^ tihvaxy of t:he t:heolo0ical ^tminavy 
 
 PRINCETON • NEW JERSEY 
 
 •a^^D* 
 
 BL 51 .M473 1895 
 Meakin, Frederick, 1848- 
 
 1923. 
 Nature and deity 
 
NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 A STUDY OP 
 
 RELIGION AS A QUEST OF 
 
 THE IDEAL 
 
 BY 
 
 FREDERICK MEAKIN 
 
 How charming is divine philosophy! — Milton 
 
 CHICAGO 
 CHARLES H. KP:RR Sc COMPANY 
 175 Monroe Street 
 
Copyright, 1895, 
 By FREDERICK MEAKIN. 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 The following essay is an attempt to find in the 
 constitution of our humanity and in our general rela- 
 tions to nature tlie grounds of a religious philosophy 
 considered as the general philosophy of life. 
 
 The point of view is that of pure naturalism. And 
 no need arises, within the scope of this inquiry, for 
 the discussion of the various theories of knowincf and 
 being which have vexed philosophy and shaken the 
 foundations of religion. Onlolog}', epistemology, 
 and the moot questions of metaphysics, have no di- 
 rect bearing upon our conclusions in their main drift ; 
 and realist or idealist, theist, theosophist, or agnos- 
 tic, who should allow that the power which gives 
 form and force to the law of life has given us also a 
 natural means for the interpretation of this law mi^ht, 
 for the purposes of this inquir}', waive the consicicra- 
 tion of ulterior problems and search with us fur the 
 natural grounds of such vital or religious law. At 
 any rate, we look no further than nature here for the 
 basis of re-ligious thouglit. The philosopliv of relig- 
 ion is conceived as a form of naliu'al piiilooophy. 
 
 And having identitied religion with the rational law 
 of life, as disclosed in the specilic charact(.'r of the 
 being with wliieh we havr brcn enclnwcHJ by nature, 
 we lind that tlie sjihere of rcbgion includes the spliere 
 
6 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 of morals as the greater includes the less. Ethical law 
 is but a part of the law of life as a whole. In so far, 
 therefore, we differ from those who would expand 
 the content of ethics so as to include all conduct or 
 conscious direction of life whatever. We have con- 
 ceived the theory of ethics, distinctively, as the funda- 
 mental theory of associative life, believing that the laws 
 commonly recognized as moral are practically limited 
 to the requirements of organic (not necessarily primi- 
 tive) social law. Such a limitation of the scope of 
 ethics, however, though consistent with general hab- 
 its of thought, as we maintain, and an aid therefore 
 to effectiveness of treatment, is mainly a matter of 
 classification, and of the classification of phenomena, 
 too, which cannot be marked off by abrupt or definite 
 lines. The vital principle fuses and unifies all the 
 activities of life. And the philosophy of life would 
 remain the same even if we should include the whole 
 of life within the sphere of ethics, banishing religion 
 to the putative sphere of the supernatural. The rela- 
 tions of language to thought, nevertheless, are so inti- 
 mate, and conduct depends so largely upon habit, that 
 old names, to which the theorist may as theorist prop- 
 erly be indifferent, ought not to be lightl}' discarded 
 in matters of practice; and, unless we arbitrarily ex- 
 tend the scope of morals, a term more comprehensive 
 than morality is needed to cover the entire discipline 
 and conduct of life. Such a term we have ready to 
 hand in the word religion. To certain extremists 
 it ma}^ seem that the associations inseparable from the 
 name arc misleading, or even vicious, but on tl^e 
 
NATURE AND DEITY 7 
 
 whole more will be lost, we believe, than can be 
 gained by the excision of a word of so great breadth 
 and inspirational power. Religion is a word which 
 is not a mere word. It is a force. 
 
 The idealism which emerges as the result of this 
 inquiry, and into which religion is here resolved, 
 will hardly be confounded, after what has been said, 
 with philosophic idealism, or the system of thought 
 which resolves all being into forms of thought. The 
 questions raised by idealism as a philosophical theory 
 are beside the aim of this essay. The ideal here 
 represents the form which rational conduct contin- 
 ually approximates, and is contrasted with the real, 
 not as thought is contrasted with things, but as the 
 perfection of the ideal is contrasted with its incom- 
 plete manifestation in the real ; and the actual or real 
 which should perfectly exemplify the type would be 
 itself the ideal. And the law of approximation to 
 the type, or the ideal law, is implied in the principles 
 in which nature universal has founded the nature of 
 our humanity, and is deepl}^ impressed, in part at 
 least, upon our instincts. It appears, in one of its 
 aspects, as the moral sense, or the intuitive sense of 
 right, which is sometimes made the ultimate ground 
 of moral distinctions. A theory is needed, however, 
 to give greater certainty and consistency to the sug- 
 gestions of this moral sense, which is unequally de- 
 veloped in dilTerent minds, and, witli the practical 
 advantages, has the imperfections of an instinct, and 
 to reduce its deliveranc(^s, if possible, to a general prin- 
 cijile or law which shall appeal witli paramount an- 
 
8 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 thority to all rational minds. Such a general law, 
 we submit, is to be found in the law of human hap- 
 piness or well-being. The fundamental precepts of 
 ethics derive their authority, we maintain, from the 
 fact that their fulfillment is a condition indispensable 
 to that complete discharge of the vital functions as 
 a whole in which life attains its happiest consumma- 
 tion and most perfect form. 
 
 This most perfect life, conceived as an expression 
 of the universal life, we have called divine; and nat- 
 ure in her ideal aspect generally we contemplate, 
 in like manner, as nature in her deity or divinity. 
 Exception may be taken to this use of a term which 
 might be supposed to have no place in a merely nat- 
 vu^alistic scheme. But, after Spinoza, no justification 
 is needed. Nature and deity are not by the force of 
 the terms mutually exclusive. It is a mere incident 
 of theology and its skeptical counterpart, so to speak, 
 that the divine should now be expunged from nature 
 and relegated to the domain, knowable or unknowable, 
 of the non-natural or the supernatural, and religious 
 sentiment has never perhaps wholly divested nature 
 of the divinity with which she was associated in the 
 antique thought. Christianity itself, from Paul the 
 Apostle down to Berkele}^ the philosophizing bishop, 
 has shown distinctively pantheistic leanings. The 
 identification of the divine with the ideal has, more- 
 over, gone into literature, and only those who are 
 violently theistic, or those who are as yet in the vio- 
 lence of their reaction from theism, will see a nec- 
 essary incongruity in the recognition of deity in the 
 
NATURE AND DEITY 9 
 
 ideal aspects and tendencies discernible in the general 
 being of nature. So at least we are persuaded. But 
 if a man will insist that "religion'' and "the divine" 
 are but the perishable terms of an illusion which 
 must one day be dispelled, the natural laws which 
 govern the quest and cultus of the ideal will remain 
 nevertheless the same, and will remain equally au- 
 thoritative, with whatever terms associated, in deter- 
 mining the conduct of reasonable men. And these 
 are the laws which we have attempted here to ration- 
 alize or trace to their general grounds in the natural 
 scheme of things. 
 
 For the rest, the essay must be left to the judg- 
 ment of the reader for what it is worth, with the sug- 
 gestion, only, that he weigh its conclusions more 
 considerately than its terms. Its language is general, 
 since it is addressed to no particular class, unless 
 such as are willing to discuss religious topics with 
 the freedom which they assert in other directions of 
 inquiry may be called a class. And its aim is con- 
 structive rather than critical. Criticism of old sys- 
 tems has already done its most eilective work. It 
 remains now, if religion shall be taken still in any 
 vital sense, to refer its verities to the ground of the 
 natural and the knowable, on the one hand, and to 
 guard it from moral indilTcrentism, on the other. 
 And "divine" philosophy may in fact, we are con- 
 vinced, be presented in terms of a natural philosophy 
 without loss of moral or inspirational force. 
 
NATURE AND DEITY. 
 
 I. 
 
 The truth, it would seem, is most profitable, not for instruction 
 alone, but in its bearing too upon life. — Aristotle: Nichomachean 
 Ethics. X. I. 
 
 Under the stars, or by the mountains or the sea, 
 the contemplative mind, escaping the fever and con- 
 straint of its working-day aims, is conscious of a deep 
 affinity with the power and being of the natural world. 
 Nature then, that to our conventionalized thought is 
 a mere mechanic mass wanting an inner original drift, 
 is revealed as an omnipresent life, a perduring vital 
 energy, of which man himself is but a phase and 
 product. A common principle animates all being. 
 But seen in Nature's vast perspective, how fleeting 
 and contracted is man's particular being. His boldest 
 thought is awed by her infinitudes. Nor by her vast- 
 er motions or her starry spaces only is his sense op- 
 pressed. A blade of grass, a pebble, the merest ripple 
 that breaks the surface of a pool, lures his thouglit 
 into a sea of change that batlles thought. Nay, the 
 mind, self-conscious subject, the mind which thinks, 
 finds in itself a world (jf causes, relations, laws, as 
 olijcctive and as deep and strange as those of any far- 
 oil world or system of worlds beyond the limit of our 
 
 11 
 
12 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 natural vision. Within as without we encounter the 
 mystery of being. 
 
 And the sense of this myster}^ it may be conceded, 
 is an element of the religious sense. The awe which 
 fills the soul in moments of religious exaltation would 
 fail or vanish were the universe to shrink from its in- 
 finitude to the small compass of our intelligence. But 
 religion is not amazement merely or blind stupefac- 
 tion. To acquire a religious value, feeling must as- 
 sume a measure of consistency and form, for though 
 the depth of religious feeling may obscure the formal 
 or intellectual elements of religion, the feeling, as re- 
 licrious, can not be defined as the mere recoil of 
 baffled intelligence: it must be informed b}^ some 
 positive idea. Religious ideas, it is true, are vari- 
 able, hard to hold and define. As they are inces- 
 santly changing and expanding with the giowth of the 
 mind and the shifting of the mental horizon, it is only 
 in their more general content or intention that they 
 are likely to be constant. Such pervading intention, 
 however, it seem.s possible to trace. A certain sub- 
 stance or positive content survives the long process 
 of religious change, and constitutes, at least for such 
 stages of man's religious development as it is our 
 purpose to consider, what we ma}- fairly assume to be 
 characteristic or essential in religion — its underljnng 
 thought and its underlying aim. 
 
 If we separate religion from its mere ceremonial 
 or uninformed habit, its vital underlying thought is 
 the idea of power,in nature or through nature in some 
 way made manifest, guiding from within or from 
 
NATURE AND DEITY 1 3 
 
 without the operations of nature, and determining also 
 our human lot. Such a thought has its seat deep in 
 the sources of feeling, and is found in intimate relation 
 with the most significant acts of life. In serious 
 minds it is interwoven with every purpose of life. 
 Religion appears on its practical side, accordingly, 
 as a paramount aim: an aim, that is to say, inspired 
 by the hopes or the fears associated with our concep- 
 tion of overruling power, to harmonize our lives with 
 the will or determination of such power. And this, 
 it would seem, is religion's permanent or underlying 
 aim. 
 
 By the rudest minds this overruling power is con- 
 ceived as embodied in many forms, human in kind, 
 and influenced by ordinary human motives: the con- 
 ception of deity is polytheistic and rudel}^ anthropo- 
 morphic. At a stage of culture relatively more 
 advanced, these various forms, subordinated by de- 
 grees to the authority of a single will, coalesce at 
 length in a single power, which, however, is still 
 conceived as personal and, in the character of its mo- 
 tives, essentially human: religion becomes monothe- 
 istic. Later this personality is idealized. The moral 
 obligation, at first but loosely associated with the re- 
 ligious, gains in time a certain ascendency among 
 religious obligations; the arbitrary and ceremonial 
 elements of reli<fion are subordinated or slowly de- 
 cay; and in the comjilete identification of the jier- 
 sonal deity with the moral id(\'il we reach tlie 
 consummation of tlu^ anthropomorpliic conception 
 of supreme power. 
 
14 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 The conception of overruling power as a human or 
 personal deity, a conception which tends to dissociate 
 nature from her inworking life, is rarely held, how- 
 ever, in its simplicity. It is modified inevitably by 
 the effect of our perpetual contact with nature, whose 
 operations challenge all attempts to conform them to 
 personal or human patterns, or to compress them with- 
 in the scope of quasi-human ends ;and we may discover 
 all along in the later development of religious thought 
 traces of the difficulty which has been felt, especially 
 in moral speculation, in completely personifying 
 nature, or deity conceived as the author and control- 
 ler of nature. Theism and providential theories 
 have felt the influence of naturalism, or the habit of 
 dealing with nature as an original rather than a 
 derivative power. 
 
 But under whatever name or type we seek to fig- 
 ure the being of deity, or the relations which we sus- 
 tain to the power, natural or supernatural, which we 
 call divine, the type is more or less blurred, the rela- 
 tions are more or less confused. The subject, in 
 fact, mocks our efforts to grasp it. Infinity here em- 
 barrasses all our measurements or appreciations. 
 The mind, passing from form to form, each in some 
 degree intelligible, finds the forms numberless; or, 
 tracing the power in nature through its perceptible 
 modes, loses its way in an endless succession of modes. 
 All pathways vanish in a shadowy land to which not 
 even thought can climb: to us their end is mystery; 
 and our vision of nature, and our conception of the 
 power resident in nature or manifest through nature, 
 
NATURE AND DEITY 1 5 
 
 are obscured under the continual pressure of this 
 mystery. It is the perceptible and the intelligible, 
 nevertheless, which give to the impression its quality 
 and distinctiveness. The merely inscrutable is to 
 the religious sense nothing. The power which every- 
 where invites our scrutiny, though in the end it 
 outruns all inquiry by its immensity and infinite com- 
 plexity, impresses us primarily by that which our 
 scrutiny reveals. The mj'stery of the unknown is 
 the suggestion of that which we know. Ar.d we are 
 still in the field of the known or knowable when we 
 consider those elements or aspects of universal power 
 which, giving color by induction as it were to the 
 vague unknown into which all knowledge fades, are 
 the natural and universal symbols of the infinite, the 
 essential objects and media of religious thought. 
 
 And our object here is to search in this knowable 
 realm for the basis of a religious philosophy. It is 
 not our purpose to trace out the natural history of 
 religion, so to speak, and prove its identity from the 
 germ to the ripest form. Ethnologically, that is, as 
 phases of the human mind maturing under dilTerent 
 conditions, all the forms of religion have value, and 
 science properly takes cognizance of even the most 
 barbarous forms. But systems of religion embody 
 systems of thought — theories of nature and human 
 nature — which may be true or which may be false; 
 and religious philosopliy, great as is its debt to ethnol- 
 ogy and the history of religions, is, as philosophy, 
 directly interested only in determining the theory 
 whicli is true. Its aim is to ascertain, not that which 
 
1 6 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 men have hitherto believed or done, but, within the 
 scope of its subject, that which in fact or in princi- 
 ple is true, that which as practical law is wholesome 
 and sound. .The rationalization of religion, in short, 
 is its object. And this is our object here. And as- 
 suming that the subject-matter of religion is univer- 
 sal power and the method of harmonizing our lives 
 with its laws, we shall attempt to interpret this power, 
 in the religious sense, as natural power, and to de- 
 duce the method of the religious life from the forms 
 of natural law. 
 
 As against the utility of such an aim, it may be 
 urged that the truth of religious thought is of little 
 moment as compared with the strength of religious 
 feeling; and religion, it is said, is most fitly defined 
 in terms of feeling. And doubtless religion, which 
 to have any effective existence must exist as a dom- 
 inant force, can scarcely be said to be present where 
 strong emotional elements are wanting. But mere 
 excitement or hysteria is not religion. Religious 
 feeling is the emotional phase of some idea. Our 
 ideas may be adopted by inheritance, by contact, by 
 insensible absorption, without conscious submission 
 to the tests of truth ; they may be contradictory, irrec- 
 oncilable under any theory; but ideas of some sort 
 must exist, vaguely and confusedly if not in definite 
 and harmonious relations, as necessary elements of 
 the religious consciousness. Thought must fuse with 
 feeling in the same conscious state. And to give 
 definiteness and purpose to the feeling it must be in- 
 spired by some vital defining conception of the gen- 
 
NATURE AND DEITY 1 7 
 
 eral aim and deeper relations of life. Strength and 
 concentration of feeling cannot proceed from confu- 
 sion of thought, and religious feeling is weak to-day 
 because it has lost its own drift. It wants the direct- 
 ive force of a strong and persistent idea. 
 
 Or it is urged that religion is essentially a matter 
 of conduct. The moralist, looking at religion mainly 
 in its practical aspect, that is, as characterized by the 
 form of the will and of the acts which it initiates, 
 contends sometimes that there is little in religion but 
 the discipline of the will. Conduct, he may aver, 
 has but the remotest connection with the form of re- 
 licrious belief, or even with theories of conduct. 
 Modes of faith may involve, in the rigor of logic, 
 conclusions which the will systematically repudiates, 
 and errors of logic, it is urged, and errors of faith are 
 alike immaterial if one's life is in the right. And 
 there is an element of truth in this contention. Re- 
 ligion on its practical side, which is mainly ethical, 
 has adopted the results of experience. The religious 
 life, it is now broadly conceded, must be first of all 
 a moral life, and our moral ideals have assumed the 
 shape in which we find them only after prolonged 
 and varied experimental tests. But the forms of re- 
 ligious belief or the theories of religion, which in- 
 cludes the theory of morals, are commonly olTered as 
 superior to criticism and the teachings of experience 
 alike. Theories so held have, unquestionably, no 
 vital relation to practice. A verified theory, on the 
 other ha!ul, or a theory which had received sucli 
 verification as a considerate view of experience may 
 
1 8 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 afforo, would be found in practice invaluable. Ethical 
 distinctions are drawn for the most part instinctively, 
 that is, in accordance with mental habits which have 
 been organized into what is called the moral con- 
 sciousness, or the conscience. But the moral instincts 
 appear to enjoy no special immunity from error or 
 confusion. In undeveloped tribes they share the 
 imperfect development of the mind, and among va- 
 rious tribes give various and sometimes conflicting 
 results. And even in developed communities the 
 older instincts clash with sound but relativelj^ feeble 
 convictions of a later civilization. The personal ob- 
 ligation as intuitively apprehended conflicts with the 
 public obligation, and often quite overpowers it. 
 The sublime instinct of pity may fill a land with pau- 
 pers. And, in general, the growing complexity of 
 our civilization presents problems so novel and intri- 
 cate that the instincts which make up the body and 
 force of conscience are not seldom at fault and in- 
 competent to resolve their several tendencies into 
 resolute and harmonious action. In the emergencies 
 thus arising an analysis of the moral situation with 
 reference to some broad principle becomes a neces- 
 sity, and if one is in possession of a well-grounded 
 theory, to which the moot questions of morals may 
 be referred, such a theorj^ has the strongest possible 
 relation to practice. Theories and modes of faith 
 which cannot be tested, or which ask immunity from 
 the tests of truth, are indeed irrelevant to the purpose 
 of the teacher or disciplinarian. An attested theory, 
 on the other hand, is his chief desideratum. 
 
NATURE AND DEITY I9 
 
 But in attempting to frame such a theory, the theo- 
 retical aspect of religion (in which morals must be 
 included) is isolated, we should remember, only by 
 abstraction. Distinctions in the field of view serve 
 a useful end, of course, and are in fact indispensable 
 to the accuracy of a general survey. But in the field 
 of mental phenomena few, if any such distinctions, 
 are absolute. Religion, as a form of thought, must 
 give tone to the feeling, and, so far as the convictions 
 it represents are genuine convictions, must bear upon 
 the will and its acts; as feeling, it rests upon an in- 
 terpretation of universal power and a certain general 
 view of life, that is, upon a form of thought, which, 
 where religion is a vital fact and not a mere survival 
 of external habit, determines the form and tendency 
 of the feeling; while in its practical aspect, that is, 
 as it affects the determinations of the will, it stands 
 in immediate relation to motives, in which both feel- 
 ing and thought combine to express themselves in 
 action. Thought, will, and feeling, separable in idea, 
 are thus inseparable in fact. Our view will be dis- 
 torted, therefore, if we carry the distinction, as in 
 pliilosophy it has been carried, farther than is neces- 
 sary for convenience of treatment. As a vital reality 
 religion, various as are its aspects, shares the unity 
 of the mind which is its seat. 
 
 litre, however, our immediate object being neitlier 
 edification ntjr disciplin(\we must leave to the prophet 
 and mentor the main di^eliaij^t* of these hij^h 
 functions. Our spccilic jnirpose is, as we have said, 
 to examini' ihr basis of ri'liifious tlioujjlit anil tlie 
 
20 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 method and purpose of the reh'gious life, in the hope 
 of contributing in some degree to the rationalization 
 of religious theory. How much the matter is in need 
 of revision appears from the general unrest which 
 pervades men's minds. For centuries the funda- 
 mental religious idea, though variable and on the 
 whole progressive, has corresponded to cosmic con- 
 ceptions which, in the light of our present knowledge, 
 are felt to be defective and misleading. The changed 
 aspect presented by the face of nature seems to re- 
 quire some modification of the fundamental religious 
 idea through which we undertake to interpret nature. 
 At any rate, doubt and disquiet are common; and as 
 belief without evidence, or against the evidence, 
 though sometimes paraded as a virtue, is but the 
 vice of an indolent or a servile mind, our only course, 
 if Vv'e really respect the truth and are anxious for a 
 rational adjustment of the religious problem, is to 
 exiimiiie the crrounds of our convictions and of our 
 doiib '^, nnd to reason our way, if possible, to a well- 
 rounded belief. And the end to be attained in such 
 nil iiK[iiiry is not merely intellectual assurance and 
 rr^poFe. We have in fact, on practical grounds, the 
 strongest of motives to attempt the resolution of our 
 doubts or the rationalization of our beliefs, not only 
 in the elTect of religion on the particular form of the 
 conduct, but in the tendency of religion — a tendency 
 which strengthens with the strength of religious pos- 
 session — to harmonize the dissentient impulses of the 
 soul, enlarge and unif}^ our aims, and give force and 
 efficacy to the life. Compare our skeptical age with 
 
NATURE AND DEITY 21 
 
 the ages of faith. In those unreflecting ages — how 
 vainly we sigh for their rclurn — faith was weakened 
 by no misgivings or reserves. It had then the force 
 of a real conviction. And to what achievement, 
 what sacrifice, men were borne by their faith! But 
 the force of that conviction fails. The old tenden- 
 cies in the feelings and the will yet retain a strength 
 that is left of habit and certain remnants of belief, 
 but the faith that sustained them is feeble or wanting, 
 and loss of faith must betray itself in distraction of 
 feeling and flaws of the will, unless genuine convic- 
 tions m;ike good the decay. Conviction, however, 
 in a candid mind, comes not with the wishing: it 
 follows the weight of evidence. There are many, it 
 is true, who value what is taught as religion less for 
 the evidence of its truth than for its iteration of pleas- 
 ing hopes. To such fables will still be told. And 
 the number of this kind, and the vogue which num- 
 bers give to a timorous and sensuous habit in religious 
 thought, have driven men of virile minds and women 
 with a passion for truth to aver that the whole fabric 
 of religion is but the eilect of illusiiMi. Let us by all 
 means, even in religion, divide fancy from fact, the 
 presumj:)tions of desire from the convictions of truth. 
 It is time that the sense of veracity and the power to 
 apj")reciate evidence should make themselves felt in 
 religious philosophy as in science. But whatever we 
 discard, the power ojierative in nature, immanent or 
 transcendent, remains. And we remain, subject to 
 the laws of growth and cKeay, of sulTering and joy, 
 of well-being and ill, as in the nature of things estab- 
 
22 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 lished. The form of these laws, the mode of their 
 operation, and our general relations to the power to 
 which they owe their force, are questions of fact; 
 and there must be some statement of such laws, if by 
 wit or patience or good hap we may arrive at it, 
 which is true. We must allow, therefore, unless we 
 dogmatically den}^ the possibility of such a statement, 
 or insist on a definition of religion which excludes it 
 from the domain of nature and of rational thought, 
 that there may be a true religious philosophy, or a 
 resolution of the fundamental problems presented in 
 each individual life which will command the cre- 
 dence and attention of the most rigorous devotee of 
 truth. And this fundamental truth has the same vital 
 interest for the rational mind by whatever name it 
 be known. The aim of the present inquiry is the 
 exploration of this truth, and religion is here under- 
 stood as resting, proximately at least, on a basis of 
 natural law. 
 
II. 
 
 AUe Schopfung ist werk der Natur. — Goethe. 
 
 internum namque illud et infinitum ens, quod Deum seu naturara 
 appellamus, eadera, qua existit, necessitate agit. — Spinoza. 
 
 Aside from verbal revelation, which is usually re- 
 garded as without the scope of philosophical inquiry, 
 the tendency of religious thought has been to search 
 for its fundamental principles in the constitution, or 
 assumed original content, of the mind itself, as known 
 a prior i^ that is, with more than empirical certainty. 
 It has seemed unsafe to build on sensible data, or 
 upon experience which may be resolved into sensible 
 elements. Descartes, accordingl}', finding in the 
 mind the idea of an intlnite being of infinite perfec- 
 tions, maintained that such an idea could never or- 
 iginate in an imperfect and finite mind, and must be 
 traced to such infinite being actually existent as its 
 only adecpuite cause. And so he would prove, with- 
 out other evidence than the idea of God, the actual 
 existence of God in character antl tlistinctiveness 
 corresponding to the idea. Kant, again, unable to 
 construe the mere presence of an idea in the mind as 
 proof of the existence of a corresponding object, held 
 that the assumption of God's existence is a necessity 
 of the moral consciousness, an inevitable hyjiolhcsis 
 of the practical reason, which nuist assume the ex- 
 istence of a cause adequate to the complete fulfillment 
 
 23 
 
24 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 of the moral law and its complete fruition in perfect 
 happiness. And this law, in virtue of which Kant 
 postulates freedom and immortality also, he authen- 
 ticates by reference, apparently, to a supersensuous 
 or intelligible or noumenal source. And thus, by 
 intuition, by inner suggestion, by deduction aprt07'i\ 
 or by some purely mental necessity, the certainty 
 which we demand for the fundamental datum of our 
 religious systems, that is, for the existence of a being 
 whose attributes and power are the sole and suffi- 
 cient basis of religion, is believed to be secured with- 
 out impairment or attainder of sense. 
 
 But the possibility of reaching such supra-sensible 
 certainty becomes more doubtful the more we study 
 the operations of the mind. The old philosophies 
 borrow their premises from a premature psychology. 
 Modern theories of cognition point to the conclusion 
 that first principles so-called, and, in general, princi- 
 ples assumed a -priori^ cannot either in religion or in 
 science be traced to a unique and mystical source 
 absolutely dissevered from the sources of sensuous 
 knowledge, or pretend, in virtue of their origin sim- 
 ply, to a certainty so absolute that it is superior to 
 criticism and needs no verification. With much 
 pains we have, it would seem, inverted the order of 
 thought. It is not the general principle, we learn, 
 but the sensible impression which is the original 
 datum. Not the law of gravitation but the fall of the 
 apple is first apprehended. And the process of knowl- 
 edge is in all cases essentially the same: it is the 
 same mortal and fallible mind which applies itself to 
 
NATURE AND DEITY 25 
 
 all the data of knowledge, arriving at such degree 
 of certainty as the conditions of knowledge and 
 the opportunities of verification permit. Even 
 the foundations of mathematics — mathematics, the 
 type of certainty and the env}' of metaphysicians — 
 are laid in experience. In short, experience, once 
 despised, by reason of its dependence on sense, as 
 infecting with a species of taint all knowledge into 
 which it enters, appears to afford the grounds of 
 whatever certainty attaches to principles assumed a 
 Priori and exalted above experience. 
 
 Leaving out of consideration, then, theories which 
 assume a sphere and faculty of cognition independent 
 of experience, we find current a theory which allies 
 itself more closely with the assumptions of common 
 thought. It is essentially a dualistic theory. It pos- 
 tulates, it is true, an original, eternal, self-existent 
 spirit from whom all things proceed, and is in so far 
 monistic; but the creation which it assumes is a pro- 
 cess remote from the common thought, or a mere 
 dogma of which no exposition is attempted: virtually 
 it recognizes a thorough-going partition of being, a 
 material substance shaped by an immaterial force, a 
 universal body intormed by a universal mind. And 
 these correlatives, matter and spirit, body and mind, 
 reflect, it is obvious, the opposition conceived as ex- 
 isting between the human body and the human mind. 
 The mind is regarded as a several whole, with an 
 individuality distinct from that of the l)()dv, which it 
 o':cupies as a tenant liolds his tenement, and wliich 
 in (hie time it will cjuit with no impairment of its or- 
 
26 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 iginal character, but with enlargement of its freedom 
 rather, the body being regarded, after old Heraclitus, 
 as the prison or grave of the spirit which at death is 
 restored to liberty and life. But the relation between 
 body and mind is more intimate than this hypothesis 
 implies. The mind, in its growth, modifications, and 
 decay reflects with minute fidelity the growth, mod- 
 ifications, and decay of the hody^ and particularly of 
 those parts of the body — the brain and nerves and 
 the organs of sense — which are most immediately as- 
 sociated with our conscious life. Such concomitance 
 seems to point to a certain dependence or interde- 
 pendence, or some sort of causal connection. The 
 relation, in fact, is so intimate that it is difficult if not 
 impossible to isolate the sphere of mental activity by 
 any definite boundary. No sharp line marks the 
 threshold of consciousness. And shall we say that 
 there is nothing corresponding to mental life below 
 the line? Ordinarily we limit the sphere of mind to 
 the sphere of consciousness; but all conscious action 
 is found to rest upon a basis of unconscious activity 
 in which, as it would seem, it were arbitrary to deny 
 that there is something of intelligence or of the qual- 
 ity of mind. Starting with the dualistic theory of 
 human personality it seems impossible to resolve 
 away the dualism even below the threshold of con- 
 sciousness and beyond the immediate organs of men- 
 tal life. In every organic structure, in every cell, 
 and even in each proximate principle, we discover 
 functions, affinities, self-determining powers, which 
 seem to bear to the matter in which they reside rela- 
 
NATURE AND DEITY 27 
 
 tions similar to those which the mind as a whole bears 
 to the body as a whole. Thus in the last analysis 
 body and mind, or their representative elements, are 
 still undissociated, and the conclusion seems to force 
 itself upon us that the same process which compounds 
 the material elements into the substance of the body 
 develops by gradation all the qualities of mind. 
 
 But the hypothesis that the body is the merely 
 local and temporary habitation of the mind, or a ma- 
 chine which may be spatially distinguished from its 
 director, the mind, has been extended, we have said, 
 beyond the limits of our particular being to the realm 
 of universal being. The phenomena of sensible ob- 
 servation are aOiliated upon a kind of body known as 
 nature, a bod}^ which, in virtue of the orderly and 
 systematic character of its movements, is assumed to 
 be under the control of a being who is individually 
 and severally distinguished from this body, and whose 
 essence is spirit or mind. Or, pushing the distinc- 
 tion to its extreme, we conceive of matter, the ab- 
 stract of all sensible, ponderable stull, as brute and 
 inert, without life or direction, save as animated by 
 that self-sustaining spirit which is conceived as the 
 original source of life and mind in general. But 
 closer familiarity with nature than was possible with 
 primitive methods of investigation teaches us that 
 matter brute and inert has no existence. Life and 
 mind, or the activities which are believed to betray 
 the influence of life and mind, are present in the 
 minutest atom. There is nothing in nature which 
 is merely passive, dependent, lifeless. Kvery ele- 
 
28 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 ment has its inherent qualities, its original activity 
 and impulse, which, however compounded or ob- 
 scured, are never annulled, and the intelligence which 
 has been conceived as centered in a separate presid- 
 ing mind is found omnipresent in nature and involved 
 in the very existence of matter. Matter and spirit, 
 that is to say, are separable in thought but inseparable 
 in fact. The reality, considered from without, as 
 inert object passively determined by some guiding 
 force or principle conceptual]}^ distinguished from 
 the object, is body or matter: considered from with- 
 in, as subject and itself the origin of determinative 
 force, it is spirit or mind. And as this inner deter- 
 minative principle, thus distinguished from matter in 
 thought, is never dissociated from matter in fact, it 
 would seem more reasonable to regard the directive 
 principle of nature in general as immanent and in- 
 herent in the bod}^ of nature than to erect it, hypos- 
 tatizing our abstraction, into a several, distinct and 
 transcendent being. 
 
 Be^'ond this we need not go. The ultimate con- 
 stitution of matter and mind it is unnecessary to dis- 
 cuss in the present inquiry. So far as we are now 
 concerned, we may treat either as a function of its 
 correlative, taking sides with the spiritualists on the 
 one hand or the materialists on the other; or, with 
 certain evolutionists, we ma}^ regard them as inde- 
 pendent entities exhibiting parallel phenomena; or 
 we may interpret them after the manner of Spinoza, 
 in a monistic sense, as coordinate aspects of one and 
 the same complex reality. But all theories must as- 
 
NATURE AND DP:iTY 29 
 
 sume the being of nature, and the action of a direct- 
 ive principle in the operations of nature. Here we 
 insist only that this directive principle be interpreted, 
 in religion as in science, through the modes of nature, 
 that is to say, we recognize the sufficiency of natural 
 law in the sphere of religious thought. 
 
 But in the criticism of men's beliefs we have 
 always to remember the preoccupations and the happy 
 inconsequence of the human mind. Even philoso- 
 phers will illogically reach conclusions that are true 
 from premises that are false, and few theories are in 
 practice pressed strictly to their full sequence of 
 error. It is inevitable too that general theories 
 adopted without much examination to explain a com- 
 plex assemblage of facts, which are themselves in- 
 distinctly apprehended, should be conceived with 
 more or less looseness, and that theories mutually 
 exclusive should be found maintaining a certain foot- 
 ing side by side in the same hospitable mind. We 
 find, accordingly, that the conception of spirit as 
 pure activit}', and of body as purely passive, is really 
 lost sight of in the ordinary view. The human body 
 is conceived as having a certain life of its own, inde- 
 pendent of the indwelling mind; and nature, in like 
 manner, is accorded undefined limits within which 
 she is vaguely supposed to exercise a certain initi- 
 ative, and to be capable on her own motion of orderly 
 and harmonious action. The elemental activities, 
 thr growth of i^lants, tlu^ instinct of animals, may be 
 included in the limits thus assigned to nature, limits, 
 however, which each man extends or contracts ac- 
 
30 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 cording to his point of view or the general tendency 
 of his thought; while the presiding mind is conceived 
 as combining the more or less dissociated activities 
 of nature to general ends, and particularly in the 
 human interest and to moral ends. And this is the 
 compromising view of the matter most generally 
 taken, perhaps, among ourselves to-day. The im- 
 manent life of nature forces recognition by the univer- 
 sality of its manifestation; while the sphere of deity, 
 as the external, governing mind, is restricted, barring 
 sporadic cases of divine interposition, to the realiza- 
 tion of high and ulterior ends, and, in general, to 
 such facts or phenomena as cannot be explained on 
 "natural" grounds. Hence every great acquisition 
 of science seems, by extending the bounds of nature, 
 to shrink the domain of deity. But the field of 
 nature, the sphere of natural law, still widens. And 
 each such extension strengthens our latent convic- 
 tion of the universality of natural law, so that we 
 trace with increasing confidence the broadest tenden- 
 cies and the highest results discoverable in the activ- 
 ity of nature not to a purpose imposed upon her from 
 without, but to principles recognized as proceeding 
 from within, and germane to her proper sphere. 
 There seems, at length, to be no room or require- 
 ment for the activity of a several, individual, and 
 presiding mind dominating from afar the activity of 
 nature. The unknown as fast as it becomes known 
 is found to be natural; the abstract and general, once 
 assumed as the pure product of mind, or as an ema- 
 nation from a purely mental or ''intelligible" world, 
 
NATURE AND DEITY 3 1 
 
 appear but to note our discrimination and summation 
 of certain particulars perceived in the concreteness 
 of the natural world ; and the conclusion seems in- 
 evitable that the intelligence which we had set over 
 against nature, as the readiest explanation of her or- 
 der and harmonies, is inherent in the constitution of 
 nature. 
 
 But is not this conclusion over-bold as yet? Are 
 the methods of nature so patent and familiar that we 
 can deny the intervention of any occult or non- 
 natural principle whatever in the operations of nature? 
 Development theories are rife — and plausible. They 
 explain much, perhaps; but there is much more 
 which they are but assumed to explain. Have they 
 as yet made intelligible, for instance, the process by 
 which life in the specific sense is evolved from inan- 
 imate matter, or from matter which is alive only in 
 the broader or, if you please, metaphorical sense? 
 Or if it be allowed that the physiologist has discovered 
 in the affinity of protoplasm for oxygen the inorganic 
 reason for organic movement — or the chemical ex- 
 planation of a biological fact and the transitional 
 stage between animate and inanimate being — what 
 shall we say of the transition from the unconscious 
 to the conscious, from physiological life to psychic 
 life? Is not the wit of savant and philosopher baffled 
 in every attempt to figure in i magi nation even a pos- 
 sible mode of such transition? In excludinif the 
 supernatural and allirminif the suflicirncv of natural 
 causes we are, it would seem, but substitutin<r one 
 hypothesis for another. And wc may admit that 
 
32 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 this is true. But the hypothesis on which we are 
 proceeding seems the more reasonable of the two, 
 seeing that the hypothesis of the supernatural is not 
 supported by what we know and understand, but rests 
 upbn a putative basis in the unintelligible and the un- 
 known. We might even contend that there is no 
 operation of the mind by which the supernatural can 
 be known. But it is not our purpose to discuss the 
 theory of knowledge. The hypothesis, if such we 
 must still call it, of the universality and sufficiency of 
 natural law is a postulate of this inquiry. Nature, 
 as contrasted with humanity and the human mind is 
 assumed so far at least as the present investigation is 
 concerned, as coextensive with being, and our prob- 
 lem is to outline the philosophy of religion, if such a 
 thing may be done, upon principles not assumed to 
 tianscend the sphere of the simply natural. 
 
III. 
 
 All the vast bodies that compose this mighty frame, how distant 
 and remote soever, are by some secret mechanism, some divine art 
 and force, linked in a mutual dependence and intercourse with each 
 other. — Berkeley 
 
 Taking the ground, then, that nature is in religion 
 as in science the proper field of knowledge, we iden- 
 tify, generally, the power which is the theme of re- 
 ligious thought with nature's universal energy. 
 
 But nature touches us in every mood and appeals 
 to us in every sense. Environed and sustained by 
 nature, we cannot for an instant escape her influence, 
 or survive out of relation with lier in any element of 
 our being. All is nature. According to the theory 
 upon which we are proceeding, all is natural. Good 
 and evil, fair and foul, man's wretchedness and wrong 
 no less than his noblest virtues and greatest good fort- 
 une, are all alike the issue of the processes of nature. 
 It is not enough, therefore, simply to identify tlie 
 power to wliich religious feeling appeals and re- 
 sponds with natural power. How may we conceive 
 of tliis jiowrr, which in its universality impresses us 
 in every form of being, and through every sense, as 
 appealing to us distinctively in the religious sense? 
 
 If we noti* the habit of the relitrious mind we tiiul 
 it most impressible to nature apprehendi'd in the 
 large, in such general motions and broader pliases as 
 
 ay 
 
34 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 efface the sense of the individual, the particular, and 
 the personal. The specific thing, its color and line 
 and curious detail, are searched by the intellect, as it 
 searches everywhere, in the mere zeal to know; but 
 the religious sense, ignoring the egoism and conten- 
 tions of particular being, searches for an all-embrac- 
 ing unit}^ in virtue of which the particular and the 
 individual exist, and from which they borrow such 
 religious interest as they awaken. It tends continually 
 to grasp nature as its object under the form of a single 
 idea. 
 
 This tendency may be compared with the philo- 
 sophical impulse to unif}- our knowledge, or to reduce 
 all nature as the general object of knowledge to a 
 single principle, type, or form. But the mere unifi- 
 cation of knowledge will not in itself content the re- 
 ligious impulse. The unity of the natural world is 
 sometimes conceived, for instance, as unity of compo- 
 sition, and the chemist would determine, in hydrogen, 
 say, or in some element perhaps as yet undissociated, 
 the ultimate form of matter, and thus reduce all nature 
 to a primal substratum or stuff. But atomic units are 
 of as little service to religion as atomic weights. 
 There is nothing necessarily hostile to the religious 
 interest in the idea of a universe compounded of sim- 
 ilar elements, which yield by their permutations and 
 combinations the infinite diversity so grateful to our 
 human sense. A rational religion must find means to 
 accommodate itself to any fact, if it be indeed a fact. 
 But religion has its peculiar interests, and interprets 
 the universe only as it seems to be related to such in- 
 
NATURE AND DEITY 35 
 
 terests; and though the minute investigation of nature 
 has given us a truer conception of natural processes 
 and natural power, the religious interest attaches to 
 being as compounded rather than to the elemental 
 points or pulses of being, to nature alive and whole, 
 rather than — to recall the sneer of Mephistopheles 
 in Faust — to nature broken and disintegrated and 
 stripped of her vital charm. 
 
 And yet the finer anal^^sis to which nature has 
 been subjected by the science of our time does but 
 confirm and extend the view which the general life 
 of nature might at any time suggest. Poh theism, 
 pantheism, and a)l the forms of worship which sim- 
 ply deify the power of nature, are evidence of a na- 
 tive tendency in man to conceive the action of nature, 
 as it was apprehended by the Ionic founders of phi- 
 losophy, under the form of vital action. A closer study 
 of the facts corrects, of course, the extravagance and 
 crudity of many primitive notions. But closer stud}^ 
 discloses everywhere in nature interaction, interde- 
 pendence, correspondence. The light of the stars 
 tinds an answering sensibility in the eye; the 
 p(jnderous eartli thrills with maiden delicacy to 
 the varying moods of the sun; and the same ele- 
 mental forces which sustain the planetary masses 
 centre in a droji of dew. And in this universal recip- 
 rocity and communion, comparable with tlie nexus 
 which correlates and unilies the parts of a livin<' be- 
 ing, we see all things bound to all in vital union. A 
 common principle animates and conscMvrs in prrfect 
 solidarity the general mass of nature. Mens Ui^ildt 
 
36 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 moIe7n. The wide expanse of being, with its be- 
 wildering activities and endless diversity of form, 
 we conceive and rationalize as a process of growth, 
 resolution, and regeneration, in accordance with an 
 immanent law. Its unity or solidarity is an organic 
 unity. 
 
 And in contemplation of this pervading life we 
 seem to come nearer to the unifying principle which 
 in the religious interest we seek. Unity of organi- 
 zation, however, is not to be confounded here with 
 numerical unity. The synthesis in virtue of which 
 we attempt to conceive of nature as an organic unit 
 is never completed ; though all forms of being coalesce 
 in relations of organic union, this union is never pre- 
 sented as an organic whole. Nature discloses no ul- 
 timate limit. None of our individualizing terms, there- 
 fore, which define by comparison as from without are 
 in strictness applicable to nature universal, whom we 
 know only from within, and interpret only by pro- 
 gressive application of laws originally learned as in 
 relation to the particular and finite. And this pro- 
 gressive expansion of our knowledge of nature is 
 never finished. The organic nexus which binds the 
 elements and forces of nature never completes itself 
 to our apprehension in a perfected organism, in the 
 sum of all being rounded off as a unit of being. Nat- 
 ure, that is to say, is infinite. 
 
 But the term infinite is itself misinterpreted. What- 
 ever is distinguished as an object of thought so far as 
 to receive a distinctive name, tends by analogy to dis- 
 sociate itself from other named objects of thought 
 
NATURE AND DEITY 37 
 
 with more or less definite, not to say spatial, com- 
 pleteness. We objectify our own concepts or ideas. 
 And thus the term infinite (or endless), which is 
 properly a disclaimer of bounds and terminals, is 
 itself conceived as implying, even when applied to 
 universal being, a certain completed and bounded 
 individuality; whereas its true significance is that 
 the particulars through which, in accordance with 
 the laws of thought, we seek in any given case to 
 represent to ourselves the universal object of thought 
 are never exhausted. Infinite being is not an object 
 definitely presented to our apprehension and difTering 
 in kind from the beings we call finite. It includes 
 all being, and, in the degree to which the finite in 
 any case extends, is coincident with the finite. The 
 idea of the infinite has thus both positive and nega- 
 tive elements — a positive content, but vanishing limits. 
 While we yet regard being tlirough its oppositions 
 and repulsions, in its exterior relations, its bounda- 
 ries and individuality and form, it is finite; and all 
 defining thousfht, all thout^ht which rests in contem- 
 plation of a definite relation or particular content in 
 its object, must, by the force of the terms, be the 
 thought of an obj "Jct as finite. But as thought trans- 
 cends particular linens and removes each successive 
 limit, resting at no limitation, it passes frcmi the finite 
 to the infinite. The substance of the finite remains to 
 give cont(Mit and meaning to the infinite, or the infi- 
 nite were but a name; but the process which carries 
 the mind from limit to limit is never finished; the 
 finite rims into infinite series, the progression is end- 
 less. 
 
38 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 While therefore we see all the elements of being 
 subsisting in living organic union, the fact that being 
 is infinite, transcending all limits and exhausting all 
 modes, should deter us from any attempt to conclude 
 under the form of a unitarj' conception, as whole or 
 all, as object or person, or even as organism, the 
 characters of being universally^ Infinite being can 
 be reduced to, or defined by, no assignable form of 
 being. It appears in thought only representatively, 
 through the finite, and no particlar form of being, 
 as the human or personal, can serve as such a defi- 
 nition of being universal that we may deduce from it 
 particular conclusions as to the course of nature, for 
 instance, or the destiny of man. Our knowledge of 
 nature is attained by a study of the particulars of nat- 
 ure. We consider her in certain relations, and what 
 we learn of her is valid in such relations. We ap- 
 proach her from a dillerent aspect and add to our 
 knowledge. Continuing our observations, we extend 
 our view, subsuming under a few brief principles 
 perhaps, like the laws of motion, a vast assemblage 
 of facts. And we may reach at length a point so 
 remote from the actual objects of sensible experience 
 that our thought, forgetting the data of its knowledge 
 and objectifying the product of its own abstraction, 
 leaps to the conclusion that it has attained, without 
 the intervention of sense, to a conception or idea by 
 which we may define the Infinite, and from which 
 we may extend our knowledge deductively, without 
 consideration of the facts, and even in the teeth of 
 the facts. So Plato defined and objectified the orig- 
 
NATURE AND DEITY 39 
 
 inal creative principle as The Good, which he referred 
 to a noetic world, a world of the mind; and so our 
 theologians still objectify the Moral Ideal, or identify 
 it with an individual yet infinite spirit — the concep- 
 tion has never been cleared of its contradictions — 
 dwelling apart in the spiritual world. And from the 
 character assigned to such infinite spirit it is assumed 
 that we may draw various conclusions as to the facts 
 of life. But the process is illicit. A principle, or 
 concept, or idea, by whatever effort of abstraction 
 or imagination it is reached, is still, so far as it is 
 legitimate and intelligible, but an abstract or re-com- 
 bination of certain data of experience, with no higher 
 warrant than the warrant of such experience, and 
 neither takes us quite out of the world of sensible 
 observation nor acquires such comprehensiveness and 
 breadth that it may serve as an exhaustive definition 
 of the infinite or the a priori ground of a complete 
 religious philosophy. We cannot compress the in- 
 finite and universal into a premiss. We have no such 
 premiss or key furnished in advance for the general 
 interpretation of nature — the dream of mediaeval sci- 
 ence — and we have no sufiicient clew in the assumed 
 general character or aims of the infinite for the an- 
 ticipation of our luunan destiny — the illusion slill of 
 theological science. Man and nature must be studied 
 through the particulars of human history and natural 
 events, and in religion as in science the deductions of 
 thought must start from the inductions of experience, 
 (^ur knowledge is not restiicted, it is true, to the 
 bare fact or actuality observed. Experience has bred 
 
40 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 in us the assurance — an assurance which logically 
 antedates our logic whether of induction or deduc- 
 tion, that nature's methods are uniform, that when 
 the conditions, particularly the conditions distin- 
 guished as causal, are the same the behavior of nat- 
 ure will be the same. In dealing with the elemental 
 forms and relations of matter we thus arrive at prin- 
 ciples of broad and very general application. The 
 law of gravitation, for instance, is applied to all mat- 
 ter; the principles of mathematics are extended to 
 all space; and the physicist turns his spectroscope 
 with absolute confidence in therevelations of color and 
 light to the remotest point which glows in the heav- 
 ens. Experience, therefore, when its results are 
 sifted and verified, is not coterminous with history, 
 but guides us with equal security through the "dark 
 backward and ab3^sm of time" and the dim reaches 
 of the future. The book of nature is both a record 
 and a prophecy. And the increase of our familiarity 
 with nature may continue indefinitely. No single 
 mind, in fact, can contain what now is known. Yet 
 however broad we make the sphere of the known, 
 our knowledge is conditioned by the experience of 
 which it is the abstract. We know that the particu- 
 lar fact will recur if onl3^ the observed conditions 
 recur. As to the presence of the conditions (which 
 really represent an infinity of causes) we must be 
 mainly in the dark. Even the principles of "pure" 
 science, in which our knowledge reaches its maxi- 
 mum of clearness and certainty, cannot escape the 
 uncertainties of misapplication and unsuspected con- 
 
NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 41 
 
 ditions, and it is with astonishment that we find the 
 computations of a Levenier or a Fresnel tallying with 
 the facts. And where the conditions, known and un- 
 known, are highly complex, as in pathology, history, 
 juridical procedure, social economy, we must con- 
 tent ourselves in the main with a mere probability. 
 But when, abandoning principles known and verified 
 (vcrcE causce), and fields of knowledge with which 
 we are more or less familiar, we assume such knowl- 
 edge of the modes, methods, or ends of universal be- 
 ing as to infer with a confidence which asks for no 
 verification tht'it righteousness must necessarily tri- 
 umph, or that this terrestrial life will be supplemented 
 by a life in which all inequalities will be adjusted, 
 and all sulTering compensated, we abandon the iield 
 of science and legitimate inference and assume little 
 less than omniscience. Such conclusions are to be 
 reached, if at all, not by direct inference from the 
 general character of the universal life, but b}' mediate 
 conclusion based on a study of the particular con- 
 ditions of our particular human life. No deductions 
 may be made from infinity. It is the unexplored deep 
 to which all knowledge leads, but in which all knowl- 
 edge fades and characterization fails. We may sym- 
 bolize the infinite by the more impressive of its finite 
 phases. We may put the known for both the known 
 and the vast unknown in which all knowledire mertres, 
 but the universal reality, or that which we represent 
 by the phrase, nuist be conceived, from the very 
 wealth (jf its attributes, as in its lujinversalitv untle- 
 termimcl and undefined — a jiremiss transcending all 
 
42 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 definite knowledge, and from which no definite infer- 
 ence can be drawn. The unencom passed reality be- 
 comes indeed, representatively or symbolically, an 
 object of thought, but the being of the object still 
 overmasters or transcends our thought; thought never 
 traverses this reality. And we mark our sense of this 
 transcendence by such terms as the Infinite, the Uni- 
 versal, the Absolute. Somewhere our thought must 
 pause. Beginning with the finite, it reaches no ter- 
 minal, and notes by a symbol, as it were in despair, 
 both its own exhaustion and the reality which it must 
 leave untraversed. 
 
 But a more definite symbolism is demanded by the 
 processes of religious thought and the needs of relig- 
 ious feeling. As the submersion of all determinations 
 in the indeterminate extinguishes thought, infinite 
 being, to maintain a place in our thoughts, must be 
 represented by some more or less determinate and 
 interesting aspect of being. Undiscriminated being 
 — to refer to the Hegelian dialectic — is undistinguish- 
 able in thought from no-thing. Some type or symbol 
 drawn from the finite manifestations of the infinite 
 is therefore a necessity of thought, and religious 
 thought, following the religious interest, conceives 
 or symbolizes the infinite as infinite power or intel- 
 ligence or wisdom or goodness. And so long as 
 the mind moves freely among the special associations 
 which we cannot wholly disengage from the typical 
 thought, here necessarily borrowed from the human 
 type, we need not be betrayed into the metaphysical 
 vice of incarnating our symbols, or assume that the 
 
NATURE AND DEITY 43 
 
 sign is a sufficient exposition of the thing signified. 
 Unfortunately, with the special term we commonly 
 carry over the special sense. Conceiving of universal 
 power as personal, for instance, we tend continually 
 to limit its action to the scope of human aims and to 
 weigh all nature in the partial scales of human inter- 
 est. Or, if we deny personality, and conceive of nat- 
 ure as a vast and complex machine, we interpret her 
 activity as at the level of ordinary mechanical ac- 
 tion, and miss the inner vivifying principle wliich 
 energizes matter apparently the most inert. Thus we 
 come to the study of nature with a bias. The symbol 
 is treated as a definition, a premiss from which all 
 that is involved in the term in its original and partic- 
 ular application may be deduced and applied to uni- 
 versal being. But if we remember that universal 
 being cannot be apprehended or defined as a whole, 
 that in the idea of the infinite we should look for the 
 vanishing-point rather than the starting point of 
 thought, we may use such symbols as the nature of 
 our thought or the method of our approach to the 
 infinite suggests. Here, seeking for a basis in the 
 known or knowable as the only basis upon which 
 we can build a rational theory of religion, we con- 
 ceive tlu' motions of the infinite, or of such aspects 
 of the infinite as are olTered to human apprehension 
 and interpretable tinough law, under the type of vital 
 or organic action. The present utility, at hast, of 
 such a symbol, is indisputable. It avoids, on the one 
 hand, \hv jnrpK'xing implications which it seems 
 impossible to disentangle from the mure specific idea 
 
44 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 of personality as applied to being in general; and it 
 precludes the assumption, on the other hand, that 
 nature in the vast realm of the so-called inorganic 
 and inanimate world is without inner deterimination 
 or even the suggestion of life. And its fitness is al- 
 ready recognized. From the time of Xenophanes the 
 continuit}^ and solidarity of universal being is a theme 
 which has never been abandoned in ohilosophical 
 thought. 
 
 But we are not restricted, let it be said, to this or 
 to any particular symbol. As no given symbol may 
 be taken as an adequate expression of the reality, 
 we are free to choose such form of expression as in 
 any case is truest to our thought. And in religion, 
 we should remember, the instinct of language obeys 
 mainly the suggestion of the emotions, and philos- 
 ophy may not assume to chide religion for giving ex- 
 pression to the feelings inspired by the infinite reality 
 in such terms as it is constrained to employ. But 
 philosophy indeed, by showing the incommensurabil- 
 ity of language or thought with the universal object 
 of thought, helps to maintain this freedom. It teaches 
 us that no name or phrase by which we seek to ex- 
 press the ineffable may be assumed to be sufficient 
 or final. It makes for religious freedom, therefore, 
 as agains*^ those advocates of religion who, clinging 
 to the names and forms and transient phases of relig- 
 ion, miss its substance; against the Christian who 
 forgets that the spirit of Christ may dw^ell in men 
 who do not take on the name of Christ; against the 
 worshiper of Jahveh for whom Ormuzd, Allah, Tao, 
 
NATURE AND DEITY 45 
 
 Brahma, Vishnu, Rudra, Zeus, are all false gods. 
 For the infinite as for the finite the form of expression 
 is indeed not indilTerent. Feeling, however deep or 
 subtle, is related to language by certain laws. But 
 these are inner, not external or conventional laws; 
 and philosophy, in exposing the vice or futility of the 
 arbitrary law, does but aid religion in attaining to a 
 freer and therefore more prefect expression of the 
 essential matter of religion. At difi"erent periods and 
 with the varying attitudes of the soul the symbol will 
 change. But for the present needs of religious phi- 
 losophy, which suffers on the one hand from the habit 
 of compressing all natural action to the measure of 
 human standards or the scope of human aims, and 
 from a tendency on the other hand to harden our in- 
 terpretation of nature into some mechanical theory, 
 it would seem that no symbol of the universal energy, 
 as it offers itself to our apprehension and considera- 
 tion, is truer or more fitting, so far as it goes, than 
 that of a universal life. 
 
IV. 
 
 The great Idea baffles wit, 
 Language falters under it, 
 It leaves the learned in the lurch; 
 Nor art, nor power, nor toil can find 
 The measure of the eternal Mind, 
 Nor hymn, nor prayer, nor church. 
 
 — Emerson, 
 
 We have found, now, a form or type of being 
 under which, as under a natural symbol, we may 
 represent to ourselves the form of being generally. 
 In the diversity of nature we apprehend a living 
 unity. That is to say, the interrelation of parts and 
 the interplay of forces which we find specifically ex- 
 emplified in animal and plant, or in the modes of be- 
 ing called in the specific sense organic, may be 
 observed, in a more general sense, in nature at large. 
 Nothing is isolated. Each particular thing is related 
 to all and exchanges infiuence with the universe of 
 things. Nature coheres by an immanent or inherent 
 vital law. 
 
 This fundamental idea of nature as an organic unity 
 is yet too general, however, to satisfy the demands 
 of religious feeling or religious thought. It olTers a 
 means, a rational symbol, by which to represent the 
 general being of nature as an object of thought, and 
 is more or less consciously^ present, no doubt, in the 
 sympathetic thrill which runs through the soul in 
 
 46 
 
NATURE AND DEITY 47 
 
 contemplation of nature. But religion deals with 
 relations more specific than the general relation of 
 all things to all. So far, we have arrived at no more 
 than the vaguest pantheism, with which the religious 
 sense refuses to be content because of its vagueness, 
 because of its insufficience to account for the moral 
 and other ideal aims from which we feel that religion 
 hereafter can never be divorced. The life of nature, 
 if it may be religiously interpreted, must be inter- 
 preted as in some special relation to the fundamental 
 laws of the inner human life, which cannot be relig- 
 ious unless it is first of all a moral life. Nature can- 
 not be construed in the religious sense unless she be 
 construed as in some necessary relation to the moral 
 sense. 
 
 In the theories generally current the relation of 
 our inner life to the life of nature is but little studied, 
 nature being regarded as but the secondary manifes- 
 tation of a Power whom we know more directly 
 through the soul, and who alone, to the exclusion of 
 all merely natural being, is the inspiration of the re- 
 ligious life. Room is thus given for the play of every 
 arbitrary tendency of thought, and the fundamental 
 religious idea is delivered over to a riot of instincts, 
 emotions, and unrestrained fancies. Protest from 
 the point of view of the facts is treated as irrelevant. 
 Nature, it is argued, is not all. She is but a hv- 
 product of the divine activity, and tlu* great Artificer 
 may have attributes of which wv see no hint in his 
 art. And if aught is lacking in natin^e it argues no 
 defect in licr Original. \\ C havt" subjt^ctive evidence 
 
48 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 which outweighs a whole universe of external fact. 
 Nature may be cold, but God is pitiful; man may be 
 inhuman, but God is humane; life may be full of in- 
 juiy, but the life of God hereafter will wipe out the 
 memory of injustice. Nature, in short, is fragment- 
 ary and transient. Or she is a specious illusion. 
 The intercourse of the spirit is with the eternal invis- 
 ible Spirit, the universal Creator. And this spiritual 
 relation, it is averred, is in an eminent sense a per- 
 sonal relation. 
 
 But this habit of referring the life of nature to an 
 extraneous spiritual and personal life seems really to 
 be but a later phase of an ancient tendency to per- 
 sonify nature herself. And in childhood, in poetry, 
 and in that natural religious feeling which has its seat 
 deeper than the schematism of the intellect, we tend 
 yet to read into nature's lineaments the lines of our 
 own personality. But the diction of poetry, fine as 
 are its discriminations, is governed mainly by emo- 
 tional and aesthetic considerations; the poet's inter- 
 est in matters of fact is determined by the artistic 
 value of the fact. Religion, too, it may be said is 
 idealistic and emotional; its language is the language 
 of feeling. And yet, unless the feeling, whether 
 poetical or religious, is determined wholly by sub- 
 jective considerations, unless it is a mere process of 
 make-believe in which the critical habit is quenched 
 because we are constitutionallj' di.sposed to a certain 
 form of self-delusion, it implies certain objective re- 
 lations of fact: there is in nature that which inspires 
 this feeling. And if, unconvinced that religion has 
 
NATURE AND DEITY 49 
 
 no more than such merely subjective basis, we allow 
 that there must be some natural and objective source 
 of religious inspiration, the intimate relations which 
 we thuii sustain towards nature need interpretation, 
 and become a subject of philosophical inquiry'. 
 
 Is there, then, any intelligible sense in which these 
 relations, as conceived in the religious sense, may 
 be construed as personal, and by consequence moral? 
 If nature i.s to be regarded as her own original, and 
 the continent of all that is, in what manner, if at all, 
 may personal or moral attrilmtes be ascribed to the 
 life or power of nature conceived as an object of re- 
 ligious contemplation? 
 
 In personality we must include, it would seem, 
 consciousness, and the question becomes more defi- 
 ni'te, and brings us perhaps nearer to the heart of the 
 m.atter, if we ask ourselves. Is nature conscious? 
 The question is not, let it be noted, whether nature 
 is as truly conscious in the forms which we ordinarily 
 consider inorganic, inanimate, and unconscious as in 
 the forms of being called, distinctivel}', conscious — 
 in the attraction of the magnet, for instance, as in the 
 afliniiies of the human mind. But, conceiving of 
 natiu'e generally and compreh.cnsivel}' — so far, that 
 is, as nature in general is ajiprehended by ourselves 
 — is it a conscious process, we ask, by which what 
 we have called the general organic acliviiy of nature, 
 in which the special activities of mind and matter 
 are all includi'd, produces the special modes of being, 
 organic (in the sjiccilic sense) and inorganic, con- 
 scious and unconscious? Is the general life of nature, 
 in other words, a conscious life? 
 
50 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 Consciousness, in the strict sense, is a highly spec- 
 ialized state of being arising under special conditions. 
 It may be roughly defined, perhaps, as organized 
 sensibility. Its raw material, at least, consists largely, 
 if not wholl}^, of sensuous impressions, and it pre- 
 supposes therefore the peculiar mechanism of the 
 senses. To ascribe consciousness in this sense to 
 nature, accordingly, is as if we should endow her 
 with sight, or hearing, or any special form of sensu- 
 ous impressibility. But for aught we know, it may 
 be said, there is a form of consciousness wholly in- 
 dependent of the conditions which determine it for 
 ourselves, and a consciousness superior to our own 
 for the very reason that it is free from the limitations 
 of our sensibility. And so there might be anything 
 whatever. Nothing can be inferred from a mere 
 abstract possibility of this sort. Our hypotheses should 
 at least start from the ground of experience, or, rea- 
 soning from the unknown to the unknown, we fall 
 into that speculative abyss of "neither sea, nor shore, 
 nor air, nor fire," to which religious philosophy too 
 generally tends, and in which all guesses, all possi- 
 bilities are on the same indifferent footing. And con- 
 sciousness is a term too specific, it would seem, to be 
 applied without relaxation of its strict significance to 
 the general impressibility of nature. Analogies or 
 "correspondences" there are indubitably between 
 this impressibility and the impressibility of sense. 
 But the unity of the life which pervades the univer- 
 sal reality is so complete that a lively fancy may de- 
 tect such correspondences wherever it alights, and 
 
NATURE AND DEITY 5 1 
 
 SO overwork its analoc^ies as to reduce all diiTerences 
 to a fundamental identity, or characterless unity like 
 that of the Eleatic One. This underlying unity does 
 not eilace the qualities and individuality of specific 
 things; nor does it convert their specific characters 
 on the other hand, into attributes of the general being 
 as such. Each parcicular thing, human or non- 
 human, though rooted in eternal being, is what it is; 
 its attributes, though a process or creation of the 
 eternal life, are in their specific distinctness its own. 
 And there appears to be no ground for identifying 
 our human consciousness with anything that we can 
 call an attribute of nature in general, that is, of nature 
 so far as we may legitimately generalize her illimita- 
 ble being. Or if we cannot escape the conviction 
 that there is in nature that which in ourselves, though 
 with a ditTerence, is conscious thought, or that which 
 corresponds to our conscious thought, the human 
 attribute must be regarded, it should seem, as spe- 
 cific and in a real sense unique, or as a peculiar and 
 singular case of an attribute which only in a broadly- 
 generalized sense can be considered as an attribute 
 of nature in general. Nevertheless, assuming, as we 
 have assumed, that the human mind is developed 
 within the sphere and from the source of nature, there 
 is justification for the tendency to see in nature the 
 rellection, as it were, of tlie attiibutes of our own 
 personality. l!^ach natural tiling, or quality of a 
 thing, being a spi>cial rfii-ct of nature in general as 
 the cause, must be contained, in a sense, or accounted 
 for in tlie cause; and yet, for llie reasons assigned. 
 
52 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 it must be distinguished from the cause. And the 
 special characters which constitute the human con- 
 sciousness that which it is are so highly specialized 
 that to insist in any rigorous sense on the presence 
 of the human attribute in the general being of nature 
 would invite confusion rather than assist our thought. 
 Humanity, though springing from nature, cannot, 
 any more than any other natural effect, be qualita- 
 tivel}" identified with nature the universal cause. We 
 are a differentiated product of nature. 
 
 And if we hold ourselves to anything like the strict- 
 ness of language which is indispensable to scientific 
 procedure, what is here said of consciousness gen- 
 erally may be said also of the particular forms, 
 sensitive or active, of conscious life. The mind, 
 as characteristic of man or of the animals to which 
 we are willing to allow a mental life, is associated 
 with specific organs, and varies in complexity 
 or power with the variations in the structure of such 
 organs. And where such special organs are wanting, 
 the phenomena of mind, in their special significance, 
 are wanting. It were as reasonable therefore, fol- 
 lowing the observed analogies of physical structure 
 and mental life, to search universal nature for an 
 eye or a brain as to ascribe to nature generally the 
 specific characters of the human mind. 
 
 But the stream, it may be said, cannot rise higher 
 than its source. And if we assume no substratum of 
 mind in the activity of nature, how may we see di- 
 vinity in nature, or any attribute which constrains 
 ihe thinking soul to a religious attitude, or inspires 
 us with awe? She is degraded, it would seem, to a 
 
NATURE AND DEITY 53 
 
 level below the human and even below the brutish 
 plane. The endless reaches of being before which 
 the soul surrenders its last vestige of pride ofTer us, 
 on this assumption, one may say, but the multiplica- 
 tion of senseless atoms, and man, sensitive and con- 
 scious, is superior to universal nature, impersonal 
 and unconscious. Though the product of nature, he 
 has bettered his origin. Apparently' the stream is 
 higher than its source. 
 
 The error here lies in ignoring the solidarity of 
 nature and confounding the general being of nature 
 with certain specific objects which we mentally dis- 
 sociate from her pervasive energy. On the grad- 
 uated scale by which we mark oil the foims of being 
 as ''higher" or lower" the comparison is restricted 
 to individuals, or to particular tNpes of being, and, as 
 the series is arranged \\ ith reference to man as the 
 standard, the further vve recede from the human type, 
 as from man to the polyp, the lower vve appear to 
 descend. Man is left in undisputed preeminence. 
 And if the line is prolonged beyond the limit of sen- 
 sation, through the vegetal series, and until life 
 itself in the special sense disappears, vve seem to de 
 scend still further, and matter mechanic, insensate, 
 the vast aggregation of inorganic objects tvpititd by 
 the clod, is found lying at the very base. By this 
 manner of approacli nature is indeed degraded to a 
 plane below tluit of man's svlf-conscious intelligence. 
 The transition from man to nature is here, of neces- 
 sity, a descent. And nature in this aspect n)a\- 
 inspire, perhaps, no rrligious awe. 
 
54 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 But comparison of this sort is misleading from the 
 beginning. Nature in the religious sense, nature in 
 her unity, is ignored. It is a mere appraisement of 
 the several (-bjects of nature as set over one against 
 the other, and diverts attention completely from the 
 general being of nature of which they are severally 
 the products. Such an assignment of values has its 
 use, of course, in the refinement and extension of our 
 knowledge. Science must abstract, particularize, and 
 define. And it must apply special standards to the 
 special matter of its investigations. But the compar- 
 ison of man with nature, in any sense germane to re- 
 ligious thought, is not a comparison of man with the 
 isolated objects of nature. The superficial lines traced 
 by the point of sight as the bounds or barriers of in- 
 dividual things, the units of life or power which we 
 mentally dissociate and vest with independence, all 
 the forms and elements which we find by disintegra- 
 tion of the being of the natural world, are resolved 
 again, in the religious view, into the general body 
 of nature — and comparison fails. We cannot measure 
 ourselves as against the immeasurable. Man may 
 glance complacently from himself to the ape. As 
 between the human brain and so many ounces of 
 matter, choose it where we will, there is nothing 
 which assails our pride. But neither man nor any 
 individual thing can subsist alone, or as a mere ex- 
 truded issue of the natural forces. Our lives are 
 shaped and nourished at every instant, and through 
 oacli minutest change, in nature's universal matrix, 
 and the mind of man, which we would impose upon 
 
NATURE 4ND DEITY 55 
 
 nature as her standard, is itself conditioned and pre- 
 served by her ever-active energy. He is the creature: 
 she is the creator. His is the evanescent thought: 
 she is the eternal reality, the origin, the object, and 
 the sustenance of his thought. To the religious mind, 
 man himself, the measurer and critic of nature, ap- 
 pears as a phase of nalure. His particular being, in 
 body and in mind, is an outcome of her universal 
 energy. 
 
 And in this all-pervasive energy man finds — distin- 
 guishing his particular being from the being of nat- 
 ure — not indeed his counterpart, or his own familiar 
 attributes reduplicated in large, but activities which, 
 as we have said, bear a certain analogy to his own 
 conscious activity. Our anthropomorphism is not 
 wholly unmeaning. Conscious intelligence com- 
 putes, for instance, the motions of the planets. But in 
 the moving orbs themselves, in the energy which 
 through eternity guides their motions with certainty 
 so absolute, is there not a principle as exalted as the 
 intelligence of a Kepler or a Newton, who but sees 
 and records tlie inelTal)le wonder which yet endures 
 when the human facuhy is qu^Miched? Nay, in the 
 structure of a Kaf, in tlie initlescence of a slu'll, 
 in the forces that shape a crystal, there is that 
 which tries the conscious wit of man to follow and 
 define. And is it a mere misnomrr to name tlie 
 formative princijile of which these are but special 
 clTects, itself intcIUctuaL 'i'lie principle wliich 
 dir«'ets the mind of man iis olisi-i vrr must be distin- 
 gui^h<*d, of conrs(\ from thr piiiieiplo which main- 
 
56 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 tains m its order and relations che actuality ob- 
 served. But the analogy is too obvious to be ignored, 
 and it is in obedience to the instincts out of which 
 language grows that we mark it by an identity of 
 names. And the religious mind, the mind which is 
 sensitive, that is, to the profounder relations which 
 unite things dissimilar, and feels instinctively for the 
 fibers which root the finite in the infinite, is little 
 likely to exalt the special directive principle or delib- 
 erative intelligence in man above what we may call 
 the intelligence of fact, the creative intelligence in 
 nature which shapes each individual thing in its dis- 
 tinction, and of which the conscious preventative 
 thought of man may at most be conceived as but a 
 special and transitory mode. Our common thought 
 goes no deeper than the surface, and is embarrassed 
 by the miultitude of divisions and distinctions patent 
 on the body of nature. And we assume, upon this 
 superficial view, a certain superiority in the reflective 
 human consciousness. But what is our science in 
 comparison with the reality which it studies? Is our 
 geology more than the earth, or our astronom}^ supe- 
 rior to the stars? In the petty scales b}^ which we are 
 fain to determine values absolutel}/ the worth of man's 
 discursive thought, to man himself invaluable, may 
 seem to the shallow or irreverent to transcend the 
 worth of an infinity not essentially human. But in 
 the broader view to which the religious thought in- 
 clines we see the madness of this conceit. Compared 
 with the strong and wide-reaching web of existence 
 man's thought is but a knot of fragile threads, trail- 
 
NATURE AND DEITY 57 
 
 ing a little way from loop to loop and par^^ed by any 
 accident. And shall our frailly measure omnipotence ? 
 Small need to ask the soul once touched by the sense 
 of things infinite whether our little lives, rounded 
 with a sleep, are lower or higher than the all-pervad- 
 ing life. The mortal mind is abashed by immortal 
 universal being. Though nature ma}' contain — if vve 
 are bold enough to assume it so — no several thing 
 higher than the intellect of man, both the thinker and 
 the object of his thought, the seer and all that he 
 sees, are created and sustained b}^ nature. She is the 
 life in which our intellectual life is but an infinitesimal 
 element, a momentary phase. It is through the modes 
 of our self-conscious activity, nevertheless, that we 
 must perforce interpret the modes of natural action. 
 Of our human attributes we frame our thought of 
 nature; by these, as intimations or symbols, we are 
 fain to define our mental attitude or the manner of 
 our approach to to the miracle of universal being. 
 But nature, not less or lower than her arrogant creat- 
 ure man, infinitely transcends our thought. In the 
 infinite reality thought is lost. And the finite mind, 
 lost in the infinite, is filled with awe; its attitude is 
 worship. 
 
V. 
 
 No man will hinder thee from living according to the reason of thy 
 own nature: nothing will happen to thee contrary to the reason of the 
 universal nature.- -Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. 
 
 Wirke, so viel du willst, du stehest doch ewig allein da, 
 Bis an das All die Natur dich, die gewaltige, kniipft. 
 
 — Schiller. 
 
 The power in nature, it appears, may be conceived 
 as manifesting in a certain sense attributes of our hu- 
 manity. We may even call the impressibility of nature 
 a form of consciousness; in fact, as shutting out of 
 view the universality and delicacy of this impressi- 
 bility, it were a kind of untruth to say absolutely that 
 nature is unconscious. By some means nature takes 
 account of, or reacts to, each particular event, even 
 the most secret human thought, and if we and all men 
 had the chemist's or physicist's familiarity with the 
 intimate life of nature doubtless we should say, reflect- 
 ing in our common language the common thought, 
 that nature knows each event. And it were, to say 
 the least, as reasonable thus to impute consciousness 
 to nature as to shut our eyes to an obvious analogy, 
 and subject all nature to the tyranny of a "blind ne- 
 cessit}^" a deity hypostatized from the abstractions 
 of mechanics, and really as external as Fate or Provi- 
 dence. Yet the analogy is not more than an analog}'. 
 The human function and the more general function 
 
 58 
 
NATURE AND DEITY 59 
 
 of nature are not the same, and though a riper sci- 
 ence may reduce the diilerences which to us seem to 
 separate them so widely, and exhibit the conscious 
 intelligence of man as a particular case of the uni- 
 versal responsiveness of nature, the specific human 
 function must always be marked by specific charac- 
 ters, characters which cannot be transferred to the 
 more general function whatever the tricks that lan- 
 guage may play upon our thought. 
 
 And what we have said of intelligence and con- 
 sciousness will serve as an illustration of the extended 
 application which we may give to terms borrowed 
 from the moral life of man. We may see in nature 
 justice, for instance, or wisdom, or parental love. 
 But if, yielding to the seductions of language, which 
 tempts us to assume in the shifting content of thought 
 the definiteness of things, we forget that a term when 
 pressed beyond its strict and special application must 
 lose much of its original import, we must surely be 
 misled. We can set no fast limits, nevertheless, to 
 the expansibility of our terms. To a susceptible spirit, 
 poetical or religious, contact with nature may be felt, 
 for instance, as personal contact. lUit in interpreting 
 the sense in which the idea of personality may legit- 
 imately receive this general application, we tiiul tliat 
 the sense is necessarily much relaxed. Sometliing 
 in the general being of nature impresses us as we are 
 impressed l)y the attributes of humanity. But the 
 impressions thus received are vague — thougli llie 
 rmrUinnrd result mav be unmistakable — and the Ian- 
 guage in which they are expressed, sharing their 
 
6o NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 vagueness, cannot serve the purposes of definition; 
 nor can we combine qualities so vaguely apprehended 
 into a distinct or deiined personality, or deduce from 
 such qualities, as we might deduce the acts of a man 
 from the characer of the man, particular conclusions 
 as to the actual course of nature in the government of 
 the world. Such personal attributes, so assigned to 
 universal being, do not represent general laws, or 
 true inductions drawn in scientific or ordinary logical 
 form from observed and correlated facts of being. 
 They indicate a point of view. And their value, 
 which only a cold heart will dispute, is emotional 
 rather than intellectual, save as the intellect may ac- 
 count for our emotions. 
 
 But if the idea of personality cannot be applied to 
 nature in any but this general and analogical sense, 
 how may we hope to find in nature a basis for the 
 principles of practice, that is, for religion as an im- 
 perative law of conduct? Can nature be impersonal 
 and yet moral? Or if nature is not moral in a defi- 
 nitely human sense, how can she be conceived as the 
 source of human morals? The moral law must be 
 accounted for. The foundations of morality are so 
 detp— so at least we may fairly assume from the uni- 
 versality of moral distinctions — that it seems impos- 
 sible to legard its laws as mere conventions; and if 
 they are in truth more than social conventions, and 
 nature nevertheless is not in an}^ strict sense either 
 personal or moral, whence do they drive their force? 
 
 The Stoics, who held to the Socratic idea that the 
 true law of life is that which reduces the elements of 
 
NATURE AND DEITY 6 I 
 
 life to harmony or unity, felt the same necessity which 
 here presses upon ourselves. The ethical end, it 
 seemed to them, must be of more than merely human 
 prescription. And seeing in nature a rational prin- 
 ciple shaping the matter of nature in accordance with 
 law, they believed that theethical law might be stated 
 with greater breadth and force if the harmonj- which 
 it induces in the soul were regarded as "harmoniz- 
 ing" the soul at the same time with the rational prin- 
 ciple so discerned in nature. But the truth thus 
 adumbrated their merely practical philosophy could 
 not define. They could not borrow a philosophical 
 principle, of course, from the Epicureans, and had 
 not their own highly developed and instinctive sense 
 of right impressed them with the force of a natural 
 law, and had not their practical needs been more ur- 
 gent than their philosophical, they would doubtless 
 have been more distinctly conscious of the insufli- 
 ciency of their account of the moral life as a life "in 
 conformity with nature." The readiest explanation 
 was that nature, or the divine life of which nature 
 was conceived as the expression, is moral; that the 
 ethical end is at the same time an end of nature, or 
 of the divine mind, already conceived, after Anjixa- 
 goras, as informing nature with a vaguely personal 
 life. And this interpretation of the natural ground 
 of the m(3ral law survives, mutatis nuituudis^ to the 
 present day. Ikit we cannot assume, shifting our 
 regard from nature in man to nature in general, that 
 her activities are directtxl universallv to ethical ends, 
 because we cannot grasp tlie linal aim of nature, or 
 
62 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 assume even that there is such an aim. Nor does it 
 seem possible, if, mindful of the narrowness of our 
 outlook, we forbear the attempt to interpret nature 
 as All, or Whole, or Absolute, and hazard conclu- 
 sions of no broader sweep than from our little coigne 
 of vantage we have the right to draw, to construe the 
 facts of nature as we find tlicm into complete con- 
 formity with our moralties. If we apply to nature the 
 standards which we apply to men, she must often 
 seem indifferent both to ourselves and to the ends for 
 which good men make sacrifice. In earthquake, 
 famine, and storm, we must judge her, if we judge her 
 by the human law, remorselessl}^ cruel; and the 
 world, as if of purpose to def}^ the demands of our 
 morality, teems with creatures that seem formed ex- 
 pressly to cause suffering, that live in fact by the de- 
 struction of sensitive life. Nature, in morality as in 
 other matters, is not, we must confess, conformed 
 to our standaids, and is as liberal of precedents for 
 our brutish acts, apparently, as for the sublimest sac- 
 rifices of human love. We may take refuge again in 
 the much-worn argument from ignorance. We may 
 assume that in the hidden future, or in the wide realm 
 of the unknown, the untoward facts which are seen 
 must have their unseen counterpoise. It is a light 
 thing, to men of a certain habit of thought, to take 
 so much for granted. But we can assume nothing 
 from our ignorance. If we have any clew to the un- 
 known it is to be found in that which we know. And 
 the truth seems to be, as we have foreshadowed, that 
 in the strict and human sense nature as we have 
 
NATURE AND DEITY 63 
 
 knowledge cf her is neither moral nor immoral. We 
 may relax the strict sense, and find nature moral in 
 an analogical or more general sense. We may see 
 prudence or good house-keeping in the economy 
 which suflers no atom to be \va?;ted or lost; or eternal 
 justice in the relations of action and reaction, cause 
 and eilect ; or immortal love in the affinities of mat- 
 ter, or in the generation and sustenance of the myriad 
 forms of life — though Empedocles, it is instructive 
 to note, paired Love with Hate. Or looking with 
 modern eyes on natures evolving life — a view not 
 wholly strange, however, to this antique seer and 
 savant — we may perceive in the processes of terrestrial 
 growth a continuous progress toward ends which are 
 in a certain harmony with the moral end. 
 
 Self-kindled every atom glows, 
 And hints the future which it owes. 
 
 But it will scarceJy be contended that a system of 
 morals applicable to human conduct could be derived 
 from the natural sciences or the action of merely ex- 
 ternal nature. Moralitv, as human bein<rs understand 
 the term in judging human c(jnducr, has constant 
 reference to the ends of human activity, and being 
 which does not conform to the human tvpe is not to 
 be judged by the standards which we apply to human 
 conduct, and alTords no ddinite or suflicienl basis for 
 the construction of sucli standards. So far as appears, 
 humanilv, high as are its prerogatives, is but an in- 
 cident in the natural order, not its final cause or end. 
 Must we then be contfuc to be baiUetl in our scaieli 
 of nature for a basi.-; of morals? To this complexion, 
 
64 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 the theist may say, it must come at last. Moral dis- 
 tinctions must vanish in a philosophy which knows 
 nothing but nature, and which must represent every 
 impulse, moral or immoral, as proceeding from the 
 same natural source. Vice is at least as natural as 
 virtue, unless, like the Stoics, we assume a principle 
 which limits the natural to the virtuous; e^'go^ vice 
 is as well authenticated as virtue. 
 
 But we have gone too far afield. Moral good and 
 moral evil are, as we have said, distinctions founded 
 in the nature of human ends; it is nature working 
 in humanity that has defined the moral law. And as 
 nature may be studied only in her works, it devolves 
 upon us now to look w^ithin, and to search for the 
 general or constitutional ends, if any such there be, 
 which are subserved by morality as a means. The 
 difficulties inherent in the subject, it must be confessed, 
 are not small. The intricacies of the inner conscious 
 life present to our inspection relations even more 
 delicate and complex than the relations of external 
 objects. Our constitution is marked, nevertheless, by 
 certain constitutional traits, and it may not be impos- 
 sible, in spite of inconsistency and caprice and the 
 evanescence of our conscious states, that a free and 
 patient study of our nature may discover certain 
 general and relatively constant ends — ends which in 
 the e3^es of a reasonable man impose upon our con- 
 duct a paramount law. And the law by which the 
 various activities of our nature may be combined in 
 orderly and effective movement in the direction of 
 such ends, if we grant that such ends may be found, 
 
NATURE AND DEITY ^ 65 
 
 will be for ourselves in an eminent sense a natural 
 law; the law of nature, that is, to which we as human 
 beings are rationally bound. Let us consider, then, 
 the evidences of such a natural and rational law. 
 
 We pause, however, to clear up a misunderstand- 
 ing which may arise as to the moaning of the word 
 law. As employed in the natural sciences it implies, 
 for the most part, a generalized statement of fact. 
 The attraction between any two particles of matter, 
 we say, is directly proportional to the product of their 
 masses and inversely proportional to the square of 
 their distances asunder. And this law, within the 
 sphere to which it applies, is never violated. In fact 
 we regard inviolability as a characteristic of natural 
 law. Is the moral law thus inviolable? We might 
 more pertinently ask, is it ever in full of all its de- 
 mands complied with? Man's deep distrust of his 
 neighbor, founded in long experience of social life, 
 gives an air of grotesqueness to the suggestion even 
 that ethical law should l)e interpreted as a summarized 
 description of the actual conduct of any considerable 
 portion of mankind. But natural law is not necessa- 
 rily the expression of a completely actualized relation 
 of fact. It may express the relation of means to end 
 — to an end possibly never as yet attained. The laws 
 of health, for instance, are the conditions governing 
 the attainment and preservation of a state of the botlv 
 distinjruished as normal, and have been studied with 
 tolerabh' success, though p()ssii)le a bodv in all re- 
 spects normal is never, or but rarelv, to be found. 
 The mind, resolving the actual into its elements, re- 
 
66 , NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 combines them into an as yet unrealized ideal; 
 through the imperfections of the actual man we dis- 
 cern the perfections of the man that shall be. Imagi- 
 nation, elaborating the material of experience, figures 
 in idea the end; science, testing experience, discloses 
 the means, which are what we recognize as the laws 
 of health, or of normal physical life. And in a man- 
 ner analogous to this, that is, by idealizing the inner 
 life, and testing by experience the laws of psychic 
 growth, we learn the conditions made by nature in- 
 dispensable to the actualization of the spiritual ideal. 
 And among these conditions we must name, preem- 
 inently, fulfillment of the moral demand. The moral 
 life is, as in nature established, a condition precedent 
 to the attainment of an ideal end. Moral laws, ac- 
 cordingly, are natural laws. They express the natural 
 relation of cause and effect, of means to an end. 
 
 And the supreme importance of these laws, let us 
 add, must arise from the supreme desirability of the 
 end to which they define the means. However rig- 
 orously the end were conditioned by the means, un- 
 less we were interested in the end we should regard 
 neither means nor end; and unless the end were su- 
 preme, there would be no intelligible sense in which 
 the authority of the moral laws, the means to this 
 end, could be regarded as supreme. Nature has no 
 codes or formulae in which we ma}^ read the inert 
 record of her will. Her laws are discovered only in 
 their operation, and a natural law which is paramount 
 for us can be recognized as such onl}^ as we see in 
 its fulfillment necessary means to a paramount end. 
 
NATURE AND DEITY 67 
 
 And here lies the authority of the moral mandate. 
 Without the interest which we must have in the end 
 to be attained by the moral life all our acts would 
 stand on the same footing; the sinners appeal to nat- 
 ure would be as valid aS the saint's; for whether we 
 fultill the conditions of approximation to the ideal 
 type or the conditions of reversion to the brutish type 
 we are equally powerless to escape the universal em- 
 brace of nature. It is our interest which discrimi- 
 nates. And this interest is organic; it is inherent in 
 the human constitution, a character impressed uni- 
 versally by nature creative upon man her creature. 
 Many modes of life are by nature made possible. 
 We may be led hither and thither as impulse uncon- 
 trolled or our interest misconceived happens to guide 
 us. But the same sovereign nature to whom we owe 
 each instinct has, in the general form of our nature, 
 determined for each man, independently of errors 
 of judgment or vagaries of the will, a supreme inter- 
 est or end, and through this interest, conceived in its 
 fiili breadth, has prescribed for each instinct its ra- 
 tio i-il limits, and fur life as a whole its supreme and 
 rational law. And it is this law of which we are in 
 rearch. Conformity to tliis law would be that con- 
 l"or;ni;v to nature whicli the stoics found so dillicult 
 I') jiresent in theory, and of which they gave such 
 ilhistrious examples in jiractice. And upon this 
 law, if upon any natural law, oiu" ethics must be 
 founded. 
 
VI. 
 
 For that is, and ever will be, the best of sayings, that the useful is 
 the noble, and the hurtful the base. — Plato: Republic, ^j/. Jowett*s 
 Translation. 
 
 The inquiry here carries us within the bounds of 
 psychology. To trace out the foundations of moral- 
 ity is to discover a principle which is broader than 
 that of moral distinctions. The science of conduct 
 resolves itself into a particular phase of the science 
 of human nature. 
 
 We assume — not to carry the inquiry farther back 
 than is necessary for our present purpose — we as- 
 sume in our nature certain impulses or tendencies to 
 action. Such inherent tendencies we observe even 
 in the unconscious life of our system, and we arrive 
 at consciousness with an organization which^irrespect- 
 ive of the particular direction which may afterwards 
 be given with conscious preference to its activities, 
 is determined to actions of a certain general kind. 
 Man is predestined by his structure to a set of activ- 
 ities different from those of the sheep or the tiger. 
 But within the limits to which we are constitutionally 
 restricted there is wide range for variation. A form 
 or principle is required by which, within the range 
 allowed by the general form of our organization, our 
 activities may be determined more definitely in direc- 
 tion and degree. 
 
 68 
 
NATURE AND DEITY 69 
 
 Such a principle m^^y be found, we submit, refer- 
 ring the matter to common experience, in the desire 
 for happiness or well-being; in the fundamental de- 
 sire, that is to say, to increase the several and general 
 satisfactions of life, and to make life as a whole, as 
 it progresses, in a completer sense worth the living. 
 
 Take some simple instance, the impulse to walk, 
 for example, or to eat or drink. Taking some such 
 impulse for granted, and isolating it, so far as that 
 is possible, from the general activit}- of the organism, 
 we have still a principle to seek by which we may 
 determine the time, place, occasion, continuance, and 
 other circumstances of the act which the impulse 
 initiates. The principle of the mean, which assumes 
 a certain recognition of the extremes, may serve as 
 a useful practical guide, but neither mean nor ex- 
 tremes can Idc discriminated without reference to some 
 relatively determinate point or standard. For the 
 virtuous mean Aristotle refers us to the judgment of 
 the reasonable or prudent man. And we may consult 
 the reasonable man here. Until the personal judg- 
 ment can be reduced to quantitative terms, or meas- 
 ured by objective standards, the subjective or personal 
 factor cannot be eliminated. Something is gained, 
 howevi^r, if we can reduce the personal judgment to 
 lower or more elementary terms. And in such cases 
 as we have instanced, at least, the true or rati(tn:d 
 mean ajiprars to be established, in the end, if we 
 disregartl everything but the natural and sjiecitic 
 elTt'cts of the isolated act, by the feelings of satisfac- 
 tion or discontL'ut, uf pleasure oi- jiain, assoc:aleil 
 
70 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 with or consequent upon the act under consideration. 
 The force of analysis can as yet, perhaps, no further 
 go. The interpretation of such feelings in physiolog- 
 ical terms, with reference, say, — to instance a re^nt 
 hypothesis, — to the nutritive states of the organs em- 
 ployed, would aid us collaterally in giving definite- 
 ness to our criterion, and might impart to it something 
 of objective clearness. But though physiology has 
 done service to psj-chology, and promises to do much 
 more, it is very far as yet from giving us a general 
 objective standard for the comparison of pleasures 
 and pains. We must content ourselves here with the 
 introspective method, and the confirmation of its re- 
 sults in common experience. And a little considera- 
 tion is enough to convince us that, if w^e could in any 
 case isolate the individual from his fellows, and could 
 further restrict our attention to some simple function 
 or some single form of activity of such individual, the 
 point of maximum satisfaction or pleasure would de- 
 termine the golden mean or the rational law for that 
 particular case. 
 
 But no case is so simple. No organ or "faculty" 
 acts entirely alone. Nor are the faculties combined 
 in mere contiguity, like a bundle of fagots. Tl.ey 
 act and react one upon the other in close organic 
 union, and a question which might be answered read- 
 ily enough as referring to a single impulse or a simple 
 taste becomes more difficult when other tastes and 
 other impulses, if not the man entire, go into the ac- 
 count. The satisfaction of one impulse may be at 
 the expense of another, or of all the others, and may 
 
NATURE AND DEITY 7 1 
 
 be modified, or even changed into discomfort or pain, 
 by the reactions it sets up. It does not appear, how- 
 ever, that the complexity of the functions of an indi- 
 vidual life changes the general principle established 
 for the simpler case. The fixed point or standard is 
 merely shifted to the position which is marked by 
 the highest satisfaction resulting from the play of the 
 functions as a whole. A man indulges his appetite, 
 for instance, with some reference directly to the sense 
 of taste, but mainly, if he is a reasonable man, with 
 regard to the eflect upon his health and strength ; and 
 for the sake of restoring his health, once lost, he is 
 glad to take remedies for which he has no appetite, 
 and which are nauseous to the taste. And the struct- 
 ure of the mind requires that we should consider the 
 particular forms of mental activity in the like general 
 light. While functions unexercised yield no pleasure, 
 but a sense of discontent more or less distinct, and 
 exertion pushed beyond a certain limit causes wear- 
 iness or pain, the mean between these two extremes, 
 considered in relation to the particular function which 
 is employed, does not solely and finally determine 
 for such function the occasion and extent of its ac- 
 tivity. No particular function is a complete and un- 
 qualified law unto itself. The several activities of 
 the mind must be considered with reference to the 
 mind as an organic whole. And the estimate, whether 
 in terms of mental or in terms of physical life, must 
 be made with reference also to remote etlects — clTects 
 which are often suflicient to outweigh in their impor- 
 tance to the individual all present considerations of 
 
72 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 pleasure or pain. Nevertheless, making every allow- 
 ance for this added difficulty in making a just estimate 
 of hedonic values, we cannot find that life as a whole, 
 considered from the point of view of the individual as 
 a dissociated unit, discloses any other rational prin- 
 ciple for its own regulation than the degree of individ- 
 ual satisfaction or pleasure which attends its activities 
 as a vv'hole. 
 
 But as a matter of fact the individual is only in 
 very rare instances dissociated, and the social nature 
 of man makes it impossible to narrow down the func- 
 tions of life, in society, to a circle which excludes 
 society. Certain impulses, impulses which appear to 
 be as original and fundamental in our nature as those 
 which are distinguished as strictly self-regarding, 
 are directed to the happiness or well-being of others. 
 We cannot be indifferent to the situation of those who 
 are about us, and especially of those who are closely 
 related to us. Their pleasures and sufferings are, in 
 a greater or less degree, our own. The difficulty, 
 already sufficiently great, of establishing a general 
 rule of personal conduct, is thus indefinitely increased 
 by the individual's social instincts. It might seem, 
 indeed that the effect of these instincts is to change 
 the rule; that in recognizing the happiness of others 
 as an end, and a natural end, of desire, we abandon 
 the ground upon which it is possible to find in indi- 
 vidual interest the governing principle of individ- 
 ual conduct. The desire which goes forth of the self 
 cannot, it might be urged, be determined by a prin- 
 ciple which resides in the self. But here again the 
 
NATURE AND DEITY 73 
 
 rule is complicated rather than changed. It is my 
 sympathetic or social interest, an interest still my 
 own, which engages me in the interest of others. A 
 man cannot be said, indeed, to really desire the hap' 
 piness of others unless he feels, on his own account, 
 some interest or pleasure in their haj^piness; and a 
 pure or disinterested regard is not a regard from 
 which all personal interest is expunged (a contradic- 
 tion in terms), but a regard which, undisturbed by 
 calculations of prolit, or by ulterior non-social mo- 
 tives, is purely social or S37mpathetic. Nay, does 
 not the beneficiary find the sweetness of the gift in 
 the pleasure which the giver feels in his giving? And 
 would not a spirited man resent, even in extremity, 
 every offer, though prompted by more than a Kan- 
 tian sense of duty, in which such pleasure seemed 
 wanting? True, one does not incessantly study or 
 bring into conscious relief the egoistic ground of 
 one's benefactions? The ultimate motive to genuine 
 beneficent activity, the sympathetic interest which 
 makes the motive mine, and which most commends 
 the benefit to the beneficiary, would defeat itself did 
 it not leave me free to study the tastes, the pleasures, 
 the welfare of others, as proximate interests. All 
 compound motivation shows a similar obscuration of 
 the original motive; it is the more immediate steps 
 necessary to the realization of the linal end that re- 
 cpiire our more immediate attention. And language 
 itself misleads us here. The sympathetic motive be- 
 ing called an unselfish motive, we speak of it as if it 
 were entirely tlissociated from the ends cherished by 
 
*J^ NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 the self. But the entire self includes, of course, all 
 our ends or interests, all our motives. The ends 
 which are placed without the self, and approved as 
 unselfish, are not without the self in its entirety, but 
 merely opposed to ends which are identified with the 
 self in a special and narrower sense, that is, with the 
 self less the social and generous interests which do 
 in fact constitute a part of the self as a whole. The 
 ego does not cease to be the ego when it becomes un- 
 selfish. It is discharging an essential function, the 
 gratification, namely, of the social impulse. And it 
 seems impossible to assign any principle for the gov- 
 ernment of the ego in the discharge of either its so- 
 cial or its non-social functions which does not appeal 
 to some interest of the ego. A principle, to become 
 mine, must have some basis in the nature of my aims. 
 If you seek to engage me in your cause by appealing 
 to my physical sensibilities or my fears, you address 
 yourself to what are called my lower interests. And 
 if you honor me by assuming my scorn of such ap- 
 peals, and seek to enchant me with stories of long- 
 suffering and martyrdom, you appeal to an interest 
 which you believe to be stronger than my longing for 
 creature-comforts or even for life, but an interest 
 which is still my own. You must ground yourself 
 in my interests somewhere. You must offer gratifi- 
 cation to some impulse of my nature. 
 
 And it is in the social impulse that the moral law 
 is founded. The moral aim is the complete social- 
 ization of the race, the organization of mankind into 
 a fraternity in which man's social nature, and, in- 
 
NATURE AND DEITY 75 
 
 deed, man's nature as a whole, shall find its fullest 
 satisfaction ; and the moral obligation, as an inner 
 principle binding a reasonable man in virtue of his 
 constitution as man, must rest ultimately in his inter- 
 est in the establishment of a perfect social state. Moral 
 principles, that is to say, derive their force, in the 
 end, from the individuars interest in the institution 
 of a true society. And there seems to be no escape, 
 on natural ground, from this ultimate reference. We 
 may expand the content of morals and make it as 
 broad as the sphere of human activity, but we shall 
 go far to find a natural basis for a rational law bind- 
 ing on the individual — and it is to the individual con- 
 science that the moral law is addressed — other than 
 the interest of the individual as determined by nature 
 in his constitution as man; and the universality of 
 such a law must be grounded in a community of in- 
 terests among individual men. Even the theological 
 systems, with other worlds in view, and with all the 
 apparatus of supernaturalism at their command, ap- 
 peal to individual interest. But having an eternity 
 of rewards and punishments to distribute, the center 
 of interest is thrown so far beyond the limits of this 
 our natural life as to leave little motive for stud^'ing 
 the relation of morals to our profoundest interests 
 under present and natural conditions. If, however, we 
 content ourselves witli merely natural considerations, 
 it would seem that some inherent and natural interest 
 in the law which we seek to impose nuist be shown, 
 some instinct or impulse of the individual must be 
 found which is gratified through the fullillment of the 
 
fj6 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 law, or the law remains foreign and meaningless, and 
 must borrow sicrnificance, like that which attaches 
 to our penal laws, from an interest with which it is 
 but artificially or indirectly associated. And the nat- 
 ural interest which sustains the moral law is prima- 
 rily, we submit, the social interest. 
 
 But in estimating the importance of morality as a 
 social obligation we should bear in mind that the ben- 
 efits of the social state are not conhned to the direct 
 gratiiication of the social instincts. Art and science, 
 civilization and refinement, well nigh all that life 
 means to the modern man, were impossible but for 
 the opportunities which society alone, society, that 
 is, orcranized and cohering as a moral life, can offer 
 for the play of individual genius. As the individual, 
 therefore, is interested in his own development, he is 
 interested in the establishment of sound social habits, 
 and especially in the fulfillment of the moral demand 
 whicli embodies the requirements of elementary social 
 law. Ila ma}^ not be alive to this his true interest, or 
 in the disorder of his habits he may wilfully disregard 
 it; but the conditions of his happiness lie deep in his 
 nature, and are independent of his recognition or pres- 
 ent inclination. Nature herself has bound up his well- 
 being in the establishment of a true social state, which 
 coheres and continues only by the force of the moral 
 tie. Hence the peculiar force of the moral obligation. 
 In the moral judgment it is society itself, prompted 
 by the insinct of self-preservation, which speaks 
 through the individual, and reinforces the individual 
 judgment by the whole energy of its struggle to main- 
 
NATURE AXD DEITY 77 
 
 tain the conditions of social life. It may seem perhaps 
 that at times a r!(£orous observation of the canons of 
 morality lacks justification in the individual account 
 of pleasures and pains. The fault, possibly, may lie 
 in our formulas. The phenomena of life depend upon 
 conditions so complex and variable that our attempts 
 to reduce these conditions to a law must often result 
 in mere approximations; and when we consider that 
 our formulations of the moral law are applied to men 
 in all situations, and in all phases of development, it 
 is conceivable that the law, as we formulate it, may 
 hot have the same justitication for all absolutely in its 
 direct operation upon the individual life. l)Lit since a 
 true society, which is a voluntary cooperation of in- 
 dependent minds, is necessarily founded in morality, 
 (a true morality being but a voluntary compliance with 
 the elementary conditions of the social state), the jus- 
 tification of the law is to be sought, not in the direct 
 and apparent results of each virtuous act, but in the 
 advantages accruing to the individual from the social 
 union as a whole. It is possible that the general wel- 
 fare may sometimes demand unconditional and appar- 
 ently uncompensated sacrifice on the jiart of a few. We 
 know that even the soundest le<£islation works hard- 
 shij") in exceptional cases. Hut the advantages of good 
 legislation, in spite of its imperfections, remain to the 
 individual, as it atTects him generally, incalculable; 
 and [he advantages nf moral or primarv social law 
 are f.o much the more incontestable as compliance 
 with its demands is the indispensable condition of the 
 social uriion itself, so far as it is really social, and of 
 
78 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 all that man, whose dread of isolation is hardlj^ less 
 than his dread of death, can hope to gain or enjoy 
 in the society of his kind. And with this general con- 
 sideration, which is sufficient to establish the general 
 validity of the moral law, we must here be content. 
 The discussion of particular or exceptional cases, as 
 also of the theory of punishment and the question of 
 responsibility, belongs to a special treatise on ethics. 
 
 We must leave to the ethical student, too, the task 
 of deducing and systematizing the provisions of eth- 
 ical law, noting only our conviction that the princi- 
 ples of morality, as disclosed in the long experience 
 of the race and as commonl}^ formulated among civi- 
 lized nations, may be taken as true enough in the 
 main to stand for the natural law. The right remains, 
 of course, to search for completer formulae, to deter- 
 mine with more precision the application of each par- 
 ticular rule. But meantime we may agree that the 
 ordinary statement of the law is at least an approxi- 
 mate statement. Practically, it may be taken for 
 nature's law, the natural and indispensable condition, 
 that is, of the establishment of a true social state. 
 
 The end directly contemplated in the moral law, 
 however, namely, the establishment of a perfect so- 
 cial union, is, as we have seen, but a means to the 
 attainment of an ulterior and a broader end. Ulti- 
 mately, we contend, the moral end and all discipli- 
 nary ends are merged in one general end, the 
 attainment of a happier estate. Happiness, it is true, 
 is a comprehensive word which includes, in gross, the 
 attainment of man}^ different ends, and is therefore 
 
NATURE AND DEITY 79 
 
 open to different interpretations as taste or inclination 
 varies, or as our skill in the estimate of hedonic val- 
 ues is less or greater; but as it is idle to affect in our 
 language a rigor which the facts will not warrant, 
 or a precision which is wanting in our knowledge, 
 we content ourselves with a term which is fairl}^ in- 
 telligible, and which experience and reflection tend 
 to define with increasing certainty. We put the term 
 happiness, therefore, to represent the ideal or perfect 
 satisfaction of man's nature as a whole in life as a 
 whole, or such approximation to this ideal estate as 
 the circumstances of life make possible. We allow a 
 certain indefiniteness in the term. We admit, further, 
 that constitutions differ, and that to the extent of this 
 difference the ends of life, as also the means for the 
 attainment of such ends, must differ. But so far as 
 morality is concerned such differences are relatively 
 unimportant. Morality is founded in certain com- 
 mon characters and common interests of humanity. 
 It is, as we have said, elementary. All are interested 
 in strengthening and perfecting the social union, not 
 only as a means of gratifying the social impulse, but 
 as a condition absolutely indispensal^le to the general 
 development of our nature, and to the ampler, keener, 
 and more varied satisfaction which attends the activ- 
 ity of energies more fully and more harmoniously 
 developed, a development which, as we have seen, 
 is impossible except in the social union. And the 
 essential law of this union is the moral law. Moral- 
 ity (U'fines the form of tlu' elementary social ri'la- 
 tions, antl the c][ualilications of the individual will 
 
8o NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 pre -requisite to the formation of such relations. Truth, 
 honesty, justice, love — so far as a man is destitute of 
 these, the elements of the moral character, he is dis- 
 qualified for the social life. Morality is capable, there- 
 fore, interpreted as a means to happiness, of something 
 like definiteness of treatment and universality of 
 application. Though we may allow that life is too 
 complex and that men are too unlike to admit of the 
 reduction of the conduct of life generally, as a pur- 
 suit of happiness, to definite prescriptions valid for 
 all, yet if any science of conduct is possible, if there 
 is anything whatever in the ends pursued by human- 
 ity which is common to the species, the elementary 
 principles of such a science ought to be susceptible 
 of some precision of statement. And among such 
 elementary principles, we maintain, must be included 
 the principles of morality. 
 
 The moral law, therefore, lying at the basis of 
 politics and jurisprudence — (ethics was fused with 
 politics in the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle) — 
 and of all the more specific requirements of the social 
 union, may be regarded as a main condition of the 
 attainment of ideal happiness, and of the ideal life in 
 which alone such happiness is possible. In other 
 words, virtue is a means — an indispensable means — 
 to such happiness as man may hope for through a life 
 in union with his fellowmen. The moral quality of 
 an act, accordingly, is not an ultimate, irresoluble 
 fact. It is a means to an end. And it may be dis- 
 cussed and determined as we discuss and determine 
 the reasonableness of the means to any end, that is to 
 
NATURE AND DJCITY 8 1 
 
 say, in the ligbt of the fitness of the means to promote 
 the realization of the end. The end here, proxi- 
 mately the solidification of human society, is ulti- 
 mately, the promotion of human happiness, that is, 
 the hcippiness of the units which constitute humanity, 
 since it is only through the individual consciousness 
 that society is conscious of happiness or unhappiness 
 at all. Moral determinations, therefore, and all dis- 
 tinctions urged as valid in morals, may be analyzed 
 and weiifhed with reference to the end to be attained 
 by the moral life, and are to be approved or con- 
 demned, not absolutely, or as ultimate facts of con- 
 sciousness, but according to their relation to this end. 
 And such determinations have become, to a certain 
 extent, habitual or instinctive. The conscious rea- 
 soning process has been abridged or eliminated. But 
 they do not for that reason occupy a position which 
 takes them out of the ordinary course of the develop- 
 ment of the mind. The}' are particular cases of a 
 general law, a law which, so far as men are reason- 
 able, governs their choice in the general relations of 
 life, including those which are commonly considered 
 extra moral. 
 
VII. 
 
 Mon voeu le plus cher serait d'entretenir en vous le 
 
 culte des belles connaissances, ce gout des choses de I'esprit sans 
 lequel I.homme civilise n'atteint jamais a toute la noblesse de sa des- 
 tinee ni a tout le fini de sa nature. — Sainte-Beuve. 
 
 And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with 
 all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and 
 with all thy mind; and thy neighbor as thyself. — Luke X,2j. 
 
 It appears, then, that the moral law is a natural 
 law. Man being by nature what he is, and the laws 
 of his growth being such as they are in nature estab- 
 lished, the morallaw prescribes certain natural means 
 indispensable to the attainment of the end which ap- 
 pears, upon due consideration of man's nature, to be 
 in reason supreme. And this sequence of means and 
 end is the sequence of cause and effect. In so far as 
 we follow the end which is by the form of our con- 
 stitution man's supreme or rational end, we must, in 
 the nature of things, shape our lives in harmony with 
 the moral law as defining an essential part of the 
 means. We may ignore the moral demand. But to 
 ignore the moral demand is, so far, to abandon the 
 end toward which we advance by the moral life. 
 Means and ends are causally conjoined. 
 
 And it were hard to overstate the importance to 
 mankind of a general and settled moral habit. The 
 social union is a moral union. The struggle for the 
 
 82 
 
NATURE AND DEITY 83 
 
 supremacy of the social instincts is man's great moral 
 struggle. And as all the gains of civilization depend 
 upon social or cooperative action, man's progress in 
 tlie development of his being or in the realization of 
 life's essential ends, begins in morality. The moral- 
 ist's persistent assertion of the urgency of his message 
 is justili''d by the facts of our nature. 
 
 But life can yield its maximum satisfaction only 
 through such development of our functions generally 
 as is consistent with their completest efliciency as a 
 Vv'hole; and the discharge of the social functions 
 proper, especially when these are further limited to 
 such elementary acts, aptitudes, or tendencies as com- 
 monly occupy the attention of the moralist, engages 
 but a portion of our total conscious activity. In other 
 words, the moral law, broad as is its application, is 
 not the whole law of conscious life. There are forms 
 of our activit}' — intellectual, artistic, creative, for in- 
 stance — which demand a special discipline, for which 
 moralit}^ at least as ordinarily interpreted, makes no 
 provision, and of wliich it hardly takes cognizance. 
 Tlie moral demand, sliaped bv experience to our 
 practit:al needs, is restricted to the fundamental and 
 more obvious necessities of social life. And havintr, 
 moreover, in the form in which we actually lind it, 
 a strong traditional element, to which it owes much 
 of its force in the control of conduct, it is not wliolly 
 free from the vice of tradition, that is to sav, from 
 the tendency to l)ecome unicasoning, hard, and 
 formal, wliich marks the arrested development of 
 thought. But were it as vital ami rxpansive as a ra- 
 
84 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 tional apprehension of its aim should make it, much 
 that concerns the government of life as a whole 
 would lie without its distinctive sphere. True, one 
 may scarce name a phase of life that has not its so- 
 cial bearing; and possibl}', with a little ingenuity, 
 one might cast every principle of life into ethical 
 form. The ethical ideal would then stand for the 
 full ideal, and govern the whole sphere of life, leav- 
 ing no room for religion, as a praxis, except as iden- 
 tified with ethics. But such an expansion of the 
 content of ethics, though of present service perhaps 
 in correcting the obstinacy with which popular relig- 
 ion cherishes certain cosmic and theologic hypotheses 
 to which it is committed, must tend to obscure the 
 fundamental importance of ethical distinctions, and 
 therefore to weaken the real strength of the moral 
 demand. ■ Nature indeed knows no absolute line. 
 Each element of life is organically united with all 
 the elements that enter into the vital union. But this 
 underlying unity does not justify us in ignoring all 
 distinctions in the point of view, or m refusing sepa- 
 rate treatment to clearly separable fields; and inas- 
 much as the moral laws, slowly learned in the pain 
 of experience, have acquired in the thoughts and in- 
 stincts of the race a fairly distinctive form, this 
 general form it seems best, if only on practical 
 grounds, to retain. 
 
 And the practical distinction is philosophically 
 justifiable. A single broad principle, as we have 
 said, comprehends in the main all that is ordinarily in- 
 cluded in the moral demand. Morality interpreted as 
 
NATURE AND DEITY 85 
 
 the primar}^ or elementary law of social life is prac- 
 tically coextensive with the scope of the judgments 
 commonly recognized as moral. From the empirical 
 character of such judgments, as they arise in the com- 
 mon consciousness, we may well understand how the 
 line of demarcation corresponding to this underlying 
 principle should at times be overstepped, but it will 
 be found upon analysis, we submit, that where 
 morality is emancipated from the arbitrary require- 
 ments imposed b}^ mere custom, ancestral or relig- 
 ious, the moral laws may be readily reduced to the 
 fundamental conditions of social union. And as 
 these general conditions are precisely the conditions 
 which would naturally be recognized, not indeed by 
 every barbarous tribe, but b}' all the races of men 
 who have addressed themselves with any considerable 
 success to the problems of social organization, we 
 see how it is tliat morality, defined as the fundamental 
 social law, should assume a form which, with some 
 natural dilTerences, is practically the same in all de- 
 veloped communities. A tract of conduct so consist- 
 ently distinguished, in practice, and so easily covered, 
 as thus distinguished by a common principle, it were 
 best thoiefore to reserve as the proper domain of this 
 princijile when we attempt to reduce our emj")irical 
 judjrments to scientific form. 1 Icnce we have marked 
 olT the field of morals as a part only of the general 
 field 01' conduct. Morality goes to the character of 
 the individual, not in his many-sided and (general 
 capacity as man, b il in his ijuality, distinctively, as 
 a member of the human fraternity; and it is further 
 
86 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 distinguished from social law in general by the fun- 
 damental character of its requirements. It is to the 
 general body of social law what the constitutional law 
 of the state is to the great body of its subordinate leg- 
 islation; it is the organic law of social life. Indi- 
 rectly it has, of course, a bearing upon all our 
 conduct, social and non-social, seeing that there is 
 no phase of the activity of a vital organism but is 
 conditioned by, and in turn reacts upon, the activity 
 of the organism as a whole. But, for the reasons as- 
 signed, it seems better to restrict the immediate 
 subject-matter of morals to the attitude and general 
 disposition of the individual unit toward other such 
 units in the organic unity of society. And the moral 
 principle, thus restricted or defined, will expand, so 
 far as it needs expansion, by the natural laws of 
 growth. As the feebler moral impulses settle firmly 
 into instincts, that is, as our actual moral state im- 
 proves, the moral demand, which in its application to 
 our actual conduct cannot ignore the limits of what 
 is practicable, will become upon is own proper ground 
 more searching and comprehensive. And the essen- 
 tials of conduct will cover, no doubt, a progressively 
 wider area of conduct. 
 
 But if morality, as here accepted and as commonly 
 understood, occupies only a part of the field of con- 
 duct, moral discipline must be supplemented by a 
 broader culture. The moral law should be appre- 
 hended in the light of some principle or idea which em- 
 braces the possibilities of luiman life as a whole. And 
 for such an idea we must turn to religion, as conceived 
 
NATURE AND DEITY 87 
 
 by its profoundest teachers, and developed in the 
 direction of its soundest growth. True, there is hardly 
 a notable error but has been consecrated b}' asso- 
 ciation with religion. So, also, one could scarce name 
 a crime against humanity that has not been commit- 
 ted in the name of the state. But tlje religious idea 
 and the idea of the state, though sadly distorted by 
 ignorance and passion, are both, apparently, indis- 
 pensable, and are both capable of purification and 
 expansion. And the fact that religion assumes to 
 comprehend the total activity of human life, and has 
 shown itself susceptible of adaptation to the thought 
 of any age, would suggest, it would seem, to a mind 
 impressed with the evolutionist tendencies of the 
 time, that in our need for a discipline and an ideal 
 which shall be as broad as our human endowment, we 
 should make use, as far as possible, of the accumu- 
 lated strength of religious habit, rather than under- 
 take the establishment of a new discipline or cultus 
 in more or less conscious anta££onism with that which 
 has been instituted under relitrious sanctions and un- 
 der the inlluence of religious ideals. In fact, the 
 distiiictlv idealizin({ tendencies of rcli^^ion seem to 
 mark it as the necessary counterpoise to man's dis- 
 content with the bare actuality, and an indispens il'le 
 means of correcting the grosser elTects in the mind 
 of the struggle for existence under the actual contli- 
 tions of life. The religious ima<{ination has doubt- 
 less run wild. It is the tendency of every strong 
 imjnilse to run wild. Jiut without imagination, with- 
 out ideals which are the creation of the imaiiination, 
 
88 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 the hope of rescuing humanity from its animalism 
 and selfishness is slight, and we must trust to the in- 
 crease of knowledge to discipline the imagination — 
 not to weaken it; to strengthen it, rather, by teaching 
 it to walk, as Shakespeare and Raphael walked, on 
 the ground of reality; by directing it to the facts as 
 the fittest matter for its creative or shaping hand. 
 And there is in religion, however we may condemn 
 its irrational elements, an ideal of human perfection, 
 whether conceived as embodied in human life or as 
 exemplified in an expanded form in the divine exist- 
 ence, which has been of incalculable service to 
 humanity, and which is so far broader than the moral 
 ideal that it needs but easy modification to suppl}^ the 
 want of which our study of morals has left us con- 
 scious. Heart, soul, strength, mind, every instru- 
 mentalitj' and every power, are constrained to the 
 service of this ideal. Man is conceived as in his whole 
 being responsible to an ideal being; and we have 
 only to develop this conception by a completer recog- 
 nition of the richness of human capacit}', and by a 
 juster appreciation of the meaning of the ideal and of 
 its relation to the actual, to fit the conception for every 
 purpose which we may hope to accomplish b}^ means 
 of an idea as comprehensive as the scope of human 
 activity and aims. 
 
 Contrasting religion, then, conceived in this de- 
 veloped sense, with moralitj^ we find that it compre- 
 hends moralit}'. In its practical aspect, that is, as 
 furnishing a guide for conduct, it is distinguished 
 from morality by its greater breadth, or as the whole 
 
NATURE AND DEITY 89 
 
 may be distinguished from its part, since it takes cog- 
 nizance of all the means to life's general end, and 
 commands the devotion of heart, mind, soul, strength, 
 to the realization of the fuller ideal in which the 
 moral ideal is merged. It comprehends all duty, all 
 aspiration ; hopes for all happiness. The faith of 
 many ages, shaped by the dream of a fairer life, to 
 which we feel instinctivel}^ that this actual life must 
 tend, has laid the scene of its consummated hope in 
 a "world beyond," created under gentler conditions 
 than our care-laden earth, and lying nearer to the 
 hand of that providence which dela3'S, it would seem, 
 to soften the harshness of natural conditions and stay 
 the injustice of our fellowmen. But the naturalist 
 does not so despair of nature. For him the ideal is 
 the development of the actual. He looks forward, 
 not to translation to other worlds, but to the transfor- 
 mation of the existing world, building his hope upon 
 the reformation of the will, completer organization 
 or fraternity, the unfolding of powers yet latent or 
 feeble, and the slow amelioration of the external con- 
 ditions of life. But wherever the world of our long- 
 ing, it is man in his ideal estate which inspires man's 
 finest thought and touches his spirit to finest issues; 
 and it is the impulsion toward this ideal world, 
 wherever in imagination it is figured as real, which 
 characterizes the religious life. R».'ligi()n is the 
 cfTort of our nature to perfect itsolf as a wliole. It is 
 the total imjiulse of the rational life shaping all the 
 means of life to life's supreme enil; tlie resultant of 
 all vital tendencies seeking each its fullest realization 
 
90 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 as a constituent force in the action of the soul as an 
 organic whole. Religion, in a word, is, in its best 
 and ultimate sense, the general principle of life as- 
 serting itself in its completest and most effective form. 
 And morality is so far from exhausting the contents 
 of religion, that the moral regeneration of our nature 
 is, in a sense, but a preparation for the realization of 
 the religious ideal. The education and discipline of 
 our powers, the enlargement of our interests, and all 
 the finer effects of human energy, are possible only 
 in the medium of a socialized community, in a com- 
 munity, that is, which has acquired a certain soli- 
 darity through the strength of moral ties. Where these 
 ties are wantinor there can be no social state; and 
 where these ties are relaxed there we may see already 
 the beginnings of a social and general decline. It is 
 indeed a commonplace of history that vice, which is 
 the corruption of the social bond, brutalizes the mind, 
 and tends necessarily, as it debases the feelings, to 
 the extinction of art, science, philosophy, and all the 
 higher forms of the intellectual life. The function of 
 morality, however, is not merely preparatory or an- 
 cillary to the general discipline of the spirit which is 
 the function of religion. Society is more than a means 
 to ulterior ends; the social impulse is an integral part 
 of our nature. The feeling which holds us to our 
 kind, and makes the human face, marred as it is by 
 relics of our original wildness, the dearest sight that 
 can satisfy our eyes, is a jo}^ in itself, an end in itself. 
 Love, the fulfillment of the law, is its own sufficient 
 reason. Life, nevertheless, is more than the fulfill' 
 
NATURE AYD DEITY 9 1 
 
 ment of the social law. It is conceivable, indeed, 
 that every barbaric impulse were softened, and the 
 last ugly residue of the struggle for existence were 
 refined from our manners, leaving our lives notwith- 
 standing insipid and barren. But in truth love itself 
 is not mere love. It is companionship in life's occu- 
 pations: presupposes, as its ground and opportunity, 
 interests and occupations which companionship shall 
 make more gracious. And the soul grows morbid 
 when not well occupied. Atrophy wastes its sub- 
 stance, and a chafing, inarticulate discontent eats up 
 the zest of life. Hence the emptiness of our ordinary 
 ambitions. The soul is but in part alive; its fine ap- 
 titudes are ignored, and the taint of insufficiency in- 
 fects the natural sweetness of life. 
 
 "We look before and after, 
 And pine for what is not; 
 And our sincerest laughter 
 With some pain is fraught." 
 
 Power undeveloped, life denied, cankers the life 
 which finds expression ; and man, born to the free- 
 dom of nature, ''so noble in reason, so infinite in 
 faculties," drags himself hopelessly in a dull round 
 of habit, making of the means of life its end, and 
 shutting out the liope and illumination of those gen- 
 erous aims which broaden the intention of life, anil 
 which alone bi'ing life to its full fruition. 
 
 To correct this morbid condition, and to grasp and 
 keep before tin* mint! the functions of life as an or- 
 ganic wholf, V liich f-ilTei? as a whole whrii it is 
 niaiinvtl or disonh-r^ ti in any part, is the ollit:e of 
 
92 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 religion, we conceive, as distinguished from morals 
 or the discipline of any social function. The total 
 end of life is attainable only through the discharge 
 of the general offices of life, each in its place and 
 degree, as measured by the general result; and re- 
 ligion, which owes its inspirational power to its lofti- 
 ness and breadth of view, relieves by its freedom the 
 constriction of each special pursuit, and tends espec- 
 ially to check the degradation or necrosis of the finer 
 energies which results from absorption in material- 
 istic aims. It blows over our faces the air of those 
 Delectable Mountains which haunt the vision of every 
 idealist. It will liberalize the ethical aim itself, 
 which commonly unites with a kind of translocated 
 materialism, or longing for celestial luxuries, which 
 calls itself religion, in diverting to petty issues the 
 little thought that we spare for the general conduct of 
 life. Idealizing the form of our humanity, religion 
 ignores no element of manhood. The caieful pains, 
 the late-learned skill, with which we spell out the 
 letters of nature's imperishable laws ; the sense im- 
 pressible to beauty, and the plastic hand which re- 
 casts all natural forms in art's original molds; the 
 brooding thought which enters, impatient of the too 
 obvious sense, among the mysteries and shadows of 
 being and lingers about the portals of the infinite; 
 have all, as elements of that fuller manhood whiiih is 
 at once the despair and the hope of each generous 
 spirit, a religious worth. And in that fairer manhood 
 are attributes which the more pretentious gifts ob- 
 scure. The patience of Vv'eakness, the heart that bears 
 
NATURE AND DEITY 93 
 
 up under defeat; na}^ the laborer's strength, the 
 runner's swiftness, the workman!s craft, ranks each 
 in its degree as a fit expression of the energizing 
 soul. Life is the sum of all its qualities. And relig- 
 ion, as the cultus of the general ideal, cherishes each 
 in its peculiar excellence, and cherishes all. 
 
 On practical grounds, however, it may well be 
 found that morality must long furnish the main text 
 of our religious teachings. The gravity of the in- 
 terests which depends upon the strength of the moral 
 tie, and the relative feebleness of the moral instincts 
 in a large pait of mankind, appear to justify the re- 
 striction of religious eHort mainly to the reinforce- 
 m-Mit of these instincts. But we cannot overlook the 
 fact that morality itself must sulTer where the general 
 development is retarded. Rude sensibilities imply 
 dull S3 mpathies. Ignorance and a blunt intelligence, 
 even where the conscience is alive, miss all but the 
 more obvious of moral distinctions; and in commu- 
 nities where there is a pervading dullness of moral 
 perception even the more sensitive will feel the elTect 
 of the general obduration. Every man's conscience 
 is influenced by the standards of the men amongst 
 whom he moves. And the moral sense shares the 
 bias and dispro]-)()rti()n of the mind. The religious 
 partisan who would shrink from a conscious lie cir- 
 culates without scrutiny slandtM* of a Romanist or a 
 freethinker, and political immorality is rife among 
 men who in private relations pass for men of their 
 word and honest. Hence, as th(^ wise phvsicinn at- 
 tacks the diseases of the botly not idways with spe- 
 
94 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 cifics, but oftener perhaps by raising the general 
 tone, so the thoughtful moralist, knowing that the 
 conscience cannot be wiser than the reason which 
 guides it, or tenderer than the feeling which quickens 
 it, will broaden the basis of his work, and rely even 
 more upon the elevation of the mental tone than upon 
 direct moral teaching. As mere moralist he must 
 study more than his science. The very depth and 
 pervasiveness of the moral interest require that he 
 shall conceive of his ethical doctrine as but a chapter 
 in the general doctrine and discipline of the soul. 
 Without the inspiration of religion's broader aims he 
 is a docrmatist or a martinet. Mere rules or dicta in- 
 flame no zeal; it is the beauty of the full ideal which 
 touches the imagination and kindles the ardors of a 
 sacred passion. Ethics must borrow its heat from 
 religion. 
 
 Religion, in fine, as here conceived, regards the 
 capacities and possibilities of life in their harmony and 
 entirety. Recognizing in ethics the same general 
 principle which in reason should govern the conduct of 
 life, it insists upon the general principle as against 
 the particular rule, or rather as the source and justifi- 
 cation of all that is sound in our rules. This general 
 principle is the law of human happiness, the natural 
 law which prescribes the immutable conditions of 
 human well-being. Religion apprehends in this law 
 the fiat of omnipotence. Shifting our regar^^ from 
 immediate to remoter ends, from the meaner interests 
 of life to its broader intention, it traces the scheme 
 and purport of our lives to universal laws, and grounds 
 
NATURE AND DEITY 95 
 
 our frail being in the infinite. It is, in a word, reason 
 in its highest exercise, feeling on its highest plane. 
 Comprehending life in its total scope, it spurns the 
 suggestions of an errant inclination, and winning us 
 to the contemplation of great ideals stirs in us a zeal 
 to seek for our particular lives, meager as may be 
 their gifts, the most perfect expression. And human 
 nature, den^nng the religious law, denies itself, for 
 in the end it is the vital principle itself which deter- 
 mines the form of the law. 
 
VIII. 
 
 11 y a au sein de 1' humanite une source de chaleur qui n'est pas 
 pres de s'eteindre, et, quand meme il serait proave que Thumanite 
 comme le soleil se refroidera un jour, il y a quelque chose qui ne 
 meurt pas, c'est I'ideal, — Renan. 
 
 In reducing religion, as a law of conduc!-, to the 
 law of the complete or ideal development of life we 
 arrive at a principle which furnishes the key to the 
 solution of our main problem in each of its aspects. 
 
 We started our inquiry assuming as the underlying 
 thouorht in religion that there resides in nature, or is 
 manifest through nature, an overruling power. And 
 to propitiate, or in some way harmonize our relations 
 with, this power we assumed to be religion's underly- 
 ing aim. So much we took for granted. Our task 
 then was two-fold ; first, to interpret this power as 
 apprehended in the religious sense; secondly, to 
 frame a theor}^ of life in harmony with its action. 
 
 We took the ground at the outset, also, that our 
 
 knowledge of such supreme power, interpreted here 
 
 as natural power, must be based upon a stud}^ of the 
 
 order and content of nature. We postulated, in fact, 
 
 that nature is identical with universal being. But as 
 
 being in general includes both man and the object 
 
 of his worship — includes, indeed, all objects and all 
 
 determinations whatever — it was necessary to search 
 
 for a principle in the light of which we might inter- 
 
 96 
 
NATURE AND DEITY 97 
 
 pret nature universal in a sense specifically religious; 
 or define, in other words, the religious aspect of nat- 
 ure. Such a principle or clew it seemed that we 
 might find in the principle of morals. Seeing that 
 morality is generally recognized as an essential ele- 
 ment in the religious life, and as binding upon hu- 
 manity in a certain extra-human sense, we pursued 
 our search by investigating the relation which nature 
 might be found to sustain to human morals, and 
 learned at length that the moral law is to be con- 
 strued as a form of natural law. We showed, further, 
 that this law is but a branch of the more general law 
 of conduct which is determined by universal nature 
 for her particular creature man in the specific form 
 of the constitution which he has received from the 
 hands of nature; which is, that is to say, the natural 
 condition of an end naturally and constitutionally de- 
 sirable. And this more general law, which embraces 
 life as a whole seeking complete or ideal expression, 
 we identified with the law of the religious life. The 
 supreme or religious law was traced to the form of 
 the vital principle itself. 
 
 Our two-fold problem was thus considered in its 
 second or practical aspect first. Religion, as a law 
 of conduct, refers us back to the human constitution, 
 and tlie conditions established by nature under which 
 our humanity may consummate its deepest desire. 
 The law of the religious life is thus, in a profound 
 and real sense, a law of nature. And it is a rational 
 law, tlu' law which drlines our "reasonable service^^ 
 and that conformity with nature, fc>lt rather tliaii 
 
pS NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 defined, which was the guiding principle of the Stoics. 
 For the rational ends of life being predetermined, 
 totrether with the conditions under which this life 
 may be realized, in the constitution which is our gift 
 from nature, the life which ignores these conditions, 
 or makes irrational choice of means to its end, is out 
 of harmon}', not indeed with all natural law, since 
 that were impossible, but with the law which nature 
 has prescribed for the attainment of the ultimate end 
 which it is our nature to desire. It is a discordant 
 and an irrational life. In an eminent sense it is an 
 unnatural life. 
 
 But the vital principle which defines the office of 
 religion as a law of conduct is the very principle 
 which we have been seeking as a guide to the true 
 apprehension of nature as an object of religious con- 
 templation. The soul is an essential unit. The' 
 various phases of life, practical, emotional, intel- 
 lectual, are all but various phases of the same activity ; 
 and the same constitution which determines the true 
 law of conduct, or the practical law, discloses also, 
 in the discriminations of its sensibility to nature and 
 natural impressions, a principle of distinction by 
 which we may interpret the universal and indeter- 
 minate being of nature in a determinate and specific- 
 all}" religious sense. In the structure of the soul is 
 found our criterion of the divine or ideal in nature 
 as of the divine or ideal in man. Nature's inex- 
 haustible content comes to the touch of human feel- 
 ing and is judged as good or ill, or mean or 
 fine, with reference to a norm prcdeterminrd by 
 nature in the modes of our sensibility and the condi- 
 
NATURE AND DEITY 99 
 
 tions of its idea; satisfaction. It is the eye and the 
 apparatus of vision which determine the ideal of color 
 and licrht: it is the ear and its accessories which 
 determine the harmonies and perfection of sound. 
 Or if we allow with the psychologist that it is the 
 whole organism which reacts upon the report of each 
 special sense, it is still the form of our impressibility 
 which determines in its perfect or ideal gratification 
 the standard for every impression. And this is true 
 of all impressions whatever. So much truth lies in 
 the dictum of Protagoras. " Man is the measure of all 
 thinc/s." All that enters into the substance of nature's 
 boundless complex must be judged by the mind. 
 And the standard here, like the standard of conduct, 
 is no arbitrary or capricious standard. It is grained 
 in our system, and its application to the general mat- 
 ter of our impressions, on the one hand and to the 
 determination of our conduct and practical aims, on 
 the other hand, is lite's supreme or idealizing func- 
 tion. And life idealizing itself as a whole is the relig- 
 ious life. Essentially it is one and tlie same principle 
 which, in respect of our conduct, demands the perfect 
 development and organization of our practical ener- 
 gies, and which impels us, in respect of the contem- 
 plative or intellectual life, to search in nature {nr 
 order, ada[itation, beauty, sublimity, and all ideal 
 aspects of nature — all that is perfect! v responsive to 
 perfected human sensibilitv or feeling. 
 
 The religious life, thereftjre, in either aspect re- 
 garded, wheth(M- as the searcli for the deity or divin- 
 ity of nature or as the search for a divine law of 
 
lOO NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 conduct, is reducible to a single formula; the quest 
 of the ideal. This, in a word, is the office of religion. 
 The deity we seek and adore is nature in her ideal 
 manifestation; the law which we revere as supreme 
 is the law of the ideal life. And the form of the ideal 
 has reference in either case to our nature. Ulti- 
 mately, reiigion construes the universe and defines 
 the law of lite with regard to the principle of life 
 itself, referring this principle, again, back to nature, 
 the universal source of life. 
 
 The religious interest centers, then, not in univer- 
 sal power as undifferentiated and uninterpreted, but 
 in a certain aspect or interpretation of nature. Nat- 
 ure indefinite, indeterminate, unaccented by human 
 interests, is but a bewildering maze of change; but 
 in the divine we regard the general ground of nat- 
 ure's being as manifesting, or tending to manifest, 
 the perfections demanded b}' human sentiment for its 
 perfect satisfaction. It is the soul's specific sensibil- 
 ity which discriminates, and deity is nature as per- 
 fectly responsive to the soul's demand. And wherever 
 we turn we discover this divinity; in germinant life, 
 in the play of the elem.ental forces, in the orbits of 
 the stars; and the soul, reflecting on itself as the 
 product of the same universal power which discloses 
 these perfections, distinguishes in its own depth also 
 a divine intent, an instinct, or inspiration, constrain- 
 ing the life to its ideal form. And even when the 
 sense revolts the eye may discover an attendant per- 
 fection. Slime and filth transmit all the wonders of 
 light; disease, to the pathologist, may seem more 
 
NATURE A\D DEITY lOI 
 
 beautiful than health ; and in liim who may consider 
 it dispassionately the anatomy of the tiger provokes 
 admiration b}^ its perfection as an instrument of death. 
 But the perfections of nature are relative always to 
 some specific type or end; the ideal is limited by its 
 idea. And the perfect aspect of nature ma}' be but 
 the obverse of imperfection in the reverse. Darkness 
 alternates with light. For each proof which piety 
 may instance of God's goodness the skeptic is ready 
 with evidence of malevolence. Nay, piety itself has 
 recognized and personified the black and untoward 
 aspect of nature no less than the fair and propitious; 
 and Ormuzd must share dominion with Ahriman, 
 God with Devil, Love with Hate. The universal 
 reality, in short, is a ccjmposite of contrasts juul op- 
 positions, aspects of being which vary as they are 
 addressed to our various sensibilities, or as they ob- 
 struct or reinforce our intention ; and which, it would 
 seem, we may never perfectly harmonize, seeing that 
 perfect harmony, in any sense intelligible to ourselves 
 would imply a universe created wholly in the human 
 interest or with reference to the huuKui organism, 
 and so, as a whole, apprehended; an implication 
 which the rashest of dogmatists would scarcely insist 
 upon. The pantheistic dream of universal good, into 
 the terms of which we may translate all partial t'vil, 
 is thus as unverifiable as the theist's assnnijnion of a 
 humani' providence struggling witli the perversity of 
 inc()rri<fil)le nature. Neverllu'less, it is the ifood 
 alone, the good in the broad jilatonic sense, which 
 engages the nOigious interest. Religion, as the pro- 
 
I02 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 duct of the idealizing impulse, sees and pursues the 
 ideal alone. That which it sees in nature — the deit}'' 
 or divinity of nature — is nature tending to an ideal 
 expression of her typ^s and powers; that which it 
 seeks and conserves in humanity is the ideal expres- 
 sion of the human tj-pe. 
 
 And art too dwells and works in this ideal element. 
 But while the aesthetic sense is gratified rather by 
 the outer charm and the purity of definite objective 
 types, or associates the forms and qualities of things 
 according to a certain unit}' of sensuous impression 
 determined by the form of our sensibilit}', the relig- 
 ious sense penetrates the apparent and external form, 
 and searches the beautiful, which is the perfect in its 
 type, or the sublime, which is nature in her grand- 
 eur and power, for the inner meaning or the deeper 
 law through which it may refer all types and powers 
 to their universal source, aspiring to reach at length, 
 if that were possible, the point of view at which all 
 imperfections should vanish, and all forces, forms, 
 and qualities should appear as perfections of the uni- 
 versal life apprehended in the unity of an ultimate 
 ideal, an infinity of infinite perfections. Religion 
 represents, in fine, the subjective demand in its pro- 
 foundest intent. It includes art, in its deeper mean- 
 ing, and all idealistic tendencies; and though under 
 present conditions it is mainly absorbed in the prac- 
 tical idealism of morals, nothing that pertains to the 
 refinement of the human type or to the realization of 
 human ideals is foreign to its scope. 
 
 And religion, reflecting upon its own origin and 
 
NATURE AND DEITY IO3 
 
 aims, or attempting the s^^stematic interpretation of 
 man and nature as in relation, generally, to the ideal, 
 passes on the other hand into philosophy. The phil- 
 osophical aim is "truth." The ideal here is a per- 
 fect general representation of the created world as it 
 is. The philosophical interest, as distinguished, say, 
 from the practical interest or the aesthetic interest, 
 impels us to schematize the facts and the laws of be- 
 ing, not directly with a view to re-forming them or 
 re-disposing them in furtherance of some high or 
 cherished aim of ours, but with reference in the first 
 instance to the action of the intellect in apprehending 
 them. The fact, perfect or imperfect in its type, the 
 fact as it exists, with the law of its existence or its 
 place in the scheme of things, is here the desideratum ; 
 and philosophy, as the systematization of the sciences 
 or of the specific forms of knowledge, ministers to 
 the interests of the intellect, distinctively, as an in- 
 strument of cognition. But our intellectual interests, 
 owing to the interplay of function which characterizes 
 the organs of intellectual life, cannot be wholly dis- 
 engaged from other interests, and as a matter of fact 
 the problems of philosophy have been to a large ex- 
 tent religious problems because our broadest and 
 profoundest interests, which are the interests that 
 religion conserves, are those wliich naturally engage 
 the attention of conijirchensive intellects seeking lit 
 material for the cognitive faculty to act upon. No 
 profounder interest, indeed, ciui engage human activ- 
 ity than the relation of tiu; actual man in tlu' actual 
 world to man and the world as li;;ured and dnnanded 
 
I04 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 by our ideals, which is the relation to be determined, 
 if possible, by religious philosophy. And this is a re- 
 lation of fact, an object of intellectual cognition. Re- 
 ligious philosophy is therefore, inasmuch as it studies 
 a determinate relation established in the order of nat- 
 ure, a form of natural philosophy, and religion has 
 always been found, in the course of its actual develop- 
 ment, in close relation with man's cosmological con- 
 ceptions. Our religious schemes, it would seem, depend 
 upon and change with our views of the scheme of 
 nature. But neither science, in the ordinary, more 
 physical sense, nor thephilosophy of science, is neces- 
 sarily religious. Knowledge is obtained by abstrac- 
 tion of specific parts, qualities, or aspects of being from 
 the whole of a given content, and the form of the re- 
 sults which "vve reach in the scientific contemplation of 
 nature depends upon the form of the material which we 
 abstract for consideration from the plenum of nature. 
 By elimination of nature's inexhaustible wealth of 
 form and quality we may resolve all beinginto bare 
 force; the study of spatial relations will reduce the 
 heavens and the earth to the compass of an astro- 
 nomical chart; or, inverting the order of physical se- 
 quence, we may come, in our search for the primal 
 cause, upon an elemental star-dust or some primordial 
 gas. Phj^sical, chemical, and mathematical inquiries 
 lead us directly only to physical, chemical, and math- 
 ematical results. And, in general, the relations which 
 we consider in what is called the scientific investiga- 
 tion of nature are highly specialized and abstract, 
 representing nature with fidelity, indeed, so far as 
 
NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 105 
 
 they go, but not as in relation to the vital and ideal 
 interests which are the theme and motive of religious 
 thought. The mountains lying in the sunlight are 
 more than the elements of their constituent rocks; 
 something more than a lesson in optics shines through 
 the purple haze which blends their rugged lines. And 
 philosophy, regarded as a mere synthesis of the ab- 
 stractions of science, though it satisfies a noble curi- 
 osity and occupies a necessary' place in that general 
 discipline and development of our nature which it is 
 the office of religion to care for, still leaves us cold, 
 is not yet "divine'' or religious philosophy. Its uni- 
 verse is but a system of forces,causes, elemental com- 
 binations, and general classes — the mere anatomy of 
 nature — and represents as incompletely the relation 
 of the universal reality to the idealizing tliought 
 which moves religious feeling as the chemical foi'm- 
 ula, two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of 0x3 gen, 
 represents the sublimity of Niagara or the sea. 
 
 Religious philosophy takes as its immediate subject- 
 matter not the fact which is, but the fact which, on 
 demand of the subject man, ought to be. Its theme is 
 an idea, the idea of a perfected humanity domiciled 
 in a perfect world; and it is interested in the actual 
 world and man in his actual estate, not as mere mat- 
 ters of fact to be fitted to their place in certain 
 schemata of facts, but mainly and primarily as dis- 
 closing the means and C(jnditions of the progressive 
 realization of this idea. Sucli means and conditions 
 are, neverthless, matters of evidence, antl capabK' of 
 scientilic treatment in accordance with the laws of 
 
I06 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 evidence. And though the immature thought of man 
 has spurned the actual world as impotent to satisfy or 
 realize his ideals, and as having no interest therefore 
 for the religious or idealizing mind, a more intelli- 
 gent study of nature has corrected our understanding 
 of nature's methods, founded a new cosmology, and 
 opened vistas of hope in the natural world which out- 
 reach even the enthusiast's fancy sporting with the 
 insubstantial elements of an imagined world. Changes 
 vast and revolutionary, it appear, are but the cumu- 
 lative effect of graduated and unperceived mutation ; 
 and natural idealism, studious of nature's ways, con- 
 ceives that man may grow step by step into that 
 which he ought to be as the earth step by step was 
 fitted for his habitation. It seeks to root itself, ac- 
 cordingl}', in the ground of fact; in the constitution 
 of nature, the ultimate source of life and power; in 
 the constitution of man, whose life it seeks to perfect. 
 A knowledge of facts as they are, and a clear rec- 
 ognition of the laws of growth actually operative, are 
 as necessary to the elaboration of productive and en- 
 during ideals as is the constructive energy of the 
 imagination itself which bodies forth the forms of 
 things as yet unknown in nature. Da Vinci and 
 Angelo, idealists of color and form, were anatomists 
 too, and students of the living model. Dante, Shake- 
 speare, Balzac, had been but ineffective idealists of the 
 motives and the passions of life, had they been less 
 profoundly versed in the actual experience of life. 
 And all the various and special arts, born of a special 
 subjective need, and striving for unity and perfection 
 
NATURE AND DEITY IO7 
 
 of expression in their several creations in response to 
 this need, depend upon the artist's mastery of some 
 aspect of nature which he represents under ideal 
 forms, or of some mode of human sensibility to which 
 he offers ideal gratification. Religion, on the other 
 hand, is related to all impressions and all unities, and 
 represents the im.pulse of the soul to perfect itself as 
 an organic whole harmonized with the organic life 
 of nature. It idealizes our humanity, and would 
 surround it with an ideal world, unifying man and 
 the world as concurrent effects or expressions of a 
 common power which tends everywhere to express 
 itself in ideal forms. But religion, that is, natural 
 as opposed to conventional religion, must begin with 
 man and the world as they are. Its ideals can be 
 realized only through development of the actual in 
 conformity with the actual laws of growth, and its 
 need of knowledge is as profound as is the primary 
 need or aspiration which religion seeks to satisfy. 
 There is nothing in the entire circle of the sciences, 
 in fact, which has not, either as instrument or disci- 
 pline, a bearing upon the religious problem. The 
 interest of rclij/icjn is of course most vital in the facts 
 and laws which are most deepl}' related to human 
 welfare, in the fiicts and laws of the inner life. But 
 the sympathit;s of religion are universal. Its interests 
 are coextensive with the human inierest, and the op- 
 position betwe Ml scii-nce and religion exists only so 
 far as religion assumes a false basis of fact, or a the- 
 ory of nature and natural law which will not bear the 
 minute and patient analysis of science in its effort to 
 
I08 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 attain to a just apprehension of the fact. Religion 
 iij conflict with science, or that which is known, is 
 in en-ror. Religion may offer us fair ideals, never- 
 theless, while yet cherishing many illusions of fact; 
 but it cannot maintain such supremacy as comports 
 wnth the dignity of its aims until it becomes a more 
 patient student of nature as we lind her, until it ceases, 
 in spleen, or in despair of nature's aid, to project all 
 its hopes into other and imagined worlds, and sub- 
 mits its ideals as types for realization by actual men 
 in the real world. True religion is the true law of 
 growth. Its datum is the actual; but its function is 
 the cultus of the ideal, that is, to develop the actual, 
 to give true form and tendency to the real, to lure 
 and guide and shape that which is to that which 
 ought to be. 
 
 And the effort of religion to exceed this its true 
 function, and to grasp at something which it calls 
 the good absolute, must always fail. Man, mortal 
 and iinite, can do no more than orient himself and 
 better himself and his estate in an infinity where 
 the liuman element, though of the substance of the 
 infinite, is but an element. The soul, specific and 
 human in its quality, needs but meat for its proper 
 sustenance and room for the play of its peculiar fac- 
 ult}^; and its reasonable demand, its sole object, ra- 
 tionally apprehended, is to find in the wide range of 
 the world such sustenance, such opportunity; no 
 more. But religious philosophy, forgetful of the es- 
 sential human reference in all our standards, and ves- 
 ting the soul's demand for perfection relative to the 
 
NATURE AND DEITY IO9 
 
 needs of its kind with the efficacy of a law applicable 
 to the universe in its infinitude, assumes that our 
 idea is the form to which infinite and eternal being 
 must be compressed, and wastes itself in the struggle 
 to round out our general impression of nature into 
 a total unity, in which all particular impressions, good 
 or ill, perfect or imperfect, may appear, tried by some 
 ultimate standard, as all alike harmonious and per- 
 fect. The effort is not, indeed, fruitless. As the 
 vision widens deformity and disproportion tend to 
 disappear. The broken line which bounds our hori- 
 zon at the level of common life rounds into the full 
 circle as we ascend. And it is the dream of philos- 
 oph}', theistic, deistic, pantheistic, to reach such ele- 
 vation of view that all evil and insufficiency may 
 suffer a divine transformation, and the actual itself 
 be seen in its totality as the absolute ideal. Color of 
 justification for this presumption comes even from 
 science as it broadens. When we see the physicist 
 watching in awe the action of the forces of crystalli- 
 zation and showing us in the bod}^ of death an im- 
 manent lieauty and life; when we see the naturalist 
 tracing the steps by which nature, even through 
 rajiine and greed, lends her creatures a keener intel- 
 ligence or a finer grace; it seems not impossible that 
 the science which is stigmatized as profane, and 
 whicli, in the rigor of its scrutiny of the facts, is 
 wont to discredit the idealist as warping the vision to 
 a f:dse ch-w and hiiidcrinir knowleilj^e, sliould itself 
 suggest a more comprehensive view of nature, and 
 resolve away ci^rtain of the perplex ltit\s of religious 
 
no NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 thought. And this progressive expansion and or- 
 ganization of thought is the life of thought. But our 
 progress brings us no nearer, it would seem to a final 
 consummation; is itself, indeed, an infinite progress; 
 and an ideal unity in which every phase and detail 
 of being shall find its place as in all relations good 
 and fair appears to be as unattainable as a mental 
 representation of universal being rounded off into 
 a physical unit or whole. Nature can not be reduced 
 in idea even to the scale of the human relations which 
 are implied in our ideals. Man is in nature; he is 
 not to be assumed as the end of nature; and the ends 
 to which human nature, harmonized with itself, and 
 happy in means and opportunity of harmonious self- 
 expression, must ever tend are yet too specific and 
 narrow to be imposed upon the being of nature gen- 
 erally. The ideal law is natural law; but it is natural 
 law as related to human sensibility and auxiliary to 
 human needs. Nature in her various kinds, or nature 
 for herself and in her universalit}^, can not be tried 
 by the laws of human conduct or constrained to the 
 compass of human aims. She offers, nevertheless, 
 infinite recourse to the activity of the human mind. 
 Herself without limit, and eluding all effort to com- 
 press her infinitude to the measure of a finite idea, 
 she opposes no limit to the idealizing course of hu- 
 man thought. The search for the divine can never 
 end. 
 
IX. 
 
 God's wisdom and goodness! — Ay, but fools 
 Misdefine these till God knows thern no more. 
 Wisdom and goodness, they are God. 
 
 — Mattheiv Arnold. 
 
 Schadliche Wahrheit, ich ziehe sie vor dem niitzlichen Irrthum. 
 Wahrhe it heilet den Schmerz den sie vielleicht uns erregt. 
 
 Goethe. 
 
 Religion we define, then, as the quest or cultus 
 of the ideal. It is distinguishable from the arts 
 wliich relate to special foims of the idealizing impulse 
 in that it embraces our nature in its entirety; and 
 whereas these special arts are occupied for the most 
 part in creating exemplars of their several ideals, the 
 practical or formative elTort of religion is directed to 
 the amelioration of our humanity generally, or to the 
 progressive assimilation of the human type, in its 
 most comprehensive sense, to the human ideal. Ikit 
 the human organization, thougli specific among nat- 
 ure's innumerable species, is, as we have seen, the 
 key or touchstone of the ideal, as the human mind 
 must conceive it, universally; and the more perfect 
 the human organization as in relation to its own ideal, 
 the more complete is its I'lficiency as an instnmient 
 for the interpretation of tlie universe in its divine or 
 ideal aspect generally. Thus religion, strenuous to 
 
 perfect the human type, passes from nitUi to nature, 
 
 111 
 
112 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 essaying the interpretation of all particular forms, 
 forces, qualities, and tendencies as perfections rela- 
 tive to the universal life of nature But the actual 
 we cannot resolve wholly into the unity of the ideal. 
 Nature cannot be grasped in unit}^ or as a whole, in 
 her mere reality ; much less can she be comprehended 
 in an ideal unity, or harmonized in all her visible 
 aspects with standards of perfection paramount for 
 man, but relative ultimately to the human organiza- 
 tion, and therefore specific, not universal standards. 
 The search for the ideal is, nevertheless, the essential 
 function of religion. In the life of man, or in nature's 
 infinite life, the religious enthusiast must pursue his 
 idea, which, though never perfectly realized, is yet 
 forever in process of realization. 
 
 For all things have their divine or ideal aspect. 
 Though the infinity of nature mocks our attempts to 
 reduce the universe of being to the limits of an}^ par- 
 ticular idea, the religious soul is conscious of divine 
 suggestion in every natural thing. And this, the di- 
 vinity of nature, is the Deity of our aspirations, the 
 Ideal, the omnipresent Good, that we adore. Obey- 
 ing the common tendency of thought to clothe its 
 more distinctive ideas with individuality and inde- 
 pendence, men have personified this ideal, parting it 
 from nature conceived as impersonal and created, as 
 if it were another nature, distinct, personal, and cre- 
 ative. But the ideal, thus parted from nature, is 
 parted only in our thought. The reality, so far as 
 the ideal is real is in nature, and is, as reality, insep- 
 arable from nature, who is at once created and ere- 
 
NATURE AND DEITY II3 
 
 ative [jiatiira nattirata and natiira iiaticrans). And it 
 were as reasonable — as a process of thought it would, 
 in fact, be the same — to abstract and personify the 
 principle of evil as to abstract and personify the prin- 
 ciple of goodness, for the evil which we shun and 
 the good which we pursue are but converse aspects 
 of nature, discriminated b^- our organization as men, 
 and having real existence, not as beings or essences 
 dissociated from nature, but as alike included in her 
 universal reality. Deity therefore, truly conceived, 
 is God, the Ideal, or the Spirit of the Good, manifest 
 in nature. The divine is not to be dissevered, save 
 in the abstraction of our thought, from nature. It 
 is an aspect or principle or tendency of nature, em- 
 phasized by human feeling and human aspirations, 
 to which it is so nearly and so profoundly related that 
 for us it is supreme as a principle directive of our vis- 
 ion or apprehension of nature; but the reality in which 
 this principle is manifest, the actual being in which 
 the spirit or process of the ideal appears, is the being 
 of nature. 
 
 But it is in humanity, of all nature's products, that 
 we, as men, must look for our true Avatar. Here, 
 for us, is the true incarnation of deity, in the coales- 
 cence of the human and the divine; naliu'e in the 
 brief span of a human lift' and nature in the long 
 story of humanity's ascending progression tending to 
 the more perfect embodiment of the human tvjH'. In 
 the older thouglit tlie operation of deity was as an 
 extra-natural inlhience jilaving from without upon 
 the human faculty, and bearing it on to achievement 
 
114 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 above the plane of merely natural action. But to the 
 naturalist the voice of deity is a natural voice; the 
 inspired thought, in religion and morals as in litera- 
 ture and art, is still a natural thought. The change 
 in the point of view is indeed momentous, and far- 
 reaching etlects must follow the change. And new 
 wine, we have been warned, should not be put into 
 old bottles. But though in the long process of growth 
 into which we now resolve the incomplete story of 
 creation much is outgrown, the truth which com- 
 mends itself as new has grown out of the old and is 
 vital with the life of the old ; and it seems not unfitting 
 that the ideal, long associated with the thought of 
 deity, should still be called divine, and that religion, 
 whose peculiar office (so far as it has not been per- 
 vert^ to the mere conservation of vested interests 
 and conventional opinion) has been to keep alive 
 our sense of deity as idealized being, should yet dis- 
 charge the same high function, though the divinity 
 which we worship is found in humanity, and in fa- 
 miliar and companionable nature, whom we cease to 
 revere only as we strip her of her divinity to clothe 
 the supernatural withal. Deity, in the earlier philos- 
 ophies but the intellectual or disposing principle of 
 nature, then the hypostasis of natural power, and 
 afterwards dissevered from and conceived in opposi- 
 tion to nature, comes again at length in the revolution 
 of modern thought back to nature, immanent, inher- 
 ent, indissociable from the life of nature. 
 
 But this divinity in nature, or in human nature — 
 is it in truth the deity we needs must worship? Re- 
 
NATURE AND DEITY I I 
 
 ligion has so long been associated with a personality 
 assumed to be distinct from and superior to nature 
 that, with some impatience perhaps, one may ask, 
 "Why yet talk — if we are convinced of the futility 
 of all attempts to transcend the natural order — wh}^ 
 yet talk of religion or religious inspiration, or darken 
 counsel with terms that have lost their significance? 
 If the supernatural be indeed extinct, what remains 
 but a supposititious deity to kindle the religious fire? 
 In reducing the divine to the plane of nature we have 
 so changed the form of deity, it would seem, that we 
 have lost the substance. We may oppose the natural 
 force of the soul to the unpitying force of nature 
 without; but religion — if we are abandoned to such 
 tenderness as resides in nature's impersonal laws, 
 what is there left of religion? 
 
 The change which the change in our attitude to- 
 ward nature must work in religion is indeed so pro- 
 found that its effects can Ijardly be overstated. The 
 abolition of the practices of idolatrx^ the absorption 
 of polytheistic powers in a single supreme power, 
 wrought changes less radical perhaps in their inlluence 
 upon the habit of the mind than the clianges involved 
 in th(^ reversion of our belahorc^d and conxcnlional- 
 ized thought from the supernatural liack to the 
 natural. Init wi^ have seen that a law of life founded 
 in some theory of our relation to universal law is a 
 necessity of the rati(M)al and rellecting mind, and re- 
 ligion, wliich claims absolute authority over the con- 
 duct of life, is for eiieh man jiroperly iil« iililiecl, in its 
 philosophical aspect, witli the doctrine which to him 
 
Il6 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 accounts for such authority. And the form of relig- 
 ious thought in general has been tending steadily, 
 though in part, perhaps, unconsciously, in the direc- 
 tion which, in virtue of the changes it is undergoing, 
 it must hereafter consciously pursue. There is, in- 
 deed, a stage in religious development when the force 
 of the ideal does not yet appear, when religion is 
 little more than a timorous effort to propitiate a for- 
 midable and malignant power by means such as 
 might appease human wrath; and there are doctrines 
 in our lately dominant theories which carry unmis- 
 takable traces of this earlier and ruder phase of relig- 
 ion. But since the absorption of ethics by religion, 
 idealistic tendencies have become more and more 
 pronounced in religious thought. The object of re- 
 ligious worship has been more and more completely 
 identified with the moral ideal, and the belief in hell 
 is at length disappearing, not so much on account of 
 the weakness of the evidence for its existence — or the 
 belief in a local heaven might have shared its decay 
 — as on account of the incompatibility of endless 
 suffering, endured by any creature, with the ideal 
 attributes ascribed to the creator. And the force of 
 the ethical ideal is undoubtedly becoming in religion 
 the governing force. Indeed, so far as we can per- 
 ceive through the mass of speculative and fanciful 
 matter with which the great religions have been over- 
 laid, it was the intention of their founders, long ago, 
 to give it predominance. But they were interested 
 in the practical issue rather than in the theoretical 
 basis of their teachings, and if it appears to our later 
 
NATURE AND DEITY II7 
 
 thought that ethical law is not the mere fiat of a su- 
 pernatural lawgiver, as they may have believed, but 
 a form of natural law, we are still, as learners of the 
 ethical life, in harmony with the great teachers whose 
 constant minds and heroic lives gave to ethics its 
 preponderant force in religion and merged their im- 
 mortal figures in our immortal ideals. Hence, how- 
 ever radical the changes which we introduce into the 
 philosophy of religion, if the ethical ideal is kept 
 steadily in view the main content or the substance of 
 religion, as religion is represented in the lives and 
 teachings of its greatest leaders, is not changed. 
 We have in morals a binding element uniting the new 
 with the old. The moral law, transformed from a 
 personal into a natural law, becomes a means of 
 transition from the personal to the natural theory of 
 reliction. 
 
 In making this transition, therefore, we do not 
 abrogate the ofiice of religion. We simply ration- 
 alize its theory. Taking up substantially as we lind 
 it the ethical elemen% which is central or tends to 
 become central in the older systems, we allow it, in 
 terms and with deliberate preference, tlie same central 
 importance; tracing then the form of this ideal to 
 the form of our nature, we show its relation to a yet 
 broader ideal which is referrible to the same general 
 principle, namely, the elTort of our nature to seek its 
 fullest satisfaction in the fullest expression of its es- 
 sential vilalitv; and the moral ideal thus rationalized 
 and expaniled becomes the religious ideal, the pur- 
 suit of which yields the profoundest happiness, ''the 
 
Il8 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 peace which passeth all understanding," and con- 
 stitutes the religious life. Religion is therefore neither 
 destroyed nor displaced by something substantial!}' 
 unlike it. It is simply developed. That is to say, 
 the gap between the new thought and the old faith is 
 not so wide that w^e need break, or attempt to break, 
 the continuity of the line of religious growth ; or, 
 rather, there is no gap, we develop a naturalistic sys- 
 tem from the naturalistic elements which religion 
 already contained. The theory of a personal deity, 
 personal in the specifically human sense upon wnich 
 many 3'et insist, indeed falls away; and to the dog- 
 matist on the one hand, or the skeptic on the other, 
 who maintains that this hypothesis, with the super- 
 naturalism which it involves, is essential matter of 
 religion, its decay means of course the decline and 
 fall of religion. But we have to guard ourselves here 
 against the seduction of scholastic disputes about 
 names and essences; and in dealing with a matter 
 so comprehensive as religion, so subjective in its na- 
 ture, and so inevitably modified b}' constant and 
 progressive change, it would seem that critical con- 
 sideration were more profitably directed to the truth 
 or falsity of its content as we find it than to any at- 
 tempt to conclusively determine the essential impli- 
 cation of the name. It is our contention that the 
 substance of religion is not changed by the substitu- 
 tion of a natural for a supernatural theory, and that 
 the particular form in which we conceive of the power 
 which is recoornized as the ultimate source and 
 sanction of the laws of human well-being is less es- 
 
NATURE AND DEITY II9 
 
 sential, having been the subject of constant change, 
 than the recognition of the fact that some such power, 
 whatever the form in which we apprehend it, exists. 
 But, however th.is may be, the existence of such 
 power, natural or supernatural, will hardly be denied ; 
 and if the s^'stem of thought or tlie law of life which 
 the mind, maturing its reflections, constructs about 
 its conception of such power, conceived as natural 
 power, shall not be called religion, it will at least 
 occupy the place which has been occupied by relig- 
 ion, and the question of names may be left to take 
 care of itself. To us no name seems so fitting as that 
 of religion. But if its litness be disputed we shall not 
 be very strenuous to insist on the name. It is not the 
 verbal symbol, but the momentous truth which is 
 symbolized, which is our present concern. 
 
 But the mind is as yet tender of its errors, and 
 misses in the face of unfamiliar truths the warmth 
 and intimacy of the illusions displaced by the truth. 
 Religion consecrates all things, true or false, with 
 which it is allied, and we have looked so long upon 
 nature as dependent upon extraneous power that the 
 investiture of nature with her natural rii^lits is resented 
 as sacrilegious. The theistic prejudice has discred- 
 ited nature. We ignore, or take for granted simjih', 
 the common and standin<£ miracle of natural beino;, 
 or gaze at it as a mere mechanic wonder, the inven- 
 tion of a non-resident mind ; or if tlu^ awe and ad- 
 miration inspired by the vastness and perfection of 
 nature's works ran not be repressed, thev are diverted 
 from their propi r ohj 'ct, the immanent life and powci' 
 
I20 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 of nature, to the transcendent being assumed as nat- 
 ure's designer. But science has opened the book of 
 a new revelation. The infinite and eternal has de- 
 scended from the clouds and shines in the dust. And 
 with the juster thought of nature comes a sense of 
 emancipation, a feeling of security and reality, as if 
 one were escaping from the phantasmata and spells 
 of enchantment into the familiar world and the plain 
 light of day. If an illusion lost is nevertheless a loss, 
 the truth frankly accepted brings fresh inspiration. 
 We may allow that the source of that inspiration 
 through which human feeling in the past reached its 
 highest plane was conceived in many aloft}' mind as 
 personal and as more or less disparted from, nature. 
 The fact could not well be otherwise. Feeling takes 
 its clew and tendence from the thought, and where 
 the mind through the undeveloped form of its knowl- 
 edge sees in nature no original power or direction it 
 traces the source of its own life and inspiration inev- 
 itably to a non-natural director of nature. But the 
 truer insight made possible by the expansion of 
 knowledge will give the feeling a truer form. And 
 the conception of divinity as the expression of the 
 infinite and eternal under ideal forms, which is the 
 underlying conception of developed religious thought, 
 will lose nothing of its religious qualit}' by translation 
 from the domain of speculative shadows to the natural 
 realm. It may be said indeed that religious feeling 
 has survived in spite of theorists and dogmatists. 
 The cumbrous structures which have imposed them- 
 selves upon religious thought have borrowed from 
 
NATURE AND DEITY 121 
 
 the sweetness and sincerity of devout and simple souls 
 more of vitality than they have given, and when a 
 truer apprehension of our relations to nature shall 
 have allied itself with our instincts and ranged itself 
 with the general furniture of the mind our devotion 
 to the ideal law need discover no less singleness and 
 strength than the devotion of the long roll of martyrs 
 who have witnessed the power of the ideal. Nor need 
 we fear, as many seem to fear, that tlie moral ideal, if it 
 shall lack the extraneous support of conventional re- 
 ligion, must needs decay. Its strength is inherent. 
 True, it has so long been allied with the dogmas of 
 religion that to the timid it may seem a perilous ex- 
 periment to bare the doctrine of morals of its time- 
 worn associations; but time was when the alliance 
 was but feeble, or as yet not formed, and the moral 
 sense, independent in its origin, grew then with an 
 independent strength. And it grew to such vigor 
 that it even invaded the realm of reli^jion and com- 
 pelled on Olympus the reformation of the old immoral 
 gods, as lately in chiistendom it has slaked, if not 
 extinguished, certain subterranean fires. Religion, 
 or what is taught as religion, needs rather borrow 
 stiength from morals than that morals should depend 
 on religion. Our ideals, imperfect as they are, spring 
 from the depths of our being, and are as ineradica- 
 ble as any principle of our being; and without doubt 
 the moral ideal, conceived as embraced in the gen- 
 eral ideal which we have here identified with the 
 religious, will llourish as vigorou^lv under the disci- 
 pline of science as ever it llourished under the tyranny 
 
122 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 of dogma. It is a baseless dread which distrusts 
 our hiter thought. All that ever was now as really 
 is. And if it be possible, as the too optimistic thinker 
 would aver, that even the illusions of the mind as it 
 moves from stage to stage are beneficent, can we 
 doubt, when we consider the cumulative effects of 
 error, that is better, always, where it is possible, to 
 know that which is, as it is; that the truth, as com- 
 pared with error, must be yet more beneficent? 
 
 But the aspirations here identified with the sub- 
 stance of the religious impulse are too intermittent 
 and too feeble, it may be said, to influence the lives 
 of men in general as they have been influenced here- 
 tofore by religion ; only imaginative minds, or minds 
 of relatively high development, conceive the ideal as 
 a motive for action. With the masses of men, who 
 accept themselves frankly as the}' are, it is simply 
 the strongest propensity that rules; and ideal laws, 
 having no reality in their minds, no edge to cut their 
 sensibilities, can exert no real influence on their lives. 
 Religion as here interpreted is too impalpable for the 
 gross uses of the world. To become a power among 
 men it must touch them where they can feel. 
 
 If it were simply a question of devising, under the 
 name of religion, the means for coercing all sorts and 
 conditions of men into the form of goodness, and if 
 the truth of our creeds or the sincerity of our profes- 
 sions bore no essential relation to the moral or relig- 
 ious life, we might spare ourselves the pains of 
 scrutiny, and offer our adherence to the highest bid- 
 der, to the propagandist who promises most or 
 
NATURE AND DEITY 1 23 
 
 threatens most. And, undisturbed b}' the question 
 of evidence, we might still urge, with the propagan- 
 dist's recklessness and fervor, the material pleasures 
 of heaven, the sensible pains of hell. But where the 
 truth is in question the matter of evidence should cut 
 a certain figure. And if we believe that our religious 
 difficulties will never be settled except through inde- 
 pendent conviction of the truth as determined by the 
 evidence, it is our duty to apply the tests of truth to 
 the postulates of religious teachers without the bias 
 which a tremulous consideration of results is certain 
 to give to our estimate of the evidence. There may 
 be those who are persuaded, with Plato, that any 
 •'useful" fiction may be paraded before the ignorant 
 and superstitious as truth, assuming, it would seem, 
 that the ill-instructed may be entrapped or cajoled 
 into conformity with a law which the}' would never 
 respect on its merits. But can we believe that a great 
 delusion will work as a great moral force? Veracity, 
 veracity of insight as well as veracity of expression, 
 is (as Plato himself perceived) of the very fiber of 
 the moral life, and whatever specious advantage is to 
 be won by deceit, we cannot build up a sound moral- 
 it} by systematic fraud. 
 
 'Sage, thun wir nicht Kecht? Wir miissen den Pobel betruj^en; 
 
 Sieh nur, wie ungeschicht, sieh nur, wie uiki er sich zeigl! 
 Ungeschichl unci wildsind alle rohe Betrogenen: 
 
 Seyd nur redlich, und so fuhrt ihn zum Menschlichen an.' 
 
 Insincerity and hyjiocrisy will scarcely be avowed, 
 it is true, as allies of religion ; and the brand of the 
 liar, ev(Mi among tlic iiieligious, isthehotlv resented 
 brand of shame. And yvi do not our religious teach- 
 
124 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 ers discredit the truth by discrediting an uncompro- 
 mising application of the tests of truth? Do they not, 
 in all solemnit}', affirm as fact matters wl ich they 
 have never scrutinized ? as truth, principles which 
 they have never disussed or dare not deny? But man 
 must know where he stands. We cannot play fast 
 and loose with nature and her immutable laws. Nor 
 are the fundamental principles of religious philoso- 
 phy so easy of determination that we may dispense 
 with criticism and evidential tests, or light-heartedly 
 assume the truth of any principle which seems to us 
 beneficent. The evils which a false principle entails 
 are cumulative, and in the beginning may be com- 
 pletely disguised. It is the sounder practice, taking 
 one step at a time, to assure ourselves by every test 
 that ma}' be applied that each step as we take it is on 
 solid ground. 
 
 The prior question here, then, is the truth of ideal- 
 ism, not its force as a motive. It may be shown, 
 nevertheless, that the ideal is in fact a force among 
 men, and is something more than a delicacy for the 
 refined. Ideal motives may be present, indeed, 
 where there is little suspicion of their presence. Every 
 impulse or facult}^ tends, in proportion to its strength 
 and the completeness of its development, to create in 
 the mind a standard, or an ideal law, determining 
 from within the measure and form of its ac[i\itv. 
 The eye will revel in color, the ear in sweet sounds, 
 and music and painting with tl:eir subjective laws are 
 in every man embryonic; the skillful hand delio^hts 
 in its skill, and art, whose end is in itself, graces not 
 
NATURE AND DEITY 1 25 
 
 Statuary and architecture only, but every utilitarian 
 service which is but the means to an end ; and every 
 natural turn or talent of the mind, craving its proper 
 exercise, finds satisfaction in its own perfect work 
 independently of the ulterior or utilitarian or self- 
 regarding aim. And the finer the capacity the more 
 unselfish or impersonal its action. The stronger the 
 genius or passion, relatively to the personal interest, 
 the more it tends to subdue or ignore all ends but the 
 gratification of its craving for complete or ideal ex- 
 pression. Hence we are all, all at least who are 
 conscious of any spark of originality, idealists. Ever}^ 
 ambition is an ideal, and only such as are destitute 
 of any native aspiration, whose mental life is but the 
 reflex response to the stimulus of other minds, are 
 inaccessible to the force of ideal motives. It is the 
 devotion to narrow and perverted ideals, not any gen- 
 eral incapacity' to subordinate the act to the idea, 
 that in the main of mankind corrupts the purpose 
 and disorganizes the life of the soul. Even the crim- 
 inal and the desperado have a standard of shrewd- 
 ness and daring wh.ich they respect, and meet their 
 punishment sometimes wiih the fine resilience of a 
 manly spirit. 
 
 "Sae rantingly, sae wantonly, 
 
 Sae dauntingly gaed he; 
 He played a spring, and danced it round. 
 
 Beneath the gallows-tree.'' 
 
 And so the various aims pursued in business, in po- 
 litics, in social life, aims not less repulsive, often, to 
 a true social feeliim or less hostile to the social in- 
 tcrest than is the violence of the outlaw, represent 
 
126 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 ideals for the sake of which men will sacrifice safety, 
 ease, enjoyment, all that is most potent to seduce the 
 will. The power of the imagination to project and 
 keep figured before the mind a form or idea of the 
 acts indispensable to the perfect achievement of the 
 work undertaken, apart from ordinary personal con- 
 siderations, is not limited to the few who in an artis- 
 tic or special sense are recognized as men of 
 imaginative minds. It is a power which, in some 
 degree, one might say, is inseparable from the human 
 outfit. Dimly or distinctly there is mirrored to each 
 man's mind, during the formative period at least, the 
 manner of man he would be — strong or brave or 
 wise or rich or good — and the ideals thus formed, 
 varying according to the structure of the mind or the 
 influence under which it falls, react upon all its aims 
 and affinities and form or deform the general conduct 
 of life. 
 
 There is little weight, therefore, in any objection 
 urged on the ground of the insensibilit}^ of the mind 
 to ideal influences generall}^ The difliculty lies in 
 shaping our ideals in accordance with a juster esti- 
 mate of vital good. And this difficulty lies deep in 
 our nature. From the beginning there is dispropor- 
 tion or bias in the structure of the mind, and there- 
 fore in the configuration of its ideals; and education 
 must strike deep into the substance of the life to 
 correct its bias and mold it to a truer form. The 
 discipline of the race, however, shows a progress. 
 The true law has a yet deeper organic basis than the 
 false, is in fact truer because it is deeper. The de- 
 
NATURE AND DEITY I 27 
 
 sire for a deeper, a less qualified satisfaction with 
 the results of life, for a profounder harmony of the 
 vital elements, is a fundamental desire, and is at the 
 bottom of our very discontent; and this rooted de- 
 sire, appearing in ease and in dis-easc, through our 
 dissatisfacti(jn or through our content, must tend, 
 while the soul has freedom to act and intelligence to 
 meditate upon the result of its acts, to promote a 
 juster appreciation of spiritual values and abetter ad- 
 justment of our elTorts to our ultimate end. Selfish- 
 ness itself learns to discipline its forces, and frames 
 for itself a contracted or distorted ideal; and the 
 ofllce of religion, as here conceived, is not to ex- 
 punge all ccjmmon motives, or to inject some novel 
 principle into our nature, but to broaden our appre- 
 hension of the actual capacities of life, harmonize 
 its present interests, enlarge and purify existing ideals, 
 and fire the imagination vvitli some glimpses of a re- 
 mote, and for us perhaps unattainable, ideal. The 
 process is necessarily slow, but it is continuous with 
 processes already well advanced. It is the process, in 
 fact, which religion has always, since its alliance 
 with morals, inulertaken to accelerate; and natural 
 idealism, as a j")hilosoj:)hy of religion, is but an at- 
 tempt to rt'fi'r religion, as a permanent force in 
 human development, to a natural basis, and to 
 strengtlien it, by harmonizing it with natural law, for 
 . the performance of its proper work 
 
X. 
 
 Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, 
 Which we ascribe to heaven: the fated sky 
 Gives us free scope; only doth backward pull 
 Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull. 
 
 — Shakespeare. 
 
 Power, more near my life than life itself 
 
 1 fear not Thy withdrawal; more I fear 
 
 Seeing, to know Thee not, hoodwinked with dreams 
 Of signs and v.^onders, while unnoticed, Thou 
 Walking Thy garden still, commun'st with men, 
 Missed in the commonplace of miracle. 
 
 — Lowell. 
 
 Thus the mind, estranged from nature by an in- 
 veterate tendency to objectify or personify its own 
 abstractions, comes back in alTectionate reverence to 
 her, our Alma Mater. And nothing that touched 
 the deeper feeling or the finer sense is lost. But 
 nature, no longer the mere premiss from which we 
 conclude the being of infinite power, is herself the 
 power, and herself awakens the emotions which, 
 conceiving of nature in a mechanic sense, we have 
 regarded as the soul's recognition of deity conceived 
 as an exterior and supra-natural mechanician. Deity 
 is immanent, rather, the spirit of the ideal, actual and 
 operative in nature. The vastness and perfection of 
 her works, the immutability of her laws, her imper- 
 ishable energy and life, in fine, all that was ever 
 read in evidence of the being and attributes of a dis- 
 sociated deity, all that natural theology, basing itself 
 
 128 
 
NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 129 
 
 on that natural religious feeling of which the sweet 
 and reverent spirit is conscious in the presence of 
 nature, turns to theological use, remains as the ex- 
 pression and evidence of nature's own divinity. Na- 
 ture in her own character and right embodies the 
 manifold good which we have conceived as hers by 
 mere reflection and contingence, or have interpreted 
 as an index only of the perfections of her designer. 
 That is to say, in nature herself, and in nature alone, 
 need we search for the divine. 
 
 But, mindful of the infinity of natural being, we 
 shall guard against making a transcendental use of 
 our predicates or ascribing determinate attributes to 
 the indeterminable universality, lest we fall again 
 into the perplexities and contradictions of theology. 
 Our characterizations of nature are relative always 
 to the spirit or purpose or idea in which we contem- 
 plate the being of nature. Nor can the mind, shift- 
 ing its points of view, by successive approaches 
 exhaust its field, or sum up the qualities of being in 
 a series of supreme determinate attributes. We find, 
 if we venture the attempt, that our language, as our 
 thought, loses in content what it gains in generality. 
 We generalize only by abstraction of quality. And 
 in the highest gcuieralization — being — all quality or 
 attributive force disappears, save as there may be 
 reserved in the term certain faint traces of the attri- 
 butes it has drojiju^d, or some implication that being 
 cannot be conceived save as in cjualitative relation 
 with the mind which conceives it. luit a relation or 
 an attribute of tenuity so extremes has no ruligious 
 
130 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 value. The aspects of nature which appeal to relig- 
 ious feeling, though the}^ must be broad enough to 
 direct the mind from the individual toward the uni- 
 versal, should yet be sufliciently determinate to be 
 conceived and felt in their qualitative character. We 
 cannot worship a bare abstraction. Nor can the re- 
 ligious sense rest in any merely negative aspect of 
 being, as the Un-conscious, the Un-knowable. Such 
 negations may have a temporary use in correcting 
 a certain bias or false emphasis of religious thought, 
 too dogmatic, often, and too overweening in its as- 
 sumption of knowledge; but whatever their schematic 
 value, as religious concepts they are sterile. That 
 there is somewhat of being which we do not, or 
 which we can not, know; that our human conscious 
 thought is not the thought, if thought we may call it, 
 which is expressed in the order and beauty of the 
 Cosmos; may, as propositions, be true, and of serious 
 import, perhaps, in denial of a false or an overstrained 
 theor}^ But there is no inspiration in a mere priv- 
 ative or negative. Negation, though it may correct 
 an error, inhibits, as mere denial, the sympathetic 
 and unifying impulse in which religion is founded, 
 and tends, by emphasizing difference rather than 
 similarity, to alienate us from nature. The vital 
 concepts in religion are positive concepts. Religion 
 dwells, not in ditlerence or disruption or denial, not 
 in the thought of self and its demarcations from the 
 general being of nature, but in the consciousness of 
 the union of our individual life with the universal life. 
 I'Icnce religious language is inevitably personal. 
 
NATURE AND DEITY I3I 
 
 The characters which the religious mind must con- 
 template in nature are those in virtue of which na- 
 ture may be feU, if not adequate!}' defined, as a 
 personal life in intimate contact with our human 
 personality. The religious impulse is thus the poetic 
 impulse in its most aeneralized form. As the liter- 
 ary spirit, most completely represented in poetrj^ 
 generalizes individual feeling and gives it universal 
 form, searching for the touch of nature which makes 
 the whole world kin, so the religious spirit general- 
 izes all being, and searches the universe with sympa- 
 thetic eyes for vivid expression of all that is kindred 
 with itself in the universal life. 
 
 And matters are much simplified when the search 
 for deity is thus shifted from some timeless and space- 
 less realm — wliatever that may mean — to the realm 
 of nature, and the divine attributes, of which nature 
 is the evidence, are found in nature herself who offers 
 the evidence. In contemplating deit}^ as immanent 
 in nature religious thought approaches its object more 
 directly, and more intelligently', we may presume, 
 since nature is always present to correct the extrava- 
 gance and inconsistencies of our thought. Willi the 
 eternal reality ever before us, transcending the capac- 
 ity of our language as of our thought, we shall not 
 read the attril)ules of our human personalitv, in their 
 specific character as human, into tlie general being 
 of nature* ; and, abandoning the attempt to interjiret 
 universal law as the expression of an ailiitrary per- 
 sonal will, we shall cease to br vexed by the contra- 
 dictions inherent in such an intcM'pretation and in all 
 
132 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 our efforts to define the infinite through the determin- 
 able attributes of the finite. We may dwell on the 
 analogies between nature and human nature, on the 
 essential unity of the life which binds humanity to 
 the beincf of nature — which is all that is demanded 
 by religious feeling — but the ends of our human na- 
 ture will not be assigned as the ends of universal 
 nature, or as furnishing a measure or standard to 
 which all her operations must be assumed to conform. 
 Our peculiar impressibility, our interests and our 
 aspirations, though the ultimate ground from which 
 we derive all rules for self-direction as human beings 
 and all standards of preference in respect of the in- 
 finite content of nature, impose neither form nor lim- 
 itation upon being universal. The human spirit, 
 trying all things by its peculiar touch, chooses, con- 
 templates, assimilates, in virtue of laws peculiar to 
 its nature; and that which we cannot convert to our 
 uses, which offends our human sense, or which 
 clashes with our human aims, we may leave, if we 
 must, unappropriated, unassimilated, unharmonized, 
 as elements of a universe which, while it includes 
 our humanity, includes also an infinity which trans- 
 cends our humanit}^ The necessity of resolving away 
 all infelicities, all discord, all that mocks our human 
 sentiment, is gratuitous and self-imposed. It is the 
 mere implication of a theory. And the mind, re- 
 lieved of the necessity, imposed by such a theory, of 
 interpreting all things in a predetermined sense, is 
 free to look at nature as she is- — to take the facts as 
 it finds them — constrained by no pious obligation to 
 
NATURE AND DEITY I33 
 
 call evil good, bat inwardly impelled in all evil to 
 search out the good, that is, to discover in nature, 
 or to create of the substance of nature, that which 
 responds to our human ideals. This is the sum of 
 our life; and this should suffice. Man, his interests, 
 the laws of his being, are finite; nature, as the gen- 
 eral medium and ground of being, of all that is 
 individual and specific, is herself neither individual 
 nor specific, but infinite. 
 
 Nor need we fear, searching for divinity in the 
 domain of nature, to miss the strengthening and cur- 
 ative power of which religion has professed to know 
 the source. Certain rankling reflections, moreover, 
 which paternalism provokes do notarise in the natur- 
 alistic view. From a personal providence we ask 
 the tenderness of personal consideration. But the 
 sternness of the general conditions of life, the com- 
 monness of misfortune, failure, pain, tend to strain 
 men's confidence in parental and providential care, 
 and to instill in all but the sweetest natures a lurkintr 
 resentment fatal to repose and spiritual strength. 
 And even wr.ere such confidence is complete, the 
 habit of interpreting the severities of lift? as within 
 the scope of an overruling personal intention, which 
 must necessarily include compensation or personal 
 amends, cannot be so favorable to firmness of moral 
 fiber as the habit of frankly accepting the inevitable 
 as so far final. The theistic hypothesis, in fact, by 
 encouraging the demand for an arbitrary relaxation 
 of the harsher condilit)ns of life, tends, in a tlegree, 
 to demoralize the mind. It puts us at a false point 
 
134 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 of view. Suggesting to our importunity the means 
 of supplementing or overriding the operation of nat- 
 ural law, it leads to a view of thefactsof life as tran- 
 sitory, provisional, and in a sense unreal: we reserve 
 the right, if nature seems unkind, to appeal from 
 nature to the author of nature. But naturalism, see- 
 ing in nature the sole and universal reality, accepts 
 her laws and the whole discipline and circumstance 
 of life in earnest, and inspired with a serious present 
 purpose to use the present opportunit}-, or to crea e 
 its opportunity', fosters the growth of a cheerful and 
 resolute manhood. 
 
 And nature, rude as is her chiding, is full of ben- 
 efit. Though by tears and supplications she cannot 
 be constrained to swerve by the smallest aberration 
 from her course, she works ungrudgingl}-, untiringly, 
 with him who allies himself to her laws. For loss 
 of any good she offers other good. But her indem- 
 nities are not for the supine and fearful. And neither 
 piet}^ nor goodness may ignore the conditions she 
 imposes, or idly presume on her favor. She demands 
 of us the willing hand, the docile mind, the skill 
 which discipline teaches. Her gift to us is opportu- 
 nity. We have assumed, too lightl}^, that nature is a 
 scheme which but centers in man, who may with 
 justice feel himself aggrieved if in the individual 
 case fate seems harsh. Nature is, rather, a field of 
 infinite possibility^ offered to man, not as his sole 
 prerogative or birthright, but to him with all the off- 
 spring of nature, and to him effectively only as he 
 has the courage or address to use the proffered ad- 
 
NATURE AND DEITY 1 35 
 
 vantage. The personal obligation to deal with us 
 graciously, which we would read into the scheme of 
 things, attaches only to our theories of personal gov- 
 ernment, theories founded in the constitution of hu- 
 manity and inconsequently applied to the constitution 
 of nature universal. There is no debt to us from na- 
 ture. Our wisdom is to take witliout cavil the good 
 that she otiers — to take it as a gift. Nature is before 
 us; awaits us. She is under no pledge to our desires; 
 but her store is inexhaustible, and if we have willed 
 the unattainable, or suffered loss that seems irrepara- 
 ble, she still awaits us; we are yet free to choose of 
 her gifts. The soul's attitude is ever the main mat- 
 ter. If the spirit be yet alive and tender, nature's 
 mere presence is consolation. There is life in the 
 touch of light and air; sanatory influence exhales 
 from the soil; the very grass at our feet is full of 
 healing. And the soul may be nourished even on 
 disaster. Borne in upon itself, it has leisure then to 
 disengage essential good from the specious hopes 
 wliich distract the purposes and eat up the energy of 
 life; and the futile personal will, reconciled at length 
 with the eternal will, discovers its allinity with all 
 devout and inward-looking minds that have pene- 
 trated the shows of life and laid hold upon its verities. 
 It is well, we may feel then, that nature should know 
 no deviation or bias. Were she less constant there 
 were less aiound for the Stoic's couraife, tlie Chris- 
 tian's self-surrender, tlu> Pnulclliist's calm. The fretful 
 soul would change the unchangeable. Our pt^'tty 
 egoism demands of the inexorable personal conces- 
 
136 NATURE AND DEITY 
 
 sion, and relaxation of the chain which binds each 
 effect to its cause. But riper wisdom, rapt by glimpses 
 of the infinite life from which our finite life proceeds, 
 stills our repining, and is content that universal be- 
 ing shall follow stable and universal laws. 
 
 THE END. 
 
'Jriifl^Hit 
 
 M\ 
 
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Princeton Theological Seminary-Speer L brani 
 
 1 101 
 
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