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Ormond, Alexander Thomas,

1847-1915. The philosophy of religion

THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

Alexander Thomas Ormoxd

THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

LECTURES WRITTEN

FOR THE ELLIOTT LECTLTIESHIP

AT THE WESTERX THEOLOGIC.\L SEMLXARY

PITTSBURGH, PEXXA., U. S. A.

1916

BY

ALEXANDER THOMAS ORMOXD, Ph.D., LL.D.

LATE PRESIDENT OF GROVE CITY COLLEGE

FORMERLY MC COSH PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON

LO^^X)N: HUMPHREY iHLTOBD

OXFORD U>TTERSITT PRESS

1922

Copyright, 1922, by Princeton University Press

Published 1922 Printed in the United States of America

FOREWORD

I am glad to contribute a brief foreword to this volume because it affords me au opportun- ity to pay a tribute of affectionate admiration to my friend and colleague, Alexander T. Or- mond.

He was a man of the most transparent sin- cerity and simplicity of character who could ab- solutely be relied upon in every relation of life. There was, besides, no lecturer in the University whose lectures were more worth while. All his work was characterized by the most honest in- dustry and solid judgment.

I consider it a privilege and honor to have been his colleague.

WooDROw Wilson. 5th July, 1921.

PREFACE

The eight lectures in this volume were writ- ten during the summer and autumn of 1915 and were to have been delivered under the Elliott Lectureship at the Western Theological Semi- nary, as explained in Dr. Kelso's introduction. The author's interest for several years had centered in the philosophy of religion and it had been his expressed purpose to write a book on the subject. These lectures were the first fruits of that intention, and death prevented any fur- ther elaboration of his ideas.

The majority of the lectures were left in manuscript in the author's handwriting, and were typed after his death. They were later read, and the proofs corrected, by us, his chil- dren ; and any inaccuracy or lack of clarity that may appear can be attributed to the fact that the text was never reviewed by the author, and we hesitated to make any but very minor changes in the text as received by us. In this connection we wish to acknowledge gratefully aid from Dr. Calder of Grove City, Professor Armstrong of Wesleyan, and Mr. Minot Morgan of Detroit.

Alexander Thomas Ormond was born in Punxsutawney, Pa., in April, 1847, received the ordinary country school education and began to

• •

Vll

viii PREFACE

teach school himself at the age of seventeen. He taught and farmed till he reached the age of twenty-six, when he entered Princeton College with many conditions. lie graduated in 1877, taking the Mental Science fellowship, and re- ceived his Ph.D. three years later. He then spent three years at the University of Minne- sota as Professor of History and Logic, return- ing to Princeton as Professor in 1883. He took a prominent part in the councils of three admin- istrations : those of Dr. McCosh, Dr. Patton and Mr. Wilson, and in addition to his work in the university, he gave courses of lectures in the Princeton Theological Seminary for many years. He remained in Princeton till 1913, when at the age of sixty-six, he resigned to ac- cept the presidency of Grove City College, Pennsylvania. After tw^o arduous, but very successful years there he died suddenly of heart failure in December, 1915. A year before his death he had had a thorough survey of his physical condition by Dr. Janeway, of Johns Hopkins, because of some unpleasant symptoms referable to the condition of his heart, and he was then told that sudden death might be ex- pected any time unless he would retire from active work and live in a milder climate. He, however, considered it a point of honor to com- plete the work he had undertaken in connection with Grove City College. Three weeks before his death he stated to one of us that he thought he had brought his work to a successful conclu-

PREFACE ix

sion and that later in the winter he would retire, remove to a milder climate and devote himself to writing his book on the Philosophy of Re- ligion.

None of us, his children, are in any degree capable of appreciating the Philosophical value of this book of lectures or of estimating our father's place as a philosopher, but we could not fail to appreciate in him those qualities which impressed all who came into contact with him — his broad humanity, simplicity and inde- pendence of character — and singular intellec- tual honesty.

In publishing this book we wish to dedicate it to his memory, as a token of our increasing admiration.

CONTENTS

PAGE

Introduction by Dr. James Kelso xiii

Part I. Religious Knowledge Lecture I. The Problem of Religious

Lecture

Lecture II.

Lecture III.

Lecture IV.

Knowledge

The Problem of Religious Knowledge, (continued) . .

The Rational Type of Re- ligious Knowledge

The Synthesis of the Me- diate and the Immediate in Religious Knowledge ....

Part II. The Soul V. The Soul as Subject of

or.

48

72

Lecture VI. Lecture VII. Lecture VIII.

Religious Experience .... 97

The Agency of Man 120

The Overcoming of Evil. 141 The Destiny of the Soul. . 172

INTRODUCTION

The Elliott Lectureship was founded by the alumni and friends of the Western Theological Seminary as a memorial to the Rev. David El- liott, D.D., the Seminary's first professor of Systematic Theology (1836-74). The object of the foundation was to provide lectures "in the defence of revealed truth." In the course of the years some of the most distinguished Brit- ish scholars have lectured on this foundation. There appear on the roll of the Elliott Lecture- ship, for example, the names of Rev. Professor Alexander F. Mitchell, who treated "The His- tory of the Westminster Assembly" (1880); Principal A. M. Fairbairn, who lectured on "Theism and Natural Religion" (1890); Rev. Professor James Orr, whose subject was "The Progress of Dogma" (1897) ; and Rev. Profes- sor David Smith, whose theme was "The His- toric Jesus" (1912). It was in connection with the Elliott foundation also that Rev. James S. Dennis, D.D., an American scholar, made a not- able permanent contribution to the literature of modern missions. These lectures, somewhat en- larged, appeared later in three volumes, en- titled "Christian Missions and Social Prog- ress." Realizing that, on account of a long and intimate familiarity with the problems of phi-

xiii

xiv INTRODUCTION

losophy and its relations to theology, as well as on account of his mature judgment, President A. T. Ormond, of Grove City College, was ex- ceptionally well prepared to discuss the funda- mental problem of the relations of philosophy and religion, the faculty of the Seminary unani- mously elected him to treat this theme in a course on the Elliott foundation. The appoint- ment was made in December, 1913, and the lec- tures were to have been delivered sometime during the Seminary year 1915-16. But in the providence of God, President Ormond was never to fulfil this engagement. The lectures had been written and the date for their delivery defi- nitely set, when suddenly, while busy with the duties of his office, Dr. Ormond was summoned to that realm where metaphysical speculation ceases and ultimate reality is apprehended. Notwithstanding these untoward circumstances. President Ormond 's mature conclusions were not lost. Soon after his death a part of the course was read before the students and faculty of the Seminary by his colleague, the Rev. R. S. Calder, Ph.D., and arrangements were made for their publication. The war intervened, however, and made it necessary to postpone the issue of the volume which is now given to the public as a worthy companion to the other mem- bers of this series of lectures.

James A. Kelso.

PART I RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE

THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE

Lectube I. The Pboblem of Religious Knowledge

The problem I propose to discuss in this and the following lecture is that of the primary foundations of religious certitude, whether im- mediate knowledge, or inference, or faith, or the sense of value. There have been partisans of each of these claimants, and it cannot be de- nied that each has contributed an important part to the building up of the body of what we may call religious truth. But the question of the primary source of religious certitude is special, and ought to admit of some definite answer. Now, the proposition that best ex- presses my own belief in the matter may be stated as follows : Man is endowed by nature, and by virtue of his being a potentially self- conscious being, with a religious consciousness, which is the organ and source of certain pri- mary verities that constitute for him the first data of a possible religious experience. In the light of this proposition, it is clear that we will have to deny that either faith or the sense of value can be taken as a primary source of re- ligious truth. Let us consider very briefly here

1

2 PHILOSOPHY OF EELIGION

the claims of each to be a primary source. It is clear in the first place that what we call a judgment of value is not primarily a judgment of truth, but rather of our appreciation of something, whether it be true or not. It can only acquire epistemological value when we are led to say of it, that it is so dear or precious, so essential to the realization of the highest ideals, that it must needs be true. In other words, to enlarge the position of Kant, the truth of a proposition is a postulate of its value. This proves that the judgment of value is only an in- direct or mediate judgment of truth. In the second place, if we analyze what we may call the judgment of faith, it will become apparent that, whatever the degree of assurance it may pos- sess, it is only the assertion, on mediate evi- dence, of the truth of something that is not now present. Now, the evidence on which faith rests may be either some insight of immediate knowl- edge, or some consideration of value, and the point of interest here is that in neither case is it primary, but its appeal is to something that involves primary truth data. Furthermore, just as it is clear that, in any great field of truth, certitude cannot rest, in the last analysis, on inference, but must have as its basis some first-hand touch of reality : so here, if the super- structure of religious experience is to be at all reducible to a body of assured truth, its judgments must be capable of being reduced back to some first-hand facts of knowledge.

PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 3

Neither faith, which is a kind of inference, nor inference, nor consideration of value, can sup- ply the first act in the drama of religious truth.

We come back then to the terms of the origi- nal proposition — that the primary source of re- ligious truth is to be found in an original con- sciousness, which is inseparable from man's self-consciousness, and is in fact an integral part of it. That man, by virtue of being self- conscious, is also religious, — that, in the same process by which he finds himself, he also finds his transcendent other, is, I feel sure, the only ultimate ground on which the claim that re- ligion is a natural endowment of man can rest.

Before proceeding to the analysis of the re- ligious consciousness, I wish, however, to con- sider briefly at this point the claim of Professor Hoffding, in his Philosophy of Religion, that religion can supply no valid principle of world- explanation. Hoffding 's claim is that the prin- cipal of natural causation, as employed by science, is the only valid principle of knowledge, and that the theoretic principle to which relig- ion lays claim cannot maintain itself in face of criticism. He rightly names this the principle of teleology, and holds that the theoretic preten- sions of religion stand or fall with the validity of teleology as a principle of world-interpreta- tion. The religious view of the world is the teleological, and, should teleology be proved false, or, in fact, too weak to bear the burden of world-explanation, it follows that religion would

4 PHILOSOPHY OF BELIGION

be logically bound to give up its theoretic claims, and to content itself with the world- view of science, which finds either no place, or, at least, a subordinate place, for teleology. The purpose of Hoff ding's book is to induce religion to give up the theoretic claim which brings it into conflict with science, and to plant itself solidly and exclusively on the principle of the conservation of values. Hoffding sees clearly that no principle of unconditional value for the interpretation of reality can be deduced from the judgment of value. To Hoffding belongs the credit of having made this perfectly evident. His position cannot be successfully called in question by anyone who admits the soundness of his judgment in regard to teleology.

Without entering into an elaborate discussion here, I wish simply to give certain reasons why I cannot accept Hoffding 's low estimate of tele- ology. In the first place, it is evident that his conclusion is not founded on any adequate, criti- cal study of teleology itself. There is a popular and superficial conception of teleology which has, unfortunately, dominated the greater body of our religious literature of the past. It is that conception that proceeds on the assumption of a conflict between teleology on the one hand, and natural causation and mechanism on the other, leading to the false and mistaken attempt either to substitute teleology for natural causation and mechanism, or to limit these in their scope and seek a place for teleology in the gaps that

PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 5

are to be found in the mechanical armor. The alternative of substitution is the bolder of the two proposals, and, on account of its radicalism, has commended itself to certain idealistic phi- losophers like Schelling ; but neither alternative has been able to stem the tide of science, and Hoffding is on safe ground when he rejects as unsound the principle as thus conceived. There is, however, a profounder conception of teleol- ogy that, to my mind, lifts it above the level of such criticism and vindicates its claim to be a true principle for the interpretation of the real. In the first place, a profound psychological study of experience shows that, at the founda- tion of our world-view, there is operating a principle of selection, which underlies and af- fects all the processes by which we develop a view of any part of our world. Perception, which gives our first judgments about the world, is, in a primary sense, selective, and the later stages of mental activity are determined by the same principle. Now, when we study selection, we are led to the conclusion that, even in the first stages of perception, there is some quality of mind that renders it primarily teleological, — that leads it to act, not mechanically, but with an activity motived by the sense of something more or less definite, which it is seeking to rea- lize. In the lowest stages there is the germ of an end-motive that instinctively knows what to appropriate and what to reject. If we follow this motive into the higher stages of mentality,

6 PHILOSOPHY OF EELIGION

we find it taking on more definitely and con- sciously the teleological form. When we pene- trate beneath the surface of the mind's activity and come on what we may designate its onto- logical motive, we find that it is always tele- ological and ideal. To illustrate briefly what we propose to elaborate more fully at a later stage in these lectures : above the lower selective range of perception there is the epistemologi- cal activity of apperception which gives us the objects or things of cognition and certain rela- tions that are central in our judgments about the w^orld. Very briefly stated, the thing of per- ception is an object that the mind refuses to regard simply as a plexus of qualities w^hich it can reclaim as its own subjective possessions. It was on the rock of this refusal that Berkeley- anism in its first draft made shipwreck and had to be modified. For, in spite of the fact that Berkeley had forever dispelled the illusion of material substance, the mind refused to leave the place of substance empty; and rightly, for this reason: Strictly speaking the place had never been occupied by material substance, but rather by the mind's own ideal which we may read in the following language ; the qualities of things are simply the mind's own ideas in an objective form of existence, and, like these ideas, on their subjective side, involve some uni- tary and perdurable subject (substance) of which they are the plurality of phenomenal manifestations. In other words, the thing is

PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 7

ontologically a teleological ideal of the mind. The thing is the first overt act of mind in build- ing a teleological world.

If now we enter the field of the judgment of cognition, we find the same truth staring us in the face. When we enter a room and recognize it as the same room we were in yesterday or last week, we pronounce the judgment of iden- tity, which, in its ontological or underlying mo- tive, means that our mind has appealed from the perishable and broken order of our own perceptions as empirical to an order of ex- istence that is unbroken, and that is perdurable through the change and perishability of the em- pirical. If we deny this, we reduce our world to a flux which supplies no standing ground for any judgment whatsoever. Here again we find that the mind, in the self -committal of its judgment, has, in spite of Hume's destructive analysis, refused to leave the place of material substance empty, and has filled it with its own ideal of being that is unitary and perdurable. Again, if we study the activity of mind in the mediate judgment that expresses itself formally in the syllogism, but ontologically and really in the search for grounding, we find that the mind is just as insistent in refusing to accept the terms of a world-plurality as final, and that, in its demand for an ontological ground, it is not obeying any law of things imposed on it from without, but rather the law of its own ideal,

8 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

which requires the many and changing to be grounded in the unitary and jDcrdurable.

If we turn to another part of the field and consider the world from the point of view of natural causation, we find the same kind of a situation, AVhen the empiricist finding the only principle of things open to his vision to be that of natural causation, which gives us a series of conditional antecedents and consequents that commit us to the treadmill of an infinite round but reveals no ground, the mind following its ontological motive refuses to rest in a world of eternal contingency, and, following a deeper in- sight, fills the vacant place of ground-being with its own ideal, that of a unitary and perdurable being that is equally related to every part of the contingent series, and in the light of which it is to be interpreted as a manifestation of a system of reality.

In this brief statement, I have endeavored to sketch the outline of a deeper doctrine of tele- ology, which virtually identifies it with the prin- ciple of ontology itself. Ontology is the science of being, and its central problem is to determine the final concept of reality. The ontological mo- tive is the central inner motive of all mentality. It inspires the initial selective activity of mind, and is the prime mover in all the mind's sub- sequent activities, forbidding it to stop short of an ideal construction that shall be final and satisfactory. Teleology, in its deeper sense, is the same process from the standpoint of its

PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 9

most obvious term. A teleological process is one that is aiming at an end, which is not, how- ever, a mere end standing as a last link of a chain, but, rather, the explicit expression of a motive that has been the selective lode-stone, the provisional guide, and the purposive activ- ity out of which the motive has emerged as the realized end or ideal of the whole.

By identifying teleology with the inner onto- logical motive of all reality, it is clear that it becomes a more profound principle, and it be- comes evident that Hoffding, in rejecting tele- ology as a source of real knowledge, is casting aside the central principle of idealism itself. Now, I am not holding a brief here for idealism or any particular form of it. What I have aimed at more particularly is the demonstration of the fact that, when we penetrate to the inner constitutive motive of knowledge, we find that it is teleological, and that to deny its soundness as a principle of knowledge is to deny the valid- ity of all knowledge. In its profounder sense, moreover, it is clear that it can no longer be re- garded as antagonistic to either mechanism or natural causation. A mechanical situation may also (in fact will) be, in a deeper sense, teleo- logical; and a product of natural causes may, in a profounder sense, be the manifestation of design and purpose. We have only to study the situation in order to find this to be the true re- sult of analysis. Let us take any work of art, say a cathedral, and study its construction from

10 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

the point of view of ordinary sense-observa- tion. We will find that the whole from that ex- ternal point of view will be a phenomenon of mechanical construction under the operation of natural forces and causes. Every part of the work can be accounted for in this way, and the circle will be mechanically complete, so that no place will be left for the intrusion of any other kind of agency. Moreover, the whole, when completed, although it expresses an idea which satisfies a rational demand, must yet from the standpoint of mechanism be either ascribed to a kind of accident and regarded as an epi-phe- nomenon, or referred to the necessity inherent in the composition of physical forces. In no case can the result be ascribed, in any part of it, to any agency lying outside of the pure me- chanical. The logical conclusion from this point of view will be, therefore, that the rational idea or design that is present in the completed edi- fice is a pure come-outer at the end of the pro- cess, and has had no causal agency toward de- termining the result.

Now, this seems to be quite obvious, and in accordance with strict, mechanical logic, and it has for us this significance, that, arguing from mechanical data, we can reach only mechanical conclusions. In other words, the mechanical system is self -completing, and no point of limit can be found. But it will also be clear from this example that, while no limit can be found to mechanism within mechanical conceptions, yet

PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 11

mechanism itself expresses a certain limit to our insight into the reality of the situation as a whole. For we know from other data, which have their roots in the inner regions of our own self-conscious activity, that another kind of agency has been at work from the beginning, and 'that to this agency is due, especially, the ontological motives that have led to the incep- tion of the enterprise, as well as the conception of the idea or plan that is expressed in the com- pleted work of the cathedral as a whole. Fur- thermore, it will be clear, in view of this insight, that not a single stone takes its place in the structure; not a single mechanical force oper- ates in any specific direction; not the smallest detail of construction is effected without the touch of the idea-purpose, as we may call it, in the mind of the architect, and communicated to the minds of the subordinate agents. • Now, this whole insight, which alone satisfies the requirements of reason, makes clear also what i3art of the whole must be ascribed to extra-mechanical agencies. The parts that mechanism does not explain will be the origina- tion of the idea-plan, and the direction of the mechanical forces to its realization. Origina- tion and direction are the two specific attributes of teleological agency as distinguished from that which is mechanical. If, however, the at- tempt be made to turn the point of this reason- ing by distinguishing, as some have done, be- tween art and nature, on the ground that art

12 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

presents a duality of agencies that is not found in nature, we answer that this is the very ques- tion at issue. Allowing that, from the stand- point of sense-observation, the mechanism of nature has no limit; that mechanism, to outer observation, presents a complete circle; it is yet true that mechanism presents an order or system that expresses an idea of reason; that this gives rise to the question whether mechan- ism be self-explanatory, or must refer for final explanation to agencies that are extra-mechani- cal. The answer to this question will, I think, bring to light the fact that nature presents to thought the same issue. For nature does not reveal the motive in which its processes origi- nate. Nor, as Lotze has pointed out, does the operation of mechanical forces account for that specific action of the several forces which im- parts to them their individual character. If any particular force acts in a given way and in no other, this is a fact that cannot be explained by the mere positing of a force ; but the idiosyn- cracy of the force raises a question also: Why it invariably acts in this particular waj^ and in no other. In other words, quality is a charac- teristic of idea, and, as such, transcends the mere mechanical. Furthermore, the order of the whole of nature, or of a part of it, is but an expression in the form of developed results of this same transcendence. The order or system in nature is no more explicable, in any final

PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 13

sense, by the mechanical than are the same phe- nomena in the work of art.

We seem to be justified, then, in drawing the following conclusion: from the standpoint of a complete insight, mechanism, which, in itself, is unlimited and self -completing, stands limited and conditioned by an insight that is transcen- dent; that this insight, proceeding from data furnished by our own conscious inner agency, supplies a criterion to reason that fixes for it the standard of finality of judgment in an idea or ideal that both expresses the inner ontologi- cal motive of all activity, and also the teleologi- cal end that is the directive agency in determin- ing the rational result. If this be true, mechan- ism will be the outer form of an agency, (the form in which it presents itself to outer sense- observation) that, in an inner and more funda- mental sense is teleological and rational. And it will follow that the mechanical explanation of any natural phenomenon does not thereby shut out the teleological, but rather, in the light of a complete insight, calls for it.

Now, what I have been endeavoring to prove in this part of my argument is that, when pro- foundly interpreted, the principle of teleology is the only principle that, in the light of a com- plete insight, will lead to an interpretation of things that reason can admit as final in its type. And it is very significant that this type is to be come upon at first-hand only in our self-con- scious experience. There alone we find the

14 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

form of an agency that acts teleologically. Upon this form reason seizes, and, by a subtle use of analogy, generalizes it and makes it the criterion by which it judges reality in general. Coming back now to the theme from which we have made this long digression, — the prob- lem of the religious consciousness; we have al- ready contended that man is, by virtue of his nature as a self-conscious being, also a religious being, and that his religious consciousness, which has clearly manifested itself in his his- tory, must rest, like all other primary forms of consciousness, on some data that are immedi- ately given and will underlie all deliverances of inference, or faith, or sense of value. This con- tention I shall proceed, in the remainder of this lecture, to elaborate. When we say that man is, by virtue of his fundamental nature, a re- ligious being, we mean to say that religion bears such a relation to his nature that it will affect both his conscious and his unconscious (or, bet- ter, his sub-conscious) processes. We mean that he is a religious being in the same, or even more fundamental sense, that he is a social be- ing. He does not need to await the development of his consciousness into any form of definite awareness in order to become a social being. He becomes social in the first profound sense he has of the existence of beings of his own kind. This sense of kind is the primary condition, not the result, of sociality. In other words, we do not have to consciously reach any definite ex- perience of our own kind in order to establish

PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 15

the germ of the social. Rather, as we have con- cluded, the opposite order is the true order. At the basis of the social, and as one of the primal terms in the development of self-con- sciousness, is what we may call the sense of the presence of the other; not the sense of the pres- ence of the other — not ourself. This would be too erudite, but merely the sense, in germ, of the other self. The history of the child shows this to be true. The first social world of the child is a world of beings like itself, with which it instinctively associates. Only later it begins to distinguish its own kind from other species of existence. This being true, the child's first awareness of its other, will be of the nature of a perception in which the defining or noetic ac- tivity will be wholly latent and unconscious. It will not be difficult to determine the type of this activity, for it could not be other than a sense of its own type of being. Its first social acts can be defined as its largely unconscious sense for itself or its own in another. To use an il- lustration for which I am indebted, I believe, to William James, a piece of iron, in the presence of a magnetic object, will be put into a state of excitement, which, were it endowed with a bit of consciousness, would be the feeling of some- thing that it could not otherwise define. This primary feeling would be the sense of a pres- ence in connection with which it would have what the psychologists call the reality-feeling. Now, if the iron were really a being, gifted with

16 PHILOSOPHY OF KELIGION

the potentiality of self-consciousness, it would have in it the germ of a noetic activity that would be aroused by this sense of presence to the effort to define: to determine the what or kind of existence, and the first effort of the de- fining mind would take the form, as I have in- dicated, of an instinctive reading of the type of its own being into the other. This, I feel sure, will be taken as describing fairly well the first act of the social consciousness. It will have, as its datum, the sense, further undetermined, of a presence, which will arouse the noetic ac- tivity into a germinal effort to define.

"Wliat is true of the social will hold in any primary form of mental activity. There will be an immediate datum, that of existence, and this will arouse the noetic effort to define. Now, in claiming that the religious consciousness is a primary form, and perhaps the most funda- mental of all the types, I have not made any genetic claim that religious experience will antedate, in time, other forms of experience, such as the social and the awareness of objects of sense. This may or may not be true. What I do contend for is that the religious conscious- ness is primary in the sense that it is an origi- nal type, not derived from any other more pri- mary, nor a modification of it. It is our busi- ness here, then, to try, if possible, to determine the distinctive quality or qualities of the re- ligious type, which differentiate it from any other primary type, and constitute its distinc-

PHILOSOPHY OF EELIGION 17

tive character. In this enterprise, we are fortu- nate to have the assistance of almost every thinker who has dealt with the problem and at- tempted to give a definition of religion. If you study the current definitions of religion, you will find that the large majority of them agree in the judgment that the differential quality of the religious consciousness is the sense, or feeling, of the presence to man of some tran- scendent being or order, which he is convinced, somehow vitally affects his life and destiny. Extracting this core from the definitions, let us regard it as the one most irrefutable datum of the religious consciousness. In regard to it, two questions may be asked. (1) What are the implications of this datum when critically de- termined? (2) In its appearance as an active factor in the life of man, can it be said to antedate other types of experience? Now, the first of these questions is one of analysis. The definitions give us the datum in the sense or perception of the presence of some transcendent being or order. This, as you will observe, does not define, in any sense, the type of being, and it is important that we should make no assump- tions of type in this, our initial, inquiry. Nor, on the other hand, may we minimize the datum into the mere subjective sense of transcendence. Like all forms of cognitive activity, there is the sense of existence (of objectivity) in its first manifestations. The primary datum may, therefore, without violence, be spread out into

18 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

the form of a germinal affirmation of the ex- istence of something transcendent. In this form it becomes, in truth, the datum of a type of experience, which is distinctive and ranks with other primary types. Now, I have em- ployed the term *'type" here in the generic sense, as simply indicating a form of experi- ence, which has the transcendent as its object of determination, without further specifying. Later on, we shall have occasion to use the word "type" in a narrower sense. Summing up our results here, we may say that the primary datum of the religious consciousness is the sense of a transcendent object, to which we stand immediately related.

To the second question, we may not be able to return so specific an answer. That the religious consciousness is a primary endowment of the race is a contention that is not only capable of intrinsic justification, but also one that finds strong confirmation in the history of religion, and in the relation it has borne to other forms of human experience. The testimony of history to the fact that forms of religious society ante- date all others is practically unanimous. The germs of polity and of organized sociality are to be found in religious motives. The same is true of art and morality. This is so overwhelm- ingly demonstrated that there is now no longer any hesitation on the part of historians of cul- ture in assigning to religion the parental rela- tion. All the forms of human civilization have

PHILOSOPHY OF EELIGION 19

had their roots in religious soil; have grown to maturity under the tutelage of religious motives and restraints, and, only at the stage of ma- turity, have separated from the parental roof, and entered on the experiment of housekeeping for themselves. That this is no mere accident, or that the course of human history could not have been different is beyond question. Fur- thermore, there is evidence that is convincing to the effect that religion is so closely identified with the ground-springs of the life of humanity that it is a necessary source of power and inspi- ration for the achievement of its best results. The proposition is not without verification that neither art, nor sociality, nor morality can sepa- rate itself from religion or repudiate the re- ligious motive, without losing power and suffer- ing the drying up of inspiration. The great periods in art, for example, have been the relig- ious. Sociality, also, without religion is doomed to run out into the shallows and lose much of its effectiveness as a force in human life. These facts have a vital bearing on the question as to the relative date of the appearance of religion as a factor in human experience. Without mooting the perhaps unanswerable question as to the priority of the social or the religious in the experience of the individual (and there is as much evidence for the priority of the relig- ious as for that of the social), it will be evident that the considerations we have already brought out; namely, the testimony of history to the

20 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

parental relation of religion to all other forms of civilization; the testimony of experience to the fact that the divorce of other forms from re- ligion involves a loss of power and inspiration ; these, it need not be urged, have an important bearing on the question of priority. Besides, there is another consideration that will also have a bearing on the question, if not of prior- ity in time, certainly on that of the deeper logi- cal priority of religion to other factors in civi- lization. The consideration of which I speak arises out of the existence of evil in the world, and the exigency which its existence gives rise to in the life of the individual and the race. No profound insight into evil can be reached with- out leading to the conviction that a radical cure of evil will involve more than the mere reform of the individual or society. It is not reform but renewal; the organization of the whole of life around a new center, that is the funda- mental need of both the individual and society. Now, it is clear that there is no other point of view than that of religion from which this will be apparent. Furthermore, there is no other agency outside of religion which is in possession of that whole insight into reality, that will en- able us to see that the remedy, to be effective, must be one that will deal radically with the whole man, seeking to deliver him from his evil self and make him fundamentally a new crea- ture. In short, the insight of religion teaches the need, not of reform or betterment, but of

PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 21

salvation. In this conclusion, we are in agree- ment with all thinkers who have thought deeply on the religious problem. This consideration of the profound relation of religion to the life of man as a whole, and its insight into the radi- cal nature of the remedy of evil that is required, serves to reinforce the other reasons which lead to the conclusion that religion, as a factor in the life of the race not only antedates in time all other factors, but that, logically, it bears a deeper and more radical and fundamental rela- tion to the life of man than any other factor in his civilization.

Having determined what the primary datum of the religious consciousness is, and its signifi- cance for the grounding of the religious type of consciousness and experience, the next point we wish to consider is that of the noetic activity that is aroused by this primary datum in ex- perience. In dealing with the primary datum, we indicated that it fixed the general type of the religious consciousness, as that which grows up around the central sense of a transcendent being. In dealing with the noetic activity, we are concerned not only with the further defini- tion of type, but also with the method by which intelligible categories gather around this type. We saw, in treating of the social type, that, in determining the other as its own kind, the child performs, largely in an unconscious and instinc- tive way, a noetic act that may be characterized as finding itself or its own in the life of another.

22 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

Now, it would be a cheap sort of wit for one to wax humorous, in view of this contention, and exclaim, *'how absurd to imagine that the child is capable of carrying through such an erudite mental process as you have described. In order to do so, your child must be a philosopher." But it ought not to be forgotten that the deep- est things are hidden in the simplest experi- ences, and that the ''flower in the crannied wall ' ' conceals in its life many things that baffle the deepest insight of the philosopher. We have made no claim for the child that will not be borne out by a genetic study of its experi- ence.

Now, applying the same analytic to the noetic activity in religion, we will be led to analogous conclusions. Here, however, I shall task your patience a little further by asking your indul- gence while I spend a few minutes considering further the claim that the religious conscious- ness is a derivation from the social. If this be true, then, to us men, God can never be so near as are our fellow-men. There will always be an interval that will be spanned by the link of the social. But this would involve the reversal of what must be true if the consciousness of re- ligion is at all true. If the primary datum is not misleading ; if the transcendent being exists — then that being is more intimately related to us than any other. If God exists ; that is, if He is real and not illusory. He is "closer than breathing: nearer than hands and feet." In-

PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 23

stead of having to traverse the social link to get to Him, He is closer than the social, and we have only to inner ourselves to the secret hiding place of our real selves in order to find our- selves in His presence. The theory of social derivation is a species of deistic separation, which has been discredited in other fields of re- ligious thought.

Eeturning, then, to the problem of our analy- tic, we will be prepared to find, in the noetic activity of the religious consciousness, an an- alogy to that of the social, but not a mere dupli- cation of it. Like the consciousness of which it is the organ, it will manifest differentia that will distinguish it from the social activity. What, then, we may ask, shall we take as the differentia of the noetic activity of the religious consciousness ; or, if you like to call it so, of re- ligious perception? This differentia will reveal itself, I think, if we translate the sense of the transcendent being into the ontological sense of ground. Our warrant for this may be stated as follows: The ontological motive [which we have treated in another part of this lecture], which leads the mind in a process that ends in the conception of ultimate grounding, is on its negative or privative side, the sense of de- pendence arising out of our feeling that the last secret of our being is not to be found in our- selves, but that it must be sought in some more self-sustaining principle of reality in which the primal roots of our existence will be found.

24 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

The fact that this motive is central in all the ac- tivities of our life shows how fundamental it is, and will lead us to seek for its expression in the most primary experiences of our nature. Now, it is in the light of this insight that I have made the translation above proposed, and have identified the primary sense or perception of the transcendent being with the sense or per- ception of a being in which our own existence is grounded. This translation also satisfies, as no other can, the sense of closeness and inti- macy that binds the soul to whatever being it may call God.

The conclusion we have reached here will be of great service to us in the further analysis of the noetic activity of the religious conscious- ness, for it will safeguard us against that crude and superficial use of analogy called anthropo- morphism, into which so many religious think- ers have fallen in dealing with the sources of religious ideas. Defining anthropomorphism as an abusive and uncritical use of analogy, it will be our task, in the next lecture, to define a criti- cal conception of the principle and to determine the nature and limits of its use as a principle of religious knowledge.

PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 25

Lecture II. The Problem of Religious Knowledge (Continued.)

In the last lecture we characterized anthropo- morphism as a crude and abusive use of an- alogy, and proposed, in another lecture, to de- termine a critical and adequate conception of the same principle. To this task we now pro- ceed. We may define anthropomorphism as the tendency to conceive the nature of the transcendent object of religion in unmodified terms of our own conscious being. The God of anthropomorphism will, therefore, be man writ large, a being with the magnified intellect, pas- sions and will, with the magnified personality of a human being. Xenophanes, the critic of the old Greek theological conceptions, brought out this characteristic weakness of anthropomorph- ism in his saying that, could oxen conceive a God, they would represent Him as a magnified ox. What, then, is wrong with anthropomorph- ism? The answer will, I think, bring out two respects in which it fails: One, the more ob- vious, and the other the more profound and sig- nificant. The first of these faults is what we may call the crudeness and indiscrimination of its use of the human analogy. It ascribes the passions, faults and limitations of humanity to God, as well as its nobler and more rational qualities. This is exemplified in the lower forms of religion, as well as in the religious conceptions of the child. To the child, God

26 PHILOSOPHY OF EELIGION

will be the human father it knows, magnified, and possessing all the characteristics of the hu- man parent ; or, if the child has reflected a lit- tle, and found the human father possessing some faults, its conception of God will still be of the purely human type, from which these faults have been purged. Now, it is not neces- sary to argue at length, in order to convince the man of the present day, that no adequate con- ception of the Divine Being is possible so long as we adhere to the unmodified type of our o^vn being, even in its most exalted form. Anthropo- morphism only needs to be clearly defined in this regard in order to be condemned as inade- quate. The second and more erudite fault of anthropomorphism lies in its failure to appre- hend the true significance of the fact of tran- scendence. Why, we may ask, could the vice of anthropomorphism not be cured by distinguish- ing critically between the lower and the higher attributes of man, and founding our analogies only upon the essential attributes of his rational and spiritual being? This, we must admit, would be a great step in advance, and it, no doubt, represents the highest point of much of our contemporary religious thinking. But we must insist that this leaves the more subtle form of the difficulty untouched. We will never un- derstand the real import of transcendence so long as we conceive it in a purely quantitative sense, — that is, so long as we simply conceive God's attributes as our own enlarged. If we

PHILOSOPHY OF EELIGION 27

simply regard God 's thoughts as different from ours in being larger intellections of the same species, we will not be in the way of forming an adequate conception. The same will be true of all other ascriptions, as of knowledge, wisdom, power, goodness and rationality. The vice here can only be escaped by conceiving transcen- dence in the qualitative rather than the quanti- tative sense. Now, I do not wish to conceal the fact that the recognition of this does involve a limitation of our powers of knowledge. If God's thought is not simply our thought with the plus sign, but is, in some way, qualitatively unlike our thought, then there will be a mystery about the divine thinking that will be impene- trable to our powers. The acceptance of the claim that the transcendence of the object of religion is qualitative rather than quantitative involves the final surrender of the Gnostic's claim of the omniscience of human reason. God cannot be brought onto the plane of the tri- angle, and made the object of a definition that will enclose its object.

Let us endeavor, at this point, to grasp the significance of the step we have taken here. If it be true that the transcendence of the divine object is qualitative rather than quantitative, — that God is different from man in kind as well as in degree, it follows that our conceptions of God will be qualitatively inadequate to fully grasp Him ; that we cannot say that He is a be- ing like ourselves without qualification. It fol-

28 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

lows that, when we ascribe wisdom, power or love to Him, we do so with the recognition that our conceptions of wisdom, power or love are only imperfect lights; only imperfect symbols that give an intelligent direction to our think- ing, but do not conduct it to its goal. It in- volves the recognition on our part that our highest conceptions are but approximations to the reality; that they simply express the formula of the curve without being able to fol- low it out to infinit}^

Should anyone, at this point, object that this conclusion lands us logically in the camp of the agnostic, I will ask your indulgence for a para- graph or two on this point before proceeding with the main line of the discussion. It is a bad custom of many religious thinkers to regard ag- nosticism as an altogether reprehensible re- sult of wrong-headed and perverse thinking. Now, I do not hold any brief for the agnostic here, but I wish to point out what I conceive to be the grain of truth in his position. If we in- quire what kind of thinking it was from which agnosticism arose as a reaction, we will find that it was the type fashionable in the eighteenth century, a type that involved the infallibility of the human reason as a judge of all truth. We find this type prevailing not only in the camp of the unbelieving rationalist, but also in that of the orthodox believer. The agnostic is one who repudiates the infallibility of reason, but goes farther and proclaims its absolute in-

PHILOSOPHY OF EELIGION 29

competence in the field of transcendent realities. The highest efforts of reason are only pseudo- conceptions, to use Herbert Spencer's phrase, and leave the object absolutely untouched and mysterious, if it exist at all. Now, what I con- ceive to be the modicum of truth in agnosticism is its denial of the absolute claims which ration- alism makes in behalf of reason. The agnostic says to the rationalist: ''Your claim that rea- son is able to grasp and define all truth is one that cannot be maintained. There is always something that transcends your highest concep- tions. You will find that your efforts to define the object you call God, not only fail, but that they contradict each other. In the effort to grasp the transcendent in its conceptions, rea- son falls into contradiction with itself. This proves conclusively that the reason of man has no faculty for representing the transcendent re- ality in its forms of thought. ' '

Admitting here that the plea of the agnostic is valid against the extreme position of the rationalist, the point which I wish to make here is that the denial of the infallibility of reason as an organ of truth does not carry with it the agnostic claim of its absolute incompetence. To confine our consideration to the field of relig- ious conceptions, when we affirm, from the in- adequacy of our conceptions to grasp and de- fine the transcendent, their absolute incompe- tence to determine it in any degree or sense, we ordinarily do so ostensibly on the basis of

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the claim that the finite cannot grasp the infi- nite. But the agnostic conclusion of the abso- lute incompetence of reason, has hidden in it the subtle assumption that there is no intelligi- ble or possible link between the finite and the infinite. It is clear, however, that, were this the case, it would be strictly impossible to pass in thought from the finite to the infinite. In short, it would be impossible for the finite rea- son of man to form any conception of the in- finite. Such a conclusion is flatly in contradic- tion to the facts of experience. The fact that we not only conceive the infinite, but assert it as the necessary correlate of the finite, proves the distinction to be only relative and not ab- solute. We will detect the linkage, I think, be- tween the finite and the infinite if we take two other analogous conceptions, those of the im- perfect and the perfect. There is very clearly a link between the concepts of the imperfect and the perfect of such a character that the concept of the imperfect will itself suggest that of the perfect. Also an intelligent insight into what constitutes the imperfection of the one will give us an intelligible conception of the pathway along which perfection is to be sought. This will be perfectly consistent with the recognition of the fact that the idea of perfection is beyond the complete grasp of the human reason. For, admitting this, the way of approximation is still open, and our conceptions, while not valid as absolute definitions, will be valid as approxima-

PHILOSOPHY OF EELIGION 31

tions. They will serve as guide-boards on the way to the goal which can never be completely attained.

Without pursuing this line any further at present, let us return to the main thread of the argument. We had reached the conclusion in our former lecture that the foundation of our religious consciousness is the sense or percep- tion of the presence of a transcendent object, and that this perception, coalescing with the ontological motive of all human activity, leads to the translation of this primary datum into the postulate of the transcendent being as the ground-spring or primary root of our existence. The problem then was by what process does the noetic activity further define this ground-being ? And at that point we were led into the wide digression which we have made, not unprofit- ably, I may hope, in our criticism of anthropo- morphism. Returning to the main question, we may take, as the outcome of our discussion up to this point, the conclusion that, at the basis of our religious consciousness, rests the postu- late of the transcendent ground-spring of our existence. This is deeper than analogy, and is a deliverance of the primary motives of our nature. Now, it is when we inquire what form the noetic activity takes in the further determi- nation of our religious conceptions that we come upon the place and function of analogy. We are able here to distinguish two lines of funda- mental analogy. (1) The analogy of type, and

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(2) the analogy of attribute. In both, there is involved the point of departure from our o^vn self-hood as revealed in self-consciousness. Briefly stated, we proceed to the further deter- mination of the primary datum of religion by the employment of analogies drawn from our own self-tjTDe of reality. It is important, then, that our conception of self -hood, the form of be- ing revealed in self-consciousness, should be adequate. "Without going into details, which will be reserved for a subsequent lecture, let me have your indulgence while I make a condensed statement of what I believe to constitute the outlines of an adequate conception of self. We know that empiricism, limiting itself to the plural world of phenomena, is able to find in consciousness only the existence of a transient and perishable self. There are states of unity, identity and perdurability, it is true, but these are states among other states, and pass in the perpetual flux of coming into and passing out of existence. But empiricism finds only a pass- ing, unreal self, while it denies the existence of a real, perdurable self. From the standpoint of a rational self-consciousness, however, we are led to distinguish between two selves, or, rather, two orders of self, the empirical, which is plural, fragmentary and perishable, and the deeper, real or rational self that is unitary, stable and perdurable. A deeper criticism of self-consciousness always reveals this real self as the ground and ideal of the empirical self

PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 33

that is perishable. Ontologically viewed, the life of the subject of experience may be repre- sented as a process in which there is a perpetual effort to pass from the flux and transciency of the empirical to the stability and unity of the real and rational. The real self is, therefore, both the ground of the empirical self and its ontological goal. It is to the self, viewed from this rational and ontological point of view as unitary, stable, unbroken and perdurable, that we apply the name soul. The soul may then be identified with the real self, or real subject of experience, and may be regarded as the uni- tary and perdurable subject which maintains its identity in and through the flux of empirical change. Now, I will ask you to let this brief characterization serve our purposes provision- ally at this stage of the discussion. From the point of view of the real self, the whole effort of our experience is, as I have said, to find something permanent, stable and unitary as its ground. This being true, it will be clear that the deepest analogies we can employ will be those we derive from the conception of our real and deeper selves, and these I propose to con- sider under the two divisions above indicated.

In the first place, how does the analogy of self or the soul enable us to define, in any sense, the primary being? Well, if we consider that the soul stands related to experience as its uni- tary ground, as well as its ontological goal or ideal, we have the deepest reason for affirming

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the same or its analogue of the primary and transcendent spring of existence. We say, us- ing this deep analogy, that the primary being is the unitary ground of existence, as well as its ontological goal. We say, using the same an- alogy, that this being is one of our ovm type; that is, of the soul-type ; in that, we assert of it the same relation to the total plurality of the phenomenal world that we assert as existing be- tween the soul and the plurality of the world of consciousness. Without further elaborating the argument here, we may say that the use of this analogy enables the noetic activity to define the conception of a being that is generically of the same type as the soul in us. But, in the use of this analogy, it must not be forgotten that the ground-being will, by virtue of its transcend- ence, be qualitatively different, in some sense, from our soul type. Can we determine any sense here in which that may be true? Well, if we consider the soul as a real subject of ex- perience, we will find that the notion of a real subject is not consistent with a passive, but only with an active agent. If so, the least, and perhaps the most, we can ascribe to it is what we call self-activity. But that which is self- active may not be self -existent. It may have the principle of self-activity in it, and may yet be conscious that it does not contain the ground of its own existence. This will enable us to de- termine a distinction, — for the transcendent be- ing, as the ground of all existence, will be not

PHILOSOPHY OF EELIGION 35

only self-active but self-existent, and, as such, will be qualitatively different from the soul.

Here, I apprehend, we have come upon a matter of importance for, if we study the onto- logical proof of God's existence, as developed by Anselm and adopted by Spinoza, we will find that, in principle, it is the identification of God with the self-existent, and the assertion that the existence of the self -existent is self-evident. It is only the existence of derived things that needs to be proved. The spring of all existence exists necessarily. Analogy enables us, then, to ascribe the type of our own soul to the tran- scendent being, with the qualification that this being is not simply self-active but self-existent, containing in it the principle of all existence.

Our second point involves the use of analogy in the field of the attributes of this being. The first group of attributes we will consider are what have been called metaphysical: namely, the attributes of infinitude, absoluteness, om- nipotence, omniscience, omnipresence and etern- ity. Taking these attributes as a whole, I think, when we affirmed of God the attribute by virtue of which He transcends man in existence, we have affirmed the principle of all this group of attributes. If God is self-existent; that is, if He holds the springs of being within Himself, He is thereby infinite, free from finite limits; absolute, free from existential dependence ; om- nipotent, free from the restrictions of derived existence; omniscient, that is, the subject of a

36 PHILOSOPHY OF KELIGION

knowledge that is commensurate with all ex- istence; omnipresent, that is, present to all re- ality by virtue of being the principle of all ex- istence ; eternal, by virtue of His self-existence, which antedates time and grounds its series. It seems to be quite evident that, when we have once grasped the true principle of transcend- ence the application of the analogy of the self to the ground-being becomes clear.

Let us, then, take another group of attributes, which we may call the psychological. The re- ligious consciousness persists in ascribing thought and feeling and will to God, in spite of the prohibition of Spinoza and other great phi- losophers, who say that there is no warrant for saying that God either thinks or feels or wills in any sense that we can understand. Have we not in our possession a key that will open the way to a ray of light on this situation ? If God transcends our type in His self-existence, it is clear that His intellections, as well as His feel- ings and volitions, if we suppose Him to be the subject of such activities, will be commensurate with His self-existence. This will involve two conclusions regarding all these activities. They will be related to the whole of existence, and they will be related directly and immediately, since the principle of self-existence will be pres- ent in all existence. God's thinking will be, therefore, a function of the whole of reality; it will be all-including. The Divine intellection will also be immediate. Kant has the same

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thought in mind when he conceives an under- standing whose conceptions are immediately perceptive of the truth. We cannot, he says, determine whether such an understanding ex- ists or not. But its possibility cannot be de- nied, and, could we pass from the idea of God to His existence, we would then have sufficient grounds for asserting that this type of intellec- tion is real. The reason, then, why Kant is un- able to assert that this type of understanding is real, is mainly due to the fact that he is forced to leave the existence of God in doubt. In these discussions, we have escaped the dilemma of Kant by refusing to divorce the idea of God from the existential grounds out of which it arises. Taking the idea of a perceptive under- standing as a type of the qualitative difference that must be recognized as existing between the divine intellection and its human analogue, the conclusion will be obvious that both gnosticism, which assumes the unqualified ability of the hu- man reason to grasp and define the nature of the divine intelligence; and agnosticism, which asserts the total inability of reason to form any conceptions of the divine, are alike false; — the one failing to realize the impossibility of form- ing an intelligent conception of self-existence, which is, nevertheless, the first datum of all ex- istence, and thus vitiating all its conclusions; the other failing to recognize the ability of the human reason to reach approximate conceptions of the divine attributes, which, though they are

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inadequate, point the way toward a limiting ideal and render its nature intelligible.

The last group of qualities we shall study brieliy in this connection are the moral, the ascription to God of the attributes of righteous- ness, holiness, justice, goodness and truthful- ness. We will find that the ground of discrimi- nating judgment here is the same as above. It is not worth while to pause on the question whether the conception of God involves moral attributes or not. An immediate necessary in- ference from the idea of God is that He is good. This springs immediately from the idea of per- fection involved in the very notion of God. But there is a still further reflection that is not so obvious. The idea of God, we have said, in- volves perfection, and the idea of God, as main- tained above, is that of the self-existent ground of all existence. The perfection of things will always be determined in the light of their first principle, which will fix their ideal limit. Hence God, as the self-existent principle of all exist- ence, will contain, in His own nature, the ideal and standard of perfection. It is the conception of God as the self-existent principle of all exist- ence that involves perfection as an immediate necessity. Applying this conclusion to the moral attributes, we will find that thev must all be conceived under the idea of perfection. This will involve the same limits as above. The righteousness, holiness, justice and truthfulness of God may be represented intelligently under

PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 39

the analogies of our own corresponding human attributes, provided we take our highest con- ceptions of these attributes as approximations which give us intelligent guidance, but never en- able us to fully grasp the ideal.

We have now proceeded far enough to enable us to draw some conclusions in regard to the ground terms of religious knowledge. The re- ligious consciousness, in common with all pri- mary forms of consciousness, gives some imme- diate deliverance, which serves as a datum for the superstructure which the noetic faculty pro- ceeds to erect upon it. We have seen that the primary datum of the religious consciousness is the sense or perception of a transcendent pres- ence, which the noetic faculty, following the ontological motive of grounding, translates into the notion of the self-existent ground and spring of all existence. This is the intuition out of which springs that sense of dependence, the feeling that he is not self-existent, but has his being rooted in soil deeper than his own, which is so fundamental and which so domi- nates his religious consciousness. With this perception of the self-existent ground of its ex- istence as a primary datum, we have seen how the noetic faculty, proceeding, not from any an- alogy of sense, but from the analogy of man's own self-conscious being, as revealed by the deeper processes of his consciousness, defines this primal being as the unitary, stable and per- durable ground of all existence. In other words,

40 PHILOSOPHY OF EELIGION

it is defined in terms that are fundamental to the soul-type of self-conscious being, and as a being of the same type.

At this point, we had occasion to criticise the tendency of anthropomorphism to represent this being as such a being as ourselves writ large, and the refutation of anthropomorphism was founded on the claim that it misinterpreted the transcendence of this being as being only quantitative, whereas quantitative transcend- ence has no significance for religion. The true sense in which the primal being transcends we found to be qualitative, and to arise out of the fact that the ground-spring of existence is self-existent. This qualitative difference, as we saw, lifts the ground-being above the plane of the human soul, and makes it impossible to define it in unmodified categories of the human type. This, as we saw, gave rise to the issue between gnosticism, which asserts the omni- science of reason, and agnosticism, which af- firms its total incompetence in the field of re- ligious conceptions. We met this issue with our doctrine of approximating conceptions, which, while they do not enable us to fully grasp or define the transcendent object, yet render it in- telligible, and represent the true pathway to- ward the ideal. Finally, we have seen how the qualitative transcendence of the ground-being, having its principle in the self-existence of that being, must be taken into consideration in shap- ing our efforts to determine the attributes of the

PHILOSOPHY OF EELIGION 41

ground-being. In employing our own funda- mental conceptions of the attributes of being, as ascriptions to the divine being, we have found it necessary, in all cases, to take into account the qualitative transcendence of the divine na- ture, and to treat our conceptions accordingly. We proceed, now, to another phase of re- ligious knowledge, which arises out of an ap- parent conflict of opposite tendencies in the de- velopment of religious ideas. We have seen that two forces operate in determining our re- ligious conceptions, and, more specifically, our idea of God. The one we may call the self- analogy, which acts to define the type and at- tributes of God in terms of our own conscious being. This force, acting alone and unmodified, would lead to the extreme of anthropomorph- ism on the one hand, and that of gnosticism on the other. Proceeding on this analogy alone, God would be completely knowable and defin- able, either in the lower terms of anthropo- morphism, or in the higher terms of an omnis- cient reason. But we have found that there is another and more subtle force which acts in an opposite way, either consciously or unconscious- ly, in shaping our religious conceptions. This is the force of qualitative transcendence, which constrains us to recognize a qualitative differ- ence of type and attribute, and apparently un- does what has already been accomplished by the use of the self -analogy. Now, the sense of this opposition, when first apprehended, will, with-

42 PHILOSOPHY OF KELIGION

out doubt, put the thinker into a sore dilenuna. He will be strongly driven to commit himself either to the side of transcendence, or to that of the self-analogy, and, in either case, will manifest a characteristic tendency in the field of religious thought. If the moment of tran- scendence fertilizes in his mind, he will become a partisan of the Eleatic gnostic, who puts God so far removed from the world of plurality and change, that He is virtually isolated and lost in His unapproachable oneness and immutabil- ity. It is only a short step from this conclusion to the modern Spencerian type of agnosticism that denies the power of reason to conceive such a being, and hides it absolutely behind the veil of mystery. If, however, it is the self -analogy that fertilizes in our thinking, the sense of transcendence will fall into the background, and we will seem to be in possession of a prin- ciple which renders God intelligible to us, but one that stamps our categories as adequate and our reason as competent to grasp God in our definitions, and reduce His nature to terms as definite as those of mathematics. Anthropo- morphism and dogmatic rationalism have a very close kinship and agree in asserting the self-sufi&ciency of their own categories to de- termine the idea of God. But the history of thought teaches us that dogmatic rationalism will meet criticism in the way, which will con- vict it of transgressing the limits of a possible knowledge and working out formal demonstra-

PHILOSOPHY OF EELIGION 43

tions that have no sound major premises ; while the lion in the way that will confound anthropo- morphism is humanism, which will convict it of the employment of purely human data to prove a super-human conclusion. For human- ism is the logical outcome of anthropomorph- ism, and follows strictly from the terms of the anthropomorphic logic.

Truly, the thought of man is thrown into a painful dilemma by this conflict of opposite principles, neither of which he can repudiate or neglect without following into extravagance. Now, the real solution of the dilemma is to be found, I think, in recognizing the fact that we have come upon a dialectic of principles, which, when apart and unqualified, tend to contradic- tion and paradoxes, but, when kept together in the relation of mutual qualification, give rise to true and consistent conclusions. Let us con- sider, then, how the dialectic will operate in the genesis of true conceptions. Take, for example, the ascription of moral attributes to God. The difficulty here consists in the fact that we do not understand how morality can be ascribed to a being without subjecting him consciously to moral law. But this would make something else more primary than God, who would thus become a dependent being. The opposing prop- ositions which arise are (1) that God is not a moral being; (2) that He is moral and depend- ent, or subject to law. This is a sore dilemma from which thought has not been completely de-

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livered from Plato's time down to the present day. But is there no way out of it ? The dialec- tic will give us, at least, some help, and we may, perhaps, get a hint from Kant's perceptive un- derstanding. If we regard the opposition as a real dialectic, how will it help our difficulty ? In this way; while we regard our principles as operating on the same plane, they will be in contradiction ; whereas, if we do not proceed on this assumption, but recognize the possibility that we may be dealing with conceptions which belong to different levels, a way out of the di- lemma may appear. Now, if we scrutinize the two principles, that of transcendence and that of self -analogy, we will find reasons for regard- ing the principle of transcendence as occupying the higher level. The principle of self-analogy is clearly on our human level ; but transcendence is a category of the self-existent, and is, there- fore, above us. Naturally, then, in a dialectic, the higher will be the checking principle of the lower. To return to our example, the ascription of moral attributes to God: the principle of self-analogy will lead us to ascribe morality to God, but here we come on the difficulty that, if we ascribe the type of our human morality to God, we bring Him under law, and there is something more ultimate than Himself. Shall we say, then, that God is not moral! The prin- ciple of transcendence would seem to suggest a better way. Being a principle on a higher level, it is not in contradiction with self-analogy.

PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 45

Rather it is a principle of delimitation, and the kind of delimitation it enforces will only appear in the light of the specific character of the prin- ciple itself. Now, we have already concluded that the root-notion of transcendence in this re- gard is self-existence. God transcends the soul of man by virtue of his self -existence, and this means that he has the first roots of existence in himself. Applying this to the case in hand, we will get a hint of where the difficulty lies. We were not troubled by the ascription of morality to God, for to deny Him morality would seem to be a privation ; but what did trouble us was its seeming implication of the divine subordination to law. But the transcendence of God implies His antecedence to law; that, as the self-exist- ent, the springs of law are in His own being. If we ascribe morality to God, we must, there- fore, do it in the transcendent sense, which will enable Him to be moral without being con- sciously subject to law. Is this at all thinkable I It is here, I think, that Kant's suggestion of a perceptive understanding will give us a hint. Kant meant, by a perceptive understanding, one that, like perception, will constitute its object or content immediately, and not by a mediate process. This must be the sense of Spinoza when he regards thought as perceptive. In other words, what Kant and Spinoza mean to do is to ascribe the creative function to the under- standing ; the power to create the objects of its own intellection. Applying this insight to the

46 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

case in hand, if we ascribe morality to God, we must do so creatively. God will be the prime author of the moral, and it will exist because it has its first-springs in His nature.

What, now, would be the consciousness of such a being in connection with his own activi- ties, either intellectual or moral? Would it be that of a being who is consciously related to that which, in its roots, transcends Him, and to which He is subjected in the sense of law? Or, would it be the relation of free creativeness, in which the dominating consciousness is that of authorship, and not of law or dependence? Very clearly, the latter.

We have here come upon the terms, as I think, for the solution of our dilemma. The dialectic will operate in this way. It will say, in its moment of transcendence: You cannot ascribe morality to God in the ordinary sense, for that would subordinate Him to law ; but He is self-existent and is the source of all law. You must, therefore, modify your conception of the moral, and conceive it as related to a con- sciousness of free creativeness, in which the thought of the right or true does not bring its author consciously into subordination to the law of something that is objective to him, but is, rather, creative of the right or true. That the divine thinking is creative ; that the divine will- ing is constitutive, — this is the requirement of the principle of transcendence, and the dialectic will work out in the following manner. When

PHILOSOPHY OF KELIGION 47

we represent God as moral, following the an- alogies of our own being, the other term of the dialectic will lead us to qualify this judgment with the touch of transcendence, so that we will be led to admit that the morality of the divine nature cannot be altogether like our own, which subordinates us to law. It must, rather, be that of a free, creative being, whose nature is its prime source, and whose thought creates the moral law of which he thinks. Whether this can be made wholly intelligible or not is a problem to which we will be led to answer both yes and no : No, if, by wholly intelligible, is meant that our categories are adequate, and enable us to fully grasp the conception of creative morality ; for it is clear that we are here dealing with terms that are above us; but yes, if we mean that under the stimulus of the sense of tran- scendence itself we may qualify our concep- tions, and treat them as merely approximations. "We will learn the lesson that things, in order to be intelligible, do not require to be wholly graspable or definable; otherwise, our knowl- edge would be much more limited than it is. But, in the field of religious ideas, we have learned that, although our reason must abdicate its claim to omniscience and full competence, yet it is possible for us, by the use of our con- ceptions, as terms of approximation, to render intelligible that which, nevertheless, transcends our powers to fully grasp or define. In this we express, I think, the truth of our most adequate,

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as well as our most reverent, religious con- sciousness, which is not willing to surrender the claim that we may know God in an intimate way, while, at the same time, it would regard as a kind of blasphemy the claim that He may be brought completely within the limits of human thought. Mystery is a necessary factor in a true, religious experience.

Lecture III. The Rational Type of Religious

Knowledge

Before entering on the principal topic of this lecture, which is a critical treatment of the rational type of religious knowledge, I wish to draw a deduction or two from the conclusions we have already reached. We saw how the de- velopment of true and adequate conceptions in religion involves the exercise of a dialectic by which opposing principles modify each other in bringing about satisfactory results. I propose to show, in the beginning of this lecture, the v^alue of the dialectic in criticising certain laws that have been proposed as expressing the real tendency of history in the development of re- ligious conceptions. One of these laws is that laid down by Herbert Spencer. We find the data for his law in his procedure in the philos- ophy of the unknowable. Quoting, with ap- proval, the reasonings of Sir William Hamilton and Dean Mansel, to the effect that the idea of God is one that altogether transcends the con-

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ceptions of men ; that, therefore, human reason is wholly incompetent to form any true concep- tions of God, Mr. Spencer adduces additional reasons of his own for accepting the doctrine of nescience. The peculiarity of his doctrine is that he affirms dogmatically the existence of the transcendent reality while maintaining that its nature is wholly beyond knowledge. This he regards as a common deliverance of both science and religion, and he puts forth the dog- ma of the existence of an unknowable power as the ground of reconciliation between science and religion. Now, on this basis, Mr. Spencer is able to see that the tendency of human think- ing from the beginning has been to pass from a stage in which God has been altogether clothed in the attributes of man to an ideal stage in which he is regarded as wholly transcendent and drops into absolute mystery. Logically and historically, the passage is from crude anthropomorphism to pure transcendence, the process being characterized as the gradual stripping off of human attributes till nothing remains, and reason, recognizing its incompe- tence, gives up the attempt to characterize and restrain negation. This is the single law which Mr. Spencer regards as valid in the field of the development of religious ideas. At the oppo- site end of the scale, we find the position of the humanists, who deny all transcendence and supernaturalism, and seek to reduce religion to purely human and knowable terms. We may

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take Auguste Comte as the classic representa- tive of humanism. The foundation of his re- ligious philosophy is to be found in his doctrine of the law of the three stages in the develop- ment of human conceptions; the religious, the metaphysical and the scientific. Comte sees the race passing through the three stages of mental gro^vth, beginning with the lowest stage, the religious, when man peopled the world with superior beings like himself; passing on to the metaphysical, in which the place of these beings is taken by occult and abstract entities, like that of substance; to a final stage, called the scien- tific, in which the place of the religious and metaphysical entities is taken by the notions of natural causation and scientific law. This, to Comte, is the final stage, and the only one that represents the truth. It might be supposed that, having reached this conclusion, Comte would propose the abolition of religion, but he pursues a more logical and rational method. He proposes to preserve religion, but to erect it on scientific foundations. Now, two ways are open to such a project, either that of naturalism or that of humanism. But Comte, being most vitally interested in the social sciences, natur- ally chose the alternative of humanism. We are not interested here in the details of Comte 's system, but only in the principle on which it was founded. The scientific conception of religion commits it to a knowable and verifiable founda- tion, and eliminates all ideas of the super-

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natural or the transcendent. The idea of man and his destiny must, therefore, be taken as the central object of religion. Humanism, as a re- ligion, will involve the worship of this ideal of humanity, which may be symbolized as Comte symbolized it, or left without any symbol. The principle is that of pure humanism, and has in it the logical denial of transcendence in its roots. Now, it is quite clear that the Spencer- ian law and that of Comte in Humanism are contradictory. Standing as they do in hostile opposition, they put reason in a dilemma, and the truth of one involves the falsehood of the other, yet it is clear that neither, standing alone, expresses the full truth of the situation. Each seems to require the checking and limiting in- fluence of the other in order to check erratic tendencies. That Spencer's law requires modi- fication is evident not only from the refusal of reason to accept absolute mystery as a finality, but also, and this is the more significant con- sideration, because it is logically impossible that an existential judgment should assert nothing but abstract existence. The that and the what of things are strictly not separable, and Mr. Spencer proves this in his effort to purge his judgment of the existence of the ultimate power from any kind of characterization. In fact, when we come to analyze, we stir up a whole nest of qualifications, which come in unavoid- ably with the judgment of existence. I shall not delay you in pointing out any of these since

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they are not in dispute, but will take them as evidence of the impossibility of separating ex- istence from nature. If we know the existence of something, we have some knowledge of its kind. The law is, therefore, fallacious in so far as it asserts a tendency toward absolute mys- tery. Turning to the law of humanism, we find it open to the same criticism on the oppo- site side. The dilemma here arises from the at- tempt to exclude transcendence in a judgment that is strictly human in its scope and limita- tions. It is as though a rope that is ten feet long should assert that there is nothing beyond the ten-foot limit, on the ground that its measuring limit is ten feet. It forgets that its ability to determine the limits of its own meas- uring power depends on its possession of a standard of measurement that transcends its own limits. In other words, the logic of reason is such that a boundary, in order to be fixed as a fact of knowledge, must be overleaped and viewed from the other side. All limitation is, therefore, relative, and the Comptean, in order to restrict the intelligence of man to purely hu- manistic boundaries, must appeal to trans- cendence as a necessary datum of his judgment. It is clear, therefore, that the attempt to elimi- nate the datum of transcendence absolutely from our judgments of limitation, involves a subtle self-contradiction and is unsound. The exclusion is relative only and presupposes a

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larger insight that reality flows out and beyond the arresting points of all our judgments.

The conclusion of this critical analysis will make it clear, I think, that neither of these so- called laws, taken in its abstract independence, expresses for us a true principle in the develop- ment of religious ideas. That either law should work out true results, it must be checked by its opposite. The true and adequate con- ception of the logic that avoids contradictions and obtains rational results, is that of a dia- lectic of opposites, such as we have described, in which the unchartered opposition of one- sided forces is overcome, and the unchecked ten- dencies of pure humanism are qualified by the insight of transcendence, while, reciprocally, the tendency of transcendence to break with the boundaries of the finite, is checked by the insight of humanism. The principle of the dia- lectic supplies, therefore, a more adequate and rational law of the development of religious ideas that is exemplified by the real history of religions. We do not find in the highest relig- ions, like Judaism and Christianity, that the tendency is to magnify either the principle of transcendence or that of self-analogy to the ex- clusion of the other. On the contrary, we find in them a clearer movement of the dialectic, and a higher and purer exhibition of both prin- ciples, than in any of the lower types of re- ligion.

We pass, now, to the consideration of the

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mediate and rational type of religious knowl- edge. Now, in distinguishing between the im- mediate and the mediate forms of religious knowledge, I do not wish to be understood as claiming that the two are separable. In fact, they are not, and the noetic activity will reveal in its earliest and most elementary movements, the germs of mediation. The distinction is largely one of aspects, and, in fact, there is no stage of mentality in which an absolute separa- tion is possible. But while, heretofore, the emphasis has been placed on processes which are dominantly immediate, we are about to shift the scene and invite you to the study of an aspect of religious knowledge that is dominant- ly mediate. I will designate this aspect as the ideo-rational ; as that aspect of knowledge in which reason performs its most characteristic function. Before proceeding, however, it is im- portant, in the interest of clarity, that we should point out one or two distinctions. You have heard of the distinction between two phases of reason, which are called abstract and concrete, and you are, no doubt, not unfamiliar with the fact that, in some quarters, a fashion has sprung up of speaking of the abstract rea- son with a certain disrespect. Now, while I, myself, do not share in this disrespect, it is my purpose here to draw the distinction in order that I may make my appeal to the concrete rea- son. What we mean by the abstract reason, when we speak with discrimination, is reason in

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its formal activity, as it expresses itself in the logical processes. This activity is most clearly revealed in judgments and inferences. A judg- ment is, briefly, a device by which we think two contents of our world together that were, here- tofore, disjoined, in the relation of subject and predicate, so that the matter of the predication becomes a qualifier of the subject. What we call inference is simply an extension of this thinking together process beyond the limit of single judgments. This inferential process may be either immediate or mediate, as, when we infer from the judgment John Smith is honest, that John Smith is not a rascal. This would represent the immediate form. But, if the ques- tion be whether John Smith be a cultivated man or not, then, without the means of testing the question directly, if we happen to know that John Smith has had a college education, then we argue, mediately, that John Smith hav- ing enjoyed the advantages of a college edu- cation is a cultivated man. Here our inference takes the technical form of the syllogism in which our major premise is that a college- educated man is a cultivated man. Using the mediating term, college-educated, we are able to so connect Smith's case with the major that the conclusion follows as a third judgment. Stated this way, it will be clear that what we call the formal or abstract activity of reason does not deserve our reprobation, but is nearly as close to us as breathing, and forms the hands and feet of our intellectual processes. It is

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hardly deserving of the epithet abstract. What I call the concrete reason is not something dif- ferent from this and separable from it, but, rather, the same activity viewed in the light of its inner, and what I have already called its on- tological motive. Let us consider, a little fur- ther, the activity on its formal side. In this aspect, as a thinking together part of a world of content that is as yet separate and plural- istic, it is a movement that seeks to remedy the detachment and plurality of its world by bring- ing the fragments together into a unity. It does this by means of a common quality in the two contents of a judgment ; by means of a com- mon or mediating term in the case of mediate inference. This common term or linkage is the principle by which reason organizes the parts of its world into a unity. It is by this means that it overcomes the immediated plurality of the materials with which it deals; by which it cures the instability of the parts by introducing stability; by which it overcomes the perisha- bility of passing and disconnected phenomena by fixing them in an order that is unbroken and permanent. On its formal side then, we find that reason is a principle that organizes the plural and disconnected elements of its world into an organized order and unity. This formal aspect of reason, however, while it may be con- sidered abstractly, is not separable from a deeper and more hidden aspect by which it is related to the foundations of reality. We are

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indebted for this insight to the philosopher Leibnitz, who distinguished the formal aspect of reason and its principle of contradiction; or, in the reformed logic which he proposed, iden- tity, from its more fundamental and real as- pect, the principle of which he characterized as that of ground and consequent. This was a fertile distinction, which was overlooked by Leibnitz' successors, and led to the attempt to regard the formal activity of reason and its principle of identity as constituting its whole legitimate use. The result was the drying up of the springs of living knowledge, and the per- version of philosophy into a species of formal and dogmatic rationalism, which found its ne- mesis in a desert of arid abstractions and pure- ly formalistic demonstrations. Dogmatic ra- tionalism may be taken as the inevitable type of philosophy, which will result from the ele- vation of the formal principle of reason into the sole organ of thought. If we ask, now, what deeper and more adequate conception of reason is possible, we may appeal to Leibnitz for our answer. Leibnitz saw clearly that, if we regard reason as a purely formal activity, it will cease to be an organ of truth, and we will be commit- ted to some empirical principle for the fruitful increase of knowledge. But empiricism, in its scepticism of reason, and its exclusive adhesion to sense, falls into blindness, as Hume showed later, and loses itself in a morass. The only means of vindicating reason from empirical scepticism, and of making it a real organ of

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truth, was, in Liebnitz's view, to claim for it a deeper function than the formal, and a princi- ple that would be synthetic rather than purely analytic. It has not been sufficiently recognized that Leibnitz has here anticipated the famous distinction of Kant, although it did not, in his case, lead on to the discovery of the categories. The principle of the deeper and more concrete exercise of reason, Leibnitz finds in the notion of ground and consequent. To state the matter in a form that will bring out the Leibnitzian in- sight, the formal activity of reason is super- ficial, and, when abstracted from its deeper mo- tive, ceases to be an organ of knowledge. But this separation should not be made since the formal activity can be kept in vital touch with the real only if we relate it to a deeper activity, in the light of which it becomes the formal elaborative aspect of the process of real knowl- edge. Now, this deeper activity of reason is one that springs from an insight which may be ex- pressed as follows: Nothing is rationally ex- plained that is not grounded in something that has more reality than itself. In short, the in- sight into the qualitative transcendence of a real grounding principle was the great contri- bution of Leibnitz at this point. The formal statement of this insight is to be found in the phrase ratio-sufficiens, and Leibnitz expresses in this form the rational demand that nothing can be regarded as adequately explained that has not been referred to its ground. It is evi-

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deit, however, that such a statement will be mere commonplace if it is not conceived in the light of the insight to which I have referred ; — the fact that the sufficient ground of anything is something that qualitatively transcends it. It then becomes a most significant and fruitful principle since it forbids the mind to rest satis- fied with any explanation of a thing that does not refer it to a qualitatively transcendent ground. This will not only motive a synthetic activity that looks outside and beyond the pres- ent matter for the grounding fact that will ex- plain it, but it also institutes an unending pro- cess. The quest for transcendent grounding never ends until the point is reached where the whole of existence is seen to have its final ground in the self-existent. It becomes evident at this point that the deeper activity of reason, which we have been considering, is connected with what has been designated in a former lec- ture as the ontological motive of reason; the motive which leads it on from point to point in the search for truth until it relates all reality to the foundation of the world. We are ready to see now that this ontological motive springs from an insight, and that the insight fixes as the goal of all rational activity, the point where existence will find its grounding in the self-ex- istent. It is from the point of view of this in- sight that we are able to understand what I have called the ontological motive of reason. And since, as we have contended, the rational

GO PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

motive is present in the most direct and imme- diate form of the noetic activity, we will be pre- pared for the contention here that this inner ontological motive of reason will be found oper- ative in the lowest stages of perception, as well as in the highest exercises of rationality Whether we consider the selective process by which certain experiences are organized into objective form: or the method by which the con- cept of the object is formed as synthetizing a plurality of otherwise disconnected qualities into the unity of a substance ; whether we con- sider the appeal that is made in every judgment of identity to an order that gathers up the frag- mentary and the perishing into the unitary and the permanent; or the mediating activity, by which the fragmentary parts of a plurality are further organized into a unitary and unbroken system, we find that every stage reveals the presence of this rational motive. The inner on- tological principle by which all mentality is actuated, which translates the whole noetic ac- tivity into a teleological process, is rational. The goal of the process is the rational require- ment of grounding, which, as the imminent mo- tive of all its stages, becomes explicit at the end in the requirement that all existence shall find its roots in that which is self-existent. Now, the position I wish to take here is that concep- tions and conclusions that are formed according to the principles of our nature, and are motived by the fundamental data of our whole experi-

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ence, will be able to bear the tests of existence as well as that of rational soundness. In gen- eral, it is a false deduction that separates the considerations of existence and nature. To be sure there are some regions of abstractions into which human reason is tempted to enter where the distinction is pertinent, and we need to bring our conclusions back to the test of existen- tial conditions ; but, after all, the main guaran- tee of all our results will consist in the fact that they have been reached in accordance with the fundamental motives and conditions of our cognitive or thinking processes. The scientific mind does not burden itself with the task of proving the reality of its world, provided its conclusions bear the test of phenomena, and are a satisfactory answer to the questions it has asked; nor does the artist trouble himself about the existential value of his creations, pro- vided they realize for him the highest standards of beauty. It is only when the artistic mind begins to aberrate from these standards, and to produce what cannot be reconciled with the ideals of beauty, that the question of its truth to reality will be raised. This is due to the fact that there is such a thing as artistic per- ception, which brings the mind into direct rela- tion with first-hand facts ; a perception in which all men participate in a measure. Otherwise, there would be no organ in man to which the artist could appeal. But this common organ is raised to a higher power in the mind of the

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artist, and will open a field of perceptions to him that is not open to the ordinary man. So long, however, as the productions of the artistic genius are able to make their appeal to the, per- haps dormant, artistic perceptions of the aver- age mind, and to arouse in it a sense of appre- ciation for that which transcends its own range of intuitions, while appealing to something in itself that is akin to the highest, the question of the correspondence of the artist's concep- tions with reality need not be raised. Applying this conclusion to the problem of religious knowledge, I would lay down, at this point, the following proposition : If it he true, as we have endeavored to prove in these lectures, that the religious consciousness of man is an organ that brings the mind of man into first-hand and per- ceptive relations with existential realities, and, if it he further true, as ive have endeavored to prove, that the rational motive at the heart of the whole noetic activity has its roots in the pri- mary religious consciousness; in its original datum, the sense of the presence of a transcen- dent and grounding reality; and if it he true, as we have also sought to prove, that this inner motive of the noetic activity develops into the notion of ground, which is the ideal of the tvhole reasoning process; then tve have reasons that are sufficient for concluding that the religious consciousness, like the artistic, for example, is an organ of hnoivledge where judgments when reached, in accordance with motives and data

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that are fundamental to it, will have epistemo- logical value.

The bearing of this proposition on the mod- ern criticism of the so-called proofs of the ex- istence of God will, I think, be obvious. The classical criticism is that of Kant, and the verve of it will be found in his critique of the onto- logical proof. The method of this proof con- sists in first separating the conceptual process, in which the idea of God is developed, from the data that connect conception with existence. It is then possible, as Kant does, to concede all the intrinsic rational force that is claimed for the idea by its authors, while, at the same time, putting in the plea that the question of exist- ence is not thereby affected. This will be be- yond cavil if you study Kant 's reasoning. The idea of God, he contends, is formed according to the standards and requirements of reason. It is rationally without flaw, and embodies what is necessarily involved in a rationally complete and satisfactory system of being. But this does not even bear directly on the question of ex- istence. At the outset, the question of existence has been so completely separated from that of nature that an impassable gulf yawns between them, so that, how^ever cogent the idea of God may be, it can have no bearing on the problem of existence. Moreover, the gap is so wide and absolute that no credential can pass over from existence to qualify in any sense the idea. I hope I do not exaggerate when I say that a

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situation like the one that Kant has created seems to be so strained and artificial as to de- stroy the possibility of continued credence. In a procedure with which we are perfectly fa- miliar, we are in the habit of testing our judg- ments by bringing them before the tribunal of standards that are germane to the matter that is being tested. It does not occur to the sculp- tor to apply the rules of surveying to his statue, nor will the legislator appeal to the laws of poetry. Every subject-matter has standards that are germane, and, when these are satis- fied, the question of reality has been answered. Now, the spring of the difficulty mth Kant will be found, I think, in an initial assumption he makes with regard to existence. Kant was al- ways more than half an empiricist in some of his conceptions, and, in that of existence, he was entirely so. The senses supply to him the only type of existence. That which does not phenomenalize in some physical order or time or space cannot be really existent. But man's real self and God have no such phenomenal character : they cannot, therefore, be proved to really exist. This being true, however convinc- ing the conception of God as an unphenomenal being may be, it will not bear the application of the only standard of existential reality within the limits of our knowledge. God cannot be af- firmed, therefore, as a real being. From this point of view, it will not be difficult to see that Kant's conclusion about the ontological proof

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was foregone. God cannot be said to really exist because He cannot be affirmed to exist as a phenomenal reality. Let us, however, refuse to commit ourselves to the empirical dogma that limits existential reality to the sense form. For this, if we recall what has gone before, we will have ample justification. Rather, man will have as many types of reality as he has primary in- tuitions, and we have made it evident, I think, that the intutition of the transcendent is pri- mary. A rational doctrine of self -consciousness will reveal a type of self -reality that is not con- formed to the sense-type. When we refuse to honor the assumption of empiricism that the sense-type of existence is the sole criterion of reality, we have broken the barrier that sepa- rates off the noumenal or the non-sensible from possible knowledge. Anything that is know- able has real existence. Taking our stand, then, that there are as many knowable types of real existence as there are forms of primary intui- tion, the whole of our previous discussion may be taken as justification of the position that the religious type of being, that of a self-existent ground of all existence, is one of real existence. Its intuition is central in the religious conscious- ness, supplying the norm of its perceptions, and revealing to man the primary datum of relig- ious knowledge.

Let us, then, on this basis, make an effort to reconstruct the ontological proof. The claim that is common to all the exponents of the on-

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tological proof is that the existence of God is necessarily involved in his conception, provided this is able to bear the tests of a real idea of reason. Few of the ontologists, however, have fully realized the true significance of their own assumption. Descartes, for example, treats ex- istence as an attribute which, when denied of the idea, leaves it imperfect as an idea. Kant de- nies that existence can be regarded as a quality, and proves that the idea of a hundred dollars will be the same whether it exists or not. Now, this is conclusive against Descartes, and, per- haps, against Anselm. But it is to the interest of the ontological proof to deny that existence can be treated as, in any ordinary sense, a quality. Analysis will show that the whole of the idea of an object is made up of qualities of kind. They do not say that an object is, but are wholly devoted to determining its what. This makes it clear that there is a sense in which existence is extra-ideal. But there are two different angles from which an idea may be viewed; the first and most obvious is that of its form. In this, it is an activity of ideation that is exclusively employed in determining qualities, and organizing them into a unitary conception. From this point of view, it will be called a rational conception. The second point of view is that of content or objective signifi- cance. Viewed from this angle, the idea will be considered as the qualification of some object, as summing up what we believe to be true of

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its nature. It is from this objective relation that the question of existence arises. We do not ask whether the idea exists; we know that it does ; but in its objective character, in its ref- erence to the system of reality is it true ? Does it tell the truth about real existence? It will be clear that this is a question not about an ad- ditional quality, but rather about the claim of the idea as a whole as to the real existence of its objective content. The non-existence of its content would not affect the idea as a plexus of qualities. The case may be put hypothetically. Whether God exists or does not exist as a real being does not affect, one way or another, the rational adequacy of his idea, provided this idea has been formed according to the canons of reason and is perfect. Why, then, is not the Kantian criticism justified! The answer will be two-fold. In the first place, the assumption of the Kantial critique that a real idea may be formed entirely apart from the processes of ex- istence is false and contrary to experience, as well as refuted by considerations we have al- ready advanced. This being true, the process by which a real idea is formed is brought into vital relations with existential processes, and will derive from them the presumption of real existence. Secondly, to recall a conclusion we have already reached, the claim of the suflfi- ciency of the idea of God to prove His real ex- istence does not rest on the mere existence of the object. If God be conceived to be merely

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existent like other finite objects, then the criti- cism of the old monk on Anselm's claim would be valid. The idea of a perfect island does not carry with it the necessary existence of the island. But Anselm might have replied that it was not mere existence but self-existence that is involved in the idea of God. He might have said that while the existence of all finite things is contingent and cannot be assumed as neces- sary; on the contrary, the self-existence of a non-contingent ground of all being is neces- sarily involved in the very conception of it. On this ground, Anselm would have been invincible, and the ontological proof, when rested on this ground, will prove itself able to resist all at- tacks.

Let us make sure of this conclusion before passing on to other considerations, for in this is involved the whole claim of the religious con- sciousness to have a world-theory of its own. We may, without further ado, dismiss Kant's divorce of real existence from the normal pro- cess by which ideas are formed, as unsound. Why, then, do we take the principle of ontology, the principle of the ontological proof, as the central nerve of the theoretic basis and claims of religion? We can answer this now without undue elaboration. Because ontology rests on the insight and postulate of self-existence. It takes as its primary datum the self-existence of the transcendent; that is, the self-existent ground of all reality, and it rests the cogency

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of its claim on the fact that, when we study the processes of the souPs activity, either intellec- tually, emotionally or volitionally, we find that they attach themselves to reality by means of their inner ontological motive, which forbids them to rest until they have reached a ground of existence that will supply the explanatory principle of the whole. The lesson of ontology is that the beginning and the end of existence is the same, and that the whole process of re- ality can be rendered intelligible and self -con- sistent by bringing it around to the point of its beginning. This is what we mean when, in re- ligious phraseology, we characterize God as the Alpha and Omega; the beginning and the end of all things. The detailed verification of this conclusion we cannot attempt here; it will be found in following out, into greater detail, the data and principles which we have not done much more than formulate in the preceding lec- tures of this course, and I wish to say right here that the necessary limits of these lectures have made them as conspicuous for what they have omitted as for what they have included in a brief and inadequate discussion.

There is one other topic on which I wish to dwell briefly before closing this lecture. The plea which we have made here for the theoretic rights of religion brings us into apparent col- lision at least, with the doctrine of Professor Hoffding and others, who deny this theoretic claim, and, as Professor Hoffding does, limit re-

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ligion to the conservation of values in the world. Leaving out of consideration the negative side of the doctrine, which we are the more justifi- able in doing in view of the plea already made for the theoretic claims of religion, I wish to consider for a few minutes the question whether the motive of value can be maintained at its maximum altogether apart from the question of the theoretic truth of the value-consideration itself. It is not claimed here that a relative separation of worth-considerations from those of theoretic truth may not be both possible and desirable. This is freely conceded, and the im- portance of the worth-consideration is insisted on. But the position I wish to argue here is that the distinction is only relative, and that value-judgments will be impoverished if the separation is made absolute. What Professor Hoff ding's conception of religion in its out- working is, I am unable to say, but we have an example of the divorce in the case of Kant's moral theology. Having determined that, theo- retically, the existence of God cannot be main- tained, while conceding the moral value of the conception, Kant works out a practical theol- ogy which consists in affirming God as a postu- late of the moral consciousness. The founda- tions of morality would be impaired, and the unconditional worth of its judgments would be weakened if the foundations were not secured by the postulate of a Supreme Being, whose care it will be to guarantee the moral order of

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the world. This, I think, is more creditable to Kant's heart than it is to his head; for, when challenged to say how a being, whose existence cannot be affirmed theoretically, can yet be the mainstay of our moral Judgments, he can only give this counsel: The idea of God is so valu- able that you cannot afford to deny His real ex- istence. Otherwise, morality would cease to be unconditionally valid : Act, therefore, as though God did exist, and you will be right. But, aside from the impossibility of acting with full as- surance on an assumption that we cannot know to be true, Kant's position is self-refuting ; for, if the unconditional worth of morality is the ground on which we are to postulate God as a real being, and, if the failure to make this postu- late impairs the unconditional value of moral- ity, then the worth of morality is impaired, and the full reason for making the postulate does not exist. We come upon a typical difficulty here in Kant; one that besets all attempts to make the separation between truth and value absolute. Professor Hoffding himself seems to recognize this when he regards it as a desider- atum, if it were possible, that some reconciling medium between the value judgment of religion and the truth judgment should be discovered. The doctrine here defended is that no absolute divorce is possible ; that the denial of the theo- retic claims of religion so diminishes its worth that it soon ceases to be a prime force in the life of humanity.

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Lecture IV. Synthesis of the Immediate and Mediate in Religious Knowledge

When Professor James characterizes relig- ious experience as introducing the mind of man into a new dimension of life, he is using more than a figure of speech. The statement is scien- tifically accurate, and, as I hope to show, is capable of demonstration. If we refer back to the conclusions we have reached about the pri- mary datum of the religious consciousness, it will appear that what we have claimed for the religious intuition is the revelation of a new di- mension of life. Let us consider in this light the whole original insight of the religious con- sciousness, that of a self-active subject of ex- perience in perceptual relations with the self- existent ground of its existence. If we say that the empirical conception of the self as a flowing stream, or as a series of perishable states, rep- resents the first dimension of conscious exist- ence, it will follow that the conception of the rational or real self as a unitary and perdur- able being will represent a two dimensional ex- istence. Now, we are in danger of being led astray here by space-analogies. Spatially con- ceived, the first dimension is a line, w^ile the second is a flat. Some mathematicians have in- dulged in curious speculations about the con- sciousness of a being who dwelt in flat land, and had no perception of a third dimension. This, however, is misleading, for we know that con-

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sciousness cannot be spatially determined, and, though there is some ground, as Bergson has shown, for using the linear dimension of space as a symbol of the mental series, there are none that would justify the employment of the flat in the same way. Our conscious experience re- veals to us the fact that the second or rational dimension is that by which the series of states is connected with an inner subjectivity, which relates all its parts to a common centre, through which relation they become elements in a uni- tary and perdurable experience. When, with the empiricist, we speak uni-dimensionally, there is only the linear analogy for our guid- ance, in the light of which the series is per- petually resolving into its plurality of states, and losing itself in the flux. But when we speak duo-dimensionally, we have a more adequate symbol, that of a subject-owned experience for our guidance in the light of which the serial states are transformed and take on a new sig- nificance. For the fact is not that simply a new region has been added to insight which gives the plus-sign of a new dimension. The fact is one of far greater significance. The light of the new dimension transforms the terms of the old, and imparts to them a character and signifi- cance they did not before possess. For it is evident that the individual terms that are con- nected by the serial linkage could not, as an ab- stract series, be aware of their serial character. This awareness will be the function of some

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consciousness that qualitatively transcends the series. This difficulty long ago gave trouble to John Stuart Mill, who found difficulty in con- ceiving how a series could be conscious of itself. The truth is that, from the insight of the duo- dimensional or self-consciousness, it is seen to be strictly impossible. The consciousness of two dimensions brings in a light that gives a new character to the terms of the series. They become aware of their serial character and of other members of the series, and, being perish- able, when they die are able to make the suc- ceeding state their residuary legatee. That this is no fancv has been shown bv James in his elaborately worked out doctrine of the perish- able self. According to James, the old belief in a perdurable subject of experience is fallacious, and will not bear destructive criticism. It must, he contends, be replaced by the uni-dimensional conception of a thought that is part of the stream and passes, but, in passing, hands over its treasure to the thought that follows. It is a curious short-sightedness that prevented James from seeing that it is only the duo-di- mensional consciousness that makes a transac- tion of this testamentary sort possible. For it is true that, looked at from tlie purely empirical point of view, this seems to be exactly what happens. The consciousness of self is ex- pressed in a thought that exists only momen- tarily, and another reigns in its stead. And the singular fact which troubled Mill, though it

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does not seem to have troubled James, is that the new self -thought is aware of the act of in- heritance, and traces its own fortunes back to its dead ancestor. This would be perfectly in- telligible from the standpoint of a duo-dimen- sional consciousness, but, from the empirical point of view, it is as surprising as would be the phenomenon of a man walking on one leg. The doctrine we wish to make clear and em- phatic here is that, in the light of the new di- mension, no fact of the old dimension remains what it was before ; it takes on a new character that belongs to it only by virtue of perceptions which come from a transcending source of light. It will be obvious, from this, what is meant when we say that the first intuitions of religion introduce into the human consciousness the transforming sense of a new dimension. Just as it is true that the empirically perishing self cannot be conscious of its inheritance from its ancestor, nor, after it is dead, hand over its possessions to its successor, unless there be an insight that comes from a higher consciousness ; so it will appear to be true that the duo-dimen- sional conciousness will be unable to translate its experience into that of a subject that is stable and perdurable, without the transform- ing agency of the tri-dimensional consciousness of religion. Let us analyze this point more in detail. If self-consciousness only made us aware of ourselves as the subjects of particular experiences, it would be impossible for us to lift

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ourselves out of the empirical stream. For, like the order of perception in general, our par- ticular acts of self-consciousness belong to an order that is pluralistic and broken. "We might suppose a second dimension then, in the light of which our serial states would organize around self-centres. But, if this were all, these self -centres would partake of the serial charac- ter, and would present the phenomenon of a passing series of self-centred states. This was, no doubt, what James had in mind. But what he did not see was that, in order to be true to our whole self -consciousness, it would be neces- sary to find some higher ground from which the self could transcend the serial flux, and secure for itself a more stable position. When I say, in order to be true to the whole self -conscious- ness, I can only explain by appealing to the judgment of personal identity, in which a con- scious subject that, as a fact of natural history, has only a momentary existence, appeals to an order of existence that is unbroken and perma- nent. Now, what I wish to insist on here is that this conscious appeal to the judgment of iden- tity transcends the ordinary consciousness in precisely the same sense as the awareness of our unitary self transcends the limits of a serial consciousness. What it does, in the judgment of personal identity, is to identify its true life with an order that abides through its changes and imparts to them an unbroken — that is, a non-serial existence. For, in pronouncing such

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a judgment, as that of identity, we are always exemplifying the scriptural injunction to lay up our treasure where moth and rust do not cor- rupt, and where thief will not break through and steal.

The question, then, is how it can be made to appear that this conserving judgment is pos- sible only in the light of the higher insight of the religious consciousness. If we can make this clear, we will be able to accept Tolstoy's definition of religion as 'Hhat by which men live" as literally true. Let us at this point go back a little and recall some conclusions we have already drawn. You will bear in mind that, at one point in our discussion, we reached the definition of the real self or subject of experi- ence as a self-active being. The reasons for this definition, which were not then fully stated, I will attempt to briefly enumerate here. In the first place, we have learned that all the real ac- tivities of the mind are self-determined, for, in the light of the best psychological analysis, it may be said to have been demonstrated that the cause of choice, or any other characteristic ac- tion of the mind, is the self that acts. In other words, it is a form of what we may call self- activity. That self -activity is the primary form of mental activity will further appear from the fact that, if we deny initiative to the mind in its actions, we thereby place the initiative in other than mind, and reduce the mind to a purely pas- sive and receptive agent. This, in the first

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place, is not intelligible, and, in the second place, belies the consciousness that connects our responsibility with the sense of our ownership of our actions, a sense that would be impossible were our actions determined mechanically, as one billiard ball by the propulsion of another. I think I am safe in saying that, in these times, onlv the extremist will denv real initiative to the mind in connection with its activities. No proof is needed to make it clear that real initiative in- volves the power of self-activity — that is, the power of action that is self -initiative. If, how- ever, we consider what this power of self-activ- itv involves intrinsicallv, we will find that it cannot be ascribed to any being that is conceived abstractly as dependent for its being on some more ultimate spring of existence. For it will be clear on reflection that only the self-existent is capable of real self-initiative. In other words, it is only being as self-existent that can be regarded as self-active in an unqualified sense. If, as I think we are obliged to, we ascribe self -activity to the human subject, we seem to be logically committed to the conclusion that it is also self-existent, which, in another place, we have been led to deny. Now, there are two ways open to us at this point. We may, without further parley, take the pantheistic road, and identify the soul with the self-ex- istent ground of all existence. This is, of course, the solution which much of the deeper thought of the world has reached ; the practical

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identification of the real self with the principle of absolute existence. The master in the Upani- shads leads his pupil on by individual examples to seek the invisible principle that is concealed in all the things that appear to the senses, and, when he has reached the end of his analysis, and found nothing visible or phenomenal, the master concludes "that art thou." We have here very clearly the identification of the soul with the self-existent principle of all existence. But there is another way open to which we seem to be committed here, if the whole self -conscious- ness of man involves, not alone the sense of his two-dimensional self, but, also the sense of the transcendent ground of his own existence. This gives him, to use James' analogy, the sense of a new dimension, and the insight which trans- forms his two-dimensional world, and imparts a character to his real selfhood, which it would not otherwise possess. Now, it is this fact of the transforming light of the new dimension that is the significant consideration here, and it is this that I shall ask you to follow me in elabo- rating in the remainder of this lecture. Des- cartes takes the position, in his fourth medita- tion, that the knowledge of God is not only the most clear of all knowledge, but that it is the ground of clearness in all other fields of knowl- edge. This position Descartes is unable to re- duce to demonstration, because he seems to lack some of the data necessary to a proof. Had he clearly realized the fact that the principle of the

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ontological proof of God's existence is the identification of him with the self -existent ground of all existence, it would then have occurred to him that an appeal to this principle would not, in the first instance, be an inference of reason but a datum of immediate insight. In the light of this insight, the existence of God would be the clearest of all knowledge for the reason not alone of its immediacy, but also, and more significantly, because it would be an in- sight that would accompany and condition all other knowledge. It is this latter point that will claim our attention here. How can the propo- sition be established that all our knowledge is conditioned and qualitatively affected by the in- sight of the religious consciousness. There are several steps in the proof that we shall offer. In the first place, all knowledge of existence rests, in the last analysis, on the postulate of self-existence. The world cannot be contingent in the last resort of its being. It is a clear datum that, without the self -existent, the con- tingent could not be. But it has been made evi- dent that this postulate rests on the insight of the religious consciousness. Again it has been proved, in previous discussions, that, in every genuine act of knowledge, two orders are in- volved; the empirical order, in which the cog- nition is simply a member of a broken and pluralistic series; a term that perishes in the using. But in every act of cognition there is something that proves eternal. This is revealed

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in the objective appeal to an order that is per- manent, though it is, at the same time, invisible. When I look out and cognize a building, my act is perishable and soon disappears. The visible part of the phenomenon perishes with my cog- nition, but cognition is what it is only by virtue of the appeal it makes to an invisible order that transcends the perishable order of perception, and is unitary, unbroken and perdurable. If we take the judgment of recognition, the case becomes clearer still; for, from a momentary act, in which we recognize a visible phenomenon that is but a complex of perishable qualities, we affirm an invisible order of existence that has continued unbroken and perdurable in the long intervals between the occurrences of our perish- able experience. Nor do we fill up the gaps in the visible order and make it continuous by any device like that of J. S. Mill, who supposes that what we mean by asserting the continued ex- istence of anything is simply the experience of an ideal observer, who keeps himself in circum- stances where his perceptions will constantly repeat themselves and give a continuous order. It requires very little penetration to see that something deeper is involved; that, when we af- firm the continuous existence of the objects of our cognition, we are really pronouncing an ontological judgment. We are, by implication, asserting the great truth that, in every act of cognition, the appeal is in fact to some onto- logical grounding of the phenomenon, without

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which the act would lose its real significance. This consideration may be generalized and ex- tended so as to cover the whole scope of knowl- edge ; and it may be applied outside the scope of the noetic activity to the movement in the life of the emotions or volitions. Everywhere the real significance of the movement will be ap- prehended only in the light of its ontological motive, which demands the grounding of the contingent and perishable in the self-existent and permanent. It will be evident here that the whole activity is motived by the transcendent insight of the new dimension revealed in the religious consciousness. Furthermore, when we consider our conscious activities in the light of our deeper consciousness of self, we will find ample evidence of the same transforming light. Not alone is the consciousness of self-activity significant for the judgment of ground, but the most characteristic judgments of self -conscious- ness involve this higher insight. The rational consciousness, by which we relate all our transi- tory states to a subject that is one and unbroken and perdurable, is one that implies the pres- ence of this higher insight. For, when we assert for ourselves a perdurable and self-identical selfhood, we are going flat against all the em- pirical evidence. The empirical facts of the case, taken abstractly, would only justify the judgment of Hume that a permanent self is an illusion; or, at most, the judgment of James that the real self is a perishable thought, which

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is unable to rise above the stream of contin- gency. But, to repeat our former contention, the doctrine of the perishable thought is only plausible when a datum is introduced into it that contains deeper presuppositions.

The logical conclusion that follows from the foregoing considerations is, I think you will ad- mit, that, in all the mental activities, the prin- ciple of grounding is supplied by that three- dimensional consciousness, which we have called the religious consciousness; that, as Words- worth has said, it is the foundation light of all our day, the master light of all our seeing : that Tolstoi's definition of religion as that by which men live, stands completely vindicated. It also supplies a basis of insight to the profound con- victions of so many of the greater religious thinkers, that the soul of man can only reach the completeness of its own being by identify- ing itself with God, the ground-spring of its ex- istence. This would seem to bring our pro- foundest western thought round to the point of identity with the insight of the Oriental's. For, as I have pointed out in the illustration from the Upanishads, the master and pupil, hav- ing come upon the invisible principle of being, identify the soul with it in the formula: That art thou. This seems strongly pantheistic, and I will ask your indulgence a few minutes in an effort to show how, from the positions we have developed here, the close identification of hu- man spirit with the divine may be secured with-

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out involving the pantheistic conclusion, which, if I do not mistake, means the breaking up of the human personality as a distinct centre of individual existence. If we consider the situa- tion from the point of view of its ontological motive, we will see that the impulse in all this movement of identification is toward the com- pletion of our own being. This would not seem to be consistent with the breaking up of our centre of individual existence. Again, if we bear in mind that the sense of transcendence is one that is present in the closest relations ; that otherwise the religious consciousness, and, with it, the religious situation, would disappear ; this fact will bear against the breaking up of the centre of individuality. Lastly, we have found reason for affirming an identity of type between the human soul and the ground-being, and this would mean, reading our insight from the hu- man to the divine, that the ground-reality is of the soul-type, an individual defined in terms of a higher dimension of being. If this be true, it will be possible for us, in the light of it, to be- gin to see that entrance into the life of this higher dimension will not involve the breaking up of our own individual centre of existence, but, on the contrary, will be the means of realiz- ing it in a higher sense. This being true, we may conclude that the impulse of the soul to more and more identify itself with the divine spring of its existence may be given unlimited scope without entailing the breaking up of its

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own individual existence. It is possible, there- fore, to turn the point of pantheism without, in any sense, weakening the force or the truth of that identification with the divine, toward which the soul is moved by the strongest forces of its being.

There are two problems growing out of our study of religious knowledge, which I wish to treat briefly before closing this lecture. The first is the problem of the so-called proofs of God's existence. I am not about to reargue here the question of the validity of these his- torical proofs. But assuming that, on the basis of the religious consciousness, and its vital con- nection with the whole nature of man, there will naturally be evidence, the question here will take the following form : What is the principle of all mediate proof of God's existence, and what are the principal definitive forms or lines in which it may be stated f The principle of all proof, I think, we are in a position here to state very briefly. It is this: That, in view of the fact that the existence of God adds a new di- mension to reality, as viewed from the empir- ical standpoint, it will affect and transform the whole of reality in such a way that, in order to intelligently understand any part of it, we must understand its divine principle ; that is, we must be able to see it in the light of its self-existent ground. The principle of all theistic proof will be, therefore, the immediate necessity of the self -existent as the suflScient reason or ground-

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big principle of all existence, whether consid- ered as a whole or in its details. It will follow that, given any existential system like the pres- ent with which we are connected, there will be no part of it, not even the smallest and most insignificant detail, that, to the eye of reason, will not be luminous with the secret of its origin. The pebble on the beach, or the little worm at your feet, will say to your listening ear ; I am a being that exists, but not of myself. My being is rooted in a being that is self-exist- ent, and that holds me in my place against the flux of contingency that is perpetually sweeping me into nothingness. To the listening ear of reason this will constitute the formula of all contingent being, and, whether it be a star or a mote in the sunbeam, it will utter the same voice. This is not mere poetic fancy, but the soundest philosophizing; for, after science has exhausted all its resources in bringing out the nature of things, it has only brought into clearer light, and into more insistent form, the demand of reason that only by connecting it with the self-existent spring of its existence do we reach its final meaning and explanation. The principle of all theistic evidence is that which is embodied in what has been called the ontologi- cal proof, because it is simply a statement that the necessity of self-existence as the ground of all existence is self-evident. The application of it is to the idea of God which has been formed according to the canons of reason and is a real

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idea. That this idea involves existence in some way has been insisted on from the beginning. In other words, that the existence of the being conceived in the idea of God is self-evident has been felt, even when the formal demonstration admittedly fell short. It is only when the ex- istence involved is conceived as self -existence, we are able to say now, that the argument be- comes convincing, and our instinctive feeling of necessity is justified.

Aside from the ontological, that embodies the principle of all theistic proof, there have been developed historically three other forms, which we will treat very briefly here; the cosmologi- cal; the proof from the evidence of design or intelligence in nature, the ordinary form of the teleological proof; and, lastly, the proof from moral teleology developed by Immanuel Kant. The principle of the cosmological proof is to be found in the contingency of the phenomena of empirical existence, whether viewed in them- selves or in the light of their linkage with other phenomena, they are not self-explanatory, but refer to something beyond themselves for their explanation. This fact of dependence we call contingency, and the inner motive of the cosmo- logical proof is the appeal from the contingent to that which cures its contingency and grounds it, the self -existent. The wide sweep of this proof will be evident for, touching the empirical world at any point, we find this contingency and its ontological demand. The proof from design

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is of a different character. It does not appeal to the contingency of things, but, rather, to the empirically unseen and non-contingent, the presence in the world of order and system. Now, science finds order and system as its ulti- mata, but the ontological reason, finding that these concepts are not self-explanatory, but that they themselves are phenomena that can be fin- ally explained only when their existence as phenomena is referred to some self-existent ground, in the light of which they will be con- nected with intelligent purpose, finds its satis- faction in connecting order and system with in- telligence and purpose, while, for the ground- ing of these, it finds it necessary to appeal to its own first principle the necessity of self-ex- istent being as the gi'ound of all existence. When, finally, we turn to the Kantian proof, which we have called moral teleology, it would seem that here we have, at last, found a line of evidence that is independent of all theoretic considerations. Now, recalling the conclusion we have reached in regard to the validity of a pure-value consideration when abstracted from all implications of truth, I think this is what we will be led to say about moral teleology. As a theoretic proof, its value will be measured by its bearing on the question of existence; in other words, on its epistemological value, con- ceding that the exigencies of the moral law make God a moral necessity, the value of this will be assessed when we determine what bear-

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ing the moral necessity has on the theoretic question of existence. For this assessment, Kant himself furnishes us with the data. If morality represents the highest values, and these values can be conserved only by supposing God as their guarantee, then the non-existence of God would plunge the moral universe into chaos, a result which is intolerable to reason. What, now, is involved in this reasoning f I think you \\'ill agree with me that there are two things involved in it. In the first place, the ap- peal has been made to a genuine theoretical is- sue. If the non-existence of God, morally, is irrational, then it would be irrational not to affirm His existence, not simply in the interests of morality, but in the interests of reason her- self. Again, when we seek to determiiie why it is that the non-existence of God would mean the defeat of reason from the moral point of view, do we not find that the removal of God from the ethical situation takes away its self- existent ground, and that morality, like all ex- istence, is ruined by the loss. When we reach this insight, we will be ready for the conclusion that the necessity on which the strength of the moral argument depends leads directly to the postulate of a self-existent ground of the moral as its only guarantee of stability. We are thus able to trace all lines of proof back to their first principle in the ontological necessity of a self-existent ground of all reality. And it will be clear, without further proof, that, in the last

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analysis, all considerations of worth will only have unconditional value it* they are grounded in the self-existent, and that the proposal to divorce judgments of value from theoretic con- siderations is tantamount to emptying value it- self of much of its significance.

I pass, in conclusion, to a brief consideration of another problem ; namely, that of the relation of the higher sources of religious knowledge to which we give the names inspiration and revela- tion, to the lower and more common sources. If we have followed, with assent, the doctrine that has been developed in the preceding discussions, we will be ready, I think, for some such proposi- tion in the outset as the following : If it be true that man is, by virtue of his fundamental con- stitution, endowed with a religious conscious- ness that introduces a new dimension of being into his conscious life, and is the source of im- mediate intuitions that supply the first data of his whole experience as a religious being ; it will not, then, be necessary to suppose that the pres- ence of any new organ is involved in the com- munication of the highest truths of religion. I am not about to ask you, at this point, to accept any statements as to the sufficiency of reason for the apprehension of religious truth. Far otherwise, I am only taking the ground that, if God has not first created man a reasonable be- ing and left it to accident to make him religious, but, rather, as we have contended, has brought him into the world with the three-dimensional

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consciousness of religion, we are in a position to say that, in the conditions of his nature, man has all the faculties that are necessary to make him the organ of the highest truth. It is only necessary to raise his native powers to a higher degree in order to put him on the plane of higher truth. In other words, if God desires to communicate a higher truth to the race, it will only be necessary for Him to raise the religious nature of some man to a higher degree of spiritual susceptibility and intuition in order that the new truth may be realized. When this heightening of the natural powers occurs in the other fields we call it genius; when in the field of religious perception, we call it inspiration, but, in all instances, it involves the same prin- ciple. Let us, then, consider very briefly inspi- ration and revelation from the standpoint of the prophetic function in religion. The prophet, we say, is the inspired bearer of new truths which would not be open to him in his ordinary moods. We mean that his spiritual intuitions have been stimulated and aroused to a more than ordinary degree of activity and insight; for it is evident that this elevation can be at- tained in no other way than by the sharpening of the powers of intuitive insight. This we may call inspiration. Now, inspiration may lead to truths that are not revealed; that is, in connection with which there is not the sense of having received them from a higher source. It is likely that most of the truths discovered by

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genius have been arrived at in this way. The genius will feel inspired, but his truths will not be revelations in the strict sense of that word. Such inspiration is, no doubt, as common in re- ligion as in art. But with the religious prophet it is different. His dominating consciousness is that of an agent who receives his message from a higher source, and his certitude as to the truth and authority of his message will spring di- rectly out of his consciousness of being the me- dium and agent of a higher being. Now, the fact on which I wish to put the emphasis here is this. We have already reached the conclusion that the sense of the transcendent ground of his existence is a primary intuition of man's nature. Let us suppose that the inspiration of the prophet, which, in general, has raised his ordinary intuitions to a higher degree, has, in the case of the prophet, stimulated, in an espe- cial sense, his intuition of the transcendent. It will follow that he will be dominated with the consciousness of the transcendent source of the truth he realizes, and he will feel himself to be the organ of the transcendent being, who re- veals truths to him of which he is conscious of not being, himself, the author. The conclusion I am reaching here is that we have here a ra- tional principle by which we can connect the highest stages of religious knowledge with its lower stages in such a way that the whole may be organized into a coherent and rational sys- tem. If the objection be urged that some truths

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of religion are super-rational, this will readily be granted, if reason be regarded only as the organ of ordinary tnith. But, if reason, in its highest sense, be a three-dimensional faculty, and has in it the light of the transcendent, then we may take courage and go forward, for in- spiration and revelation will be included in the scheme as organs of higher rational truth ; then the whole issue between reason and revelation may be regarded as being no longer vital, for, if the central demand of reason is for a God who is the self-existent ground of all reality, it fol- lows that reason itself will be hospitable to the highest revelations of God's truth.

PART II THE SOUL

THE SOUL

Lecture V. The Soul as Subject of Religious

Experience

The most difficult thing the modern man is asked to believe is that he has a soul. His trouble may be due largely to the form in which the question is ordinarily stated. That a man has a soul would seem to classify it among the things he may possess and of which he is, there- fore, the subject. This Lockian conception of the soul is a hard one to entertain. If the soul is simply one of a man's possessions, like other pieces of property, it may be lost and there is nothing of which the modern man feels more sure than this, that, if he ever had a soul, some how in the hurly-burly of modern life, it must have dropped out; at least, he is not now con- scious of having any such possession. Were the question changed, however, and were he asked the question, **Are you a soul," the form of the query would throw him back onto himself and it would become a problem of his own essential personality. It is clear that the question when put in this form could not be treated with the same light hearted superficiality. Take, for ex- ample, the classical example in modern philos- ophy of a sceptical doctrine, critically reached

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by a mind of the first order, regarding the re- ality of the soul as a substantial and perdurable subject of experience; that of David Hume. Hume is, in fact, what James would call a pure empiricist. To him there is only one order of being, the empirical or sensible, and any mental content that is not in the last analysis reducible to terms of that order is fictitious and imagin- ary. Now, if we carefully attend to the empiri- cal order, we find that it is resolvable into a plurality of parts which have no stability in themselves and no real connections with other parts of the plurality. This being so, there is no principle of continuity that can bind the em- pirical into an unbroken order and, especially, there is no point of unity from which the plur- ality of perishable states can be organized into a one subject of experience. The doctrine of the one self that lies back of and owns the states is, therefore, an illusion. Hume establishes the empirical doctrine in detail in, (1) his sceptical refutation of the doctrine of spiritual sub- stance, which consists in simply applying to the mind itself the logic by which Berkeley reduced the concept of material substance to an illusion, reaching the conclusion that nothing can be proved to exist in consciousness but a plurality of conscious states. When I look into my con- sciousness for the evidence of a unitary self, I never see anything but a particular state, and Hume is sure that nothing else exists and his scepticism as to spiritual substance is complete.

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(2) The second count in Hume's refutations is his sceptical analysis of identity as a real rela- tion of existence. When Hume scrutinizes the empirical order, he finds in it no point of per- manence in continued existence. What seems to be a case of identity, as when I judge that this pen I hold in my hand is the same object I held in my hand last week, or that it maintains its existence in an unbroken flow of a present per- ception, resolves under Hume's analysis into a mere succession of broken and distinct acts of consciousness. What we mistakenly judge to be identity is resolvable into two facts, (1) a rapid succession of separate states and, (2) the close resemblance of these states. The judgment of identity is, therefore, one of those inevitable il- lusions of consciousness which common sense takes to be real. The application is sufficiently obvious. The judgment of objective identity has no foundation but the empirical fact of a rapid flow of a plurality of states. The same rapid flow is the sole fact and basis of the judg- ment of personal identity; insofar as it seems to assert the continued existence of the self it is a fiction. The only fact is the rapid succession of subject-states. The self loses its stand in be- ing, therefore, and becomes a mere passing phenomenon of an empirical flux. Now, Hume may be taken as the chief prosecuting attorney in the case of empiricism versus a real and per- durable soul in self. But he has a very able as- sistant in William James, who introduces what

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he conceives to be important new evidence in favor of the empirical conclusion. We may con- cede, he says, that there is in consciousness the idea or thought of a unitary and perdurable self which is the permanent subject of all our chang- ing experiences. But this idea or thought is it- self momentary and perishable. While it lives, it performs the office of a real subject. When it passes, however, it transmits its self -content as an inheritance to the thought that succeeds it, which thus becomes its residuary legatee. We have here an interesting phase of the Hindu doctrine of Karma; only, in this case it is not the evil destiny alone that is transmitted. But, like the doctrine of Karma itself, in order to escape contradiction, it must concede the point of continued existence. It is impossible to imagine the legacy of the dead self-thought as leaping the gulf of absolute extinction to the new self-thought that comes into existence on the other side.

Now, if I were the attorney for the defense, I would endeavor to show that the empirical argument owes its cogency to the fact that it has been blind to one very important piece of data. When Hume fails to find any unitary self, and when James fails to find any self that persists, they are both taking the attitude of ob- servers of a consciousness that cannot present itself as an object of scrutiny except in the form of an empirical plurality of states. For the consciousness under question can only be that

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of the observer himself. In order to make it an object, it must be projected as onto a can- vas, and the self-states will be part of the pro- jection. That being true they could not be otherwise than part of the moving show. There is no permanence about any part of a moving picture show, but the parts succeed one another in a series of dissolving views. There is, how- ever, a very subtle fallacy involved in this whole method of dealing with the subject. In order to project the contents of consciousness onto a screen so that they may be observed, there must be an observer left behind and that ob- server will be the real subject of the inspection and the judgments that are pronounced. What about this back-standing subject of all the ob- servations ? It will seem almost inevitable that, if Mr. Hume objectifies his inner consciousness, his self-states will be thrown out with the others and they will all seem to be but moments in a passing show. But what about Mr. Hume him- self? Is he also a passing moment in the show? And, if so, what is the possible value of his judgment? It is self-evident that, if the world is to be judged a passing show, the standpoint of the judgment itself must be permanent, for it is only in relation to a fixed point that anything can be in the state of passing. The truth of the matter is, that it is only when the real subject has abstracted itself from the situation and has become the observer of what we may call the empirical self, that the self seems to lose its

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permanence and sinks into the flux of existence. In this case, its judgments are true, since the empirical self is a phenomenon of the perishable aspect of the soul's life. But its judgments be- come false if they are supposed to qualify the self that is the subject of them and pronounces them. To this back-standing subject of judg- ments, the term epistemological self has been applied. I have no quarrel with this designa- tion, if it means the self that knows in any real situation. But it ought to be observed that it is the same self that, also, feels and wills. The empiricist has simply left the real self out of view in his reasonings, while, as a matter of fact, it has been because he has used it that he has been able to reach any conclusions at all.

Now the loss of the soul in the modern world is due, in part, to the empirical blindness I have been trying to expose. But it is due, in part also, to another cause of a different order. When the traditional slavery of mediaevalism was broken and the modern world set out on the path of free inquiry, its problem was nothing less than the rediscovery of both the inner and the outer world. The mediaeval system found no place for first hand inquiry into either the nature of man or that of the world. The entire body of orthodox knowledge was defined in terms of tradition and authority. I do not mean to say that there were not original searchers for the truth, like the mystics and scientists; but these were outsiders and, if not directly un-

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der the ban, were regarded as objects of sus- picion. When the bonds of tradition could no longer hold and the mind of man freed itself from the restraints of authority, it acted logic- ally when it threw out, provisionally, at least, as in the case of Descartes, all the content of the old culture and set out on the task of build- ing up a new knowledge and culture by means of methods of original and first hand inquiry. The result of this was the fact that both nature and man were regarded as unknown realms and the modern mind had on its hands the discovery or the rediscovery of both the outer and the in- ner worlds. The record of the way in which this great task has been prosecuted includes the his- tory of both philosophy and science. To pass over all details, we may say that to philosophy and psychology fell the task of explaining the inner world of man's nature, while that of the outer realm or the outer world fell to the lot of the physical sciences. I shall only briefly allude to the fact that, while philosophy has made some splendid achievements in its researches into the inner world, yet it has been surpassed beyond compare by the progress of the sciences. The dominance of the concepts of the physical sciences over the minds of men has been almost overwhelming and, while the effects have on the whole been good, there is one effect of this dominance that vitally concerns the problem of this discussion. So completely have the physi- cal conceptions and categories incorporated

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themselves with the modern ways of thinking that the average mind has suffered a kind of atrophy of the spiritual and the result has been not so much a positive disbelief, but rather an inability to believe, in the inner spiritual world as real. This inability reveals itself in the vogue of empiricism, which can find no basis for a doctrine of a real self, and is predetermined by the limits of its data to a sceptical conclu- sion regarding the inner spiritual realm and its objects. To this is no doubt largely due the fact that through its blindness to spiritual fact the modern mind may be said to have gained the whole world of outer and physical reality at the cost of losing its own soul. The task, there- fore, which the friend of the spiritual has on his hand is that of the revival of the lapsed sense of spiritual reality and the re-discovery of the soul.

Let me say then in a word, that the object of the preceding lectures of the course has been to contribute something to the revival of the lapsed sense of spiritual reality. If man is by virtue of his constitution a religious being in the profound sense that his perception of spiritual realities adds a new dimension to his consciousness and transforms all the activities of his nature ; if it be true that his spiritual in- heritance is so deep that to take it from him would virtually relegate him to an existence be- low the human type ; if the activity by which he knows the smallest detail of knowledge or by

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which he achieves the smallest result in life be such that its motive can be completely satisfied only in the grounding of its human existence in the divine life ; then the reality of the spirit- ual can be no longer in question and with the development of this insight the sense of the re- ality of the soul will grow from more to more. Making bold then to use the insight we have acquired in dealing with the problem of the soul or real self, I think you will be ready to go with me in the following argument. The as- sumption of empiricism that there is only one order of reality, the empirical, is false, since it cannot account for irrefutable facts of con- sciousness. There are two orders of reality, one, the empirical, the other we may call the real or rational. The presence of these two orders will be found to be involved in any act of cognition. Take, for example, the cognition of a Greek temple. The cognition itself as an experience was momentary; but, if you are asked in connection with it the question, does the temple exist, you know that the question goes beyond your cognition as a conscious ex- perience. It means does the temple continue when you are not looking at it or thinking about it; and, when you consider this, you find that what the questioner really wishes to know is whether the temple belongs to an order of ex- istence that is different from your perceptions ; or is altogether a phenomenon of your percep- tions and shares the fortunes of their order.

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When you further consider the question, you find that it involves something still more pro- found. The order of your perceptions is a broken one and presents many gaps : it is made up of momentary and perishable experiences, so that were you to take the Berkeleyan posi- tion, esse est per dpi, you would not be able to escape the logic of it but would conclude that the Greek temple is wholly an affair of your personal consciousness. You know, however, that the questioner will be satisfied with no such subjective answer. What he has in mind in putting his question about the existence of the Greek temple is an order of reality different from the empirical order of perceptions; an order that is unbroken and perdurable, so that the temple has had a continuous being. Now the appeal has been here to the empirically un- seen: to that which transcends the empirical and at the same time grounds its object by giv- ing it a real status in being. Turning now to the problem of the self, we find the same dual distinction necessary to any adequate doctrine. The question regarding any individual, Does he exist, or has he a soul? will involve the dis- tinction between what we may call his empirical and his real self. The empirical self will be the self considered as a phenomenon of the empiri- cal order. We have seen that the sceptical empiricist has smooth sailing so long as we per- mit him to play his game of the one order. The self may be projected then as part of a moving

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panorama and will be perishable like all the other parts. But when you search for his real self and find it not in the show itself, but find it identical with the deeper point to which the show is a contemplated object, you will then be in a position to understand the deeper meaning of the question. The real self will be that which remains identical with a fixed point of contem- plation when all that is empirical and objectifi- able has been projected into the picture. This will be the self that the questioner will imply when he asks, does he exist, or has he a soul! There is, then, another self that is implicit in the empirical as possessing qualities that the empirical self does not possess and which are, in fact, the opposites of the qualities of the em- pirical self.

What, then, are these qualities? In the first place a quality of the empirical arises from the fact that all its groundings are resolvable into pluralistic elements. There is an empirical self, but it is a dissolving momentary grouping and lapses into the stream ; but the real self is a unity that is not thus resolvable. There are no seams in the garment of the real self. This is what constitutes it a real rather than an em- pirical fact. The whole validity of the empiri- cal perception depends on the fact that it is re- lated to a unitary point of view which is not in- fected with plurality. This is necessarily true whether we can understand it or not. Again the moments of the empirical are perpetually

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losing their identity and passing into something else, whereas the real self is only conceived to be real as it maintains itself from thus passing into something not itself. The real in experi- ence is identical, from this point of view, with the stable ; with that which is its unbroken self.

When we consider the deeper facts of knowl- edge, we will find the conclusions reached above confirmed by every part of it. For, as I have already shown, no act of knowledge completes itself and obtains full cognitive value except by appealing to some order that is more stable and unbroken ; that is, more substantial than the perceptual order of which it, as a subjective ex- perience, forms a moment. In every act ; in the cognition of a thing as something more than a mere plexus of perishable qualities; in the judgment of identity, which is involved in rec- ognition, in which an unbroken order of exist- ence is affirmed; in the immediate and mediate processes of reasoning, which consist in their ontological sense in binding that which in itself is particular and unstable to an order of being that is one and unbroken ; — in short, there is no act of knowledge that does not reveal the same inner motive. The process of objective knowl- edge may then be represented as a movement in which the subject-known is continually passing from an empirical order which is plural, un- stable and broken, to a rational order of exist- ence that is unitary, stable and unbroken.

Much more when we turn our attention to the

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world of consciousness, do we find the same thing to be true. What we call the empirical self is a temporary aggregation of states con- stituting an eddy in the stream, which dis- charges a temporary function, then dissolves into the current. If this be the whole of self- experience, then James' representation is the only one logically possible, and the self is a momentary and perishable thought, as unstable and transitory as any other eletoent in the stream of existence. But when we look deeper ; or to put the same thing in different words, when we think from the standpoint of the self that is pronouncing the judgments, it becomes clear that the passing of the empirical self can become a fact of knowledge only as a pronounce- ment of a subject-known, that does not pass but speaks from a durable point of existence. If this be true, and I can see no tenable position from which it can be gainsaid, then, the way to a doctrine of a rational and stable self as the real subject of experience is made clear. The act in which we affirm our own identity, as well as the act in which we affirm the phenomenal character of the empirical self, is the act of a knower that itself transcends the empirical and identifies itself with the rational and abiding.

Taking this as established, let us now con- sider, as briefly as possible, what are the funda- mental attributes, or to use the Kantian term, categories, of the real self. In a former lec- ture, we had occasion to draw a distinction be-

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tween the two categories of self-existence and self-activity. This was done for the purpose of showing that, while self -existence cannot be af- firmed of anything but the ground of all ex- istence, self-activity may be a property of a being that is immediately conscious of its de- pendence on its ground. For self-activity im- plies simply the power of initiative arising out of the self -determining character of its actions. The concept of self-determination will be con- sidered more in detail in a later lecture; here we will content ourselves with the statement that self-activity involves the initiative of an action that originates with ourselves and is not determined by other. That the subject of ex- perience possesses this power is borne out not only by the testimony of self consciousness but, also, by the consideration that the only alterna- tive to initiative is passivity, whereas the no- tion of a subject of action is contradictory to the notion of passivity. We could define a sub- ject of action as that which initiates the action by making it its own. The definition would be true whether the proposed act originated with the given subject or was originated by another and simply received the stamp of its own en- dorsement. In both instances, the subject is self-active. Now in this sense that its acts only become its own by virtue of its own endorse- ment we call the real subject of experience self- active. It could be shown that not only does this notion of a real subject of experience in-

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volve self-activity, but, also, that this is in- volved in the notion of responsibility. For we are responsible for actions only so far forth as we own them; that is, put the initial stamp of our endorsement upon them. The so-called refutations of the self -activity of the subject of experience owe their entire force to the fact that their application is limited to the empirical self. It is difficult to see how a subject that is constantly dissolving into the stream of con- tingency can be the bearer of a function so dig- nified as that of self -activity. Besides, the logic seems to be unassailable that what is purely phenomenal cannot be conceived as exercising any real agency. If, however, we refuse to limit our view to the empirical and identify the real self with the subject that pronounces the judgments on the empirical situation, it will then be clear that the value of the empirical judgments themselves will be conditioned on other judgments proceeding from a standpoint that transcends the empirical. Taking it as established then that self-activity must be ascribed to the real subject of experience as the form of its agency, let us go on to the question of other essential attributes. We do not need to dwell altogether on a group of attributes of which we have had something to say in former lectures; the categories of unity, stability and perdurability, which inhere in the very concep- tions of a subject that transcends the empirical stream and is able to judge its phenomena. Let

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us ask the question, how is it possible for us to know and judge that some things are empirical ; that is, mere appearance, unstable and pass- ing,— except from the standpoint of a judg- ment that is not affected by such contingency? That the subject that issues the non-empirical judgment is itself non-empirical follows with- out question. That a subject which utters judg- ments that are unitary, — that are stable and that perdure, is itself unitary, stable and per- durable, is equally beyond question ; otherwise, it would be necessary to regard the real self that is the subject of the unphenomenal judg- ments as a duplicate of the empirical, and the left hand would thus tear down what the right hand had builded.

There are, however, certain categories of the real subject of experience, so fundamental to its unphenomenal character that they must be treated with more detail. These are individu- ality, personality and personal identity. It might be argued that what is self-active, will, also, be individual, and the conclusion would be hard to refute. But what we propose here is, first, to determine, as far as possible, the con- cept of individuality. If we say that the in- dividual is not decomposable into parts, we ut- ter an important but identical proposition. If, however, we say that an individual is an ex- istence that maintains its own integrity and is not broken into by other existences, we utter a proposition that follows immediately from the

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notion of individuality itself. When we say, further, that the individual is one: That it is not broken into by change ; that it is perdurable, we utter propositions some of which, at least, are mediate and not immediately certain. For example, the judgment of unity may be taken as a definition of individuality from a certain point of view ; but the propositions that the individual is not broken into by change and that it is per- durable, are not self-evident. The first propo- sition, that the individual is not broken into by change is not obvious until we have looked at it on its obverse side and have perceived that change itself has no significance except as it is related to the permanent and unbroken. The individual in order to be a subject of change and to be aware of change must itself be un- broken and aware of its integrity. We do not mean here that individuality excludes change, like the being of the Eleatics ; rather that change may enter into it without breaking its continu- ity. If we are able to grasp the concept that something may change through and through and yet maintain its being unbroken, we will have mastered the secret of individuality. The indi- viduality of the self is the respect in which it is unbroken by the changes of its experience. Other aspects of individuality are expressed in the fact that, like the Leibnitzian monad, its life-activity is internal rather than external; another way of saying that the individual is self-active and not determined from without.

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From another angle individuality will express the substance of a thing, — that by virtue of which it transcends the empirical concept of a bunch or plexus of perishable qualities. We are justified in concluding, I think, that when we say that the subject of experience is a real individual, we have ascribed to it the attributes of unphenomenal and stable existence ; we have afl5rmed its unity, its integrity and its perdura- bility.

When we say that the real subject is per- sonal, we ascribe to it individuality, plus some further characterizations. To be a person is to be an individual; but the concept of person is richer than that of individual. When we speak of individuality, we have in mind certain un- phenomenal attributes of being; we have in mind the self for example, not in its aspect of change and plurality but rather in that of its unity and permanence of existence. But, when we speak of personality, we have in mind, not simply the unphenomenal character of the self, but rather the self as a concrete, as a synthesis of the real and the phenomenal. It is this syn- thetic view that is the source of the richness of personality. Let us take, for example, here the profound conception of personality adopted by the early Christian thinkers; that of the Logos; a conception that combined the notion of a permanent substance or individual with that of utterance or expression. In its sub- stance or unbroken individuality, or being, it is

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one, but in its phenomenal or empirical expres- sion or manifestation it is plural. Now I am not about to ask your participation in a theo- logical discussion, but rather to assist me in ab- stracting the core of insight from this profound doctrine of theology. Personality is the indi- vidual nature of a man viewed from the side of its empirical expression. Personality is plural and changeable, so that the total impres- sion of it will be that of a rich variety; but it will not represent simply a heterogeneity of change. There are certain genuine forms of psychic activity which determine the funda- mental types of personal expression. I mean the three first forms of conscious activity, ex- pressed in the terms, thought, feeling and vo- lition, or whatever more modern terms the psy- chologists may have invented for these forms of mental action. We will express the full sig- nificance of personality, I think, if we regard it as the individual nature of a being expressing itself in any of the threefold forms of psychic activity, thinking, feeling or willing ; or in some blend of the three. With us the types, the vari- ations, may be practically infinite, so that what is called the play of personality is more than a figure. The significant fact about personality, for us here, is its synthetic character: it is a unitary nature expressing itself in a plurality of forms.

The third category of our list is in many re- spects the most significant of them all. No one

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doubts that personality is an attribute of man, although there may be a variety of doctrines as to its nature. But there is no such unity re- garding personal identity. In order to develop any adequate doctrine of personal identity, it is necessary for us to keep in mind the distinction between the real and the empirical. This we have found to be a distinction of cardinal im- port in every field of existence. From the stand- point of pure empiricism, there is no adequate ground for maintaining any real identity of the self. The empirical self as James has con- tended, does not persist but is a perishable thought that dissolves into the flux, leaving self- hood to be taken care of by another thought as perishable as itself. It is only from the stand- point of one who recognizes the unphenomenal character of the real self that there seem to be sufficient grounds for maintaining the real con- tinuity of the perishable self. This will be clear, if we consider John Locke's doctrine of personal identity. He seems to regard person- ality itself as a forensic term employed by the jurists to fix legal responsibility for acts. Psy- chologically, he regards it as a matter of con- sciousness, so that the maintenance of the same person would depend on the continuity of con- sciousness. If a man should forget himself, he would become another person. But, while this may be true in a measure, as the modern in- vestigations into plural and alternating person- alities have shown; yet the significant fact is

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not that a man may forget himself, but that having done so he may, perhaps after long lapses, come back to himself and re-establish an unbroken thread of continuity. The common fact of memory is one that cannot be explained from the standpoint of the empirical conscious- ness alone, since the judgment of recognition in memory appeals to an order of reality that is unbroken; otherwise, recognition would be im- possible and every act of mind would be a fresh creation. It is impossible to take time here to develop this position in order to bring out all its implications; but memory-acts, in common with all cognitive acts, make a common appeal to an unbroken order of existence. In this case, the unbroken order is that of the real subject of experience, which not only transcends the empirical order but, also, grounds it.

We pass now to the closing topic of the lec- ture; that of the self as a subject of religious experience. It is vital that we should determine what self is the court of appeal in the case of religious experience. If it be the empirical self, then we meet the difficulty that the empirical self is too transient and perishable to be the bearer of a religious intuition or the subject of an experience that binds the soul of man to the rock of the immutable. The court of appeal must be the real self which as an individual and perdurable being will find some affinity with that which appeals to the sense of the unitary and abiding. Now we have seen how the re-

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ligious consciousness opens up in the soul of man the insight of a new dimension of being. In the light of this new dimension which con- nects existence with its self-existent ground, we have seen that the fundamental relation of re- ligion to the whole activity of man is made clear. Not only does it appear that religion supplies the true end of his being which is the salvation of his soul. But what is even more significant here, it supplies the ontological mo- tive of all his activities, so that whether we re- gard him as an intellectual, emotional or vo- litional being the mainspring of all his activi- ties is found in the common and persistent im- pulse toward the self-existent ground of being as the goal of all endeavor. Furthermore, there is an insight here that will be necessary to the completion of our doctrine of the self. We have been led to the distinction between the empirical and the real self as fundamental, and we have found that the real self must be conceived as a self -active individual subject of experience. In ascribing self-activity to the soul of man, we have been led to distinguish between self-ex- istence and self-activity and have recognized the fact that the self-activity of the soul does not involve its self-existence. At the basis of the soul-life there is the insight into the tran- scendent ground, the spring of its existence and the rock on which it rests. What I wish to point out here in conclusion is the fact that it is only in this transcendent insight; in this three-di-

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mensional vision, that we discover the datum that is needed to give final and unconditional value to all our rational conclusions. For the position that we have maintained from the be- ginning- : that the doctrine of selfhood must go beyond the limits of the empirical which is broken and perishing, and must find the concept of the real self in that which is unitary, un- broken and perdurable, is one that depends for its final justification on the insight of the re- ligious consciousness. There is a sense in which the fruits of all our labors are dropping from us, and the non-empirical self is in danger of dropping into the stream of the empirical and being lost. If there were not the three-dimen- sional consciousness which gives the insight of religion, the soul, although it is a self-active individual, would have no sense of its self-ex- istent ground. The logic of empiricism would be constantly prevailing against it and it would be incessantly facing the annihilation of its dearest and most fundamental hopes. But the three-dimensional insight of religion supplies it with the light that ** never was on land or sea" that enables it to lay hold of the self-existent and complete the story of its life with the vision of that which has life in itself. Or to put the truth in different words : The soul of man can be sure of its own unbroken and permanent ex- istence only when it sees it in the light of its relation to its divine spring. This will mean that it is only the self-existent principle of ex-

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istence that imparts to the soul of man its own permanent individuality and it is only in the light of the ground-intuitions of religion that the soul obtains a clear insight into its own na- ture and destiny.

Lecture VI. The Agency of Man

The problem of this lecture is that of the agency of man, and the special question will be that of human freedom. The chief difficulty involved in the discussions of this subject has arisen from the presence in the mind of the in- vestigator of some predetermined concept of freedom. This has rendered the problem, ap- parently, so hopeless that we are often dis- posed, like Milton, to relegate it to the angels along with the problem of fore-ordination, on the ground that they will have ample leisure for its discussion. If, however, we do not dogma- tize on the subject before investigating it, and, if we can hold our judgment open for the time, at least, it may be that, travelling this new road, we may be led to some valuable discoveries. At the outset, therefore, I would be chary of com- mitting myself or you to any statements of the question. When the two knights quarreled about the color of the shield they were both right, and it is possible that two parties, at op- posite ends of an argument, may be defending one and the same thing. Most men will, at times, find difficulty squaring their abstract

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theory with the theory that is implied in their practice. Much of the perplexity surrounding the problem of freedom arises, without doubt, from the fact that it is, in some respects, more simple than is ordinarily supposed, while, in other respects, it is much more profound. For example, if we accept the testimony of con- sciousness as final, which we must as far as its testimony goes, as I hope to be able to show, then the fact of freedom is very simple ; where- as, if we go deeper into the subject, and raise the question whether the action of man has not been predetermined in such a way that he is not free in the sense which his consciousness con- firms, we will find that a very deep issue has been raised, the settling of which may baffle our deepest insights. Instead, then, of indulging in premature definitions, or even statements of the question, I will ask your leave to proceed di- rectly to the consideration of a negative propo- sition; namely, that human agency is not a form of mechanical activity. The doctrine of mechanical determination may take several dif- ferent forms, all of which have this in common, that they treat the relation of choice to its antecedent as an external relation, which may be quantitatively conceived, if not definitely de- termined. The relation of the antecedent, which we may call motive, to the choice being ex- ternal ; the motive, as a force, stands outside of the subject that is determined, and the choice is the result of a stronger force operating upon a

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weaker. It is ordinarily regarded as a case of natural causation. The result is strictly de- termined, and there is no more place for free action than there is in the case of one billiard ball producing, by impact, an effect in another. When, however, we analyze the situation in an act of choice, we find that it cannot be externally represented; that A, the motive, in order to produce an effect, B, in the agent, must give up its external position, and become a feeling or desire in the consciousness of Y. This relates A internally to all the other states of Y, which are not a determinate number exercising a de- terminate force. For A, like any other form of stimulus, is a challenge which rouses the memory processes in an effort of the conscious- ness stimulated to pull itself together, so to speak, for the present occasion. Let the recol- lected self be composed of N states, all of which will blend together into one consciousness. The state A, which, let us say, is an inducement to steal, will blend with the other states, and there will be, as a result, a subject that will feel in- clined to steal. It is clear that the situation cannot be mechanically represented since the matter in hand is an internal transaction in a consciousness, the states of which have ceased to exist separately, and are constantly varying in force, according to the states with which they blend or stand in contrast. If the states, in the restored consciousness with which the desire to steal is able to blend, are able, in combination,

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to determine the whole trend of the conscious- ness that decides, then we will feel sure that the choice of theft will follow, unless some in- hibitory motive should, in the meantime, come in and redress the balance. Now, while this analysis shows that the situation is not mechan- ical, is it not open to the construction of being the prevailing of the stronger consciousness over the weaker? Or, to put it differently; if we represent the situation as that of a struggle between two empirical selves as to which should be realized in this instance, may it not be in- terpreted as the succeeding of the stronger self, and the temporary suppression of the weaker self? I see no way of escaping this conclusion, unless there are other facts not yet considered that would modify the situation. That there are such facts, I will now proceed to show. In the first place, the strength of motives are sub- jectively determined by the internal character of the subject. The internal nature of each sub- ject is a selective principle which expresses it- self in certain motives, desires and impulses. The internal character of a lodestone is such that it will attract iron filings, but will have no power to draw wood or copper. The selective principle here may be expressed as follows ; the lodestone has a desire for iron, a latent impulse to seek iron which will be aroused when iron comes into the neighborhood, but will be dor- mant if the objects are of wood. Putting it from the standpoint of the iron, we may say

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that the iron has latent in its nature a desire for the magnet, which its presence and attract- ing power will call into action, but that there is no such desire in wood and copper. There is a subjective principle in consciousness analo- gous to this in the light of which we can say that the strength of all motives is to be expressed in terms of evaluation by consciousness itself. If the sexual instinct were not latent in man there would be no temptation in female beauty. This is the first point. The second is a deeper aspect of the same situation that is revealed in connection with deliberate action. It is present, but not so obvious in action that is spontaneous. The fact I wish to call attention to is this ; that, viewed as a whole, the act of deliberation is one in which the decision is held up until the con- scious nature as a whole has an opportunity to put its valuation on the factors involved. If A, objectively, may be the knowledge of the combination of a safe in which valuable stock is locked up, it is clear that the force of the internal feeling or desire to steal cannot be determined from the knowledge itself, but will depend for its force altogether on the internal assessment of it by the person who possesses the knowledge, and that this will vary indefi- nitely at different times in the life of that in- dividual. These facts will, I think, cause us to reverse our judgment, and say that no objec- tive motive possesses any power over a con- scious being that is not given to it by the in-

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ternal assessment of the subject who has cog- nizance of it. This, together with the fact that this assessment varies infinitely, will wholly dis- credit the quantitative measurement, and will convince us that we must seek the coefficient of choice in the nature of the choosing subject, and not in the force we may ascribe to any ob- jective motive.

If, now, we accept this as the final refutation of the mechanical theory of choice, the ground will be clear for some further advances. If we scrutinize a process that leads to and deter- mines choice or action, we will find that, psycho- logically, it is teleological rather than mechani- cal. A mechanical process is one from which all selection, prevision or internal guidance has been eliminated. The forces push for- ward, however definite may be their path, blindly, so far as any internal vision is con- cerned, and fatalistically, as far as any purpose or end may be concerned.

'^The ball no question asks of ayes or noes, But here and there where strikes the player goes."

But, if we scrutinize a choice situation, we will find that it is motived from beginning to end by a prevision of the end, which motive, at first a point of selectiveness, becomes progressively a prevision of end, a purpose and a goal of reali- zation, where the mechanical agent is blind, like the ball, and goes, fatalistically, where the

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player strikes; the psychical agent is seeing, and goes intelligently, to the realization of a prevised goal. When an action is thus intelli- gently informed, we call it self-determined to distinguish it from the mechanical type, which is determination by other.

We are ready now to return to our question of freedom, and I think we will be prepared for the conclusion that freedom, whatever it may be, will be identical with self-determination. We mean by that, not that all self-determina- tion is free determination, for that would be the simple conversion of a proposition in A, but that all acts of freedom will fall under the cate- gory of self-determination. If, then, we distin- guish between the form and the substance of freedom, we will be justified in saying that all acts that are self-determined are formally free. How, then, are we to distinguish the substance of freedom from its form? This will lead us along another line of investigation. At the out- set, we may say that, while consciousness is an adequate witness to the fact that we are form- ally free from any constraint, there are condi- tions of real freedom that go beyond its vision. For example, if the question is not as to present determination, but takes the form of a question of pre-determination, we are plainly facing an issue that an appeal to consciousness or to the psychic form of human choice cannot determine. I do not wish to conceal the fact that the grav- est issue in the whole question of freedom is

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that of pre-determination. Is our choice pre- determined, and, if so, in what way, and does this militate against free choice?

In dealing with this phase of our question, there are two lines of consideration. (1) The bearing of the forces of the soul's ordinary life in the problem of its choice, and (2) the bear- ing of its relation to God, or the self-existent ground of its existence, or the nature of its own agency. If we consider the first problem, we are brought into relation with the forces of the world, and their bearing on the nature of the soul's life and agency. There is one conclusion which we have already reached that will simpli- fy the problem. It has been made clear that the agency of the soul is not mechanical but teleo- logical. This removes the mechanism of the world from any direct causal part in determin- ing the life and agency of the soul. If the soul of man is vitally connected with the world-pro- cess, it is with its life and history. It is the process of the world in time ; what we call its development in time ; to which the history of the soul is vitally related. If, then, we conceive the soul to be connected with the world's life, and a part of that life, we will have before us the task of determining the part which these evolutionary forces have played and continue to play in constituting it, and fixing its place in the life system to which it belongs. Now, without attempting to determine any theory of evolu- tion, which would be out of place here, the fol-

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lowing proposition will, I think, be accepted as true. The forces that determine or affect the soul 's life will be inheritance, environment, and, as a subordinate factor in the latter, what is called the physical habitat. Let us allow to these forces a full measure of agency in deter- mining the nature and status of the soul. Let us say, for example, that it is through heredity that the soul has its rootage in the life of the world, while, in heredity taken with environ- ment, we have the factors that enable us to give the natural history of the soul as a product and manifestation of the world's life. Two ques- tions may be asked, when all the claims of natu- ral agencies have been satisfied. (1) Do these forces account for the absolute origin of the soul, and (2) what effect do they have on the freedom of the soul's action? In order to answer any of these questions, we must form some critical concept of the forces we call heredity and environment. The term heredity in the popular mind bears an evil repute, since the public only hears of it in connection with dis- ease or the transmission of criminal tendencies, like the propensity to steal in the Duke family. But it is clear that the agency of such a princi- ple cannot be confined to what the Hindu phi- losophy calls Karma; the self -perpetuation of evil ; that it will be absolutely indifferent to the good and evil, and will transmit both with equal facility. In other words, the whole genetic stem of its existence, the soul will owe to the princi-

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pie of inheritance. Heredity will be a faithful transmitter of whatever be given to it, and this will be true whatever theory of heredity we may espouse, for any theory accepts the principle, and seeks simply to determine the limits within which it operates. If, then, we say that the business of heredity is impartial transmission, it will be clear that no creative function can be ascribed to it. It is the analogue of habit in the psychic realm, and, like habit, its sole function is that of conservation. Passing to the other factor, environment, leaving out of view the subordinate influence of the habitat; it will be evident that in relation to the soul-life of man, the environment will be a very broad and signifi- cant factor. It will be clear, also, that, while biologically considered, it will be important as a factor in the lower life of the soul, yet, in its higher life in the human stage, its psychological aspect will be much more vital in its bearing on the problems of our inquiry. For the environ- ment will include all the forces and agencies of man's own civilization, including the social, moral and religious ; it will include all the edu- cational agencies that bear on his culture, in- cluding his science, literature, history and art. In short, the whole operation of the environ- ment which man has builded about himself on the basis of his physical surroundings.^ Now, it is clear that the environment, so conceived, will not be a mere conserver of riches already ac- cumulated, but rather a stimulus to new ad-

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vances in the fields of achievement. The biolo- gist, in considering the relation of the organism to these forces in the light of the organic re- action, calls one habit, the other adaptation; the organism conserving its past through habit while adaptation is its way of taking a step in advance in response to the stimulus of the en- vironment.

From this point of view I think we will be in the way of reaching two important conclusions. The first will bear on the question we stated sometime back, as to whether evolution ac- counted for the absolute origin of the soul or only for its place in a natural scale of being. If heredity only conserves the germ, it is evident that it can shed no light on the origin of the organism which it conserves. This is so obvi- ous as to require no further elaboration. In re- gard to the environment we meet a somewhat different situation. Given the organism, which may be a germ cell, the environmental agencies, acting with heredity, will account for the ad- vances in organization from one stage of de- velopment to another. If now we apply the name evolution to the combined function of these agencies, the question comes up in the general form as to how far, if at all, creative functions may be ascribed to evolution. This brings us at once face to face with the opposite claims of the two prevailing philosophies of the day — pre-formationism and eugenics. The pre- formationists tell us that not only is the germ-

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cell the protagonist in the drama of evolution but that it must be regarded as a little micro- cosm which contains in it the germ-forms of all that is to unfold from it; that the first lion germ-cell for example has wrapped up in it all the lion-germs which will develop all the lions that are to succeed it to the oldest generation. This was the philosophy held by the early bi- ologists of the seventeenth century and that ob- tained its most perfect expression in the mo- nadology of Leibnitz. It was set aside by Dar- win, and the opposing doctrine of epigenesis ob- tained vogue until recently when, as my friend and former colleague. Professor Conklin, tells me, the biological wind has set in an opposite direction and the ship is now sailing danger- ously close to the Charybdis of preformation- ism. The theory of epigenesis differs from pre- formationism in this that it is willing to concede only an irreducible minimum of initiative to the germ-cell, while on the contrary it ascribes a larger and more creative function to the en- vironment. For example, while it finds it nec- essary to admit some original quality in the germ that in a vague and indefinite way acts as a force of predetermination, its tendency is to minimize this and to regard it as practically a negligible quantity. Not only the definable de- velopment of the germ along the line of its own type but the more original steps, the branching off into species, it ascribes to the creative agency of the environment. Darwin expressed

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this mere creative view in his statement : given a few original germs and the development of all existing species may be accounted for by natural selection and the other forces of evo- lution.

Now when we consider the situation criti- cally, I think it will become clear that in both philosophies the germ as a pre-determining form is assumed. Only the epigenesist reads out of it all except the indispensable minimum, while the preformationist finds in the germ-cell the hidden antetype of all the forms that are to develop from it. For our purposes here we do not need to take sides for it is obvious that both parties disclaim the responsibility of absolute origin. Furthermore when we scrutinize the concept of the minimum indispensable to the evolution that follows, I think we will be led to the following conclusion. The primary germ- cell may not have in it all the definite poten- tiality which the preformationist ascribes to it, but when all deductions have been made, in order that the minimum may be able to perform its biological duty it must have in it the pre- determining form of some kind of individuality. The germ-cell must be able to say, I am not the centre of a force that is perfectly general and indeterminate for then I would have nothing to say as to the type or form of existence into which the forces of nature are shaping me. In that case an inorganic germ would serve the purpose as well as an organic. The very fact

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that I am living is a force of predetermination in regard to what I am to become. Now how I am to conceive that force of predetermination is a difficult question for I am not conscious of nursing in my womb any definite predetermin- ing forms. But of this much I am quite confi- dent : As a life-germ I have a kind of individu- ality that belongs to my nature and I feel quite sure that anything that develops from me will inherit from me the form of an individual. We may, I think, take the work of the germ-cell as expressing the true philosophy of the whole problem. It is the insight into the fact that evolution, when its largest claim is allowed, is creative only in a relative sense: That some- thing original has to be postulated and that the responsibility for absolute origin is waived.

We are now in a position to debate the other question ; namely that of the bearing of the phi- losophy of evolution on the problem of freedom. Carrying with us the insight of the conclusion already reached, let us consider its logical bear- ing on the question of human agency. The first point we will emphasize is this : There is at the heart of the soul's life an original something which we call its individuality which evolution must assume and for which it has no explana- tion. When now we try to conceive what this individual form which is inherent in the living germ, may be, one thing will seem to be evident ; the principle, whatever it may be, will be active rather than passive. For if it did not involve

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an initial activity, there would be no occasion for postulating it at all. The responsive move- ment in obedience to stimulus is all explicable except the primary initiative that is presup- posed as the very condition of response. We begin to see here that all activity involves self- activity and that the evolutionist is brought un- willingly to the admission at this point in his philosophy that the germ of self-activity is involved in life itself and that when the living being reaches the stage of human self -conscious- ness, it becomes conscious of this self-activity in its own agency, — a doctrine which in the light of the present discussion will not need to be argued at length.

From this point of view we may answer the question as to the bearing of evolution on the question of freedom as follows: Although in the operation of its forces of heredity and en- vironment, evolution seems to defy the category of predetermination and to close the door to any reasonable concept of freedom; yet when con- sidered more critically in the light of its neces- sary presupposition, it tells a different story. In the postulate of individuality, the principle of active initiative is secured for the living sub- ject and the possibility of free self-initiated ac- tion is left open. Furthermore, if we consider the history of the movement of the human spirit itself as expressed in the process of an advanc- ing civilization, the following fact will become clear. The forces of inheritance and environ-

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ment will be able at any given stage in the his- tory to explain the rise of the contemporary spirit to the level of the past. This will be ac- counted for by habit and accommodation. But the characteristic of each generation is that it adds something to the achievement of the past. In order that there may be advance, each gen- eration must add its increment by taking a new step forward. This being true, it will be clear that whether from the standpoint of the race as a whole or from that of the individual, there will be this open door to freedom. The way of advance will be open and the forces of pre- determination will have brought the spirit of man up to the point where the demand for free initiative will be in old hands.

I think the conclusion here Is obvious ; a study of the problem of human agency as a whole brings us to this result, whether we study the psychological form of human agency from which we conclude that choice is non-mechanical and takes the form of the free and teleological, or, view the problem in its deeper aspects aris- ing out of the pre-determining agencies of the forces of evolution, in which case we come upon the fact that pre-determination prepares the way for freedom. In each case the possibility of free agency stands demonstrated; not only so, but the necessity of it, in order that the pri- mary postulate of creative evolution may be justified and in order that evolution itself may not force the spirit of man into a procrustean

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bed of a pre-determined fate that would para- lyze activity and render all advance in life and civilization impossible.

We now pass to the consideration of the re- ligious aspect of the problem. But first a pre- liminary statement: If we recall the ground distinction we have made between the empirical and real self, it may be said that the conclusions we have reached above will not be obvious from any purely empirical point of view. The em- pirical self taken abstractly is too much of a passing phenomenon to bear the responsibility of any dignified function like that of freedom. The subject of free activity must have some real standing in being. The point of view from which the doctrine of freedom will seem reason- able is that of the synthesis of the empirical and the real in view of which the whole life of the soul may be construed as a movement in which the soul strives to secure itself from the contingency of its empirical life by seeking its grounding in the stable and perdurable. From this point of view it will appear that though the soul has in its possession all the conditions of the possibility of free agency, it is neverthe- less true that the achievement of real freedom is a process that includes the whole life struggle of the soul. Its life may be teleologically char- acterized as the effort to pass from potential to real freedom. As a matter of fact it may be true, as Henri Bergson says, that man is only free in the great crises of his life when he acts

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most characteristically. Such a conclusion will harmonize with the principle of our argument here for we have distinguished between formal and real freedom as a teleological achievement. When we pass to the religious aspects of free- dom, certain problems arise which we now pro- ceed to consider. Referring back to the doc- trine of the religious consciousness as devel- oped in former lectures, we may ask what new light does this doctrine shed on the problem of the soul's agency. Bear in mind that we have distinguished between self-existence and self- activity and have shown that the soul, while self-active, is not self-existent. It is the intui- tion of self-existence that imparts the new di- mension to the soul's being. The question we are debating here is what modification, if any, this new insight makes necessary in our con- cept of the soul's agency. Let us ask how the concept of self -existence can be brought to bear on the real in order to become to it the source of new insight! This question would be unan- swerable if it were not in part an answer to itself. The only way to such an insight will be that of inclusion ; that is, the soul must identify the transcendent ground into its own conscious life that the insight of the transcendent will be its own. This is what we call the immanence of the divine in the human, a term that is often used with little insight into its meaning. This being true, at the point of immanence the dis- tinction between the agency of the transcendent

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and that of the soul itself will lapse, and there will be a blend of both into one. I apprehend that this will express the most perfect form of the religious consciousness; the stage above that which the poet expresses thus : * ' Our wills are ours to make them thine," when the blend has been completed and there is no longer any consciousness of two wills but of one only which the religious consciousness ascribes to God. The immanence of God in the human means here not the complete absorption of the human will into the divine, but the blending into one will which so far as concerns the individual hu- man is his own will.

This will, I think, shed some light on the re- ligious aspect of freedom and will explain the consciousness we have that in approaching to God we do not lose the sense of our freedom but on the contrary feel it greatly enhanced. For if the religious consciousness leads to a blend of the divine in the human, then it will be only when we are most highly conscious of our rela- tion to God that our consciousness of freedom in any sense approximates to that of God Him- self. For we have seen that our own freedom, even when at its highest, apart from the con- sciousness of religion, is only relative; that it falls short of the absolute freedom of the self- existent. It is only through the medium of the religious consciousness, that in its highest reaches identifies the divine life with the hu- man, that this relativity can be overcome in a

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measure and the spirit of man rise to the sense of a freedom that is absolute. The conclusion we have reached here will be true only to the spirit that has risen to the consciousness of this identification. It will not be true for any soul that is alienated from God or whose wickedness has made a chasm between the human soul and the divine. Sin is something that in its very nature cuts the soul off from this high preroga- tive.

Finally I wish to consider in this connection the doctrine that is sometimes called theologi- cal fatalism. It arises, as in the case of Jona- than Edwards, in the identification of an act of choice with the mechanical type of natural caus- ation so that the antecedent of the choice is some agent outside of the self that is able to de- termine it to action. In the case of the soul's relation to God, it is the will of God that is the antecedent, and in relation to it the soul has no freedom of choice. Now I do not need at this point to repeat the refutation of the mechanical doctrine of choice as it bears on the relation of the soul 's action to natural antecedents. For it is not too much to say that Edwards was mis- taken in his conception of the real form of hu- man choice and that in consequence his indefec- tible logic leads to what may be called a non- sequitur. To return then to the doctrine of the- ological fatalism, it proceeds on the assumption that the situation is one in which there is an issue between two forces, the divine will and the

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human, and that on the principle of the stronger force overcoming the weaker, the human will be overcome and the divine will prevail. If the situation were analogous to that of a tug of war, no doubt that would be the result, and we would all be partisans of the divine. But I do not need to insist here that such a representation is crude almost to the verge of absurdity. Let us admit that the wrecked man in some way makes himself the ward of fate, but let us take the testimony of the normal religious conscious- ness as giving us the truth of the matter. This will teach us that, one will cannot affect an- other in such an external and mechanical fash- ion but only by becoming internal as a motive or desire of the consciousness to be influenced. The only point in the experience of a human soul, therefore, on which the plea of fatalism can be brought to bear with any force is that where the distinction between the two agencies seems to lapse in the blending of the two into one. Now the fact that at that point we do not lose our freedom, but on the contrary have our sense of it heightened, is very significant. If fatalism were true that would be the point where the soul ought to feel a sense of the con- traction of its power but the universal testi- mony is that the opposite sense of great en- largement is the dominating one. All the con- siderations that have a vital bearing on the issue seem to point in the same direction. The free agency of man does not suffer contraction

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or suppression from the existence or agency of God except in the case where the soul regards God as its enemy. But normally the insight of the religious consciousness introduces a new dimension not only into the conscious life but into the conscious agency of man. The blending of the divine and the human will initiates man into a new consciousness of freedom, one that is in some sense commensurate with His divine origin. If we define a free act as one that in the last analysis has the initiative of its own movement in itself, it will be clear that the proof of freedom is to be found wherever there is a real agent for we have but to penetrate be- neath appearances in order to see that the con- ditions of freedom are deeply rooted in our na- ture, and that the achievement of freedom as a full possession is the teleological goal of our whole being: One that can only be fully real- ized in the highest insights and experiences of the religious consciousness.

Lecture VII. The Overcoming of Evil.

Here, as in the case of the problem of free- dom, much depends on clearing the ground of confusing and misleading issues. We cannot say that anything unsatisfactory is evil. The unsatisfactory condition may be temporary and incidental to the working out of processes and results that are normally good. If we define as good that which is tributary to life, we have

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simply determined the genus of good while the species has been left undefined. It may be true that what is not tributary to life is evil but we cannot assume it, for the statement looks sus- piciously like the simple converse of a proposi- tion in A. We need to be more definite as to the meaning of the phrase, tributary to life, and we need to inquire for the species of the non-tribu- tary that may be defined as real evil. Now when we say tributary to life we may fairly well understand what tributary means. It means promotion of the development or completeness of life and more specifically the conservation of what we may call the true ends or ideal values of life. This restriction not only defines a spe- cific problem but brings it into the forming of conscious life where alone the problem has any existence. The question of the true end or ideal of life seems by its very statement to be very complex and diflficult, perhaps beyond answer. But if we consider it from the standpoint of the ontological motive of the living process which we have treated in former lectures it would seem to be possible to define the good in terms of that which is deemed to be permanently de- sirable. That men will differ as to what is per- manently desirable is a minor consideration, since men may be mistaken in all fields of in- quiry. The core of the matter lies, I think, in the phrase permanently desirable. We admit the possibility of mistaking the temporarily de- sirable for the permanent, and even the possi-

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bility of deliberately choosing the temporary in preference to the permanent. And we admit also the difficulty of determining what the per- manently desirable is. But these perplexities, again, do not touch the core of the definition. Everything being granted that seems reason- able, it still remains true that men will agree that the good and the permanently desirable are one and the same thing. It will be clear also that a thing may be desirable without be- ing permanently so, and it may be possible on this basis to determine a subspecies of minor goods which perish with the using. In fact it seems obvious enough that there are temporary goods that while they last are tributary to life and cannot in any sense be ranked as evil on account of their transitoriness. But it is also evident that these goods are a lower species and that the term good in the absolute sense must be reserved for the goods that are perma- nent. Going on to the second question ; that of the specific character of evil, several like dis- tinctions are pertinent. The term evil will be applicable to that species of the non-tributary to life which may be defined as positively hos- tile or unfavorable to it. This will put evil in opposition to the good and will provide in the very concept for the avoidance of that confusion that sometimes results in mistaking evil for im- perfect or abortive form of good. There would be reason for doubting whether such, if it exist, could be put into the category of evil at

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all. The evil will be that which is opposite to good. But in order that its definition may be commensurate with that of the good, we must exclude the category of things that are only in temporary opposition to the good as a relative species in regard to which the question may be put whether or not they are not to be consid- ered, in the last analysis, as in some sense tem- porary phases of the good. Evil as such and in its full concept will be defined as the perma- nently undesirable : as that which in its nature is in permanent opposition to the good.

Having reached the definition of evil as that which is permanently undesirable and therefore hostile to the good, we are in a position now to consider the seemingly hopeless question : what is the real problem of evil 1 I call it seemingly hopeless because there are so many and con- flicting ways in which it has been formulated. For example the hedonist will say that evil is pain and that the question is whether in a calcu- lus of pains and pleasures, the pain side of the account has a balance in its favor. The result- ing theory of the world will be optimistic or pessimistic according as the balance swings in favor of pleasure or pain. As the utilitarian who is generally a hedonist will define evil as that which is hurtful, meaning opposite to use- ful, the question with him will be whether the hurtful processes in the world overbalance the useful. An example of this would be the de- duction of Malthus from the alleged truth that

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population tends to increase more rapidly than the means of subsistence, that the economic ten- dency of the race is toward poverty. The Kant- ian moralist on the other hand, regarding not happiness but righteousness, or as some of the modern Kantians term it, excellence, as the cri- terion of good, would formulate the question in terms of his own ideal. Is there a tendency for righteousness to prevail over its opposite; or do conditions exist which would justify us in hoping that righteousness will prevail over its opposite? The Kantian will be an optimist or a pessimist according as he believes that the forces that make for righteousness or their op- posite are likely in the long run to prevail. I propose to avoid this field of conflict by stating a proposition to which it is not impossible that all the parties will be able to assent; namely, that, as a colleague and friend of mine said re- cently in some lectures on pessimism, delivered before the Grove City Bible School, the critical problem of evil is not whether there are, as a matter of fact, conditions in existence that tend toward evil results, but whether the fundamen- tal constitution of the world is evil or good. To state the proposition in a somewhat different form, the great problem of evil is not whether evil exists, or how much harm it does in the world, but rather, is evil so entrenched in the conditions of existence that all efforts to eradi- cate it are doomed to failure. Stated thus it is clear that the answer to all other questions

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about evil will depend on the answer we return to this central problem.

My friend reached the optimistic answer that the fundamental order of the world is good. I must go on, however, and reach my own con- clusion. You know the famous dictum of the pessimism of Schopenhauer, that the root of ex- istence, the effort to live is painful and there- fore irrational. The conclusion of Schopen- hauer is, of course, that good is impossible and that evil is inherent in the root of living itself. This may be true or not. There is much to prove that living in itself is sweet. Further- more, if we maintain that the act of living is painful and yet admit as one must that the in- stinct to life overcomes the aversion that the pain of it inevitably causes, the question comes as to the inner motive of this instinct itself. It would seem that even granting the truth of what Schopenhauer says, the ontological motive of life, that in it which impels it to press for its own completeness, is stronger than the pain of actual existence. If this be true, and how oth- erwise can we explain the instinct which life has for its own preservation, have we not the wit- ness of radical pessimism in favor of the truth of our own proposition that it is the ontological motive, the end motive of life that determines for us our final conceptions of good and evil! It would seem that the question as to whether the root of existence is sweet or bitter, like that of the balance between goods and evils of ex-

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istence, is one that cannot be solved. Perhaps we may go further and say that the balance of facts that have a real bearing on the case will point to a different conclusion.

But there are other points of view from which the question as to the character of the funda- mental order may be approached. If we say that the concepts of good and evil are formed in view of the end-motive of living ; that is, the attainment of that which will be permanently satisfactory, and if the permanently satisfac- tory means fullness and completeness of life: this will itself have a significant bearing on the question. In this case the whole nature of good and evil would have to be determined in view of their relation to the ideal end of life. It would not be a problem that could be stated in the form of a question as to whether or not life is worth living. The fact that life has ideal values would seem to have disposed of the ques- tion as to whether it is worthwhile. At all events, to stop to argue this point here would be a loss of valuable time. Let us assume that the fact that life has ideal values does set aside the question, whether or not it is worth living ; for when we go into a game we calculate to play it fairly and go on to the finish. The presump- tion of the fact that life has ideal values is in favor of the conclusion that life is worth living whether it be bitter at its roots or not. It is also in favor of the presumption that the funda- mental order of the world is consistent at least

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with the possibility of good. For, to go back a step or two, the fact that the ontological mo- tive of existence supplies a propulsive force in life toward its full realization or perfection is proof that the most central and significant thing in life is its idealistic trend. It is in the light of this that the whole meaning of life is to be de- termined. Wc have seen that the concepts of good and evil can be developed only in terms of the ideal, and the general position we take here is that inasmuch as the very notions of good and evil are functions of the ideal, it follows that the true significance of all the facts and phenomena that bear on the problem will ap- pear only when they are brought into the light of the ideal. This is obvious, for good and evil are distinguishable only in view of the ideal values of life, and the solution of all other prob- lems will depend on the clearness with which this distinction is realized and accepted.

Taking this point as settled, and confining our attention to evil as a factor in the life of conscious beings, we may look further into the bearing of the ideal character of good and evil on the question as to whether the fundamental order of the world is to be regarded as good. If we say that it is good we must do so in view of the fact that evil exists and that good is in peril at least of being defeated. Is there any reason for saying that the existence of evil in the world is an insuperable bar to the proposition that the fundamental order of the world is

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good? Let us examine the proposition. If good and evil upon inspection prove to be conceptions that are coordinate and of equal positive value, then we shall have to conclude that the funda- mental order cannot be regarded as unquali- fiedly good. There are, however, several con- siderations that have a bearing on this question. When we consider the two concepts of good and evil, reasons will appear for denying that they can be taken as resting on the same plane. For if we ask this question, are the two concepts mutually implied in one another, the answer will be that while the concept of evil implies that of good, it is not true on the contrary that the concept of good implies that of evil. The good is therefore the prior concept and has an ontological value that the evil does not possess. Again when we consider the concept of evil, we find that it is not positive like that of the good, having ontological structures of its own, but that it rather uses the form of the good in order to ruin the structure of the good. A lie for ex- ample has no independent structure of its own but employs the form of truth in order to de- feat the truth. From this which will be found true generally, we may draw the conclusion that evil is negative in its ontological structure while good is positive. In the world evil is the spirit of denial and negation : it is the destroyer not the builder; its negative ideal is chaos and disorder; its symbol is darkness rather than

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light, and abysmal perdition rather than the stable and permanent.

If then evil is negative, and if it has no per- manent ontological ideals, it would appear that it is not only not entitled to the position of a co- ordinate with the good; but also that it is not provided for in the original constitution of things, and, like a late intruder, finds it nec- essary to make a place for itself by creating a breach in the order already established. This I should say is more than a mere appearance. The negative character and function of evil confirms its truth, and also explains the fact that the notion of evil always implies a good without which the evil could not exist. We will be on firm ground, I think, if from these sig- nificant facts we conclude that evil is not a fact of the fundamental order of existence at all, but presupposes the existence of that order, and that its business is to prey upon that order and defeat and destroy it. The fundamental order is good and the idea of good is therefore that of the permanent satisfaction that arises from the realization of the permanent order of the world. Or, to put it in other words, the good may be defined as the permanent satisfaction which arises from the realization of the ideal order of life. The ideal of life will be its com- pleteness or perfection, and this will be part of the ideal order of the world which constitutes its fundamental nature.

Let us now consider the concept of evil in

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somewliat further detail. We may define as evil the failure of the good, but it is not clear that mere failure can be called evil ; nor can we regard mere privation of good as evil. The concept in both cases is too empty. Also the no- tion of imperfection is inadequate since it only implies the absence of the sense of attainment; not even its failure. We do not deny that fail- ure, privation, and imperfection, may in some of their consequences be evil, but in all such cases some condition more definitely inconsis- tent with the good will enter. We begin to reach definite ground of evil when we define it as aberration or a tendency to depart from the good. Aberration will be evil in the sense that it is a departure from the line of the good. While aberration considered as eccentricity may be considered evil and in many instances is in fact, we do not in mere aberration from the good standard get an adequate concept of evil. For example the line of statement may be an eccentric departure from the perpendicular of truth without necessarily becoming a lie. We find it necessary to introduce the notions of op- position and contradiction in order to fill out the full measure of the concept of evil. For a lie, for example, is more than a departure from the truth or a failure to tell the truth. It is op- posed to and contradictory to the truth. We must not mistake, however, wherein this con- tradiction lies. It does not consist in a contra- dictory ontological structure. If it did, the lie

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would be impossible : nor does it consist essen- tially in stating the opposite of the facts. This happens frequently without any lie being told. It will consist, and this is significant, in deceiv- ing and misleading the person to whom the statement is made. It is the use of a form of truth to convey a meaning the opposite of that which a true statement would convey. In short it is an appeal to the ideal. There is a standard of truth which commands common acceptance. This is an ideal to which all are committed in their statements. The liar is false to the ideal. His act is one that assails it and attempts to destroy it. We may generalize this instance and say that in all cases where the essential na- ture of evil can be determined it will be found that it is opposite and contradictory to the ideal of the good.

If now we attempt to distinguish between dif- ferent forms of evil, we will be able to make sev- eral distinctions of greater or less value. Leib- nitz is perhaps our best guide here. He classi- fies the species of evil under three different heads; natural, metaphysical, and moral. The natural, to hold the discussion within limits al- ready defined, would include what are called the natural evils of life, pain, disease, poverty and death. Metaphysical evil would consist in im- perfections while moral evil can be brought un- der the category of sin. Turning then to the form of evil called natural, it may be said that while all the forms we have stated except the

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phenomenon of death are evils of a grave order, two facts are true regarding them. In the first place they are either avoidable or curable. Pain in the abstract is an unqualified evil but concretely it may in general be regarded as a danger signal set up by nature to warn con- scious beings from breaking some of her laws. This is generally true, and even where pain strikes innocent victims, we can trace the agen- cies that enable us to see that it is avoidable and thus take the hopeful and remedial view. In the case of disease and poverty the case is clearer. There are economic evils which are traceable to bad but remediable causes, and while it is true that in the case of both disease and poverty the world is full of innocent vic- tims, the fact that these are all remediable and that by a more perfect action of human agencies they might have been prevented, is sufficient to justify the conclusion that bad as they are the case is not hopeless. They contain in them the implication of no infraction of the fundamental order of the world. That this is good and that therefore sickness and poverty ought not to ex- ist is rather the logic of all hopeful measures for their relief. As to death which has been called the arch-enemy of life, we do not know enough about it to be able to say whether this is true or not. But there are some facts about death which will perhaps shed some rays of light into the dark prospect. It is to be borne in mind that death, apart from the apprehension

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of it, in its relation to life is only an event with- out significance, and so far as we know the act is painless. It is only a consciousness that can look before and behind, that can have some sense of the sweetness of life and of its ideal outlook, that can regard death as an evil or feel any regrets at the prospect or certainty of its approach. The significance of this is great. If life be sweet, we may feel in the prospect of death, as the shade of the ancient Greek is rep- resented as feeling, that a single day of life among men is better than an aeon in Hades. In this case it is not any mystical thing caUed death but simply the ending of a desirable state of existence that is considered the evil. Again, I think we may say that the largest ingredient in the evil of death to mortals arises from the fact that it seems to be a defeat of the plans and purposes and ideals of life. The sense of the vanity and of the futility of life springs largely from the feeling of life's brevity. In the midst of his plans and enjoyments, the de- stroyer strikes, and his house of cards is shat- tered and the cup falls from his lips. Surely life is a vain show. Now the point of all this as it bears on our problem is that the evil of death is measured largely in terms of some ideal of life which we mortals entertain. It is not so much that it dashes the cup from our lips, but it seems to block the way to all ideals of perma- nent satisfaction. It is as a destroyer of the ideal that death seems to be the great evil of

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existence. We can understand this and it in- terprets for us the attitude taken toward death in much of the literature of the world where life is idealized and death is represented as the great enemy that breaks in and thwarts the ef- forts of life toward permanent satisfaction. How else could the gloom be so deep ; the regret so poignant? When a child dies we do not interpret the evil from the standpoint of the child-consciousness to which it is doubtless al- most nil, but rather from our own larger per- spective and in terms of the ideal satisfactions it has been cut off from realizing. Of course we may be pessimists and then we will not regard the child's death as an evil at all, but as an escape from evil. If then death is considered an evil only, or for the most part, as it seems to contradict our ideal estimate of the value of life, we come back to our old proposition that the evil of life is to be estimated in terms, not of brute fact as Professor Royce would say, but in terms of ideal values. This is true of all the forms we have considered, and if we elimi- nate from the problem the evils that are reme- diable, we will have as our irreducible residu- um those evils that are bound up with mortal existence, pain, defeat, and death. In regard to these we have already reached the conclusion that the respect in which they are unmistakably evil arises out of their relation to the ideal values of life. Pain, for example, may be re- garded as disciplinary up to the point where it

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clearly stands in the way of realizing the good ; it then becomes destructive.

There remains then of our species of evil, sin or its moral aspect. There is a famous old formula that defines sin as any want of con- formity to, or transgression of, the law of God. This formula is profoundly significant, for it seems to cover the grounds of both the meta- physical and the moral as per the classification of Leibnitz. Such is in fact the case if we do not interpret the formula too narrowly, for if want of conformity be construed objectively and apart from our consciousness of it, it will simply be measured by the distance between action and its ideal standard. Sin itself is de- fined objectively in terms of this distance or on its more positive side in terms of opposition to the ideal standard. If we translate it into psy- chological terms and substitute philosophical for theological terms, the formula may be read as follows : Sin is the soul's sense of its failure to realize the ideal standard of perfection and of its active transgression of the ideal stan- dard. The two evils, a sense of failure to rea- lize and of actual infraction of the standard, seem to fill out the measure of sin as a state of the conscious life of the subject.

Let us consider then these two aspects in the conception of sin. There could be no sin, it is clear, except from the point of view of the ideal values of life. This is evident. Now, the first part of the definition; the sense of the failure

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to measure up to the standard of ideal value, while it does not involve any actual transgres- sion, or in fact any disposition to transgress, is yet the source of the profoundest consciousness of sin. It was no doubt from this inevitable failure to realize the ideal that the Stoics as well as the early Christian thinkers developed their doctrine of total depravity. Christian thought connected the doctrine with that of the fall of man and the hereditary transmission of its effects along spiritual lines; whereas, in stoicism there is no such saving clause, but the depravity is inherent in man's constitution. It may be overcome by those who are able to live up to the requirements of the life of perfect reason. But for all men, except a few, the fail- ure, like the Karma of the Hindu philosophy will be an inevitable perdition. It must be con- fessed that the Christian doctrine of total de- pravity has shown a constant tendency to free itself from the limits of the doctrine of the fall and to find the real root of depravity intrinsic in the constitution of man. Without following this line farther, it will be evident, I think, that the deepest sense of sin will spring from the consciousness of the failure of our lives to measure up to the standard of ideal values. On the other hand our actual sense of sin in the plural will be largely, if not exclusively, that of acts or attitudes that are in contravention of the law of the ideal. Now without going further into detail we are

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in a position from which the following conclu- sion may be drawn. The implication of all forms of sin is that life has ideal values which set the standards of living to which the soul by virtue of its constitution is committed. These standards are both the lineaments of the ideal and the laws of its activity. Sin, therefore, im- plies a service of the ideal. It is its sense that this service expresses its true life that gives it the deep sense of sin in view of its failure to conform or of its actual infractions or its temp- tations to infract.

The question of the origin of evil has, per- haps, been surrounded with difficulties that are more apparent than real. It is usual to hamper the problem with certain assumptions about the author of existence which turn out to be incon- sistent with any rational treatment of the prob- lem. It is my purpose here to point out the only assumption that seems to be necessary as a condition of a rational answer. This is the conclusion toward which the whole of the pre- ceding discussion has been pointing. There is, in the first place, nothing in the fact of the ex- istence of evil in the world to militate against the doctrine that the fundamental constitution of things is good. Secondly, our analysis of the concepts of good and evil, as well as our study of the different forms of evil, may strongly support the doctrine that evil in all its forms is to be interpreted in the light of the ideal values of life. If, in other words, the constitution of

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things did not reveal a standard of ideal values, evil would practically cease to be evil by losing a large part of its significance. We may then conclude with a high degree of rational certi- tude that the fundamental constitution of the world is good. This I am prepared to claim as the only assumption that it is necessary to make in order to make a rational solution of the prob- lem possible. In the first place then if the fun- damental constitution of things is good, it will follow that evil will arise out of conditions that are themselves good. Augustine recognizes this when he says in his Confessions, that the ante- cedent of an evil will is a good will. In other words, if we go deep enough into the problem we will find a point where evil vanishes and every- thing becomes good. This seems to be at first sight only a deeper mystery. How can evil come out of good? In answering this question I wish to state in the first place a very deep fact which I will be unable to elaborate. It is this, that our whole doctrine of evil, as we have unfolded it, involves a certain conclusion about the nature of men. We have given our reasons for assuming that a rational solution of the problem of evil depends on the postulate of the goodness of the fundamental order of the world. A branch of that postulate will have a vital bearing on the question of the origin of evil in man's nature. In short in order to make the situation at all rational, it will be necessary to assume that, fundamentally, the nature of man

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is good and incorruptible. We have seen that sin can only be known as sin in the light of a standard of ideal values. The consciousness of sin arises from our recognition of this standard as expressing our true existence. Sin is the con- sciousness of failure to realize our ideal, which is our real self, or our consciousness of volun- tary infraction of its law. What the theologian calls the Will of God will be from another point of view the law of the real self. This we have justified in our doctrine that there is a point of immanence where the Divine Will and the hu- man will become one. In one aspect of it, it becomes the will of a self of ideal values which is presupposed in the whole theory of evil. There is a point in the constitution of man where it becomes identical with the fundamental constitution of the world and when it speaks, it will speak from the standpoint of that constitu- tion. It is from this point of view that Kant's doctrine of the autonomy of the will derives its true significance. For it is the will of the un- perverted noumenal self that utters the cate- gorical imperative of the moral law, and this will, if Kant had seen the fact, is at the same time both the Divine will and the will of the unperverted self. When Augustine says that the antecedent of the evil will is the good will, he has a deeper truth in mind than that in the empirical line of acts of choice we come to a point where the next antecedent is not evil. He meant this but much more. Metaphysically

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speaking, there is always a will that is good, and that is the will of the real self that stands above the empirical and through conscience utters its law to the empirical. If we enter into the deeper Angnstinian insight, the situation that reveals itself will be that of a nature that has in it a distinction between an empirical and a real self. The empirical self will be the self that makes our individual and momentary choices. It acts and passes and some other empirical subject takes its place. But back of it or above it or within it, as we have seen, there is an abiding self which holds the empirical to per- manent conditions and utters the permanent law of existence. If we ask where evil belongs in this constitution, the answer will be that it is man's empirical and perishable self that is evil. The significance of James ' doctrine of the perishable self will be recognized here. James finds some principle of continuity like the Hin- du Karma that binds the empirical selves into a continuous chain along which the empirical doom of the antecedent may be transmitted. If we recall a doctrine that we developed in a former lecture, we will be able, I think, to find the true interpretation for this conclusion of James, and at the same time secure a signifi- cant clue to the way in which evil may arise in a system that is good. The doctrine I refer to is that it is in the synthesis of the empirical and the real selves ; of the momentary and the abid- ing ; that we find the key to the concrete life of

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the soul. From that point of view we saw that the law of its activity as a whole could be char- acterized as a perpetual effort to pass from the momentary and perishable to that which is abiding and stable. If we hold fast to this con- ception and avail ourselves of the insight of natural history which teaches the lesson of a gradual genetic progress of life upward through the animal stages to the human, and in the human, from the senstitive to the rational, we will reach something like the following. The life of the soul in its natural history passes through a number of progressive stages from the lower to the higher, each of which manifest a mode of activity that is appropriate to its stage of existence and therefore good. Thus we say that the animal stage will be dominated by instinct, the lower human by sense, and the higher by reason. Now what we find in each one of these stages, going from the lower to the higher, is the survival of the law of the pre- ceding stage in the higher, as a lower nature which the higher stage, when its activity is nor- mal, subordinates to the higher law of its own nature. Thus, in a being that has reached the stage of reason, the laws of instinct and of the sensitive nature will survive. If these are held in subordination to reason, all will go well. But it is evident that these lower forces will seek to dominate the higher nature and that whether they succeed or not, they will constitute a temp- tation to the higher nature to fall under the law

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of the lower. It is evident also that should a ra- tional being that has the higher ideals of life, and recognizes these as its law, fall under the law of the lower and act in the level of instinct or sense, it would immediately develop the sense of sin. It would be conscious not only of having fallen short, for this consciousness might not give rise to the sense of sin ; but also of having contravened the higher law; of having proved traitor to its higher nature. I think we have a perfectly clear account here of the way in which a being that is good may fall into sin. The sin would consist in the fact that a higher nature, or, if you prefer, will, whose prerogative it is to dominate the lower will of instinct or sense, has fallen under the dominance of the will of in- stinct or sense, and chooses the good of the lower for its own proper and higher good. Augustine says virtually the same things in his contention that the soul falls into evil and com- mits sin by choosing some lower or creature good as its supreme good and putting it in place of the supreme good which is God. A strong confirmation of the truth of this is found in the consciousness of it that is displayed in the best spiritual literature. I need not quote Augustine further. The classical example will be found in that famous passage in Romans in which Paul describes a warfare between the flesh and the spirit in which the spirit is constantly being brought under bondage to the law of the flesh, and as a consequence deadening the conscious-

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ness of sin. The consciousness of the same struggle is betrayed in the biographies of the saints and in the common consciousness that arises when a propensity that is innocent in it- self has been gratified in circumstances where a higher law is contravened.

To develop this position at length here would be impossible. But an insight has been reached, I think, that will lead to the conclusion that the existence of evil in the world is consistent with the doctrine that the fundamental order of the world is good. We will also be ready to admit that an intelligible theory of the possible origin of evil and sin in a good system is possible ; that in the doctrine that sin originates in a fall of a good will, temporarily at least, under the law of that which is lower, we are able to interpret the classical passages on the subject in the spiritual literature of the world. The gravity of moral evil or sin arises from the fact that while it is not inconsistent with the goodness of the fundamental order of the world, it does, in fact, involve a breach in that order at a particu- lar point: the higher will has surrendered it- self to the lower will and has thereby become evil. This shows the gravity of sin as a breach in the order of the world at a point where the life of an individual soul touches and is one with it. From this point of view the final problem of the cure of evil arises. This problem has spe- cial reference to sin or evil in its moral and its most serious aspect. If it be true that sin is a

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breach in the fundamental order at the vital point where the soul's existence becomes one with it, the seriousness of the situation and the inadequacy of any proposed remedies that do not go deep into the nature of man becomes al- most self-evident.

The problem of the cure of evil will divide naturally into two parts, that which concerns the group of evils which are included in the cate- gory of remediable by ordinary human agencies and those like death and sin that are not cur- able in that way. Regarding the first group lit- tle need be said except that the difficulties are to be met by human intelligence and foresight. They involve the regeneration of human society, the eradications of the causes of the disturb- ances, and the reorganization of the social forces along the lines of human welfare. To correctly diagnose the disease and to devise practicable and effective remedies are tasks that will call for more, no doubt, than the present resources of human knowledge and devotion to the good. But the point of interest to us here is the fact that men may approach the task with the reasonable belief that it is not only practic- able but that it is not beyond their human re- sources. We may leave the rest to the practical reformer. In regard to the second group, the case is different. No one in his sober senses has proposed to abolish death. It stands there a door of exit from the only life of which we have any conscious knowledge. We have seen,

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however, that the evil of death is largely esti- mated from the point of view of the ideal values of life : that if the scope of the life vision could be circumscribed by the limits of time and sense, as in the case of the animals, death could scarce- ly be called an evil. It is in view of the life that is **on ahead" with its ideal satisfactions that death becomes the great destroyer. If this be true, and there is not room for reasonable doubt on the subject, it would appear that redress of the evil of death would have to be sought in some conception of the ideal values of life. If death is inevitable the cure of death as an evil will be to seek in a conception of life from the point of view of its ideal values that will make it appear, not what to the ordinary view it ap- pears to be, the end and defeat of life, but rather an episode in a life history that opens the door into new fields of realitv. Aside from this prospect nothing remains except the con- sideration that a life may be so filled with satis- factions that the desire for the "on ahead" will be swallowed up in the sense of the worth of what has been already achieved. That this is a consideration of some value may be admitted but that the most generous souls, those whose loyalty to the good is greatest, could not with- out lowering their ideals take advantage of its consolation, is also evident. For the most gen- erous souls value life for the scope it gives to their beneficent activities, and there is a subtle self-contradiction involved in the supposition

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that they could regard the cutting off of these opportunities as anything but an evil. Not to dwell on what we must consider the major issue here, the question whether there are grounds to rationally justify a conception of life that will remove death from the category of evils, a theme that will come up for further considera- tion in the lecture on the Destiny of the Soul, let us now take up our final problem — that of the remedy for sin or moral evil. Going back to the conclusion reached in a former passage of this lecture ; that sin involves a breach in the fundamental order of the world at the point where that order vitalizes in the consciousness of the sinner; there are several questions on which the insight of this will shed some light. In the first place it helps us to realize the na- ture and gravity of sin as an evil, and how radically it affects the nature of man. If sin is a breach of the fundamental order at the point where the soul becomes conscious of it as its own highest order, it will mark a radical per- version of that order, and from the point of view of the deepest consciousness a sense of treason to that order. The soul that sins will feel that it has thereby become a traitor to the highest, and further that there is no atonement that it can itself make for its offense. From any lower point of view than the highest, com- pensation would be possible, since it would be possible to atone in terms of a higher order than that in which the offence was committed. Thus

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if I take advantage of a position of trust and steal money that belongs to another, I cannot atone by simply restoring the breach I have made in the order of property rights. If that were true, I could make complete atonement by replacing the money I had stolen. I might, however, do this and still be a thief. My chief offense has been that of treason to the law of human trust and confidence. I can only atone truly by ceasing to be a thief and becoming loyal to the law of trust and confidence. And I will be restored to my former position only when I have convinced my employer of my re- stored loyalty. But if the overt breach has been made in the order that is highest, there is then nothing higher from which to make real atone- ment. The sin is against God and our con- sciousness is that of the Psalmist, ** against thee and thee only have I sinned and done this evil in thy sight." The soul feels that for such an oif ense there is no atonement within its power ; it cannot repent though it seek it with tears. In the second place, light will be shed on the reason why this is true if we are able to see that sin is an oif ense of the religious conscious- ness. We have seen that the religious con- sciousness adds a new spiritual dimension to life in the light by which life is seen to be transformed by its relation to its self-existent ground. If sin be an offense of the religious consciousness, it then reveals itself as a breach in the Divine foundation of the soul's existence.

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It is disloyalty; treason to the Divine Order in which its life has its deepest roots. The result will be that not only is atonement impossible from the standpoint of its own resources, but also that the poison of the primal sin will affect its whole being; that is, its being as a whole and every part of it. From the very nature of sin it follows that it is a perversion of the whole nature. If the essence of sin be disloyalty to the highest, the effect of it will be an attitude of will that will pervert and turn into wrong channels all the streams of its being. If then, sin be an evil that corrupts the whole nature, and if the soul out of its own resources cannot atone for it, two conclusions seem to follow. In the first place it is clear that the evil of sin be- ing one that affects the whole nature of man in a very radical way, it cannot be remedied by any kind of superficial reform. A sinner cannot make himself good by cutting off evil habits, checking evil tendencies or even holding him- self in check by a strong will. We feel the superficiality of all this. What the sinner needs is salvation and salvation will always involve atonement, the restoration of the sinner to com- plete unity with the highest. This will make an operation that will radically affect his whole nature. In the second place it will follow from this that if the sinner cannot save himself be- cause of the fact that sin is a breach of the transcendent order of his being; the vicarious principle must enter into and constitute the

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constructive feature of a real act of salvation. For the true principle of vicarious action is that of the entering of the higher into the life of the lower in order that the lower may be lifted to the plane of the higher. There may be and no doubt is vicarious action where no offense has been committed. But in the case of sin and sal- v^ation, an offense has been committed against the highest order which the sinner is unable to redress. The only redress possible in the case is for someone who is a bearer of the highest order and against whose nature the offense has been committed to identify himself in some way with the conscious life of the sinner for without this identification the sin could not be atoned for, as without it it could not have been com- mitted. He will be able to do this in the first place through the consciousness of perfect unity in himself with the highest, and secondly through perfect sympathy with the sinner in his sin and anguish. This will make it possible for him to bear the burden of the sinner's sin and anguish in a way in which the sinner will be- come conscious that he bears it himself through a stronger than himself that he feels to be in him. St. Paul says it is no longer I but Christ that dwells in me. The strength of vicarious atonement is in the consciousness of its vicar- ious character which the sinner has in him. That he cannot atone but that he is being vi- cariously atoned is the saving quality of his consciousness. Now this is the great transac-

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tioii on which in its transcendent sense the sal- vation of men depends. There are, however, many relative and human illustrations of the vicarious principle in human experience. Royce has shown with great weight how the conscious- ness of a community which has been thrown in- to spiritual confusion by the rise of treason in its midst to the highest, may be restored to unity with itself by the vicarious action of a good man whose act is the embodiment of the tran- scendent principle. In simpler form the same principle is exemplified in individual instances. The good father or mother who follows an err- ing son and finally by their sacrificing love are able to enter into the conscious life of the son, as a stronger and elevating force, perform a true act of vicarious atonement. In conclusion I wish to make two observations. In the first place I have not been attempting here any apologetic justification of the Christian doc- trine of the atonement. I have rather followed out logically certain deep insights and philo- sophical considerations which lead to the con- clusion that the issues which the Christian doc- trine of atonement is designed to meet are the deepest and gravest issues of man 's nature. If the evil of sin is to be really cured, it must be by measures that will reform the very foundations of the nature of man. In the second place it is clear, I think, that the problem of sin is one of the religious consciousness. It is through this consciousness that the soul achieves a new

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spiritual dimension and gets an insight into the true foundations of its being. It is only in the light of this new spiritual dimension that one can arrive at a true conception of sin, and it is only in its light that we can see how salvation from sin is possible and how the highest may interfere vicariously for the redemption of a soul that has ruined itself through disloyalty to the highest.

Lecture VIII. The Destiny op the Soul

We saw, in the last lecture, that the only point of view from which death could be lifted from the category of irremediable evils was that of an interpretation of life in the light of its ideal values. Is any such interpretation possible? We are free to answer that it will be possible, if we can find sufficient reason for the convic- tion that our life, in its very constitution, is such as to ignore and cancel any proposed limits of time and sense. If time and sense limits are purely empirical, and, in a real sense, physical, it may then be that, in our doctrine of the soul 's life, as transcending the empirical, we will find the transcendent point of view for which we are searching. Now, that time and sense are em- pirical, and, in a real sense, physical, is a propo- sition that is, I think, open to proof. There is no question about the senses. Every man who admits the limit of sense to the possibility of

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knowledge is an empiricist who believes in the one order ; that of perception. But that time is purely empirical and physical is more open to debate. In dealing with the problem of time in this connection, we will be helped, I think, by the analytic insight of Henri Bergson, who dis- tinguishes between time as succession, and non- serial time as duration. The metaphysical con- cept of time is that of duration, which is exis- tence apart from any distinction of moments or measures of lapse. Time only becomes a suc- cession of moments when we apply to it the linear measure of space. Time has no dimen- sion, but, as a series, it has been spatialized by fitting it into the linear dimension of space. This phenomenalizes it by adapting it to the changes of the world, and it imparts to it physi- cal character in spatializing it, since space is the form of the physical which imparts to it dimen- sion and capacity for mathematical measure- ment. So, when we apply the serial measure to consciousness, we thereby translate it out of pure time, which is duration, and render it physical by introducing its pulses into the measures of space.

Now, without developing this doctrine fur- ther, or committing myself to all the Bergson- ian deductions from it, I wish to point out a sense in which it seems to me not only to be true, but also vitally important. If we take our consciousness in its higher dimension; — that is, in terms of its self-conscious activity of

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thinking, we will find that, in no sense, does it follow the linear order of the time series. The activity is one that is self -centralizing, and all the moments are internal to the conscious life of the self. It is only when we throw our thoughts out, — that is, make them terms in a space-world, that they take on the form of the series. They really occupy a place in space, and are, so far, physical. The life of the soul, there- fore, as it is lived in serial time and space, is a physical life which pertains to the body. It naturally and logically ends with the dissolution of the body, therefore, and supplies no point of departure for any doctrine of survival. I do not think that, from the empirical point of view, any doctrine of survival can be logically de- fended. It is only when we deny the sufficiency of the empirical point of view, and, recognizing the validity of the distinction we have drawn between the empirical self and the real self, that we will begin to see the grounds of a logic that goes beyond the limits of the empirical. Let us attempt to develop a little ways the logic of the position we have here reached. If the serial time-form is a form of the physical, then to rep- resent consciousness as a simply flowing stream is to picture it as a physical phenomenon. The physical is decomposable, and it is by decompo- sition that death occurs to the body. If con- sciousness is physical, it will be decomposable in the same way. Death will be the end of both soul and body. And I submit that this is the

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only point of view from which the mortality of the soul can be affirmed. It must first be re- duced to the terms of physical existence ; it will then be reasonable to conclude that, like the body, it is perishable. It is a matter of vital importance that we should have reached this conclusion, since, from any other point of view than that which identifies the soul-life with that of the physical, the question as to its survival of the dissolution of the body is open.

Let us, then, consider the bearings which the doctrine of the soul we have already found rea- son to accept will naturally have on the prob- lem of survival. We have already attained to one or two conclusions which will have an im- portant bearing here. In the first place, we have seen that the real self transcends the em- pirical and physical by the measure of a whole dimension; that it refuses to conform to the serial world, and unifies itself around a self- centre, and claims for itself a stable and abiding existence. Looking at it from this angle, we see a self-centred life that is maintaining the in- tegrity of its existence through the broken and perishable order of its empirical existence. This is something that wholly transcends the empirical, and from the empirical point of view is incomprehensible. Again, we have seen that, in the light of the religious consciousness, the soul achieves a new dimension of spiritual in- sight, which enables it to see itself in the light of its transcendent origin. The insight here is

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into the eternal life of the self-existent ground, into which the soul enters and participates by virtue of its religious heritage. That the soul, from the standpoint of its religious conscious- ness, becomes the bearer of a life that constitu- tionally transcends the physical measures of time and sense is so apparent as to require little further elucidation. But all that follows will be, in a sense, but the elaboration of that propo- sition.

Let us ask again here the question, what is the real life of the soul; the life that is most characteristic of it? Do we say that it is living a life worthy of its nature when it is seeking its whole satisfaction in the perishable things of the present, or when it simply follows the dic- tates of prudence for this present life, and lays up material treasures alone to the neglect of the more spiritual values ? Or even when it re- sponds to the moral side of life to the extent of obeying the laws of honesty, truthfulness, purity and fair dealing, — do we say, even then, that the soul has filled out the full measure of a life-ideal that can be taken as permanently satisfactory? To all of these questions we will be constrained to return a negative answer. What is sometimes called mere morality, — that is, a point of view that is satisfied with the ful- fillment of ordinary moral obligation, will not save a soul that is fully awake to its real con- dition and needs. Nor can we say that the soul can find the ideal of its true life in the terms

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of ethical culture, however exalted they may be. The whole trend of the ideals of the ethical schools may be in the line of the soul's true de- velopment. They may nurture a life-ideal that is rich in self-sacrificing devotion to the high- est forms of personal and social good. They may nurture the sense of a value in life that is higher than mere happiness; that places the highest excellence at the pinnacle of achieve- ment. Even then, if these ideals are restricted to the sphere of humanistic limits, and are not touched with the sense of transcendence, I think we will have to say that they do not fill out the measure of a life that is completely satisfac- tory. Why do we insist on this? Not that we do not fall in with most of the positive content of the teaching of the leading ehtical culturists ; for our entire criticism of their programs has for its motive the belief that they show a cer- tain lack of insights that are of vital impor- tance. The central contention of these lectures is; that man is, by nature, a religious being; that his religious consciousness opens up to him a new dimension of life ; that the insights of this new spiritual dimension transform all the other issues of his life, so that he becomes, in his es- sential activities, a religious being; so that ideals that will meet the full requirements of his life must give satisfaction to his religious nature; that they can do this only when they are developed in the light of the highest that is in man, — in the light of the insight which the

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soul has into the self-existent ground of its being, and into the fact that it attains its high- est only when it realizes, in its consciousness, its identity with the most fundamental order of the world. If we have here sketched the funda- mental conditions of the soul's realization of its highest good, then the conclusion follows that the highest life is that of religion ; that no pro- gram of life can be completely satisfactory in which the ideals of religion do not hold the cen- tral place.

Now, this conclusion has been reached here not alone in the interests of the life of religion. Rather, our chief aim has been to show that it is only from the standpoint of the life of re- ligion that any very certain conclusions can be reached regarding the destiny of the soul. This I mean to be taken broadly, as not involving any issue between religion and rational reflection, but rather as indicating that it is only when philosophy avails itself of the insights of the religious consciousness that it is in a position to grasp the problem in its fullest significance. One thing may be taken, I think, as settled ; that a philosophy that confines itself to the physical limits of time and sense has no problem on its hands; or, if it succeeds in formulating one, it is cut off by its limitations from the data of a true solution. How, then, can the data of a hopeful solution be reached? In the first place, to revert to our discussions in the lecture on the nature of the soul, we will find it necessary to

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be in earnest with the distinction we have there worked out between the real and the empirical self. We found there that, while, empirically, the self may be represented as a transient fea- ture of a flowing stream of conscious existence, in reality the soul that cognizes the flowing stream must itself have an abiding stand on the rock of permanent being. We saw that the em- piricist, who applies his solvent analysis to the self, has unconsciously reserved the self with which he has identified himself as the observer. This observer-consciousness that pronounces all the judgments is not the self that is judged, else no judgments would be possible. We saw, also, that it is only from the point of view of the synthesis between the empirical and the real that the true teleological motive of the whole living activity of consciousness can be interpre- ted. So viewed, it becomes a struggle up from the fragmentary and unstable to the ground of the unbroken and stable ; and it is only as this struggle is successful that the abiding satisfac- tion of life is attained. If we add to this the fact that this effort is only unconditionally suc- cessful when, through the insight of religion, the soul is able to see its relation to its self- existent and transcendent ground ; for it is only through this insight that it is able to fix its own life on the rock of essential existence, — if, I say, we add this insight, we will then be in pos- session of the data that will enable us to work out a true philosophy of life, in the light of

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which we may throw some light on the mystery of death.

For, if these data enable us to put a rational construction on life, it is very likely that we will find in them a clue to the interpretation of the ideal values of life. We have seen that the evils that afflict the life of man can be understood only in view of the ideal values of life. Now, all these values we have summed up in the phrase, permanent satisfaction. What, then, are the permanent satisfactions of life? I do not propose here to enter upon a task of enu- meration, but rather to seek some criterion that will enable us to determine what a satisfaction must be in order to be permanent. In the first place, it is mere tautology to say that nothing can give permanent satisfaction that perishes in the using; and, by perishing in the using, we mean, superficially, the object that does not last, like a feast which mil be eaten up. More profoundly, we mean the decay of our capacity for obtaining satisfaction from any such source. In the scope of our teleological proposition, however, we find a judgment of condemnation on all those projects of life that are foredoomed to failure from the fact that the transient will cease to be sweet and will turn into the ashes of bitterness. But, passing on to the more serious aspects of the problem : another criterion of the permanently satisfactory is its transcendence, in its essential power to satisfy, of all the acci- dents of time and sense. Wealth may satisfy,

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and the pursuit of it may be still more attrac- tive; but it is liable to accident; we never pos- sess it with absolute security, and, even when we extend its satisfaction to the utmost limit, it must cease with this life of time and sense. Much more durable are the satisfactions yielded by a good education or a character of solid ex- cellence. These, however, owe their superior excellence to the fact that they are relatively in- dependent of time and sense, and belong to the category of spiritual values. Now, when I say that there is no one that will regard either the perishable or the relatively permanent as meet- ing the highest demands of the soul, I mean, of course, no one that has come to any true reali- zation of himself ; such realization, for example, as comes in the time of great calamity or the imminence of death. There is no one that will find in these things, at such moments as these, that which will permanently satisfy the soul. We strike the deepest note when we put the question, — what alone will the soul regard as un- conditionally valuable in these moments of deepest realization'? It is very significant that the goods of time and sense are like straws which the soul grasps in vain. The true in- stinct of life, which is hidden in ordinary cir- cumstances, asserts itself, and the soul seeks the abiding that is higher than itself. It is the religious consciousness that asserts itself here ; the soul, in the attitude of death, so far as the empirical is concerned, arouses to its real life,

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and cries out to the source of its existence. There can be no mistaking the significance of this experience. The soul, when the world is going well with it, and its eyes are holden from the deeper things of life, may satisfy itself with any mess of pottage; but there comes a time when all the cups of enjoyment are shattered, and the skull and bones appear at the end of the broken feast ; then the soul realizes its true na- ture, its deeper needs begin to clamor, and it realizes that, after all, the only destiny that will satisfy its cravings is an immortal one. The soul, in its real life, is a three-dimensional spiritual being. Its deepest insights, and, con- sequently, its deepest ideals, are those of re- ligion. This is true of the lower stages of its existence, though it does not realize the truth; for the religious insight alone explains the fact that creature goods cannot satisfy; that it is the sense for the highest that sends it out on that unending search for good that is the most significant feature of its life.

In ancient philosophy, the most cogent proofs of immortality were two of Plato's, which he presents in various parts of his works. One is founded on the substantial nature of the soul, as what he calls the self-moving principle of mo- tion. Now, we have found in our study that it is necessary to ascribe to the soul the principle of self-activity. No soul-life would be possible without real initiative, and we have seen that real initiative is self-initiative. If this ex-

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presses the substantial nature of the soul, it is clear that Plato has seized on a fact that has great significance in its bearing on the problem of the soul's life. The principal reason why, in physics, science is obliged to assume the inde- structibility of matter is that, as we have al- ready pointed out, existence implies self-exis- tence as its ground. Hence, if matter is to be postulated as permanent, it must involve in it the self-existent. Science, however, is not inter- ested in this implication of its assumption. The insight to which science is blind rests at the foundation of Plato's proof. He says that the soul, having in it the self -moving principle of motion, cannot perish. In the light of our own previous conclusions, we are able to see that Plato affirms, with intelligent insight, what science implies without insight ; only we are not able to say whether Plato's affirmation was made in the light of the last insight in this field, — namely, that it is only when that which is not the spring of its own existence, lays hold upon its self-existent ground that its immor- tality can be affirmed. It is a three-dimensional spiritual insight that rests at the foundation of the proof, and makes it valid as the soul's as- sertion of its own existential prerogative.

The second proof of Plato is founded on the principle of his idealism; — namely, that it is the true prerogative of the soul to contemplate the highest truth. These truths are the first and eternal principles of things, and the soul's

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knowledge of them is direct and immediate. It is clear here that Plato expresses a principle that we have become familiar with in our study of religious knowledge. There we saw that the whole activity of knowledge, when viewed from the standpoint of its ontological motive, is to be regarded as a movement from the fragment- ary and perishable order of its empirical life to an unseen and permanent order of truth and re- ality. In the course of this movement, the soul is consciously in the way of realizing its ideal destiny. Now, Plato states this proof in the intellectual form; but, in the light of his ideas, which are ethical as well as logical, the proof is capable of the broader construction we have given it, when we pointed out that the same movement is found at the heart of the emotional and volitional struggles of the soul's life. The force of the proof will appear when it is con- cretely and broadly stated. It is founded on an insight into the fact that the inner movement of the soul's life is away from the temporal and perishable elements of existence to those that are eternal and perdurable. In the light of the insights that are open to us, the theoretic co- gency of these proofs is unmistakable.

There is another proof of a different char- acter which Plato cites, the principle of which is this; that, since the whole of the existent has been made after the idea of the good; this establishes the realization of the good as the end-category of the world-system as a whole.

PHILOSOPHY OF KELIGION 185

Now, the soul is the apex of the creation; that in which, what it has had at its heart from the beginning has come to realization. It would be contradicting the good and would spell its de- feat, were the soul itself to prove mortal and perishable. This we see clearly in an inference from the soul 's value as the highest term in the realization of life to the immortal and imperish- able quality of its existence. The force of this, which has been felt by great thinkers in mod- ern times, is obvious, and will come up again for consideration. The Platonic proofs we have cited have never, in fact, been set aside. We have a restatement of them under the episte- mological category of probability in Cicero, and they dominated the thought of the middle ages. When the modern mind broke away from me- diaevalism, and set out on its own independent pathway, it still carried some of the old heritage with it. For example, the first fruitful stage of our modern thinking may be called the period of substantialism. It includes Descartes, Spi- noza, and, in a modified sense, Locke, Liebnitz, and his German successors before Kant. It was Hume that cleared the field of substance, and opened the way for empiricism. If we study this age of substantialism, we find that its thought was dominated by the ontological proof of the existence of God, and what Kant called the dogmatic, rationalistic proof of the inunor- tality of the soul. The form of this latter proof which brought it under Kant's criticism was

186 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

that of Mendelssohn, one of Wolff's successors, who argued from the substantiality of the soul to its spiritual unity and indestructibility. Now, Mendelssohn had, perhaps, lost some of the in- sight of the early thinkers, and Kant's task was comparatively easy.

But, if we go back to Descartes and Spinoza, we will find a basis for proof that is not lacking in cogency. As I have pointed out in another connection, the principle of the ontological proof of God's existence is the same in both Descartes and Spinoza ; that of the self-evident or necessity of the self-existent. This is in- volved in the concept of substance, and is ap- plied in the same sense to the soul by both these great thinkers. For Descartes' distinction be- tween created and uncreated substance, and his identification of the soul with created substance that has only God for its presupposition, while formally repudiated by Spinoza, is accepted in principle in his doctrine of the soul as a mode of the Divine thinking, having only the arche- typal thought in the mind of God as its antece- dent.

What I wish to say in this connection is that, in the light of a distinction with which we are now familiar, between the self -active substance of the soul, and the self-existent ground of its existence, a clear basis can be found in the sub- stantialism of Descartes and Spinoza for a co- gent proof of immortality. We have seen that the soul gets a true insight into the nature of

PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 187

its own being only when it identifies itself with the self -existent ground of its existence. In the light of this three-dimensional insight, the con- viction of the permanency of its own essential being ripens into certitude. If these old think- ers had realized this, which they did in princi- ple, they could have built up a cogent argument upon its basis, for the immortality of the soul. They could have contended that, inasmuch as the soul is a substance in the sense that, as Plato says, it contains the self -moving principle of motion, and inasmuch as the soul only attains the true ground of its life when, through the ontological insight, it seeks to identify itself with the self -existent ground of its existence, it may be concluded that its true life is a life with and in God, and that the life, all of whose springs are permanent, will itself be permanent and eternal. It was open to Mendelssohn to build up such a proof, but he was able to find no cogent proof of the substantiality of the soul, and the task of Kant in showing that his whole reasoning is a paralogism was made easy.

Whatever we may think of Kant's critical doctrine of substance, the outcome of it is very significant. The notion of substance is treated by Kant epistemologically ; that is, as a factor in knowledge. He has shown that, epistemo- logically, it is the principle of the permanent which all knowledge demands for its founda- tion. Kant probably did not realize all the im- plications of his doctrine. But we can see, in

188 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

the light of our own studies, that the notion of substance, as the necessary ground of knowl- edge, is easily translatable into terms of the inner ontological motive of knowledge, — a mo- tive that forbids the noetic activity in man to rest until it has anchored the whole of knowl- edge in the permanent.

When this has been seen, the deeper meta- physical significance of the principle will ap- pear. The soul, not alone in its noetic activity, but in the whole movement of its being, is obey- ing a three-dimensional insight which leads it to see that it can live its true life only when it follows the religious light of the higher reason, and identifies itself with the self-existent ground of its being. Kant had some insight into this when he came to the problem of the moral con- sciousness, of which we will have something to say later.

It only remained for the post-Kantians to de- velop the insight that the real is not identical with the notion of substance as the unstamped material of being that gives it permanence, but that it is individual, and, as the permanent in being, must bear the individual stamp.

There is not time here to point out how, be- ginning in its Socratic form with individuality in its subjective aspect, the concept freed itself from its subjective limitations, and took on the universal, ontological form in the thought of Hegel. Since Hegel, the concept of substance, as held by the early rationalists, has passed into

PHILOSOPHY OF EELIGION 189

that of individuality; which is simply that of the permanent in existence, with the stamp of the highest reality upon it. The real is the concrete universal of being, and the later thought has on its hands the problem of deter- mining the final relation of the self-conscious individuality of man to the individuality of the self-existent or absolute.

Now, the way is open to Pantheism here if one wishes to enter. But, as I have contended elsewhere, it is open to us to accept the princi- ple of this doctrine of individuality as the con- crete universal without becoming pantheists. We have only to recognize the distinction be- tween the soul of man; — the finite individual, and the absolute self-existent individual in order to see that, at the highest point of the soul's experience, it may, and does, in fact, iden- tify itself with the absolute, so that the abso- lute life becomes its own, and the absolute in- sight becomes its own insight, without thereby losing its own individuality or the sense of it. In fact, it is in those moments of highest reali- zation that the lineaments of its true individu- ality stand out in the clearest light. We seem here to come upon the great paradox of the in- dividual consciousness ; namely, that it is in the moment when we rise to the clearest insight into our own identity with what we may call, para- phrasing Emerson's phrase, our over-individu- ality, that we have the strongest sense of our own individuality which, in the terms of an out-

190 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

side logic, ought to be completely absorbed at that point. The truth of the paradox is, how- ever, incontrovertible.

I think I have given a suflScient statement of the theoretic proofs of the soul's immortality, and will now turn to another phase of the prob- lem. We have made clear, in another place, that life is to be estimated in terms of its ideal values. That the question of value cannot be absolutely separated from that of theoretic truth I have already contended. But it is not altogether identical with it, either. One may despair of theoretic proof, and yet be con- vinced by the worth of the consideration. That the truth of immortality may be postulated on the ground of its value is the principle of Plato's teleological proof of immortality. If the end of the creation is the good, and the good reaches its highest expression in the soul of man ; it would mean the defeat of the good and the lapse of the whole scheme of creation into irrationality, if we were to suppose the soul itself to be mortal and perishable. The integ- rity of the whole system of reality is staked on the perdurability of the soul. That this is a strong consideration is evident.

Again, when Kant, having critically under- mined the theoretic proofs, appeals to the con- sideration of moral value, and argues that the worth of the moral order of the world is so great that whatever is an essential condition of its realization must be postulated as true, he

PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 191

appeals to the same principle. Kant sees very clearly that to impose a moral destiny on a be- ing whose life is mortal and perishable, wonld involve a glaring contradiction before which the obligation-ness of the moral would be destroyed. But moral values are the highest, and, in order to prevent a kind of treason to the highest, a life must be ascribed to the soul that will be commensurate with its highest ideals. Kant is here proceeding on ground that has become fa- miliar to us.

Let us turn from Kant to the philosophy of modern evolution for our last example of reas- oning along this line. The late John Fiske, in his little book entitled *'The Destiny of Man," practically espouses the value-argument of Plato. Fiske, in his earlier treatise on **The Idea of God," had developed a theistic concep- tion of evolution, in which, like Plato, he con- nects the whole evolution process with the reali- zation of a good purpose. His argument in ''The Destiny of Man," assumes this theism as its basis, and, taking the ground, as Plato did, that, in the soul of man, the whole evolution pro- cess reaches its culmination, and reveals what has been at its heart from the beginning, he argues that to suppose that this outcome should itself be mortal and perishable, would be an affront to the reason of man. God would not so affront the intelligence of man, and bring the creation to a conclusion so irrational. On the strength of this consideration alone, Fiske

192 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

subscribes to a belief in the immortality of the soul.

Now, whether we be convinced or not by con- siderations that were convincing to Plato, Kant and Fiske, we will be ready to admit the force of the moral and teleological argument. Its true force will appear, however, if we maintain its connection with the theoretic proofs. If the soul is immortal in its nature, then its immortal- ity ought to shine through every true insight in- to its nature. This seems to be literally true; for, whether our insight be into the true essence of the soul's life, or into the significance of the end values which it places before itself, it will lead us to the same conclusion, that the true concept of the soul is that of a being whose life, while lived empirically in a world of time and sense, and subject to its contingency, is yet, in its essential nature, as well as in its life-ideals, a being that transcends these limits, and lays hold on that which is abiding and eternal.

At the conclusion of this lecture, I wish to point out certain conclusions which may be drawn from what has preceded. In the first place, we will, perhaps, experience a feeling of surprise in view of the strength of the consider- ations which the resources of philosophy enable us to bring to bear on the problem of the soul's immortality. These resources are a treasure that must be mined for, and the tendency is very strong to assume that, because the gold is not lying around on the surface, it does not exist.

PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 193

What lies on the surface is mortal and perish- able, and the tendency is to conclude that all life is doomed to perish. When, however, we go beneath the surface, the deeper we mine the more assurances we find that life, in its pro- founder aspects, is different; that the soul, in the light of its essential nature, as well as in that of its end-values, is the bearer of a tran- scendent life, and is a natural heir to immor- tality.

In the second place, I think the results of our mining will enable us to throw a side light on the absolute assurance that existed in the mind of the Founder of Christianity, not only as to his own immortality, but in regard to the im- mortal existence of the souls of men. If the re- ligious consciousness reveals to us a new di- mension of spiritual life, in the intuitions of which we are able to identify our lives with the transcendent ground of their existence, much more will these intuitions be clear to the Mas- ter, who came out from the bosom of the Father, and whose vision would, therefore, be ideally perfect. That insight, in which he realized his oneness with his father, would be the insight that would reveal the true. Divine nature of the life that he lived. The problem of immor- tality would not exist at all for him, and he would see in men around him, however ignorant and degraded, the same essential nature, which, on its lower level of absorption in time and sense, had lost the intuitions of its higher birth-

194 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

right. His wish was to recall men to their lost inheritance, and raise them to a level where their deeper intuitions would revive, and they would see their true destiny with something like his own clarity and assurance. When it is said that he brought life and immortality to light, the insight might have been truly and just as adequately phrased, the life of immor- tality; for, once get a clear vision of life, and the conviction of immortality follows. The Master of life does not place an empty hope before us, but one that is rich in the promise of fulfillment. In the light of the life, the hope blossoms into assurance.

The third and final consideration is that of the bearing of the doctrine of immortality on the problem which death presents to us men. If man were merely mortal, and yet were gifted with the power of prevision, death would be to him the king of terrors. It would mean to him the absolute defeat of life, and the skull and bones would be the symbol of despair. But the doctrine that crowns life with immortality sets death aside from the path of life as no longer an absolute fact. Death only means the falling away of the physical and mortal. But the soul's real self is transcendent; its nature is stable and perdurable, and all its end-ideals are shaped in the moulds of the eternal.

To die is, then, only to break the moulds of the present existence, and to make a new be- ginning in the drama of living. That this is

PHILOSOPHY OP RELIGION 195

true, we need not doubt. What it signifies for the new life-chapter we cannot say, but it is a legitimate object for the brush of a hopeful imagination.

We may state the outcome of this lecture, and, in fact, of all the lectures, in the following proposition: The soul is born heir to an im- mortal existence, and the whole teleological sig- nificance of the struggle of its life may be summed up in that fine, old scriptural state- ment— it seeks a house not made with hands; eternal in the heavens.

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