and experience 
 of the past ; it means also that these living forces are 
 still living, and all the people of the past may be- 
 come the living environment of the present for any 
 one of us. If religion has this as a living belief, it 
 must exercise a corresponding influence on life and 
 conduct. And this belief widens the problem of 
 religion beyond the range of philosophy. It be- 
 comes the highest problem that man can grapple 
 with, for it has brought with it elements which have 
 not been prominent in the treatment which philoso- 
 phy bestows on its problems. 
 
 Religion teaches us to look at the social environ- 
 ment from a new point of view. We saw the signifi- 
 cance of the family, the city, the state, and other in- 
 stitutions in the training of men. We see, also, that 
 heredity does not exhaust the debt we owe to our 
 ancestors, nor have their gifts to us descended alto- 
 gether by the line of direct descent. Men have 
 
236 THEISM 
 
 lived, wrought, felt, acted, and they have written 
 their experience, and the written thoughts and deeds 
 of former thinkers and workers have become the most 
 effective means of training their successors. This is 
 a commonplace. But the commonplace is transfig- 
 ured when religion grasps it, and gives it the colour 
 of its own faith and hope. It tells us that no one of 
 the achievements done by men in the past is lost, nor 
 are they lost who did them. The men who opened 
 out paths into strange countries of thought and expe- 
 rience, who widened the bounds of knowledge, and 
 left us examples of what human life and thought may 
 be, are not passed into oblivion and non-existence, 
 they are somewhere and doing some worthy work 
 to-day. Assume this hope to have a true ground, 
 and we add immeasurably to the worth of human life 
 and endeavour. Life assumes a new meaning, hope 
 takes a grander sweep, and the horizon is widened 
 beyond measure. It is the characteristic way of re- 
 ligion thus to introduce grandeur into our thoughts, 
 and a deeper worth into our estimate of things. 
 
 It is the mark of religion, in particular, to introduce 
 the note of eternity into our estimate of the most 
 common of our experiences. Philosophy takes note 
 in its own way of eternity, but it grasps it with a fal- 
 tering hand, and follows the clew with a hesitating 
 foot. But religion neither falters nor hesitates, but 
 boldly places all the objects of its contemplation in 
 the light of eternity. In particular, it places persons 
 
RELIGION 237 
 
 in this light, looks at them as beings who shall live 
 forever, and regards all actions, feelings, and thoughts 
 as something which has a significance that will never 
 die. Above all the note of religion in its estimate of 
 men is that it looks at this life and this world as the 
 place for the making of persons, for the building up 
 of character, and for the preparation of them for a 
 place and a work in the kingdom of God. Philosophy 
 at its best does not attempt so high a flight. It takes 
 shorter views. Evolutionary philosophy limits its 
 view to the lifetime of the sun, or, if it takes a longer 
 view, it contemplates a collision with some other 
 solar system, which will scatter the material of both 
 systems into a cosmic cloud, and from such a nebula 
 a process of evolution may again emerge to run a 
 similar course. It contemplates with as much com- 
 posure as is possible to it the wreck of all the toil 
 and labour of the world. All the thoughts and work 
 of men, even that thought which evolved the theory, 
 vanish and leave not a wreck behind. Even Hege- 
 lian evolution, which is a greater and higher thing 
 than Darwinism, leaves us without a future, and its 
 outlook is bounded by the life that now is. Indeed, 
 the highest product of evolution in the hands of 
 Hegel seems to be a Prussian at the beginning of the 
 present century — a respectable product of evolution 
 certainly, but one that does not seem to have ex- 
 hausted the resources of civilization. 
 
 Where philosophy falters, and where it almost 
 
238 THEISM 
 
 fears to tread, religion boldly enters in and makes a 
 home for itself. In virtue of this assured hope, 
 which it may be said has been ever a characteristic 
 of religion in every form of it, religion has trans- 
 formed the problem of life, and made it a greater 
 problem than ever. It has given to man a new en- 
 vironment, by the very fact that it has placed him 
 in eternity. It has given a new meaning to our 
 endeavour by showing that all we do has a meaning 
 that time cannot exhaust. If I learn to look at the 
 man in the street as a man who shall live forever, 
 then I dare not use him as a means for any end of 
 mine. I dare not attenuate him to an aspect as I 
 find myself in constant danger of doing, for he has 
 in him the eternal worth of personality. Philosophy 
 may teach us of the worth of man, it may tell me 
 that as a person I must treat others as persons, and 
 always use the humanity in my own person and 
 in the persons of others as an end and never as 
 a means ; but religion gives a new sanction to this 
 teaching when it tells me of the worth of a person as 
 a being of eternity. If the consequences of actions 
 are exhausted here, if the building up of character 
 has a meaning only within time, if the work we can 
 do can live only in the memory of our successors, 
 then clearly the motives which have only this tem- 
 poral sanction are of less strength than those that 
 religion enforces with its doctrine of immortality. 
 As the advent of reason has transfigured all the 
 
RELIGION 239 
 
 feelings, emotions, desires, thoughts, and volitions of 
 the rational being, so a further transfiguration takes 
 place in the plastic hand of religion. We may not 
 speak of the advent of religion as if the appearance 
 of it was subsequent to that of rationality, for man 
 has always been a religious being. But religion does 
 transfigure every aspect of the human being, gives a 
 new character to his affections, a new stimulus to his 
 action, a new motive to his endeavour, and a new 
 aim to his aspiration. It brings new light to his in- 
 telligence, and a new strength to his will. Only one 
 of the great thoughts of religion has been yet looked 
 at by us, but how great has been the significance of 
 this thought for man ! The hope of immortality has 
 had a larger influence than can be traced here, but 
 let what has been indicated suffice for the present. 
 The particular forms in which this hope has em- 
 bodied itself are as various as are the races of men. 
 It is quite true that these embodiments of the hope 
 of the future life have not been of an elevating or of 
 a purifying kind. True that the peoples thought 
 of the future life in colours borrowed from the scenery, 
 the occupations, the vicissitudes of the present life. 
 The happy hunting ground of the Indian, the per- 
 petual battle of Valhalla, the happy halls of the Egyp- 
 tian, and all the innumerable forms which have been 
 drawn by the imaginations of men to set forth the 
 conditions of the future life, do not convey to us any 
 real conception of what that life may be. In truth, 
 
240 THEISM 
 
 we are not able to picture to ourselves what life in 
 these new conditions may be, while we may be fully 
 persuaded of the reality of that life, and the belief of 
 it may have the largest and most beneficial influence 
 on our conduct. It is quite legitimate for us to take 
 our conception of the future life from the highest 
 and best thought of it, set forth in the highest form 
 of religion known to man, and to use all the other 
 forms of it simply as testimonies to the universality 
 and influence of that belief. Life and immortality 
 have been brought to light, and these are the sure 
 possession of the highest religion at this present 
 hour. 
 
 The belief in immortality and the belief in a divine 
 being or beings have always gone together. There 
 is no tribe without its God, as there is none without 
 a religion. At all events, every tribe which has come 
 within our knowledge had a belief in beings or a 
 being superior to himself, whom he had to please 
 and to propitiate, and on whose favour he depended 
 for any good he desired. It is true that the forms 
 in which he pictured this superior being vary widely. 
 Almost all things on earth, under the earth, and 
 over the earth, every phenomenon on land or sea or 
 sky has been taken as a symbol or sign of the divine. 
 The spirit worshipped, feared, and served may have 
 had its home in the sun, moon, or stars, on the moun- 
 tains or the plains, may have dwelt in anointed stones 
 or sculptured pillar, in fact, there is nothing which 
 
RELIGION 241 
 
 may not be or become a dwelling place of the spirit 
 in which man believed. Anything might assume a 
 sacred form, and attain to a sanctity arising from 
 some relation to the divine being. Thus there were 
 sacred stones, sacred trees, sacred groves, as well as 
 sacred places, persons, and sacred guilds. So also 
 there is no form of service which has not had a place 
 in the observances which men have devoted to the 
 worship of the divine beings in whom men believed. 
 The sacred rites were innumerable, and the sacri- 
 fices offered included all that a man had to give, — 
 goods, possessions, cattle, slaves, children, wife, even 
 personal honour and life itself were offered, if in 
 no other way the lost fellowship could be restored. 
 Thus the belief in a superior being receives illustra- 
 tion from all the religious experience of the race. 
 The intensity of the belief, and the reality of it, are 
 attested by the earnestness and thoroughness of their 
 religious service. It was a belief that influenced 
 conduct in the most practical way. It was no half- 
 hearted belief, it was living and real. 
 
 Whether we regard religious belief as rational and 
 one that is in correspondence with reality, or whether 
 we regard it as superstitious and unjustified, there 
 can be no difference of opinion as to the reality and 
 intensity of it, and the powerful influence it has ex- 
 erted on the thoughts and lives of men. Whether 
 true or false, the belief in a divine being is a sign 
 of the greatness of man. It reveals a power in man 
 
242 THEISM 
 
 whereby he is enabled to transcend the present and 
 the visible, to pierce through the veil of sense and 
 time, and to think of himself as related to an unseen 
 power to whom he could assign no limits. How 
 earnestly he strove to find God, - how eagerly he 
 sought to serve Him, let the records of the religions 
 of the world testify. Happily the labours of our 
 numerous scientific workers in anthropology have 
 made us acquainted with the forms which religion 
 has assumed among the peoples of the earth. No 
 doubt the facts are given to us mostly as illustrations 
 of a theory, but still the facts are there, and we may 
 separate them from the theory. One arranges the 
 facts to set forth the theory that ancestor-worship 
 is the root of every religion, another finds in animism 
 the first outline of religion, and traces its develop- 
 ment upwards through polytheism to theism. While 
 others start with the worship of nature and natural 
 phenomena, and then strive to find a method of de- 
 velopment which will give the phenomena of the 
 higher religions. The important thing for us is, 
 not the various theories, but the universal fact 
 they all assume. These theories I do not criticise 
 here. 
 
 This, however, must be said, that no theory has 
 as yet commanded general assent. The ghost theory 
 accounts for very few of the facts, and the theory 
 of Tylor is met by the array of facts gathered to- 
 gether by Mr. Andrew Lang, and these facts can- 
 
RELIGION 243 
 
 not be explained on the animistic view. How did 
 savage tribes come to believe in a God, of great 
 power, of an ethical character, and of great and 
 high attributes, when all their other beliefs were on 
 the rudest savage level ? That such is the case is 
 abundantly proved by Mr. Lang, and also by your 
 own Dr. Brinton. To these writers and to many 
 others I refer for the proof of this statement, as my 
 space is very limited. "Our next step," says Mr. 
 Lang, retracing the steps of his argument, "was to 
 examine in detail several religions of the most re- 
 mote and backward races, of races least contami- 
 nated with Christian or Islamite teaching. Our 
 evidence, when possible, was derived from ancient 
 and secret tribal mysteries and sacred native hymns. 
 We found a relatively Supreme Being, a Creator, 
 sanctioning morality, and unpropitiated by sacrifice, 
 among peoples who go in dread of ghosts and wiz- 
 ards, but do not always worship ancestors. We 
 showed that the anthropological theory of the evo- 
 lution of God out of ghosts in no way explains the 
 facts in the savage conception of a Supreme Being." 
 ("The Making of Religion," pp. 327-8.) 
 
 The evidence attainable as to the belief in God 
 among early men, goes to prove that, be the source 
 of that belief what it may, they did believe in a 
 powerful, moral, eternal, omniscient Father and 
 Judge of men. Religion and morality were not 
 disjoined, they were united, and served the same 
 
244 THEISM 
 
 end. "We see that even in its rudest forms religion 
 was a moral force ; the powers that man reveres were 
 the side of social order and tribal law ; and the fear 
 of the gods was a motive to enforce the laws of 
 society, which were also the laws of morality." 
 (Robertson Smith, " Religion of the Semites," p. 53.) 
 Religion in alliance with ethics, moral conduct en- 
 forced by the commands of the Supreme Being, this 
 is presented to us in the evidence gathered even by 
 Spencer in his " Sociology." It is to be admitted that 
 the conclusion is not universal, that religion is often 
 divorced from morality, and rites and ceremonies 
 have often ceased to have a moral reference. It is 
 a fact that meets us in the history of advancing 
 peoples that their religion remains conservative, while 
 their intelligence, their morality, and their civilization 
 makes progress. This conflict is often symbolized 
 in the fact that there is a change in the character 
 and names of the gods of a people. A change of 
 the mind of the people may have left no trace save 
 in a revolution among the gods. When Varuna 
 ceased to be the chief figure among the Aryan gods, 
 and Indra took his place ; when Ahura Mazda 
 ceased to occupy the highest place in the thought 
 of Iran, and attention was concentrated on Mithra, 
 — the change indicated a profound revolution in the 
 mind of the worshippers, and a change from a higher 
 to a lower ethical platform. 
 
 In truth, part of the tragedy of the ages lies in 
 
RELIGION 245 
 
 the fact that religion tends to be conservative, while 
 knowledge has grown ; the very sacredness of religion 
 makes it averse to change. Thus a religion and . the 
 gods it worships may no longer fitly serve the higher 
 needs of an advancing people. And religion may 
 become hostile to morality. The rules it sanctioned 
 fit for one stage of culture may be seen to be quite 
 unsuitable for a higher stage. It is well illustrated 
 in the case of Greece, Rome, and in fact in all the 
 progressive nations of antiquity, in which we find 
 elaborate explanations of the myths of the gods, and 
 allegorical meanings are found for the stories of the 
 adventures of the gods which had become incredible, 
 as well as revolting. Thus the mind of the more 
 educated was led away from religion ; and while the 
 rites and ceremonies were duly observed, the feeling 
 these represented had passed away. It is to be 
 acknowledged that there have been religions which 
 were irrational, childish, and immoral, and the con- 
 ception of God contained in them was altogether 
 unworthy. That is only to say that religious concep- 
 tions were on a level with all the other conceptions in 
 the savage mind at that stage of culture. But there 
 has been a process by means of which religion has 
 established its claim on man, and has absorbed all 
 that is best and truest in his being, commending it- 
 self to his whole nature, to his conscience, his heart, 
 and his reason as the most precious endowment of 
 his life. There has also been a progressive purifica- 
 
246 THEISM 
 
 tion of the idea of God till God becomes the moral 
 ideal, and the Object of reverent worship. 
 
 It has been a long process, and it is a process 
 which will task the powers of man for ages yet to 
 come. As we look back on the progress of religion, 
 we see by no means a regular and orderly develop- 
 ment. We see in some cases that the idea of the 
 divine had scarcely in it any worthy element. The 
 gods were often thought to be almost non-moral, 
 capricious, selfish, lustful, hateful, and impure. Yes, 
 and even when the moral sense revolted against the 
 kind of action represented as divine, reverence con- 
 strained silence. For a time the sense of depen- 
 dence and the feeling of awe constrain to silence, 
 and the commands of the god continue to be obeyed 
 until the moral nature, gathering strength and cour- 
 age, rises in revolt, and the relation between religion 
 and morals becomes very strained. Sometimes, in 
 such a crisis, many things may happen. Morality 
 may go one way and religion another, or there may 
 be a reformation of the religion, and a conception 
 of God and His character may arise more fit and 
 adequate to meet the higher thoughts of the wor- 
 shipper, or there may be a new religion introduced 
 under the impulse of a great religious leader. Ex- 
 amples of each may readily be found in the history of 
 religion. The beginning of morality may be found 
 in a criticism of the prevalent religion of the hour. 
 Anaxagoras, in the history of Greek thought, began 
 
RELIGION 247 
 
 the criticism of the religious teaching embodied in 
 the poems of Homer and Hesiod, Xenophanes car- 
 ried on the same necessary work, and Plato from 
 a higher platform set himself to purify the religious 
 conceptions of his time. Plato's criticism was not 
 altogether destructive, rather it was an endeavour to 
 remove from the character of the divine every trace 
 of immorality, and to set forth the character of God 
 as righteous, true, and good. The history of the 
 strenuous attempts of the peoples to reach some 
 worthy conception of the unseen power on whom 
 they felt they depended, cannot be given here. It 
 is a long and a painful story. 
 
 It may, however, be said that we do find in the 
 history of almost every people times when there is 
 a conflict between the religion and the moral ele- 
 ments of character they had come to reverence and 
 observe. Sometimes, too, the conflict arises because 
 the claims of religion are in advance of the moral 
 power of obedience, and the ethical character of their 
 god is far above their thought and their desires. Not 
 often do we find a correspondence between the mo- 
 rality and religion of the people. In a progressive 
 people the morality outgrows the religion, in a people 
 given over to self-indulgence the religion is higher 
 than the morality. Only once in history do I find 
 that a progressive development of morals was also 
 a progressive revelation of the character of God. 
 There in Israel the apprehension of the character of 
 
248 THEISM 
 
 God was the signal of moral progress. The religious 
 and the moral consciousness of that people was 
 bound in a real unity, just because God was an 
 ethical God. 
 
 What has been said amounts to this, that the re- 
 ligious needs of mankind were deep, wide, and abid- 
 ing, and that satisfaction for these needs was difficult 
 of attainment. When the people had a conception 
 of a creator, ethical and powerful, it often happened 
 that they were not able to use that thought for the 
 practical guidance and consolation of their life. 
 Either the thought made too great a demand on 
 them, or they thought that God had no need of them 
 and their service, or they were attracted by spiritual 
 beings nearer to them who demanded service, so we 
 find that among many tribes the worship of the 
 creator God fell into the background, and the 
 thought of Him had no practical effect on them. 
 Still the thought and the fact were there, ready for 
 use when the need for such a thought arose. 
 
 The religious history of mankind is, without doubt, 
 a record of high and lofty endeavour, begun ever 
 anew after many a disastrous failure, and carried on 
 with the hope that man will one day attain to the 
 knowledge of God, the knowledge of whom is eternal 
 life. Men have held fast to the belief in a supreme 
 power, even when they had found no worthy thought 
 by which they might think of Him. The divorce 
 between religion and morality, the reverence which 
 
RELIGION 249 
 
 made them slow to change the traditional thought of 
 the unseen power whom their fathers believed in, the 
 passionate seeking after a true thought of God which 
 drove them at last into open rebellion and revolt 
 against an unworthy and untrue religion, are ele- 
 ments in that age-long striving after God which 
 assuredly would never have been perpetuated 
 throughout the generations were there no God to 
 seek. It is also true that these perturbations of 
 spirit, these dissatisfactions with the teaching of 
 almost all religions, are simply testimonies to the 
 belief that God must be a worthy God when they 
 have found Him. Every criticism of religion, rightly 
 viewed, is really a protest against an unworthy or 
 inadequate representation of the divine. God must 
 be the ideal in whom all ideals meet. In Him must 
 be the ideal of power, for from Him all power, as 
 known to man, must flow. In Him is the ideal of 
 reason, intelligence, wisdom ; for all the arrange- 
 ments of the universe are His appointments. Noth- 
 ing exists beyond His power, nothing hidden from 
 His omniscience. Then He has a purpose and a 
 meaning in all His working, and He knows what 
 His purpose is. He is righteous, just, holy, good, 
 the ruler of the nations, and the judge of all. 
 
 These characteristics of God are drawn from 
 ancient literature, some of them from the Assyrian, 
 Babylonian, and Egyptian hymns, and some of them 
 from the Rigveda and the Zend-Avesta. They may 
 
250 THEISM 
 
 also be paralleled, at least in the ascription of power 
 and omniscience to the divine being, in many things 
 told of the ruder races of mankind. These stand out 
 from the common beliefs and practices of the ruder 
 and even from the more civilized races of men, and 
 we are puzzled to find an explanation of them. Be 
 the explanation what it may, it was certainly a strenu- 
 ous task to find an adequate conception of the power 
 on whom men depended. That many mistakes would 
 be made was to be expected, that the goal would be 
 hard to reach is what might have been expected. 
 That there should be many revolutions of thought 
 and feeling, and many revolts, and many persecu- 
 tions to put down revolt, may almost be taken for 
 granted. For religion is the most precious posses- 
 sion of man, and in the history of it and its changes 
 we find enlisted the deepest feelings, the strongest 
 passions, the brightest and the darkest aspects of 
 human nature, its fiercest bigotry and its deepest 
 love. It is an intensified history of the ordinary 
 story of human life, and the usual motives which 
 actuate men are here disclosed with every tone 
 accentuated. The object sought for is the highest, 
 and the search is the most strenuous, of all human 
 efforts. 
 
 The story of science is, also, one of errors and mis- 
 takes. In fact, it is not so long ago since science was 
 in its infancy. The crudest notions of man, and of 
 the world in which he lived, abounded, and one of 
 
RELIGION 251 
 
 Rome's foremost poets, who felt that he was quite 
 equal to the making of a world, and who was fierce 
 in his criticism of the gods, believed that the sun 
 was only a few feet in diameter. We may read what 
 passed for science in many of the sciences ; we may 
 read of the Ptolemaic theory of the universe, of phlogis- 
 ton, and of many other curiosities of the history of 
 science, and yet we do not go to our scientific friends 
 and urge these mistakes as reasons why the possi- 
 bility of scientific truth should be doubted. In truth, 
 science has to rewrite itself almost every generation. 
 The conceptions of chemistry have been revolution- 
 ized within my own time. But the mistakes which 
 science has made, and the imperfections which still 
 cling to science, do not interfere with our belief in 
 the existence of the objects with which science deals. 
 Why should the mistakes which religion has made 
 invalidate our persuasion of the great being who is 
 the main object of religion ? It is quite true that she 
 has given forth in the course of time many partial, 
 inadequate, even unworthy representations of the 
 divine, but has not science given forth many inade- 
 quate and unworthy representations of nature ? Has 
 not nature been regarded as lawless, uncertain, 
 capricious, and we have overcome that view, and 
 look on nature now as an ordered system, moving 
 under law. But have we not corrected the first 
 attempts of men to set forth the idea of God, and 
 have we not now come to some conception of the idea 
 
252 THEISM 
 
 of God not altogether unworthy of Him who is the 
 maker of heaven and earth ? It does not seem to be 
 a profitable exercise for science or religion to remem- 
 ber the sins and faults of youth, each of the other. 
 Let each be judged by the achievements of their 
 maturity, and by the promise of further progress of 
 which they may hold out a reasonable hope. 
 
 Is it not time that the conflict should cease, or, at 
 least, take another form ? Is it not time to seek 
 after something of a synthetic view, which shall 
 gather together the elements contributed to the uni- 
 fied knowledge of the world in which we live and the 
 power manifested in it, by all the sciences and phi- 
 losophies and theologies, which represent the ripest 
 achievement of human thought? Conflict and con- 
 troversy may be the way, or one way, by which we 
 attain to clearness of thought and lucidity of concep- 
 tion. Truth may advance in circles or curves, and 
 advance may seem to be only retrogression, while it 
 really moves in an upward spiral, toward a more 
 complete form. Or there may have been an element 
 neglected, necessary for the expression of the unity 
 of truth, and that element may have to struggle for 
 recognition, and its advocates may press it to the 
 dislocation of the symmetry of the whole, and peace 
 cannot be obtained till it finds due recognition. Look- 
 ing back over the history of the struggle between 
 competing ideals of life, between rival systems of 
 philosophy, and opposing views of ethics, and con- 
 
RELIGION 253 
 
 trasted systems of theology, we may find that each 
 system has some elements worthy to have a place 
 in the hierarchy of truth, fitted to represent the re- 
 ality of things and persons in its adequate form. If 
 our thoughts take a wider view and we look at the 
 conflict between the scientific and the philosophic 
 mind, and between both and the theological, we may 
 ask ourselves whether these have not been looking 
 at opposite sides of the shield ? A mere syncretic 
 method is not advocated by me. I do not wish to 
 shovel together all the contradictory notions that 
 have found a place in ethical, philosophical, and theo- 
 logical systems, and serve them up as the conciliation 
 of differences, and the final product of rational in- 
 vestigation. Eclecticism and syncretism do not play 
 an important part in the history of human thought. 
 But cross-fertilization is an important process in 
 biology, and has beneficial consequence. 
 
 May there not be cross-fertilization among the 
 various organisms, the sum of which make up the 
 organism of human knowledge, won by the pro- 
 tracted labour of the ages ? May we not take from 
 the physical sciences what they can tell us of the 
 laws and methods of the working of the physical 
 world ? May we not familiarize our minds with the 
 stupendous spectacle of the physical forces keeping 
 step with one another, each in the service of the 
 other, and all working in long-drawn harmony as 
 elements in one system ? Surely the service of these 
 
254 THEISM 
 
 sciences ought to be recognized, and the greatness 
 of the order made plain to us by them, the coordi- 
 nated harmony of all the parts, and the order of the 
 whole should give us some thought of the power 
 manifested in and through them all. That gives 
 one element in our thought of God. Our thought 
 of Him must widen itself to the recognition of the 
 stupendous power at work in the universe, working 
 by methods which so far man has understood, though 
 much is still beyond his conception. Science shows 
 us a related world bound in a system, the changes 
 of which take place in an orderly way, the rhythm 
 of which may be understood. This vision of the 
 order, beauty, and harmony of the world is the con- 
 tribution of science to religion and theology. It 
 matters not that once religion was suspicious of law 
 and the reign of law, that it fondly lingered on the 
 thought of a personal government of the world, 
 which seemed also a capricious government. Re- 
 ligion has outgrown that mood, and it does not look 
 for God in the absence of law, method, and order, it 
 finds God in law, and rejoices in every discovery of 
 science, and looks at such as a new discovery of the 
 presence and the working of God. It still believes 
 in a personal government of the world, but it has 
 learned that will is steadfast and intelligent, not 
 wilful and capricious. 
 
 Science has helped theology to purify and extend 
 its thought of God. It was bound to do so, for it 
 
RELIGION 255 
 
 has revealed to us somewhat of the magnificence of 
 the world in which we live. Lengthened in time and 
 widened in space, filled with order and harmony in its 
 onward sweep through the ages, the thought of all that 
 science has disclosed must have widened our thought 
 of God. Worlds beyond worlds and systems within 
 systems, well our thoughts of the maker of the uni- 
 verse ought to be greater than the thoughts of those 
 who believed this little planet was the centre of all the 
 universe. But the main achievement of science is 
 the discovery of law, at least this is its main achieve- 
 ment from the theological point of view. But science 
 reveals to us still more as we wait and watch its work 
 in the higher regions of its great endeavour. Through 
 the ages one increasing purpose runs. Life prepared 
 for, life appearing, life growing, developing, creatures 
 appearing who are made to make themselves, and 
 rational creaturehood appearing who develops the 
 power of reading the story of the making of the 
 world, all revealing a patient foreseeing intelligence 
 content to labour and to wait in order to make a 
 world fit to know, understand, and serve its maker. 
 Biology makes its own contribution to the widening 
 and deepening of our thought of God. He seems 
 to win a way which can be understood, and, having 
 once begun to work, He seems to keep to the method 
 with which He began. It would seem as if the in- 
 telligent understanding of His work and His method 
 was an object to Him. He worked in such a fashion 
 
256 THEISM 
 
 as would disclose itself to the patient inquiry of 
 finite intelligence. So the slow process of the evo- 
 lution of life is a process of revelation, or a dis- 
 closure of the divine method of work, and thus a 
 revelation of God. 
 
 It is, however, in relation to the character and 
 the history of rational being that we come to a 
 deeper revelation of God ; or, to use another word 
 which has not so technical a meaning, it is in con- 
 nection with history that we have a deeper mani- 
 festation of God. Here we have larger discords 
 yet a deeper harmony, more failures yet a higher 
 success, mistakes innumerable in all departments 
 of human action, yet each generation taking up the 
 burden of the effort after truth, knowledge, and 
 life, and working on in the hope of finding the 
 kingdom of God. We need not again refer to the 
 mistakes, failures, and sins of men through the gen- 
 erations, for, after all, too much may be said of 
 them. Ethics slowly advanced, morality came to 
 some consciousness of itself, philosophy came with 
 its searching questions and its partial answers, criti- 
 cism arose to try all that could be tried, and through 
 the conflict and the struggle, the still, small voice 
 of conscience made itself increasingly heard until 
 the ripened thought of men came to have some 
 idea of what a worthy conception of God ought to 
 be. It was stern work which had to be done — 
 not merely to advance from age to age, but to deal 
 
RELIGION 257 
 
 with the attainments of former generations, to criti- 
 cise inadequate conceptions which had not seemed 
 inadequate to a former generation, to rise above the 
 reluctance and unwillingness to disturb inherited be- 
 liefs, and to move onwards to the recognition of a 
 moral ruler, judge, and loving friend of men. It 
 was stern, and hard work, and it would not have 
 attained the success it did attain if there had been 
 no voice from beyond the veil and no pressure of 
 God in history. 
 
 The effort of philosophy is not merely man's 
 work; it is the work of God too. Theology owes 
 a large debt to philosophy ; it has always used the 
 work of philosophy, and sometimes without due 
 acknowledgment. But while religion and theology 
 owe a large debt to science and philosophy, and 
 have learned from them to deepen and widen their 
 thought of God and man, they still have their own work 
 to do, their own problem to solve, their own burden 
 to bear, and these are harder than any other problem. 
 They have to deal with the ultimate harmony and 
 unity of the universe, with the unity of all things in 
 the kingdom of God. They do not look on the unity 
 and harmony as accomplished ; rather, it is the 
 goal to be reached in the far future, when the 
 world is made which as yet is only in the making. 
 Religion and theology are grateful for the service 
 of science and philosophy, which have been of un- 
 speakable service ; they are grateful, too, for the in- 
 
258 THEISM 
 
 cessant criticism of these worthy friends — a criticism 
 not always friendly, sometimes indeed very candid, 
 bitter, and contemptuous, but they are thankful, not- 
 withstanding. For it is of the utmost importance, 
 in so high an endeavour, to have every belief tested 
 to the uttermost, every assumption sifted, every argu- 
 ment criticised, that nothing weak or unworthy may 
 be suffered to remain. For anything weak, un- 
 worthy, or unreasonable may have issues perilous to 
 the success of the highest emprise ever undertaken 
 by man. So we ask the help of science and phi- 
 losophy for this great end, and we give the warning 
 that we shall use their help for our own purpose. 
 We do not seek a scientific or a philosophic solution 
 of the problem, we have a deeper purpose than that. 
 We will not accept from science merely an infinite 
 and eternal energy, though we shall receive that as 
 an element in our solution, nor will we accept from 
 philosophy merely a universal substance, or a uni- 
 versal self-consciousness and nothing more, or any 
 other of those substitutes for God which philosophy 
 is fond of presenting to us, though we take their 
 contributions as elements in our construction. We 
 shall not rest until we find a God who will satisfy our 
 religious needs, as well as our scientific and rational 
 aspirations. It is not enough for us to arrive at 
 infinite power, wisdom, even infinite goodness, we 
 seek a God who can speak to us and to whom we can 
 speak, a God who is something for Himself, as well 
 
RELIGION 259 
 
 as something for us, who can be the home of our 
 life, and meet every aspiration, desire, and longing 
 of the whole man. It is because we believe that the 
 being whom we call God is all that we have described, 
 and more than we can describe, that we welcome all 
 the help of science and philosophy ; for we need 
 all the help we can get to make any approximation 
 to the work which man most sorely needs. 
 
IX 
 
 PHILOSOPHY IN ITS AGNOSTIC ASPECT: 
 ITS POSTULATES, ITS CHARACTER, AND 
 ITS TRUTH 
 
 The philosophies in vogue and influence at present 
 are mainly of two types, and, while these types have 
 many subsidiary forms, they are mainly two. In 
 both the idea of evolution has a predominating influ- 
 ence, and plays a great part as an instrument for the 
 solution of difficulties and as a fruitful point of view. 
 True, they look at evolution from different ends of 
 the telescope. The one philosophy of which the 
 synthetic philosophy of Mr. Herbert Spencer may 
 be taken as the type, looks at evolution from its 
 simple and abstract beginnings, and seeks to deduce 
 the actual world from them, by the use of such 
 principles as "the instability of the homogeneous," 
 "the multiplication of effects," and so on, and to 
 some observers they seem to be engaged in the task 
 of making something out of nothing. Evolution 
 becomes the universal solvent, and in the last resort 
 we must make any particular transition which is 
 needed, under the threat that to suppose otherwise 
 is to suppose that force does not persist. The other 
 
 260 
 
AGNOSTIC PHILOSOPHY 26 1 
 
 type of philosophy may be briefly described as 
 idealism, of which there are many expositions, and 
 many expositors in your country and in ours. It looks 
 at evolution from the other end, and judges it from 
 the point of view of the goal to which evolution 
 tends. In fact, idealism rules in the most of our 
 universities in England and in Scotland, and the 
 philosophical voices of America set forth the idealist 
 view with great eloquence and power and with per- 
 suasive force. The writers do not echo a British 
 note, nor do they speak with a German accent; they 
 have really done the work over again and have added 
 to the idealist solution of the problem something 
 distinctive and valuable. The typical name with us 
 is that of Edward Caird, which is the most influential 
 name in philosophy in Great Britain, and has been 
 so for years. 
 
 What help toward a solution of the permanent 
 religious question do we obtain from these dominant 
 types of philosophy. Not much from Mr. Spencer. 
 He leaves us in an attitude of reverence before 
 an unknowable, and presents religion as a mystery 
 which must always remain a mystery and nothing 
 more. Once in a late part of the lengthened ex- 
 position of his system he seems to strike a more 
 positive note, and gives an account of the object of 
 religious veneration which is not merely negative. 
 We have tried to read the " First Principles " in the 
 light of the more recent exposition, and the last 
 
262 THEISM 
 
 seems to go much farther than the first statement by 
 him of the function and object of religion. They may 
 be the same to Mr. Spencer, to me they seem to differ 
 to the extent that the first statement is wholly nega- 
 tive, while the last is partly positive. We take the 
 more positive statement. " That internal energy 
 which, in the experience of the primitive man was al- 
 ways the immediate antecedent of changes wrought by 
 him — that energy which, when interpreting external 
 changes, he thought of along with those attributes of 
 a human personality connected with it in himself; is 
 the same energy which, freed from anthropomorphic 
 accompaniments, is now figured as the cause of all 
 external phenomena. The last stage reached is 
 recognition of the truth that force as it exists beyond 
 consciousness, cannot be like what we know as 
 force within consciousness; and that yet, as either 
 is capable of generating the other, they must be 
 different modes of the same. Consequently, the 
 final outcome of that speculation commenced by the 
 primitive man is that the Power manifested through- 
 out the Universe, distinguished and material, is 
 the same Power which in ourselves wells up under 
 the form of consciousness." (" Ecclesiastical Insti- 
 tutions," p. 839.) Another passage we quote, as 
 it seems to leave us the hope that as evolution 
 advances and man advances with it a knowledge of 
 God may be within the reach of the developed man 
 of the future. " Occupied with one or other division 
 
AGNOSTIC PHILOSOPHY 263 
 
 of Nature, the man of science usually does not 
 know enough of the other divisions even rudely to 
 conceive the extent and complexity of their phenom- 
 ena; and supposing him to have adequate know- 
 ledge of each, yet he is unable to think of them as a 
 whole. Wider and stronger intellect may hereafter 
 help him to form a vague consciousness of them 
 in their totality. We may say that just as an 
 undeveloped musical faculty, able only to appre- 
 ciate a simple melody, cannot grasp the variously 
 entangled passages and harmonies of a symphony, 
 which in the mind of composers and conductor are 
 unified into involved musical effects awakening far 
 greater feeling than is possible to the musically un- 
 cultured ; so, by further more evolved intelligences, 
 the course of things now apprehensible only in part 
 may be apprehensible altogether, with an accom- 
 panying feeling as much beyond that of the present 
 cultured man as his feeling is beyond that of the 
 savage. 
 
 " And this feeling is not likely to be decreased but 
 to be increased by that analysis of knowledge which, 
 while forcing him to agnosticism, yet continually 
 prompts him to imagine some solution of the great 
 enigma which he knows cannot be solved. Espe- 
 cially must this be so when he remembers that the 
 very notions, origin, cause, and purpose, are rela- 
 tive notions belonging to human thought, which are 
 probably irrelevant to the Ultimate Reality transcend- 
 
264 THEISM 
 
 ing human thought; and when, though suspecting 
 that explanation is a word without meaning when 
 applied to this ultimate reality, he yet feels com- 
 pelled to think there must be an explanation. 
 
 " But one truth must grow ever clearer, — the truth 
 that there is an Inscrutable Existence everywhere 
 manifested, to which he can neither find nor conceive 
 either beginning or end. Amid the mysteries which 
 become the more mysterious the more they are 
 thought about, there will remain the one absolute 
 certainty, that he is ever in presence of an Infinite 
 and Eternal Energy, from which all things proceed." 
 (pp. 842, 843.) 
 
 We are glad to receive from Mr. Spencer the 
 assurance of one "absolute certainty," that there is 
 an infinite and eternal energy, and that it stands in 
 relation to all things, namely, that all things proceed 
 from it. There is also something to be thankful for 
 in the recognition of the fact that the power that 
 manifests itself, distinguished as material, is the same 
 power which in ourselves wells up under the form of 
 consciousness. It would appear that agnosticism, 
 even in the presence of the ultimate reality, is not 
 absolute. It can, at least it does, make some asser- 
 tions about the reality. It exists, it is infinite and 
 eternal, it is manifested in the material world, it is 
 manifested in consciousness, and the agnostic knows 
 these two to be the same ; and the agnostic can say 
 that from this infinite and eternal energy all things 
 
AGNOSTIC PHILOSOPHY 265 
 
 proceed. The creed of agnosticism as set forth by 
 Mr. Spencer is considerable. Far be it from us to 
 seek to attenuate it, while we may wonder how on 
 its own principles it came to make such assertions, — 
 how do they reach the infinite and eternal, and how 
 do they affirm the relationship between the ultimate 
 reality and the finite manifestation of it? If the 
 power is manifested, as Mr. Spencer says it is, is it 
 not knowable, at least as far as it is manifested ? If 
 it is manifested in the material world and also in con- 
 sciousness, can we not put these manifestations to- 
 gether, and say something true and adequate about 
 the ultimate reality in addition to the propositions 
 of Mr. Spencer ? What is manifested is revealed, and 
 the character of the thing is given by the manifesta- 
 tion, and we may speak about that. 
 
 In these passages quoted from Mr. Spencer, and in 
 certain obiter dicta of his elsewhere, he opens out for 
 us paths into the unknowable which we may safely 
 tread, and following his example we may make for 
 ourselves wider and longer paths than he would 
 allow. In fact, that has been done for us by a dis- 
 tinguished follower of Mr. Spencer on this side. I 
 do not know whether Mr. Fiske will allow me to 
 call him a follower of Spencer, and so I will call him 
 a distinguished exponent of a philosophy in many 
 respects identical with the Spencerian philosophy. 
 He has brought within limits the whole system of 
 Spencer, and expressed it in clear and perspicuous 
 
266 THEISM 
 
 language, and has brought within the reach of all, the 
 leading principles of that philosophy which has many 
 exponents at present, the greatest of whom is Mr. 
 Fiske. His "Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy" has 
 been familiar to me for years, and I read it yet. In the 
 later part of the exposition Mr. Fiske seems to have 
 worked at the subject of evolution for himself, and to 
 have come to conclusions rather more positive than 
 those of Mr. Spencer. In the Preface to his little 
 book on the "Idea of God," Mr. Fiske says, "Nothing 
 of fundamental importance in ' Cosmic Philosophy ' 
 needed changing, but a new chapter needed to be 
 written, in order to show how the doctrine of evolu- 
 tion, by exhibiting the development of the highest 
 spiritual human qualities as the goal toward which 
 God's creative work has from the outset been tend- 
 ing, replaces man in his old position of headship in 
 the universe, even as in the days of Dante and Aqui- 
 nas. (The "Idea of God," Preface, p. 20.) To me as 
 to other readers of " Cosmic Philosophy " it seemed 
 that Mr. Fiske had left little room for theology except 
 in the Spencerian sense, and he had certainly disposed 
 of purpose in every sense of the term. His "Cosmic 
 Philosophy " added nothing to the system of Spencer, 
 and left us in the presence of an omnipresent energy. 
 Like other readers, I welcomed that teleological 
 passage, I am about to quote, and I do not care to 
 inquire how much of " Cosmic Philosophy " would 
 require to be rewritten to make it consistent with 
 
AGNOSTIC PHILOSOPHY 267 
 
 this and other passages. " The teleological instinct 
 in man cannot be suppressed or ignored. The 
 human soul shrinks from the thought that it is with- 
 out kith or kin in all this wide universe. Our reason 
 demands that there shall be a reasonableness in the 
 constitution of things. This demand is a fact in our 
 psychical nature as positive and irrepressible as our 
 acceptance of geometrical axioms and our rejection 
 of whatever controverts such axioms. No ingenuity 
 of argument can bring us to believe that the infinite 
 Sustainer of the universe will " put us to permanent 
 intellectual confusion." There is in every earnest 
 thinker a craving after a final cause ; and this crav- 
 ing can no more be extinguished than our belief 
 in objective reality. Our belief in what we call 
 the evidence of our senses is less strong than our 
 faith that in the orderly sequence of events there is 
 a meaning which our minds could fathom were they 
 only vast enough." (pp. 137-8.) 
 
 It would appear, therefore, that according to Mr. 
 Spencer and to Mr. Fiske, there is a meaning in 
 the universe, were our minds only great enough to 
 grasp it. Mr. Spencer holds out a hope that in the 
 future, whether distant or near he does not say, but 
 in the future there may appear a mind to which 
 the secret of the universe may be open, and Mr. 
 Fiske has restored to us the hope of learning the 
 meaning of the universe which is there already. 
 Agnosticism is thus so far departed from by two of 
 
268 THEISM 
 
 its greatest advocates. The unknowable has shrunk 
 to smaller dimensions, and it is only the fear of 
 anthropomorphism that seems to keep them from 
 attenuating it still further. If a wider and stronger 
 intellect may yet arise which may have a vague con- 
 sciousness of the world in its totality, we may work 
 on with the assurance that there is nothing in the 
 totality considered in itself which makes it unknow- 
 able. Even human intelligence as it is, may come to 
 have an apprehension of the meaning of the universe 
 and its cause. 
 
 With anthropomorphism I have dealt elsewhere, 
 and have endeavoured to show that all science and 
 philosophy are anthropomorphic, and it is not possi- 
 ble for the human being to be other than anthro- 
 pomorphic. Those who think they get beyond 
 anthropomorphism have simply interpreted the uni- 
 verse in terms borrowed from the lowest parts of 
 human experience. (See " Is God Knowable ? " 
 Chap. III.) It is largely from men who approach 
 the problem from the scientific side that we hear 
 the charge of anthropomorphism. For example, Mr. 
 Graham in his " Creed of Science " puts the matter 
 thus : " In particular this conception of God will not 
 suit the theology that insists on ascribing to Him the 
 attributes, at once metaphysical and specially human, 
 of personality and consciousness ; the former being 
 the precise one that it is so difficult to get any clear 
 conception of even in ourselves, and both, especially 
 
AGNOSTIC PHILOSOPHY 269 
 
 consciousness, being as Fichte and other philoso- 
 phers have irrefutably demonstrated, inapplicable 
 and directly contradictory to the notion of an Abso- 
 lute Being. For consciousness and personality, what- 
 ever else they imply, clearly imply the notion of limits 
 and conditions, neither of which can without contra- 
 diction be applied to an absolute and unconditioned 
 Being, to a transcendent tremendous and universal 
 power, the chief fact in our knowledge of which is 
 precisely its freedom from the limits which govern 
 and bind our finite being." (" Creed of Science," 
 p. 364.) I have for a long time regarded with 
 wonder and admiration sentences like the one now 
 quoted, and many such may be culled from the 
 pages of the current philosophies of this type. I 
 have wondered that the writers of such sentences , 
 have not seen that they contradict themselves. At 
 all events that they have fallen into confusion of 
 thought, when they speak of being at all. Being is 
 a determinate phrase, with a definite meaning, and 
 that is a limitation. When they define it as power, 
 that, on their own terms, is also a limitation. Still 
 greater are the limitations set forth by the terms 
 absolute, unconditioned, tremendous, and universal ; 
 from their point of view all these predicates involve 
 limitations just as much as or more than is implied 
 by consciousness and personality. 
 
 They proceed on the assumption that predicates 
 are limitations, as in one sense they are, but from 
 
27O THEISM 
 
 any rational point of view, to be is more than not to 
 be, and the larger the number of predicates ascribed 
 to a subject the greater is that subject. Deferring 
 for a time the discussion of whether infinitude and 
 personality are inconsistent with each other, let us 
 ask what help we get from science that has become 
 a metaphysic, toward an intelligent solution of the 
 theistic question. From Mr. Spencer and Mr. Fiske 
 there is some help, as we have pointed out already, 
 in the insistence by them of the existence of a power 
 to whose might we can set no limit. The whole 
 of things proceeds from that infinitive and eternal 
 energy. We are afraid that Mr. Spencer would go 
 no further, and while he denies that we can infer 
 anything of the power and the character of it from 
 the manifestations within and beyond consciousness, 
 he yet seems disposed to affirm that the power is 
 immanent in the manifestations, and that the force 
 is persistent along the lines of its manifestations, 
 and has no other mode of persistence. It is, indeed, 
 difficult to be sure of his meaning, and one can 
 hardly say whether he has thought out the ques- 
 tion. He is for the most part contented with the 
 general assertion that the eternal power is unknow- 
 able. But Mr. Fiske has spoken on this very point 
 and spoken to the purpose. " Hence to the query 
 suggested at the beginning of this chapter whether 
 the Deity can be identified with the Cosmos, we 
 must return a very different answer from that re- 
 
AGNOSTIC PHILOSOPHY 2J\ 
 
 turned by the Pantheist. The ' open secret,' in so 
 far as secret, is God — in so far as open, is the 
 world ; but in thus regarding the ever changing uni- 
 verse of phenomena as the multiform revelation of 
 an Omnipresent Power, we can in no wise identify 
 the power with its manifestations. To do so would 
 reduce the entire argument to nonsense. From first 
 to last it has been implied that while the universe 
 is the manifestation of Deity, yet is Deity something 
 more than the universe. The doctrine which we 
 have here expounded is, therefore, neither more nor 
 less than theism, in its most pronounced, consistent, 
 and unqualified form. It is quite true that the word 
 'theism,' as ordinarily employed, connotes the 
 ascription of an anthropomorphic personality to the 
 Deity." ("Cosmic Philosophy," Vol. II., p. 424.) Mr. 
 Fiske, like Professor Graham, and all others who 
 approach the question from the merely scientific 
 side, will not allow us to ascribe the attributes of 
 personality and consciousness to the deity. He is 
 quite decided on that head. Again and again he 
 tells us that " personality and infinity are terms 
 expressive of ideas which are mutually incompatible. 
 The pseud-idea, 'infinite person,' is neither more 
 nor less than the pseud-idea circular triangle." 
 (pp. 408-9.) 
 
 Thus, on the whole, while we gain something from 
 the statement of Mr. Fiske that the deity is some- 
 thing more than the universe, we know nothing of 
 
2 J2 THEISM 
 
 what the " more " may be. We do not know, in- 
 deed, we may never know, whether we can ever 
 come into the fellowship of the divine, or whether 
 the divine can care for us ; and the divine becomes 
 for us on these terms a term from the meaning of 
 which all thoughts of providence, guidance, govern- 
 ment of the world, are rigidly excluded, as well as 
 other notions more characteristic of religion. We 
 are not prepared to pay so great a price, even for 
 the doctrine of evolution, though we are persuaded 
 that the doctrine of evolution is not essentially tied 
 to the doctrine of the unknowable. That it is so is 
 only the private opinion of Mr. Spencer and Mr. 
 Fiske, and the evolutionary theory in its essentials 
 may go along with the idea of a God who may be 
 known and has made Himself known. The doctrine 
 of the " unknowable " is the fruit of a theory of 
 knowledge, and after that theory is removed, the 
 gain we have got may still be retained. As we re- 
 marked already, the theory of Mr. Spencer and Mr. 
 Fiske is refuted by their own practice. They define 
 the "unknowable," and the one calls it an infinite 
 and eternal energy, and the other calls it a power 
 to which no limit in time and space is conceivable. 
 In the use of these phrases they have transgressed 
 against their own canons, and have ventured to 
 speak of infinite and eternal in positive terms as 
 if they had a real content which could be known as 
 positive. What, then, becomes of the contention 
 
AGNOSTIC PHILOSOPHY 273 
 
 that the infinite and eternal are wholly negative ? 
 Are we to suppose that when we apply the words 
 "infinite " and "eternal" to energy they negative the 
 positive content of energy ? Nay, for they merely 
 negative the idea of any limit to the energy and the 
 power. We have simply to carry out this statement 
 of theirs in all directions and we get rid of a great 
 part, of in fact the greatest part, of the agnostic 
 argument. What right have they, on their own 
 terms, to speak of the infinite and eternal in any 
 way ? They have no right to use negative terms to 
 enhance a positive content. 
 
 Further, have they not transcended the limits of 
 human knowledge, when they speak after this fash- 
 ion, that is, the limits set by themselves ? If they 
 transcend the limit and extend our finite idea of 
 force to its ideal, why find fault with me when I 
 use the same privilege ? If they raise power to its 
 ideal and make it infinite, I am going to do the same 
 thing, and to say there is an ideal of righteousness 
 in the universe, there is truth eternal and beauty 
 infinite and harmony unspeakable ; and in fact I am 
 just to take all I know of finite qualities, properties, 
 and relations, and I am to raise them to their ideals, 
 and hold them to be realized in the infinite and 
 eternal being from which all things proceed. Why 
 should these distinguished men be allowed to raise 
 one property to its ideal because it suits their theory ? 
 and why should all others be characterized as an- 
 
274 THEISM 
 
 thropomorphic if they use the same privilege ? But 
 I do not press the argumentum ad hominem, there 
 is something better to do. 
 
 Let us look back from the point where Mr. 
 Spencer leaves us, and let us also look round and 
 up to find what worlds he has taken away. Taking 
 the great scientific movement of thought which may 
 be represented by Mr. Spencer, let us observe 
 how far it has brought us and where it leaves us. 
 We had thought that we had stood in the middle 
 world of being, with God above us and the world 
 beneath us, and in most intimate relations with both, 
 and we thought that the full interpretation of our 
 own experience would give us the key to the know- 
 ledge of what is beneath us, of what is around us, and 
 of what is above us. Well, but with the advance of 
 science, and specially with the coming of the theory 
 of evolution, we are left in the sad predicament that, 
 while there may be something above us, we can 
 never know what it is. Our highest and our best 
 are expressly shut out from the exercise of any 
 function in the ultimate interpretation of the uni- 
 verse. Our kinship with what is beneath us is fully 
 brought out, and great stress is laid on it, no doubt 
 to our advantage, for all truth is beneficial. A vast 
 body of truth has been brought home to us ; we are 
 sharers in countless structures, organs, and functions 
 with the grades of being beneath us. The world 
 of nature cannot be regarded as alien to us, and 
 
AGNOSTIC PHILOSOPHY 2?$ 
 
 whether we were moulded out of the dust or evolved 
 by slow degrees through an ascending series of lower 
 beings, in either case we must feel a true kinship 
 with all that is beneath us, and a true reverence for 
 it. Our knowledge of all that is beneath us has 
 come in like a flood, wave upon wave, in all the 
 sciences, and as a consequence our thoughts in 
 general and of the methods by which truth may be 
 known are dominated by the methods and the aims 
 which have been so successful in this single region 
 of truth. Thus we are inclined to judge of ourselves 
 and of all that is above us by methods and measures 
 taken from things below us. This tendency grows 
 by what it feeds on, and the explanation of the uni- 
 verse by what is below man strives to become com- 
 plete, coherent, and exhaustive. 
 
 The most complete expression of this tendency is to 
 be found in the works of Mr. Spencer and Mr. Fiske. 
 While they formally protest that there may be 
 something higher than intelligence at work in the 
 world, as a matter of fact every principle of explana- 
 tion found in their works has been drawn from the 
 world beneath man. The persistence of force is 
 the foundation principle, and from it all is derived 
 As we advance in the process of explanation there 
 are introduced successive simplicities, which form the 
 elements which by differentiation and integration 
 proceed on their way to further complications ; and 
 so the story goes on until we come to the perfectly 
 
276 THEISM 
 
 evolved society of Mr. Spencer as set forth in the 
 " Data of Ethics." Here is an evolution up to man, 
 and no further. Measures and procedures taken ex- 
 clusively from the world below us are held sufficient 
 for the explanation of things, and even the fruit and 
 flower of personal and social life are derivatives from 
 what is below us. Man is left with no higher, with 
 nothing nobler than himself. But is there not the 
 infinite and eternal energy left to us, and the blind 
 and blank adoration of the unknowable? Yes, but is 
 that higher, greater, nobler than I am ? No, for an 
 infinite that does not know itself, that has no purpose, 
 no aim, no way of making itself known, is not higher 
 than man, it is lower. The theory of Mr. Spencer 
 is not even zoomorphic, it is drawn solely from 
 physics. Or rather it is drawn from the lowest 
 aspect of human experience, that of our simplest 
 experience of resistance. 
 
 Still there is the irresistible belief that we do stand 
 in the middle between what is below and what is above 
 us, and the knowledge of this belief must lead us 
 upwards or downwards. Man always has found it 
 difficult to be upright when he has disregarded the 
 knowledge of God. Take away that ideal and man 
 immediately becomes retrogressive. It was always so, 
 and it is more so to-day. Formerly he thought he 
 was a being apart, separate from the other beings of 
 the earth, separately formed, able to pursue a sepa- 
 rate destiny. But now he finds that in his physical 
 
AGNOSTIC PHILOSOPHY 277 
 
 structure he is not widely separate from what is lower, 
 and in many other respects he is closely akin to the 
 higher animals, and the full force of these scientific 
 discoveries press upon him to his undoing, if he can- 
 not reenforce his conviction of his uniqueness by 
 considerations of endowments shared by none of the 
 other creatures. To restore him to himself, to lift 
 him upwards, and to enable him to realize that better 
 and higher self after which he aspires, there is needed 
 the sure hope of the knowledge of an actual God in 
 whom is realized the ideal of truth, life, knowledge, 
 and action, who alone can raise him to the goal 
 which he dimly foresees as possible, and which he 
 longs to make real. 
 
 Thus we need to supplement the story of the 
 evolution up to man, by the story of a moral evolu- 
 tion of man up to the ideal he has attained, and to 
 show that the story of ethical evolution has a 
 method and law of its own. There is also the story 
 of spiritual evolution to be told, whereby man has so 
 far reached the stage of self-knowledge, self-reverence, 
 and self-control. There is still more the story of 
 religious evolution, a more difficult story to tell though 
 inextricably interwoven with the others, — the story of 
 the purification and elevation of man's belief in God 
 until he came to believe in the living God, the maker 
 of heaven and earth, the upholder of all that is, the 
 source, the guide, and the goal of all things, of whom, 
 for whom, and through whom are all things. Nor do 
 
278 THEISM 
 
 I believe that the process of evolution in any sphere 
 has taken place without the help of Him Whom they 
 call the unknowable Power from which all things 
 proceed. The activity of the Eternal, call Him by 
 what name you may, is the postulate of every theory 
 of evolution. It is so when you have attenuated it 
 to the idea of persistence. And it is much more so 
 when you give to the conception of God its full value. 
 Why, I ask, forbid us to find the realization of all our 
 ideals in the infinite and the eternal, when you have 
 permitted yourselves to realize your ideal of energy in 
 the infinite and the eternal ? I do not find any worthy 
 answer to that question, and no answer at all save a 
 reference to a theory of knowledge which makes 
 knowledge impossible. 
 
 In the experience of mankind, so far back as 
 we have any knowledge of that experience, there 
 is the belief in a higher power, on whom man felt 
 his dependence, and that power was believed to be a 
 power making for righteousness, interested in truth, 
 working for the growth of goodness, taking measures 
 for the suppression of wrong-doing, and evil of all 
 kinds. There is a belief in a righteous ruler of the 
 world who had the right and the authority to govern, 
 and the right, also, to enforce his will by the most 
 terrible sanctions. The actual government of the 
 world of men, as it can be traced through history, 
 seemed to confirm that belief, and to show an actual 
 government of the world according to ethical law. 
 
AGNOSTIC PHILOSOPHY 279 
 
 The power above us was on the side of virtue, good- 
 ness, truth, and righteousness; and on the reading of 
 events, through a lengthened period, it seemed to hold 
 true that where the ethical qualities of self-restraint, 
 self-government, by high aims and purposes, purity, 
 goodness, love, and other ethical qualities have be- 
 come less and less, there followed consequences of 
 a grave and miserable kind. The presages of con- 
 science seemed to be confirmed by the actual facts of 
 human experience as these are recorded in history. 
 Then there are the reflections of man on his own life 
 in its intellectual, ethical, and religious aspects as these 
 were present in his experience. It seemed to him 
 that intellectually he was related to an external world, 
 in intercourse with which his life of feeling, thinking, 
 and activity came to fruition. The existence of an 
 external world, in connection with which he could 
 realize his purpose and his character, became one 
 of his assured beliefs, and in acting on that belief his 
 life became one of realized activity. However we 
 may interpret the external world, it is confessedly 
 there, and in intercourse with it life realizes itself. 
 But the external world does not exhaust the beings 
 with whom we have intercourse. There is the world 
 of our fellow-men, who are more to us, and who play 
 a larger part in the evolution of our personality, than 
 is accomplished by our fellowship with the external 
 world. From man we obtained language to enable us 
 to think and to give expression to our thought, lessons 
 
280 THEISM 
 
 of experience not transmitted by mere hereditary de- 
 scent, but handed down as a treasure of human feel- 
 ing, aspiration, achievement, a record of noble aims 
 and deeds expressed in thoughts that breathe and 
 words that burn ; we obtained in addition the love that 
 blessed our infancy, the care that guarded our youth, 
 the patient forethought that planned and carried out 
 our education, the wise affection that looked forward 
 to our future and taught us the habit of obedience to 
 what was wiser and better than we, as the sure way 
 to self-control and to a life of fruitful endeavour and 
 assured work, the atmosphere charged with the tra- 
 dition of the ages, which we breathed in our home, in 
 the school, college, university ; these and many other 
 influences played on us and helped to make us what 
 we are, and are we to question or doubt the reality 
 of those intellectual, ethical, and spiritual influences ? 
 No, we do not doubt the existence and validity of 
 these. 
 
 But pass on now and inquire into the validity of 
 the object on which our religious life is fed, and you 
 meet with a different mode of treatment of that object. 
 Nay, it is not our religious life alone, it is our higher 
 ethical life as well that has its postulates called into 
 question. One of the postulates of our moral life is 
 that we are in relation to an objective moral authority 
 of perfect holiness, goodness, righteousness, and love, 
 who has the right to control us, guide us, cherish us, 
 and reward us. Without this postulate the infinite 
 
AGNOSTIC PHILOSOPHY 28 1 
 
 character of duty is never adequately realized. With- 
 out this objective authority who has the right to 
 command our conscience, we can never rise to the 
 great height of our moral calling, and the word 
 "ought" without this authority will never reach its 
 transcendent significance. We may try — it has been 
 often tried — to attenuate the meaning of the word 
 "ought," to substitute for its categorical imperative 
 some lesser derivative, such as, if you desire the end 
 you must use the means ; or it may be contended that 
 the oughtness that constrains a man is the inherited 
 custom of countless generations ; but after it is atten- 
 uated so it comes back in its august authoritative- 
 ness, and confronts us with its awful benignity and 
 says, "You ought." And we bow in silence before 
 the majesty of moral law, and recognize in our best 
 moments that this is the voice of the supreme. Duty 
 is itself infinite. I appeal to the voice of our con- 
 sciousness, and I ask how is it that we feel that we 
 can never realize our ideal of duty, how is it that we 
 find that ideal growing as we climb higher, that the 
 more we attain the farther removed from us seems 
 the ideal of duty which is our ideal ? This is the uni- 
 versal testimony of the human consciousness, that, 
 no matter what the ideal of life and duty is, or may 
 be, whether it be that of the cultured or the uncul- 
 tured, he finds himself ever baffled in his striving 
 to attain it. 
 
 Is not this one of the pathways that lead to God, 
 
282 THEISM 
 
 and one of the infinites which God has put within 
 the human heart ? What is this ideal of duty, this 
 imperative feeling of obligation, this conscious con- 
 straint that bids us to go on even when we have 
 found our most earnest strivings baffled, and our 
 best efforts ineffective, unless it is the call to us of 
 an infinite perfection that really cares for us, and 
 the prompting of a love that is supreme, that we 
 should remember our eternity, and be worthy of 
 bearing the responsibility of being a rational, self- 
 conscious, ethical, and spiritual being, who can by 
 divine help determine himself to the realization of his 
 ideal in character and life. It is a great position, this 
 of a rational self-conscious, ethical being, and the 
 risk of failure in the trial to realize the personality is 
 great. It is the task of all of us. To live is, indeed, 
 for all of us, to form ideals and to fall short of them, 
 and ever to realize that there is a contrast between 
 what is and what ought to be. In all spheres of 
 human activity this is so, we can never state a truth 
 in all its fulness and accuracy, nor put into form the 
 beauty that haunts us ; we labour to make our prac- 
 tical action embody our ideal of what a perfect action 
 ought to be, and we fail ; we cannot even write as we 
 see we ought to do ; and in our moral action and life 
 the good that we would we do not, and the imper- 
 fections and defects we would avoid, if we could, 
 cling to us through all our life. 
 
 Yet to our finite and baffled existence there comes 
 
AGNOSTIC PHILOSOPHY 283 
 
 the persuasion that there is a complete and perfect 
 life, a grander world than the present, a conviction 
 that this world and this life is not the whole. Our 
 ideals imperatively demand realization. Our im- 
 perfect knowledge leads us to the hope that there 
 is a knowledge that is perfect, an explanation that 
 makes the rationality of the whole apparent to a 
 mind for which the whole is. The isolated frag- 
 ments of our existence, even in their isolation, cause 
 us to think of a complete and perfect beauty and 
 symmetry, in which the visions of harmony and 
 beauty that dimly float before the imaginations of 
 the best and purest of the sons of men have their 
 complete fulfilment. Beauty and harmony, grace 
 of outline and harmony of parts, are with us here, 
 and our aesthetic convictions demand a sphere in 
 which they will be satisfied. Above all, in the moral 
 sphere man sees a hand that beckons, a vision that 
 invites, an ideal that draws him on, and on the reverse 
 side a pure and holy power that warns and sternly 
 forbids those actions and inclinations that lead men 
 to become false to the highest moral ideal they know. 
 Thus while we are in the midst of the perishing, the 
 transient, and fragmentary, we are so constituted 
 as to demand the imperishable, the abiding, and the 
 whole; in one word, man's greatest need is God, in 
 whom all ideals meet and are realized. 
 
 We need God on all sides of our manifold life, — ■ 
 intellectually, aesthetically, morally, religiously. God 
 
284 THEISM 
 
 alone can draw forth all the powers of man into 
 harmonious action. If one may use the phrase, God 
 is the environment of man, in intercourse with whom 
 man can attain to perfection. Shall the need of man 
 for the infinite and the eternal be limited merely to 
 one aspect, and that not the highest ? Shall we say 
 that there is energy, and declare all else to be un- 
 knowable ? Are we to look up to a lonely universe, 
 and in all the higher spheres of being be driven to 
 think that we have no kith and kin in the world 
 above us ? Is the world above and beyond us, as 
 Shelley says, "A wide, gray, lampless, dark, un- 
 peopled world ? " No, the history of humanity, sad 
 though it be, proves that there is a Being who is 
 above them, interested in them, caring for them, 
 who allowed Himself to be thought of by them in 
 such forms and terms as they could use to describe 
 the highest and the best, and from that lowly and 
 inadequate beginning strove to lead them onwards 
 and upwards to higher, truer, and more adequate 
 thoughts and conceptions of Him. In the earlier 
 days men sought for their highest and best in the 
 external world of nature, and seemed to exhaust the 
 possibilities of earth and sea and sky, in order to find 
 a fitting expression for the Divine; and they were 
 not satisfied, for the world-idea could not adequately 
 represent the Divine. Then they turned to the idea 
 of their own intelligent, social, and ethical life, and 
 sought for the highest and best conceptions wrought 
 
AGNOSTIC PHILOSOPHY 285 
 
 in them by their personal, social, and civic life, and 
 strove to think of the Divine in terms borrowed from 
 these ideals. It did not satisfy, though it led them 
 to worthier thoughts of God. There was something 
 gained when the phenomena of personal, social, and 
 state life were taken as the material of their thought 
 of God, for it led them to think of God as the 
 meaning of the social union, its source, and its goal. 
 The actual life of man in social union led to that 
 thought which we find in Greek and Roman civiliza- 
 tion, that gods and men formed one community, and 
 were in relation to each other. 
 
 But the growing intelligence of men, and their 
 higher organization, and their advancing morality, 
 led them on to further striving. Religion is not sat- 
 isfied with the solutions of intelligence, nor with the 
 sanctions of ethics, nor with that conception of God 
 which, perhaps, might satisfy our speculative, our 
 aesthetic, and our ethical activity. She must find a 
 God who realizes her own ideal. So in every age 
 religion, while taking note of all that is accomplished 
 in science, philosophy, and ethics, sets men to work 
 anew, for she must solve the problem from her own 
 point of view, with her own postulates, and from her 
 own data. The work must be done over again, and 
 she is not satisfied until she has worked up the ma- 
 terial derived from the sciences and philosophies 
 into a new and higher synthesis which is all her own. 
 She is not contented with a philosophy of religion, 
 
286 THEISM 
 
 nor will she consent to be reduced to an aspect of 
 philosophy ; rather her imperious and imperative de- 
 mand is that science and philosophy shall toil in her 
 service. For religion is highest and most central, 
 and has, or ought to have, the controlling position in 
 life. Religion is the sanction of morality; yes, but 
 it is more than the sanction of morality. When it 
 becomes a mere sanction of morality, it fares ill with 
 religion and morality. Philosophy may be satisfied 
 with such a conception of God as will help her to 
 solve the problems of thought and life which are 
 confessedly philosophical ; science may be satisfied 
 with such a conception of God as will help her to 
 conceive the order of the universe, and help her to 
 think of the realm of law as real ; and ethics may be 
 contented with the recognition of moral law as issuing 
 forth from a sovereign, of infinite power and wisdom, 
 who has imposed an ethical law on all intelligent 
 agents as the condition of their existence in a realm of 
 rational beings. But a God who is only the cause 
 of order, the presupposition of knowledge, the source 
 of moral order, is utterly insufficient to satisfy the 
 religious demands of man. 
 
 So religion ever sets men to toil anew in order to 
 reach God, if haply they can find Him. Men must 
 find God, and the God we find must satisfy all our 
 needs ; the craving for guidance, the thirst for right- 
 eousness, the striving after truth, and the longing for 
 purity. Specially does religion demand a God who 
 
AGNOSTIC PHILOSOPHY 287 
 
 is something, and can do something, who can come 
 near to men in a personal way, and speak to them 
 words which they can understand. Here we come 
 to the crux of the whole matter, to that point where 
 religion must ever take her stand, and absolutely 
 refuse to accept the solutions pressed on her accept- 
 ance by science and philosophy. What some of 
 these are we shall see in the concluding chapter. At 
 present our aim is to say that religion can never 
 accept a solution that casts the world into the life of 
 God, and makes the states and changes of the world 
 to be states and changes of Him. God is for religion 
 more than the universe, and He has ways of activity 
 and of manifestation not measured by the move- 
 ments of the universe, and not limited by its ongoing. 
 In other words, a postulate of religion is the tran- 
 scendence of God. 
 
 No doubt the task is a tremendous one that re- 
 ligion sets to man. We recognize, also, that science 
 and philosophy have not made the performance of 
 the task an easy one. But it is a task to which 
 we must gird ourselves generation after generation. 
 We try to think it is possible to construct a thought 
 of God, as One in Whom all things and persons 
 live and move and have their being, and yet as a 
 God who has a life in Himself, for Himself, and to 
 Himself. It is comparatively easy to reach the 
 immanence of God in the world ; in fact, that con- 
 ception has been reached by many routes, in many 
 
288 THEISM 
 
 ways. That mysterious power which is both the 
 path and the path goers, which is everything and 
 nothing, meets us in the speculations of Laotze, in 
 the existence without a predicate, which is an Ind- 
 ian form of mysticism ; and on the subjective side, 
 meets us again in the self of all selves, meets us 
 in the anima mundi, and in a thousand other forms 
 in the history of speculation, ancient and modern. 
 It is not a solution hard to reach, for it has been 
 reached so often, and reappears so frequently in the 
 history of human thought. Religion is never satis- 
 fied with a pantheistic solution, let it take whatso- 
 ever form it may. For religion must have a God 
 who can speak, who can reveal Himself, not only 
 as the power by whom planets gravitate and stars 
 shine, by whose strength the worlds are maintained 
 in being, and living things have their life and activ- 
 ity, but religion demands a Being, who, though He 
 is not an object among other objects, yet is still an 
 object. 
 
 Thus religion must look at the problems and so- 
 lutions of science and philosophy from its own point 
 of view, and in the light of its own imperative needs. 
 And she has as good a right as they ; the only rele- 
 vant question is can she make her contention good ? 
 At all events, religion has under the guidance of her 
 own postulates entered into human life, transformed 
 and transfigured it, and made it holy, sacred, and 
 august. She has made every man feel, as nothing 
 
AGNOSTIC PHILOSOPHY 289 
 
 else has made him feel, that life is a sacred trust, 
 given to him for eternal ends ; that there is a pur- 
 pose for every man which every individual must 
 realize for himself and in himself, or otherwise it 
 will never be realized. No one else can take the 
 place of any man, no one can do his work, and if 
 he be a failure, the wealth of the universe is so far 
 lessened. This purpose is not formed by the man 
 himself, he feels that it is formed for him by Another 
 with whom he has to do, and it is gradually revealed 
 to him as he faithfully strives to follow the light and 
 do the work which he recognizes he must do. In 
 his life calling, in his daily work, whatever that work 
 may be, a man whom religion has grasped, feels that 
 he is in the presence of One high, pure, holy, to 
 Whom he belongs, Whose authority is absolute, 
 Whose power is sovereign, and Whose care over 
 him is most minute, and Whose interest in him is 
 unspeakable. This is one of the most familiar of 
 human experiences, and who shall say that it has 
 no roots in reality ? 
 
 Suppose, then, we take this as an actual experience, 
 and ask ourselves how religion may state its de- 
 mands ? Let us think of one omnipotent, all-wise, 
 all-loving, who in power, love, and wisdom made 
 the worlds, and who set Himself to make a crea- 
 tion to which He could communicate Himself. This 
 is the central thought of your great American 
 thinker, Jonathan Edwards, who ever strove to set 
 
290 THEISM 
 
 forth God as a Being who strives to communicate 
 Himself to His creation. Looking back on the 
 history of the creation as we are able to read it, it 
 may be fruitfully looked at as the story of the mak- 
 ing of a world, which could receive the self-com- 
 munication of the living God. God gave Himself 
 to the universe as the universe was able to receive 
 Him. To the inorganic world as immanent power 
 and order, to the organic world as life, growth, and 
 purpose, to the world made in His own image, He 
 gave Himself as intelligence, self-consciousness, self- 
 guidance, ethical purpose and freedom, and above 
 all as the religious spirit of truth and love and grace, 
 so that when they attained to purity of heart they 
 might see God. 
 
 Religion is thus not without a view and a purpose 
 and a goal. For it looks back on the history of the 
 past as a story of divine toil and striving toward 
 the making of a world to which God could commu- 
 nicate Himself and which would have the capacity 
 of receiving Him. This is a kind of world which 
 could not be produced by a fiat, if, indeed, any world 
 could be. It is a kind of world which could only 
 be made by its own cooperation. To take it in its 
 highest reaches, the world to which God could com- 
 municate Himself, is a world of ethical, self-con- 
 scious beings, who under the leading of a divine 
 training and education, through discipline and trial, 
 would build themselves to a character, and mould 
 
AGNOSTIC PHILOSOPHY 2QI 
 
 themselves on an ideal made known to them, and who 
 would be persuaded that they were made for God 
 and that they could be themselves only when they 
 found themselves in God. Thus religion regards the 
 unity of things not as accomplished or real in the 
 past or in the present ; it lies before her vision as a 
 goal to be accomplished in the future when the mak- 
 ing of the world is complete, and a creation is formed 
 that can be filled with all the fulness of God. Reli- 
 gion must find a way of conceiving the relation of 
 God to the world which will conserve the freedom of 
 God and leave Him free to enter into these closer 
 relations with a people fitted to receive them, which 
 can represent that fellowship which alone deserves 
 the name of religion. 
 
 We do not in any way interfere with the work of 
 science, which is based on the intelligibility and ration- 
 ality of the universe, nor do we say anything against 
 the striving of philosophy to think the universe as 
 one, and to regard it as a related system existing for 
 thought. We simply take care of our own postu- 
 lates, and say to them that religion cannot, will not, 
 place the world-idea in the position of the idea of 
 God. We must ever hold that these are distinct. 
 As we saw, Mr. Spencer, finding that the belief in im- 
 mortality and the belief in God have ever gone to- 
 gether in human history, has insisted that one of them 
 should be derived from the other, so science and 
 philosophy have insisted that the idea of the world 
 
292 THEISM 
 
 and the idea of God should be identified, and this 
 has in fact been the real issue of the age-long contro- 
 versy which religion has had to wage for its existence. 
 It is the issue to-day. Never in the history of human 
 thought has the identification of the world-idea with 
 the idea of God been presented in so alluring and 
 persuasive a form as at the present hour. Never has 
 philosophy taken so fair and fascinating a form as 
 it does now, and never has it given so generous a 
 recognition to the moral, social, and religious ideals 
 of men. Never has philosophy insisted so strongly on 
 the truth, beauty, and worth of the highest ideals of 
 religion as under the inspiration of Hegel, one of the 
 greatest, if not the greatest, of philosophic thinkers. 
 But while we gladly admit and, indeed, assert this, 
 and much more than this, we must sadly turn to our 
 own path and take up the burden of our own work ; 
 for the idealistic philosophy makes religion to be 
 simply an aspect of itself, and does not leave us a 
 God into whose fellowship we may enter, in whose 
 service we may find perfect freedom. For we can 
 come to Him, and He can come to us, only by the 
 way of the works He has made, by the institutions He 
 has founded, and by the ways of the universe which 
 is His only manifestation. We need a God who can 
 speak to us, and if He cannot speak directly to us, 
 the greater and better part, the flower and fruit of 
 religion will wither and die. 
 
X 
 
 IDEALIST PHILOSOPHY: ITS MERITS AND 
 ITS DEFECTS ; THE CONCEPTION OF 
 GOD ; HOW SHALL WE CONCEIVE THE 
 SYNTHETIC UNITY OF GOD, MAN, AND 
 THE WORLD? — THE KINGDOM OF GOD 
 
 Religion is possible only if man feels that he is re- 
 lated to God. A God above us, but also a God who 
 is within us, is a perennial belief of man, common to 
 all religions. It has obtained the most complete ex- 
 pression in the highest religion known, Christianity, 
 yet it has been present in every religion. God as the 
 universal father and all men as His children, this is 
 the expression of the relationship between God and 
 man. It is the general expression of the relationship 
 that we take at present, without entering on the par- 
 ticular doctrines that articulate it into a scheme. Nor 
 at this stage do we dwell on the proof of the state- 
 ment that this appears in every religion. For this has 
 received proof in almost every book dealing with the 
 history of religions. We may take it for granted here. 
 
 The relationship between God and man, which is 
 a postulate of the religious life, has found various 
 forms of expression, and has demanded many means 
 
 293 
 
294 THEISM 
 
 for its satisfaction. The need for fellowship is im- 
 perative. Yet as religious thought advanced, and the 
 conception of God advanced with the growth of hu- 
 man intelligence and character, the difficulty of fellow- 
 ship appeared to become greater and greater. For 
 God seemed to become farther and farther removed 
 from man in proportion as man conceived Him in 
 higher and higher terms. He became in man's 
 conception of Him, the all-knowing, almighty, all- 
 present One, in Whom all things lived and moved and 
 had their being, and His ethical attributes became 
 more and more distinct ; justice, holiness, righteous- 
 ness, truthfulness, and love came to be predicated of 
 Him, and these conceptions of Him grew with the 
 religious experience of men, until they found it diffi- 
 cult to conceive the possibility of communion with 
 God. The higher the conception of God, the greater 
 is the difficulty of conceiving the possibility of fellow- 
 ship and communion. The heavens of heavens can- 
 not contain Him, shall He indeed dwell with man on 
 the earth ? This is an ancient expression of the diffi- 
 culty, and yet a religious solution of it came to these 
 old thinkers. He whom the heaven of heavens could 
 not contain, became a dweller in the human heart. 
 This solution was reached by an ancient people, who 
 had somehow attained to the highest thought of God 
 reached by the ancient world, who thought of the 
 worlds as formed by the word of God, Who spake and 
 it was done, Who commanded and it stood fast, who 
 
IDEALISTIC PHILOSOPHY 295 
 
 held fast both to the transcendence of God, and to 
 His dwelling with men, and His indwelling in them. 
 O God, thou art my God, though at the same time 
 the worshipper knew that God was everywhere. 
 Communion with God a necessity of the worshipper, 
 though how it was possible to think out the possibility 
 of such fellowship was not clear. In fact, these an- 
 cient people had the same difficulty which weighs on 
 us to-day, namely, to think of fellowship between an 
 eternal, infinite being, and man the creature of a day. 
 But such a fellowship is necessary if religious life is 
 not to die. A man must be persuaded that he is near 
 to God, and that God is near to him. Men have had 
 that persuasion, and the records of religious expe- 
 rience tell us that they have had a conviction of fel- 
 lowship with God of so vivid and real a kind as to 
 change their conduct and purify their life. The 
 record of such experience is so wide and so common, 
 that it is as well attested as any experience can be. 
 There must have been a way whereby God could have 
 come to man, for the records prove the reality of 
 this communion. 
 
 Again, the religious life demands that the living God, 
 with Whom man has fellowship, shall be no abstrac- 
 tion, Who has no power or movement in Himself, with 
 no character and no attributes, but a real living power, 
 Who can be an object to our devotion, our affection, 
 Who can call forth our desires and reward them ; and 
 be the theoretical difficulties of construing such an ob- 
 
296 THEISM 
 
 ject what they may, man will continue to act on this 
 belief. You say that God is not an object among 
 other objects, but He is the subject for which all 
 objects are. Well, religion, with imperturbable con- 
 viction, makes reply, and says, yes; God is the 
 subject for which all objects are, but He is also an 
 object for me with whom I have come into com- 
 munion, and He has spoken to me. Religion makes 
 the further request to science and philosophy, had 
 you not better try to conceive a kind of unity which 
 will enable me to look at all things in God, and God 
 in all things, and yet maintain that God is something 
 for Himself, and something directly for me? Have 
 you exhausted the possible kinds of unity ? 
 
 Still more imperative becomes the need of religion, 
 when we come face to face, not merely with the facts 
 of human weakness and fmitude, but face to face 
 with the awful fact of the consciousness of sin and 
 guilt, the most inexplicable and the saddest of human 
 experiences, if there is no fellowship with God. It 
 does not help me much to be told that error is only 
 one side of truth, and is done away with by being 
 included in a wider truth, nor that sin is merely 
 defect, because, in my consciousness of guilt, there 
 is the persuasion that I have broken that personal 
 bond which subsisted between the holy God and me, 
 and I can have no abiding peace till the fellowship 
 is restored. Guilt arises from the consciousness of 
 kinship with God, and from the feeling that I have 
 
IDEALISTIC PHILOSOPHY 297 
 
 proven untrue to that kinship. This is also a uni- 
 versal human experience, and must, therefore, have 
 its roots in reality. 
 
 I do not dwell further on the demands which re- 
 ligion makes on our thinking; these are named just 
 to show that any philosophical construction of the 
 unity of things must be widened in order to do jus- 
 tice to the religious experience of man. It was in 
 this relation that the great system of Hegel came to 
 grief, broke up into a right and a left and a centre 
 party. Hegel did really try to do justice to the 
 religious experience of man. He did believe that 
 his system was theorized Christianity, and he spoke 
 beautifully of the synthetic unity which religion 
 brought to the life of the common man. His sys- 
 tem did for the thinker what religion had already 
 done for the man in the street. But alas ! the ex- 
 perience of the common man refused to be theorized 
 in the Hegelian way. The position set forth was 
 that religion and philosophy were different in form, 
 but in matter and aim they were one. Philosophy 
 was religion in the form of thought, reasoned, artic- 
 ulated, set forth in such a way as to be wholly 
 explicated, and understood. Religion is philosophy 
 as the Vorstellung, and its truth is set forth in in- 
 stitutions, customs, rites, and it is always embodied 
 in some symbolical way. The history of religions 
 is the description of the way in which religion was 
 able to embody in partial forms, more or less com- 
 
298 THEISM 
 
 plete, the truth that it was able to grasp. Finally 
 the absolute religion was reached, and Christianity 
 was able to grasp on its own side and embody in its 
 own way that absolute truth which on its side philos- 
 ophy, in the hands of Hegel, had also accomplished. 
 Hegel set to work on these lines, and made a man- 
 ful attempt to translate the facts and doctrines of 
 Christianity into the language of the Hegelian sys- 
 tem. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity became 
 the whole of philosophy and the essence of religion. 
 Thesis, antithesis, synthesis, the tripartite movement, 
 which expressed the dialectic evolution of the uni- 
 verse, easily applied itself to the doctrine of Father, 
 Son, and Spirit, and immediately there arose schemes 
 which dealt with the kingdom of the Father, the 
 kingdom of the Son, and the kingdom of the Spirit ; 
 for the Father is God as He exists in and for Him- 
 self, in eternity, and the Son is God as He exists 
 as other, in time, and the Spirit is the other return- 
 ing to oneness, bearing with it the reconciliation 
 accomplished in the process. The Hegelian dialectic 
 movement entailed immense labour on its advocates. 
 It was necessary for them to apply the dialectic 
 movement to nature, to history, to religion, and to 
 show that the facts of nature, the world of life, the 
 phenomena of human history, and the world of re- 
 ligion could be read in that way. The attempt to do 
 so led to many luminous and instructive and sug- 
 gestive views ; but the facts were somewhat stubborn 
 
IDEALISTIC PHILOSOPHY 299 
 
 and refractory, and the Hegelian philosopher was 
 sometimes not well acquainted with science, or his- 
 tory, or religion, and to the reader of their works the 
 facts and events seemed to be on a bed of Procrustes. 
 On all sides there was a revolt against this idealism. 
 Men of science neglected the theory and turned to 
 other work, philosophy also turned away, and re- 
 ligion, in particular, found that its most important 
 interests were in danger. It was in this relation that 
 the matter came to a crisis. Strauss applied the 
 Hegelian method to the facts on which Christianity 
 based her belief. No doubt Hegel had himself done 
 so, but cautiously and generally ; but Strauss, per- 
 suaded at that time of the truth and adequacy of the 
 Hegelian philosophy, sought to translate the doc- 
 trine of Christianity into Hegelian formulae. The 
 outcome of the transformation is found in the " Leben 
 Jesu " and in the " Domatik " of Strauss, which I shall 
 not describe, as they are familiar to every student. 
 But the publication of the " Leben Jesu " was the 
 signal for the outburst of the storm, and the signal 
 for the separation of the Hegelian school into the 
 three parties of the right, the centre, and the left. 
 A full account of the separation and its results for 
 modern thought and life, will be found in Siebert's 
 " Geschichte de neueren Deutschen Philosophie seit 
 Hegel," an able and candid work. See also Fair- 
 bairn's " Christ in Modern Theology." 
 
 My limits will not permit me to enter on the his- 
 
300 THEISM 
 
 tory of the modern tendencies toward idealism. The 
 modern idealists in our country and in yours agree in 
 saying that the work has all to be done over again, 
 and with fuller knowledge of science in all its depart- 
 ments, and of the facts and events of history, and of 
 the meaning and worth of religion. To myself their 
 efforts have been very significant, and they have been 
 able to fertilize all modern inquiry, and to set every 
 problem in a new light. There is no sphere in which 
 their influence is not to be traced. They have helped 
 us to place evolution, which seems to be in the air, in 
 a light which enables us to accept it without accept- 
 ing the evolution of something out of nothing. They 
 have enabled us to look with fresh interest on the 
 history of habits, customs, institutions, from the 
 rudest to the most complex, and they encourage us 
 to look forward to a goal not yet reached, a goal 
 which will conserve the gain won by the toil of all 
 the ages. Why, then, not accept idealism as the 
 crown and the hope of theology and philosophy. In 
 some respects I do accept it. I accept it in so far 
 as they tell me that mind is first in the universe, and 
 that the universe has a meaning. I accept it when 
 they tell me of experience and the rise within experi- 
 ence of the distinction of subject and object, and of 
 the truth that all objects are for the subject. I 
 follow gladly, as they take this living, breathing, 
 concrete self of mine, and show me that the analysis 
 of this real self and of the conditions of its life, 
 
IDEALISTIC PHILOSOPHY 301 
 
 thought, and action, gives, or imperatively demands, 
 the cosmos, that is to say, they show me that my 
 experience is possible only if I am in a rational 
 world, to which I am related, and which is related to 
 me. The world they show me is not a huge con- 
 temporaneity, but an ordered world, each part related 
 to each, and all bound together in relations which 
 can be thought. I follow on as they lead me into 
 the ethical world, and watch with admiration their 
 theoretical construction of the possibility of moral 
 experience, and obey as they tell me how the self is 
 to be realized. Nor do I dissent, though I hesitate, 
 as they proceed to show that as from the side of the 
 finite self a cosmos is needed and is given as the pre- 
 supposition of experience, so on the other side a cos- 
 mos demands a mind for which it is. But here I 
 falter and tread with a hesitating step. For I look 
 at the representations of the subject, for which all 
 subjects are, and I do not find that the conceptions 
 set forth by recent idealists meet the conditions of 
 the case. 
 
 To begin with Mr. Bradley : " The absolute has no 
 history of its own, though it contains histories with- 
 out number. These, with their tale of progress or 
 decline, are constructions starting from and based 
 on some one given piece of finitude. They are 
 but partial aspects in the region of temporal ap- 
 pearance. Their truth and reality may vary much 
 in extent and in importance, but in the end it 
 
302 THEISM 
 
 can never be more than relative." ("Appearance 
 and Reality," p. 499.) Again, "The absolute is not 
 personal, nor is it moral, nor is it beautiful or true." 
 (p- 533-) I n a rather condescending tone he says: 
 " Religion prefers to put forth statements which it 
 feels are untenable, and to correct them at once by 
 counter-statements, which it finds are no better. It is 
 then driven forwards and backwards between both, 
 like a dog which seeks to follow two masters. A 
 discrepancy worth our notice is the position of God 
 in the universe. We may say that in religion God 
 tends always to pass beyond Himself. He is neces- 
 sarily led to end in the absolute, which for religion is 
 not God." (p. 466.) The climax of this argument is 
 found in a footnote to page 450. It leads to the di- 
 lemma : " If God is, I am not, and if I am, God is not. 
 We have not reached a true view until the opposite of 
 this becomes self-evident. Then, without hesitation, we 
 answer that God is not Himself, unless I also am, and 
 that, if God were not, I certainly should be nothing." 
 It is somewhat difficult to follow the reasoning 
 of Mr. Bradley, and exceedingly difficult to know 
 what God stands for in the sentence we have quoted. 
 For him the reality is experience ; so he calls it 
 frequently. It has no history, though it contains 
 histories without number. Changes are ever going 
 on within that " experience," and yet that experience 
 knows no changes. But the main difficulty I feel in 
 dealing with the idealistic solution in all its forms is 
 
IDEALISTIC PHILOSOPHY 303 
 
 that the unity they reach is a quantitative one. It 
 is so with Mr. Bradley, it is so with the Master of 
 Balliol, with Professor Wallace, with Green, and with 
 all who work under their influence. The experience 
 of Mr. Bradley is the union of subject and object in 
 the underlying unity set forth in the " Gifford Lec- 
 tures " of Edward Caird, or it is the all-inclusive 
 self-consciousness of Green which realizes itself in 
 finite consciousness. The objection to all of these 
 representations is just that they are quantitative, and 
 that they cannot do justice to the reality of finite 
 experience. 
 
 To do justice to the work of Edward Caird, we 
 quote the following : " If, in accordance with the 
 principles of Idealism, we regard the infinite not as 
 an abstraction, but as a self -determining principle ; if 
 we follow out the doctrine of the correlation of inner 
 and outer experience, and if we interpret that doctrine 
 in the light of the idea of evolution and the conse- 
 quences which have been drawn from it, viz. that 
 nature comes to self-consciousness in man, and that, 
 therefore, the process of man's life is a continuation of 
 the self-revelation of the Absolute Being which begins 
 in nature, — it then becomes possible to think of God 
 as the principle of unity in all things, and yet as a 
 living God in whose image man is made. And, on 
 the same view, it becomes possible to think of Man 
 as 'a partaker in the divine nature,' and, therefore, 
 as a self-conscious and self-determining spirit, with- 
 
304 THEISM 
 
 out gifting him with an absolute individuality, which 
 would cut him off from all union and communion 
 with his fellow-creatures and with God. I do not 
 deny that there are many difficulties in this view, 
 difficulties with which I have not attempted to 
 deal. But it seems to me this is the only line of 
 thought which makes it possible to escape the oppo- 
 site absurdities of an individualism which dissolves 
 the unity of the universe into atoms, and an abstract 
 monism which leaves no room for any real individ- 
 uality either in God or in man ; not to speak of the 
 still greater absurdity of holding both of these one- 
 sided views at once." ("The Evolution of Religion," 
 Vol. II., p. 84.) 
 
 The problem is to obtain such a conception of 
 God, the cosmos, and man as will enable us to think 
 them in their relations each to each, the relative 
 reality of each, and how to construe the reality as a 
 unity. What kind of unity is it to be ? For some 
 kind of unity must be reached, or we shall be driven 
 to despair of knowledge and of life. An abstract 
 unity is not sufficient, it dissolves in our hands on 
 a moment's serious examination. Neither force, 
 energy, nor substance can stand the strain of criti- 
 cism, for it is impossible to get these to move, or 
 to translate themselves into the concrete reality of 
 experience. Nor does any other simplicity I have 
 been able to meet in the history of philosophy help 
 me to think of the unity in variety which makes up 
 
IDEALISTIC PHILOSOPHY 305 
 
 the universe. A universal self-consciousness, or the 
 unity of subject and object, is no more an adequate 
 conception than the persistence of force. Nor will 
 the experience of Mr. Bradley meet the case. In 
 truth, we must arrive at a conception which leaves 
 room for real individuality, that will recognize the 
 uniqueness of every person, and yet place every per- 
 son in relation to every other person and thing, that 
 is, has been, or will be. It must allow reality to 
 history, and permit a real progress and real events 
 in it. It must recognize human activity as a fac- 
 tor in the world's history, and recognize somehow 
 that good and evil, happiness and misery, righteous- 
 ness and sin, are not appearance, but stern realities 
 which philosophy and theology must deal with. The 
 cosmos is not appearance, man is real, and God is no 
 abstraction. 
 
 The great question of theism to-day is not con- 
 tained in a discussion of the various proofs elabo- 
 rated by the diligence of former thinkers, nor in the 
 criticism of these, which is so commonplace ever 
 since the epoch-making work of Kant. The proofs 
 and the criticism can be found in many volumes, 
 and on both not much that is new or profitable can 
 now be said. The problem to-day is to reach or find 
 a conception of God adequate to the wider know- 
 ledge placed within the grasp of man in the present 
 age. If we obtain such a conception, how shall we 
 define the relation of God to the world, and to man ? 
 x 
 
306 THEISM 
 
 Negatively, we may say that a solution which in any 
 way makes the world to be the other of God, or 
 which makes the world to be the evolution of the 
 divine life, or makes God and the world to be aspects 
 of one reality, will not suffice. For any solution that 
 will satisfy the speculative and the practical inter- 
 ests of man, and meet his moral and religious needs, 
 must recognize the freedom, the worth, and the inde- 
 pendence of God. Any solution that falls short of 
 that or confuses it must be rejected ; and even if we 
 can find no solution, we must hold fast to the belief 
 that a solution is possible, though we may not be 
 able to find it. Any solution that makes it impos- 
 sible for man to draw near to God, or for God to 
 draw near to man, refuses to recognize patent facts 
 of experience, and must be rejected as inadequate. 
 The idealistic solution may be accepted as an ele- 
 ment in the case, but it must be supplemented. We 
 may say that for God the world is, and add that God 
 is not the world. We say that in God all things and 
 persons live, and move, and have their being, and 
 yet maintain the richness, the fulness of the divine 
 life apart from the world. In fact, we must do so, if 
 we are to do justice to all the elements involved in 
 the case. 
 
 Thus we approach the question, not by the process 
 which gives us such terms as being, substance, the 
 unknowable, the unconditioned, the absolute, which 
 are terms so familiar to readers of metaphysical 
 
IDEALISTIC PHILOSOPHY 307 
 
 discussions, and lead to no result. For to us in the 
 very nature of the case all being is determinate 
 being. It is characterized so and so, and every 
 predicate is a definition of being. To speak of the 
 absolute and unconditioned as synonymous with God, 
 is simply to alter the conception of God. For God 
 exists as a determinate Being, and His attributes are 
 simply expressive of the determinate Being that He 
 is. If we take the religious consciousness as our 
 guide and as our means of interpretation, and take it 
 in its highest reach as given in the New Testament, 
 then we shall no longer speak of God as absolute, 
 and so on, but we shall borrow the grand words, 
 God is spirit, God is life, God is love. In other 
 words we shall think of God as a determinate Being 
 existing in relations, and these relations are abiding 
 distinctions within the circle of the divine life. God 
 is not an abstract unity, nor an absolute and inclusive 
 self-consciousness, God is a living, concrete, complex 
 Being, and in the Godhead there are relations and 
 activities always in relations and always in action. 
 The relations within the Godhead come to our help 
 and rescue us from the paralysis of thought wrought 
 by the abstractions of metaphysics, and we are not 
 compelled to think in terms of an abstract order, 
 nor driven to the necessity of deriving a manifold 
 universe from a simplicity in which there are no 
 relations. 
 
 In the Godhead, then, we already have a kind of 
 
308 THEISM 
 
 unity which does full justice to all the facts ; it con- 
 serves the unity and makes room for all the inter- 
 relations in which the Godhead consists. The God- 
 head is not abstract identity ; infinite differences are 
 within God, and infinite manifoldness are embraced 
 within one unity. The relations become more appre- 
 hensible to us when they are looked at from the 
 ethical side. Then they become vivid, real, and 
 intelligible. The ethical terms in which we set forth 
 these determinations of the divine are Father, Son, 
 and Spirit. Before fatherhood and sonship had any 
 existence among men the fact in all its glory, in all 
 its fulness, in all its meaning, was in eternal existence, 
 and love has always been, for it has its native home 
 in God. God is the eternal actuality of love. 
 
 Thus in the very conception of the Godhead as 
 given us in the highest expression of the religious 
 consciousness, we find a type of unity such as we 
 have been in search of. Infinite differences held 
 together in living relation, the self-surrender of one 
 to another, measureless love abiding in all the move- 
 ments within the divine life, and endless oppor- 
 tunities of self-communication. It may be possible 
 to call this " experience," to use the words of Mr. 
 Bradley, but it is no lonely experience of one in mere 
 relation with a world, it is already and has always 
 been a social experience. In the divine life as it 
 is disclosed to us, or as it is set forth in the highest 
 form of the religious consciousness, we have, not a 
 
IDEALISTIC PHILOSOPHY 309 
 
 simple type, but a manifold in unity, not an absolute, 
 unlimited, but a determinate being existing in rela- 
 tions, and in reciprocal relation of intelligent, rational, 
 and spiritual movement. Not in quantitative sim- 
 plicity nor in metaphysical abstraction are we to 
 think of the Godhead, but the highest conception we 
 can form is that of love unbeginning, unending, love 
 at its highest ideal. Such a conception helps us to 
 make intelligible the train of thought contained in 
 the passage quoted from the Master of Balliol on a 
 former page. It makes it possible to think of " God 
 as the principle of unity in all things, and yet as a 
 living God in whose image man is made." 
 
 We may invert the sentence of Mr. Bradley and 
 say that the absolute, if we may call God by that 
 name, is personal, is moral, is beautiful, is good, is 
 true. It would indeed be difficult to make these or 
 any other propositions of the absolute as the abso- 
 lute is construed by him. For in that experience 
 which has no history, though it contains all histories 
 in it, there can be no reciprocity, no communion, no 
 love. Indeed, the descriptions of the absolute, con- 
 tained in the book of Mr. Bradley, are mainly nega- 
 tive. Almost every proposition is negatived by some 
 other proposition. But on the view stated above, it 
 is possible to find our highest and our best realized 
 without imperfection and without any drawback. 
 In the divine life our ideals are already realized, 
 whatever these ideals may be. Every power of 
 
3IO THEISM 
 
 man, every faculty, every ethical virtue, every spirit- 
 ual quality, has its ideal; our imperfect knowledge 
 has perfect knowledge as its ideal ; reason as insight 
 and as power leads on to perfect reason as its ideal; 
 Fatherhood and sonship, imperfectly realized here, 
 have always been in their perfect form. The in- 
 finite is the realized ideal of the finite forms which 
 our ideals take. In the Christian conception of the 
 Godhead, we have the joy of recognizing the realiza- 
 tion of the ideals which haunt us with their shadowy 
 forms as the perfection of what we know and ex- 
 perience here. Whatever personal life foreshadows, 
 whatever social relations may indicate as to their 
 perfect form, all beauty, all righteousness, all truth, 
 have their home and their perfection in God. 
 
 But what of the cosmos, and what of man ? In 
 connection with the Christian conception of God how 
 are we to think of a material world, and of the pos- 
 sibility of individual selves living together in one 
 cosmos ? How can we think the cosmos along with 
 the Christian conception of God ? Are we to think 
 the cosmos as the other of God ? Idealism says we 
 must so think if we are to think at all. Such a 
 necessity of thought lies on all who lead up to a 
 universal self-consciousness, or to any representation 
 which leaves God without an other. From that 
 point of view an other is imperatively needed, the 
 universal subject must have an object; without an 
 object it could not realize itself. But the Christian 
 
IDEALISTIC PHILOSOPHY 3 1 1 
 
 conception postulates otherness in the very divine 
 life, and in that determinate Being, who we rever- 
 ently name God, there is the otherness which is 
 the actualization of all possibilities of perfection. 
 For the Christian conception the stress is laid on 
 another side, and the solution of the problem takes 
 another form. We do not try to find God from the 
 world merely, or to argue from the articulated system 
 to the thought which makes it a system, though that 
 way is open to us too, nor do we merely look for a 
 subject for which all objects are, for we have recog- 
 nized in the manifoldness of the Divine, character- 
 istics which lay no imperative of thought on us why 
 we should demand a datum objective to God. God 
 is ; and ideals are realized in the Godhead, and would 
 be so if there were no cosmos. 
 
 If so, why should there be a cosmos? Perhaps 
 we cannot say. But this may be said, that we must 
 find a reason in some other direction than that which 
 makes a cosmos necessary for the realization of God. 
 May we not find a sufficient reason for the existence 
 of a world in the ethical character of God ? Suppose 
 we take the great word " God is love," and take it 
 as the essential meaning of God, may we not find 
 in it the explanation of the cosmos and of man ? 
 Love is transitive, passes out beyond itself, gives 
 itself to its object, and strives to make that object 
 blessed. Eternal love had its home in God, but 
 love abounds more and more ; may we not conceive 
 
312 THEISM 
 
 this love as the creative impulse to the making of 
 a cosmos ? Love can be satisfied only by giving, 
 may it not explain, or make conceivable to us, a 
 noble necessity that led to the making of a world? 
 To us there is a necessity which is the meaning of 
 freedom, we speak it every time we use the word 
 "ought." There is a service which is perfect free- 
 dom. We may say in a higher sphere that there 
 was an ethical necessity for creation on the part of 
 God to satisfy His need of loving and of communi- 
 cating Himself to the beings who could receive 
 Him. " Creation is due to the moral perfection of 
 the Creator, who is so essentially love that He could 
 not but create a world that He might create beati- 
 tude." (Fairbairn's " Christ in Modern Theology," 
 
 P-4I3-) 
 
 Looking at the cosmos as the outcome of the 
 creative love of God, just as we looked at the God- 
 head as the synthesis of transcendence and imma- 
 nence, how are we to think the relation of God to 
 the world ? Has there ever been a deeper, truer word 
 spoken on this than the ancient word, " He spake 
 and it was done, He commanded and it stood fast " ? 
 In our measure we also have an activity that makes 
 things to be which once were not. All around us 
 are the works of man. At his command cities, 
 states, empires, poems," histories, philosophies, arise, 
 and man's activity under conditions and under limi- 
 tations may enable us to think of an activity through 
 
IDEALISTIC PHILOSOPHY 313 
 
 the exercise of which the cosmos may have arisen. 
 In the service of love, the power, wisdom of God, 
 set to work and the cosmos began to be made. The 
 material world is for us a means of effecting our 
 purpose and realizing our aim. But before we can 
 use it we must understand its nature, its law, and 
 its method of working. But its nature, law, and 
 method of working is on the other side a revelation 
 to us of a mode of thought higher than our thought, 
 and of a purpose greater than we have yet learned 
 to know. May not nature be simply a mode of 
 communion between beings who can think, reason, 
 and feel? The story of nature is a story that we 
 are learning to read more clearly as the years pass 
 on, and every new page which we slowly spell out 
 is a fresh testimony to the depth and breadth of the 
 thought that is embodied in the universe. I have 
 said something of the wondrous story in former lec- 
 tures, here I lay stress on the conception that what 
 we call the material world is, after all, only a system 
 of embodied thought, a language conveying a mean- 
 ing which may be understood, and is so far under- 
 stood. May not this material universe be simply a 
 vehicle for the expression of a divine meaning, and 
 may not it be there for a purpose beyond itself ? 
 
 One thing we know, that the material universe 
 is there for the expression of our meaning, and it 
 will take up what we mean, preserve it for a millen- 
 nium or two, and the record can be read by those 
 
314 THEISM 
 
 • 
 
 who can wrest the secret from it. The bricks of 
 Babylon, the pyramids and the papyri of Egypt, 
 and remains of antiquity from many countries and 
 ages, have lent themselves first to take the meanings 
 read into them, have kept that meaning, and have 
 yielded up that meaning to the judicious questioning 
 of the men of this century. If matter can thus 
 serve intellectual and moral ends impressed on them 
 by finite intelligence, what is to hinder us from 
 thinking that in its very nature and in all the history 
 of its movement, it is intended to convey to finite 
 thinkers a meaning put into it by a Thinker and a 
 Maker who is the source of it and of them ? Science 
 is just the meaning which man has found in nature, 
 and it presupposes that there is such a meaning. 
 The world of nature is a determinate world, existing 
 not in vague possibility, but constituted so and so, 
 in definite relations, and in defined modes of action 
 which we call laws ; that is, it has a meaning. 
 
 Out of infinitely possible worlds there is this 
 actual world in which we are, and the nature and 
 history and evolution of it are all definite and in- 
 telligible. What is that but to say that the Maker 
 of the world proceeded in the making of the world 
 as if He had the aim of enabling intelligent beings 
 of a finite order so far to read and understand the 
 method of His working. He bound Himself, having 
 begun to make a world, to proceed on the lines 
 which He first laid down, and to make each step 
 
IDEALISTIC PHILOSOPHY 31 5 
 
 presuppose what had gone before, and make the 
 next step a consequence of all that had been accom- 
 plished. Permanence and progression are notes of 
 the history of this universe, and the method of evolu- 
 tion has established this conclusion on a firmer basis 
 than ever. From the point of view of Christian 
 Theism nature is the middle term between God and 
 man, an instrument in the hand of both for com- 
 munion and knowledge. May we ask what is the 
 relation of God to the material universe ? Can we 
 find an answer? We have already expressed our 
 dissatisfaction with the idealistic answer, may we 
 keep what they have gained, and still have an an- 
 swer of our own ? They have helped us to conceive 
 the real as rational, and to think of the world as a 
 rational world. Is not the rationality of the world 
 conserved when we regard it as the embodiment of 
 a divine thought, the fulfilment of a divine purpose, 
 even though we refuse to regard it as the other of 
 God, or as necessary to the realization of God ? We 
 may go still farther and say that God is immanent 
 in the material universe so far as that universe is 
 able to receive Him. He is present in the atoms of 
 matter as the power which holds them in being, He 
 is present in the chemical world as the power that 
 shapes the laws of its working, present in the world 
 of life as the sustaining power that upholds and 
 guides them onward and upward. He is the God 
 who ever strives to communicate Himself to His 
 
3l6 THEISM 
 
 creation, and to make a creation which can receive 
 His self -communication. 
 
 The making of a world which can receive the 
 fulness of God is a long, slow, and painful process. 
 The process is not yet complete. We may, however, 
 see something of the divine patience and love that 
 has toiled at the making of such a world. We see 
 that it is a work of patient and infinite toil, and we 
 set aside the notion of a fiat as altogether unsuitable 
 to the making of an ethical world. Such a world 
 cannot be so made, for it can be made only by its 
 own cooperation. Even in the lowest reach of life 
 living things move, act, grow, only by their own 
 exertions, and every quality they possess must, if not 
 acquired, at least be used by them. The upward 
 striving of life is the commonplace of evolution. 
 Though this may be stated in terms that are merely 
 mechanical, and may be reduced to terms of an 
 abstract struggle, yet it is true that life makes 
 progress only by effort, and living beings can main- 
 tain themselves and make progress only by sustained 
 and well-directed effort. They have to help to make 
 themselves. If this be true of all life, even of life 
 which is guided by pressure, and not by foreseen 
 ends, how much more true is it of life self-conscious, 
 rational, and ethical, life which is ruled by ideals 
 presented as motives and acted on for the accom- 
 plishment of foreseen ends. Emphatically here is a 
 life that cannot be made by mere power, or by 
 
IDEALISTIC PHILOSOPHY 3 17 
 
 pressure, or by instinct, or by the exercise of 
 terror or fear. It must be won by rational motives 
 and ideal ends set forth in such a way as win the 
 desires and inform the motives, and to persuade the 
 conscious being that this is the ideal which he is 
 bound to realize. 
 
 If a world is to be made in this way, — and it is the 
 only way in which such a world can be made, — clearly 
 it is a process that must be slow. The education of 
 the human race has been slow, painful, and laborious, 
 but there has been an education of the human race. 
 Progress has been made, ideals have been formed, 
 and men have been trained to understand and love 
 these ideals. It has been a real history to which all 
 the races have made their contribution, and the end 
 is not yet. It is a history from which we have yet 
 much to learn, and when we read it, we ought to take 
 heed lest we bring it down to the level of our own 
 idealism, and reduce it to a formula of our own. 
 Idealism has manifested that tendency many a time, 
 notably in the case of Strauss and Green. But the 
 trend of history is the exhibition of a larger idealism 
 than ours, it is the idealism of God, worked out in 
 the making of a world, to which He can communicate 
 Himself. As the world of nature is larger than our 
 science, and is the most constant and stringent critic 
 of our science, so is history the greatest critic of our 
 theories. On all sides nature and history remind us 
 that we do not rule even this planet, and that there 
 
318 THEISM 
 
 are larger meanings in the world than we have yet 
 seen. 
 
 But we have read the story so far as to get a 
 glimpse of the larger meaning. If we read it as the 
 story of the making of a world which is to have a 
 diviner issue than is yet seen, may we not hope that 
 the apparent failures, the woes, the miseries, the 
 mistakes, and the evil that stand written in lurid 
 colours all over the pages of history may have a 
 meaning ? At all events, the making of an ethical 
 and spiritual world, in which ethical ideals will be 
 universally acted on, is a stupendous task. As I 
 glance at the histories, philosophies, and religions 
 of the world, I must say that I have not found much 
 light cast on the awfulness of human history by any 
 one of them, one only excepted. Not much help 
 can be had from a philosophy which minimizes the 
 sin and misery of the world, nor from one that ex- 
 aggerates these until the other side is lost sight of 
 altogether. But in one place and among a certain 
 people there arose a way of thinking of man and 
 his history and destiny which relieves the darkness 
 of the outlook, and that without doing violence to 
 the facts whether these are optimistic or pessimistic. 
 That view teaches me to look at the world of nature 
 and of man as the work of God, and it represents 
 God as a living God, of Whom, to Whom, and 
 through Whom are all things, and it represents God 
 as not indifferent to the world of men. But the 
 
IDEALISTIC PHILOSOPHY 319 
 
 main thing at present for us is, that this God is 
 represented as working and toiling through the ages 
 in order to make man, and to raise man to that 
 divine ideal formed for each man and for all men in 
 the kingdom of God. 
 
 We are coming to understand that wondrous 
 story, and the light which it casts on the character 
 of God and the course of history. A living God 
 striving to persuade an intelligent, rational creature 
 to whom freedom has been given, of the kind of life 
 he ought to live, and of the aims he ought to have, and 
 to win him to surrender himself to the higher guid- 
 ance, and to realize the chief end of his being. That is 
 the vision disclosed to us in that literature. It is a 
 story of the mistakes which man has made, a story 
 of the way in which he has perpetually chosen lower 
 ideals and has striven to realize them. A story on 
 man's side of baffled aims and thwarted desires, of 
 defeat and misery because he had made mistakes, 
 and on the side of God, a constant, patient love, striv- 
 ing to raise man to the recognition of the higher 
 ideals and of the life which a man ought to live. God 
 bearing with men, striving, toiling, working, loving, 
 shall I not say suffering ? in order to make men who 
 might receive Him, and striving to satisfy His desire to 
 love and impart Himself to a people who could receive 
 Him. So the course of history may be read, as the 
 striving of God to educate men, and to raise them 
 to the recognition of that ideal He has formed for 
 
320 THEISM 
 
 man. May we not thus read the discipline of law, 
 the connection between wrong-doing and misery, the 
 pain of thwarted desire, and the pang of deferred 
 hope ? All these and the other phenomena of human 
 life and history become luminous when read in the 
 light of the purpose of God to make a kingdom 
 of finite spirits to whom He could communicate 
 Himself, and to whom He might give blessedness 
 unspeakable. 
 
 This ethical world is making, it is not yet made. 
 It is being made now by all the agencies at work in 
 the world we know, and in the making of it a 
 mother's love, a father's care, the answering love of 
 children, the pity and piety that are in the world, 
 loyalty to ideals, devotion to duty, the grandeur of 
 science, the splendour of philosophy, the vision of 
 beauty realized in art and poetry, the might of re- 
 ligion, and the magnificence of Christian effort are 
 factors in the hand of God for the making of that 
 kingdom of God which is to crown the cosmos and 
 justify the toil of the ages. Unless we can have such 
 a hope as the outcome of all the travail of the ages 
 human effort would be paralyzed. Even with that 
 hope clouds and darkness remain, and the difficulty 
 of a speculative adjustment of all elements abide. 
 That is simply to say that we are finite, and cannot 
 look at all things from the centre. 
 
 At the same time, it is to be observed that the 
 world to which the present state leads is a world of 
 
IDEALISTIC PHILOSOPHY 32 1 
 
 persons, intelligent, self-conscious, ethical, spiritual, 
 and the unity of such a world presupposes a plu- 
 rality of such persons, bound together by bonds 
 which are not quantitative, but ethical and spiritual. 
 The. bond is constituted freely through self-surrender, 
 and the recognition of the bond of service is the way 
 of self-realization. In any ultimate unity there must 
 be a recognition of the worth of each person, and 
 each person must be conceived as ready to see that 
 for the realization of his personality the whole is 
 needed. " Be a person and recognize others as per- 
 sons," it seems to me that no scheme of monism can 
 give a real meaning to this ethical precept. We are 
 in search of a unity, and the unity we require is of 
 the most complex kind. For it must include in it 
 God, man, and the world. No unity of the kind 
 proposed by monism meets the necessity of the case. 
 In fact, monism does injustice to the conception of 
 God, for it makes Him to be nothing for Himself, it 
 destroys the reality of finite life, and leaves it no 
 room for self-development and self-surrender to a 
 higher, and it makes the cosmos to be really acosmic. 
 We must widen the meaning of unity, and follow on 
 from the unity of abstract identity to the wider unity 
 which meets us in scientific investigations, up to the 
 unity of self-conscious life, up to the higher unity 
 of many self-conscious lives in an organism which is 
 spiritually held together, not by physical bonds in any 
 way, but none the less held together in a real unity. 
 
322 THEISM 
 
 The history of the universe must be construed as 
 a real history, and the events in it must have real 
 validity. How shall this be accomplished? It seems 
 to me that it has so far been accomplished by the 
 recognition of the unity of many persons in a social 
 unity. There is, if anywhere, the type of unity of 
 which we are in search. A social unity constituted 
 by God, to God, and for God, in which a finite world 
 can come to its ideal in God, and be a world to which 
 God can communicate Himself, and in which the 
 world will gladly surrender itself to God, this is the 
 unity we need, and we have it in the kingdom of 
 God. But can we have such a unity of God, man, 
 and the world ? Not if we make it a quantitative one. 
 To such a unity Strauss's objection would be fatal. 
 " If reality is ascribed to the idea of the divine and 
 human natures, is this equivalent to the admission that 
 this unity must have actually been once manifested, 
 as it never had been, and never more will be, in one 
 individual ? This is, indeed, not the mode in which 
 the Idea realizes itself ; it is not wont to lavish all 
 its fulness on one exemplar, and be niggardly to all 
 others — to express itself fully in that one individual, 
 and imperfectly in all the rest; it rather loves to 
 distribute its riches among a multiplicity of exemplars 
 which reciprocally complete each other — in the alter- 
 nate appearance and suppression of a series of indi- 
 viduals." (Strauss's " Life of Jesus," George Eliot's 
 "Translation," pp. 779-80.) 
 
IDEALISTIC PHILOSOPHY 323 
 
 The objection reveals the character of the unity 
 which is in his mind. It is simply a quantitative 
 unity, and the riches of the idea are of a quantitative 
 kind. Now there is a kind of wealth which is 
 quantitative. If you have it, I have it not. If it 
 is yours, it is not mine. This kind of wealth has 
 nothing personal or distinctive about it, and it is 
 equally at home in every pocket. There is another 
 kind of wealth which is kept by giving it away. 
 Intellectual wealth, moral wealth, spiritual wealth, is 
 increased by imparting it to others. If the wealth 
 of the idea could be lavished on one exemplar, that 
 would be the shortest and surest way of enriching 
 all the individuals in the world. It enriches me to 
 think of Sir Isaac Newton, and the wealth of the 
 " Principia " is mine when I can receive it. The 
 thoughts of Plato and Aristotle, the poetry of Homer 
 and Dante, the achievements of any man, the meas- 
 ure of perfection maintained by any man, — these are 
 not an impoverishment of me, but a way of enrich- 
 ing me. The wealth of human thought, the great- 
 ness of human achievement, the grandeur of moral 
 life realized in any life, are mine, if I can take them. 
 And if I take them I do not make any man the 
 poorer. Suppose all perfections realized in one man, 
 suppose the wealth of the idea to be fully realized in 
 one individual, then that would be a way of revealing 
 to all men the greatness of humanity, and of inspir- 
 ing them to follow and to imitate. The fulness of 
 
324 THEISM 
 
 realized and manifested human life is the heritage of 
 man, and it is of a kind to which the measure of 
 quantity does not apply. Think of what Washington 
 and Lincoln have been to this great land, and to the 
 people in it. 
 
 Moral, intellectual, and spiritual wealth are qualita- 
 tive, not quantitative. The criticism of Strauss be- 
 comes inept as soon as this is seen. The relations 
 in the kingdom of God are qualitative, not quantitative. 
 What is given and taken in that kingdom grows with 
 the giving and taking, just as the intellectual, moral, 
 and spiritual wealth of humanity increases from age 
 to age ; but the growth of such wealth here is but 
 a shadow of the growth of that wealth in the per- 
 fected kingdom of God. God can give Himself in 
 love, grace, and truth, and the giving does not lessen 
 the fulness of God. Man can surrender himself to 
 God, and in that surrender find perfect freedom and 
 fulness of being. We have exemplars of that fact 
 in human life here, and we can see it realized in part 
 in the family, the state, and the church. Of course 
 neither the person who surrenders himself nor the 
 object to whom he surrenders himself is perfect, and 
 the full ethical meaning of such a relationship is not 
 disclosed here and now. But it is so far disclosed as 
 to reveal to us the ideal of such a relationship under 
 other conditions. Nay, there is one phase of such a 
 possibility set forth even here, but it is one on which 
 I do not dwell. Let me say that in the surrender of 
 
IDEALISTIC PHILOSOPHY 325 
 
 a man to Christ, and in the giving of Himself by 
 Christ to man, we find a fact of religious experience 
 in which an ideal is reached, and the man who sur- 
 renders himself to Christ finds himself in Christ. 
 
 Full scope for individual life, thought, and action, 
 full realization of the individual in all his individual- 
 ity, perfected character of each according to the ideal 
 of the individual, and on the other side the wealth of 
 the whole poured into each person, and returned by 
 each person to the whole, and all in God, who gives 
 himself in immeasurable fulness to His creation, such 
 is the ideal of the kingdom of God. That unity is 
 not the starting-point, it is the goal. It is not yet, 
 but it will be. It will be the outcome of infinite striv- 
 ing, it will be the result of age-long divine endeavour, 
 the fruit of eternal toil, work, and suffering, for it is 
 the effort of God to make a world, which also makes 
 itself, and must be persuaded to do so. 
 
 Much more might be said, had I more time. But 
 I have already far exceeded my limits. In this last 
 lecture I have been only able to give an outline of 
 what I mean, but the outline I hope is intelligible, 
 and, in the future, it may be worked out in more de- 
 tail. But I am persuaded that it is on these lines 
 that the philosophy and theology of the future may 
 most hopefully proceed. Philosophically, we must 
 retrace our steps somewhat, and try to make the 
 metaphysic of Kant agree with his ethic, and give a 
 rational meaning to the thing in itself, which is an 
 
326 THEISM 
 
 irrational element in his system. Theologically, too, 
 we have a great deal to do, and we must overhaul 
 our abstract doctrines, rescue them from the dominion 
 of abstractions, and make them to be a fuller repre- 
 sentation of the reality of the concrete personal, 
 religious life of the individual, and of individuals 
 constituted into a society of redeemed men. The 
 outlook is not dark, it is hopeful. Many are at work, 
 many run to and fro, and knowledge is increased, 
 and every increase of knowledge is available for the 
 service of theology, and theology is giving itself to 
 the mighty task of using it. For theology is in the 
 central position, and has the widest command of the 
 requisite resources ; it can alone adequately deal with 
 the postulates and the fulness of the religious life; 
 and if unity is to be attained, it must be attained 
 through theology. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Agnosticism, see Synthetic Philoso- 
 phy. 
 Anaxagoras, 246. 
 
 Animism, Tylor on, 112, 242; 122. 
 Anthropomorphism, 268. 
 Atomic theory, 21 seq. 
 Aufklarung, 143, 163-5, I 74i I 9°" *• 
 
 Bain (Dr. Alex.), 201. 
 
 Balfour (A. J.), his thesis, 188; and 
 a criterion of belief, 188-9 ; his 
 antithesis between authority and 
 reason, 190 seq. ; that antithesis mis- 
 leading, 193-4. 
 
 Bastian (Dr. H, C), his experiments, 
 44. 
 
 Bradley (F. H.), on the content of 
 the absolute, 301-2; 54, 158, 303, 
 
 30S. 309- 
 Brinton (Dr.), 243. 
 Buckle (H. T.), and Mr. Benjamin 
 
 Kidd, 164. 
 
 Caird (Edward), on development, 
 95 seq. ; on God as the principle of 
 unity, 303-4; 261, 309. 
 
 Causality, science and the concep- 
 tion of, 39, 91. 
 
 Cayley, 3. 
 
 Cell, structure, 56 ; differentiation of, 
 60 ; Marshallow, 57. 
 
 Conservation of energy, 8. 
 
 Darwin, on the limits to the increase 
 
 of a species, 77 ; 89, 99. 
 Definitions, the inadequacy of, 12. 
 Descartes, 142. 
 
 Edwards (Jonathan), 1, 289. 
 
 Environment, correspondence be- 
 tween life and, 102; man and his, 
 102 seq.; organism relative to, 112; 
 modifications, of — toolmaking, 
 104 ; speech, 108, see Man. 
 
 Ether, Maxwell on the properties and 
 functions of the, 26 seq. 
 
 Evolution, theory of, factors undis- 
 covered, 71; value of, 81; special 
 difficulties of, 88,94; arrested de- 
 velopment, 88 seq. ; and the con- 
 ception of causality, 91 ; and 
 philosophy, 260 seq. 
 
 Evolution, ethical, spiritual, and re- 
 ligious, 277. 
 
 Existence, the struggle for, y$seq, 
 
 Fairbairn (Dr. A. M.), on the ethical 
 necessity for creation, 312 ; 299. 
 
 Feeling, psychology of, 63. 
 
 Fichte (J. G.), 269. 
 
 Fiske (John), on evolution and man, 
 266 ; on causality, 267 ; on the 
 identification of the deity with the 
 cosmos, 270-1 ; 272, 275, 
 
 " Foundations of Belief," see Balfour. 
 
 Geddes (Prof. P.), on the organism, 
 69; 89. 
 
 Generalization, the process of, objec- 
 tions to, and limitations of, 8 seq., 
 14, 24 seq. 
 
 Graham (Prof. W.), on the divine 
 consciousness and personality, 
 268-9 1 2 7 r - 
 
 Greece, and the emancipation of the 
 individual, 141. 
 
 Green (T. H.), 303, 317. 
 
 Hamilton (Sir W.), 63. 
 327 
 
328 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Hebrews, and the emancipation of 
 the individual, 141. 
 
 Hegel, 126-7, 237. 292, 297-9. 
 
 Hesiod, 247. 
 
 Hoffding (Prof. H.), on conscious- 
 ness, 203-4. 
 
 Homer, 247. 
 
 Hume, on personal identity, 199 seq. 
 
 Huxley (Prof. T. H.), on the physi- 
 cal processes and basis of life, 
 46 seq. ; on the organism, 68 ; 201. 
 
 Hyde (Prof. T. DeW.), 150. 
 
 Idealism, see Philosophy. 
 Individualism, 140 seq. 
 Isomerism, 54. 
 
 James (Prof. W.) , 149-52, 157, 201. 
 
 Kant, 30s, 325. 
 
 Kidd (Benjamin), his thesis, 163; 
 and Mr. H. T. Buckle — a compari- 
 son, 164-5 I an( l 'h e Aufklarting, 
 165 ; on the struggle for existence, 
 i66seq. ; on selection, 169; and 
 Weismann, 169 seq.; and degener- 
 ation, 171 ; and rationality, 173-4, 
 176 seq. ; and religion, 181 seq. ; 
 and altruism, 186-7 '< his theory 
 and its defects, 168 seq.; 105, 162. 
 
 Kinetic theory of gases, 13. 
 
 Kropotkin (Prince), 89. 
 
 Lang (Andrew) , on the origin of re- 
 ligion, 243. 
 
 Laotze, 288. 
 
 Law, mechanical, 10; insufficiency 
 of, 24 seq. ; and purpose, 40. 
 
 Law, the periodic, 14, 22. 
 
 Life, conditions of, 37 ; origin of, 43 ; 
 Watson on origin of, 44 ; growth, 
 83 seq. ; embryonic, 85; arrested 
 development, 88 seq.; rational, and 
 its implications, 98 seq. ; relations, 
 50 seq. ; see Environment and 
 World. 
 
 Lockyer (Sir N.), 78. 
 
 Lotze, 225. 
 
 MacBride (Prof.), on zoological 
 classification, 83. 
 
 Mackenzie (Prof. J. S.), on the 
 family, 127. 
 
 Man, primitive, environment, 102 seq.; 
 toolmaking, 104; speech, 108; 
 reason and retrogression, 113-4; 
 taboo, 115 ; a standard of conduct, 
 115 seq.; his family or tribe the 
 unit, 119; mythology, 120; science, 
 121-2; animism, 122, 242-3; mar- 
 riage and the family, 123 seq. 
 
 Man, the making of, world empires, 
 132; war, 133; citizenship, 135; 
 conflict between the individual and 
 society, 132; the emancipation of 
 the individual, 140 seq.; organi- 
 zation for a common end, 136 seq. 
 
 Man, and the knowledge of God, 
 276; moral, spiritual, and religious 
 evolution of, 277; the God of his 
 experience, 278 ; objective sanc- 
 tions for morality, 280 seq.; God 
 in history, 284 ; humanity a unity, 
 144, 147. 
 
 Marshall (A. M.), on cell structure, 
 
 57- 
 Master of Balliol, see Caird. 
 Materialism, 146. 
 Matter, definitions of, 12 ; pre-atomic 
 
 state of, 21 ; properties of living, 
 
 46 seq. ; interrelation of organic 
 
 and inorganic, 48, 59. 
 Maxwell (clerk) .onthepropertiesand 
 
 functions of the ether, 26 ; 29, 154. 
 Mill (James) , 201. 
 Mill (J. S.), 201. 
 
 Natural selection, sub-terms of, 73 
 
 seq., 170-1. 
 Nebular theory, 35. 
 Newton, 3, 7, 29. 
 
 Organism, unity of the, 51 seq., 67 
 seq.; relation to environment, 62; 
 variations, 71 ; is more than a sum, 
 71 ; Huxley on, 68 ; Sedgwick and 
 Wilson on, 67; Geddes, Stirling, 
 
INDEX 
 
 329 
 
 and Virchow on, 69; the social, 
 174 seq. 
 
 Paley, 91. 
 
 Personality, Hume on, igg seq.; con- 
 sciousness, 202 seq.; Hoffding on, 
 203-4 1 conception of self, 209 seq, ; 
 realization of self, 212-3 1 individu- 
 ality and, zi^seq.; development of, 
 a condition of social union ,217 seq.; 
 irrelation and independence of, 220 ; 
 ideals and their reality, 221 seq.; 
 Lotze and, 225; influences affect- 
 ing, 279-80. 
 
 Philosophy, idealist, its basis, 261; 
 debt of theology to, 257 seq. ; 
 and Christianity, — Hegel, 297 seq., 
 Strauss, 299 ; its unity quantitative, 
 303, 322; its value and influence, 
 300-1 ; Bradley's, 301 seq., 309 ; 
 Caird's, 303-4 ; the problem of, 
 304 seq. 
 
 Philosophy, the synthetic, its basis, 
 260, 275 ; and the normality of the 
 religious faculty, 230-1 ; debt of 
 theology to, 257 seq.; and a know- 
 ledge of God, 262 seq.; and the 
 ultimate reality, 264 seq.; and an- 
 thropomorphism, 268 seq.; its af- 
 firmations, 270 ; its conclusions 
 extended, 272 seq., 278 ; its results 
 and tendencies, 274 seq. 
 
 Plato, 247. 
 
 Poulton (Prof. E. B.), on physiologi- 
 cal selections, 79 seq. 
 
 Power, manifest and therefore known, 
 91 seq. 
 
 Preadaptation, 86. 
 
 Quantities, transmission of, acquired, 
 90. 
 
 Ramsay (Prof. W.). *3~4- 
 
 Rayleigh (Lord), 13. 
 
 Religion, universal, 227-8, 240 ; and 
 
 human life, 228, 288-9, 293 seq.; 
 
 and science, 228-9, 2 5° se 3** 286; 
 
 Spencer and, 230, 260-7, 270, 272- 
 
 6, 291 ; and the race, 240-2, 2^3seq., 
 
 278 seq.; origins of, 242 seq.; Lang 
 and Smith on origins of, 243-4; 
 conservatism of, 244-5 '» Plato and, 
 247 ; and morals in crisis, 246-7 ; 
 and Israel, 247-8; evolution of, 
 277 seq. ; and God in history, 284 ; 
 the conception of God, 285 seq., 
 294-5 1 Edwards and, 289-90 ; Kidd 
 and, 181 seq.; see Philosophy. 
 
 Romanes (G. J.), 79, 99. 
 
 Rome, and the emancipation of the 
 individual, 141. 
 
 Science, attitude to, 2; presupposi- 
 tions of, 3; need of a concrete 
 universal in, 8 seq. ; methods of, 24 ; 
 and the conception of causality, 39, 
 91 ; conservatism of, 43 ; the chang- 
 ing order of, 153-4; an d religion, 
 228-9, z$oseq., 286. 
 
 Sedgwick and Wilson, on the unity 
 of the organism, 67. 
 
 Shakespeare, 217. 
 
 Siebert, 299. 
 
 Smith (W. Robertson), on primitive 
 religion, 244. 
 
 " Social Evolution, 1 ' see Kidd. 
 
 Spencer (Herbert), 32, 47, 51, 86, 94 
 122, 150, 169, 171, 201, 204, 222-3, 
 230-1, 244, 260-7, 27°. 272-6, 291. 
 
 Spinoza, 15 seq. 
 
 Stirling (J. Hutchison), on the unity 
 of the organism, 69. 
 
 Strauss, on a quantitative unity, 322 ; 
 
 299. 317. 324- 
 Struggle for existence, 75 seq.; Kidd 
 
 on, 166 seq. 
 Survival of the fittest, 73. 
 Sylvester, 3. 
 
 Taboo, 115. 
 
 Theism, intelligibility of the world 
 
 a postulate of, 21 ; origins and the 
 
 theistic argument, 42. 
 Tylor, on animism, 112; 242. 
 
 Unity, in things, 11, 36, 155 ; of the 
 cell, 58; of the organism, $iseq. t 
 
330 
 
 INDEX 
 
 67, 70 ; of the race, 144, 147, 195-6 ; 
 extra mundane, 161; difficulty of 
 thinking a, 157 seq., 304-3 ; the 
 Godhead the type of, 308 seq.; 
 idealism and a, — Bradley, 302, 
 Caird, 303-4, 309; Strauss and a 
 quantitative, 322. 
 
 Variation, 71, 75 ; demand for indefi- 
 nite, 78 ; 171. 
 Virchow, on the organism, 69. 
 
 Wallace (Prof. W.), 149, 303. 
 Ward (Dr. James) ,201. 
 Watson (Prof.) , on the origin of life, 
 44- 
 
 Weismann, 90, 167, 169-71. 
 
 World, rational, 21, 154 seq., 314-5; 
 conditions which have made life 
 possible in, 37 ; preparation for life, 
 34 seq. ; evolution of the inorganic, 
 36 ; entry of life into, 49, 60 ; pur- 
 pose evident in, 40 seq.; power, 
 manifest and therefore known, in, 
 91 seq. ; subjective aspect of, 198 
 seq. ; ethical necessity for creation, 
 311-2; extra mundane unity, 161. 
 
 Worlds, the making of, 18 seq. 
 
 Xenophanes, 247. 
 
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