^^^' PRINCETON, N. J. 'ft *^^ BL 51 .L2 1909 v. 2 Ladd, George Trumbull, 1842- 1921. The philosophy of religion flHIW " y -■•■''■<;',-', ■>'-''i^-<5Ff^ ■"■*"~^ ..-'■ . ■ . -•?:.'•, '^^ • . 1 "^•'.^^^^^^^1 * t, ! , '' v.::T' .''<^:'iriHMiiiiflH 4 v..- j^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^H ' '-■ ;* , y^ "1 ■ ^k^'- PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION BOOKS BY GEORGE TRUMBULL LADD, LL.D. Published by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS The Philosophy of Religion. 2 vols., 8vo net $7.00 Philosophy of Conduct. 8vo , . . net $3.50 A Theory of Reality. 8vo $4.00 Essays on the Higher Education. 16mo net $1.00 Philosophy of Knowledge. 8vo .... $4.00 Philosophy of Mind. 8vo $3.00 A Primer of Psychology. 12mo . . net $1.00 Outlines of Descriptive Psychology. 8vo net $1.50 Psychology, Descriptive and Explanatory 8vo $4.50 Outlines of Physiological Psychology. Il- lustrated. 8vo $2.00 Elements of Physiological Psychology. Il- lustrated. 8vo $4.50 Introduction to Philosophy. 8vo .... $3.00 The Doctrine of Sacred Scripture. 2 vols., 8vo $7.00 The Principles of Church Polity. Crown 8vo $2.50 What is the Bible? 12mo $2.00 In Korea with Marquis Ito. 8vo. Illus- trated net $2.50 * NOV 22 19: THE r-' r* — > '■^iisiui sty.' PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION A CRITICAL AND SPECULATIVE TREATISE OF MAN'S RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE AND DEVELOPMENT IN THE LIGHT OF MODERN SCIENCE AND REFLECTIVE THINKING BY y GEORGE TRUMBULL LADD, LL.D. FOBMEBLY PBOFKSSOB OF PHILOSOPHY IN YALE UNIVEBSITY VOLUME II NEW YORK CHARLES SCKIBNKR'S SONS 1000 Copyright, 1905, By Charles Scbibner's Sons Published, October, 1905. X "All living Things are indebted to Thy goodness, . . . . It is Thou alone, O Lord, who art the true Parent of all things." Prayer to Shanq Ti. "Among themselves all things Have order; and from hence the form, which makes The Universe resemble God." Dante. "Is not God i' the world His power first made? Is not His love at issue still with sin, Visibly when a wrong is done on earth?" Browning. CONTENTS OF VOLUME II PART IV GOD: THE OBJECT OF RELIGIOUS FAITH CHAPTER XXVI importance op the conception Page The Change in Point of View — The Conception of Divine Being — Its Influence on Morals — and on Social and Political Life — Positive Content of the Christian Conception — Influence on Philosophical Development — God, the Central Problem of Religion — Indiffer- entism, Syncretism, and Agnosticism — The Removal of Prejudice 3 CHAPTER XXVII NATURE OF THE EVIDENCE The Two Problems involved — Knowledge and Faith distinguished — Conception of the "Unknowable" — Theory of Rational Intuition — The "Vision of God" — The so-called "God-Consciousness" — The Claim of Demonstration — The Experience of the Race — An- thropomorphism again 21 CHAPTER XXVIII THE CUSTOMARY PROOFS EXAMINED Use of the Word "Proof" — The Ontological Argument — Anselm and Descartes — The Cosmologioal Argument — The Conception of a World-Ground — The Teleologicul Argument — Conception of Uni- versiil Order — Tiie Moral Argument — The Argument from Human Ideals 45 CHAPTER XXIX THE ARGUMENT RECONSTRUCTED Necessity for Criticism — The Nature of the Task — Further as to the Conception of a World-Ground — The Unity of Reality — Force expressive of Will — Irnmiinence of Mind — Will and Mind as Con- acioua — Negative Conception of the Unconscioua — Possibility of viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page an Absolute Self-Consciousnes,3 — Bearing of the Categories — The Personal Absolute — God as Ethical Being — Conception of Per- sonal Life 66 CHAPTER XXX GOD AS INFINITE AND ABSOLUTE Purely Negative Notions Valueless — The Absolute not the Unrelated — The Infinite not the Unknowable — Adjective Nature of the Terms — Quantitative Meaning inapplicable to Persons — The Ab- soluteness of Self-hood — Ideal Being of the World-Ground . . . 107 CHAPTER XXXI THE METAPHYSICAL PREDICATES Meaning of the Term — Conception of Omnipotence — of Omnipresence — and of Eternity — The Divine Omniscience — Nature of Time- Consciousness — Self-Consciousness and Other-Consciousness of God — The Unity of God 122 CHAPTER XXXII THE PROBLEM OF EVIL Deficiencies in the Conception of Personal Absolute — The Problem of Evil unsolvable — Estimates of Happiness and Misery — Estimates of Moral Evil — Pain as Means of Development — The Defects of the "Medicinal Theory" — Problem of Evil as a Theodicy — Help from the Theory of Development — The Answer of Ethical Dualism — The Answer of Monistic Philosophy — Brahmanism and Bud- dhism — The Christian Answer — The Individual and the World . 146 CHAPTER XXXIII THE MORAL ATTRIBUTES God as Ethical Spirit — The Divine Justice — Belief in its Perfection — The Attribute of Goodness — Christian Conception of God — The Stoical Conception — The Logos Doctrine — Religious Pessi- mism — Perfection of the Divine Moral Attributes 177 CHAPTER XXXIV HOLINESS AND PERFECTION OF GOD Unethical Conceptions of Holiness — The Ideal of Ethics — Jesus' Con- ception of Purity — Defects of Historical Christianity — The Divine Wisdom — Union of the Metaphysical Predicates and Moral At- tributes — God as the Ideal -Real — Absolute Will as perfect Good- Will 200 TABLE OF CONTENTS ix PART V GOD AND THE WORLD CHAPTER XXXV the theistic position Page Reality of the Divine Relations — The Concept of Relation — The Rela- tions of Dependence and of Manifestation — The Figurative Speech of Theism — The Conflict between Theism and Science — The Rec- onciliation of Science and Theology — The two Forms of Denial . 221 CHAPTER XXXVI ATHEISM AND PANTHEISM The Denial of Agnosticism — Religious and anti-Religious Agnosticism — The Content of Truth — Materialism — The modern Conception of Mechanism — Failure of Mechanism as a Principle — A Develop- ing Mechanism — The Position of Pantheism — The Conception of Identification — The Truth of Pantheism — The Supremacy of Per- sonal Being 237 CHAPTER XXXVII NATURE AND THE SUPERNATURAL Complexity of the Terms employed — The Existing Conceptions — Distinction between the Two — The Standpoint of Science — Limits to the Conception of Nature — Deficiencies of the Naturalistic View — God as the Supernatural — Immanency and Transcendency — Jesus' View of Nature — Reconciliation of the two Conceptions — Return to the Conception of A Personal Absolute 264 CHAPTER XXXVIII THEISM AND EVOLUTION The Tenet of Evolution — The Modem Conflict — The Two Forms of the Theory — Materialistic F.volution -Evolution aa Descriptive Historj' — The Metapliysical Assumptions of Science — Reconcilia- tion of Science and Faith — The Conception of Development as applied to Divine l^ing — God as Personal Absolute and Ethical Spirit 290 X TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER XXXIX god as creator and preserver Page Early Beliefs in "Creator Gods" — Ancient Cosmogonies — Special Relation of Man — God as Creator, Upholder, and Destroyer — The Old-Testament View — The Doctrine of the Logos — Time and Manner of Creation — Creation and Development — Idealism and Reahsm — Progressive Making of the "Over-Man" 314 CHAPTER XL GOD AS MORAL RULER AND PROVIDENCE Necessity for Ethical Conceptions — Absolute and Finite Wills — The Fact of related Self- Activity — Conception of God as Moral Ruler — Nature of a Moral Unity — Theanthropic and Theocratic Re- ligions — Deity as perfect Moral Reason — Perfection of the Divine Rule — Method of the Divine Rule — God in Nature and Human Society — Doctrine of Universal Providence — The Supernatural in Nature — Corollaries as to the Place of Prayer 344 CHAPTER XLI GOD AS REDEEMER Religions of Salvation — Need of Redemption — The Conflict in Human Nature — Conception of a Mediator — Doctrines of Hinduism and Buddhism — Divine Redemption in Judaism — Christian View of God as Redeemer — Significance of Jesus' Death — Reality of the Divine Redemption — The Witness of Experience — The New Life in God 382 CHAPTER XLII REVELATION AND INSPIRATION Religion as Revelation — Source, Subject, and Object of Revelation — Its Historical Nature — The Psychology of Revelation — Means of Revelation — Significance of Human Speech — Inspiration de- fined — A Relation between Persons — The Men of Revelation — Christianity as Divine Self-Revealing — The Doctrine of Inspired Scriptures — The Miracle as Means of Revelation — False and True Conceptions of the Miraculous — Place of the Miraculous — The Modus Operandi of Revelation and Inspiration — Religion as the "Psychic Uplift" of the Race 410 TABLE OF CONTENTS xi PART VI THE DESTINY OF MAN CHAPTER XLIII THE FUTURE OF RELIGION Page The two Forms of Optimism — Religion and Race-Culture — Office of the Christian Church — "The Irreligion of the Future" — The Per- manence of Essentials — Universality and Absoluteness of Chris- tianity — The Rival Religions — The Final Testing 453 CHAPTER XLIV IMMORTALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL Belief in Existence after Death — Causes for this Belief — The "On- tological Consciousness" again — Connection with Ancestor-Wor- ship — Various Conceptions of the Soul — Lower Historical Forms of the Belief — The Doctrine of Karma — Egyptian Notions — Other Ancient Views — Greek Doctrine of Man — The Early He- brew Conceptions — Old-Testament Doctrine — Later Judaism — The Doctrine of Jesus — and of the New-Testament — Later Chris- tian Developments 479 CHAPTER XLV THE IMMORTALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL [CONTINUED] Naturalness of the Belief in Immortality — Separability of the Soul from the Body — The two Ways of Believing — Modern Objections to the Doctrine — The Objections Answered — Conclusion from the Biological Standpoint — The Primacy of Psychical Life — The Problem of Developed Selfhood — Arguments against Natural In- destnictibility — Reality of the Self — Value of the Self — The Positive Arguments — Significance of the Individual — The Guar- anty of the Moral Being of God — The Witness of Religious Ex- perience — The Assurance of the Christian Hope — Concluding Deductions 516 CHAPTER XLVI THE FUTURE OF THE RACE The Conflict of Different Religions — The Christian Conception of th« Divine Kingdom — The Conception of the Church Universal — The xii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Uncertainties of Scientific Prediction — The Social Ideal — Rising Spirituality of the Race — The Triumph of the Divine Kingdom . 550 CHAPTER XLVII SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION ^Ian as potential Son of God — Reality of the Religious Ideal — The Being of the World as perfect Ethical Spirit — The Harmony of the Totality of Spiritual Experience 567 PART IV GOD : THE OBJECT OF RELIGIOUS FAITH il Blessed are the pure in heart; for they shall see God." Jesus. " Worthy art thou, our Lord and our God, to receive the glory, and the honor and the power; for thou didst create all things, and because of thy will they were, and were created.'' Apocalypse. "/ vrill pass then beyond this power of my nature also, rising by degrees unto Him who made me ... . Yea, I will pass beyond it, that I may approach unto Thee, 0 sweet Light." Augustine. "Whom shall we worship but Him, who is the sole King of the seeing and living creation ? " Rig Veda. "There is only one thing needful; to know God." Amiel. PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION PART IV GOD: THE OBJECT OF RELIGIOUS FAITH CHAPTER XXVI IMPORTANCE OF THE CONCEPTION A certain obvious change in the point of view and in the method of discussion now becomes necessary in order to make further progress toward a systematic and satisfactory treatment of the more important problems of the philosophy of religion. The method of the phenomenology of man's religious experience is comparative, historical, and psychological. But the method for determining the truth of these phenomena is critical, syn- thetic, speculative. As was explained with sufficient fullness in the last chapter, it is therefore proposed from this point onward to subject the religious conceptions, beliefs, sentiments, and practices which humanity has cherished — especially in the form wliich they have attained as the result of their highest development in the past — to the judgment of that supreme court which universal reason provides. It is fitting, then, that we should remind ourselves anew of certain rights whicli may be considered as already guaranteed, and not less of certain duties which are lx)tli enjoined and de- manded. Among tlie former the chief and most comprehen- sive is the right of the religious experience of the race to fair 4 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION and sympathetic treatment from the rational points of view and by the method of systematic philosophy. Such treatment guards the conclusions of historical and psychological study against the more general objections of Agnosticism and Posi- tivism. As to the abstract possibility of establishing any truth whatever respecting the realities of man's religious knowledge or religious faith, the philosophy of religion is under no obli- gation to argue. This important aspect of human experience has the same rights as any other to be defended by the critical studies of epistemology and metaphysics. And we cannot keep on raising the question over and over again, whether man can know anything worthy of being called " real," in the fullest possible ontological signification of that very misty and much abused word. What we have said in other works, and in cer- tain chapters of this treatise on religion,^ must suffice to explain our confidence in the possibility of attaining truth about God and about man's relations to Him, through the complex but disciplined activities of man's rational nature. As to any more definite conception of the Object of religious faith, whether framed from the point of view held by some one of the world's great religions or by some one of its various schools of religious philosophy, the case is by no means the same. The appropriate and the supremely difficult task of the critical and speculative method of philosophy is directed toward every such conception ; the special purpose of the philosophy of religion is accomplished when some one of them all is seen to unite most harmoniously and perfectly with that conception of the Being of the World which is particularly favored by modern science and reflective thinking. For ex- ample, doubt, or the agnostic position toward the problem of attributing certain moral characteristics to this Being, and, indeed, toward the effort to unite such conceptions as those of 1 Especially in the "Philosophy of Knowledge" (chap. XVIII and XXI), and "A Theory of Reality" (chap. XVIII and XIX); and in chapters XII-XIV of Volume I of this v/ork. IMPORTANCE OF THE CONCEPTION 5 " the Infinite," *' the Absolute," with the fundamental attri- butions of an ethically perfect Personal Spirit, must be met by argument and as far as possible removed. It is, then, with the faith of reason in itself, and yet with a faith which is chastened by a knowledge of its own limitations, that all fur- ther approach should be made to the discussion of the problems before us. Among the several investigations which the phenomena of man's religious life and development imperatively demand, that necessary for validating the religious doctrine of the Divine Being stands preeminent. Is the conception of God as Abso- lute and also perfect Ethical Spirit able to maintain itself in the full light of modern science and modern philosophy ? It is well to enter upon this investigation with some preliminary apprecia- tion of its importance for a system of religious philosophy. The importance of the conception of Divine Being, both for thought and for life, follows from the very nature of religion itself. This is true whether we consider religion in its aspect of belief, or of feeling, or of practice. It is also true if we consider any particular religion from the point of view of its development and of the reciprocal reactions between it and the other related factors of an advancing race-culture. " Now the character of a religion," says Tiele,' *' and, therefore, also the direction of its development, depend chiefly upon the concep- tion which people form of their god or gods, their conception of what the deity is toward man, and conversely of man's re- lation to the deity, and of the relation of God, and therefore of God-serving man also, to the world of plienomona." In the lower, and even in the lowest forms of religious belief, this in- timate and influential connection is manifest. Wherever tlie mysterious, bodeful, and harmful side of nature is deified, and her superhuman powers are regarded as embodied in poisonous serpents and ravenous beasts, in destructive storm, or blight on the crops, or in diseases of men and animals, there we have » Elements of tlic Science of Religion, First Series, p. 752. 6 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION superstitious and magical propitiatory rites, to restrict human life in its activities by manifold tabus and to make it miserable with sordid fears. Darkness and cruelty among men correspond to the dark and cruel conceptions of the superhuman powers which are over man. When, however, the conception of these superhuman powers is more helpful and kindly, the beneficent eifect upon the entire life, even of savage or half-civilized man, through this channel of religious belief is most obvious. Among peoples who have attained a relatively high degree of artistic and scientific development, the same important influence from the conception which the multitude entertain of their gods, or of their supreme God, remains in force. This might be illustrated by a comparison of the attitude of mind toward life, and of the social customs, prevalent in Japan to-day, with those of the South-Sea Islands or of portions of Central or Southern Africa. In the former country the early conception of the gods answering to the word Kami, while not of a lofty spiritual and moral character, was of beings that awakened a certain respect, and kindly sentiments of a mj^sterious and quasi-sesthetic^l quality. Our previous re- searches have shown how in nominally Christian lands, great multitudes of the people still cling to these more primitive superstitions in their conception of the superhuman powers ; and in this way are their lives profoundly influenced. Special instances might be noticed to illustrate the influence of the conception of Divine Being upon the morals of sex and of eating and drinking ; — for example, the effect of the ideas respecting Astarte among the Phoenicians and Aphrodite among the Greeks ; or of phallic worship in " Old Japan " and of the woi'ship of the lingam in India to-day. The " liquor-cult " among the early Aryan peoples was undoubt- edly more truly religious and less degrading morally than our modern ideas on such subjects might lead us to suppose ; but we can scarcely believe the worship of the intoxicating juice of the Soma-plant as *' wisest in understandirjg," and as a IMPORTANCE OF THE CONCEPTION 7 guide " along the straightest pathway," to have been devoid of baleful influence. As to the somewhat similar cult of Bacchus among the Greeks there is even less doubt. The influence of the conception of Divine Being upon all the religious and social life of any people is illustrated in a notable way by the worship of the greater nature-gods, — es- pecially of the Sun. Among the early Aryans, where this luminary was conceived of as the deva, or divine One, the shining god par excellence^ the god of life who bestows chil- dren, " the active force, the power that wakens, arouses, en- livens," and the giver of all good things to mortals and to gods, sun-worship contributed a variety of uplifting spiritual impulses to the entire life of the people. Thus he is prayed to as a purifying force : " Do thou from that (viz., foolishness and human insolence), O Savitar, make us here sinless." So in Egypt, the sun, deified as the god of light, became a sym- bol, and to a certain extent a source, of moral illumination and purifying. Among the unreflecting but warlike and cruel Aztecs, however, the worship of the sun, regarded as lord of life and death, bore quite different fruitage. It was to their sacrifices to the sun that they attributed their successes in war and the prosperity of the empire. Never did the " imperialis- tic " conception of the Supreme Being among a warlike and cruel race l>ear witness more unmistakably to its own potently bad influence over social and political affairs. They " pushed the superstitious practice of human sacrifice to absolute frenzy." In '' the abode " of this god the Spaniards could count 13f),000 symmetrically piled skulls of the victims sac- rificed since the founding of the sanctuary. But even this number is small compared with that which might be counted on tlie battle fields on which have fallen the victims of tlie conception of Jehovah, or of the Christian (}od, as the relent- less " (iod of Battles." The important influence over all the social and political life of the people, both for good and for evil, which flows from the 8 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION more elaborate forms of ancestor-worship in China and Japan has already been sufficiently illustrated.^ The conservative power over the Chinese which their conception of Divine Be- ing has exercised is almost incalculable. The scope and strength of the relation between the concep- tion of the gods, or of God, and all the other tenets of religious belief and the practices of religious life, as well as the influence of the same conception upon every important factor in race- culture, increases with the height in the scale of development reached by any particular religion. The whole religious, so- cial, and political history of Israel has justly been declared to be " virtually a development in the idea of God." Where, as in Buddhism and in much of Hinduism, this idea is characterized by vagueness and mysticism, such as are descriptive of the Oriental temperament and habit of meditative thinking, its very negative character, when considered from the logical point of view, becomes a powerful and positive influence over the opinions and practices of the people. It would be difficult better to describe all this for one who can read between the lines than to reflect upon the declaration attributed to him who became " enlightened." " There is, O disciples, something not born, not originated, not made, not formed. If, O disciples, there were not this not-born, not-originated, not-made, not- formed, there would be no escape from the born, the originated, the formed, the made." (In the Udana, viii, 3.) Above all in Christianity it is the positive content of its con- ception of personal life as applied to God, and of personal re- lations as existing between man and God, which chiefly deter- mines its superiority over all other religions. This is true, as respects both the satisfactions which it affords to the intellect and to the sentiments, and also as respects the influence which it exerts over the social and political institutions and life of the people. We have already seen (Vol. I, pp. 205^.) how this conception arose and developed. It derived from that branch iVol. I, pp. 403^. importa:sXe of the conception 9 of Semitic religions which Judaism produced, the conception of Divine Being as the fount and guardian of righteousness. It owes to the personal experience and unique religious insight of Jesus that modification of its contents, as they had ripened and matured in the later Judaism, which brought it near to the affections of the human heart and immensely increased its comforting and purifjdng power. But it also derived from Greek reflective thinking certain elements which increased its potency and charm as a stimulus to the imagination and a su- preme satisfaction to man's aspirations after the highest truths v/ithin the grasp of his rational activities. Where it has been most free from those superstitious elements that emerge out of the darkness of primitive times and linger in the beliefs, sen- timents, and practices, even of Christian communities, and from those defects of the Judaistic conception which reli^nous experience has hitherto not quite succeeded in displacing, this conception of God as perfect Ethical Spirit has been a meas- ureless influence for good to the modern world. In subsequent chapters it will be made clear how the con- ception of God logically and practically determines one's atti- tude toward all the other principal problems of the philosophy of religion. Its reciprocal relations with the problem of evil are obvious at once and from the very nature of this problem. Without attaining the knowledge or rational faith in the per- fect divine wisdom and goodness, the problem of evil admits of no hopeful answer, not to say satisfactory solution. But, on the other liand, this very problem, wlien considered from the historical and ^^/asi-scientific points of view, is the most dilVi- cult olwtacle in the path to such a faith. Hence it comes about that all human conceptions of what is really good and really evil, of the forces and laws which the ethical evolution of the nice exhibits, of the goal of this evolution, and of the priKspt'ct of reacliing this goal, are interdependently related to the con- ception of God. All problems of good and evil — every kind of good and every kind of evil — are influenced jui respects lH)th 10 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION the method employed and the conclusions reached in their at- tempted solution, by our beliefs regarding the nature of that Being of the World, which religious faith calls God. The same important relation exists, as a matter of course, to influence all such contentions of science and religion as are raised over " nature " and " the supernatural," law and miracle, order and so-called '' intervention ; " and to decide all such in- quiries as concern themselves with revelation, inspiration, and sacred scripture, in view of the conceptions which the contestants entertain as to the Divine predicates and attributes. For these predicates and attributes are little else than religion's way of conceiving of the dependence of the physical universe and of the history of the race upon the Divine Being. What God is, must be judged by what God seems to be doing in the universe of things and minds. And what the rational procedure in such questions can conceive of him as doing, depends much upon the conception already formed as to his Being, when the ques- tions themselves are first approached. All this, to be sure, in- volves a certain logical circle in conception and in argument. But it is only the same kind of an apparent circle as describes the form of all human advances in knowledge. It is the ap- parent return upon itself of the uprising spiral curve. The importance of the conception of God, in its influence upon all religious thought and religious life, and even upon the social and philosophical development of the race, will also appear in a somewhat startling way when we come to say the few words which can safely be said upon the problems of the immortality of the individual and the destiny of the race. The Universal Life can never be conceived of in any particular way without carrying along with the process not a few as- sumptions and factors which determine the tenets to which our rational thinking must hold respecting the nature and final purpose of human life. Neither the descriptive history of the past, nor any deductive theory from the conceptions which such a history supports, can afford a wholly satisfactory basis IMPORTANCE OF THE CONCEPTION 11 for that hope and faith which the religious nature of man craves and even demands. As a man conceives of God, the Fountain and Author of Life, so will he believe, with more or less assurance of conviction, respecting the life hereafter of the individual and of the race. But tlie importance of forming a rational and defensible conception of God is even greater and more obvious for the philosophy of religion than for the religious life and religious development of man, so far as these can be considered inde- pendently of philosophy. It is the unifying and systematizing instinct and practice of the reason which makes itself felt here. It is, indeed, a mistaken and narrowing view of the philosophy of religion which defines it as the investigation of the foundations of the conception of Deity " in the principles of belief as aj>- plied to the data produced by science and philosophy." ^ Nor is any complete identification of the philosophy of religion with Theism and with the critical examination of anti-theistic theories satisfactory. Yet this tendency to concentrate reflection and speculation upon the treatment of the problem of the Divine Being, as tliis problem appears in the light of modern evolu- tionar}' science and agnostic or positivistic philosophy, is sig- nificant of an important trutli. It is, indeed, impossible to de- termine the true conception of God by the critical and specu- lative processes of philosophy, in independence of the facts and laws of man's religious development. Emphatically true is it — to repeat the conclusions of our study of the phenomena — that no man can separate himself from tlie race in his opinions and sentiments touching tlie Divine Being and the Divine rela- tions to the world of finite things and minds. To attempt this in the name of reji.st)n is to commit reason to an effort whii^li is, historically and psychologically considered, impossible and al>- surd. The central problem of the philosophy of religion is afforded by the conception of Go So Caldecott, The ThiloMophy of lleligion, p. 3. 12 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION Theism so-called and the anti-theistic tlieories is the most im- portant which the reflective powers of man can undertake to answer. And the answer given to this question is the more influential in determining the answers given to all the other problems with which the philosophy of religion attempts to deal, the more systematic and thorough such attempts become. It is, indeed, impossible to develop a system of religious phi- losophy which shall arrange its theorems after the manner of the " Ethics " of Spinoza, or which shall successfully employ in the solution of its problems the methodolog}^ of geometry. But every theorem in any system of theology or of religious faith is influenced by the assumptions and tenets displayed or concealed in its handling of the theistic problem. The truth of this statement reaches its greatest intensity of expression when we come to consider, in the light of modern science and philosophy, the possibility of uniting such concep- tions as those subsumed under the terms " Absolute," " Infi- nite," etc., with the conceptions described in the familiar lan- guage of the domestic affections and of the popular beliefs and sentiments on matters of ethics. The study of the phenome- nology of religion has placed before us as our most important problem the conception of the Being of the World as perfect Ethical Spirit. But agnosticism contends that no knowledge, or even rational faith, is possible regarding that Ultimate Reality, or Infinite and Absolute Being, about which philosophy has been accustomed, somewhat over-confidently and with excess of details, to discourse. And if we dismiss — as we have agreed to do — this extreme position of agnosticism, as belonging to epistemology and to general metaphysics, we cannot so easily es- cape in this connection the next attack from the agnostic posi- tion. For when we ask ourselves the question which Professor Howison has put in this form : " Does a Supreme Being, or Ul- timate Reality, no matter how assuredly proved, deserve the name of * God ' simply by virtue of its Reality and Supremacy ? " we are obliged to give a prompt and negative answer to this IMPORTANCE OF THE CONCEPTION 13 question. Certainly, No : if under the title, " God," it is proposed to cover a conception that shall meet the intellectual, emotional, and practical needs which all religion expresses to some degree, and which every so-called " universal " or " greater " religion must measurably, at least, be able to satisfy. The conception of God^ which the highest development of the i.ice has adopted, is that of an Absolute or Infinite Being luho />>• aho perfect Ethical Spirit. But not only the agnosticism which denies the possibility of any philosophy of religion, but also certain important schools of religious philosophy, deny tlie [)Ossiblity of a rational union between these two sets, or classes, of conceptions. It is this and kindred contentions, therefore, which serve yet more heavily to weight the importance for the philosophy of religion of the central problem of Theism. Thus it comes about that from the philosophical standpoint, as well as from that of history, the doctrine of God as both Absolute Self and perfect Ethical Spirit, furnishes to tlie philosophy of religion its most important and difficult problem. To establish the conception of an Absolute Self, and the rela- tions of dependence sustained to such a Being by the world of finite Things and finite Minds, upon the basis of a critical sur- vey of the facts experienced by the race, is the supremely difficult task of meUiphysics. The approximately successful accomplishment of this task includes the discussion of the fol- lowing questions : (1) What is it to be a person, or Self, as I, the subject of religion, am a person ? (2) What is it to be a pei-son, or Self, lus God the Object of religious faith and woi-sliip must be conceived of as personal ? and (3) What are the most essen- tial relations, conceivable and defensible in a rational wav, between me the dependent and fuiite Self and God the Absi>- lute Self? Tliese questions emlKxly and give form to the very problems wliicli tlie historical and psychological survey of tlu' phenomena of man's religions life and development has forced upon our attention, liut the trutli in answer to them is not of such a nature that either history or psychology can 14 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION either establish or refute it. And until we grapple with the logical consistency and ontological value of the conception of God as Absolute Self our studies of the religious experience of the race seem to lead us farther and farther away from any ultimate and systematic views on the entire subject of religion. The more we dig into the history and the psychology of man's religious development, the more heterogeneous does the ma- terial thrown out by pickax and spade appear to be ; and the more imperative becomes the demand for some kind of critical testing, which shall separate the refuse from the rich ore and fuse the ore into some worshipful image of Reality. It is " the truth or untruth of the Whole " which our rational nature seeks to know.^ Unless the religious experience of the race leads on in a helpful way toward the apprehension of the ulti- mate truth of religion, the investigation of the details is of comparatively small importance. In this respect the science of religion is not like the other particular sciences ; if, indeed, it is to be given any place among them. It is the knowledge of, or rational faith in, the Reality which answers to the central con- ception of religion, — the conception, namely, of God as Abso- lute Self and perfect Ethical Spirit — which sets the goal of scientific endeavor. And here we are reminded of the truth of what Leibnitz affirmed : " It is at once the easiest and hard- est thing to become acquainted with God in this way ; the first and easiest in the way of the light, the hardest and last in the way of the shadow." The practical importance of the conception of God in the beginning of the individual's religious experience may be indi- cated by the statistics collected by a recent writer on the subject. Starbuck'-^ found that from ninety to ninety-four per cent, of the persons who reported to him regarded a belief in God as the central thing in their religious experience. Next in importance among the positive beliefs of religion, as tested 1 Compare Eucken, Der Wahrheitsgehalt der Religion, p. 8. 2 The Psychology of Religion, Table on p. 320. IMPORTANCE OF THE CONCEPTION 15 by this somewhat shifty and uncertain but suggestive method, stood the belief in immortality. " The belief in God," says he, " in some form is by far the most central conception, and grows in importance as years advance. . . . There is advance likewise in the quality of the belief. . . . These younger per- sons are often found in the process of awakening to the significance of the idea of God. . . . Belief in God as a larger unnamed Force or Spirit, or as a Power that works for right- eousness, while common among the older persons, is almost never given by the younger." These testimonies express the similarity between the stages of intellectual development as characterized by this central conception of religion, in the individual and in the race. That attitude of mind appropriate to the metaphysics of re- ligion, or the speculative discussion of the conception of God, which properly follows from the importance of the subject, has to contend acrainst a number of current tendencies of thoutrht and feeling. These tendencies may be somewhat roughly classified under the three heads of Indifferentism, Syncretism, Agnosticism. Neither of these tendencies is, however, either rational or morally justifiable in view of the immense impor- tance of the questions raised by the speculative discussion of the conception of Divine Being. Indifference to this concep- tion is not only the very essence of irreligion, but it is also subject to the charge of being an intellectually unwortliy and morally wrong attitude of mind, hy whatever name we call the product of man's attempt to grasp and \u)\d togetlier in one conception his most fundamental and ultimate convictions and knowledge respecting the Being of tlie World, not to have an interest in this conception is an irrational attitude of mind. Granting all that can 1x3 said as to tlio diniculty of the i)rocess, and as to the vague and unrrrtain character of tlu» product, this supn^me effort of human n'asoii to comprehend tlie Whole, and to view and interpret the parti(;ulai>> in tlie light of tlie comprehension of tlie Whole, can never be deprived of the 16 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION right to charm the mind and to command its supreme en- deavor. By Syncretism in this connection I mean that attitude of mind which so frequently follows the first discovery of the great variety of views with regard to the true and valid con- ception of God, and of the undoubted general fact of an evolu- tionary process as characterizing and conditioning this concep- tion in all the places and periods of human history. A certain confusion of thought, and a time of hesitation and doubt is almost certain to follow this discovery. Such a result is not necessarily discreditable to any inquirer. But when "poly- theism, monism, and pantheism are supposed to cancel each other, leaving the enlightened mind with no belief in God," the mental attitude of syncretism may become the opposite of reasonable. In every form of progress in race-culture essentially the same experience prevails. The phenomena are manifold, complex, apparently self-contradictory. The truths which they substantiate cannot be discovered by approaching them with a tendency to this kind of syncretism. Reality is, indeed, no patently logical system which appears as such to the first ob- servations of the chance observer. The rather is it always, at first sight, and even more at second and third sight, an infinitely varied play of struggling existences, contending forces, and diverse and mysterious modes of behavior. To conclude off-hand that one religion is as good and true and worthy of a man's acceptance and adherence as another, that all alike are coins of an equally genuine ring and of quite completely interchangeable values, is to dismiss altogether too summarily the obligation of human reason to prolonged and searching criticism as a basis for its fundamental beliefs. The conceptions of science and of philosophy respecting the Being of the World have in the past exhibited no less baffling variety and patent inconsistencies than have the conceptions of reli- gion. The very metaphysical categories under which they subsume the phenomena are scarcely less vague and indefinite IMPORTANCE OF THE CONCEPTION 17 than are those with which the religious experience is accus- tomed to consort. Indeed, the categories which necessarily claim validity in any Theory of Reality, whether its peculiar point of departure be derived from science, from philosophy, or from religion, are substantially the same. Being and at- tribute, force and causation, law and order, number and quan- tity, etc., when applied to finite things and finite minds, or to the so-called infinite and absolute God, are, after all, essenti- ally considered, equally anthropomorphic, equally valid or in- valid ontologically. And this sort of loose syncretism is no more, but rather less, justifiable in religion than in either sci- ence or philosophy. There is indeed truth in all religions ; because all religions are essentially, and by tlieir very nature, the expression in man's de- veloping life, of an eternal and unchanging truth. But it be- longs to the growing faculty of the race to criticise and synthe- size, and to appreciate better the values, of its own experience ; and thus more and more clearly and comprehensively to appre- hend what that truth is. This is the express task of the phi- losophy of religion. The attitude of mind toward the discussion of the ontologi- cal nature and value of that conception of God which man's obligations to his own rational nature seem to command, is, in the third place, opposed to several of tlie many forms of Ag- nosticism. Undoubtedly at the present time it is agnosticism, rather than any form of so-called false religion or any school of religious pliilosophy, from wl)ich come the principal ol>- stacles to a rational belief in God. In its extremer form the agnostic attitude will not admit even the propriety or the liope- fuhiess of any effort of liuman reason to attain such a be- lief. That the human mind refuses to remain quiet in the agnostic attitude toward the conception of God, the history of religion shows most convincingly. According to the earlier doctrine of the Upanishads, Atman is the Alone Reality and is forever and 2 18 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION wholly uncognizable by man. But as Deussen^ well says, the investigating human spirit refuses to stop with this. And Hinduism, " in spite of the unknowableness of Atman pro- ceeded to treat of Atman as an Object of cognition ; in spite of the non-reality of the World outside of Atman it proceeded to busy itself with the world as ' a real.' " The same truth was illustrated by the earlier history of Buddhism. Its original agnosticism was, indeed, rather negative than positive ; it was practical rather than dogmatic. Of philosophy about the Di- vine Being there was then in existence enough and to spare ; but the people were miserable and perishing because they knew not " the Way." The new voice said to them all : *' It belongs to you of yourselves, and not through the medium of priestly intervention or of schools of metaphysics, to attain the desired good. The knowledge most necessary for this does not con- cern the hidden nature of the gods, or indeed whether the gods of Hinduism exist in reality or not ; it concerns the way to live, the way of salvation." This attitude of the practical religious teacher toward the ontology of religious faith and religious philosophy has a cer- tain warrant in the necessities of the religious life. To wait for the full assurance of a reasoned metaphysics before enter- ing upon the path of salvation would be for the great multi- tude of the people, and indeed for every man of a most reflec- tive turn, to postpone indefinitely the most pressing concerns of religion. Yet more is true. A certain large measure of agnosticism is, historically and speculatively considered, the critic, the foil, and the cure, of a demonstrative and mathemat- ical theology. The metaphysics of the Divine Being must grow out of human experience historically and reflectively interpreted. But Buddhism itself soon constructed a positive doctrine of the gods ; and it afterward gave birth to various schools of religious philosophy. There are few more interest- ing studies in the evolution of religious opinions than that af- 1 Allgemeine Geschichte der Philosophie, I, ii, p. 213. IMPORTANCE OF THE CONCEPTIOX. 19 forded by the wonderful process by which this agnostic reli- gion— especially the Northern Buddhism — proceeded upon the view of Voltaire : '* If we had no God, it would be necessary to create one." A certain agnostic attitude toward any attempt to unite the conception of an Absolute Self with the conception of perfect Ethical Spirit is, undoubtedly, appropriate to the difficulties inherent in the very nature of tlie attempt. It is so easy to juggle witli words when reflecting upon such subjects. It is 80 difficult to avoid mistakhig the glitter of superficial but hol- low abstractions for great and sublime ideas that have been derived from a full and rich storehouse of human experience. It is well not to affirm certain knowledge when only a some- what hesitating faith is appropriate ; — and this, without accept- ing tlie validity of the Kantian effort to remove knowledge in order to make room for faith. If by '* agnosticism " be meant a somewhat extreme caution about drawing hard and fixed lines around the conception of God, or about venturing to affirm that human distinctions and qualifications, negative or affirmative, wholly avail to define, much more make comprehensible, its con- tent; then every student of the philosophy of religion may properly cultivate no small measure of the agnostic attitude. Such a reasonable agnosticism, which wishes to adjust the certitude of one's mental attitude toward the object, to the agreement and clearness of the various lines of evidence, is a quite different affair from much wliich goes by this name. There are, however, two kinds of the agnostic attitude towanl the conception of God which deserve especially to bo avoided. Of these one is tliat dogmatic agnosticism wliich we liave al- ready twice or thrice rejected, and wliicli is taught by those of whom Schurman dechirrs : ' '*The burden of their mossaire is always tlie incapacity of the human mind to know anything but the phenomena of the sensible world, or the contradictions in which it is involved when it essays to reach Infinite and ' Agnoaticieni unci Religion, p. SG. 20 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION Absolute Reality." Such dogmatic agnosticism, when con- fined chiefly to questions of ethics and religion, and when coupled — as it often is — with an uncritical credulity toward the current metaphysics of the physical and natural sciences, is the very opposite of a legitimate attitude of mind. Legitimate agnosticism=" Removal of prejudice, intellectual honesty, judicial temperament." Yet more disturbing and irrational was the agnosticism which resulted from the attempt, by Sir William Hamilton and Dean Mansel, to unite the most negative results of the Kantian Critique with the orthodox}^ of the Church of England. Fortunately on the whole for the philosophy of religion this attempt soon spent itself. It is a current opinion that modern science, historical criti- cism, and critical philosophy, have placed the assumptions of the extreme form of dogmatic agnosticism toward the concep- tion of God upon unassailable foundations. It is true that the recent advances in scientific discovery and reflective thinking have made certain forms of this conception quite untenable. But it is also true that the same science, historical criticism, and philosophy, have enormously widened our acquaintance with every sphere of reality, and thus have provided new ma- terials for the thought of the race to combine in so incompar- able and incomparably grand a conception. The lesson of the hour is not that we should despair of framing any valid idea of the Being of the World in a way to satisfy the religious as well as the scientific and philosophical needs of humanity. The lesson is, the rather, that we should so heighten, deepen, broaden, and enrich this conception, by use of all the available material, that it shall more adequately than ever correspond to these magnified needs. For tlie relation which is sustained by the way in which the race conceives of God to the entire de- velopment of the race, and especially to the solution of the prob- lems proposed to philosophy by the religious experience of man- kind, is an essentially unchanging relation. CHAPTER XXVII NATURE OF THE EVIDENCE In preparation for the critical and reflective examination of the central conception of religion it is not simply desirable to estimate adequately the importance of the task ; it is also necessary to comprehend, at least in a preliminary way, the nature of the evidence to be sought for, and reasonably to be expected. Otherwise the student of the philosophy of religion is liable to one of two errors. Either, on the one hand, he may claim a degree or kind of proof for his conclusions which is inappropriate to the subject and unreasonable to expect ; or else, on the other hand, he may esteem too lightly the c'lisensus of evidence, and the robust tenure of the composite thread of argument which can be woven to his connnand. Our present inquiry may, then, be stated in the following way. Of what kind and degree of evidence — of argument, or of so-called *' proof " — does the conception of God admit? Any attenq)t to estimate tlie nature and value of the evidence for the conception of God involves an intelligent opinion upon these two subjects. In the first place, it requires a correct view, in general of man's mental activities and products as rc- hited to the different classes of objects, — especially, of the nature and the validity of knowledge, faith, science, opinion, etc. Hut it also inv(jlves, in particular, tin; detailed apprecia- tion iind adjustment of the different lines of evidence which converge upon the Objet^t of religious l)elief and woi-ship, — namely, the conception of (iod. The former of these two problems is that attempted by the 21 22 PHILOSOPHY OF EELIGION psychology and philosophy of the cognitive processes. The net result of the attempt is a body of epistemological doctrine which, in order to be available for use in the discussion of any partic- ular application of this doctrine, requires to be combined with a careful observance of the principles of logic and an acquain- tance with the methodology of the positive sciences. From this body of doctrine we may profitably borrow the following tliree tenets. And, first : Knowledge is from its very nature a mat- ter of degrees, so to say. No degree of knowledge that amounts to perfectly absolute and indisputable certainty of the reality of its object can be reached otherwise than by self-conscious- ness. Even here, the only object thus absolutely and indisputa- bly known is the " here-and-now " existence of the Self, with its concrete present object, whether envisaged as some state of the Self or as some manifestation of a not-self. Various theories of the intuition or intellectual vision of God, or of some mystical union of the finite soul with the Divine Being, have attempted to establish the knowledge of God upon this indisputable basis of self-consciousness. But such a knowledge of God could come only through a consciousness of the Object as a species of Self-consciousness ; and this would seem to be intrinsically impossible, both from the nature of self-consciousness, and also from the nature of the Object which is alleged to be known in self-consciousness. On the other hand, to refuse to consider any degree of the cognitive attitude, any manner of hioivledgey as attainable with regard to the Being of God, is to overlook the fundamental doctrine which regards the cognitive attitude itself as admitting of an indefinite variety of degrees.^ But, second, the distinction ordinarily made between so-called knowledge and so-called faith is an unstable and vanishing dis- tinction. Belief that rests upon no grounds of knowledge, if such belief is possible even for human beings of the lowest in- tellectual order, certainly is to be rejected by the philosophy 1 For a further discussion of this subject, see chapter VHI on "Degrees, Limits, and Kinds of Knowledge" in the author's Philosophy of Knowledge. NATURE OF THE EVIDENCE 23 of religion, as without evidential value. On the other hand, knowledge that does not involve large elements of belief — and often elements of belief which are varied in character, sub- tile in origin, and extremely difficult to estimate with regard to their evidential value — is not to be had by human minds, whether in the form of religion, or science, or philosophy. The reasons why the term *• faith," rather than the terra "knowl- edge," is appropriate with reference to the verities of religion in general, and especially when treating of man's conception of God, have already been made sufficiently clear.^ By combining the two preceding conclusions we arrive at the following position : In matters theoretical as well as practical, our attitudes of mind, both those which we are pleased to call " knowledge " and those which are often deprecated as only "faith," can claim only a higher or lower degree of vrohablUty with regard to the real existence of their objects. We do not increase the ontological value of any judgment by bringing it under the category "knowledge"; we do not necessarily diminish the ontological value of any judgment by being con- tent to let it rest under the rubric " faith." Some men's knowledges are by no means so rational, or so certiiin, as other men's l>eliefs. And much of the development of the particular sciences, as well as of the evolution of religious faitli, consists in finding out that what was thought to be assuredly known is no longer worthy even of belief ; but that many of tlie insights of faith have turned out to be anticipations of future iissured knowledge, whether of law or of fact. From tliis point of view again it is pertinent to call attention to the kind of agnosticism wiiicli is apj)ropriate to a critical examination of the religious conception of God. In spite of his reasoned agnostic attitude toward tliis conception as an object of knowledge, and of liis continued adherence to the tenet of a fundamental distinction between the scientific and the theological, and between knowledge and faitii, we lind Kant » Vol. I, pp. 300//. 24 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION referring to " the supersensible substrate of all our faculties," and to " the intelligible substrate of nature both external and internal, as the Reality -in-itself (^Sache an sich Selhaf).'''' ^ Thus, the other ivay of getting at God, through the postulates of the practical reason rather than through a demonstrative con- clusion based upon phenomena of an external and physical sort, may lead to an attitude as truly and securely cognitive as any that the fundamental conceptions and postulates of the particular sciences can boast. And Kant himself, if we may excuse a certain almost grotesque mixture of precision and squeamishness in his use of terms, may be made to agree with a recent writer in holding : " Strictly, to be an Agnostic, is to be a heathen " (this means, I suppose, a human being who has not as yet been subject to the influences of religious race- culture); " and we are not heathens, for we are members of Christendom." All of which favors a critical and moderate attitude toward the evidence for the Being of God, rather than the attitude of an already convinced and dogmatic agnosticism.^ The same epistemological considerations may fitly guard us against another mental attitude which not infrequently goes under the name of agnosticism. It is the attitude of a vague unreasoned mysticism, a sort of agnostic sentimentalism. Be- cause it is held, previous to examination, that the idea attaching itself to the contemplation of the evidence must always remain wholly negative and undefined, both knowledge and faith are denied their rights in the central field of religion. God as Reality, it is said, can neither be known nor believed in ; but a certain stirring of aesthetical feeling is permissible even in the presence of the conception of the " Unknowable." 1 See the Kritik of Judgment, Bernard's Translation, pp. 238 and 240. 2 The ground in debate between Theism and dogmatic Agnosticism has been so thoroughly gone over by such writers as Flint, "Agnosticism," Fraser, "Philosophy of Theism," Schurman, "Belief in God," Ward, "Nat- uralism and Agnosticism," and others, as not to require further treatment at our hands. NATURE OF THE EVIDENCE 25 It is certainly obligatory upon the philosophy of religion to furnish evidence for something more clearly rational than this feeling. The case is surely one for argument, and for the con- sideration and balancing of evidence. It cannot be dismissed with the exclamation : " Alas! how is it with you That you do bend your eye on vacancy, And with the incorporal air do hold discourse ? " The outcome of a detailed examination into the theoretical and practical problems in debate between Theism and Agnosti- cism, ends in advice similar to that given in a declaration attrib- uted to Confucius : " When you know a thing, to hold that you know it ; and when you do not know a thing, to allow tliat you do not know it — this is knowledge." Perhaps we might modify this advice, as applying to the object of religious belief, in somewhat the following way : '' To have a rational faitli in God, and logically to proceed from, and intelligently to hold by, the grounds in experience on which that faith is based ; and when any form of belief proves doubtful or untenable on such grounds, to decline or postpone accepting it as your faith ; — this is to have all the ' knowledge ' which is appropri- ate or possible with reference to such an Object." But is this so very far, in tlie last analysis, from what science and j)hi- losophy both advise with reference to the atUiinment and growth of so-called hnowledge respecting all classes of objects? Only in this way, can religion be made as scientific and rational as its intrinsic nature admits. But only in the same way, can science and pliilosopliy ])e connnitted to the cause of religion. In attempting to co-ordinate and to appreciate the different lines of evidence leading toward a rational faith in Goil, one is met l)y several claims the testing of which is in a large meas- ure dependent upon one's views in general, as to the nature of faith and of knowledge. Among these claims is that of an infallible intuition, or envisagenuMit, of the reality of the object. This claim may take either of two principal forms. One of 26 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION these is the more mystical ; the other the more argumentative, or even rat ion aL The chiim to have an immediate vision of Deity almost un- doubtedly originated in the experience of dream-life. It is this experience that gives apparent warrant to the otherwise quite untenable theory wliich finds in dreams the origin of the belief in spirits and in immortality. In its most ancient, and by far most frequent form, the vision is of some particular god — divine animal, deified ancestor, or individual member of the pantheon. Such are the appearances to believers, in their dreams, of Apollo, Minerva, Venus, and the other Greek divinities, whether as narrated in the Homeric poems or in the annals of historians. But it has been shown that such al- leged visions of the divine beings imply an already existing belief in the gods. They may confirm the belief ; they do not originate it. Undoubtedly, however, when the tendency to believe is undeveloped, or the dreamer has been in doubt, the evidence of the dream may turn the scale with him. Thus men have come in all ages of the world to trust the reality of their conception of Divine Being, because some manifestation of such Being has appeared to them, has seemed to be actually envisaged by them, in a dream or in a vision. Quite different in some important respects, although similar in others, is the intuition of God which is claimed by the doc- trine of Yoga, or " mental concentration." ^ '* He that every- where devotes himself to Him (that is, Atman as Lord), and always lives accordingly ; that by virtue of Yoga recognizes Him, the subtile One, shall rejoice in the top of heaven." Again : " He that devotes himself in accordance with the law " — i. e., to avoiding certain vices and attaining certain virtues — and "practices Yoga," "he becomes sarvagamin," or "one belonging to the All-soul." The tradition as to the " illumi- nation " of Gautama tells us that it was attained by the means of contemplation, after the process of self-torture and the Yoga- 1 See Hopkins, Religions of India, p. 262. NATURE OF THE EVIDENCE 27 discipline had been found unavailing. In both these cases, however, the envisagement of reality is reached not so much by way of a vision, or any form of intuition precisely, as by a kind of absorption into the essence of Reality itself. The Yoga doctrine teaches that by a process, partly physical and partly psychical, called '' mental concentration," the human in- dividual may attain union with God (jugum^yoke). He who Ijecame " the Buddha," however, found out another equall}^ mys- tical path to a complete mental satisfaction in the object sought by religious feeling. And both doctrines agree as to the possi- bility of putting the faith of the individual upon a basis of ex- perience which has the immediacy and certainty, up to the point of an infallibility, which belong to a species of intuitive cogni- tion. There is, then, a certain amount of truth in the statement of Professor Flint :^ " To find intuitionists which in this connec- ti(jn really mean what they say, we must go to Hindu Yogi, Plotinus and the Alexandrian Mystics, Schelling and a few of liis followers — or in other words, to those who have thought of God as a pantheistic unity or a Being without attri- butes." It was chiefly under the influence of Greek thinking that the conception of God was itself made more rational, and that tlie way of verifying this conception by intuition became more of a rational process. Outside of Christianity this doctruie of God as the Object of knowledge by means of a rational intui- tion came, perhaps, to its highest development, as judged by ethical and spiritual standards applied to the conception itself, in the; writings of IMiilo JucUeus. As Bousset says:* *'For the Greek idealistic pliilosophy " (that is, iis it culminated in Plo- tinus iind the other Neo-Platonists) *' (iod i-emained, funda- mentally considered, a pretty barren aKstraction, a limiting concept, the Highest, Unknowable, and Nameless. For Philo God is, and remains, a highest living Reality." Much of the » Theism , p. 350. ' Die Religion des Judeiiturns, p. 420. 28 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION best of the Old-Testament conception had united with the best of the Greek philosophical thinking in the conception of Divine Being held by Fhilo. "God only is the truest and actual Peace ;" and although he is " One and All," He is also the " Good God." Citing Plato in the Timseus, Philo tells us ^ that " the Father and Maker " is good. And do we inquire of Philo, "How do you know this?" We are elsewhere^ in- formed : *' I once heard a yet more serious story from my soul, when seized, as it often was, with a divine ecstasy. ... It told me that in the One really existing God there are two supreme and primary powers (Suj/dyoeis), Goodness and Might; and that by Goodness, he begat the Universe and in Might he rules that which hath been begotten." It is instructive to no- tice in this connection that, without any claim to a mystical intuition or any toleration for the method of ecstasy, but in the cool and practical manner of his race, the great Confucian thinker, Shushi, entertained a parallel conception of the Being of the World, or the Ultimate Reality. But with the Chinese philosopher Reason embraces the ethical conception of good- ness, and more. The substantial or more primary Being of the Universe is Reason ; its manifestation, or derived activity, is Force. By a union of Ri or Reason, and Ki or Force, the Universe and every particular thing in it exists. And wher- ever there is Reason, there is also Force. Reason itself is im- material and invisible ; but all manifestations, whether of minds or of things, are due to its activities. The Ultimate Reality is, therefore, active Reason ; and this, of necessity, includes all moral principles and all social order. Now nothing is plainer from the historical point of view than the contention that neither the most successful practicer of Yoga, nor Gautama who became the Buddha, nor the Chi- nese thinker Shushi, — not to mention Plotinus and all his more ancient and modern disciples — did in fact arrive at the con- 1 De Opif. Mundi i, 5: So/cet /lot .... dyadbv elvai rhv iraripa koL wotTjrrjv. 2 De Chenibim, 9. NATURE OF THE EVIDENCE 29 ceptions they held (not now to speak of the claim to know the extra-mental validity of these conceptions) by way of the in- tuitive, or mystical, or ecstatic vision of God. They were all like us, children of the race. The conceptions they came to hold of God had their roots in the historical development of humanity. However sudden and immediate their upspringing in the consciousness of the individual might seem to be, it was the growth of many centuries of toilsome reflection upon the witnesses of experienced fact, which bore fruit in the form taken by the conception. In estimating the evidential value of the claims to a vision of God, in the sense of an ecstatic or otherwise intuitive knowl- edge, two contrasted, not to say antithetic truths must be borne in mind. On the one hand, in no case does tliis form of evi- dence, when critically examined, turn out really to be what it claims, or at first even seems to be. The subjective convic- tion is no guaranty to others of the reality of the object ; — and this is true, all the way from the savage or half-civilized man who dreams of the gods appearing to him in most gro- tesque forms, and with the most extravagant messages, up to the Indian Yogin, the ecstatic Philo, the devotional Christian saint. Let it be remembered that the question at issue does not con- cern the use of dreams, and visions, and even — or if you will, even especially — the '' mental concentration " of Yogism, or the disciplined and self-forgetful contemplation of Huddiiism, as mean8 of revelation. Indeed, from both the historical and the j)sychological points of view, that the faith of man in God has been confirmed and developed in this way is matter of fact. Hut this experience is an individual affair. However convinc- ing it may Ixicome to the individual, it can never, on account of its own intrinsic nature as an exix^rience, be converttnl into a universally convincing, nut to say indisputable kind of evi- dence. Indeed, just the contrary is true. This kind of evi- dence is inherently such as is most diOicult to employ in de- fence of any universal propositions with regard to the existence 30 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION and nature of its object. It is also most liable to all sorts of impure mixtures and misleading and harmful elements. Still further, if the concrete vision of God were always ac- cepted at the full value claimed for it by the individual whose experience it is, it could at best be considered as only one par- ticular manifestation, — a religious phenomenon. But so varied and conflicting are these manifestations that, unless they are sub- jected to a critical testing, they furnish no trustworthy evi- dence, not to say proof, on which to base a rational conception of the Divine Being. That the Ultimate Reality, if it be eth- ical Spirit, might graciously condescend to bring some rays of a comforting belief about himself to the human soul through dreams or visions, may be a tenable enough view. But to con- struct one's conception of God by patching together these frag- mentary and elusive individual experiences would lead in quite the opposite direction from a rational procedure. And, finally, there is no form of intuition or envisagement of any sort of finite reality — Things or Minds — which cannot be subjected to analysis, seen to be composite, 'and to contain factors of more or less doubtful inference. Immediate cogni- tion of this sort belongs only to the finite and the particular. It is only by rational procedure that the mind can obtain and validate so subtile, complex, and changeful a conception as is afforded by the Object of religious faith. On the other hand, it would be unfair to the claims of re- ligion, and indeed a violence done to the scientific and logical way of treating similar facts in every sphere of knowledge, to deny all evidential value to those experiences upon which the intuitional proof, by way of a vision of God, or union with God, is based. For here is certainly a pretty persistent and by no means unimportant phase of man's religious life and development. Even if this experience were much more largely pathological than it is, a certain evidential value would still be- long to it. But there are modified forms of this religious con- sciousness, which to call " pathological " would be promptl}^ to NATURE OF THE EVIDENCE 31 go wide of the mark. Doubtless the saying of Jesus — " Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God" — is figurative and cannot be quoted in support of the intuitive theory, strictly interpreted. But the truth which it does express lies deeper still, — too deep and yet too high to be wholly covered by its figurative expression. That the mind's grasp upon Reality — That it is, and What it is — should be conditioned upon cul- ture of the powers employed in the effort to grasp, is good enough psychological and epistemological doctrine ; and it is doctrine of universal applicability. The experiences which have led many of the choicest characters of the race to be per- fectly confident of the reality of Divine Being, and of the ac- tuality of his spiritual immanence in their own souls, cannot be considered devoid of all evidential value. It is not simply the fanatics or extreme mystics in Christianity who have at- tained to this sort of a vision of God. In the Confessions of Augustine, as well as of Thomas a Kempis or St. FrancLs of Assisi, and in the Memoirs of theologians like Jonathan Ed- wards, as well Jls of men prominent in the developments of the positive sciences, similar experiences are not infrequently re- corded. After his vision of tlie risen Jesus — abnormal and pathological as this vision may have been — the Apostle Paul expressed the secret of his entire life as a i)erfect confidence that he, the man, was in some real and vital way united with God through faith in Christ. Nor are such experiences by any means confined to the Christian religion. That cort;iin experiences should have a great, and even a supreme evidential value for thase minds whose experiences they are, is not only to be expected as a fact ; it is also in good measure to Ixi justified in a «/«^?«/-scientitic and philo- sopliical way. Their nmnlx*r and quality, and the connection which they have liad with the religious development of the race, are such, as to constitute an argument for the reality of the religious concej)tion of the BtMng of the World. This argument niay, if one choose, be looked upon as a part either 32 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION of the ethical and ps3'chological or of the historical proofs of Theism. " Religious history," says Rdville,^ is " one unbroken attestation to God." All so-called proofs may be summed up in this : Religion itself could not be accounted for without God. There must be such a Being of the World as will account for the religious life and development of humanity. The claim to have an intuitive knowledge of God may take yet another and more rational form ; it may become a theory affirming what is known as a " God-consciousness " in all men. If by tliis be meant that the human cognitive conscious- ness has the power of making an immediate seizure, so to say, of the Object God, as we envisage the Self in self-consciousness, or the something not-self in sense-perception, then the claim is psychologically indefensible. The argument against this view of a so-called " God-consciousness " is substantially the same as that already advanced against the other form of the intui- tional theory. Neither the nature of conscious intuition, psy- chologically considered, nor the nature of the object of reli- gious cognition, historically and analytically considered, would seem to admit of such a theory. There is much important truth, however, in the evidence for the Being of God which is customarily offered by the ad- vocates of this view. What we do really find in the religious consciousness of the race is a spontaneous interpretation of experience both internal and external, both of things and of selves, as due to other spiritual existences ; — with its accom- paniment of confidence in the ontological value of the inter- pretation. This process is, indeed, the ever-developing source of the knowledge of God. Thus the One Other-Self comes to be believed in, or mediately known, as implicated in all our conscious cognitive acts. And it becomes the duty of a crit- ical philosophy of religion to explicate and to estimate the value of that evidence for the Being of God which is, indeed, implicate in the very nature and working of the cognitive con- 1 The Native Religions of Mexico and Peru (Hibbert Lectures, 1884), p. 6. NATURE OF THE EVIDENCE 33 sciousness of humanity, and of its progress in knowledge of every kind. By an easy and almost inevitable transition the claim to have an intuitive knowledge of the reality and attributes of Divine Being passes over into the claim to have demonstrative, or what Kant called '' apodeictic," proof on these matters. It has for centuries been the ideal of philosophy and theology. by a process of reasoning which shall start from an absolutely indisputable major premise, and shall proceed by equally in- disputable logical steps, to establish deductively the conclusion that God is, and — at least in some degree — as to What God is. The author of the critical pliilosophy,^ on the contrary supposed himself to have demonstrated once for all the illogical character of all the existing " proofs " of the reality of God ; and to have shown in an a priori way that the very nature of man's cogni- tive faculty makes any knowledge of God impossible. But like other demonstrations which were to settle for all time the limits of metaphysics as ontology, this one has been quite per- sistently disputed both by those who believe — as Kant himself did — in God, and also by those who are either agnostic or scep- tical toward the conception. So far as the claim to demonstrate the Being of God has taken the form of the so-called '^ ontological argument," it will be discussed in its proper place. But there are two or three somewliat modified attempts at a demonstrative proof which may fitly receive consideration in this connection. Of these one may be called the mathematical or geometrical, par excel- lence ; and this, either because it finds in tlie nature of pure matliematics ;in argument amounting to a demonstration of God ; or because it aims to demonstrate his Being more mathe- matico but sLirting from some yMa«/-mathematical conception » Especially in the Kritik der Reinen Vrmunft; {ind see j^rr contra the earlier treatises, Dilncidatio Nova, and Dcr Einzig Mogliche lieireisgmnd zu einer Demonntration des Daseins GoUcb; and the position assumcfi in the late*" work, Die Helicon inncrhalb dcr (t'rcnzrn dcr blossen Vemunfl. 3 34 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION or principle as its major premise. In the Latter of these two cases, some conception of "Substance" — as with Spinoza for example — or of " Pure Being," as in the views of the early Neo-Platonists, is customarily made the prmdple of the argu- ment. Under this head may be classed the ancient Platonic argument from geometry to God. "All the judgments of geometrj^," says a modern advocate of this view,^ " imply that there are unchanging relations in the one system of reality which alone is or can be known, and these unchanging relations con- stitute the objectivity of that system, so far as it comes within the view of geometry." As to this claim to demonstrate God, out of the nature of pure mathematics or by methods employed in the development of mathematical conceptions and relations, the objections, if we adhere to the strict construction of our terms, are quite de- cisive. Religious conceptions in general are not formed after the analogy of mathematical conceptions, nor are they arrived at and confirmed by proof which can be presented in a form similar to that of a mathematical argument. Indeed, this, which is the Kantian conception of pure mathematics, and of its a priori origin and nature, is now thoroughly discredited among mathematicians themselves. " Pure mathematics," just so far as it maintains and perfects its " purity," abstracts its conceptions and propositions from all experience with concrete realities and their actual relations. Yet, these same concep- tions and propositions are themselves derived from experience. Its demonstrations are therefore complete, are indeed, strictly speaking, demoiistrations^ only when it is agreed to accept some small group of postulates, of the actuality of which it is impossible to arrive at an empirical proof, and proceed with the strictest regard for the laws of logical deduction. In this way nothing whatever is demonstrated as to the nature of reality, except the mind's own possibility of being logical and, if logical, of avoiding inherent self-contradictions . The moment, 1 Professor Watson, Christianity and Idealism, p. 158/. NATURE OF THE EVIDENCE 35 however, we try to picture reality in terms of these purely mathematical conceptions and propositions, we find our attempt developing not a few most stubborn contradictions. All this might well enough convince us that reality is not constructed according to purely mathematical conceptions, arranged in the attractive form of a system of interrelated abstractions. As Schurman ^ has well said in contrasting this religious concep- tion with the conceptions of geometry : " God, on the other hand, who is the ground and source and moving spirit of all reality, must be the most concrete object of our thought. By no possibility, therefore, can a theology or science of God fol- low the demonstrative method of mathematics."^ This conclu- fiion avails also against the somewhat looser opinion of Locke,^ who regarded the demonstration not one whit inferior to mathematical certaint3^ On the other hand, the possibility of applying mathematics to the experienced realities of the world of concrete existences and actual relations, is one of the most convincing of argu- ments for the position that the Being of the World is some kind of an orderly and rational totality. Or if we take the position of religious faith and regard the system of minds and things, of which we have an ever-growing experience, and an ever-improving conception, as related to God the Creator and Preserver, we find in the procedure of mathematics, and in the control which it gives the human mind over the understiinding of phenomena, a very convincing form of evidence that Rea- son rules Force in the cosmic constitution and cosmic develoj)- meiit. There is, therefore, no conviction of modern science more welcome to the philosophy of religion — as it is indispensable to modern science itself — than the conviction of the unity and systematic connection of all Reality. > liclief in God, p. 30. 'See also Flint, Theism, Appendix, 425^. on the impossibility of demon- stration, in mathematical or a prwri fashion, of the IkMnj; of God. ' Comp. Essay concerning Human Understanding, Book IV, chap. X. 36 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION The inner connection of all the so-called arguments for the Being of God is shown again, — as it was shown in the transition from the claims of the intuitional theory to the claim of the ontological argument, — when we consider what is really involved with reference to the nature of the human mind by the application of mathematical conceptions to concrete reali- ties and their relations. For another form of the demonstra- tive argument sees in the very possibility of any knowledge whatever an unanswerable proof of the Divine Being. That all knowledge, whatever be its object or the method of its as- certainment, and whatever the degree and nature of its so-called evidence, involves a certain theory of reality, may be maintained successfully from both the epistemological and the metaphysi- cal points of view. For knowledge is always of reality. The mind's cognitive attitude toward its object is essentially some sort of a grasp — by belief, intuition, inference, primitive and unanaly- zable feeling, or by all these and other hands and tentacles of tlie soul — upon the actuality of the existence and of the relations of just this same object. Psychologists may try in vain to agree, or they may quarrel eternally, over the nature of the cognitive process. A sceptical theory of knowledge may carry doubt as to the extra-mental validity of knowledge to the ex- treme of solipsism. But in religion which is invariably, as we have already seen, a theory of reality, as well as in science and in philosophy, the confidence in reason as a vital and effect- ive commerce between the knower and the reality of the object known will always prevail. Knowledge itself implies indubita- bly the actuality of certain universal standards of a rational order. This is true, whatever the specific object cognized may be. The same thing is true of all reasoning, whatever the sub- ject about which the reasoning is ; and whatever the subjective condition of the cognitive and reasoning mind in which the process terminates — whether it be affirmation, denial, or doubt. To this extent a so-called proof of the immanence of Reason in both minds and things may be drawn from that experience NATURE OF THE EVIDENCE 37 which we call " knowledge." In this experience lie the grounds of all argument and proof. But to say this is not equivalent to affirming a demonstration of the Being of God. We shall see subsequently, however, what a consensus of evidence is reached by following to the place where they unite, the particular and partial arguments for the conception of re- ligion ; and as well by considering the relation in which all these arguments stand to certain fundamental conceptions of science — to the categories of Being, Cause, Law, Final Purpose, etc. In this way the proof amounts to showing that certain unchanging factors in the conception of God are essential, un- changing, and necessary features of all liuman cognitive con- sciousness. Stated in figurative and somewhat exaggerated form, the argument then concludes that " To desire to know God without God is impossible ; there is no knowledge without liim who is the Prime Source of knowledge." Or, to employ the more philosophical language of Hegel : ^ '^ What men call the proofs of God's existence are, rightly understood, the ways of describing and analyzing the native course of the mind, the coui'se of tliowjht^ thinking the data of the senses. . . . The leap into the supersensible which it tiikes when it snaps the chain of sense, all tliis transition is thought and nothing but thought." Here we encounter, to be sure, the customary Hegelian over-emphasis and extension of '* thought " as con- cerned in both faith and knowledge. But this is far truer to the facts of the case, wliether the objects of thouglit be those proposed as problems to science, to philosophy, or to religion, than is the sceptical epistemology of the Critique of Pure Reason. And religious feeling, as well as the sentiment for the ideal of philosophy, leads us to sympathy witli Hegel when he elsewhere-' asks : *' What knowledge would ha worth the pains of acquiring, if knowledge of God is not attainable?" Indeed, • The Lopjic of Hccrl, Wallarc's Translation, p. lO.i; and compare the re- marks on the methofl of demonstration as apphed to God, p. 72/. ' rhilottophie dcr Kchgion (Edition of Marhcinekc). I, p. 37. 38 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION all rivulets and larger streams may contribute to swell the river that bears humanity toward that ocean of truth which is the knowledge of God. It is scarcely necessary to show that processes of induction similar to those by which the particular conceptions or laws of the chemico-physical and biological sciences are established do not comport with the essential nature of the conception of God. Yet in the larger, but no less true and valid meaning of the words, this conception may be placed upon a basis of expe- rience. If the proof of the Being of God is to be found neither in some infallible vision of an intuitive sort, nor in some form of demonstrative argument, nor in an induction which pro- ceeds upon a purely empirical basis : Where is proof to be found? Or must the human mind renounce all effort to rea- son its way to the truth about this central conception of reli- gious faith ; not to say, all pretence of being able to prove the ob- jective validity of the conception ? To such questions it may be answered that the alternative which they imply is neither well conceived nor fortunately expressed. There is a middle way between exaggerated affirmations of proof and the negative position of early Buddhism ; "No god of heaven or Brahma-world Doth cause the endless round of birth; Constituent parts alone roll on, From cause and from material spring. " But this is a childish philosophy, if philosophy at all it can be called ; it is as inadequate to explain the religious experience of tlie race as the childish theogony it would displace was inad- equate to compete with modern physical science. The sci- entific and philosophical, as truly as the religious nature and needs of man, can never be satisfied with so barren a conclusion. The one inexhaustible source of evidences for the true con- ception of God is the expeinence of the race. But these words must not be interpreted in any narrow and half-hearted way. NATURE OF THE EVIDENCE 39 This experience must be considered in its totality and as itself subject to development. This experience is all we have on which to base any kind of proof ; but it is enough, and even more than enough, to satisfy all the reasonable demands made upon it. Indeed, in all the lines of evidence, the so-called proofs, the attempt at a satisfactory understanding of the origin, laws, historical course, and meaning, of the world can never disre- gard the origin, nature, needs, destiny, and historical develop- ment of man as chiefly necessary to its full account.^ The proof of God for the individual searcher may, therefore, take some such form of argument as the following: Whatever else really is, or is not really, in the world, I am here ; and I want myself explained to myself, made self-consistent and helped in self-development, in a satisfactory way. This " myself " in- cludes not only my bodily organism and dependent connec- tion witli external nature and with the race, but also my own truest and highest self, with its hidden potentialities and aspira- tions, its hopes, fears, and ideals touching its own destiny. " With the mass of faculties and capacities and experiences, which constitute my personal nature," said Cardinal New- man, " I believe in God." The generalizations and courses of reasoning by wliich this intelligent, but personal faith in God may be converted into a quasi-scienti^c and philosophical proof of the validity of the conception of God, have themselves no otlier source than the experience of the race. We may say with Schultz ' then : '* To be certiiin of the existence of God means, fundamentally con- sidered, to recognize as necessary the religious view of the world." But just what is the truth of this view of the Being of the World, and how it is so to be stated and ex})()undod as 1 As says iSabntier (Esquisse d'linc Philosophic dc hi Hehi^ion, p. 120): "Pour se repr(''.stuxter le divin, Phonirne n'a jamais eu e wholly passed over by the phihjscjpby of religion. We shall content ourselves with • The so-called cosmologicul argument, us it has inlluenced Chriiitian the- ology, goes back to Aristotle; the teleological, to Socrates, etc. • Among the numerous IkkjIch on Theism, |)orha{)s none gives a mora 8at> isfactopular survey and criticism of the customary arguments for the lieing of (Jod than that by Professor J. J. Tigert: "Theism. A Survey of the Paths thiit Lead to God." The discussiori of the Theologian J. A. Dorner, System der Chriatlichen Glaubcnslehre, I, pp. 173-330, is particularly valu- able. 45 46 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION a brief attempt to estimate the value which they seem to possess in their relations as factors to the reconstructed argument. At the head of the arguments for the Being of God it has been customary to place the so-called " Ontological." From its very nature tliis argument in its more modern form implies a high development of the speculative and metaphysical in- terests and aptitudes of man. Historically considered it is, therefore, of course a relatively late product of his reasoning faculties. In that more positive statement in which it has in- fluenced theology and the philosophy of religion it was shaped principally by The Church Father Anselm (1033-1109) and by the philosopher Descartes (1596-1650). The distrust of it, and the partial if not complete overthrow of its independent (?) influence, was brought about by the trenchant criticism of Kant. " The conception of God to which, on cosmological grounds, by a logical ascent from the particular to the univer- sal, Anselm had arrived in the 3Ionologium^ he seeks in the I*roslogium (originally entitled Fides querens Intellectum) to justify ontologically by a simple development of the concep- tion of God." The argument ran thus : Every man, even " the fool," has in his mind the conception of, or belief in, a good than which no greater can be thought. But that is not the greatest thinkable good which exists merely in the mind, but does not also exist in reality. Therefore this greatest good must exist in reality, as well as in the human intellect ; and this greatest really existent Good is "our Lord God." The argument of Anselm was considered unsound even by some of his contemporaries among the believers in Christianity ; it was estimated as a pure paralogism, especially by the monk Gaunilo, Count of Montigni, in a controversial treatise. Liber pro Insipiente. The critical Kant pointed out that the onto- logical argument cannot be considered as an independent, much less a demonstrative proof. It does, however, enter in an es- sential way into the ontological validity of all the arguments. It is — to use the phrase of Kant — their nervus prohandi. CUSTOMARY PROOFS EXAMINED 47 For the system of thought which Descartes elaborated, the conception of God was not simply of supreme moral and re- ligious significance ; the demonstrable ontological validity of this conception was the bridge over which the human mind must pass from the last inner retreat of consciousness to a world of verifiable experienced realities. With this thinker the ontological argument took more than one form. In the Third Meditation, Descartes, in accordance with his general doctrine of Method, proceeds to argue from the perfectly clear idea of an infinite, eternal, and unchangeable Being to the In- finite Reality corresponding to the idea. Such an idea de- mands a corresponding reality as its cause. In the Fifth ]\Ied- itation the claim is advanced that, just as it follows of neces- sity from the essence of a triangle that the sum of its angles = 2 right angles, so it follows from the essence of the idea of a most perfect Being that such a Being really exists. Existence in reality is a perfection ; hence God exists. The essential thini^ about all these forms of the so-called ontological argument is the claim that we may conclude with a perfect conviction — Nay ! that we must conclude — from the conception of the Divine Being, as it exists in human thought, to the extra-mental reality of the same Being. In this very fact Kant found its fatal defect: — namely, that it did, without additional warrant as it were, pass from idea to actuality ; — from the object as conceived to the Thing-in-itself. Tlius all the arguments of theology became the conspicuous insbmce of that vain pretence of knowledge, of wliich mcUij^hysics — in the sense of ontological doctrine — is perpetually guilty. To state the objection in the terse manner of Ueberweg:' The on- tological argument is a *' meaningless tautology;" and "the only conclusion which is logically valid is this ; so surely as God exists, so surely is he a real l>eing." On the other hiind, it is complained of such curt dismissal of the ontological argu- ment, and with reason, that the objection overlooks the very 1 A History of Philosophy (English Tran^ilation of 1S72), I, p. 384. 48 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION consideration on which the argument is based ; and this con- sideration is, the peculiar nature of the conception itself. Cer- tainly, to borrow the figure of speech with which even Kant stooped to ridicule this so-called proof, the conceived hundred dollars that are not in my pocket do not add a penny to the sum that is really there. But if what Descartes set out to prove is this — *' That God is the only sufficient source or cause of the idea of God, — i. e., the Infinite and the Perfect,"^ — the alleged proof may fall far short of a demonstration with- out by any means losing all claim to evidential value. Differently understood and more fairly rated, this argument can be so employed as to turn Kant's criticism of it against himself. For with Kant — and this is the central positive posi- tion of the critical philosoph}^ — Reality is always apprehended by the human mind under the formal conditions of a synthetic judgment a priori. Only then, if we regai-d the judgment which affirms the self-existence of the Absolute as a merely logical and analytical judgment, a sort of equation between adjectives, can we demolish it in so summary a fashion. But in fact, this judgment is not merely abstract, logical, and analytical. It is, the rather, an exceedingly complex synthetic affair^ a summing up of many threads of argument, taken from the complex web of Reality, and woven together by human thinking. The grounds, the necessary conditions, and the substance of the experience, which enter into the argument, belong to the con- stitution of reason itself. Something like this Kant was him- self forced to confess in his " Critique of the Practical Reason," and even more in his '* Critique of Judgment." In its peculiarly Cartesian form the ontological argument is therefore, on the one hand, refuted as a demonstration of a purely a priori sort, and on the other, confirmed as a necessary and rational explanation of the historical conditions under which, 1 This argument is presented at length by Gratry in his Connaissance de Dieu: " C'est-a-dire I'idee de Dieu, laquelle des qu'elle est obtenue, prouve par elle-meme que Dieu existe." (2 vols., 5th ed., Paris, 1856.) CUSTOMARY PROOFS EXAMINED 49 slowly and through the centuries and in dependence upon all the ideal lines of human development, this conception of God as perfect personal Being has come to the fore. We cannot, perhaps, say with Principal Caird : ^ " The true meaning of the Ontological proof is this, that as spiritual beings our whole conscious life is based on a universal self-consciousness, an Ab- solute Spiritual Life, w^hich is not a mere subjective notion or conception, but which carries with it the proof of its necessary existence or reality." We cannot argue with Anselm and Descartes that what I conceive of as ivorfhiest of existence is thereby proved actually to exist. But we may draw in sympathy near to the truth as Fichte affirmed it : " We must end at last by resting all existence which demands an extrinsic foundation upon a Being the fountain of whose life is within Himself; by allying the fugitive phenomena, which color the stream of time with ever-changing lives, to an eternal and unchanging exist- ence." The World is only intelligible to us, if our thinking is true thinking ; if it brings us, so to say, into commerce with Reality. Figurative and poetical ways of stating this meta- pliysical postulate, which is entitled to reverse the entire scep- tical conclusion of the Kantian theory of knowledge, are abundant enough in the literature both of philosophy and of religion. *' The ' is ' between subject and predicate," said Herder, " is my demonstration of God." " God is the truth in us," said Leibnitz. And Harms declared that "in all finite spirits the idea of the truth is contained a priories an original thought which arises out of the essence of the spirit itself." In the opinion of Pfleiderer'^ the argument from religion and that from the theory of knowledge were both originally identical — as seen in the Confessions of Augustine and in the writings of Anselm — with " the kernel of the ontological argument." The history of philosophy in its relations to religion seems to suggest this view. Even in Hiuldhisni, with its fundamentiil ' Philosophy of Religion, p. 1.50. 3 Philosophy of Religion (English Translation, ed. 1888), III, p. 274/. 50 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION doctrine that '* all the constituents of Being are transitory," the distinction has to be introduced between " Karma-existence " and " Originating-existence." ^ " Existence is twofold ; there is Karma-existence and an Originating-existence." The Wheel of Existence is indeed without known beginning ; and yet, just as the ignorant and desiring Mind has made it to exist, so the blessed and wise Mind may cause it to cease to be. Thus also in the " Discussion of Dependent Origination " between Sakya- muni and Ananda, where Name and Form are made the cause, the occasion, and the origin of all dependent existence, both are personified and deified in the fashion of Oriental mystical metaphysics. Elsewhere,^ however, in the effort to escape all ontology, and playing with mere words and symbols and figures of speech. Buddhism assures us that Form itself is caused by ignorance, desire, attachment, and Karma ; while Name depends on the senses and attention. Man, in a germinal form found everywhere existing but only ripening along certain lines of development under the more favorable conditions into the fruitage of a rational Theism, conceives of and reasons about the Ground in Reality of his own being and of the existence of things. His conceptions are thus variously shaped by the effort to give such an account of his varied experiences as shall satisfy the constitutional and permanent demands of his own life. What the ontological proof so-called amounts to is, therefore, this : It is difficult or impossible, from thepoint of view of reflective and self-consistent thought, to regard the conception of God as a purely subjective development. This conception, as human reason has somehow succeeded in framing it, seems to the same reason to demand the Reality of God. The gist of the Cosmological argument is found in the log- ical and, as well, the practical necessity of referring the de- 1 The quotations are from Buddhism in Translation; Harvard Oriental Series, vol. 3. 2 Visuddhi-Magga, Chapters XVII and XX. CUSTOMARY PROOFS EXAMINED 51 pendent and relative character of finite beings and events to the Unity of some Independent or Absolute Ground. Its point of starting is, then, to be located in man's concrete, par- ticular knowledge of the world ; its impulse proceeds from the feeling of dissatisfaction with the fragmentary and discrete character of the explanation which this point of view affords ; its movement is along the argument from causation onward and upward towards a resting place in some ultimate or primal causative Principle. Against this argument, as it has custom- arily been employed by theology, two powerful objections may be brought : First, that the argument involves the attempt at an impossible regressus ad ii)Jinitnm^ a search for cause be- yond cause, and other cause still back of this, — the wliole proc- ess being without power or prospect of ever reaching the end of the chain of causation. It is also objected, secondl}', that any application of the law of causality under whieli man knows the phenomenal world, to a region whicli is qualitatively different from the phenomenal, involves a misconception of the principle of causality itself. Both these objections do, indeed, bear heavily against the cosmological argument, as it has been customary to employ it ; but they both involve a misconce^v tion of tlie principle of causality, and of the use which it is proper to make of this principle in the reconstruction of the argument. The conception of a '' World-Ground," or so-called '' First Cause "of all finite beings and events, has been an exceedingly slow and painful evolution. But the conception is an important product of man's ment;d develo[)ment ; and any incjuiry into its validity nujuires a criticism which profoundly concerns not only the faiths of religion but also the rational beliefs postu- latetl, and the conclusions confirmed, by science and by phi- losophy. For untold ages the race existed without any clear and reasoned conception of the unit}- and personality of the Divine Being. Not until late did man aim at th(' position from which to frame the conct'j)tion of a Pci"Sonal Abeolute as 52 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION the Ground of all cosmic existences and events, the First and the Final Cause of all human experiences. But all the way, in its gropings after the true idea of God, as well as in its growth of scientific and reflective knowledge, the human mind has made use of the cosmological argument. This is simply to say that man has been trying to explain his own expe- rience, and to satisfy his own needs, by interpreting the world of things and of selves in terms of a higher and more univer- sal, real Principle. In all such work of the interpretation of experience, the human mind both posits and infers entities that act upon it and upon one another. This is true of savage man ; it is true of childish man ; it is true of insane man ; it is true of scientific and cultured man. It is as true of the Berkeleian idealist, or the Comtean positivist, as it is of the common-sense realist or the so-called "reconstructed" realist. Without some such intellectual movement of a metaphysical character neither science nor religion could arise and develop. Our study of the phenomena of man's religious life and reli- gious development has shown us the truth of the declaration of D'Alviella : ^ " The savage, wherever he finds life and move- ment, refers them to the only source of activity of which he has any direct knowledge, namely the will." And this will is never the " pure activity " of '* non-being," but the will of some spiritual agent. In this way mythology, whether of the religious order or not, grows up and flourishes with its in- structive and yet grotesque and monstrous contributions to the cosmological argument with reference to the Being of the World. Of the primitive man Roskoff ^ truly says ; His con- clusion is the joining of the phenomena together, according to the laws of thought, in the relation of ground and conse- quence ; he operates in general according to the principle of causality." The same author adds : " This inner impulse has 1 Origin and Growth of the Conception of God p. 52. 2 Das Religionswesen der rohesten Volkerstamme, p. 129. CUSTOMARY PROOFS EXAMINED 53 been called a ' metaphysical instinct. ' " With chastened and corrected imagination, and enlarged and more penetrating ob- servation, modern science refers the same phenomena to phys- ical entities, to masses, atoms, corpuscles, ions, or ether, etc. ; and it weaves new connections between these entities, of a most marvelous and incredible intricacy, according to the same principle of causality. In one of its oldest forms the cosraological argument led Aristotle from motion in the world of things to a Being which must be conceived of as a Prime Mover. Through the Middle Ages, and in its most subtile and refined modern form, this argument implies that the rational conceptions of cause, ground, and law, may be applied to reality in the interests of a better explanation of concrete human experiences. The im- plication is undoubtedly true. There is no form of contesting it that does not either employ essentially the same argument, or else end in some absurd and self-contradictory form of scep- ticism in matters of science as well as of religion. At the same time any use of the cosmological argument which relies upon the mere recoil of the mind from an in- finite regressus, and upon the incomprehensible and absurd nature of the infinite series of causal connections, in order to justify tlie conception of a so-called First Cause, deprives itself of all real cogenc}'. " First Cause," in the cosmological argument, cannot mean simply, at the beginning in time ; it must mean, as Mr. Spencer admits^ — '* Infinite and Absolute." The moment this argument separates the Ground of the Uni- verse from present human experience, and thus conceives of a God that is aloof fi-oin tlie actually existing world, its ten- dency is toward a Deism which science rejects as unnecessary for an explanation of plu'n()mena,and which religious feeling regards iis cold and unsatisfying. The (tod man needs, if lie needs any God at all, whether to come near to liis lieart or to quicken and support his intellect, is not a Being whose living relations > First rriuciplc-s (cditiou of 1872), p. 38. 54 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION with the world of things and selves lie chiefly antecedent to, or run mostly separate from, this same known world of things and selves. On this point it has been well said : ^ " Not a mere foundation of Being in the abstract .... but a real, actually existing, primitive Ground (^Urgrund) of all reality," is what the cosmological argument seeks to establish. In the use of the cosmological argument it is essential that we should, on the one hand, guard against such agnostic prej- udices as render both modern science and critical reflection wholly doubtful about the nature of Reality ; and, on the other hand, that we should not accept that extreme of dogmatic con- fidence which concedes to either physical science or to current theological systems the exclusive right to give a complete and final form to their respective conceptions of this Reality. Moreover, the very terms which both science and theology em- ploy for the statement of their postulates and their conclusions are greatly in need of a more fundamental criticism. " Laws of nature " have no meaning in a world which is not essen- tially orderly and teleological. " Efficient causes," or whatever substitutes the most skillful scepticism may devise for this complex notion, signify nothing for an exposition of facts that does not repose upon the experience of intelligent wills. In- deed, the detailed and elaborate recognition of causal connec- tions everywhere in the world, taking place under so-called laws, — this universal fact is the cosmological argument. " In- telligence endowed with will," said Kant, '' is causality." Bet- ter said : Will, realizing its own immanent ideas, — this is what physical science speaks of in such terms as cause, law, relation, etc. The Teleological Argument, or Argument from Design, may be said in general to proceed from the obviously planful nature, or orderliness, of particular existences and their rela- tions, as man has an increasing experience of them, to the conclusion that they all have their Ground in One Mind. 2 Lindsay, Recent Advances in Theistic Philosophy of Religion, p. 143. CUSTOMARY PROOFS EXAMINED 55 From this point of regard it may be considered as based upon the self-confidence of human reason in its ability to know the cosmical forces, existences, and laws, as they really are and actually operate. Thus the teleological is an extension of the cosmological argument ; and both are supported by the onto- logical postulate which underlies all forms of the argument. On the value of this argument the judgment of the founder of the modern critical movement is well known. '^ It is," said Kant,' " the oldest, the clearest, and most in conformity with human reason ; " and he adds that it would be " not only extremely sad, but utterly vain, to attempt to diminish the authority of that proof." Socrates ^ is represented as giv- ing this argument naively when he convinces Aristodemus that " man must be the masterpiece of some great artificer." Plato presents it in detail in the Timseus. But Aristotle's profounder view justifies us in saying that tlie recognition which he gave to the immanent end of every object, and of the Totality, made his doctrine of finality worthy to be '' radi- cally distinguished from the superficial utilitarian teleology of later philosophers." ^ Bacon, the reputed founder of tlie modern theory of the inductive method, declares in his Essay on Atheism that when the mind of man belioldeth the chain of causes " confederate and linked together," " it must needs fly to Providence and Deity." The fact that Kant rejected the claims of the Teleological Argument to *' apodeictic cer- tainty " need not greatly disturb those who neither seek nor expect such certainty in an argument for the Object of reli- gions faitli. And the confession — **The old arguniunt from design in nature, as given ])y Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered " — is even less disturbintj for one who * Kritik dcr Reinen Vernunft, in the section, Von dcr Unmoglichkeit dcs physiko-thcologischen lieiveisefi. ' Xenophon. Mcrn. I, iv; comp. TV, iii. 3 For a note on the history of the teleological iirji:umcnt, see Flint, Theism, pp. 387/7. 56 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION has passed quite beyond the philosophical standpoint of either Paley or Darwin. The phrase " superficial utilitarian teleology " may very fitly give us our point of starting for an intelligent appreciation of the nature, value, and cogency pf the so-called argument from design. It is an important introductory consideration that the human mind has always, and of necessity, made use of the teleological conception in finding its way to a belief in the object of religious worship. That which does not seem to have a mind, and at least to some extent to show its mind, can- not stir or guide the religious nature of man. All our histor- ical study of religion illustrates this statement. In order not only to reconcile modern science and philosophy with the teleological view of the world, but also to commit them to it, and to the proof wliich it affords of the truth of the religious conception of the Divine Being, the teleological argument must, indeed, be apprehended in a generous, broad- minded, and magnanimous fashion (inan muss die Frage hn grosser en Stil heJiandehi). For such a treatment modern science has prepared anew the way. Its very efforts to intensify and to extend the mechanical conception of the universe, and, in spite of all its splendid success in these efforts, its complete failure thus to furnish an adequate and satisfactory explana- tion, have expanded and strengthened this argument. Nowhere do we find any " dead mechanism," worked upon, as it were, by blind forces that reside upon the outside. Even the kind of mechanism which we do find, and of which the particular sciences can make use for a limited and partial explanation of phenomena, is itself unthinkable without an indwelling final purpose. What modern science presents is a lively picture of the ceaseless, indescribably intricate, and richly productive Life of Nature, regarded as a system of interacting Things and Selves. In this system there is everywhere present an im- manent teleology — a vast, complex, and all-comprehensive net- work of final puiposes. CUSTOMARY PROOFS EXAMINED 57 Into a detailed exliibition of the facts upon which the con- ception of this universal " immanent teleology " relies, there is the less need to enter, because it has been so repeatedly and so fully made. The criticisms which have been most recently given to the conception in its modern form have abundantly shown its power to adapt itself to such minor modifications as the facts require, without losing anything whatever from its inlierent impressiveness. Indeed, the greater number of these criticisms scarcely touch the nerve of the argument ; much less do they weaken or destroy it. For example, when one writer^ maintains that the proof from the observed adaptation of means to ends, to the intelligence which adapts them, is either tautological or false, because the very conception of ends necessarily involves intelligence, his objection, when examined, comes perilously near to being a mere verbal quibble. The distinctions, which are then introduced in the effort to substi- tute for this " argument from design " a so-called " eutaxio- logical argument " based upon the " reign of law," are, for the most part, either superficial and unnecessary or inconclu- sive as to the points at issue. To establish for the world of human experience a reign of law it is necessary to deal with the same facts to which the teleological argument appeals. " Order " and " the reign of law " everywliere imply both internal and external relations, really existing and actually effective, among the different parts of the world's individual beings, and also Ixitween those individual beings ; these rela- tions themselves indicate that the beings do in fact serve, or oppose, one another as means to the realization of common or of different ends. The very conceptions of " Order " and " Law " therefore involve the idea of the adapUition of means to ends. Nor does the proposal to sulwtitute tlie conception of " function " for that of '' purpose " eitlier tlirow any glare of new light upon the j)henoniena or avail to weaken the force of » Ilicka, Critiijue of Deaign Arguments, p. vif. 58 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION the teleological argument. For function, too, is a fact from which we legitimately infer a purposing mind ; just as order is a fact from which we infer an ordering mind. And if things cannot, without putting mind into them, be conceived of as ordering themselves, or as performing their several functions properly, then surely they cannot without putting mind into them, be conceived of as adapting themselves to one another with the result of constituting a vast system of apparent means and ends. At this point, of course, it is the vast and even uni- versal extent of the system which seems to human reflective thinking to require the Unity of one intelligent First Cause. Thus the teleological argument extends the cosmological and ontological arguments. The objections and concessions of another critic may be held to affect, as little as those of the writer just noticed, the re- statement of the argument from the observed " immanent tele- ology " of man's experienced world to the Being of God con- ceived of as Intelligent Will. " The argument," says this critic,^ *' as popularly pursued, proceeds upon the analogy of a personal agent, whose contrivances are limited, etc., .... an argument leading only to the most unworthy and anthropomor- phic conceptions." Yet we are soon told that " the satisfactory view of the whole case can only be found in those more en- larged conceptions which are furnished by the grand contem- plation of cosmical order and unity, and which do not refer to inferences of the past, but to proofs of the ever-present mind iind reason in nature." And elsewhere,^ the critic of the tel- eological argument already quoted, does not hesitate to say : " Tlie instances in which we can trace a use and a purpose in nature, striking as they are, after all constitute but a very small and subordinate portion of the vast scheme of universal order and harmony of design which pervades and connects 1 Baden Powell, Order of Nature, p. 237/. 2 Baden Powell, Unity of Worlds (2d ed.), p. 142. CUSTOMARY PROOFS EXAMINED 59 the whole. Throughout the immensely greater part of nature we can trace symmetry and arraiigement, but not the end for which the adjustment is made." Now the truth which the modern developments of the par- ticular sciences are enforcing and illustrating is this : Every- where, in the large and in the small, in the parts of individual things and in the relations of these things to one another, in the past and in the present, in the realm of so-called matter and in the realm of so-called mind, and as respects the relations be- tween the two, there is increasingly manifest the evidence " of universal order and harmony of design." At the same time, the inexplicable facts, and even the facts which seem to con- tradict the universality of this order and the harmony of this design, are greatly multiplied. Nevertheless, the human mind, working antliropomorphically but ever more and more after the pattern of the Universal Reason, refuses to accept as final that interpretation of such facts which does not relate them, too, to the all-ordering and all-harmonizing purposes of the *' ever-present Mind and Reason." Let it be granted, then, that the so-called teleological argu- ment may more properly be called '' the Argument from an universal Order." Combined, as it always must be, if it is to produce a rational conviction, with reasoning from the nature of the effect to the nature of the cause, and implying the validity of the ontological postulate, the argument from design becomes a cosmological argument in a truer, profounder, and more complete form. It is an argument from cosmic existences, processes, forces, as man has experience of them, to the Being of the Cosmos in respect of its real nature. Briefly stated it runs thus : (1) Man's experience with the world shows, and shows incrciUsingly, lus the different positive sciences extend the domain of liuman knowledge and bring their separate con- clusions into greater liarmony, that IT is an orderly totility ; (2) The proper, rational, and only satisfactory explanation of this general fact of experience is the postulate of a World- 60 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION Ground, conceived of as an absolute Will and Intelligence — an intelligent Will, a willing Mind. "Among themselves all things Have order; and from hence the form vfhich makes The Universe resemble God." At this point, the purely negative and quite unthinkable conception of the " Unconscious " intervenes. And doubtless, the unconscious for us as individuals and for the whole race of men is by far the greater part of what really is, and of what actually happens. But the " Unconscious " in general, em- ployed as an explanatory principle or as the conclusion of an argument, is the mentally unpresentable ; it is the Unding^ the vast, the infinite envelope of night, in the center of which floats the expanding daylight of man's cognitive strivings and cogni- tive attainments. The same thing is equally true of such nega- tive and mystical conceptions as are involved in Eckbart's dis- tinction of "God and Godhead," which "differ as deed and not-deed ; " and of all the negative predicates assigned to the "Godhead," such as "non-spirit," "non-good," "non- moral," etc. Emphatically true is it that the net result of the various theories of evolution, all of which have tended to replace the older mechanical conception of the world with the conception of the physical Cosmos as a developing Life, has increased rather than diminished the scope and the cogency of the tele- ological argument. The Mind and Will which this evolution of living forms manifests, indicate that the teleological principle is so deeply bedded in the heart of Reality as to make it im- possible for any individual existence to come actually to be, or even to be conceived of as being, without an implied con- formity to a plan. If biological evolution starts, as most modern forms of the theory seem inclined to do, with the funda- mental principle of variability assumed as a general fact of all life, and as a resultant from the composite nature of the germ and the infinitely varying forms of its environment, then science CUSTOMARY PROOFS EXAMINED 61 must account for the plan-full, specific limitations of this vari- ability. The principle of heredity must somehow co-operate, and must direct the variable along certain lines of development. But if biology start with heredity, and take for granted all that goes with this principle in order to secure a plan-full stability for living forms, then it must also discover some real principle which will account for the obvious restriction of the effects of inheritance. Only in this way can the progressive order and continuity of development in the different genera- tions having the same ancestor be satisfactorily explained. But from whichever point of view science takes its start, the final problem remains essentially the same ; — namely, to get all the principles so adjusted to one another and to common ends, that the actual, observed history of the development of life on the ' earth shall be adequately explained. And this cannot be done without the hypothesis of an immanent teleology, an indwell- ing and ordenng Mind. Surely, in the interests of every theory of biological evolution we cannot say less, even if we cannot say more, than Weismann ' has said upon this point: *' I neverthe- less believe that there is no occasion for this reason to renounce the existence of, or to disown, a directive Power." " Behind the co-operating forces of nature which * aim at a purpose ' must we admit a Cause, which is no less inconceivable in its nature, and of which we can only say one thing with certiiinty, — viz., that it must be teleological." The cosmological and teleological arguments so-called reach their supreme form of expression in what is denominated, with a somewhat loose and expansive signification, the " M(^ral Ar- gument" for the Being of God. In considering the evidence of immanc^nt final purpose wliich tlie world-order shows, it is es- pecially important to comprehend, if possible, the teleoloL^^y of man iiimself, l)ot]i of the individu:d and of tlie race. In some sort, and in spite of no little confusion and nuich darkness, the Universe {is known to man seems to liave realizeil in his pro- 1 Theory of Descent (ed. London, 1882), II, p. 70S; 712. 62 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION ductiou and development one of its most obvious final pur- poses. But IT has made him moral and capable of pronouncing judgments of value on things and on himself from the moral point of view. What sort of a universe must *' IT " be, which can bring to actuality the moral being that man certainly is? According to Pfleiderer^ the moral argument falls into two parts : (1) " From the existence of the absolute moral law in our consciousness we arrive at God as absolute lawgiver ;" and (2) " for the possibility of the realization of the moral law in the visible world, we postulate God as absolute ruler of the world." In one word, only absolute, or independent moral Being, can serve as the Ground of that ethical nature and eth- ical development which man knows himself to have attained. In a more tentative way Wundt^ finds in human ethical ex- perience the proof of a principle which seems to demand a source for itself that can neither lie in the individual animal or the individual man ; nor in nature, considered as an un- ideal and unethical environment. How such a principle can be, "Wundt thinks is " one of the questions which we shall in all probability never be able to answer." We shall subse- quently express more in detail our agreement with Pfleiderer in thinking that the existence of such a principle demands the postulate of an ethical World-Ground. The so-called moral proof, like all the other arguments, is not improved or made more theoretically convincing and prac- tically effective by any of the various attempts to throw it into a demonstrative or intuitive form. For example, when one author^ affirms, " What we are immediately conscious of is, that the Ultimate Ground of all reality is asserting itself in us, and revealing to us an objective norm of conduct which is felt to possess a universality and an authority such as nothing fi- 1 Philosophy of Religion, III, p. 264/. 2 Ethics, I, p. 130/. 3 Upton, Bases of Religious Belief (Hibbert Lectures, 1897), p. 37. CUSTOMARY PROOFS EXAMINED 63 nite or created could originate," — he is leaping at a bound the steps in the argument through which the race has slowly found its way upward, in the evolution of moral and religious experience. Neither can we accord the verdict of success to Kant for his effort, in the " Critique of the Practical Reason," to connect the conception of God in a perfectly indisputable way with the absoluteness of the moral law, conceived of as a so-called categorical imperative. But undoubtedly, as Schultz argues,^ the teleological argument is greatly strengthened by the facts and principles of man's moral life and moral develop- ment. "Every man," says he, " who believes unconditionally in moral obligation has in his heart an altar to the unknown God." The moral argument in truth puts the crown on the other forms of the cosmological and teleological arguments. But it can do little or nothing to overcome a determined agnosti- cism or materialism, because the citadel in which these views entrench themselves lies on the other side of the moral domain, so to say. It must, therefore, be taken by siege or by assault before religious experience can approach the discussion of prob- lems of an ethical sort in their bearing upon the proof for the Being of God. " Unless a man really believes in God on other grounds," says the Roman Catholic writer, R. F. Clarke,'^ " I should be very sorry to have to convert him by means of the argument from conscience." In the conceptions of Deity which are formed by savage or primitive man, the moral elements are either largely wanting ; or else tliey are so uncertain and shifty as only sHglitly to in- fluence his conduct or his cult. The same gods — whether con- ceived of as natural powers personified or in a more definite antliropomorj)hic fashion — may 1x3 regarded as well-elief in one (iod rather than in indefinitely many gods. Even in the case of the ancient Egyptians wlio, as Renouf affirms,' j»robably saw no inconsistency in holding at one and the siime time the doctrine of many gods and One God, there was evolved the conception expressed — in however 1 The Religion of Ancient Egypt, p. 96. 74 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION esoteric form — in the hymn to Amon Ra : " The ONE, Maker of all that is ; the One, the only One, the Maker of existences." Philosophy may then appeal to both science and religion, and may base its appeal upon the achievements in development of both, when it claims that, either in the course of argument or in the form of a postulate, some one real Principle must be arrived at which shall assist in explaining the unitary nature of our experience with the manifold world of things and of men. This explanatory Principle must be not merely logical but real ; it must be believed in, or known, as having an existence independent of the constructive activity of human imagination and human thinking. It must serve as the Ground, both of these activities and of the objects which they construct. To use the abstract and often misleading, but expressive term of the Hegelian philosophy, it must have its " Being-in-itself." And this real principle must be One. It must have some unity in reality. Since the world of fact and law is constantly re- vealing itself in human experience as more and more an inter- connected whole, tlie real Being which explains this whole in a fundamental way, must also be conceived of as a unifying actus. It is the Unitary Being of this principle which accounts for the interconnection and orderly relations of the world of man's varied experiences. When, however, such metaphysical abstractions as the fore- going are examined, it soon becomes obvious how unsatisfac- tory, if left in their abstractness, they are to account for the manifold, vital, and intensely real, concrete facts of daily life. In spite, however, of this dissatisfaction which philosophy shares with common sense and with popular feeling, let us call for the present that Unitary Being which is to serve as a real explanatory Principle of these varied facts, by the title of " The World-Ground." Such a term has confessedly an un- couth structure and harsh acoustic properties ; but it is, per- haps, as well fitted as any other to express the conclusion of THE ARGUMENT RECONSTRUCTED 75 the present moment in the argument. For, (1) it is imper- sonal ; (2) it nevertheless expresses some sort of a unity ; and (3) it indicates some sort of a real relation, a vital and pro- ductive connection, between our experience of the world and the explanatory principle which we seek. It was Schopenhauer who more clearly than any other modern philosopher brought forward a thought which, after all, is necessarily regulative of all the attempts to explain experience that depend upon the belief in, or knowledge of, a World- Ground. No conception can explain this experience that does not incorporate in itself our human but fundamental idea of causative activity. The World-Ground cannot serve as a real and unitary princijjle imless It is itself conceived of as Will. This contention may be argued in the light of the psychologi- cal study of that universal experience from which man derives all his categories of Force, Power, Energy, Cause ; — and what- ever other conceptions seem necessary to distinguish being from non-being, doing from not-doing, life from death. It is in this knowledge of himself as essentially an active will that man finds tlie warrant for all these categories as he applies them to external things. The application is, indeed, made as a kind of fundamental anthro{)omorphism. But it entei*s into all knowledge ; and without it nothing can be known to act or even to be.' The same conclusion may be argued on the authority of modern science. Tlie conceptions wliich it lias embodied in the so-<.'alled law of tlje conservation and coiTelation of energy are in evidence here. This '' energy " of the Being of the World aj)i)Oars to scientific insight more and more of a kind to bring into orderly connections and sequences all the separate manifcistations of energy, wlictlicr tliese manifestations are iocaUul, so to say, in selves or in things. To i)e sure, no one specific kind of energizing, and no one established formuhi to • Thi.s truth in shown in detail thruu^hout the jiuthor's treatujca on tlie "Philosophy of Knowletl^ce" hihI "A Tlioory of Reahty." 76 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION express the reLations of the different centers of energy has been discovered hitherto. Moreover, any expression for the dynamic relations which seem to be maintained between selves and things is as yet a formula so hidden, if indeed it exist in reality at all, that the mind can scarcely imagine words in which such an expression could be framed. Still further, the behavior of radio-active substances, and other physical phenom- ena, as well as the growing tendency to look on psychoses themselves as active forces, and the difficulties of reconciling so static a conception as the " conservation of energy " offers with the evidences that the World is an evolving Life, are just now shaking the confidence of the thoughtful in the finality and supremacy of the scientific conception of Energy as a uni- fying principle. Still the positive sciences cling, and very properly cling, to their determination to regard the separate forces as somehow resolvable into different forms of the mani- festation of that which is essentially One. To fill the abstract and barren conception of One Force with a vital experience we are obliged to refer to the unifying actus of a single Will.^ In some form the reflections of philosophy have, from time immemorial, virtually endowed the Being of the World Avith that capacity for causal energy which man knows in himself 1 A careful analysis of any of those terms in which modern science attempts to summarize its views as to the nature of that substantial and ultimate unity in which it wishes to ground all its explanations of physical phenomena will illustrate this statement. According to a recent writer the latest con- clusions as to what is known about this unity may be summarized as follows: '^ Ether under strain constitutes 'charge'; ether in locomotion constitutes current and magnetism; ether in vibration constitutes light. What ether itself is we do not know, but it may, perhaps, be a form or aspect of matter. Now we can go one step further and say: Matter is composed of ether and nothing else." [Address by Professor Edward L. Nichols on "The Funda- mental Concepts of Physical Science." before the International Congress at St. Louis; see Popular Science Monthly, Nov. 1904, p. 62.] The "in-itself" being of this Ether, out of which Matter in the different forms of its manifes- tation and activity is composed, so far as it is known or knowable is stata- ble only in terms of Will and Mind. THE ARGUMENT RECONSTRUCTED 77 as his will. On the basis of that irresistible experiential proof to which we have already referred, man believes that such car pacity, altliough limited and subject to development, is the fundamental thing with himself. It is the very core of his being, to will. So must it be, according to the testimony of the world's reflective tliinkers, after an enlaiged and more mysterious fashion, with the Being of the World. With Plato the Good was conceived of as a fountain of quenchless and ex- haustless energy. Witli Aristotle the Prime Mover was the responsible agent for the changes of which men's senses and reasonings took account. With Kant the Ultimate Reality was personal Will. And Hegel's "Thought" is no passive entity or merely abstract arrangement of dead categories ; it, too, is the energizing of a self-revealing Will. Although we have no experience from which to derive a con- tent that shall give the conception of the World-Ground its right to exist as an explanatory principle, which does not re- fer to the core of its reality as an actual energizing, the con- ception of mere Will is quite inadequate. It is both too meagre and too abstract. Just as our experience is not an experience of things and minds merely acting and interacting, so its ex- planatory Principle cannot be a mere Being of the World con- ceived of after the analogy of Will. Order and adaptation — as the so-called cosmological argument has already been justi- fied in asserting — imply that the syntheses of Will which everywhere abound must l)e directed by Mind. Order and adaptation are facts. They are facts which require co-openiting energies that are sonuihow converged, as it were, upon the at- tiinment of an end. Such is the comprehensive conohision of the so-called cosinolo'^ical and tclcolotrical view of the world, from the iK'ginning of human reflccHion down to tlie present tiiiu.'. Wt» have alicady seen (pp. i') f}'.^ that tlu' nature of the argument has not changed essentially, from first to hist. E.ssen- tially considered, it cannot change. Wht'ii the world of man's experience waa conceived of as " dead matter," ;i8 a macliine 78 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION moved upon by forces from without, the Mind which it dis- played, and on which it depended for its forms and laws, was lo- cated ah-extra, and operated upon it from afar, as it were, — albeit through subordinate agencies and secondary causes and intermediary existences. When, however, the subtler concep- tion of a mechanism, molecular and atomic, had supplanted the coarser notion of a world made like a machine, the intel- ligent Will, the willing Mind, was conceived of as interpenetrat- ing and immanent in every detail of the world's beings and doings. Yet subtler is that more modern conception of the world which likens it to an indwelling and unfolding Life. With this conception. Mind becomes, not only that intelligent force which makes things so to exist that human beings can apprehend and understand them, but also that explanatory Prin- ciple which gives the warrant to assert that things themselves are manifestly all informed with mental life. For centuries astronomy afforded both the most influential line of thinking along which men were carried from mytholog- ical nature-worship toward theistic views, and also the most impressive argument for the Being of God. Of Confucius* use of the vague term " Heaven," which he employed to win the people from idolatry. Dr. Martin affirms :^ " He ascribed to the object of his reverence more of personality than they (his followers of to-day) are willing to admit." In the Chinese con- ception, Heaven has always possessed certain indwelling ca- pacities of will and mind. The modern sciences of chemistry, physics, and biology — especially the latter with its microscopic investigation of the evolution of cell-structure and cell-growth — directs our attention the rather to that immanent Life of the world, whom religion worships as the " living and life-giving God." On the level of the chemico-physical sciences, this thought is put into realistic and highly figurative language by a celebrated writer on physics, when he says :^ " The atoms are 1 The Lore of Cathay, p. 43. 2 Life of James Clerk Maxwell, p. 39L THE ARGUMENT RECONSTRUCTED 79 a very tough lot, and can stand a great deal of knocking about, and it is strange to find a number of them combining to form a man of feeling." And again :^ " I have looked into most phil- osophical systems, and I have seen that none will work without a God." This vitalistic view of Nature as implying an indwelling Mind and Will is a return, in the name of science and in vastly improved and more profoundly significant form, to the same point of view from which so much of religious belief and prac- tice took its rise. In this connection it should be noticed that tliose categories under which all scientific research, and all the expositions of the sciences, relate their discovered phe- nomena, imply essentially the same conclusion. Causation means nothing intelligible unless it means active will endowed with intelligence. Bare Cause, mere Force or Energy, causes and forces and kinds of energy that are not directed toward some end, are not only inconceivable as having place in a sys- tem of existences, but they also are quite unable to effect the reality of such a system. If, then, God is to be known or knowable as the Ground of tlie World, it cannot be as bare Will, or as unconditioned Pri- mal Cause, or as mere and indefinite Principle of existence. For the world itself, as known or knowable, is not a mere " lump," so to say, of existences and occurrences ; nor do its existences, forces, and so-called causes, operate upon each other, or stand together in the totiility of the world, in an undefined, unclassifiable, unspecialized way. This is to say that '* causes" are always, and of their veiy nature, teleological. They serve their own and one anotlier's ends. God is the Ground of the co-oi>eration of existences and causes to whatsoever ends are — wliether we can discover what they are, or not — actually IxMJig fulfilled. As I have elsewhere said,*' in conclusion of a deUiiled discussion of the conceptions involved : *' This is, indeed, just » Ibid., p. 426. > A Theory of Reality, p. 360. 80 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION what a ' principle of causation ' necessarily means — Will energiz- ing in conformity to ideal forms and aims.^^ On the one hand, then, this One Will, the Will of God, is not something apart from, or wholly beside and above, the many finite and concrete centers of energy — human wills and willing things, considered as relatively independent centers of activity, which by their co-operating bring about the manifesta- tion of the One Will of God. Or as Professor Royce has forcefully but not quite adequately stated the case : ^ " The Divine Will is simply that aspect of the Absolute which is ex- pressed in the concrete and differentiated individuality of the World." But, on the other hand, God as Will is not mere undifferentiated Power ; in order to " get his will done," this infinite Power must be translated into many finite powers. The forms and laws of the translation, as we actually see it constantly going on in the processes of so-called Nature, im- plies the immanent presence of Mind. Thus much at least is demonstrably true. It is enough at this stage of the argument to say, that the very words and formulas which man is obliged to use in all his attempts to construct a scientific and systematic interpretation of his experience, shows him to be obliged to conceive of the Ground of it all as an ordering and designing Will, or Mind. But other experiences enable us to consider this Divine Will as rising above the blind strivings and desires which the phe- nomena of nature exhibit, and lead our thought beyond the more definite specializations of energy, its kinds and laws, with which the particular sciences make us familiar, upward to the con- ception of moral will as choice ; and this moral will, blended with emotion, is the Divine Love and the precondition of the Divine Blessedness. The argument for the Being of God still remains, however, in the region of inadequate abstractions. May this Mind-Will be conceived of as a self-conscious personal Life, an Absolute iThe Conception of God, p. 202/. THE ARGUMENT RECONSTRUCTED 81 Self in the supremest meaning possible for these words ? At this point the argument undoubtedly begins to grapple with the objections of those who will go only so far as Schopenhauer and Hartmann, and many others both in ancient and modern times have gone. If it stops here, however, it rests in such a largely negative and abstract conception of the Divine Being as has seemed sufficient to Bralimanical and Buddhistic phi- losopy, to most of what is called Pantheism in Western think- ing, and to not a little of both ancient and modern Christian mysticism. But it fails eitlier to explain or to satisfy the de- mands of the religious consciousness, both psychologically and historically considered ; and it denies or minimizes the onto- logical value of the Object of religious faith and worship, con- ceived of as perfect Ethical Spirit and so as the Father and Redeemer of the race. We must, tlien, in spite of defects in the cogency of the argument we are following, and of obstacles from counter-arguments, accept still further the leadership of the history of the race in its religious experience and religious development. It may well be that we shall discover that both science and philosophy, if not wholly able to accept and sub- stiintiate the convictions of religion, are at least unable success- fully to dispute or to displace them. It must at once Ix? admitted that we cannot affirm the self- consciousness, and so the complete Self-hood or Personality of God, in quite tlie same way as tliat in which we are led to believe that the World-Ground must be conceived of as Will and Mind. All rejisoninir about the interactions and relations of finite things and minds, and all forms of mentally repre- senting these interactions and relations, imply the immanence and control of an active, telcological principle in the world. Tliis truth must Ije accepted, with all tliat it implicates, or else all attempt to give a rational expliination to any form of liuman experience must be abandoned. But there are many exhibi- tions of this principle concerning which experience cannot af- firm the presence of self-conscious and personal Life, in the 6 32 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION fuller meaning of this term. Molecules, atoms, ions, as well as everything animate or inanimate, from expanding iron to growing cell, from flower in crannied wall to star overhead, are individual beings whose actions and relations exemplify the truth of immanent Will and Mind. But that each of these beings is self-conscious and personal, or even conscious so as to have any awareness of the ends which it seems to us to serve, or of any ends whatever, we cannot claim to know in any de- monstrative way. It has been claimed in the interests of the theistic position, that the conception of a mind which is not self-conscious or at least conscious, is like the conception of " wooden iron; " it involves, that is to say, a contradiction in terms. Now it is undoubtedly true that all knowledge of the nature of mind is conscious experience. The results of such knowledge are pre- sentable and intelligible only in terras of consciousness. More- over, in order to know what it is to be a Self, or Person, in the fullest meaning of the word, one must have had the ex- perience of self-consciousness. It is also true that selfhood, or personality, is impossible — cannot exist, cannot be con- ceived of — without self-consciousness. Undoubtedly, too, the measure of mind which is credited to the lower animals, as well as to our fellow men, and even to plants and inorganic things, is realizable for human minds, only in terms of conscious- ness. All psychology, even that which assumes to deal with the "unconscious," or the "subliminal," is descriptive and ex- planatory of conscious states in terms of such states. And yet there remains the undoubted fact that, so far as immediate experience or observation can go, the greater part by far of all the world's happenings take place without either the con- sciousness, or the self-consciousness, of finite beings availing to account for them as an immanent cause. These happenings, too, all make upon the mind the irresistible impression of being manifestations of intelligent will. This is the lesson of the religious development of humanity, all the way from the low- THE ARGUMEXT RECONSTRUCTED 83 est stage of unreflective spiiitism to the highest form of phil- osophical monotheism. Whenever, then, it is proposed to attribute the unifying actus of a self-conscious Life to the world at large, or to justify re- ligious faith in the Selfhood of God on grounds of the obvious self-conscious and personal characteristics belonging to this world, the proposal voices certain well-founded impressions, which can be supported by credible proofs ; but the argu- ment rests upon somewhat tentative and doubtful grounds. For, in tlie first pkice, the enormous complexity and bewil- dering variety of causes and happenings which the world, con- ceived of as a totality, exhibits, seem to made it difficult or im- possible to unite them in any one event, so to say, like that of an act or state of self-consciousness. Each atom, molecule, ion, ovum, thing, finite mind from the beginning to the end of its development, surely cannot be said always to be self-conscious and so personal in the higlier meaning of the term. Mucli less would it seem that the totality of them all, in all their re- lations, could be demonstrably proved to coexist — not simply at some one time, but always and essentially — within the grasp of the self-consciousness or other-consciousness of some one Personal Life. That the Being of the world shall be explained as the dependent manifestation of a Pei"sonal Absolute, wlio is conscious and self-conscious ; that It shall be considered as only the impersonal term for that Principle which is, essen- tially considered, the Absolute Solf ; — this is, indeed, an ex- alted conception and one worthy of the most serious and prin longed consideration. But there is no safe and sure sliort-cut in tlie argument ])y wliich to justify tlie conception. On the contrary, tlicre are many and great difiicultics which lie along the way. The contemptuous manner in whi( h some writei-s have dis- missed th(^ rational postulate tliat the World-Ciround is self-conscious and pci'sonal Being is even less wortliy of the thougijtful mind than is the easy-going dismissal of the 84 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION difficulties involved in its proof. To affirm off-hand that " abso- luteness " and " personality " are incompatible and self-contra- dictory conceptions, or that an Infinite Being cannot be self-con- scious, because this implies limitation, is again to mistake mere juggling with abstract terms for sound criticism of an impressive argument. Especially is this manner of procedure impertinent, when it is accompanied by the proposal to make some purely negative notion play the part of a valid explana- tory principle. If God cannot be infinite and also personal, it is a fortiori true that "The Infinite," "the Unconscious," " the Unknowable," cannot in any wise be made to take the place of an infinite, personal God. Neither does it help either head, heart, or conscience, to proclaim the dictum — so fashion- able of late — that the Infinite and Ultimate Reality is some- thing "more " and " higher " than personal. More and higher than all human conceptions of his personal Being, God undoubt- edly is. This truth has always been insisted upon by the high- est religious experience, and by the most penetrating insight and elaborate reasoning of the philosophy of religion. But, so far as human imagination and thought can compass what that something is like, it must be imagined and thought in terms of the most perfect self-conscious and personal Life. It is the Ideal of such Life which sets to humanity its stand- ard of value. Anything higlier and better than this ever-ad- vancing Ideal is not to be spoken of as a substitute for the Ideal itself. And all the negative and limiting conceptions proposed as substitutes are quite devoid of either theoretical or practical worth. It is significant to note that the one form of religious philos- ophy which has most keenly felt and boldly expressed the difficulty of conceiving of God as both absolute and self-con- scious, infinite and personal, has itself been exceedingly vacil- lating and equivocal in the use of its terms. This form of the philosophy of religion is customarily called pantheistical ; even when it is not charged with being pantheism outright. Abun- THE ARGUMENT RECONSTRUCTED 85 dant illustrations of this historical fact might be derived from the treatment given to this conception, whether as embodied in the Nous of Anaxagoras and Plotinus, or the Logos of Philo and of much of Christian mysticism. Even Islam, with its stern and fanatical assertion of the sovereignt}^ of a personal God, when its later theological developments brought it face to face with this problem, fell into the same vacillation and habit of equivocating. "The anthropomorphic God of Mu- hammad, who has face and hands, is seen in Paradise by the believer and settles himself firmly upon his throne, becomes a spirit, and a spirit, too, of the vaguest kind."^ This rejection of personal qualifications as limitations inconsistent Avith the absoluteness of tlie One God led such a theologian as Ibn Hazm to the startling conclusion that all the human and moral attributes ascribed to Allah by the Koran are mere names ; they indicate nothing belonging to the real essence of the Infinite. To regard these names as ontologically valid would involve multiplicity in God's nature; for there would at least be intro- duced into the Divine Being the distinction of quality and the thing qualified. Along this path the later Sufis come to the wholly puntheistic position, which denies the self-conscious personality of God and identifies God and the world. "It is part of the irony of the history of Muslim theology," says a writer' on this subject, "that the very emphasis on the tran- scendental unity should lead thus to pantheism." In the religions philosophy of India — the reflective thinking which is, on the intellectual side, the religion of Brahmanism — tlie confusion caused by the efforts to unite the factoi*s neces- sary to the conception of an Absolute Pereon is conspicuous. This philosophy, indeed, includes within its entire circuit every iin[)()rtant phase of Ix-li^'f respecting the nature of the One Divine Being — from Tiieism to Pantheism, from Material- * Macdonald, Muslim Theology, Jiirisprutlcnce and Constitutional Theory, p. 115. ? Macdonald, Ibid., 233. 86 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION ism to monistic Spiritualism. But for this reason, and through- out it all, it shows the characteristics of vacillation and equivo- cation. Brahma is variously conceived of and defined in shift- ing manner, with the ohvious intention of escaping the charge of limiting the conception, and at the same time securing a fuller satisfaction both to the philosophical and to the religious consciousness.^ " All this (universe) is Brahma'^ " This (universal being) is my ego, spirit, and is Brahma^ force (ab- solute being)." Brahma is "the self-determining principle manifesting itself in all the determinations of the finite with- out losing its unity with itself." It is " absolute thought and being." The world of our experience, which is Maya, came into existence because Brahma " thought and willed to become many and accordingly became many."^ Brahma may even be called, when the thought of the thinker escapes from the leashes, "self-conscious spirit." But when the stricter inter- pretation of the nature of this spirit, with its self-conscious activity, is demanded, the fear of limiting the Absolute, defin- ing the Infinite, calls the thought back to the necessity of em- ploying more vague and flexible terms. Then Brahma is incomprehensible and is to be described only by negatives. That the more modern thinking over this problem finds itself beset at this point with the same difficulties, and tempted to the same mode of escape from them, there is no need to show in detail, in the present connection. It is therefore imperative for religion, if it proposes to recon- cile that philosophical conception of the Being of the World which is supported by the assumptions and discoveries of the positive sciences, with the conception which it holds respecting the Object of its own faith and worsliip, that it should arrive at 1 For illustrations, see Hopkins, Religions of India, p. 221/. 2 Comp. the Vedanta Sutra, 1-5; and, as a modern Hindu writer declares: "Thus Rationalism (that is of the Vedanta philosophy) reveals the Supreme Being both as personal and impersonal (The Hindu System of Religious Sci- ence and Art, by Kishori Lai Sarkar, p. 19). THE ARGUMENT RECONSTRUCTED 87 some clear understanding of its position in the face of these difficulties. Is God to be conceived of, not simply as Absolute Will and Mind, in the vague and shifty fashion in which The- ism and Pantheism may be now antagonistic and now agreed ; but, the rather, as a self-conscious Person, a true and complete Self? Tlie more recent discussions of this problem have been ac- customed to minimize its importance by passing it by on the one side or the other. Those who take the left-hand path, as- sume that the complete incompatibility of absolute and infinite Being with the limiting conditions of self-consciousness has been so established as to make unnecessary further discussion. Those who pass the same problem by upon the right-hand side are apt to shield themselves by an appeal to the claim of Lotze^ : " Perfect personality is in God only, to all finite minds there is allotted but a pale copy thereof ; the finiteness of the finite is not a producing condition of this Pereonality but a limit and a hindrance of its development." We do not find it, alas ! so easy on merely metaphysical grounds to settle this contention. That the antinomies in the conception of an Absolute Self- conscious Person are largely introduced there by those who find them, or by their predecessors in the same line of research, we have no doubt. On the other hand, it is well to remember that Lotze himself came to his conclusion only at the end of a lengthy discussion of related problems ; and that the conclusion, as applied in the philosophy of religion, follows from a doc- trine of the reality of things and of their dependent existence^ which is by no means either a universally accepted postulate of science or an undisputed principle of ontology. What Ixitter, then, can philasophy do at this point for the con- ception of religion than accord to it the favorable considemtiou to which, on histr)rical and psychological grounds, it is clearly entitled'.'* To such a considi»ration tlie following thoughts 1 Microcosrnus (English Trun.sl:ition\ II, p. 688. 'As given at length in his MeUiphy.sik, Book I. 8S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION prepare the way. And, first, there can be no doubt that the more purely religious beliefs, sentiments, and practical life of mankind are better satisfied with, than without, the conception of God as self-conscious Spirit, a true Person, or Self. This fact is evidenced by the form taken by the highest develop- ments of religious experience in the past. It is, indeed, in- volved in a very important way in the most essential charac- teristics of this experience. The experience itself is one of personal and spiritual relations ; the most important beliefs, sen- timents, and practical life of religion cannot be understood or justified in terms of a conception which denies self-consciousness to the Absolute Will and Mind. If the undoubted conclusions of the particular sciences or of modern philosophy should dis- cover that the World-Ground cannot be, or rightfully be con- ceived of as being, a self-conscious Spirit, then these sciences and this philosophy could not be brought into a rational har- mony with the supreme product of the religious experience. But the persistence and development of religious experience, with its beliefs, sentiments, and practices, is as much a funda- mental fact as is the persistence and development of either sci- ence or philosophy. And philosophy is especially charged with the responsible task of a perpetual effort to bring about har- mony in the total life of humanity. But, second, a critical examination of the conceptions cur- rently subsumed under such titles as Absolute, Infinite, The Unconscious, Self-consciousness, Personality, etc., shows that every one of them is in constant need of revision and improve- ment. Especially is such need apparent in the case of those vague, negative conglomerates of thought and imagination that are wont to be clothed in some of these terms. Small wonder, then, that they refuse to lie quietly side by side in the same bed with any rational conception of a self-conscious and personal existence. It may be possible, however, — and we need not, at least antecedently to renewed trials, despair of this possibil- ity,— to remove from these terms some of their more unwar- THE ARGUMENT RECONSTRUCTED 89 rantable and objectionable factors ; and thus to make them fitter companions for union with the factors really belonging to the nature of a Self. Or, even in the last resort : What if one should feel obliged to deny the absoluteness and infinity of God, in the stricter meaning of these terms, in order to save some intelligible and practical concept of his personality ? This would, indeed, be a disappointing result. It might force the mind back upon the Kantian position of a recognized power- lessness to transcend the limits of the cognitive reason ; but, as Kant liekl, we might be none the less compelled to believe in God as Infinite Person, in the interests of moral and practical reason. And to sacrifice — at least for the time being — some- thing from our conception of God on the side of his absolute- ness and infinitude, would not necessarily be more irrational than to surrender all claim to a belief in Him as Self-conscious Spirit. Indeed, even on metaphysical and purely cognitive grounds, the finger-point of the highest rationality would seem to indicate that tlie path to Reality lies in the opposite direction. For, in the tliird place, if it cannot be affirmed that all real Being must be, and essentially is, self-conscious, it can be demonstrated that man's best-known being, as well as the most liighly de- veloped and valuable form of being conceivable by man, is that of a self-conscious Pei-son. Whether other apparent beings have any reality, real unity, or indeed real place in the Univeree of beings and events, or not, our own self-conscious selves are known to be real and unitary, in a very special and umleniable way. And what is even more importiint for tlie argument: Self-conscious Ix^ings, so far as the human mind can know or conceive of Reality, stiind at its very head in the scale of values. Or — to express the same truth in a more aljstract way — to be self-conscious, to l)e-for-oneself, to have *' For-Self-Ht-ing," is to have atUiined the very most distinguished and intensely actual and profoundly worthy kiml of existence. It is such self-con- scious personal existence, which, in the example of man as a 90 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION species, and supremely in the example of the few most highly- gifted and developed of humanity, is altogether the choicest known or conceivable product of Nature's evolution through the ages. It is not of morbid, or of excessive and vain self-conscious- ness, in the popular acceptance of the term, that we are speak- ing in this connection. Neither does the argument depreciate the value and significance of those artistic and constructive activities in which the Self seems to lose itself; or even of those states of religious contemplation or intuition, in which a certain immediacy of the knowledge of the object seems largely or wholly to exclude the reflective attitude. But that a being who could form no conception of a Self, could never know what itself was about, could only be mere intelligent Will without being a self-comprehending Mind, must not be re- garded as vastly inferior to a developed self-conscious Person, it is impossible to concede. Mind, without self-consciousness, if such mind could really be at all, would not be s^Zf-compre- liending, s^//-directing, 8e//"-determining — all of which capacities are most essential for the existence and development of a Self, and themselves stand highest in the scale of rational values. It is in order now to notice that the existence and develop- ment of selves are facts, the account of which must somehow be found in this same World-Ground. Even to take the scientific point of view is to accept the warrant for regarding man himself as a child of Nature. A society of selves is to be explained as the product somehow resulting, under the laws which phj^sics, chemistry, and biology have discovered, from the forces that are conceived of as differentiations of Nature's exhaustless Energy. For however the human species came to be such, it is in fact composed of self-conscious as well as intelligent wills. In the case of the individual man it is his own psychical activities that construct the peculiar type of self-hood which each individual has. A true person, or Self, cannot come THE ARGUMENT RECONSTRUCTED 91 into existence, unless the forces and stimuli existing outside serve to arouse the dormant will and inchoate reason to the full measure of an energy that is something more and higher than that of blind will, or unconscious mind. Only self-conscious and self-determined activity can create a Self. When, then, the conception of a Nature which can so bring into co-operation the external and internal or psychical forces as to create a Self is reflectively examined, this conception is found to be no barren and meagre affair. Can an unconscious, or a non-self-conscious Nature create and develop a race of self- conscious personal beings? Can mere willing Mind, or mere intelligent Will, without experience of the nature, tlie method, and the value of personality, serve as a satisfactory explanatory principle for this human species which is, in fact, self-conscious ; and for its historical evolution into even so high a grade of self- hood as man has already attained ? It seems to us that the only credible, not to say conceivably tenable, answer to such an inquiry is a decisive No. In order to beget and to nourish self-conscious existences the World-Ground, or some impor- tant part of It, must itself be a self-conscious Personal Life, a true Self. And by so much as the positive sciences are be- coming confident about the real unity and absoluteness of this World-Ground, by just so much the more should philosophy be confirmed in the opinion that its real Unitary Being is that of an Absolute Self. The logical conviction that it is impossible to derive the personal from the Impersonal, a multitude of developing finite selves from a World-Ground that is wholly lacking in the possession and appreciation of Selfhood, is strengthened by considerations which flow from the social life of humanity. Now the problem which presses for an answer is this : What sort of Being must the World have in order that it may serve as the rational and real (Jround of a community of selves — a network of commcju experiences, a social existence, between one self-conscious Self and other selves? Here am I — a 92 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION Self ; but I am not, and I cannot conceive of myself as being, a lone Self. Even my physical environment is, fundamentally considered, a social affair. Even " Things " manifest them- selves to me as not merely my objects, but as essentially the same objects for others, whose conscious and self-conscious experience is essentially like my own. The totality of phys- ical existences is not for me, or for my fellows, an Absolute that is a mere aggregate, or lump sum, of things. Much less is the environment of other selves a mere multitude, or gross number, of the human species. It is the rather a society, in which individual persons are bound together by an infinite number of bonds, both the so-called physical and the so-called psychical, all of which are knowable and useable, only on the assumption that the Being of the World in which they have their Ground, has the nature of a social, a humanly Universal, an all-embracing Self. That this is anthropomorphizing, is preparing the image and ideal of our own thought, in a way fit to be worshipped and obeyed, may undoubtedly be charged against the argument. But the word " anthropomorphism " should have ceased by this time either to deter or to terrify our minds. For all the sesthetical and moral values which characterize the conception of God contribute to the weight of argument in favor of the same truth. Undoubtedly, the reflective thinker experiences a feeling of awesomeness and of mystery before such vague conceptions as endeavor to represent the Divine Being without limiting Him by any terms that apply to human and finite, self-conscious existence. This feeling is genuinely worthy and true to reality in the view of any at- tempt to explicate and defend the conception of God. But it is least of all appropriate when the very process of thought which has framed the conception has neglected to introduce into it those factors that are most appropriately greeted with feelings of awe and mystery ; and they are just those factors which can be actualized only in the lives of self-conscious and THE ARGUMENT RECONSTRUCTED 93 personal beings. Respect for the mystery, the grandeur, and the worth, of Personal Being is the most rational kind of re- spect. For Things, as such, there is little or no reason to have respect ; they are awful and respectable only in so far as they are means and servants of persons. The religious feel- ings are appropriate toward things, because religion regards them as somehow being partial and undeveloped selves, or else as manifestations of the thought and will of the Absolute Per- son. In living and conscious beings it is not the blind and instinctive psychical stirrings and strivings which we observe with most of respect. We feel the mysterious nature and profound value of these lower forms of soul-life, only when we regard them as the beginnings of Nature on her way to the production of self-conscious personality. And even among men — who differ so enormously in the amounts of self-hood, so to say, which they achieve — it is those individuals that at- tain the heights of personal experience and personal develop- ment, who seem most worthy of an awesome veneration and of the regard appropriate to what is most sublime. Kant has nowhere arrived at a more satisfactory position than that which he assumes when he claims that our human "feelincf of the Sublime in Nature " implies a respect for what in less de- gree we find in ourselves — the Personal — and which we then by an irresistible law of our rational activities attiibute in su- preme mciisiire to the Impei-sonal. It is plainly, to use his own phrase, a "conversion of respect for the Idea of humanity ill our own subject into respect for the object."' There are many other similar considerations derived from a study of the nature of human knowledtre, and from an analysis and criticism of those fundamental characteristics which the mind attributes to all reality, — the so-called categories, — that compel us, finally, to place the argument for the self-conscious- ness of the World-Ground, the personality of God, upon a yet surer and broader phih)S()phical basis. No meaning can bo » Kritik dcr rrtheiKsknift, I, § 11. 94 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION given to such abstract terms as " the Absolute " or *' the Infi- nite," unless these adjectival words are further defined by being attached to some Subject. The only kind of a subject to which they can be attached in such manner as to make the completed conception serve the purposes of a real explanatory principle is that kind of a subject which is known as a self-conscious Being, a Person, a Self. Unity amidst multiplicity and variety, real Identity of some sort that is compatible with actual change, Indi\dduality that maintains its essential being through all processes of becoming. Law that reigns over things or exists as immanent idea in things, a Whole that admits of, and de- pends upon, interactions and causal relations between its parts — these and all like conceptions and principles under which the human mind is obliged to view and to interpret its experience, are, without exception, taken from the experience of a self- conscious person with himself and with other things and selves. To try to combine any or all of them in a description of the Absolute, and to leave self-consciousness out, is to overlook and to discredit that very experience in which they all origi- nate ; and for the description and explanation of which they are appropriate and serviceable. " Self-consciousness " is the one category which is rich enough in content, and real enough in its nature, to envelope and validate all the others. This cate- gory we cannot, indeed, ascribe to all manner of things, organic and inorganic, or even to all forms of animal life, as though they were, each one, centers of self-conscious, or even of con- scious, functioning. Individual self-conscious beings, or selves, are comparatively rare ; finite persons, as we know them, are always developments whose preconditions and antecedents seem to belong to the realm of the — to us — Unconscious ; that is=:to the L^nknown or the Unknowable. But, when the mind tries to connect such unconscious individual beings with those that appear to be conscious, and finally with self-conscious beings, it can discover no active Principle that seems capable of uniting them all into a self-consistent and self-regarding THE ARGUMENT RECONSTRUCTED y5 system, except that which implies the reality of a self- conscious Absolute Person. If, then, the argument is carried through it is found to estab- lish this conclusion : Nothing can be known about the Unit- ary and Real Being of the World, unless this knowledge be known and stated in terms of a self-conscious Life. All the terms in which science, philosophy, and the plain man's obser- vation and reflection express themselves, are based upon this awareness of self, of other selves, and of so-called not-selves. These other selves are known or imagined after the analog}^ of tlie self-known Self ; the not-selves are either not-known — mere negative and barren abstractions ; or they are known as imperfect and half-finished selves. And although human knowledge does not guarantee the right to afTirm that each thing, or part of an individual tiling, is a center of conscious and self-conscious life, the human mind cannot imagine what it really is to be an individual, as a dependent part of an intel- ligible system, without using terms that have meaning oidy for self-consciousness. In conclusion, then, we are obliged to say that the concep- tion of the World-Ground as unconscious Avill and mind does not remove the limitations of human self-consciousness from the conception. On the contrary, it deprives the conception of what is clearest and most valuable in all the cognitive processes of humanity. It proposes to substitute an attempt to conceive the inconceivable for a thought which, although it is necessarily limited by the nature of our finite human experience, is, never- theless, representiitive of what is intellectually most well- founded, and aesthetically and ethically most valuable, in this experience; its inevitable logical result is a return to dogmatic agnosticism. For these reasons the tlieistic argument is entitled to postu- late the conception of God ius the Pei'sonal Alwolute, a Self in the sui)reme8t possible meaning of tliat word. All the various linos of argument converge upon this conclusion. It is, how- 96 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION ever, a conclusion which needs still further critical examina- tion with a view, if possible, to relieve the conception from some of the internal contradictions with which it has so fre- quently been charged. But the argument is strengthened in a preliminary way by noticing the very terms employed by those who deny self-conscious personality to the Being of the World. What — Pray ! is the real meaning, the meaning for Reality, of the oft-repeated categories applied to the totality of the cosmic existences, forces, and processes ? On tlie basis of a confidence in the modern chemico-physical sciences, it is styled a '' self- explanatory," *' c^e(/-contained," " se//-maintaining " System. What, that is intelligible to human minds, can this mean un- less it be to say : The Cosmos is a Self, whose explanation comes not from without itself? Its circuit and content are not included, as our selves are, in Somewhat greater. Its indepen- dence is absolute ; for no other than Itself has the task of main- taining itself. But all this, as we shall see, is precisely what must be understood by an Absolute Person or Self. Certain predicates of that Absolute Person, 'Svhom faith calls God," seem to follow of necessity from the very nature of the conception. The argument here is not a return to the ontological argument in the form in which it has already been rejected. The " proof " does not claim to move demonstra- tively from the nature of the conception to the reality of the object thus conceived. The rather does it seem certain that, if the reality of a Personal Absolute as the World-Ground be somehow proved or made a sure object of rational faith, then certain predicates necessarily follow from the absoluteness of this Personality. Among such predicates the following five are chief : Omnipotence, Omnipresence, Eternity, Omniscience, and Unity. These qualifications must be characteristic of an Absolute Self which shall be so conceived of as to afford a sat- isfactory real Principle explanatory of the world of things and of selves. It is an important task of the philosophy of religion to expound these predicates in a manner consistent THE ARGUMENT RECONSTRUCTED 97 with the truths of fact and with the nature of the concep- tion.^ The conclusion that God is a Person in the sense that he is self-conscious and intelligent Will is, at one and the same time, the most original and fundamental assumption of the cruder forms of religious Ijelief, and the most mature and con- clusive tenet of scientific and philosophical Theism. On the one hand, the Dakota dialects express " the hidden and m3's- terious power of the universe" by the word wakan^^^ tlm deification of that peculiar quality or power of which man is conscious within himself, as directing his own acts or willing a course to bring about certain results." In the Islands of the Pacific, too, is found the conception of a wonder-working power called 7?mMri= (apparently) "that which is within one," the principle of life and motion consciously directed to an end. But it is the higher religions, and above all Christianity, which round out this conception of God as self-conscious and per- sonal Life with the fullness of moral attributes. " God is Spirit," said Jesus, "and they that worship him must worship in spirit and in truth." A study of the ethical nature and development of man un- doubtedly makes upon philosophy the demand that the Ground of the phenomena of his moral life should be found in a self- conscious Personal Al)sulute. But this is not the same thinor o by any means as to say that this Personal Absolute must be conceived of as perfect Ethical Spirit, in a manner to satisfy the claims of the highest religious faith. The former conclii- eion rests upon a tolerably 11 rm and exceedingly broad specu- lative basis. It is only a further and quite legitimate exten- 1 Pfleidcrcr'H stHtcmciit scarcely does ju.sticc to the nature of the proMcm when he afTinns tliat "those prechcutes do not arise out of philosophical speculation on the nature of Goeculative way. Sec his di^cuasiou of the urguaicnt^, The Philosophy of Religion, III, sec. II. 7 98 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION sion of the cosmological argument, with its appreciation of the principle of " immanent teleology," and its confidence in the ontological validity of the work of human reason. In a word : Because the world of human experience is shot through and through with facts, forces, and other manifestations, that have an ethical, or, at least, a quasi-ethicol significance, the conclu- sion is demanded that the real principle, in whose Being this world has its Ground, must be so conceived of as to explain these ethical facts, forces, and other manifestations. But the further conclusion, which attributes the perfection of justice, goodness, and holiness, to this same World-Ground, can only appeal to one side of even the religious experience of the race ; and this side is shown chiefly by a triumph of faith over many seemingly contradictory facts, forces, and manifestations. The undoubted truth of man's ethical history is that some- how he has come to create for himself ideals of conduct and character ; and that his conceptions of moral laws and principles seem to him to have a very great, if not a supreme and absolutely unconditional value. For these ideals and laws he has never had — and he never can attain — a wholly satisfactory warrant in his experience of the physical world or of his own social and political environment. Moreover, religion and morality, although they are by no means wholly to be identified, have throughout human history exercised an enormous influence each upon the other ; they have either aided or hindered each other's development to an almost incalculable extent. " The best religion as related to ethics is, then, the faith in an Ideal Personality, whose real Being affords the source, the sanctions, and the guaranty of the best morality ; and to whom reverential and loving loyalty may be the supreme principle for the con- duct of life." 1 If an examination be made of these " universals " in ethics 1 Vol. I. chap. XIX, and for the following quotations not otherwise cred- ited as well as a much fuller statement of the same argument, see the author's Philosophy of Conduct, chap. XXIV and XXV. THE ARGUMENT RECONSTRUCTED 99 which the philosophy of religion must chiefly take into its account, they are found to be of two orders : (1) Certain func- tions of human nature, and their products, which belong to all men in whatever stage of moral evolution ; and (2) certain ideals which, although variously conceived in respect of their details and always conceived imperfectly, are shared in by all men, and are recognized as powerful forces in the moral evolu- tion of humanity. This moral nature of man, with its func- tions and their products, but especially with that sort of activity of thought and imagination which creates moral ideals, comes out of the larger Nature which has produced, environs, and develops humanity. The experienced world of moral facts, laws, forces, and ideas, no more " explains itself " than does any other part or aspect of this same world. Just as little, and even much less satisfactory to the demands of the reflective reason, is it perpetually to revise and to recite the de- scription of the mechanism, when we are seeking to account for this form of the evolution of mankind. An unconscious, impersonal, non-moral Nature cannot be conceived of as pro- ducing a race of self-conscious personal and moral beings. A Nature which has absolutely no capacity for appreciating the value of moral ideals, and of character conformable to these ideals, cannot serve as the explanatory real Principle of natures whicli develop such ideals. A systematic study of those con- ceptions and principles which control the activities of men's cognitive faculties shows that "our human way'* of knowing the " Being of the World " conceives of it " after the analogy of the Life of a Self, as a striving toward a completer self- realization under tlie consciously-accepted motif of immanent Ideas."' To Mr. Spencer's question, "If the ethical man is not a product of the cosmic process, what is he a product of?" it must undoubtedly be answered that the psychological and historical sciences are sufliriently justified in maintaining this view. Hut philosophy wants to know what is the last » A Theory of Reality, p. 517; comp. Philoaophy of Conduct, p. 59S. 100 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION word as to the inmost Being of a Cosmos whose process results in such a product. And it cannot rest satisfied in any answer which denies to this Being a self-conscious apprehension, and an appreciation of the value, of what it is about in going through with this process. From the point of view of ethics, the best and most valuable known cosmic product is just this same ethical man, — what he now is ; but more especially what he may become, when his moral ideals are raised to tlieir highest potency, and are realized in their best form by a re- generated human society. That the World-Ground should have got even as far as it has on its sad and weary way toward the realization of these ideals, without knowing what it is about, and without caring for its own success, and without ap- preciating its own failures or triumphs, is a conclusion which human reason refuses to entertain. Better no God at all than one so unworthy of the respect, veneration, and service of " the ethical man." On this subject we can neither approve of the critical scep- ticism of Kant in his treatise of the " Pure Reason," nor of his critical dogmatism in the treatise of the " Practical Reason." What our argument requires is not a compulsion to believe in God as prepared to "back up" with reward and punishment an impersonal law — itself apodeictically demonstrable — by an appeal to human wills that may thmk of themselves as free, although they can only know themselves as mechanism. What the argument seeks, is a sufficient reason for the rational faith in a God who knows and appreciates the value of righteous- ness ; and who really is somehow the fountain, source, and reality, of man's moral being and moral ideals. And this faith is justified — although it must be confessed only in a partial way, so far as the perfection of ethical spirit is concerned — by the same sort of an argument as that by which the knowledge of God as the World-Ground is reached. The objections to the procedure of the theistic argument up to this point are for the most part essentially those of a dog- THE ARGUMENT RECONSTRUCTED 101 matic and uncritical agnosticism. The alleged contradictions, and even the difficulties, which are found in the conception of God as moral Personality, are chiefly due to the metaphysical habit of juggling with abstractions. The absoluteness and infiniteness of the Divine Being are not more inherently con- tradictory of the characteristics assigned to him as the self- conscious and rational Ground of man's moral nature and moral development than of the position which assigns to him intelli- gence and will. On the other hand, the interests of man's re- ligious experience and religious ideals demand in a peculiar way, and with a most imperative urgency, a rational faith in the moral personality of God. In the view of those religions which have readied the higher stages of development, God is not God unless he is conceived of after the type of " the ethical man." Indeed, chief among the works of God, the gesta Dei in which a recent writer ' finds the '* religious proof " for the Being of God, is tliis same ethical man, with his history of a moral evolution. The one objection which may be urged most strongly against any conception of God as ethical personality is undoubtedly this : It Viiiv\\>\xiQS feel Inj to the Divine Being. And upon this point much of Christian theology, as well as most of the philosophy of religion. Oriental and Occidental, ancient and modern, lias been really, although not usually in a conscious and avowed fashion, opposed to regarding God as, so to say, through and through moral. Religion, as distinguished from its philosophical and theological stiitements, has, on the con- trary, always emphasized the feeling-full nature of God. This is especially true of Judaism and of Christianity — the pre- eminently ethical and practical religions of humanity. It is true also — not less intensely but far less satisfactorily — of the Muslim faith. It is even true in a vague and indecisive way of Buddhism. Of the assumptions whicli underlay the Catholic orthrwloxy, I A. Domer, Grundrisa der Keligionsphiloeophic, p. 236/. 102 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION as it formed itself by the end of the third century, Hatch de- clares ^ : "It is assumed that rest is better than motion, that passionlessness is better than feeling, that changelessness is better than change." This view has been fortified in modern as well as ancient times by tlie further assumption that weak- ness, temptation, and the overcoming of these finite and limit- ing conditions by an act of will, are indispensable to moral character ; for morality is always and essentially a matter of development and growth. God, therefore, cannot be both ab- solute and infinite, and also moral. The more complete answer to these objections must await a fuller consideration of the meaning in which, and the extent to which, moral attributes may be ascribed to God. We remain for the present in the conclusion that if God is a rational, self- conscious Will, active in the interest of moral ideals, or moral ends, then he is properly called an Ethical Being. That he is such a Being, all the ethical experience of the race contributes to the argument to prove. And it is true, and grandly true, that this conclusion necessarily implies that God is a Being of feeling, as certainly as of mind and will. This latter conclusion is so intimately connected with the argument, at every stage and in every form, that if man's reflective thinking is valid for any factor in the conception of God, it is valid for this factor. The world of man's experience — things as well as selves, and nat- ural events as well as occurrences in human political and social life — is everywhere as truly a manifestation of feeling, and as vividly an appeal to feeling, as of mind and will. Indeed, the affective factors can no more be analyzed out of both the knowing subject and the known object, than can the factors indicative of intelli- gence and volition. Yet more : Personality itself is not such a compound of intellect, feeling, and will, as that it could still pre- serve its essential character if only it should happen to lose out some one of these three groups of characteristics. To be a " per- son," limited or infinite, dependent or absolute, implies self-con- 1 Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church, p. 281. THE ARGUMENT RECONSTRUCTED 103 scious feeling as truly as self-conscious thought, or will con- sciously directed toward ends. But especially absurd is it to con- ceive of ethical personality that has no feeling appreciative of values ; that is neither approving nor disapproving of courses of conduct and of the aims and ends of conduct. No contradiction between the absoluteness and the affective nature of the Divine Being can equal that which emerges in the attempt to think of this Being as at one and the same time without feeling and yet an ethical Spirit, — not to say a perfectly righteous, good, and holy God. The history of the treatment of this problem of the Person- ality of God by the reflective thinking of mankind is exceed- ingly suggestive. Its principal features are well illustrated in the attempt at a philosophy of religion made by Plutarch. This attempt, according to Oakesmith,^ was '' a compound of philosophy, myth, and legalized tradition." Plutarch had re- spect for the conception of Deity embodied in the Demiurgus of the Timseus, the One and Absolute of the Pythagoreans, the UpCjTov Kivodv^ the N677<^ts, or NoTfo-ews vdTjo-ts of Aristotlc, the im- manent World-Soul, or A670S 6iu ry "TXjof the Stoics, etc. But " the metapliysical Deity thus created from these diverse ele- ments is made personal by the direct ethical relation into which He is brought with mankind." '* And I am of opinion," says this ancient pliilosopher,^ " that the blessedness of that eternal life wliich belongs to God consists in the knowledge which gives Him cognizance of all events ; for take away knowledge of things, and the undei'standing of them, and imuKjrtality is no longer life, but mere duration.'' The Divine One must, then, be conceived of as the life of a Knower who rejoices in his knowledge, and who is on account of that knowledge an inex- liaustil>le fountain of feeling worthy to \)e called blessedness. It must, indeed, n(;ver Ix; forgotten tluit the diilioulty of recon- ciling a certiiin acceptance of thetrutlisof the popular polythe- » The UcliKion of riutarch, p. ST. a Plutarch, Dc Isidc ct Ubiritlc, 351 E. 104 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION ism with a somewhat highl}- spiritual monotheistic conception of Deitj was for the thought of antiquity, and is for the thought of the great multitudes of Christian believers in the present day, by no means the same as that encountered by the Western philosophic mind. And yet for all minds, and all times, the problem is essentially the same. Without feeling and moral attributes the absolute Will and Mind cannot become an object of religious belief, feeling, and worship. And the conception of the Absolute as a " self-consistent " One falls apart as surely, and becomes as intrinsically absurd, if we rule out of it all the ethical factors as it does if we rule out of the same conception the factors of rationality.^ The cosmological argument as it advances along the lines drawn by man's sesthetical conceptions, ideals, and develop- ment, pursues a course similar to that of the so-called " moral argument," — not identical with it, or strictly parallel to it, but crossing it back and forth at many points. Here the facts are, in important respects, essentially the same. That the race has created for itself ideals of sublimity and beauty, and that in thought the mind gives an objective character and apprecia- tive estimate to whatever, in concrete forms, seems to embody these ideals, are matters of undoubted fact. The reflective treatment of such facts, in its search for a rational ground, seems to make clear that the race recognizes in whatever is re- garded as beautiful, or sublime, some manifestation of the unchanging characteristics of an ideal Personal Life. The necessity for finding the ontological source and ultimate ex- planation of this experience in the World-Ground, conceived of as an absolutely sublime and perfectly beautiful self-conscious Spirit, is not, indeed, the same as that felt by the mind when dwelling upon the phenomena of man's ethical develop- ment. Yet somehow, the " cosmic process " has evolved ''the 1 This is eminently true of Mr. Bradley's efforts to construct the Idea of the Absolute as "self-consistent" and yet "non-moral." See his Appear- ance and Reality, pp. 430^. THE ARGUMENT RECONSTRUCTED 105 sesthetical man " as well as " the ethical man." And if man were not sesthetical, as well as ethical, he could not be the religious personality which he certainly is. The conclusion that the source of his sesthetical experience must be found in the sesthetical Being of the World-Ground is certainly somewhat vague and difficult to state in logical terms, ^sthetical expe- rience itself is, essentially considered, largely a matter of inar- ticulate emotions and sentiments. But the very mysterious, expansive, and inexpressible character of these sentiments and ideals fits them the better to suggest and to confirm faith in the reality of the Object which goes farthest in the direction of satisfying their demands. Humanity's thirst for the sublime and the beautiful knows not, indeed, precisely what it wants : it therefore none the less, but even all the more, is an un- quenchable thirst. At every turn, then, along the pathway of exploration into the conception of God as perfect Ethical Spirit, it will be found that the combined impulse of sesthetical and ethical feeling is present in power, and that the ideals of moral goodness, and of sublimity and beauty, tend to converge and to appear as, after all, only different aspects of the One Ideal-Real. In this attempt at a reconstruction of the argument for the Being of God we shall for the present add notliing by way of a so-called *' historical argument." All argument, it hiis al- ready been said, even the most speculative, must constantly cling f(ust to the facts of history, and must proceed on its way with full allowance of respect for the historical method. In- deed, from a certiin point of view it may be claimed that the one and only lugument in the liistorical. For the historj' of the evolution in humanity of the l>elief in God as perfect Eth- ical Spirit is tlui all-inclusive and satisfactory proof of the real- ity of the Objc^ct answering to the Ix'liof. In ordur, liowever, to make this argument, which is l)Oth historical and speculative, the more convincing, it must be sul>- jected to a detailed examination — especially at several critical 106 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION points. In this examination two sets of considerations must be given the great weight which they deserve. These are (1) the evidences of a Development, as applied to the progressive realization of the eudaemonistic, ethical, and sesthetical ideals of the race ; and (2) the more permanent faiths, hopes, and practical results of man's best religious Experience — above all, of that which is embodied in the religion of Christ. Argu- ment and reasoning, logically conducted, there must be ; bat the argument must, at every step in its advance, respect the truths supported by these two sets of considerations. CHAPTER XXX GOD AS INFINITE AND ABSOLUTE The conflict which has been waged from antithetic points of view, and between contradictory conclusions, through the at- tempt to use the words " infinite " and *' absolute " in relation to the Object of religious faith, is one of long standing. This fact is certainly indicative of difficulties inherent in the conception of a Pei-sonal Absolute ; and these difficulties cannot be said to have been wholly resolved at the present time. But to admit tliis truth is by no means the same as to say that all the grounds of the conflict render its perpetual waging inevitable ; even less, that the continuance of the conflict hitherto shows the conception to be self-contradictory or absurd. On the one hand, history teaches us how the human mind, in its effort to escape from the limitations, and even the degrading elements, of that conception of Deity which the lower forms of re- ligion have espoused has tried the extreme of negation. It hiis shaken off contemptuously all the seemingly anthropomorphic and authropopatliic factors. In this way progress toward a purer and more defensible monotheistic conception of God hiis been made possible. But on the otlier hand, the ethical and SBsthetical demands to which the experience of religion gives rise, and to which this experience is itself in turn subject, lead the mind to reject as unsatisfactory the barren and abstract notion covered by such phnii^es as'* The Infinite," or *' The Absolute." Thus polytheism and pantheism contribute irrec- oncilable factors to the human conception of G(kI. Periods of that dugmatiam which cLiims to have sounded to it^ depths 108 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION the Divine Being, and to have systematized for faith all his attributes and his relations to the world, alternate with an ag- nosticism which goes to the length of asserting that finite minds do not know and never can know, anything about God. Neither of these conclusions, however, satisfies for any long time the great majority of thoughtful minds. It is a reasonable claim when we are told^ that Brahmanism, with its doctrine of the Being of God, and its goal of religion as a mystical union of the finite Self with God, has truth in it which Christianity and the philosophy of religion must recog- nize. What kind of Being, however, must be attributed to God ? and, How, in view of the answer to this question, must the supreme goal of religion be understood ? A ** metaphysics- shy, purely practical Christianity," or a purely " pragmatical philosophy," cannot reply to either of these questions. The reply which we are trying to establish, rejects the abstract Ab- solute of Brahmanism and of all similar religious philosophies ; on the other hand, it defines the Being of God as active, ethi- cal, spiritual. It affirms that God is at one and the same time, infinite and absolute, and also perfect Ethical Spirit. By this affirmation it aims to avoid the errors of agnosticism and pan- theism, on the one hand ; and on the other, it rejects all forms of Dualism which find the ultimate Ground of any part of the expe- rienced world of finite existences and events in some other Being than God ; — whether in " Law," or the " Nature of things," or in some limiting personal existences, such as a kingdom of evil, or a personal Devil, or what not. The more recent discussions of such conceptions as are pos- sible or tenable, under the terms " Infinite " and " Absolute," have undoubtedly helped to harmonize differences and to clear up obscurities. In the field of pure mathematics, where the notion of infinity has been most easily and properly allowed, as it were, to roam at large, certain valuable restrictions have now been put upon its use. As a purely negative notion it can no 1 See A. Domer, Grundriss der Religionsphilosophie, p. 168/. GOD AS INFINITE AND ABSOLUTE 109 longer, even in mathematics, be involved in self-contradictions that are introduced by applying to its treatment the methods of an a priori and demonstrative proof. To show that Achilles cannot overtake the tortoise, or that the arrow cannot fly, by an abstract analysis of the notions of infinity and infinitesimals is to juggle with words, by shifting the content of their meanings, in and out, with the dexterity of a practiced prestidigitateur. In mathematics, then, one must always tell what sort of an infinite — be it line, succession of separate points, series of numbers, or extension of surface — one is talking about ; and without some noun of positive content to qualify the negative qualification, no denial of limit can logically take place. Moreover, in the argument, the character of the infinity which is, so to say, made the subject of the argument, must remain unchanged throughout. The advances of physical science in the knowledge of the world as a system of interrelated and interacting things and minds, as well as the psychological analysis of the cognitive act itself, forbid all attempts to treat the conception of the Absolute as purely negative and unlimited. First of all, and in importiince above all, must the true doctrine of God as In- finite and Absolute be distinoruished from the neo^ative doc- trine of the ancient Greek and Hindu philosophy; and as well from the fast vanishing, purely agnostic or pantheistic type.^ The motto of the latter is ever No, No ; and whatever goes beyond this is held to be significant of illusion or self-ileception. The absolutism of tlie theistic conception is, on the contrary, in the form of an ever enlarging, loftier, and more comprehen- sive affirmation. » According to Tigert (Theism, etc., p. 39/.), with one exception, "Per- haps no com[>ctent thinker of the present day holds that our notion of the infinite is (merely?) negative." Although there is no doubt much histori- cal warrant for the cluirge of Max Miilk-r (Anthropological Religion, p, 101) thiit Christian theology has held the negative conception of God, it ctinnot now be urged against its more gifted teachers. no PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION The harsher contradictions and graver difficulties which have been introduced into the conception of God as Infinite and Ab- solute Person are removed when the following three considera- tions are borne in mind. Without some preliminary agreement the disputants cannot, in any intelligible way, take even the first steps in this argument. For it is only when starting from points of view thus established, that argument is appropriate to the problem at all ; or, indeed, that any problem can be set clearly before the mind. And first : To identify the Infinite or the Absolute with the Unknowable or the Unrelated is absurd. To know is to re- late ; and all knowing is, in respect of one group of its most essential elements or factors, relating activity. Thinking is relating ; and although thinking is not the whole of knowing, knowledge and the growth of knowledge are impossible with- out thought. Moreover, all human knowing is finite ; man's knowledge of the Infinite and Absolute God is a very finite and relative kind of knowledge. But to speak of the knowl- edge of God, the Infinite, as impossible, because the knowing mind is finite ; or of God, the Absolute, as impossible, because knowing is essentially relating ; — this is so to mistake the very nature of mental life as to render the objection nugatory and ridiculous. This strange psychological fallacy, although it so frequently entraps writers to whom credit must be given for ordinary acquaintance with mental phenomena, scarcely de- serves other treatment than a reference to the most elementary psychological principles. Man's cognitive capacity is not to be compared with the capacity of some material vessel ; the content of the mind is not to be likened to the contents of a wooden measure. As to " The Infinite "=" the Unknowable," or " The Absolute "=" the Unrelated," we are indeed warranted in affirming : " Such a metaphysical idol we can never, of course, know, for it is cunningly devised after the pattern of what knowledge is not." ^ 1 Schurman, Belief in God, p. 117. GOD AS INFINITE AND ABSOLUTE 111 But, secondly, the words " infinite " and *' absolute " as ap- plied to God cannot be used with a merely negative significance. Absolutely negative conceptions are not conceptions at all ; thinking and imagining cannot be wholly negative ; words that have no positive meaning are not words, are not in any respect signs or symbols of mental acts. Preeminently true is all this of an Idea so infinitely rich in content as that arrived at by thought, when, reflecting upon the significance for Reality of man's total experience, it frames the ultimate explanation of it all in terms of infinite and absolute self-conscious and rational Will. In arguing about the possibility of an Infinite Personal- ity this rule, which forbids laying all the empliasis on the ne- gation, must always be rigidly observed. Personal qualifi- cations do not necessarily lose their characteristic personal quality, when it is affirmed that certain particular limitations, under which we are accustomed to experience them, must be thought of as removed. No removal of the limit destroys, as a matter of course, the essential nature of the qualification it- self. Yet, again, — to express essentially the same cautionary truth in another way — the words " infinite " and " absolute " as ap- plied to God must always be taken with an adjectival significa- tion ; they are predicates defining the character, as respects its limit, of some positive factors of the God-Idea. " The Infinite," ** the Aljsolute," — these and all similar phrases, wlien left wholly undefined — are barren al)stractions ; they are, too often, only meaningless sound. The negative and sceptical conclusions, which it is attempted to embody in this way, are controverted by all the tendencies of the modern sciences — physical lus well as mental. All tliese sciences, in their most comprehensive conclusions and highest speculative flights, point toward the conception of a lenity of Reality, a Subject (or TVtiV/f r) for the phenomena. The Oneness of all b'ings that are **real," we may call the lieing of tlu; World. I')Ut,as has already l)een seen, we can nut rest in this abstniction. What really is this 112 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION Being which has the manifold qualities, and performs the varied operations? This Subject of all the predicates, we desire more positively to know. Meantime, we call it Absolute ; because, Itself unconditioned. It is the Ground of all conditions. We call it Infinite ; because. Itself unlimited from without, or Self-limited, It sets the limits for all finite and dependent exis- tences. In speaking, then, of God as Infinite and Absolute Person, or Self, it is not meant simply to deny that the limitations which belong to all finite and dependent things and selves ap- ply to Him ; it is also meant positively to affirm the confidence that certain predicates and attributes of Personal Life reach their perfection, and are harmoniously united in the self- conscious and rational Divine Will. It follows from this that the conceptions of infinity and absoluteness apply to the differ- ent predicates and attributes of a person, in quite different ways. Thus a Personal God can be spoken of as " infinite," in any precise meaning of this term, only as respects those as- pects or activities of personal life to which conceptions of quantity and measure can intelligibly be applied. His infinite- ness of power for example becomes his omnipotence ; his in- finiteness of knowledge his omniscience ; his complete freedom from control by the limiting conditions of forces that act in space becomes his omnipresence, etc. To such moral attri- butes, however, as wisdom, justice, goodness, and ethical love, the negating aspect of the conception of infinity does not ap- ply, except in a figurative way which, by being mistaken, may become misleading. It is at once more intelligible, appropriate, and safe, to speak of the perfection of God in respect of these moral attributes. For the very conception of measure and quantity, strictly understood, has nothing to do with moral dispositions or attributes, as such ; but only with the number of the objects toward which the corresponding acts of will go forth. An infinitely wise person is one whose wisdom is perfect as respects all other beings ; but this perfection of GOD AS INFINITE AND ABSOLUTE 113 wisdom could not be unless the same person were omniscient, omnipotent, and perfectly good. By calling God "absolute " it is meant, on the one hand, to deny that he, in respect of his Being or of any of its manifes- tations, is dependent on any other than his own self-conscious, rational Will. No others, no finite things and selves belonging to the world of which man has experience, constitute the original ground and reason of the divine limitations, whether of power, knowledge, wisdom, or love. He is, in his essential nature, a5-solved, absolute, as respects dep 'ndence upon others. But, positively considered, his absoluteness is such that He is the One on whom all beings, both things and selves, are dependent. In his self-conscious rational Will, finite existences and events liave their Ground. Outride of this self-conscious rational Will, no real uniting principle for the cosmic existences, forces, and events, can anywhere be found. In brief, by speaking of God as Infinite and Absolute the philosophy of religion means to afifirm that there are no limi- tiitions to the self-conscious rational will of God which can arise elsewhere than in this same self-conscious rational Will. God is dependent on no other being for such limitiitions as his will chooses to observe. God wills his own limitations. And he would not be infinite, or absolute, or morally perfect, if he did not. Will that is not self-controlled, or limited by the reason or purposes known to the Self, is not rational, or morally perfect will. On the other hand, all finite and de- pendent beings and events do have the original ground and final purpose of their l)eing and happening in this same Divine Will. All the many finite and dependent lyings have the only satisfactory explanation of their existence and their na- tures in the Infinite and Aljsolute One ; and this infinite and alwolute Being is the Personality whom faith calls God. The objections to so thorout^h